[PHOTO] Pearson by day

The end of the flight from New York took me to Toronto Pearson, where I eventually surfaced under the shadow of the inter-terminal monorail, where I waited for the 192 Airport Rocket to come and take me to Kipling Station and eventually home.

Under bright blue skies, the grand scale of Pearson's architecture looks bolder and friendlier than it does at night, as illustrated inMarch post.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton profiles the light rail mass transit system of Oregon's city of Portland. Promising, the MAX seems to be.


• blogTo shows its readers where to find abandoned TTC buses and subway cares (near the Wilson Subway Yard in east-end Toronto, it turns out). Photos!
  
• Centauri Dreams takes another look at the prospect of Earth-like worlds orbiting post-main sequence white dwarfs. They may be rare, but they may also be easy enough to detect.


• Daniel Drezner rounds up academic responses to Mitt Romney's claim that Israeli wealth and Palestinian poverty can be explained by "cultural" differences. Fail, yes.


• Eastern Approaches takes a look at the Czech heritage of Madeleine Albright in the context of her new biography.


• Marginal Revolution examines the consequence of the trade-off in Japan to maintain a strong currency to support its graying population at the expense of domestic industries.


• This Savage Minds post taking a look at the failings of Mark Regnerus' post on same-sex parenting is worth reading.

[URBAN NOTE] On artist migration to Hamilton, Ontario

A Burgh Diaspora post pointed me in the direction of this CBC news story noting the migration of artists from Toronto to the city of Hamilton, an industrial--now post-industrial--city of a half-million people, anchoring the western edge of the Greater Toronto Area on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Overall, news about Hamilton is negative, stories of economic decline and urban decline predominating in the media, but the low cost of living and a slow economic revival has also been attracting some "creative class" migrants--I blogged about this juxtaposition briefly in this 2009 post, and my own visit to Hamilton last year was positive.

Is this migration indicative of an eventual revival of the city? That hope doesn't seem implausible to me, for whatever it's worth.

When Ron Weihs and Judith Sandiford opened the doors of their Artword Artbar on Colbourne Street to the Hamilton Fringe Festival crowd last week, there was no shortage of former Torontonians like themselves who have migrated south to Hamilton.

There are playwrights and musicians. There are writers and visual artists. Often, the couple run into other former Toronto residents who came to Hamilton for the same reason they did — it's more spacious, more livable, and for many in the artistic community, more inspiring.

It's not exactly an artistic brain drain. It's more of a slow, steady migration of Toronto artists to Hamilton to join the local scene, said Weihs, a playwright who moved from Toronto in 2007 and opened the Artword Artbar two years later.

“They're slowly, tentatively finding their way here,” he said. “I'm just as happy about that because Hamilton has a very strong scene of its own. The healthiest thing is for that scene to assimilate new people rather than artists coming in from outside guns blazing.”

[LINK] "Merkel’s Right, Greece Should Act Like Bulgaria"

This unsigned piece published late last month by Bulgaria's FOCUS News Agency contrasts and compares Greece with Bulgaria, the latter country--Communist until 1989, outside of the European Union unil 2007, still outside of the Eurozone--being presented as a model.

Leaving aside the complexities of the now-stable Bulgarian-Greek relationship, and the question of whether the Bulgaria's transition from Communism is relevant for Greece's ongoing transition to some unknown state, is the example of a country still substantially poorer than Greece going to be welcomed by Greeks as meaningful and positive? The bar can't be set too low.

Earlier this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel cited Bulgaria as an exemplar of fiscal virtue in its response to the financial crisis, Bloomberg informed.
It isn’t every day that Bulgaria, still the poorest country in the European Union, is held up as a role model. The only way to understand Merkel’s praise was as a parable for her belief that countries that spend more than they earn have to go through a period of harsh austerity if they are to grow sustainably.

[. . .]

Greeks and Bulgarians had a lot in common until relatively recently. Both spent centuries under Ottoman rule; both fought for their independence and became poor backwaters of Europe. Their paths began to diverge only after World War II, when Bulgaria was folded into the Soviet bloc and Greece remained part of Western Europe. Once Greece joined the EU -- then called the European Economic Community -- in 1981, it was showered with money, as the communists next door stagnated.

Then, in 1989, the Soviet bloc collapsed. A new Bulgarian democracy was born, but with no money in the state treasury to pay for it. The nation’s savings were insignificant, shops were empty, unemployment was high and infrastructure was rudimentary. Austerity was just a fact of life.

[. . .]

The decade of 1989-1999 was harsh, but it turned Bulgaria into a disciplined nation of savers -- even after the country joined the EU in 2007. The banking sector is financed by these savings accounts, which provide a healthy Tier 1 capital- adequacy ratio of 15.8 percent. Credit-card penetration is extremely low -- Bulgarians prefer cash.

Being poor is no fun, of course. Public-sector employees are badly paid and retired people struggle to survive with their low pensions. Not a single motorway has been completed to link one end of Bulgaria with another and only parts of the subway in the capital, Sofia, work. This is the price to pay for not spending money that isn’t yours to improve your lot, at the level of the state and of the individual consumer.

But today Bulgaria has positive economic growth and the second-lowest state debt in the EU (after Estonia) at 16 percent of gross domestic product. It also has a manageable budget deficit of about 2 percent of GDP, despite levying a flat corporate and personal income tax of just 10 percent. Foreign- exchange reserves amount to 6 percent of GDP. In short, the country has a future.

[. . .]

Bulgaria’s example is the only way forward for Greece. It does mean becoming poorer for now, but unlike Bulgaria in the 1990s, Greece has infrastructure and savings -- an estimated 600 billion euros stashed abroad alone -- to make the process easier. Austerity should make the Greek government and the nation more disciplined in their spending habits.
Europe may have mishandled the financial crisis, but for the past three years Greeks have tried to blame others for the state of their own economy. Unless they recognize the mistakes they made on their own, their future path of development will never be sustainable.

[LINK] "The Future Is Unevenly Distributed"

George Dvorsky's io9 report on a futurists' conference in Toronto with global attendance points out the obvious fact that First World concerns aren't universal, with multiple interesting examples from different points on the Earth's surface.

"Futurist" has two meanings depending on the context. The traditional definition has to do with holding a positive sense of the future. It's an expansion of the humanist suggestion that progressive developments in society, institutions and technology can make the world a better place. The second meaning refers to people who makes it their business to predict the future. That would more accurately be referred to as futurology.

The futurists at the WorldFuture conference most definitely subscribe to the former definition. And as the panel discussion revealed, visions of the future tend to get more restrained depending on the state of things in one's home country. It's difficult to dream of a grander future when conditions are tough. Consequently, the panelists centered their discussion around such topics as clean water, literacy, poverty, internet use, unemployment, ecology, and the threat of terrorist attacks. For many countries, the alleviation of these problems is part of a broader futurist project.

The situation in Egypt provided an excellent example. Panel member Kamal Zaki Mahmoud Sheer talked about how shocking the Arab Spring was to his country — but in a good way.

Full size The toppling of the Mubarek regime sent a wave of hope through the country where previously there was none. Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, the general public was concerned about the processes of democratization.

"The future suddenly opened up before us," he said, "and it created a new kind of engagement where we could actually have discussions about creating a constitution and new institutions." The Arab Spring inspired the rise of a futurist voice in that country — one that could suddenly and freely engage in strategic thinking and long term planning.

The Dominican Republic's Yarima Sosa shared her colleague's sense of hope, but her priorities were elsewhere. Sosa's talk focused on a bare necessity of life most of us take for granted: food. She talked about how one in six people on this planet go hungry every day, and how a diminished quality of life results in despair and loss of hope.

As Sosa's talk revealed, a fundamental goal of developing world futurists is to grab hold of their own destiny. To that end, she is working to see the UN pass a resolution in which they acknowledge the problem and start to work on regulating the food market. "The system needs to be more transparent, to bring more ethics to it, and to show that food cannot be used as a financial asset," she said, "it should be used as a source of nourishment, and not for the wealth of a couple of people playing on their computers."

Sosa is engaging in what she calls "creative destruction" — the act of putting an old world to rest in favor of a better one.

Go, read.

[LINK] Two links on Poland's debatable, debated 20th century frontiers

An Eastern Approaches blog post, "Ukraine's faded gem" , takes a brief glance at the Ukrainian city of Lviv, once the Polish-Jewish city of L'wow until the Second World War.

SUMMER is in full swing in Lviv, a city that is a faded gem in western Ukraine. Some locals have retreated from the city to their dachas. Old men play chess on the shaded promenade while couples stroll along. The Mitteleuropa coffeehouses overflow with tourists. (One café is inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who hails from Habsburg Lviv.) Just two hours’ drive from the Polish border, the city is far from the politics of Kyiv. It is the self-proclaimed cultural capital of Ukraine.

Lviv is still coming to terms with life after Euro 2012, the football championship co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland in June. The new airport terminal is spookily empty. Polish tourists have long come to Lviv in search of prewar Lwów (on Polish territory) and a night at the magnificent opera house. Now new budget flights might make Lviv another Kraków or Riga, beloved by Brits on stag nights.

[. . .]

Ukraine’s language law, which was rushed through parliament earlier this month was not popular in this “most Ukrainian city”. The bill would make Russian an official regional language in predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the industrialised east and southern regions such as Crimea where Russia's Black Sea fleet is based. In Lviv Russian would not qualify for the status of official regional language (it needs to be spoken by 10% of the local population) but Lviv’s citizens opposed it anyway. In the city centre, the mouths of six statues of famous Ukrainians were taped over in symbolic protest. Yaroslav Hrytsak, a well-known historian from Lviv, says the law encourages Yugoslavia-style confrontation. Politicians' manipulation of regional differences has brought Ukraine to the “brink of civil war”.

[. . .]

On July 30th, the election campaign kicks off. In recent years, Western commentators have raised their eyebrows at the emergence of an extreme-right, nationalist party called Svoboda (Freedom), which has its stronghold in western Ukraine. It has held a majority in Lviv city council since 2010. Yet it is unlikely to cross the 5% parliamentary threshold, and may indeed be part of the ruling party’s “divide and rule” tactics. The big question is whether the October elections will be democratic. But whatever the outcome, Lvivians will continue to play chess outside, serve black coffee, and speak Ukrainian anyway.

At Strange Maps, meanwhile, Frank Jacobs' post "Baltic Ifs and Polish Buts" posts a map showing the very fluid nature of Poland's boundaries in 1920, before the 1921 Peace of Riga that stabilized the Polish-Soviet and Polish-Lithuanian frontiers for 18 years and similar phenomena with Germany and Czechoslovakia to the east.

We’re used to there being three Baltic states – or none, when they were gobbled up by the Russian/Soviet empire – but on this map, there are two. Or four, depending on how you count. The northern Baltic entity is divided in three: Esthonia (only covering the northern part of present-day Estonia), Livonia (spanning the south of present-day Estonia and a large part of Latvia) and Kurland (the southern part of today’s Latvia).

The other (or fourth) Baltic state is Lithuania, but remarkably smaller than it is today. The state is denied sea access by the territory of Memel, detached from Germany after the war by the League of Nations. On the other side, it misses a great chunk of its present eastern territory.

In turn, East Prussia is cut off from the German ‘mainland’ by the Polish Corridor, and by the Free City of Danzig. East Prussia itself is divided in two, with the southern half still an ‘area for plebiscite’ (which would have to determine whether the territory wanted to remain German or not).

A similar area is detached from eastern Silesia (note just east of that area’s border the small town of Auschwitz). Another, smaller area to the south is also detached, although it is not immediately apparent from which entity (Poland, Czechoslovakia or Silesia) and for what purpose.

Interestingly, the map also appears to show a Lithuanian enclave in Kurlandish territory, somewhere between Jakobstadt and Dvinsk (not to be confused with Minsk or Pinsk). Unfortunately, the enclave’s name is illegible.

The map still shows Vilnius (Wilno in Polish, Vilna on the map) as Lithuania's capital; although it was the spiritual centre of Lithuanian nationalism, Lithuanian was heavily minoritary, the majority being Polish. After a Polish invasion and a period of detachment as the Central Lithuanian Republic (1920-1922), Vilnius and the surrounding areas were annexed by Poland. Kaunas - on this map rendered as Kovno, slightly to the west of Vilnius - was thereafter proclaimed Lithuania's 'provisional capital'.