A Bit More Detail

• blogTO notes that TTC tunnels will get WiFi in 2018.


• Border Thinking's Laura Augustín shares some of Edvard Munch's brothel paintings.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the latest science on fast radio bursts.


• Dangerous Minds shares some of the sexy covers of Yugoslavian computer magazine Računari.


• Dead Things looks at the latest research into dinosaur eggs.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that a high surface magnetic field in a red giant star indicates a recent swallowing of a planet.


• Language Log shares an ad for a portable smog mask from China.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue with the idea of NAFTA being of general benefit to Mexico.


• Torontoist looks at the history of Toronto General Hospital.


• Window on Eurasia is skeptical about an American proposal for Ukraine, and suggests Ossetian reunification within Russia is the next annexation likely to be made by Russia.

• Anthropology.net notes the ancient Bronze Age trade routes between Iran and Mesopotamia.


• blogTO notes the impending facelift of Osgoode subway station.


• James Bow overhears a conversation at the DMV started by a guy who wanted special vanity plates.


• Centauri Dreams notes a proposed satellite that would be dedicated to the search for planets around Alpha Centauri.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that stellar metallicity has nothing to do with planet formation.


• Far Outliers notes religious warfare in the Central African Republic.


• Geocurrents notes the superb Middle Eastern maps of the Institute for the Study of War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible effects of gentrification.


• Marginal Revolution notes Finland's introduction of a guaranteed minimum income.


• pollotenchegg maps the distribution of Russian and Ukrainian populations in Ukraine.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes senior poverty around the world.


• Transit Toronto notes that the last of the Orion V buses have left the service of the TTC.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russia's redirection of traffic from ports in the Baltic States, observes the need for a modern Ukrainian military, and suggests Russia will annex South Ossetia.

• blogTO comes up with a shortlist of some of the most noteworthy Giorgio Mammoliti controversies.


• Centauri Dreams has a couple of posts (1, 2) talking about how nice it would be to have space probes orbiting the ice giants of Uranus and Neptune.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an analysis suggesting that Russia is going to annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia to punish Georgia.


• Language Log tackles a myth that vocal fry is caused by stress.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the superexploitation associated with prison labour.


• Steve Munro notes the latest delays with reopening Queens Quay to streetcars.


• The Search has a fascinating interview regarding what it takes to archive electronic art, including video and programs.


• Torontoist shares photos of the Monday night storm.


• Towleroad notes the story of two Texas gay fathers who not only weren't allowed to cross-adopt the other's biological son (each father having one child, both children product of the same egg donor), but who weren't registered as the fathers of their own biological child.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that up to a quarter-million people were displaced in Brazil to make way for the World Cup.


• Window on Eurasia notes the weakness of Russian liberalism.

• Eastern Approaches follows the story of Crimean Tatars who are now refugees in western Ukraine.


• At the Financial Times' The World blog, John Reed examines the unlikely media star who is Crimean attorney-general Natalia Poklonskaya.


• A Fistful of Euros' David Weman notes the United Nations vote against the annexation of Crimea by Russia.


• Geocurrents has a series of posts on Ukraine and its area: one on the Moldovan region of Transnistria, a possible western anchor for Russia; one on Transcarpathia, a Ruthene-populated enclave in western Ukraine not quite Ukrainian; one on Ukraine's energy reserves.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley notes the Russian takeover of the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet ships based in Crimea.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh points out the many, many ways in which Kosovo does not compare to Crimea.


• Window on Eurasia has a veritable brace of posts. Crimeans aren't taking up Russian passports with much enthusiasm, it seems, while the financial costs of annexation will be significant indeed. A Russian war in southeastern Ukraine would be a difficult war to fight, while post-Soviet space has already been destabilized (1, 2). Will South Ossetia be next to be annexed? (Northern California is not so likely.) Meanwhile, Turkish support for Turkic peoples can be destabilizing.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little takes a social science approach to the Russian annexation. What does it mean for the international system's future? Will there be more annexations?

• Here on Livejournal, Elf Sternberg notes that the sort of homophobia that reduces same-sex partners to sex acts and anatomical parts is also really unflattering to heterosexuals, too.


• The New Scientist notes a recent paleogenetic study suggesting that among the legacies left to Homo sapiens by Neanderthals may be lighter skin and straighter hair.


• Bloomberg notes that growing official homophobia is making lives for GLBT people across Africa more difficult than ever before.


• The Guardian suggests suggests that the growing crackdown on student visas in the United Kingdom may be alienating future professionals from Britain, and notes that migrants from Mali are going to Africa much more than Europe nowadays.


• Al Jazeera provides background to the ethnic conflict ongoing in the Central African Republic and notes the popularity of Korean popular culture in northeastern India based--among other things--on shared race.


• New York magazine notes the absurdity of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas claiming that Georgia in the 1960s was race-neutral.


• In the Caucasus, Eurasianet notes that Georgia wants to join NATO to get its lost territories back (another reason not to let it in) and that Abkhazia has not benefitted from the Olympics as some had hoped.


• Radio Free Europe notes that Serbian and Bosnian Serb migrant workers at Sochi seem to have gotten screwed over.


• The New York Post traces the genesis of Suzanne Vega's songs in different places around New York City.

Kiren Keke, Nauru's minister of foreign affairs, trade, and finance, visited the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, today, where he said that his country is ready to begin discussions on recognizing the region as an independent country.

On December 13 Keke was in Moscow, where he held talks with Kremlin authorities on Russia's allocation of $50 million for "urgent socioeconomic projects in Nauru," according to RFE/RL's Russian Service.

In mid-November, Russia actively participated in an international conference for donors to Nauru, which has some 14,000 inhabitants and is thought to be the smallest republic in the world.

Breakaway leaders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia announced their territories' independence from Georgia soon after the five-day military conflict between Georgian and Russian forces.

The pro-Moscow governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela recognized the rebel regions' independence this year.

Andrei Zagorsky, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs, told RFE/RL that the practice of "buying the loyalty of other countries" is not new.

He said that if Russia's goal is to increase the number of countries that recognize South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, then Moscow's strategy is justified.

"We have established relations with the world's biggest nation (Russia), and now with the smallest," Abkhaz Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba told Reuters.

But Georgia said Russia had "bought recognition." "It doesn't change anything in international politics," said Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili. "If someone is happy that Abkhazia is now recognized by the country no one knew about yesterday, let him be happy."

Russia's Kommersant newspaper cited a source on Monday as saying Nauru had asked Russia for $50 million for projects on the island, which once made its money from exporting phosphates mined from fossilized bird droppings.

Asked if Nauru had been paid to recognize Abkhazia, Shamba replied: "You don't establish diplomatic relations like that ... although of course the entire international practice is sheer bargaining to a certain extent."

An independent report blamed Georgia on Wednesday for starting last year's five-day war with Russia, but said Moscow's military response went beyond reasonable limits and violated international law.

The report commissioned by the European Union said both sides had broken international humanitarian laws and found evidence of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Georgians during Russia's intervention in the rebel province of South Ossetia.

Each side said the report backed up its interpretation of the war. But the findings were particularly critical of U.S. ally Georgia's conduct under President Mikheil Saakashvili and are likely to further damage his political standing.

[. . .]

"In the Mission's view, it was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked Tskhinvali (in South Ossetia) with heavy artillery on the night of 7 to 8 August 2008," said Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who led the investigation.

The report said the war followed tensions and provocations by Russia, but Tagliavini said: "None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack lend it a valid explanation."

Saakashvili had said Georgia was responding to an invasion by Russian forces when it attacked breakaway South Ossetia, but the report found no evidence of this.

It said Russia's counter-strike was initially legal, but its military response violated international law when Russian forces pushed into Georgia proper.

"Although it should be admitted that it is not easy to decide where the line must be drawn, it seems, however, that much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defence," the report said

[. . .]

Tbilisi says 228 Georgian civilians were killed in the war and 184 Georgian servicemen are dead or missing. Russia says 64 of its servicemen and 162 South Ossetian civilians were killed, but also says the figure for civilian deaths could be higher.

The report found no evidence to support Russian allegations that Georgia was carrying out genocide against the South Ossetian population.

But it said there were "serious indications" of ethnic cleaning against ethnic Georgians in South Ossetia and found Russian forces "would not or could not" stop atrocities by armed groups in areas they controlled.

• Daniel Drezner is tired of writer Robert D. Kaplan's continued proclamations, in his books and his magazines and elsewhere, of the impending breakdown of the state in the face of ancient geographical and cultural constraints, when in fact no such thing seems to be happening.


• Far Outliers takes a look at the inability of the League of Nations or the United Nations to constrain 1930s Japanese expansionism in China, owing to Japan's single-minded determination to proceed, while also taking a look at the German influence on Latin American militaries after the Franco-Prussian War.


• Larkvi's Sean Winslow blogs about the Great Stela--obelisk--of Axum, an ancient kingdom in located in modern Ethiopia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Charli Carpenter examines the war in Afghanistan, contrasting between collateral damage and "lawfare" (human shields used by the Taliban), and argues that to be effective NATO has to abandon its reliance on airpower and send in the troops.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen examines the reasons for Ireland's sharp economic collapse, and his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok points to research suggesting that the Venezuelan state has in fact retaliated against signers of an anti-Chavez petition.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio links to an article of his where he ponders if the proliferation of social networking, by encouraging people to pay only partial attention to their surroundings, might discourage empathy.


• Dylan Reid at Spacing Toronto explores some of the new French SMS/flash mob street protests, and Matthew Blackett takes a look at the streets of Reykjavik for much the same.


• Strange Maps introduces us to a political cartoon showing iconic representations of different Asian powers peering ominously at a dangerously unpopulated and white Australia.


• Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn examines the 1880 assassination of Toronto newspaper publisher George Brown (the Globe), while on a walk through a Toronto neighbourhood Damutal Hotan lets us know about the cost differences between red and yellow brick in the 19th century.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's guest blogger Adam Mossoff reports on the dastardly sewing machine monopoly of the 19th century United States.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that there is some pent-up demand for Ukrainian-language schools in Russia and observes that Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov would like to annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.

[. . .]

In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, some 50 miles to the southeast, Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader was emerging. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a longtime anti-Soviet dissident, based his campaign for the presidency on a vaulting Georgian nationalism — an idea powerful enough to fill the vacuum left by Communism’s collapse.

The platform, known as Georgia for the Georgians, cast ethnic Georgians, who made up 70 percent of the population, as the country’s true masters. Mr. Gamsakhurdia derided South Ossetians as newcomers, saying they had arrived only 600 years ago and as tools of the Soviet Union.

On the street in Tskhinvali, small changes began to appear.

Ms. Alborova’s aunt was exasperated to go to the store and see that pasta manufactured in Russia had been put in packages labeled with Georgian script. Her neighbor Emma Gasiyeva kept hearing slogans: “Brush them out with a broom!” and “Who are the guests, and who are the hosts?” a reference to the theory that Ossetians had been brought to the area as agricultural workers.

The government in Tbilisi established Georgian as the country’s principal language, enraging the Ossetians, whose first two languages were Russian and Ossetian. A few months later, more than 10,000 Georgian demonstrators were transported to Tskhinvali in buses and encircled the city, until they were repelled by Ossetian irregulars and Soviet troops. A true war began in 1991, when thousands of Georgian soldiers entered Tskhinvali. The city was shelled almost nightly from the Georgian-held highlands, and Medeya Alborova recalls holding pillows over her teenage daughters’ heads, as if that could protect them.

When Mrs. Alborova got to Tbilisi to see her relatives, it was like stepping into a parallel universe. She sat with them watching news on Georgian television, as the announcer recited a litany of crimes committed by Ossetians against Georgians. At times, she said, she was not sure she was on the right side of the conflict.

“Georgians have always had a deep affection for Russian people and Russian culture going back centuries,” said Mr. Varsimashvili, speaking in fluent Russian at his theater in a multiethnic neighborhood of Tbilisi plastered with posters showing graphic pictures of Georgians bombed in the recent war.

“We perceive a modern Russia that is big and sometimes monstrous,” he said. “But the difference between Georgians and Russians is that we have never mistaken the Russian people for the Russian government.”

[. . .]

Yet the reality here is more complex. Although the Georgian government has spent the years since the Soviet Union fell promoting Georgian identity, Georgian society remains infused with an appreciation for Russian culture that Georgian sociologists and historians say will outlive this latest round of tensions.

A monument to Alexander Pushkin, a Russian poet and icon who once visited Tbilisi for inspiration, stands in a park just off Freedom Square in the city. Georgian television channels routinely broadcast old Russian films, kiosks sell Russian-language fashion magazines and Russian pop music blares from taxi radios. While Georgians proudly cling to their distinct centuries-old language, Russian is the second language here.

[. . .]

“We hate the policies of the Russian government, but we do not hate the Russian people,” said Zura Pushauvi, looking over the rubble of his bombed-out casino in Gori, a central Georgian city. A statue of Stalin, Georgia’s best-known son, peered from outside a shattered window. “This war was a spat between two global powers. It was not an ethnic war between Georgians and Russians.”

[. . .]

Some ethnic Russians living in Georgia, of which there are around 70,000, said the war had forced them to choose sides. Nadejna Diakonova-Giuashvili, an ethnic Russian whose late husband was a Georgian officer in the Russian Army, recently escaped to a refugee center in Gori after fleeing from her bombed-out Georgian village near South Ossetia. She said she was now ashamed to be Russian.

“I’m so ashamed to look in the eyes of my neighbors after what Russia has done,” she said, speaking in both Russian and Georgian. “I only learned my husband was Georgian when he signed his name on the marriage registry the day we were married,” she said. “He spoke fluent Russian, and he tricked me. But I didn’t care. We have the same blood.”

Some ethnic Russians here said bubbling anti-Russian sentiment had forced them to conceal their Russian identity, even as they insisted they had no intention of leaving Georgia, where they had lived for decades.

Vera Tsereteli, who moved from Moscow to Tbilisi more than 30 years ago, said her Georgian friends still greeted her with a kiss even as they teased her by calling her an “occupier.” She is unable to speak Georgian, and she said she was now wary of speaking Russian in public.

[. . .]

“During Soviet times, it was prestigious to speak Russian and a sign of being educated and refined,” she said. “Now, Russia is associated with occupation, annexation and refugees.”

Irina Minasyan, a Russian-speaking Georgian of Armenian descent, said she feared her 13-year-old son, Edgar, could face limited career prospects because he attended a Russian school in Tbilisi. “A lot of people have switched their children from Russian to Georgian schools since the war began,” she said. “The young generation is anti-Russian, and I worry about Edgar’s future.”

• Kalinga Seneviratne in "Population Decline - Enter the Matchmaker" takes a look at how, instead of doing anything to alleviate conditions of gender inequality and economic hardship that help discourage family formation, the Singaporean government is trying to promote matchmakers as a useful new tool for boosting the birth rate.


• Zoltán Dujisin's "How the Hawks Won" makes a direct connection between Saakaashvili's recently increasing authoritarianism at home and his recent appalling poor performance in the recent war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If those two territories-soon-to-be-countries distrusted Georgina promises before ...


• Mario Osava in "The Complications of Coming into Sudden (Oil) Wealth" examines how Brazilians and their government are thinking about regulating the revenues set to be produced by Brazil's massive new offshore oil. Demagoguery is a well-justified fear.


• Zoltán Dujisin in "Russian Language Toned Down: takes a look at recent trend in language policy and use in Ukraine, where education and other government facilities has been steadily Ukrainianized even as most of the mass media and business remain Russophone, and knowledge and use of the Ukrainian language are growing particularly among the young and in southern Ukraien. (After the fall of the Soviet Union Russophones and Ukrainopphones were roughly equally as numerous.)


• Vesna Peric Zimonjic writes ("Uneasy Over the Kosovo Parallel With Georgia") about how public opinion in Serbia, while broadly supportive of Russia, are concerned about the certain associations that the precedent of recognizing the independence of a territory liberated by foreign intervention from ethnic cleansing and a threatened genocide have with their own recent history. Kosovars, for their part, deny the relevance of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to their situation.


• Lowana Veal's "Filling Up on Hydrogen" takes a look at how, thanks in no small measure to cheap and abundant geothermal energy, hydrogen-fuelled cars and boats are starting to appeal in some number.