"Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture. The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria."Uh huh. "No, no, it's Frahnk-en-shteen..."
There are few places in the world Robert D. Kaplan has not visited and written about in his books and magazine articles. He travels to countries hardly anyone else even considers – to Turkmenistan, for instance, during the time of the lunatic "Turkmenbashi" who transformed his post-Soviet republic into the North Korea of Central Asia. He has an uncanny ability to see conflicts looming on the horizon well in advance and – reversing the standard relationship between journalists and officials – U.S. defense policy professionals often ask him for briefings about what he has seen.
His regular dispatches in the Atlantic ought to be required reading for anyone interested in foreign affairs, as should his numerous books.
I met him a few weeks ago in Washington D.C. while he was briefly in town after returning from a month-long trip to post-war Sri Lanka. We discussed Colombo’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign there against the Tamil Tigers, what China has been up to while no one was looking, Russia’s revived imperial project in its "near abroad," the geopolitcal ramifications of a more liberal Iran, Israel’s difficulty in fighting effective counterinsurgency warfare, and our new man-hunting General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.
MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?
Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that’s over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they’re not.
What are the Chinese getting out of this? They’re building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they’re doing all sorts of other building on the island.
Now, why did the Chinese want Sri Lanka? Because Sri Lanka is strategically located. The main sea lines of communication between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It’s part of China’s plan to construct a string of pearls – ports that they don’t own, but which they can use for their warships all across the Indian Ocean.
Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader’s son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com
So, here's the thing about black holes. They tend to be either super-massive vortexes in the center of galaxies that are, as Carl would put it, millyuns or billyuns of times the mass of our Sunn - or a remnant stellar black hole of between 3-20 solar masses.
We think we know how the smaller ones form. Supergiant star goes up the periodic table, fusing heavier and heavier elements for fuel, until its temperature and hence its outward pressure drop below key gravitic thresholds. Result: implosion, accompanied by rebound and a cataclysmic supernova explosion that blows off most of its mass. If last-stage atomic forces can hold the tiny remnant up after everything is collapsed into neutrons or quark "degenerate matter," you get a neutron star/quark star, where one teaspoonful would weigh about as much as an earth mountain. If it's a more massive remnant, however, it will continue collapsing in size, without losing mass. What's left makes such a big dent (hole? hard to say) in space-time, that even light ends up circling the drain and unable to escape if it passes within the thing's "event horizon".
What we don't know, is how the super-massive black holes form. The most popular current theory is merger: black holes combined. OK. But if that's so, there should be more of a size continuum. We should see mid-size black holes that are larger than we could expect from a single star's collapse: somewhere between 100 and several thousand solar masses.
The first strongly-confirmed example may have come in 2004, when the Hubble Space Telescope found one at the center of the giant G1 globular cluster near Andromeda galaxy. These medium-size black holes have been theoretically linked to some of the massive x-ray bursts we pick up now and then, but they aren't the only thing that could cause them. That's why the recent HLX-1 discovery using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope may have just added a 2nd medium black hole to the catalog - and an important piece to the puzzle.
10 - Leon in The Professional (1994)
9 - Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Movie (1986)
8 - Tony Montana in Scarface (1983)
7 - The Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
6 - Bill in Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
5 - Goose in Top Gun (1986)
4 - Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977)
3 - Nick in The Deer Hunter (1978)
2 - William Wallace in Braveheart (1995)
1 - Apollo Creed in Rocky IV (1985)
So I'm glad that the NY Times and journalists could sit on an exciting story to help save one of their own. In the future, will they do this to save some random civilian, or some US soldier?NYT, today, July 2:
KABUL (AP) -- An American soldier, who disappeared after walking off his base in eastern Afghanistan with three Afghan counterparts, is believed captured, officials said Thursday.Now it's not clear that the military even asked the press for silence. But the contrast is worth noting, dontcha think?
Spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the soldier disappeared Tuesday.
Grant Martin of the Kansas City Star sums up the situation in a quick paragraph:
"Just in case you've turned your TV News off because you were tired of MJ stories- Honduras' president supposedly wanted to change the Constitution and serve for more years than allowed, the Supreme Court and Congress ruled that as illegal, he tried to hold a referendum, the Army refused, he fired the Army chief, the Supreme Court told him to reinstate the chief, he refused and had some group raid the warehouse that stored the referendum ballots, and so the Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest him and send him packing."
Zelaya did more than have "some group" raid the warehouse. On June 26, he issued a decree ordering all government employees to take part in the referendum. Except the referendum can't change the constitution. Octavio Sanchez explains why this stripped him of his office:
Quantum Physics offers some weird results, to say the least. Paul Quincey, a physicist at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, points out just how weird the concept of gravity is, when you think about it. And offers an explanation that offers a much clearer philosophical view of some key quantum physics results. From the Nov/Dec 2008 Skeptical Inquirer, "Quantum Weirdness: An Analogy from the Time of Newton"
"...the borderlands of scientific knowledge have always contained some ideas considered virtually supernatural at the time, and it is instructive to see with hindsight how such ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected by mainstream science. Second, there are illuminating parallels between gravity and quantum theory that may help us come to terms with the current philosophical difficulties surrounding quantum theory."
I like this quote best:
Every once in a while, a product lives up to its billing. As an example, the Smart Spin Storage system (vid. patent) for leftover containers and lids may be the best $20 I ever spent on kitchen related equipment. Haven't seen the quality issues some others have experienced (though I could wish for a more robust high-end version), and have used it every day for a couple years now.
As many of you might have guessed from a previous post, I'm on a liquid diet/ very soft foods diet at the moment. We knew in advance that soups and smoothies would be it for a bit, so we went to a local store (cheaper) and bought one of those small Magic Bullet mini-blender things. So far, it has been as advertised. Throw the fresh/frozen smoothie ingredients in mug, screw blade onto mug top, drop in and blend, rinse blade and set to dry, drink from same cup, put cup in dishwasher. Since the blade is always either fully enclosed or without power, it's inherently very safe, and the whole process is definitely a big improvement over cuisinart/blender alternatives.
Recently tried the thing with eggs, turkey, cheese, and salsa to make fully blended scrambled eggs. That worked really well, too: flavorful and fluffy. I could wish for the mugs to be microwaveable, like the bullet cups, so they could be used as is for drinking heated soups. And I can't speak to the thing's long-term durability. Overall, however, I've been pleasantly surprised with this one.
U.S. combat troops, under agreement with the Iraqi government, abandoned the country's cities today amid public celebrations and private concerns over Iraq's future security.I'm worried but hopeful; worried because the impetus for this was political - both in the US and Iraq - more than based on military conditions. I'm hopeful because conflicts end when the political becomes more important than the military.
The government declared today a national holiday and official cars were decorated with streamers and flowers. Revellers took to the streets to toot on trumpets and beat drums while martial music and history documentaries filled television screens. U.S. military officers visited Iraqi bases in several regions to wish their counterparts well.
"We are behind you," Col. Ryan Gonsalves, commander of U.S. troops near the northern city of Kirkuk, assured officers of the Iraqi 12th Army Division. A luncheon and dancing marked the occasion. "It's their day, their sovereignty," he said later in an interview.
In a televised ceremony in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki guaranteed the government could keep its citizens safe. "Those who think that Iraqis are not able to protect their country and that the withdrawal of foreign forces will create a security vacuum are making a big mistake." The country has been hit by a series of car and suicide bombs that killed about 250 people in the past two weeks.
Every once in a while, Foreign Policy magazine says something sensible.
"[Almost 3 million] internally displaced people (IDPs) fled on just a few hours notice -- before a military offensive meant to "flush out" the terrorists in the North-west Frontier Province's Malakand district.... [But the recent] attack on the Pearl Continental [hotel] forced international agencies to withdraw their international staff from Peshawar, disrupting assistance to the hundreds of thousands now living in government-run camps.
The IDP situation matters for more than its very real status as a humanitarian crisis. Between 80 and 90 percent of the IDPs are not in the camps; they are bunking with overstretched relatives and friends who receive no outside aid whatsoever. If the international community responds to their needs, these IDPs could present a potentially powerful constituency of civil opposition to extremism. They fled their homes because they reject the militants' worldview. If and when peace returns, they, as a resident living in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas told Crisis Group, will be the robust civil society that is so badly needed in the conflict zones."
I'm less blithe about the necessary connection between leaving and rejection of extremism. Many Arabs left the immediate conflict zone in 1948 per instructions, expecting to return over the Jews' dead bodies. The act of leaving, in and of itself, spoke to little more than a wish to be out of the line of fire. On the other hand...
Off for some painful minor surgery, which falls into the category of "things you know won't make you happy (but might later on, mayhap after you can, like, eat again)." At the other end of this particular scale, I offer Cracked.com's combination of links to real science and viciously acerbic wit.
Presenting, "5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)". With the recurring sub-headings of "So, what the problem?" and "Wait, it gets worse..." An excerpt:
"Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox.
So What's the Problem?
Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria...."
