[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Budding Sociologist Dan Hirschman notes that competing estimates over the size of the Chinese economy means that no one knows whether China's economy, or the United States', is the largest in the world.


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin notes the predicament case of James Cartwright, a retired American general under investigation for leaking information about Stuxnet to the press. Quiggin argues that Cartwright stands out from others in that he has many enemies.


• Far Outliers' Joel observes that tension between African-American settlers in Liberia and Africans living in the future republic was rife from the beginning.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig writes about how the Serbo-Croatian language community has been subdivided into national language communities largely, but not only, because of the collapse of Yugoslavia.


• GNXP's Razib Khan blogs about a DNA study suggesting to him that, in the 6th century, Bengal assimilated a substantial agricultural population with links and ancestry in Southeast Asia.


• Language Hat notes that at one point, the Persian language was a lingua franca as far away as South Asia.


• Underlining that the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 could have succeeded only if the Soviets--and Stalin--went along with its, Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley observes that it just wasn't possible to supply the Polish partisans by air.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen quotes from Tarek Osman who argues that the Islamization of the new regimes in the Middle East isn't inevitable.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer celebrates the 4th of July and also shares pictures of his young son Seretse.


• Window on Eurasia notes that two million Buddhists living in Russia--Buryats, Tuvans, Kalmyks, and others--pay allegiance to the Dalai Lama, who hasn't visited Russia perhaps because of Chinese pressure.