More on politics in the 21st century --gaming with Mossadegh's cat

Mossadegh was prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s, and his effort to gain control of Iran's oil led to a crucial crisis of modern Iranian history and of US-Iranian relations.Two people at the University of Southern California thought Americans should know this crisis better -- and so they designed a game in which the player plays Mossadegh's cat.You read it right.This is...

Thought for the 4th

From TomDispatch.com, on the non-withdrawal from Afghanistan:"It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.”  After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- $20 billion a year -- is more than NASA’s total budget."Update:...

Latest news from Syria Comment

Joshua Landis pulls together a substantial collection of recent news reports and analysis. Upshot: No one knows how this complex situation will resolve; not y...

Vikings invade Ottawa on Canada Day!

http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/viking-age-in-ottawa-for-canada-day.htmlClick on the link and see what I am talking abo...

Full Metal Jousting casting call

Are you a jouster? At least, an American jouster? A "reality" show is being promoted and a casting call is out.Http://pilgrimfilms.tv/casting/jousti...

Tell this historian where he's gone wrong

He ask...

The new Nipissing University library

 Neither the above photo, nor these, does it justice.  It's a box of light....

Foreign Policy cover story: explaining the fall of the Soviet Union

Some of my readers will surely want to read Leon Aron's article in Foreign Policy, Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong*And why it matters today in a new age of revolution.A sample:LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond...

More on China -- "Too early to say"

Phil Paine forwards me this post from Delanceyplace.com:In today's excerpt - the Chinese have often been invoked as having a longer-term perspective on history compared to the West, and to buttress this view, the story is often repeated of Premier Zhou Enlai's response when asked...

Voyager at Jupiter

From a Talking Points Memo retrospective as Voyager leaves the solar syst...

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!

In the midst of what looks like an investment scandal involving a Canadian forestry company active in China, various business writers and commenters are arguing about whether China is now a good place to invest.  There are plenty of China-boosters saying that its economy will...

Two observers debate the Syrian uprising

Skeptical scholar Landis and activist Monajed:Thanks to Bloggingheads.tv and Issander el Amrani at the Arabi...

Why many Syrians are reluctant to get rid of the regime

Once again Jonathan Landis at Syria Comment explains the basics as he sees them.This time, it's why members of the Alawite sect -- the heretodox group that President Assad and his most important collaborators belong to -- haven't turned against the Assad regime.  To explain this, he uses a piece written by a Syrian Alawite back in 2006.I think this analysis applies not only...

JLiedl brings us -- Carnivalesque!

Some choice blog posts from Carnivalesque 75 -- this issue being the ancient and medieval o...

Jousting posts

A couple of days ago, it just so happened that two posts on jousting -- in an extended use of the term -- rolled into my blog reader.  (I hang out with a bad crowd.) One was a rather serious look at "pushing" or "jousting on foot" as Froissart (or was it just his  translator?)...

"Canadians, freebooters and soldiers"

Thus Rene Chartrand , author of The Forts of New France, lumps together three groups who were housed together at the French Fort Biloxi in the years after 1699.  If you know what low regard soldiers were held in during the Early Modern period, you see the inadvertant insult.This...

Kate Bush steampunk!

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Japan recovers

Remember how whole districts were smashed to flinders, and those flinders just covered the ground?   As the Big Picture shows, the Japanese have piled up or even removed much of the junk.Here's a place where they have done a particularly good job, showing before and af...

How the other half lives

While J-Lo dances in Ibiza, Tunisian migrants cross the Mediterranean the hard way.As usual, click to see a larger version.From the Big Pictu...

More news from Syria Comment

News Round Up (9 June 20...

Information overload

 Ken Stange said this video was superlative and he was right."If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem; maybe it's a fac...

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 1966

...sounding a lot like Quicksilver Messenger Service.  Thanks to John Emerson.Note: slow start, abrupt e...

Walking in Catalonia with Jonathan Jarrett

A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe is a valuable blog in many ways, but it really shines when Jonathan goes to visit the landscape that gave rise to his charters.  He's doing it now!  Don't miss ...

That Chilean volcano

Two pics -- click to expand and get a better effect -- from the Big Picture.  Yes, the white stuff is ash.  What do you do about an ashfall when it's ov...

Talking about that other place

Peter Van Buren was a Provincial Reconstruction Team leader for the U.S. Department of State in Iraq, and he speaks with some authority when he says that the "diplomatic" presence in Iraq after the military withdrawal at the end of the year -- if that indeed happens -- will be in...

Rethinking the Crusade environment in the light of the Arab Spring

Anyone who has been paying close attention to recent Arab uprisings against corrupt governments has been getting a crash course in what is unrevealingly called "sectarianism." What this term describes, or obscures, is the fact that the Middle East, which many of us visualize as Muslim,...

Name that country

From the Big Picture's monthly photo review of war in Whatchamacall...

War in heaven

A Turkish Facebook friend linked to this.  I have a strong suspicion that this is how the beautiful billionaires and their beautiful acolytes actually live -- and compete.Update: I know what this reminds me of -- the movie Blood of Heroes...not the fighting, but the Podunk aristocrats who hung around the competito...

More from Coates

He's been reading George Fitzhugh, a pro-slavery writer of the pre-Civil War era who thought most white people (but presumably not himself) would be better off as slaves than as "free workers."  In discussing this Coates makes this striking point: The value in Fitzhugh writing is, for me, first and for most its sheer beauty. The metaphor of free market capitalism as cannibalism is...

My Morning Jacket

I have seen this band twice -- they are great.  Thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates for bringing them ...

Radegund's brother

As I prepare course materials for my course on Gregory of Tours, I am blessed with a blog post that relates to him and 6th century Gaul (an earlier name for France). Medieval History Geek asks -- did the famous 6th century queen and nun Radegund, wife of the Frankish king Clothar,...

Another $100 book

To be honest, I doubt I will be buying this book, but I think some readers of this blog will be interested in this review from The Medieval Review:Bryant, Nigel, trans.  Perceforest: The Prehistory of King Arthur'sBritain.  Series: Arthurian Studies, 77.  Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,2011.  Pp. xxiii, 791.  $99.00.   ISBN: 9781843842620. Reviewed by...