Once again, for emphasis: Let’s not replace John Paul Stevens with Cass Sunstein.
US intelligence estimates that the terrible violence in Juarez over the past few years was part of a battle for control over drug trafficking routes, and that this battle has essentially been won by the Sinaloa cartel. Will this lead to a terrible kind of stability? Probably not, but it’s pretty to think so. Relatedly, some of the cross-border “spillover” in violence may actually involve “spillage” from the US, and not, as popularly supposed, Mexico. Texas corrections officers have a wee problem realizing that raping inmates is a crime. Is the EPA finally taking mountaintop-removal mining seriously?
Halliburton is still creepy. Daimler bribed its way out of investigations in 22 countries during the Naughty Aughts. People used to tie themselves in knots trying to find ways to call Hugo Chavez a dictator while admitting that he really wasn’t one (this Foreign Policy essay from 2006 is a classic example of such doublespeak). But these days, I must admit, he’s really living down to his reputation. Yet another environmental-reform activist is murdered in Latin America.
The US really wants to make Japan taste its meat, har har. Ongoing Maoist-vs.-government violence in India. Why the rhetoric about an “Asian Century” is probably claptrap. Republicans will use Obama’s authorization of the assassination of a US-citizen-turned-radical-Muslim-cleric as an excuse to pretend they care about civil rights again, after an eight-year assault on the very notion. That doesn’t make Obama’s decision any less dangerous.
The Whig Party rises again. The Missing Link rises again. Gilded Age-style murderous indifference toward workers rises again. Pirates rise again. Vietnam War-era counterinsurgency theory rises again, with major consequences for Africa.
This article’s list of great German novels we don’t have translations of made for fascinating and somewhat wistful reading. Good review by Lauren Winner of a book on reading in women’s prisons, written by a friend of my fiancee’s. It’d be a good idea to keep your eyes peeled for the results of this.
Lot in here as always.
Re-the link to German books that should be translated into English–I’m actually familiar with one of the author’s they mentioned. I read Alfred Doblin’s 1918 trilogy some years ago. Actually it was a 4 part series in the original German, but apparently the first book never got translated into English–yet another book to add to their list.
Hey, Swags, thanks (as always) for weighing in. I’m curious; did you enjoy Doblin? Should I add him to my twenty-year reading plan? I watched some of that *Berlin Alexanderplatz* movie and was bored stiff, but that’s not necessarily to do with the book.