A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams notes how gas giants on eccentric orbits can easily disrupt bodies on orbits inwards.


• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber suggests that the political culture of England has been deformed by the trauma experienced by young children of the elites at boarding schools.


• Dangerous Minds looks at the haunting art of Paul Delvaux.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the work of Tressie McMillan Cottom in investigating for-profit higher education.


• Far Outliers looks at Tripoli in 1801.


• Gizmodo shares the Boeing design for the moon lander it proposes for NASA in 2024.


• io9 shares words from cast of Terminator: Dark Fate about the importance of the Mexican-American frontier.


• JSTOR Daily makes a case against killing spiders trapped in one's home.


• Language Hat notes a recovered 17th century translation of a Dutch bible into the Austronesian language of Siraya, spoken in Taiwan.


• Language Log looks at the origin of the word "brogue".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the payday lender industry.


• Marginal Revolution notes a new biography of Walter Raleigh, a maker of empire indeed.


• The NYR Daily looks at a new dance show using the rhythms of the words of writer Robert Walser.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at how, in a quantum universe, time and space could still be continuous not discrete.


• Strange Company looks at a court case from 1910s Brooklyn, about a parrot that swore.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an affirmative action court case in which it was ruled that someone from Gibraltar did not count as Hispanic.


• Window on Eurasia notes rhetoric claiming that Russians are the largest divided people on the Earth.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at lizards and at California's legendary Highway 101.

• Kingston is expanding and modernizing its docks to accommodate cruise ships, Global News reports.


• Le Devoir reports on how gentrification in Montréal is pushing artists out of the once-inexpensive Mile-Ex neighbourhood.


• In an era where Québec City is pushing for more mass transit, the idea of building a third bridge across the St. Lawrence to relieve car congestion is controversial. CTV reports.


• Guardian Cities reports on how a fairground built in Tripoli by Oscar Neimeyer is falling into, perhaps irreparable, disrepair.


• Open Democracy reports on how new urban development is pushing out many people from old Tashkent.

• Bloomberg notes the decline of Japan's solar energy boom with falling subsidies, suggests 1970s-style stagflation will be back, looks at how an urban area in Japan is dealing with overcrowding, looks at Russia-NATO tensions, and examines how Ireland is welcoming British bankers.


• Bloomberg View looks at the return of Russian tourists to Turkey, notes Russia is not suffering from a brain drain, looks at the Brexit vote as examining the power of the old, and argues the Chilcot report defends Blair from accusations of lying.


• CBC reports on the end of Blackberry's manufacturing of the Classic.


• The Globe and Mail notes that, once, gay white men were on the outside.


• The Independent describes claims that refugees in Libya who cannot pay their brokers risk being rendered into organs.


• The Inter Press Service describes the horrors of Sudan and looks at how Russia will use Brexit to fight sanctions in the European Union.


• MacLean's reports on the opening up of the Arctic Ocean to fishing and looks at Winnipeg support for Pride in Steinbach.


• The National Post reports on the plague of Pablo Escobar's hippos in Colombia, looks at Vietnam's protests of Chinese military maneuvers, and examines Turkey's foreign policy catastrophes.


• Open Democracy notes the desperate need for stability in Libya.


• The Smithsonian reports on how video games are becoming the stuff of history.

• Bloomberg notes California's dependence on oil imports, looks at how Libya's internal divisions limit oil exports, observes the devastation of Fort McMurray, reports on EU-Turkish disputes on visa-free travel, observes the problems of Belarus' banks, and reports on Kenya's closure of Somali refugee camps.


• Bloomberg View talks about how the Venezuelan military should be kept out of business.


• Daily Xtra notes the internal struggle in the Conservative Party to accept same-sex marriage.


• The National Post notes an arson attack against Canada's only sex reassignment clinic.


• New Scientist reports on a suggestion that life might have begun on Earth at a very early date.


• The New York Times notes the impact that the marriage of the American consul-general in Shanghai to a Taiwanese man has had on China.


• Open Democracy describes the worsening situation in Turkish Kurdistan.


• Wired notes that Huawei was too eager to copy everything about the iPhone, even screws which aren't very good.

Libya’s United-Nations-brokered peace deal may help calm deepening political turmoil, but the North African nation will struggle to restore oil production to levels reached before the Arab Spring five years ago.

Output in the country with Africa’s largest oil reserves has slumped almost 80 percent since Muammar Qaddafi was toppled. Representatives from the two rival factions that emerged after a 2011 rebellion ended the dictator’s 42-year rule -- an Islamist-backed government in Tripoli and an internationally recognized administration operating out of the east -- signed a peace deal on Thursday, paving the way for shuttered oil fields and export terminals to be reopened.

While a lasting peace deal would allow the North African country to ramp up its output from below 400,000 barrels a day last month, the threat from Islamic State in the oil-producing Sirte region means the situation may get worse in the short term, according to Richard Mallinson, a London-based geopolitical analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd.

“There’s no immediate signs that it’s opening up oil facilities,” he said by phone. “The risk is that this expansion of Islamic state into the Sirte basin and some of the producing fields there is a bigger risk than production coming back.”

While the world’s attention has been focused on the US-led military interventions in Iraq and Syria, a quieter build-up of military assets has been continuing along the newer, western front of the 'war on terror'. The security crises in Libya and north-eastern Nigeria escalate and the conflict in northern Mali is far from over. And, amid revolutionary change in Burkina Faso, the efforts of outsiders to enforce an authoritarian and exclusionary status quo across the Sahel-Sahara look increasingly fragile and misdirected.

In early August, coinciding with the restructuring of French military operations in the Sahel and the US-Africa Leaders Summit, Oxford Research Group and the Remote Control Project published a comprehensive assessment of counter-terrorist operations targeting jihadist groups in the Sahel-Sahara region of north-west Africa. That report found extensive and growing evidence of combat, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), training and equipment, abduction and rendition programmes on this new frontier. While France and the US were easily the most active foreign actors, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and several other NATO states were also found to be increasingly involved in special forces and ISR operations.

The launch coincided with the onset of air attacks on Islamic State targets, initially by the US in northern Iraq and latterly by a broad coalition of Western and Arab states in Iraq and Syria. In a context of worsening security crises in Libya, Nigeria and northern Mali and Niger since, US and UK ISR activity is increasing, French deployments in Mali have been reinforced, a new configuration of Arab states has provided impetus for foreign intervention in Libya’s civil war and a “black spring” backlash is emerging against the west’s authoritarian allies in the region.

Libya is at the core of the security crisis in the Sahel-Sahara. Since the NATO-led military intervention which overthrew the Qaddafi regime in 2011, Libya has become a security and political vacuum and a major exporter of weapons and insecurity in the region. This has included the return home to the Sahel of hundreds of combatants formerly given refuge or employment by the Libyan state.

• Al Jazeera notes the breakdown of the Libyan state.


• Bloomberg mentions Finland's new interest in NATO, notes European Union plans to strengthen sanctions against Russia, takes note of China's vetoing of democracy in Hong Kong and looks at China's strengthening of its South China Sea holdings, and in West Africa notes the unburied bodies in the street in countries hit by Ebola and observes the apparent spread of the epidemic to Senegal.


• Bloomberg View observes how the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong is alienating Taiwan, notes that Scotland may secure its future in the European Union by leaving a United Kingdom hoping to leave, looks at the frightening military theories of Russia, considers whether taxation may spur corporate consumption in Korea, wonders if France's Hollande can pull off Mitterand's turn to the right, examines secular stagnation, considers the issues of Macau, and warns Israel about economic issues ahead.


• CBC looks at how walking bichir fish may explain how vertebrates moved onto the land, notes that Canadian federal government roundtables on the sex trade aren't inviting sex workers, and notes that convicted serial killer Russell Williams has settled lawsuits made by some victims and their families.


• Defense One notes that the Islamic State controls mainly areas around roads (but then, the roads are usually the areas that are controlled).


• The Inter Press Service examines the settlement of Somalian refugees in Istanbul, considers the future of Ukrainian agriculture, looks at the spread of jihadi sentiments in Tajikistan, points out that the United States and Brazil will soon improve genetically engineered trees, examines anti-gay persecution in Lebanon, and looks at the legacies of the balsero migration from Cuba 20 years later.


• National Geographic examines the positions of Yazidis in northern Iraq versus the Islamic State, notes the mobilizatin of Assyrian Christian refugees in the same region, and notes that more trees in the mountains of California means less run-off.


• Open Democracy notes the precedents for Russian policy in Ukraine two decades earlier in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and provides a critical tourist's perspective on Belarus.


• Universe Today notes an ancient star that preserves legacies of the first generation of stars to form, and observes the preparation for the landing of the Philae probe on the surface of its comet.


• Wired examines sriracha and maps where future roads should be placed.

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling points towards the first step of the exact role that the famed underground tunnels of Gaza have on the political economy of that territory.


• Crooked Timber's John Holbo argues that the legacies of coded racism used by many Republicans in the United States continues to make the party not credible among non-whites.


• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird points to a new study arguing that stars richer in heavy elements than our own (elements like uranium) are likely to have planets that have more heavy elements than our Earth, meaning more geologically active planets on account of the additional energy.


• Eastern Approaches notes the ongoing deterioration of Serbian-Croatian relations.


• At False Steps, Paul Drye profiles the nearly successful Hermes spaceplane planned by the European Space Agency for the 1990s, undermined by technical challenges and the costs of German reunification.


• Far Outliers quotes J.H. Elliott on the Catalonial rebellion of 1640, coinciding at the time with rebellion against Spanish rule in Portugal.


• At Normblog, Norman Geras links to a tribunal set up by Iranian exiles to gather evidence about crimes committed by the Islamic Republic.


• Registan's Casey Michel wonders if claims that Kazakhstan in 1992 turned down a proposal by Libya's Gaddafi to keep its nuclear weapons are being publicized to distract from Kazakhstan's authoritarian government.


• Steve Munro gives a positive review of a TTC-themed play.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes Pat Robertson's statement that young-earth creationism is not biblical. Robertson knows, I suspect, that linking any belief system to something incredible undermines the belief system.

bradhicks

The stories out of Libya and Egypt broke just as I was going to bed. (I sleep at weird hours in my old age.) When I woke up, and skimmed a half-dozen news sites to see what had changed and started to write something up, only to find out that Richard Engel was going to be on Rachel Maddow's show, so I sat down and shut up and waited politely, because what Richard Engel doesn't know about the current politics of the Middle East, and the players, I could calligraph onto my thumbnail with a Speedball C-3 point. I would, frankly, think more highly of any politician if, anytime something surprising happened in the middle east, when he was asked about it, said, "I don't know, yet, I'm waiting to hear from Richard Engel." It turns out he didn't have a lot more to say than was on the other sites, but Maddow's intro story had the pieces I was missing.

What happened yesterday breaks down into four very distinct stories, and don't trust anybody who tries to lump them together: (1) the military-style assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador to Libya and burned down the consulate; (2) the completely unrelated mob protest on the US embassy in Cairo that was, almost inexplicably, allowed to enter and vandalize the compound; (3) the covert-ops media provocation that was behind the Cairo riot; and (4) the story of how one American political campaign tried to politicize this before knowing any of the facts and shot their foot off. I'm not going to say anything further about story #4; it's beneath my contempt and will, frankly, no longer matter when people's attention drifts away from in it the next couple of days. But those first three stories have fascinating back story, and/or fascinating recent reporting, that you may want to know while your co-workers and friends are blathering about them.

[. . .]

It doesn't make any sense to talk about what just happened, either in Libya or in Egypt, without catching you up on what's been happening in each of those countries since their previous military dictatorships were toppled, a year and a half ago, in the Arab Spring. Both countries are having the same problem that every post-revolutionary government has in its first couple of years: until the victorious side (and, to some extent, the supporters of the vanquished out-going government, and to even larger extent the vast majority who don't care as long as they have a job and can afford to pay their bills and there's some semblance of policing and sanitation) agree on what constitutes a legitimate post-dictatorship government, there are a lot of heavily armed groups running around, confident that they can overthrow the next government if they don't like it any better, who remain to be convinced that they won't need to.

• 80 Beats reports on new research arguing that Easter Island was doomed not by the people's overuse of resources but rather by invasive rats.


• Writing at the Everyday Sociology Blog, Colby King describes how he experienced Las Vegas as a sociologist and as a tourist at once.


• Eastern Approaches notes the success of the heavily Russophone-supported Harmony Centre party in the recent Latvian election.


• Far Outliers quotes from Bloodlands about the ways in which casualty numbers and perpetrators are used to deploy Second World War casualty figures for political reasons.


• Geocurrents reports on the nationalism and history of the Barotse people of western Zambia.


• The Global Sociology Blog observes that Western countries allow the export of relatively inexpensive and highly capable surveillance technologies that permit governance both minimalist and repressive.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín (originally writing in Spanish but translated via Google Translate) talks about how migrants are willing to take risks--including participate in the sex trade--in order to benefit themselves in the longer run in unknown or uncertain ways.
  
• Normblog's Norman Geras is overkind to people who suspect that Gadaffi wouldn't have engaged in a bloody massacre of Benghazi had his forces been allowed to enter the city before the NATO intervention.
  
• Slap Upside the Head seems not that pleased that queer men in Britain can now donate blood if they haven't had sex in the year prior to their donation.
  
• Writing in French at Une heure de peine (but translated into English thanks to Google Translate), Denis Colombi argues that the example of Steve Jobs shows that capitalism needs charismatic businessmen if it's to innovate.