Saturday, December 31st, 2011
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Conservative economic theories and the policies that arise from them have proven to be disasters. Why, one might ask, do we continue such policies? The answer: because they make a small group of people very very rich, and they have bought the government; and because when you live in willful ignorance you can put your faith in ideology and theology since facts don't have any dispositive weight.
The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.
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Saturday, December 31st, 2011
IVAN KRASTEV, - Nation of Change
Stephan: I am publishing this not because I agree with all of it, but because I see it as one of the first shoots of commentary concerning the powerful geopolitical trend in which we move from the bipolar world that has run the world since 1945 to the multi-polar world that is emerging.
For a European these days, thinking about the future is disturbing. America is militarily overstretched, politically polarized, and financially indebted. The European Union seems on the brink of collapse, and many non-Europeans view the old continent as a retired power that can still impress the world with its good manners, but not with nerve or ambition.
Global opinion surveys over the last three years consistently indicate that many are turning their backs on the West and – with hope, fear, or both – see China as moving to center stage. As the old joke goes, optimists are learning to speak Chinese; pessimists are learning to use a Kalashnikov.
While a small army of experts argues that China’s rise to power should not be assumed, and that its economic, political, and demographic foundations are fragile, the conventional wisdom is that China’s power is growing. Many wonder what a global Pax Sinica might look like: How would China’s global influence manifest itself? How would Chinese hegemony differ from the American variety?
‘Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Ivan Krastev, click here.’
Generally, questions of ideology, economics, history, and military power dominate today’s China debate. But, when comparing today’s American world with a […]
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Saturday, December 31st, 2011
JOSH DORNER, - Think Progress
Stephan: It isn't yet quite clear what this means, but I think we can take it as a positive development.
A new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press out yesterday shows that ‘progressive
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Saturday, December 31st, 2011
Stephan: Almost everything you learned in school about early humans is wrong, as long time SR readers have discovered. The whole idea of early humans being these primitive crude people -- remember a movie called The Search for Fire -- is just a projection of writers and researchers captured by their own biases. I am fascinated by these studies which show how truly sophisticated they were.
More information: Astruc L., et al., Multi-scale tribological analysis of the technique of manufacture of an obsidian bracelet from Aşıklı Höyük (Aceramic Neolithic, Central Anatolia), Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 3415-3424.
Researchers from the Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul and the Laboratoire de Tribologie et de Dynamiques des Systèmes have analyzed the oldest obsidian bracelet ever identified, discovered in the 1990s at the site of Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey. Using high-tech methods developed by LTDS to study the bracelet’s surface and its micro-topographic features, the researchers have revealed the astounding technical expertise of craftsmen in the eighth millennium BC. Their skills were highly sophisticated for this period in late prehistory, and on a par with today’s polishing techniques. This work is published in the December 2011 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science, and sheds new light on Neolithic societies, which remain highly mysterious.
Dated to 7500 BC, the obsidian bracelet studied by the researchers is unique. It is the earliest evidence of obsidian working, which only reached its peak in the seventh and sixth millennia BC with the production of all kinds of ornamental objects, including mirrors and vessels. It has a complex shape and a remarkable central annular ridge, and is 10 cm in diameter and 3.3 cm wide. Discovered in 1995 at the exceptional site of Asıklı Höyük in Turkey and displayed ever since at the Aksaray Archeological Museum, the […]
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Saturday, December 31st, 2011
JOHN ROACH, - National Geographic News
Stephan: I feel so sorry for Creationists. Their willful ignorance cuts them off from the extraordinary saga of how we came to be who we are today.
This Neanderthal tool-kit study was published Friday in the journal Science.
A hardy band of Neanderthals may have made a last stand for their species at a remote outpost in subarctic Russia, a newfound prehistoric ‘tool kit’ suggests.
The Ural Mountains site ‘may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting,’ said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France’s Université de Toulouse le Mirail.
Neanderthals dominated Europe for some 200,000 years until modern humans began moving into the region about 45,000 years ago. The two human species likely shared space for a while, but it’s a mystery what happened during that period, how long it lasted, and why Homo sapiens prevailed in the end.
(Related: ‘Neanderthals, Humans Interbred-First Solid DNA Evidence.’)
Previous archaeological evidence had placed the last known Neanderthal refuges on the Iberian Peninsula, home to current-day Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. (See ‘Neanderthals” Last Stand Was in Gibraltar, Study Suggests.’)
‘Not surprisingly, it was in the peripheral areas’-Iberia and perhaps northwestern Europe-’that Neanderthals remained the longest as discrete populations,’ said Neanderthal expert Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who wasn’t part of the new study.
But now hundreds of stone tools found at Byzovaya-a Russian site at the same chilly latitude as Iceland-could redraw the […]
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