inebriantia

Dear Leader's Bodyguards

Who cares about nukes. It is these guys I fear:

Aaah, Democracy!

from WashPo:

The powerful and pro-Kremlin United Russia party has a new opponent -- one, however, that bears all the marks of a Kremlin creation.

The leaders of three small Russian parties -- Motherland, the Party of Life and the Party of Pensioners -- announced a merger Tuesday. The union followed a series of meetings between the leaders and President Vladimir Putin, who blessed a venture that appears designed to leave him with loyalists on both sides of the Russian political aisle.

The consolidation offers new evidence of the Kremlin's intolerance of political pluralism or democratic competition in any kind of undirected manner. Since Putin came to power in 2000, his government has established extensive new controls over the news media, industry and grass-roots organizations.

Woman shot with rubber bullets at a protest in Miami

Heh...

Hilarious

Christopher Hitchens writes about someone elses hateful drunken ramblings.

Moby kicks ass for Net Neutrality

Where my politics are ending up.

This is the way I've been feeling for some time, and now it seems that there is a movement to reclaim the Democratic Party in America with these ideas. From Dailykos by Markos himself:

It's no secret that I look to the Mountain West for the future of the Democratic Party, people like Brian Schweitzer and Jon Tester. But I also look to candidates like Jim Webb in Virginia and Paul Hackett in Ohio.

And what is the common thread amongst these candidates?

They are all Libertarian Democrats.

Ack, the "L" word! But hear me out.

Traditional "libertarianism" holds that government is evil and thus must be minimized. Any and all government intrusion is bad. While practical libertarians (as opposed to those who waste their votes on the Libertarian Party) have traditionally aligned themselves with the Republicans, it's clear that the modern GOP has no qualms about trampling on personal liberties. Heck, it's become their raison d' etre.

The problem with this form of libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty -- the government and other individuals.

The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty -- the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.

Maps of the World

If a flat, two-dimensional map of the world was to represent the area of each country correctly, as opposed to providing a better idea of the shape of each country, it would look like the following:

Do you notice how small Europe looks? How much bigger Africa looks? Apparently this is a much more accurate representation of the size of each land mass with relation to each other. Unfortunately it also manages to distort the shape of land masses, making Africa for instance look much longer than it should be, since in reality its length and width is roughly the same.

This particular map was developed by Arno Peters in 1974 and not surprisingly, managed to shock a few people.

Check out the controversy here: http://www.petersmap.com/index.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall-Peters_projection

North Korea Is Weird

My evidence is provided below:

http://www.1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip1.htm

http://ariontheweb.blogspot.com/

Finland, Nazi Germany and the Molotov Cocktail

Supposedly, liberal democracies have never fought against one another on the battlefield. During the second World War however, Finland was using the Molotov cocktail and Nazi Germany to keep the Soviets out of their country, thereby fighting with an English enemy against an English ally. This development led to England declaring war on Finland, and producing the incredibly rare occurence of a liberal democracy declaring war on another liberal democracy.

The Soviet Union had eyes on Finland and right after Hitler invaded Poland, Stalin invaded Finland. The Finns were outnumbered three-to-one yet managed to stay independent even though they had to cede valuable land to the Soviets in an agreement made in 1940. Not surprisingly considering how outnumbered the Finns were, they managed to keep the Soviets at bay by employing guerilla tactics, and in the process, develop the Molotov cocktail after adapting an incendiary device used in the Spanish Civil War by the Russians.

The Finns named the cocktail a Molotov to mock the then Soviet Union's Secretary of War who publically declared that the Soviet Union was not dropping bombs on Finland, but in fact delivering food. So the Finns mass produced their own adaptation of a Russian incendiary device, and sent back to the Soviets the food they had been delivering in the form of Molotov cocktails.

After the peace treaty of 1940, the Finns were smart enough to realise that the Soviets would again try to conquer their country in the near future. Knowing that alone they would not be able to stand up to the might of the Soviets indefinitely, they vainly sought for help from Sweden and England. This help was not forthcoming due to both tactical and diplomatic reasons, and so a deal was struck with Nazi Germany for supplies and access to Finnish territory in order to keep the Soviets out, and to regain the territory Finland had lost in the peace treaty of 1940.

So being that Finland was allied with the Germans and fighting the Soviets, England reluctantly declared war on the Finns mostly as a means to sustain a workable relationship with the Soviet Union. The British RAF execution of an air raid on a Finnish harbour was about the extent of actual fighting that occurred between the two countries however. Nonetheless, one liberal democracy not only declared war on another liberal democracy, but actually attacked its territory.

Anyway, the Finns managed to defend their territory without eventually regaining their losses from the peace of 1940. In the end, they had to chase the Germans out of their country after a second peace treaty had been negotiated with the Soviet Union, and although fighting against the victors of the War, international opinion was sympathetic to Finland's position and its well regarded reputation in world affairs was unaffected.

Most of the information can be found at Wikipedia. Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War