Mike Linksvayer attended a lecture on “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century”.
Perry Metzger shares a report (pdf) on infrastructure in Somalia. (Later: Michael Tennant comments on it at Strike The Root.)
Mike also has a map showing the potential partition of Ukraine. He wraps up:
It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, [rather than] as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.
. . . .
So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.
(afterthought 2009) I would hope that most citizens keep an attachment to the wider region’s culture, rather than to the successor state.
An odd thing about the Ukraine story: most of the articles I’ve seen say something to the effect that the dividing line follows the traditional division at the river Dnipro, when in fact the two are nearly orthogonal.