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The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents. […] The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined.

An overview. If you were a 70 year old who had lived in Iran all your life, you would not be able to remember a time, except for a brief interlude in the early 1980s, when your country was neither (a) occupied by a foreign power, (b) ruled by the puppet of a foreign power, nor (c) prevented from free trade by the sanctions of a foreign power. That is what comes of being what the British imperialist Lord Curzon called in 1892—even before oil became a strategic issue—one of “the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world”. More than a century later, Iran (Persia as it was in Curzon’s day) is still a piece on the board.

Such walls are built because they can be, because a ruler can make the implausible real.

Maria Bustillos picked Ernest Becker’s ‘Escape from Evil’. Becker won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Denial of Death, but this one, published posthumously and building on ideas from that earlier work, is far, far better, to my mind, more compact, more advanced, more compelling. This book is pragmatic synthesis of multiple disciplines in the science of man, the place where humanities and science collide. Theories about Becker's work abound, but for me his great gift was the way he seemed to have led us to the threshold of a new enlightenment, clear-eyed, undeceived, ready to take the next step. It's a step the reader may be able to intuit, and perhaps even gain, and make practical use of in his or her own life: '[W]e have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism.'

As of Tuesday, September 4, 2012, things look bad and won't be getting better soon.

Why I don't think I'm a curmudgeon for thinking the green Iran icons are a joke. "…if you believe for one minute that publicly agreeing with an echo chamber is changing anyone’s mind, behavior, or outlook, you need to stand up, locate your disused front door, walk the fuck through it, and then go spend a full (unwired) day doing something to actually help another person."

On the situation in Afghanistan and how, step-by-step and with troops we already have, we can start to fix it. "It's still winnable, but only just."