If France is talking about sanctions and taking more aggressive actions to dissuade you from gobbling up nations and empire-building at your former satellite states’ expense… you are probably on the wrong track.

Even the would-be Central-East Asian answer to NATO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), has not backed Russia’s land grab in Georgia.

Now granted, France is “just discussing” the idea of sanctions, and while Britain refuses to accept a Europe carved up along mid-20th century Cold War lines, Germany is very well dependent upon all that dead dinosaur juice coming Russia’s GazProm fields.

In the end, it will be all a bunch of posturing and talk, but let’s hope that France under Monsieur Sarkozy shows itself to have a backbone, and that Britain’s leadership will stand fast with Mr. Churchill’s spirit when dealing with the brutally ursine Messrs. Putin and Medvedev and their attempt to annex pieces of sovereign nations back into the old Soviet sphere of influence.

Ukraine, and particularly on account of the Crimean Russians, and its seaport on the Black Sea, might be able to yet avoid being forcibly annexed back into Russia, if Europeans pull together to contain the Russian Bear once again.

Article Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/washington/28detain.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

It appears that we are sorting through the many captive enemy combatants we have collected and maintained at great taxpayer expense, and repatriating them back to their homelands.

While it is good to finally see some of these long time prisoners set free - and released from being a burden on our soldiers and our taxpayers… it makes me ponder the entire necessity of having had to warehouse these humans for so long, and if indeed it has done much good.

Will their captivity have truly made a difference? Will they yet still attack us, and yet all the more because of their captivity? Or can we truly expect that they will “peaceably” go home, and not be beholden to the Wahabbist preachings emanating from their local mosques every Friday?

Only time will tell.

And I pray that we will never again repeat either the circumstances of an unconstitutional war or the summary, multi-year detention and/or torture of people without hope of trial… or ever realize the more chilling possibility that someday, thousands or hundreds of thousands of American citizens be so inequitably carried off into captivity or tortured for being of the wrong political beliefs.

Or should we properly call it “ObamaCon 2008″? Probably not, as that lends it a comic book convention like feel to it.

Of course, this entire travesty of a campaign Obama has been running would have us serfs think that it is all for the glory of a superhero like Obama, who may turn out to be so much more like the Armadillo from the Capital One advert.

VDH (Victor Davis Hanson) does a right good skewering of “The Coronation”, with numerous classical references, such as the Attic Orators.

And that’s the sort of thing I like about reading VDH’s columns: every so often, he makes one learn some interesting tidbit of the Greco-Roman portion of our Western Culture that helped make us a great nation.

That, and I often have to read it at least twice to fully take in the wisdom of his writing.

Bob Barr: The ONLY choice on the Texas Ballot!

Now I am not a supporter of the Bob Barr campaign (beyond the common problem of ballot access like all third parties have in our grossly biased two-party system), but I am somewhat enjoying a small touch of schadenfreude at the moment, since under Texas election law, Mr. Barr is the only presidential candidate qualified to be on a ballot line in the state of Texas.

See the Texas ballot line here (current as of 28 Aug. 2008, subject to change upon sufficient amount of winging, cajolery, and perhaps “special deals”).

Apparently the law states that the POTUS candidates were required to have submitted their signatures by 26 August 2008, and as since neither the Democrats nor the GOP (nor the Constitution Party, to my deep chagrin) have submitted their signatures by the dealine, Mr. Barr is on the Libertarian Party ballot line in Texas.

Assuming that massive amounts of cash, favours, or extreme whinging by the two major parties doesn’t get them on the ballot contrary to Texas Law, the only way Texans will be able to vote for McCain or Obama will be to write him in.

I’m a tad taken aback at why Dr. Baldwin’s people in TX (as well as the Constitution Party of Texas) were not able to get their signatures in on time. This is a sad thing for them, since no amount of pleading or protesting will get the board of elections to bend the rules as they might for the major parties.

Article Source: A.A. Gill, for the Sunday Times (the London Times) 24 Aug. 2008

The following is a rather large excerpt from Mr. Gill’s article on the Battle of Towton… I’ve opted to excerpt these parts here as periodicals may drop or discontinue internet links to interesting articles such as this one over time.

The original article can be read at this link, and is excerpted here, after the “fold”.

Please note that there is some mild foul language and innuendo used by the original author…

(more…)

h/t to Dan Riehl for his link to this article in the Daily Rubbish Guardian on how Barry “Hugh” O’Bama (he be Irish today, don’tcha know…!) has parlayed his rock-star appeal into various T-shirts, if not convincing the better half of the electorate to vote for him.

Of particular interest to Dr. Who fans might be the uncanny resemblance of one Mr. Kellam Clark, of Brooklyn, NY whose profession as an “artist” and a furniture maker are no less impressive than David Tennant’s credentials as The Doctor, if not their common fashion sense:

Click to enlarge

Now the next item we will probably see from those fine specimens of journalistic integrity over at the Daily Rubbish Guardian will be comparing the likeness of one Senator McCain to that of a Dalek… a comparison which I believe would actually not be entirely inaccurate at all.

My Exchange Server occasionally gets a hiccup in its spam filters, and stuff like this gets through:

Recently there has been a rash of spam spoofing CNN and MSNBC addresses with the subject lines like CNN - BREAKING NEWS: (insert random really outlandish news item).

PSA: As with all suspicious mails, don’t even bother opening these. Shift-Delete them straight into oblivion.

Whoever the social engineering/spam artist who came up with these subject lines “Police Raid Donut City” gets an “E” for the effort of being at least a tad clever.

Now I have to admit that I have little sympathy for either Russia or Georgia (the former Soviet territory and current independent, sovereign state). I might be inclined to be slightly more biased in favour of the “little guy”, Georgia… as I am not confident that the press either has, or is telling, the full story with regards to what touched off the recent Russian invasion.

Regarding the airlifting of Georgian troops back to their homeland, well, that was the right thing to do: when another nation’s armed forces are deployed out-of-country at the behest of the World’s Lone Hyperpower™ to help it along on its wars of empire, and that other nation is suddenly troubled by another former empire that would like to perhaps not-so-kindly remind the rest of the world that it has much of the military hardware from its superpower days, and the will to use them on a pipsqueak former satellite state, it behoves us of the aforementioned Hyperpower™ to shuttle them back to their homeland at the very least.

Beyond that, and some statements attacking Russia for her impropriety at militarily badgering her neighbours … we really have no room to speak too heatedly against Russian military actions in her own back yard.

That, and we really shouldn’t have (a) made promises to Georgia that we really aren’t able to, or willing to keep and (b) either backed the Russians into a corner or given them an excuse to use their new-found resource wealth to re-grow their military back to Cold War levels with our courting of all those newly “free” former Soviet states into NATO (which is something of a defunct and increasingly irrelevant alliance).

Unless of course, that is exactly what the military-industrial complex wants: a new Cold War to keep the revenue streaming into their pockets.

(h/t to Michelle Malkin)

So Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has kinda-sorta reversed herself from her “no, not now, not ever” position against drilling offshore for oil.

But notice anything strange in how she tries to sell it?

And the consumer is our first responsibility. The American taxpayer owns this oil offshore, by the way. Let me make this one final point. This oil is owned by the American taxpayers. The oil companies drill. We give them money to drill there. But we get very little in return.

So I think as we have this debate, which is a very healthy one to have and I welcome it, we have to review and realign the relationship between our oil, big oil’s profits and what it means to the consumer and the taxpayer.

I am not the only one who smells something vaguely socialist here, as in “nationalization” of some large fraction of oil profits in exchange for “license” to drill… am I?

Or is it more like what Michelle Malkin suggests, that she is really shilling for T. Boone Pickens‘ wind farm ventures?

And here is one of my few works of art I’ve whipped up just for this very occasion. Do enjoy, and click to view it in its three-shades-of-smog-brown glory.

[ Clickie to see it in its 2000 x 1200 size… ]

Here’s hoping that the smog doesn’t tamp down our athletes’ performances in Beijing over the next few weeks. Good luck, Team USA!