Holy meme splicing!
by Steve Saideman | 27 Jul 2012 |
Holy meme splicing!
by Rodger Payne | 27 Jul 2012 |
Have you wasted any time viewing Bear cam? This Wired story explains:Media company Explore has teamed up with Alaska's Katmai National Park to install webcams that will deliver live video feeds of brown bears catching salmon in a popular feeding ground.Each year, around a hundred bears travel to a stretch of Brooks River to fill their bellies with salmon. Now anyone with an internet connection can witness this gathering thanks to four...
by Dan Nexon | 27 Jul 2012 |
The fighting in Khorog is very serious. As Eurasianet notes, "The fighting in Gorno-Badakhshan province (GBAO) is being described as the worst in Tajikistan since the 1990s civil war and raises concerns of a protracted new conflict." The government has cut off communications into the region. The Wall Street Journal has an overview. Suzanne Levi-Sanchez reproduces a letter from a close friend of hers in Khorog. Reuters reports on the "Secret...
by Steve Saideman | 27 Jul 2012 |
Instead of posting a video, I thought I would present a short book plug/review:I actually don't read that much science fiction or fantasy, but I could not resist once I heard the concept of Redshirts by John Scalzi: that instead of writing about the main characters on a starship, he would focus on those extras that tended to get killed on the away teams that get deployed to the planets the starship would visit. Scalzi is touching on a key...
by Charli Carpenter | 26 Jul 2012 |
World Politics Review has a feature section in this issue on the "invisibility" of contemporary US wars, fought through covert ops, drone strikes and cyber attack rather than on conventional battlespaces. The issue is a thought-provoking read: Thomas Barnett aims a verbal fusillade at Obama's "one-night-stand" foreign policy; scalding expositions on the illegality and perverse side effects of drone strikes come from Michael Cohen and Micah...
by PM | 26 Jul 2012 | Featured
The running through of the bullsSomeone asked me the other day whether I had read any books for fun recently. Caught up as I was in compiling the lit review for one project and writing lectures for an introductory class, I couldn't think of anything--the words "fun" and "reading" at the moment were almost precise antitheses. (Having read large numbers of scholarly treatises is enjoyable. Plowing through large numbers of monographs is...
by Jon Western | 25 Jul 2012 |
Yesterday's IMF report on China "praised China's leaders" for responding quickly to its recent economic slowdown and concluded that "China's economy seems to be undergoing a soft landing, though global headwinds are increasing." It also repeated increasingly frequent warnings about the fragility of the banking sector and suggested that there are "significant downsize risks" ahead in China. China may have a soft landing amid the current...
by Dan Nexon | 25 Jul 2012 |
by Dan Nexon | 25 Jul 2012 |
As might (or might not) be clear from recent activity, we're getting an increasing number of requests for guest postings, guest blogging, and links.I'll put up a permanent "policies" pages soonish, but for now:Yes, we love love love guest posts. However, we are biased toward academics, academics in training, and cognate types. Just send one of us a nice email and we'll see if we can make something happen.We are extremely flattered when we get...
by Dan Nexon | 25 Jul 2012 |
I'm out of town, so this is the best I can do. And since one post with Dunecat isn't enough....Climate:'Tis the summer of depressing climate news. Today is Greenland edition (via). Syria:Dan Byman urges full US support for the rebels. Rob Farley discusses CJ Chivers analysis of the impact of rebel-deployed IEDs on the Syrian army.Russia:A long essay by Greg Afinogenov on Putin's Russia and current protests there. Afinogenov argues that Putinism...
by Josh Busby | 24 Jul 2012 |
The International AIDS Society conference began Sunday in DC, the first time the conference has been held in the United States since 1990 because of the now-lifted travel ban on HIV+ people coming to the U.S. That means that 25,000 activists, researchers and clinicians have converged on DC and what seems like a fanciful goal - an AIDS-free generation. Given that donor foreign assistance budgets are increasingly constrained around the world,...
by Dan Nexon | 24 Jul 2012 |
Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer (writing at the Fair Observer) argues that there's no double-standard problem because the Libyan intervention did not establish or reflect a generalized responsibility to protect.The R2P is a slogan that has some media efficacy but a rather dubious legal existence. That does not prevent the majority of observers asserting that it was the basis of Resolution 1973, authorizing intervention in Libya. That is not true...