[BRIEF NOTE] Elsewhere in the blogosphere

[rfmcdonald]

• Apart from the usual well-written stuff about the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Head Heeb has two posts of note: one examining voting procedures in the self-governing island of Niue, which has a diaspora of recent emigrants a dozen times the size of the population resident on Niue, the other evaluating the possibilities for independence and democracy in Lebanon.


• Dragan Antulov describes how the pressure from the Catholic Church is placing the right of Croatian parents-to-be to in-vitro fertilization at risk. On a lighter, related note, he also details how Dr. Damir Buković (Damir Bukovic), one of Croatia’s leading gynaecologists and a leading proponent of the new restrictive regulations, self-destructed on Croatian television.


• Phil Hunt suggests that pro-fox hunting activists and pro-cannibis partisans should unite. After all, they have so much in common already.


• Charlie Stross provides an author's-eye view of how to write a multi-book fantasy epic.


• Foreign Dispatches has a pithy post describing the failure of the protocols created around the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project to actually prevent massive corruption. His conclusion? That establishing civil and political liberties, and the rule of law, is essential; and, that large resource-driven and government-directed economic development projects rarely work.


• Regions of Mind describes the fascinating evolution of American slavery before the development of the plantations, when laws and customs were lax enough to allow many colonists of African descent--particularly the "Atlantic creoles," people versed in the cutlures of Europe and Africa and America--a substantial degree of freedom.