[PHOTO] Missing

Walking home along Dupont Street last night, I came across this 8 1/2x11 poster looking for a missing person pasted on the side of a disused telephone booth.

The story of the man, Mickey Hamill, ends sadly: a man who disappeared on the morning of the 11th of April after leaving home for a restaurant was found dead four days later in High Park, not a victim of foul play. Going home the evening before the discovery, I passed a pair of people in a truck, a worried adult man and a young boy, who were driving around with these posters looking for Hamill.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bag News Notes' Michael Shaw wonders whether the real problem with the attempted Nelson Mandela photo op wasn't that it took advantage of a man in ill health but that it did so badly.


• What does it mean, Daniel Drezner asks, that almost all transactions one's likely to encounter in China--even ones that would be handled electronically--are handled in cash? (A lack of trust in the banks, perhaps?)


• The issue of anti-Semitism in Hungary as it hosts the World Jewish Congress is tackled at Eastern Approaches.


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh is skeptical about Shinzo Abe's inflationary experiment in Japan, since--he argues--shifting demographics are pushing Japan towards deflation and economic decline.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money places the recent catastrophe in Bangladesh in perspective. Clothing manufacturers have almost always made use of easily-exploited, marginal, and--literally--disposable labour.


• Registan notes that, after the arrest of two Kazakhstani students in Boston for complicity with the younger Tsarnaev brother after the fact, people are now looking at Islam in Kazakhstan. (It's historically quite placid, FWIW.)


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh reacts to a report finding a disturbingly high level of support for honour killings in many parts of the Muslim world.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Tajikistan is trying to limit the abuse of its migrant workers in Russia by stationing diplomatic personnel to greet and guide new arrivals.


• Wonkman makes the case for the utility of labels in referring to people, since they can legitimately help guide and identify them. (He's talking about GLBT/queer identities, but I think the principle is portable.)

[LINK] "Ontario budget: Can NDP leader afford to prop up Ontario Liberals again?"

CBC's Robert Fisher writes about how the NDP in Ontario, under Andrea Horvath, holds the future of the province in its hands. Will the Liberal minority government of Kathleen Wynne survive? Or will we go to elections just 19 months after the last one?

It was a triple "e" budget that Ontario's minority Liberal government brought down yesterday: A little of everything, for everybody, everywhere, with the NDP's Andrea Horwath very much in mind.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa and Premier Kathleen Wynne made it clear for weeks that their first budget would be a "Liberal" budget.

But this one has NDP handprints all over it. And the reason was straightforward.

Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, risking (as one senior Tory told me privately) being the only guy "in short pants" at Queen's Park, decided to reject the budget and its direction for the province in advance, to push instead for a provincial election.

Whether he gets his wish, though, will depend on Horwath, who wants to wait a little longer before she delivers her yea or nay. She wants to consult Ontarians, and her party, as she did last spring with what turned out to be Dalton McGuinty's final budget.

But this time there is the added dimension of Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan telling Horwath not to bring down the Wynne government, and instead work toward an accord with the Liberals to try to create some mutually desired change.

What Ryan is suggesting would be not unlike what happened in 1985 when then NDP leader Bob Rae and then Liberal leader David Peterson brought an end to the long-standing Conservative rule in Ontario with their two-page document that kept Peterson's minority government going for two years.

But the situation this time is a bit different.

[LINK] "Why Cyprus went bust, and the case of the mystery memory stick"

Via Nicholas Whyte I came across Peter Birks' account of what is--at best--remarkable incompetence on the part of the Cypriot financial sector in buying up Greek sovereign debt, aggravated likely by some guilty knowledge on someone's part. (This Reuters article goes into more detail.)

By April 2010 Bank of Cyprus had €2.4bn worth of Greek bonds – above the Bank's own limit, but that limit was raised a month later. Bank of Cyprus bosses still maintain that "everybody was buying into Greek bonds at the time". Well, yes, there were lots of sellers (mainly banks) and lots of buyers (mainly private equity speculators). There were not many bank buyers. At the end of 2010, only two banks in Europe actually had bigger holdings than BoC (€2.2bn) and Laiki (€3.3bn). Those banks were the vastly larger operations BNP Paribas and Société Générale. And both these banks got hurt hard when the default came.

More interestingly, it appears that the Bank of Cyprus knew that it was in a bit of a mess. Notwithstanding the claim that Kypri was only referring to a short-term sell-off in response to market conditions, in April 2010 BoC moved €1.6bn in Greek bonds out of its trading book and into its "held to maturity" book. That meant that the bank could count the Greek bonds at the price it paid (the value of Greek bonds had been falling for some time). BoC said at the time that the move was made because Greece would redeem the bonds – a triumph of hope over reality, as the events of early 2012 proved.

Andreas Eliades, CEO of the group until April last year, still insists that no-one could have imagined that a European country in the euro could default.

That, of course, is an excuse we have heard from many others in the banking sector – not just in Cyprus. "No-one could have foreseen it; no-one predicted it", was said again and again, despite the fact that from 2000 onwards several people were foreseeing a credit bubble and several people were predicting that it would end in tears.

When the axe fell last March, Bank of Cyprus was €1.8bn in the hole. Cyprus, whose GDP outside of offshore banking was tiny, was never going to be able to bail out BoC and Laiki. I've written before about the farce that led to a short period where all bank deposits at Boc and Laiki were going to suffer a hit. That nightmare scenario, which within 18 months would have led to banking crises in several other countries in the eurozone (starting with Slovenia) was thankfully abandoned a week later. But the larger depositors had to take a hit, and the effect was to destroy the Cypriot financial system. No-one would leave money in the Caymans if they thought their money would be confiscated. For Cyprus, the game is over and the economy is shot.

But things get even murkier. As we've seen, it would appear that the managers of the bank were almost operating on their own, with a Board of Directors who didn't really know what was going on. Was this true?

We shall never know. As Reuters reported, one day last October a memory stick was placed into a desktop computer at the Bank of Cyprus. There was some clever software on that memory stick. It quickly erased a staggering 28,000 files, including internal emails in late 2009 and early 2010 – precisely when many of the Greek bond purchases were taking place.

[LINK] "I commit sociology, and I don't intend to stop"

Last night I linked to American sociologist Jonathan Wynn's reaction to Prime Minister Harper's accusation that Justin Trudeau was "committing sociology". Canadian sociologist Michael Adams' essay in The Globe and Mail is classic. From corruption early in childhood, Adams' path in the social sciences was set.

{M]y own sociological tendencies went unchecked because of Canada’s permissive atmosphere at that time. In those days, Canadians mused with impunity about social trends and even the workings of power. Indeed, state-sanctioned sociology was widely accepted as a practice of good government. Governments funded shadowy networks of sociologists.

The perps were not limited to universities and institutes; they infiltrated the public service. The federal government even conscripted ordinary Canadians into this nefarious activity. It perpetrated coercive, large-scale sociology against its own people in the form of a robust census. Sociology also informed the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, arguably the most influential such inquiry in our history, whose conclusions seemed to many to undermine the colonial values that had made this country great.

The tendrils of this scourge – which feeds rapaciously on curiosity, data collection, analysis and debate – reached into every corner of society. Ringleaders in fields from public health and urban planning to marketing and social services used its tools and ideas, supposing it would enable them to better understand the behavioural patterns and even key attitudes of the people they sought to reach through their work.

All this activity was underpinned by the assumption that society influences the lives and behaviour of individuals. This notion, of course, is anathema to those who would attribute all success and failure to individuals alone. One of the most forceful proponents of this position, Margaret Thatcher, not only rejected the idea that society influences people but that society exists at all. The lady’s not for polling.

My own tendency to commit sociology eventually became the source of my livelihood. I founded Environics, a polling and market research firm, rather like a sociological hit man: committing the offence on behalf of clients who prefer to leave the dirty work to others.

[URBAN NOTE] "RE/MAX fires agent over family-values brochure"

Xtra!'s Marcus McCann reports on the firing of a Mississauga realtor by his agency for distributing a pamphlet criticizing same-sex families based on widely questioned research. (See also the Toronto Star's article.)

There are many questions to ask. Is this an appropriate reaction by the agency, for instance? Is this actually hateful? Et cetera. The question I just want to have answered relates to why Ciastek did this. I can't think of a way that a scattershot distribution of pamphlets containing controversial material could be a plus for a businessperson.

Andrew Ciastek was terminated for “poor judgment on his personal marketing,” according to Christine Martysiewicz, director of internal and public relations for RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic Canada.

“We assure the general public that his actions in no way reflect RE/MAX or our associates. We're offended by the insensitivity shown here just as much as the community is. We take pride in the diversity of our workforce and our clients,” Martysiewicz says.

The flyer's headline reads, “Traditional family is the best for the future of the kids.” It is based on research that suggests that gay parents are more likely to be unemployed than their straight counterparts. The author of the study, Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, has since backtracked on key claims made in the study, and gay activists and other academics have roundly criticized it as politically calculated.

Ciastek was not immediately available for comment. In an interview before the termination was announced, he told the Toronto Star he realized people are “hurt” by the flyer and promised to apologize.

RE/MAX will be making a donation to Peel Pride, Martysiewicz says, but she declined to disclose the amount.

[URBAN NOTE] "Montreal’s Food Truck Plan Is a Symbolic “Fuck You” to Poor People and Immigrants"

VICE's Jonah Campbell has a strongly-worded article describing the city of Montréal's apparently ill-judged approach to food trucks. Did they learn nothing from Toronto's experience?

As those who are attentive to gastronomic rumblings in Canada are doubtless already aware, a few weeks ago it was announced that Montreal is finally lifting its 60-odd year ban on street food, although it is so doing in as perversely over-regulated and ass-backward a fashion as la Belle Province can muster (Quebec, I mean, not the fast food chain). The city will be granting a small number of permits, exclusively to pre-existing restaurants and caterers, and apparently only to those that will provide food of a quality “highly respected and renowned” that showcases the gastronomic excellence of Quebec. Vendors will be restricted to food trucks per se (no carts, wagons, etc.), and the majority of the food preparation will have to occur off-location, ie: not in the truck itself.

[. . .] Arguably, what is important about street food is the opportunity it provides for people who don't have the resources to open up a full-scale restaurant to make some kind of a living through food (important in the “big picture” sense; it is also important because of how vastly it improves the quality of life of wasted people, obvs.). What is interesting about street food is that, partly due to the lower overhead, a greater flexibility is allowed – street carts can afford to cater to the specific and sometimes obscure culinary inclinations of particular neighbourhoods, communities, or cultures, and the material and logistical constraints of how to prepare and serve food on the fly can produce mutations and innovations in local culinary practices, even if it's as simple as “Fuck it, let's put it on a stick.” In this way street food comes to constitute a lively and often idiosyncratic part of the foodscape of a city.

Montreal's food truck plan explicitly precludes the former, which if one is even remotely sensitive to questions about cultural appropriation, constitutes a pretty undeniable symbolic “fuck you” to the poor people and immigrants upon whom street food has depended, basically forever. And even if you're completely indifferent to that side of things, the idea that the vendors are going to be selected on the basis of some city wonks' idea of what the culinary identity of Montreal is supposed to be should give anyone pause. The city is supposedly proceeding with due caution in light of the colossal failure of Toronto's similar A La Cart pilot program, but what is truly creepy is the consonance of this with the project of asserting a particular Québecois identity that must be carefully tailored and maintained, protected from threats both internal and external by an elaborate scaffolding of regulation and legislation.

[LINK] "Economically, Russia Is Roughly Where the United States Was In The 1950's"

Forbes' Mark Adomanis makes a reasonably compelling argument that, by virtue of its level of economic development, Russia shouldn't be considered a peer of the United States, that the problems of Russia now are those of the United States in the past--1950, using the single crude metric of GDP per capita, to be precise.

(Going to the Penn World Tables catastrophic deconvergence occurred, with Russian GDP per capita collapsing by more than half, from two-fifths of the United States' level in 1990 to less than a fifth in 1998. Even now, Russia is still below its relative peak.)

There's much to be said about problems with this. Social development doesn't feature, for instance, while levels of technologies aren't factored directly into GDP per capita. Still, Adomanis does make the good point that the various problems of Russia aren't the problems of high-income advanced democracies but, rather, those of middle-income countries with very troubled political histories.

In the decade from 1998, [. . .] the Russian economy grew much more rapidly than the American economy did in the decade from 1948. But what interests me is that in 2008, at the peak of the energy boom and after a decade of run-away growth, Russia’s GDP per capita was still lower than the United States had been back in 1950. Think about that for just a moment. Despite all of the bluster about being an “energy superpower” and all of the hyperventilation that “the bear is back,” Russia’s economy is less developed than the United State’s was more than a half century ago.

And the United States in the 1950′s, as you might recall, had a couple of pretty serious issues. Across the South, African Americans were systematically disenfranchised and subject to political violence condoned, if not actively supported, by local power structures and state governments. Jim Crow was alive and well and, for a good portion of the decade, schools were still legally segregated. Women were limited from most high-end professions and most of the elite educational institutions, and sexism of a sort we have a hard time imaging these days was perfectly conventional. There was universal conscription, and the country spent something like 10% of GDP on the Pentagon and the global struggle against communism. Immigration laws explicitly discriminated against non-Europeans. Obviously the 1950′s weren’t all bad, there were clearly a number of redeeming features of the society at the time, but they nonetheless were a time before Martin Luther King Jr, before the Civil Rights act, and before any of the other major legal and political reforms that helped make the country we know today.

And the United States has, by and large, had an extremely easy go of things in the 20th century. Unlike Russia it didn’t suffer any of the following: military defeat in the First World War followed by state collapse, revolution, and civil war; massive terror-famines designed to starve the peasantry into submission; forced industrialization; the Great Purge; invasion and military occupation by the Nazis. Even without experiencing anything remotely comparable to the manifold horrors that Russia suffered, even without the societal cancer of the Gulag or the omnipresence of the KGB, the United States in 1958 still had some pretty messed up things going on.