Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's day to those of you who are Moms, and the rest: call her. The Radiance (cruse ship) is at pier 30-32 and must be attended to, so I'm going to run through this week's linkdump in a straight forward manner. In other words, cut, paste, and get my touchis to work. The first one is a three part post, by Larison, on Intervention and International Order.

India is a democracy and most will agree that India is an important U.S. ally. It is also a country that suffers from many tribal, ideological and separatist conflicts, one of which is the rebellion of the spreading Maoist Naxalite movement mostly in eastern and southern India.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Next are the political opinions. I try to get some without catch-phrases or marketing slogans, because they're free (like it or not) on any channel.

• Former Vice President Dick Cheney popped up yesterday in Saudi Arabia, where he met with King Abdullah. Accompanying him was former State Department diplomat and its top translator, Gamal Helal, who recently left the government to form a consulting firm, Helal Associates.
• As we follow the NPT Review Conference in New York and the enormous salience of the Iranian nuclear issue there, it is useful to consider some recent observations about the Iranian case by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s former Director General, Mohammed ElBaradei.
• ...something akin to Singapore with a suzerainty and guarantor of laws that doesn't interfere with internal affairs--and in the process allowing the rest of the world to learn from experimentation in the field. It's the "laboratory of the states idea" on steroids.
• Chances are that unless you’re a total financial wonk, you’ve never heard the term “seigniorage.” But you should, because doing the right thing with it could help solve several major, interrelated problems.

Next, as usual, are the culture and make items. The first one, an ice printer, might have a number of more technical uses, But I can see it in the kitchen of a large hotel, making ice decorations for the banquet table. The last is more astronomy pictures, again reminding us that the universe is bigger than this week's flapadoodle.

• Computer-controlled techniques for constructing objects at varying scales out of ice.
• Windsor Executive Solutions :Short story by Nakashima Brown and Bruce Sterling.
• Shing-Tung Yau is a force of nature. He is best known for conceiving the math behind string theory—which holds that, at the deepest level of reality, our universe is built out of 10-dimensional, subatomic vibrating strings.
• Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it.
• Seems like we don’t pay much attention to the 7th planet.  We know it’s out there, and it’s blue (but not as blue as Neptune).  We know it’s cold, and a gas giant, and … well … it’s cold, and blue, and it’s the 7th planet…