Nine years ago, the U.S. and its NATO allies bombed heck out of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia) in order to liberate Kosovo, a province universally recognized as legitimately part of Yugoslavia-Serbia. After a couple of months, Milosevic gave up, and Kosovo recently declared its independence.

Russia has been squabbling for years with Georgia over a bit just over the Russian border within Georgia called South Ossetia, that, like Kosovo, is ethnically different on the whole from the rest of Georgia. Yesterday, Russia and Georgia went at it hammer and tongs.

How, exactly is this different from our Kosovo War, other than that Kosovo was thousands of miles away from America, while South Ossetia adjoins Russia?

Wikipedia writes:

“The Republic of South Ossetia consists of a checkerboard of Georgian-inhabited and Ossetian-inhabited towns and villages. The largely Ossetian capital city of Tskhinvali and most of the other Ossetian-inhabited communities are governed by the separatist government, while the Georgian-inhabited villages and towns are administered by the Georgian government. This close proximity and the intermixing of the two communities has made the conflict in South Ossetia particularly dangerous, since any attempt to create an ethnically pure territory would involve population transfers on a large scale.”

Back in 2000, on the first anniversary of the Kosovo war, I offered an explanation of a costly but peaceful way to resolve these kind of inevitable disputes.

Let the games begin! Law games, that is.

The first state trial for the Knoxville Horror carjacking-kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murders, which claimed the lives of Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, was scheduled to begin on Monday, with defendant George Geovonni “Detroit” Thomas in the dock. Instead, it will begin on August 10—August 10, 2009, that is.

Thomas’ trial had originally been scheduled to be the last of the four state capital trials, in each of which, in the event of a murder conviction, Knox County (TN) State Attorney General Randy Nichols will be seeking the death penalty. However, the April federal trial of accessory Eric Boyd revealed that the state had no DNA evidence tying Thomas to either the anal gang-rape of Newsom, or to the oral, vaginal, and anal gang-rapes of Christian, and thus that the case against him was the weakest of the four. When the defense teams in the other three capital trials petitioned for and received postponements until 2009, reasoning that the prosecution would seek to use those trials to bolster its case against Thomas, his attorneys petitioned that his trial be moved up one year, back to its original date. The petition was granted by the court.

The prosecution retaliated by producing new evidence (which it had previously gotten permission from the court to delay providing the defense teams) by the cartload, which the defense had insufficient time to review for an August, 2008 trial, whereupon Thomas’ team cried uncle.

At present, the first state capital trial in the case, of Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins, is scheduled to begin on January 26, 2009. Co-defendants Vanessa Coleman and Cobbins’ half-brother, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson, are scheduled to go on trial on April 13 and June 22, 2009, respectively.

By the way, Boyd was convicted on April 16 of being an accessory, after the fact, to the carjacking, for helping Davidson evade arrest. Federal prosecutors David Jennings and Tracy Stone implied that Boyd was guilty of the carjacking and murders, as well, and that he might yet be charged with those crimes. However, they and their state counterparts would do well to put their pants on one leg at a time. A potential problem which the April 16 conviction may raise on appeal is that, in presuming that Davidson was guilty of carjacking, which remains to be proven, Boyd’s trial was prejudicial. Davidson won’t be tried on the state charges prior to 2009, and if he is convicted in state court for murder and sentenced to die, that would moot any issue of punishment for carjacking, which is a federal crime.

Given the above-cited conditions, could a criminal attorney please weigh in on the validity of Boyd’s conviction? Thanks in advance.

I love lists, where facts are jumbled together with no pretense of literary continuity. So simple!

Here is an example of the genre from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver: Things you might not know about Barack Obama (August 8, 2008).

In his early years he was known as Barry.

According to his memoirs, he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine in his youth.

His first name comes from the word that means “blessed by God” in Arabic.

At his wife’s suggestion, he quit smoking before his campaign to win the Democratic nomination began.

Holds both American and Kenyan (since 1963) citizenship.

Fascinating. Has there ever been another Presidential candidate who has been a dualer? If so, I’ve never heard of it.

If Obama becomes President, then a self-proclaimed Citizen of the World would be in charge, and his citizenship in another country would be a sweet victory for one-worlders who think the nation-state stands in the way of global kumbaya.

For scholarly remarks on the subject of post-national loyalty, see John Fonte’s fine 2005 presentation to a Congressional committee, Dual Citizenship, Birthright Citizenship, and the Meaning of Sovereignty.

At the heart of patriotic assimilation is the transfer of allegiance. For more than 200 years, immigrants have taken an oath renouncing prior allegiance and transferring sole political allegiance to the United States.

The transfer of allegiance is central to America because of the kind of country that we are. If we were a country that did not receive large numbers of immigrants, this would not be as important in practical terms. But, it is precisely because we are a “nation of (assimilated) immigrants” that we must be serious about dual allegiance.

We are a civic, not ethnic nation. American citizenship is not based on belonging to a particular ethnicity, but on political loyalty to American democracy. Regimes based on ethnicity support the doctrine of “perpetual allegiance,” where one is always a member of the ethnic nation. In 1812, Americans went to war against the concept of the ethnic nation and the doctrine of “perpetual intelligence.” At this time, Great Britain, under the slogan “once an Englishman always an Englishmen” refused to recognize the “renunciation clause” of our citizenship oath.

The elites may have adopted globalism as a core belief, but heartland America has not. A 2005 Rasmussen survey showed that two-thirds of citizens believe newcomers should “adopt America’s culture, language and heritage.” And a February Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll found 61 percent of voters preferred a President who represents “America’s shared values” versus a belief in “wide diversity.”

Dual citizenship is the national equivalent of polygamy, and is similarly convenient for the practitioner, who has a spare country. Not so much for those on the receiving end though, who can never be sure of their current ranking.

As Testing99 has commented, the idea that a lone mad scientist could have pulled off the 2001 anthrax attacks is, in one way, much scarier than the idea that it was a conspiracy using special weaponized anthrax. If Ivins, whose anthrax specialty was defense, not offense, could have done it all by himself, then anthrax terrorism isn’t that hard to do. Not easy–Ivins had 20 years experience at the bioweapons lab–but not dauntingly hard, either.

That would be bad news.

We were frequently told in 2001 that the terrorist’s anthrax had been weaponized using sophisticated techniques to make it especially dangerous, but, did that turn out to be true?

Greg Cochran emails:

I’m pretty sure that the FBI doesn’t think there was any super-special ‘weaponization’ at all. From Wiki:

” The August 2006 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology contained an article written by Dr. Douglas Beecher of the FBI labs in Quantico, VA.[30] The article, titled “Forensic Application of Microbiological Culture Analysis to Identify Mail Intentionally Contaminated with Bacillus anthracis spores ,” states “Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents.” The article also specifically criticizes “a widely circulated misconception” “that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production.” The harm done by this misconception is described this way: “This idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone. The persistent credence given to this impression fosters erroneous preconceptions, which may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations.” However, after this article had appeared the editor of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, L. Nicholas Ornston, stated that he was uncomfortable with Beecher’s statement in the article since it had no evidence to back it up and contained no citation. “

I’ve never seen any evidence of any coating, either, just a lot of people say that there must have been some. Finding silicon with a mass spectrometer doesn’t mean a there was any coating. This discussion is complicated by a natural reluctance to talk about the exact methods of preparing weapons-grade anthrax. I suspect that one point they’d really like to skip over would be that its fairly easy.

More on this from the Washington Post, 2006:

” The FBI would not allow Beecher to be interviewed about his article. But other scientists familiar with the forensic investigation echoed his description. Whoever made the powder produced a deadly project of exceptional purity and quality — up to a trillion spores per gram — but used none of the tricks known to military bioweapons scientists to increase the lethality of the product. Officials stressed that the terrorist would have had to have considerable skills in microbiology and access to equipment.

“It wasn’t weaponized. It was just nicely cleaned up,” said one knowledgeable scientist who spoke on the condition he not be identified by name because the investigation is continuing. “Whoever did it was proud of their biology. They grew the spores, spun them down, cleaned up the debris. But there were no additives.”

Like I said. This simplifies the situation considerably.

Rielle Hunter, the 44-year-old mother of former VP candidate John Edward’s love child, was the inspiration for “Alison Poole,” the narrator / main character of Jay McInerney’s 1989 third novel Story of My Life.

McInerney’s friend Bret Easton Ellis then borrowed “Alison Poole” and did terrible things to her in American Psycho, then had her come back and play a larger role in Glamorama.

Story of My Life tells of the breakdown of a NYC party girl, whose friends all tease her by singing Elvis Costello’s “Party Girl:”

They say you’re nothing but a party girl
Just like a million more all over the world

and Costello’s ominous “Alison:”

Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.

Story of My Life is often criticized as being “just like McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City except it’s about a girl.” But, first, being just like Bright Lights Big City is nothing to sneeze at–I like McInerney’s debut novel better than Evelyn Waugh’s similar Vile Bodies. I’ve felt that McInerney’s best books are often underrated because he works hard to make them easy on his readers. With Waugh’s formal prose style, it’s easy to see his craftsmanship. In contrast, McInerney works hard to make his literary prose a fast read.

Second, writing a novel about a character of the other sex is harder than it looks. Waugh only did it once, in his almost unknown 1950 novel Helen about the mother of Emperor Constantine. Similarly, Philip Roth hasn’t tried it in the last 40 years. So, I was impressed by Story of My Life the two times I read it. McInerney’s career seems to be idling today, so my old hopes that he’d grow into the American Waugh seem doomed, but his first, third, and fourth (Brightness Falls) novels were first-rate.

Anyway, what’s the deal with Rielle Hunter?

I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s song “Alma Mahler:”

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You’d never be free of her spell.

(more…)