[BLOG] Some Saturday links

You may notice that this is the same [BLOG] links post I posted Thursday. It turns out that I posted it with smartquotes turned on. (Stupid things, those.)

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason points out that governments should not be run like businesses since each organization has different functions.


• Centauri Dreams points to an announcement that the venerable Green Bank Observatory radiotelescope will be looking for signs of extraterrestrial civilization around some of the planets discovered by the Kepler mission.


• GNXP’s Razib Khan points to research suggesting that genetic and linguistic distinctions in the Caucasus tend to map closely onto each other.


• Language Hat quotes from Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, quoting a couple of paragraphs describing a language diversity that--as commenters note--no longer exists as such.


• At Registan, Joshua Foust disagrees strongly with one journalist’s contention that Kazakhstan is on the verge of a Tunisia/Egypt-style revolution.


• The Search’s Douglas Todd refers to a poll suggesting that, after this month’s federal election, Canadians have become more interested in politics.


• Slap Upside the Head talks about a British Columbian conservative who believes that sexual orientation is a choice and should therefore be removed as a category under provincial human rights law, unlike--say--religious affiliation, which is completely inherited. Obviously.


• Torontoist’s Jaime Woo writes about an effort by a team of Torontonians to come up with a new generation of video arcades.


• Window on Eurasia quotes from a selection of politicians and writers who are interested in the idea of Russia becoming a more explicitly “Northern” power.


• China, the Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell notes, is directing international naval forces in the fight against Somali pirates fropm a centre near Beijing.

[FORUM] Do you worry about catastrophes?

Today the 21st of May has had a lot of people joking about predictions of the apocalypse, or the rapture, or whatever that California preacher has been talking about. But are you concerned about serious catastrophes--local, global--in real life?

I'm happy I never had any experience of the Cold War era. Towards the end, it seems to have become insanely risky and destructive. With tens of thousands of Soviet warheads, thought may well have been spared by Kremlin strategists to annihilate Charlottetown and Summerside, the provincial capital and site of a Canadian military base. (If your strategic plan involves immediately killing half of the population of Prince Edward Island, go back to first principles.) Without the threat of nuclear annihilation, though, there are still risks. What about global economic malaise leading to renewed tensions? What about environmental issues? What about asteroid impacts?

Discuss.