[LINK] Damn you, Saddam, for killing Nelson Mandela

Really. Via zarq, news that Bush blames Saddam Hussein for killing the Mandela family.

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

Jailed for 27 years for fighting white minority rule, Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for preaching racial harmony and guiding the nation peacefully into the post-apartheid era.

References to his death -- Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail -- are seen as insensitive in South Africa.

I think that South Africa is free from invasion, despite the country's substantial Muslim community and the existence of the terrorist group PAGAD--South Africa is just too far away from the Middle East to become the next target in the War on Terror.

UPDATE (11:09 PM) : As princeofcairo and thebitterguy point out in the comments of the post, the statement by Bush was taken out of context, extracted from a longer passage in which he sought to explain the apparent absence of peacemakers in Iraq. Bush can fairly be assigned part of the blame for that, but he can't be fairly assigned blame for believing in Ba'athist Iraq's assassination of the Mandela family. My apologies.

[URBAN NOTE] War of the Sexes

Boarding the Dufferin bus home this evening, I noticed a cute young man--thin, with short blond curls and horn-rimmed glasses and a British accent--talking to his black-haired girlfriend.

- We were talking about stuff, you know, sports and ...

- Oh, so nothing important.

[URBAN NOTE] Progress Bakery, 996 Dovercourt Road

Progress Bakery (996 Dovercourt Road) is located at the moderately important intersection of Hallam and Dovercourt in the northern fringes of Bloorcourt Village, just a few minutes' walk from my home and kitty-corner to my favoured laundromat. It's a fairly humble place, a miniature convenience store and restaurant that might once have been a community institution in one of Toronto's Italian-Canadian districts as testified by the stand for the Corriere Canadese, but as in Little Italy to the south the local Italian-Canadian population seems to have gone to the suburbs and been replaced by Portuguese-Canadians: The Corriere Canadese stand now holds copies of Sol Português, and cans of Guaraná Brasil are stocked in the freezer. The service isn't that great, but the food is wonderful, with $1.25 bags of a half-dozen egg-white pastries that crunch and melt as you chew them, excellent loaves of bread and rolls, and my favourite veal (maybe "veal," I can't tell) sandwiches complete with peppers and mushrooms for $5.50.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Nicholas Li at 1948 offers extensive criticism (1, 2) on Texan Republican Senator Ron Paul's dislike of the Federal Reserve Bank and desire to return to the gold standard.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism has written (1, 2) about Uzbekistani billionaire Alisher Usmanov's successful use of British libel law to force British ambassador Craig Murray to remove a critical posting on Usmanov from his blog. So does Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber.


• Edward Hugh at Bonoboland takes a look at the Greek and Italian economies, concluding that Greece's construction-dependent economy and aging workforce risk putting on an Italy-like path of sustained very low growth without a spike--of necessity, migration-associated--in the working-age population.


• Richard at Castrovalva finds in imomus' identification of Japan as unique in contrast to a mandated-individuality West just another case of projection.


• Centauri Dreams argues that nearby star Tau Ceti's dense Kuiper belt might not preclude life on any hypothetical suitable Earth-like planet.


• Over at The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird links to a recent paper that suggests that Homo floresiensis might not be as close a relative to Homo sapiens sapiens as once was thought.


• Joel at Far Outliers links to a blog posting that contains two anecdotes about the Japanese diaspora in Latin America, speculating that Japanese emigrations were traditionally lumpy (large nubmers of people from a single community going to a single place).


• inuitmonster points out that the very idea of Alan Dershowitz calling anyone "a propagandist and not a scholar" and expecting to be taken seriously is ridiculous.


• Joe.My.God has some interesting statistics about the state of the blogosphere. It's big.


• Alex Tabarrok starts a discussion over at Marginal Revolution in response to the news that the Canadian and American dollars are now at par for the first time in more than three decades. One conclusion is that a currency union between Canada and the United States is still unlikely, if only because fiscal policies in the two countries are so at odds.


• Thanks to bear_left for forwarding me a link to Strange Maps' map of Mikhail Yuryev's Third Russian Empire circa 2053. An ultranationalist and a geopolitician as well as a science-fiction writer and a claimed adviser to Putin, Yuryev's fiction predicts that after fighting and winning a nuclear war with the United States, Russia would go on to conquer Europe as far west as Greenland. Other continent-scale pan-nationalisms make their appearance on the map. (The Islamic Caliphate must be having fun with its occupatino of a largely Christian sub-Saharan Africa.)