Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

Politics: 

The Guardian speculates on how Iran will react to new sanctions by the United States and the European Union.

Who is the group that is terrorizing Christians in Nigerians?

Wired on America's shadow war in East Africa. 

Just the policy of the State of the Union Address, and the entire State of the Union Address, and the only picture that you will want to see of the State of the Union Address (and if you really want to knock yourself out, watch the entire thing just for John Boehner's face).

Wow, so we're really talking about this now, are we?

It is the rumour that – almost – dare not speak its name.

But, as the Republican nomination race descends into civil war in Florida, some senior figures on the right of American politics are speculating openly about the prospect that none of the contenders should win.

Instead, they argue, several scenarios could play out which would allow someone not currently in the race to step in at the last moment, or appear at the party's convention in Tampa in August, and win the right to fight Barack Obama for the White House. 

The Guardian: Mitch Daniels? Chris Christie? GOP begins to think the unthinkable, January 26, 2012

Pop Culture: 

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein interview each other (favourite moments: Fred talking about his favourite acts on SNL and tweeting about Beyoncé; how much he loves Sleater-Kinney, Carrie reacting to that last part); spontaneously play Devo's Beautiful World after deciding against Billy Joel ("Fred is THE nicest guy"). 

Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman make "all other marriages look like gray, boring shams".

An interview with Ali Liebert who plays Betty on Bomb Girls, which is now one of my favourite current shows and is getting better with each episode (why are there only six?!). 

What to read on ACTA

pdfs galore!

• The final text of the agreement, as signed by the EU and 22 member states today.
• An essay on the troubles with ACTA by Michael Geist (for SAIS Review in 2010) and the articles published in the current issue of The American University International Law Review. 
• Pages 53-58 from the Official Journal of the European Union C45 E /53, either as reassurance before the late spring/early summer vote ("asks the Commission to ensure that ACTA will not grant public authorities access to private computers and other electronic devices") or as entertainment for the wording of the final paragraph. 

Issues: 

• Lack of transparency during the negotiations
• Creation of a framework outside existing institutions to exclude developing countries
• Possibility that ACTA would eventually become the international standard and countries not involved in the negotiations would be forced to join
• Therefore, developing countries facing severe security issues would be asked to use their limited resources to hunt down counterfeited handbags
• The agreement might limit access to medicine in developing countries.
• ACTA is not a sole executive agreement, raising issues of its binding quality (in the United States) since Congress is excluded from the decision-making process (see here)

So yeah, this is about more than whether you can still travel with your notebook or your iPod without fearing that it will be immediately destroyed by border authorities (I wonder how that part of the agreement would even be implemented?). 

Getting ready to eat my words

Newt Gingrich won the Republican primary in South Carolina by 12 percentage points. Mitt Romney was also stripped of his Iowa win after a recount. With a possible new front runner (Gingrich looks to be leading polls in Florida as well) who does not have the support of the party elite now competing against Romney, who also lacks backing - is a late entry candidate a possible scenario?

Romney really is a wildly successful businessman with a traditional family life. And Gingrich is indeed a right-wing culture warrior. In attacking one another, maximum damage is done by focusing on specific  heresies against ideology, so that it becomes harder and harder for a voter to support either man and still think of himself as a principled conservative. For example, the individual mandate is now widely denounced on the right as unconservative, and hearing that Romney and Gingrich supported it is enough to cost them some votes. 

The Atlantic: In GOP Debate, Romney Wins the Clash of the Unreliable Conservatives, January 24, 2012

Also: 

And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way. 

Peter W. Singer, The New York Times Sunday Review: Do Drones Undermine Democracy?, January 21, 2012

Eight experts rate President Obama's foreign policy.
The Atlantic on the rise of antibiotic resistance 

The Atlantic Cities on the future of American cities that lack long-term water sustainability

On the one hand, there's the super-creepy ACTA (Remember when it looked like we'd all soon be travelling with the good old Walkman instead of digital music players? That might still be happening) looming in the distance, on the other, the European Commission is proposing a data protection regulation that would give consumers control over how their personal data is being used. 

Alex Gansa walks the A.V. Club through the first season of Homeland. 

Episode One. This is life, not heaven.

real estate | it's real. is tropical | the greeks. dillon | thirteen thirtyfive. battles | my machines. first aid kit | ghost town. fleet foxes | helplessness blues. amor de días | bunhill fields. skream | monsoon (loefah remix). dreamer | dubstep. crim3s | new flesh

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

Dark Dark Dark - Wild Goose Chase (Elephant Micah Cover)

Relevant because of reasons (and yes, I do realize that I've posted this pretty much exactly a year ago - it made things even weirder BECAUSE IT'S NOT EVEN THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THAT SONG).

Politics: 

Both the Atlantic and Die Zeit have essays on Guantanamo which, after ten years, still exists. 

It is the legacy of a country, known for its civil liberties, which allowed government power to exceed reason or justice or morality. So long as the place remains open, so long as men are detained there, the wound we opened but refuse to close cannot meaningfully heal.

Jon Huntsman withdrew from the Republican race this Monday, leaving Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul to pretend like it isn't decided yet.

Today I dreamt about having an argument over why Austria lost its S&P AAA rating and Germany didn't (the banks' exposure to volatile Eastern European, especially Hungarian and Rumanian, market? The inability of the governing coalition to find a majority to enshrine the debt ceiling in the constitution?). It was weird. Also someone made me listen to Elisabeth - The Musical, and there's this line in a song that describes (or over-dramatises, we'll see) the lack of action following: "Wir sitzen im Kaffeehaus rum und erwarten gähnend die Apokalypse." But hey, look, at least Germany has low borrowing costs now that it's a safe haven!

In the same vein: 

“Mathematics is mathematics, and one plus one has to equal two and not five,” he said, describing how, even with a significant restructuring of its debt, the Greek government’s deficit would still be too large and its economy not competitive enough to put the country back on a sound footing.
That sense can be self-reinforcing as well, making it even harder for Mr. Papademos to push through the changes Greece needs to survive the current crisis.
Greece’s dire economic condition can hardly be overstated. After two years of tax increases and wage cuts, Greek civil servants have seen their income shrink by 40 percent since 2010, and private-sector workers have suffered as well. More than $75 billion has left the country as people move their savings abroad. Some 68,000 businesses closed in 2010, and another 53,000 — out of 300,000 still active — are said to be close to bankruptcy, according to a report issued in the fall by the Greek Co-Federation of Chambers of Commerce.

NY Times: As Reforms Flag in Greece, Europe Aims to Limit Damage, January 15, 2012

Foreign Policy has an photo essay comparing the most iconic pictures of the Haiti earthquake with how these sites look now, two years later. 

A couple of days before Wikipedia and other sites went black to remind users of the looming threat that is SOPA (and its Senate counterpart, PIPA), the Obama administration announced that any attempt to battle the threat of online piracy "must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small." This is not actually a promise to veto the act should it eventually pass.

Pop Culture: 

io9 has an interview with Caroline Skinner, who joined the production team of Doctor Who and oversaw the making of The Fades (which is still waiting to be renewed for a second season and has just started its run on BBC America - you know what to do!). 

If you want to potentially spoil yourself for the first episode of Skins and possibly subsequent ones, Digital Spy has interviews with Dakota Blue Richards and Jessica Sula. 

Here's a trailer for Mad Men's fifth season, which is scheduled to premiere on March 25! In the meantime, may I point out that Justified has just started its third season.

New Santigold! (Big Mouth). Still a big fan of Go, the co-op with Karen O. 

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Blitzen Trapper - Taking It Easy Too Long



I've been taking it easy too long, 
sticking around this lonesome town
like a bird that just won't fly. 
Why can't I just get over you, 
what will I do?

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Does this make a third party candidate more likely, because if it does, I'm all for it.

Eeek.

Trailer for the first episode, and 4oD will stream the premiere A WEEK EARLY aka NEXT MONDAY for those lucky people in the UK. 

"The longest love letter in the world"

I see now that at any point in a life of any length, when our relentless distractions lapse for a moment and there is that sudden flash of inspired clarity in which we see that all that life is about is nature, breathing in and out and keeping your head high until you drop, Orlando is the book to put under your pillow and rest upon. 

The Telegraph: Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf's Orlando, January 9, 2012

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

-Politics edition.

The New York Times portrays a group of South Sudanese journalists who publish a daily print newspaper in Juba, under difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, president Obama has dispatched military officers to support the UN mission (UNMISS)

A French investigation into the 1994 death of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, the event that is considered to have triggered the genocide and was believed to have been caused by Paul Kagame's oppositional Patriotic Front, has found that the plane could not have been shot down from Kagame's camp. 

Nigeria is shaken by outrage over rising fuel prices (after the government lifted gas subsidies and prices almost doubled, also causing a cost increase in food prices) and ethnic violence. 

Two years after the devastating earthquake, the situation in Haiti is still terrible. 

Foreign Affairs on how the situation in Syria would need need to change to make a foreign intervention more likely: the fractured opposition has "to coalesce into a unified political force worth backing". 

The Atlantic provides A View Inside Iran - the everyday life rather than what is currently making headlines. 

Die Zeit has a fascinating collection of photos by Peter Bialobrzeski, of the rapidly growing megacities in Asia. 

SOPA will possibly be voted on this month in the United States' House of Representatives, and for the first time ever, people who may actually be able to judge the consequences are being asked to contribute to the debate. 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies on some of the current burning questions (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, "Is Europe the new 'sick man' of Europe?"

Brookings on the implications of Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey's reaction to the "Arab Awakening".