[META] Blogroll Update

I've decided that it's time for a massive blogroll update. For your amusement and mine, then, here's links to eight blogs of note.

• First up is the blog of Kitchener-based writer Bow. James Bow.


• The group blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money has a nicely eclectic mix of material--the Battle of Jutland and Canadian politics--that appeals to me.


• Mark MacKinnon's blog belongs to the Canadian journalist of the same name.


• Peace, order and good government, eh? is an energetic left-wing Canadian group blog.


• Did you ever want trenchant commentary on GLBT news content with a Canadian twist and a sketch to boot? Mark's Slap Upside the Head has what you've been longing for.


• Chet Scoville's The Vanity Press is a great Canadian politics blog.


• For a fair stretch of time, I'd linked to the law-oriented group blog Volokh Conspiracy. Now I'm doing it again.


• Finally, Paul Goble's Window on Eurasia has a lot of interesting material on Eurasian and especially Russian affairs, with an emphasis on minority populations of various kinds.

Go, read!

[PHOTO] Toronto Skyline from Bathurst Street Bridge

Toronto Skyline from Bathurst Street Bridge
Originally uploaded by Serdar's digital world

I found this photo in the Torontoist Flickr pool. Photographer Serdar Gurbus took this magnificent picture of downtown Toronto, looking from the Bathurst Street Bridge. My heart skips a beat just looking at its beauty.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• James Bow suggests that the adoption of a system of proportional representation in the Canadian House of Commons, perhaps using a Single Transferable Vote or Mixed Member Proportional scheme, would be the best way to avoid aggravating regional splits--Conservatives have been shut out of major cities in central Canada despite having relatively strong support there.


• Centauri Dreams reports that carbon dioxide has been found in the atmosphere HD 189733b, some 63 light years from us. It won't be long until we'll be finding oxygen.


• Far Outliers quotes at length from a passage by Tunzelmann in his book Indian Summer describing the profound corruption afflicting British India's largely self-governing princely states.


• Joe. My. God quotes British author Mark Simpson (inventor of "metrosexual") as suggesting, perhaps unsurprisingly, that attempts to limit marriages may well hasten the institution's collapse and its replacement by civil partnerships of one kind or another. He also suggests that most gay men are likely to be single, something that doesn't fit well with my personal experience of gay men in my age group at least.


• Arnold Zwicky's Language Log considers the very interesting question of the origin of phrases like "day without a gay."


• Strange Maps links to the famous map showing Ukraine's division between a pro-Yushchenko/Orange Revolution west and north and a pro-Yanukych south and east, this division roughly corresponding to language divisions between Ukrainophones and Russophones.


• At Torontoist, Stephen Michalowicz writes ("The City Known as Dixon" about the concentration of Somali-Canadians in the Dixon area of northwestern Toronto. It's main selling point, it seems, was its location near Pearson International Airport.


• Noel Maurer pointed this curious Canadian to The Daily Show's take on Canada's ongoing political crisis. Visits from the Queen really are worth all that.


• Eugene Volokh makes the interesting suggestion that tasers be made legally available to the general public, on the grounds of their effectiveness.


• Paul Goble quotes a Russian scientist who suggests that, as a result of the growth of non- and often anti-Russian national consciousnesses elsewhere in the Soviet space, the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians in Russia and the official support for a civic nationalism, and a sense of threat coming from Western economic and political expansion at Russian expense is encouraging a growth of Russian ethnic nationalism. This, he thinks, is a good thing.

[LINK] "PEI tightens registry access as traffic spikes"

Oliver Moore at The Globe and Mail let us know about a rather remarkable blogging-related development on Prince Edward Island.

The government of Prince Edward Island moved to tighten access to its corporate registry after a local blogger and tech developer found a way to search by shareholder, sparking a flood of public interest.

About 140,000 searches were done at his site in the first week it was live. Most of them were by locals and roughly one-fifth were by keyword, employing search terms that suggested some people were using the site to check up on politicians.

"You see the Premier's name [being used as a keyword], you see some cabinet ministers' names," Peter Rukavina said.

He said he created the Web-search tool because he was interested in finding out the names of shareholders behind a development project in downtown Charlottetown. It was purely to satisfy his own curiosity. But when he offered the public access to the search tool, it gave everyone the chance to explore who might have had ties to a much-criticized immigrant-investment program.


The amount of traffic was something of a surprise to Mr. Rukavina, who hadn't realized the depth of public interest.

He wasn't the only one surprised. A representative of the corporate registry said officials there had no idea that shareholder data could be so easily retrieved from the site, and they moved quickly to limit access. The added security brought the registry into line with most other provinces, the official said, and enhanced the privacy of its clients.

But it's not just curious members of the public who will be missing the access.

"One of the significant sources of traffic to the site is people within government," Mr. Rukavina said. "Presumably it's more effective than the tool they have at their disposal."

He shut down opencorporations.org yesterday, saying the added security at the corporate registry had made the data stale.

The so-called Provincial Nominee Program has dominated the political chatter in PEI for months. Under the program, thousands of would-be immigrants put up $200,000 in return for being allowed to settle on the island. Most of the money was supposed to be invested locally.

Businesses connected to some politicians are known to have benefited from the program, which Richard Brown, Minister of Innovation and Advanced Learning, has said was not a problem, provided it passed conflict-of-interest rules.

When questioned during the fall about the involvement of politicians, Mr. Brown asked rhetorically: "Are we saying if he owns a farm he is not allowed to apply for farm subsidies?"

The province's auditor-general started a probe in early October, and interest in the story has continued to grow. Among the more recent revelations was that some would-be migrants paid $2,500 to have an interview overseas, and that some of the money was given out as bonuses for staff at the Crown corporation that administered the program.

"This story has more legs than a centipede," said Ian Dowbiggin, chair of the department of history at the University of Prince Edward Island.

He said the story has aroused so much interest in part because of the amount of money involved - hundreds of millions of dollars - and also because the government has released so little information.

"Almost everything that we hear about the program ... is speculation. It's innuendo and rumour," Dr. Dowbiggin said.

"What I am prepared to say is that if even a third of what has been alleged about this program turns out to be true, it will be the biggest scandal in Prince Edward Island history."

Rukavina has more on this situation here. All I can say is that, in a province where people were outraged that an elected government would give jobs out based not on their political affiliation but rather on their qualifications, this sort of scandal is not surprising in the least.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Paraguay and Brazil

Interesting things are happening in Paraguay, and many of them have to do with Brazil. Take land reform.

Brazilian farmers who have settled in Paraguayan territory have asked the government of Brazil to mediate in the tension, which in some cases has escalated into confrontations with local groups of campesinos.

The Lugo administration’s response was that it will seek the best solution, within a framework of respect for the rule of law. Through negotiations, a first agreement was arrived at between the campesino Coordinating Committee for the Defence of Sovereignty and Agrarian Reform, and a group of Brazilian landowners.

The Brazilian farmers agreed to sell 22,000 hectares to the Paraguayan state, which will pay for the land using part of the revenues from the Paraguayan-Brazilian Itaipú hydroelectric dam that are set aside for social spending.

Balbuena stressed that resistance against the Brazilian soybean farmers is growing because the spraying of their crops hurts campesino communities and their crops and livestock. "This dispute is not about occupations of land, but about the problems associated with the use of toxic agrochemicals," he said.

The boom in soybean monoculture in eastern Paraguay in the last few years is at the root of the present conflicts.

In seven years, the area under soybean crops in Paraguay doubled, reaching 2.4 million hectares by 2007, equivalent to 25 percent of all cultivated land in the country. And all of it is genetically modified (GM) soy, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

Paraguay is now seventh in the global ranking for the area under transgenic crops, and has no legislation on the use of GM seeds. It is also the world's fourth largest exporter of soybeans.

There are 81,000 Brazilians living in this country, not counting their Paraguayan-born descendants. Most of them live along the Brazilian border.

"Between 1992 and 2002, the number of people describing themselves as Brazilian nationals fell. However, there are many more Portuguese-speakers," Fabricio Vázquez, a researcher at the National University's Faculty of Agrarian Sciences, told IPS.

Vázquez said that Brazilian immigrants should be regarded as a social group undergoing a process of integration.

"Rural immigrants (Brazilians, Canadians, Russians, and so on) settled a long time ago in border areas that were neglected by the Paraguayan state. The issue is not whether they are many or few, but that they are a group of producers who have a large socioeconomic impact," he said.

The catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance saw Paraguay radically depopulated in the 1860s by the armies of the Empire of Brazil, and subsequently saw Paraguay--like Uruguay and Bolivia--become a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina. In the 1950s, Paraguay's dictator Stroessner decided to move closer to Brazil and away from Argentina, eventually falling into a Brazilian sphere of influence. Kacowicz argues that the whole of the Southern Cone is part of a Brazil-defined zone of influence as expressed most recently through Mercosur, but the greatest imbalance within the Common Market of the Southern Cone is arguably between an industrialized Brazil of 190 million people and a poor landlocked Paraguay home to less than ten million. Naturally, there are fears of Brazilian domination. The electricity produced by the joint Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu Dam is another sticking point, since Paraguay wants to renegotiate the terms of the deal to give Paraguay a larger share of the revenues. So far, Paraguay has managed to avoid falling into the same trap of somewhat self-destructive nationalism that characterizes modern-day Bolivia owing to the greater maturity of Paraguay's political culture and the relatively minor nature of ethnic cleavages, but Paraguay's Brazilian connections may yet prove to be especially controversial.