Today particularly, I've been posting a lot of links about First Nations, their identities and the political movements and their cultural revivals. This year does seem to be a big year for indigenous movement, building on previous protests like last year's Idle No More movement.

What do you see coming of all this?

Discuss.

• blogTO notes how expensive Toronto's rental market is.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system.
• Crooked Timber engages with the complexities of racism.
• The Crux shares some oral history about the detection of the first gravitational wave.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports about the difficulties involved with detecting exoplanets around red ( Read more... )

The Atlantic's Adrienne Lafrance examines how Facebook stumbled into a needless confrontation over colonialism in India.

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t had the best week ( Read more... )

Al Jazeera reports on the noteworthy impending recognition by Germany of the campaign waged againdt the Herero of then-German Southwest Africa as genocide.

German authorities are set to officially recognize as "genocide" the colonial-era crackdown in Namibia by German troops more than a century ago in which over 65,000 ethnic Hereros were killed ( Read more... )

In an essay at The Atlantic that demonstrates his typical brilliance, "What This Cruel War Was Over", Ta-Nehisi Coates goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the Confederacy--and, by extension, its flag--were all about slavery and white racism.

This afternoon, in announcing her support for removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds ( Read more... )

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• Bag News Notes isn't impressed by the scandal aroused by Arne Svenson's photos of New York City condo dwellers taken through their windows--they are open, aren't they?
• Beyond the Beyond links to an interview with Chinese science fiction writer Fei Dao about that genre in China.
• Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell writes about the problems of rural America ( Read more... )

In August of 2008, I took two photos of the statue of South American liberator Simón Bolivar, located in the northwest corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park. just south of Dundas Street West. here and here. On Sunday, I revisited the site and took another photo.


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• Bag News Notes takes a look at the political iconography surrounding Chinese first lady, and patriotic singer, Peng Liuang.
• BCer in Toronto Jeff Jedras doesn't like suggestion like the one made by Liberal leadership candidate Joyce Murray that, in order to bring down Harper, the NDP and Liberals should consider not running candidates in ridings ( Read more... )

• 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 ( Read more... )