[PHOTO] "Take this in my name"

"Take this in my name"
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias makes the point that by the time women present themselves for an abortion, they've already made their minds up and aren't going to be dissuaded.


• James Bow suggests that a full bus in a transit system, far from primarily representing said system's popularity, actually represents the sort of inefficiency that leads to the bunching up of buses. Better to increase funding.


• Centauri Dreams considers the effect of general relativity on hypothetical solar sail crafts which would dip very close to the sun in order to get a maximum acceleration.


• Charlie Stross points out that if the Viking 2's lander had dug just a little bit deeper back in 1976, it would have found the global superabundance of ice that we're now discovering. This would have had major knock-on consequences for space exploration, needless to say.


• Far Outliers reports on the failed Hawaiian colony in early 19th century Vanuatu.


• Gideon Rachman talks about the way in which Qadaffi's recent speech before the UN actually made some sense.


• Intuitionistically Uncertain's Michel blogs about a recent Senate vote that would strip Amtrak of funding if it didn't let travelers take firearms in their checked luggage.


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money reports that, in the early 1980s, Castro apparently wanted to launch a nuclear first strike against the US.


• Marginal Revolution considers the question of why Coca Cola is more expensive in Europe.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer examines Brazil's leading position in the ongoing Honduras crisis.


• Slap Upside the Head reports that people have come up with a Facebook app that determines if someone's gay or not. Apparently it works.


• The Vanity Press reports that the Harper government is starting to manifest a scorn for know-it-all experts. Oh dear.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that many prominent Ukrainians are looking for security guarantees against Russia.

[PHOTO] A shrine on your front lawn

A shrine on your front lawn
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Any number of houses in Italian- or Portuguese-Canadian districts have these little shrines to the Virgin Mary in front, just by the walkway or strategically placed in the shrubbery.

[LINK] "Giant Squid: Don't Mess With Them"

Slate has reproduced Grady Hendrix' 2005 article on why it's a good idea to leave giant squid alone. A very good idea.

The giant squid is an "eat the crew, ask questions later" kind of cephalopod, and motion pictures have rightly depicted it as a very angry animal that's not given to conversation. To see a giant squid is to be attacked by a giant squid, the saying goes. But, like Tom Cruise between movies, the giant squid is camera-shy. And, just like the diminutive actor, Architeuthis dux spends long periods lurking out of sight, surely up to no good, before bursting forth, tentacles flailing, and exercising its alternate belief system. In Mr. Cruise's case, the alternate belief system is Scientology. In the giant squid's case, the alternate belief system is a desire to wrap you in its horrible tentacles and poke you to death with its poisonous beak. There are similarities.

Usually we only see giant squid in artist's conceptions fighting sperm whales (very scary) or washed up dead on beaches (not very scary at all). But now the Japanese have ruined it for everyone. With the aid of a very long string and a bag of mashed shrimp, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori have taken 500 pictures of the giant squid at home. Stripping all the mystery and dignity from this great beast, they got the not-very-coordinated, 26-foot-long monster to snag itself on their bait bag. No one said the giant squid was very bright, but the fact that it tried to free its tentacle for more than four hours before giving up and tearing the thing off doesn't do much for its reputation. Even the researchers' statement that the giant squid seems "much more active … than previously suspected" comes across as a little condescending.

Kubodera and his crew have taken great pains to emphasize that losing a tentacle hasn't harmed the squid, but if they knew anything about giant squid they'd cut the press conferences short and run home to protect their families from this now-livid cephalopod that almost surely wants revenge. The giant squid hates everything: It hates Kirk Douglas, it hates the crew of the Pequod, and it especially hates scientists who make it look stupid.

You know that cephalopods are qutie smart, right? schizmatic once joked--was it a joke?--that giant squid spend most of their time on the sea floor, contemplating the void, and that sometimes, the void blinks.

[LINK] "Un village coupé en deux pendant 37 ans"

Le Télégramme features an article describing the fate visited on the village of Mödlareuth in the Cold War. With one half in Bavaria and one half in Saxony, the community was soon divided between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.

C'en est fini des espoirs d'échanges. L'auberge est fermée. Les habitants, côté Est, sont expatriés vers l'arrière-pays. Plusieurs maisons sont détruites. «Pendant cette période, nous n'avions aucun lien direct avec nos familles, restées de l'autre côté. Le téléphone, les lettres, tout était contrôlé», se souvient Jutta, née à l'Est, attablée dans la «gasthaus» (auberge) rouverte il y a huit ans. Quand la chute du Mur survient à Berlin en novembre1989, Mödlareuth attend encore quatre semaines avant d'ouvrir une brèche dans le sien. Il fait froid ce jour-là et la fanfare fête les retrouvailles un peu surréalistes sous la neige. Vingt ans après, tout est-il redevenu comme avant? «Il existe à nouveau une unité. Les seules différences sont administratives parce que le village appartient à deux länder», souligne Robert Lebegern, directeur du musée de Mödlareuth.

Gone were the hopes of trading. The inn was closed. The inhabitants on the east side emigrated to the hinterland. Several houses were destroyed. "During this period, we had no direct link with our families remaining on the other side. The telephone, letters, everything was controlled, "remembers Jutta, born in the East, sitting in the "Gasthaus" (inn) reopened eight years ago. When the fall of the Berlin Wall came in November 1989, Mödlareuth still had to wait four weeks before opening a breach in hits war. It was cold that day and the band celebrates a reunion that felt a little surreal in the snow. Twenty years later, everything is as it once more before? "There is again a unit. The only differences are administrative because the village belongs to two federal states,"said Robert Lebegern, director of the Mödlareuth museum.

[LINK] "Secteur privé : Les libanais bousculent les français"

Lanciné Bakayoko at Abidjan.net writes about how the Lebanese diaspora in Côte d'Ivoire is going from strength to strength, Lebanese-owned firms even successfully challenging the French firms that long dominated the country.

Treichville et Adjamé, deux marchés populaires pour les tissus, les produits de beauté, les chaussures, le textile, l’électroménager et l’électroni­que. Ce pan fructueux du commerce ivoirien est en passe de chan­ger de main. Il y a quelques années, il était la chasse gardée des libanais. Mais avec le dynamisme de l’informel et surtout la ruée des chinois, ces libanais tentent de réorienter leurs activités vers des secteurs plus porteurs et lourds en investissements que le tertiaire. Selon Roger Dagher, chef d’entreprise et conseiller économi­que et social, aujourd’hui, les activités de la communauté libanaise se sont étendues aux secteurs du transport, de l’immobilier, à la distribution d’hydrocarbure, à la recherche minière ainsi qu’à l’exploitation, et surtout à la création de fonderies pour produire le fer et l’acier. «Je ne pourrai pas citer tous les domaines dans lesquels les libanais se sont investis, mais je voudrais indiquer que suite aux évènements de 2002 et 2004, ces domaines se sont diversifiés suite au départ de certains opérateurs économiques », lance-t-il à Elan, le conclave de la société civile. En effet, ils sont dans l’industrie, l’importation et le conditionnement de produits alimentaires tels le beurre, le lait, les cubes de bouillon, les savons, l’hôtellerie, la restauration. Selon l’hebdomadaire français Le Point, depuis les évènements de 2004 qui a vu des dizaines d’entreprises ravagées par les «Jeunes patriotes », les petites et moyennes entreprises seraient contrôlées à 60% par la communauté libanaise.

Treichville and Adjamé are two popular markets for textiles, cosmetics, footwear, textiles, household appliances and electronics, but this profitable destination for exporters is going to change. A few years ago, it was the preserve of the Lebanese, but with the dynamism of the informal sector and especially the influx of Chinese, the Lebanese are trying to reorient their activities to more important industries than those of the tertiary sector. According to Roger Dagher, business leader and social and economic advisor, the activities of the Lebanese community have expanded into the areas of transportation, real estate, oil distribution of oil, mining exploration and exploitation, and especially the establishment of smelters to produce iron and steel. "I can not mention all the areas where the Lebanese were invested, but let me say that following the events of 2002 and 2004, these areas have diversified after the departure of some traders." Indeed, Lebanese are in manufacturing, importing and packaging of food products such as butter, milk, bouillon cubes, soap, hotels, and catering. According to the French weekly Le Point, since the events of 2004 that saw dozens of businesses ravaged by the "Young Patriots", 60% of small and medium enterprises ware owned 60% by the Lebanese community.

[LINK] Otto Pohl on genocide

He makes a very important point.

The issue of genocide is one that has suffered from a severe narrowing of Raphael Lemkin’s original conceptions and constricted interpretations of the already watered down and politically deformed Genocide Treaty. At the heart of the matter is the claim that instances where deliberate state actions which directly lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of people belonging to racialized ethnic groups are not genocide because the element of “intent” is missing. In the case of the USSR this has led to Arseny Roginsky one of the founders of Memorial in Moscow to remark with regards to Stalinist terror that there are only victims and no crimes. The mass deaths caused by Stalin's deportation of whole nationalities are thus portrayed as purely accidental with no moral or legal responsibility accruing to the Soviet government for causing what were the inevitable consequences of their deliberate actions. Of course intent in such cases is always interpreted in an extremely narrow manner which makes it a synonym for motive or goal. That is the primary purpose of an action must be the extermination of a targeted group and that actions which inevitably have the effect of killing off large portions of specific nationalities undertaken for other reasons thus do not constitute genocide. This interpretation of the word intent is very different from the meaning of the word in Anglo-American common law. Under this definition it is not necessary for death to be the sole object of an action for it to be intentional. Rather it is only necessary for death to be the foreseeable consequence of a voluntary action for it to legally count as intentional. It is quite obvious that moving an entire national population numbering hundreds of thousands of people and consisting mostly of children, the elderly and the disabled in the middle of war time to desolate deserts and frozen taiga will result in a large percentage of them dying. This is exactly what happened during World War Two with the various nationalities deported by Stalin.