Comments on The Belmont Club,"The PKK loses its gamble"

Dan,
(who was "e-mailing and chatting with friends in Tbilisi" about the mutiny/coup attempt)
Twenty years ago I was working in the Central Users Site of The University of Chicago Computing Organization in Harper Library as the People’s Liberation Army attacked Tien an Men Square. The palpable sense of both being there and being unable to help flowed through me. Unfortunately the logs that I had saved were lost years ago but I remember them, “The soldiers are gathering at the train station” “They are entering the square” “Help us, they are killing us.” Like what Wilson purportedly said of the new medium of cinema after a screening of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Real people are dealing with life and death while the children in Washington are busy calling Hollywood for rewrite to fix the plot.

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anton,
There is nothing in the Constitution that says only lawyers can be appointed to the SCOTUS or any bench.

Dan,
From the AP wire this bit is ominous

The NATO exercises, which continue through June 1, were originally planned to include about 1,300 personnel from 19 NATO and partner nations.
But some former Soviet republics have recently decided not to take part.

Among the countries to back out was Armenia, which is dependent on Russia for its economic survival. Four other former Soviet republics — Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Moldova — and Serbia also had decided to pull out, the Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported Tuesday.

How horrible it must be to be a small nation and knowing that you are alone and the Bear is coming. Poland must look East and West and wonder, what has changed? The thing is that much has changed. The problem now is one of will more than capacity. Poland could probably fight Russia to a draw if she had any support. Nato could kick Putin's hollow husk of a regime in. The problem with the West is that it is turning inward and giving up. Like the dog that has stopped eating and waits for the end, they will not fight.