[PHOTO] Blooms outside of the University of Toronto Bookstore

Outside of the University of Toronto Bookstore at 214 College Street, in the Koffler Student Centre on the corner of College and St. George, the trees were in bloom. Cherry blossoms?

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Big Picture shares photos of Iran 25 years after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.


• Crooked Timber continues its seminar on the ethics of open borders.
D-Brief notes the discovery of two new classes of planets not found in our solar system, Earth-mass gas dwarfs and rocky super-Earths.

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that red dwarfs' solar wind would significantly heat exoplanets in their circumstellar habitable zones and links to another paper concluded that Kepler-10c is a giant rocky world.


• The Dragon's Tales notes drama in Canada regarding the possibility or not of a F-35 purchase.


• The Financial Times' The World blog wonders about the future of the monarchy in a securely democratic Spain.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis concludes that poverty isn't clearly the cause of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, notwithstanding the relative poverty of the Muslim north.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is rightly upset that Confederate general and defender of slavery Robert E. Lee is positioned in a new book as an American patriot.


• The New APPS Blog considers the issues associated with democracy in the European Union after the recent elections.


• Savage Minds' P. Kerim Friedman considers the shooting ratio of ethnography. How much raw material do anthropologists need to collect to come up with something compelling?


• Window on Eurasia traces the genealogy of Eurasianism in the Soviet era.

[LINK] "An Afterlife for Europe’s Disused Places of Worship"

Sharing Christine Bohlen's article in The New York Times about disused places of worship in Europe on Facebook, I said that in Toronto the tendency seems to be to turn these places into condos. This Little Italy church, for instance, has long since made the transition.



That's not something that can be done with every church, in Toronto, in Europe, and elsewhere. What can be done with often beautiful buildings which can no longer serve their original purpose? Some people in Europe are trying to answer this question in an organized fashion.

When a church closes its doors, it is a sad day for its parishioners. When it is slated for demolition, it is a sad day for the larger community, as Lilian Grootswagers realized in 2005 when she and her neighbors in the small Dutch village of Kaatsheuvel learned that St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church was due to be torn down and replaced by a four-story apartment block.

Leaping into action, Ms. Grootswagers started a petition drive, collecting 3,250 signatures, almost one-quarter of the village’s population, and sought help on a national level. As it turned out, St. Jozefkerk, built in 1933 as the centerpiece of an unusual architectural ensemble, was eligible to be on a register of historic buildings.

Today, nine years after it held its last Mass, the church is still standing, empty but awaiting its next incarnation. Its rescue was a victory for a widening effort across Europe to preserve religious buildings in the face of rapid secularization and dwindling public resources.

Begun as a grass-roots movement in 2009, the Future for Religious Heritage took shape in 2011 as a network of groups from more than 30 countries, dedicated to finding ways to keep churches, synagogues and other religious buildings open, if not for services, then for other uses.

But making the transition from places of worship to some other purpose is a tricky one, which necessarily involves not only community support, but also managerial skills. “You can only manage a building if it has income,” said Leena Seim, executive officer of the Future for Religious Heritage, which has an office in Brussels.

[LINK] "Would You Pay $1,000 Once to Get Free Beer for Life?"

Michael on Facebook shared this National Journal article by Matt Vasilogambros describing an unusual sort of crowdsourcing finance for a new restaurant. The technique described is something that can be applied more generally than a single bar in a single city; it could be generalized much more broadly, I think.

There is a price tag for unlimited beer for the rest of your life. It's $1,000.

In reality, the cost for that much beer is a lot more. But for a few dozen people, free beer for life is their reward for investing in a small restaurant called Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub in a quiet southern corner of Minneapolis.

Amy Johnson and her two business partners needed to raise $220,000 to secure a bank loan and fulfill their dream of opening a restaurant that served beer brewed right there at the pub. They went to investors who offered to give heavily for a voting share in the restaurant. But since the potential investors had no experience in the restaurant industry, the owners backed away.

And then came the idea from some friends and family who wanted to help out. "They were, like, 'I've got a few grand, but I don't have too much money,' " Johnson recalls. "And people kept saying this over and over, and we latched onto the idea. Why not just take a couple grand from everybody and then we'd have all the money we'd need?"

So, that's what they did. People who invested $1,000 receive free in-house beer for the rest of their lives, or as long as the place stays open. People could also receive 0.1 percent nonvoting equity in the company for every $1,000 invested. Or for $5,000, investors get 0.5 percent equity and free in-house beer for life. The brewpub, now a registered LLC, hit its goal of $220,000 through the 46 people who chose the first option, 42 who picked the second, and 30 who took the third, all finding out about the opportunity by word of mouth.

Northbound has now been open for almost two years and is thriving. The investors didn't drink them dry. The restaurant is giving away some 17 beers a day, and the cost is low, at just 40 cents a beer. Plus, investors aren't just going to the brewpub for a beer by themselves—they order food, bring people, or maybe order a scotch after dinner. For the investors, it's also about the sense of ownership. Or, as Johnson explains, "We have an army of over 100 people who are our cheerleaders."

[LINK] "Liberal-NDP coalition isn’t cheating, it’s democracy"

Martin Regg Cohn's Toronto Star article rightly criticizes the Ontario Progressive Conservatives' preemptive condemnation of the idea of a possible coalition government uniting the Liberals and the NDP. In parliamentary systems of government like that of Ontario, coalition governments are entirely legitimate.

The Tory leader [Tim Hudak] not only ruled out any coalition between himself and the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne or the NDP’s Andrea Horwath, but railed against the notion of those two relatively progressive parties teaming up themselves. It would, he claimed, be cheating — breaking the rules.

“I think that’s cheating voters, and I think that it’s all about Kathleen Wynne trying to keep her job instead of doing the right thing,” Hudak said.

Why can’t left-leaning parties do the left thing?

Taking a page from Stephen Harper, our noted prime ministerial constitutional contortionist and distortionist who famously denounced coalitions in 2008, Hudak is now demonizing them in advance. He is echoing Harper’s cynically anti-democratic notions, which whip up public distrust of our parliamentary traditions.

Hudak should have a word with the U.K.’s Tory premier, David Cameron, who formed a post-election coalition with deputy premier Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Or with Australia’s right-wing Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who governs thanks to a formal coalition with the National Party.

Ontario’s Liberals and New Democrats inked a formal accord in the wake of the 1985 election to oust the Tories (who held a plurality of seats). These are parliamentary precedents, not deceptions, yet Hudak is crying foul in advance.

[URBAN NOTE] "What a Green Win Would Mean for Toronto"

Completing Torontoist's roundup of the positions of the major political parties on Toronto issues, Patrick Metzger earlier this week took a look at what the Green Party of Ontario would do if it got elected. They might do good things indeed.

There won’t be a Green government, of course—they even acknowledge it in their platform: “In the next session of the legislature, your Green MPPs will demand that government … [followed by a list of demands].” In fact, the Green Party of Ontario (GPO) will be lucky if it manages to send its first MPP to Queen’s Park in the upcoming election.

That said, the province might be lucky if it did. Leader Mike Schreiner and the Greens approach electioneering with a candour that likely comes at least in part from the knowledge they won’t win—they’re free to advocate useful ideas that more electable parties won’t touch.

Improved transit funding, the abolition of funding for the Catholic education system, innovative social policy proposals, and the like all come up. Metzger's conclusion?

Is it time to start taking the Greens seriously? A Green government isn’t coming any time soon, but having a Green MPP or two might help introduce to the mainstream some ideas that are otherwise unlikely to see the light of day.

As it happens, though, the Greens haven't won a single seat in the party's history. In the 2011 election in my riding of Davenport, the Green candidate got less than 3% of the vote. I'm sufficiently concerned with the prospect of the Liberals that voting for another party unlikely to elect their candidate just doesn't appeal, no matter how interesting the platform. (The question of whether this platform would be translated into action is a separate issue that, again because of the lack of electoral success, likely wouldn't come into play here.)

[BRIEF NOTE] On the birth of the state of Telangana

On Monday the 1st of June, India formed the new state of Telangana out of the still-existing state of Andhra Pradesh. The Telugu-speaking districts of the former princely state of Hyderabad turn out to have retained enough of a collective identity to merit the subdivision of a state. The Times of India has a potted history.

Today is a new dawn in the history of the Indian Union. For the first time — outside the Hindi- and Bengali-speaking areas — two states speaking the same language have been created. Both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the two successor states to Andhra Pradesh, that come into existence on Monday, swear by Telugu.

This knocks down the basis on which the internal map of the Indian Union was redrawn in the first decade after Independence. With the linguistic basis of states — language being assumed as the indicator of a homogeneous culture — being challenged, there is scope for another exercise to redraw the internal map of India. Whether this will happen or not is a moot point but the question is why did this "Telugu state" break down. And what are the lessons for the future?

Although there was a demand for a composite Telugu state from before Independence, the Nehru-led government created Andhra Pradesh due to Congress's political interests. History has thus come full circle. In Andhra state (which was carved out of the Telugu speaking areas of then Madras state in 1953), the Congress was facing a tough electoral contest from the Communists.

So it was decided to merge Andhra with the Telugu speaking areas of the dominion of the deposed Nizam of Hyderabad. This would create a larger entity where the communists could be defeated.

[. . .]

The second unstated reason was that the Nehru government, chastened by the experience of the integration of Kashmir, did not want to leave the territories of the Nizam as they were. Therefore, while the Telugu-speaking areas went to Andhra Pradesh, the Marathi and Kannada speaking areas went to Bombay and Mysore provinces.

But the Congress chief ministers did little to promote rural empowerment or land reforms. The only chief minister who tried — Narasimha Rao — faced opposition from vested interests and was axed. Growing rural angst led to Maoism striking deep roots.

Alienation led to separatism and eventually a separate state.

Where will this lead? I'll note, from my perspective as an outsider, that the ability of the Indian government to divide existing states indicates Indian federalism is highly centralized indeed. Canada, to name a single example, lacks completely the ability to subdivide a federal unit without that unit's full consent.