[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Nicholas Li at 1948 offers extensive criticism (1, 2) on Texan Republican Senator Ron Paul's dislike of the Federal Reserve Bank and desire to return to the gold standard.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism has written (1, 2) about Uzbekistani billionaire Alisher Usmanov's successful use of British libel law to force British ambassador Craig Murray to remove a critical posting on Usmanov from his blog. So does Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber.


• Edward Hugh at Bonoboland takes a look at the Greek and Italian economies, concluding that Greece's construction-dependent economy and aging workforce risk putting on an Italy-like path of sustained very low growth without a spike--of necessity, migration-associated--in the working-age population.


• Richard at Castrovalva finds in imomus' identification of Japan as unique in contrast to a mandated-individuality West just another case of projection.


• Centauri Dreams argues that nearby star Tau Ceti's dense Kuiper belt might not preclude life on any hypothetical suitable Earth-like planet.


• Over at The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird links to a recent paper that suggests that Homo floresiensis might not be as close a relative to Homo sapiens sapiens as once was thought.


• Joel at Far Outliers links to a blog posting that contains two anecdotes about the Japanese diaspora in Latin America, speculating that Japanese emigrations were traditionally lumpy (large nubmers of people from a single community going to a single place).


• inuitmonster points out that the very idea of Alan Dershowitz calling anyone "a propagandist and not a scholar" and expecting to be taken seriously is ridiculous.


• Joe.My.God has some interesting statistics about the state of the blogosphere. It's big.


• Alex Tabarrok starts a discussion over at Marginal Revolution in response to the news that the Canadian and American dollars are now at par for the first time in more than three decades. One conclusion is that a currency union between Canada and the United States is still unlikely, if only because fiscal policies in the two countries are so at odds.


• Thanks to bear_left for forwarding me a link to Strange Maps' map of Mikhail Yuryev's Third Russian Empire circa 2053. An ultranationalist and a geopolitician as well as a science-fiction writer and a claimed adviser to Putin, Yuryev's fiction predicts that after fighting and winning a nuclear war with the United States, Russia would go on to conquer Europe as far west as Greenland. Other continent-scale pan-nationalisms make their appearance on the map. (The Islamic Caliphate must be having fun with its occupatino of a largely Christian sub-Saharan Africa.)