[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• At 3 Quarks Daily, Justin E.H. Smith criticizes the homogenizing category of "white" in the United States, which encompasses any number of regional and ethnic subcultures. His northeastern urban Catholic/Jewish experiences are rather different from those of Ulster-Scots descendants, say.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling provides more disapproving commentary to an article critical of India's shirt from concern to official indifference to Burma's problems on the grounds of geopolitical competition.


• Co-blogger Scott Peteson writes about how rising diabetes rates in India relate to new research suggesting that undernourishment at a young age plays a major role in increasing the risk of diabetes.


• A Georgia that's trying to get closer to Europe and the United States, Eastern Approaches observes, is also trying to get closer to Iran for trade and visa purposes. Why? Who knows, but it may be an ill-advised move.


• Marginal Revolkution notes that the drop in Irish living standards caused by expected tax hikes will be unparalleled in any industrial/post-industiral economy outside of the Soviet bloc.


• Australian blogger Jim Belshaw--Kim, not Paul--continues his Greece-related posts, meditating on Australia's links via the cultural and military history of the British empire and Commonwealth and on Knossos' sigularity as representative of a Minoan civilization outside of the traditional historiography.


• Savage Minds takes a look at a newish book, James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed, that makes the case that the dispersed and fragmented nature of many hghland Southeast Asian societies is product but of isolation, but of choices made to maximize autonomy from lowland states.