[BLOG] Some Friday links

• BlogTO notes plans by the City of Toronto to refurbish Front Street.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster points to astronomers who think current techniques might, just barely, be able to identify massive moons orbiting exoplanets--the more massive and hotter the moon the better, of course.


• Eastern Approaches observes the popularity, in Poland, of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2010 crash of the plane carrying Polish president Lech Kaczyński and 95 other VIPs in Smolensk.


• Geocurrents notes that Lithuania's electorate has voted massively against building a new nuclear power plant to replace the recently-closed Ignalina plant.


• GNXP's Razib Khan makes mention of the surprising fact that the near-totality of the wilderness present in North America four centuries ago at the beginning of European colonization is back.


• Language Hat comments on the etymology and usage of Rus, as ethnonym and political term.


• Language Log's Victor Mair examines the origins and usage of the terms "Sinophone" and "Sinosphere."
  
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley points out that with the single exception of North Korea, East Asia is actually reasonably demilitarized by the standards of the Cold War powers.


• The Numerati's Stephen Baker praises Nate Silver and his methods of statistical analysis: they don't make use of unquantifiable and misleading sentiments, they just make use very accurate statistical methods and models.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ford’s dumb mistakes make Mayor Olivia Chow more likely"

The National Post's Matt Gurney argues convincingly that current mayor Rob Ford's unending series of gaffes are making credible candidates--like Olivia Chow, like Karen Stintz of the TTC recently, like Adam Vaughan--more popular. People like their politics to be serious.

There’s a new poll out, showing that Rob Ford would lose in a hypothetical election campaign against NDP MP Olivia Chow. Chow, who was a Toronto city councillor for years alongside her late husband, Jack Layton, hasn’t committed to running, but has of late left the door to a potential run increasingly open. The poll is consistent with others that have shown Ford with a core group of supporters that would give him an excellent chance of being re-elected in a three-way race, but trouble if running against only one (presumably left-leaning) challenger. Ford’s approval rating is still hovering in the low-to-mid 40s, where it’s largely stayed since he took office two years ago. But as much as 10% of the city, while approving of the job he’s doing, would shift their votes to someone else, like Chow.

This might have something to do with what even Ford admits is his habit of doing stupid things. He recently told the media that going forward, he needs to avoid support-sapping little mistakes. “Minor stupid things like talking on the phone [and] reading while I’m driving,” the mayor listed as the sort of thing he needs to stop doing.

That was a pretty generous self-appraisal — the mayor routinely does things that are way stupider than that. Recent examples: Suggesting the city’s integrity commissioner positions be scrapped because they annoy him, giving out the wrong emergency telephone number ahead of Hurricane Sandy’s arrival in Toronto, writing an apology so grudging and half-hearted that the city’s integrity commissioner thinks he should be reprimanded for it, pressuring the city to spend money improving the area around his family business and seeking provincial help for his football team. Only his football team.

This list of Ford fumbles is far from complete. It’s just stuff that’s happened the last few days.

[URBAN NOTE] "Shit Rob Ford's Done"

Via Torontoist's morning roundup, I discovered the Tumblr blog Shit Rob Ford's Done.

("An attempt to keep track of all the shit Rob Ford has done since elected mayor," the subtitle reads. It goes on for four pages of summaries and links.)

Go, read, share.

[CAT] "Toronto's cat population booming"

This Canadian Press story tells a sad story of neglect of cats by their owners (and, implicitly, of significant environmental damage as hungry cats seek out food and play everywhere).

A warm spring led to a boom in Toronto's cat population and now more of them than usual are roaming the streets, pushing the city's animal shelters over capacity.

As many as 300,000 cats are on Toronto's streets, said Barbara Steinhoff with the Toronto Humane Society. In a given year there are between 100,000 and 300,000 cats without homes and this year it's at the extreme high end of that range, she said.

"Through the spring and summer, with the warm weather, the cats had one more birthing period than we would normally see," she said.

"So we saw a huge influx of kittens coming into the shelter over the summer period."

The city's shelters are full — but still accepting dozens more cats each day — and so are foster homes.

[LINK] "Decision 2012: What Does It Mean for the Gay Republican?

I have blogged a fair bit about the mainstreaming of GLBT issues and individuals in the Conservative Party of Canada. Ari Ezra Waldman has blogged at Towleroad about the importance of this process for the Republican Party.

The LGBT community played an outsized role in Tuesday's Democratic sweep. Constituting 5 percent of the electorate in 2012, the gay community went 77 percent to 23 percent for President Obama. If you do the math, the number of LGBT voters who chose to re-elect President Obama exceeded the margin of votes separating him and Mitt Romney. That means that our community delivered the election to the President.

[. . .] Both the increase in gay voting numbers and the increase in our already heavy Democratic tilt, together with a sweep of the four states voting on the freedom to marry and the elections of the openly gay candidates across the country, have a lot to say about the role of gay identity in modern politics. It is not simply, as Richard Socarides said, that today, supporting gay rights is no longer the albatross it was in the 1990s and, instead, is a banner to wear proudly. He's right, but that's too simple. Nor is it simply about gays being liberal. There are a lot of gay conservatives, but being conservative and voting Republican are two different things.

Our victories on Tuesday prove the hollowness of the gay Republican talking point that gay identity is tiny in politics. For all the talk that gay people want jobs, too, and for all the chatter about the economy being of supreme importance no matter who or how you love, the idea that our identity as gay persons does not mean that equal rights are more important to us than, say, our concerns about the debt is simply not true. Gay Republicans and gay conservatives risk irrelevance if they stick to the notion that "being gay is only a small part of who I am" and then proceed to endorse candidates who are anti-gay in the traditional sense. Being gay is who we are. It tints the way we see the world and how we interact with others. It informs our vote, as well.

We need gay Republicans. We need them to talk with fellow Republicans, to teach them that gay people are good, moral, upstanding citizens, who love their country, each other, and their children. We need them to push their party's leadership away from "legitimate rape" and away from "it's wrong on paper" to a mainstream party -- like the Tories in England -- who support the freedom to marry not in spite of their conservative principles, but because of them. But, voting for a Republican who wants to rescind their rights because gay Republicans are more concerned with other things than being gay is at once wrong -- by all accounts, Mr. Romney's tax plan and proposals for spending trillions the military did not want would add to the debt and raise taxes on the middle class -- and foolish. No one will respect them until they respect themselves.

This election showed that gay social identity is predominant in determining our political identity. If they ever hope to attract more of our community, even the conservative among us, to the Republican fold, gay Republicans should take heed, drop the canard that being gay doesn't matter, and embrace the importance of equality.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Love on the March"

I'm not the only person linking to Alex Ross' biographical essay in The New Yorker describing the massive progress in GLBT rights in his lifetime as an adult, nor should I be.

I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a “pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.” David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)”—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that “if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.”

By the mid-eighties, when I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, a few gay people held political office, many states had dropped long-standing laws criminalizing sodomy, and sundry celebrities had come out. (The tennis champion Martina Navratilova did so, memorably, in 1981.) But anti-gay crusades on the religious right threatened to roll back this progress. In 1986, the Supreme Court, upholding Georgia’s sodomy law, dismissed the notion of constitutional protection for gay sexuality as “at best, facetious.” AIDS was killing thousands of gay men each year. The initial response of the Reagan Administration—and of the mainstream media—is well summarized by a Larry Speakes press briefing in October, 1982:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement [from] the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?

Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?

SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

By the time Reagan first spoke at length about AIDS, in May, 1987, the death toll in the U.S. had surpassed twenty thousand. What I remember most about my first sexual experience is the fear.

Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine. That’s the sensation that hit me when I watched the young man in Tempe shout down a homophobe in the name of the President-elect. Gay marriage is legal in six states and in Washington, D.C. Gays can serve in the military without hiding their sexuality. We’ve seen openly gay judges, congresspeople, mayors (including a four-term mayor of Tempe), movie stars, and talk-show hosts. Gay film and TV characters are almost annoyingly ubiquitous. The Supreme Court, which finally annulled sodomy laws in 2003, is set to begin examining the marriage issue. And the 2012 campaign has shown that Republicans no longer see the gays as a reliable wedge issue: although Mitt Romney opposes same-sex marriage, he has barely mentioned it this fall. If thirty-two people were to die today in a mass murder at a gay bar, both Obama and Romney would presumably express sympathy for the victims—more than any official in New Orleans did when, back in 1973, an arsonist set fire to the Upstairs Lounge.