A Bit More Detail

• 80 Beats reports that most of the patients who went through an experimental gene therapy that had a side-effect of inducing leukemia are fine. Will gene therapy come back into vogue?


• Bad Astronomy alerted its readers to the very bright supernova in galaxy Messier 101, just 25 million light years away.


• Daniel Drezner points out the ways in which the recent NATO involvement in Libya should not be seen as paradigmatic.


• The Discoblog reports on how a recent study confirming the existence of male bisexuals did that. Good scientific, it turns out, helps.


• Far Outliers shares the news that half of the population of Belarus was killed or displaced by the Second World War.


• The reconstruction of a well where, in 13th century England, a Jewish family was murdered and disposed of features at Inuit Panda Scarlet Carwash. (It's usually a much more cheerful blog.)


• At The Search, Douglas Todd blogs about the extent to which Jack Layton's beliefs and policies were influenced by the United Church of Canada.


• Slap Upside the Head notes that a Canadian same-sex female married couple was prevented from entering US Customs' family entrance because of the Defence of Marriage Act in our southern neighbour. I mean, really.

Rebel fighters have claimed complete control of a sprawling oil refinery in this coastal town, seizing one of Muammar Gaddafi's most important assets after just three days of fighting and delivering the latest in a string of small victories that have suddenly put the rebels at Tripoli's door.

Despite what rebel leaders described as fierce fighting, many of them expressed surprise that the Gaddafi loyalists were routed with relative ease. Some people even wondered whether the chaotic exit by about 50 of the Gaddafi fighters - who fled by boat before they were bombed by NATO warplanes, according to several fighters - was a ruse.

''We hope this is it,'' said Ajali Deeb, a petrochemical engineer at the seized refinery. ''These are indications that the system has started to collapse.''

The six-month history of the Libyan conflict is filled with similar predictions. Even so, the rebels have taken a substantial swathe of territory in western Libya over the past few weeks, and Gaddafi's forces have not mounted a forceful counterattack.

There were other signs of a conflict that had reached a critical moment, if not its final stage. For days, the vital highway from Tunisia to Tripoli has remained closed, controlled by the rebels in a harsh blow to the Gaddafi government, which relies on the road for supplies of food and fuel.

Thousands of refugees are also fleeing daily from Tripoli, some to escape the city's mounting hardships but others expecting that they would be safer in rebel-held areas.

Suddenly things seem to be moving very fast. It’s possible that Qaddafi could still launch a counterstrike, of course. But he won’t easily be able to undo the results of the past few days; for instance, even if he retakes the coastal towns, the rebels can still destroy highway bridges and overpasses, keeping the capital’s main supply route cut for days or weeks.

One peculiarity of this whole thing is that the eastern front — where the main concentration of government forces faces the main rebel army — has been almost static. The rebels have spent the last few weeks very slowly fighting their way into the town of Brega. Brega sits at the edge of a massive concentration of Libya’s oil infrastructure — pipelines, refineries, an export terminal. So it’s possible that the rebels have been deliberately going slow in order to minimize the risk of damaging large amounts of complex and expensive equipment, hoping that it will fall into their hands intact. Whether this will work out or not remains to be seen.

Another interesting point: the rebel offensive seems to have been remarkably well coordinated, with major offensives in three widely separated fronts. As far as can be told (this is not certain) NATO forces seem to have been working quite effectively with the rebels, providing air cover and helping bring down Loyalist strongpoints. Someone fairly competent is running this show, it seems. It would be nice to know more.

Qaddafi is losing ground for a variety of reasons. His military is a bunch of unhappy draftees; morale is low. (Civilian morale is no better.) NATO is preventing him from using his air, armor, or heavy artillery, while also degrading his 4C. He has every reason to be paranoid about a coup, which means he must restrict power and personal interaction to a small trusted circle, which cuts down on his (already degraded) ability to process information and respond effectively.

Here’s my take on this: things are likely to get worse for him, because the more ground he loses, the more likely he is to lose more ground. He’s probably still able to launch counterattacks at the tactical level, so he may well be able to roll back the rebels in one or more areas. But he won’t easily be able to build on those victories, because they won’t change the underlying diplomatic, economic, or internal-political dynamics. To accomplish that, he’d have to win a major, crushing victory — retake Misurata, say, or wipe the Berbers off the map. That’s unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, rebel victories in the field do change the correlation of forces — they further depress Loyalist morale, make Qaddafi’s remaining foreign allies less enthusiastic about standing up for him, make major desertions more likely, and thus make Qaddafi ever more paranoid and isolated. Simply put, he’s trying to climb a slope that’s steadily getting steeper.

One, the dismount is going to be tricky. Much depends on how Qaddafi leaves the building. If he flees like Ben Ali, that’s one thing. If he’s taken out by a coup, that’s another. If it ends with rebel columns rolling into Tripoli ... that’s actually pretty unlikely. So, flee or coup.

Say it’s a coup. Then what? Qaddafi’s inner circle are still around. Say they can be sidelined. (How? Could get messy.) You’ve still got a functioning state government in Tripoli. And that’s great — nobody wants a Somalia on Europe’s doorstep. But whoever ends up running it, that state government is not going to be eager to hand over power to a bunch of scruffy rebels in Benghazi. (Never mind a bunch of Berbers. Ugh, Berbers.) On the other hand, the National Transition Council (NTC) — the guys in Benghazi — are reasonably going to ask why they should acknowledge the authority of a bunch of guys in Tripoli who, until last Tuesday, were loyal apparatchiks of the Supreme Leader. So, watch for some sort of National Reconciliation Council, possibly brokered by friendly foreign powers.

Two, legitimacy. PQL is likely to be a troubled place in various ways. Qaddafi did a pretty good job of crushing civil society. The country is divided by regions and tribes. Nobody has any meaningful experience with civil liberties or democratic institutions. Everyone’s going to be armed. A significant amount of nation-building type assistance is going to be required, and frankly it’s none too soon to start.

Meanwhile, who’ll have legitimacy? The NTC can advance a plausible claim if they’ve reached a clear point of military dominance — control over most of the country’s territory and population, Loyalists clearly falling backwards. They’re nowhere near that point today. Otherwise, legitimacy will have to come from, sigh, democratic elections. I sigh because those are likely to be... problematic. Libya’s a country that has never had anything remotely approaching a fair and clean election. And being in political opposition, in Libya, has not historically been a great career choice. So everyone is likely to enter this thinking winner-take-all, so our side must not be allowed to lose! Things could work out, but...

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton points out that biking is problematic if there's no infrastructure, like bike lockups.


• Centauri Dreams observes the exciting news that Pluto's thin atmosphere has carbon monoxide.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis examines the different Wikipedia encyclopedias and language use. Which is largest? Which has the most articles per capita?


• The Global Sociology Blog links to an article and a video from the Guardian examining the strains placed on family life when two young women refuse female circumcision.


• At Itching for Eestimaa, Palun doesn't think that Estonians will look back on this time period as a golden age, akin to the 1950s in the United States. But then, was that the way things were seen at the time? History patinas.


• Language Log's Mark Liberman writes about the Berbers of Libya, starting to assert their ethnic identity in following a pattern common to the wider Maghreb.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Charli Carpenter considers the question of who, exactly, released the Guantanamo data into the media. It wasn't Wikileaks and likely not OpenLeaks, after all.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen wonders why Russian Jews in the United States are more conservative than many of their co-religionists. It may relate to, among other things, a strong affiliation with Israel and hence the Republicans.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin responds to Cowen and argues that Russian Jews in fact are more conservative because--on many metrics--Russia is a more conservative society than the United States.

• 80 Beats notes the creation of the first artificial leaf--more precisely, an affordalbe implementation using technology of the basic processes of photosynthesis.


• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton visits Japan's virtual music star Hatsune Miku. She might not be a hard light hologram, but she won't melt down!


• blogTO's Agatha Barc lists the various troubled, decaying heritage buildings of Toronto.


• James Bow notes a suggestion that PR firms working for the Conservative Party might be trying to recruit commenters to fill blogs with pro-Tory material.


• Russian-language photo blog centralasian takes a look at the different ways that light bulbs have been used to illustrate different themes.


• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo notices his Cleveland's popularity with tourists and notices that the things which make a city attractive don't necessarily suffice to make it attractive to permanent residents.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Doug Merill revisits a prediction he made seven years ago about the number and timing of the next countries to join the European Union. He found his earlier prediction over-optimistic, particularly on the fringes of Europe entering, particularly Ukraine and the Caucasus but also Turkey.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis explores the Alawites of Syria, a minority sect descended from Shi'ite Islam and certainly heterodox, that happens to dominate Syria and is in a decidedly unstable manner.


• At GNXP, Razib argues that genetic data suggests that the expansion of the Bantu language group across most of central and southern Africa was accompanied by Bantu migration, including the replacement/assimilation of populations on the standard model.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer visits the various Arab countries in revolution: Libya's rebels are ill-organized, Bahrain's future is in jeopardy, Egypt might, and Yemen, ack.


• Slap Upside the Head notes that a lawsuit has been lodged in Québec against the policy of that province's blood-collection agency for not taking blood from queer men.


• Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin notes that an analysis of the Russian census data suggests that the Russian population began growing again, thanks mostly to immigration but also to a higher birth rate, in 2008.

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton suggests that Vancouver's use by American film crews as a stand-in for American cities generally worked well enough in the alternate-history television show Sliders, set in alternate versions of San Francisco, mostly. Alienation?


• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling notes that former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma has finally been charged with murder for hte death of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.


• BlueJacket 1862 lists the many different monarchies in the world, with their diverse histories, and wonders about the institution's future.


• At Border Thinking, Laura Agustín links to an old article of hers wondering why sex work isn't viewed as a job or a service, excluding sex workers from protection.


• Centauri Dreams notes that the fastest space probes launched so far, the Helios probes of the 1970s, only reached speeds of 70 kiometres a second, far less than one percent of light speed. We've a lot of speed to catch up on.


• Crooked Timber hosts Conor Foley, who argues that the intervention on behalf of Libya's rebels was justified on the grounds that a threshold of violence was about to be crossed and that the intervention did make things better. Controversy ensues in the comments.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley thinks that the Libyan rebels are too fragmented to take over.


• Torontoist's Brian McLachlan focuses on two interesting pieces of Toronto sports-related public statues.


• At Wasatch Economics, Scott Peterson points out that demands Western wages be reduced to Chinese levels overlooks higher Western levels of productivity compensating for wage differences and, indeed, rising wages in China itself.

Turn on the radio and Greek music will waft over the squat brick houses built by Italian colonizers in the 1920s in a bid to finally urbanize a Bedouin population of roamers and tie them down to the Cyrenaican coast’s fertile land.

“Star FM, the soundtrack of our lives,” a breathy announcer’s voice exhales in Greek from across the sea’s blue horizon.

Subconsciously, when these former nomads nod, it takes them 200 kilometers across the sea to Crete. It also takes them back to their past. For Jalal Bayram, a retired Libyan civil servant, the island over the horizon feels even closer: His family came from it.

“When my family arrived, the Arabs accepted us,” he told me one scorching March afternoon as we stood in the shade of his porch.

I had been touring the Appolonia archaeological site when a couple of locals asked me where I was from. They had never met a Greek but suddenly their faces lit up. “Go and see Jalal Bey,” they told me using the Ottoman honorific for older men. “He’s Kritli.”

Kritli, it turned out, was the term used for a very special tribe: a group of Cretan Muslims who arrived in Libya in the early 20 century when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the last organized migration of people from the Greek mainland to Libya and it happened in the mid-nineteenth century as some 20 thousand Muslim Greeks fled the Greek War of Independence, the accompanying persecution of Muslims and the destruction of their holy places.

As Crete left the orbit of the Ottoman Empire and became part of the fledgling Greek state, they abandoned their mountain villages and fishing ports in a Great Exodus that lacked a convenient national narrative of loss and exile to adopt it.

The Ottoman Empire evacuated its own citizens to Muslim lands still under its control. Half were sent to the Syrian coastline where they built a new life for themselves. The village of Hammidiyeh still survives today and has been visited by several Greeks dumbfounded to find some of the older residents still speaking a fossilized Cretan dialect.

For years, the Greek media has described the two Greek-speaking villages on the Muslim Mediterranean coastline—Sosa in Libya and Hamidiyyeh in Syria. The breathless reports relate with a latent pride how their older inhabitants still speak an archaic Cretan dialect. But what the reports don’t stress too strongly is that these people who were forced from their homes by the cruel processes of state formation are Muslims: For the Greek state to come into being, across-the-board homogenization had to be imposed to exorcise the amorphous, the ethnically diverse and the ambiguous. Indigenous Muslims need not apply.

“They call them Turkish Cretans but they’re not, they’re Greek Muslims,” said Kanakis Mandolios, president of the Greek community of Benghazi, the historic center of Libya’s Greek diaspora. “Either way, they’re headed towards extinction.”

Minimally-trained infantry should be able to outflank government forces outside the cities, but the rebels seem to be worse than minimally-trained. Maybe this is my own experience talking, but they seem like mobs with guns, rather than a serious fighting force. The West could send in advisors, which would, of course, be serious mission creep. If it happens, I’d bet on the British doing it, not the United States.

The truth is, neither side the Libyan civil war appears to be particularly competent. (This should not be surprising.) In the words of a former RAF officer (and personal friend): “I think holding onto small cities was a mistake, the rebels have bogged themselves down there and waited for the fight to come. Ideally, defence should have been based on the ‘restricted block methodology’ (ie: Stalingrad) freeing up manpower to build SUV mobile platoons heading for Tripoli and locking the government in. Not rocket science, infantry 101 which concerns me about the skills of the regular Libyan NCO/Officers.” This graduate of Fort Benning, for what little that is worth (and truly, it is not worth much at all; the only times I have been in a combat zone have been as a civilian) concurs. Andrew Exum also concurs. (Oh man did his post bring back memories of digging. And getting tear-gassed. But I digress.) 

[. . .]

In this war, the logistical advantage is gone: the U.N. forces are going to make sure of that. In the east, you are going to have ugly ugly irregular fighting until the last of the Gaddafi forces are gone. In the west, though, it depends.

One smart policy would be to promise financial rewards to defecting Libyan forces, including foreign-born militia. With economic sanctions on, Gaddafi is down to paying to his troops from his cash reserves. He can’t export oil or gas, he can’t access his foreign assets. Libya is also an importer of gasoline (this is not unusual for oil producing countries). The rebels knew this, and hijacked vessels headed to Gaddafi-held territory, but now NATO navies are enforcing a blockade. Moreover, the Ras Lanouf refinery is damaged and on fire.

Another smart policy would be to call off the International Criminal Court and offer a blanket amnesty. I am sure that Venezuela would be happy to take the Colonel. (Once upon a time, I would have thought Saudi Arabia, and that might still be a possibility, even with the recent collapse in U.S.-Saudi relations.)

In short, the U.N. coalition is going to dismantle Gaddafi’s air defenses and enforce a no-drive zone. The rebels will root out government forces in the east in awful fighting to which the press will probably not pay much attention. Then we are going to get a waiting game. Even with sanctions, Gaddafi can hold out for a long time, especially if his troops think that the alternative is death. Thus, bribes ... but somehow I do not think that is going to happen. In short, we could have a long waiting game, unless

• blogTO points out a map--well-grounded, this time--by a pro-Transit City group that doesn't want all the money put to subways.


• Bruce Sterling links, at Beyond the Beyond, to a promo video by fashion deisgners Rodarte, combining their distressed fabrics with the Space X experimental labs.


• Centauri Dreams also reports on the anomalous heat generation on Enceladus, suggesting that this makes the case for oceans on that Saturn moon all the more likely.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the various stealth aircraft projects around the world.


• Daniel Drezner engages with the question, newly energized by the revelations surrounding the interactions and support lent by prominent political scientists and others when Gaddafi seemed a reformist, and what the academy's relationship with power should be.


• Eastern Approaches reports on the Estonian elections, which kept the free-market Reform Party in power.


• GNXP notes DNA studies suggesting that the most diverse human populations are in southern Africa, not eastern Africa, suggesting either that southern Africa is where our species evolved or that greater diversity in eastern Africa was overwhelmed by recent migrations.


• Language Hat takes a look at language in Libya, where the Arabic language is well-ensconced but notable language minorities remain.


• Language Log has at Christopher Hitchens for his tendentiousness re: the usage of "brutalizes". Who knew he was so retro?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Scott Lemieux wonders when Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is going to note that, actually, all that it took was for anti-gay policies to be removed and campuses did see ROTC again.


• Slap Upside the Head is thoroughly unimpressed with Mayor Ford and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, inasmuch as their feud is threatening city funding of Toronto pride.


• Spacing Toronto's Jessica Lemieux takes a look at soil remediation in formerly industrial areas of Toronto.


• Torontoist's reports on the straight students in a Toronto school's gay-straight alliance.


• Towleroad's Andrew Belonsky notes Grindr's expansion to Android, wondering about the potential for spontaneous contacts the software offers based on shared interests.