[PHOTO] Snails by the stairwell

I took this picture of snails creeping about in the detritus by the stairwell, I saw three. Can you?



I saw this solitary snail earlier this month.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton has a photo of the Danforth subway tunnel, looking east from Chester at a point where Pape is barely visible.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling writes about a Montréal exhibition of the history of computing.


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin starts an insightful discussion, inspired by the controversies about same-sex marriage, about the ideological cleavages in France.


• The Dragon's Tales Will Baird discusses exoplanets: briefly, dim orange and red dwarfs frequently have Earth- and Neptune-sized planets but not larger giants, while there are fewer Earth-sized planets than one would expect from the distribution of discovered ones.


• Eastern Approaches notes that clerical sex abuse scandals are starting to break in Poland.


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes Chinua Achebe on the anti-Ibo pogroms of Nigeria in 1966.


• Language Hat links to a site examining documentary evidence of the presence of the French language in pre-revolutionary Russia.
  
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes about the collapsing infrastructure of the United States.


• Peter Rukavina describes how he used a 3-D printer to print replacement parts for his desk. The replicator cometh.


• Torontoist examines the origins of the name of Toronto and points to Andrew Cash's interest in bolstering the position of precarious urban workers.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell is rightfully unimpressed by the incompetence of British Tory Iain Duncan Smith.

[URBAN NOTE] "In Defence Of Rob Ford, Or, Against The Mob"

John Moyer's blog post makes some salient points about the way in which the Crackstarter fundraising campaign started by Gawker to raise funds for the alleged crack video is unsettling, voyeuristic spectacle driven by the mob.

It’s not about justice. No-one is seriously talking about jailing Ford over this. Further, the sort of young, hip people who oppose Ford and understand enough about crowd-funding to actually give money to it are probably the same sort who have flirted, at least once, with things like illicit drugs. I’m not saying “glass houses” because I’m not Mayor of Toronto, a person you really don’t want publicly abusing drugs, but we’re not seriously saying Rob Ford is a drug-dealer out to destroy Toronto. At worst (and most likely), he’s someone with a history of substance abuse that now includes some crack. Yes, that’s bad for a Mayor, but remember: he’s got plenty of other reasons not to be Mayor. This isn’t a make-or-break issue for re-election. Even if he’s never touched a gram before in his life, his handling of this case alone is reason enough not to re-elect him.

Second, this isn’t about politics. Whether or not Ford smokes crack is irrelevant inasmuch as it affects his ability to lead Toronto. If he in fact is a smart, capable man who’s been dulled by drugs, then getting him off them might, in fact, net us four more years of him. No thank you. If you opposed Ford before the crack, then you still oppose him, pipe and all. His policies are either good or bad, crack or not. While yes, character is very important in a leader, let’s not kid ourselves. Plenty of leaders do bad things and so long as they lead well, we tend not to care right or wrong. We aren’t in the habit of electing our saints, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.

I’ll admit to one concession: drug abuse is a big deal-breaker for many in our elected officials, and I don’t necessarily disagree. I wouldn’t want a junkie in charge, but so far as the video alleges to prove, one hit of crack does not a junkie make. Until a habit is proven or confessed to, it remains like all of Ford’s tenure: a bad mistake.

If it’s not about politics or justice, then I can’t see it being about anything more than a personal dislike verging on hatred. The Crackstarted is asking for money to give to a drug-dealer! And it’s asking you for that money! Not the police, not the city, not the government, and not even the Ford family; you. Do you, it asks, hate Ford enough to want to give up your money to see him humiliated? Not kicked out of office, because it legally can’t (unless he’s thrown in jail, which this video alone will not do), and not an invalidation of his policies because, remember, if you’re in the urban core then you already invalidated them by voting against him; no, all it can do is have the man humiliated.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford’s insatiable appetite for destruction"

Nichols Köhler's extended MacLean's article has an interesting portrayal of the media representation of Rob Ford, as a man who straddles Toronto's public and private faces, forcing public recognition that Toronto isn't all world-class sweetness and light.

As much because of his gaffes as because of his no-nonsense, low-cost, customer-friendly take on municipal government—respect the taxpayers, return their calls—Torontonians of all sorts thrill to Rob Ford. Those who hate him see in him everything that is wrong with their city, from the out-of-control car culture to the rabid condo development to the city’s parochial and low-brow sensibility. Those who love him see themselves in his modest comforts and earthly desires. Ford holds a mirror to the conflicted heart of this city and asks Torontonians why they would ever want to be Manhattan when instead they could be the very best of The Simpsons’ Springfield and Shelbyville combined. Yet though he sold himself to Toronto as a simple man, clearly Ford is anything but—complex, even troubled, he seeks to honour the memory of his father, a provincial politician, but just as often falls short. In his latest scandal he has taken us into the dark place at the edge of the city, a forbidden realm, and transformed himself from a harmless Mayor Quimby figure into a character from a film by David Lynch. Mayor Ford’s most recent troubles find him straddling two Torontos—the wholesome place and the den of iniquity.

[. . .]

For Toronto readers there was something undeniably compelling about Cook’s Gawker account, written with the keen fresh eye of a non-resident. The Gawker story reads like vivid travel literature, a glimpse into the exotic soul of a Toronto many here don’t know or give much thought to, and which exists on the inner suburban fringes outside the downtown core. A vertigo similar to that which accompanied the gender-bending tale of NFL linebacker Manti Te’o, whose fake online girlfriend turned out to be a man, attends the Ford crack-cocaine allegations. But in Ford’s story it is the unusual collision of class, high and low, and race, white and black, that injects a taboo frisson into the mix, a Dickens novel of street drugs and F-bombs.

“Toronto is lovely,” Cook writes before detailing his time spent in the company of youths who “speak in a language other than English.” Cook doesn’t say it, but the Star story is more specific, and suggests that these men are active in the hardscrabble Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue area of west Toronto, a 10-minute drive northwest of Ford’s lushly situated Etobicoke home, and that the language Cook heard was likely Somali. Cook and the Star also published a photograph they said was supplied by these men of Ford posing with three apparent youths, one of whom appears to be Anthony Smith, a 21-year-old Seneca College student who died in March with two bullets in the back of his head. Ford, who is seen in the picture grinning like a rambunctious child—apparently more comfortable than Ford, who is unaccountably shy, ever looks at city hall or in the midst of a crowd of his supporters—reinforcing the impression he is travelling in an underworld. “Smith was, according to our tipster, a kid from the same neighbourhood as the dealers who service Ford, and the photo was taken while Ford was going to the neighbourhood to purchase and smoke crack cocaine,” Cook writes.

Here, then, is a portrait of a wealthy and powerful white man, the mayor of North America’s fourth-largest city and heir to Deco Labels and Tags, a successful business begun by his father, Doug, with his arm around a black youth who died in a gang-related shooting and who can be seen extending his middle finger to the camera. The photograph shocks in part because it depicts Ford, mayor of the surface Toronto of tall glass buildings and urban elites, travelling in a gangland netherworld, lost somewhere in the sprawl of Dixon and Kipling or of such inner Toronto suburbs as Rexdale, where much of the city’s drug crime is located. Not far away is Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, where Ford coached the Eagles football team until this week, when the Toronto Catholic District School Board dismissed him from the position for saying during a recent television interview that his players would be dead or on drugs were it not for him.

The Gawker and Star accounts, which describe cellphone footage that three reporters say shows Ford inhaling from a glass pipe and uttering obscenities—Justin Trudeau is a “fag,” the football players he coached “just f–king minorities,” according to the Star story—link the mayor to crack cocaine, a drug with a low-rent mystique, the soma of the ghetto. That class marker goes back to the 1980s, when inexpensive crack cocaine fuelled an inner-city epidemic of crime across the U.S. that culminated in the arrest of Washington mayor Marion Barry. Since then it has morphed somewhat in the popular imagination into the vice of tabloid celebrities, of Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston. So improbable is crack’s use among white professionals, in this popular view of the drug—however misguided it may be—that the phenomenon has spawned an addiction-memoir sub-genre all its own, detailing the exploits of high-functioning or well-heeled users slumming it on the stuff (Bill Clegg, a New York literary agent, with Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, and New York Times columnist David Carr’s Night of the Gun, to name two).

[URBAN NOTE] On how, and why, Gawker raised its $200 000

Gawker's controversial crowdsourcing campaign aiming at raising two hundred thousand dollars to buy the alleged crack video has succeeded, though as Torontoist's John Kupferman notes there are still problems.

John Cook, the Gawker editor who is one of three reporters known to have seen the footage (the other two work for the Star), has called it a “crystal clear, well-lit video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine.” Gawker intends to publish the video.

Gawker‘s plan to obtain the video this way was never a sure thing, but Cook further tempered expectations last Thursday when he revealed that Gawker has been having trouble getting in touch with the video’s owner since May 18. Ford, for his part, now denies that the video is even a thing. He said, on Sunday’s edition of his weekly radio show, that it “doesn’t exist.”

Regardless, if there is someone out there with access to the video, and if that person is still able to sell the video, things should move pretty quickly now. If the deal doesn’t come together, Gawker has pledged to donate the money to a Canadian non-profit that deals with drug addiction, though its editors haven’t said which one.

The motives of a presumably representative sampling of individual donors were covered in the New York Observer.

Dennis Raphael, a professor at York University in Toronto, made two $75 donations in the hope that the video’s release would force Mr. Ford to resign. “Around Toronto, there is little doubt that Mayor Rob is unfit for office and has a reputation for denying wrongdoing until [he’s] confronted with confirming evidence,” he said. As for Gawker’s possible payday? “Everybody is making money off of everything,” he said. “If some money can be made at the same time that public accountability can be supported, then so be it!”

Daphne Bonar, also of Toronto, donated $60 to the Crackstarter for similar reasons. “If the video is real, I want Rob Ford to be exposed as a liar who is unfit for public office,” she said. She did not mind that Gawker might make some money off of the whole endeavor. “That’s the business they’re in,” she said.

Steve Nardi, a Toronto resident who donated $105, is happy that Gawker is crowd-sourcing the project rather than paying for it themselves. “If [Gawker] had purchased the video outright, the Ford Nation [Mr. Ford’s supporters] would bang the drums about it being ‘checkbook journalism’ and attempt to cast doubt on the authenticity of the video.” The Crackstarter, on the other hand, shows that “the video is being acquired by the people of Toronto who are looking for the truth, sort of ‘democratic journalism.’” If Mr. Ford’s supporters are unhappy, he said, they will be able to “blame the people of Toronto rather than singling out one or two media outlets.”

For Ms. Bonar, the crowd-sourced nature of the Crackstarter is almost more important than the video itself. “Even if the video is never actually obtained, just the message that this sends and the sort of participatory democracy that it demonstrates, is a greater good,” she said.

[LINK] "CSIS knew of navy spy's activity, left RCMP in the dark"

I've been following the case of Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian navy officer who also turned out to be spying for Russia, since the story broke with his March 2012 arrest, continuing through to his surprise October 2012 guilty plea and subsequent sentencing to a twenty-year prison term this February. CBC reports that, apparently, CSIS and the RCMP were unable to cooperate at even the most basic level; the FBI needed to get involved.

The Canadian Press has learned that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation alerted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to Delisle's illicit dealings with Moscow well before the Mounties took on the file in December 2011 and later brought him into custody.

CSIS ultimately decided not to transfer its thick Delisle dossier to the RCMP. The spy agency, acting on legal advice, opted to keep its investigation sealed for fear of exposing a trove of Canadian and U.S. secrets of the intelligence trade in open court proceedings.

In a bizarre twist, it fell to the FBI — not CSIS — to send a letter to the RCMP spelling out how a Canadian was pilfering extremely sensitive information, including highly classified U.S. material.

The RCMP had to start its own investigation of Delisle almost from scratch. The delay alarmed and frustrated Washington as the geyser of secrets continued to spew.

At one point the Americans, eager to see Delisle in handcuffs, sketched out a Plan B: luring the Canadian officer to the U.S. and arresting him themselves, perhaps during a stopover en route to a Caribbean vacation.

The RCMP and CSIS are supposed to be able to "seamlessly hand off cases back and forth between them," said intelligence historian Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa's graduate school of public and international affairs.

He said "it is deeply troubling" if the system indeed broke down in the Delisle case over CSIS's refusal to share its files or to bring the RCMP in at an early stage.

"I think that's scandalous, in fact," said Wark, who served as an expert witness at Delisle's sentencing. "And it would be a matter, I think, for a judicial inquiry or certainly a serious parliamentary investigation."

[LINK] "Abolish the Senate if it can't be reformed, Marjory LeBreton says"

While the headline of the CBC article/u> about Conservative Senate leader Margory LeBreton's statements about the future of her house of the Canadian Parliament is overblown, it does touch upon the question of the Senate's viability. If the Senate loses popularity, how long can it last?

The government's leader in the Senate says the Senate should be abolished if it can't be reformed, comments that come as Prime Minister Stephen Harper returns this week to Ottawa, where he is expected to face questions about the expenses scandal.

Marjory LeBreton made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to highlight a package of proposed changes to Senate rules on expense claims. However, in an interview with CBC News, she conceded, "The public do not see the Senate as a legitimate institution.

"We have got to fix this, once and for all," said LeBreton. "Otherwise ... the Senate as an institution cannot survive."

LeBreton, who has served the Conservatives in various roles for more than three decades, emphasized that abolition of the Senate was one of the possibilities that the government has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on.

"One of the options that the Supreme Court should have to consider is whether the Senate should be abolished."

[. . .]

LeBreton said on the weekend that Canadians have every reason to be angry about the latest expense scandal in the Red Chamber.

"Because it's not seen as a legitimate institution, the public ... obviously react in a very negative way — as you would expect them to do."

[LINK] "A tale of two passports"

Efrat Neuman's Haaretz article of the 15th of April describing how many Israelis who have ancestral claims to citizenship in one European Union member-state or another are trying to claims these citizenships, for reasons of personal advantage or security. Needless to say, it can be rather fraught, especially for Israelis whose ancestors--or who themselves--fled those member-states.

In the past few years, arranging a European passport has become a flourishing industry in Israel, with a plethora of websites explaining the rights one can expect to receive and explaining the factors that might facilitate the process. There are attorneys who specialize in the issuing of passports by different countries and check entitlement to naturalization, as well as translation and notary services.

The upsurge began about 10 years ago. Until then, most Israelis did not consider a Polish, Hungarian or Romanian passport to be of any value. These countries were not considered attractive targets for emigration, and their passport was no better than the Israeli one. But in 2004, 10 states were inducted into the European Union, mainly from Eastern Europe. The new member states included Poland, Hungary, Latvia and the Czech Republic. Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007. Ever since, a Romanian passport, for example, is no longer considered merely a Romanian passport: Now it is a European passport that opens the door to life on the Continent, facilitating free passage between countries, easy movement of workers in EU member states ‏(subject to some restrictions‏), free university studies ‏(in some countries‏) or low tuition fees, entry without a visa to the United States and most other countries, and also commercial advantages.

[. . .]

Not everyone wants to receive a foreign passport, even if they meet the requirements. Seven years ago, when Romania joined the EU, Michaela’s children tried to convince her to apply for Romanian citizenship so that they, too, would benefit from citizenship and a foreign passport that would grant them free access to EU states. But she refused. As a Holocaust survivor whose family was expelled from the village in Romania where she grew up, she wanted nothing to do with the place where she was born and raised.

Not long afterward, the children traveled with their mother on a “family roots” trip to Romania. Her daughter recounts that after seeing up close the places where she spent her childhood and hearing at length what happened there, they for the first time identified with Michaela’s refusal to turn the clock back.

Similarly, the 60-year-old father of Gabi vehemently refuses to accept a foreign passport. However, after Gabi pressed and begged − on the grounds that it was worth having an option if something bad ever happened in Israel − his father reluctantly began the process. He traveled to the village in Romania where he was born to obtain his birth certificate, inquired as to the cost of submitting the request − and then regretted the decision.

Interestingly, the reason he gave was his children: He did not want them to have any incentive to leave Israel. Gabi’s father claimed that his own mother, who survived the Holocaust, had not relinquished her life and citizenship in Romania so her descendants could later do the same vis-a-vis Israel. The family disagreement has been raging for 10 years, and Gabi is still trying to persuade her father to change his mind.