[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird reports on PZ Tel, a very young Sun-like star with a brown dwarf that has recently been photographed in a relatively close, elliptical orbit around its star.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh takes the Economist to task for what he sees as its shoddy and unfair treatment of Catalonia, something he suggests may be connected to Catalonia's sub-state nationalism.


• Geocurrents writes about the Republic of Ambazonia, a stat declared by Anglophone Cameroonians unhappy with Francophone dominance.


• At the Power and the Money, Noel Maurer argues that dollarization can boost trade. Look at West Africa, where--after the French franc was subsumed into the Euro--trade between users of the now Euro-tired CEF franc and non-French users of the Euro rose sharply. Or seems to; the data's complicated.


• Registan and Savage Minds both tackle the Time magazine cover featuring a teenage girl whose nose had been cut off by the Taliban, the first arguing this justifies American involvement and the second suggest it justifies American violence.


• Douglas Todd at The Search considers Ann Rice's recent quitting of Christianity, wishing that she specified which kind of Christianity she was quitting. (He surmises she was renouncing conservative Christianity.)


• Wasatch Economics' Scott Peterson argues that aging and migration may create Detroit-like situations of vast stretched of abandoned housing in--among other places--Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.


• Window on Eurasia quotes a Russian analyst who argues that western Ukraine isn't inherently anti-Russian, given that Ukrainian nationalism is manipulated by political figures who come from and draw their support from central and eastern Ukraine.