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Sep. 25th, 2014
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Sep. 25th, 2014 01:28 pm- The Big Picture shares photos from the Asian Games.
- blogTO notes that Loblaws in Toronto will pioneer drive-through grocery sales.
- The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her issues with being an adjunct professor.
- The Dragon's Tales notes the ongoing disputes within the European Space Agency behind the creation of the next generation of Ariane rockets.
- The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas notes some good recent criticism of Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money and the New APPS Blog both note the expanding controversy surrounding philosopher Brian Leiter.
- Marginal Revolution notes the beginning of drone delivery in Germany.
- pollotenchegg notes the scale of demographic collapse and rapid aging in Ukraine's Donetsk.
- Torontoist notes that a Toronto policeman has been acquitted on charges of assaulting a former Torontoist contributor at the G20 protests.
- Towleroad notes the Serbian Orthodox Church's opposition to Belgrade Pride and observes that France has streamlined the adoption process for lesbian mothers.
- Window on Eurasia suggests that Crimean Tatars should prepare for another deportation and notes that Russia's economic travails are weakening its influence in Central Asia at China's expense.
I hope Anatole Kaletsky's Reuters article is correct. His suggestions that this could be a catalyst for positive change in both Russia and Ukraine would be nice if they were fulfilled.
The ceasefire no longer relies on good faith or benevolence but on a convergence of interests: Putin has achieved all his key objectives, and Poroshenko recognizes that trying to reverse militarily the Russian gains would be national suicide.
Admittedly, there is still a “party of war” in Kiev, seemingly led by Prime Minister Arsenyi Yatsenyuk, who has called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to back his country in an all-out war with Russia. But this week’s vote in the Ukrainian Parliament on temporary autonomy for the rebel regions suggests that most of the country’s politicians have abandoned hope of winning a war with Russia. They also understood that Western military assistance is not coming.
[. . . T]his compromise is infinitely better for Ukraine, as well as for Europe, than a protracted war. Though Poroshenko has been forced to make major concessions by offering partial autonomy to the Donbas rebels, this was inevitable.
In fact, the compromise now under discussion seems close to the deal that Putin and Poroshenko were near reaching over the summer, partly in response to the German government’s appeal for a non-military resolution to the crisis. Unfortunately, potential progress was shattered when pro-Russian rebels shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. This outrage forced German Chancellor Angela Merkel to abandon her role as an honest broker and simultaneously emboldened Ukrainian hopes of gaining Western military support.
Second, Putin shows no sign of wanting to extend Russia’s boundaries after absorbing Crimea and destabilizing the Donbas. Putin has proved that he will fight against any further encroachment onto Russia’s boundaries by the European Union and NATO, which he now views as an expansionist empire.
Evgenia Pismennaya's Bloomberg article takes a look at one element of Russia's forced rapprochement with China.
Vladimir Putin has a secret agent in his campaign to curb the impact of sanctions on Russia’s economy: Mr. Yuan.
That’s what skeptical bankers started calling Igor Marich after he introduced yuan trading in Moscow in 2010, when Russia became the first country outside China to offer regulated renminbi purchases. Now, as sanctions from the west over the conflict in Ukraine prompt more Russian companies to look east for growth, Mr. Yuan has become something of an honorific.
The yuan-ruble trade on the Moscow Exchange, where Marich runs money markets, has jumped 10-fold this year to $749 million in August, though still a sliver of the $367 billion in dollar-for-ruble sales. Yuan buying hit a then-peak of 666 million yuan ($109 million) on July 31, when the European Union penalized Russia’s largest banks, OAO Sberbank (SBER), VTB Group and OAO Gazprombank, over Putin’s support for Ukraine’s insurgency. With EU and U.S. sanctions in place and ties with China deepening, daily trading will soon reach 1 billion yuan, Marich said.
“I believe we can see this result within a year,” the 40-year-old sports enthusiast said in an interview at the exchange in central Moscow, where he started working in 2000, the same year Putin became president.
Marich’s goal may come sooner than he thinks. Russia is considering accepting yuan for gas under the $400 billion, 30-year supply deal that China signed during Putin’s visit to Beijing in May, according to four senior Russian officials and executives who asked not to be identified because a final decision hasn’t been made.
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Yay!. From Bloomberg:
The European Union and Canada are poised to celebrate the end of five years of negotiations on a free-trade accord when both sides hold a summit later this week.
The draft agreement, the EU’s most ambitious commercial pact to date, will then go through about nine months of legal checks before being put to the bloc’s 28 national governments and the European Parliament for final approval. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will host the EU-Canada meeting on Sept. 26 in Ottawa.
The deal, projected to take effect in 2016, would end 98 percent of tariffs on EU-Canada goods trade from the outset and 99 percent after seven years. Each side would dismantle all industrial tariffs and more than 90 percent of agricultural duties. Markets for services and public procurement would also be opened under the pact, the EU’s first with a fellow member of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations.
This “is a new generation agreement that will create more opportunities for our businesses, who will receive the same treatment on both sides of the Atlantic, and generate more job opportunities,” Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said in a statement today in Brussels. “This is no small achievement between two G-7 members.”
The EU is seeking to build on the draft trade agreement with Canada to push for a bigger market-opening pact with the U.S., a step that would expand what is already the world’s largest economic relationship. By contrast, Canada is the EU’s 12th most-important trade partner.
Open Democracy's Charlie Hoyle describes one filmmaker's efforts to help preserve her native city of Bethlehem.
When Palestinian filmmaker Leila Sansour left Bethlehem in the 1980s there were no military checkpoints intimidating the city, no separation wall jutting into residential gardens, and no Israeli settlements dominating the horizon.
"I grew up in a very idyllic town, but I didn’t think of it like that as a child. There were forests of olive trees, fig trees, apricot trees and huge fields filled with grape vines," she says. "All of this is lost in Bethlehem. Now what we have is a concrete forest of buildings."
Sansour’s new documentary, Open Bethlehem, is the culmination of a ten-year journey of emotional reconnection with a city she left as a teenager to experience the wider world. It is also a tribute to the legacy of her father, who founded Bethlehem University.
[. . .]
The fabric of everyday life in Bethlehem has fundamentally changed since Sansour left in 1983. The ancient city that gave birth to Christianity is now guarded by Israeli military watchtowers, which jut into main thoroughfares, and an eight-metre high concrete wall, which abuts residential properties. The wall cuts off the population from Jerusalem, historically Bethlehem's twin city.
Israeli soldiers raid the city almost daily to arrest Palestinians, and the rolling hills surrounding the city have been replaced by concrete Israeli settlements.
Only thirteen percent of the Bethlehem governorate is accessible to Palestinians due to Israeli restrictions. Sansour says the Israeli military occupation is threatening the very survival of a way of life that had thrived for generations.
This Universe Today story is cute. How long will it be before we actually get an interplanetary Internet up?
India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft was greeted via Twitter after successfully entering orbit of the Red Planet. The Curiosity Rover, a Mars old-timer of two years, sent a welcoming tweet: “Namaste @MarsOrbiter. Congratulations to @ISRO and India’s first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit.”
The @MarsOrbiter replied: “Howdy @MarsCuriosity? Keep in touch. I’ll be around.”
We jest, of course, about using Twitter for space communications. The Deep Space Network provides critical two-way communications between spacecraft and Earth.
The DSN sends information that guides and controls the spacecraft for navigation, and it collects telemetry of the data — images and scientific information — sent back by the spacecraft. NASA is not the only space agency to benefit from the international network of communications facilities that make up the DSN, as spacecraft from around the world use DSN for communications. In fact, MOM is currently sending and receiving telemetry from the DSN, as well as ISRO’s tracking station in Bangalore.
Margaret Rhodes' Wired article describes Instagram's exhibition of its works at Brooklyn's Photoville gallery. As a new user of Instagram--you've noticed my square-format photos, surely--I approve.
To thumb through Instagram is to parse a wide and often unpredictable range of emotions. Things can be sensational (Beyoncé‘s Instagram account), harrowing and uplifting, all at once (the Humans of New York feed), or kinda raunchy (The Fat Jew). But it is always, unconditionally, digital.
Except for next week: For ten days, for free, anyone in New York can take a screen-free tour of Instagram. The company’s editorial division is exhibiting at Photoville, where a string of shipping containers will decorate Brooklyn Bridge Park from September 18 to 28. Two of those will host Instagram’s exhibits, The Everyday Projects and Here in the World: Voices of Instagram, a survey of different creative types that have appeared on Instagram’s blog.
The Everyday Projects began in 2012 when photographer Peter DiCampo and journalist Austin Merrill were working in West Africa. They saw a side of life often left out of the usual visual narrative. “Western journalists are often only sent in times of crisis, so the images from media in the news are full of despair, and perhaps they miss out on some of the beauty and the normal everyday life that happens in between,” says Pamela Chen, editorial director at Instagram. Her job includes keeping tabs on the artists and photographers leveraging Instagram for creative uses, and she calls the “everyday” movement a “unique Instagram phenomenon,” because after @everydayafrica gained traction, feeds started appearing for dozens of other countries. There’s @everydayiran, @everydayasia, and @everydayjamaica, to name a few. Sixty-five photos from ten of those feeds will appear at Photoville.
[. . .]
To really drive that IRL-ness home, Chen and her team installed a large scale, analog photo feed in one of the shipping containers. Instead of thumb-swiping upwards, visitors will use a lever to manually crank a stream of two-feet-tall photos. Each comes with the signage and descriptions you’d get in the app, so users can figure out whom to follow once they’ve left Photoville.
Jason Horowitz's New York Times article describing the life that former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has made for himself in the Brooklyn hipster-heavy neighbourhood of Williamsburg is a minor classic. The former eastern European leader exiled in a hip New York City neighbourhood, hoping for a return to relevance at the same time that he enjoys his new life, is the stuff of drama. (Or, perhaps, comedy.)
“It’s the end of Putin,” Mr. Saakashvili, 46, said of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the topic of discussion on Thursday as its president, Petro O. Poroshenko, met in Washington with President Obama and congressional leaders. Mr. Saakashvili called Mr. Putin’s actions “very, very similar” to those in Georgia. “I think he walked into trap.”
But Mr. Saakashvili, considerably plumper than when he was in power, argues that the conflict should also mark a reappraisal of his own reputation as a reckless leader whose peaceful Rose Revolution and commitment to reform were eclipsed by years of riding roughshod over opponents, bending the rule of law and provoking Mr. Putin into a war that resulted in the death, displacement and impoverishment of thousands of Georgians. “It should be revisited,” he said.
Mr. Saakashvili said that while he had a “normal life” in Brooklyn, he considered himself a big deal in Eastern Europe, pointing out that on a recent trip to Albania “they shut down traffic for us and our 20-car escort.”
Mr. Saakashvili’s personal rehabilitation project is complicated by his eroded popularity back home and charges filed against him by Georgian prosecutors of human rights violations and embezzlement of government funds. He shrugs off the prosecutors as politically motivated puppets of his nemesis, the billionaire and former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. Some of Mr. Saakashvili’s critics agree that the charges say as much about the current Georgian government’s hunger for revenge as they do about him.
For now Mr. Saakashvili is writing a memoir, delivering “very well-paid” speeches, helping start up a Washington-based think tank and visiting old boosters like Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state. He said he was in the process of changing his tourist status here to a work visa and in the meantime is enjoying the bars and cafes of his adopted homeland. On his roof deck, with sweeping views of Manhattan, he has entertained David H. Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and is expecting Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, at the end of the month. Usually, a cousin mans the grill, along with the chef from Fabbrica, the neighboring Italian restaurant opposite a CVS. Like those chain drugstores, glassy high-rises and Eurocentric nightclubs, Mr. Saakashvili is evidence of Williamsburg’s steady transition to a playground for moneyed out-of-towners.
“I used to look at this place from Manhattan, it was such a pity, it was mafia, a place where hit men dump bodies,” he said, recalling his time in the 1990s as a Columbia University Law School student. Now he sees “a jazzy atmosphere” rife with energy and new construction.
“Williamsburg is part of the democratic transformation,” he said.*