From the category archives:

Foreign Policy

Russia has redneck tabloids too

by Rod Edwards on February 25, 2010

“We all know Canada has problems with the future lines drawn on Arctic maps and we all know Canada lives in the shadow of its larger neighbour to the south. The abject cruelty shown by Canadian soldiers in international conflicts is scantily referred to, as indeed is the utter incapacity of this county to host a major international event, due to its inferiority complex, born of a trauma being the skinny and weakling bro to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost to the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps.”

via Vancouver: Mutton Dressed as Lamb – Pravda.Ru.

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PANIC: Inside the Soviet Apolocalyptic Doomsday Machine, “Dead Hand”

by Rod Edwards on September 23, 2009

Turns out they built a machine at the depths of the Star Wars-fueled cold war nadir – a system that could nuke the States, even if the Soviet leadership had already been vaporized. From Wired:

“Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.” [Wired]

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India & China don’t care about climate change? Here’s why.

August 4, 2009

“…try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing’s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can’t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one. People who live in Third-World countries—like Mexico, where I grew up—tend to understand this, even [...]

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Obama sums it up: when his father, Barack Obama Sr., came to the United States from Kenya, Kenya’s GDP was higher than Korea’s.

July 10, 2009

“Obviously much has happened since then and he wanted to make it clear that the problems that Africans face weren’t just a product of colonialism or past history,” Froman said, “that this partnership — whether it’s over food security or other development ideas — require local governments to take responsibility seriously. This wasn’t a time [...]

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Iran: Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers

June 22, 2009

The Washington Post uses statistics to show human meddling with Iranian vote counts: The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s [...]

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