[PHOTO] Grace Church on-the-Hill

A friend of mine works at Grace Church on-the-Hill, an Anglican church located east of the intersection of Spadina Road and Lonsdale Road, above St. Clair.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to an interesting analysis of the apparently jumbled and occasionally anachronistic elements of futurism in the Persian Gulf states.


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin wonders whether Southern whites should be treated as an ethnic group, in some dimensions at least. (One implication in his analysis is that a Democratic Party outreach to Southern whites is doomed, on tribal grounds.)


• Far Outliers' Joel examines how the Spanish word biombo ("folding screen") came from the Japanese byōbu via the Tokugawa Shogunate's early 17th century exchanges with New Spain.


• Geocurrents notes that some organizations advocating for indigenous peoples in the Russian Far North have been subjected to what seems to be a measure of state persecution.


• Language Log takes a look at an interesting use of negation in language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis observes that the Republican Party stands out in not recognizing contraception as a human right.


• Steve Munro and Torontoist both review the TTC's new streetcars.


• Torontoist's Chris Riddell notes that efforts by the owner to sell the decrepit and commercially unattractive Captain John's Harbourfront Restaurant aren't going so well.


• Elsewhere on Torontoist, Chris Riddell is rightly skeptical of the fuss over GE's nuclear fuel plant on Lansdowne Avenue.


• Towleroad notes that Uruguay's parliament has begun to debate full marriage equality for same-sex couples. This would make Uruguay the second Latin American country to achieve marriage equality, after neighbouring Argentina.

[LINK] "Many good years left"

Xtra!'s David K Seitz interviews Canadian clergyman Brent Hawkes, a man who has not onyl served for decades senior pastor of Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, but has become one of Canada's leading gay rights activists. (Same-sex marriage wouldn't have gotten off as early as it did without his help.)

You and MCCT played a central role in the struggle for same-sex marriage, but you've always been working on a range of issues and have stressed the importance of not becoming a "single-issue" church. What are the main post-marriage challenges for the LGBTQ community?

First, we have to ground the gains that we've made in education, because there are significant portions of the Canadian population that don't support the LGBT community. That's one of the things that, to their credit, Egale is focusing on. How do we educate teachers? Judges? Police? The RCMP? We're pretty solid in terms of public opinion, the courts and the laws, but we should not take for granted the gains we've made.

Secondly, the obvious one is transgender rights. Transgender people are where we [non-trans lesbian, gay, bisexual people] were 40 years ago, in terms of lack of human rights legislation and supports. Although it's passed in Ontario, it's not passed federally or in other provinces.


Thirdly, there are segments of the population that continue to be vulnerable in Canada. We know that bullying in schools is one, but also seniors. Many retirement homes are still pretty conservative, and many of us who are living our lives out don't want to go back into the closet or faces challenges if we retire to seniors facilities.

Finally, internationally. If you look at Earth from a satellite, you see no boundaries. In a sense, we are all one together on this one planet, and so we share a responsibility for the human rights of GLBT people in other places around the world.

It's an interesting point we're at as a community, because to some extent the gay community is kind of artificially held together by the threat to our rights. As that threat to our rights declines, the community naturally dissipates. So, for instance, you see more gay Conservatives than you would even 10 years ago. Also, bars tended to be where gay people, particularly gay men, congregated for cruising and social purposes. The bars are under stress nowadays, because Grindr is doing what the bars used to do. How we connect, how we communicate, how we build the community is shifting. So if we're going to continue to have some kind of an identity as a gay community, we're going to have to do it differently.

[LINK] "Desertec's Promise of Solar Power for Europe Fades"

Spiegel Online International's Joel Stonington warns that ambitious plans to set up solar power farms in the Sahara desert to supply Europe with clean energy is falling apart. Political concerns about instability in North Africa along with a shortage of the government revenue needed in Europe to subsidize more expensive solar power are to blame.

Supporters hailed the Desertec Industrial Initiative as the most ambitious solar energy project ever when it was founded in 2009. Major industrial backers pledged active involvement, politicians saw a win-win proposition and environmentalists fawned over Europe's green energy future. For a projected budget of €400 billion ($560 billion), the venture was to pipe clean solar power from the Sahara Desert through a Mediterranean super-grid to energy-hungry European countries.

Today, a scant three years later, there is still little to show for the project but the ambition.

The list of recent setbacks is daunting. The project has failed to break ground on a single power plant. Spain recently balked at signing a declaration of intent to connect high-voltage lines between Morocco and the rest of Europe. In recent weeks, two of the biggest industrial supporters at the founding of the initiative, Siemens and Bosch, backed out. And perhaps most tellingly, though last week's third annual Desertec conference was held in Berlin's Foreign Ministry, not a single German cabinet minister bothered to attend.

[. . .]

Political backing for energy from the desert, in other words, is evaporating.

The hurdles facing the project, to be sure, have always been high and have become more challenging in recent years. For one, political strains in North Africa have multiplied as the Arab Spring destabilized the political landscape in the region and, in some cases, reignited the historical distrust that exists among neighboring countries. Furthermore, energy needs in the Middle East and North Africa are growing even as a lack of experience and a challenging regulatory environment produce new challenges.

Finally, energy policy and security policy tend to go hand in hand. For all the initial enthusiasm, countries have been hesitant about plunging into a large, cooperative grid in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The result is a paucity of public investment funds.

"It's a shame," said Dr. Wolfgang Knothe, a co-founder of the Desertec Foundation, a non-profit organization which is a significant motor pushing the Desertec idea forward. "We should say we're closing the whole thing down because we have no political support."

[LINK] "A Canada-EU trade deal? ‘Hmm …’"

MacLean's' Paul Wells reports that ongoing discussions about a free trade deal between Canada and the European Union seem likely to go nowhere.

Everybody connected to the negotiations assures me there will be a deal. Every public sign I see makes me think there won’t.

At the end of October, De Gucht, a former Belgian foreign minister, sat down for a webcast interview with an EU journalist about the negotiations. His body language was comical. “I hope that we can finish these negotiations by the end of the year,” he said. “That’s the day after tomorrow, hmm?” Translation: that deadline is really freaking close.

So, he said, Fast would come to Brussels. “But we should have no illusions. There are still a number of difficult issues to tackle. So I’m not promising anything. But we will make a major effort to close the deal before the end of the year. That’s what we are going to do. But there are a number of issues I believe that you can only resolve at the political level. That’s why . . . we will have a ministerial [meeting] to, yeah, to close the deal, I mean to sort it out and do the necessary political arbitration.”

Pro tip: if an automobile salesman describes his product to you in similar halting terms, don’t buy the car.

Two weeks later, De Gucht was sounding far more chipper. “I expect to conclude a comprehensive agreement with Canada very soon,” he told a business audience in Mexico. “Even more crucially, it is possible that we will start talks for a deep free trade agreement with the United States, if our leaders agree on this in the new year.”

But now it was Harper’s turn to sound less than bullish. “There’s a lot of roadblocks out there in all these relationships, China, India, the negotiations with the European Union, the Americas strategy,” he told the Toronto Star. “Frankly, because of all the impediments, my judgment is that we have to go hard on all fronts and see what actually progresses.”

Why does it matter? Because the so-called Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Europe is the biggest and oldest trade file on the government docket. Jean Charest started pushing European contacts to take the idea seriously during his first term as Quebec premier, in 2006. Harper came on board in early 2007. Negotiations began in 2009, after a preliminary study suggested an agreement could be worth $12 billion a year to Canada. Back then, Stockwell Day was the trade minister and he said he’d like to see negotiations conclude by the end of 2010. They slipped, and slipped again, and slipped some more, and now it’s two years later.

Why is it so hard? A Canada-EU CETA would be much more ambitious in opening markets in services, investment and government procurement than the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement. A broad range of domestic interests on both sides would rather keep those markets closed. And the opponents of CETA have been far more effective at mobilizing opposition than its proponents have been at mobilizing support.