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For the Global Thinker
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Monday, May 28, 2018

An American Drug Lord in Acapulco

How a high school jock from Texas rose to the top of one of Mexico's most powerful and ruthless cartels

Excerpt:   ....a few weeks later, one of Barbie's assistants was pulled over by the police on the way to a carwash in Mexico City. Two officers jumped out of their black truck, guns drawn. "Freeze, motherfucker!" they screamed. They demanded to know where Barbie was. "Where is that son of a bitch?" one officer said. "Don't bullshit, or I'll cut off your balls and feed them to you."

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE....
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/an-american-drug-lord-in-acapulco-20110825

Sunday, May 27, 2018

How “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons” Changed TV Forever


 The debuts of “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons,” like the debut of "Citizen Kane" or Bob Dylan's ‘electric’ performance at the Newport Folk Festival, expanded the boundaries of genre and medium. Television, comedy, and American culture have permanently changed.
 
 Read more here...

https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2014-1989-and-the-making-of-our-modern-world/how-seinfeld-and-simpsons-changed-tv-forever/

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Comforting Myths


"By the standards of the European industrial world, we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe."

Read full article here...

 https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/comforting-myths/

From Memory to Myth: The Adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor


The daring exploits and beguiling charm of the 20th century’s greatest travel writer...

https://www.weeklystandard.com/dominic-green/from-memory-to-myth-the-adventures-of-patrick-leigh-fermor

Stories from the Sinai


Excerpt:   "We were sitting on a dune overlooking the glittering Red Sea east of Sinai. The mountains of Saudi Arabia could be seen in the distance. It was 1984.

With me were the renowned smuggler-poet Ayaad and his eldest son, Salim. They had asked me to join them “to discuss something serious,” out of earshot of those who were encamped with them. We knew each other well. I had been recording and studying Bedouin poetry for some fifteen years, and Ayaad was the best poet in Sinai.

Once we were seated in the sand, our legs folded before us, Salim, facing me, opened the...

Read more here...
https://hudsonreview.com/2018/04/stories-from-sinai/

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Killing of Osama by Seymour Hersh


The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE....
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Saturday, May 17, 2014

The Gift of American Power


Often I'm inundated with left-wing liberal media, so it's refreshing to get a different point a view even if I don't entirely agree with it....great article by Robert D. Kaplan

The United States is not a traditional empire because it has no colonies, but its military -- and the diplomatic power that accompanies it -- is deployed in an imperial-like fashion worldwide. The U.S. Navy calls itself a global force for good. That claim would pass the most stringent editorial fact-checking process. Without that very naked American ambition, which allows the Navy and the Air Force to patrol the global commons, the world is reduced to the sum of its parts: a Japan and China, and a China and India, dangerously at odds and on the brink of war; a Middle East in far wider war and chaos; a Europe neutralized and emasculated by Russian Revanchism; and an Africa in even greater disarray. It is not that regional powers cannot act rationally on their own; it is only that without a global hegemon of sorts, local balance-of-power interactions become more fraught with risk and are, therefore, more dangerous.

READ MORE HERE....
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/05/15/the_gift_of_american_power.html

Saturday, March 29, 2014

New Discovery Puts Humans in South America 22,000 Years Ago

Fascinating article...

Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. 

Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

“If they’re right, and there’s a great possibility that they are, that will change everything we know about the settlement of the Americas...

Read more and see video here...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/world/americas/discoveries-challenge-beliefs-on-humans-arrival-in-the-americas.html?_r=0

See more interesting articles here...
http://ajarnmike.blogspot.ca/search/label/Native%20Americans

Sunday, January 12, 2014

The Bewildered Kingdom


Can't stay on top forever... 

The issue for the Saudis is not merely Iran’s putative nuclear capability. A deal on Iran’s nuclear program would legitimize the regime’s regional influence in a way that has not occurred in decades, thereby serving its hegemonic objectives. The deeper threat or fear is that Iran’s ultimate target is leadership of Mecca, the cradle of Islam.

That is why the Saudi royals prefer to keep Iran chained with international sanctions. True, even under economic sanctions, Iran has intruded ever more deeply into Arab politics, but it was the US that opened the door by overthrowing Saddam’s Sunni-minority regime in Iraq, which ultimately brought an Iranian-backed Shia government to power.

READ MORE HERE...
 http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mai-yamani-assesses-saudi-arabia-s-increasingly-assertive-regional-foreign-policy-since-the-start-of-the-arab-spring

Sunday, December 1, 2013

The Last Great Escape

The best documentary I've seen on North Korea in a long time.  ANyway, this doc tells the story of two North Koreans who escaped from Prison camps in North Korea and uses animation to enhance the story...check it out...

(PS:  This doc plays in Canada...hopefully works everywhere...)
The Last Great Escape
Also this is another doc with a great INSIDE Look into CAMP 14...
Camp 14: Total Control Zone

More on North Korea here.


Friday, September 20, 2013

US Nearly Detonated Atomic Bomb Over North Carolina



Journalist uses Freedom of Information Act to disclose 1961 accident in which one switch averted catastrophe.

Excerpt:

The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Milgram experiment


The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychological experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

Findings....
"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. 

Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."
Read More here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment 

 More in-depth article in Harper's Magazine...
 The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram

A social psychologist's experiments show that most people will hurt their fellow man rather than disobey authority.

Read more here....
 http://www.laquintahs.org/ourpages/auto/2007/9/26/1190783482193/Milgram%20-%20perils%20of%20obediance.pdf

Monday, July 1, 2013

Saturday, May 18, 2013

10 Tribes That Avoided Modern Civilization



There are said to be as many as one hundred “uncontacted tribes” still living in some of the most isolated regions of the world. 

The members of these tribes, who have maintained traditions long left behind by the rest of the world, provide a wealth of information for anthropologists seeking to understand the way cultures have developed over the centuries.

http://listverse.com/2013/01/24/10-tribes-that-avoided-modern-civilization/

Stone Age Tribe Kills Fisherman Who Strayed on to Desert Island

One of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
READ MORE HERE...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1509987/Stone-Age-tribe-kills-fishermen-who-strayed-on-to-island.html

Monday, April 1, 2013

Confronting What We Don't Know About the Korean Crisis

  North Korean soldiers attend military drills in an unknown location in North Korea March 20, 2013.

To make things easy, let's start with what we do know, as a matter of fact.

North Korea has a young (he's 30), untested leader, Kim Jong-un, who has been at the helm for barely a year, following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, a domineering presence. The Korean peninsula is crammed with soldiers and armaments, more so than any other place on the planet. A war would thus be a catastrophe -- no question about it.

There's no way that the United States could stay clear: it has alliance with South Korea and 28,000 troops stationed there.

Ditto for Japan, which hosts some 49,000 U.S. forces (11,000 are offshore) and over 80 American military installations, and would come under immediate attack by North Korea.
North Korea is the weaker side, based on the standard measures of power. The South has a GDP that's close to 40 times the size of the North's and a defense budget larger than the North's entire GDP. Its arsenal is much more advanced than the North's, which consists of Chinese and Soviet weaponry dating back to the 1970s, much of it even older.
The United States is treaty-bound to defend South Korea; North Korea lacks an identical arrangement with China, its principal patron.
Now for what we don't know, which is where the problems begin.

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajan-menon/fessing-up-to-what-we-don_b_2985651.html?utm_hp_ref=world

What North Korean Attack on South Korea look like...
See full video here. 

See more great photos and articles here...
http://ajarnmike.blogspot.ca/search/label/North%20Korea

Friday, March 29, 2013

Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says

 A new study has put the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars at between $4 and $6 trillion. By my calculation that's more than $40,000 per American household. And of course that's just the financial cost, not including the toll in American or Iraqi lives.
 To put that sum in perspective, the mid-range figure of $5 trillion is enough (by UNESCO numbers) to get all the remaining unschooled kids in the world through primary school for the next 312 years. In other words, for the first time in the history of the world, we would have had universal literacy--and education often fights extremism more effectively than bombs.
Read more here...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html