Jazzmen, one, two, three… (62)
30 aprilie 2014 2 comentarii
Nu am blog, astept sa treaca moda.
29 aprilie 2014 Un comentariu
28 aprilie 2014 Lasă un comentariu
Obama has concluded, according to Baker, that he “will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin,” and so he has decided that he “will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin.” Ignoring the master, of course, has the consequence of ignoring the master’s victims: the Obama administration abandons to their fates one people after another, who pay the price for the president’s impatience with large historical struggles. The Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Moldovans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Baltic populations: they are all living with the jitters, and some of them on the cusp of despair, because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies, which it prefers to meet with meals ready to eat. No wonder that so much of our diplomacy consists in tendering reassurances. The United States now responds to oppressed and threatened peoples by making them more lonely and afraid—a sentimental objection, I know, and one that is unlikely to trouble Henry Kissinger’s epigone in the White House.
Obama’s impatience with history has left him patient with evil. It is not a pretty sight; but his broken foreign policy is riddled with such ironies. Here is another one: Baker reports that the president has elected to revise his Russia policy into “an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.” How twentieth century! Never mind that containment was a policy with many interpretations, and not quite the formula for moving on that Obama is seeking. The grim fact is that Obama’s containment is not containing Putin, whose “green men” and “peoples’ republics” and Big Lies and Russophilic incitement and covert operations and military deployments are undeterred by it. While Obama pitches the “off-ramp,” Putin revels in the on-ramp. Geneva is now the world capital of failure. The only country that American containment is containing is America
25 aprilie 2014 Lasă un comentariu
“The whole point of colour vision is not to inspire poets, but to allow contrast detection,” says Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford. “You’ve got a much better chance of detecting an object against a background if you have colour vision.” Birds are the masters at this, he says – they are tetrachromatic, having four colour detectors, and would see things that we see as a single red as an infinite, glorious wash of colours. (Mantis shrimp, a kind of predatory marine crustacean, have 12 detectors, but for some reason do not seem to be better at distinguishing colours than we lowly humans.)