Dutch military analyst Ingo Piepers is doing some extremely interesting research on the dynamics of international systems and… war. If his theories are correct, then another world conflagration at some point in the future may well be more or less inevitable. I am going to let Piepers explain and point our readers to [...]

From the BBC News site:
France’s anti-immigrant party, the National Front, is selling its headquarters to a Chinese university, according to the party leader. (…) Mr Le Pen, 79, has campaigned to become president several times under the slogan “Keep France for the French”.
One might have expected a bit more chauvinistic heroism, no?

Shot taken from Samurai Champloo
About a year ago there was this email exchange between me and some of my AFOE colleagues in which I talked a bit about my daily job as a subtitler. Actually, I was venting. During this exchange I was invited to write a post about subtitling for AFOE.
The image at the [...]

It seems self-proclaimed guru Dragan Dabic aka Radovan Karadzic may possess some healing powers after all. At least, that is what some Dutch Srebrenica veterans hope (hat tip Eric Gordy):
Former Dutchbat soldier Johan de Jonge is elated about Mr Karadzic’ arrest. He hopes there will be less focus on the former Dutchbat soldiers now that [...]

Some European MPs sure love to control everything, as Alex’ post Horrible European Surveillance Proposals already demonstrated. It may be old news to some of you, but check out this motion for a European Parliament resolution (pdf) by Estonian MEP Marianne Mikko entitled Draft report on concentration and pluralism in the media in the European [...]

Only a couple of days before the big European sporting event of 2008 kicks off in Austria and Switzerland. Who will be crowned European football champion of 2008 in Vienna on June 26th?
For my own country The Netherlands, which finds itself in a Group of Death with France, Italy and Romania, the odds do [...]

It is reading time again here at AFOE. I am happy to invite you to read The politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy. If you like the world to be simple and easy to understand then you will hate The Politics of Chaos.
Olivier Roy offers his readers a descriptive overview of [...]

The associative mind works in mysterious ways. At least, mine does. The New York Times has an amazing article today called Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done about, as the title suggests, the countless bacteria that live in and on our bodies. It turns out humans are really individual ’superorganisms’. What caught my [...]

In The Netherlands cartoon artist Gregorius Nekschot has been arrested following complaints by imam Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven that his work discriminates against, notably, Muslims and dark-skinned people. I really do not have the time right now to write a decent post about this and I am also waiting for more information, but Dutch weblog [...]

Just a short linkdump post. Newsweek has an interesting opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria entitled The Rise of the Rest that ties in nicely with my previous post Uncomfortable thoughts and philosophy. Zakaria is much more positive about the emergence of new global powers, even when he understands the transition engenders some degree of anxiety:
American [...]