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“Lippmann…argued in his best-selling book called Public Opinion that democracy was fundamentally flawed. People, he said, mostly know the world only indirectly, through “pictures they make up in their heads.” And they receive these mental pictures largely through the media. The problem, Lippmann argued, is that the pictures people have in their heads are hopelessly [...]
Also filed in Anthropology, Belgrade, Crime, Education, Geography, Hotties, Images, Internet & Online Culture, Law, Long Emergency, Maps, Media, News, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Quotations, Race & Ethnicity, Religion & Spirituality, Science, Serbia, Sociology & Social Sciences, Terrorism, Travel & Transport, Warfare
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Friday, February 22, 2008
The happy innocent days when Serbs thought that with Slobo gone, they would be treated fairly.
I have received a number of emails from friends curious to know the inside track on the Kosovo situation from their man on the ground in Serbia.
The problem is that when one is very close to the situation, and are [...]
Also filed in Civil Liberties, Contemporary Culture, Crime, Economics, Education, Hotties, Images, Internet & Online Culture, Law, Linkdumps, Media, News, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Science, Sociology & Social Sciences, Travel & Transport
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Saturday, January 12, 2008
“European Union battlegroups (EU BGs) are military forces of 1500 combat soldiers under the control of the European Union. There are currently fifteen, mostly multi-national groups who rotate actively so that two are ready for deployment at any one time.
The battlegroups reached full operational capacity on 1 January 2007. They are based on existing ad [...]
Friday, November 16, 2007
From Channel 4 website:
A video obtained by a charity shows the life for many inside Serb mental hospitals amounts to a version of hell. Unending cruelty if not by design, then by neglect. And yet tonight Serbia’s Prime Minister said it’s all “fabricated” and “malicious”. Source: Channel 4 - News - Serbia’s secret shame
This [...]
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The New Yorker serves up a brilliant article this week on how fMRI scans of people in a “vegetative state” have revealed astonishing evidence that many have an active mental life, and some might argue may actually be conscious.
The findings are having powerful effect on not just the diagnosis of individuals with brain injuries, but the very concept [...]
Monday, September 24, 2007
Ever wonder why those beaten and abused spouses stay with their abusers? Do you know why it is so hard to stop a gambling habit? It has to do with a bizarre trick of nature called variable reinforcement, and it can keep us trapped in behaviours for life.
From “Don’t Shoot the Dog!” by Karen [...]
Douglas Farah: While Lebanon Boils, Watch Bosnia
There is concern among Bosnian contacts that, if Iran feels things are going badly in Lebanon and that the war needs another front, it would take little to ignite Bosnia. It would not be hard to do and the international presence in Bosnia is greatly reduced. So is the [...]
From Discover magazine comes the story of a superb piece of historical detective work, Megadeath in Mexico
“Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native‚Äîa killer that could still be out there.”
When Hernando Cortes and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men [...]
From Slate.com comes “Counterinsurgency by the Book - The lessons of a new Army Field Manual By Fred Kaplan“:
Two messages flutter between the lines of the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counterinsurgency wars, its first document on the subject in 20 years.
One is that Pentagon planning for the Iraq war’s aftermath was at least [...]
Chinese Man Gets Partial Face Transplant
A man whose face was badly disfigured after an attack by a black bear received a partial face transplant Friday, in what a hospital described as a first for China.
The hospital’s claims, if verified by independent experts, would make China the second country to conduct the procedure.
The partial face [...]