[PHOTO] The former Zelda's

The former Zelda's
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

The former location of drag bar and restaurant Zelda's, located just south of the intersection of Church and Wellesley in the heart of Toronto's gay village, remains empty months after increased lease payment caused Zelda's to decamp to a Yonge street location near Bloor (merged with, I think, or inheritor of the venerable Living Well). The fact that such a well-located property is empty--and the departure of one of the most successful local businesses from the neighbourhood--suggests to me that rising real estate prices will play havoc.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams reports on an ingenious use of Google's Ngram, checking which stars are mentioned most often after 1935. Of the classics, Alpha Centauri is doing quite well, while 61 Cygni has not since 61 Cygni C was disproved.


• At Extraordinary Dreams, Rob Pitingolo examines the legislation in Washington D.C. limiting the height of buildings in that city, agreeing that it has a particular character but pointing out that the downtown needs space where people can live.


• Judging by gene flow, GNXP's Razib Khan suggests that modern-day Turks in Anatolia are descended at least as much from Armenians as from Greeks.


• io9 links to a cool map of Hong Kong's former Walled City of Kowloon, a sort of ultra-high-density interzone that acquired a reputation of its own.
• Mark Simpson notes briefly that cosmetic companies are now making use of the vanity of the middle-aged male.


• Registan's Umairj reviews the past year in Pakistan. On the plus side, the country still exists as a functioning entity.


• A bizarrely mislabeled map in the Daily Mail is the occasion for a Strange Maps post looking at the non-existent, yet shadow-existing, Australian state of Capricornia in the north of what's now Queenland.


• Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin posted his predictions for the coming year. Debt issues, among other things, look to be more salient for the United States than for the PiIGS.


• Towleroad has excerpts from an interview with a former skinhead gaybasher, now repentant.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little writes about comparative living standards around the world at different points in time. It looks like the high wages of the 18th century western European urbanite don't have parallels elsewhere--or, is it just a matter of insufficient data for other similarly prosperous regions of Asia?


• The Volokh Conspiracy has a couple of posts on Soviet Jewish immigration, the first looking at the Jackson-Vanik Amendment's effects on Soviet Jewish emigration and the community that stayed, and another observing that Soviet Jewish immigrants are considerably more right-wing than other Jews.

[LINK] Canada's own space toys

Some of you may remember the photos I posted of the Canadian Air and Space Museum, hopefully including the display case of vintage space toys there. It turns out that these are collectors items, photos of them being rare, and a British collector--with my permission--pointed his readers towards my blog post.

Here's the full display case, where you can see a Spacex Moon Base, SWORD vehicles and a flotilla of Major Matt Mason toys including the wonderful Space Station with it's silver beacon light atop [feels like yesterday when I was switching my own on in the late Sixties!]. I like the combination of the wooden Dyna Soar model stand next to the plastic SWORD version on the top shelf. And look at the size of the PAYA Lunar Jeep [bottom centre] - it's bigger than the Moon Prospector or even the Space Glider! God knows how big the PAYA Lunar Climber must be? If any reader is lucky enough to own one please consider sending in a shot of it like this next to a SWORD vehicle!

[LINK] "Tunisia's protest wave: where it comes from and what it means"

At Foreign Policy, Christopherm Alexander examines the street recent protests against the Tunisian government. By regional standards, Tunisia has done quite well, experiencing strong economic growth, for instance, and achieving high levels of social development including enfranchised women and successful mass education which have led to a rapid demographic transtition that will further the country's growth. Why, given these achievements, are Tunisians unhappy? It's the standard story of unsatisfied expectations.

The current's democracy autocracy and corruption is offputting, for instance.

[President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali] used electoral manipulation, intimidation, and favors to co-opt leaders of ruling-party organs and civil society organizations. Those who remained beyond the reach of these tools felt the force of an internal security apparatus that grew dramatically in the 1990s. Most Tunisians grudgingly accepted Ben Ali's heavy-handedness through the 1990s. Authoritarian rule was the price they paid for stability that could attract tourists and investors. Ben Ali was an effective, if uncharismatic, technocratic who beat back the Islamists, generated growth, and saved the country from the unrest that plagued Algeria.

Over the last five years, however, the fabric of Ben Ali's authoritarianism has frayed. Once it became clear that the Islamists no longer posed a serious threat, many Tunisians became less willing to accept the government's heavy-handedness. The regime also lost some of its earlier deftness. Its methods became less creative and more transparently brutal. The government seemed less willing to at least play at any dialogue with critics or opposition parties. Arbitrary arrests, control of the print media and Internet access, and physical attacks on journalists and human rights and opposition-party activists became more common. So, too, did stories of corruption -- not the usual kickbacks and favoritism that one might expect, but truly mafia-grade criminality that lined the pockets of Ben Ali's wife and her family.

Regional inequality in economic development, with the north and the eastern coastline prospering while the interior has stagnated, is also displeasing.

Tunisia has built a reputation as the Maghreb's healthiest economy since Ben Ali seized power, as market-oriented reforms opened the country to private investment and integrated it more deeply into the regional economy. Annual GDP growth has averaged 5 percent. But the government's policies have done little to address long-standing concerns about the distribution of growth across the country. Since the colonial period, Tunisia's economic activity has been concentrated in the north and along the eastern coastline. Virtually every economic development plan since independence in 1956 has committed the government to making investments that would create jobs and enhance living standards in the center, south, and west. Eroding regional disparities would build national solidarity and slow the pace of urban migration. [. . .]

Government investment transformed the countryside in terms of access to potable water, electrification, transportation infrastructure, health care, and education. But the government never succeeded in generating enough jobs in the interior for a rapidly growing population. In fact, two aspects of the government's development strategy actually made it harder to generate jobs. First, Tunisia's development strategy since the early 1970s has relied progressively on exports and private investment. For a small country with a limited resource base and close ties to Europe, this strategy generated an emphasis on tourism and low-skilled manufactured products (primarily clothes and agricultural products) for the European market. Scarce natural resources, climate constraints, and the need to minimize transport costs make it difficult to attract considerable numbers of tourists or export-oriented producers to the hinterland. Consequently, 80 percent of current national production remains concentrated in coastal areas. Only one-fifth of national production takes place in the southwest and center-west regions, home to 40 percent of the population.

Finally, Tunisia's significant achievements in mass education have not been matched by correspondingly high rates of unemployment and underemployment for university graduates, especially in the interior. Thus, a discontented class is formed.

The prevailing culture holds up university education as the key to security and social advancement. However, universities do not produce young people with training that meets the needs of an economy that depends on low-skilled jobs in tourism and clothing manufacturing. This mismatch between education and expectations on the one hand, and the realities of the marketplace on the other, generates serious frustrations for young people who invested in university educations but cannot find commensurate work. The challenge is particularly dire for young people in the interior. While estimates of national unemployment range from 13 to 16 percent, unemployment among university graduates in Sidi Bouzid ranges between 25 and 30 percent.

The likely end results? The Tunisian regime may be weakened significantly, although given the significant divisions and weaknesses of the opposition a transition to another autocrat within the framework of the Tunisian regime.

Anyway. Go, read the analysis in full.

[LINK] "Give Us This Day Our Weekly Drone"

Over at the Inter Press Service, Ashfaq Yusufzai suggests that many people living in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where American drones have been killing Al-Qaeda and Taliban actually approve of the attacks, on the grounds that the attacks are killing people who they despise who have not been killed yet by the Pakistani government.

"Drone attacks have become quite popular with the local population because these are spot-on and there are lesser chances of killing innocent people," says Jehangir Alam, professor of political Science at the Government College in Mardan, one of 24 districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The U.S. carried out the first drone attack on Jun. 18, 2004. So far 215 drone attacks have hit militants in South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Khyber Agency and Bajaur Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan.

[. . .]

A total of 2,049 persons have been killed in these attacks so far, which have been averaging about one a week over the past few years. There has been criticism that not all of these were militants.

[. . .]

But locally not everyone takes the official Pakistani position. "Drones are an extremely popular weapon," Hameed Akhtar a local journalist in Miramshah, North Waziristan tells IPS. "The local population is quite satisfied the way they are fired.

"Militants are passing sleepless nights due to fear of drone attacks," he said. "They are on the run. Everyday three to five drone aircraft come hovering over the North Waziristan territory, and fire missiles when they find their target."

"The list of successes the U.S has achieved by using pilotless planes is long and impressive," says Taza Gul a lecturer at the Degree College in Bannu. "People here appreciate the drone strikes because these are Al-Qaeda and Taliban specific."

Bannu is one of 24 districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and is home to about 100,000 displaced persons from South Waziristan where the Pakistan army launched an operation against Taliban militants in 2007.

"We have been living with relatives here. The U.S. should expedite the drone attacks to eliminate the Taliban as soon as possible so we could return to our homes," says Shah Wali, a shopkeeper from South Waziristan. "The Taliban are responsible for all our woes."

[LINK] "Information doesn't want to be free, people do"

At Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Charli Carpenter is skeptical about the argument that social networking systems and the Internet help civil society form in repressive societies, on the grounds that the assumption of privacy is problematic.

[I]] the off-cited "boomerang effect" this [prviate] communication often crosses boundaries and involves dissidents within one country seeking alliances with civil society networks and sympathetic governments abroad. The public sphere, in other words, is increasingly internationalized. The strategy of capturing and leaking digital evidence of such communications, while intended to hold governments to account, predictably produces blow-back effects on dissidents as well by exposing their connections with those governments abroad. Belarus and Zimbabwe are two recent country contexts where this allegations of this dynamic are coming to light.

Similarly, as privacy controls on social networking sites and laws protecting the privacy of text messages are increasingly whittled away, will this not dampen precisely the public sphere that translates social media into political power? As plausible as Assange's argument that transparency will hobble the ability of state bureaucracies to organize wrong-doing in secret is the threat that transparency will hobble citizens' ability to organize dissent and protest against the state. If so, strengthening laws, norms and media architecture to protect the right to control who can view and disseminate one's digital artifacts - be they governments, corporations or individuals - would perhaps be a more important step toward freedom than condemning information censorship. And this is an argument to be pitched not just at the US State Department but the wider elements in global civil society that want a rights-based internet architecture that works for people

[URBAN NOTE] "Eglinton Transit City Line may survive"

This is very good news. The proposed Eglinton Crosstown LRT will play a critical role, with Eglinton Avenue constituting the next logical west-east street above Eglinton to have a non-bus mass transit route. Eglinton was even supposed to host the Eglinton West subway line in the mid-1990s before money issues led to its cancellation. With this, observers have noted, Transit City is likely to survive in some recognizable form.

A modified version of the Eglinton light-rail line, a key part of Toronto's Transit City plan, is likely to be constructed despite Mayor Rob Ford's assertions that his administration would focus on construction of new subway lines.

Bruce McCuaig, CEO of the provincial transit authority Metrolinx, said the 33-kilometre Eglinton line is a major priority for the province and his agency is working with city officials to make it a reality.

"They've communicated back that they understand the importance of the Eglinton line. So we have ... confidence that we will be moving ahead with that particular project," he told CBC News in an interview.

McCuaig's comments come just over a month after Ford said unequivocally that "Transit City is over," referring to the plan to construct an integrated network of light-rail lines across Toronto.

Ford later said his office's most pressing transit priority is to construct a subway line from the Don Mills station eastward to Scarborough Town Centre.

But TTC Chair Karen Stintz told CBC News that the Eglinton LRT may survive because an 11-kilometre stretch is slated to be constructed underground, or "below grade."

"We see that the light-rail transit across Eglinton is below grade," she said. "And even though it's not quote, unquote a subway, it does meet with the mayor's vision that new transit built in Toronto be below surface."

[DM] "On the migration-as-invasion motif"

I've a post up at Demography Matters where I take a brief look at migration seen as invasion. This does nothing good, and obscures the fact that most migration is temporary, indeed much more could be if borders weren't so tight.

Go, read.