A Bit More Detail

• Dangerous Minds takes note of a robot that grows marijuana.


• The Dragon's Tales has a nice links roundup looking at what is happening with robots.


• Far Outliers notes the differences between the African and Indian experiences in the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing recovers a Paul Goodman essay from 1969 talking about making technology a domain not of science but of philosophy.


• JSTOR Daily notes the mid-19th century origins of the United States National Weather Service in the American military.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extent to which Jared Kushner is not an amazingly good politician.


• The Map Room Blog notes artist Jake Berman's maps of vintage transit systems in the United States.


• The NYR Daily examines The Price of Everything, a documentary about the international trade in artworks.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw wonders how long the centre will hold in a world that seems to be screaming out of control. (I wish to be hopeful, myself.)


• Drew Rowsome reports on a Toronto production of Hair, 50 years young.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shows maps depicting the very high levels of air pollution prevailing in parts of London.


• Window on Eurasia <a href="http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/01/black-january-in-baku-time-and-place.html'><U>remembers</u></a> Black January in Baku, a Soviet occupation of the Azerbaijani capital in 1990 that hastened Soviet dissolution.</li> </ul>

• Centauri Dreams notes the remarkably complex system of Proxima Centauri, with multiple belts and more possible planets, as does D-Brief.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of a new sort of fusion reactions, involving not atoms but quarks.


• Hornet Stories notes a new acoustic cover of the Kinky Boots song "Not My Father's Son."


• Language Hat takes a brief look at Cyrillic, since the Soviet era written in Cyrillic script.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how the Trump Administration is unconcerned by the latest report regarding catastrophic climate change.


• The LRB Blog notes how Armenia and Armenians remember past genocides and current refugee flows.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the further extension of the Dawn mission at Ceres.


• Drew Rowsome shares some of Stephen King's tips for aspiring writers.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how some long-exposure Hubble photographs of galaxies picked up nearby asteroids.


• John Scalzi shares his cover of "Rocket Man".


• Window on Eurasia wonders if ISIS is spreading into Russia via migrant workers from Central Asia.

• blogTO notes the rapid expansion of A&Ws across Toronto's neighbourhoods.


• Centauri Dreams reports that none of the exoplanets of nearby Wolf 1061 are likely to support Earth-like environments, owing to their eccentric and occasionally overclose orbits.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper looking at high-temperature condensate clouds in hot Jupiter atmospheres.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on Trump's unsecured Android phone.


• Language Log reports on Caucasian words relating to tea.


• The LRB Blog notes the emerging close links connecting May's United Kingdom with Trump's United States and Netanyahu's Israel.


• Marginal Revolution shares an interview with chef and researcher Mark Miller and reports on the massive scale of Chinese investment in Cambodia.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the idea of choosing between the Moon and Mars as particular targets of manned space exploration.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the mechanics of imposing a 20% tax in the United States on Mexican imports. (It is doable.)


• The Russian Demographics Blog reports Russian shortfalls in funding HIV/AIDS medication programs.


• Supernova Condensate warns that Trump's hostility to the very idea of climate change threatens the world.


• Towleroad shares the first gay kiss of (an) Iceman in Marvel's comics.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the constitutional problems with Trump's executive order against sanctuary cities.


• Window on Eurasia argues Ukraine is willing to fight if need be, even if sold out by Trump.

• Apostrophen's 'Natha Smith talks about his tradition of the stuffed Christmas stocking.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling talks about the decline of the Pebble wearables.


• blogTO lists some of the hot new bookstores in Toronto.
  
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about some of her family's traditions.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the ancient history of rice cultivation in the Indus Valley Civilization.


• Joe. My. God. notes the willingness of the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation to recognize same-sex marriages.


• Language Log shares a photo of an unusual multi-script ad from East Asia.
  
• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the Russian involvement in the American election and its import.


• Marginal Revolution links to a book about the transition in China's financial sector.


• Window on Eurasia reports on efforts to revive the moribund and very complex Caucasian of Ubykh.

• blogTO looks at 1970s representations of Toronto on television and in film.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the genesis of antimatter propulsion.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper asking if we might be one of the first intelligent civilizations to arise.


• Joe. My. God. notes the questioned future of Orlando's Pulse nightclub.


• Language Log reports on a fascinating-sounding concert of the Turkic world's music.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little considers ethnographic studies of far-right movements and their memberships.

If 2015 was the year of purges of regional elites for the North Caucasus, 2016 will be the year of political innovation. And Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has been first off the starting blocks.

Kadyrov began the year by announcing a new political agenda — at a federal, not just regional level. In a joint statement with two other senior Chechen politicians, Kadyrov labelled Russia’s opposition and dissenters as “enemies of the people” and “traitors”.

The North Caucasus, and particularly Dagestan and Ingushetia in the region’s east, is bound to respond to these clear (and pretty scary) signals. Especially when you consider that the local political process is already moving in a dangerous direction. Both state and public institutions are in decline. They are short of money and no longer care where and how they get it. The law of ‘might is right’ is back, and it isn’t just Kadyrov’s dog Tarzan who is sharpening his fangs.

In the 1990s, when the Russian state was ‘on its knees’, the institutional specifics of the Caucasus came to the fore in the growth of ethnic nationalist movements, a rise in religious fervour and the emergence of Islamist parties.

In its most brutal moments, the national-liberation struggle descended into open war, while global Islam became the ideology behind the ‘village revolutions’ in rural Dagestan. At one point, two villages (Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi) declared themselves an ‘independent Islamic state’.

During the gloomy years of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the infamous ‘power vertical’ was built in the North Caucasus, and with it, the emergence of a new political class. This new group came from former members of the FSB and other defence and law enforcement operatives.

A narrow valley in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, Pankisi Gorge is back on the local and international media radar. In fact, Pankisi has been the centre of attention for the past year after it was discovered in June 2014 that Abu Omar Al-Shishani, a leading commander in Islamic State, was born and raised here.

The focus on Al-Shishani has done Pankisi, and coverage of the region, few favours. Beka Bajelidze, Caucasus director at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), stresses that both local and international media reports lack context and deeper analysis. 'Foreign media was concerned only with the personality of Tarkhan Baritashvili [birth name of Abu Omar Al-Shishani] when they came to report from Pankisi.' Bajelidze tells me. 'They were not interested in the bigger picture - why mainly young people are joining insurgents in Syria.'

Bajelidze believes that, at a time when a lot of journalists solely rely on desktop research and online sources, they get disconnected from the reality on the ground, producing unverified and often biased material.

According to Bajelidze, Georgian news outlets also lack in-depth knowledge of Pankisi. Their reports are affected by prevalent attitudes towards ethno-religious minorities: 'For some journalists, it is enough to know that [Pankisi's inhabitants] are Muslim. Religion becomes the main cause of radicalisation. They often do not take into consideration factors such as the lack of inclusion in local governance, institutional support and social and economic alienation.'

Local and international media reports strengthen Pankisi's already infamous reputation as a cradle of radicals, criminals and terrorists in Georgia. This reputation emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the gorge became a haven not only for thousands of Chechen refugees fleeing the war with Russia, but also a base from which Arab and Chechen militants, allegedly with ties to al-Qaeda, could launch strikes into Russia. By 2004, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had cleared the gorge of paramilitary fighters – with US support – and dispersed the majority of the area's well-established criminal gangs.

Were it not for the snow-capped summit of Mount Ararat shimmering in the distance, or the closer rumble of spluttering Lada cars, casual visitors to the downtown Lahmajun restaurant might be forgiven for thinking they’d strayed into Aleppo’s teeming old city.

Flour-covered bakers busily prep dough with minced meat toppings while peppering their speech with Arabic swear words. They greet regular diners with effusive Middle Eastern courtesy and break stride only to catch flashes of news from their TV.

Ever since he fled Syria’s commercial capital in mid-2012, when the country’s civil war took a serious turn for the worse, Gaidzas Jabakjunian has done his utmost to recreate the eatery he once operated in the heart of his beloved hometown.

“It reminds us of Aleppo,” he said, casting a quick, wistful glance at a photo of the city’s now mostly destroyed citadel. “It was the good life there, and we want things to be good here too.” In his absence, the city and its ancient monuments have crumbled amid government barrel bombs and rebel shelling.

But like many of the other 16,000 or so Syrians of Armenian origin who have descended on this small, landlocked state perched high in the Caucasus mountains, he’s found an imperfect sanctuary.

• Centauri Dreams considers the perhaps implausible magnetic sail.


• Crooked Timber looks at William Gibson's new novel, The Peripheral.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that half of all red dwarf stars might host Earth-like or super-Earth-like planets.


• D-Brief looks at the latest findings from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.


• Joe. My. God. notes Irish same-sex marriage activists turning to their Irish-American counterparts.


• Language Log considers the distinction, in official Chinese, between "accident" and "incident".


• The Planetary Society Blog considers the dynamics of the geysers and subsurface ocean of Enceladus.


• Savage Minds notes that the 17th of February is national anthropology day.


• Towleroad notes that Scotland has hosted its first pagan same-sex wedding.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an odd dispute, one parent suing another for writing a book about their moderately famous autistic son.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russia's proposal to try a Russian soldier accused of murdering an Armenian family in a Russian court in Armenia, and points to armed unrest in Turkmenistan.

• Al Jazeera notes that Tunisia is still on the brink, looks at the good relations between Indians and Pakistanis outside of South Asia, suspects that a largely Armenian-populated area in Georgia might erupt, and reports on satellite imagery of Boko Haram's devastation in Nigeria.


• Bloomberg notes that a North Korean camp survivor caught in lies might stop his campaign, reports on Arab cartoonists' fears in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, notes the consequences on Portugal of a slowdown in Angola's economy, and notes that the shift in the franc's value has brought shoppers from Switzerland to Germany while devastating some mutual funds.


• Bloomberg View warns about anti-immigrant movements in Europe and notes that Turkey's leadership can't claim a commitment to freedom of the press.


• The Inter Press Service notes Pakistani hostility to Afghan migrants, notes disappearances of Sri Lankan cartoonists, and looks at HIV among Zimbabwe's children.


• Open Democracy is critical of the myth of Irish slavery, notes the uses of incivility, and observes that more French Muslims work for French security than for Al-Qaeda.


• Wired looks at life in the coldest town in the world, and notes another setback in the fight for primate rights.