[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Andrew Barton shares in the general disgust with the utter pointlessness of the G20 riots here in Toronto.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan doesn't like the sorts of public perceptions which make it impossible for journalists like Dave Weigel--i.e. all of us--to present different faces to different people in the Internet era.


• At Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster lets us know how preliminary surveys may well demonstrate that there are more brown dwarfs--basically, star-like objects lacking the mass necessary to sustain fusion--in our area of the galaxy than normal stars.


• Eastern approaches points out that the Holocaust was rather discontinuous from post-war pogroms in Poland, not least because the Polish state didn't authorize them and tried to stop it.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews a book that takes a look at downwards social mobility, making the point that fears of decline often inspired dodgy politics.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen worries about Berlin's economy. Since the end of Communism, the end of subsidies to industry in west and east Berlin both has led to an industrial collapse, leaving the city without much of a tax base and forcing the state to take on the role of patron to the arts.


• Torontoist has great pictures of all the free swag that accredited G20 journalists go.


• At The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl writes about how Isaac Asimov really didn't like people saying that he was not Jewish enough.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Uzbekistan's admittedly powerless opposition wants Kyrgyzstan's Uzbek population to receive territorial autonomy.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell takes a look at how the Taliban in Afghanistan is reshaping itself in Afghanistan in response to its need to acquire public support. The ideological dialogics continue, as they always do.