The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Koala: A Creature for Our Time Adapted from a talk intended for the edification of older students in a secondary school LIBRARIAN OF CELAENO The koala is an arboreal mammal native to Australia, one of that island nation’s most iconic fauna.  Though commonly called a ‘koala bear,’ it is not closely related to ursines, nor indeed is even a placental mammal, but rather a marsupial like the kangaroo, giving live birth to an almost larval offspring which then nurses in a pouch until maturity.  Koalas are medium sized animals, averaging about three feet in length and weighing about thirty pounds or so, with some sexual dimorphism.  They are also retarded. [Image found through Google] As a disclaimer, I use that term in its purely clinical sense, and in no way do I mean to imply anything pejorative about this animal or any person.  I mean only that the koala as a species displays categorically the characteristics of developmental problems related to its cognitive function.  All koalas h

  What Are Our Chances, Doc? Crisis statistics for the End Times HARRISON KOEHLI I know the feeling, calculating cat. I loathed statistics in university. But I still love statistics—as long as they’re interesting. So the final chapter of Peter Turchin’s  End Times  was an extra treat. All the fun without any of the bore—if you can call epidemics, civil wars, and state collapse fun, that is. Over the years, the number of crisis periods studied by Turchin and his team has grown impressively. From Jack Goldstone’s original study of the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century and the Age of Revolutions, then Turchin and Sergey Nefedov’s study of eight cycles in the histories of England, France, Russia, and Rome,  CrisisDB  has expanded that number up to around 200 case studies, soon to be 300. Turchin has even put out  a call for any academics interested in joining the fun . As he writes in his latest  preprint : This chapter offers a road-map for researchers to take up this call and ext