John Mortell’s blog

This new book coming out from David King looks quite interesting and foreign policy have a nice preview of it here. My personal favourite though has to be this one of Stalin:

Cyanide and Happiness have been running a ‘depressing comic week’ all week and while most of them are only ‘ok’ mainly due to the fact that the fact that they suffer from ‘that’s depressing but is it really likely’ syndrome, today’s one though really hits the mark:

Interesting article from the BBC here that, if accurate, undermines pretty thoroughly the claims for the ’surveillance society’:

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.
In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.

Interesting (if biased) post on the current conservative movement placing the ‘birthers’ and their ilk in some historical context:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”

Really interesting piece from Ken MacLeod about how Christian denial of evolution responded to the movement of evolutionary theory from a ‘moral’ idea to one that was purely ‘amoral’

Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn’t like modern creationism. It wasn’t joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest – valid enough in its own terms – against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of – and private reservations about – evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn’t stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about ‘presuppositions’ and ‘world-views’, in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?

Essentially, MacLeod points to the move away of evolutionary thinking from ‘evolution as a moral force’ to our current ‘amoral’ understanding of evolution as the reason for this change and the blow-back from religious/creationist groups. Its an interesting article anyway so have a look.

This marvel/DC parody is much better than Inglorious Basterds:

Fantastic short video that will undoubtedly give some nightmares:

Absolutely brilliant idea here as New Humanist magazine has a version of trumps cards featuring different religions. Part one is here and two here. Though its probably a bit easy, my favourite one has to be this one:

I’m pretty much a believer that record companies have no moral right (regardless of the law) to charge for music. Especially as I’ve been seeing more artists charge directly (or more often adding ‘value’ beyond the music alone to make a profit) and bypassing record companies altogether. So I was quite interested to see this article about a company called Topsin who have gone the ‘value added’ route. I’d advise you to read the whole article but here is the significant part for me:

In an era of shrinking revenues, Topsin’s success with bundling – offering an affordable digital album, but encouraging the purchase of more expensive packages that might include video, merchandise, other releases, concert access or an artist-specific subscription – should attract the attention of artists, mangers and labels struggling to monetize content. The average Topspin motivated transaction often exceeds $22 vs. 99 cents to $9.99 on iTunes. In one recent campaign, 84% of all purchases were above the basic level offered.

When Amanda Palmer who has been very vocal about hating her record company can make $19,000 off Twitter while earning no money off her solo album, that the system is beyond broken seems obvious.

.. Is the fascinating headline from this foreign policy article. As you can probably guess from my other articles on the topic, I’m quite interested in the idea that military power (at least in terms of the ‘West’) can/is becoming more based on drones/remote power that is both cheaper and less intensive with regards to manpower. For example the article notes that

According to the Government Accountability Office, $24.5 million will purchase a set of four MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drones plus a ground station and satellite relay (while) .. The latest guess of the price for a single F-35 fighter-bomber is $100 million.

When the same article notes that one man can run four drones at the same time, this differential in manpower and price becomes obvious. Though as in pointed out in the other article I linked to, what such a difference in risk to your own soldiers means in terms of Western nations willingness to go to war is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, the foreign policy article has some interesting notes about Afghanistan, including the suggestion that current military planners are looking at the wrong lessons from history and should instead be looking at periods of ‘peace’ (relatively) in Afghanistan, rather than the British / Russian invasions…. All worth a look.