A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait evaluates the doability of Elon Musk's proposal for colonizing Mars.


• blogTO notes that Casa Loma will be transformed into a haunted house for the month of October.


• The Dragon's Tales notes NASA's belief that Europa almost certainly has watery plumes.


• False Steps shares an early American proposal for a lunar base.


• Far Outliers notes the location of multiple massacres in Chinese military history.


• Joe. My. God. notes that a far-right group is unhappy Alabama judge Roy Moore has been suspended.


• The Map Room Blog notes the acquisition of a British-era map of Detroit.


• Marginal Revolution speculates as to whether a country's VAT promotes exports.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the end of the Rosetta space probe.


• The Russian Demographics Blog charts increases in maximum life expectancy over time.


• Seriously Science notes a paper arguing that small talk diminishes happiness.


• Towleroad reports on a gay Cameroonian asylum seeker in the United Kingdom at risk of deportation.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes Instapundit's departure from Twitter without noting why Reynolds is leaving.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the complexities surrounding the possibility of another Finno-Ugric festival.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the things important to her.


• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram shares a quietly beautiful picture of a Paris cafΘ late at night.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper suggesting that atmospheric haze on exoplanets might be a biosignature.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the Earth appears not to have gotten its water from comets, and examines the geology of Mars' massive Hellas crater.


• Far Outliers notes initial Soviet goals in Afghanistan and looks at Soviet reluctance to get involved.


• Joe. My. God. notes panic in the Republican Party establishment over a possible victory of Carson or Trump.


• Language Hat notes some online resources on Beowulf and the Hittite language.


• pollotenchegg maps the distribution of ethnic Germans in Ukraine in 1926.


• Torontoist notes an architecturally sensitive data centre on Cabbagetown's Parliament Street.


• Towleroad notes Ukraine's passage of a LGBT employment non-discrimination bill.


• Window on Eurasia notes Putin's attempt at forming an anti-globalist coalition and notes Russian opinions about Western passivity.

• blogTO notes the heavy level of pollution in Toronto Harbour following recent rains, and suggests Toronto is set to get gigabit Internet speeds.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her recent vacation in Donegal.


• Centauri Dreams revisits Robert L. Forward's Starwisp probe.


• Crooked Timber speculates that there is hope for rapid action on climate change.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on an inflated hot Jupiter orbiting a F-class star.


• The Dragon's Tales shares a vintage supercomputer pamphlet.


• Far Outliers looks at the collapse of the Comanche empire in the 1860s.


• Language Log looks at the controversial English test in France.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reacts to an overly broad pulling of computer games with Confederate flags.


• Steve Munro reacts to the state of streetcar switches.


• Torontoist looks at a queer art exhibition at Bay and Wellesley on sex ed.


• Towleroad shares a straight-married Scottish bishop's tale of same-sex love.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that remembering the Civil War does not requite keeping the Confederate flag.


• Window on Eurasia notes how few Crimeans identify with Russia and looks at Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian influence on Russia's Finno-Ugric minorities.

While Israel is gearing up for the “day after Assad,” without knowing what that day without President Bashar al-Assad will bring, Israel’s neutrality with regard to the civil and ethnic war in Syria is being challenged by an interesting turn of events. In the past few weeks, the heads and leaders of the dominant Druze sect in Israel have turned to Israeli authorities with the request to extend help to the hundreds of thousands of Druze in Syria. These Druze are very concerned about the steady advance of the Islamic rebels toward Jabal al-Druze, or Mount Druze, where the majority of Syrian Druze are concentrated.

The contacts were conducted so quietly that were not revealed until June 12 in the Israeli daily Haaretz. The Druze are characterized as being loyal citizens of the central regime of the country in which they live. The Druze, who are dispersed across Syria, Lebanon and Israel, are viewed as an especially close-knit community that maintains tight cultural and familial connections, despite the borders and even wars that play a role in separating their various population centers in the Middle East. They tend to settle and establish their villages on high, mountainous areas, to improve their self-protection and defense capabilities. In Lebanon they are concentrated around Mount Lebanon and in Syria, at Jabal al-Druze, as well. Most of the Druze villages in Israel are located in the mountainous Galilee region.

There are about 136,000 Druze in Israel today; they signed “a covenant of blood” with the Jews even before the establishment of the State of Israel, taking part in Israel's wars and battles. They have sacrificed their youngsters in Israel's defense. Thus, they are viewed as patriotic Israelis. Members of the Druze community serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and rise to high-level command positions; the conscription percentages among the Druze minority (those who are Israeli citizens are drafted, unlike Golan Heights Druze, who are not drafted) are even higher than that of Jewish Israelis. On average, 83% of them serve in the IDF, compared with 75% among Jewish Israelis.The military cemeteries are full of graves of Druze soldiers. In short, the vast majority of the Israeli Druze identify themselves with the State of Israel.

When Israel conquered the Golan Heights in 1967, about 20,000 additional Druze, residents of the Heights, found themselves living in Israeli territory. In contrast to their Israeli-Druze brethren, most of the Golan Heights Druze remained loyal to Hafez al-Assad’s regime and refused to accept Israeli citizenship, even though it was offered to them. Nevertheless, and despite their strong affiliation to Syria and their refusal to take Israeli citizenship, good relations and mutual trust prevailed between the Druze in the Golan Heights and the Israeli authorities.

At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, the heart of Park Slope’s tree-lined prosperity abruptly gives way to grittier windswept blocks that march south to Sunset Park and west to the Gowanus Canal. Trucks and cars speed down Ninth Street as dusty construction workers, sharply dressed professionals, nannies with strollers, and roughhousing teens hustle across Fifth Avenue, all on their way to somewhere else. Perhaps this neither-here-nor-there-ness explains why two skinned goat heads that appeared without explanation above the intersection last November remained there for days. The heads were tied together at the base of the skull with twine and slung over a light pole on the intersection’s northeast corner. After at least four days, an employee from a nearby car service knocked the goat heads down with a pole and threw them in a garbage can.

Or maybe the sluggish reaction to the Park Slope goat heads signals the extent to which such discoveries have become a routine occurrence in the area. Severed goat heads keep turning up in nearby Prospect Park. Last year alone, readers sent the blog Gothamist photographic evidence of three goat heads found in the park. (In all of these cases, the goat heads had their skin still attached.) Gothamist seems to be experiencing something like goat-head fatigue, judging from the increasingly nonchalant tone of its goat-head coverage. Pretty soon it will probably take a cow head to get them excited. "It's New York,” one spectacularly unimpressed passerby told DNAinfo. “I've seen the towers come down, so beyond that, nothing really stings that bad.”

But while repeated exposure to goat heads may have inured some local residents, others have sensed an unsettling trend. Many news reports about the Park Slope goat heads suggested a dark link to the goat heads discovered in Prospect Park. “Residents have questioned whether the incidents could be connected to religious animal sacrifice,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. The specter of Santería was invoked. The Drudge Report picked up the story. The goat heads went global. As I read all this in my apartment a few blocks from the site of the hanging goat heads, I was riveted. A mysterious flood of goat heads is the only interesting thing that has happened in Park Slope since I moved to the neighborhood three years ago. Yes, the rush to blame a little-understood religion practiced largely by immigrants smacked a bit of lazy xenophobia, but the idea of Park Slope as a hotbed of animal sacrifice, in addition to child-friendly bars, was undeniably intriguing. In a city where everyday occurrences are casually weighed against the events of September 11, 2001, it was shocking to find that so many of my neighbors and I were actually shocked. The goat heads seemed to rear out of some shadow New York City that was even gnarlier than the pre-Guiliani version I’d seen in the movies, and at the edge of Brooklyn’s most thoroughly gentrified neighborhood, to boot. When New York asked me to investigate the goat heads, I leapt at the chance. I wanted to see if the world they hinted at lived up to the hype.

I quickly learned that any answers would not be forthcoming from official channels. The NYPD opened an investigation into the hanging goat heads back in November, but a public information officer with Park Slope’s 78th Precinct informed me that “no further information has been found out.” A spokesman for the Prospect Park Alliance said, “I don't think anyone in the park is going to have that much to say about it.” A FOIL request I filed with the New York City Parks and Recreation Department (for “all records related to reports of decapitated animal corpses and animal heads found in New York City parks between the years 2010–2014”) didn’t seem to be at the top of their list of priorities.

A sculpture of nine eagle feathers will be installed in Bailic Park, in Midleton, Co Cork to thank the Choctaw Indians for their kindness and support during the Great Irish Famine.

Despite the oppression faced by the Choctaws in the years preceding the famine, on hearing of the plight and hunger of the Irish people in 1847, they raised $170 to send to the Irish people and ease their suffering. This figure is equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars in today’s currency.

The sculpture, consisting of nine giant, stainless steel eagle feathers, is currently being completed by Cork sculptor Alex Pentek. Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Pentek says, “I wanted to show the courage, fragility and humanity that they displayed in my work.”

[. . .]

In what is one of the most surprising and generous contributions to Irish famine relief, a group of Choctaw people gathered in Scullyville, Oklahoma, on March 23, 1847 to collect funds for the starving Irish people. They passed money collected onto a U.S. famine relief organization, in an extraordinary act of kindness from those who already had so little.

Just 16 years prior to this collection, the Choctaws were among one of the so-called “civilized tribes”, who were forced off their land by President Andrew Jackson (the son of Irish immigrants) and forced to complete a 500-mile trek to Oklahoma that would become known as the Trail of Tears.

If the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant preaches the truth, why do most Muslims oppose it? “Because most Muslims go to hell,” answered the young man wearing a black hoodie adorned with a Kalashnikov and ISIL’s logo. “The hadith are clear. For every 1,000 [Muslims], 999 will enter hellfire.”

Michael “Younes” Delefortrie, 26, a former Catholic altar boy from a diverse Antwerp suburb, was convicted last month of belonging to a terrorist organization in a trial of 46 members of Sharia4Belgium, a group accused of recruiting young Belgians to fight in Syria. Sentenced to three years of probation and under continued monitoring by the authorities, he sits nervously in a booth at a diner once frequented by the group.

He was answering questions from Palestinian researcher Montasser AlDe’emeh, who grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan and is studying ways of countering the appeal of extreme ideologies to at-risk youth. AlDe’emeh said he believes that exposure to a more sophisticated study of Islam can help some of those recruited by armed groups rethink their fanatical views. He engaged Delefortrie, who adheres to ISIL’s interpretation of Sharia, in a spirited theological discussion on his harsh view of other Muslims — even citing the criticisms of ISIL by Al-Qaeda-associated ideologues.

Delefortrie stayed in Aleppo, Syria, for about five weeks, according to court papers, and while there he posed for photographs with weapons and posted them on his Facebook page, where he named as his employers Jabhat Al-Nusra (the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise) and “Revolusi [revolution] Dawlah Al-Islamiah [ISIL].” He said he told the court he returned to Belgium because he missed his wife and two children. Court documents noted that as a converted Muslim, he likely didn't enjoy much trust among the Syrian rebels.

[. . .]

About 470 Belgians are estimated to be fighting in Syria — the most per capita of any Western European country, according to data compiled by Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a Belgian researcher. The extraordinarily high concentration of recruits to ISIL and other violent groups has put the country in the international spotlight, leaving policymakers searching for a strategy to combat extremism.

When Chinese tour guide Eric Liu found out that Jews were fleeing Paris and other European cities to escape their worsening anti-Semitic environment, he asked if they might want to “return” to his city of Harbin, once among the most vibrant and important Jewish centres in the Far East.

“We welcome them. They are smart, educated and hard-working, and will be a very positive influence for the city,” he said as he recounted the role of Jewish businessmen, musicians, writers, bankers and engineers in making this northeastern Chinese city one of the country’s most prosperous early last century.

[. . .]

China has been quietly growing trade and investment with Israel and Jewish businesses. From about $2.6 billion (US) in 2005, Israel’s bilateral trade with China had grown to $15.59 billion in 2013, just slightly below the $16.3 billion worth of business conducted with the United States.

Given recent growth rates, China could soon overtake the United States as Israel’s largest trading partner, said Ophir Gore, the head of trade mission at the Israeli embassy in Beijing. With China hungry for Israeli water expertise, information technology and farming know-how, the government of Israel has set a target to double its exports to the Asian nation over the next five years.

As if catching up with its own past, Harbin is eager to attract a new wave of Jewish businesses and settlers to replicate the success that the earlier legendary generation had brought. Mayor Song Xibin is leading a delegation to Israel this month to invite Israeli investors to his hometown.

In November of last year, the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso completed an extensive lecture tour of the USA. Of the thousands who showed up for the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s talks, one group arrived without fail to each of his events: crowds of mostly white protestors in Tibetan robes who came to boycott the religious leader. Brandishing placards and shouting slogans, they accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite, a liar and a denier of religious freedom. Calling the leader ‘the worst dictator in this modern day’ and a ‘false Dalai Lama’, the demonstrators seemed to be channelling the most zealous of Chinese Communist Party ideologues. Yet these were no party cadres. Rather, they were converts to the Dalai Lama’s own school of Tibetan Buddhism. As representatives of the ‘International Shugden Community’ (ISC), the protesters came to highlight their grievances over the Dalai Lama’s opposition to a Tibetan deity known as Dorje Shugden, and the discrimination and human rights violations they claim the religious leader’s rejection of this being and its followers has engendered.

The ISC is a major mouth-piece for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), a sect of almost exclusively non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan Buddhism that currently spearheads the global pro-Shugden, anti-Dalai Lama agenda. On the surface, the NKT’s almost two decades-long global campaign against the Dalai Lama and his supporters – that is, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist global population – appears to be primarily about a dispute hinging on opposing theological positions within a single tradition. The Dalai Lama believes that Dorje Shugden is a dangerous demon masquerading as a benign deity, the NKT believes that the being is a bona fide Buddha. What I want to argue here is that the controversy, and specifically NKT’s involvement in it, points as well to the politics of race, appropriation, and privilege involved in conversion and new religious movements, and highlights ongoing tensions between ethno-nationalist and universalist impulses in the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture.

The Dalai Lama and NKT converts are all members of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, in which at least since the 19th century, Dorje Shugden has been seen by some practitioners as a particularly potent ‘protector’ (in Tibetan Buddhism protectors are powerful, yet ferocious, egotistical spirits that have been ritually converted into defenders Buddhism). Although the Dalai Lama is technically not the highest spiritual authority in the Geluk school, his line’s historical political leadership of Tibet has made him one of the school’s most prominent figures. His dual role as a national leader and sectarian authority, however, has generated some tension, and historically the Dalai Lamas’ more inclusive, nationally orientated policies have clashed with the narrower sectarian priorities of some Gelukpa elites. Himself once a Shugden propitiator in accordance with his Geluk education in Tibet, the current Dalai Lama began to voice reservations about the spirit in the 1970s. Shugden’s reputation for ruthlessly punishing (and assassinating) prominent Gelukpa practitioners who engage with teachings from other schools has made the spirit iconic of a certain brand of Geluk supremacism. Such bias is in fundamental conflict with the Dalai Lama’s particularly non-sectarian vision of Tibetan Buddhism and a Tibetan nation in exile. Thus, to protect himself and the Tibetan people from what he sees as a dangerous demon, the Dalai Lama has prohibited those with ritual commitments to the spirit from attending any of his teachings, and has purged exile monastic and government posts of anyone associated with the being.

[. . .]

NKT members have made their quarantine into something of a virtue. NKT converts claim Tibetans have become too worldly and politically-focused to be worthy of functioning as custodians of pure Buddhist teachings. Though inji monks and nuns entering the NKT rely on a Tibetan guru, adopt Tibetan names, wear traditional robes and preserve lineage practices hailing from Tibet, any direct engagement with Tibetan politics or culture is denounced as retrogressive and unnecessary. The NKT’s philosophy is one of ‘one lama, one yidam (meditational deity), one protector’ in reference to their sole reliance on Kelsang Gyatso and his particular teachings, a stance distinctly odds with how Tibetan Buddhism has historically been practiced. Today, the NKT curriculum is based exclusively on Kelsang Gyatso’s texts, and ritual activity and teaching in NKT centres worldwide happens pretty much entirely in languages other than Tibetan.