by CKR
Short reviews of three blogs (RealClimate, Arms Control Wonk, and abdymok) that provide lots of detail on their respective subjects.
RealClimate is by a group of climate scientists. I’ll quote what they say about their purpose:
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.
It’s pretty heavily scientific, and some articles are long. The contributors sometimes go into a degree of detail or qualification of results that can be confusing. Overall, they are trying to make climate science accessible and sometimes succeed.
Arms Control Wonk covers many issues that I touch on, and more. The posters there are more expert in the details of weapons systems, for example. Their posts tend to be more current, while mine tend to be more reflective, although if I got a good piece of news, I would certainly post it! Here is their statement of purpose:
I started ArmsControlWonk.com for inchoate reasons. Over time, I’ve constructed an elaborate post-hoc rationalization for the site focusing on four goals: 1.To report items of interest to the arms control community that wouldn’t make it into the New York Times... 2.Place arms control related developments into context and correct lousy reporting. 3.To explore the foundations of arms control and other cooperative security strategies. 4.Finally, to amuse myself and others.
abdymok contains a lot of detail about particular issues in Ukraine, particularly the murder of Georgy Gongadze. I don’t know enough about Ukraine to make a judgment of accuracy or not. Many of the posts seem to assume an agreement with the author’s viewpoint or a knowledge of Ukrainian details that I lack, so they can be hard to read. Here’s that blogger’s statement:
I have been here before, i think.enrolled in the dod and national security agency's le fox purple program in 1979 and was posted to a 3-year stint in berlin, usm-5.
spent 1986 drinking lots of cabernet at moscow maurice thorez institute. u.s. foreign service took me to washington, d.c., magnitogorsk, leningrad and minsk two years later.
as the ussr disintigrated, managed joint ventures in moscow and kyiv. then went the corporate route for merck & co, heading its scientific n(read: sales & marketing) network in russia and central asia.
my life changed forever in 1993 in chara, chitinskaya oblast, after a reindeer ride and helicopter trip.
joined george soros’ open society institute one year later.
warsaw, paris, bratislava, belgrade, hungary, st. petersberg ... then back kyiv after being expelled from belarus 1997.eventually wound up at the post in kyiv.