Month: August 2008

A reader writes:

While I sympathize with your reader’s comparison between our policy towards Kosovo and South Ossetia, there is a crucial problem with the excerpt you posted. It claimed that there are a majority of ethnic Russians in South Ossetia. In fact, the majority are Ossetians, a small Iranic-Language speaking group.  Their exact origins (like many of the small ethnic groups of the Balkans and Caucuses) are hazy, but they’ve been around an awful long time, and are not in any sense "Russians". Russians make up no more than 3% of the population.

What is happening is that Russia is exploiting the ethnic tension within a state it abhors.  And while the reader is correct that we appear to be hypocrites in our reaction to South Ossetia compared to our reaction to Kosovo, much the same could be said of Putin in regards to Chechnya.  Moreover, Kosovo has to be seen in the light of Bosnia. The Serbs had a record of attempted genocide before we bombed Belgrade. While Putin is claiming a genocide in South Ossetia, put me down as skeptical in the extreme.

"On January 20th 2009, either the president of the United States will be a man who used to snort coke to ease his blues, or the First Lady will be a former drug addict who stole from charity to get her next fix. In this presidential campaign, there are dozens of issues that have failed to flicker into the debate, but the most striking is the failing, flailing ‘War on Drugs.’

Isn’t it a sign of how unwinnable this ‘war’ is that, if it was actually enforced evenly, either Barack Obama or Cindy McCain would have to skip the inauguration — because they’d be in jail? At least their time in the slammer would feature some familiar faces: they could share a cell with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and some 46 percent of the US population," – Johann Hari.

Adidas re-mixes sports sounds for the Olympics:

Appleyard chides Brooks’s labeling China collectivist and America individualist:

Individualism is defined by a collective just as the self is defined by the collective enterprise of language. Collectivism is defined by the individual just as society is defined by individual judgment. Seeing China as solely collectivist and America as nothing but individualist is an illusion. To a large extent, these are matters of rhetoric. That these two countries are different is indisputable, but differences between nations can seldom be reduced to a simply duality.

Fallows protests on the same grounds.

Gldberg hauls out an old interview he did with Tim "Left Behind" LaHaye:

"Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind. Sigmund Freud, Marx, these were Jewish minds that were infected with atheism. The Jewish brain also has the capacity for great good. God gave the Jews great intelligence. He didn’t give them great size or physical power–you don’t see too many Jews in the NFL–but he gave them great minds."

Not Penn’s memos or Cheney’s afternoons, but fascinating nonetheless:

The new image reveals the spectral fingerprints created by dark energy as it stretches huge supervoids and superclusters, structures that are roughly half a billion light-years across. Superclusters are filled with dense clusters of galaxies, while supervoids are made up of mostly empty space. According to the team, there is only a 1-in-200,000 chance that their detection of dark energy’s fingerprints happened randomly.

Yglesias explains:

On the whole, Russia’s clout is still puny compared to what it was back in the day and demographically it continues to be in decline while a large number of countries once subservient to Moscow are growing more prosperous than ever in the western orbit.

Off-message, Matt. This is Brezhnev, remember?

Suskind on the Daily Show: