[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams examines the equations used to try to estimate the numbers of high-tech civilizations in our galaxy and comes up skeptical but hopeful. More data's needed, of course.


• Daniel Drezner worries that Dubai's government isn't being nearly as open about its finances and the emirate's economic plight as it should be.


• Far Outliers blogs about the women and children left behind by Japan after the Soviet conquest of Manchuria, and the surprising ways in which they were treated, as well as the ethnic politics of Uighur dance halls.


• Gideon Rachman blogs about his visit to Hebron and comes off depressed.


• Mark MacKinnon argues that, for the time being, it's probably best for Russia and the West to leave countries like Ukraine alone, and to let them evolve on their own terms rather than try to sponsor proxies.


• Noel Maurer is surprised by the speed at which China's exports are contracting. Also, that the drop in U.S. employment in this recession is no different from other recessions, and that a "double-dip" pattern has been characteristics so far.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the mysterious Vela incident (asteroid impact or nuclear weapons test in the late 1970s Indian Ocean?), Ford Motors' Brazilian rubber plantation city and the ever-dangerous Reelfoot Rift of the central Mississippi river area, poised to go off in a tectonic catastrophe.


• Slap Upside the Head blogs about the tiresome tendency of some conservative groups to put quotation marks around "marriage" when it's used in reference to same-sex relationship.


• Spacing Toronto reports that Paris' bike-rental scheme is encountering major problems, thanks to the theft or vandalism of bikes.


• Strange Maps features maps showing how non-French Euro coins infiltrated across the French frontiers.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin speculates that the economic crisis will discredit the current Russian government, leading either to a more authoritarian model of government or a more liberal one.


• Windows on Eurasia suggests the Russian political system is set to transmute under the pressures of the economic crisis, that Russian ambassador in Kyiv Viktor Chernomyrdin's professions of skepticism about closer Russian-Ukrainian relations might be, suggests that Circassians and other Russia-based diasporas might receive "the right to return" under citizenship legislation though ethnopolitics is likely to be an issue slowing this down if not blocking it entirely.