[PHOTO] Storm coming, Wellesley at Yonge

[LINK] Two Toronto Star reports on the mental issues of the alleged Via Rail terrorists

The Toronto Star's Alyshah Hasham has been reporting extensively from the trial of the two men convicted of plotting to attack VIA Rail trains. The first, Raed Jaser, was the subject of a report Monday: "Convicted terrorist actually motivated by drug addiction, psychologist testifies".

Rather than being a terrorist who plotted the murder of Canadians with his co-accused and an undercover FBI agent, Raed Jaser was trying to con his way into getting money to support his lifelong drug and alcohol addiction, a clinical psychologist testified Monday during Jaser’s sentencing hearing.

Jaser also says he was high on hashish each of the five times he met with the undercover agent, the psychologist’s report states.

A jury found Jaser, 38, guilty of three terrorism-related offences after a six-week trial and ten days of deliberations. His co-accused Chiheb Esseghaier was convicted on five counts including plotting to derail a Via Rail train, killing the passengers on board. The jury remained deadlocked on whether Jaser was part of the train plot.

On Monday, the psychologist who conducted an assessment of Jaser, testified that in his opinion Jaser “does not represent the typical pattern and motivation of someone representing and being involved with radical Islam.” His were “the actions of someone desperate to stay high, who would do anything to stay high,” Dr. Jess Ghannam testified on behalf of the defence.

Ghannam, 58, is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. The court heard that he has consulted on rehabilitation and risk assessment in several terrorism cases in the U.S.

Tuesday, Chieh Esseghaier was the subject of the article "Psychiatrist says Via Rail terrorist likely mentally unfit to continue sentencing hearing".

The man convicted of plotting to derail a Via Rail train and murder the passengers on board may suffer from schizophrenia and is “clearly psychotic at this juncture,” according to a forensic psychiatrist, court heard Tuesday.

“I believe that (Chiheb) Esseghaier is unable to participate meaningfully in the proceedings at this juncture, and is more likely than not unfit,” Dr. Lisa Ramshaw wrote in her psychiatric assessment submitted during the sentencing hearing.

Esseghaier, 32, has chosen to represent himself throughout the court process including the jury trial earlier this year where he was convicted of terrorism-related offences, along with his co-accused Raed Jaser.

Superior Court Justice Michael Code told the court Tuesday that he did not consider Ramshaw’s report alone as a reason to explore Esseghaier’s mental fitness before continuing the sentencing hearing, but would hear Ramshaw’s testimony before coming to a decision.

A finding that Esseghaier is currently unfit to continue, or an order to conduct a full hearing into the matter, could lead to serious complications in the case. A further assessment of what Esseghaier’s mental state was during the trial and at the time of the offence could be ordered, potentially raising concerns about the findings of the jury.

If this is actually true, this would tend to confirm much of the research suggesting that terrorism is something that people in good positions actually do not do.

[URBAN NOTE] On how Torontonians (and other humans) benefit from trees

A post on Discover magazine's Inkfish blog alerted me to some interesting research.

What’s a tree worth to you? According to a large study in Toronto, trees may increase both how healthy you feel and how healthy you really are. Having some extra foliage on your block could be as good for your health as a pay raise–or an anti-aging machine.

It’s a complicated relationship to figure out, because variables that affect how many trees you see each day could also affect your health. The population of a concrete, inner-city apartment complex may have socioeconomic differences, for example, from the population of a leafy, well-tended suburb. University of Chicago psychologist Marc Berman and his colleagues used a detailed analysis to try to tease out the impact of trees themselves.

They started by going to Canada. In a country with universal health care, they figured, access to doctors isn’t as much of a variable as in the United States. Since socioeconomic status can still affect how people use doctors, the authors also gathered information on their subjects’ income and education. And rather than comparing people from multiple areas, they focused only on the city of Toronto.

From a large-scale, ongoing project called the Ontario Health Study, the authors collected data on over 31,000 adult residents of Toronto. In addition to household income and years of education, they looked at subjects’ sex, diet (self-reported servings of fruits and vegetables per day), and neighborhood. The Ontario Health Study questionnaires also asked subjects whether they’d ever been diagnosed with various physical and mental health conditions.

The final measurement was health perception: how healthy do subjects feel they are, on a scale from 1 to 5? It sounds vague, but this measurement has been found to strongly predict actual health, the authors write.

The Toronto Star's Geoffrey Vendeville went into more detail.

Using data from Toronto, a team of researchers has found that having 10 more trees on your block has self-reported health benefits akin to a $10,000 salary raise or moving to a neighbourhood with a $10,000 higher median income or being seven years younger.

By comparing satellite imagery of Toronto, an inventory of trees on public land and general health surveys, the team, led by University of Chicago psychologist Marc Berman, found that people who live on a tree-lined block are less likely to report conditions such as high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease or diabetes.

Their findings appeared last week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports.

The study suggests “pretty strongly” that planting 4 per cent more trees would have significant health benefits, Berman said.

Researchers don’t know why, exactly, trees seem to be good for people’s health.

“Is it that the trees are cleaning the air? Is it that the trees are encouraging people to go outside and exercise more? Or is it their esthetic beauty? We need to understand that,” he said.

[ISL] On how the recovery of Iceland from 2008 was not so miraculous

The New York Times' Jenny Anderson reported from Iceland as it prepares to lift post-2008 capital controls, noting how it recovered with an eye towards how it might serve as a model of some kind for Greece.

Iceland is not Greece. As a tiny island with a population of 320,000, it was able to muster political will more easily than most countries. (Meeting the prime minister is no big deal to locals.) Greece has a population of 11 million, a gross domestic product that is $242 billion, or 16 times Iceland’s, and a history of political antagonism and government corruption. The two countries blew themselves up, though in different ways. Greece, as a nation, spent too much; in Iceland, the private banks went on a bender that ended badly.

But Iceland came out the other side of disaster in part because it had its own currency, which devalued, and it imposed draconian capital controls. If Greece ends up with its own currency, it would most likely descend into an economic Hades in the months after dumping the euro before even having a chance to emerge on the other side.

Yet, even as Iceland is in the bloom of health, its comeback is about to be tested again. The government recently announced it would start to lift capital controls imposed at the peak of the crisis. Meant to last a few months, the controls have been in place for seven years, creating a shelter under which Iceland has mostly thrived.

Their success, paradoxically, has made their removal all the more precarious.

“They worked better than anyone expected them to work,” said Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister. “But they of course are not a sustainable situation for an economy.”

Anderson goes on at length, noting the specific policies adopted. Matt O'Brien of the Washington Post's Wonkblog crunches the data, noting that the much-mooted miraculous recovery of Iceland is actually not that, starting off by comparing Iceland with Ireland.

Both countries' banks went bust, both got bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, and both did austerity afterward. But despite these similarities, Iceland's recovery has been better than Ireland's. Specifically, its economy is 1 percent bigger than it was before 2008, while Ireland's is still 2 percent smaller. That's more surprising than it sounds since Ireland's crisis was merely catastrophic and Iceland's was completely so. But more than that, Iceland is doing better even though—or, for the most part, because—it did everything you're not supposed to. It let its banks fail, it let its currency collapse, and it implemented capital controls--limits on people taking money out of the financial system--that it's only now getting ready to lift. Not all of it helped, but enough of it did that the question has become how much of a role model Iceland should be for everyone else. And the answer is: It depends!

Iceland might have been the most obvious bubble ever. During the mid-2000s, it went from being an Arctic backwater that specialized in fishing and aluminum smelting to an Arctic backwater that specialized in global finance. Iceland's three biggest banks grew to 10 times the size of their economy by offering people overseas, especially in the Netherlands and Britain, higher interest rates than they could get at home. Then, armed with this cash, Iceland's bankers went on a historically ill-advised buying spree. They bought foreign companies, they bought foreign real estate, they even bought foreign soccer teams. But with it all, they bought the dregs. The problem, in other words, was that Iceland's banks were not only paying high prices for questionable assets, but also promising to pay their depositors high interest rates. This was about as unsustainable as business models get, and it wasn't that hard to tell. All you had to do was look for five minutes. That's what Bob Aliber, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, did in 2006 after he heard a talk about Iceland that might as well have been a neon sign flashing financial crisis. What he found convinced him, as Michael Lewis tells us, to start writing about Iceland's crash even before it happened.

And then it did. Short-term lending died after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and Iceland's banks were collateral damage. Although, to be honest, they were so mismanaged that collapse was inevitable (which is why some of their high-level execs have been sent to jail). But in any case, Iceland's government couldn't afford to bail out its banks that had gotten so much bigger than its economy. The only choice was to let them go under. In other words, Iceland's banks were too-big-not-to-fail. That was a lot easier, though, when letting the banks fail meant letting foreigners lose their money. Iceland's government, you see, guaranteed its own people's deposits, but no one else's.

But now it was Iceland's government that needed a bailout. It needed the money to protect domestic deposits, cushion the economy's free fall, and keep their currency, the krona, from crashing much more. In all, Iceland got $4.6 billion, with $2.1 billion of that coming from the IMF and the other $2.5 billion from its Scandinavian neighbors.

This is where the story that Iceland broke all the financial rules begins to fall apart. In a lot of ways, the IMF's intervention was typical. Iceland sharply reduced spending—introducing more austerity than than Ireland or Portugal or Spain or Britain or even supposed budget-cutting superhero Latvia did, as economist Scott Sumner points out. Only Greece has done more. Not only that, but Iceland also increased interest rates all the way up to 18 percent in the immediate aftermath of the crisis to rein in inflation. It gradually cut interest rates afterward, but it wasn't until 2011 that they reached a "low" of 4.25 percent.

There was no economics-revamping miracle on Iceland, it turns out.

[LINK] "Germany set to recognize genocide in colonial Namibia"

Al Jazeera reports on the noteworthy impending recognition by Germany of the campaign waged againdt the Herero of then-German Southwest Africa as genocide.

German authorities are set to officially recognize as "genocide" the colonial-era crackdown in Namibia by German troops more than a century ago in which over 65,000 ethnic Hereros were killed.

Talks with Namibia on a joint declaration about the events of the early 20th century are ongoing, and it isn't clear when they will be concluded, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said Friday.

The basis for the German government's approach is a parliamentary motion signed three years ago by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stating that "the war of destruction in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a war crime and genocide," Schaefer said. Steinmeier was an opposition leader at the time, and the motion didn't pass.

German Gen. Lothar von Trotha — who was sent to what was then South West Africa to put down an uprising by the Hereros against their German rulers in 1904 — instructed his troops to wipe out the entire tribe in what is widely seen as the 20th century’s first genocide, historians say.

On Oct. 2, 1904, Trotha issued a proclamation: “Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle will be shot. I shall not accept more women and children. … I shall order shots to be fired at them.”

Rounded up in prison camps, captured Hereros and as well as members of the Nama tribe died from malnutrition and severe weather. Dozens were beheaded after their deaths and their skulls sent to German researchers in Berlin for "scientific" experiments.

[LINK] National Geographic on the challenges of the eulachon fisheries of British Columbia

In National Geographic, J. B. MacKinnon reports on the challenges faced by the eulachon fisheries off of the coast of British Columbia. Once a noteworthy resource of the First Nations of the area, the species is now facing threats.

It's nearly midnight, and Oscar Robinson Sr. has been on his feet for hours, stitching a torn fishing net by the light of a naked bulb. At sundown, two Steller sea lions—one of them a bull, which typically weighs over a ton—punched straight through the mesh and popped up behind the fishing crew's aluminum punt with a bad-tempered gasp.

Now Robinson must mend the net—"the bag," as he calls it—in time to fish the next outflowing tide, which turns at 4:30 a.m.

He works patiently: If it isn't one thing, it's another. Today it was sea lions, tomorrow it might be the current's raw power snapping the net anchor poles or a grizzly bear stalking the camp.

This is the last great eulachon fishery on Earth, near the mouth of the Nass River in British Columbia, just at the tip of the Alaska Panhandle. Eulachon are a species of smelt, each fish a bolt of silver-blue not much longer than a ballpoint pen.

[. . .]

Along the river's banks, you can still hear eulachon spoken of as saak, their name in the language of the Nisga'a, one of the indigenous peoples known in Canada as First Nations and in the U.S. as Native Americans.

But the fish are also known as halimotkw, often translated as "savior fish" or "salvation fish." Eulachon return to the rivers here to spawn at the end of the North Pacific winter, when historically food supplies would be running low. In lean years the eulachon's arrival meant the difference between life and death for people up and down the coast.

Today, the fish that used to safeguard native people from starvation is itself in need of a lifeline.

[LINK] Slavoj Žižek in the LRB on the Chinese model

Writing in the London Review of Books, Slavoj Žižek writes about the extent to which politics has been depoliticized. He turns to China, ostensibly the last major Communist power, as proof.

An exemplary case of today’s ‘socialism’ is China, where the Communist Party is engaged in a campaign of self-legitimisation which promotes three theses: 1) Communist Party rule alone can guarantee successful capitalism; 2) the rule of the atheist Communist Party alone can guarantee authentic religious freedom; and 3) continuing Communist Party rule alone can guarantee that China will be a society of Confucian conservative values (social harmony, patriotism, moral order). These aren’t simply nonsensical paradoxes. The reasoning might go as follows: 1) without the party’s stabilising power, capitalist development would explode into a chaos of riots and protests; 2) religious factional struggles would disturb social stability; and 3) unbridled hedonist individualism would corrode social harmony. The third point is crucial, since what lies in the background is a fear of the corrosive influence of Western ‘universal values’: freedom, democracy, human rights and hedonist individualism. The ultimate enemy is not capitalism as such but the rootless Western culture threatening China through the free flow of the internet. It must be fought with Chinese patriotism; even religion should be ‘sinicised’ to ensure social stability. A Communist Party official in Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, said recently that while ‘hostile forces’ are stepping up their infiltration, religions must work under socialism to serve economic development, social harmony, ethnic unity and the unification of the country: ‘Only when one is a good citizen can one be a good believer.’

But this ‘sinicisation’ of religion isn’t enough: any religion, no matter how ‘sinicised’, is incompatible with membership of the Communist Party. An article in the newsletter of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection claims that since it is a ‘founding ideological principle that Communist Party members cannot be religious’, party members don’t enjoy the right to religious freedom: ‘Chinese citizens have the freedom of religious belief, but Communist Party members are not the same as regular citizens; they are fighters in the vanguard for a communist consciousness.’ How does this exclusion of believers from the party aid religious freedom? Marx’s analysis of the political imbroglio of the French Revolution of 1848 comes to mind. The ruling Party of Order was the coalition of the two royalist wings, the Bourbons and the Orleanists. The two parties were, by definition, unable to find a common denominator in their royalism, since one cannot be a royalist in general, only a supporter of a particular royal house, so the only way for the two to unite was under the banner of the ‘anonymous kingdom of the Republic’. In other words, the only way to be a royalist in general is to be a republican. The same is true of religion. One cannot be religious in general: one can only believe in a particular god, or gods, to the detriment of others. The failure of all attempts to unite religions shows that the only way to be religious in general is under the banner of the ‘anonymous religion of atheism’. Effectively, only an atheist regime can guarantee religious tolerance: the moment this atheist frame disappears, factional struggle among different religions will explode. Although fundamentalist Islamists all attack the godless West, the worst struggles go on between them (IS focuses on killing Shia Muslims).

There is, however, a deeper fear at work in the prohibition of religious belief for members of the Communist Party. ‘It would have been best for the Chinese Communist Party if its members were not to believe in anything, not even in communism,’ Zorana Baković, the China correspondent for the Slovenian newspaper Delo, wrote recently, ‘since numerous party members joined churches (most of them Protestant churches) precisely because of their disappointment at how even the smallest trace of their communist ideals had disappeared from today’s Chinese politics.’

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Crooked Timber's John Holbo wonders about people who are foxes and hedgehogs, following Isaiah Berlin.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one examination of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres and links to another noting how white dwarfs eat their compact asteroid and other debris belts.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the dinosaurs disappeared in the Pyrenees amidst environmental catastrophe.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Liberty University is liable for helping a woman hide her child away from her lesbian partner's custody.


• Language Hat notes an apparent mistake in prose.


• Language Log examines new frontiers in negative negation.


• Languages of the World notes the role of Dante in establishing an Italian literary language.


• Marginal Revolution wonders what books contain the most wisdom per page.


• The Search notes one librarian's experience with web archiving.


• Torontoist shares photos of the Pan Am Games.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that genetic engineering of babies for IQ will occur as soon as the technology becomes possible.


• Window on Eurasia notes that support is growing for an enquiry into the Malaysian Airlines shootdown, notes military reform's stagnation in Russia, and looks at a Crimean Tatar meeting in Turkey.


• The Financial Times' The World notes that Spain has come out weaker of this round of Eurozone negotiations.

[NEWS] Some Pluto links

The above is such a cool photo.

• Yesterday I linked to, among other things, three Centauri Dreams posts looking at early speculation about Pluto and Charon. Centauri Dreams today has more
.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait analyses some of the first pictures of Pluto and Charon.


• io9 noted the crowdsourcing of names form Pluto's new detailed map, while the 70s Sci Fi Art tumblr shared vintage depictions of Pluto. Discover's Imageo blog has more.


• Wired noted the posting on Instagram of the first Pluto photo and observed that Pluto is so low-mass that if it disappeared we would not notice.


• The Telegraph and MacLean's both look at Clyde Tombaugh, the American astronomer who found Pluto in the first place.