[PHOTO] How I now know Montenegro will succeed

How I now know Montenegro will succeed
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

When I saw this subway advertisement for an education consulting service, education.me, I know that Crna Gora picked the right Internet country code. Well done.

[META] Blogroll Expansion

• The acerbic and acute nature of cities-focused murderingmouth appeals to me.


• Jim Belshaw's Personal Reflections and Scott Peterson's Wasatch Economics are both blogs which whose posters have been associated with Demography Matters, the first with a focus on Australasia and the second with one on economics.

[LINK] "Pride 2009's economic impact: $136-million"

This summer's gay pride was good for Toronto.

According to figures released by Pride Toronto today, Pride Week 2009 brought an estimated $136-million to the city despite the event happening in the midst of the summer garbage strike.

That’s up from $99.1-million generated from Pride Week 2006, the last year for which figures were immediately available.

“These economic benefits are exceptional,” said Michael Harker of Enigma Research Corporation, which conducted the 2009 economic impact study for Pride Toronto. “The estimates are considerably higher than we have seen at many similar sized festivals and sporting events throughout North America.”

According to the study, $33-million was spent at restaurants and bars across the city, while $12-million was spent on Toronto hotels.

Of the total, $94.3-million came from tourists visiting Toronto from over 80 kilometres away. A survey conducted during Pride Week 2009 found that 80 per cent of those surveyed said they are “very likely” to return to the city for Pride Week 2010.

I'd prefer to see figures provided by organizations unattached to the Pride planning committee, and I wonder whether the Pride event displaced tourists who might have otherwise come, but interesting stats nonetheless.

[LINK] "Officials worried group in Canada went to join Islamic radicals in Somalia"

This news, reported by Stewart Bell for the National Post, suggests worrying trends acting on at least some individuals belonging to the Canadian segment of the Somali diaspora.

Counterterrorism officials are investigating a group of youths who allegedly left Canada for East Africa two weeks ago, amid concerns they may have gone to join the Somali militant group Al-Shabab.

Two sources familiar with the case said investigators had been canvassing Toronto's large Somali-Canadian community for information about as many as five men who departed Canada together in early November.

They are believed to have flown to Kenya, the sources said. Kenya borders the region of southern Somalia controlled by Al-Shabab, an Islamist militia aligned with al-Qaeda and sometimes likened to the Taliban.

[. . .]

A handful of Canadians have fought with armed Somali groups in recent years, including Abdullah Ali Afrah, a former Toronto businessman who was killed last year while leading an ambush against Ethiopian troops.

The directors of the Khalid Mosque, one of the most popular places of worship for Somali-Canadians in Toronto, said in a statement to the National Post in September they had no knowledge of any youths who had traveled to Somalia to fight.

"Members of the Khalid mosque congregation have not reported to us any missing children," the directors said in the statement, a response to questions posed by the Post.

"Our message to the Toronto Somali youth regarding the Somalia conflict is: your parents left Somalia to escape the raging war in the homeland and to provide their families a better life. Do not even entertain the idea of returning to Somalia to fight. Somalia has seen more than its share of bloodletting.

"If you want to help yourself, your family and Somalia, hold fast to your faith, focus on and excel in your academic studies and become a productive member of the Somali community in particular and Canadian society in general."

But since about 2006, the fight in Somalia has drawn several foreign youths. Earlier this year, two young men told a news conference they were Americans and had traveled to Africa "to fight alongside our brothers of Al-Shabab" and "to be killed for the sake of God."

[LINK] "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"

Hanna Rosin's article in this week's Atlantic, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?", makes some interesting suggestions about the cultural underpinnings of the United States' sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

[. . .]

Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.

But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.

One commentator, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, is quoted as saying that "[n]arratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM."

I'm not sure what to think of the thesis. Spain and Ireland seem to have had their massive real-estate crises without religion, likewise Iceland's financial meltdown. Then again, all three countries seem to have shared a common optimism (if a secular one), a belief that age-old patterns of poverty had been broken and that everyone could now live the good life.

Thoughts?

[LINK] "Opening the Gardens"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn writes about the Maple Leaf Gardens' opening in 1931. Even though the building's been closed for years and might well be demolished, thanks to the Toronto Maple Leafs' shift to a newer and more modern forum, it's still a big thing.

From the dawn of the National Hockey League in 1917, its Toronto franchises had called the Arena Gardens on Mutual Street home. By the late 1920s, its small capacity (eight thousand seats) and lack of amenities like reliable heating led Smythe to push for a new facility at any opportunity. Larger arenas in Chicago, Detroit, and New York allowed those teams to offer higher salaries to top players, which made Smythe fear that Toronto’s limited financial resources would leave the team uncompetitive. He also felt the arena’s drawbacks prevented a higher-quality clientele from attending games. As he told the Star’s Greg Clark, “As a place to go all dressed up, we don’t compete with the comfort of theatres and other places where people can spend their money. We need a place where people can go in evening clothes, if they want to come there from a party or dinner. We need at least twelve thousand seats, everything new and clean, a place that people can be proud to take their wives or girlfriends to.”

By early 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens Limited was established to raise funds for a new building. The first site considered was near the foot of Yonge Street, but the property was not for sale. The company then looked at land that had belonged to Knox College on Spadina Avenue north of College Street, but opposition from nearby residents spearheaded by future Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips scuttled those plans. Smythe then approached Eaton’s department store, which had just opened its College Street location and was open to drawing more customers from a nearby arena, even if its clientele might not be the type of people they hoped to attract to their frou-frou new store. Eaton’s initially offered Smythe the block north of Wood Street, but he insisted on land the company owned at the corner of Carlton and Church due to its direct access to streetcar service. Maple Leaf Gardens ended up with an option on the property, while Eaton’s received twenty-five thousand dollars worth of stock.

[. . .]

Smythe, Bickell, and the other executives prodded local business titans to invest, despite questions about the timing of building a $1.5 million facility. As Elias Rogers Coal head Alf Rogers asked Bickell, “Don’t you know there’s a depression on?” (Rogers eventually bought twenty-five thousand dollars worth of stock). When construction bids were tendered, the Gardens found itself $250,000 short of financing the lowest offer. When Smythe came out of a meeting with the Gardens board and bankers indicating that they felt construction should be delayed for a year, Maple Leafs business manager Frank Selke ran down to an Allied Building Trades Council meeting on Church Street. Selke, who also served gratis as the business manager of an electrician’s union, proposed to the attending unions that any labourers who worked on the Gardens would receive 20% of their pay in Gardens stock instead of cash. Few objections were raised toward Selke’s scheme and he proceeded to sign agreements with twenty-four unions. When word of this plan reached Sir John Aird of the Bank of Commerce, he agreed to fund any lingering shortfalls. Workers who held onto their shares would have eventually made a nice little profit, as prices fluctuated from the fifty-cent range in the mid-1930s to the hundred dollar level by the end of World War II.