A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of rocky debris indicative of destroyed planets in orbit of the white dwarf SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, 400 light-years away.


• JSTOR Daily shows how the Columbine massacre led to a resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US.


• Language Log notes an example of digraphia, two scripts, in use in Taiwan.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money identifies the presidential run of Howard Schultz in ways unflattering to him yet accurate.


• The LRB Blog takes a look at the current, unsettling, stage of artificial intelligence research.


• At the NYR Daily, Boyd Tonkin writes about an exhibition of the works of Van Gogh at the Tate Britain highlighting his ties with England and with his Europeanness.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on the ultimate fate of the Earth, a cinder orbiting a black dwarf.


• Strange Company tells the strange, sad story of 19th century California writer Yda Hillis Addis.


• At Vintage Space, Amy Shira Teitel explains why the Apollo missions made use of a dangerous pure-oxygen environment.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, 41 years ago, protests in Georgia forced the Soviet Union to let the Georgian republic keep Georgian as its official language.


• Arnold Zwicky starts with peeps and goes on to look at dragons.

• 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>

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her rules for life.


• The Crux explores the development of robots that can learn from each other.


• JSTOR Daily explores the legal and environmental reasons why commercial supersonic flight never took off.


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines what might have been had the F-14 Tomcat never escaped development hell.


• Peter Watts wonders if, with de-extinction becoming possible, future generations might become even less careful with the environment, knowing they can fix things and never bothering to do so.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw argues that, with MOOCs and multiple careers in a working lifespan, autodidacticism is bound to return.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Marc Rayman looks at the final orbits of the Dawn probe over Ceres and the expected scientific returns.


• Roads and Kingdoms explores the New Jersey sandwich known, alternatively, as the Taylor ham and the pork roll.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers what led to the early universe having an excess of matter over antimatter.


• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy explores why the California Supreme Court took the trifurcation of California off referendum papers.


• Window on Eurasia notes how some in independent Azerbaijan fears that Iranian ethnic Azeris might try to subvert the independent country's secularism.

• Bulgaria and Macedonia have at last signed a treaty trying to put their contentious past behind them. Greece next?


• The legacies of Stalinist deportations in Moldova continue to trouble this poor country.


• The plight of the ethnic Georgians apparently permanently displaced from Georgia has been only muted by time.

• blogTO notes the 1970s, when Yonge around Queen was under reconstruction.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her writing life in New York City.


• The Crux considers: Neandertal or Neanderthal?


• Dangerous Minds notes the new Laibach app.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at evaporating hot Jupiter HD 209458b.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russia's planned reduction of its crew on the International Space Station.


• Joe. My. God. notes the reactions of the Trump camp to Hillary's alt-right speech.


• Language Hat links to a paper examining the transition from classical to modern Arabic.


• Marginal Revolution considers the economics of durable art.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at post-Soviet patterns of migration and examines the ethnic composition of Georgia circa 1926.


• Une heure de peine reports on a new French series on sociology in comic book format.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the legal question of a head transplant.


• Window on Eurasia notes the violent rivalries of the two Donbas republics and looks at a refugee-prompted restricted movement zone on Russia's frontier with Norway.

• Bloomberg notes that Azerbaijan's oil wealth lets it outspend Armenia on military good, looks at a hydropower project in Congo intended to eventually protect mountain gorillas, and notes that spending on solar and wind energy is outpacing fossil fuel spending.


• CBC notes the alarming possibility that smart devices could be bricked by their manufacturers.


• The Dragon's Tales linked to a Eurekalert press release examining how population levels in the pre-Columbian Southwest were intimately tied to climate.


• Fortune reports about the many failures of the F-35 project.


• The National Post notes that a gay atheist Malaysian student in Winnipeg has received asylum and looks at the discontent of Jewish groups with an inclusion committee at York University.


• Vox suggests
  

• 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.

Conspiracy theories are no stranger to resourceful leaders. They can consolidate political power, cultivate the image of an external enemy and reduce their responsibility for the nation's ills. And in the ex-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, conspiracy theories help keep incumbent president Ilham Aliyev in power.

According to these conspiracies, Azerbaijan has two main enemies: the Armenian lobby and the jealous west. As the former is often said to finance the latter, these two enemies become one: an omnipresent and all-powerful ‘Armenian lobby’. This powerful structure has become a commonly used weapon in the hands of the authoritarian leadership of Azerbaijan to crack down on dissent. By referring to all of its critics both at home and abroad as Armenian, pro-Armenian, and representing Armenian interests, the authorities have created a quick conspiracy formula for muzzling independent voices by labelling them as traitors.

In Azerbaijan, Armenia wasn’t always used as a political tool—at least, not as much as today. Between 1988 and 1994, the two countries fought a bitter war over the mountainous area of Nagorno Karabakh. The ceasefire that ended the conflict in 1994 failed to maintain a buffer zone.

Casualties on the front line continue to this day, and the failure to reach an agreement between the two states to this day leaves the territory administered as an unrecognised state under Armenian protection. Thousands of civilians have been displaced. Warlike rhetoric has significantly increased over the years and, these days, it is the rubber stamped government policy in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Sandwiched between Turkey and Russia, and for centuries a battleground for the erstwhile empires, the South Caucasus is bracing for fallout from the geopolitical furor sparked by the Turkish downing of a Russian fighter jet.

Memories of multiple Ottoman-Tsarist wars that ravaged the South Caucasus from the 17th to the 20th centuries still exert influence over public opinion in the region. But modern-day issues wield the most influence in shaping loyalties, splitting the region into pro-Turkey and pro-Russia camps. The three states in the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – are coming under growing pressure to choose sides following Turkey’s November 24 shoot-down of the Su-24 fighter.

Armenia, Russia’s main, if only, committed ally in the South Caucasus, has been quick in unequivocally backing the Kremlin. With no diplomatic ties with Turkey to worry about, Yerevan essentially has echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “stab-in-the-back” line about Turkey’s conduct.

Armenian public opinion backs Moscow’s military objectives in Syria, according to policy analyst Vahram Ter-Matevosian, a lecturer at the American University of Armenia. Prior to the outbreak of the civil war, Syria had been home to a large ethnic Armenian Diaspora. Meanwhile, Russia has long been a guarantor of Armenia’s security, a status underscored by the presence of a Russian military base in the northern Armenian town of Gyumri, not far from the Turkish border.

With Russia’s actions in Syria possibly set to expand, Moscow might look to use Gyumri as a “lily pad” facility that supports its Syrian campaign.

The “increasing military engagement of the Russian armed forces in this war [in Syria] will require huge resources,” said Ter-Matevosian. “Armenia is the closest [place] to the Syrian front where Russia has military bases. Hence, Armenia, as Russia’s strategic ally and a CSTO [Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization] member, may be asked to contribute.”

The three main capital cities of the region have their own distinct histories. A century ago, neither Tbilisi (Tiflis), Baku, nor Yerevan had a majority population of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, or Armenians, respectively. Tbilisi can lay claim to being the capital of the Caucasus, but its Georgian character has been much more intermittent. For five hundred years it was an Arab town, while the older city of Mtskheta was the old Georgian capital. Then, in the medieval period, the city was taken over by the Armenian merchant class. They were the biggest community in the nineteenth century and finally left en masse only in the 1960s. Famous Tbilisi Armenians have included the world chess champion Tigran Petrosian and the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Baku became a cosmopolitan city with many different ethnic groups from the late nineteenth century. Russian became its lingua franca. Garry Kasparov, the Jewish Armenian world chess champion, who was born in Baku but is unable to return there because of his Armenian roots, describes his nationality as “Bakuvian” (Bakinets in Russian). Baku only turned into a strongly Azerbaijani city with the end of the Soviet Union, the Nagorny Karabakh war, and the mass emigration of other national groups.

By contrast, up until the First World War, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, had a Persian flavor and a Muslim majority population. Its major landmark was a blue-tiled mosque, and there was no big church. Von Haxthausen wrote, “In Tiflis, Europe and Asia may be said to meet, and the town has a divided aspect; but Erivan is a purely Asiatic city: everything is Oriental, except a few newly-built Russian houses, and occasionally Russian uniforms in the streets.” More Armenians lived in Tiflis, Baku, Shusha, and Van. Yerevan became an Armenian city only after the mass flight of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and of Azerbaijanis from eastern Armenia in 1915–18.