[PHOTO] Old computer, new computer

My new Kobo Arc 7 tablet computer is here perched in front of the monitor of my old, but still working, Compaq Presario desktop dating from 2000. How technology progresses!

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO reports on a very futuristic and upscale condo planned to be built in North York.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper arguing that Kepler-93b is likely a super-Earth, not a mini-Neptune.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at a spectrographic study of part of Mars' Valles Marineris.


• Joe. My. God. notes that a business district in Fire Island is going up for sale at an unexpectedly low price.


• Language Log notes the declining usage of the definite article "the" and increasing use of the indefinite "a".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money calculates how much money Yale spent on educating The Great Gatsby's racist boor Tom Buchanan.


• Marginal Revolution notes a 1991 paper suggesting international terrorism is rare because it is costly.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that American oil exports to Mexico aren't noteworthy, being relatively low-volume and of fuel Mexico can't manufacture.


• Savage Minds follows an anthropologist in Bulgaria as she reacts to the death of one of her informants.


• Torontoist and blogTO both report on the three new charges of sexual assault brought against Jian Ghomeshi.


• Towleroad has a funny video of gay couples reading Grindr exchanges to each other.


• Window on Eurasia notes Estonian criticism of Russian assimilation of Finno-Ugric minorities, and predicts crisis in the North Caucasus.

[LINK] "I Wear A Red Dog"

John Moyer writes about satire, generally and in the context of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. Satire's not nice, and that's the point.

Satire is a hunting wolf that seeks prey. Satire demands a sling and a shot and finds only pleasure in the bloody thunk when it hits the target. Yet in all that there is a point, a meaning behind the lurid absurdities of Mad magazine and the slashing, daring art nouveau of Simplicissimus. When I was a child (and oh, how youth was wasted on me!), nothing drew a greater laugh than the firing of the chicken cannon at the end of The Royal Canadian Air Farce. The idea of the segment was ludicrous; Don Ferguson, dressed up in snappy Canadian Forces greens as Colonel Stacey, fired an air cannon filled with crap of all sorts at pictures of politicians, celebrities, and anyone else deserving a rubber chicken to the face. This was Canada in the 90s; there was no shortage of targets. But only now, much older than I was, do I understand the courage it took to choose, not a target, but a person, and to mock them for a reason. Unstated but always present was the idea of the wagging finger of the CBC-watching proletariat as we waged our vengeance upon those untouchable politicians who wronged us. It was not us that was being blasted with baked beans, it’s you, Jean Chrétien, and you, Lucien Bouchard, and so on, as the laughter sounded. Equally absurd, though, would have been the idea that you could not do that, and that the very image of the politicians or the clergy were somehow untouchable. The chicken cannon showed me true democracy, where any face can be pie-d.


Laughter means so much in the world and to the world because laughter is the greatest power of the powerless. We are all just parts of a giant machine beyond our comprehension, just bricks in one giant wall, but the comedian is the one that comes and spray paints a penis on us, or tosses a wrench in the gears. “Hey,” they yell gleefully, a toothy smile on their gaunt faces, “what are you doing? Isn’t that ridiculous?” Every day, we’re ground down by machines bigger than us, and every day we’re reminded just how small we really are. But we are never too small to laugh, and there is nothing too big that cannot be made small by our mockery. Even when the jabbing finger of humour is thrust straight in our own faces we can laugh at ourselves, for we are ridiculous, aren’t we? For if we are, then so too the machine we’re a part of (this is where the madness comes in). And what’s it even making, anyways?

But the satirist must always be hungry; they must have eyes bigger than their stomach and only a razor-sharp tongue to whittle the world down to manageable chunks. And very little likes being mocked. I know well the stories, of the hundreds (thousands!) of artists who, with a simple image or word now incomprehensible to us, lead to the fury of the belittled (for that is what satire does; the presumptions of grandeur are torn down until even the Emperor knows he too is just another brick in the wall) and the punishment of the satirist (presumably for telling the truth). Lese majeste, Majestätsbeleidigung, blasphemy; it’s all the same reaction to that which thinks itself great being told “No, actually, you aren’t”.

[NEWS] Some Friday links

• Al Jazeera notes ethnic violence in Assam, the despair of people in Yemen who go about their lives amid chaos, Iran's advantage in the Middle East, the organization of Lebanese domestic workers, and Cambodia's predilection for spiders.


• Bloomberg View suggests the US should try for a Cuba-style opening with North Korea, criticizes the response of Hong Kong's leadership to protests, notes the consequences of Palestine's membership of the International Criminal Court, and suggests that the death of malls has been greatly exaggerated.


• The Inter Press Service notes the rapid aging of Latin American populations, suggests falling oil prices could lead to decreased military spending, wonders about the future of democracy in the Middle East generally and in Libya specifically, notes a South African crackdown on Zimbabweans lacking papers, and looks at issues with the world's poorest nations.


• Open Democracy argues for a bold defense of immigration and argues human rights should take priority over traditions.

[LINK] "Young members of Louisiana’s Houma Nation try to reclaim tribe’s lost language"

Earlier this week I linked to an article describing how the Houma, an indigenous people of coastal Louisiana, were seeing their homeland wash away. I've more recently come across a Washington Post article are trying to revive their moribund language.

The challenges are steep: There are few available recordings and texts of the language and only a few dozen words are known, largely because of a Smithsonian anthropologist who interviewed native speakers in 1907.

The fate of the Houma language is not unique. Linguists say that the rate of language extinction is accelerating and that by the next century, nearly half of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today — like the Houma, mainly spoken by small tribes in remote places — will probably disappear because of cultural assimilation and globalization. The loss will be profound, says Irina Shport, an assistant professor of language acquisition at Louisiana State University in Lafayette.

[. . .]

The starting point was a single recording made in the early 1970s by Elvira Molinere Billiot, the great-grandmother of [activist Colleen] Billiot, a Georgetown University graduate who grew up in St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans. Her father’s distant cousin found the cassette recording and gave it to Billiot, who upon moving back home had already expressed a strong interest in learning more about her Houma ancestry. The recording was made by Mennonite missionary Greg Bowman, who was conducting research about the Houmas to help them achieve federal recognition. It features the elder Billiot singing “Chan-Chuba,” a simple children’s song that some believe is about chasing an alligator out of the house.

Earlier, at a Houma tribal council meeting outside Lafayette, Billiot met Dardar. The two women realized they shared an interest in researching their tribal roots but didn’t know where to start. When they listened to the elderly woman sing the strange melody, in a language they did not understand, they knew it presented an opening to their project.

“I was getting teary-eyed listening to a voice I was related to, but who died before I was born. It was surreal,” says Billiot, who now lives in Northern Virginia and works in government. “We knew there was something to be preserved, something we should care about, that we should at least try to find more about as Houma. We finally had something to go off of and we got exited.”

[LINK] "Another Reactor Closes, Punctuating New Reality for U.S. Nuclear Power"

National Geographic's Christina Nunez reports how nuclear reactors in the United States are being closed down, but are leaving a legacy of issues not previously addressed including the issue of waste disposal and the question of where power will come from in their future.

As another nuclear power plant closed this week, the United States faced a dwindling fleet of aging reactors, few new projects, and the challenge of safely mothballing radioactive fuel for decades.

Almost all its nearly 100 remaining reactors will be more than 60 years old by 2050. Their owners will have to decide whether the investments needed to keep them running are worth it, given the influx of cheap natural gas that has reshaped the U.S. energy economy.

So far, nuclear isn't winning. Vermont Yankee, which shut down Monday after 42 years of operation, is the fourth U.S. nuclear facility to close in two years. For the owners of each recent retiree—from Vermont Yankee to San Onofre in California, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, and Crystal River in Florida—the math just didn't work.

"When we looked at the cost of those improvements with what we projected as the cost of energy, the decision was that it would be better to shut the plant down," said Martin Cohn, spokesperson for Vermont Yankee's operator, Entergy.

[. . .]

Yankee generated 70 percent of Vermont's electricity, but the state will be able to replace that power through other regional sources. Still, the shutdown has broader implications for New England. The share of power coming from natural gas-fired plants there leaped from 15 percent in 2000 to 46 percent in 2013, according to a recent report from regional grid operator New England ISO, which works to ensure reliability.

"The ISO is concerned about the amount of non-gas generators retiring, because it also increases the region's dependence on natural gas-fired generation," said spokeswoman Lacey Girard, noting that demand for natural gas has expanded faster than the pipeline capacity to deliver it. "It is a challenge for the region."

[LINK] "Why Fighting Oligarchs Is a Bad Idea"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky makes a controversial argument, drawing from the example of Russia to suggest that campaigns against oligarchs merely centralize power.

The top economic spokesman for the leftist Greek party Syriza, which leads the polls ahead of the Jan. 25 election, says one of the party's goals is to crack down on the nation's oligarchs. Reducing the outsized role of politically connected magnates, George Stathakis argues, will allow smaller, more honest businesses to be more competitive.

Syriza's implied threat to break apart the euro currency union was scary enough. But Stathakis's rhetoric is at least as worrisome. Any regime that wants to fight the oligarchs means to increase government interference in the economy -- to such an extent that it will end up replacing old oligarchs with new ones.

[. . .]

The same billionaires still controlled the country's resource and financial wealth. But then something strange started happening. First, Vladimir Gusinsky lost the media empire he had built with cheap government loans and a free national broadcasting license from Yeltsin. Then, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 1990s privatization, was jailed on dubious charges, and the assets of his oil company, Yukos, became part of state-owned Rosneft. Most of the old oligarchs were still around, but only the Western press still used the term when referring to them. They were still rich, but they no longer ruled Russia.

On the flip side of that development was the government's growing importance in the Russian economy. Government spending as a share of gross domestic product increased steadily from 15 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2013, and that was only the tip of the iceberg: Russian methods of measuring the public sector do not comply with international standards. In 2012, the consolidated public sector accounted for at least 68 percent of GDP by expenditure. The Russian government came to control more than two thirds of the economy, and while comparable data for 2000 do not exist, research into specific sectors indicates how that share was achieved: In 2000, Russia's five biggest state-owned banks accounted for 36 percent of all assets in the banking system. By 2009, that share increased to 52.1 percent.

Inevitably, an all-powerful state creates a class of beneficiaries. The recipients of big government orders, the controllers of state assets -- these are all Putin's friends. Most of them are now on U.S. and European sanctions lists. And though they are rarely labelled as oligarchs, they fit the definition: They are leeches whose businesses exist only because they know how to exploit their proximity to the government.

[LINK] "New questions raised about U.S.-Saudi relationship"

CBC's Neil Macdonald wonders if questions over Saudi involvement in the September 11th terrorist attacks will harm the Saudi-American relationship.

For more than a decade now, 28 pages in a congressional report about the 9/11 attacks have been entirely excised.

To allow the American public access to the information they contain, says the government, would imperil national security.

President Bush first ordered them censored, and President Obama has kept them sealed.

The section deals with foreign financial support of the 19 men who flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

By several accounts — including statements by two former Senators who sat on the 9/11 commission — the sealed pages point the finger at America's close friend and ally in the war on terror, Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has consistently denied any advance knowledge of, or connection to the hijackers, but some information in the 28 pages has already leaked.

According to multiple reports here, the FBI and CIA suggest Saudi Arabia provided at least indirect support and funding for the attackers.

And the report isn't talking about the usual "wealthy Saudi sympathizers," we so often hear about. No, the pages reportedly describe consular and financial support by officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

[LINK] jsburbidge on what actually is popular science fiction

Livejournaler jsburbidge does a great job in crunching book sales data to see if, as some claim, the Hugo Awards are neglecting popular science fiction. (It turns out that it isn't really, and that it may be more of a case of complainants not believing that some books could actually be popular. Yes, it's the usual right-wing and libertarian suspects.)

[DM] "On how China and Asia show how demographics alone is not destiny"

I've a brief post at Demography Matters, looking at China and wider Asia, noting how demographics however foundational are not alone in determining the fate of countries and regions.