[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton is rightfully unimpressed with the way in which the organizers of the London Olympics are criminalizing precrime, even, and engaging in massive over-protection of copyright, et cetera.


• The Burgh Diaspora approves of Brazil's response to brain drain by treating the emigration of Brazilians trained abroad as a way to plug into global networks, as opposed to Ecuador locking its education migrants into restrictive contracts requiring them to come back.


• Daniel Drezner notes that there's nothing that can be done at this point to control the Assad regime.


• Eastern Approaches notes that counting on Poland to be automatically pro-American is, for any number of reasons, a dated assumption. Poland is a European country of note, after all.


• Geocurrents notes the expansion of Russian influence in Tajikistan.


• GNXP's Razib Khan notes the lazy assumption of many that Iran has always been a Shi'ite-majority country when in fact its current religious configuration is a product of the modern era.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis is pessimistic about the prospects for political mobilization to deal with environmental change when human beings are able to normalize extreme variations fairly readily--he cites the expectation of people in the Great Plains that the unusually rainy weather of the 1880s and 1890s was normal.


• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir discusses three possible ways Syria might be partitioned by the Assad regime--all involving substantial ethnic cleansing--and finds them all lacking in plausibility.