Dive into the archives.
- The Kaplan View of Mumbai
Robert Kaplan just spent a month in Gujarat reporting on Hindu-Muslim relations (does trouble follow this guy or what?). He has a few brief words on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Kaplan argues that “India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world” and that despite the terrorist’s [...]
- A call for a different kind of don’t ask don’t tell
In pointing out that it was Lenin, not Darwin, who was the first leader of the Soviet Union, PZ Myers links to a piece on proselytizing evangelicals stirring up trouble in the US military. This time an evangelical chaplain argues that creationism is the solution to suicide in a PowerPoint presentation that was mandatory for [...]
- The Israeli View of Mumbai
The following was written by Steven Plaut, an economist at the University of Haifa, as an approximation of what Former Israeli PM Shimon Peres would write to the Indian PM if he were to encapsulate his own thinking on how Israel should deal with the Palestinians and extrapolate this to how India might deal with [...]
- Global Trends, Part 4: An Older World, and thinking Core-Gap
Prelude – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3
Countries with a “youth bulge” in the population, are frequently cited as hotspots of social unrest, war and terrorism. Historians link youth bulges in populations to genocides, 20th-century fascism, revolutions (from France to Iran), and ongoing conflicts such as that in Darfur. Youth bulge [...]
- Greenland Independence?
See previous posts regarding fun facts about the coldest inhabited regions of the world, such as France’s Icelands, Iceland’s bankruptcy, banks of seeds, and seeding arctic populations.
Tribalization and nationalism in the arctic continues! Following on the push for independence from Denmark by the Faroe Islands, Greenland this week voted with a supermajority of more [...]
- News Roundup
I have three posts I want to write, but I’ll summarize them into one post. Incidentally, they all peripherally relate to what I expect will be a plummet in tourist travel in Asia, although only the last of three paragraphs directly notes that.
– Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked tourist targets [...]
- University education meets Stasi
...Queen’s University’s plans to hire six students as “dialogue facilitators.” Their job will be to intervene in conversations they overhear among students in dining halls and common rooms in which topics of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disability and social class are discussed. The facilitators, says Patrick Deane, the university’s academic vice-president, are supposed “to [...]
- Global Trends, Part 3: The Changing Face of Conflict
The Russian invasion of Georgia’s secessionist territories was the first conflict by a major power with a smaller neighbor since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the first such conflict in the current “information age.” The Global Trends Final Report has plenty of comments on the trend of change regarding conflicts, and here is a [...]
- Global Trends, Part 2: in re Al Qaeda
The following is a quoted exerpt from the Global Trends Final Report:
As al-Qa’ida celebrates its 20th birthday, most experts assert that the struggle against it will continue indefinitely, the so called “long war.” Other experts who have studied past “waves” of terrorism believe that al-Qa’ida is an “aging” group by terrorist standards and suffers from [...]
- Global Trends, Part 1: Projected Water Scarcity
Clean water is set to become the world’s scarcest—but most vitel—natural resource. Check out this global map of water scarcity.
Climate change will play a role in water scarcity. Demand will increase for water for domestic use, as well as for agriculture (including new biopharma and biofuel crops) and industry processes. And regions experiencing [...]
