[PHOTO] Red soil garden, Rollo Bay

[PHOTO] Tree under lights by the 519, Church and Wellesley

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares evidence that a Lake Ontario worth of water is present, in the form of subsurface ice, in Mercury's polar regions.


• blogTO profiles the life and latest releases of one-time punk band adolescent frontwoman Chandra Oppenheim.


• Centauri Dreams features a guest essay by Andrew Lepage on Alpha Centauri Bb, still quite possible.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining the study of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs and links to another that seeks to explain the orbits in the system of Fomalhaut.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on Chinese involvement in South Sudan and suggests that Lockheed's announcement of a working fusion reactor is being greeted skeptically.


• Marginal Revolution suggests advocates of open borders need more research to support their positions.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw fears for the economic future of the world.


• Towleroad reports that magistrates in North Carolina are required to perform same-sex marriages or face removal.


• Transit Toronto examines the consequences of last night's flooding for the TTC system.


• Why I Love Toronto likes Summerhill Avenue.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russian liberals like Navalny are unwilling to challenge Russian policies in Ukraine.


• The World reports on the latest developments in Spain re: Catalonian separatism.

[LINK] "The New International Brigades"

Marco d'Eramo's blog post at the London Review of Books looks at the dispiriting subject of the volunteers travelling around the world to fight for the Islamic State. These people, it seems, are not especially disenfranchised. They're doing it because they want to do it.

No one really dwells on the question of why so many young men from Europe, Canada, Australia, even China, are going to fight in Syria and Iraq with the so-called Islamic State (Isis), or with other Islamist militias. The New York Times recently published a map showing which countries the foreign volunteers come from. The numbers are slippery and often contradictory, but the foreign presence in Syria and Iraq is reckoned at around 17,000 fighters. The biggest contingents are from Chechnya and the North Caucasus (around 9000) and Turkey (1000). There are also 400 from Kosovo. But 1900 come from Western Europe (700 from France, 340 from Britain, 60 from Ireland), 100 from the US, and between 50 and 100 from Australia.

The prevailing view is that these volunteers are marginalised fanatics: in other words, they’re ‘crazy’. Madness has been used to explain everyone from Caligula to Hitler, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein and any other leader or dictator who has been either defeated or marked for defeat. But it is an explanation that explains nothing, and which rather indicates that we are incapable of explaining the phenomenon. We need to be extremely careful with the way we define other people: no one defines himself as a ‘terrorist’ (just as no one defines himself as a ‘populist’). During the Second World War, the Germans called the maquisards ‘terrorists’, but after the Allied victory no one called them that any more. The French called the FLN in Algeria ‘terrorists’, but after independence no one used the term, simply because the FLN had won. No one called Begin or Ho Chi Min a ‘terrorist’, because they too imposed a victor’s narrative.

The conclusions drawn in An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qaida in Iraq, prepared by the Rand Corporation in 2010, apply to Isis too, the institute says. First, financial gain is not the principal motive driving people to join Islamist militias: a fighter earns a lot less than the regional average, while his chances of dying are a lot higher. Second, the terrorists have higher than expected levels of education and wealth, ‘which weakens theories explaining individual participation in militancy as being due to financial deprivation, mental instability or poor education’: the volunteers, according to the Rand Corporation, are not marginalised, crazy or poor.

The new international brigades are a phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously, and raises a serious question. The first modern ‘foreign volunteers’ were those who in the early 1800s went to fight and die for the independence of Christian Greece from the Islamic Ottoman Empire, including Santorre di Santarosa (who died on Sphacteria in 1825) and Byron (who died at Missolonghi in 1824). Garibaldi was known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ because he fought in Brasil, Uruguay, Italy and France (in 1870-71, against the Prussians). They all embodied the words of Emile Barrault, a follower of Saint-Simon who told Garibaldi in 1833 that ‘a man who, making himself cosmopolitan, adopts humanity as his fatherland and offers his sword and his blood to all peoples who struggle against tyranny, is more than a soldier; he is a hero.’

[LINK] "Putin’s International Brigades"

Alexander Litoy's Open Democracy article looks at the demographics of the volunteers who have come to eastern Ukraine to fight for separatists (generally anti-American, commonly far-right Europeans, often Serbs and Hungarians).

Foreign volunteers also figure prominently in Russian media propaganda; and separatist websites are full of interviews with them. Not that they necessarily get to fight. ‘They can’t wait to get to the front line, but it’s unlikely they’ll be sent there,’ began a story on Russia’s main news channel, about two young Spaniards who had come to support the separatists. ‘We’ve got enough fighters of our own, and they’re more use behind the lines. Let them watch and remember, so that when they go back home to Spain they’ll be able to tell people what Kyiv is doing to south-east Ukraine’. It is certainly true that few foreigners’ names have been on the lists of the dead, and prisoners.

This propaganda campaign has worked well. ‘He said how terrible it was to see the faces of children and old people who were hostages of the crisis, who had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide when the Ukrainian army started shelling Lugansk,’ another news channel reported of an interview given to the pro-Kremlin Vzglyad [The Viewpoint] newspaper by one of the Spanish volunteers. ‘“I was struck by the courage and determination of these people,” he said. “They are very serious about their dream of becoming Novorossiya and freeing themselves from the oppression of the illegitimate Fascist government in Kyiv.”’

Some foreigners do, however, get to the front. Many of the Serbs, for example, are veterans of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And Vladimir Antyufeyev, the former KGB head in Transnistria (the breakaway state between Ukraine and its eastern neighbour Moldova), has helped set up the DNR’s Special Forces; and the self-styled republic feels a close solidarity with this and the other pro-Russian unrecognised states that were previously part of the USSR – South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In fact, people from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to fight for the Donetsk-Lugansk separatists: from Serbia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Israel, other ex-Soviet states, and even Brazil, Australia, and the USA – an unexpected bonus for Novorossiya’s propaganda machine. Andrei Rodkin, head of Russia’s diplomatic mission in Novorossiya, told me he had no accurate figures about their numbers, but it was clear that they made up only a small percentage of the fighters, although their presence is important for the locals’ morale.

‘Back in June the concept arose – spontaneously, and partly out of responses to questions from journalists – a concept of a new anti-fascist International Brigade,’ Rodkin explained. ‘The recovery of the Russian world is obvious to everyone, so it’s clear why volunteers have been arriving from other countries in the Orthodox, Russian language orbit. But Spanish people aren’t part of that world, and nor are anti-fascists from France or Italy.’

[LINK] "Germany Clamps Down on Flow of Fighters to Islamic State"

Rainer Buergin and Arne Delfs' Bloomberg article looks at Germany's ongoing attempt to limit the flow of volunteers fighting for the Islamic State.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is planning legal changes that will allow it to keep Germans from leaving to join groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

Under the planned law, the government can retract identity cards of potential foreign fighters and replace them with substitute identification, de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin today. Without passports, which can already be confiscated, or ID cards, suspects wouldn’t be able to leave Germany, he said after a meeting with state interior ministers.

“We don’t want terrorism to be exported from Germany, we don’t want men and sometimes women who grew up in Germany and have undergone radicalization to carry terrorism to Syria and Iraq,” de Maiziere said. “And we certainly don’t want some of them to return battle-hardened to plan attacks.”

More than 450 Islamists with German citizenship have left the country to join fighters in Syria and Iraq, and more than 150 have returned, often to recruit more fighters to join their cause, the Interior Ministry said separately in an e-mailed statement.

Germany will take a dual approach that aims to crack down on the cross-border movement of suspects while at the same time using preventive measures to counter the radicalization of “young people” who’ve been exposed to terrorism propaganda and Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni interpretation of Islam, the ministry said.

[LINK] "'Death Star' Moon May Hide a Buried Ocean"

National Geographic reports on findings from the Cassini probe suggesting Saturn's moon Mimas might have a subsurface ocean, too.

Saturn's moon Mimas, the smallest of the ringed planet's major satellites, may join the growing list of moons that hide an ocean of liquid water beneath their cratered surfaces, astronomers report Thursday in the journal Science.

That's one plausible interpretation, at least, of a rhythmic wobble Mimas displays as it orbits Saturn once every 23 hours or so, says study lead author Radwan Tajeddine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. The other possibility, says Tajeddine, is that Mimas might be solid throughout but that its rocky core might not be spherical even though its icy outer layers clearly are. "Instead," he says, "the core might be elongated—shaped like a rugby ball."

Whatever the reason, the wobble Tajeddine and several co-authors discovered by carefully examining images from the Cassini space probe was unexpected. The scientists weren't surprised at the wobble itself, since many moons, including our own, oscillate slightly as they orbit. Mimas's shudder, however, is enormous for a moon just 250 miles or so in diameter. "We expected it would wobble by about three kilometers [1.8 miles] once every orbit," he says, "but it turned out to be twice that."

[. . .]

An elongated, rocky core could create a wobble [. . .] without affecting Mimas's orientation.

So could a subsurface ocean lying between a normal, spherical core of rock and a shell of ice perhaps 15 or 20 miles thick, say the paper's authors. "If you spin a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg, the boiled egg spins faster," says Tajeddine, and Mimas's wobble could also be related, in a slightly different way, to a partly fluid interior.

[URBAN NOTE] "Baghdadis Stay Put in Belief Islamic State Can’t Take City"

While I suspect that the Baghdadis interviewed by Bloomberg's Aziz Alwan and Zaid Sabah are right, I also really really hope that they are entirely wrong. Terrible things--a mass expulsion of Sunnis from greater Baghdad?--are possible.

Each morning Majdi al-Dabbagh listens to the news to figure out if Islamic State is any closer to Baghdad. He has an escape route south planned for his family if the jihadist group manages to storm the Iraqi capital, yet sees no immediate need to flee.

“I’m afraid of hearing headlines saying that Da’esh are clashing or fighting in the streets of Baghdad,” the Sunni Muslim resident of the eastern Baladiyat neighborhood said in a phone interview, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “All Baghdadis are scared right now. But in general, life is still normal.”

By staying put, al-Dabbagh is betting that Baghdad will be better defended than cities such as Mosul, seized by Islamic State after it routed the Iraqi army during a lightning advance across the north in June. Analysts say he’s probably right, with enough government forces and allied Shiite militias amassed around the capital, and backing from U.S. warplanes, to prevent an outright assault by the Sunni militant group.

“Baghdad isn’t Mosul and is the hardest domino to knock over,” Ramzy Mardini, a Jordan-based non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council research group, said in an e-mailed reply to questions. “To overtake Shiite territory, especially a major city like Baghdad, the Islamic State would need far more military power than it has.”

There are about 120 Iraqi battalions stationed around the capital, according to Abdul Kareem Khalaf, an Iraqi military analyst and former interior ministry spokesman. While numerical superiority didn’t help the Iraqi army in Mosul, the mostly Shiite force faces less opposition from the public in Baghdad, and will get more support from irregulars.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, Shiite militias have set up checkpoints where masked men in black with automatic rifles stop and search vehicles. The largest groups include the Peace Brigade of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the League of the Righteous linked to Qassem Suleimani, head of foreign operations for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

[LINK] "A lesson for the Dalai Lama"

Johannes Nugroho's Open Democracy article examining the increasingly negative reaction to the suppression, by the Tibetan government-in-exile under the Dalai Lama, of the Shugden sect outlines interesting things. My skepticism about freedom of religion (and other freedoms) of an independent Tibet under the current leadership seems justified, for instance, while Nugroho's argument that this reveals a serious clash between Tibetan adepts and Western converts also seems sound.

More significantly, it is the western Shugden devotees who spearheaded the campaign to pressure the Dalai Lama to stop discouraging Tibetan Buddhists from worshipping Shugden. The official discouragement against the deity took place in the 1970s. In 1996, the Tibetan Parliament in exile went further and passed a resolution against the employment of Shugden practitioners in government departments.

Western Shugden activists claim that within the Tibetan community in India, Shugden devotees are discriminated against, and prevented by ordinary people from entering shops and denied hospital services. However, the Central Tibetan Administration counters that the ill-treatment of Shugden practitioners is a spontaneous act by the people, not an official government policy.

Tibetologist Thierry Dodin, while agreeing that Tibetan Shugden followers are “shunned by the community”, said in an interview in May that the shunning takes place “for no other reason than the fact that they themselves choose to live in groups largely cut off from the rest of the community.”

Judging from various interviews with the media, the ostracized Tibetan Shugden followers living under the jurisdiction of the CTA, while bemoaning their fate, have so far failed to organize themselves into an activist group in their own defence.

The opposite is the case, however, with their western counterparts. There is undeniably a great difference in cultural values between Tibetan Buddhists who grew up within their community in India and the western converts who were raised with liberal western values.

[DM] "Some thematic links: France, Ukraine, Russia, Japan, China, South Pacific"

I've an extended Demography Matters link post examining in brief situations in the six countries/regions mentioned above. Original content to come tomorrow evening.