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  • Adam Fish at anthro{dendum} shares a new take on the atmosphere, as a common good.

  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a photo of Earth taken from a hundred million kilometres away by the OSIRIS-REx probe.

  • The Crux tells the story of how the first exoplanets were found.

  • D-Brief notes that life could be possible on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, assuming it could deal with the blueshifting.

  • io9 looks at the latest bold move of Archie Comics.

  • JSTOR Daily explores cleaning stations, where small fish clean larger ones.

  • Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the role China seeks to play in a remade international order.

  • The Map Room Blog looks at the new upcoming national atlas of Estonia.

  • Marginal Revolution touches on the great ambition of Louis XIV for a global empire.

  • Steve Baker of The Numerati shares photos from his recent trip to Spain.

  • Anya Schiffrin at the NRY Daily explains how American journalist Varian Fry helped her family, and others, escape the Nazis.

  • Drew Rowsome reviews the classic movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

  • Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a map looking at the barriers put up by the high-income world to people moving from outside.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel answers the complex question of how, exactly, the density of a black hole can be measured.

  • John Scalzi at Whatever reviews Gemini Man. Was the high frame rate worth it?

  • Window on Eurasia notes the deep hostility of Tuvins towards a large Russian population in Tuva.

  • Arnold Zwicky considers the existential question of self-aware cartoon characters.

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  • The BBC takes a look at Pontic Greek, a Greek dialect that survives precariously in exile from its homeland in Anatolia.

  • Klaus Meyer writes at The Conversation about how Hitler, in his rise to power, became a German citizen.

  • Low-income families in the Toronto area face serious challenges in getting affordable Internet access. CBC reports.

  • Jeremy Keefe at Global News takes a look at Steve Skafte, an explorer of abandoned roads in Nova Scotia.

  • In some communities in British Columbia, middle-class people have joined criminal gangs for social reasons. CBC reports.

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  • Cody Delistraty considers the new field of dystopian realism--of dystopia as a real thing in contemporary lives--in popular culture.

  • D-Brief notes how direct experiments in laboratories have helped geologists better understand the mantle of the Earth.

  • Far Outliers shares a terribly sad anecdote of a young woman in China who killed herself, victim of social pressures which claim many more victims.

  • Imageo notes how recent headlines about ocean temperature increases are misleading in that they did not represent the steady incremental improvements of science generally.

  • Joe. My. God. notes the unexpectedly rapid shift of the location of the northern magnetic pole.

  • JSTOR Daily links to a paper that links to the quietly subversive aesthetics and politics of the 1950s and 1960s surf movie.

  • Language Hat links to an intriguing paper looking at the relationship between the size of an individual's Broca's area, in their brain, and the ways in which they can learn language.

  • Language Log shares a poster from Taiwan trying to promote use of the Hakka language, currently a threatened language among traditional speakers.

  • Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extreme secrecy of Trump regarding his Helsinki discussions with Putin, going so far as to confiscate his translator's notes.

  • Justin Petrone at north! writes about the exhilarating and liberating joys of hope, of fantasy.

  • The NYR Daily examines the new Alfonso Cuarón film, the autobiographical Roma.

  • Drew Rowsome takes a look at the interesting show by Damien Atkins at Crow's Nest Theatre, We Are Not Alone.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on what a report of the discovery of of the brightest quasar actually means.

  • Window on Eurasia notes the historical cooperation, before Operation Barbarossa, between the Nazis' Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD.

  • Arnold Zwicky shares a video examining Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole still spoken in the Philippines.

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  • Open Democracy notes how the unrestrained and unpunished violence of the far right helped doom the Weimar Republic.

  • VICE reports on a remarkable project, wherein an American in the 1930s solicited and received explanations from Germans as to why they became Nazis. (The letters' language echoes.)

  • This Adnan Khan interview at MacLean's with Russian expert Bobo Lo puts forth the origins and prospects of the Russian challenge to the world order.

  • Given the growing problems of the United States, the fact that American military power versus China or Russia cannot be guaranteed is something Canada needs to take into account. CBC reports.

  • Stephen Maher at MacLean's makes the point that, with the casual corruption of the Doug Ford government, it is as if Ontario is living a Dukes of Hazzard episode.

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  • David Price at {anthro}dendum considers, going through archival material from the 1950s, the number of radical anthropologists in the US as yet little known or unknown who were marginalized by the Red Scare.

  • Centauri Dreams ruminates on a paper examining 'Oumuamua that considers radiation pressure as a factor in its speed. Might it work as--indeed, be?--a lightsail?

  • D-Brief notes the various reasons why the Chinese proposal for an artificial moon of sorts, to illuminate cities at night, would not work very well at all.

  • The Dragon's Tales touches on the perhaps hypocritical anger of Russia at the United States' departure from the INF treaty.

  • Far Outliers notes the sharp divides among Nazi prisoners of war in a camp in Texas, notably between pro- and anti-Nazi prisoners.

  • L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing revisits the original sin of the Internet culture, its imagining of a split between an individual's virtual life and the remainder of their life.

  • The Island Review welcomes, and interviews, its new editor C.C. O'Hanlon.

  • JSTOR Daily explores the reasons for considering climate change to be a national security issue.
  • Language Hat is enthused by the recent publication of a new dictionary of the extinct Anatolian languages of the Indo-European family.

  • Language Log examines the existence of a distinctive, even mocked, southern French accent spoken in and around (among other cities) Toulouse.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the rise of fascism in Brazil with Bolsonaro.

  • Roger Shuy at Lingua Franca writes about the power of correspondence, of written letters, to help language learners. (I concur.)

  • At the LRB Blog, Jeremy Bernstein writes about anti-Semitism in the United States, in the 1930s and now.

  • The NYR Daily examines the life of writer, and long-time exile from her native Portugal, Maria Gabriela Llansol.

  • Haley Gray at Roads and Kingdoms reports on the life and work of Mark Maryboy, a Navajo land rights activist in Utah.

  • Window on Eurasia looks at the Russian urban myth of blonde Baltic snipers from the Baltic States who had been enlisted into wars against Russia like that of Chechnya in the 1990s.

  • Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the classic red phone booths of the United Kingdom, now almost all removed from the streets of the country and sent to a graveyard in a part of rural Yorkshire that has other claims to fame.

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  • In response to a desire to remove an almost bizarre controversial statue of a cow from its location in a neighbourhood in Markham, the owner has sued the city for $C 4 million. The Toronto Star reports.

  • The mayor of Hamilton, Ontario, would like housing incorporated into shopping malls, to deal with issues of housing and retail in one go. Global News reports.

  • Brexit threatens to decidedly destabilize the picture for the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. The Independent reports.

  • Bloomberg notes that the controversial Chinese-owned port of Hambantota, in Sri Lanka, is doing terrible business.

  • Newly-discovered documents provide confirmation of the belief that the Nazis planned to utterly destroy Warsaw. The National Post reports.

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  • Centauri Dreams celebrates the science behind Cassini.

  • Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell is breaking from Harvard's Kennedy Centre over its revocation of an invitation to Chelsea Manning.

  • The Crux points to the ways in which the legacy of Cassini will still be active.

  • D-Brief notes that some tool-using macaques of Thailand are overfishing their environment.

  • Hornet Stories notes the eulogy given by Hillary Clinton at the funeral of Edie Windsor.

  • Inkfish notes one way to define separate bird species: ask the birds what they think. (Literally.)

  • The LRB Blog notes the recent passing of Margot Hielscher, veteran German star and one-time crush of Goebbels.

  • The NYR Daily notes the chilling effects on discourse in India of a string of murders of Indian journalists and writers.

  • At the Planetary Science Blog, Emily Lakdawalla bids farewell to the noble Cassini probe.

  • Roads and Kingdoms notes a breakfast in Bangladesh complicated by child marriage.

  • Towleroad notes an Australian church cancelled an opposite-sex couple's wedding because the bride supports equality.

  • Arnold Zwicky notes the marmots of, among other places, cosmopolitan and multilingual Swiss canton of Graubünden.

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In this weekend's Historicist feature, David Wencer describes for Torontoist an early protest in Toronto against Nazi anti-Semitism and fascism.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 11, 1933, people began gathering in the park at Wellington and Bathurst Streets. Most of the men and women in attendance were labourers, and many were there to represent Toronto’s predominantly Jewish garment industry unions. Some were there to represent various left-wing Toronto political organizations, which were ideologically opposed to Adolf Hitler’s fascist policies and treatment of German workers. Others were motivated to protest by local newspaper reports of pogroms in Hitler’s Germany. Carrying signs and banners reflecting a variety of interests and causes, the crowd paraded up Spadina to Dundas, then east to University Avenue, and finally up University to Queen’s Park, where thousands of others joined. The protest brought together Torontonians of many affiliations, united in their determined opposition to “Hitlerism” and the events unfolding in Germany.

In the early months of 1933, the Toronto press reported regularly on the developments which were taking place in Germany following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. These articles ran not just in the Yiddish-language Der Yiddisher Zhurnal and in radical leftist newspapers, such as Young Worker, but also in the four mainstream Toronto dailies. They described the increasingly restrictive conditions in Germany, and included reports of concentration camps and attacks on Jews in the streets. In their book Riot at Christie Pits, Cyril H. Levitt and William Shaffir write that Toronto’s newspapers “carried horrifying front-page reports of the atrocities against Jews during the first months of Hitler’s rule…In fact, because of the censorship of the media by the Hitler regime, Torontonians probably knew more about what was occurring to Jews in Germany during those fateful months than did most Berliners.”


A Jewish market on Kensington Avenue, January 14, 1932. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1266, Item 26172.
A Jewish market on Kensington Avenue, January 14, 1932. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1266, item 26172.

April of 1933 saw the formation of a new Toronto group, the League for the Defence of Jewish Rights (not to be confused with today’s Jewish Defence League), whose leaders included Rabbi Samuel Sachs and Shmuel Meir Shapiro, editor of Der Yiddisher Zhurnal. The League soon emerged as Toronto’s leading Jewish protest group, and co-organized a massive meeting at Massey Hall on April 2. This meeting, which drew the support of numerous non-Jewish politicians and organizations, included the development of a strategy for countering local antisemitic sentiment, and the organization of a local boycott of German goods. The League was also instrumental in the formation of a new incarnation of a national-level Jewish organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress.

In 1933, Toronto’s Jewish population numbered around 46,000, and was heavily concentrated downtown, near the city’s many clothing factories. In her 1992 book Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto 1900–1939, Ruth A. Frager writes that, by 1931, approximately one-third of Toronto’s gainfully employed Jewish population worked in the needle trades, and that “Jews constituted roughly 46 per cent of the people employed in this sector in this city.”
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  • blogTO notes that Green Day will be headlining a festival in the Distillery District.

  • Centauri Dreams looks at research into an interstellar solar sail.

  • The Dragon's Gaze notes a study of brown dwarf populations.

  • The Dragon's Tales looks at ancient Martian rivers and flood plains.

  • The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the protest of Colin Kaepernick.

  • The Map Room Blog reports on a map exhibition at the Library of Congress.

  • Marginal Revolution notes low murder rates among Haitian-Americans in Florida.

  • The Planetary Society Blog examines the Dawn probe's low orbit scans of Ceres.

  • Otto Pohl announces the beginning of his first semester in Kurdistan.

  • The Volokh Conspiracy notes that it is a crime to talk about the Nazi-Soviet alliance versus Poland in Russia.

  • Window on Eurasia looks at how North Caucasians in Moscow identify quickly as Muscovites.

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  • blogTO notes the all-gender washrooms of the CNE.

  • The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly looks at ways people can preserve themselves.

  • Dangerous Minds shares photos of homeless people, by themselves and dressed in their childhood dreams.

  • False Steps looks at a proposed Soviet orbital tug.

  • Far Outliers looks at the Navajo, at their pastoralist lifestyle, at their adaptiveness, and at their 1864-1865 deportation east and their 1868 return.

  • Marginal Revolution notes the extreme dependence of Australia on China.

  • The Planetary Society Blog considers the question of scale in a Mars photo.

  • Towleroad notes the impending success of Frank Ocean's album.

  • Window on Eurasia suggests Russia is undercounting Ukrainians, despairs for the future of Russia-Ukraine relations, and notes the Hitler-Stalin alliance's legacies.

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  • Anthropology.net notes the discovery of Australopithecus remains east of the Great Rift Valley.

  • blogTO suggests that Toronto restaurants east of the Don face trouble in attracting customers.

  • Patrick Cain maps gentrification over the past decade in Toronto and Vancouver.

  • Geocurrents polls its readers as to what themes they would like the blog to examine.

  • Joe. My. God. shares the new Pet Shop Boys tracks "Burn" and "Undertow".

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the problems of the right in the United States with being consistent in its rhetoric about abortion being murder.

  • Marginal Revolution links to an interesting article suggesting that Soviet movies had fewer Americans villains than one might expect, partly because Nazis filled that niche but also because Americans were not seen as inherently threatening.

  • Personal Reflections looks at the particular fiscal imbalances of Australian federalism.

  • The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer starts to examine the likely consequences of a Venezuelan defaullt.

  • The Volokh Conspiracy notes the ongoing litigation over the Star Trek fan production Axanar.

  • Towleroad notes the first attempts to set up arranged same-sex marriages for people of Indian background.

  • Transit Toronto notes a repair to a secondary entrance of Ossington station and the continued spread of Presto readers throughout the grid.

  • Window on Eurasia suggests Russia is the chief beneficiary of an Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

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Bloomberg's Jeremy Hodges and Kit Chellel tell a remarkable story about how a British exploit in the Second World War made a spa town a leading world centre in cybersecurity.

On a winter’s evening in 1942, a daring raid by British commandos to steal a German radar on the French coast set in motion a series of events that would see a small town, nestled in middle England, become a leading cyber-defense hub.

Malvern is home to more than 80 companies dotted among nondescript office parks in the rolling hills of the Worcestershire market town, about 100 miles north west of London. During World War II, Malvern was used as a radar research center, growing to a large scale government operation that spawned defense contractor Qinetiq Group Plc (QQ/) in 2001.

As the rate and sophistication of cyber-attacks has grown, small, specialist businesses in the region are taking on the hackers, winning contracts with governments and businesses around the world.

In Malvern there is a “long-standing pedigree of specialist security research and delivery expertise,” said Robin King, chief executive officer of Deep-Secure, a 25 employee company that develops software to protect sensitive information and counts the U.K. Ministry of Defence as a client.

[. . .]

In the U.K., Malvern is better known for its mineral water. Its reputation as a spa town dates back to the 17th century when tourists traveled to the area to sample the health-giving properties of the water that ran down from the surrounding hills.
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  • Behind the Numbers' Carl Haub notes that several countries have seen their demographic transitions stall above replacement levels, notably post-Soviet countries but including outliers like Israel and Argentina.

  • Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling describes the reception given to Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show in belle époque Europe.

  • Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster goes into detail about the implication of the discovery of hydrogen peroxide on Europa's surface, and its implications for life in Europa's oceans.

  • Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram argues that while Margaret Thatcher may have managed to Americanize the United Kingdom, she certainly didn't make it more egalitarian or meritocratic.

  • Daniel Drezner wonders if the collapse of China's overextended financial sector could have implications for the future of the Chinese government.

  • Eastern Approaches has three recent posts of note: one regarding political maneuvering around arrests in an increasingly autocratic Ukraine; one from Hungary describing the resignation of a deputy governor of the Bank of Hungary, Julia Király, over concerns that the Orbán government's populism could threaten the country's future; and one from the Czech Republic, about an almost pleasingly non-catastrophic transition from one president to another.

  • False Steps' Paul Drye goes into detail about the orbital mirror proposed by some people in Nazi Germany. It would have worked, but just have been impractical.

  • Geocurrents links to a map of endangered languages around the world.

  • The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that official Argentine statistics might understate levels of poverty, but also notes that levels of poverty have improved markedly over the past decade. Why bad statistics, then?

  • Torontoist blogs about a new tool library in the neighbourhood of Parkdale.

  • A report from Towleroad: apparently it's possibly to identify who, in a same-sex relationship, is more likely to be a top than a bottom and vice versa, on average.

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  • Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.

  • The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination--this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they can't find at home.

  • The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to a proposal by biologists that life initially evolved in highly saline environments.

  • Democracy is still fragile in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Eastern Approaches notes.

  • Odd placenames in Minnesota are analyzed at Far Outliers.

  • A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the translation problems surrounding the Nazi term volkisch, liking one recent translator's suggestion that "racist" works best.

  • Razib Khan at GNXP introduces readers to the historical background behind the recent ethnic conflict in Burma.

  • Itching for Eestimaa's Guistino takes a look at same-sex marriage in Estonia.

  • Savage Minds reviews Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands, which took a look at offshore banking centres like Cyprus.

  • Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes the background behind Elvis' 1957 performances in Toronto.

  • The negative effects of mass migration to Russia from Central Asia on sending countries, especially the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are introduced at Window on Eurasia.

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3 Quarks Daily always links to great material.



Go, read.
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  • 3 Quarks Daily's Azra Raza wonders how, in the face of the difficulty of creating life in the lab, life evolved on Earth as quickly as possible and survived massive asteroidal and cometary bombardments roughly four billion years ago.

  • Andrew at Acts of Minor Treason imagines what the night sky might look like from a habitable world in the planetary system of 55 Cancri.

  • This Centauri Dreams post has a lot of interesting stuff, everything from ideas for space elevators to bacteria discovered kilometres below the Greenland ice sheet.

  • In what now seems to be a fine Republican tradition, Republican Senator John Ensign--he who voted against same-sex marriage bills--has been caught having an affair with the wife of one of his supporters. It's getting to be like the John Major Conservatives, really, when backbenchers kept being found dead, tied to a bed and dressed in women's underwear, every fortnight or so.

  • While tumult in Iran continues--and I wish them the best--Daniel Drezner points out interesting information suggesting that the conservatives are getting help from Russia.

  • Far Outliers has a wealth of material, everything from the nasty civil wars in Nazi-occupied countries to Germany's development of the originally British blitzkrieg theory to the Iranian society to outside observers.

  • Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros argues that the best model for Iranian events can be found in Yerevan, when after an obviously faked election the government clamped down and ended up surviving quite nicely, thank you very much.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money tackles the idea of geoengineering, fearing that it might be used as an excuse to do nothing else on global warming.

  • On yet another blog, Douglas Muir examines why what should be a major Senegalese port, the community of Kaolack, isn't.

  • Open the Future's Jamais Cascio links to some informative videos on geoengineering.

  • [livejournal.com profile] pauldrye blogs about the many, many, destructive uses of Egyptian mummies in the foolish 19th century.

  • Towleroad reports that same-sex couples can use the spouses' name on passports and that the White House wants to include same-sex couples on the census.

  • The Volokh Conspiracy's Dave Kopel blogs about a woman in China who was let off after killing a Communist Party official in self-defense following popular uproar, suggesting that this reflects not the rule of law so much as it does the need to satiate public opinion.

  • Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that at least one Russian newspaper argues that Russian policies are alienating the other post-Soviet states, potentially leaving it alone in the region.

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Today's links post is a big one.


  • At Alpha Sources, Claus Vistesen analyzes the ongoing economic mayhem in the Baltic States, especially in Latvia.

  • Centauri Dreams reports on the first planet, a "cold Jupiter," discovered orbiting a very dim red dwarf star in the neighbourhood thanks to astrometry.

  • Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell reports on a ludicrous paper which argues that problems with the Euro could precipitate interstate war, and Ingrid Robeyns examines the consequence of a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Namibia.

  • False Positives' Ian Irving commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  • On the subject of Poland in the Second World War, Far Outliers blogs about how the Nazis and the Soviets both did their best to decapitate Polish society in the zones that they occupied.

  • Gideon Rachman wonders if California's institutionalized gridlock will become a model for the world.

  • Joe. My. God reports that gay men tend to do better in college than their heterosexual counterparts.

  • Mark MacKinnon blogs about the peaceful democratic elections in Mongolia, which has seen the election of a president who belonged to a party that wasn't descended from the old Communist party.

  • At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the stories of the East Asians who may well have been the first to visit Europe before the modern era.

  • The Pagan Prattle reports on the belief that the Antichrist might be homosexual.

  • Slap Upside the Head lets us know about the recent bill passed by the Alberta provincial legislature which allows parents to pull their children out of classes dealing with GLBT subjects. It would have to be Alberta.

  • Strange Maps describes the barren island of Sable Island, a part of Canada hundreds of kilometres away from Nova Scotia, notable mainly for its herd of wild horses and the many ships wrecked on its adjacent underwater dunes.

  • Towleroad reports on surviving photos of Stonewall taken just after the riots 40 years ago.

  • Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that Moscow's backing away from the claim that Poland started the Second World War, and that efforts to impose a single literary language on the Mordvin might doom this small population.

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    • Acts of Minor Treason features a vintage 1989 photo from the streets of the far northern Ontario community of Moosonee.

    • blogTO's Rick McGinnish blogs about how the corner of Queen Street West and Roncesvalles has remained so astonishingly the same for decades.

    • Centauri Dreams suggests that very soon, we'll be able to see if there are any Earth-like worlds, broadly speaking and otherwise, next door at Alpha Centauri. In addition, it seems as if even during the very heavy bombardment of Earth by various asteroids and comets and whatnot in the period 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, life could have persisted beneath the surface.

    • The Dragon's Tales reports that, in select portions of the Martian surface, rivers may have recently flowed, i.e. less than a billion years ago.

    • Daniel Drezner, Far Outliers, and Lawyers, Guns and Money have all reacted to the publication of the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, a liberal Chinese leader dismissed after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    • Far Outliers blogs about how the British government was so much readier to support the Sudetenland's separation from Czechoslovakia than Ireland's from the United Kingdom, and compares and contrasts the evolution and the fates of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires as seen by contemporaries.

    • A Fistful of Euros reports that, characteristically, the Soviet Union missed the importance entirely of European integration after the failure of the European Defense Community.

    • Hunting Monsters blogs about the numerous reasons for low voter turn-out in European Parliament elections.

    • Paul Wells reports that Canada's fiscal record for the past decade may well make it a better exemplar of fiscal small-c conservatism than the United States, this news leaving some American heads spinning.

    • Joe. My. God reports how some Americans are demanding that the U.S. Census Bureau include questions about same-sex couples in time for 2010.

    • Towleroad documents how Mariela Castro, daughter of Fidel, continued to promote gay rights by taking part in a gay conga line in Havana, and reports on the recent arrest of dozens of gay rights protesters in Moscow during Eurovision.

    • The Volokh Conspiracy's posters are justly critical of the idea of Somali pirates as forces for social justice and cover the decline of universal jurisdiction statutes.

    • Window on Eurasia reports that many Crimean Tatars are unhappy with their continued marginalization in their homeland, regarding education and language issues, land rights, and similar issues.
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    Thanks to Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley for pointing out that Condoleezza Rice said that al-Qaeda was a bigger threat to the United States than Nazi Germany, in a Q&A session with students. (Yes, it's videotaped.)

    Q: Even in World War II facing Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced –

    RICE: Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

    Q: No, but they bombed our allies –

    RICE: No, just a second, just a second. Three-thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

    Q: 500,000 died in World War II –

    RICE: Fighting a war in Europe.

    Q: — and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.

    RICE: We didn’t torture anybody here either.


    So: al-Qaeda is a bigger threat to the United States than Nazi Germany. Think about that one for a bit.

    The original blogger argues that "[i]t’s hard not to read this as an admission by our former Secretary of State that terrorism works — or at least it worked on her, to the extent that it induced her to embrace interrogation methods that previous American administrations prosecuted as crimes. Farley also notes that, "[i]n fact, the German Kriegsmarine sank approximately 600 US and Allied merchant vessels in and around US territorial waters between January and June 1942. These attacks came shortly after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. Approximately 1500 American sailors were killed in these attacks. I suspect that an attack on an American ship in US territorial waters would be interpreted by just about anyone as an attack on the homeland of the United States."

    From Canada, I'd also add the 1942 torpedoing of the Newfoundland ferry S.S. Caribou, at a cost of 137 dead, as an attack against the Canadian mainland, to say nothing of other attacks on ships the German weather-monitoring stations placed at various points on the Atlantic coast.

    What all these means is that, while al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations can do horrible things (assuming that their agents can get past the ever-tightening webs of police and state surveillance, that is), the only organization capable of credibly challenging the existence of a state is another state. If I'm alone and say I plan on destroying Canada, or even if I'm hanging out with a few hundred friends, in person and via social networking, who will say the same thing alongside me, even if we all pledge our energies towards destroying this country, who likely are we to succeed? Really. Police measures are more suited than military interventions, and panic is not your friend regardless else you say silly things like the above and act accordingly. *

    * Unless we're talking about military interventions against states which are involved, seriously at least, in supporting terrorist attacks. That's a different story.

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