[PHOTO] Evening in my backyard

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton describes how, playing the new Elite game, he visited the HD 28185 planetary system that features in his written science fiction.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her recent visit to London.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes ways in which close binary stars like Alpha Centauri or Gamma Cephei can develop planets of their own.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a Japanese proposal to jointly build a submarine fleet with Australia.


• Joe. My. God. and Towleroad note how evangelical Christians who somehow are gatekeepers for civil marriage in Mexicali have been trying to block a same-sex marriage by claiming that the grooms are insane.


• Language Hat notes how early Christians, like post-revolutionary Russians, had a very complex relationship with their pagan past. Should they keep it, or not?


• Language Log's Mark Liberman looks at the continued shift from definite to indefinite articles in English.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the people who are continuing to defend David Petraeus.


• Marginal Revolution notes that the recent Gambian coup attempt seems to have cost less than a quarter-million dollars.


• Livejournaler Nicholas Whyte looks at the strange story of Marie Louise Kwiatkowski, a German expatriate who splattered Edward Heath with ink in 1972. Why did she do so? Who was she?


• Otto Pohl criticizes American president Lyndon Johnson for his role in the anti-Nkrumah coup in Ghana.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw looks at architecture in Australia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains why the Saudis are pushing the global price of oil so low.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little looks at hip hop's impact on African-American thinking.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Central Asian countries' policies towards Afghanistan, the complexities of Central Asian migration to Russia, looks at Russia's distinction between nations with and without history, and notes Ukrainian support for a Russian-language television channel independent of Russia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell finds reflections of the British economy in call centre employment records.

[LINK] "Nous sommes Charlie"

Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum explores the meaning of "Je suis Charlie", and much else besides.

The actual allusion, Florent Guillaume points out to me, may very well be to the phrase "Nous sommes tous Américains", the title of a front-page editorial in Le Monde editorial after 9/11/2001 (see this article for details).

Linguistically, Je suis Charlie is unlike I'm Spartacus in one respect: it's ambiguous. The verb être ("be") and the verb suivre ("follow") happen to share the first-person singular present tense form suis, so Je suis Charlie can be read either as the mostly intended defiant moi aussi solidarity claim (I am Charlie too, and if you attack the magazine Charlie Hebdo you attack me), or the much less dramatic "I follow Charlie." I suppose the two meanings could be intended simultaneously, but it is surely the first that predominates.

The ambiguity is only there in the first-person singular. If we at Language Log wanted to say "We are Charlie", taking the side of Charlie Hebdo rather than the side of the cold-blooded killers who slaughtered the staff at the magazine's morning editorial conference, the French would be Nous sommes Charlie, and it would mean only "We are Charlie", not "We follow Charlie."

All official Muslim commentary on the Paris massacre has voiced shock and disapproval, but BBC Radio 4 interviewed a couple of British Muslims who insist that nothing can justify insulting the prophet, so the editorial staff and cartoonists in Paris brought their fate upon themselves. This is really rather shocking. The people who hold these views truly miss the point of the kind of society we have in countries like France, Britain, and America. It is simply not negotiable for us whether people should be free to express unpopular or even offensive views, linguistically or artistically: unless very substantial arguments can be given that harm will ensue (you don't get to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or threaten someone with death), you should be free to hold whatever opinions you have come to and express them in any way you wish.

[LINK] "Korea Shows the Way on 'Womenomics'"

Bloomberg View's William Pesek suggests that South Korea is doing a better job incorporating women into public life than Japan, and that it shows economically.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he wants to put more women to work, to help make up for the country's shrinking population. His Liberal Democratic Party seems to have other ideas. Of the 1,093 people who ran for office in recent snap elections, a mere 169 were women. Once the votes were counted, the lower house was 91 percent male.

That ratio falls a long way short of Abe's goal for corporate Japan: to have women in 30 percent of leadership roles in all sectors by 2020. Such ambitious targets are laudable. Studies routinely show diversity at companies and in politics increases innovation and economic growth. The problem is that thus far, Abe's policies have been too incremental and unimaginative to have much impact.

The prime minister might want to study neighboring South Korea, where President Park Geun Hye looks to be pioneering a smarter path. In her latest budget, Park has earmarked much of next year's 5.5 percent increase in public expenditures to encourage companies to offer more flexible schedules -- key for working mothers -- and to subsidize the prohibitive cost of childcare. For kids aged three to five, day care will now be free.

Park has set some ambitious goals of her own, including raising the number of women in the work force to 62 percent by 2017, from the current 56 percent. While she could go further -- say, by setting quotas for female managers -- Moody's, for one, is impressed. The ratings agency has described Park's pro-women policies as "credit positive."

[. . .]

The private sector amply demonstrates the power of diversity, Bloomberg data show. Crunching the numbers, my Seoul-based colleague Esther Jang finds that the 24 Kospi 200 companies with at least one female board member outperform others in Korea by 22 percent. In Japan, the 180 companies in the Topix index that have a female board member (out of nearly 1,800) outperform by 33 percent. At Jack Ma's Alibaba, one third of 18 founding partners are women, as are nine of the company's 30 top decision makers. The company, a finalist for this year's Financial Times women-in-business award, recently pulled off history's biggest initial public offering.

[LINK] "Venezuelans Throng Grocery Stores Under Military Protection"

Bloomberg's Andrew Rosati and Noris Soto describe what may be the beginning of economic meltdown in Venezuela.

Shoppers thronged grocery stores across Caracas today as deepening shortages led the government to put Venezuela’s food distribution under military protection.

Long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the South American country’s capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.

“I’ve visited six stores already today looking for detergent -- I can’t find it anywhere,” said Lisbeth Elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern Caracas. “We’re wearing our dirty clothes again because we can’t find it. At this point I’ll buy whatever I can find.”

A dearth of foreign currency exacerbated by collapsing oil prices has led to shortages of imports from toilet paper to car batteries, and helped push annual inflation to 64 percent in November. The lines will persist as long as price controls remain in place, Luis Vicente Leon, director of Caracas-based polling firm Datanalisis, said today in a telephone interview.

Government officials met with representatives from supermarket chains today to guarantee supplies, state news agency AVN reported. Interior Minister Carmen Melendez said yesterday that security forces would be sent to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.

[LINK] "After the Spill: Life in West Virginia's Coal Country"

The Atlantic's Omar Ghabra describes how, in coal-mining West Virginia, a profound economic dependence on environmentally destructive and medically hazardous coal-mining is making criticism of that industry impossible.

Forty-two miles from the Freedom Industries facility, Junior Walk, a 24-year-old lifelong West Virginia resident, first learned about the spill on the radio while at the makeshift office for the Coal River Mountain Watch, a local environmental watchdog where he works. Walk wasn’t surprised. As soon as he discovered the magnitude of the spill, he loaded up the bed of his red 1991 Ford Ranger with two 55-gallon barrels full of water and delivered them to fire departments and other distribution centers in the nearby areas that were hit.

Walk grew up in the coal town of Whitesville in Boone County, one of the nine counties affected by the leak. When he was twelve years old, his family moved from a remote area, what he describes in his energetic Appalachian accent as “the head of a holler,” closer to town. “Our water used to be pristine before we moved,” Walk recalls. But their new home was close to a site used by nearby mining operations to deposit coal slurry—a thick, black sludge comprised of waste fluid produced in the coal preparation process.

This toxic waste is often injected underground into abandoned coal mines, a process that can easily result in the leaching of slurry into nearby groundwater. It wasn’t long before contaminated well water in their new home came out of the faucet, discolored and fetid. “I can’t even describe the stench. We didn’t drink it, but I had to shower in it.” For five years, until their home was hooked up to a municipal water supply, Walk says he went to school smelling like the contaminated water every day, and his family could not use tap water for drinking or cooking.

West Virginia’s economy has heavily relied on the coal industry for decades. In the 1950s, the industry employed some 125,000 people. Today, mechanization and the rise of natural gas have driven that number down to anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000. Wal-Mart, not the coal industry, is now the state’s leading employer. Like many West Virginians, Walk’s family members have been employed by the coal industry for generations. His father worked at a coal prep plant until he was recently laid off.

“When I was getting ready to graduate high school, I realized that I didn’t have the grades nor the money to go to college, so I was kind of stuck here,” Walk says. “Like everybody else in that situation around here, I only had a few options: go to work for the coal industry, sell prescription drugs, or join the military.” West Virginia has the highest drug overdose mortality rate of all fifty states. It also has one of the largest veteran populations per capita, and the lowest rate of adults with college degrees.

[LINK] "Kyrzbekistan Isn't Funny"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky is entirely right to find the ignorance that first lets the New York Times make up a Central Asian country, then to make this country a joke, offensive. I've written in the past about the ways in which Borat represents the same sort of racism. It's nice to see others pick up on this.

Laugh all you want about Kyrzbekistan -- the country accidentally invented this week by the New York Times, and now blessed with its own Twitter account and hashtag, and even put on the map by Conde Nast Traveler. But the birth of another ridiculous nonexistent "stan" is a serious issue for countries that have that syllable as part of their names -- and for the rest of us, too. It's a reminder that, as it becomes easier to travel the world, we do so in cocoons, making little effort to understand where we are.

Kyrzbekistan -- born of a mountain climber's kidnapping by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which was fighting off the army of neighboring Kyrgyzstan -- continues a line of high-profile "stan" gaffes. In 2011, U.S. presidential candidate Herman Cain said in an interview he had no idea who the president of "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" was. In 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised diplomats working to support democratic institutions in "Kyrzhakhstan" (or maybe he said "Kyrzygstan," which is not much better).

[. . .]

Nazarbayev was right about the "stan" stigma, though: It clearly exists if people keep confusing Central Asian nations, and other people (or sometimes the same people) keep laughing at their mistakes.

That stigma isn't just the result of linguistic confusion. Few people mix up England, Ireland and Poland because they share an element in their names. It's a manifestation of our strange indifference to, or even contempt for, countries that appear remote, small or unimportant.

Americans are often accused of that. They are notoriously bad at placing countries on the map, and when they realize it's too hard, many feel compelled to mention "Borat," the movie by Sacha Baron Cohen that almost destroyed Kazakhstan's international reputation, though it was filmed in a Romanian gypsy village. It's not a uniquely American problem, though.

[LINK] Two Daily Kos links on the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo

plg's "Charlie Hebdo : some context" provides background context for the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, placing them in the context of French radical cartoonists generally.

"[O]ffensively anti-Muslim" is a completely wrong description of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, at least from the point of view of the people who drew them. As a rule, the cartoonists did not attack Muslims as Muslims (whereas the sacked cartoonist did attack Jews as Jews, hence the sacking), and they did not even attack Islam per se. Rather, they attacked Islam as one element of a larger set of revealed religion, all equally hateful. They expressed a deep hatred of organized religious institutions, first and foremost, and for most of them (but not all) a rejection of all religious thinking. This is what their work was all about: attacking religious authorities and sometimes religion in general, and this blanket attack grew straight from the French revolt against an extremely oppressive Catholic Church in the 18th century.

The visual and intellectual equipment of both anticlericalism (attacking religious institutions) and antireligion (attacking religion in general) was consolidated around 1900. Anticlericalism was at the heart of the secularization of all public spaces (including schools) which took place in France between 1880 and 1910. But Jules Ferry, one of the leaders of the secularizing movement, took pains to explain that what had to be destroyed was not religion in itself, but the political and institutional power of religion (for anybody reading French, here is his "Letter to schoolteachers" which is a perfect presentation of what the original version of French laïcité was really all about).

A second, more virulent strain of secularizers did think that religious beliefs in and of themselves were medieval superstitions to be rooted out, that reason and enlightenment would eventually lead humanity on the road to complete atheism. For these "free-thinkers" (as they styled themselves), New Age types from Boulder would be just as bad as Fundamentalist Christians from the Bible Belt, or Islamists for that matter; all would be denounced as benighted brains clutching at shadows.

[. . .]

A second group of cartoons came also straight from the 18th century anticlerical fighters' handbook, and would have been eagerly endorsed by Voltaire or Diderot, and probably Ferry and many IIIrd Republic secularizers as well (as far as contents were concerned only of course; the raunchy 21st century presentation would have shocked!). These cartoons took aim at the distance between the actual teachings of various religious leaders, primarily Muhammad and Jesus, and the behavior of their followers. The following covers illustrate this (and contain representations of Muhammad, so, for those who don't want to see that, don't click!). In one, Cabu's Muhammad, seated on a cloud, has his head in his hands, weeping and saying "It's tough to be loved by a--holes". This cover by Charb, captioned "If Muhammad came back..." shows a kneeling Prophet about to have his throat slit by a Jihadi fighter, with the following dialogue: -"I am the Prophet, stupid!" / "Shut up, you infidel!".

The second, tekno2600's "On not understanding "Charlie:" Why many smart people are getting it wrong", talks about the magazine's brand of satire and things people don't get about this, and France.

I think many (though perhaps not all) of their biggest controversies are cases of what I call Onion Fail. You know, like that one time when Iranian state media quoted an article from The Onion that said Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama, or that other time when North Korean media quoted a story that said Kim Jong-Un Named the Onion's Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. Quoting a satirical magazine is risky business, especially if the magazine is in another language or requires some understanding or the politics or culture of another country. Satire is about mockery. So, clearly, instead of actually praising Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Un, they are actually ridiculing them. Simply reporting a word-for-word translation of these farcical articles is going to get the intended message exactly backwards. You'd think the part about Kim Jong-Un having abs to rival Matthew McConaughey’s would have been a tip off, but alas, one of the truly boundless qualities of the universe is the ability to kiss ass and the willingness to receive it."

[. . .]

As you will see, someone in the Twitterverse has cited the image as an example of racism and has blasted it out under #JeNeSuisPasCharlie. The image shows a cartoon depicting Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who was born in French Guiana, as a monkey. An open an shut case of racism, right? Actually, au contraire.

There are a number of glaring problems with the claim that this anti-racist cartoon is actually pro-racist. First, note that it is drawn by Charb himself. As mentioned in the beginning, his girlfriend was of North African decent and is also chair of the French Equal Opportunities and Anti-Discrimination Commission. So, it might seem a little strange for him to be promoting a racist image.

Second, look at what the text says: "Rassemblement Bleu Raciste." This is a parody of the slogan "Rassemblement Bleu Marine," which is used by Marine Le Pen's Front National. Also notice the tricolor flame next to the image. That is a mock up of the party's logo.

This cartoon came out following a controversy in which a politician from Front National shared a photoshopped image on Facebook that showed the Justice Minister as a monkey. The Charlie cartoon is doing a parody of this and saying Front National is racist. Ironically, some people outside of France are using it to say Charlie Hebdo is racist.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the 200th anniversary of the birth of John A. MacDonald

Yesterday, Sunday the 11th of January, Stephen Harper led Canada in celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of John A. MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister.

Stephen Harper paid tribute to the country's first prime minister Sunday, marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir John A. Macdonald by saying the Scots-born politician "forged Canada out of sheer will."

"Never forget, there was nothing certain or inevitable about what Macdonald and his fellow fathers of Confederation accomplished. It was in fact remarkable," Harper told a room full of dignitaries — including two former prime ministers — under tight security at the historic city hall in Kingston, Ont.

"Without Sir. John A. Macdonald, Canada as we know it — the best country in the world — simply would not exist," Harper said to applause.

Macdonald's political career as a Kingston alderman began the year the cornerstone of Kingston City Hall was laid, 1843, and after his death the first prime minister of Canada lay in state in the same room where Harper delivered his remarks.

Harper called Macdonald "a shining example of modesty, hope and success," that mirrors the country itself.

In April of last year I shared a photograph I took in 2003 of the statue of MacDonald standing in his adopted hometown of Kingston. I'd mentioned at the time that, as Canada approached the bicentennial of his birth, MacDonald was becoming a subject of controversy.



This statue stands outside of Queen's Park, home of Ontario's Provincial Parliament here in Toronto.



These photos I took in 2012, standing outside of Parliament Hill in Ottawa in the middle of a scorching drought.





The National Post's Tristin Hopper defends John A. MacDonald against his critics by arguing that his racism was normative.

In 1887, the first of Vancouver’s many anti-Chinese riots had just broken out when Sir John A. Macdonald stood up in the House of Commons to propose further measures to keep out the Chinese.

The Chinese took white jobs, he said. The Chinese would breed a “mongrel” race in British Columbia and threaten the “Aryan” character of the Dominion. Altogether, the prospect of having white working classes living alongside Chinese could lead only to “evil.”

But in an odd aside, Macdonald admitted that he was supporting the policy largely because he was running a country full of racists.

“On the whole, it is considered not advantageous to the country that the Chinese should come and settle in Canada,” said Macdonald. “That may be right or it may be wrong, it may be prejudice or otherwise, but the prejudice is near universal.”

Although they were laying the groundwork for one of the world’s most tolerant nations, the Canadians of 1867 largely took white supremacy for granted. Blacks were barred from staying in Toronto hotels. The average British Columbian saw Asians as a threat to racial purity. And almost everybody was fine with the expectation that the native way of life would soon be extinct.

On Sir John A. Macdonald’s 200th birthday, the country’s founding prime minister has no shortage of critics to deem him a racist, a colonizer and a misogynist. They’re right on all counts, but the man who founded Canada was the product of an age that made Archie Bunker look like Mohandas Gandhi.

Others disagree.

[DM] "On recent post-colonial immigration to Africa"

I've a post up noting how people immigrate to Africa these days.