[PHOTO] Four pictures from Chinatown, New York City

New York City's Chinatown is fantastically photogenic. I found the first scene with the aid of Alexander, the remaining three with satyadasa.

Doyers Street is, as shown on Google Maps, an unusually-shaped street, here shown as it makes its sharp turn between Chatham Square and Pell Street. Apparently it was known as the "Bloody Angle" on account of the frequent wars between Chinese organized crime groups in the neighbourhood.

The Nom Wan Tea Parlor visible in the left of the photo is a famous dim sum restaurant; Indonesian/Malaysian-Chinese Sanur, where my host Alexander took me, would be found at the far end of the street to right.

For more photos, see this excellent collection of contemporary and historical photos.



Mott Street is a major artery of Chinatown, Chinese settlement on the street having begun as early as the 1870s.

Despite its relatively small size, Mott Street has had an outsized role in Chinese politics. This 2002 New York Times report notes that Kuomintang founder Sun Yat-sen spent a fair amount of time on Mott Street, gathering support for his party and the cause of republicanism in China among the denizens of the neighbourhood. Indeed, visible above Hop Lee Restaurant at 16 Mott Street is the Eastern Region Head Office of the Kuomintang.

(See here for a 2009 picture of the same building , and here for a close-up.)







32 Mott Street has been a commercial address in Chinatown of note since the 1890s, as this 2004 article points out.

Opened in 1891 by [Lee Lok], 32 Mott Street General Store was originally called Quong Yuen Shing & Company. During that time, the store not only sold general merchandise like medicinal herbs, sundries and silk brocade for clothing, but also conducted import and export business. Importing goods from China, the store distributed such goods to Chinatowns in major cities including Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Because immigration laws forbade Chinese men to bring their wives to America, a bachelor’s society formed and Quong Yuen Shing & Company became a social center. As society became more modernized, the store went through its own evolution. In its next incarnation under Lee Lok’s son Peter Lee, Quong Yuen Shing & Company became a restaurant wholesaler. Still engaging in the import business, the store sold imported goods such as non-perishable foods and cookware.

In the mid-1970s, Paul Lee took the reins from his father, although the two vacillated in the role of head proprietor until Paul Lee finally took over in the mid-1980s. Under his ownership, Quong Yuen Shing & Company became 32 Mott Street General Store, selling Asian giftware and knickknacks. Lee also began selling bus tickets to Atlantic City and services to local residents, such as handling bill payments for seniors without checking accounts.

But after 9/11, Lee’s business suffered. The store never even got close to earning half its original revenue, Lee said.

The location later reopened as a different store.

[LINK] Oliver stoned

Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money points out in his comments on statements made by Oliver Stone in the course of promoting his movie Savages about Mexico's drug economy, that whatever Stone's substantial accomplishment in the world of film the man is incapable of commenting with any degree of accuracy on the non-film world. This shouldn't come as a surprise after the 1991 film JFK, granted. Nevertheless.

Stone is right to point out that the mass incarceration of drug offenders is demonstrably inefficient and in many senses immoral, but his facts are incorrect. Drug offenders do not constitute 50 percent of the US prison system’s inmates, but just over 20 percent. There are certainly more effective and humane ways to deal with the issue than tossing these people behind bars, but the opponents of the largely mindless approach to drug policy that has dominated in the last 40 years only hurt their case by casually tossing out falsehoods.

The problem continues with Stone’s statement that flows of drug money in Mexico are larger than those from tourism, oil, or remittances. Estimates for the value of the Mexican drug trade are all over the map, but the most rigorous analyses have concluded that export revenue from the drug trade is far lower than Stone suggests. Alejandro Hope, for instance, places the figure somewhere between $4.7 to $8.1 billion, while the RAND Corporation estimates that Mexican traffickers earn roughly $6.6 billion per year from sending drugs to the US.

In contrast, remittances sent by Mexicans living abroad in 2011 amounted to $22.7 billion. Mexico’s tourist trade, notwithstanding the nation’s unfortunate image in the international press, still managed to generate $11.9 billion in 2010. Stone’s claim is even further from the mark with regard to oil: the revenues for Pemex, the national oil company, amounted to $125 billion in 2011.

Claims that the majority of the Mexican economy is tied up with the drug trade does multiple things, none of them good. "Stone’s comments fuel a dystopian narrative of Mexico that has done the nation a great disservice over the past few years. They also help feed a belief that Mexico’s criminals are invincible supermen, against whom capitulation is the only solution."

[LINK] "The first, second, and third nations"

GNXP's Razib Khan has a post up exploring a paper which takes a look at the genetic backgrounds of different indigenous populations in the Americas. The paper confirms the hypothesis of linguist Joseph Greenberg that the indigenous languages of the Americas fall into three broad families--Eskimo-Aleut (Inuit), Na-Dene (Navajo, Dene, Chipeweyan), and Amerind (everyone else). It goes into further detail.

The Eskimo-Aleut turn out to be a 50:50 mix between an Amerind group, what they term First Americans, and an Asian lineage related to Siberians. This is not totally surprising, but it is good to get solid grounding. Additionally, they report evidence of back-migration to eastern Siberia. Again, not too surprising, but it is a neat confirmation of the reality that the separation between the Old and New World was illusory in some deep ways. The Na-Dene population here, the Chipewyan, are a different case. They are ~90% First American, but also ~10% something else. That something else is also more Asian, but not quite the same as the non-First American component of Eskimo-Aleuts. This population X is quite possibly the Old World source for the Na-Dene. As the authors apologetically note they didn’t have many other Na-Dene samples to explore this question in detail. But, there is one aspect which they explore a great bit in the supplements: some models suggest that the Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq sample exhibits a mix with First Americans at 15%, and 85% with this Asian population. With these sample sizes the statistical significant doesn’t seem rock solid, but it’s obviously suggestive. If you don’t remember, the Saqqaq sample comes from a man who died ~4,000 years ago. He seems to have resembled modern day Siberians more than Eskimo-Aleut, or indigenous peoples to the south. These data imply that the dominant component of the Saqqaq’s ancestry may indeed have been the minor component in the Na-Dene! A final twist is that the First American ancestry of the Saqqaq and Chipewyan is somewhat different than the First American ancestry of the Eskimo-Aleut. This is important in establishing a distinct ethnogenesis of the various groups, and their relationships to each other (I take their assertion that the First American of the Eskimo-Aleut being more “derived” a hint to likely later ethnogesis of this group via admixture than the Na-Dene).

To me the above implies that the closeness of the Saqqaq to the Siberian groups may be an artifact of the fact that the Eskimo-Aleut are synthetic populations, with ~50% First American, while the Saqqaq were only ~15% First American. Some have expressed curiosity as to how Na-Dene languages spread if the Chipewyan are only ~10% Na-Dene, using a grossly simplistic equivalency between language and ethnicity, but it strikes me that over time admixture could slowly reduce the genetic difference between the Na-Dene and their Amerind neighbors. By analogy, the Hui Muslims of China seem about ~90% Han Chinese genetically, but this can be easily explained by a very moderate amount of intermarriage over the past ~1,000 years, when you consider how small the Hui populations is in relation to the Han. One thing to note is that the Saqqaq may have been the first humans to settle much of the northern fringe of North America, and the Saqqaq man who was sequenced was alive during the very early centuries of this culture. One can easily imagine a rapidly expanding population pushing into uninhabited lands admixing very little with natives who did not exist. In contrast their Na-Dene cousins to the south were pushing into settled territory, and so experienced much greater admixture.

On a big picture note this puts the lie to the idea that before agriculture hunter-gatherer societies were subject purely to differentiation in situ. The Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene erupted into a settled landscape, and dispossessed the indigenous groups of their lands. How? The standard explanation for the Thule replacement of the Dorset is that the former were better adapted to northern climes. I know of no explanation for the Na-Dene expansion, but it probably had some rationale, social or technological. The fact relatively “pure” Saqqaq were later supplanted by a genomically hybrid populations also points to the complexity of these migratory narratives. The First Americans “struck back” in this case, shoving aside the pioneers of northern living who had likely originated more recently from the margins of eastern Asia. Of course, the Eskimo-Aleut and related peoples were not First Americans only, rather, it was the old (First American) and new (Asian) ganging up upon the not so old or new (Asian).

[LINK] On Project Orion

A recent Centauri Dreams post highlighted Freeman Dyson's Project Orion spacecraft design and his intent. Wikipedia's precis of the project is worth reproducing.

Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (Nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to have taken off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space.

A 1955 Los Alamos Laboratory document states (without offering references) that general proposals were first made by Stanislaw Ulam in 1946, and that preliminary calculations were made by F. Reines and Ulam in a Los Alamos memorandum dated 1947.[1] The actual project, initiated in 1958, was led by Ted Taylor at General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, who at Taylor's request took a year away from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, US to work on the project.

The Orion concept offered high thrust and high specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, at the same time. The unprecedented extreme power requirements for doing so would be met by nuclear explosions, of such power relative to the vehicle's mass as to be survived only by using external detonations without attempting to contain them in internal structure. As a qualitative comparison, traditional chemical rockets—such as the Saturn V that took the Apollo program to the Moon—produce high thrust with low specific impulse, whereas electric ion engines produce a small amount of thrust very efficiently. Orion would have offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines then under consideration. Supporters of Project Orion felt that it had potential for cheap interplanetary travel, but it lost political approval over concerns with fallout from its propulsion. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is generally acknowledged to have ended the project.

Centauri Dreams also shared Dyson's October 1968 Physics Today paper, "Interstellar Travel", exploring the mechanics of Project Orion and likely economic surround (a cost of 100 billion 1968 US dollars in the late 22nd century, after sustained economic growth of 4% per annum, was cited) and justifications.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Iran's problematic efforts to mobilize Iranian-Canadians

There have been some alarming reports about worsening Iranian-Canadian relations, connected to some rather startling statements by the Iranian cultural counselor in Ottawa about trying to mobilize the Iranian-Canadian community of more than a hundred thousand people as a third column. Foreign Minister John Baird has actually warned the Iranian government.

Speaking out for the first time since news emerged of an alleged mobilization scheme outlined by Iran’s cultural counselor in a Farsi-language interview, Mr. Baird said his department will “watch very closely” and that Ottawa takes the counselor’s statements “tremendously seriously.”

“Iranian-Canadians left Iran for a better life in Canada,” Mr. Baird told reporters on Friday morning. “It is completely inconsistent with any diplomatic mission for the Iranian mission in Ottawa to interfere with the liberties they enjoy in Canada.”

In his interview with an Iran-based website aimed at expatriates here, Hamid Mohammadi urged Iranian-Canadians to “occupy high-level key positions” and “resist being melted into the dominant Canadian culture.”

Mr. Mohammadi, who estimated the Iranian-Canadian population at 500,000, said recent Iranian immigrants have “decisively preserved strong attachments and bonds to their homeland,” while the “younger second generation” is already “working in influential government positions.”

Most ominously, he mapped out how he says his country plans to recruit Iranian-Canadians under the guise of a cultural outreach program: “By 2031, the total immigrant population of Canada will increase by 64%, and the number of Iranians will increase due to birthrate,” he said. “So, therefore, we need to put into effect very concentrated cultural programs in order to enhance and nurture the culture in this fast-growing population. It is obvious that this large Iranian population can only be of service to our beloved Iran through these programs and gatherings.”

[. . .]

A leading Canadian expert on diplomacy told the National Post on Thursday that Mr. Mohammadi’s remarks reveal the embassy is violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which explicitly states foreign diplomats have a “duty not to interfere in the internal affairs” of a host state.

“From Canada’s understanding of international law, yes they are [breaching the convention] because they’re seeking to recruit and utilize a population of Canadian citizens in ways that are clearly an interference with Canada’s domestic affairs,” said Michael Byers, the Canada research chair in global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia. “Promoting Iranian nationals to acquire positions of influence in Canadian government smacks of more than cultural outreach … If I were minister of foreign affairs, I’d be calling in the [highest-ranking Iranian diplomat] and asking for a clarification because that kind of intent is illegal and improper.”

Going further yet, an Iranian-Canadian human rights activist who happens to be married to the Defense Minister called for the Iranian embassy to be shut down.

Cripple the Iranian regime in any way possible, outside of military intervention, human rights activist Nazanin Afshin-Jam said Friday.

The Iranian-born activist and wife of Defence Minister Peter MacKay said she's against a military mission in the country, but that Canada should shut down the embassy in Ottawa to send a message to Tehran, the country's capital.

"I'm very much against the idea of military intervention on Iran, so I'm always trying to find ways of crippling this regime in other ways," Afshin-Jam told Robyn Bresnahan, host of CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning.

"And one way would be showing symbolically that they're not welcome. Among other things, I believe shutting down Iranian embassies around the world would send a strong diplomatic message back to Iran. And I truly believe, why should we be giving an embassy for those who imprison, torture, and execute innocent people?"

Afshin-Jam is a prominent human rights activist who founded Stop Child Executions, and met MacKay when she was lobbying the Canadian government to save the life of a young Iranian woman sentenced to death for killing a man who tried to rape her. At the time, MacKay was the foreign affairs minister.

Afshin-Jam says she's told MacKay what she thinks about the Iranian embassy.

"I've shared my views with him but I don't represent the opinion of the government or even my husband. I know there are reasons why they are keeping this [Iranian] embassy open."

The apparent attempts by Iran to mobilize the Iranian diaspora behind its goals, as detailed last month by MacLean's Michel Petrou, is troubling even if--as Petrou thinks--this doesn't mean that the Islamic Republic is trying to recruit Iranian-Canadians as spies. I find the whole thing very alarming, not least since diasporas seen as having compromising connections to their homeland have fared poorly in Canada in the past irregardless of whether these connections actually existed. I suppose the Iranian government doesn't have much of an incentive to not risk disrupting the lives of Iranian-Canadians, but this doesn't lessen the Iranian government's irresponsbilitity.