[PHOTO] The cliffs of Stanhope

The cliffs at Stanhope aren't very high at all, heavily and often recently eroded. The number of trees clinging to the very edge is indicative of this.)

[URBAN NOTE] "This Human of New York Takes His Libraries Seriously"

The Atlantic Cities' Svati Kirsten Narula has a post up profiling Matthew Zadrozny, a man whose used his photo on the Humans of New York photoblog to publicize his concerns over changes to the centrepiece of that city's library system.

On Monday, Zadrozny ate his lunch outside the NYPL's main branch on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, a place he knows quite well. There, on the steps of what he calls "the most important building in New York City," Zadrozny was approached by Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind the popular Humans of New York blog.

"You want to photograph me eating chicken?" Zadrozny asked. "Yep," said Stanton. "Well, if I let you, I need you to help me deliver a message."

"When everything is finished, one of the greatest research libraries in the world will become a glorified internet café."

Zadrozny knew the nature of the opportunity he had at that moment. He had seen Stanton's website. He knew that this photo was going to be seen by thousands of people and that it would be accompanied by a quote. He wasn't crazy about the idea of this photo featuring him eating chicken—"I tried to get Brandon to take a different shot but he really wanted that shot," Zadrozny said later—but he decided, "all right, well, if he quotes me, then it's fair." And Zadrozny had spent so much time advocating and organizing against the library's proposed renovation that the right words were on the tip of his tongue.

What the NYPL is planning to do, and what has patrons like Zadrozny so upset, is tear down seven floors of the main research stacks at the flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, relocate the contents of these stacks to offsite storage, and consolidate the collections from the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry, and Business Library into a single circulating collection at 42nd Street in place of the research stacks. The sale of the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL buildings would partly defray the estimated $300 million cost of renovations at the main building. The main building would go from housing a non-circulating research collection to being the largest circulating library in the United States, one that stays open until 11 p.m. on weeknights.

[LINK] "Planets Plentiful Around Abundant Red Dwarf Stars, Study Says"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell writes about a new study suggesting red dwarf stars--the dimmest, but commonest, stars in the universe--have plenty of planets.

(The study is linked to at Universe Today.)

Good news for planet-hunters: planets around red dwarf stars are more abundant than previously believed, according to new research. A new study — which detected eight new planets around these stars — says that “virtually” all red dwarfs have planets around them. Moreover, super-Earths (planets that are slightly larger than our own) are orbiting in the habitable zone of about 25% of red dwarfs nearby Earth.

“We are clearly probing a highly abundant population of low-mass planets, and can readily expect to find many more in the near future – even around the very closest stars to the Sun,” stated Mikko Tuomi, who is from the University of Hertfordshire’s centre for astrophysics research and lead author of the study.

The find is exciting for astronomers as red dwarf stars make up about 75% of the universe’s stars, the study authors stated.

The researchers looked at data from two planet-hunting surveys: HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) and UVES (Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph), which are both at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The two instruments measure the effect a planet has on its parent star, specifically by examining the gravitational “wobble” the planet’s orbit produces.

Putting the information from both sets of data together, this amplified the planet “signals” and revealed eight planets around red dwarf stars, including three super-Earths in habitable zones. The researchers also applied a probability function to estimate how abundant planets are around this type of star.

[LINK] "China's Uighurs Fear More Prejudice After Kunming Killings"

Bloomberg News' Wenxin Fan reports on one consequence of the mass stabbing of commuters at a train station in Kunming, China, allegedly by Uighur separatists: anti-Uighur sentiments. My sense or at least hope, from the variety of sources quoted (including many Chinese opposed to anti-Uighur sentiments) and the incidents described, is that this is depicting some kind of relatively short-lived shock, as opposed to new systemic discrimination.

Saturday’s rampage at a Kunming train station that killed 29 people and injured 140—an attack that the Chinese government linked to Uighur separatists from the Xinjiang region—hasn’t changed Cheng Lin’s view about the ethnic group.

“All the Xinjiang people are bad. Even before this happened, we didn’t talk to them,” the 36-year-old housewife said from her home in a dark narrow lane in Dashuying, where most Uighurs in Kunming live. She added: “This is not a discrimination against them.”

A Uighur kid tried to steal her son’s bike, she said, while others threatened to beat people standing in their way. For her, it’s personal.

Elsewhere in Kunming, as police singled out Uighurs for registration checks or told them to stay away from train stations, it was more official.

Saturday’s killings spurred fear locally as the separatist violence that has slain dozens since November—mostly in remote parts of Xinjiang, thousands of kilometers away—crept closer to home. Others were concerned that a much more common problem—discrimination against the Uighur minority—is poised to get worse.

Uighurs, whose language, culture, and religion differ greatly from those of the Hans, already face some discrimination. In Shanghai, for example, where Uighur pickpockets were once a well-known annoyance, natives have nicknamed the entire ethnic group “cantaloupes,” after the melon that’s the region’s specialty.

[NEWS] Four links on Ukraine, Russia, Crimea, Tatars, and the European Union

• At Pando, veteran journalist Mark Ames has an article ("Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong") arguing, from a generally pro-Maidan perspective, about the ongoing issues in Ukrainian (it's a contest between factions backed by different oligarchies, fascism isn't especially a Ukrainian issue, et cetera).


• The Atlantic's William Schreiber writes in "The Hidden Costs of a Russian Statelet in Ukraine" about the economic costs of a protracted Russian occupation of Crimea. In other regions, like Abkhazia and Transnistria, Russia has found itself spending billions of dollars to prop up local economies. Crimea, with two million people, is much bigger than all of these unrecognized states combined.


• Via Jussi Jalonen on Facebook, I found an Andrew Wilson Guardian article suggesting that Crimean Tatars are starting to mobilize against Russia. Crimean Tatars have, post-1991, strongly opposed Russian influence; militias are reportedly starting to form.


• MacLean's shares an Associated Press article suggesting that, if the European Union and Russia applied sanctions against each other, the effects could be significant. Russia, which depends on the EU as its major export market, would be hit disproportionately, but the European Union would also have to find alternate sources of gas.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• BlogTO reported on the latest push by some Torontonians to crack down on nudity at the annual Pride parade.


• Cody Delistraty writes about one Parisian bloggers whose writings about overlooked corners of that city have gotten her fame.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that the effects of giant impacts on terrestrial planets might be detectable at long range.


• At the Financial Times World blog, Gideon Rachman argues that handing Crimea over to Russia (or local proxies) without the preconditions for an internationally-recognized referendum on independence would be very problematic.


• Joe. My. God. notes celebration in Lebanon after a court rules that same-sex relations are quite normal, after all.


• Language Hat notes that Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great was also interested in the Greeks, to the point of being interested in claiming the territory of Byzantium in an Orthodox imperium.


• Language Log notes that Encyclopedia Britannica is now using the Putonghua names of Hong Kong and Tibet (Xianggang and Xizang).


• Otto Pohl links to his work on the Crimean Tatars.


• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle reminds us that gardening and caring for plants can be a good thing. I hope to take it up.


• Strange Maps follows the biography and the plans of Pakistan's inventory, Chaudhari Rahmat Ali.


• Torontoist links to trans comedian Avery Edison's story of her issues with imprisonment at Toronto, being placed in one gender-inappropriate jail after another.


• Towleroad notes that Russia Today is sending an anchor who spoke out against the occupation of Crimea to the peninsula in question, in what surely is not sly payback.

[LINK] Various links on the Russia of Putin as a global conservative power

Over on Facebook, my friend Andrew joked that Putin was the president that Republicans wished the United States had: a man who persecuted non-heterosexuals, who waved the Red White and Blue, who was backed by the Church, who invaded foreign countries.

The thing is, it wasn't a joke. Putin's Russia really has been mounting a very visible effort to promote itself as a global standard-bearer for conservative values. In a December essay, no less a person than Patrick Buchanan identified Putin as a supporter of the paleoconservative brand of right-wing thought. Writing at The Atlantic, Brian Whitmore outlined what was afoot.

The Kremlin leader's full-throated defense of Russia's "traditional values" and his derision of the West's "genderless and infertile" liberalism in his annual state-of-the-nation address last week was just the latest example of Putin attempting to place himself at the vanguard of a new "Conservative International."

The speech came on the heels of the appointment of Dmitry Kiselyov—the television anchor who has said the hearts of gays and lesbians who die should be buried or burned—as head of the new Kremlin-run media conglomerate Rossia Segodnya.

And just days before Putin's address, the Center for Strategic Communications, an influential Kremlin-connected think tank, held a press conference in Moscow to announce its latest report. The title: "Putin: World Conservatism's New Leader."

According to excerpts from the report cited in the media, most people yearn for stability and security, favor traditional family values over feminism and gay rights, and prefer nation-based states rather than multicultural melting pots. Putin, the report says, stands for these values while "ideological populism of the left" in the West "is dividing society."

[. . .]

The Kremlin apparently believes it has found the ultimate wedge issue to unite its supporters and divide its opponents, both in Russia and the West, and garner support in the developing world. They seem to believe they have found the ideology that will return Russia to its rightful place as a great power with a messianic mission and the ability to win hearts and minds globally.

As the West becomes increasingly multicultural, less patriarchal and traditional, and more open to gay rights, Russia will be a lodestone for the multitudes who oppose this trajectory. Just as the Communist International, or Comintern, and what Soviet ideologists called the "correlation of forces" sought to unite progressive elements around the globe behind Moscow, the world's traditionalists will now line up behind Putin.

Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic provided a bit of background for this.

All the way back in 1946, with Nazi Germany defeated and the cold war commencing, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay on James Burnham. The author of The Managerial Revolution and a leading political philosopher, Burnham was a frequent contributor to the young National Review, and, more broadly, a leading voice of postwar American conservatism.

What Orwell found in his analysis of Burnham was that this ostensible democrat and cold warrior held deep regard for--and even envied--authoritarian or totalitarian powers, including Stalin's Russia. This is why, Orwell explained, Burnham originally predicted a Nazi victory in World War II. (Britain, typically, was considered "decadent.") In later years, Orwell continued, Burnham would write about Stalin in "semi-mystical" terms (with a "fascinated admiration"), comparing him to heroes of the past; Burnham didn't like Stalin's politics, but he admired his strength. Of Burnham's odd quasi-regard for Stalinism and its supposedly destined victory over the forces of sickly democratic regimes, Orwell added: "The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society."

Orwell, then, was not merely critical of Burnham's pessimism (Orwell himself could be overly pessimistic.) He also saw this pessimism as reflective of a mindset that prioritized vicious power-wielding and coercion over other things that allowed states to succeed and prosper.

This variety of pessimism did not end with Burnham, unfortunately. During the nearly 50 year Cold War, Americans were informed time and again by rightwingers that the Soviet Union did not allow dissent, and could therefore pursue its desired policies without protest. While the Soviets were single-minded, we were, yes, decadent. Soviet leaders could fight wars as they pleased, but freedom-loving presidents like Ronald Reagan had to put up with what Charles Krauthammer laughably called an "imperial Congress."  (Some of the same type of commentary shows up about today's China: look how quickly the Chinese can build bridges! And, as Thomas Friedman proves, it isn't coming solely from the right.) But more unique among conservatives is the desire for a tough leader who will dispense with niceties and embrace power.

The reason for all this ancient history is the situation today in Ukraine, where an autocratic Russian leader who exudes manly vibes has ordered his armed forces into Crimea. It is unclear whether this move on Russia's part will prove successful, but, amidst uncertaintly among western leaders over what to do, there has arisen a new strain of the Burnham syndrome. Conservatives don't just see the west and President Obama as weak; they also seem envious of Putin's bullying. "There is something odd," Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in New York magazine, "about commentators who denounce Putin in the strongest terms and yet pine for a more Putin-like figure in the White House."

I've seen bits of this myself, people commenting at right-wing blogs about their preference for Putin over Obama, based largely on their stance on cultural issues. Russia doesn't have gay marriage, therefore Russia is better.

Writing at The Federalist, David Ernst made the point that the effort at outreach is global, Europe particularly being a focus.

Putin’s appeal to right in Europe is far more serious. In his speech to the Duma in June of last year French rightwing geostrategist Aymeric Chauprade claimed to address Russia “as a French Patriot” who sees “Russia as a historical ally.” He decried the color revolutions, the legalization of gay marriage in his home country, the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN, and the willful sacrilege of pussy riot. He characterized these unwelcome developments as the result of “the alliance of Western globalism with anarchist nihilism” which persist courtesy of American financial and military might. In what undoubtedly flattered the Kremlin’s elite, Chauprade concluded with the bold declaration that the world’s true patriots “now turn their attention to Moscow.” For most Americans it is likely tempting to dismiss Chauprade as a crank: a representative of a loud fringe element that lacks any real political influence. Recent polling data, projections for the EU elections this May, and the Hungarian government’s recent solicitation of a 14 billion dollar loan from Moscow, however, suggest that Putin’s right turn coincides with widespread European disenchantment with the EU. Indeed, European trust in the government in Brussels is at an all time low. Moreover, as the British academic Matthew Goodwin pointed out, the stubborn persistence of the Eurozone crisis will likely yield many voters who will go to the polls to vent their frustrations.

Russia’s growing influence in European affairs begs the question, how can policymakers in Brussels counter Putin’s charms? More specifically, how can they address the grievances that many Europeans have against the EU, and indeed the transatlantic alliance itself? The dispiriting answer increasingly appears to be that they cannot; the only electoral trump card that the EU bureaucrats can play against Euroskeptics and the European radical right is the promise of continued economic growth, and the survival of Europe’s generous social programs. Other essential elements of the human condition: religious faith, national identity and a spiritual sense of purpose have no place in their discourse, or indeed in the EU’s very reason for existing. Putin has shrewdly chosen a debate over hearts and minds with an opponent who is entirely ill equipped to respond.

All this fits into the geopolitical doctrine of Eurasianism that seems to have been adopted by the Russian government, one that seeks to hold the Anglo-American powers (and China) at bay while consolidating the ex-Soviet periphery into Russia. Russia has tried to discourage its neighbours from entering into closer ties with the European Union by emphasizing the supposedly malign influence of European culture--Armenia, for one, may have opted for the Eurasian Union over the European Union because of this.

In the American Conservative, Leon Hadar cautioned against some American conservatives' fondness as a basic misreading of the Russian situation.

The bottom line is that Putin is first and foremost an autocratic right-wing nationalist who not unlike the fascist-communist clique ruling Beijing could care less if other countries embrace his political model or not, as long as Russian interests—and his—are being served.

You could have probably said the same thing about the communists who ruled Russia in the last century. They enunciated their commitment to the idea of the international solidarity of the socialist parties, but at the end of the day, the national interests of Russia took precedence over any universal principles, just as they do now.

Putin, contrary to the fantasies of some paleoconservatives in the West, doesn’t even pretend to speak for the world’s conservatives, traditionalist or otherwise. Hence it was weird to hear Western critics of the European Union (EU) applaud Russia’s attempts to sabotage an agreement between Kiev and Brussels, suggesting that Putin was trying to defend the national sovereignty of Ukraine against the expanding power of the Eurocrats.

But it is ridiculous to portray Putin as an ally of the Euroskeptics battling the creation of European super-state, when what he really wants is to tie Ukraine to his own Eurasian economic community that will be ruled from Moscow by his own political apparatchiks instead of Brussels’. Putin’s super-state for poor people, if you will.

Will it really help them in the future? And will Russia's appeal to the Atlantic right survive the current crisis?

[URBAN NOTE] "New TTC signage, 5 March 2014"

Coming home this evening, I saw some of the TTC's new signage. (Bloor-Yonge and St. George are the first stations in the Toronto subway network to have it.) Perhaps most noteworthy for numbering different routes--in this case, photographed at Bloor-Yonge, "1" for the Yonge-University-Spadina line--in this and the use of text reminds me strongly of the signage on the much more extensive subway system of New York City.

CBC's article has more background.

One goes this way. Two goes that way. The TTC is hoping riding the subway will be that easy now that it is changing the name of its lines.

The transit commission is testing the name change at Bloor-Yonge Station on Monday, identifying subway lines with numbers and colours. The Yonge-University-Spadina line will be called Line 1, with a yellow circle around the number, and the Bloor-Danforth line will be Line 2, with a green circle surrounding it.

Chris Upfold of the TTC says more colour and numbers in the signs will make the system easier to use now and in the years to come when new subway lines are added.

"This isn't about renaming our lines, but enhancing the line names we already have," says Upfold.

The TTC will expand the new signage to St. George Station, and then reassess based on the feedback it gets from riders via its website.

Eventually, the Scarborough RT would become Line 3 in blue and the Sheppard subway line would become Line 4 in purple, with Line 5 in orange and Line 6 in grey reserved for future lines.

Currently the names of the subway lines mirror the streets that they run along.