[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on Supernova 2018oh in nearby galaxy UGC 4780, a star that demonstrated a most unusual bump in its light curve. Did the explosion engulf a neighbouring star?
• Centauri Dreams reports on New Horizons as it approaches its next target, the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule.
• D-Brief notes new observations of a black hole suggesting that gas around them forms not a rigid donut shape but rather a looser fountain.
• Dead Things notes a new discovery that the icythosaur had blubber like modern cetaceans, demonstrating convergent evolution.
• Cody Delistraty writes about changing perceptions of painter Egon Schiele.
• Far Outliers notes how Japanese prisoners of war were often so surprised by good treatment that they reciprocated, by freely sharing information with interrogators.
• Hornet Stories notes that, at least on Reddit, RuPaul’s Drag Race is the most discussed show currently playing on television.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Indian police was seeking two American evangelical Christian missionaries for aiding another to breach North Sentinel Island, both having fled the country.
• JSTOR Daily looks back to a 1963 paper on the effects of automation on society by Leon Megginson, finding that many of his predictions were correct.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that it is a sad day for Hungary that its government was able to drive the Central European University out of Budapest into exile.
• At Lingua Franca, Roger Shuy takes a look at the dreaded PhD oral exam. (I know that seeing other students taking it was one thing putting me off from academia.)
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the disastrous state of politics in Honduras, with a corrupt leader deeply compromised by (among other things) a dependency upon the United States.
• The NYR Daily takes a look at the beautiful Tibetan Buddhist religious art on display in the Ladakh settlement of Alchi.
• Window on Eurasia notes a conference in Moscow taking a look at a Eurasianism based on a Slavic-Turkic synthesis.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at Santa Barbara in some of her many dimensions.

[NEWS] Five migration notes: Syrians, Iranians, Ukrainians, Central Americans, Americans

• Transitions Online reports on how Syrian refugees are increasingly finding new homes in Turkey.
• Iranian families divided by the Trump visa ban now meet in a library on the Québec-Vermont border. Reuters reports.
• Poland, this Le Devoir report observes, now attracts more immigrants in absolute numbers–many more in relative terms–than Germany.
• What, this Open Democracy essay asks, will the Honduran refugees in Tijuana do next?
• This Reihan Salam suggestion at The Atlantic that Mexico should start to encourage American retirees to settle, with the hope of diminishing the political weight of Latin American migration to the United States, actually makes a lot of sense.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO identifies four Ontario towns of note for visitors.
• Joe. My. God. notes President Obama’s commemoration yesterday of the first official report of HIV/AIDS, 35 years ago.
• Marginal Revolution looks at real estate issues in London.
• Savage Minds notes that, from the mid-20th century apogee of academia, academic jobs have been steadily declining in number and quality. (That blog wrote about anthropology, but I think it applies to academia generally.)
• Torontoist notes a racist police newsletter that saw no policeman punished.
• Towleroad observes the assassination of a Honduran LGBT activist.
• Window on Eurasia notes Moscow’s enunciation of a doctrine requiring it to intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians and looks at the new security state.

[LINK] Bloomberg on the relative strength of the economies of Central America

Bloomberg’s Michael McDonald reports on the relatively strong growth of Central America, although the “relative” has to be underlined in the context of what is, at best, a stagnant Latin American economy.

The slump in raw materials prices that has hurt Brazil, Chile, Peru and Colombia is leaving Central America unscathed.

The region is bucking a trend of sluggish growth in the rest of Latin America as cheaper crude prices cut its fuel bills and faster growth in the U.S. boosts remittances and tourist spending. The region will grow 4.2 percent this year, led by Panama’s 6.3 percent expansion, according to forecasts from the International Monetary Fund. That compares to a forecast of a 0.3 percent contraction for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole while Brazil, the region’s biggest economy, is set to shrink 3.5 percent.

All seven Central American nations count the U.S. as their biggest trading partner, while Brazil, Peru and Chile all do more business with China. Cooling demand in the Asian giant has contributed to falling prices for South America’s oil, iron ore, copper and soy. As a net importer of oil and most other raw materials, Central America is a net winner from falling commodities prices.

“Their fortunes are really tied more to the U.S. than to China,” JPMorgan Chase & Co emerging market analyst Franco Uccelli said in a phone interview. “They aren’t seeing some of the perils of being an oil exporter with oil trading as low as it is today.”

Remittances sent home to Guatemala by workers living in the U.S. and elsewhere rose 18 percent in January from the year earlier. The country, which has the largest economy is Central America, had received a record $6.3 billion in remittances last year, equivalent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product.

[LINK] Edwin Lyngar of Salon on the problems of libertarianism in Honduras

Edwin Lyngar at Salon has written a widely-shared travelogue of how, in his view, his visit to Honduras where a libertarian city-state is set to be established demonstrates the terrible weaknesses of that ideology on the ground.

Is this fair? It could be argued that, given a predatory state, a libertarian hands-off policy might be better. (Might.)

People better than I have analyzed the specific political moves that have created this modern day libertarian dystopia. Mike LaSusa recently wrote a detailed analysis of such, laying out how the bad ideas of libertarian politics have been pursued as government policy.

In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras.

In Honduras, the police ride around in pickup trucks with machine guns, but they aren’t there to protect most people. They are scary to locals and travelers alike. For individual protection there’s an army of private, armed security guards who are found in front of not only banks, but also restaurants, ATM machines, grocery stores and at any building that holds anything of value whatsoever. Some guards have uniforms and long guns but just as many are dressed in street clothes with cheap pistols thrust into waistbands. The country has a handful of really rich people, a small group of middle-class, some security guards who seem to be getting by and a massive group of people who are starving to death and living in slums. You can see the evidence of previous decades of infrastructure investment in roads and bridges, but it’s all in slow-motion decay.

I took a van trip across the country, starting in Copan (where there are must-see Mayan ruins), across to the Caribbean Sea to a ferry that took my family to Roatan Island. The trip from Copan to the coast took a full six hours, and we had two flat tires. The word “treacherous” is inadequate—a better description is “post-apocalyptic.” We did not see one speed limit sign in hundreds of kilometers. Not one. People drive around each other on the right and left and in every manner possible. The road was clogged with horses, scooters and bicycles. People traveled in every conceivable manner along the crumbling arterial. Few cars have license plates, and one taxi driver told me that the private company responsible for making them went bankrupt. Instead of traffic stops, there are military check points every so often. The roads seemed more dangerous to me than the gang violence.

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

[LINK] “Tending the ‘Stolen’ Sheep in Latin America’s Booming Bible Belt”

An interesting Christianity Today article by Morgan Lee reports on the diversity of Protestantism in Central America, where different countries seem to have different traditions.

For most of the past century, almost all (more than 90%) of Latin Americans were Catholics. But decades of attrition have resulted in a record 1 in 5 Latinos now identifying as Protestants.

Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua lead the way, where Protestants constitute 4 in 10 residents of each nation. But Protestants in those 3 countries diverge on many measures of orthodox belief and practice, according to a detailed survey of 19 Latin American countries and territories by the Pew Research Center.

Guatemala’s Protestants arguably seem the most mature. They are the most likely of all 19 surveyed groups to evangelize weekly (53%), to believe only Christ leads to eternal life (74%), and to exhibit high commitment (75% pray daily, attend services weekly, and consider faith very important). Even their millennials are the most religious (71% are highly committed).

Protestants in Nicaragua and Honduras are more varied. Only 1 in 3 share their faith on a weekly basis. About 6 in 10 are highly committed to church attendance and prayer. On Christianity’s exclusive access to eternal life, only two-thirds of Hondurans and half of Nicaraguans agree. And only 45 percent of Nicaragua’s millennials are highly committed to their faith.

Further, Honduran Protestants are among Latin America’s most syncretistic, with 42 percent exhibiting medium to high engagement with indigenous beliefs and practices (a figure that’s higher than Catholics in most Latin American countries). Nicaraguan Protestants exhibited similarly high levels (35%), but only 24 percent of Guatemalan Protestants are similarly syncretistic.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton photographs the ever-changing and increasingly condo-ized intersection of Queen Street West with Dufferin.
• James Bow points to a McDonald’s in Scarborough that appears for all the world to be abandoned. (Suburbia can be a wasteland.)
• Centauri Dreams notes that astronomers have ingeniously managed to determine the characteristics of the atmosphere of exoplanet GJ3470b, a hot Neptune closely orbiting a red dwarf.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that South Asia was repopulated by migrants from Africa after the Toba volcanic explosion.
• GNXP takes a look at some interesting genetic analysis of Caribbean populations.
• Joe. My. God. notes, with others, the irony of anti-Castro Cuban-American Marco Rubio defending the same homophobic policies that Castro would have advanced.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money does not think that internships can be defended.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen and The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer both note that Honduras seems interested in charter cities. The latter doesn’t think much will come of it.
• Elsewhere at The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer observes that Colombia is actually a very close ally of the United States and sees, in the relationship of Brazil with an Ecuador that has tried to harass Brazilian companies, the birth of a Brazilian hegemony in South America.
• Torontoist notes that ambitious plans for expanding St. Lawrence Market North have been sharply downgraded.
• Window on Eurasia notes an Uzbek writer who argues that the death of the Aral Sea will affect even upstream countries in Central Asia like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, whether directly through environmental catastrophe or indirectly through regional tensions.

[URBAN NOTE] “Deportation used to counter growth of Afghan street gang in Toronto”

The National Post‘s Stewart Bell wrote about the growth of Afghan street gangs in northern Toronto, and about the tactic of deportation against non-Canadian nationals used by the Canadian government to discourage the growth of these gangs. Apparently deportation has been used against Tamil gangs in Toronto, Haitian gangs in Montréal, and Honduran gangs in Vancouver.

I’m somewhat disturbed by this. Leaving aside the ethical question of whether it is just to deporting people who grew up in Canada to their country of birth–especially, I’m tempted to say, if that country of birth is Afghanistan is somewhere similarly benighted–this tactic by itself doesn’t tackle issues of social integration that apparently lead to crime.

Afghan For Life and its more violent-sounding offshoot, Afghan Fighting Generation, emerged partly in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood, a hub of Canada’s fast-growing Afghan population. Police and immigration enforcement officers have now launched deportation proceedings against several alleged members, including [Farhad Abdul] Fatah, a 28-year-old Russian-speaking Afghan from Thorncliffe Park.

Since 2002, more than 23,000 Afghans have become permanent residents of Canada. Gang members began tagging Afghan neighbourhoods with Afghan For Life (AFL or A4L) and Afghan Fighting Generation (AFG) symbols a decade ago.

[. . .]

Jehad Aliweiwi, executive director of the Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office, a local social agency, said gangs were not a significant problem in the area, although he had seen AFL graffiti in the past. “When I used to walk a little bit around the park you will see ‘Afghan’ or ‘Afghan For Life.’ And young kids in our youth centre, we have a lot of Afghan kids,” he said.

But he said he was less worried about gangs than the high drop-out rate among Afghan boys. “That said, I think there is a lot of affinity with a group like the Afghan For Life for maybe social and belonging reasons, Afghan pride and all that,” he said. “I think it’s a new community that’s trying to find its place in here. It’s part of a struggle of integration.”

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At Geocurrents, Martin Lewis explains why the mistaken theory tracing Indo-European origins to prehistoric Anatolia is so important as to merit nearly a half-dozen posts.
• Language Hat quotes an interesting argument arghuing that sub-Saharan African ethnicities in the era of transatlantic slavery can be rediscovered, and must be rediscovered, to understand the patterns of African diaspora communities.
• Marginal Revolution reports on the fact that some Greek islands are now up for sale to landowners, to help cover Greek debt.
• At The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer argues contra Matt Yglesias that a North America self-sufficient in oil is possible and would change things.
• Strange Maps reports on a Nicaraguan postage stamp that, on account of claims made on Honduran territory, nearly started a war.
• The Volokh Conspiracy reports on the recent sharp rise in separatism in Catalonia. The distinction made between a nationalist movement and the American Confederacy is worth keeping.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At Geocurrents, Martin Lewis explains why the mistaken theory tracing Indo-European origins to prehistoric Anatolia is so important as to merit nearly a half-dozen posts.
• Language Hat quotes an interesting argument arghuing that sub-Saharan African ethnicities in the era of transatlantic slavery can be rediscovered, and must be rediscovered, to understand the patterns of African diaspora communities.
• Marginal Revolution reports on the fact that some Greek islands are now up for sale to landowners, to help cover Greek debt.
• At The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer argues contra Matt Yglesias that a North America self-sufficient in oil is possible and would change things.
• Strange Maps reports on a Nicaraguan postage stamp that, on account of claims made on Honduran territory, nearly started a war.
• The Volokh Conspiracy reports on the recent sharp rise in separatism in Catalonia. The distinction made between a nationalist movement and the American Confederacy is worth keeping.