[PHOTO] Three Victoria Day Tulips

When I passed by the St. Alban's Boys' and Girls' Club (843 Palmerston Avenue) on Victoria Day, inspired by larkvi's advice I decided to photograph some tulips. At the time, the tulips were just starting to die, but there were still some nice examples.

Red Tulip, 843 Palmerston Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Yellow Tulip, 843 Palmerston Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Pink Tulip, 843 Palmerston Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[MUSIC] Blur, "Girls and Boys"

Blur's 1994 international hit single "Girls and Boys", with Damon Alborn's accented drawl and the shiny electropop sound and its inimitable Britishness, is one of my favourite songs.

"Challenger Disaster Live on CNN" (Watch on YouTube)

I was disappointed to find out, via Wikipedia, that Blur intended this to be purely satirical, a take-down of reckless vacations. The song's first verse and its chorus still stands out to me as an anthem for the sort of world that I wouldn't mind to live in.

Streets like a jungle
So call the police
Following the herd
Down to Greece - on holiday
Love in the nineties
Is paranoid
On sunny beaches
Take your chances - looking for

[. . .]

Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they're girls
Who do girls like they're boys
Always should be someone you really love

Ah, well; readers can subvert the author's intentions, I suppose.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the 20th anniversary of the suppression of the Tiannamen Square protest

I've four memories of events in the outside world before I turned 10 in 1990 that stand out in my mind. The first was the failure of the 1986 US-Soviet Reykjavik summit. The second was the news that Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson cheated at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The third was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fourth, and final, was the Tiannamen Square protest and their suppression.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the Tiannamen Square protests. The Chinese government is keeping a close eye on any commemorations of the protests and their suppression. Such commemorations as are happening are taking place elsewhere, in Hong Kong, among the Tibetan exile community, and elsewhere.

Dan Twining at Foreign Policy argues that, in any number of uchronias, the protests could have ended quite differently.

We should start from the premise that the crackdown, and China's subsequent rise as an authoritarian rather than a democratic superpower, was not inevitable. We know from both The Tiananmen Papers and Zhao Ziyang's memoirs that the Communist Party leadership was split on whether to use force against the protesters. There is little question that China's regime was under threat -- mass protests had erupted not only in Beijing but in more than 180 cities across China, endangering the regime's survival. We also know that popular uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s, in some cases of a smaller relative scale than those across China in 1989, led to democratic transitions from authoritarian rule in Sinic and other societies across Asia -- including in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and Indonesia.

Moreover, China itself had a history of democratic thought and practice. Sun Yat-sen founded the first Chinese republic in 1912. The student- and intelligentsia-led May 4 movement of 1919 featured protectors, angry at the terms of the Versailles settlement in Asia, who maintained that China, to protect its integrity and interests against stronger powers in the West and Japan, needed to embrace a "new culture" grounded in Western notions of democracy and equality. The Democracy Wall movement of 1979 called for China to pursue a "Fifth Modernization": political freedom. In the liberal political climate of the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals and civic activists openly discussed agendas for democracy and reform, leading many Westerners -- and many Chinese -- to presume that China would be part of the global wave of democratization that accompanied the end of the Cold War.

The Tiananmen crackdown changed the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese economy, and Chinese foreign policy. As Minxin Pei argues, liberals like Zhao Ziyang were purged from the Party's leadership, transforming it from a broader coalition that included liberals, conservatives, and technocrats to a narrower and more cohesive one led by a conservative/technocratic elite. Not only did the Party change, but so did its relationship with society, as it pursued an aggressive new policy of coopting China's rising middle class into its ranks (which, in an inversion of Marxist class-consciousness, became a ticket to material success for the country's Party-card-carrying bourgeoisie).

Twining suggestions that as China moves from a producer-driven economy towards a consumer-driven economy, advancing up the ranks of developing countries and becoming a stable middle-income country, democracy in the Western sense could come to China. Curiously enough, this is also the opinion of a former protester whose 2003 interview was Far Outliers linked to by Far Outliers.

For so many years China had a stringently controlled educational system. From kindergarten to college, we all read the exact same books and took the exact same exams. We always believed everything that the government told us, and they told us it was an honor for ‘the people without property’ to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for the cause of communism, fighting against the two great enemies, the Nationalists [KMT] and the Capitalists. We were brainwashed....

You have to realize that Deng changed my life - everybody’s life. He opened new doors for all of us. In 1982, my mother was among the first batch of scholars who were sent abroad to study, and she went to Harvard. She returned to become the director of a major Shanghai hospital. So we are grateful. And soon so many other changes happened.

I feel a great respect for our leaders. There are some, like Li Peng, who I still have no respect for. But Deng - soon we felt as though he had torn down the Berlin Wall. I wondered, if Deng had not handled the demonstrations the way he did would China be the country it is today? The whole nation is changing and people are more affluent, and I feel proud of being Chinese. People once looked down at us, and now they have respect for us....

[LINK] Greenhouse meltdown in North America

I'd like to thank Will Baird for letting me know about this paper.I may have been quite right to leave my island homeland of Prince Edward Island, on the northeastern coastline of North America, for climatic reasons among others.

Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet this century may drive more water than previously thought toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax and other cities in the northeastern United States and Canada, according to new research.

[. . .]

"If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise," says scientist Aixue Hu, the paper's lead author. Hu is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise."

A study in Nature Geoscience in March warned that warmer water temperatures could shift ocean currents in a way that would raise sea levels off the Northeast by about eight inches more than the average global sea level rise that is expected with global warming.

But it did not include the additional impact of Greenland ice, which at moderate to high melt rates would further accelerate changes in ocean circulation and drive an additional 10 to 30 centimeters (4 to 12 inches) of water toward northeastern North America on top of the average global rise.

[LINK] "Russia accuses Poland of starting Second World War"

Thanks to Pēteris on Facebook who alerted us to this striking article.

The Russian defence ministry posted a potentially inflammatory essay on its website which claimed Poland resisted Germany's ultimatums in 1939 only because it "wanted to obtain the status of a great power".

The lengthy diatribe, which is unlikely to be welcomed in Warsaw, also lashed out at Britain and France for giving the Poles "delusions of grandeur" by promising to intercede if the Nazis invaded.

"Anyone who has been minded to study the history of the Second World War knows it started because of Poland's refusal to meet Germany's requests," the statement read. "The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded."

Appearing to take Germany's demands at face value, the defence ministry insisted that the Nazis were interested only in building transport links across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia and assuming control of Gdansk, which had been designated as a free city at the time.

Western historians largely recognise that if Poland would have lost its independence had it acceded to the demands, pointing to Hitler's policies of Lebensbraum and the creation of a Greater Germany as evidence.

Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 2009, prompting the British Empire and France to declare war over the next two days. Germany and the Soviet Union then carved up Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The statement, written by Col Sergei Kovalev, a senior researcher at the defence ministry, appears to be part of a new Kremlin campaign to push its view of Soviet era history.

[. . .]

Col Kovalev's paper, which appears under a section titled History: Lies and Falsifications, claims that British support for Warsaw caused Poland to "lose all sense of reality."

It also attacked the Western press for suggesting that the Soviet Union carried some blame for the War by its alliance with Hitler under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which carved up Europe into two spheres of influence to be headed by Hitler and Stalin.

"No representatives of a Western democracy has the right to discuss any treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany," given that Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement of 1938 giving Germany control of the Sudetenland.

As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Col Kovalev wrote, it was merely a time-buying mechanism after Britain refused to sign a mutual defence treaty with the Soviet Union.

It's worth noting that this essay is being promoted by the Russian Federation, which has claimed for itself the glory of the Soviet Union, apparently excluding anything--shall we say--antisocial that the Soviet state has done. Not that the Soviet state, with its purges and state-sponsored famines and tyranny, was in any way an unacceptable strategic partner for Britain or France or Poland, of course.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Cuba A and B

Whenever Communist regimes entered the last quarter of the 20th century, regional disparities widened. In Poland, a country that underwent political and economic changes with some speed, new divisions rose, not so much between those who bought up cheap eastern German real estate and those who went to work in Britain, but between Poland "A" and Poland "B", the former appealing to the young more than to the elderly, more to the liberal than to the conservative as I blogged back in July 2007, and concentrated in northern and western Poland. In the People's Republic of China, which has made revolutionary changes in its economy but not in its political structure, the sharp divisions between prosperous coastal provincial economies and a lagging interior may have worsened since the beginning of economic reform in 1979. What I didn't know, but do now thanks to Alfreido Prieto's report in the Havana Times, is that Cuba, despite its relative lack of political and economic change, is also marked by a Polish-style division between A and B regions.

The term “Cuba B” originated in the nineties. It refers to the “Cuban back country,” traditionally known as “the provinces,” a social and cultural phenomenon that underscores the differences between the city and the rural areas (or the capital and the rest of the country). At the same time the phrase represents a situation typical of Latin American underdevelopment that we inherited from the Spaniards.

This “Cuba B” is in no way homogeneous, since each one of its territories - the west, the east and the central region - has its particular characteristics. Nevertheless I am going to use as an illustration the provinces of Guantanamo, Las Tunas and Granma, three of the most backward regions in comparative terms, which came to be as a result of the new political and administrative divisions that have been functioning in the country since 1976.

In these provinces, one of the distinctive features is the predominance of a black and mestizo population. Granma, for example is the province with the highest percentage of mestizo population in the country. They also have relatively low levels of education and culture and a minimum of tourism development. This marks a structural difference with respect to the two principal centers of development in the country: Varadero and the city of Havana, the standard examples of Cuba A.
The city of Havana, which along with Varadero, make up Cuba A. Photo: Caridad

The city of Havana, which along with Varadero, make up Cuba A. Photo: Caridad

For these same reasons the areas mentioned are characterized by high levels of internal emigration: first to the provincial capitals, the cities of Guantanamo, Las Tunas and Bayamo. From there, if possible, many people emigrate to the nation’s capital, Havana. Among other things, they come to swell the ranks of two specific jobs that no native Havana resident wants to perform: police officers and construction workers. President Raul Castro underlined this fact during a recent session of the Cuban parliament.

This is all related to the fact that this Cuba B is noted for its generally lower salaries and for a very limited circulation of hard currency, although this has increased recently, not only as a result of family remittances from emigrants in the United States, Europe and Latin America, but also from those who work on international missions - as doctors, health workers, sports trainers, etc. that the government sends for a specified time period to places as diverse as neighboring Haiti or far-away South Africa.