Soviet Russia and the Bay of Trolls

I love this Map of Online Communities, wherein We Can Find the Precise Co-Ordinates of the Google Juggernaut, not to Mention the Location of farthest Xanga.

Thanks to Savage Minds.

Stop the Clash

I thought this bears wider dissemination. It's from the people who collected 52,000 signatures on a petition calling for Wolfie's resignation.

President Bloomberg?

And will he spend up to $1 billion to get there as an independent?

As this is coming from both Tony Blankley and Mark Green, we can assume that it has some basis in fact.

My New Yorker friends say city residents of all political stripes like the guy a lot. But Blankley gets the last word here:

If it is Rudy and Hillary, and now Bloomberg, we could be looking at a three-way race between three moderately liberal to leftist New Yorkers running for president in a right-of-center country with no even moderately conservative candidate. And should Sen. Obama surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist publicly centrist Hillary Milhous, a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Muslim, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained Kennedyesque candidate.

Thanks to Metaphysically Fit!

Smackdown!

It's nice to see Nir Rosen's take-down of L. Paul Bremer's pitiful attempt to defend himself after the fact in the Washington Post. Basically, Bremer is jumping on the bandwagon of finger-pointers who failed in this Iraq War debacle. Perhaps his most absurd claim is that his critics don't understand Iraq, the implication being that he does. Absurd, because this claim is prefaced by a fantastical extended analogy equating the Hussein regime with Nazi Germany, clear evidence that Bremer's in over his head. Rosen's choicest tidbit:

In Bremer's mind, the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities. So he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and then expected them both to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He did not see his job as managing the country; he saw it as managing a civil war. So I accuse him of causing one.

Thanks to Alif Sikkiin!

Loopholes

The New York Times is reporting Michael Chertoff's discovery that holders of British passports are not all tea-drinking, skittles-playing, fox-hunting white people. The story notes that some British people emigrated there from Pakistan, and these Britons travel to Pakistan as well as to the United States. I would have thought the New York Times editors would have already come to this conclusion, based on the many Britons of non-European ancestry it reports on each week.

But the headline as well as the tone of the story are telling. It's a "loophole" that British people who happen to have Pakistani heritage are able to enter the United States without a visa. Such a loophole needs to be closed. It has become something normal and obvious that all people of Pakistani ancestry should need a visa to enter the United States, be they citizens of Canada, the United Kingdom, or France.

So what about Americans of Pakistani heritage? Should they have to get a visa to go to England? To Pakistan? Should they even be allowed to travel at all? If the US requires visas for an ethnic class of British citizens, what's next? Poland requiring German-Americans to apply for visas? Sweden requiring visas for Italian Americans? The mind boggles.

Since the Second World War, it has been commonly accepted that citizenship conferred fundamental rights to all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, parentage, etc. Great advances in civil rights for the past half century have been founded on this principle. But as someone recently suggested, we're witnessing "a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee."