[PHOTO] Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, August 2003

These five photos were all taken at Royal Military College of Canada, in the eastern Ontario city of Kingston. I went walking there with a friend from dorm on a beautiful day sightseeing along the shoreline.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Dragon's Gaze notes that Earth-like planets may need to be in planets with more than one planet, since multiple-planet systems have more circular planets than not. Also, Gliese 667C might not have nearly as many planets as believed.


• The Dragon's Tales observes that fracking produces huge amounts of methane and notes that, when Earth has been less than hospitable, life has hidden in a variety of environments.


• Language Hat explores Ingalric, an alternate-historical English language.


• Marginal Revolution wonders why New Zealand isn't richer, concluding in the end that isolation and underinvestment in human capital are key.


• Strange Maps illustrates how countries don't spend nearly as much money on foreign aid as some believed, and even spend less--often much less--than their international commitments would have them spend.


• Towleroad notes increasing persecution of gays in Egypt.


• Transit Toronto notes the diverse streetcars put on a recent parade in The Beaches.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin is skeptical of arguments regarding illegal immigration which phrase it in terms of law-breaking.


• Window on Eurasia notes tendentious claims that Tatarstan is unstable, links to criticism of the recent Geneva pact aiming to stabilize Ukraine, suggests that Russia has given up on ethnic coexistence with non-Russians and is now going for irredentism, and links to predictions that immigrants might form a majority of the Russian population in a few decades.

[LINK] "Sonic Foam"

British music writer Ian Penman's article in the London Review of Books about Kate Bush is wonderful. Fannish in the best ways, knowing his subject without being uncritically admiring, it's a joy to read. Plus, it's a teaser for more to come from Bush herself.

We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an immense amount we don’t know. Has she ever taken psychedelic drugs? Has she had therapy? (Reichian, Jungian, marriage?) What music makes her cry? Is she actually a lifelong Rosicrucian? I could make a list fifty items long. Her appeal crosses age, gender, taste; she’s taken on a quite distinct mythic life in our collective dreaming. People who would usually have nothing to do with mainstream rock music (like Rushton) are smitten. She has a huge gay following (queer pagans, radical faeries). Ex-punks and one-time surly troublemakers line up to hymn her praises, when not so long ago she would have been the very model of everything they professed to despise, what with her taste for fuzzy ‘spirituality’ – ley lines, yetis, orgone energy – and tendency towards heavy concept albums. (One side of Aerial has both a Prelude and a Prologue.) Women of all political stripes adore her for the control she has exerted over career and image, for all the easy options she refused; though in fact, she may be the bloke-iest woman in rock. (More of that in a moment.) Rock blokes themselves seem to have an en masse crush on her, though how much this is to do with the real middle-aged mum and canny businesswoman, and how much is down to a long-ago teenager’s tight-leotard dreams, is sometimes hard to judge.




Kate is perceived to be more ‘one of us’ than other pop/rock figures, one of the extended family. There’s a feeling that she’s ‘stayed the same’, that success ‘hasn’t spoiled her’. She’s someone you might have known at sixth-form college, or at your Saturday job (the artier kind, obviously: knick-knack stall at the local market); but definitely a scream down the pub, with her packet of Silk Cut and pint of proper scrumpy. At the same time, people are drawn to her peacock’s-tail otherness, the slightly recherché taste for odd bods like Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Wilhelm Reich. She has the soul of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but the robust mien of Mrs Thatcher at a 1980s cabinet meeting. Obviously, no one maintains a position somewhere near the top of the music biz for three and a half decades by being entirely nice and floppy and whichever-way-the-wind-blows. From the off, she was the beneficiary of her parents’ middle-class smarts. A precociously dreamy, sky-eyed teen daughter, she was wisely shepherded. Family and management were merged, became one and the same: Kate Inc., a well-tended cottage industry. Her decision, after 1979’s one exhausting and ill-fated outing, not to tour again, removed yet another plank from the algae-hued drawbridge over the moat. (Consider a few tropes from Aerial: fond dreams of invisibility; pained bafflement at Elvis’s trashy reclusion; the self-imposed exile of Charles Foster Kane; and Joan of Arc, ‘beautiful in her armour …’) Ever since, she has lived a life in many ways more like a writer’s than a modern pop star’s: pop’s own J.K. Rowling. (With her Roman Catholic background and taste for bittersweet mysticism, other names suggest themselves here too: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon.) She slowly assumed the status of national treasure, despite or maybe precisely because of the cannily maintained, resonantly low profile. There are forms of politesse and prevarication that can slot very well into a wider tactical scheme. Pragmatic business smarts and keeping the wider world at one remove: why shouldn’t they go hand in hand? Other rock stars may be called out for losing touch with real life; when Bush betrays the same distance it’s thought admirable, soulful, apt. Whatever the soil that sustains this particular English Rose, we obviously consider it healthy.

She gets away with (indeed, gets praised for) things which, presented by other members of the rock aristocracy, would be strafed with scorn. All her albums from The Sensual World to Fifty Words for Snow got far kinder reviews than the patchy material really merited. (I had to consult the track listing of The Sensual World when I realised the quietly awesome title song was literally the only thing I could remember.) It’s hard to dispel a suspicion that were she one more Rock Bloke (a Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters or Brian Pern), critics would be far less kind to her mistakes. Imagine a reclusive Rock Bloke foisting on his impatient public the following: long waits for concept albums full of ‘great mates’ from the 1970s; songs about Bigfoot and snowmen and Stephen Fry reciting daffy gibberish; unadventurous marking-time remixes of old material. Someone, in sum, who displayed every symptom of having let zero new music into his manor house for twenty or thirty years. I’m not convinced our huffy Rock Bloke would get the same across-the-board critical hosannas as Bush. There’s a song on Aerial about her son Bertie: ‘Lovely lovely lovely lovely Bertie! The most wilful, the most beautiful, the most truly fantastic smile I’ve ever seen!’​6 Would Sting, say, be as gently indulged, should he trill something similar? Granted, we may look more kindly on a mother’s paean to her first child; but there is a line between a song about maternal psychology and just plain yuck, and Bush comes perilously close to country dancing all over it. (The song is smarter than it might at first seem, and involves balancing her shameless gush against a rigid classical line – an interesting idea that suggests both selfless love and disciplined nurture. But in the end that’s what it remains: an interesting idea.)

[CAT] "What Are Cats Thinking?"

Writing at Slate, David Grimm writes about the state of research into cat intelligence. It seems that it's not very advanced, largely because cats have a different sort of intelligence from us (and from dogs).

In 1998, [Ádám Miklósi] and Duke University biological anthropologist Brian Hare independently showed that dogs can understand human pointing. Both labs conducted experiments demonstrating that when a volunteer pointed at one of two cups containing a treat, dogs almost always went for the correct cup. Though it may seem a simple test, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, fail miserably; they ignore the volunteer, pick cups at random, and rarely score above chance. The ability to follow a pointed finger isn’t just a neat trick; it shows that dogs may have a rudimentary “theory of mind”—an ability to understand what another animal is thinking (in this case, that the human volunteer was trying to show them something). The skill is so important to our species that without it, we would have trouble learning and interacting with the world around us. That’s why so many labs have begun studying the canine mind; dogs, the thinking goes, may provide clues to the evolution of the human mind.

But what about cats? Miklósi, I was surprised to learn, had also conducted the pointing test with felines. Like Agrillo, he had a hard time getting cats to cooperate in his laboratory—so he went to their homes instead. Even then, most of the animals weren’t interested in advancing science; according to Miklósi’s research paper, seven of the initial 26 test subjects “dropped out.” But those that did participate performed nearly as well as dogs had. Cats too, it appears, may have a rudimentary theory of mind.

But when Miklósi took the study a step further, he spotted an intriguing difference between cats and dogs. This time, he and his colleagues created two puzzles: one solvable, the other impossible. In the solvable puzzle, the researchers placed food in a bowl and stuck it under a stool. Dogs and cats had to find the bowl and pull it out to eat. Both aced the test. Then the scientist rigged the exam. They again placed the bowl under a stool, but this time they tied it to the stool legs so that it could not be pulled out. The dogs pawed at the bowl for a few seconds and then gave up, gazing up at their owners as if asking for help. The cats, on the other hand, rarely looked at their owners; they just kept trying to get the food.

Now before you conclude that cats are dumber than dogs because they’re not smart enough to realize when a task is impossible, consider this: Dogs have lived with us for as many as 30,000 years—20,000 years longer than cats. More than any other animal on the planet, dogs are tuned in to the “human radio frequency”—the broadcast of our feelings and desires. Indeed, we may be the only station dogs listen to. Cats, on the other hand, can tune us in if they want to (that’s why they pass the pointing test as well as dogs), but they don’t hang on our every word like dogs do. They’re surfing other channels on the dial. And that’s ultimately what makes them so hard to study. Cats, as any owner knows, are highly intelligent beings. But to science, their minds may forever be a black box.

[LINK] "Alistair MacLeod, acclaimed Canadian writer, dead at 77"

East coast author Alistair MacLeod has died; CBC's initial report only touches on his importance. It's remarkable that he had such an impact with such a small collection of published work. Such quality, though!

Alistair MacLeod, one of Canada’s great short story writers whose work detailed the people and culture of Cape Breton, has died. He was 77.

His death was confirmed by his friend, author Donna Morrissey.

"He was a beautiful friend, a mentor, a hero," she told CBC News. "He was just a force that we … looked up to him."

MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Sask. He moved with his family when he was 10 years old to Inverness County, N.S.

He authored two collections of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986).

He wrote the novel No Great Mischief (1999), which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Lannan Literary Award.

In 2004, he also authored the illustrated story To Everything There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story (2004).

His writing touched on themes of economic migration, family ties and tensions and portrayals of cultural decline.

MacLeod taught literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor and was retired. He would return to Inverness County during the summer, where he wrote in a cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island.

In 2008, MacLeod was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for his commitment to Canadian literature and influence on Canadian authors.

[LINK] "East Ukraine crisis and the 'fascist' matrix"

Writing for Al Jazeera, Ukrainian activist and journalist Halya Coynash makes the point that Russia's claims that it is opposing fascism in Ukraine is rich, given the nature of Russia's local allies in Ukraine and the nature of Russia's alliances with the European far-right. (Russia's own domestic policies could also be mentioned in this context, though they aren't in this piece.)

Ukraine's main far-right party, VO Svoboda, has been dumped by its erstwhile European ultra-nationalist allies. It was dumped for Russia with whom the most virulently anti-Semitic, anti-migrant and far-right parties in France, Hungary and other EU countries are developing close ties. The Kremlin's blossoming contacts with those parties, and the far-right roots of prominent pro-Russian activists in Ukraine do not deter Russia from claiming to be protecting Russian nationals from the anti-Semitic and fascist hordes who have allegedly seized control in Ukraine.

[. . .]

Russia's propaganda machine, and especially Russian-language TV channels are feeding not only the Russian audience, but also a significant number of Ukrainians with lies and manipulated reports. Images of a Crimean rabbi forced to leave for Kiev after condemning Russian intervention are presented as showing a rabbi forced to leave Ukraine because of mounting anti-Semitism.

In one astounding attempt to explain the denial by Ukrainian Jews of Russia's claims, viewers on the Kremlin-funded Russia Today were asked whether such Jewish organisations "are with their own hands bringing on a second Holocaust?"

You have only to listen to those on the streets supporting the armed "federalists" in the Donetsk region to see that the propaganda works. The armed separatists and their supporters would tell journalists that they do not want to live in the same country with "fascists". It is no accident that the puppet government "elected" after armed Russian soldiers seized government buildings in the Crimea immediately closed down almost all Ukrainian media and gave the broadcasting frequencies to Russian channels.

A number of the main actors in the pro-Russian protests in the Donetsk region have strong links with far-right parties. Pavel Gubarev, for example, is a Donetsk business owner and the head of the "People's Militia". On March 1, he was supposedly elected "people's governor" and led a crowd in storming the Donetsk regional administration building, demanding that a referendum be held on the oblast's secession and calling for Russian military intervention. His detention was presented by Russian TV channels as politically motivated persecution. They preferred not to delve into Gubarev's ideological roots as a member of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity Party.

[LINK] Torontoist on Oronhyatekha, "The Supreme Chief Ranger of the IOF"

This weekend just past, Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn posted a history of a remarkable man. The Mohawk Oronhyatekha was a prominent man in Victorian Canada, who despite virulent racism and oppression managed to become a social networker par excellence.

Born on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford in 1841, Oronhyatekha’s name translates as “burning cloud.” Though baptized as Peter Martin, he preferred to use his Mohawk name throughout his life, a practice which contemporary chroniclers honoured. During childhood, he trained as a shoemaker at a missionary-run industrial school. Following a visit by a phrenologist who, after measuring his head, deemed him “educable,” Oronhyatekha attended schools in Massachusetts and Ohio before returning to the reserve as a teacher.

When the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) visited the Six Nations in 1860, Oronhyatekha delivered a welcoming address. Despite an unremarkable speech, the 19-year-old’s dignified bearing and deep voice impressed the Prince. Oronhyatekha was invited to continue his studies at Oxford, under the tutelage of one of the Prince’s entourage, Regius professor Henry Acland. He stayed in England for the next three years, later acknowledging his respect for his tutor by naming his sons Henry and Acland. Upon returning to Canada, he married a great-granddaughter of Joseph Brant and studied medicine at the University of Toronto. One classmate, future U of T president Sir William Mulock, later recalled that because of troubles pronouncing his name, he was dubbed “Old Iron Teakettle.” His nickname was later shortened to “Dr. O.”

After earning his medical diploma in 1867, Oronhyatekha travelled Ontario to build up his medical career, stopping in Deseronto, Frankford, Napanee, and Stratford. To attract business and reduce the stigma attached to his Mohawk background, he overstated his medical credentials, claiming he was an Oxford-trained physician specializing in nervous disorders and respiratory diseases. He earned enough respect to serve as first secretary of the Hastings County Medical Association, and was appointed, based on a recommendation by John A. Macdonald, as consulting physician to the Mohawk reserve at Tyendinaga.

Following a personal bankruptcy, Oronhyatekha moved his practice to London, Ontario in 1874. To build his social network, he joined numerous fraternal organizations and temperance societies. He had been involved in such groups since his U of T days, having spoken at a conference of the Independent Order of Good Templars in 1863 on the dangers of “fire water” to the First Nations. Charm and persistence gained him entry to powerful organizations, such as the Orange Lodge, which rarely accepted aboriginals.

One membership would change his life. In 1878, he joined a local court of the Independent Order of Foresters (IOF). Since the organization’s membership rules stated that only white males aged 21 and over could join the fraternity, he received a special dispensation thanks to his Orange Lodge associations. He later joked that his sponsors “recognized that I belonged to a race which is superior to the white.”

Oronhyatekha later made the IOF, once a failing organization, into a significant force in the insurance world.

Remarkable. (The Wikipedia page is good, too.)

[URBAN NOTE] "Mississsauga, then and now"

The Toronto Star's Wendy Gillis had an interesting article that took a look played by long-time Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion in overseeing her city's growth. For all of its lack of a centre, Mississauga has boomed, its population nearly tripling, attracting migrants from around the world, and becoming one of the largest cities in Ontario. (I think it's ahead of the more established Hamilton, and is fast approaching Ottawa in size.)

As she peered out the windows of Mississauga City Hall, through classic 1970s horned-rimmed specs she sometimes donned, newly anointed mayor Hazel McCallion would have seen a city unrecognizable to the one she steers today.

For starters, the view north, west and south was nothing but rolling green fields.

In 1978, when McCallion rode a wave of support for what the Star dubbed her “plain talk” and “unpretentious campaign,” the 57-year-old politician inherited a predominantly white, car-dependant town of 280,000 not unlike Pleasantville.

“Everything was closed on Sunday, kids were in Sunday school, and all the dads cut the grass at the same time on Saturday,” said George Carlson, a long-time city councillor and lifelong Mississauga resident, with a chuckle. “It was a vanilla town. Light vanilla, even.”

In some ways, governing in that simpler time was, well, simpler, Carlson said, more to do with building the infrastructure — “all road, sewer, bridge, park, more paint by numbers,” he said.

But Mississauga was also already demonstrating the characteristics of a complex, diverse city with competing residential interests, foreshadowing what was to come. After all, McCallion had become heir to a brand new, toddling municipality, thanks to the province’s decision to amalgamate Mississauga with former towns Streetsville (where she had been previously been mayor) and Port Credit in 1974.

Much like the aftermath of Toronto’s amalgamation, the merger was a forced marriage of communities that resulted in discord amongst residents — everything from infighting about who got new fire trucks to who had the best sports arena lighting.

[LINK] "The Minor-League Superhero Who Changed the Face of Fandom"

Wired's Rachel Edidin has a nice article taking a look at the recent resurgence of Carol Danvers. The long-time Marvel Comics superhero was initially positioned in the late 1970s as a female superhero, but it's only now--with a new series, a new costume, and the energized fandom that goes by the name "Carol Corps"--that she has become high-profile. (Also, her character appears to be attracting women and girls to comics.)

Created in 1968 by writer Roy Thomas and artist Gene Colan, Carol Danvers was an Air Force officer who gained superpowers after being caught in an explosion with a superhero named Captain Marvel. Adopting the moniker “Ms. Marvel,” Carol spent time on and off with the Avengers and occasionally headlining in her own series. As a character, Ms. Marvel had a lot in common with Iron Man: a larger-than-life personality who’s struggled with alcoholism and alienated fellow heroes with her die-hard stubbornness. She’s got abilities on par with Marvel’s heaviest hitters: She’s super-strong, super-tough, shoots blasts of radiant energy from her fingertips, and she can absorb and redirect the energy of a nuclear explosion.

Yet, she remained a persistent C-lister: shuffled between teams, canceled, and restarted. By rights and name, she should have been a flagship character, but no one at Marvel seemed to know quite what to do with her.

Then, in 2012, everything changed. Suddenly, Carol wasn’t Ms. Marvel anymore—she was Captain Marvel. Gone was the swimsuit-and-sash costume, replaced by a sharp full-coverage bodysuit designed by artist Jamie McKelvie.

Since then, she’s become a fan favorite—and a rallying point for readers like Jennifer DePrey. “I’ve been reading comic books since I was eight,” DePrey says, “and I’ve always kind of avoided superhero comics. If I was looking for a superhero that I felt was like me, her costume was a bikini and thigh-high boots or had a boob window, or she wasn’t ever on a cover by herself—she was always with a bunch of dudes that looked way cooler than she did.”

Jennifer first discovered Captain Marvel with the new series. Her curiosity was piqued by news of the character’s transition and redesign. “One issue in, I was like, ‘This is my superhero. This is the character I wish I’d had when I was 12,’” she says. “I went back and read every Ms. Marvel that had been published and absolutely fell in love with this flawed, real character I could identify with.”