[LINK] Some Tuesday links

[rfmcdonald]

For obvious reasons, I wasn't doing an extended links post on Christmas Day.

• Andrew Barton suggests that human genetic engineering might start off by offering parents the chance to increase their progeny's height.


• Laura Agustin writes about how some male sex workers in Kenya want, need, HIV education but are afraid of getting it openly for fear that they might be found out by homophobic neighbours.


• Daniel Drezner work on Iran. Targeted sanctions could send the message that the West would still want to deal with the government, general sanctions could help trigger regime change but aren't likely too given how Iran's major trading partners aren't likely to join in, and who knows who things will go?


• The Global Sociology blog is unimpressed by the Facebook campaign that saw rage Against the Machine take the #1 position on the UK's Christmas music charts. "A virtual flash mob does not a social movement make."


• Language Log's Mark Liberman writes about how users of standard English (whatever the standard may be) have made fun of speakers of non-standard English, from the 17th century through Dickens up to Sarah Palin.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders whether Rwanda, in the course of its years-long occupation of large swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, did profit from looting the territory after all.


• Scott Peterson at Wasatch Economics suggests that New Zealand might follow the United States in making very significant deep-water finds of oil and natural gas.