From the cutest to a video of the most over-the-top Travel Trailer – Vin Diesel’s $1.2M behemoth.
Month: August 2012
The Empire Strikes Back
Yale Prof. Charles Hill sees two very different kinds of challenges to the liberal, state-based world order. One, the aggressive kind, is exemplified by China. The other, very different, can be seen in the European Union.
“The way the world through almost all of history has been ordered is through empires. The empire was the normal unit of rule. So it was the Chinese empire, the Mughal empire, the Persian empire, and the Roman empire, the Mayan empire.”
What changed this was the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century. “That was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. They had come forward in northern Italy in the Renaissance and now they were taking hold in what we think of as a state-sized entity. The Netherlands and Sweden and France were among these. . . . France was both an empire and a state—and the key was when [Cardinal] Richelieu took France to the side of the states, which was shocking because France was Catholic and the empire was Catholic and the states were Protestant.”
“My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back. World War I is a war of empires which comes to its culmination point when a state gets into it. That’s the United States.” And then we get something very interesting added: “That’s Woodrow Wilson and [the promotion of] democracy.”
“World War II, and I think this is uncomprehended although it’s perfectly clear, . . . World War II is a war of empires against the state system. It’s Hitler’s Third Reich. It’s Imperial Japan.” The Axis goal “is to establish an empire. The Nazi empire would be Europe going eastward into the Slavic lands. The Japanese empire in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as they called it.”
via The Weekend Interview with Charles Hill: The Empire Strikes Back – WSJ.com. Continue reading “The Empire Strikes Back”
XP Hasn’t Aged Well
I
nstantly recognizable to most as the default wallpaper in Windows XP. May be the most viewed photograph in history.
Shot by Charles O’Rear on a medium format camera in 1996 and not digitally enhanced or manipulated in any way. The approximate location is 3101 Fremont Dr. in Sonoma, coordinates 38.250124,-122.410817.
In November 2006, Goldin+Senneby took the same picture, titling the piece After Microsoft:
via Photographs: What are the most viewed photos of all time? – Quora.
Bird Flu Blamed for Seal Deaths
First there was swine flu. Now, while everyone’s attention is on another Ebola outbreak there may be seal flu.
In the wake of a pneumonia outbreak that killed 162 harbor seals in New England last year, researchers are blaming the deaths on an avian flu virus.
The virus is similar to one circulating in North American birds since 2002 but shows signs of having recently adapted to mammals, according to according to Ian Lipkin, MD, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City and colleagues.
The outbreak is “particularly significant,” they wrote, because the virus has naturally acquired mutations that may make it a candidate to cause disease in humans.
via Medical News: Bird Flu Blamed for Seal Deaths – in Infectious Disease, Flu & URI from MedPage Today.
Return of the disparaged “Limits to Growth” Prediction
Carlton Palmer shares this gem with these comments:
Thoughtful, analysis and personal take from a Financial realist . Civilized not a Rant! Long, Worth the effort. Ex Pat Brit.Jeremy Granthams take on the ongoing food crisis plus the Game changer implications for the Human condition. Of note “the ethanol/gas” idiocy.
Click on the link to download the .pdf file and take the time to read this 22 page analysis
Ex Pat Brit. Jeremy Granthams take on the ongoing food crisis
What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America?
This American Life, talking to refugees who’d moved to the U.S., mostly from conflict zones, found that the foreigners were shocked by a number of things that Americans might consider routine: public displays of affection, high obesity rates, families shipping their elderly parents off to nursing homes, dog-owners kissing their pets,Christmas lights and widespread gun ownership.
The U.S. can be such a jarringly strange place for many foreign visitors that travel guidebooks detail everything from the dangers of talking politics to tips on respecting Americans’ famously guarded personal space. But what do those visitors find when they actually get here? This American Life spoke to a relatively narrow slice of foreign arrivals, but a thread on public question site Quora, jumping off from the radio segment, asks web users from around the globe to chime in with what surprised them about America. Click on the link.
