Dive into the archives.
- What happened to the Duke of Norfolk?
I’m enjoying the ongoing second season of the Tudors even more than the first. But as the second season is now half over it’s clear that one key character has gone missing. What happened to actor Henry Czerny who plays Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk?
Thomas Howard first appears in Season 1 [...]
- Yet Another Pirate Attack near Somalia
With the high profile abduction of a French Yacht earlier this month, it seems the fun never stops off the coast of Somalia, if by fun, you mean piracy. According to the AFP,
A major Japanese oil tanker was damaged Monday in a chase by heavily-armed pirates off the coasts of Somalia and Yemen but no [...]
- Deterence And the Missile Shield
As is common with most things dominating the news cycle, important background explanations and underlying principles are often if not always left inadequately answered or not touched on at all. One such example is the US missile shield which now has the official backing of NATO and the issue of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. [...]
- Japan’s Border Towns
Japan is an archipelago and has no land border with any neighboring nation. However, several towns and regions take the modern role of “border town”—politically, economically, and culturally.
Wakkanai is the northernmost town in Japan and is located just across from Sakhalin island, which today is Russian territory. Wakkanai developed a century ago as [...]
- The democratic nominee debate in historical context
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858
Brilliant.
- April 19: Primrose Day
Reposting from April 19, 2005.
Today is Primrose Day in the United Kingdom, an uncelebrated memorial day marking the death of former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s only Jewish head of government and a staunch imperialist. [When we first conceived this blog, Disraeli was my close second choice as an alias—albeit because of his politics, [...]
- Comparison of submarine fleets in Northeast Asia
Mingi Hyun’s return to blogging about maritime Asia and South Korea’s new submarine program inspired me to put together a comparison of the sub fleets in northeast Asia.
I consulted The Military Balance 2008 for the numbers. Here are the definitions of the classes indicated above:
SSBN=ballistic-missile submarine nuclear-fuelled
SSN= attack submarine nuclear powered
SSGN=SSN with dedicated non-ballistic missile [...]
- Robert Kaplan on the New Balance of Power
A summary at FPRI on Kaplan’s latest work on the new balance of power.
Kaplan feels that we tend to divide the world up artificially into old Cold War classifications of the Middle East, the South Asian Indian subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim of East Asia. These divisions were forced on the U.S. by the Cold [...]
- Snack to the Future: The Col-Pop
Via Marmot. Awesome.
- Haiti’s government falls
Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis, the head of a coalition Cabinet supposed to bring stability, was just ousted from power by a unanimous vote in the Senate. Alexis was pushed out because of a week of riots and demonstrations over rising food and fuel prices. The Senators who unanimously voted for his censure [...]
