[PHOTO] Looking on Rollo Bay, part 2

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling shares a United Nations reaction to a United States human rights report.


• The Dragon's Tales observes one model for the climate of the ancient Earth and notes that, on the basis of ancient DNA, ancient Europeans were not uniformly white.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes studies of the galactic habitable zones of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.


• Eastern Approaches reacts to the recent Crimean vote.


• Geocurrents' Asya Perelstvaig shares a post about Irish cuisine over time.


• Joe. My. God. notes the recent visit paid by American evangelist Michael Brown to Peru to try to spread anti-gay ideology.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, the argument is made that the Democratic Party really has shifted left.


• James Nicoll, at More Words, Deeper Hole, notes the racism of environmentalist Garret Hardin.


• The New APPS Blog tackles the question of the extent to which the anti-Semitism and Naziism of Heidegger informed his philosophy.


• The Volokh Conspiracy is unimpressed by the Crimean referendum.


• Window on Eurasia shares the warning of Andrei Ilarionov that Russia plans on annexing and dominating far more of Ukraine than Crimea.

[LINK] "If libraries can't make it here in New York, can they make it anywhere?"

Matthew Mateusz Zadrozny has an opinion piece at The Guardian regarding the New York Public Library's controversial planned revamp. (As it turns out, I noted it here in 2012.) Zadrozny, as I noted here, gained fame via a photograph of him eating his chicken lunch on the steps of the beautiful Bryant Park branch.

The Central Library Plan, now misleadingly rebranded as a “renovation”, would sell off the Mid-Manhattan Library (the busiest lending library in the country and the place where President Obama got his start) and the Science, Industry and Business Library branches; squeeze users into a space that is a fraction the size; and divert $150m in taxpayer money from 87 resource-starved community libraries. The 42nd Street Library, the most democratic of the world’s great research libraries, would see its seven floors of historic books stacks gutted to make way for an airy and hard-to-access atrium, in a shortsighted worship of the digital.

I say “shortsighted” as someone who has experimented, clear-eyed, with all the forms of digital reading – laptop, phone, tablet, e-reader – before concluding that reading on paper is, in general, better. Sure, digital text is necessary for computational linguistics and preferable for referencing, but paper is easier on the eyes, impedes distractions, prevents snooping, obstructs censorship and does justice to paragraphs and pictures in all their shapes and sizes. I have discovered, too, that digital devices bias reading toward the immediate and ephemeral, and printed information, being slower and more expensive, tends to be of higher quality.

The virtual destruction of the New York Public Library rests on faulty premises. In a world of cheap personal computers, ubiquitous internet access and vanished book stores, libraries will always be special. For in addition to preserving manuscripts that may never be digitized, providing services to communities, and lending e-books to remote users, library collections entice citizens to meet in public spaces – and not just for the experience of reading on paper. Readers come for the ageless experience of browsing the shelves and commenting on one another’s dust jackets. Should the plan here in New York go through, the 42nd Street Library may soon find that its terminals are as empty as the ethernet ports carved into the tables of the Main Reading Room.

Amazingly, this desecration and downsizing is taking place amidst an upsurge of usage across libraries in the City and broad support for libraries across the country. According to an in-depth report released last week by Pew Research’s Internet Project, all Americans – including technophiles – love their libraries to this day.

[LINK] "It’s a Scary Time to Be Super-Rich in Ukraine"

Carol Matlack's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article talking about the position of Ukrainian oligarchs in post-revolutionary Ukraine is worth noting, not least because an alliance between them and the new government would go a long way towardss cementing the country's unity.

Other oligarchs could play an important role in Ukraine’s future—if for no other reason than that they control, by some estimates, more than one-fifth of the country’s gross national product. Take Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s richest man holds an estimated $12.9 billion fortune that includes control of half Ukraine’s steel, coal, and electricity production. “He controls hundreds of thousands of jobs” and is immensely popular in his home region of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, says Matthew Rojansky of the Wilson Center in Washington. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Most of the oligarchs started building their empires under previous governments, and many enjoy good relations with opposition parties. Billionaire financier Igor Kolomoyski, for example, helped bankroll past campaigns by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was jailed by Yanukovych but now looks set for a comeback. “Each of the major oligarchs has got several dozen votes they control” in the national parliament, including some from opposition parties, Rojansky says.

Some business leaders began openly criticizing the government last year, after Yanukovych touched off the protests by spurning a trade agreement with the European Union. They included Akhmetov, media tycoon Dmitry Firtash, industrialist and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk, and confectionery magnate Petro Poroshenko.

These oligarchs supported the trade deal “because they want to export to Europe,” Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in a commentary for the BBC published in December. “Most of all,” he added, “they desire legal protection against raids by the Yanukovych ‘family.’”

[. . .]

Most of the oligarchs haven’t said much since Yanukovych’s ouster. “They’re trying to stay as neutral as possible, conserve their wealth,” says economist Tim Ash of Standard Bank in London. “They want European integration, but they don’t want to piss the Russians off, either.”

[LINK] "Moscow’s largest gay club closes after string of vigilante attacks"

From PinkNews:

Moscow’s largest gay club will soon close its doors for good, after a string of vigilante attacks, including shootings, violent assaults and the release of poison gas.

According to Queerussia, the Central Station club, which is Moscow’s biggest gay club, will shut its doors for good, after owner Andrei Lischinsky resigned as CEO earlier this year.

The club has suffered from a huge number of attacks in the past year, including shootings, the release of a poisonous gas, and a coordinated attack by around 100 men.

Lischinsky previously said that Moscow Police had refused to investigate any of the incidents, and that none of his 30 complaints had received a police response.

Announcing his resignation earlier this year, he said: “I am resigning from my job as CEO of the Central Station club on February 1, 2014. Tired of fighting with the ‘windmills’.

“It has been 3 years of unforgettable work in the biggest gay club in the country, a lot has been passed through: the attack of the local prosecutor’s office, and burning my car down, and the fight against the raiders… It was one of the most interesting experiences of my work in the best club in its [market] segment.”

[BRIEF NOTE] More on modern Irish moving to Canada, and Toronto

The new surge in Irish migration to Canada, and specifically Toronto, was noted recently in the aftermath of a mass offering of Canadian work visas, in The Irish Times and the Toronto Sun's Kevin Connor.

Young Irish citizens snapped up 3,850 Canadian work visas in 11 minutes last Friday. And plans are in place to soon make another 3,850 visas available to Irish citizens who are under 35.

“We have a number of young people coming here and they will help play a critical role,” Matthew Cotter, president of the Irish Canada Chamber of Commerce, said Monday.

“What Canada is getting is a young, professional, skilled workforce. Canada’s gain is Ireland’s loss,” added Cotter, who was downtown for an announcement about a new Irish firm that is setting up shop in Toronto.

[. . .]

Ireland’s Aer Lingus airline will begin flying year-round to Toronto, starting in April.

The only direct flights from Toronto to Dublin used to be during summer’s high-travel season.

“Irish companies are expanding to Canada in many sectors,” said Ross O’Colmain, country manager with Enterprise Ireland.

On the subject, I noted last year that social networks related to sports (Gaelic football) and St. Patrick's Day parades and organizations (The construction industry is big.)

[BRIEF NOTE] On different religions and irreligions, in Germany and France and the world

Deutsche Welle had an interesting article up, "Ghanaian pastor seeks to 're-Christianize' Germany". An evangelical Christian is trying to convert Germans but finding little success beyond the immigrant sector.

In just a decade, the number of evangelical Christians in Germany has doubled - and Ghana-born evangelical Rev. Edmund Sackey Brown has grand plans to ride this new wave. In 2011 he purchased a former Edeka supermarket in Mülheim an der Ruhr, in the heartland of Germany's industrial region, and converted it into an evangelical house of worship: The House of Solution.

He is convinced that within 10 years his 600-member congregation, comprised mostly of African immigrants from the surrounding areas, will swell to 5,000. He has pledged his commitment on the number plate of his Mercedes "MH FJ 5000" (Mülheim for Jesus 5000). "Centuries ago, Europeans came to Africa with the word of God. But these days Europe is a godless center. It needs redeeming," says Sackey Brown, "My mission is to re-Christianize Europe."

According to Sackey Brown's vision, Christianity's sweeping re-embrace of Europe will not come from an increase in African immigration, but from first-generation African-Germans spreading the word of God to their peers. "Hope is with the new generation. They can be disciples of God," he says. But the children of African immigrants are a minority group within a minority group - hardly the catalyst for a near-future boom - and the fact that the church's weekly youth service has been scaled back to every other week is a signal that things are not going to plan.

[. . .]

German-born Jan Sickinger, now the coordinator for community outreach programs at The House of Solution, is the son of a Protestant pastor. As he came of age, he grew wary of Protestantism's increasingly "liberal social theology" and craved a closer connection to the Gospel. So he found salvation as a born-again believer, married an African evangelical and started working at

Despite handing out thousands of advertising pamphlets and organizing expensive stage productions in the city center, Sickinger has struggled to bring outsiders to the church. "I don’t think there's any church in Germany that is actually growing at the moment," he says, defending his own church's sagging numbers more than lamenting the larger situation in Germany. "I mean, the first German missions to Africa and South America didn't change things overnight."

But in the greater historical context, The House of Solution's plan for radical growth in just 10 years is ambitious. Other German evangelical churches, however, are enjoying steady growth. Though evangelicals account for only about 3 percent of the German population, they are an relatively devout group; the number of those who attend church regularly is comparable with the Protestants, one of Germany's two major faith groups, together with Catholics.

This reminded me of a 2005 post where I noted that evangelical Christianity in France tended to be dominated by immigrants, whether from the French Caribbean or eastern Europe or elsewhere.

Territory like this has been explored elsewhere, by Philip Jenkins among other scholars. I'm skeptical as to whether or not missionary endeavours in multiethnic societies will actually take off. Different religions, and irreligions (non-practice of a dominant religion is not the same as practising nothing), can plausibly survive for quite some time.