Saturday, November 13, 2010 

It's been another intense week up at the Borderlands Lodge. Yesterday, Veterans Day, is a state holiday in Montana so there were no classes. Sometimes it's great being a civil servant.

I, meanwhile, have been holed up at the Lodge, writing like a madman and doing what I do.



But that doesn't mean there hasn't been any N & P!
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Russia and ex-USSR

Keeping things stirred up between neighbors: Eurasia.net reports on an Azerbaijan increasingly caught between US, Iran.

Amid the ongoing controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, Azerbaijan appears caught in a delicate balancing act between cooperation with the United States in implementing sanctions against Tehran and the reality of its own longstanding ties to its southern neighbor.

Azerbaijan and Iran share a border, and a big chunk of Iran's population in the north is Azeri
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Aaaaargggg!!!: Joshua Kucera writes about piracy on the high Caspian.


Photograph courtesy of unemployed person with sense of humor who plays with Legos
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Waking up to more managed democracy: attacked Russian journalist Oleg Kashin regains consciousness.
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The Kremlin Stooge on recent Georgian-Russian spy ring dust-up.
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The Jamestown Spooks write on recent developments in Dagestan.

Shortly after an all-Chechen congress was held in the Chechen capital of Grozny from October 13-14, the Dagestani authorities promptly started preparations for a congress of peoples of Dagestan. Similar to the practice in the former Soviet Union, the purpose of the event is to demonstrate the unanimous support for the leadership of the republic headed by Magomedsalam Magomedov. Although pre-staged well in advance, the congress would have enormous importance for the Dagestani leader, who has been openly criticized by the Kremlin for his ineptitude and indolence.  

Dagestan is one of 21 republics inside the Russian Federation
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US & World

Gallup poll: 18% of Americans had trouble putting food on the table last year.

Fortunately for them, the government will likely be preserving tax cuts for families earning over $250,000.
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Paul Krugman on yet another example of Washington "bipartisanship."

Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

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Too much post-Super Bowl shuffling: Jim McMahon, the former QB for the Chicago Bears, says his memory is "shot."

"My memory's pretty much gone," McMahon recently told the Chicago Tribune. "There are a lot of times when I walk into a room and forget why I walked in there. I'm going through some studies right now, and I am going to do a brain scan. It's unfortunate what the game does to you.

Will the NFL be done in by lawsuits from all of these former players suffering from brain injuries?  It's turning into a pretty big issue. 


Jim McMahon in happier days
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Getting the hell out of here: American priests overwhelmed by requests for exorcism.
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Huffington Post sez: W. plagiarized memoirs. In addition to getting Bush's story, his publishers also:

got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.  

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I liked Jon Stewart's interview on the Rachel Maddow Show. Stewart defended his Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
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Turkey and SE Europe

Kurdish-Turkish bilingual signs, which attracted so much excitement among Turkey-commenting bloggers last year, are now being taken down by court order.


The AKP's so-called "Kurdish initiative" was hyped big-time in the west, but it was never much more than a series of small gestures
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Hurriyet reports that head of Religious Affairs Directorate in Turkey replaced, "radical changes" envisioned for directorate in upcoming months.  

It's hard to say what this means. The headline of the article implies that the head of the directorate was forced out for not being pro-headscarf enough. However, this view is undermined a bit by the second half of the article.

Zaman is unsurprisingly playing down the forced-out angle.


Professor Mehmet Görmez (L) replaced Ali Bardakoğlu as the new head of the Religious Affairs Directorate (photo/caption from Zaman)
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Taraf journalist, editor facing long prison sentences in Turkey: 7.5 years apiece for interviewing PKK officials
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....meanwhile, Aengus Collins writes on Oktay Ekşi's firing, and press freedom in Turkey more generally under the AKP and Prime Minister Erdogan

One suspects that Mr Erdoğan may have some kind of bulk-discount arrangement with his lawyers—”sue three, get one free”—because his action against Mr Ekşi coincided with another flurry of prime ministerial lawsuits. He is seeking TL100,000 for “emotional damages” from the opposition leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who last month referred to Mr Erdoğan as a spineless hypocrite. He has also taken a separate action against Mr Kılıçdaroğlu’s party in relation to an exhibition of political cartoons at its headquarters.

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Cut-throat criticism: Kamil Pasha writes on the "culture wars,"
commenters mock NYT article
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Drago Hedl on writing in Croatia about Croatian war crimes committed against Serbs

To write in today’s Croatia about war crimes committed by Croats no longer earns one the label of a traitor as it did in the time of President Franjo Tudjman, who died in office in late 1999...but while official Croatia no longer denies that in the 1991-1995 war the Croats committed war crimes as well, it is not easy to write about it even today. It’s a topic that makes no one popular. Journalists writing about it still find themselves in unpleasant situations, and many readers still tend to react by saying, Why don’t you write about war crimes committed by the Serbs, who committed aggression against Croatia?

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Let the tension build: Allen Iverson postpones first start, watches game from stands.

Team manager Murat Murtezaoglu told The Associated Press the 11-time NBA All-Star "did not feel ready" to play Friday and instead watched from the stands as his new team beat Oyak Renault 87-81.

I guess there was no room on the bench for him.

Well, if you can't get the Answer on the court, let me give you a bit right here, when Iverson visited a Besiktas soccer game:


In one of the cleanest chants ever heard inside a Turkish soccer stadium, Allen Iverson is lauded by thousands of Besiktas fans.
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And that, as they say, was your N & P!