– With the State of the Union tonight (/tomorrow morning local time), it’s a good time to review the myth of the independent voter. And no matter what device you plan to watch on, you’ll be able to stream it here.

– Kotaku has a piece on how a cover system (as opposed to run-and-gun) has revolutionized the first-person shooter.

– Indiscriminate bigotry: Europeans hate Muslims or Jews. In America, if you hate one you hate them both.

– Finally! We get LASERS!

– As long as were talking tech, there’s finally an exoskeleton in the prototype phase.

Up next: peak phosphorus

– Patrick Porter at Offshore Balancer refights World War II.

– As the state continues to hollow out (I’m officially two feet in the Robb camp), the citizenry will work to actively undermine its legitimacy, intentionally or not. We’re most like going to see examples like this of jury nullification widespread.

– Straight from the Moscow Times, 1/3 of Russian militiamen are alcoholics or psychopaths (and presumably often both).

– Fascinating story of an international criminal gang, ‘the Pink Panthers‘; a lot of jewelery heists, but not always. Playing by their own rules and using globalization as a means.

– And the absurd ROI rates found in the ‘global guerrilla’ phenomenon apply psychologically as well. Nate Silver compiled this data before, but the visual reinforces just how rare an incident on an airplane is.

Zach Galifianakis, the newest member of the New Zealand SAS

– Robert Manning calls out George Friedman for a preposterous set of predictions for a century from now. Included are such gems as a Russian breakup in 2020, a collapse of the EU, and the major global players are Poland, Turkey, and Japan. Ooph.

– Strike – Hold! has a great piece recalling the “1/21 Incident” in South Korea. I had no idea of its very existence before reading this. The infiltration route is now a park.

– The Chinese economy grew 8.7% in 2009. Either Gordon Chang is seriously wrong, or the Chinese government is getting creative with their bookkeeping.

– An interesting, if infuriating takeaway from the Massachusetts election:

In a somewhat paradoxical finding, a plurality of voters who switched to the Republican — 37 percent — said that Democrats were not being “hard enough” in challenging Republican policies.

– Foreign Affairs offers a reading list on fascism. Curiously absent: Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

– Michael Lind at Salon writes about the solely partisan nature (read: hack party consultants) of virtually all political television commentary.

“Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called “Democratists.” Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are “Republicanists.””

– Flying back home through Boston just got a little bit sweeter.

– This is the first I’ve even heard mention of ‘morale drives‘. Can anyone shed a little light on the situation? The crackdown is just one more instance of the corporate-nationalist divide. The music and film industries don’t actually give a fuck about America (and at this point it’s getting hard to determine who’s still invested in its future).

– Enjoy the Gray Lady while you can. The New York Times is on its way to a paywall model.

– “Where in the World is Nigeria’s President?” An excellent question.

Happy Martin Luther King Day to those back in the U.S. And to those back home in Massachusetts, please remember to vote tomorrow. Hopefully you’ll make the right choice.

– The huge mosque being built in London’s East End by Tablighi Jamaat has been canceled. Not sure whether to believe the characterization of the organization as a radical, extremist sect or a pacifist, moderate group, but either way…this could get interesting.

– The fallout over Reza Pankhurst teaching at the LSE continues. Turns out he may have coached a suicide bomber and been in some sort of secret society. I can’t take it anymore. Just fantastic (via Road to Academia).

– While we’re at it, Juha at RtA says maybe we should all just chill out for a second. And he might just have a point.

– Foreign Policy offers Liberia as a template for indigenous army-building. “We determined that protecting civilians was more important than protecting the state.”

– Credit BAA with yet another oops.

– Came across a great Ricks piece in Foreign Policy: what to read if you’re heading to Afghanistan.

– A piece in the New York Times throws a new wrinkle into the idea of systems and network thinking. The internet is much more vicious and counterproductive than anyone had thought. Open-sourced (and crowd-sourced) ‘wisdom’ is nothing of the kind. Sort of like how Robb says globalization will put an end to globalization?

Continue reading →

– Curzon at ComingAnarchy considers a little-known bilateral relationship: Thailand and Saudi Arabia.

– Been wondering if the Pants Bomber really has made flying more difficult for us? GOOD and Design Language have teamed up to bring you an infographic on the new delays at American airports.

– Looks like we might finally have a real replicator on our hands. MIT has created a food printer that appears to be everything I want it to be. And it’s green as can be, for those who care (not to mention the definition of self-sufficient).

– How is the American intelligence community like Detroit’s Big Three? Luis Garicano and Richard Posner have the answer.

– Any society can produce good hardware, but you need open, innovate markets (and politics) to produce good software. “Free markets require free minds.” Daniel Gross in Slate:

The United States had China’s present-day economic profile—per-capita GDP of about $5,000, 40 percent of the work force in agriculture, 30 years of industrialization and urbanization—in 1900, a time when there were no direct elections for Senate, women couldn’t vote, and segregation reigned in the south.

Thomas Cole’s 1836 painting, The Destruction of Empire, from his series The Course of Empire.

– The fun never stops in British higher education. Turns out one of the graduate TAs here did some jail time in Egypt  for – and is still a member of – Hizb-ut Tahrir. Fantastic work, LSE.

– Taibbi is full of fightin’ words. It’s nice to read a diatribe like this and not be turned off – he’s exactly right about pretty much anything. This is rapidly becoming a central question to our time: is capitalism sustainable?

– I’d like to see this applied on a large, large scale.

– It would be pretty fun to stumble upon an Afghan village in the middle of Indiana. What do the Indianans think? Full immersion is the way to go.

– Joseph Fouche at Chicago Boyz on Jonathan Rauch and the ossification of the American way.

– Check out Geocurrents. Their manifesto: “this blog is based on the proposition that geographical knowledge can greatly enhance our understanding of current events” (via The Map Room).

– I think we’ve learned to seek revenge right away, rather than letting perpetrators linger. Hakeemullah Mehsud is dead?

– The “Coke Zero Facial Profiler.” Facial recognition technology goes viral.

– Love him or hate him (or merely disagree), Tony Judt is a pretty monumental intellectual. Which makes his battle with ALS all the more poignant.

– Another vector in the coming resource wars: food. Scientific American [subscription required] attempts to answer the question: could a collapse in the global system be the death knell for civilization?

– More on the cringe of the West. The Spiegel‘s Henryk Broder writes of the West as “choked by fear.”

– Kings of War has a great article on the nature of “100% readiness” and why it’s an impossible goal. The 7:1 ratio of applicants to recruits who make it through training are just further proof that the risk-averse society is losing effectiveness, even if there’s a point to be made in comparison with American replacements in Vietnam.

Continue reading →