[PHOTO] Between old and new, Royal Conservatory of Music

Between old and new, Royal Conservatory of Music
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

At the end of Philosopher's Walk, a pleasant short walking route extending from Harbord Street by Queen's Park, north past the University of Toronto's Trinity College Royal Ontario Museum towards Bloor Street West, is the rear of the Royal Conservatory of Music. There, you can see the join between the old building and the recent expansion.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• BagNewsNotes' Michael Shaw wonders whether the assassination attempt in Arizona on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, an attractive, kind, broadly centrist woman married to an astronaut, could shift people from the extremes.


• blogTO's Derek Flack wonders when the necessary infrastructure for electric cars in Toronto will be installed.


• Daniel Drezner wonders if the current standoff in Cöte d'Ivoire between illegal incumbent Gbagbo and, well, everyone else might be one of those rare cases where unilateral American military intervention might be justified.


• The Discoblog notes that toilet-trained pigs in Taiwan have dramatically reduced the volume of waste in Taiwanese rivers.


• Extraordinary Observation's Rob Pitingolo makes the point that the tendency to judge cyclists or drivers by the behaviour of the worst isn't good, and that cyclists need to be responsible, too. Hear hear.


• Far Outliers traces the origins of the Indonesian national army--the one that drove out the Dutch--in the Japanese transfer of matériel to local nationalists after the Japanese surrender in 1945.


• Jonathan Crowe, at the Map Room, links to a collection of maps showing Asian mass transit network routes, up to the year 2020.


• Slap Upside the Head takes note that the immigration rules for international same-sex marriages in Canada are being tightened, to reduce the risk of fraud. Is the same being done--has the same been done--for opposite-sex marriages? I hope.


• Torontoist's Steve Kupferman gets a tour of the surprisingly attractive R.C. Harris water treatment plant in east-end Toronto.


• Andy Towle at Towleroad noted the creation of a GLBT museum in San Francisco.


• Une heure de peine's Denis Colombi writes about the fundamental tensions in the positions of Banksy and other renegade artists, who pose themselves as countercultural while needing to participate in the web of established artistic networks.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Moscow is encouraging the growth of Ruthenian--Rusyn--nationalism in far western Ukraine.

[URBAN NOTE] The city budget: not as bad as feared

The general consensus is that the Toronto city budget for 2011 announced yesterday isn't nearly as bad as people had feared it would be. That'll be one year's grace; 2012 will be tough, and the requests by services like the police and the libraries for increased funding were met with Ford's statement that if the chiefs couldn't limit spending he'd put in new heads.

The staff-crafted, Ford-guided operating budget is not the bombshell many expected when the penny-pinching conservative succeeded Miller.

But what amounts to a breather budget sets the stage for a bloody battle over deep cuts for 2012. Ford threatened to fire managers who thwart efforts to find savings during a wide-scale spending review to begin after this budget is put to bed.

This year’s $9.3 billion blueprint would reduce operating hours for some bus routes, hike TTC fares, close a library branch at Metro Hall, send some refugee claimants to motels rather than homeless shelters, reduce a fund to help tenants fight bad landlords and end a downspout disconnection program that has 13,000 Torontonians on its waiting list. Also vanished: plans to build a glittering waterfront ice rink complex.

So-called “service efficiencies” total $57 million.

A further $23 million would be raised by boosting user fees, details of which could be released as early as Tuesday. They are expected to include a 3 per cent increase for swim classes, ice time and virtually all other city recreation programs.

Last year, Miller hiked user fees by $16 million. He was derided by Ford as a spendthrift during an election campaign that saw the Etobicoke councillor promise deep spending cuts with no service reductions.

Ford is achieving a relatively bloodless balanced budget and tax freeze only by applying every penny of $706 million in one-time windfalls, including a $268 million surplus from 2010, to the operating budget, with none of it going to debt reduction or reserves.

Changes to the TTC have caught a disproportionate amount of attention, with a planned increase in token fees from $2.50 to $2.60 and in Metropasses (cards allowing for free unlimited travel for a month) up five dollars to $126. There are also going to be service cuts, with no routes being cut altogether but some low-usage routes seeing their hours reduced (my 26 Dupont will have no runs after 10 pm, for instance).

So far, so good. But when 2012 comes ...

[LINK] "Queen West as a video game"

blogTO's Derek Flack is to be thanked for highlighting this video.

Watch on YouTube

This post is for 1) people who love Toronto and 2) who have eight minutes to kill on a bit of early 90s nostalgia. It's Queen West as a video game! Or, more accurately, it's a YouTube video of Queen West / West Queen West as a side-scrolling, Mario Brothers-esque pseudo video game. Now that's a mouthful -- but it's also quite a bit of fun.

The handiwork of illustrator Brett Lamb (with music from Suba Sankaran and Dylan Bell), there's something that a 80s/90s hound like me finds irresistible about a little souvenir like this, which was originally put together for the 2010 Queen West Art Crawl fundraiser. We posted about a Toronto-based LEPOS prototype arcade game that was on display at Magic Pony a few months back that also got me longing for my childhood days, but although it featured notable landmarks like Honest Ed's and Spadina Subway Station, Lamb's take on the genre is even more specific to our city.

Essentially what you get here -- if you're willing to stay on board for the duration of the game -- is a tour of Queen from University to Roncesvalles, complete with retro-styled landmarks like the MuchMusic/CTV building, Trinity Bellwoods Park and the Gladstone. Also included, of course, are our colourful cabs, newspaper boxes and TTC streetcars.

[URBAN NOTE] On how the TTC's safe from fare increases, so far

This is good news ...

TTC chair Karen Stintz has confirmed that the fare hike is off and the city has found the $24 million the fare increase would have raised.

Stintz said city staff found a further $16 million that will be added to the TTC budget, and the TTC found $8 million. She couldn't say where the money is coming from, referring questions to city manager Joe Pennachetti and TTC staff.

Adrienne Batra, a spokeswoman for Mayor Rob Ford who was present at the 2 p.m. announcement, welcomed the news and praised Stintz, brushing aside suggestions the aborted hike was engineered to make Ford and Stintz look good.

All will be explained, she said, when staff release details of the found money.

[. . .]

The proposed TTC fare hike of $5 a month on Metropasses would have cost transit riders $60 a year.

Sort of. I wonder if this was all a piece of political theatre, something to make wary TTC users happy. I also wonder if this is sustainable, and if the city government is going to transfer more funds to the TTC--that, or cut services even more.

When Mayor Rob Ford announced his proposed Toronto operating budget on Monday, he said he wasn’t happy about the fare increase. Stintz echoed his displeasure. Both vowed they would do everything possible to avoid the price increase.

But city manager Joe Penachetti said staff could see no other way to balance the city budget while ensuring the TTC had the money it needs to operate.

In addition to raising fares, the TTC is proposing to cut late-night, off-peak and weekend service on 48 bus routes it says average 12 or less riders per hour.

And what of the 2012 budget and TTC service in the future?

Mr. Ford leaned heavily on revenue windfalls and $346-million in surplus cash – $78-million from 2009 and $268-million from 2010 – to balance his budget. The real pain, he and others warned, won’t be inflicted until 2012.

“It’s a bunch of good luck,” said David Soknacki, David Miller’s first budget chief. “The advice is to enjoy it, because it won’t happen every year.”

[. . .]

Mr. Ford still wants the TTC to find some way to stop the 10-cent fare increase, but Gary Webster, the TTC’s chief general manager, said that would require slashing service and shelving the mayor’s customer-service improvements.

Will this mean a more straitened TTC in the future?

[LINK] "Dutch cabinet considering training mission in Afghanistan"

Lennart Breuker's Invisible College post raises the subject of Dutch training missions under NATO in Afghanistan. For Canadians facing similar issues, this post is uncomfortably relevant.

[An observer] asserts that US pressure on the Dutch cabinet to train Afghan police forces is directly linked to the considerably more violent approach the US military has taken under Petraeus. He states that the US government aims to expand the Afghan police forces from 100.000 to 134.000 in 2011. To this end the training period will be shortened from 8 to 6 weeks, much to the horror of the European allies.

The 'little soldiers' are not only often deployed at night raids, but also at heavy engagements with the Taliban and at isolated places that have just been (re)captured. They do so without armored vehicles, often without helmets or bullet proof vests, resulting in a casualty rate three times higher than regular Afghan soldiers. US general Caldwell confirms that 47 % defects after their training, and it is assumed that many join up with the Taliban, or sell their weapons to them.

This account is disconcerting for several reasons. Not only would the Dutch government co-operate with a policy of a questionable ethical nature by producing a cheap army to face situations for which it is neither adequately trained nor equipped. It would also assist the implementation of a policy which will further alienate the Afghan people from the NATO forces by crude and indiscriminate military actions and a high amount of civilian casualties. This would be in stark contrast with the relative success the Dutch military achieved in containing violence in the province of Uruzgan by marking diplomacy and development as key components in a counterinsurgency strategy, in stead of sheer military power.

Moreover, the resort to 'little soldiers' might even fuel the conflict in a way that humanitarian aid is often accused of. That is, the goal may be legitimate – providing humanitarian relief – but the result is plainly that many resources are taken by a warring faction which allows them to sustain their war efforts and thus to prolong the suffering that humanitarian aid seeks to mitigate. In a similar vein, the allied forces in Afghanistan are providing the Taliban with personnel and weapons by the huge defection rate of the 'little soldiers'.

In addition, the current military attitude towards the war in Afghanistan and towards the Afghan people is uncomfortably reminiscent of how the US military conducted its business in South East Asia several decades ago. One would assume that the experiences in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would have taught the US military that an increased civilian death toll by indiscriminate air strikes will drive the population into sympathy for and co-operation with the resistance. The bombing campaign in Cambodia is widely acknowledged as an essential condition for the exponential growth and subsequent success of the Khmer Rouge movement, whose recruitment efforts greatly benefited from the death and destruction reaped by American bombs. In combination with the poor quality of the regular Cambodian army, the numbers of which were tremendously inflated by the use of so-called 'twenty-four-hour' soldiers – cheap soldiers without proper training and equipment [...] - the US backed Cambodian regime succumbed to the hugely expanded Khmer Rouge movement in a few years time.

Go, read the post in full.

[LINK] "Trees and Forests – Deranged Individuals and Seditious Movements"

The Global Sociology Blog makes note of the fact that social movements can create distinctive individuals--assassins, say--without these individuals' being directed by a central organism. This is particularly important to note when these individuals belong to the sorts of high-status groups that would never countenance that sort of thing.

This timeline reveals how the “deranged man” hypothesis leads to faulty explanations based on individualization and protects white social movements from the scrutiny that non-white movements receive. The ideological context of this has been studied extensively by journalist David Neiwert.

This list is quite long and definitely establishes a pattern of political violence. But if every incident is treated as an individual act, taken in isolation, and explained by reference to individual characteristics of the perpetrator, then, the social, political and cultural background disappears, leaving the emerging social movement unexplained and unaccountable.

It is a common phenomenon, long studied and explained by social psychology that when individuals from our in-group or privileged individuals commit questionable acts, these acts are explained individually. When individuals from out-groups, or groups that are socially unpopular, commit questionable acts, these acts are explained as part of group membership, as categorical. The former are exceptions, the latter are representative. That is how racial and ethnic prejudice persist and how white privilege is preserved. One only has to imagine what media discourse would be, had the shooter been non-White, Latino or Muslim.

So, this timeline is one of white, domestic terrorism, fueled by seditious rhetoric from various media outlets and figures. The fact that the perpetrators are not part of a single organization does not change that fact. Social movements can exist without social movement organizations.

Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] Are we ready to meet with alien intelligences?

80 Beats recently linked to a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society dedicated to the question of extraterrestrial intelligences. One author, Albert Harrison, says that we're quite ready.

Albert Harrison, psychologist at the University of California, Davis, may live to regret saying nice things about humanity. But it’s nice to see somebody giving us a vote of confidence:

The Brookings Report warned in 1961 that the discovery of life beyond Earth could lead to social upheaval. But [Harrison] says “times have changed dramatically” since then. Even the discovery of intelligent aliens “may be far less startling for generations that have been brought up with word processors, electronic calculators, avatars and cell phones as compared with earlier generations used to typewriters, slide rules, pay phones and rag dolls,” Harrison writes in one of the papers. [MSNBC]

SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) hasn’t been successful in its half-century hunt for alien civilizations, but it has ingrained into people the idea of looking for life beyond Earth. The continually increasing exoplanet count (one discovery was announced just today) is showing people just a small glimpse of the variety of worlds out there. Thus, Harrison says the people of Earth would respond to the discovery of alien life with “delight or indifference,” according to the Press Association.

I'd also add that early 21st century people, unlike perhaps their 1960s counterparts, have developed and are continuing to develop strong interests in relatively intelligent non-humans here on Earth and on extending basic protections--rights, even--to animals generally. Increasingly, it's unacceptable to mistreat beings possessing a certain degree of sentience, and considered a positive good to behave appropriately (protecting their natural environment, say, trying to prevent their extinction). Would it be too much to hope that visiting extraterrestrial intelligences would share in our history of slowly extending the sphere of empathy beyond their immediate species?