[LINK] Some Friday Links

[rfmcdonald]

• Amused Cynicism lets us know that instruction information on interrogation techniques given to newcomers at Guantanamo seems to have been lifted from a 1957 Air Force Study outlining the torture techniques used by China during the Civil War to extract confessions, even false one.


• Over at Centauri Dreams, fans of Einsteinian physics can rest easy that the laws of relativity still hold, thanks to two close-orbiting pulsars.


• Daniel Drezner blogs about the news that Munich-based printing firm Giesecke & Devrient, known for (among other things) printing the bills used by Zimbabwe, has stopped. Not that it will do much good, of course.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros explores the question of which countries aren't likely to recognize Kosovar independence and breaks them down into different categories.


• Gideon Rachmann suggests that the 2008 American elections might look a lot like the 1976 one, and offers advice to Obama on how not to be the 21st century's first Jimmy Carter.


• Douglas Muir (again!) at Halfway Down the Danube writes about a friendly encounter that he had in the 1990s with a Japanese-Brazilian woman on Saipan, and her take on Japanese life.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution wonders how Zimbabwe's trillion-percent inflation rate can possibly benefit the Zimbabwean government in any rational way. The answer, apart from noting that that foreign currency entering the country is confiscated, is that it isn't especially rational.


• Pure Product of America wonders about the fate of satire in a post-Bush world.


• Matthew Hague at Spacing Toronto has an extensive writeup of Pride in Toronto, including pictures.


• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money links to Delong's defense of American independence, suggesting that Britain's democratization in the 19th century wasn't inevitable, and that without the example provided by anotehr Anglophone country it might have been fatally delayed. "It is one thing to be a Dominion in close alliance with and owing some degree of allegiance to a rapidly-democratizing Britain. It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords."


• Wis(s)e Words lets us know that Christipoher Hitchens has tried out waterboarding, and, yes, he thinks that it is torture. Good for him.