The Moscow Times has some follow up on the story of the historical website www.hrono.info getting shut down by authorities (the owner later moved to another server and got back up an running).  Here's the interesting bit which ties the crackdown to an article by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, rather than the posting of materials related Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - which was the original reason cited:Rumyantsev said Tuesday that he suspected that the real reason for the closure last week was an article critical of Matviyenko that was posted on the site's magazine section on June 15, four days before the police warning. "It was a very quick reaction," he said. "'Mein Kamp' was on the site for two years, and no one lifted a finger." In an ideal world, all of these materials would be free and ...

We spent the morning musing on the Maginot Line. The French built this elaborate line of fortifications along its border with Germany in the 1930s to thwart an invasion by its Great War enemy. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, Adolf Hitler’s armies simply bypassed the line and invaded France through neighbouring Belgium. The Maginot Line proved to be an elaborate dud.

As Nassim Taleb points out in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, build a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion – Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision.

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /blockquoteKeynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge.br /Martin Wolf, a href=”http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be2dbf2c-d113-11dd-8cc3-000077b07658.html”Financial Times/a/blockquotebr /br /The euro fell again yesterday, by 1.1 percent against the dollar (to $1.2860) and by 1.2 percent against the yen (to 117.52 yen). The change, even if quite large in a short space of time, is hardly dramatic, but what is of more interest is the why. Russian companies announced yesterday that they were thinking of opening negotiations to “restructure” their debt. a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101sid=aq5iyuLURj1srefer=japan”Bloomberg/a:br /br /blockquoteThe euro fell after a Russian bank official said the nation’s lenders asked the government to help moderate talks with foreign lenders on $400 billion of loans, adding to speculation financial turmoil in Europe is worsening. br /br /The euro fell versus 13 of the 16 most-active …

img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/5843/160/thinking.jpg"br /br /emfont color="#0000FF"(P.S: Sorry for any disturbances the advertisements above may have caused you)/font/embr /The extremely warm reception that China's Olympic Torch Relay runners have been getting from supposedly pro-Tibet protesters in the various Western cities they have passed so far has been alarming, and though I'd like to believe the Western governments have nothing to do with the (seemingly well-coordinated multinational) protests, the veiled threats by various Western leaders to boycott the opening ceremony suggests that indeed, these protests exhibit signs of going all the way up to the top levels.br /br /We have seen TV images of protesters in the Paris and London legs trying to sabotage the relay and then forcing the San Francisco leg to be cut short, casting a pall over the entire global torch relay and generating waves of righteous anger among Chinese citizens not just in China, but ethnic Chinese across ...