[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bag News Notes’ Michael Shaw touches upon the use of infrared photography to detect a hiding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
• The Burgh Diaspora notes the beginning of migration into Poland from western Europe, specifically of professionals fleeing southern Europe.
• Eastern Approaches describes the pragmatic deal struck between Serbia and Kosovo, hopefully allowing both states to normalize.
• Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis blogs about regional trends in economic development in China, coastal provinces rising relative to a declining northeast and interior.
• Marginal Revolution notes a recent study claiming that health in Cuba improved during the 1990s, as a result of the post-Soviet economic contraction and food scarcity. This is debatable.
• Steve Munro continues his analysis of the famously irregular 29 Dufferin bus route.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh points to a UN committee arguing that racist Thilo Sarrazin should be prosecuted on the grounds of hate speech.

[BLOG] Some Monday blog links

• Bag News Notes’ Michael Shaw documents in photographs the docking of the Freedom Tower’s spire with the building.
• The Dragon’s Tales links to a paper analyzing the extent to which increased atmospheric carbon dioxide compensate for a planet’s relatively dimmer, or more distant, sun.
• Daniel Drezner approves of Obama’s attempt to lead public opinion by pointing out that there are a lot of good things going on in Mexico.
• Eastern Approaches notes that Polish prime minister Donald Tusk is encountering serious conflict within his Civic Platform party between social liberals and conservatives.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Sally Roskoff notes that correlation is not causation, starting with an amusing graphic purporting to illustrate the connection between falling rates of Internet Explorer browser usage and falling murder rates.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen starts a discussion about which athletes and entertainers are more likely to come out that others.
• The New APPS Blog’s Helen De Cruz argues that there are proportionally many more female academics in Turkey than (for instance) Belgium because, among other things, the modern tradition of women working in academia is strongly implanted and female academics can easily acquire cheap household labour.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio talks about the fuzzy now. If transported backwards or forwards in time, how long would it take for an observer to pick up on the many small and large changes?
• Understanding Future’s Daniel Little introduces people to some discussions on the future of Detroit.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes a Russian analyst claiming that the Russian elite has definitively accepted the independence of the Baltic States in a way that it hasn’t that of the other former Soviet republics.
• Alex Harrowell does not think that Labour need go out of its way to try to attract UKIP voters to its left-wing economic policies, inasmuch as the only change that Labour could make to attract these UKIP voters is become more bigoted.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Burgh Diaspora notes the migration of Spanish professionals to Morocco. (It’s close and the cost of living is low.)
• Daniel Drezner, in contrast to other writers, has become somewhat more dovish since the Iraq War, but not that much more.
• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, Jonathan Wynn examines the sociological settings of the coverage of the Steubenville rape trials. Among other things, he suggests that the search for novelty, more than an insensitivity to the victim, played a role in CNN’s infamous coverage.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell argues that the British government’s diagnosis of the problems with the British economy is fundamentally flawed, with obvious implications for the recovery of the British economy.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig examines the fascinating birch bark documents from the medieval Russian state of Novgorod.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan notes the evidence of substantial non-European ancestry among South Africa’s Afrikaners.
• Language Hat notes the influence of the Polish language and Roman Catholicism in early modern Ukraine.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis starts an interesting discussion of ethnonational identity, history, and social class in culture from a book on Mexican food.
• Supernova Condensate considers the possibility of life evolving on worlds orbiting bright, massive stars. Planets, at least, seem able to form even around the brightest …
• Technosociology’s Zeynap Tufekci discusses the right of children to privacy.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Over at the Burgh Diaspora, Jim Russell takes a look at Japan’s system of higher education, with a proliferating number of institutions and faculties but collapsing numbers of students, and argues that financially viable higher education systems will need students beyond their immediate catchment area.
• Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell starts a discussion about post-democratic governments such as Italy’s recent Monti government and elsewhere, and wonders what response there can be apart from an inchoate populism.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird links to a paper suggesting that the greenhouse effect has been mitigated in the past decade by the sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions.
• At False Steps, Paul Drye contemplates the abortive joint ESA-Russia effort at an Ariane-launched spaceplane, the Kliper.
• Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis notes, with some local distinctions, the contrast between a broadly secular and liberal minded core Egypt (Cairo and the upper delta) contrasted with a more conservative rest of the country.
• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir expects the Syrian civil war to continue for a good while yet.
• Towleroad reports on Lech Walesa’s homophobic statements, denounced even by Walesa’s own son.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little sees reason for concern about the long-term effectiveness and academic credibility of the French university system.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes, via others, the alienation of western Kazakhstan–rich in natural resources, more conservative, but subordinates–from the remainder of the country.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell reminds his readers–proponents of the Iraq war, too–of the broad consensus in the United Kingdom against the 2003 invasion and its sequelae.

[LINK] “Western Poland more expensive than eastern Germany”

I’d blogged in 2008 about how traditional migration patterns in central Europe from east to west were starting to reverse themselves with, among other nationalities, newly well-off Poles taking advantage of low real estate prices and good infrastructure in eastern Germany. With stories like this, the imminence of some sort of limited convergence, at least, is impending (East Germany is much the poorest region in a Germany perhaps two-thirds richer than Poland, even western Poland is poorer than East Germany, and the sheer number of Poles means that some number will be able to make foreign purchases of whatever).

Though Eurostat data indicates that Germany is a more expensive country than Poland, it still pays for Poles to go grocery shopping in eastern Germany. According to the Wrocław branch of the Central Statistical Office, shoppers in Wrocław pay 17 percent more for beer, 25 percent more for butter and 70 percent more for bottled water than they would in stores in Germany.

The list of products that are more expensive in the west of Poland than in eastern Germany also includes: cottage cheese, condensed milk, cream, juice, honey and soap, with the biggest price gaps on alcohol.

The price differences are attributed to a gamut of factors, some of them being: higher commissions on alcohol sales in Poland, higher VAT in Poland on products like bottled water, and a more concentrated German market with fewer intermediaries.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states–basically–that early feminists didn’t think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.
• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that’s still relevant today.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines “Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times”. It does look interesting.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City’s Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.
• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.
• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.
• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.

[DM] “A few Tuesday demographics-related news links”

Here’s a few links to demographics-related news stories I thought readers might be interested in.

Eurasianet, via Inter Press Service, features an article describing how many children in Kyrgyzstan have been left effective orphans by the migration of their parents, for work purposes, to Russia and Kazakhstan. I’ve read of similar phenomena elsewhere in the world, for instance in other post-Soviet republics like Armenia and Moldova.

The Guardian carried the news that Polish, on account of the past decade of immigration, is the second most common language by number of speakers in England, with the half-million Polish ranking just behind Welsh-speakers in total numbers.

On a related note, The Telegraph reports that not only have 3.6 million Britons emigrated in the decade 2001-2011, just under two million were people in the 25-44 age group, i.e. not retirees looking for the good life in France or Spain.

The Washington Post takes note of the fact that in Ireland, the ongoing post-boom recession is made relatively tolerable only by the resumption of large-scale emigration.

A recent OECD report points out that the German labour market hasn’t been taking up large numbers of immigrant recently, tracing the problems to a regulatory system that’s seen more as administering a ban on migrant workers with exceptions than one that enables migration, particularly for non-highly skilled workers, as well as the relatively small number of potential migrants fluent in Germany.

The Vancouver Observer notes that while Iran has a substantial population of talented computer engineers and software designers, by and large they can only exercise their talents outside of their country.

The South China Morning Post‘s Tom Holland writes, from a Hong Kong perspective, about how Singapore’s total population and GDP may have surpassed Hong Kong’s thanks to the former’s liberal immigration policies, but notes that Hong Kong still has an advantage in GDP per capita. A Straits Times article, meanwhile, notes that the Singaporean government hopes to boost TFRs up to the 1.4-1.5 child per woman level, by a quarter.

The Hankoryeh notes that fertility in South Korea has risen somewhat in recent years, the TFR rising from an all-tie low of 1.08 in 2005 to 1.3 last year.

The Global Post has a photo essay depicting Chinese workers making their annual migration back to their home communities for the Lunar New Year festival.

On the subject of islands, growing migration from New Zealand (mainly to Australia, Bermuda (to the United States and Australia) and Puerto Rico (to the United States, increasingly to Florida) has been note in the press.

Al Monitor and Reuters both note the pronatalism of Erdogan in Turkey, who is trying to prevent Turkey’s fertility rate from falling below the replacement level through a combination of financial incentives and public lectures.

(Crossposted at Demography Matters here.)

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Burgh Diaspora notes that Spanish workers are moving to Mexico and the Germany isn’t doing so well thanks to regulatory and language barriers.
• The Dragon’s Tales points to a recent study suggesting that the Neanderthals of the Iberian peninsula died out before the arrival of Homo sapiens.
• Eastern Approaches observes, after the failure of a civil union law to make it through the Polish parliament, the problems of facing GLBT rights in Poland.
• Could we have had a moonbase instead of the International Space Station? At False Steps, Paul Drye suggests that might have been a possibility.
• The Global Sociology Blog observes the global rise of the cosmetic surgery industry and points out that Saudi Arabia is a terrible place to live if you’re a woman or a child.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan points to a German study suggesting that only 1% of children, not 10%, have biological fathers other than the people identified as such.
• Language Hat notes the substantial immigration of Circassian-speaking Armenian Christians to the Russian North Caucasus in the 18th century.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux doesn’t think much of Alan Dershowitz’s many intellectual contortions, on the matter of the Brooklyn College’s conference and on other things.
• Window on Eurasia links to speculation in a Russian regional paper as to the prospects for the amalgamation of different federal units. Could there be a Middle Volga unit dominated by Kazan’ (and Tatarstan)?

[LINK] “Lithuanian identity and the riddle of General Lucjan Želigowski”

The English-language edition of Lithuanian news portal 15min.lt features an interview with Lithuanian historian Šarūnas Liekis, examining the controversial person of Polish general Lucjan Želigowski. In 1920, Želigowski staged a coup that led to the annexation of Vilnius–now the Lithuanian capital, at the time part of a largely Polish-populated region–into Second Republic Poland. Liekis suggests that Želigowski was acting as a Lithuanian–the only dispute related to questions of identity. Was Lithuania the nation-state of the ethnic Lithuanians, or was Lithuania inheritor of the multiethnic (and largely Polish-speaking) Grand Duchy of Lithuania federated with Poland?

- Želigowski’s name still sounds odious to Lithuanian ears, since it is associated with the loss of Vilnius in 1920. Who is this man and what was his connection to Lithuania?

- Želigowski’s was an old family coming from Ashmyany (currently part of Belarus), its roots go back to the 16th century. An entry from 1623 in Lithuanian chronicles reads: “Jakob Želigowski from Kimbor estate came with a horse, armour, helmet, and harquebus.”

Želigowski’s father Gustav, brothers Jan and Juzef participated in the 1863-1864 uprising. His uncle Edvard Želigowski was arrested for joining the Dalevski brothers’ patriotic youth group in Lithuania – the tsar had outlawed the organization and persecuted its members.

In other words, Želigowski did not come out of the blue, he was not from Silesia, Berlin, or Stockholm – he came from here. His fate is comparable to that of thousands of descendants of Polish and Lithuanian nobility who had to choose one or the other nationality in modern times.

Želigowski was a professional military officer at the tsar’s army. He studied military sciences in a Junker school in Riga, graduated in 1888, and later continued his service in the tsar’s army. He chose the military to escape poverty.

He participate in the Russo-Japanese war and World War One. He was already leading a division in 1917. He was on the White side in Russian civil war, fought in Southern Russia and Crimea. After that he led the 4th Polish rifle regiment, formed of soldiers that came from territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, crossed Romania and joined Poland’s army. He fought in Ukraine with the Polish regiment.

[. . .]

One could say that younger officers, born around 1890, tended to choose service in the Lithuanian army. Older ones chose Poland because their formative years, their socialization happened in a Polophone culture, within the ideology of Lithuanian-Polish nobility. They thought it was natural to choose Poland rather than the new non-historic ethnic Lithuania built on the peasant culture.

Another example – the Inavauskai brothers who chose different Belarusian, Polish, and Lithuanian nationalities. Tadas Ivanauskas, Lithuanian biologist who set up a zoology museum in Kaunas, had a son, Jerzy, who fought with the Armia Krajowa during World War Two.

[LINK] “Two Christmases in One Country”

Over at Belarus Digest, Vadzim Smok’s article of the 7th of January takes a look at national identity in Belarus through the prism of the two largest religious denominations, Orthodox Christianity and the much smaller Roman Catholic Church.

The Belarusian state officially recognises two confessions – the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches – as the most legitimate and important. Orthodox believers celebrate Christmas on 7 January by the Julian calendar, whereas Catholics celebrate Christmas on 25 December by the Gregorian calendar.

Through centuries of coexistence of many confessions, Belarusians have developed a distinct tolerance towards various religions. However, today these two main confessions have different positions and political backgrounds in relations with the Belarusian authorities. They also pursue different policies towards the use of the Belarusian language in church.

Orthodoxy was the first Christian confession that came to the territory of contemporary Belarus in the 10th century. The Catholic Church appeared here in the 14th century, when Belarus’ territories constituted the core of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Grand Duchy presented a very interesting country religion-wise. Here, various Christian churches coexisted with each other and with Islam and Judaism, as well as with elements of paganism.

Throughout the country’s history, no major conflict has happened between the two biggest churches of Belarus, despite the dominance of one or the other during various historical periods. One or another church’s prevalence depended on the domination of either Russia or Poland in local affairs.

In towns and villages, Catholic and Orthodox churches often stood side by side. A family could celebrate Catholic Christmas on 25 December, and two weeks later join the celebration at their Orthodox friends or neighbours. In independent Belarus, the authorities decided to preserve this good tradition of religious coexistence and set both dates as official holidays.

According to official figures, around 60 per cent of Belarusians today claim to be believers. However, Orthodox Christians appear less religious than Catholics or Protestants. 18 per cent of Orthodox Christians report to be attending church regularly, while 50 per cent of Catholics do so. Most Catholics reside in the western part of Belarus, especially on the borders with Lithuania and Poland. They have a particular identity, more west-oriented, and often call themselves “Poles”, though hardly any of them can speak Polish.