[PHOTO] St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, 4 Bellwoods Avenue

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, 4 Bellwoods Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, located at 4 Bellwoods Avenue on Queen Street West just next to Trinity Bellwoods Park, is evidence of a large Ukrainian community once concentrated in this area.

Since Ukrainians in Toronto constitute over 10 per cent of all Ukrainians in Canada they have a considerable impact on the entire Ukrainian Canadian community. The earliest Ukrainians to settle in Toronto around the turn of the century lived in the two major immigrant reception areas: I) St. John's Ward (Yonge University, Queen-College Streets) with Ukrainians settling in the south on such streets as Terauley (now Bay), Alice (where the Eaton's Centre is today), Elizabeth and Elm; 2) The Junction area in west Toronto on streets such as Franklin, Edwin, Perth, Edith and Royce (later Dupont).

After World War One the community started to expand and resettle west along Queen Street with an axis at Bathurst. This became the main Ukrainian community area in Toronto from 1920 into the 1960s with almost all the major organisations and churches located here. Such streets as Denison, Augusta, Lippincott and, further west, Palmerston and Euclid were heavily populated by Ukrainians who bought, rented, or boarded in these locales. In the early days they were called Bukovinians, Galicians and Ruthenians.

By 1920 Ukrainians were settled in an area on King Street East and others such as Duchess and Dalhousie. In the 1920-30s there were also Ukrainians in an area south of Queen in the Niagara-Tecumseth triangle. In the interwar period colonies started in Mimico-New Toronto-Long Branch and from 1932 in the farm area of Scarborough-Agincourt at Warden Avenue to escape the depression in the city.

[. . .]

In Toronto the two traditional churches in 1971 counted 58.1 per cent of Ukrainians as their parishioners with Ukrainian Catholics at 23,565 (38.8 per cent) and Ukrainian Orthodox at 11,700 (19.3 per cent). Some 14 per cent of Ukrainians in Toronto were Roman Catholic, 9.1 per cent were United Church, 5.2 per cent were Anglican and 1.9 per cent were Presbyterian. The traditional churches of Ukraine have been losing their predominance with Ukrainian Catholics decreasing from 57.4 per cent in 1931 to 38.8 per cent in 1971. The Ukrainian Orthodox church has gone from 10.6 per cent in 1931 up to 27.1 per cent in 1951 and then down to 19.3 per cent in 1971.

[BRIEF NOTE] James Nicoll was right about the US and Iran agreeing on religion's in politics

Well, more precisely some segments of the American and Iranian populations.

This article featured on the front page of the Toronto Star a couple of days ago, perhaps prompted by a recent visit he made to Toronto. (I saw the solid line of Secret Service cars protecting him while he ate at the Artful Dodger.

Bush, a born-again Christian since age 40, arrives for today's paid speaking engagement at Metro Toronto Convention Centre with fellow former president Bill Clinton amid a series of stranger-than-fiction disclosures, one of which suggests that apocalyptic fervour may have held sway within the walls of his White House.

Bush, who turns 63 in July and was 54 when first sworn into office in 2001, has yet to comment on the reports. They include last week's GQ magazine exposé into the hawkish use of scripture in 2003, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld forwarded secret intelligence memos to Bush embroidered with biblical passages.

"Therefore, put on the full armour of God," a verse from Ephesians, and "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter," from Isaiah, are among the messages that adorn reports prepared for Bush by Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

It gets better.

Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins," Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the biblical reference. Romer first revealed his account in a 2007 article for the university review, Allez savoir, which passed largely unnoticed.

Chirac, in a new book by French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, is quoted as confirming the surreal conversation, saying he was stupefied by Bush's reference to biblical prophecy and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."

[. . .]

"Speculating on what goes on inside George Bush's head is always a bold endeavour. But the sense one gets from this is that biblical prophecy somehow factored in the thinking," said Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Yale University in a recent article for counterpunch.org.

"The most striking thing for me is in the real world, trying to get France to go to war on that basis is crazy. It is hard to imagine a better way to scare off a potential friend."

I know many people of faith, and I respect their religion. That said, I think that Gore Vidal was absolutely right when he said that people who believe in the imminent apocalypse should never have access to a nuclear arsenal.

[CAT] "Why cats fail to grasp string theory"

The New Scientist's Ewen Callaway has sad news.

Now we know why cats never get bored of chasing string. A new study has found that domestic felines don't seem to understand cause and effect connections between objects.

Chimpanzees, tamarin monkeys, parrots and ravens all understand that tugging on one end of a string will bring a treat at the other end closer. Pigeons and human infants don't; and cat lovers dismayed at their pets' lack of nous can console themselves with the knowledge that dogs don't either.

"There's no reason to think that cats are more stupid than dogs," says Britta Osthaus, a comparative psychologist at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, who led the study. "I've done quite a few tests and I always find that dogs just don't get it."

Working with 15 shelter cats, Osthaus's team attached fish or biscuit treats to one end of a string. A plastic screen with a small gap at the bottom separated cats from their reward, requiring the felines to tug on the string to get the treat.

With a single string attached to the food, most cats learned to paw at the string to get a snack. But when Osthaus' team introduced a second piece of string, unconnected to any foods, cats tugged on the correct string less than half the time.

This suggests that the cats couldn't infer cause-and-effect relationships between two objects and could only learn an association from scratch each time.

This, of course, underscores the need for immediate cat uplift. I, for one, will welcome my felinoid brethren. And you?

[LINK] Torontoist's now with the Globe and Mail

Torontoist, one of my favourite group blogs and threatened with extinction at the end of last year, has now entered into a promising partnership with The Globe and Mail, perhaps my favourite newspaper.

As of Friday night, the Globe now has a brand new Toronto section on their website, and as of Friday night, that hub will regularly and prominently feature selected Torontoist content, part of a content-sharing partnership between the two media organizations.

In her announcement of the new hub on the Globe's site, Toronto Editor Kelly Grant called Torontoist "the city's best comprehensive blog" and said that we'll bring her paper's readers "intensely local tales from every corner of Toronto, along with listings of events you won't want to miss"; in a separate statement, she added that the Globe is "delighted to be working with Torontoist." The feeling's mutual! The partnership is something that we've all been working towards for a long while now, and something we couldn't be more excited about.

I am so happy with this.

[BRIEF NOTE] On George Friedman and glaring futurological research errors

Over at Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton considers George Friedman's latest work of futurology, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. The book, as he notes, has some interesting elements.

When I first came across George Friedman's The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century in a bookstore, I flipped through it but didn't buy it because 1) I had to get to work soon and 2) I really didn't feel like shelling out $30 CDN plus applicable taxes. Nevertheless, it did intrigue me quickly and the ideas I was exposed to from briefly flipping through it kept nattering at me, and so on Friday I went and paid the $30 CDN plus applicable taxes.

Forecasting is an inherently tricky business. Also on my shelf is Your Next Fifty Years by Robert W. Prehoda, circa 1979, which among other things forecast a barely-averted Malthusian famine and population collapse in 1994 that ended the Cold War because the United States shared its emergency food supplies with the Soviets. Technological forecasting, which is really what much of the field is concerned with, is particularly hard to nail down.

Geopolitical forecasting is something else again. Geopolitics doesn't play by the same rules as technology - regardless of the tools at hand, the overarching goals, drives, and motivations of its players are the same as they've been throughout history. As the founder and Chief Intelligence Officer of the private intelligence agency Stratfor, Friedman probably has access to a wealth of information from around the world that helped him design a possible 21st century.

The book strikes me as interesting in a sort of negative way, at least in terms of plausibility. Plausibly enough, Friedman argues that as Russia declines as a great power--first relatively, then absolutely--European influence, perhaps especially Polish influence, is likely to grow. His growth projections, however, might be a bit off. At one point, referring to the Soviet occupation of central Europe during the Cold War, he suggests--light-heartedly, I hope--that indeed there might one day be a Polish occupation of Minsk and a Hungarian occupation of Kiev. (Indeed, why not?) He also doesn't seem to grasp multilateralism at all, for instance having a Germany that he describes as decadent and pacifistic launch a preemptive war against Poland without any reference to, well, anything. His complete neglect of the Southern Hemisphere--are Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, all trivial--doesn't speak well of him, and while his suggestion that Turkey may become a regional superpower is quite plausible his suggestion that Japan might end up involving itself militarily in a fragmented China is not.

Anyway. At one point, Friedman has a Japanese-Turkish alliance attack the United States' "Battle Stars," manned military stations in orbit. As Andrew notes, Friedman doesn't seem to have paid attention

What really gets me is that, considering that the Japanese-Turkish coalition is banking on its possession of an intact satellite network to pummel the United States into submission, physically destroying its Battle Stars is fucking stupid - but then, when you get right down to it, the same can be said for orbital warfare as a whole.

Humans are spoiled by habits that a gravity field encourages. If we blow something up, we expect the rubble to stay where it is; no fun to clean up, sure, but also something that can be sidestepped and no longer provides any value to the enemy. Space doesn't work that way. Sure, Japan's destroyed the Battle Stars and blinded the American eyes in the sky, but it won't matter because the debris from the destroyed stations, tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of debris, is now hurling around Earth at 8 kilometers per second on unpredictable orbits that may intersect with yet more satellites. Many of them would, undoubtedly, constitute the intact Japanese-Turkish network with which they can keep an eye on the States.

This is a perfect recipe for a Kessler Syndrome, something I've written about before, where the volume of debris in Earth orbit makes spaceflight effectively impossible. This is also something people aren't really familiar with yet. After all, garbage doesn't last forever - except in space, where it effectively does.

What do I think of The Next 100 Years? It does have some thought-provoking ideas, but on the whole I'd have to mark it as implausible in the grand fashion of the American militarist nationalism. Pity; he might have otherwise written a good book.