[PHOTO] The CN Tower as seen from Trinity Bellwoods

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• James Bow, in the Kitchener-Waterloo area in southwestern Ontario, reports on what the recession looks like in his part of the world. So far things aren't too bad.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study on exoplanets looking for binary star companions.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas bids farewell to his blog for now.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw describes the competitive portrait scene in Australia.


• pollotenchegg looks to the 1926 Soviet census to see what it has to say on ethnicity in Ukraine's mixed Donbas region.


• Torontoist looks at the city's floating houseboats.


• The Volokh Conspiracy analyzes to death the false allegations of a positive link between immigration and crime.


• Window on Eurasia notes nationality policy in Russia's regions.

[ISL] "Is East Timor Illegally Putting Together a National Soccer Team With Brazilian Players?"

Jack Kerr of Vice reports on something that actually does look quite sketchy.

FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation may be turning a blind eye to the illegal movement of players into Asia.

Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor has been improving steadily in recent years, and just recently moved ahead of Indonesia, the country it broke away from at the turn of the century, in the FIFA rankings.

[. . .]

A large part of Timor's improvement has been done through the recruitment of Brazilians with no discernable links to this poorest nation in Asia. And neither FIFA, the AFC or the local FA will say how they qualify.

According to FIFA regulations, a player born in one country can play for another country if they have lived there for five years as an adult, and get citizenship. But none of Timor's Brazilian contingent appear not to have lived or played in the half-island nation as adults—if at all.

[. . .]

They would also qualify to play for the Asian side if they had parents or grandparents from there. However, despite a Portuguese colonial legacy in Timor-Leste, there is no strong history of immigration between the two countries.

"Until 2000, I would say there was no migration, and since then it has been limited, mostly via marriage," says Damien Kingsbury, a Melbourne professor who specialises in politics and security in Southeast Asia, particularly Timor-Leste.

[LINK] "Greece, Argentina Provide Model as Ukraine Considers GDP Linkers"

I have to say, reading Lyubov Pronina and Katia Porzecanski's Bloomberg article, that none of this looks good for Ukraine.

As debt talks intensify between Ukraine and its creditors, securities that pay out if economic growth exceeds expectations will probably be on the agenda, echoing deals done by Argentina and Greece in the past decade.

Ukraine’s restructuring proposal includes a “value-recovery instrument,” the Finance Ministry said last month, while a person familiar with a bondholder plan submitted in May said it has a debt-for-equity swap element. Both securities feature interest payments tied to gross domestic product, so-called GDP-linked warrants.

The main point of disagreement in the talks is whether bondholders should accept losses on the face value of the debt, something that Ukraine insists upon, while a creditor group led by Franklin Templeton has said it isn’t necessary to achieve the goals of the restructuring. The two sides said today they made progress in talks this week and are working on “narrowing the gaps” between their proposals.

While providing scope for compromise, GDP warrants are also likely to be a source of further disagreement, with the level at which they’re triggered open to debate. Argentina is considered to have set it too low, saddling the country with billions of dollars of payments over the past decade, while the Greek securities have yet to bear fruit with the nation’s economy shrinking in every year but one since its bailout.

[LINK] "Moscow is Losing Serbia Just as It has Already Lost Ukraine,’ Kirillova Says"

Window on Eurasia summarizes the arguments of a Russian analyst that the friendly Russian-Serbian relationship might break down on account of the Russian state's overly-close relationship with one grouping on the Serbian political spectrum.

Russia and Serbia have a long history of warm and close ties, reflecting their similar situations and especially the propensity of people in each to draw parallels between the Serbian-Croatian wars and the Russian-Ukrainian ones, Kseniya Kirillova says. But despite that, Moscow is on its way to “losing Serbia just as it has already lost Ukraine.”

The reason for that, the US-based Russian analyst says, is that Moscow is overplaying its hand, supporting Serbian nationalists against the Serbian government which has shown itself more than willing to cooperate with Russia but does not want to break all ties with the European Union and the West (ru.krymr.com/content/article/27123352.html).

[. . .] “It is important to understand,” the Russian analyst says, “that Russia lost Ukraine not after the victory of the Euro-Maidan but only when it began a war against it.” Prior to that, Ukraine did not view Russia as an enemy the way it does now.

Moscow’s “all or nothing” attitude led it to invade Ukraine and it is leading it to back Serbian nationalists against the Serbian government. “The Serbian radicals promise a complete break with the EU, unqualified recognition of the annexation of Crimea and ‘Novorossiya,’ the fullest integration with Russia.”

All these things may be what the Kremlin wants, but they go far beyond what many Serbs do – and that is generating a kind of backlash among them and especially among members of the current government. What such people can see is that its deference to Moscow has only encouraged Moscow to push harder.

[LINK] "Putin is a Mussolini Not a Hitler, Inozemtsev Says"

Window on Eurasia summarizes the arguments of another Russian analyst, one Vladislav Inozemtsev, who makes what I think is the correct argument that the contemporary Russian regime bears quite a few similarities to that of 1930s fascist Italy.

The Kremlin regime has met “in practice all” of the characteristics of fascism: a leader cult, a desire for revenge for supposed defeats in the past and attacks now, and an ideological portrayal of these events as the work of others rather than the Russians themselves.

The Kremlin routinely touts Russia as something pure standing against rotting Europe, “masculinity has become a cult, which to a large extent comes from the president himself.” In addition, “a corporate state has been completely constructed: the oligarchs are subordinate to the will of the state, the bureaucracy controls a large part of economic activity, and ‘the corruption vertical’ is more effective than ‘the vertical of power.’”

But what Putin wants makes him look more like Mussolini than the more grandiose Hitler. “In Moscow they want as a maximum the rebirth of the Soviet Union; as a minimum, certain territorial corrections” that would satisfy “the crowd that routinely votes” for the state and its leaders.”

“Crimea,” Inozemtsev suggests, “is Abyssina of 1935, not Austria or the Sudetenland of 1938.” When Mussolini seized Abysinnia, he declared “Italy has an empire.” He wasn’t interested in going further. And Putin isn’t either: he will never invade the Baltic countries or attack NATO, and for the same reason Mussolini didn’t – a fear of attacking major powers.

What Putin has succeeded in doing is creating “a populist fascist regime, one that is “moderately aggressive [like that of] Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal.”

[LINK] "How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language"

The Atlantic's Roc Morin has a delightful essay about the conlang Toki Pona, which makes itself known for the economy of its vocabulary. How this actually works, and what this forces speakers to do, is remarkable.

While the Oxford English Dictionary contains a quarter of a million entries, and even Koko the gorilla communicates with over 1,000 gestures in American Sign Language, the total vocabulary of Toki Pona is a mere 123 words. Yet, as the creator Sonja Lang and many other Toki Pona speakers insist, it is enough to express almost any idea. This economy of form is accomplished by reducing symbolic thought to its most basic elements, merging related concepts, and having single words perform multiple functions of speech.

In contrast to the hundreds or thousands of study hours required to attain fluency in other languages, a general consensus among Toki Pona speakers is that it takes about 30 hours to master. That ease of acquisition, many of them believe, makes it an ideal international auxiliary language—the realization of an ancient dream to return humanity to a pre-Babel unity. Toki Pona serves that function already for hundreds of enthusiasts connected via online communities in countries as diverse as Japan, Belgium, New Zealand, and Argentina.

In addition to making Toki Pona simple to learn, the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its speakers think. The paucity of terms provokes a kind of creative circumlocution that requires careful attention to detail. An avoidance of set phrases keeps the process fluid. The result, according to Lang, is to immerse the speaker in the moment, in a state reminiscent of what Zen Buddhists call mindfulness.

“What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto.

“You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.”

The real question is: What is a car to you?

[NEWS] Some Pluto and Charon links

My RSS feed remains filled with Pluto/Charon-related information.

• Wired and Universe Today report more on the photos, paying more attention to Charon.


• The Dragon's Tales links to NASA reports on lumpy Hydra and mysterious young Charon.
  
• Discover's D-Brief and Imageo share more beautiful photos.


• Whatever's John Scalzi thinks the Pluto photos bear a remarkable similarity to some 19th century astronomers' drawings of Mars.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emilky Lakdawalla has an extensive post on the subject, sharing photos and reports and wondering--first time I've seen it--if the high recent level of activity seen on Pluto and Charon perhaps indicates that the impact that formed the Pluto system occurred recently.