[PHOTO] Staying balanced

For years, I've been wondering who was creating remarkably balanced towers out of rocks--concrete chunks, natural stones, everything--balanced with an amazing precision on street corners. Last night, walking past the corner of Bloor and Brunswick that I'd singled out earlier for its book sales, I came across another one of these tower clusters.

From Bloor Street West (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is the first of two pictures that I took of the standing stones at Bloor Street West and Brunswick, looking south.

From Bloor Street West (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is the second of two pictures that I took of the standing stones at Bloor Street West and Brunswick, again lookng south.

On Brunswick, looking north
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I took a picture of the standing stones to the south, on Brunswick Street.

Business Stone
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This business stone shows a link to the blog of the artists responsible, at the Sunjye-Blog. How could I refuse to take it?

Going to the blog reveals that the towers have been put up by one Aura Catherine Lowe, and that she experiences the balancing of the stones as a spiritual exercise. They look striking, too.

[LINK] Some Friday links

Today's links post is a big one.

• At Alpha Sources, Claus Vistesen analyzes the ongoing economic mayhem in the Baltic States, especially in Latvia.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the first planet, a "cold Jupiter," discovered orbiting a very dim red dwarf star in the neighbourhood thanks to astrometry.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell reports on a ludicrous paper which argues that problems with the Euro could precipitate interstate war, and Ingrid Robeyns examines the consequence of a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Namibia.


• False Positives' Ian Irving commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  
• On the subject of Poland in the Second World War, Far Outliers blogs about how the Nazis and the Soviets both did their best to decapitate Polish society in the zones that they occupied.


• Gideon Rachman wonders if California's institutionalized gridlock will become a model for the world.


• Joe. My. God reports that gay men tend to do better in college than their heterosexual counterparts.


• Mark MacKinnon blogs about the peaceful democratic elections in Mongolia, which has seen the election of a president who belonged to a party that wasn't descended from the old Communist party.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the stories of the East Asians who may well have been the first to visit Europe before the modern era.


• The Pagan Prattle reports on the belief that the Antichrist might be homosexual.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know about the recent bill passed by the Alberta provincial legislature which allows parents to pull their children out of classes dealing with GLBT subjects. It would have to be Alberta.


• Strange Maps describes the barren island of Sable Island, a part of Canada hundreds of kilometres away from Nova Scotia, notable mainly for its herd of wild horses and the many ships wrecked on its adjacent underwater dunes.


• Towleroad reports on surviving photos of Stonewall taken just after the riots 40 years ago.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that Moscow's backing away from the claim that Poland started the Second World War, and that efforts to impose a single literary language on the Mordvin might doom this small population.

[LINK] Pawning the ex-master

A while ago--but not too long ago--james_nicoll posted a wonderful link, "What's 19th century English for getting schooled?", purporting to contain the letter written by one ex-slave, Johndon Anderson, in response to a request by his former owner to come back to work for him.

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson
Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, Them colored people were slaves down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

It goes on, deliciously, in this same vein.

There has been some question as to the authenticity of this document. It is certain that it dates to 1865, and as for the question of authorship, who knows? Hidden in the academic debate on the profitability of American slavery, horrible things were obviously going on. Robert Fogel, a man who argued that slavery was profitable, also calculated that the average slave woman had a roughly 50% chance of bearing the child of her owner or one of the owner's male relatives. It's certainly brilliant satire!

[DM] "On Tonga and the Pacific Islanders"

Over at Demography Matters, I've got a post up examining the massive and vital role that migration has played in Tonga particularly and the South Pacific generally.

Go, read!

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On "Lyin' Brian"

The reputation of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took a spectacular hit in the past couple of weeks, when his testimony before a parliamentary committee in the Airbus affair confirmed that he accepted three envelopes of cash containing $75 000 each from Karlheinz Schreiber, a German-Canadian businessman whose unorthodox transfers of money to German chancellor Helmut Kohl brought down that man down while he was still in office.

Brian Mulroney told a federal inquiry Friday there was nothing "sinister" about accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber at three hotels in the 16 months after he stepped down as prime minister in the summer of 1993.

The former PM also told the inquiry that contrary to Schreiber's assertions, there was "zero" talk about the two of them working together in the future when they met two days before Mulroney resigned from office.

Mulroney was responding to questions from Richard Wolson, lead counsel for the inquiry, who was pressing the former Conservative prime minister to describe, in painstaking detail, how he felt about accepting cash payments of $75,000 three times, beginning on August 27 at a hotel at Montreal's Mirabel airport.

The line of questioning appeared to wear on Mulroney, who looked increasingly uncomfortable responding to direct question such as: Why didn't you open a bank account; and why didn't you start your open paper trail?

Mulroney confirmed anew he tucked the money away in safety deposit boxes in his Montreal home, and at a New York bank.

Although he saw the cash payments as unconventional, Mulroney said, he did not consider the need for transparency, especially as a former prime minister.

"I simply was not thinking that way at the time," he said.

I'm sure that he's being entirely honest. Why, I myself have $C 10 000 secreted in my closet, and a few thousand Euros buried, wrapped in plastic bags, in a nearby park--

Right.

Mulroney had earlier issued a straightforward denial that any illegal exchange of money occurred between him and Schreiber, and yet.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologized publicly on Thursday for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from a German arms dealer, but he bluntly rejected suggestions he had taken kickbacks.

Mulroney, a mentor to current Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had for years declined to answer why exactly he took the money from Karlheinz Schreiber after leaving office in 1993. Schreiber says he handed over a total of C$300,000 ($295,000), while Mulroney said he received C$225,000.

The affair is one of the great mysteries of Canadian politics and efforts to uncover what happened have revealed allegations of skullduggery and influence-peddling that involve senior officials and politicians.

Schreiber, awaiting extradition to Germany to face charges of fraud, bribery and tax evasion, says he paid Mulroney to help German firm Thyssen AG build a plant in Canada to assemble light-armored vehicles.

Mulroney told legislators on Thursday that the money was in fact a retainer to promote use of the vehicles abroad in peacekeeping operations.

He said that while the deal had been legal, and while he had accepted no money while in office, he recognized he had made a serious error in judgment by agreeing to take cash.

Things haven't improved since then, with the former Canadian ambassador to China denying that Mulroney raised the issue of selling vehicles to the Chinese government, and the RCMP denying that they escorted Mulroney to once of his cash-exchange meetings with Schreiber. Things have reached the point where even commenters at the conservative National Post has compared Mulroney to a drug dealer. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already been desperately trying to distance the Conservative Party from Mulroney, much to the displeasure of the remaining Mulroney loyalists.

This may--may--mark the end of the man who was an enormously controversial politician. He did lead the Commonwealth in the fight against apartheid, won two majority governments, and created the US-Canada free trade agreement. He's also a man whose mishandling of national affairs led to the growth of separatism and the 1995 referendum, coincided with one of the worst economic crises in economic history, came to be seen as personally slimy and part of a greedy government, and ensured that his Progressive Conservative Party would be annihilated come the 1993 election. Entire books of hostile jokes were published featuring Mulroney as a butt of humour. My favourite Mulroney joke is below.

One day, Brian Mulroney came to his mother and asked for an increase in his allowance. She said "No," but then told him that he should pray to the Virgin Mary for strength.

Young Brian went into his room, and began to kneel to pray before the statue. Then, he got an idea.

Carefully, he took the statue off of the mantle, put it into a shoebox, and placed the shoebox under his bed. He then took a piece of paper and a pencil, and began to write.

"Dear Jesus," he began, "if you ever want to see your mother alive again ..."

Mulroney aside, this whole incident says disturbing things about Canadian governance. If it took this long to uncover this, and followed a previous inquiry which ended in the federal government giving him millions of dollars by way of compensation, how effectively is the Canadian government dealing with corruption. More, what other kinds of corruption are going on right now in the upper echelons of Canadian politics? I worry.