[PHOTO] Front of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church, Dundas and Grace

I snapped this photograph of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church (15 Grace Street) from the window of the Dundas streetcar as it passed by. I think it turned out rather well.

[PHOTO] Car parked by Queen Street liquor store behind St. Dunstan's Basilica, Charlottetown

The towers of Charlottetown's St. Dunstan's Basilica are visible, beyond the back of the alley of the Queen Street liquor store.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton comes out in favour of seeing Scottish independence not as a sign of failure. Sometimes relationships just end.


• blogTO lists the top ten thrift shops in Toronto.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study on interactions between exoplanets and their host stars.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the growing strength of the Catalonian separatist movement.


• Marginal Revolution touches upon the enclaves created by the convoluted Indo-Bangladeshi frontier, and the sufferings of their inhabitants.


• Towleroad notes the arrest of three people in Serbia who attacked a German LGBT activist, leaving him in critical condition.


• Transit Toronto notes the state of construction on the Eglinton light rail route.


• The Volokh Conspiracy and Marginal Revolution both note the arguments of economist Bryan Caplan in favour of open borders.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian support for pro-Russian parties in the Donets Basin, and suggests that 3500 Russian soldiers have died in the Ukrainian fighting.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell suggests that the United Kingdom has been hollowed out by a political centre that doesn't see much use in the British state and its traditions.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Al Jazeera notes the rivalry between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, observes claims of persecution by evangelical Christians of followers of traditional African religions in Brazil, notes that separatism is unpopular in Scotland's border regions, considers the problems of a beetle theme park in the penumbra of Japan's Fukushima, looks at a Palestinian-American model, and considers rap music in Iran.


• The Atlantic notes how events have vindicated the American Congress' Barbara Lee, the only person not to vote in favour of granting unlimited war-making powers to the American presiden after 9/11, looks at the existential problems of Yiddish outside of ultra-Orthodox communities, and examines Stephen King's thinking on how to teach writing.


• Bloomberg notes the water problems of Detroit, looks at proposals to give Scotland home rule and Euroskepticism among the English, considers claims that Scotland might need huge reserves to back up its currency, notes ways sanctions threaten oil deals with Russian companies, examines Poland's natural gas issues and those of the rest of central and southeastern Europe, notes Ukraine's exclusion of Russian companies from a 3G cellular auction, notes the reluctance of Scottish banks to support an independent Scotland, and observes how domestic protectionism in Argentina is boosting Uruguay's beef exports to Europe.


• The Bloomberg View argues that it should be possible to cleanly break up even established nation-states, is critical of what Colombia is doing to Venezuelan refugees, argues that the achievements of social insects like acts are irrelevant to more complex beings like us, and suggests Britain has no place to criticize China over Hong Kong.


• CBC notes the strength of Inuit oral history following the discovery of one of the Franklin Expedition's ships, notes that the type of cancer that killed Terry Fox is now highly curable, and notes NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's proposal of a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.


• The Inter Press Service notes Uzbekistan's fear of Russia motivating a look for eastern allies and suggests that an anti-discrimination law can worsen the plight of sexual minorities in Georgia.


• MacLean's notes that Mexican economic development is good for Canada, looks at Catalonian secessionism, and suggests that a new EI tax credit won't help Canadian business boost employment.


• Open Democracy looked at the likely outcome of Crimean elections under Russian rule.


• The Toronto Star revisited the unsettled state of affairs in the Central African Republic.

[URBAN NOTE] "What has Doug Ford done for his ward? Apparently very little"

Spacing Toronto's Graeme Bayliss has a very unflattering description of city councillor and mayoral candidate Doug Ford's actions on behalf of his riding, Toronto's Ward 2, Etobicoke North.

The rookie councillor routinely calls out his City Council counterparts when he feels they are shirking their duties. Last week, he excoriated Councillor Jaye Robinson (who was bedridden with a chest infection at the time) for missing a Civic Appointments Committee meeting. Ford decried her supposed shiftlessness and claimed that her absence caused the meeting’s cancellation (which, as it happens, was an outright lie — the meeting proceeded as scheduled, with Ford himself in attendance).

The week before that, on the CFRB radio show he co-hosts with the mayor, Ford chided the 18 Toronto councillors who attended the recent FCM annual conference in Vancouver for not doing their jobs. Later on in the show, he backed away from the prospect of not doing his job by running in a Provincial election, and announced that he will instead focus on not doing his job by continuing to act as the mayor’s self-appointed Polonius. He’s turned his attention to “the job at hand with Rob into the next election.” But giving his brother a hand with his job is not the job Ford was handed.

[. . .]

Nearly 25% of Ward 2 residents live in poverty [PDF], and transit options are limited throughout the ward. A 2008 study conducted by PollutionWatch, which shows a positive correlation between poor air quality and poverty, indicates that air pollution levels in some sections of Ward 2 are amongst the highest in Toronto. The southeast corner of Ward 2 falls within Weston-Mt. Dennis, one of 13 priority areas in Toronto identified by the City as requiring considerable attention due to inadequate community services and high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment. This, clearly, is a ward that needs an engaged and informed city councillor.

Unfortunately, Ford is neither of those things. His web site, for example, is bereft of substance: links to Twitter, Facebook, email, and RSS that lead nowhere, a ward profile with three bullet-point factoids and nine more dead links, and a homepage that refers to only two ward-specific events — one that took place two weeks ago, and another that happened last summer (although both are advertised as upcoming).

It’s possible that Ford has heard some distant rumour of the problems that plague his ward, but he appears to have done nothing substantial to fix them — no transit initiatives, no environmental initiatives, no housing initiatives.

Instead, he has put forward motions like EY21.48, wherein he motioned that a condo developer be permitted to erect three times as many A-frame advertising signs as the Municipal Code permits; EY19.40, wherein he motioned that certain properties at risk of violating driveway-widening regulations be granted an extension to the one-year extension they’d already been granted to comply with the regulations; MM7.7, with which he sought to provide the Toronto Catholic District School Board with $75,000 to build a change room; and EY11.17, with which he sought to block a pedestrian walkway with a 1.8-metre chain-link fence, as requested by a number of residents.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Livejournal becoming many things, hopefully doing at least one of them well

On Saturday, James Nicoll--ruling blogger of English-language Livejournal--linked to a new video advertisement on YouTube for Livejournal.

"What Is LiveJournal?" (Watch on YouTube)

In it, an anonymous narrator suggested that Livejournal would meet the needs of people who would like to write at length in anonymity, to shed the public identities of Facebook and the like for something pseudonymous, even anonymous.

I said in the comments of that YouTube video that I wished Livejournal had done it before now. Visiting that page again, I see that it recorded only 647 views. That's up a few hundred since the first time I saw the video, but still. The commenter at James' blog who suggests the whole thing is moot until the people who left Livejournal for Facebook come back is entirely right.

I mentioned in May that Livejournal was also being positioned as a competitor to Medium, as a host for long-format writing. This new use is not incompatible with that previously-stated use, yet I have to wonder. Does Livejournal know what it is doing? Or is it desperately casting about for something that can keep it going in the English-speaking world?

[PHOTO] On vintage photos of the last days of the World Trade Center

The New Yorker's Nick Paumgartner's "Take Picture" describes some remarkable photos of the World Trade Center taken just months before the complex's destruction.

In June, 2001, Konstantin Petrov, an immigrant from Estonia, got a job as an electrician at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was given a little office without cabinets, and after he built a shelf there, by bolting a steel plate to an exposed steel girder, he sent his friends a photograph of himself lying across it, and boasted that if the shelf ever collapsed the building would go down with it.

Petrov worked the night shift. This suited him, not only because he had a day job, as the superintendent of an apartment building at the other end of Manhattan, but because he was an avid photographer, and the emptiness of the Trade Center at night, together with the stunning vistas at dawn, gave him a lot to shoot, and a lot of time and space in which to shoot it. In the summer of 2001, he took hundreds of digital photographs, mostly of offices, table settings, banquettes, sconces, stairwells, kitchen equipment, and elevator fixtures. Many shots were lit by the rising sun, with the landscape of the city in the background, gleaming and stark-shadowed, more than a hundred floors below.

Paumgartner's evaluation of Petrov's photos elsewhere strikes me as correct.

Petrov’s photos, viewed now, contain the premonition of obliteration. It’s amazing to behold this ordinariness and know that it will soon be consigned to dust. The dawn glow in many of the shots makes the arrival of the planes seem imminent. There’s something apocalyptic, too, about the absence of people, as though these were dispatches from a different calamity, of the cinematic kind, in which the cities endure but the citizens do not—just a few survivors roaming around, foraging for food. Here is the hideous décor of Windows on the World, in itself a kind of aesthetic innocence; it didn’t know any better. You half expect to see Burt Reynolds. But fate imbues the restaurant with a retroactive dignity. These aren’t the bygone glories of, say, the old Penn Station, but all of lost New York has a corner in the kingdom of Heaven.

Konstantin Petrov's Fotki photo archive is all online.

[LINK] Charlie Stross on "The referendum question"

In a post at his blog, science fiction writer Charlie Stross announces his support for Scottish separatism. This support, it turns out, is not only motivated by support for the independence of Scotland. Stross favours the more general breakdown of nation-states.

In the long term I favour a Europe—indeed, a world—of much smaller states. I don't just favour breaking up the UK; I favour breaking up the United States, India, and China. Break up the Westphalian system. We live today in a world dominated by two types of group entity; the nation-states with defined borders and treaty obligations that emerged after the end of the 30 Years War, and the transnational corporate entities which thrive atop the free trade framework provided by the treaty organizations binding those Westphalian states together.

I believe the Westphalian nation-state system isn't simply showing its age: it's creaking at the seams and teetering on the edge of catastrophic breakdown. The world today is far smaller than the world of 1648; the entire planet, in travel terms, is shrunk to the size of the English home counties. In 1648 to travel from the south of Scotland (from, say, Berwick-upon-Tweed, the debatable walled border city) to the far north-west would take, at a minimum, a couple of weeks by sea; to travel that distance by land was a harsh journey of hundreds of miles across mountains and bogs and through still-forested glens, on foot or horseback. Today it's a couple of noisy hours on board a turboprop airliner. Distance has collapsed under us. To some extent the definition of the Westphalian state as being able to control its own internal territory was a side-effect of distance: a foreign army couldn't rapidly and easily penetrate the inner lands of a state without fear of retaliation. (Tell that to the residents of the tribal provinces in Pakistan.)

Moreover, our nations today have not only undergone a strange geographical implosion since the 17th century: they have exploded in population terms. The population of the American Colonies in 1790 is estimated at roughly 2.7 million; the United States today has over 300 million inhabitants. In 1780 England and Wales had around 7.5 million inhabitants; they're now at 57 million. So we have a 1-2 order of magnitude increase in population and a 2-3 order of magnitude decrease in travel time ... and possibly a 3-5 order of magnitude decrease in communications latency.

Today we're seeing the fallout from this problem everywhere. Westphalian states can't, for the most part, control their own territory to the extent of keeping intruders out; just look at the ghastly situation in Ukraine right now. Non-state actors play an increasingly huge role in dictating our economic conditions. And it seems to me that something goes badly wrong with representative democracy in polities that grow beyond somewhere in the range 5-15 million people; direct accountability vanishes and we end up with what I've termed the beige dictatorship. Beige isn't the worst colour‐some of the non-beige contenders are distinctly alarming—but their popular appeal is a symptom of an institutional failure, a representational deficit: many voters feel so alienated by the beige that they'll vote for the brownshirts.

My feeling is that we'd be better served by a group of much smaller nations working in a loose confederation or treaty structure. Their job should be to handle local issues(yes, this is localism) while compartmentalizing failure modes: the failure modes of a gigantic imperial power are almost always far worse than those of a smaller nation (compare the disintegration of the Soviet Union with that of Czecheslovakia). Rather than large monolithic states run by people at the top who are so remote from their constituents that they set policy to please lobbyists rather than their electors, I'd prefer to see treaty organizations like NATO and the EU emerging at consensus after discussions among numerous smaller stakeholder entities, where representatives are actually accountable to their electors. (Call me a utopian, if you will.)

Yes, this is also an argument for Wales, the North of England, and London itself all becoming independent nations. But they aren't on the ballot. So Scottish independence is a starting point.

Thoughts? I'm rather more skeptical of this argument for a general breakdown than Stross, or many of the commenters at his blog. Isn't the construction of larger federations with some degree of democratic responsibility preferable to more fragile and less legitimate coalitions of smaller states? There's room for flexibility, but a general reconfiguration strikes me as a non-starter.