That long-running leftist delusion about how “We will make the world love us again” sure got old fast, didn’t it? (Never mind that outside of the jet-setting cliques of babbling salon intellectuals, our reputation around the world has always been pretty good - unlike the salon intellectuals, your humble correspondent actually gets out on the ground and meets real people with real ideas. But I digress.)

I don’t know how much you can trust polling inside Russia, but even so… consider this:

What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush…

(Emphasis mine.)

After not even a year of this vanity-fueled ineptitude on the international stage, we are weaker at home and less-respected around the world.

This morning, I’m in Zurich on the way home from a few days in Nairobi (Kenya).

This was a rather interesting and serious visit, and I got to spend quite a bit of time talking with both business and government leaders about their longer-term development plans and aspirations. If there is interest (vote in comments ), I can try to put together a more serious post later in the week (once I get home and get everything settled back down).

But for your Sunday morning relaxation, I’ll just present a few photos from Nairobi for some cultural upliftenment.

More below the fold….

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Over the past year, we’ve discussed a variety of prior-Presidential prototypes that Barack Obama seems to be following - by intent or outcome.

Jimmy Carter is prominently mentioned - as is LBJ.

But recent events prompt me to give you another one - of a presidency that never even happened.

Barack Obama is Walter Mondale. And he insists on running - 25 years later - a silly philosophy that was soundly rejected at the polls in 1984 (and, within a few short years, by history itself).

More below the fold.

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In the grand sweep of American history, the “War of 1812” seems to rank near the bottom of the list of events of possible importance. Just the name given to war seems to reflect this – naming nothing in particular to associate with that war, other than the year in which it began.

However, the “War of 1812” (which actually stretched on until the end of 1814) was anything but trivial. Circumstances concatenated to a fever pitch in the later part of 1814, as the fledgling United States of America frantically fought off a three-pronged British attack of continental scope.

And while today we mark more recent events, we should also note that perhaps the most crucial of those moments occurred on this date in 1814 – in the waters near (of all places) Plattsburgh, New York.

The tale is told – in words and pictures – below the fold.

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Today is an anniversary that is being marked rather somberly in places like the Baltic countries.

Seventy years ago today, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany - Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop - stunned the world by announcing a non-aggression pact between their two (totalitarian) countries.

While there had been a great deal of vituperate invective between the two great socialist powers, the underlying reality was that they had long been de facto allies. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Soviet Union provided training facilities for German pilots as Germany tried to secretly rebuild its air force - something that was forbidden to Germany under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the meantime, the Soviet Union continued to be a very large supplier of raw materials to Germany’s rebuilding industries. And during the 1930s, Nazi Germany’s nascent “security services” learned a great deal from the Soviet Union’s “security agency”….

So on the surface, the agreement of a simple “non-aggression pact” seemed rather anodyne.

But it was the secret protocols that were the real “content” of the agreement.

We’ll look at those details - and why they are suddenly important again - below the fold.

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This morning at the hotel here in Pretoria, I had breakfast with a businessman who is in town from Harare, the capitol of nearby Zimbabwe.

He had a number of fascinating things to say about the present situation in Zimbabwe, which I’ll share below the fold.

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There’s a nice little piece over in today’s Wall Street Journal authored by General Merrill McPeak, expressing his dismay at the premature termination of the build-out of the originally-planned fleet of the F-22 Raptor - the kick-*ss air-superiority fighter pictured above.

The piece is rather good, so I’ll let you go read the whole thing via the link.

I’ll just note a couple of things here:

The future air combat capabilities we should build are based on the F-22, a stealthy, fast, maneuverable fighter that is unmatched by any known or projected combat aircraft.

….

It’s been more than half a century since any American soldier or Marine has been killed, or even wounded, by hostile aircraft….

That first item is simply a statement of fact, while the second is a truly-astonishing description of an unparalleled military achievement.

But there’s a kicker at the end of this piece, which we’ll note below the fold….

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(Back in June, while I was in Washington, “Green Hell” author Steve Milloy graciously agreed to sit down for an interview. You can find my review of “Green Hell” here.)

Q: At what point did you realize that you had accumulated enough material for a book?
A: Having run JunkScience.com for 13 years now, I started to realize that on this issue someone really needed to issue a tough message to the public. So during the 2008 hysteria, I started to simply collect newspaper clippings. After just two weeks of accumulating such clippings, I realized that it would soon accumulate into a book – something that was basically indeed the case after about three months.

(More below the fold.)

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You might have noticed that Al Gore has recently been saying some very immodest things about anyone who dares to disagree with his views. Of course, when someone like Mr. Gore says things like that, it tells us more about his views than about those of his opponents.

And what is the real agenda of Mr. Gore and his fellow-traveling greenshirts?

If you want to find all of that scary information in one place, read “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do To Stop Them,” by Steve Milloy.

More below the fold.

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When one heads north out of Bucharest (by either road or rail), it takes a considerable amount of time for the city to “fall away.” When that finally does happen, you find yourself out on the Wallachian plain – which is very flat, now nearly treeless, and (in summer) very hot. The cityscape and traffic of Bucharest are replaced by scenes of peasant farmers transporting wood, hay, and other agricultural substances in horse-drawn carts – often doing so while chatting on their mobile phones.

But between Bucharest and the Carpathian foothills, just 35 miles north of Bucharest, the transportation corridor runs just by the western edge of the small city of Ploesti. Just to the west of the road and the rail line looms the large and venerable Ploesti oil-refining complex.

Today, Ploesti and its environs are peaceful – and almost bucolic.

But on this day 66 years ago, Ploesti was anything but peaceful. In the short span of 30 minutes, the Ploesti refinery was engulfed in flames, and the cornfields of the Wallachian plain were littered with the burning remains of aircraft – following one of the most unusual and brutally-courageous air attacks in history.

The tale is told below the fold.

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(N.b. - This is actually a rearranged and expanded version of this post from last Thursday. I happened to stumble across the printed version of the cited article on Sweden over my morning tea earlier today, so I wanted to revisit this with more details and emphasis on Sweden. — Sk.)

Last month (28 June) saw the 300th anniversary of the pivotal Battle of Poltava. Poltava was a watershed in the history of eastern Europe (and the world), as it marked the emergence of Peter the Great’s Russia as a major power - and the dashing of any hopes for Ukrainian independence for the next 282 years.

A third consequence was that Poltava marked the end of Sweden’s long run as a major power with an extensive and far-flung empire. After Poltava, Sweden gave up on its imperial status - and largely withdrew from the rough-and-tumble of continental politics.

Nowadays, Sweden is giving up on another long run - its run as the “model” welfare state.

More below the fold.

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I’ve suddenly been finding myself saddled with a surprising amount of travel - both recently-done and on the short-term schedule.

If there’s a possible theme, it relates to what the next onset of economic growth will look like. And these days, it’s about a great deal more than what will drive the next surge of economic growth - it’s also about where the next surge of growth will occur.

And on that count, contemporary Washington is badly, badly out of step with much of the world - and is dangerously oblivious to that reality.

More below the fold.

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Back during the 1980s, there were many left-right intellectual divides regarding the Soviet Union.

One of the forgotten ones was: How should we regard the “Soviet Union?”

Mushy-leftist types were fond of the notion that the Soviet Union was a relatively normal, basic “nation” - but one that was deservedly paranoid because of the 1941 German invasion (a line of thought conveniently stoked on a regular basis by Radio Moscow). In this view, the Soviet Union was really a cuddly little fuzzball, and if we’d just be gentle and reassuring it would cease and desist from its continual truculence - since if we could get across that we really, really, really had no aggressive intentions, the bear would purr. And, oh yeah, we could help this along by pledging that we would cheerfully recognize the extant possessions as a permanent Soviet “sphere of influence.”

More of us, though, took a different view - one that was more grounded in reality and history.

More below the fold.

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The FP has been too quiet for too long.

Hence, let’s have some culinary upliftenment:

(From the lunch menu in Iasi, Romania last Monday.)

Overnight culinary open thread.

This hasn’t gotten much mention here - but when I was in Romania earlier in the week it was big, big news:

The troubled Nabucco pipeline project — designed to diversify Europe’s energy supply and loosen Russia’s grip on the continent’s natural gas market — took a major step forward on July 13 with the signing of a transit agreement between Turkey and five European Union countries involved in the undertaking.

The 2,050-mile-long (3,300 kilometer) Nabucco pipeline is designed to bring gas from the Caspian Basin and the Middle East to European markets via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria. The $10-billion pipeline is scheduled to start operating in 2014. Nabucco’s primary objective is to lessen Europe’s overdependence on Russia for gas. Moscow currently supplies approximately 40 percent of Europe’s gas.

But there’s even more good going on, which we’ll discuss below the fold.

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Maybe some societies should take their own national anthems to heart.

E.g., excerpt:

Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos battalions!

(Citizens, to arms!
Form your battalions!)

Happy Bastille Day from…. Bucharest.

Bastille Day open thread….

Here in Iasi, the technical university and the “physical sciences” university main buildings appear to be separate - with separate entrances. Once you’re inside though, you can see that a long colonnaded hallway connects them - a hallway known as “The Hall of Lost Steps.”

The first time I came to Iasi, I had no idea that there was more to the hallway than I realized. At some point, one of my colleagues asked me, “Have you seen the paintings in the hall?” “What paintings???” “Let’s go back downstairs for a few minutes.”

There are paintings, but they are well-hidden. Along the colonnaded hallway, there are arched niches that contain many strikingly beautiful (and deeply allegorical) paintings.

More below the fold.

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My work causes me to travel a great deal. With that kind of load, I don’t seek things out; however, things just happen along the way.

One of the best instances of that occurred several years back when I made my first visit to Iasi, Romania. My hosts insisted that we make some time to visit the nearby Painted Monasteries of Southern Bucovina. This was all new to me, so I was intrigued - and these turned out to be one of the world’s greatest (yet still little-known) cultural gems.

Now, when I’m in Iasi, *I* insist that we make some time to visit the monasteries. So that’s what we did on Saturday - and if you’ve never seen or heard of these monasteries, you are in for a real treat.

I’ll do my best with some words and many photos below the fold.

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Tucked deep inside Mark Steyn’s excellent (as usual) weekend column is this bit of shocking news:

Last week, the donut chain Tim Horton’s, which operates on both sides of the border but is incorporated in the state of Delaware, announced that it was reorganizing itself as a Canadian corporation to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.

I’ve been sending up warning flares about this sort of thing for some time, and perhaps the only surprise is that it’s taken so long for things like this to actually start happening.

Let’s review a few facts below the fold….

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