[LINKS] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Richard at 1948 reflects on the Turkish military's rather unhelpful and confrontational stance towards Turkey's media.


• Phil Hunt at Cabalamat has some rather harsh towards towards anti-poor and pro-torture Republicans.


• Ibn Kafka at 'Aqoul wonders if the American intelligence community hung Bush out to dry with their recent announcement on the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program.


• Centauri Dreams considers the likely effect of travel times in space on human polities. If Rome could exert authority over territories at most one year's travel time from its empire's core, what will this mean for interstellar societies even if relativistic speeds are possible?


• Crooked Timber delves into the question of whether or not the Israeli lobby in the Untied States is more exuberantly and ultranationalistically Israeli than the Israelis themselves.


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass observes how recent fluctuations in the value of the United States dollar in the United Arab Emirates have badly hurt South Asian migrant workers there.


• Will Baird notes that, in a recent experiment, very low levels of hydrogen sulfide added to the air breathed by worms extended their lifespans by 7%. Might this lead eventually to human applications?


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros constructs a very worrying model of the Russian economy's evolution. Briefly put, Russia's labour force that's doomed to shrink significantly and is badly distributed relative to economic resources besides. Oil exports are financing strong economic growth, and this growth is reflected in wages, but labour shortages and the Dutch disease are contributing to slow growth in non-oil sectors of the Russian economy. The net result of this is that Russia's oil income is eventually going to finance the expanding consumption of goods by Russia's population via imports, with serious consequences for Russia's long-term growth.


• feorag at the Pagan Prattle blogs about how a Conservative MP in the United Kingdom is trying to get "Christianophobia" recognized as a prejudice.


• Strange Maps exposes to the Anglophone world and debunks a strange E-mail chain letter suggesting that the Untied States was planning to annex Brazil's Amazonian rain forest.