[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Otto Spejkers at 1948 refers to Haile Selassie's famous 1936 speech before the League of Nations to pose the question of how an international system run by states and groups unwilling to invest the necessary effort can survive, then and now.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism links to convincing arguments that the Flynn Effect of rising IQ over time is real, a consequence of--among other things--better nutrition and public health.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul writes at length about remittances and the role that they play, and that some would like them to play, in the economies of the Middle East and North Africa. In the absence of a business-friendly environment, of course they'll be transmitted outside of the formal financial sector and used mainly for consumption.


• Centauri Dreams is one news source among many that carries the news that the asteroid impact that triggered the dinosaur-killing mass extinction of 65 million years ago may have been an incidental byproduct of a collision btween two large asteroids 160 million years ago. Celestial billiards.


• Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes about how Wikipedia is just like the Internet, while Henry Farrell observes that RapLeaf has touched wonders in jurisdictions like the European Union with strong privacy laws.


• Daniel Drezner links to multiple reports that the Bush administration is preparing to launch a PR campaign to try to get some support behind the idea of attacking Iran. ¡No Pasarán!, perhaps?


• Ian Irving at False Positives advertises the Friends of the Merril Science Fiction/Anime Flea Market that's being held tomorrow, the 8th of September, from 10 am to 4 pm at the Toronto Reference Library to raise funds for the Toronto science fiction collection.
  
• Razib at GNXP responds to the news that, for the first time in ten thousand years, agriculture is no longer the biggest employer of human beings by wondering how cultural traits developed during this long agricultural idyll are going to adapt to post-agrarian environments. ("Badly" is probably an accurate one-word answer.)


• Joe.My.God has written a couple of posts about Mike Rogers, a Washington D.C. blogger who's been busily outing closeted Republicans. So long as the people involved are in positions of power, I've no problem with his actions. It's as morally unambiguous as revealing that, oh, gosh, look how many Jewish relatives some of the members of such-and-such anti-Semitic movement have.


• Language Hat has a post up about the Basque-Icelandic pidgin, and about the masterwork on this pidgin that may have gotten neglected because it was written in Latin in 1937.


• Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia writes about how the Russian state's promotion of Russian as a foreign language conflicts with other, like non-Russian identities in the post-Soviet world, or the presence of more attractive language communities, or the whole messy history of Russian hegemony over its near abroad.


• Jeff at the Tin Man neatly sums up the reasons why he's uncomfortable with meat-eating and why he does it anyway. Me too, I guess.