A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
  
• Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.


• The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.


• Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.


• Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.


• The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.


• Reddit's mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.


• Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.


• Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.


• Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.


• Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.


• Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.

• io9 notes that kale, cauliflower, and collards all are product of the same species.


• The Dragon's Gaze speculates on the detection of Earth analogues late in their lifespan and notes the failure to discover a predicted circumbinary brown dwarf at V471 Tauri.


• The Dragon's Tales shares Lockheed's suggestion that it is on the verge of developing a 300-kilowatt laser weapon.


• Far Outliers considers the question of who is to blame for the Khmer Rouge.


• Joe. My. God. notes that One Million Moms is hostile to the free WiFi of McDonald's.


• Spacing Toronto notes an 1855 circus riot sparked by a visit of clowns to the wrong brothel.


• Torontoist notes how demographic changes in different Toronto neighbourhoods means some schools are closing while others are straining.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes a California court ruling not recognizing the competence of the Iranian judicial system in a civil case on the grounds of its discrimination against religious minorities and women.


• Window on Eurasia considers the implications of peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine, notes the steady integration of Abkhazia and South Ossetia into Russia, and notes Russian fascism.

‘[I]ndependence’ will bring little to most South Ossetians – they will be condemned to isolation, marginality, and dependence. The prospects for cooperation with Georgia, its natural economic partner, and contacts with the rest of the South Caucasus through traditional seasonal work and cross border trade, are closed. In the 2012 South Ossetian presidential elections, all four candidates declared they would not engage with the Georgian government. Local migration to North Ossetia and Russia has accelerated, particularly among youth, adding to the SOAO’s demographic decline (villages are disproportionately made up of older women).

the 2012 elections, Alla Dzhioyeva, an anti-corruption crusader against Eduard Kokoity, the outgoing president (unrecognised by Georgia and the rest of the international community), had victory snatched from her by the South Ossetian Supreme Court. Dzhioyeva’s challenge had been unexpected, and she was not Russia’s preferred candidate. Although Dzhioyeva was later given a cabinet post, it illustrated the region’s limited political autonomy, underlined by the intimidating and unchallengeable presence of the Russian military. That court decision supported the Georgian contention that South Ossetia is a not a real state, but a Russian vassal, subject to Russia’s strategic goals. South Ossetia’s borders remain under Russian control, and South Ossetian foreign policy simply does not exist.

South Ossetia does not have the autonomous functions of a state able to provide for its citizens, 80% of whom hold Russian passports. There is constant talk (which goes back to irredentist demands made in the early 1990s) by Putin and local South Ossetian parties for a simple solution – union with North Ossetia. This means annexation by Russia because North Ossetia is part of the Russian Federation. United Ossetia, one of the nine parties running in the June 2014 South Ossetian parliamentary elections, has made union with North Ossetia central to its platform. It would be a popular decision. In a rare independent survey of South Ossetians in 2010 by Gerard Toal and John O’Loughlin, over 80% expressed the desire for union with the Russian Federation, and 82% wanted Russian troops to remain in South Ossetia permanently. Unlike Abkhazia, there is, paradoxically, little support for independence.

[. . .]

There are, in addition, potential repercussions in the North Caucasus if annexation takes place. The North Caucasus, which consists of six non-Russian autonomous republics (which contain significant ethnic Russian populations) and over 40 national groups, is crisscrossed with conflict between clans, regions, religions and republics; there are multiple border disputes – between Ingushetia and Chechnya, North Ossetia and Ingushetia, between Kabardins and Balkars, and between Kumyks and Chechens in Daghestan, to mention just a few. Changing borders in the Caucasus is rarely accomplished peacefully, and right now Russia does not want to endanger its precarious control over the North Caucasian Federal District.

• Crooked Timber continues its immigration and open borders symposium, wondering about the European Union.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that brown dwarfs will also form planets out of their discs.


• The Dragon's Tales tracks the Ukrainian conflict.


• Eastern Approaches notes that, despite continued warm feelings for the United States, Poland is now becoming concerned with its affairs as a European power.


• Language Hat notes how for many Russians in the 19th century, Francophilia was seen as a shame, a betrayal.


• At Language of the World, Asya Perelstvaig notes efforts among some local Christian Arabs to revive the Aramaic language.


• James Nicoll of More Words, Deeper Hole reviews fondly the Joan Vinge classic novel Psion.


• At the Planetary Society Blog, Bill Dunford shares photos of the tracks of Mars rovers taken by the rovers themselves.


• Steve Munro links to John Lorinc's series of articles at Spacing on the neglect of transit to the benefit of talking in Scarborough.


• Towleroad notes a recent meeting held in Vienna, funded by a Russian oligarch, aimed at fighting gays.


• Window on Eurasia notes the role played by Facebook in coordinating recent anti-government protests in Abkhazia and observes fears for the Crimean Tatars among scholars.

• Here on Livejournal, Elf Sternberg notes that the sort of homophobia that reduces same-sex partners to sex acts and anatomical parts is also really unflattering to heterosexuals, too.


• The New Scientist notes a recent paleogenetic study suggesting that among the legacies left to Homo sapiens by Neanderthals may be lighter skin and straighter hair.


• Bloomberg notes that growing official homophobia is making lives for GLBT people across Africa more difficult than ever before.


• The Guardian suggests suggests that the growing crackdown on student visas in the United Kingdom may be alienating future professionals from Britain, and notes that migrants from Mali are going to Africa much more than Europe nowadays.


• Al Jazeera provides background to the ethnic conflict ongoing in the Central African Republic and notes the popularity of Korean popular culture in northeastern India based--among other things--on shared race.


• New York magazine notes the absurdity of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas claiming that Georgia in the 1960s was race-neutral.


• In the Caucasus, Eurasianet notes that Georgia wants to join NATO to get its lost territories back (another reason not to let it in) and that Abkhazia has not benefitted from the Olympics as some had hoped.


• Radio Free Europe notes that Serbian and Bosnian Serb migrant workers at Sochi seem to have gotten screwed over.


• The New York Post traces the genesis of Suzanne Vega's songs in different places around New York City.

• 80 Beats observes that scientists found proof that weather affects continental plates. This discovery has implications for the geologies of other planets.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason is displeased with Ontario's left-wing New Democratic Party for its opportunistic misunderstanding of radiation levels in its opposition to nuclear power.


• bitterlawngnome has photos of yesterday's controlled burn in Toronto's High Park. Aiming to simulate the natural wildfires of the ecology, it creates some unearthly beauty.


• blogTO has more on the controlled burn.


• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes that the cohorts of young people in both San Francisco and Portland (Oregon) is either static or shrinking.


• demographer links to a map showing the dates the countries of the world adopted their national anthems. The United Kingdom, Argentina, and Peru seem to have some of the oldest.


• Eastern Approaches blogs about the weakness of social capital--and, by extension, civil society--in Georgia.


• Matt Warren at The Long Game acquits George Lucas of misogyny in the Star Wars movies since he can't write realistic characters as a rule.


• At NewAPPS, Caterina Dutilh Novaes writes about how, in the wake of the mass shooting at a Rio de Janeiro school, efforts to reduce the availability of firearms in Brazil are continuing (and may already have reduced the homicide rate substantially).


• pollotenchegg has a Ukrainian-language post here (translated into English here taking a look at different demographic trends in Poland. The division between pre-1939 Poland and the territories annexed in 1945 is notable.


• Quiet Babylon's Tim Maly notes that virtual reality failed as a project, that augmented reality has taken its place instead.


• Slap Upside the Head observes that today is the Day of Silence, a day aiming to publicize and combat the existence of homophobic bullying.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that the recent visit of Abkhazia's president Sergey Bagapsh to Turkey indicates Turkey's desire to establish closer relations with the various parties in the South Caucasus without risking diplomatic issues with the West over recognition or with other diasporas over other territories.

A singer from 1970s disco group Boney M continues a visit to Georgia's rebel region of Abkhazia on Wednesday after a concert intended to promote the war-scarred territory abroad, officials said.

Singer Sheila Bonnick performed Boney M's hits at a concert on Tuesday in Sukhumi, the capital of the disputed Russian-backed region which fought a war to break away from ex-Soviet Georgia in the 1990s and has since seen repeated outbreaks of violence.

"It is very important in terms of promoting our country outside of Abkhazia," the region's culture minister, Nugzar Logua, told local news agency Apsnypress, adding that the concert was also a "kind of gift" to people who fought for Abkhazia.

Bonnick described the Abkhaz people as "warm and hospitable" and said that she would spend Wednesday sightseeing in the breakaway Black Sea region, the news agency said.

Bonnick is one of several singers performing Boney M hits like "Rasputin" and "Daddy Cool" around the world after the original group split, and her concert is not the first time that the 1970s disco stars have become involved in the long-running conflicts in Georgia.

In 2007, the Georgian authorities brought Boney M singer Marcia Barrett to play near the frontline in another Russian-backed rebel region, South Ossetia, to promote their campaign to regain control.

• 80 Beats announces that Japan's solar sail craft is working nicely.


• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew writes that the Toronto Transit Commission might be insensitively making use of eminent domain, but at least--unlike its counterpart in the Australian state of Victoria--it's actually telling the people whose property it's confiscating (or wants to confiscate).


• blogTO's Robyn Urback informs us that the Toronto Reference Library, my favourite library, is--like other downtown buildings--infested with bedbugs.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh writes about the Polish economy and the extreme care to avoid Baltic-style debt bubbles its leaders must demonstrate.


• Geocurrents observes that China and India are so solidly the world's most populous countries, not only are they far and away the two most populous countries in the world, 39 of the 61 most populous political subdivisions or either Chinese or Indian.


• At the Grumpy Sociologist, David Mayeda crunches data on problems experienced by students in the United States, suggests that students of indigenous background--American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Hawaiian--are significantly more likely to experience violence than students of other demographic groups. Is the violence of colonization continuing?, Mayeda suggests.


• Joe. My. God lets us know that the tourism agency of Mexico City--a polity which earlier recognized same-sex marriage--is offering a free honeymoon to the first Argentine couple married under the new marriage laws.


• Over at Towleroad, there's an scandal caused by a German football/soccer coach who claims that there were too many games on Germany's third-placing World Cup team.


• Wasatch Economics' Scott Peterson notes that, very rapidly over the past decade, China has replaced the United States as Japan's leading trade partner.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the European Union--not the United States--is moving towards engaging with Abkhazia on the principle of "involvement without recognition," potentially giving Abkhazia more options other than the Russian.

Kiren Keke, Nauru's minister of foreign affairs, trade, and finance, visited the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, today, where he said that his country is ready to begin discussions on recognizing the region as an independent country.

On December 13 Keke was in Moscow, where he held talks with Kremlin authorities on Russia's allocation of $50 million for "urgent socioeconomic projects in Nauru," according to RFE/RL's Russian Service.

In mid-November, Russia actively participated in an international conference for donors to Nauru, which has some 14,000 inhabitants and is thought to be the smallest republic in the world.

Breakaway leaders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia announced their territories' independence from Georgia soon after the five-day military conflict between Georgian and Russian forces.

The pro-Moscow governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela recognized the rebel regions' independence this year.

Andrei Zagorsky, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs, told RFE/RL that the practice of "buying the loyalty of other countries" is not new.

He said that if Russia's goal is to increase the number of countries that recognize South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, then Moscow's strategy is justified.

"We have established relations with the world's biggest nation (Russia), and now with the smallest," Abkhaz Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba told Reuters.

But Georgia said Russia had "bought recognition." "It doesn't change anything in international politics," said Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili. "If someone is happy that Abkhazia is now recognized by the country no one knew about yesterday, let him be happy."

Russia's Kommersant newspaper cited a source on Monday as saying Nauru had asked Russia for $50 million for projects on the island, which once made its money from exporting phosphates mined from fossilized bird droppings.

Asked if Nauru had been paid to recognize Abkhazia, Shamba replied: "You don't establish diplomatic relations like that ... although of course the entire international practice is sheer bargaining to a certain extent."

Abkhazians have ceased to worry about renewed war with Georgia since Moscow recognised their independence a year ago, but now opposition politicians fear their government is surrendering hard-won freedoms to Russia.

Russia and Nicaragua are the only countries that consider Abkhazia to be an independent state, following its unilateral declaration of independence from Georgia in 1991, meaning initial hopes that the Black Sea territory’s foreign policy could be “multi-vectoral” - looking towards Russia, Europe and Turkey - have been stillborn.

In the year since the August war between Russia and Georgia, Abkhazian president Sergei Bagapsh has signed deals giving Russia control over the border with Georgia proper, the Abkhazian railway network and airport, as well as rights to search for oil off its coast.

[. . .]

The issue of Russian influence is likely to dominate the December elections, but in reality the government of Abkhazia’s options are highly constrained by its dependence on Russia for trade and access to the outside world.

Half the state’s budget is a gift from Moscow, 95 per cent of trade goes across Abkhazia’s northern border, most inward investment is from Russia, and holidaymakers – who support most of Abkhazia’s economy – are almost all from Russia.

Apart from that, most Abkhazians have Russian passports, and local pensioners receive Russian pensions, which are ten times larger than they would get from Abkhazia.