• These German developers gave China a district of environmentally friendly, uber-modern looking, three to five story orange and lime green Bauhaus inspired buildings that are equipped with double-glazing and central heating that wouldn’t be out of place in a trendy new district of Stuttgart or Kassel. China asked for an idealized theme park of a German town, but instead they got the real thing. (via China’s German Ghost City - The China Chronicle)

  • Mainstream pop culture, once a font of fear and trembling among everyday Americans, is as safe and good-for-you as skim milk. Elvis’ hips, the Sex Pistols’ sneers, Amy Winehouse’s in-your-face irony, and virtually all other symbols of Dionysian excess and unpremeditated antics have officially left the building.

    —[Does Anyone Really Still Want Their MTV? TIME.com](http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/27/does-anyone-really-still-want-their-mtv/#ixzz2dBnP75OK)

  • One’s thoughts naturally turn to NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, which proponents of killing-and-maiming as a humanitarian strategy like to point to as an effective kill-and-maim episode that debunked the concerns of skeptics.

    […]

    But I do think it’s worth interrogating the larger political and ideological construct that says that spending a few billions dollars to help foreigners is a thinkable undertaking if and only if the means of providing assistance is to kill some people and blow some stuff up. The explosives-heavy approach to humanitarianism has a lot of unpredictable side effects, sometimes backfires massively, and offers an extremely poor value proposition. So whatever you think about killing some Syrians this summer, please consider throwing a few dollars in the direction of a cost-effective charity of some kind.

    “Military Strikes Are an Extremely Expensive Way to Help Foreigners”, Matthew Yglesias 

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