• The Burgh Diaspora notes that, in different American cities, efforts are being made to promote local educational and medical institutions. Some cities may do better than others.
• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes an astronomer who thinks that Earth-like planets--roughly Earth-size with broadly Earth-like environments--may be commoner around red ( Read more... )

• Cosmic Variance's Sean Carroll considers the implications of the recent declaration on the existence of animal consciousness.
• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram considers the ethical implications of restrictive immigration policies on the part of countries whose past actions--carbon dioxide pollution, or anti-drug wars--have created large numbers of ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster raises the possibility of bringing an asteroid into lunar orbit, for scientific and space-settlement purposes both.
• Daniel Drezner is pleasantly surprised that the situation of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng hasn't led to anything like a breakdown of Sino-American relations.
• Eastern Approaches notes the Polish holiday ( Read more... )

British/American historian Niall Ferguson is a very smart and deservedly well-recognized man who has written many things worth paying attention to because they are wise about globalization, and many things that will be paid attention to on account of their potentially terrible consequences in the direction of imperialisms past and present. Ferguson ( Read more... )

The title of Alex Harrowell's post at the Yorkshire Ranter is actually quite apropos, inasmuch as it deals with the potential catastrophe wrought by India's Cold Start strategic doctrine, which would see time/space-limited military assaults against Pakistan with the aim of fighting a conventional war despite the nuclear weaponization of both ( Read more... )

It has become increasingly clear we are so very, very lucky we didn't fight a war in the 1980s when world arsenals were at their peaks. This is bad enough.

Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models ( Read more... )

Today's the 65th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima; and amazingly, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones ever used in war. It's a minor miracle, considering the obscene overdevelopment of the Cold War arsenals, based as they must have been on the obvious truisms of the need for New Zealand and Charlottetown to ( Read more... )

This news isn't surprising, given the intensity of the Sino-Soviet border disputes/conflicts of 1969. The Nixon-Kissinger reaction likewise isn't a surprise.

Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a ( Read more... )

The future isn't something that people like contemplating these days, quite probably for the same reasons of disappointment and foreboding that Andrew Barton described earlier this month.

For decades, the twenty-first century was implicitly the great beyond, the city on the hill, and there was no alternative to it being a good and decent place ( Read more... )

,I quite like this Spiegel Online article.

This November, two kilometers worth of gigantic dominos will be erected between Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz along a portion of the strip that once separated East and West Berlin. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominos will be set tumbling and ( Read more... )