james-nicoll linked to a rather remarkable letter sent to the Calgary Herald by Walt Wawra, a Kalamazoo, Michigan police officer who had a very unsettling experience in Calgary while visiting that Albertan city with his wife, one that made him regret Canada's restrictive firearms legislation.

I recently visited Calgary from Michigan. As a police officer for ( Read more... )

M.I.A.'s new single "Born Free," is great music, tense and energetic in her particular fashion, but the video is ... I can see why it got pulled from YouTube on account of violent imagery, but it's a jaw-dropping video nonetheless. Thank goodness Vimeo hosts it.

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

• 80 Beats' Andrew Mosemen reports that Japan's unlucky Hayabusa asteorid probe is on track to return to Earth with its sample container, even though the probe might not have succeeded in taking a sample after all.
• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton writes about how the future may well give birth to new kinds of discrimination, suggesting that ( Read more... )

Here in Canada, we've been going through a new series of battles in the culture wars, over disputes about the acceptability of certain practices of immigrant groups in Canadian society.

For instance, the kirpan, the ceremonial dagger of Sikh men and boys, has come under scrutiny again after one radical used to stab an opponent at a Sikh temple: ( Read more... )

I'd like to begin my making special mention of the latest massive news roundup at Sublime Oblivion. Covering some two dozen different items from the end of the Pax Americana to post-Soviet politics in Eurasia, it's a must-read.

• At 3 Quarks Daily, Frans de Waal writes about how the cultural perceptions of the Japanese has led to innovations in the ( Read more... )

The small eastern Ontario town of Trenton, located perhaps couple hundred kilometres east of Toronto on Lake Ontario, hosts CFB Trenton, one of Canada's most important military bases and is the centre of Canada's air operations. Trenton has been of note in the past few years as the point of entry for Canada's Afghanistan war dead, the place whence ( Read more... )

The vestigial presence of Yemenite Jews in their homeland, decades after the mass exoduses to Israel and the United States, turns out to be threatened by violence in perennially unstable Yemen.

Three more Jewish families will leave Yemen for Israel this week, according to a Yemeni rabbi who laments the dwindling of an ancient community unnerved by ( Read more... )

The always-interesting Far Outliers blog has recently posted two fascinating recent book excerpts dealing with events in East Asia in the first millennium CE.

• In "Effects of Tang Imperialism on Its Eastern Neighbors" examines how the Tang dynasty's 7th century invasion of the Korean peninsula led to Japanese military intervention on behalf of the ( Read more... )

Thanks to dignam for pointing out his own article on the steadily decreasing rate per capita of violence, "Talkin' Gibbon in the Hypercloud" at the excellent group blog 3 Quarks Daily, which is incidentally now on my blogroll. Go, read!

I forget whoever pointed me towards Steven Pinker's essay of the same name, originally published in 2007 in The New Republic. I'm sorry that I can't thank that person, since it's one of the more thought-provoking essays that I've come across recently, tackling the myth of the noble peaceful "savage" and arguing that the 20th century has actually ( Read more... )