[LINK] Some Friday links

• At 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury links to an article by a former Bush Administration figure saying that Iraq will work out and that the United states should stay a bit longer. "You broke it, you fix it" seems at least as compelling an argument to me, but hey, one works with what's available.


• Centauri Dreams links to a map that has been drawn of some islands in a methane sea on Titan. (They might also be high points in a sea of methane sludge, but the imagination needs to be pleased.)
  
• Charlie Stross draws from a graph at The Economist to argue that the rate at which new technologies are diffused throughout potential user populations has been accelerating for a while.


• Joel at Far Outliers links to an affecting story of the life of a young girl, born to stern loveless members of the Communist Party in Stalin's era. Something in that excerpt reminds me of "The Little Match-Girl."


• A Language Log post goes on to examine borrowings being made from English into Mandarin.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen blogs about the new import of the Northwest Passage, now that it's actually a functioning seaway.


• Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia writes about the unity and disunity of the Baltic States.


• Scotland's The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are currently subject of a very annoying and very stupid hate E-mail campaign (1, 2).


• Finally, on the subject of recent media reports suggesting a Turkish state plan to revise Islam,
  slit provides a very extensive critique of the media reports, and John Reilly jokes that the inclusion of a Jesuit--responsible, some Islamists claim, for commission's imminent subversion of Islam--reminds him of a Poul Anderson short story where a Jesuit does just that, over a SETI-style interstellar connection no less.

I'd have had more links, but--a pity--Wordpress.com keeps timing out on me.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Obama's recent deserved (permanent?) downfall

After I learned of American discontent with NAFTA, I was a bit surprised to learn via the Canadian press that not only did Obama's economics advisor tell the Canadian consul-general that his NAFTA rhetoric was just for show, but that this indiscretion cost him three of the four states up for grabs ("NAFTA meeting 'misreported'- Obama"). Of course, he's not at fault.

Blame Canada!

Just like the animated characters on South Park, Barack Obama insisted Wednesday that Canadian officials "misreported" details of a meeting with his senior economic adviser now being cited as a key reason he lost Ohio's Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton.

Regrouping after losing three of four nominating contests Tuesday to Clinton, Obama maintained his campaign was not at fault in the "Nafta-gate" controversy and insisted he had no plans to fire economist Austan Goolsbee for his role in the affair.

He's an economist. He's not a politician. So, I think, you know, he's not familiar with how these things get distorted," Obama said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News Channel.

"I'm not going to punish someone for making a innocent decision like that."

Goolsbee got caught in a political maelstrom last week after it emerged he met privately Feb. 8 with Georges Rioux, Canada's consul general in Chicago, and discussed Obama's views on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In a memo leaked to the media last weekend, Canadian diplomats reported Goolsbee said Obama's tough talk on Nafta should be viewed more as "political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."

He also reportedly told the Canadians that Obama's protectionist language on Nafta was "more reflective of the political manoeuvring than policy."

Clinton seized on the reports and accused Obama of employing a "wink-wink" strategy - saying one thing about Nafta to voters in economically depressed Ohio, and another to foreign governments.

Exit polls showed a sharp swing of support to Clinton in the final three days before voting, at the height of the publicity surrounding the controversy.

An investigation of the origins of the leak is ongoing, some blaming Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's chief of staff. Harper did say that the leak was "blatantly unfair" to Obama and quite possibly illegal, but I wouldn't risk betting on whether anything will come for this up in Canada. What I will say is that I think it's fitting that Obama be called up on his politicians' rhetoric, by the often-dismissed Canadian press no less. Voters have gotten a chance to find out that the man who positions himself as being an idealist has turned out to be just as much of a crass politician as the next person.

I am also peeved that Obama's concern for ethical behaviour in public life doesn't extend to auslander like us Canadians. Under Bush, the United States has been reluctant to obey the tribunals created under NAFTA, even though NAFTA--like its successor trade deals--was tilted strongly towards the United States and has contributed to a restructuring of the Canadian economy that has left us much more dependent on the United States. Bush is just one president, hoped to be an anomaly, but if someone like Obama is willing to at least sound as if he'd behave in an even worse way towards his country's trading partners--and this rhetoric can't fairly be blamed on his bad advisors since rhetoric is what Obama does so very well--then I'd have to agree with Nick's argument at The Invisible College that it could seem to the world as if the United States has systematically been making international trade agreements in bad faith for the past decade or two.

That appearance could be very bad for the United States. If the current Bush administration and a future Obama administration are seen at this point about equally as likely to tear up inconvenient international agreements, the main difference being in the type of agreements they would reject as inconvenient, what might this do to the United States' battered image in the world? And with the actual materialization of this spectre, what wouldn't happen to it?

[BRIEF NOTE] "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so"

Peter Akinola, primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria with its 18 million communicants, has gained some setting up an alternative Anglican Church in the United States in response to the Episcopal Church's embrace of same-sex relationships. Philip Jenkins, noted scholar of religion, has written that Akinola's opposition to the West's sexual and theological liberalism comes in response to the threat from Islam.

Across the continent Muslims have tried to make converts by arguing that the Christian West is decadent and sexually irresponsible--a belief that finds daily confirmation in Western films and television. If the Anglican Communion accepted gay bishops or approved gay unions, Muslims would gain an enormous propaganda victory in Nigeria--and in a dozen or so other African countries in which Christians and Muslims compete for converts, often violently. When Akinola speaks out, therefore, it is not because he wants to intrude on the affairs of other churches but, rather, because he feels that the very existence of Christianity in his own territory is under threat. At stake, he believes, is the religious map of much of Africa, and the global balance between Christianity and Islam.

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Eliza Griswold's article "God's Country" takes a look at religious violence in the mixed Christian/Muslim middle belt, specifically in the town of Yelwa where, after Muslims attacked a Christian congregation, Christian men wearing badges of the Christian Association of Nigeria massacred over six hundred Muslims in that city's corner. Griswold asked Akinola about this.

At the time of the massacre, Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings. He has since lost his bid for another term but, as primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of 18 million Anglicans. He is a colleague of my father, who was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America from 1997 to 2006. But the American Episcopals’ election of an openly homosexual bishop in 2003, which Archbishop Akinola denounced as 'satanic,' created distance between them. When I arrived in 2006 in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the angry buzzes stopped and I could hear a man behind the door rise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a pale-blue pantsuit and a darker-blue crushed-velvet hat, opened the door.

"My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say," he said, as we sat down. Archbishop Akinola has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Protestants, and he was understandably wary of my motives for asking his thoughts. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam. "When you have this attack on Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become dhimmi, the vocabulary within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights."

When asked if those wearing name tags that read 'Christian Association of Nigeria' had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. "No comment," he said. "No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet." He went on, "I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence."

Archbishop Akinola, 63, is a Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But the archbishop’s understanding of Islam was forged by his experience in the north, where he watched the persecution of a Christian minority. He was more interested during our interview, though, in talking about the West than about Nigeria.

"People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives." What people in the West don’t understand, he said, "is that what Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it’s trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their rights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa."

He went on, "The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian heritage is being destroyed ... You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islam-phobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing. Over the years, Christians have been so naive--avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they’re dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that money isn’t evil, the love of money is, and it isn’t wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics."