From the category archives:

Foreign Policy

Direct from Egypt: Death in the streets [video - warning]

by Rod Edwards on February 3, 2011

From a thread on reddit, here’s another horrific video of people being run down in the streets. Each conflict in recent years seems to be characterized by its own signature horror – in Iran it was secret police kidnapping and torturing people, in Sudan rape squads, in Egypt it seems to be police and officials using their vehicles as weapons. Be warned – this video shows (from a distance) a lot of people getting run over at 30 seconds – appalling.

What price, regional stability?

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Will a dominant China spark tribal warfare?

by Rod Edwards on January 18, 2011

Err, personally, I think Joel Kotkin has fallen into the same populist trap that seems to ensnare fiction writers and serious journalists alike, roughly every decade – a somewhat unknown but economically prominent non-American, non-European race is targeted as the lurking enemy that will surely ruin us [the west]. Japan is the most notable of these erstwhile enemies of the state – remember Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” from 1992? Kotkin’s article borrow’s liberally from the anti-Japanese tropes of 20 years ago, codifying our own economic insecurity, and reinforcing the tribalism that he himself decries.

With China’s new prominence in global affairs, the Han race, which constitutes 90 percent of the Chinese population, is suddenly the most dominant cohesive ethnic group in the world — and it is seeking to remain that way through strategic alliances, aggressive trade policy, and attacks on racial minorities within the country’s boundaries. The less tribally cohesive, more fragmented West is, meanwhile, losing out.

via Rise of the Hans – By Joel Kotkin | Foreign Policy.

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Russia has redneck tabloids too

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 [...]

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

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, [...]

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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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