[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling argues that Japanese industry's tendency to keep all manufacturing in-house, instead of outsourcing it out to competitive sub-manufacturers, might help quality but is also going to be a palpable problem for Japanese industry's long-term viability.


• The Burgh Diaspora catalogues the efforts of New Zealand and Ohio to reverse long-standing patterns of outmigration, arguing that promoting migration is better than trying to keep people locked up.


• Daniel Drezner wonders if Japan, given its demographic reality and future, is aiming for a sort of voluntary human extinction future.


• Rob Pitingolo at Extraordinary Observations points out that it's good when people complain about mass transit, or at least better than when they give up on it entirely.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan goes into detail about theories that the Sahara was much more pleasant than at present and a possible route for human migration.


• There's a nice Lawyers, Guns and Money review of the book Small Wars, both a good book of fiction and a nice examination of the dynamics of low-level conflict.


• At Normblog, Norman Geras shows that people in British-derived parliamentary systems have problems with the legitimacy of coalition governments, in the United Kingdom as in Canada.


• Savage Minds' Kerrin argues that the separation between science and humanist paradigms is splitting, and that a rigourous holistic approach is emerging.


• Anatoly Karlin at Sublime Oblivion has a review of the past year where he highlights some of the most notable trends, form the emergence of notable regional and global powers like Turkey and Brazil, China's impending hegemony, the collapse of neo-liberalism in Europe and its replacement by state-directed capitalisms, and the importance of WikiLeaks.


• In Barcelona, there are plans afoot to build a memorial to persecuted queers, possibly outside the famous Sagrada Familia church of Gaudi.
  
• Understanding Society's Daniel Little has an interesting analysis of the success (partial, perhaps) of the Communist Party in governing the state of West Bengal, and the model's non-portability.


• Windows on Eurasia wonders if the Ukrainian government is trying to suppress the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which operates outside of Moscow's control.