[PHOTO] Lost purse, Spadina and College

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO shares photos of Nuit Blanche.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that relatively recent presence of glaciers on some high Martian mountain slopes.


• Eastern Approaches looks at the ethnically riven Latvian election.


• Far Outliers looks at the grim situation for civil rights in early independent Romania and the problematic democracy of the interwar period.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig maps the distribution of Ukrainians in modern Russia.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Shenzhen is thriving on the basis of--among other things--mobile phones.


• Otto Pohl looks at the history of Communism in colonial Ghana.


• Savage Minds features an anthropologist talking about the specific issues of academic writing.


• Torontoist and blogTO both talk about things that went well with Nuit Blanche and things that did not go so well.


• Towleroad observes anti-gay persecution in Indonesia's westernmost region of Aceh.


• Transit Toronto notes the disruption to the TTC caused by the closing-off of Yonge-Dundas Square for a hockey festival there.

[LINK] "Macau Casino Stocks Rise as Monthly Sales Meet Estimate"

Vinicy Chan and Billy Chan, writing for Bloomberg, note that casino-dependent Macau is seeing something of an economic slowdown between a crackdown on Chinese gambling and mass protests in Hong Kong.

Total casino revenue fell 12 percent to 25.6 billion patacas ($3.2 billion) in September, the fourth straight month it’s declined. The figure, the biggest drop since June 2009, was expected to drop by 12 percent to 13 percent from a year earlier, state-controlled Teledifusao de Macau reported last week, citing the city’s Secretary for Economy and Finance Francis Tam.

“You get the dynamic now whereas these gaming names have been so crushed that even a slight improvement is viewed positively,” Grant Govertsen at Union Gaming Group, said today. “You got a lot of investors who want to be in these names looking for an entry point.”

[. . .]

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption has dented spending by high-stakes gamblers in Macau, the only place in China where casinos are legal. Pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong may have caused mainland Chinese to defer their usual joint Hong Kong-Macau trips, Govertsen wrote in a note yesterday.

“Mass market casino foot traffic -- especially at the big-box casinos on Cotai -- and certain instances of table games minimums, was lower than we expected,” he said. Casino companies have been opening resorts on the Cotai Strip, Asia’s answer to the Las Vegas Strip.

About 20 percent to 25 percent of mainland travelers to Macau also go to Hong Kong on the same trip, said Karen Tang, an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG.

High rollers account for more than 60 percent of the city’s gaming revenue. The number of Chinese tourists normally rises during China’s annual week-long National Day holidays that start on Oct. 1, one of the city’s busiest times of the year.

The political protests in Hong Kong “would put further pressure on VIP visitation,” said Govertsen, using the term that refers to high-stakes gamblers.

[LINK] "England should get what England wants – it’s time to find out what that is"

Sunder Katwala's Open Democracy essay makes the sensible argument that, in the context of political reform, English issues should be answered. First, though, the English have to figure out what they want.

If ‘more powers to Scotland’ is the right response to democratic pressure, it is incoherent to argue that some measure of English devolution must prove divisive.

The charge of party interest from Labour voices sounds very much like a case of pots challenging kettles. No doubt all politicians keep the party implications of political reforms in mind but Labour’s own partisan interests, particularly representing 41 of the 59 Scottish constituencies in the House of Commons, would appear to be playing a significant role in the party’s difficulty in articulating any coherent view about England’s place in the evolving constitution of the United Kingdom.

That core principle is simple: devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland makes the issue of a fair say for England important and unavoidable.

The answer has to be that England should get what England wants.

But what does England want? Nobody can yet be certain of the detail of that.

Here, the proposal of an open and inclusive process is valid – but it has a power only once the core principle has been accepted and agreed. Otherwise it will look, to most people, like an attempt to kick the question into the long grass and to hope it does bit return.

Some form of constitutional convention could usefully be contrasted with the limits of deciding on devolution to England in a Cabinet sub-committee in Whitehall – but only if it is deciding on how to represent England, rather than whether to do so. It should also offer a clear timescale for an outcome to be implemented, as is the case with the Scottish vow.

[LINK] "With Robust Economy, Poland Navigates Around Eastern Europe’s Strains"

Rick Lyman's article in The New York Times points out that Poland's solid economic growth has continued despite adverse external conditions, and that it's starting to translate into serious heft.

To the east, Russian aggression has paralyzed Ukraine’s hope for faster economic development. To the south, Hungary flirts with authoritarianism and still struggles to climb out of the last recession. To the north, Lithuania and the other Baltic States are being squeezed by the cycle of escalating trade sanctions between Moscow and the European Union.

Poland, meanwhile, has managed to navigate safely around the latest strains on Eastern Europe, just as it managed to sail through the 2008 financial crisis with barely a bruise, maintaining solid growth rates, attracting considerable new investment and industry and using its relative economic strength to build clout within the European Union.

By dint of its size, enthusiasm for embracing the West and stable governance, Poland, a member of NATO and the European Union, has long been the most important model of post-Soviet transformation. But now, with Russia again seeking to exert its influence and much of Europe struggling to recover fully from the deep downturn of recent years, Poland has taken on an even more important role as the leading symbol of regional stability and resolve.

Construction cranes stretch across the Warsaw skyline. Huge malls and gleaming stores open almost daily. Attracted by wage rates considerably lower than those in Western Europe, many multinational companies continue to invest in Poland as a manufacturing and distribution base.

Virtually everything that Ikea, the Swedish housewares behemoth, sells in Europe, for instance, is manufactured in Poland. Many Volkswagen components are made in Poland. General Motors has facilities here, as do 3M, Procter & Gamble and other American brands.

Amazon is opening giant new distribution centers. Google Campus Warsaw, mirrored on similar projects in London and Tel Aviv, will nurture homegrown high-tech start-ups.

Intent on ensuring that it is not vulnerable to Russian pressure, Poland is pressing the European Union to do more to break its reliance on Russian energy supplies. The recent rounds of sanctions and countersanctions over Russia’s aggression in neighboring Ukraine have had relatively little impact on Poland’s economy, beyond inspiring a patriotic campaign to persuade Poles to eat more homegrown apples in reaction to Moscow’s banning of them.

[LINK] On the coded language and behaviour of Narendra Modi in the United States

Meera Nair's Washington Post article points out that despite appearances to the contrary, Narendra Modi's choice of language, his rhetorical style, and even his clothes signalled his right-wing Hindutva ideology.

Narendra Modi’s first official visit to the United States, which ended on Sept. 30 was quite a spectacle. There was a campaign-style appearance before 18,000 adoring fans at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Jumbotrons in Times Square broadcast an extravaganza that featured Bollywood dancing, convention-style balloon-drops, and a receiving line of dozens of U.S. congressmen. Modi was working hard, it seemed, to introduce himself favorably to Americans and the Indian expatriates who live among them.

But he wasn’t just speaking to the people on this continent. In fact, the symbolism and rhetoric of this trip were carefully calibrated toward his Hindu nationalist base at home (and here, too). This was old-fashioned dog-whistle politics, and it was a master class. The message: I may nod to tolerance and openness, but I’m really still with you.

For starters, take the jacket Modi wore on stage in New York. It was in a color that his personal tailor, Bipin Chauhan, has called a “silent” variation of saffron. The color is a favorite of Modi’s. Many of his iconic calf-length shirts, now rebranded as #ModiKurtas (yes, they have a hash tag), and other accessories sport some shade of saffron. In India, saffron has deep connotations for Hindus, symbolizing sacred fire, sacrifice, asceticism and a quest for light and salvation. But the color has also been co-opted by Hindu fundamentalists. The armed Hindu mobs that roamed Gujarat in the 2002 riots that led to the death of over 1,000 people, three-quarters of them Muslim, wore saffron. Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time. While evidence exists of state complicity in the riots, he personally has not been found guilty. Still, given the loaded iconography surrounding the color, Modi’s style choices seem awfully brazen.

In his speech on Sunday, the prime minister evoked yet another symbol of India — the river Ganges. In asking for help from affluent Indian Americans in the audience to clean up the polluted river, he referred to the river as Maa Ganga or Mother Ganga, an honorific routinely used by Hindus who revere the river as a Goddess and believe its water is holy. He exhorted the audience to watch a film that is a paean to Hindu rituals associated with the river. His reclamation project has been named NamamiGange; Namami is a term borrowed from Sanskrit prayers and means “obeisance.” Namami Gange translates as, “We bow to you, Ganga” — a sentiment that the hundreds of millions of Indians who depend on the arterial river may not share. In contrast, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cleanup mission was simply called the Ganga Action Plan.

[LINK] Four links on the Postmedia purchase of the English-language properties of Sun Media

The Canadian Press dealt with the concentration of media ownership this purchase would imply, suggesting that concentration is better than disappearing.

Postmedia’s plans to buy Quebecor’s stable of English-language newspapers and websites may resurrect concerns about whether the concentration of media ownership in Canada will narrow the range of editorial voices the public relies on for information, experts say.

But some say it may be the only way to keep newspapers alive in an industry that’s struggling to survive.

“What we’re talking about here is one threatened company … buying properties whose future was in doubt,” said Ivor Shapiro, chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto.

If Calgary has two newspapers with the same owner, so be it, he said. It’s been going on in Vancouver for years, with two papers competing editorially with areas of co-operation on the business side, such as advertising sales.

“That is way better at the end of the day than seeing both of those news organizations close down,” he added.

Jason Kirby of MacLean's reflected a common skepticism that the purchase would change the underlying dynamics.

When you’re an acquisition-hungry newspaper executive preparing to go toe-to-toe with regulators in a country where media concentration has long been a dirty word, it helps to have an even scarier bad guy in the room beside you. And so, as Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Postmedia, made the rounds pitching his company’s deal to buy all of Quebecor’s English-language papers—175 titles in total, including the daily rivals to Postmedia’s papers in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa—he did everything he could to conjure up the image of a multi-headed beast hell-bent on destroying Canadian journalism. Devil, thy name is Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo.

In presentations to journalists and analysts that were a dry run for the arguments he’ll be making to the Competition Bureau in the coming months, Godfrey repeatedly referenced “giant, foreign-owned, digital-only companies.” He also called them “behemoths of the digital world” and “foreign-based digital giants . . . swallowing digital revenue away from us.” Newspaper bosses (and magazine ones, for that matter) have long blamed Internet giants for destroying their business by stealing content and luring away advertisers, but Postmedia clearly believes that if the deal is going to get approval from Canada’s competition watchdog, it must raise the rapacious-foreigner threat level to severe.

But Godfrey knows where regulatory posturing ends and the actual business of newspapering in the 21st century begins. “Look, we’re not going to be able to compete with Google or Facebook just because of this deal,” he said. Which raises the question: What’s to be gained when one crippled newspaper company doubles down to buy another? Beyond the adage that misery loves company, the Postmedia merger with Sun Media is a transaction built on equal parts financial engineering and equal parts hopeful—or, perhaps, that should be wishful—thinking.

CBC's Don Pittis agreed with Kirby.

Somehow, time after time, the wily Postmedia president Paul Godfrey has pulled the paper and then the chain away from death's door. Just a year ago, as the Globe and Mail reported, the rating agency Moody's was warning about Postmedia's debt. But somehow the papers struggle on.

A lot of it may be Godfrey's personal force of will. Running Toronto's metropolitan government in the '70s, he certainly learned the skill of herding cats.

But the other signature of Godfrey's deals has been their complexity, including the financing.

Somehow, by casting off some assets and adding assets from somewhere else, building a legal structure here and borrowing money there, the National Post and its fellows survive to print another day. Each time it happens there is a new financing deal. Each time, Godfrey has a new set of reasons why, this time, it will work.

[. . .]

As usual in mergers, "synergy" is one of the purported advantages. It means that the sum of the parts makes a greater whole. But saying the word doesn't make it so. The other advantage cited by those who support mergers is that bigger is better. Godfrey used both those arguments today.

Going back to MacLean's, Martin Patriquen noted that the sale of Sun Media's English-properties by Quebecor, associated with a Pierre Karl Péladeau who has doubled down on separatism, might signal things about Péladeau's hopes for the Québec political scene.

It is often difficult to tell what is business and what is personal in matters concerning Pierre Karl Péladeau. The scion of Quebecor, long one of the country’s largest media concerns, has his father’s fiery temperament but not his ability to keep impudence in check. Take, for example, Quebecor’s acquisition of the Sun Media newspaper chain in 1998, the very chain Quebecor has unloaded (pending approval from the Competition Bureau) to Postmedia this morning for $316 million.

Formulated the weeks before Christmas 1998, that deal saw Quebecor nip Sun Media from the jaws of Torstar with a sweet deal indeed: $21 a share, or nearly $983 million—considerably more than TorStar’s $748-million takeover attempt three months before.

It was a princely sum, even in pre-Internet days when content was sold on paper, not given away on a screen. Already, the TorStar/Quebecor war had inflated the share price from $16, with TorStar unwilling to go higher than $19. The previous incarnation of Quebecor, led by its founder, Pierre Péladeau Sr., would have balked even at this amount. Indeed, one of Péladeau Sr.’s last major business decisions was to turn his nose up at a $411-million offer for Sun Media cooked up by his senior management in 1996.

But the 1998 version of Quebecor, led by Péladeau fils, was an entirely different beast. His father passed away in 1997, bringing an end to a frankly awful relationship; the pair reportedly weren’t even on speaking terms in the months before Péladeau Sr.’s death. PKP wanted to put his stamp on the company, and Sun Media was the sweetest of plums.

Acquiring the newspaper chain gave Quebecor instant national clout—and cowed the chain’s own anti-Quebec bias. No longer would its loudest voices be able to bash Quebec with abandon. If any of Péladeau’s new minions referred to PKP’s father as a “separatist, anti-Semite and ex-alcoholic,” as Diane Francis did in the Sun-owned Financial Post in 1996, they would find themselves on the curb in a hurry.

[LINK] "Why Not Eat Octopus?"

The New Yorker's Sylvia Killingsworth tackles the question of whether it is ethical to eat the intelligent octopus by, among other things, talking to chefs.

I wondered whether word of cephalopod intelligence had reached the food world, so I asked a few chefs if they had any misgivings about serving the animals at their restaurants. For Ashleigh Parsons and Ari Taymor, of Alma, in Los Angeles, the question is not what we eat but where the food is coming from and how it is treated. “The only octopus Ari can get is frozen and shipped from Japan,” Parsons told me in an e-mail. For them, sustainability is paramount, and can trump the cachet of an ingredient.

Ignacio Mattos, the chef at Estela (and formerly at Isa, where he served a whole squid), said that he recently put cuttlefish on the menu, and recalled telling his staff about how smart the creatures are. “I remember seeing this Discovery Channel documentary about them and it really blew my mind,” he wrote to me. Mattos confessed that he loved their elegant texture and taste, but added, “I might in a way have started consciously avoiding using them somehow.” Dave Pasternack, chef and co-founder of the upscale midtown seafood restaurant Esca, spoke with me last week during dinner service from a wall-mounted phone right behind his station in the kitchen. As he called out orders for sole and scampi, he assured me that he had never heard tales of octopus intelligence. “The smarter they are, the more you’d want to eat them, right?” he suggested. (I’ve always been suspicious of people who eat brains.) He insisted that there was an art to cooking octopus correctly. His includes a Neapolitan trick: a wine cork in the cooking liquid. Éric Ripert and Harold McGee dismiss this step as mere legend—to which Pasternack gleefully responds, “Éric Ripert is full of shit!”

Michael Psilakis, a successful Greek-American chef and restaurateur in New York (Kefi, Fishtag, MP Taverna), said that he’s been serving octopus for about twenty-five years but only noticed its increase in popularity over the past ten. “I remember first cooking octopus as a special, only on the weekends, and we’d do twenty orders the whole weekend. Now we do two hundred for a single shift,” he told me. He had heard about octopus intelligence many years before from a customer and Googled it. One of the first results he got was a list of the twenty-five smartest animals. “Pig was, like, number two, and sheep was on that list, too. That’s three animals specific to my cultural identity.… I sort of wondered, does that mean anything?” Psilakis said.

[LINK] "Conservative MPs approve combat mission in Iraq"

It's official: Canada is participating in the American-led intervention against the Islamic State. From the Canadian Press:

One by one, Conservative MPs in the House of Commons led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper voted late Tuesday to join the war in Iraq, passing a controversial motion that clears the way for Canadian CF-18s to embark on airstrikes in the Middle East.

After two days of debate, the motion to launch a combat mission against the militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant passed 157-134.

Some 155 Conservatives voted in favour of the motion, with the help of Independent MP Brent Rathgeber and Green MP Bruce Hyer, while the NDP and the Liberals were opposed. Liberal MP Irwin Cotler abstained from the vote.

Combat missions do not ordinarily require the approval of the House of Commons, but Harper himself promised any combat mission, including airstrikes, would be subject to a debate and a vote.

Canada had initially stayed out of the U.S.-led campaign against the now-notorious al-Qaida splinter group, which is currently in control of large swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq.

A sustained bombing effort targeting ISIL positions began in August. The following month, Canada quietly announced it would provide up to 69 special forces “advisers” for 30 days to train Iraqi and Kurdish fighters currently battling the group. At last word, 26 of those troops were on the ground in Iraq.

Those soldiers will now be part of a sustained six-month campaign that includes as many as six CF-18 fighter-bombers, two CP-140 surveillance planes, one refuelling aircraft and 600 personnel, but which expressly excludes the possibility of additional ground forces.

I approve of the war, but I fear what will come.