[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

Today's links post is a big one.

• At Alpha Sources, Claus Vistesen analyzes the ongoing economic mayhem in the Baltic States, especially in Latvia.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the first planet, a "cold Jupiter," discovered orbiting a very dim red dwarf star in the neighbourhood thanks to astrometry.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell reports on a ludicrous paper which argues that problems with the Euro could precipitate interstate war, and Ingrid Robeyns examines the consequence of a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Namibia.


• False Positives' Ian Irving commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  
• On the subject of Poland in the Second World War, Far Outliers blogs about how the Nazis and the Soviets both did their best to decapitate Polish society in the zones that they occupied.


• Gideon Rachman wonders if California's institutionalized gridlock will become a model for the world.


• Joe. My. God reports that gay men tend to do better in college than their heterosexual counterparts.


• Mark MacKinnon blogs about the peaceful democratic elections in Mongolia, which has seen the election of a president who belonged to a party that wasn't descended from the old Communist party.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the stories of the East Asians who may well have been the first to visit Europe before the modern era.


• The Pagan Prattle reports on the belief that the Antichrist might be homosexual.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know about the recent bill passed by the Alberta provincial legislature which allows parents to pull their children out of classes dealing with GLBT subjects. It would have to be Alberta.


• Strange Maps describes the barren island of Sable Island, a part of Canada hundreds of kilometres away from Nova Scotia, notable mainly for its herd of wild horses and the many ships wrecked on its adjacent underwater dunes.


• Towleroad reports on surviving photos of Stonewall taken just after the riots 40 years ago.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that Moscow's backing away from the claim that Poland started the Second World War, and that efforts to impose a single literary language on the Mordvin might doom this small population.