[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

You should consider yourself lucky that I was able to post these links today. If not, I would have had to post them tomorrow, and likely displaced that day's [FORUM] post entirely.

• 3 Quarks Daily links to Robert Kaplan's article in the Atlantic Monthly praising al-Jazeera as an authentic and interesting expression of Third World opinion.


• Acts of Minor Treason celebrates Germany's new interest in using nuclear energy.


• James Bow bids farewell to Toronto's mayor David Miller, who has announced that he won't run in the next election in 14 months' time. Bow thinks that he did reasonably well, especially considering the innate conservatism of the city's bureaucracy.


• Centauri Dreams explores new observations made of pre-planetary dust disks, soon to become planets, orbiting any number of stars. Of note is a dusk disk found in orbit of a massive and terrifically energetic B blue star. If these disks can form there, commenters suggest, surely they could form anywhere.


• Far Outliers documents the series of annexations made by Western powers in Polynesia over the 1840-1906 period, and perhaps not coincidentally notes the popularity of sailors from the Pacific islands.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell points out that the canceled American anti-missile program that would have made use of bases in the Czech Republic and Poland wasn't very useful anyway. Meanwhile, the inimitable Edward Hugh observes that the very low interest rates in demographically aging countries like Germany and Sweden has helped provider countries like the United States and Spain with far too much capital to be managed responsibly.


• Noel Maurer finds the area of a disenchanted American military staging a coup against the elected government ludicrous, and rightly so.


• Slap Upside the Head follows the lawsuit and counter-lawsuit involving a gay man forbidden from donating blood, and reports on the inability of American same-sex couples married in Canada to get divorces back home.


• Over at Torontoist, we see a sensitive, productive discussion on bicycles and their role in Toronto in the somewhat critical post "Terence Corcoran Hates Your Bike".