[PHOTO] Flag of Lebanon, Dundas West

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes the ongoing demolition of Regent Park.


• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief look at the dense ring system and possible early satellite of J1407b.


• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies considers likely scenarios for Greece.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to the Kepler-444 discovery paper and links to another one suggesting that giant planets in inner orbits block super-Earths from migrating inwards, perhaps explaining why we have Uranus and Neptune.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ben Carson has doubled down on his statement about bakers poisoning wedding cakes.


• Language Hat takes issue with the claim that languages are being simplified over time.


• Marginal Revolution starts a discussion about the thought of economist and Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares images of Ceres.


• Progressive Download happily notes that creationism is much less popular in the United Kingdom than previously feared.


• Towleroad notes a lawsuit in China lodged on the unfair dismissal of someone on grounds of sexual orientation.


• Window on Eurasia has hope that there won't be an open Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[LINK] Two links on the foreign relations of Greece under Syriza

CBC's Nil Köksal observes in "Turkey hoping for better relations with Greece after Syriza victory" that Turkey is waiting to see what will come of the new Greek government.

If political victories were cups of sugar, there are those in Turkey who might love to borrow some from its neighbour Greece.

On social media and in certain left-leaning circles, some Turks were wishing the far left Syriza Party's win in Greece might signal a bigger shift in the region, to encompass Turkey as well.

"Wishful thinking," says Dimitrios Triantaphyllou, director of the Centre of International Studies at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. "There is no correlation, the context is different," he says.

[. . .]

"We respect the decision of the Greek people," Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu said today, adding he has met in the past with Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras.

"We'd like the meetings to continue to decrease the tension in the Aegean… We'd like the Cyprus negotiations to resume."

Meanwhile, The Guardian's Ian Traynor notes speculation inside the European Union that Greece might try to veto further sanctions against Russia for the war in Ukraine.

European governments are to push for tighter sanctions against the Kremlin and against Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine on Thursday.

But the new leftwing Greek government of Alexis Tsipras is likely to use the emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels to pick its first fight with the rest of Europe.

The meeting was called at short notice by Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy coordinator, who has been forced to back down from a position calling for a relaxation of pressure on Moscow, as a result of last week’s shelling by separatists of the town of Mariupol that killed 30 civilians.

[. . .]

The Greeks complained bitterly on Tuesday that they were not consulted on the statement blaming Russia for Mariupol and calling for stiffer sanctions. This was untrue. Mogherini spoke to Tsipras by telephone.

Before coming to office on Sunday, Tsipras’s Syriza movement was a regular critic of the EU sanctions against Russia.

[LINK] "Polish GDP Growth Surges on Consumer Spending, Investment"

Writing for Bloomberg, Milda Seputyte and Dorota Bartyzel note the continuing strength of the Polish economy.

Poland’s pace of economic growth last year almost doubled from 2013, buoyed by increased investment and consumer spending as falling prices boosted their buying power.

Gross domestic product rose 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the fastest since 2011, after a revised 1.7 percent increase in 2013, the statistics office in Warsaw said Tuesday. That matched the median estimate of 29 economists in a Bloomberg survey.

Poland, whose economy is the only one in the European Union that’s gained every year through the global financial crisis, benefited from a pickup in domestic-demand growth to 4.6 percent in 2014. Fixed investment surged 9.4 percent from 0.9 percent a year earlier, the statistics office estimated.

“Last year was a really good one for Poland, despite outside geopolitical tensions and weakness in the euro area,” Adam Antoniak, a Warsaw-based economist at UniCredit SpA’s unit Bank Pekao SA, said by e-mail. “We had a noticeable rebound of domestic demand, which was the main engine of economic expansion, and that positive trend should be continued this year, helping to maintain a similar pace of growth.”

[. . .]

The uptick in growth shows the EU’s biggest eastern economy warded off risks emanating from a slowdown in the euro area, its biggest export market. Poland also had to weather the effects of the escalating conflict in neighboring Ukraine, which affected the country through counter-sanctions imposed on Russia.

[LINK] "Tending the 'Stolen' Sheep in Latin America's Booming Bible Belt"

An interesting Christianity Today article by Morgan Lee reports on the diversity of Protestantism in Central America, where different countries seem to have different traditions.

For most of the past century, almost all (more than 90%) of Latin Americans were Catholics. But decades of attrition have resulted in a record 1 in 5 Latinos now identifying as Protestants.

Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua lead the way, where Protestants constitute 4 in 10 residents of each nation. But Protestants in those 3 countries diverge on many measures of orthodox belief and practice, according to a detailed survey of 19 Latin American countries and territories by the Pew Research Center.

Guatemala’s Protestants arguably seem the most mature. They are the most likely of all 19 surveyed groups to evangelize weekly (53%), to believe only Christ leads to eternal life (74%), and to exhibit high commitment (75% pray daily, attend services weekly, and consider faith very important). Even their millennials are the most religious (71% are highly committed).

Protestants in Nicaragua and Honduras are more varied. Only 1 in 3 share their faith on a weekly basis. About 6 in 10 are highly committed to church attendance and prayer. On Christianity’s exclusive access to eternal life, only two-thirds of Hondurans and half of Nicaraguans agree. And only 45 percent of Nicaragua’s millennials are highly committed to their faith.

Further, Honduran Protestants are among Latin America’s most syncretistic, with 42 percent exhibiting medium to high engagement with indigenous beliefs and practices (a figure that’s higher than Catholics in most Latin American countries). Nicaraguan Protestants exhibited similarly high levels (35%), but only 24 percent of Guatemalan Protestants are similarly syncretistic.

[LINK] "Telus may be closing its pager network, but the beeper isn't dead yet"

CBC's Lucas Powers explains why, in parts of Canada, the pager is not yet dead. The clock is still ticking, though.

While the number of [pagers] in use has been plummeting each year since their height in the mid-'90s, Canada's Big Three telecom companies all still operate pager networks.

Although Telus announced this week that it would be discontinuing most of its Canadian pager service, a significant number of people still use beepers.

As of 2013, about 161,500 Canadians still had paging service subscriptions and the industry generated nearly $18.5 million in revenues, according to the CRTC’s most recent communications monitoring report.

The majority of remaining pager users are health-care workers and first responders, says Garry Fitzgerald, chair of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and CEO of PageNet, a paging service provider.

These are professions in which the stakes of communicating quickly, securely and without potential interference are at their highest and this is something pagers do consistently well, Fitzgerald says.

“Paging has become mostly a critical messaging device best used when other technologies either don’t fit the situation or simply won’t work that effectively, or at all,” he says.

[LINK] "How #stormchips became a Maritime phenomenon"

Adrian Lee of MacLean's describes the Maritime Canadian tradition of stormchips.

New York may not have been slammed by snow as predicted, but the eastern seaboard, including the Maritimes, was hit by heavy gusts, and more than 30 cm of snow in some areas. For Atlantic Canada, though, these tough wintry times have only one balm: #stormchips, a year-old hashtag for Haligonians to fete the snacks they’ve stocked up on. As Tuesday’s storm approached, the tag began to trend nationally yet again, and East Coast businesses and political parties took up the stormchip cause. It all started with Stephanie Domet, who hosts the Mainstreet Halifax program at CBC Radio One. Domet spoke to Maclean’s about how it all started, her personal #stormchip rules, why stormchips feel quintessentially Maritime, and what it’s like to have all this (strange) power.

So how did it begin?

We here in Nova Scotia went through quite a period last year of winter storms all the time, it felt like, for weeks and weeks and weeks. And it seemed like, last January, that every time the forecast was for stormy weather, I got the urge to get chips. I love chips. My total kryptonite is plain ripple chips—but we never have them in the house, probably because I love them too much. So they’re a super treat-thing for me, and I realized that every time there was a storm I got this incredible urge to get chips. So this one morning I go to my husband and say, “It’s going to really snow tomorrow, we should get some chips tonight.” And then in an off-the-cuff conversation, live conversation on the show that I host, I was talking with our news reader Ryan Pierce and he talked about the storm, and I said that the only thing on my grocery list to stock up for the storm is chips and dip, and he admitted that it was a similar conversation they were having at his place, what snacks to get before the storm. Maybe we talked about it a little more on the show before we were off air, and then I went to the grocery store and I got my ripple chips and dip, and took a photo of it, and tweeted, “Success! #stormchips.” The rest, as they say, is history, I guess. (Laughs)

So why do you think this blew up? There’s a feeling, for me, that the #stormchips phenomenon is kind of this essentially Maritimey thing.

The only thing I can think about it was that this was a thing that everyone was always doing, and that I just happened to tap into the zeitgeist and that’s why it resonated. I don’t know if it’s a particularly Maritimey thing. Maybe we take storms more seriously here because of the ocean? I don’t know!

[URBAN NOTE] "We need to reframe how we talk about our city"

Idil Burale's Spacing Toronto essay, reacting to a Toronto Life feature about Toronto's increasingly problematic inner suburbs is necessary commentary on an important discussion.

While I laud Toronto Life for taking an interest in the plight of those who live across the subway track, the magazine told the story in a way that feeds directly into the familiar media narrative about the inner suburbs, and which Toronto Life claimed it wanted to avoid: vertical poverty, under-resourced schools, immigrant struggle and gang warfare.

Is Toronto responsible for the over-crowded schools that resulted from Mike Harris era cuts to education, and which have yet to be replenished by the Liberal government? Did Toronto fail to ensure the safety of these neighbourhoods, or are gangs a symptom of the high youth unemployment? Who is failing whom?

The problem that I have with this feature is twofold: First, it paints a singular narrative of the inner suburbs, and provides insufficient analysis as to why things are the way they are. Second, it is unjustifiably alarmist[. . .]

Is Toronto Life saying we should ‘fix’ the inner suburbs in order to avoid social unrest? This kind of alarmist rhetoric merely undermines the capacity of the inner suburbs. Rather, we should seek to remedy inequitable access to opportunity and mobility within our city because people deserve better regardless of their social status, income, and neighbourhood, not out of fear of what they may do, if we don’t.

We need to stop talking about Toronto’s inner suburbs as if they were monolithic and interchangeable. The neighbourhoods in these former municipalities are as economically diverse and disparate in lived experiences as those in any other city.

[LINK] "The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments"

Cody Delistraty linked to his essay at The Atlantic on research on the apparently quite positive results of journaling. Preserving memories turns out to be quite comforting.

At Christmastime, my brother, my father, and our chocolate Labrador pile into the car to drive across the state of Washington to see my grandparents. We’ve been doing it since I was born. The three of us—before my brother and I put our headphones in to tune everything out—try to have meaningful conversations. Soon I’ll go back to school in England, my brother will go back to school in California, and Dad will go back to work in Washington, a transatlantic triangle keeping us apart. The three of us are together twice a year, at best, but on our car trip there’s rarely anything new exchanged. We recount memories of Mom; we discuss job prospects, baseball teams, and books (if we’re lucky); and usually we end up having a brief argument about religion or politics to round it all out. Nothing to write down. Nothing to remember.

Quotidian life seems too banal to document. Why write down routine conversations, ones we’ve had a million times and will have a million times more? Isn’t it more important to remember extraordinary moments: first steps, graduations, jobs, awards, marriage, retirement, vacations? Yet people seldom realize how fondly they will look back on days spent mundanely: a day spent reading in the bay window, a picnic in the park with friends. These things may not stick out while they are happening, but revisiting them can be a great pleasure. “Who would call a day spent reading a good day?” writes Annie Dillard. “But a life spent reading—that is a good life.”
I saved a swatch of wrapping paper to remember not just the gifts but the pleasure of opening them.

Ting Zhang is on the eve of getting her doctorate at Harvard Business School, where her focus is the psychology of rediscovery. Most recently, she was the lead author of a four-part study published in Psychological Science. In it, she took 135 university undergraduates from the northeastern United States and had them create time capsules. In these capsules, the students wrote about a range of current experiences: their most recent conversation, their most recent social outing, how they met their roommate, three songs they had just listened to, an inside joke, a photo they had recently taken, a recent Facebook status they had posted, a sentence they wrote for a school essay, and a question they responded to on a final exam.

They then rated how curious and interested they thought they would be about seeing this time capsule in the future. On a one-to-seven scale, the students gave an average rating of three. Three months later, immediately before looking at the capsule, the students were asked again to rate how curious and interested they were in their capsules’ contents. Their average answer now jumped to a 4.34. What this shows, Zhang writes, is “that even simple interventions (e.g., taking a few minutes to document the present) could generate unexpected value in the future.”

So I decided to collect memories of the banal. I had five days with my family over Christmas and each day I spent 10 minutes writing about what we had done—what I had seen, eaten, touched, and smelled—and then collected an object to mark the day. When we went to the movies I brought home my ticket stub. When we went to a seafood restaurant I brought home a dolphin figurine that came with our bill. After we opened gifts on Christmas morning, I saved a swatch of wrapping paper to remember not just the gifts but the pleasure of opening them.

[LINK] Three articles on the shift of Belarus away from Russia

First comes a report from The Moscow Times' Anna Dolgov reporting on new Belarusian legislation responding specifically to the threat of paramilitary infiltration, such as has occurred in eastern Ukraine.

Belarus has adopted a new law that states the appearance of any foreign fighters on its territory will be viewed as an act of aggression, even if they cannot be identified as regular troops.

The legislation, which takes effect on Feb. 1, seems to be Minsk's response to Russia's actions in neighboring Ukraine, where unmarked Russian troops overran Crimea prior to its annexation last spring and where Russian fighters have led pro-Moscow-separatists in the east.

According to a copy of the law published online, Minsk will view the deployment of another nation's armed groups, irregular forces, mercenaries or regular military units in the country as a military attack, regardless of whether or not it was accompanied by a declaration of war.

The package of amendments to Belarus' law on the state of war come after repeated warnings from President Alexander Lukashenko that Russia should not meddle in his country.

Next comes an article from The Guardian's Katerina Barushka noting the apparent new interest of the Belarusian government in promoting the intentionally-neglected Belarusian language. Given the language dynamics of the country, now overwhelmingly Russian-speaking on the ground, I suspect this is more important symbolically than otherwise.

Belarusian and Russian are both considered official languages of Belarus, but only 23% of the 9.67m population speaks the former, whereas more than 70.2% per cent speaks the latter. No more than 10% of Belarusians say they communicate in Belarusian in their day-to-day lives.

[. . .]

Valery Bulhakau, an editor-in-chief of a magazine Arche and a PhD in nationalism studies believes there is “a distinct growing interest in the Belarusian culture” and even goes as far as calling it a “national revival”. The language courses ““are not particularly educating, they rather represent a community, and that’s what important,” he says.

Analysts say the Ukraine crisis acted as a wake-up call for Lukashenko, who has long been a key Kremlin ally. For years, this relationship has not only been vital for Lukashenko’s grip on power, it is crucial for Belarus’s economy – around 10-15% of which relies on Russian subsidies. With such close ties between the two nations, when Moscow annexed Crimea, and Russian president Vladimir Putin justified the move by saying he would protect Russians or Russian-speakers across the world, Lukashenko was said to be rattled.

For the first time in his long rule, Lukashenko delivered part of a political speech in Belarusian in July, the day before Putin came to Minsk to commemorate the 70th anniversary of freeing Belarus from Nazi occupation. The symbolism was not lost on proponents of Belarusian language and culture.

Then, in November, he held a momentous meeting with both pro-government and independent intellectuals and writers to encourage them to promote national cultural and historical values.

Public support for Belarusian language has also shown signs of growing, as the language begins to shed its stigma. An on-going state social campaign ‘The taste of the Belarusian language’ posts billboards around Belarus with interesting words in Belarusian. And a month after an attempt to switch to using Russian-language signs on the Minsk metro, citizens convinced management to switch back to Belarusian.

Authorities have allowed such campaigns to exist and promote Belarusian, but in the sensitive political climate, the organisers of language classes and other initiatives have had to tread carefully. Though it is early days, some Belarusian nationalists believe real change is in the air.

Finally, Forbes analyst Paul Coyer notes the warming of Belarus' relations with the European Union and its western neighbours.

Last March Belarus refused Moscow’s request that it send observers to the Crimea referendum, unwilling to help Putin create any type of legal precedent that would support his claim that Russia has the right to intervene in neighboring states with Russian minorities. Lukashenko quickly recognized the election to the Ukrainian Presidency of Petro Poroshenko and received the new Ukrainian ambassador, making sure that Belarusian media gave much attention to the meeting. While criticizing Western sanctions against Russia, he refused to support Russia’s counter-sanctions against the EU, and has even done interviews on Russian opposition television in order to express support for Ukrainian territorial integrity. He has hosted Poroshenko several times since he took office last June, most recently just prior to Christmas, when he went so far as to publicly promise Poroshenko “any support” needed “within 24 hours”.

Lukashenko has gone out of his way to assert Belarusian sovereignty in the past year, indicating that he is more concerned about his neighbor to the east than those neighbors to his west. While criticizing NATO’s increased military presence in neighboring countries in order to placate Moscow, last spring the Belarusian military and troops of the Interior Ministry undertook drills aimed at countering a potential repeat in Belarus of what has occurred in eastern Ukraine. And after the meeting last month of the Security Council of Belarus, in which Lukashenko made the obligatory recitation opposing the strengthening of NATO’s forces in Poland and the Baltics, he followed that with a statement that “today’s behavior by our eastern brother cannot but cause alarm”. Several months ago, feeling the need to warn Putin against an attempt to do to Belarus what he was doing to Ukraine, Lukashenko pointedly said that he would fight any aggressor “who would arrive on Belarusian soil . . . . . even if it is Putin.” Minsk has also, for the first time, moved toward creation of full scale control of its border with Russia, and has refused a Russian suggestion that the two states establish a unified visa regime.

In the realm of church governance, the new Patriarch of the Belarusian Orthodox Church has recently formally requested that the Russian Orthodox Church grant the Belarusian Church greater autonomy in decision-making – it now has very little, being considered an “exarchate” of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin is certain to view the request, correctly, as being not so much motivated by theological as by political concerns and a desire on the part of Lukashenko to reduce Moscow’s influence within Belarus.

Lukashenko’s hosting of multilateral talks aimed at reaching a negotiated settlement of the crisis in Ukraine has helped both to emphasize his continued usefulness to Putin, as well as to make Minsk useful to the West and to help bring Belarus out of its self-imposed isolation. The visit of three EU commissioners in relation to the talks broke the de facto boycott of high level EU officials’ visits to Belarus, in place since Lukashenko’s crackdown on dissidents following his 2010 election.

Minsk has strongly engaged its Baltic neighbors, all members of NATO, who share, together with Belarus, sizable Russian minorities as well as a palpable concern about Putin’s intentions towards them. In addition to the Baltics, Lukashenko has used the Ukraine crisis to draw closer to neighboring Poland and much of Central Europe, using warming relations with Central Europe as another means to more actively engage the EU. He has also sought to engage the United States, which remains untrusted but the support of which Minsk views as necessary for the success of its policy of warming relations with Brussels. Poland has been willing to allow relations with Belarus to warm as it sees Minsk as an important source of information on Russia’s intentions towards Ukraine and appreciates the balanced position which Minsk has taken in relation to the ongoing crisis. With the EU, Belarus has begun a series of conversations with Brussels on modernization. While the talks thus far have been modest in scope and Lukashenko seems intent on focusing on economic development and trade issues and ignoring the issues of human rights and democratic reform, they are an important start. For its part, Washington has sent three official delegations to Belarus in the past year, including one in September which consisted of high level State Department, USAID, and Pentagon officials. As with the EU, the warming of ties between Belarus and the US are thus far very modest, but the important issue is the trend in this direction.