From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates.  Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak Muslims don’t seem to have a place in that partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina.  And there’s a war *right* there.

Mr. Whyte is deeper into all this than I am by a wide margin.  Most likely in these de-evolutions, I think, are Scotland, the Spanish ones and a breakup of Belgium between Flemish and Walloons.   (I’m  a mild Francophile and a much stronger Nederlands-ophile, so…)

(I will also note that I think that the French central government’s attitude on quashing linguistic minorities is terrible, and I hate it.)

Just for the fun of it, here’s their posts on rearranging other areas:

• Central Asia (essentially breaking up Afghanistan and Pakistan)
• Middle East (see also here)
• Malaysia / Phillipines / Indonesia (my readers in Singapore probably have some thoughts on this) (see also this on Sarawak and this on Thailand)

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

• Base-jumping the Burj Dubai. One of these dudes went back and did it again a couple of days later and got caught by the cops; not bright.
• Proportional discussion graph over the WATCHMEN movie.  Strangely, I didn’t think that way, but…
• Killing off a rat-ridden island in the Alaskan Aleutians - or, rather, eliminating the rats that killed everything else off.

Some GIS professor thinks that by using his systems for tracking flora and fauna that he’s figured out where Osama bin Laden is.   I think it’s crap, but he might find the ghost of Marlon Perkins.

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.

25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\

That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.

He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.

Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf nations stick serious money into post-Oil green energy, because that oil isn’t going to be around forever for all those air conditioners, etc., etc.

“The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company. “Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”

Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. Research money is tight, he noted.

With the Saudi money he has hired 16 new researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. “People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,” he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were one-fiftieth that amount.

Experts say the vast investments from the gulf states have already restarted stalled environmental technologies.

With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing.

Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Mr. Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. “The sun shines 365 days a year,” he said.

• Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
• The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government policies for a LONG time promoting hardshell settlers with lots of government support and funds created this mess in the first place.
• Pat Robertson now thinks Bush is a bumbling schmuck who has mismanaged things terribly, and has nothing but praise for Obama. *faint*

Saudi man needs money, and essentially sells off his eight-year-old daughter for $5000 for marriage to a 58-year-old-guy.  Horrified mom takes it to court.  Court sides with the dad, and says the kid can make the decision to go for a divorce - when she’s older.   Like puberty.

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand. </a>

At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   Their stock market has gone to heck in a handbasket, and so on, and they can’t keep this sort of thing going forever.

Another place where cheap oil doesn’t go over so well- Iran.  Between the fall of the Shah and the rise of the know-nothing theocrats, plus the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the ability of Iran to refine it’s own oil went to pieces.  Nobody wanted to invest there, for fear of someone walking in the next day and taking it over, and because the actions of the government are constantly ending up with various economic sanctions against Iran.  Just too unstable.  Some plans for new refineries are coming online, maybe, in the middle of the next decade.   Recently, they had to start rationing gasoline - which is kept artificially low at $0.32 a gallon.

Did they make money off the oil bubble?  Sure.  And they blew it on things like the cheap gas, because unemployment is very very high (more than 30%) and not keeping the public somewhat bought off and subsidized would create uprisings - against the theocrats.  Perish the idea of making themselves more stable and attractive to outside investment!

To keep their budget going, they expected $100 a barrel oil.  They aren’t going to get it.

Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘.

Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in  OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response.

Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if you aren’t married in Arkansas.

And monks are beating the crap out of each other in the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, and talk to the Generals, learn their languages….hmm, hmm…of course, McCain’s walk last year to prove ‘how quiet things are now’ had the cast of the 12 days of warfare. 100 soldiers on point, three Blackhawks hawking, two gunships gunning and a geezer in a big flak suit… ah, you know the song.

The idea, too, was to show how McCain was a maaaaanly man, and Obama a know-nothing elitist pipsqueak and how that would go over with Mr and Mrs. Bubba.

Of course, the answer is that Obama went and – well, looked seriously Presidential wherever he went. And the VIPs he met on the way treated him as such, and were sighing with relief that someone who was halfway sane and sensible might be President of the USA. And at point after point on the trip, and just before, Obama’s ideas on the problems with the Middle East came out as sensible, sound solutions – so much so that the locals he was visiting were endorsing them to the great consternation of Bush and McCain. And since polls are showing that Obama’s weak spots is that he’s something of an unknown factor who may not have sound stuff on security and foreign affairs – well, this is all money in the bank for him.

McCain saw the huge crowds in Berlin and compared them to the sixteen people and an oompah band that he had at his speech in New Orleans when Hillary hit the wall, and – well, he didn’t like that. So now he’s throwing dirt at the idea of Obama Campainging Overseas, the horror of it all – of course, the fact that he’s campaigned and given speeches and travelled recently for fundraisers in such places as Mexico, Canada, Britain and Colombia is set aside.

Why? Because nobody’s calling him on it. CBS got caught the other day screwing around with an interview and rearranging the answers to the questions to avoid showing that he had (1) no idea as to when and what has happened in Iraq over the last couple of years, and (2) forgetting that the war against the Taliban happened since 9-11 and Iraq happened a couple of years after that. In short, he would have looked like a total fool, and CBS was protecting him.

With that, McCain could call Obama the Muslim Spawn of Satan and get away with it, because the big news agencies are not willing to aggressively report about his failings. They aren’t willing to pull apart his fakery, his non-plans, his weak numbers and figures, his failure to remember his butt if it’s not attached. They’re not willing to point out that the man can’t remember the most basic things about the whole situation in the Middle East, supposedly his strong point. Or that short of Bush’s policies for another four years, he has nothing to offer except that there will be a different picture in the post offices with the title President of the United States of America under it.

And basically, that’s the whole campaign. He wants the big job bad enough that he’s willing to say or do anything to get it.

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.

Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.

The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.

Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.

Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.

It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.

When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)

Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.

To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.

Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.

Solving any problem becomes a  matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.

Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere.  Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?

But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.

Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?

But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.

Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.

This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.

And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-don’t-vote-for-us out of the airwaves and people’s heads, we may actually get a Congress and a President interested in straightening out this mess.  And since McCain is not interested in bucking the real Bushco system, his only way through is to  (as Charlie Black, his campaign manager said the other day and McCain himself has said in 2004 and the more recent past that) think that a real terrorist attack will be a huge boon to the campaign.

Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.

Some issues-oriented campaign.

Hydrogen, stupidity and incompetence. I swear to gawd, folks, I sometimes cannot imagine how we ever got this idea that George W. Bush, the first President with a MBA (from Harvard, yet) would run a tight, disciplined and competent organization that would - oh, how did that line go - “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”

Every time I look at some Bushoid project, I see such major idiocy and garbled photo-op efforts that I cannot imagine what the heck he was ever trying to accomplish. I see a lot of discipline in trying to get, accumulate and wield power, but nothing all that constructive is ever done with it.

I mean, it’s like calling in the roto-rooter man because you have drain problems in the downstairs toilet and come back to find him using the snake to sodomize the neighbor’s beagle to show it who’s the boss. That’s after finding that while nothing useful has been done about the toilet, drain cleaner is all over the sofa and the living room carpet, caulk has been applied to the upstairs bathroom’s toilet to seal up the tank lid so it will never open again, and a lit blowtorch has set your bedroom set afire.

As you survey the damage, the guy runs through the house and back out into the front yard screaming about terrorist dogs and presenting you with a partial bill for the next six months work for your house, with emphasis on how he’s going to make sure the rats under your house never use the sump for a swimming club again. And you should be grateful, too.

There’s a story up about a Middle Eastern Arabic language satellite channel that was broadcast as an arm of the US government, called The Free (al-Hurra) that - well, I used to listen as a kid to the Voice of America and other US government ‘information outlets’, and this is pitiful. They hired managers who have no background journalism, can’t speak Arabic, and don’t manage the finances as they flush $500 Million down the toilet.

It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station’s predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, “Jesus is risen today!” After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station’s budget.

“Many people just didn’t know how to do their job,” said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. “If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, ‘Well, nobody watches us anyway.’ It was very self-defeating.”

According to former al-Hurra staffers, Harb filled the newsroom with Lebanese employees, many of whom had thin journalistic credentials. Anchors spoke in heavy Lebanese dialects, turning off viewers from other countries. On-air reporting errors were common.

“He hired his friends — this was the problem — and they didn’t have any experience,” said Magdi Khalil, a former producer who clashed with Harb.

Again and again, that’s what I hear - people are hired because of their connections, especially political, with no real concern with their ability or competence. Karen Hughes, Bush’s longtime PR assistant, was responsible for its oversight - and did nothing to deal with the continuing problems she was repeatedly told about. Staff members ran Hizbollah tirades and pro-Iranian programming on the station that denied the Holocaust, and nobody on the top level caught on because they didn’t hear the broadcasts and wouldn’t understand them anyway.

Just pitiful. But that’s what happens when you govern without a care about anything aside of PR and photo-ops.

Man, the pander just goes on and on:

Clinton also said that as president, she would try to sue OPEC — the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which controls the price of two-thirds of the world’s oil supply.

“We’re going to go after OPEC which remember is a monopoly cartel,” Clinton said. “There’s nothing free-market about it. They sit in some conference room a couple of times a year and decide how much oil they are going to produce and how much they are going to charge for it. So lets change our laws so we can sue them on anti-trust reasons.”

I do not believe that US anti-trust laws cover companies in foreign countries, or associations of other countries.    But hey, I didn’t graduate from Yale Law School…

Museum exhibits:

• Historical maps from Dutch cartographers
• Mapping Arabia (from Aramco)
• Historical maps of Macau (Library of Congress)
• The David Rumsey collection (worldwide historical maps)
• The Social Explorer (US Census maps 1940-2000)

Chinese Maps:

• Shanghai, 1928
• More pre-PRC China maps (heavy on Shanghai)
• GIS: Chinese Historical GIS
• GIS: Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (a little arcane for me, but maybe you can dig it)

German / European Maps:

• 1883 Ravenstein atlas of the German Empire, downloadable as PDFs.
• a collection of German-language maps for the last 150 years, which are mostly available in digital reproduction for around 5 Euros a throw; you can preview them all over the place online, one small swatch at a time. Looks like good scans.
• another collection of German-language maps, most of which is online in medium-quality (and good for all that) and purchasable in sets of CDs. Pretty impressive stuff. Here’s an example of downtown Berlin.
• Various Berlin maps, mostly of the Cold War period.
• A historical map server with nice if plain computer-generated maps of Europe.
• Several good maps from the Anglo-Saxon period in England/Britain.
• If you want a good printed set of pre-WW2 atlas reproductions to buy, try Genealogy Unlimited in Canada. Prices aren’t bad, considering what you’re getting.
• Historical online interactive map of Britain over the last 200 years. Impressive if you’re looking for a particular place and you want to see the progress there over time.
• Pre-WW2 German wall maps for sale; I DO NOT agree with the philosophy of this site, but the maps look nice.
• Sort of a flag and administration resource for Germany, not really maps but interesting.

Genealogical Maps and information: Researchers trying to find some small village in Hamberdoorst sub-province where Grandpa Georg cam from are digging around for information, and they want DETAIL. Here’s a short set of map info related to that.

• Small collection of German maps from a family geneological site.
• More complex geneological reference for Germany and the adjacent area, with lots of maps of the period and historical maps, requires a little drill-down.
• Another geneological site with lots of good German, Russian and Eastern European atlas maps from around 110 years ago. Tons of detail.
• Cyndi’s List of Genealogy sites includes a lot of individual country pages, with good links to local maps of all-over-the-place. Very well worth a browse.

Other:

• Maps for sale from a Spanish-American War site of various places important in the 1890s. Looks reasonably priced.
• Map and article on the Franz-Ferdinand linked project of a United States of Greater Austria; useful for alternate history sorts who posit that Franz Ferdinand missed his assassination in Sarajevo and became Emperor-King.
• Drool city; a Tennessee maps and globes store that specializes in selling antique maps. Worth a scan.
• German settlement in Russia.

This is consolidated from several sources, about the Turkish novel, METAL STORM or METAL FURTINA in Turkish, about a Bush-invades-Turkey-for-its-goodies war in 2007.  It’s written from a Turkish POV, and sounds as if it’s we-stomped-those- Americans fantasy fulfillment, selling 600,000 copies since 2004.

It’s exactly that - an adolescent ripoff of Tom Clancyish thrillers, with lots of evil Americans and brave Turks, and echoes back against the present difficulties that we’re dealing with in US-Turkish relations.  Lots of conspiracy theory stuff here that feeds on big-cojones masculine fantasies on how the little guy gets back at the big, rich bully and shows him what Real Turkish men can do.   But it reflects a public desire to see the US taken down a whole bunch of pegs and also the mindless belligerence of the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy.

A New Yorker blog that tries to capture some of the atmosphere.

I was watching this discussion about the Middle East, and found it too depressing to write about. Nobody has anything resembling good answers, and everyone was decrying the lack of people who were willing to listen to any.

The Sun-Times and the Tribune on the convention. Also the LA Times.