A Bit More Detail

[BRIEF NOTE] On the mainstreaming of gay politicians in Canada

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:14:52 GMT

John Lorinc's Globe and Mail article on the emergence of out politicians in Canada is worth reading in full. Unfortunately, most of it is behind the paper's subscription firewall.

When Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman kissed his spouse, Christopher Peloso, before a bank of cameras this week, he announced his campaign with a public display of affection normally reserved for heterosexual candidates and their spouses.

The gesture may have appeared casual, but it signalled two things to Canadians: that same-sex marriage is becoming an acceptable part of the country's social and political geography and that being openly gay is no longer a liability for politicians. As David Rayside, a University of Toronto professor of political science and sexual diversity, notes, “Visibility counts.”

Mr. Smitherman will be getting a whole lot more visibility during the next year as he seeks to become the first gay mayor of Canada's largest city. And he may not be the only candidate reaching for that goal: He will probably be challenged by another openly gay politician, Glen Murray. The two-term former mayor of Winnipeg has not yet formally announced his candidacy, but he has acknowledged that he is considering joining the race.

Their opponent, in turn, will almost certainly be businessman and radio host John Tory, a socially progressive conservative who once lost a hard-fought provincial riding race to another openly gay candidate, Kathleen Wynne.

As a one-time health minister, Mr. Smitherman, 44, will certainly face far more questions about his role in the eHealth Ontario scandal than about his sexual orientation. That's as it should be. Few Torontonians – or Vancouverites or Montrealers – would be surprised to learn that lifestyle is no longer an issue in local politics. But are Canadians outside large urban centres – especially those in small towns or rural areas – prepared to elect openly gay politicians to top leadership roles, such as premier or prime minister?

Pollster Michael Adams, who tracks social values in Canada, says sexual orientation isn't an issue. “We're at the point where we're past it,” he says. “There are groups whose cultural differences are more controversial than being gay.”

The previously mentioned Scott Brison, out since 2002, made bids for the Progressive Conservative party leadership in 2003 and for the Liberal Party leadership in 2006. In both campaigns, his sexual orientation wasn't an issue, at least not openly. Television coemdian Rick Mercer suggests in his 2003 interview of Brison that his Nova Scotianness was the problem.

Lorinc does conclude by noting that some of the more prominent gay politicians, like Liberal George Smitherman in Ontario and John Baird for the Conservatives in Ottawa, have become prominent through their aggressiveness: the two men were loud enforcers for their governments, known for being aggressive and constantly on the offensive. Might there be parallels with the way that the first crop of female national leaders--Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, say--were notable for their hard-headedness and aggressiveness? If gay politicians now, like female politicians a couple of decades ago, have to be aggressive in order to be taken seriously, contrary to Lorinc's assertion there's still a way to go.

"What are things like in your countries," I ask my readers.

[LINK] Three space science links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:06:10 GMT

The first link from Centauri Dreams describes how astronomers have found fairly Earth-like planets orbiting fairly close Sun-like stars, 61 Virginis (Wikipedia, Sol Station) and HD 1461, and what might be a Sun-like planetary system at 23 Librae. It's only a matter of time until a truly Earth-like world is found, and it may be found from the ground or from space.

The second Centauri Dreams link considers whether or not astronomers could detect Earth-like moons of gas giants. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they can, and that it would be easier to detect these moons orbiting gas giants in the habitable zones of dim red dwarf stars.

Finally, Will Baird links to reports that astronomers have located two brown dwarfs--objects caught in the gap between Jupiter-like worlds and very dim stars orbiting a very young and massive star nearing the end of its life. If planets can form in the relatively short time that a large star will remain stable, they may be able to form anywhere.

I'm amazed by the speed with which astronomers are building up a detailed map of our interstellar neighbourhood. To think that, once upon a time, science-fiction writers imagined that starships would have to venture to nearby stars to see what worlds could be found there. It now looks like, if anything, any such starships would just be doing follow-up work, filling in the details.

[CAT] "What to make of cats"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:54:56 GMT

I quite like Stephen Baker's post at The Numerati on his cats. They're special creatures, these.

But here's what's special about them. They're cats. They're animals that spend their whole lives with us and remain total mysteries. They have the body parts of miniature lions and tigers. They're beasts, albeit domesticated ones. They carry out extravagent licking rituals. They pretend not to hear us when we call. One of them snores. They are every bit as successful from a Darwinian point of view as we are: 21st century survivors. Most interestingly, they live with us. So what merits attention isn't that they're special animals, but rather that animals are special, and two of them share their mysterious ways with us.</blockqutoe>

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Brison/St-Pierre Christmas card

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:47:48 GMT

Brison/St-Pierre Christmas card
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Originally taken from Queerty, this is a reproduction of Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison's Christmas card, featuring him with his husband Maxime St-Pierre, who he married in 2007. The card, sent to five thousand constituents and supporters, made some homophobes unhappy but overall received a positive and supportive response.

The overwhelming response has been very positive," Brison said from Windsor, N.S. "There's always a very, very tiny minority of bigots. It's their problem, it's not my problem."

At least one news website had to shut down its comments section running under a story about the card. The Globe and Mail web editor said the section was shut down because of "hateful and homophobic remarks."

Toronto Star blogger Susan Delacourt tried a pre-emptive approach: she closed off comments before any vitriol could be posted.

"So crazy hateful people should probably just walk away from the keyboard now," she wrote. "Yes, backward, just like that, slowly, hands in the air. There you go. Get outdoors; it'll be good for you."

Brison is one of the few openly gay members of Parliament. He married his partner in 2007, two years after same-sex marriage became legal in Canada. He easily won re-election last year.

The card features the two men standing in a field separated by their golden retriever, Simba, in Brison's rural riding of King-Hants.

It's the first time the couple have sent out a Christmas card together. The picture came from a photoshoot they were given as a wedding gift.

One of the more prominent articles critical of the card is this Anglican Samizdat post, where the author concluded by saying that "considering Christians do not accept same-sex partnerships as true marriage, to use a Christian festival to deliver this political message was an act of considerable crassness."

I raised the subject of the United Church of Canada because Brison's Wikipedia article identifies him as a member of the UCC and he himself was married in his hometown's United Church. Sending out a Christmas card featuring him and his partner isn't crass, as the post's author said, but is rather entirely in keeping with the theology of the church to which Brison belongs. Never mind that most MPs' Christmas cards--47 of which are viewable at the CBC--don't include any religious sentiments, or that Christmas is a holiday. As I stated in a comment that, curiously, hasn't been posted on the site, Brison's United Church of Canada membership makes it entirely possible for him not to be crass: sending out a Christmas card featuring him and his husband is entirely acceptable by the United Church's norms. Arguing, as some did in the comments, that the United Church isn't Christian and presumably isn't a sound moral judge is strangely irrelevant to the card.

Anyway. I'd like to congratulate Brison on his decision to send out the very nice Christmas card, and to observe that the supportive reaction of Canadians to the card as measured by journalistic and blog responses to the card says good things about Canada.

[MUSIC] Band Aid, "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:13:58 GMT

I like the earnestness of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and performed by Band Aid support victims of the 1984-1985 Ethiopian famine. It's an important song, not only musically but because of its role in the emergent global noosphere: a spontaneously assembled and performed song, it was released globally and became a huge hit because its listeners wanted to help people in a distant country of which they knew little.

Is it therefore wrong to criticize it? Hardly; the practice of charity deserves as much attention, and as much critical attention, as any other practice.

The song title might have made for a rousing chorus, but it was nonsensical. Of course the Ethiopians knew it was Christmas. Ethiopia has been a Christian country for centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (an Oriental Orthodox Church associated quite closely with the Christianities of the Copts and the Eritreans) dating to the 4th century, long before Britain, Germany, or Russia were brought into the fold, never mind the rest of the planet. Yes, the Ethiopian calendar marks Christmas as coming on the 7th of January, but I don't think that absolves the songwriters. As for the line "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime," it's worth noting that Ethiopia's climate is such that, even in the most mountainous areas of the relatively temperate Ethiopian plateau, snow is a rare occurrence. Charity's certain a good virtue, but a charity that doesn't seem to take notice of the particulars of the people it seeks to help has issues.

Charity misunderstanding its objects is one thing; charity misunderstanding the causes of the objects' suffering is another.Amartya Sen's suggestion, drawn from his studies of the 1943 Bengal famine, that famines are products of non-democratic regimes which lack the ability and/or interest to intervene in cases of food markets' failure, is controversial in many instances (see here for a Sen-supporting paper, see here for a more critical response). Sen's theory is perfectly applicable to the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia, triggered by climate issues but immensely exacerbated by the Derg's governance, as its counterinsurgency campaigns destabilized the agrarian economy that was already being mismanaged by the Derg's restrictions on peasant mobility and autonomy that culminated in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions weren't dying and suffering for no particular reason to do with humankind; millions were dying and suffering because of specific decisions being made by specific people. The song, and, it seems, the contemporary press reaction to the famine, didn't touch on this.

I'm being a bit hard on this song, I know. Despite not touching on the realities of the people suffering and the causes of their suffering, it is a good song, it is a song that highlighted an egregious case of mass human suffering, and it is a song that by its reception demonstrates the emerging noosphere, or at least the emergence of some sort of concern for the fate of even people far over the horizon. It's just that the song is but a first step on the path towards true global community, a reaction to suffering without going much deeper. This isn't as good, but baby steps. We have to start somewhere, don't we?

[PHOTO] The Holy Family in Plastic

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:22:58 GMT

The Holy Family in Plastic
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Living in the Toronto neighbourhoods I've lived in, with their strong Latin Roman Catholic traditions, I've gotten to appreciate the sort of plastic religious statuary that you see in the above picture. It's simple, but it's an earnest expression of what the purchasers and displayers believe. I respect that.

[LINK] "World Map of Of Social Networks Shows Rise of Facebook"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:11:53 GMT

This Techcrunch map breaks down the countries of the world by dominant social networking system. As the title suggests, Facebook is in the lead globally.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.

Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.

Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).

[LINK] "Young shoppers edge manga into Europe's mainstream"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:05:36 GMT

Interesting, if personally unsurprising. I see large and growing manga shelves wherever I go book shopping here in Toronto, too.

Young adults are a growing market in publishing: Walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books – a sight nearly non-existent a few years ago.

On Duesseldorf's Immermannstrasse, an avenue lined with shops catering to the city's Japanese population, is a scene that could come straight from Harajuku, where Tokyo's youth congregate – except the butcher around the corner sells sausages.

German teenagers dressed as Japanese goth rock stars, with multicoloured hair and heavy eyeliner, mingle with Japanese schoolchildren in a bookstore on the street, giggling as they step into “purikura” photo booths that shoot instant snapshots that people decorate themselves and print as stickers.

“They have something special,” said Berenike Schmoldt, whose fascination with manga has turned the German teenager into a full-blown Japanophile at 17, during a Friday expedition with her friends. “I spend hours every week reading them.”

Already fluent in basic Japanese, she is making her fourth visit to Japan this month to soak up the culture, eat her favourite dish of ‘yakisoba' fried noodles, and read manga.

It's a scene replicated in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome: local bookshops have expanded their manga sections and feature hundreds of French, Dutch and Italian titles. Often without the credit cards to shop online, these teenagers visit the stores as part of their social life.

“It is something that is much more than a fad,” said Paul Gravett, a publisher and expert on comics in Europe.

“The term ‘manga' is becoming a global word.”

[LINK] "Hotmail suicide"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:03:53 GMT

Many thanks to Erin for pointing me to Jason Richard's parody in NOW Toronto of Chandler Levack's mystifying "Facebook suicide" article. "Hotmail suicide" is a serious thing.

My name is Jason Richards, and I am a Hotmail whore.

I love Hotmail like a crystal meth addict loves crystal meth (an analogy I am qualified to make, as a functional crystal meth addict who consumes crystal meth like it's Crystal Lite).

My ideal Saturday night consists of a little Santana featuring Rob Thomas on the stereo, a bag of crystal meth, a Hotmail window open on my laptop, and me, nude, clicking refresh in feverish anticipation of a hot new email. Mmm, oh yeah, that's good, Internet. Just like that, yeah. Unzip my compressed folder. Give me a 40 per cent discount on Cialis. Stick it in my inbox like you mean it.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not exactly foreign to the iSocial me-networking applications. I maintain blogs on livejournal, Blogger, Tumblr, Geocities, Flim-flam, and Glurb. I do an unofficial vlog for myspacemusic.co.uk and host weekly crags for dipdive.com. I occasionally glog about men's formalwear for myflog.vlorp, and have live-blarted on numerous occasions for paulblartmallcop.com.

But I always come back to Hotmail.

[. . .]

With all this thinking about me, I had the sudden, unquenchable urge to escape myself. I fled my salon, holding my petticoat and ran through the snow, outside to a frozen pond, where I stared into my reflection, searching my own face for an answer. Eventually, it came to me.

I was terrified but resolved. I would do something courageous, controversial, borderline blasphemous, unthinkable and extraordinary in this modern day and age – but also beautiful, revolutionary, and profoundly heroic: I – yes, me – would pull the trigger. I would delete my Hotmail account. Little did I know, that would be easier said than done. The powers that be at Hotmail do everything they can to get you to stay.

[PHOTO] On the sidewalk

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:59:33 GMT

I've applied a LJ-cut to today's image because it's somewhat graphic, post-mortem wildlife, but I decided to post the photo here regardless because there is a strange sort of beauty to it. The cycle continues.

On the sidewalk
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Found 1 December 2009 outside G.H. Johnson's Trading Company at 950 Dupont Street, just east of Dovercourt Avenue.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Cornwall. abuse, and conspiracies

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:28:13 GMT

The small eastern Ontario city of Cornwall has just seen the end of an exorbitantly expensive inquiry into claims of an organized pedophile ring there. Triggered when police officer Perry Dunlop learned of a sexual abuse scandal that the Roman Catholic Church had quietly settled in 1994, matters quickly spiraled into speculation that dozens of men were systematically abusing young men. Following a series of failed trials, an inquiry into the who affair began, and was already going badly by the time that Dunlop skipped the inquiry. The whole situation is a catastrophe.

It wasn't long before the original premise grew to shocking proportions: a ring or clan of pedophiles that reached into the city's highest corners -- priests, a bishop, a Crown attorney, lawyers, probation officers, possibly senior police officers.

Because so many powerful people were involved, went the theory, the original investigation was blocked, forcing Mr. Dunlop to circle around his own police force. He was the whistleblower extraordinaire, unafraid to put his career on the line to protect abused children.

[. . .]

Mr. Dunlop's role in the case, however well intended, has contributed to a breathtaking expenditure of public resources -- time and money -- not to mention the stain on an entire community.

And Mr. Dunlop doesn't want to talk about it?

Briefly, there were two Cornwall police investigations in 1993, an Ontario Provincial Police probe in 1994 and, finally, the launching of Project Truth in 1997. It spared nothing: The allegations of 69 complainants were investigated, leading to 672 interviews.

Four years later, the OPP were satisfied there was no pedophile ring in the city, but laid 115 charges against 15 individuals. There was but one conviction.

[. . .]

At least one of the witnesses -- an original complainant -- has testified he never saw evidence of a pedophile ring, contrary to an earlier written statement. Those named in the statement? Nah, never saw them. The statement itself? Didn't even read it, he testified.

He claimed he was pressured into making the statements by one Perry Dunlop. Nor was he the only witness to retract outlandish allegations.

"I did anything (Mr. Dunlop) told me to do," said one alleged victim.

Even though the inquiry has, 53 million dollars later, come to the conclusion that there wasn't a conspiracy, the idea will still remain active.

An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others' suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

"It's very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky," he said.

Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.

They're psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy "should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses," Peterson said.

"A good rule of thumb is: Don't presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation," he said.

"Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that."

While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.

By now, the majority of Cornwall has dismissed the allegation that once spread like wildfire there, but among a small group of people the theory will never die, said columnist Claude McIntosh with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.

When historical allegations of sex abuse started surfacing in the 1990s people were certainly talking about the issue, he said. Then a group of townspeople started a website and posted names of people they named as pedophiles.

They also posted an affidavit from one man detailing the most sensational allegation, that ritual sex abuse was performed by men in robes with candles on weekend retreats. He would later recant that allegation at the inquiry.

This sounds a lot like the various panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by moral panic related to concern over the breakdown of traditional mores, like the nuclear family or conventional religion. What happened in Cornwall seems to me the consequence of the moral crisis triggered by revelations of clerical abuse. Cornwall is not only a strongly Roman Catholic community, it's a community that has experienced significant economic stresses with high unemployment and low education levels and a relative lack of investment in public facilities. A Roman Catholic priest really did abuse a child; the Roman Catholic Church really did try to cover it up. Especially when life is already strained, it's not such a big stretch go from a trusted religious authority betraying the public interest in a specific fashion to any number of trusted authorities engaging in orchestrated horrors. Besides, as Peterson notes, conspiracies tend to be more coherent than the idea that bad things just happen in isolation for no particular reason, more comforting in a way since they offer a sense of predictability and thus an ability to control the conspirators through public action.

I also recommend Religioustolerance.org's analysis.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the utility of false charges of anti-Semitism

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:57:56 GMT

The Toronto Star has it.

he United Church of Canada and other Canadian churches are demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain why one of his cabinet ministers accused them of being anti-Semitic.

The United, Catholic and Anglican churches are part of KAIROS, an aid group that was shocked to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney say its funding was lifted as part of the Conservatives' effort to cut off anti-Semitic organizations.

"It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves," said United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregersen. "We're quite disappointed in the government on this.

"The policies of KAIROS have all been approved by the collective board of KAIROS, so in a sense what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic and I think that's really unfortunate," Gregersen said in an interview.

Sam Carrière, director of communications for the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church supports a statement released Friday by KAIROS, which condemned Kenney's remarks as false and warned the Harper government against letting politics dominate Ottawa's foreign aid priorities.

Besides the United and Anglican churches, Toronto-based KAIROS's members include the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee – Canada.

Working with 21 partner organizations around the world, KAIROS sponsors projects promoting social and economic justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Canada's development community appeared stunned after Kenney, in a speech in Jerusalem, cited Ottawa's decision to end 35 years of funding for KAIROS as an example of the Conservatives' push to cut funding for anti-Semitic groups.

KAIROS was "defunded," Kenney said, because it took a leadership role in "the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel.

"Minister Kenney's charge against KAIROS is false," the group said in its public response.

KAIROS has raised questions about Israeli government policies but rejected the idea of a national boycott against Israel two years ago, its executives pointed out.

"To label KAIROS's criticism of Israeli government actions as `anti-Semitic' silences dissent and honours no one," the statement said. "KAIROS has a clear position of support for the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state."

Like Canada, Australia, Argentina, or another states and/or regions, Israel is a country of mass immigration. How can't it be, when the whole point of Zionism was to bring millions of Jews to a territory thinly populated by tens of thousands who constituted only a small minority, and when only one Israel president has actually been born in Israel? Like these other countries of mass immigration, Israel has remnant native populations, survivors of state-building. Unlike all of these countries of mass immigration save South Africa, these natives not only retain a strong sense of their own identity but actually live by the millions in their homeland. This, of necessity, complicates Israeli life in much the same way as the African majority complicated apartheid-era South African life. (Much the same way. I'm not claiming an absolute identity, although the fact that both countries ban marriage across ethnoreligious groups says something.)

Israel's a state that actively pursues policies of ethnic discrimination on a vast scale. People who belong to the Jewish ethnic majority are privileged, not only relative to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territory, but relative to the Palestinians living within Israel who are themselves Israeli citizens. People who are Israelis are immensely privileged relative to Palestinians, who get to see their land and their resources appropriated while any number of Israelis hope that if they make life for Palestinians difficult they'll leave. This is a detestable policies, just as detestable as the Serbian discrimination against Bosniaks and Albanians in the 1990s, or East Timorese in the 1970s and 1980s, or Western Saharans now. So long as an Israeli consensus in favour of these discriminatory policies exists, why not place public pressure on Israel?

Yes, yes, I know that there are other societies where worse things happen, but so what? Yes, yes, I know that critics might come from societies with their own problems, but so what? So long as the critiques are valid, and so long as the critics aren't denying the charges own relevance to their own societies' issues, the standard act of dismissing critics--here in the case of Israel as elsewhere--can only be read as an intellectually lazy and morally contemptuous effort to shrug off legitimate dissent. Trying to drown out criticisms by demanding an infinity of footnotes is silly. Yes, yes, I know that the Palestinians have done bad things, but we're not talking about that. Arguably they wouldn't be if not for ongoing Israeli colonization.

Israel might well have achieved some sort of integration into the Middle East had it sincerely entered peace negotiations instead of having an electorate unwilling to make sacrifices for a fair settlement. (I'm not talking about Israel's neighbours because Israel's neighbours aren't the subjects here.) Instead, Israel seems to have opted for a future as a Western marcher state, Israeli leaders talking about the threats of Muslims and warning about Eurabia.

And this can't be criticized? I never liked Jason Kenney. I now have another reason to hold him in contempt.

[LINK] "Israel Harvested Organs in '90s Without Permission"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:44:02 GMT

Wow. Just wow. Such a shocking lock of medical ethics, such an apparent willingness to embrace a version of the blood libel.

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, ''We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.''

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. ''This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,'' the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. ''We'd glue the eyelid shut,'' he said. ''We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.''

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

[. . .]

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report ''anti-Semitic.''

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were ''by a long shot'' not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because ''the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.''

What is there to say, apart from noting that at this stage unquestioning diasporic support for Israel is about as morally sketchy as unquestioning diasporic support for Serbia or Armenia or any other country involved in atrocities directed against the disfavoured?

[LINK] "'The buck stopped nowhere' at Foreign Affairs on Colvin's warnings"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:56:45 GMT

Grand news re: possible Canadian complicity in torture in Afghanistan

As Richard Colvin fired off warnings about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan in 2006, the diplomat's missives bounced into the computers of Foreign Affairs without ever really landing.

Inside the Department of Foreign Affairs, the biggest Canadian overseas commitment since the Korean War was organized like any other file. Diplomats in Kabul and Kandahar had different supervisors. In separate corners of the department's Sussex Drive headquarters in the Pearson building, the peacekeeping desk would handle one memo, the human rights desk another, defence relations a third.

Mr. Colvin sparked a firestorm at the highest levels in Ottawa when he told a parliamentary committee that he warned for a full year that detainees Canadian troops handed over to Afghan forces faced torture before the government began to monitor them.

But behind that furor is another story: outside the combat-focused military, no one was in charge in the early part of the Afghan mission.

A scattered batch of mid-level officials, lacking the incontrovertible proof that Canadians had no means to find, didn't have the overall responsibility or weight to push for big change.

“The buck stopped nowhere,” said one official involved in the Afghan mission.

Worse, apparently the Canadian military was hostile to the oversight of civilians like Colvin.

Mr. Mulroney needed the co-operation of generals, who hated having a diplomat vet their plans. The military had long viewed Mr. Colvin as a nuisance because he persistently pushed different views on issues such as limiting civilian casualties and removing Kandahar's governor, and interrupted during officers' briefings.

“It became easy to discount Richard because he's a pain in the ass,” recalled an official. “David could go to senior military people and say, ‘I understand. People like Colvin, they're part of the old mentality, and I'm going to rein them in.' It threw them an olive branch.”

But at the end of April, 2007, Mr. Harper's government was under fire in Parliament over the treatment of detainees after The Globe and Mail published prisoners' accounts of torture.

Mr. Mulroney issued orders for diplomatic pressure. Mr. Colvin replied that Canada needed a new transfer arrangement with Afghanistan – and Mr. Mulroney curtly told him to follow his orders.

[LINK] "Buying green could make you more likely to lie, cheat and steal: study"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:54:25 GMT

This article doesn't surprise me that much.

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, University of Toronto researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong studied how students behaved after being given the option of purchasing environmentally friendly products, like organic yogourt or biodegradable laundry detergent, or conventional items.

They found students who chose green products were less likely to act altruistically afterwards than those who were simply exposed to green products.

The study, said Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, builds on research into the idea of "moral regulation" - that people either consciously or unconsciously balance bad deeds with good ones.

"What has been shown so far is that when we engage in actions that give us some kind of moral, warm glow - let's call it that - that afterwards we are more likely to transgress," Mazar said.

"What we don't know, and what the interesting question is, is how much is really a conscious, deliberate thought process? We don't know that."

In one experiment, students were assigned to one of two computerized "stores" filled with either predominantly green products or conventional items. Once assigned to a store, some students were asked to think critically about the products, while others were told to go shopping.

The students were then given six dollars and told there was a person in another room with whom they were supposed to share the money, keeping whatever they didn't give away for themselves.

The students who were simply exposed to the green items parted with more money than those who were exposed to the conventional products. But when it came to the students who made purchases, the opposite was true: those who bought green items actually gave less than those who spent their money on non-green alternatives.

As Mazar goes on to note, this doesn't mean buying environmentally friendly products is bad.

While the findings might deflate the self-righteous air of those who brag about bringing canvas bags to the grocery store, Mazar says it definitely shouldn't be seen as a condemnation of environmentally friendly purchasing habits.

That, she feels, would be a gross misunderstanding of the point of the research. The study shows we should be aware of our tendency to treat buying green as a moral act, said Mazar, rather than as our responsibility to the planet.

"What we wanted to point out is if you start to moralize particular actions . . . then there is a danger that people get this kind of warm glow. And that can be used afterwards to engage in less, maybe, social or altruistic behaviour," said Mazar.

"But this doesn't mean that you should not buy environmental products."

Mindfulness clearly matters. Still more important, I'd say, would be the introduction of mandatory rules regarding environmentally friendly consumption as opposed to voluntary opt-ins. If people don't, in fact, have to think about deciding between products which are more or less environmentally friendly (or non-hostile), then there would not be this risk of consumers unconsciously takking their green consumption as a license to do whatever.

[META] Blogroll Additions

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:39:54 GMT

Everyone, I'd like to you welcome my friend Stephen Degrace's Infinite Recursion to the blogroll! Tech, and django and more, it's all there at this three-in-one blog.

[PHOTO] Looking out

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:36:40 GMT

Looking out
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I photographed this pensive wooden head looking out of an enclosed front porch on Ossington Avenue at the beginning of this month.

[PHOTO] Under the bridge

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:08:44 GMT

The railroad on Prince Edward Island closed down in 1987 for want of economic sense, leaving the trail to be converted into the (rather nice) Confederation Trail, a nice place to go hiking or biking. One thing among many things that I like about my home in Toronto is that it lies directly south of a freight line belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the movement of the trains punctuating my days and lulling me to sleep. The same line has also been suggested as the corridor for a midtown commuter rail line, one that would also connect to the Summerhill CPR station on Yonge Street that I've photographed before.

Crossing midtown Toronto as it does, this rail line can't help but cross over streets. Below are pictures of the undersides of two of these bridges on two of these streets.

Railway bridge at Yonge by Summerhill
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is the bridge crossing Yonge Street at the Summerhill stations, TTC and CPR both.

Railway bridge at Dupont and Dovercourt
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is one of my neighbourhood bridges, at Dupont and Dovercourt.

[FORUM] How do you interact with people on social networking sites?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:24:43 GMT

Torontoist writer David Topping's suggestion, after reading an article featuring a chart demonstrating that going on a trip to IKEA is worth a handjob at market prices, Toronto-area eye weekly is losing track of the big picture and becoming the forum for a collection of people writing personal essays, rings true to me. Certainly I confirmed that opinion after I read Chander Levack's front page article in the latest eye weekly, "Why I Committed Facebook Suicide: killing yourself to live," wherein Levack describes how Facebook became just too much for her ("I had 1,223 friends on Facebook, status updates everyone “liked” and the sneaking suspicion I was losing my real self to my more perfect profile. This week, I said goodbye to all that").

Levack's article baffles me, frankly.

You see, on Facebook I have 1,223 friends (two recently deleted and five hidden), who are constantly inviting me to ’60s dance parties, Toronto public space meetings and indie-rock concerts in abandoned factories. People “like” me — at least they say they do. They instantly respond to my thoughts and feelings about the world: a link to a Nirvana B-side, a quip about Kensington Market veganism, ruminations on what I’ll eat for dinner (though it will mostly likely be frozen peas). On the internet, I’m popular.

Recently, though, I’ve noticed that logging on makes me break into a cold sweat, as if I could never measure up to the persona I’ve created. The nagging red notifications rack up as I post covert messages to be deconstructed, stymied by the responsibility of portraying myself the way I want to be seen. I want to be “liked,” and so I post Kids In The Hall sketches at three in the morning. But if you ignore me I will crumble, unsure of my place in the world wide web.

I spoke to a psychologist, who said that even Howard Stern suffers from social anxiety disorder, but my reliance on Facebook has nothing to do with how I function in the real world. It’s just that I prefer the website’s controlled amicability to the tenuous nature of real relationships. At my lowest points (the headache and signature eye burn that proves that you have Facebooked too hard and too long, frittering away time examining the photos of your third cousin’s boyfriend’s Birthright trip), I flirt with the idea of suicide. Not real suicide, which contrary to the M*A*S*H* theme song, is not painless, but the idea of permanently deleting my profile. Facebook suicide.

It gets better. Does she have any idea what she wants out of Facebook, I wonder?

This week’s Facebook drama — new “privacy” controls that will effectively make even private information public to corporations — draws criticism, yet the website will prevail. I have more faith in Facebook than any other institution in society, because unlike religion and the government, your friends will never let you down.

Clicking through profiles in a somnambulistic haze, I came to realize that I couldn’t see the point of interacting with people in real life anymore, because I already knew everything about them. Better yet, it was what they wanted me to know, mediated by friendly wall-to-wall contact. My Facebook profile was cooler than me anyway.

And the best part is her concluding paragraph.

I logged out of the site and looked at my blue-and-white burial ground, feeling resolved to spend more time communicating with my friends. Had I just killed myself to live? I’m not sure yet. Follow me on Twitter and I’ll let you know how it’s going.

No to Facebook, yes to Twitter? You can find her at @clevack, if you want. I don't, since I'm terribly afraid that any conversation with her would implode.

Where to begin?

Let's start with a personal census. Here on Livejournal I've 264 friends on Livejournal of which 245 are mutually reciprocated. This friends list overlaps substantially with my 262 Facebook friends. Both of these lists overlap nearly entirely with the list 49 contacts I've named on Flickr. My three YouTube contacts are all on Livejournal and Facebook. E-mail's a huge sprawling thing I won't tackle here. As for the wider blogosphere, while I've RSS feeds to three dozen blogs and interact to one degree or another with most of them, there's only a relatively weak overlap with my Facebook friends and I've no idea at how who's interacting with A Bit More Detail, never mind Demography Matters or another upcoming project I'll announce shortly. (Stay tuned!)

Levack seems to have taken Facebook way too seriously. I care about other people, and Internet-based communications and platforms make it relatively easy for me to do this. I can't claim to be an expert, but I've tended to use Livejournal and Facebook primarily as a way to create and sustain relationships with people here in Toronto, and secondarily to sustain existing relationships with people who aren't in my immediate territorially sphere. After that, I use it to remain in contact with people I like based on their web presence, because these people I've never met have interesting things to say, I like remaining abreast of what's going on in their lives, and the possibility always exists of making these virtual friendships real ones should geography permit. That last is what gave me my first anchors in Toronto. It's large, it's sprawling, it's complex, but by prioritizing and planning things I've managed to make it all work for me while avoiding timesinks. I'm not sure how Levack managed to let Facebook overwhelm her to the point that she was uninterested in actually interacting with other people, but I suspect that kind of overindulgence is more the fault of the user than the platform. Why else would she be more likely to trust Facebook over governments and business while shying away from the platform?

This brings me to my [FORUM] question of the day. How do you use social networking platforms on the Internet, new or old? Do you find it easy to use them, do you fear being controlled by them? Are there things you'd like to do more with them or things that you really need to cut back upon?

Discuss/

[FORUM] Do your countries and/or governments dislike experts, too?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:10:54 GMT

Blogger James Bow has some choice words about the Conservative government's populist distaste for experts and what they have to say about the way things are and should be run, even if ignoring them leads to significant net losses for Canadians.

Back in September, Chet Scoville of the Vanity Press reported on a report by Michael Jackson, a law professor at the University of British Columbia. The report criticized the Conservative government’s proposal for revamping Canada’s prison policy. Basicallly, the massive prisons that the Conservatives hope to build are a waste of money, don’t solve the problem of crime, and possibly thwart our ability to rehabilitate these people, and the Conservatives appear to be ploughing ahead with this policy on ideological rather than rational grounds.

Their scathing analysis contends that the government road map starts with what they call an ideological “myth” — that prisoners’ human rights are at odds with public safety.

“What that’s doing is polarizing a discussion about corrections in a really unfortunate way,” Mr. Stewart said.

“It creates the notion that the decent treatment of prisoners is somehow putting the public at risk, when in fact it’s the complete reverse. …

“We don’t believe that abuse improves people.”

For the Conservatives’ part, they don’t outright deny Mr. Jackson’s criticisms. Indeed, they revel in them:

Ian Brodie, Harper’s former chief of staff, told a McGill University symposium last March that criticism of the tough-on-crime policy by sociologists, lawyers and criminologists actually bolsters the Conservative case — because they are held in lower regard than politicians.

“Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition,” Mr. Brodie said. “So we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”

For anybody who believes that politics should be an honest debate; for anybody who holds that democracy is a marketplace of ideas where policies rise and fall on their merits, this attitude should ring alarm bells. Here you have individuals who have worked hard, for years, in their chosen field of study, who have carefully gathered the facts, and have crafted credible arguments based on them, being dismissed because they have done just that. These individuals are arguably closer to the truth than most people — particularly these Conservative politicians — would care to admit, but rather than debate with them, or even agree to disagree, the experts are dismissed because their arguments do not feel right.

This, he goes on to note, has very serious effects indeed.

By disparaging the work of experts to the extent where some people believe that we should do the opposite of what the experts say, you do severe damage to the very people you’re supposed to serve. If you deliberately turn aside good advice, you allow yourself to govern with bad advice, and you govern to the detriment of the country.

[. . .]

Consider that Linda Keen and her colleagues on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission believed that it was important that the nuclear facility at Chalk River be shut down so that necessary safety improvements could be made, and they were attacked as “Liberal appointees” by Stephen Harper and Gary Lunn. Now Chalk River has been shut down in a rather more unplanned way, and the shortage of medical isotopes is getting worse. The director of FEMA during the Clinton years had actual disaster management experience and reasonably coped with hurricane strikes, tornadic destruction, et cetera. George W. Bush’s appointee, Michael Brown, had previously managed the International Arabian Horse Association (and had departed under a cloud), and you can see how well the federal government in the U.S. managed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Partly POV? Sure. I also agree with Bow's analysis.

So, that's Canada. Are there any similar trends in your societies and polities?

Discuss.

[PHOTO] Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:09:48 GMT

I live in a frontier zone. I live very close to the southern side of the railway tracks that separates the slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Dovercourt-Wallace Emerson-Junction from a not-so-gentrifying area north of the tracks.

At Geary and Dovercourt, north of the tracks, there used to be a grocery store housed in a somewhat aged building that looks almost to be slumping from the non-planular sidewalk. The store's gone now, leaving only a sign advertising the space's availability now.

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] "If only the Tsar knew!"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:54:23 GMT

Johnny Pez writes about the speculation that Obama might be purposely weakening the health care bill before Congressional discussion for the sake of his party's finances.

In this version of events, Joe Lieberman is not acting on his own to make the bill as unpleasant to liberals as possible. Instead, Lieberman is simply doing what Obama wants him to do: stripping out the parts of the bill that the health-care industry doesn't like, while keeping in the parts that the industry does like. Greenwald notes that Lieberman has received no criticism from the White House for doing this. Rather, the White House has reserved its criticism for Howard Dean, who has pointed out just how corporate-friendly the bill has become and who has publicly called for the defeat of the bill.

This is politics the DLC way: a big wet sloppy kiss for corporate interests and a flip of the bird to the party's liberal base. These are the principles that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has espoused throughout his political career, and presumably that's why Obama made him Chief of Staff in the first place.

If this is what's really going on, then Obama is a DLC Democrat, and always has been. Those who defend Obama, saying that he was helpless to influence events, and that it was all Rahm's fault, or all Joe's fault, are in denial. It's no use crying, "If only the Tsar knew!" because, as always, the Tsar has known, and approved, all along.

Disappointing, sure, socialized health care would be good for the United States, but I've no idea why people expected that President Obama wouldn't act as a politician careful to ensure his continued viability as a leader after he was elected. Expecting him to be a messiah of some sort was ridiculous. The insanely lofty rhetoric used to describe a perfectly good and idealistic man is the sort of thing that got him a Nobel Peace Prize. Just because he's not George Bush doesn't mean that he's an angel.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how you can become famous by blowing up Uruguay

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:32:52 GMT

I've always had something of a soft spot for Uruguay. I'm not sure why I've an interest in a country I've never had any significant contact with. Perhaps it's because of Uruguay's long tradition of social democracy, the generally good-natured of a country that, Tupamaros and military regime aside, has helped make the country a somewhat more shabby but still useful and up and coming Hispanophone version of New Zealand. That's why I'm a bit perturbed to see, via Will Baird and Noel Maurer, Uruguay independent filmmaker Frederico Alvarez's short film Ataque de Pánico!. The film features robots blowing up Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. And it cost $US 300.

Among the buildings blown up are (in order), the ANTEL Telecommunications Tower that's the tallest building in Uruguay, the Palacio Legislativo building that houses the national parliament, and the iconic 26-story Art Deco Palacio Salvo tower.

Since uploading the film to YouTube, Alvarez has done well for himself.

Would-be director Federico Alvarez, who runs a post-production visual effects house in Uruguay, filmed 'Panic Attack' with a budget of just $500 in his free time.

The five minute clip - which he then uploaded to YouTube - shows an invasion of Montevideo by giant robots and had special effects which could rival many big budget movies.

Once online it got the attention of thousands of movie fans… and (not surprisingly) studio bosses who wanted to meet with Alvarez to talk about his movie.

The 30-year-old was whisked to LA where he was offered a $1 million directors fee and up to £30 million to make the film, by Mandate Pictures. The plans for the movie are said to have a "compelling original story" beyond big robots blowing stuff up.

Alvarez has also been put up in a new apartment, given a new car and will work with "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi on developing the film.

As Bernard Guerrero said in Noel's comments, it's no surprise that with cheap cool films like this companies owning television networks are trying to unload them as quickly as they can.

[LINK] "Value of a Degree"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:55:59 GMT

At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo writes about the declining marginal value of graduate school education.

The first woman to wear high-heeled shoes was at a distinct advantage being several inches taller than everyone else. But as more women started wearing them, the advantage started to fade. Eventually, high-heeled shoes generated no relative advantage, but became a sort of "requirement" in social situations. Granted, there's a big difference here, in the sense that a society is better off when everyone is well-educated, but there really isn't much social gain from women who appear a few inches taller. The problem is that the cost of educating everyone is so painfully expensive.

The Great Recession has had some strange impacts. There are people in my class who aren't even bothering to look for work, because enough people have told them they can just "ride it out" in grad school. I'm not complaining if it means less competition in my own entry-leveljob search, but for the people I care about, I'm not sure how it will ultimately play out. Two years from now, if the economy recovers, which person will be theoretically more employable?.. a bachelor's degree holder with two years of full-time professional experience? or a master's degree holder with none?

No comment.

[BRIEF NOTE] On GJ 1214b

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:53:17 GMT

Centauri Dreams' summary of what's known about the newly discovered and very broadly Earth-like world GL 1214b works for me.

At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the planet orbits its star every 38 hours, with an estimated temperature a little over 200 degrees Celsius. Because GJ 1214b transits the star, astronomers are able to measure its radius, which turns out to be 2.7 times that of Earth. The density derived from this suggests a composition of about three-fourths water and other ices and one-fourth rock. Some of the planet’s water should be in the form of exotic materials like Ice VII, a crystalline form of water that is found at pressures greater than 20,000 Earth atmospheres:

“Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a waterworld,” said Zachory Berta, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who first spotted the hint of the planet among the data. “It is much smaller, cooler, and more Earthlike than any other known exoplanet.”

That’s quite a find for the MEarth Project, which uses an array of eight 16-inch telescopes that monitor a list of 2000 red dwarf stars. The MEarth array is located at the top of Mount Hopkins, Arizona. MEarth looks for the tiny drop in brightness that indicates a transit, using data processing technologies to extract the planetary signature. If ever there was a find that should galvanize the amateur astronomy community, it’s this one, as David Charbonneau (CfA), who heads MEearth, is quick to note:

“Since we found the super-earth using a small ground-based telescope, this means that anyone else with a similar telescope and a good CCD camera can detect it too. Students around the world can now study this super-earth!”

Sifting through this material, what stands out is that the radius measured for GJ 1214b is larger than expected by current models. Remember, this is the second time we’ve found a transiting super-Earth, the first being CoRoT-7b. The latter has a similar mass but the radius of GJ 1214b is much larger. Indications are that a surrounding atmosphere some 200 kilometers thick is adding to the drop in stellar light measured in these transits. Charbonneau again:

“This atmosphere is much thicker than that of the Earth, so the high pressure and absence of light would rule out life as we know it, but these conditions are still very interesting, as they could allow for some complex chemistry to take place.”

Apart from the fact that this world can be found with a small ground-based telescope--who knew planet-finding could be so easy just a couple of decades ago?--this ocean planet could be quite typical: "Planetary objects that form in the outer solar system begin as a comet-like mixture of roughly 50% water and 50% rock by weight. Simulations of solar system formation have shown that planets are likely to migrate inward or outward as they form, presenting the possibility that icy planets could wind up in orbits where their ice melts into liquid form, turning them into ocean planets."

By comparison, GJ 1214b's density would make it 50% denser than the ice-rock Jovian moons of Callisto or Ganymede and is comparable to that of famed Europa. GJ 1214b's much too hot to be a Europa, sadly, but at least there's some interesting chemistry going on.