[URBAN NOTE] "Artist says city erased mural it paid him to paint"

What the hell? I just passed by this mural, a ten minutes' walk away from me at most, two weeks ago. By its placement it was pretty clearly one of the murals commissioned by the City of Toronto for certain of its underpasses. How this mistake could be made is beyond me?

Artist Joel Richardson says the city has painted over a popular Dupont St. mural that it paid him $2,000 to create, an apparent misfire in Mayor Rob Ford’s war on graffiti.

A city spokeswoman says the railway underpass wall was returned to drab grey because Richardson’s artwork was unauthorized, uncommissioned, political and may have “referred to (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper.”

Richardson says in 2008 then-Davenport councillor Adam Giambrone’s office asked him to paint a mural on the north wall of the underpass west of Lansdowne Ave., on the funky Junction Triangle neighbourhood’s eastern edge.

The colourful scene of faceless men in suits, dollar signs and hearts, funded mostly through donations from local businesses, proved popular enough, he says, that Giambrone’s staff asked him to paint another mural on the south wall, and helped him get a $2,000 commission from the city’s Clean and Beautiful secretariat.

The painter and filmmaker kicked off work on the new mural last Sept. 25 with a community party. He had spent at least 30 hours on it, with about another 10 to go, when he learned Monday the city had used grey and white paint to completely blot out the mathematical formula incorporating Morse code symbols and grim-faced businessmen with yellow halos.

Reaction to the “commentary on the mathematics of modern finance,” had been mostly positive, he says, noting it was featured on a Jane’s Walk neighbourhood tour in early May.

The mural’s erasure “was shocking, obviously,” he said Tuesday. “I’m hoping that it was a mistake. I can’t imagine the city would paint over something they paid for. I’m still processing that it’s gone.”

A city director says that the photographed mural was unauthorized by the city and that there had been complaints it was political, Parker provided the Star with E-mails from Giambrone's staff recommending he apply for finding (but not, apparently proof of receiving the funding), Giambrone's successor Ana Bailão--elected on a platform of opposing many of Giambrone's policies--said she found nothing wrong with it, and the responsibles seem poised to investigate. It''s just such a shame that the mural had to be destroyed to get this amount of attention: I feel guilty now for not taking along a camera so as to preserve something of it.

[URBAN NOTE] What is the #Toronto war on graffiti?

After I made my post on the unjustly removed mural this morning, I realized my non-Torontonian readers had no idea what I was taking about.

In April of this year, Toronto mayor Rob Ford announced to the press, even as he himself powerwashed a graffiti-covered wall, the Clean Toronto Together program and its campaign against graffiti. This started the predictable dispute over what, exactly, is art.

It's been sprayed on many walls in the GTA, and Mayor Rob Ford said he wants it gone as he launched a campaign Thursday to clean graffiti off the city's walls.

He asked private business owners and city-run agencies to join his Clean Toronto Together campaign.

Zion, who goes by one name, owns the Bombshelter, an art-supply store that is a hub for graffiti artists. He said Thursday the mayor needs to understand the difference between art and vandalism.

"Every time you have someone buffing their wall like this, that's just going to attract the throw-up artists and vandals, and it becomes a cat-and-mouse game," he said.

He was referring to the mayor's efforts Thursday to clean a wall on an alley near St. Clair Avenue West and Earlscourt Ave., with some help from Coun. Cesar Palacio.

"We can either give up on our laneways, or simply we can start cleaning it up and take action," Palacio said.

"[They should] allow us to do murals," Zion said.

The crackdown had actually begun--as described by blogTO's Derek Flack--back in March. Many complaints from the business community were reported there, many complaniing about the cost of cleanup, easily amounting to the thousands of dollars all costed to the business owners, the nominal victims. Others disliked the lack of fine distinction between between tagging and graffiti. Still others--a demographic I've little sympathy for--complain that the campaign against graffiti impinges on their right to free artistic expression, even as they ignore the desire of some property owners not to have graffiti painted on their property. (You can find them in the comment sections of blogs, mainly.)

[LINK] "Eurogroup chief suggests East German privatization model for Greece"

Given everything I know about how the mass privatizations in East Germany left East Germans feeling systematically disenfranchised, Juncker's suggestion strikes me as potentially politically catastrophic.

Greece should establish a trust agency tasked with selling off state assets modeled after the organization that privatized former East Germany's public property, according to the Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Juncker said the trust agency would be staffed by international experts in order to lend it a degree of independence.

"I would welcome it very much if our Greek friends found a privatization agency independent of the government and modeled after Germany's Treuhandanstalt," Juncker told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, referring to the agency which privatized thousands of state-owned companies after the collapse of communist East Germany and national reunification.

Juncker said Europe would carefully guide Athens as it seeks to generate revenue by selling off assets.

"Henceforth, the European Union will escort Greece's privatization program as if we were conducting it ourselves," he said.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the decline of the #Moon re: #helium-3 mining

I've frequently frequently written about the false mirage of helium-3 mining on the Moon. Helium-3, a light isotope of helium seen by proponents as an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, is present in abundance on the Moon. Proponents of space colonization have suggested that mining helium-3 from the lunar surface would provide the income necessary to support lunar settlement. This would be the case if, in fact, the massive investments in technology and infrastructure necessary to create a lunar helium-3 mining infrastructure and second-generation fusion reactors capable of enduring the intense heat would be economic (keep in mind that we don't have first-generation fusion reactors), and that there wasn't already plenty of helium-3 on Earth.

Over at Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster made a post--"Starship Fuel from the Outer System" that james_nicoll read at about the same time that I did ("Slowly winning the war" is the title of his post). What's the war in question? (Note that the bold print is mine.)

Adam Crowl is a frequent Centauri Dreams contributor, but he’s also deep in the Project Icarus effort [to build an nterstellar probe], serving as its module lead for fuel and fuel acquisition. And fuel is the heart of the problem. Deuterium (hydrogen with an added neutron) and the isotope of helium known as helium-3 (containing one less neutron than helium-4, or regular helium) create the kind of reaction Icarus needs. The method is preferable to the fusion of deuterium with tritium because the latter releases about 80 percent of the fusion energy in the form of high-energy neutrons. To avoid that kind of heat transfer to the engine, the original Project Daedalus team focused on deuterium/helium-3, which continues to be the method of choice for the Icarus designers.

But where to get the helium-3, which is found only in tiny amounts on our own planet? You might think the Moon would be useful, given that the solar wind has deposited perhaps as much as 2.5 million tons of the stuff in the lunar regolith. But Icarus has had a long look at lunar mining, and finds that the energy needed to extract it would be greater than what it would eventually produce. That leads us back to the gas giants — Project Daedalus focused on Jupiter for helium-3 extraction, conceiving of a giant mining operation using floating factories in the atmosphere.

But Uranus may be the better choice, and that leads to quite an interesting infrastructure.

Mind, the idea of mining the gas giants of the outer Solar System may or may not economic. (I've no idea myself, and am waiting for someone to come up with the calculations.) If there is going to be a push for space colonization, the push should be based not on disproved economic dreams.

[LINK] Why Ontario New Democrats welcome Rae’s ascension to Liberal throne"

I've been arguing that the defection of strongly disliked former Ontario NDP premier to the Liberal Party, the defection of Bob Rae to the Liberal Party and most recently to the interim party leadership, and the ascent of popular and successful Jack Layton to the federal NDP leadership may remove stigma in Ontario against the NDP and lead to its transfer to the Liberal Party. Adam Radwanwski at the Globe and Mail makes these points, and also that the depth in time between Rae's failed NDP government and now may work to the NDP's advantage.

Since 1995, when it was unceremoniously relegated to third-party status, the NDP has been struggling to unload its baggage from the Rae era. The incompetence of that government may have been exaggerated, and at times it’s been too easy an excuse for the party’s subsequent failure to connect with voters. Still, the damage to the NDP’s brand in the province – and the extent to which that impeded rebuilding efforts – was undeniable.

Now, at long last, that brand is starting to recover. In part, it’s simply a matter of time; many current voters weren’t even living in the province when the NDP was in power, and others weren’t old enough to care. Even for those who voted back in 1990, the memories have faded.

But credit Mr. Rae’s career path for helping speed up that recovery. Since he began self-identifying as a Liberal, and one of most prominent ones in the country at that, it’s been a lot harder for other Liberals – competing with the NDP for left-of-centre votes – to dredge up those old memories. And now that he’s leading the federal Liberals, it’s all but impossible.

That doesn’t mean that Premier Dalton McGuinty, campaigning for a third term this year, won’t still try. In recent speeches, he’s suggested that the province tried the NDP once and won’t make that mistake again. But to that, provincial Leader Andrea Horwath could easily respond that the NDP failed because it wasn’t led by a real New Democrat, that there’s really no connection between the party then and today.

Ms. Horwath probably won’t go quite that far, because in fact there are some connections. Veteran New Democrats who toiled for the party in the Rae era are sensitive to all their hard work being dismissed by the current leadership. So she tends to cite a couple of achievements from back then, while distancing herself from the party’s overall record.

But really, Ms. Horwath doesn’t need to say all that much on the subject at all. The ambiguity around Mr. Rae’s legacy as a New Democrat speaks for itself.

[LINK] "It's little wonder Canada has lost its stomach for the Afghan fight "

Veteran Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson expressed today what I think--what I hope--will become common wisdom in Canada re: Afghanistan

Canada has been around Afghanistan for a decade. It is now withdrawing from fighting to a role of helping to train the Afghan army and police for the next three years, NATO’s theory being that after three years, Afghans will be able to take care of security themselves.

The Afghan mission has cost Canada hundreds of personnel killed and wounded, plus billions of dollars. The government intends to spend another $2-billion over the next three years in the training mission. Afghanistan has become the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid.

Hamid Karzai won a rigged presidential election, and then Afghanistan held a parliamentary election that was also criticized for interference by his ruling clique. All attempts over nine years to build some kind of solid, functioning, credible state have failed, in whole or in part. The centralized state preferred by foreigners was never going to work in an ethnically split, highly decentralized country.

Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun, would like to open a dialogue with elements of the Afghan Taliban willing to talk, but the non-Pashtuns who dominate the parliament do not favour such talks. Those Taliban remotely interested in talking have set as a precondition the removal of foreign forces, read NATO. Their removal, of course, might well create the conditions for a civil war, or at least more low-intensity fighting.

The President complains regularly (as recently as Tuesday), and with reason, about NATO air strikes killing Afghan civilians. In a counterinsurgency about winning the hearts and minds of the population, the deaths of some of the population as “collateral damage” intended to kill “militants” is utterly counterproductive. It undermines NATO’s credibility as a helping friend and that of Mr. Karzai, who looks like a patsy for the bombers.

Canada and other countries are supposed to build up the army and the corrupt police in the next three years. In Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, he reports U.S. military officers telling the President that the problems of the army and police could likely not be solved even with a decade-long project costing tens of billions of dollars. So who are we kidding?

I'd also add that I've become increasingly disinclined to supporting Afghanistan, since the introduction of pro-marital rape laws, for instance, or Karzai's staged election. Who are we trying to kid? What kinds of people have we cultivated as clients? Given the inability of even the massive Soviet occupation to change anything, best to cut the ties and let them do whatever.

[BRIEF NOTE] On a hockey that shows the limits of Canada

Writing in the Edmonton Journal, David Staples made an argument that says a certain amount about intra-Canadian solidarity, or the lack thereof. The competition between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins over the Stanley Cup has revealed something interesting.

Root for the Vancouver Canucks? Are you insane?

There’s been some chit chat that the Vancouver Canucks are Canada’s Team, and we should all root for them to win the Stanley Cup.

I beg to differ.

Now, I’m not necessarily against Canadian hockey fans getting behind Canada’s team in this year’s playoffs. But Canada’s real team is the Boston Bruins. That squad has far more numerous and significant Canadian content.

Of Boston’s 19 regular players (those who have appeared in more than 10 playoff games), 14 are Canadian, including star players such as Nathan Horton, Patrice Bergeron and Milan Lucic. Only five of the Bruins regulars — Zdeno Chara, Tim Thomas, Dennis Seidenberg, Tomas Kaberle and David Krejci — aren’t Canadian.

If you look at Vancouver’s 19 regulars, just 11 of them are Canadians. Their best players, the Sedins and Ryan Kesler, aren’t from here.

In fact, the pest Kesler almost helped beat the real Team Canada at the Vancouver Olympics. Remember? I do.

Besides, how can Vancouver be Canada’s team when it doesn’t even snow there?

As reported in the media, this sentiment--the lack of identification with and support of the Canadian team competing in the Stanley Cup finals by other Canadians--seems surprisingly common, and for many of the reasons cited by Johnson. The rivalry between the Vancouver Canucks and Alberta's Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers is legendary, besides the established rivalry between the two western provinces. The lack of snow in the Vancouver area, unlike (at least traditionally) the rest of Canada also refers to a certain Canadian sentiment that southwestern British Columbia's temperate rainforest climate is an anomaly, has also been cited. I also wonder whether there might be a certain amount of transnational solidarity between eastern Canada and parts of the northeastern United States, areas certainly sharing a great deal in common, against a region relatively foreign to both.

The sentiment is common. It doesn't determine everything, of course; there is till a goodly amount of intra-Canadian solidarity, and not only because of the Montreal-Boston rivalry. The whole thing does reveal interesting things about the priorities of many Canadians when it comes to sporting teams.