BUB: Drive-By Through the Blogs

This afternoon's BUB is looking through a handful of quality military blogs for some good articles...

The rather enjoyable A Handful of Dust has a nice article about "nationalism" and it's varying flavors.

It has served the purpose of certain nationalists groups to forefront one aspect of national identity, religion, in their struggles for sovereignty and/or for political control within what are often multi-national states. There aren’t just Muslim nationalists. Nationalism is a global feature of the modern world. There are Jewish nationalists in Israel. There are Christian nationalists, particularly in Northern Ireland and the United States. If there weren’t, the IRA would never have existed and country music would still be about cheating wives and three-legged dogs

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Global Firepower has the latest update to their World Military Strength Ranking.

GFP provides a unique analytical display of information covering nations from around the world with statistics based on various public sources. Countries covered include the major global players prominent in today's international landscape along with other smaller nations making the news - this spectrum helping to produce a broad comparison of military strengths from across the globe. This is a personal and experimental site meant for entertainment and to stir up dialogue.

1 U.S.A.
2 China
3 Russia
4 India
5 U.K.
6 France
7 Germany
8 Brazil
9 Japan
10 Turkey

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Mark Urban at the BBC is deployed and discussing the vagaries of registrations in Afghanistan.

Out in the yard of police station sit half a dozen motorbikes. They are being registered as part of the security forces' attempt to get a grip of this city.

Everything from people to guns, companies, and motor vehicles are meant to be recorded in the coming months; but meeting this daunting challenge illustrates some fundamental cultural differences between Afghans and Westerners.

Talking through an interpreter to one of the Afghan officers at the police station, I notice that the English word "registration" keeps cropping up in the Pashto language conversation. When asked whether there is no such word in Pashto, the translator replies, "No, we use the English word and other English words like 'control' too."

So it appears that under the old theory that one can tell the importance of an issue or activity in any culture by the number of words that it develops to describe it, Pashtun society just hasn't got around to the whole idea of keeping tabs on people.

By: Brant