[MUSIC] Alanis Morissette, "Too Hot" (2002 acoustic version)

Consider this post, Alanis Morissette's 2002 cover of "Too Hot," an epilogue to my previous post.

[LINK] Some Saturday Links

• Via 'Aqoul, al-Qaeda blames the theory that the Israelis perpetrated the September 11th terrorist attacks on Iran.


• Centauri Dreams discusses the Great Filter that seems to be necessary in order to explain the Fermi paradoxi, "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations."


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass examines the motives behind the acceptance of pseudoscience by smart people, starting from the whole nasty IQ debate.


• Far Outliers quotes at length an analysis of China that blames many human rights violations on the weakness of the national government versus its nominally subordinate provincial and other local governments.


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the "shadow countries" of Taiwan and Somaliland.


• Joe. My. God links to a survey in the United States suggesting that non-heterosexuals make up something in the area of 3% of the population.

[BRIEF NOTE] The rich get richer, the poor get poorer

"25 YEARS: 53 BUCKS," the banner headline for Michael Valpy's front-page story read.

The final data released from the 2006 census showed the median earnings of full-time Canadian workers had increased to $41,401 in 2005 from $41,348 in 1980 - only about $1 a week more, measured in constant dollars.

In British Columbia it was worse: Median earnings actually fell 11.3 per cent between 1980 and 2005, the steepest slide in the country and something Statscan officials were at a loss to explain.

In addition to income stagnation, the census data, as predicted, revealed the income gap between rich and poor is widening, young people entering the labour market are earning less than their parents did a generation ago and immigrant incomes are plummeting.

Over the quarter century of census data tracked by Statscan, the incomes of the richest Canadians increased by 16.4 per cent while incomes of the poorest fell by 20.6 per cent.

The data also showed a rise in the proportion of Canada's youngest children living below the poverty line, a factor attributed to the declining incomes of immigrants and young native-born men at the family formation stage of their lives.

[. . .]

Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives who has studied income inequality for the past several years, said she was surprised by the continuing income decline for immigrants and young people "because in 2005 we're at almost the tail end of a decade of strong economic growth, the strongest we've seen in 40 years, low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment, strong economic growth and people are worse off than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, which were recession plagued decades.

"You'd think that with a tight labour market that the opportunities would increase for young people under 35 and for newcomers. But that just doesn't seem to be the case."

The Toronto Star ("GTA middle class struggles") tackled the local situation, which seems aggravated by the fact that Toronto has an above-average proportion of immigrants who tend to end up more frequently marginalized than their Canadian-born peers. Past discussions of the "Three Torontos" are quite germane here.

Nowhere are these national trends more pronounced than in the Toronto area, home to the country's largest percentage of new immigrants.

As a result, median family incomes (the point at which half are higher and half are lower) in the Toronto area dropped between 2000 and 2005 while they rose across Ontario and the rest of the country.

"We are becoming a city of the servant class – who earn servant wages and live in the city's northern suburbs – and the downtown elite who run everything," said University of Toronto urban studies professor David Hulchanski.

"Immigrants who used to come to this country came for middle-income jobs in construction that were unionized and well paying. Today they can't find those jobs. They are locked out by unions or education we don't recognize, or lack of Canadian experience," he said. "So they clean our offices and hotels and universities, drive our taxis and cook our meals."

[. . .]

Recent immigrant men with employment income in 1980 earned 85 cents for each dollar earned by Canadian-born men. But by 2005, the ratio had dropped to 63 cents. It was even worse for recent immigrant women, whose corresponding earnings were 85 cents and 56 cents, respectively.

Harjot Mangat, a 35-year-old lawyer from India, completed an MBA from Leeds University Business School in England before immigrating to Toronto in 2004. But the only work he has been able to find is selling electronics. "Even though my MBA is recognized by U of T, I quickly realized without Canadian experience no one was interested in hiring me," he said.

When he switched tactics and earned a diploma as a certified immigration consultant, no one would hire him because they were worried he'd compete for business, Mangat said.

So now he's trying to put his MBA to work through a website www.help4immigrants.com. "It's not about whether you are white or brown," Mangat said. "It's about the haves and have-nots. The haves don't want to let you in."

[. . .]

Across the Toronto area, median family incomes dropped to $77,693 in 2005 from $75,829 in 2000. The 2.4 per cent decrease compares with a national increase of 3.7 per cent and a provincial increase of 1.4 per cent.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Notes on the pre-independence Slovenian military

Several years ago, I'd written about how modern Slovenia was very substantially a product of Yugslavia after the Second World War, which created its modern borders and its state institutions while allowing Slovenia to evolve into a freer society than anywhere else in Communist Europe. Much more recently, I've written about Slovenia's Ten-Day War which saw a vastly outgunned Slovenia handily defeat the Yugoslav People's Army and win its independence, as accurately described at this Slovenian government website.

According to rough estimates, the YPA had 44 casualties and 146 wounded, and the Slovenian side 19 casualties and 182 wounded. 12 foreign citizens were killed. There is no data available as to the number of Slovenian soldiers killed while attempting to escape from the YPA. 4693 YPA servicemembers and 252 federal police officers were captured. There were 72 minor and major armed conflicts during the war. 31 YPA tanks, 22 personnel carriers and 6 helicopters were destroyed, damaged or confiscated, along with 6,787 infantry, 87 artillery and 124 air defence weapons according to YPA inspections.

This leads to a natural question: How did Slovenia manage to develop a military while it was still part of Yugoslavia? Blame the Territorial Defense Forces. After the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Tito's Yugoslavia adopted the policy of creating a second military force in addition to the standing army, a collection of militias each run by a different Yugoslavian federal unit. Based on the model of the Partisans of the Second World War, the Territorial Defense Forces would mobilize the populations of each federal unit to fight in a wide-spread partisan war that, hopefully, would help see Yugoslavia liberated from its foreign invaders. Tensions between the TDF and the Yugoslav People's Army saw the former placed under the much closer supervision of the YPA, even though the federal units were charged with paying the costs of the TDFs.

Starting at the end of the 1980s, this changed when the Slovenian government passed legislation in August 1990 placing the TDF under republican control after creating secret parallel command structure within the TDF . Girded by high morale, by June 1991 Slovenia was prepared on multiple fronts.

Slovenia [. . . ] benefitted from excellent intelligence on the JNA's military strategy. Slovenes who served in the JNA gave sensitive information to senior Slovene military and political leaders. The information allowed the Territorial Defense forces to wage surprise guerrilla attacks against the JNA. Slovenia also demonstrated excellent coordination between its military and political-media staff. It successfully portrayed itself as the victim of a massive attack by the XNA. The Territorial Defense forces purposely attacked helicopters and tanks in an effort to show the JNA as thrusting its superior weaponry against the under-armed Slovenes. These attacks galvanized the world media and centered attention on Slovenia's resistance. At the same time, Slovenian political leaders cultivated diplomatic ties with key European allies, notably Germany and Austria, who spoke out against the JNA's moves. Overall, the short war illustrated a well-planned military operation by the Territorial Defense forces, coupled with a highly effective political and diplomatic strategy.

The highly successful guerrilla attacks mounted against Yugoslav military targets in the full view of international media (of the dozen foreign citizens killed, something like four were journalists) . The incompetence of the Yugoslav military--sending in tanks without providing infantry support, going in without any very clear goals, above all not believing that the Slovenians had the will to fight--ensured a pretty thorough defeat.

By all accounts, Yugoslav Army units are surrounded by Slovenian territorial defense forces behind barricades throughout the breakaway republic and are often without regular supplies of food and water, and oftencut off from their headquarters and from access to medical assistance.

"We are practically surrounded by the territorial defense," Col. Jovan Miskov, second in command of Yugoslavia's main Ljubljana barracks, said at a news conference on Sunday.

As I've said before, what particularly interests me about the Ten Day War is its sheer post-modern nature, with an underarmed political unit using asymmetric warfare (military forces and media publicity) quite successfully against a much larger conventional force and achieving its goal of separation. The mass secessions in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union didn't trigger a wave of mass secessions elsewhere: Catalonia remains Spanish, Québec is Canadian, Kashmir is Indian despite everything and Kabyles remain Algerian, Puerto Rico is heading towards statehood, and by all accounts the Western Australians and Ryukyuans are happy enough in their own states.

I do wonder if Slovenia's military example has inspired other secessionist movements interested in imitating Slovenia's very highly contingent success and believing that it can be transplanted to their situations despite everything. (The Tamil Tigers, maybe?)

Thoughts?