Blogging the democratic revolution
It’s one thing to use multiple IDs as a mere blogger, and quite another to use such devices in real life explicitly to scam a pedastalled world organization to line one’s silky pockets. But that’s what a top United Nations official has been caught doing, just like some seedy barrio gangster, using multiple id’s in a bid to extend his retirement date and collect fatter pensions from the UN money stream. The creep’s name is Kadir and he works at the World International Property Office in Switzerland. Being from Sudan, his contribution to invention resides not in industrial innovation but…
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006 Source: Getty Images, via The New York Times The great Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who was the first to distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorships, a key steps toward dividing and conquering the world’s tyrants and winning the Cold War, has died. She was only 80. Her work paved the way for democratic revolutions from the remains of the destroyed dictatorships and she will be forever remembered for that. She was the great President Ronald Reagan’s capable and effective ambassador at the United Nations, and her wisdom and counsel thwacked sense into the U.N.’s bureaucratic sybarites. One of her…
Sean Gleeson suggests ten ways to do it and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. Check out his hilarious post in this link here.
StJacques over at Free Republic has translated a fabulous Chilean editorial from El Mercurio blasting the Venezuelan dictator as dangerous for Chile’s interests, right on the heels of Mexico’s blast at Chavez for his ego. Read it here.
They’re on something like Round 28 at the United Nations for the Security Council seat and pretty much getting nowhere. The deadlock continues to show the same wretched numbers, with Hugo Chavez at about 78 votes and Guatemala at about 108 votes, more or less. Same old score, round after round. Mexico, however, as it often does, said just the right thing, telling Chavez to throw in the towel, it was sick of his shenanigans, trying to hold the UN hostage over its little proxy games it claims to play with the U.S., when in reality, Venezuela’s contest is with…
All the oil money in the world can’t help him now! Chavez pulled out all the stops to get a rotating seat on the United Nation Security Council, all in the name of challenging U.S. imperialism. Oil contracts with China, bond buyouts from Argentina, subsidized energy all over the world. Billions of dollars in political influence flushed down the toilet, being lost to U.S.-backed Guatamala, who never raised a peep during the whole affair. This is what a real vote looks like — something Chavez hates — so imagine how much he can’t stand democracy now! So far it looks…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is losing his UN Security Council bid badly. Now Chile has come out and said it won’t vote for him, but will abstain through the first round. Socialist Chile was one Chavez insisted he had in the bag. Well, he no longer does. The UN goes to the vote tomorrow and will have the results around 12:00 p.m. Eastern, so this contest for the fate of the free world’s democracies versus the world’s worst tyrannies won’t be long. Venezuela Today is up again and has the whole roundup here. UPDATE: As the vote goes on, Fox…
Not that he ever really had it, but President Bachelet was considering supporting Venezuela’s candidacy for a rotating seat on the United Nations security council that’s coming up. Possibly no more. A.M. Mora y Leon already posted up an article showing Bachelet’s absolute fury over remarks made by the Venezuelan government that the Christian Democrat Party had betrayed Salvador Allende as well as the revolution. The fallout was absolutely astronomical. Relations between the two countries have never been so low. If Chavez ever thought he had a chance of gaining Chile’s support — probably one of the most important countries…
The mystery country in the United Nations voter lineup for Security Council seats, Chile, led by a socialist with roots in the Allende era, is apparently fed up to the quick with the government of Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s anti-American diatribes disgusted most nations that had planned to support Venezuela over Guatemala for the Security Council seat, but didn’t bother Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet all that much. More recent Chavista attacks over the weekend, charging her with being rightwing – on the weekend she laid a wreath at the spot where Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated, was an entirely…
Hugo Chavez addresses the United Nations General Assembly Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News If Hugo Chavez had wanted to repel the American public, he could not have done a better job than this morning, speaking before the United Nations. Waving a Noam Chomsky book like a late-night K-Tel salesman, he found time to hawk Chomsky tomes, which I am sure was effective – given that people will want to know exactly what he filled his head with after a rant like that. Next, the oily encyclopedia salesman began raving that George Bush was the devil. He yelled about the smell…
In a moment where the forces of dictatorship and tyranny seem to be pushing back against democracy, the common thread that has successfully aligned nations such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China, and Sudan have been the supply and demand of energy. While it is encouraging that the relationships forged seem to be more based on Machiavellian pragmatism then aligned ideologies or long term goals, problematic occurrences and diplomatic realignment have debilitated the West????????s efforts to act against undemocratic forces. Increasingly, the ability to act as a geopolitical actor has been taken away from the United States and the UN as…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, in the style of Stalin before him, continuously makes ridiculous claims about ending poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and exclusion. Under his great “socialism,” all is sweetness and light, wonder and justice, just like the Happy Commie pictures you find in Iron Curtain propaganda posters. Yeah, sure. Have you ever tried to learn another language? Do you remember how hard it was to learn to read when you were five or six, even if you had the best teachers? Under Chavistadom, you are now asked to believe that it no longer is hard anymore to become literate and…
Malaysia’s Former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim Source: The Sydney Morning Herald Democratic revolutionary Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia is being approached by … well, someone … to apply for the top United Nations post, to succeed UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I think it’s a great idea! Anwar is a terrific leader whose appeal extends borders and who can talk to all kinds of people. Young men in Indonesia, who might otherwise move over to follow the Islamofascists, drop those stupid ideas when asked about Anwar, whom they really admire. He’s an authentic globalist and a very reasonable Muslim. I remember…
Why is the International Monetary Fund still around? Formed as a multilateral entity to address “balance of payments” crises, its real purpose has been obfuscated by the ending of the Bretton Woods treaty in the 1970s, which set the gold standard as the benchmark medium of exchange. Without the gold standard with which to measure trade balances and currency and things like that, the dollar became the replacement, because SOMETHING will replace anything that’s ever taken away. Unfortunately, the dollar represents one country, the U.S. and the U.S. is as subject to pressure groups and special interests as any within…
Who is President Bush????????s favorite choice to become Secretary General of the United Nations? Look for the United States to support the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, to replace Kofi Annan when his term expires Dec. 31. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the President of Latvia, has a history that has taught her the importance of democracy and freedom. President Vike-Freiberga was born in Riga, Latvia in 1937. During World War II Latvia was occupied by the Russians, then the Germans, then again by the Russians, and then was forced to join the Soviet Union at the close of the war. After the…
The United Nations was not intended to prevent genocide in Darfur. It was not to swap oil-for-food, depose of rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction, or fight avian flu. It has never had the means or accountability mechanisms available to do so. It was created by the victor powers of World War II ???????? Russia, China, France, Britain, and the United States ???????? with the sole purpose of maintaining stability and collective security. Global order was at the top of the agenda. Human rights may have received its rhetorical due, but ???????never again??????? proved to be empty in substance.…
Cuba has secured a spot on the new United Nations human rights council, the board that replaced a previous one, which was intended to keep countries like Zimbabwe and Burma off these boards. Cuba is the biggest human rights violator in the hemisphere. It is one of the few tyrannies in the world that refuses its citizens the right to leave, effectively turning it into an island prison. It has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. Its locals without party connections get no health care, and in fact are denied education if their parents are dissidents. Its residents are…
We always knew there was something wrong with Prime Minister Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and today that missing link got just a little bit more primal. Turns out his idea of democratic revolution is equal rights for apes under the law. That’s right, Zapatero’s gone ape for ape rights, and given that he’s lost the confidence of his human supporters one can probably surmise that he wants to empower a newer and far more loyal core constituency that sees things as he does. Here are the monkeyshines: The Great Ape Project is founded upon the genetic similarity between great apes –…
Yesterday, April 21, 2006, the United Nations Environmental Program gave out awards to ???????the Seven protectors of the Earth.??????? These seven individuals are hailed by the UN as ???????the Champions of the Earth.??????? One of the seven ???????protectors of the Earth??????? and a United Nations ???????Champion of the Earth??????? is Mikhail Gorbachev! This coming week will be the twentieth anniversary of what is commonly accepted as one of the worst environmental incidents of all mankind????????the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, while plant operators were conducting a safety test on Chernobyl’s Unit 4, it overheated and caused a hydrogen explosion.…
Liberian ex-dictator and accused mass murderer Charles G. Taylor Source: AFP, via Yahoo! One of the continent’s grisliest mass murderers, Liberia’s ex-dictator Charles G. Taylor, was apprehended in northeastern Nigeria yesterday and shipped back to face justice in a Sierra Leone court run by United Nations prosecutors. He’s charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity. The UN had made a resolution that Liberia put the thug on trial a couple years ago, and President Bush, meeting with his Nigerian counterpart this week, put a lot of diplomatic muscle into making sure that happened. That’s to his credit because this…
Everybody knows he’s died. Yet, with the exception of the true believers, and folks pointing out Russia playing its usual domestic-politics shenanigans vis-a-vis the old “Slavic Brotherhood with Serbia” chestnut, you can almost literally feel the pause before the blogosphere explodes. Everybody’s waiting for the toxicology reports. Was the former Serbian dictator murdered? Did the War Crimes Tribunal err by allowing healthy skepticism to undermine basic healthcare? As this excellent summary by the IHT demonstrates, part of the problem is that, like most international institutions of its sort, the Tribunal doesn’t particularly feel any need to be transparent with the…
Glamorous Pamela over at Atlas Shrugs scored an amazing interview for her blog – an interview with UN horsewhipper John Bolton. She’s got the first two parts up and will get a third part up later. This goes to show the changing nature of blogging and how blogging is now beginning to supercede the news. Who wouldn’t want to read an interview with John Bolton? What newspaper ever tried this? It took Pamela to do it! What’s more, from Bolton’s point of view, why wouldn’t he like to talk to her as a friend – he reads her blog and…
(Disclaimer: I’m in a heavy-OT zone today, and do not have the time to write this up with the care that it deserves, but the issue needs to be raised, because the “common wisdom” is beginning to accrete in a dangerous direction.) Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there’s a good reason for that: the Allies didn’t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn’t somehow wake up one morning and think “let’s go murder all the…
After so many complaints that the United Nations Human Rights Commission is host to some of the most abusive human rights violators on the planet, one would think that the United States is being hypocritical by opposing planned reform at the UN for scrapping it and creating a new Human Rights Council that’s more effective in dealing with these issues. That’s what you’d think if you only read the headline and first paragraph of this Guardian Unlimited article, anyway. U.S. Against Proposed U.N. Rights Panel UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The United States announced its opposition to the proposed new U.N.…
A brief timeline of events: – Iranian President says that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” – The United Nations condemns his remarks. – Iranian President calls for Israel to be moved to Europe and denies the Holocaust. – The United Nations is shocked — shocked! — by the remarks. Oops, I seem to have missed an event right there in the middle, right after the whole “Israel should be wiped off the map” thing. A week ago, the United Nations held a “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” at the UN headquarters in New York City, which…