Everything is rather quiet in the blogosphere today. It reminds me of the eerie still at the eye of a hurricane. Or maybe a collective inhaling while waiting for tonight’s last Presidential debate of the 2004 campaign season.

Or maybe it’s just campaign fatigue.

I’m just coming up to speed on Thomas M. Barnett’s very interesting work on the functioning Core and the non-integrating Gap presented in his Esquire article The Pentagon’s New Map (and his book of the same name) but I already have some questions. For those of you who are better-informed than I, why are Russia and China part of the Core while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is part of the Gap? History? Geography? What are the decision criteria which cause a particular country to be assigned to either category?

This week’s Carnival of the Liberated, a celebration of the work of Iraqi bloggers, is up on Dean’s World. Check it out for the lastest in the news and views of Iraqi bloggers.

It was edited by your obedient servant.

On October 12, 1492 a sailor on the ship Pinta sighted land in the Americas for the first time. A day later Columbus’s three ship fleet reached a Bahamian island and Europeans were officially in the Americas to stay. To some people this is a triumph; to some it’s a tragedy. But there’s no question that it’s important.

Americans have been commemorating October 12 as Columbus Day since 1792. In Chicago Columbus Day is celebrated as one of the great ethnic festivals along with Martin Luther King’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Pulaski Day, and Cinco de Mayo. On Columbus Day we celebrate Italians, Italian-Americans, and their contributions to American life. So, mange, already.

The area I live in in Chicago is a quiet residential neighborhood of single-family homes—some small some large—and beautifully manicured lawns. Within two blocks of where I’m sitting as I write this are the homes of heads of city departments, Mayor Daley’s siblings, owners of small businesses, and commodities traders. The people in my neighborhood tend to be well-educated and well-informed, politically aware and involved. It’s what the pol who used to live across the street from me (his widow still lives there) called a “high clout-type” neighborhood.

There aren’t any political signs in the windows or on the lawns. Well, vanishingly few. In previous election cycles every house (or at least every other house) would have one or more signs—mostly supporting the regular Democratic Party candidate—in the windows or on the lawns.

I draw no conclusions from this. Make of it what you will.

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.
Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek and MSNBC made an interesting point on Don Imus’s program this morning. Windsurfing may be a good metaphor for John Kerry’s campaign strategy. Mr. Kerry has been pretty effective at allowing events to propel his campaign along and there’s been little in the way of effective shaping of the campaign. Will events billow his sails into the presidency?

This echoes a point I’ve made from time to time. Do presidential campaigns tell us anything about the campaigns that wage them? I don’t actually have a handy answer for this question but I’d really like to hear other people’s answers to this question both pro and con.

Was HIV deliberately created? That’s what the newest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Wangari Maathai, claims:

Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, today reiterated her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent.

“Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

“Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet,” Ms Maathai told a press conference in Nairobi a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.

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Robin Burk of Winds of Change asks us a very interesting question:

Given years of starvation, the brutal if canny dictatorship of Kim Il Jung and the occasional exploding train, why hasn’t the North Korean state collapsed?

Could it be that U. S. humanitarian aid to North Korea is propping up the North Korean state? Robin goes on to present extensive quotations and analyze an article by Nicholas Eberstadt in Policy Review, The Persistence of North Korea. Read it. It provides considerable background for a discussion that, given the threat that North Korea provides in the area of nuclear proliferation, we’re likely to be a hearing a lot more of in the next few years.
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