Cattle Theft, Leicester City, Anarchy, Wargames, Consciousness
Riding With The Cow Police
Matt Wolfe | Oxford American | 26th April 2016
Rustling returns to Texas. Cattle theft has risen fivefold in less than a decade. “These days, we got more rustlers than you can say grace over. It used to be you didn’t catch a rustler that didn’t know cattle, or at least have some kind of agriculture in their background. Now, what with the drought, it doesn’t take much skill. Cows are so thirsty you can lead them into a trailer with just a bucket of water” (3,880 words)
Leicester City: Dirty Dozen Or Harvard Case Study?
John Micklethwait | Bloomberg View | 26th April 2016
At the start of this football season the British bookmakers were offering odds of 5,000/1 against Leicester City’s finishing top of the Premier League — the same odds they offered against Bono’s becoming Pope. Now Leicester is closing on “the most outrageous surprise in modern team sports”. Manager Claudio Ranieri has bought talent shrewdly and deployed it with precision: “Leicester players even seem to foul scientifically” (1,400 words)
The Post-Imperial Moment
Robert Kaplan | National Interest | 22nd April 2016
“We are entering an age of comparative anarchy. Globalization is not necessarily associated with growth or stability, but only with vast economic and cultural linkages. These can amplify geopolitical disorder in the event of an economic slowdown. That’s what we are seeing now … Everything is interlinked as never before, hierarchies everywhere are breaking down. Vulgar, populist anarchy will define the twenty-first century” (1,590 words)
Wargaming In The Classroom
James Lacey | War On The Rocks | 19th April 2016
Professor at Marine Corps War College reports “amazing” results from using war-games to teach the Peloponnesian Wars and World War I. Not only are the students spellbound; they almost always find themselves drawn into the same traps that brought disaster on their historical predecessors. Athens attacks Syracuse; the Great Powers stumble into World War. “It has never taken longer than four hours for the armies to march” (3,100 words)
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
Amanda Gefter | Quanta | 21st April 2016
Interview with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman about the mind, evolution, and quantum science. “Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you” (2,800 words)
Video of the day: Spirit Of Liberation
What to expect:
Colour film and original commentary from World War II, by Konstantin von zur Mühlen (4’08”)
Thought for the day
Inustice is relatively easy to bear. It is justice that hurts
H.L. Mencken