for economically illiterate advocates of monarchy: “Turks mourn relative of Ottoman sultan”

Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, from Osman I to Mehmed V

“No More Marches on DC”

Is it possible to be more transparent?

Note: The Post Magically Disappeared! Here’s the screen shot (click to enlarge to readable size):

So “the purpose” of the organizers of last Saturday’s march (disclosure: I neither organized nor attended it) was “to dissipate energy, and fool people into thinking that their time and money have accomplished something, as the regime laughs up its sleeve.” Ohhh-kaaay….

Who “protest” NATO meetings by setting buildings on fire, with evident impunity?

Anarchy…or…the Amero?

One thing I have been asked about at several public lectures I’ve made in Kazakhstan is when the “Amero” is going to be introduced, whether it is a plan to cancel the value of all dollars held abroad and shift to a new currency, thus robbing foreign holders of dollars of their value, etc. When I say that the “Amero” is an urban myth, that there is no serious discussion of such an abandonment of the Canadian, US, and Mexican currencies, that it seems to be more prominently discussed in Kazakhstan than in the US, etc., I get some astonished stares for my apparent ignorance of what is really happening. One person in a meeting pointed out that “they already have a name for it!” I responded that I could propose a union of the Tenge and the Ruble and name it the “Tuble,” but that doesn’t mean that there must be serious plans actually to abolish the Tenge and the Ruble in favor of the Tuble.

It’s a piece with the wacko fantasies about the “North American Union.” Once some people get it into their heads, no request for confirming evidence seems capable of getting them to question it. Conspiracy theories are very hard to disprove; the lack of evidence for them is just more proof that they must be right — after all, if there weren’t a conspiracy, why was the evidence all covered up?

This entry reveals the remarkably low intellectual depths that the Lew Rockwell Cult plumbs:

August 27, 2008

Taco on Russia v. Georgia v. S. Ossetia
Posted by Stephan Kinsella at August 27, 2008 08:50 PM
Re What About the Ossetians?: Cato’s piece on the Russia-Georgia-Ossetia crisis is a bit odd. First, as Sheldon Richman notes, “the Georgian military response to … the secessionist ambitions of the majority in South Ossetia … was the immediate cause of the current war”; but the Cato piece blames Russia (”The war was a spectacular provocation that had been long prepared and successfully executed by the Russian ’siloviki’”), without so much as mentioning Georgia’s own complicity, or Georgia’s status as neocon stooge.

Further, as Richman notes, “Defenders of liberty … should … champion the cause of the brutalized Ossetians, who … demand independence from Georgia. … When President Bush says the ‘territorial integrity of Georgia’ must be respected and GOP presidential candidate John McCain declares, ‘Today we’re all Georgians,’ they are putting politics above justice.” He’s right: any libertarian ought to favor decentralization, secession, and independence. Yet, the Cato piece seems to bemoan the possibility that the breakaway regions may actually succeed in gaining independence–it’s a “loss” (”Under the new situation, the idea of legitimizing the de facto loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may gain traction in Georgian society.”)

Interestingly, the Cato piece is linked to approvingly on the smearblog of Cato’s vice president for international junketeering, hissy fitting, and slandering. And in the comments section, one of his fellow slimers apes the neocon line in opposing Ossetian independence in the name of the international law doctrine of “territorial integrity”. But the libertarian aspect of this doctrine is its prohibition of invasions of one nation by another. To the extent the principle is opposed to secession, it is unlibertarian.

Notice the sadly childish use of links. When it looks like it might be a link to someone critical of them, it goes instead to another sad and pathetic piece about legal issues facing someone who has, as far as I can tell, not in fact done anything to arouse their ire.

The two serious links on it are to a blog post (which links to a longer essay) by Sheldon Richman that raises important issues and to an analysis by a Cato scholar with a great deal of knowledge of the issues and the powers involved; that analysis does not call for any kind of military response, but the sad Mr. Kinsella twists it into something it’s not by highlighting the reference to Georgia’s “loss” of territory…..which is, as a loss of territory, stripped down into “a loss.” Not much of a point, but Kinsella isn’t much of a thinker. (It’s also interesting that there are no mentions of the large number of other analyses of the conflict by Cato analysts. Instead it’s “the Cato piece”; whatever.)

On the substantive issue, by all means support the right of people to secede from regimes they don’t wish to be ruled by. But it’s not at all so clear that they have a right to take with them others who don’t wish to secede, or who don’t want to be a part of their smaller state. That’s why issues of secession are not always easy, unless you simply don’t care about individual rights in the first place. For example, consider the enthusiasm of the Lew Rockwell Cult for the secession of the southern states, something done for the very explicit purpose of keeping the majority population of South Carolina in chains. (You see, they were slaves and not consulted on whether “the people” of South Carolina should secede from the US.) As the members of the majority population of slaves were not asked whether they wished to secede from South Carolina or from the slave masters who promoted secession, South Carolina’s secession was simply unjustifiable on moral grounds. (That is not the same as saying that everything that followed, including the unconstitutional and terrible acts of the Union and its armies, were justified. As Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has pointed out, the issues are quite separable.)

I wish I always knew the right answers to such questions, but chasing out the largest ethnic group from Abkhazia, enduring foreign military occupation, engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing, and then insisting that the remaining population have the right to take the whole territory with them into “independence” (in reality, military occupation and domination by the large neighbor to the north) doesn’t strike me as obviously right. If South Ossetia can “secede,” can the Georgian-populated areas of South Ossetia (which were quite substantial until a few weeks ago, and were more so before the nasty ethnic cleansing touched off by a mixture of rabid local nationalism and external interventionism in the early 1990s) “secede” from South Ossetia? Not according to the Rockwell Cultists. Mr. Kinsella says someone or other (not me, and I’m not sure who, but he doesn’t have the courage to provide any actual link to any arguments) invoked “territorial integrity,” which Kinsella rejects….except when it he eagerly invokes it to support the Russian occupation and expulsion of the entire Georgian population from the Soviet-era territory of the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast. In fact, territory does have a status in international law, and for good reasons. It’s a good idea for states (the U.S. state among them, as well as the Russian state) not to use force to step over those boundaries, as the results can be quite terrible. One handy way to limit the power of states to do harm is to limit their actions to within the territorial borders that characterize the Westphalian system of states. And so invoking “territorial integrity” means that states shouldn’t send in armies to carve up the territories of other states. Unless, of course, that state is Russia, led by the man the Lew Rockwell Cult seems to idolize. (Click here and search for “Putin.”)

Now the Lew Rockwell Cult doesn’t allow anyone to comment on their blogs. Fair enough. And they also don’t link to any sources that might contradict them. Fair enough. Since I’ll be flying to Ukraine tomorrow, I’ll not have any comments here, as the Cultists are gleeful about posting many remarks under different names (but with the same IP addresses). In the meantime, if you’re interested in the study of puerile psychology, check out the links they provide and see if they seem worthy of being taken seriously. (In case the post is later changed without notice, as they so often are by the “airbrushers” there, I did take a screen shot.)

It gets more difficult to follow the absurdities at the Lew Rockwell Cult (LRC) and their spinoffs.

Thomas DiLorenzo, one of America’s finest, um, scholars, remembered something (a meeting of Cato scholars and speakers at a Moscow conference with Vladimir Putin), but was not able to get the link “to work.” So here’s what he wrote:

August 16, 2008
Cato “Hearts” Putin?
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at August 16, 2008 11:24 AM

It would seem so, from a photograph on the May/June 2004 Policy Report featuring Ed Crane and other Kochtopusians sitting around with Putin in Moscow. You can find it online by Googling “Putin and Cato in Moscow.” I couldn’t get the link to work, unfortunately. Crane must have had it airbrushed, kind of like the Soviets used to do to their “official photos.” I wonder where the Kochtopus stands on the hostilities in Georgia?

(Google cache, at least temporarily here; screenshot: here.) Then, after his equally brilliant colleague Stephen Kinsella located it, DiLorenzo….airbrushed his own oddly paranoid post and deleted the reference to not being able to locate it, a bit of incompetence on which his mind fastened as evidence that the photo had been “airbrushed.” It’s all so oddly amusing, not the least for mixing so much pure strangeness into one tiny paragraph (”Kochtopus,” a phrase from the last of the prophets, Murray Rothbard, from the 1980s, but a puzzling reference today; classical liberal thinkers referred to as “Kochtopusians sitting around with Putin in Moscow,” evidently referring to Grigory Marchenko of Khazakstan, Cato president Ed Crane, energy analyst Daniel Yergin, Andrei Illarionov of Russia, Kakha Bendukidze [then a businessman in Russia, now in Georgia], Jose Pinera of Chile, Mart Laar of Estonia; the reference to “airbrushing,” in a post that was then “airbrushed,” etc., etc.).

Since the Rockwell Cult has been openly jubilant about Russian imperialism and the invasion of neighboring countries by the Russian hegemon, it seems likely that some have suggested that that it blows their cover (claiming to be libertarians, rather than crackpot, racist, neo-Confederate cultists). To try to scrabble back some libertarian cover, the chief priest of the Cult, Lew Rockwell himself, had to post a denunciation of Russian policy in Chechnya, which does not sit well with their earlier endorsements of brutal policies to suppress the Chechens; as loony linkmaster Justin Raimondo so eagerly did. (Quick: get a screenshot before it, too, disappears down the memory hole.) As Raimondo, who seems to melt at the mention of the names of Eastern European strongmen, pointed out of an attack on a train, “That this augurs the beginning of a new round of attacks on Vladimir Putin’s Russia â?? and not only by Chechen separatists and other al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups â?? is a prediction hardly fraught with risk. A lot of people have it in for Holy Mother Russia, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out the other day in a rare television interview, and the Chechens are the least of it.” There you have it, Chechen separatists are all terrorists and are to be counted among “other al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups.” (Something made true by Russian policy, not by the initial leaders of Chechen independence, who were moderates, such as General Dudayev.) And they all have it in for “Holy Mother Russia.”

The final irony: the meeting with Putin included former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar explaining to him (a very unwelcome thing to do to a Tsar) that his policy in Chechnya was disastrous and immoral. And, in addition to Mart, the other most visible person at the table is Kakha Bendukidze, the current head of the State Chancellery of Georgia. To his left is Andrei Illarionov, whose views on Chechen independence were well known and publicly articulated even when he was working in the Kremlin (and whose views on Putin’s policies in Georgia are also clear enough).

But actually making a case for freedom is soooo much less satisfying than writing blog posts from obscure little towns (which they proudly call the “new Vienna,” minus, of course, the intellectual life, the cultural life, the interesting people, etc.)

Update: Another Rockwell post down the memory hole because it was so unhinged even Lew Rockwell wanted it taken down. And that’s saying a lot!

Can You Spell “Bigot”?

Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 11:35 AM
An emailer sent me a hilarious snippet from the personal blog of Cato’s vice president for international junketeering, hissy fitting, and slandering in which the psychotic one attacks this Web site once again by declaring that “there are no interesting people” in Auburn Alabama. Waaaaaaaa! In addition, says the sick one, there’s no “culture” there, either. (He’s never been to Auburn, of course).

Auburn is one of my favorite spots and yes, there is a culture there, but, admittedly, not one that would be agreeable to the “urbane, cosmopolitan” [T]Reason , magazine crowd, which celebrates the likes of Dennis Rodman, Madonna, Larry Flynt, and a book author who writes about having sex with animals as its cultural icons. D.C. and Hollywood are much more in tune with such cultural depravity.

Cached version here (for a while at least) and screen shot here.

“Sex with animals”…. oooohh-kay. Whatever. But regardless of Mr. D’s other interests, the post is a good example of Mr. DiLorenzo deploying his skills as a “historian.” For example, my statement that Auburn does not have the culture of Vienna (circa 1910) is the same as saying it has “no culture.” And “there are no interesting people” (using real quotation marks, too) is how he “quotes” my mockery of the comparison of Auburn, Alabama to Vienna “which they proudly call the ‘new Vienna,’ minus, of course, the intellectual life, the cultural life, the interesting people, etc.” That man has a reputation for historical reliability, alright. (And, of course, it’s hard to imagine any city in the world today with the intellectual magnificence of Vienna at its peak, and even for many years after. If New York is not close, what of Auburn?)

Bat Guano*

I’m in Germany and missed a staged demonstration by a couple dozen kooky anti-free-trade protesters outside the Cato Institute’s offices. But the “scholar Thomas DiLorenzo” did not. As he pointed out, in a display of his novel standards (”his sloppiness has earned him the abuse and ridicule of his critics“): “Recall that CNN dismissed Ron Paul as a crackpot for believing that any such highway exists. But of course, it does exist, and is even described on Wikipedia.” Right! It’s on the internet. Ergo….It’s true!!! Q.E.D.

DiLorenzo (whom I used to know many years ago, before he went off the far, far deep end, lost his connection to reality and evidence, and rejected individualism for racist collectivism) writes of an alleged conspiracy to connect Mexico and Canada and strip Americans of their jobs (rather like the warnings of “Jack D. Ripper“* in Dr. Strangelove of “a Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”). The tinfoil-hatted professor reminds us that it’s “even described on Wikipedia.” There you have it. It’s even described on Wikipedia.

Now, I hesitate to describe anyone as incompetent or lacking in capacities, but the same person asserted that the ugliness uncovered in the Ron Paul newsletters by a young journalist was obviously a set up, for “How on earth would a kid just out of college know to go to a library in Kansas, of all places, to dig up such stuff?” Maybe it was because the collections of libraries in Kansas are available on the internet, the same internet that has “an entry” on the alleged plot to sap Americans of their vital jobs.

I am reminded of seminars with undergraduates when occasionally 19-year-olds will say something odd and I ask “Why do you think that?,” to which they answer, “I saw it on the internet.”

Sad. Very sad.

*Correction: I had originally written “Bat Guano,” but Dan provided a useful correction. Thanks!

P.S. I did find a residue of the last DiLorenzo outburst at http://digg.com/political_opinion/CATO_Protesters_Tom_Palmer_has_a_sputtering_hate_fit But when you click on the link, you get
Not Found

The requested URL /blog/lewrw/archives/022229.html was not found on this server.

The link was here, as shown by the Google archives: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/022229.html

A Little Update: An internet troll (evidently the same “Francisco” who posted comments on Ron Paul support websites asserting, on the basis of “social networking theory” that I simply must have had an affair with a New Republic writer I had never met or had any contact with) has attempted to defend the undefendable in the long thread that follows. I can’t imagine any serious people being misled by it; a quick check of the links I provided in response should convince the unconvinced that there is something rotting on the fringes of the libertarian movement, something that denies its core principles and undermines its effectiveness. I leave it to readers to make up their minds for themselves. Click through to the links and see if what you find there represents your own self-understanding.

Nine face stoning death in Iran

Under Iran’s strict penal code, men convicted of adultery should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests for stoning. The stones used should not be large enough to kill the person immediately.

There seems to be some controversy in the stoning community. The stoners in Iran want it done slowly, focusing on the agony and suffering of the stoned, whereas the stoner Gary North (sorta famous for his very influential and prescient prediction of the end of the world due to the “Y2K” disaster, which, well, sort of didn’t happen, but..whatever) and his colleagues favor the economic aspect (low-cost and ready-to-hand implements and the creation of public benefits), as Walter Olson explained in Reason:

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. “Why stoning?” asks North. “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost.” Thrift and ubiquity aside, “executions are community projects–not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his’ duty, but rather with actual participants.” You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. “That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes,” North continues, “indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.” And he may be right about that last point, you know.

Maybe we could hold a contest, with Gary North and his friends volunteering to test the various techniques on each other. Better yet, invite the extremist Iranian mullahs to take part, as North and Co. consider them infidels (thus deserving of death, like gay people and adulterers), and the extremist mullahs return the compliment. Talk about a complementarity of interests! And the rest of the human race could live in peace without them.

(Let us hope that the voices of reason in that country prevail and that the nine Iranians are spared. The cruelty of the regime there — not to mention their destructive economic policies — is creating discontent and some hope for a liberal alternative. The last best hope of the regime is for the US to attack them with military force, which would create a surge of nationalist support to add to the dwindling reserves of religious fanatacism.)

I was looking for some old articles I’d written in years past and stumbled on this one from The Spectator (of London), which I think was, well, not bad:

“Hothouse of Hate” (not my title), The Spectator, 22. February, 2003

Death sentence for Saudi ‘witch’

Sharia law row: Archbishop is in shock as he faces demands to quit and criticism from Lord Carey

I’m in favor of choice of laws for arbitration, but I suspect that that is not what the madman from Canterbury has in mind…… I wonder how he reconciles his tepid support for rights for gay people with community-based Sharia law.

NOTE: I got a helpful email from a friend in the UK who is a Muslim and a libertarian and he told me that the Archbishop’s speech had been misreported and that it should be interpreted along the lines of “choice of laws for arbitration.” I based my interpretation on the earlier endorsement by the Archbishop of punishments for â??thoughtless and cruelâ? styles of speaking about religion. But my friend’s letter is thoughtful and he sent me the entire text of the Archbishop’s speech (which has a copyright notice on it from “Rowan Williams”), so I shall read both and reconsider.

Donâ??t Believe Everything You Read

I have been very occupied with other matters and not very attentive to the scandal surrounding “those newsletters,” but I’ve gotten a fair number of emails, some from friends with links to very strange internet postings and some from, well, really disturbed people. Julian Sanchez of Reason (why, at one time, he even was a colleague of mine, and before that, he attended seminars at which I lectured! he is therefore my tool, or, since I have also written for Reason, maybe I am his) shines the light of reason on the whole ugly matter.

For the record, as I have stated elsewhere, I had never met or communicated with Mr. Kirchik prior to the publication of his article. (After the publication of his article, he introduced himself to me at a happy hour and we talked for less than five minutes.) The fact that, as it turns out, I am “openly gay” and he is “openly gay,” and we live in the same city must, you know, mean that we were, you know, “friends” is one of the favorite insinuations of the LewRockwell.com crowd and has been posted on a number of prominent websites. Sorry to disappoint. But then, it seems we may both live near metro stations (I’m between a Red line station and a Green line station), so if the sexual orientation doesn’t clinch it, that certainly does. Whatever.

While not teaching at a university (the horror), I can say that I have also not been a “ringleader” of any movement to “smear” anyone by unearthing things he wrote or published under his name. I guess that’s a lot of “nots” for one life. (I am also not a member of the Trilateral Commission and I’m not a member of the CFR. And I’m not a member of the Federal Reserve Board. Whew. I don’t know how I manage it. So many nots!)

But while not doing those other things, I do have some things to attend to that keep me pretty busy.

So many pixels have been spilled over the way that Lew Rockwell & Co. have slimed the libertarian movement. What more can be said? The evidence of truly ugly racist collectivism at LewRockwell.com and the little network of groups clustered around him is overwhelming, not only in the Ron Paul newsletters that have been found, but in their hateful attacks on Rosa Parks and others, as well as in their connections with anti-Semites, German “nationalists,” white supremacists (e.g., Sam Francis), etc., etc. ad nauseam. The embrace of clearly anti-libertarian figures, sentiments, and causes, all in the name of being “anti-PC,” contrarian, and enemies of the American state has done incalculable damage to the cause of limited government. Rockwell and his sick crew should be ostracized and excluded from decent company.

My colleague David Boaz’s statement here. I agree entirely. (The blog post below has some commentary, as well.)

I’ve gotten some emails, so rather than respond to all of them, I am posting a clarification: I am not quoted in this article from The New Republic. (To the best of my knowledge, I have not met Mr. Kirchik, nor have we spoken.)

Someone I used to know, Thomas DiLorenzo, who has in the meantime taken to writing error-filled books (”a travesty of historical method and documentation“) on statist American presidents, has given us a little insight into his scholarly standards again. He wrote yesterday:

November 22, 2007

Good Reason for Libertarians to Not Support Fred Thompson
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at November 22, 2007 04:02 PM
He’s the preferred candidate of the STATO Institute. (Ted Galen Carpenter claims he’s “the only limited government conservative” running for the Republican nomination).

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017104.html

Evidently he saw that Ted Galen Carpenter had written a column on Thompson
and, true to form, didn’t bother to read it. He would have found the conclusion:

Thompson’s defense proposal is a case study in faulty thinking about important security issues. Throwing money at the Pentagon, complacently accepting a host of obsolete commitments to free-riding allies and embracing the folly of nation building is not what the next administration needs to do.

(Now there’s a ringing endorsement!)

Today, the blog entry was changed to:

Good Reason for Libertarians to Not Support Fred Thompson
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 04:02 PM

He’s the preferred candidate of the STATO Institute. (In the Oct. 19 issue of FreeMarketNews.com Michael Tanner claimed he’s positioning himself as “the only limited government conservative” running for the Republican nomination).

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017104.html

The little change (someone must have actually read the Carpenter essay) then refers to this on the FreeMarketNews.com site, which also does not say what DiLorenzo says it says.

This is just too good to be true. DiLorenzo is obviously parodying himself! Either that or he doesn’t limit his “travesty of historical method and documentation” just to events in the nineteenth century. But at least it would show methodical consistency….why actually “read” or “check” anything when it’s such a bother?

There’s a truly strange and bizarre character running around the fringes of the extreme right, who writes under the name of “Taki.” He’s, shall we say, “old school” when it comes to, um, “the Jews.” Here’s an example from a rambling and disjointed column I stumbled across in web browsing:

What I find incredible is that there are still people around who wonder why the Middle East is up in flames. Andrew Alexander explained it very well last Friday. 90 years ago Britain initiated a policy of providing a Jewish homeland in Palestine â?? on predominantly Arab lands. Then Israel was created on land that supposedly belonged half to the Arabs and half to the Jews. But not for the first time, the Jews took a bigger slice.

It would be one thing if he had written “the Israelis,” but instead he (no doubt — and I mean that quite seriously) chose the term “the Jews,” a choice all the more obvious because of the phrase “But not for the first time,” thus invoking the canard of Jews as inherently greedy and unscrupulous. I can only imagine the contortions of his apologists in justifying such crude and hateful collectivism.

How truly disgusting.

A friend just sent me a rather shocked link to Amazon.com’s page for Jonah Goldberg’s new book with the utterly crazy title: “Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.” The original subtitle was “The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” That one was unhinged enough, but the new title is simply deranged.

Now, I should admit that I don’t shop at Whole Foods, not because I think it’s “fascist,” but because I don’t like cooking, so I pay other people to prepare my food. (I’m a regular at the “Health Bar” around the corner from my place and I get 15% off the meals; that and my microwave do me fine.) If I liked to cook and if I had more time, I think I just might shop at Whole Foods, since the food’s really good. (It’s a bit pricey, but the quality is superb.) And I’m not afraid that the eggplant will be “totalitarian.” I’ve met John Mackey a number of times and I know for a fact that he’s not a “fascist,” nor does he distribute “fascist food.”

I know that authors don’t always come up with the titles or covers of their books, but they do get to veto them. This one is so utterly stupid that I hope that Goldberg is ashamed to show his face in public.

In this AP Story in today’s New York Times (Muslim Prayer Site Is Opened in Athens) we learn that:

“International human rights reports had criticized Greece for failing to provide an official prayer site for Muslims in Athens.”

Oh, no! What an abuse!

Instead, here’s what happened:

“Plans by Greece to build a mosque for tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants living in Athens have stalled, so businesspeople in Arab countries paid for the downtown cultural center in a former factory.”

That’s how it’s ought to happen. People who are dedicated to their religion put up their own money, buy land, and build a temple, mosque, church, synagogue, or other place of worship. Those who are not dedicated to that religion don’t have to pay for it. And the state doesn’t have to designate an “official prayer site” for any religion at all, and therefore avoids designating any religion as “official,” thereby designating others as non-official. (Is it a human rights abuse if the Greek government fails to designate an “official prayer site” for Scientologists, Zoroastrians, or Mormons? I guess it is, according to some self-designated “international human rights groups” who wouldn’t know what a human right is if it were to come up and bite them.)

This is a very disturbing story: “Russia Warily Eyes Human Samples — In the Name of Fighting Bioterrorism, Export of Biological Materials Prohibited.”

According to data from TNT, every day around a hundred packages of biological materials are sent abroad by Russian hospitals for clinical analyses (they comprise the majority of biomaterials sent out of Russia), meaning that the ban on the export of biological materials will affect the health of thousands of Russian patients every month. Children’s Oncology Center deputy director Alexei Mashchan told Kommersant yesterday that “if this is true, it is a cannonball to the gut for us.” Much of the analyses that require the export of biological samples can only be done abroad, such as the selection of bone marrow donors, which is commonly done in German clinics.

(Russian language here and here.)