World's a Mess

Originally run on 9 September 2009 on the News page.

In Soviet Russia He Who Controls the Past Controls You!

Last week was the 70th Anniversary of the invasion of Poland by German forces and the start of the second world war. Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev , never one to miss an opportunity to look like a villain from a John Milius movie, made a claim that Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin had nothing to do with the start of WWII.

While we’re certainly thankful to Stalin for throwing millions and millions of under trained, under armed peasants at the Nazi menace, we also recognize that he was a complete heel. Besides killing twenty-million of his own people via starvation, work camps, or executions in his spare time, he also secretly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler that would allow the two of them to dissect Poland and a handful of other nations without harassment from the other.

Considering Russia’s history of mysteriously executing journalists who report on the government, crime, and big business (which are basically one and the same in the Big Freezy, as the locals call it) it’s a pretty disconcerting for an elected official to unapologetically deny the nature of reality. Also, even if Mr Medvedev is correct about “saving Europe,” the USSR also didn’t spend a lot of time after the war debating whether or not they should crush half of it under their boot heel for fifty years.

MERCENARY HOOOOOUSE!!!

Last week an independent watchdog group exposed private contractors working for a company called Armor Corp for hazing employees and other activities that one might describes as “lascivious.” But don’t just take the watchdog’s word for it, there’s a bunch of photos of these jerks. One is of a Mr. Clean looking guard wearing nothing but a lei and half-of a coconut pounding away at a mysterious red cup that probably isn’t full of buttermilk and guards eating potato chops out of each others’ asscracks (there has also been accusations of doing shots out of said asscracks). Oh, and also there was something about procuring hookers.

When you compare the stupid, confusingly homoerotic antics of the Frat Boys of Mercenary House to other private military corporations like Xe (formerly known as Blackwater International formerly known as SPECTRE) which has been accused of multiple counts of murder by the Iraqi government and sports connections to various right-wing and Christian supremacists organizations, the embassy guards’ actions seem, well tame.

All in all, they’re really just harmless pranksters (remember that time they accidentally killed that horse in the dean’s office?), harmless pranksters that makes us look like assholes in front of a country that’s only eight years away from stoning women to death for wearing blue jeans. So while ArmorCorp’s actions might have been careless, insensitive, and irresponsible, they don’t seem to have done anything more wrong than being dumber than hell in front of a camera and I’m sure more than a few of you can sympathize.

Image by Boris Vladmirski.