Author Archives: Doug Merrill
It’s All About Me
One of the consequences of Montenegro’s split from Serbia was the country’s need for its own top level domain, following its departure from .yu and .cs. In September 2007, ICANN settled for .me, potentially setting up another odd, little-country bonanza like .tv and .to.
Miquel Hudin Balsa relates his experience playing around to get a tasty .me name. The process looks like it’s set up as much to monetize the connection to the English-speaking world as to actually get people in Montenegro registered. As for the assignment itself, 21 of a possible 26 dot-m-whatever combinations were already taken; Macau, Malta and Mongolia had already claimed some of the likelier candidates.
There’s a second-level academic domain like the UK has. I sure hope that some wag will name servers on it after Warner Brothers cartoon characters.
For the misanthropes out there, bad news. (Is there any other kind for misanthropes?) The registrar says that the domain bite.me “is a premium domain and has not yet been scheduled for release.”
Understatement
“It should be noted that AIG wrote its derivative contracts in London.” – Commenter Thomas, at Crooked Timber
And indeed, we see a report on Bloomberg, the wire service the financial folks use to communicate with each other, that Allianz was involved in a bid for AIG two days before the crisis that led to its nationalization. Financial markets are tightly linked, and we are just starting to hear the chains rattle.
As with Russia’s neighbors, the question in the markets now has to be, “Who’s next?”
Trying to Rhyme with Orange
It isn’t working, and Ukraine’s parliament has 30 days to form a new ruling coalition. Good luck with that, too. If not, elections in December.
The long-simmering feud between Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko has, again, reached its breaking point. Tymoshenko, the current premier, has a month to engineer a new coalition, which would have to be with parties from outside the Orange bloc. So she would have to team up with Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, or other, less mainstream parties. I’ll bet on new elections.
Russia has a lot of levers to pull, especially on a winter-time election, and I can’t see Medvedev or Putin having too much need for restraint. Prices on natural gas, export and import restrictions, pipeline transit fees, and much more will probably all be on the menu of blandishments. The Georgian example will also be very much on everyone’s mind.
Eastern policy has not been one of France’s priorities within the EU, so it is ironic that the country’s once-every-two-decades tenure in the EU presidency will likely be bracketed by eastern questions: Georgia at the start and Ukraine at the end. Without strong friends in Europe’s west, Ukraine’s medium-term future looks less like candidacy and more like Finlandization. Maybe Yulia just figured this out faster than the rest of us.
(On the other hand, if the Russian consulate in the Crimea starts handing out passports willy-nilly, something other than Finlandization could be in the cards.)
Francly
Flight to quality is about the only thing I can say for sure about the ongoing Wall Street crisis that swallowed up a 158-year-old investment bank and forced Merrill (no-relation) Lynch to be sold to some outfit in North Carolina. (The $613+ billion that Lehman lists as debt is between the 2007 GDP of Belgium, $448 billion, and Turkey, $657 billion, the 17th and 18th largest economies in the world.)
Stock up on Swiss francs and hope that your European institution didn’t load up on specialty vehicles backed by US property bonds. The Washington Post calls it the beginning of a new financial architecture, and it’s getting built on the fly, without blueprints, at a speed that the builders hope will be faster than the collapse of the old one. Good luck with that.
Seven Years Later
Osama bin Laden is still at large.
If you haven’t read 110 Stories, you should.
Old Habits Die Hard
Deference outlives ideology. If the Kremlin is for it, and Washington is against it, Ortega must be in favor.
From AFP, via
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega has revived Cold War ghosts by recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, supporting Russia’s stance on the breakaway Georgian regions.
Ortega, a former Marxist guerilla leader who had close ties to the ex-Soviet Union, went further than other leftist Latin American countries in his defiance of Washington over the Georgia conflict by recognizing the independence of the rebel regions. …
Nicaragua “recognizes the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia” decreed by their respective parliaments in August, Ortega said Tuesday evening.
Nicaragua also completely supports “the Russian government’s position,” added Ortega…
Given its historical experience, you might think that Nicaragua would side with a small state against an overbearing northern neighbor, but no. Apparently the habit of following the line laid down in Moscow is too strong. (Presumably Ortega is also betting on a McCain administration in the US — thumbing your nose at the outgoing administration is going to have a very short shelf life — and an Obama team would bring rather different people to Latin American relations. That may not be the best of wagers either.)
Update: The of course completely reliable Wikipedia says that Nicaragua has five territorial disputes with its neighbors. But who needs territorial integrity as a norm in international relations?
Rallying ’Round
Central Tbilisi is filling up with people coming out for an officially sanctioned (and organized) but also popularly supported rally for Georgia and against Russia. In the main roads, a human chain is forming, one that takes in the main cathedral and Parliament, as well as business areas, residential neighborhoods and bridges across the Mtkvari. It’s a conscious recollection of the human chains and other protest actions in the Baltics in their run-up to independence from the Soviet Union, and the messages are the same: “Yay us!” and “Ivan go home!”
The Fury of Gustav
It’s been a while since I mentioned it here, but I grew up in the southern part of Louisiana. Not terribly near the coast, but still way down south. Most folks have left the coastal areas now, and that’s a good thing. The next 12 to 24 hours are going to be very rough, as hurricane Gustav makes landfall somewhere near Houma, Louisiana. It’s not all that far from where Katrina made landfall three years ago this week. Though for levees, settlements, floods and homeowners, a small change can mean a decisive difference.
Hurricane Gustav at 1am Eastern Time on Sept 1, 2008.
For our readers who don’t have an immediate mental geography of the southern United States, the diameter of the red area (this a radar image, so the red indicates very bad weather conditions indeed) is about 200km. The top sustained wind speeds will be over 190 kph (about the speed that Mercedes was going when it made your car shake as it whooshed past on the autobahn), with gusts up toward 240 kph (good cruising speed for a TGV). Katrina is fresh enough in people’s minds that compliance with the evacuation call was very good, but this could still be a devastating storm.
Dushanbe Diplomacy
At this week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Russian president Medvedev was reportedly seeking support for his country’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. If that’s true, he can’t be the mastermind he’s sometimes alleged to be in the conflict between Russia and Georgia.
Surely he knows that “territorial integrity” is one of the PRC’s favorite phrases in the lexicon of contemporary diplomacy. Surely he knows that China sees Tibet as a matter of territorial integrity. Surely he knows that the PRC sees Taiwan as a matter of territorial integrity. He may not know that one of the recurring themes of Chinese history is territorial breakup, but surely he has advisors who do, and who should have told him that asking China to back the undoing of territorial integrity as a norm of interstate relations is asking for a rebuff.
The Organization’s communique split the difference, saying “[We] urge the sides to solve existing problems peacefully, through dialogue, and to make efforts facilitating reconciliation and talks.” They added, “The SCO states welcome the adoption in Moscow on August 12 of six principles of settling the conflict in South Ossetia and support Russia’s active role in contributing to peace and cooperation in the region.” The “active role” has to count as a win for Russia, but the absence of any hint of recognition or support for recognition must surely count as a loss. It’s surprising that Russia sought it at all.