[PHOTO] Coffee machine, Galleria Italia, Art Gallery of Ontario

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily has a despairing essay predicting totalitarianisms like that of the Islamic State might do quite well across the Muslim world.


• blogTO notes a comparatively inexpensive house for sale at 54 Dupont Street.


• D-Brief notes how it was determined that mysterious object G2 in orbit of our galaxy's black hole was determined to be a binary star, not a gas cloud.


• Eastern Approaches looks at electoral shenanigans in Romania and separatist eastern Ukraine.


• Language Hat notes that the TV show Homeland has terrible Urdu, and Pakistani English, too.


• Why I Love Toronto celebrates El Mocambo.


• Window on Eurasia notes Karakalpak separatism in Uzbekistan.

[LINK] "Dean Del Mastro, guilty of breaking election laws, resigns"

From CBC:

Dean Del Mastro, the MP for Ontario's Peterborough riding, has quit less than a week after being found guilty of spending too much on his 2008 campaign and trying to cover it up.

[. . .]

Del Mastro denies having done anything wrong, despite the Ontario Court of Justice finding him guilty. He told the House he would continue to fight. He said Monday that he would appeal to re-open his defence ahead of his sentencing on Nov. 21.

MPs are to vote tonight on whether to suspend him from Parliament. One of the penalties for breaking certain laws in the Canada Elections Act, including the offences for which he was found guilty, is a five-year ban on holding a seat in Parliament or running for a seat.

The Conservatives had suggested having the procedure and House affairs committee look at a number of questions regarding Del Mastro, including whether he should be suspended or expelled and what would happen to his staff and travel budget. But Government House Leader Peter Van Loan said yesterday that they would vote in favour of an NDP motion to suspend Del Mastro immediately.

In resigning his seat, Del Mastro hangs onto his MP pension, for which he's eligible when he turns 55. Del Mastro, who is 44, was first elected in January 2006. MPs have to serve for at least six years to be eligible to collect a pension.

[LINK] "Liberal MPs Scott Andrews, Massimo Pacetti suspended from caucus amid harassment allegations

This came as a surprise. Good for Trudeau that he reacted, at least.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has suspended ethics critic Scott Andrews and Quebec MP Massimo Pacetti from the party's caucus after two New Democrat MPs alleged they were harassed.

Trudeau was informed last week of allegations against the MPs, according to a letter distributed by party whip Judy Foote. The party referred the allegations to House Speaker Andrew Scheer for an independent investigation.

Both MPs deny the allegations, but have been suspended pending resolution.

The letter refers to the allegations being about "personal misconduct."

Trudeau gave no additional details when questioned by reporters after the party's weekly caucus meeting. He didn't answer questions about whether the alleged misconduct was sexual harassment, when it happened, or the exact nature of the allegations.

"I am aware of how difficult it is for people to come forward. I believe strongly that those of us in positions of authority have a duty to act upon allegations of this nature," Trudeau said.

"It's 2014 — we have a duty to protect and encourage individuals in these situations to come forward. The action must be fair but decisive. It must be sensitive to all affected parties but, recognizing how difficult it is to do so, it must give the benefit of the doubt to those who come forward."

[LINK] "How an Ancient Angled Impact Created Vesta’s Groovy Belt"

Universe Today's Jason Major notes how physical modelling has revealed just how asteroid-belt protoplanet Vesta acquired some of its more unusual markings. Vesta is lucky to have survived, it turns out.

When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta in July 2011, two features immediately jumped out at planetary scientists who had been so eagerly anticipating a good look at the giant asteroid. One was a series of long troughs encircling Vesta’s equator, and the other was the enormous crater at its southern pole. Named Rheasilvia, the centrally-peaked basin spans 500 kilometers in width and it was hypothesized that the impact event that created it was also responsible for the deep Grand Canyon-sized grooves gouging Vesta’s middle.

[. . .]

“Vesta got hammered,” said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the study’s senior author. “The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior.”

Using a 4-meter-long air-powered cannon at NASA’s Ames Vertical Gun Range, Peter Schultz and Brown graduate Angela Stickle – now a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory – recreated cosmic impact events with small pellets fired at softball-sized acrylic spheres at the type of velocities you’d find in space.

The impacts were captured on super-high-speed camera. What Stickle and Schultz saw were stress fractures occurring not only at the points of impact on the acrylic spheres but also at the point directly opposite them, and then rapidly propagating toward the midlines of the spheres… their “equators,” if you will.

Scaled up to Vesta size and composition, these levels of forces would have created precisely the types of deep troughs seen today running askew around Vesta’s midsection.

[LINK] "Jian Ghomeshi’s Poison Pen"

At Maisonneuve, Carly Lewis deftly analyzes, with the help over various PR professionals, Jian Ghomeshi's infamous Facebook posting from last Sunday. It was well-crafted enough to last for a day, yet flawed. It's a nice take.

Jian Ghomeshi’s voice sounds like a latte being poured. He’s charming. Many find him a comfort. Get into a cab in any Canadian city on a weekday morning: Q is on the radio. It plays on one of the only stations you can hear in the woods. He is familiar.

So are his PR moves.

On Sunday, Oct. 26, hours before the Toronto Star published its first story containing violent allegations against him, Ghomeshi released a Facebook post, skillfully crafted, it’s reported, with the help of powerful public relations firm Navigator Ltd. (Past clients include Michael Bryant and Brian Mulroney.)

With the post, Ghomeshi mobilized an army of allies just in time. “His pre-emptive strike was aimed at hitting hard first, to intimidate and potentially reduce his enemy’s ability to respond, knowing that media stories were imminent,” says Heath Applebaum, owner and principle consultant at Toronto’s Echo Communications. “He knew that the CBC, with their privacy policies, and the anonymous women who refused to come forward publicly, would be at a disadvantage. He wanted to project the image that he had nothing to hide.”

Applebaum is one of three damage control (or reputation management) experts who agreed to comb through Ghomeshi’s Facebook note with me. For most outside Canada’s media microcosm, it was the first they’d ever heard about Ghomeshi’s dusky reputation. Initially, the post was “liked” by over 100,000 Facebook fans—that figure is in decline as more women come forward with accounts of violence and brutality. “It now appears to be a thinly veiled ploy to silence his critics and victims,” Applebaum says. “It was successful for about a day.”

Ghomeshi’s note was successful, however fleetingly, because it reinforced untruthful stereotypes about Good Men and Crazy Women. Texting “Happy Thursday” to a woman the morning after sexually assaulting her would be a move from the same playbook—to leave a person bewildered by hatching a reality too gruelling to confront.

[URBAN NOTE] "Reclaiming Spaces/Places: Restoring Indigenous street names in Toronto"

At Spacing Toronto, Lacey McRae Williams writes about an interesting, politically-inspired effort to restore First Nations placenames across Toronto. I'll have to look for some of these signs.

The Ogimaa Mikana (Leader’s Trail) project began at the height of the Idle No More movement as a means of reclaiming and renaming streets and places in Toronto. As Hayden explains it, the idea has been to create visible and provocative interruptions in the urban landscape.

The two ways Hayden [King, the Director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance & Assistant Professor of Politics at Ryerson] and his team reinsert Anishinaabe language and culture into Toronto are done by 1) taking the literal translation of the place name and using the Anishinaabemowin name, and 2) reinterpreting a place name to disrupt the normative physical cityscape.

At Spadina, for example, the original Anishinabemowin name replaced the Anglicized street name (see picture above). Ishpadinaa literally translates to “little hill” or “place on a hill” which makes a lot of sense when standing at College looking north up ‘Spadina Avenue’ or even south to the water.

On Queen Street the team chose to replace ‘Queen’ with what they ended up titling their project, Ogimaa Mikana, meaning ‘Leader’s Trail’. The reason for placing the ‘Leader’s Trail’ on Queen Street may not need explaining for some; It did for me however, because like many residents, I took this street name at face value and had associated it with the space it occupies now, ‘The Fashion District’. This name became a part of my everyday, blended in, and I didn’t take the time until recently to question its origins.

It makes perfect sense then to dethrone the cross-Atlantic monarchy, temporarily at least, and replace the space with a tactile homage to local indigenous leaders making real change on our lands. This piece was installed the day Chief Theresa Spence ended her fast to honour her and all the women leaders at the forefront of the Idle No More movement. It was an act of solidarity.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why isn't Parkdale like Rexdale (politically)?"

Livejournaler jsburbidge wonders why, politically speaking if not economically or socially, the left-leaning Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale is so different from the right- and Ford-leaning neighbourhood of Rexdale. It's a nice piece of analysis where the author suggests that the Canadian Left is just not socially distinctive enough--not compelling enough--to take root in newer environments and communities.

The elements that cut across the Parkdale social fabric are historically conditioned by the left -- the presence of small social initiatives and an originally working-class matrix. The immigrant communities of Rexdale tend to be more inward-looking and more conservative. (Modulo the issue of poverty, the Italian immigrant community in Trinity-Spadina riding is similarly more conservative and inward-looking than the overall average of the rest of the residents.)

But I'm not sure that this would make a difference if it weren't for the changes which have taken place in the Left.

Back in the days when the working-class communities along Queen in the Parkdale and Trinity-Bellwoods areas were being established, the Left was "aspirational" almost to the point of being millenarian. It held out a goal of transforming society in ways which would benefit the people at the bottom of the heap (the proletariat).

Several things happened to that. First, the promise of Marxism as being a "science" of history collapsed when the "inevitable" conflicts of class struggle were averted by factors such as technical advances which Marx had failed to anticipate. Secondly, the collapse of the soviet bloc left socialism looking rather tarnished (although it would be fair to apply to the practice of Marxism in that bloc Chesterton's dictum re Christianity: "it has not been tried in the balance and found wanting; it has been found difficult and never been tried").

There were, of course, all sorts of non-Marxist forms of socialism, some of which still inform the more social democratic states in Europe. These seem to have been let go in North America. (Socialism used to be an accepted model even on the mild left. "We are all socialists now", said William Harcourt, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Gladstone.)

[LINK] "Illegally mining Russia's 'Baltic gold'"

Mansur Mirovalev and Denis Sinyakov's Al Jazeera article takes a look at illegal amber mining in Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. Faced with economic collapse locally, the mass export of Kaliningrad's amber--legal or otherwise--is a tempting alternative even for professionals. The Russian state is involved in this.

Amber has become post-Soviet Russia's "blood diamond" that has killed dozens of black diggers and enriched or impoverished thousands of craftsmen, smugglers and middlemen - amid an amber boom in China that sent prices up and redrew the world map of the "solar stone" trade.

Digger Alexander says his illegal job is his only chance to earn a decent living in the Montenegro-sized region of one million, where competition with European farmers made agriculture unprofitable, Soviet-era plants have been shut down, and rampant corruption stifles business.

"I have no other choice," says the former schoolteacher who refused to provide his last name citing safety reasons. During a cigarette break, he climbs a hillock that overlooks a wasteland of dead grass, other man-made pools, and upturned soil that soak in the drizzle falling from the grey October sky. "Every third guy my age around here does the same," Alexander adds.

[. . .]

After the 1991 Soviet Union collapse, amber mining - like almost any other industry in Russia - was rife with corruption and crime. Corrupt mine guards turned a blind eye to black diggers - who could get away with a fine of 500 rubles ($13) if caught, and who drove around in SUVs equipped with powerful pumps - or took part in the theft themselves. Hundreds of tonnes of amber were smuggled to Poland and Lithuania.

"There were bandits, crooks and thieves," says Galina Spivak, a guide at Combine's museum. Most of Combine's 3,000 workers were fired and "resorted to what desperate Russian men do - drinking vodka and hanging themselves", she adds bitterly.

In 2004, after a contract-style killing of a businessman who tried to wrestle control of the amber trade, a star was born. Viktor Bogdan, a former police sergeant nicknamed "Ballet", monopolised the sale of Combine's entire output to domestic and foreign buyers, and started calling himself "The Amber King".

After the Kremlin's intervention in 2012, Bogdan was charged with fraud and now awaits extradition from Poland. A new team headed by a former KGB officer was appointed to manage Combine and boost domestic production of amber.

[URBAN NOTE] "Guy Fawkes Night, 1864"

As described by Daniel Panneton at Torontoist, Guy Fawkes Night was in the mid-19th century an ethnically fraught holiday. Maybe that's why it isn't so big in a Canada where Roman Catholics now form a plurality of the population.

Irish Catholic migrants who came to Toronto in the late 1840s to escape the Famine found themselves in a British and staunchly Protestant world. The municipal government was firmly in the hands of the Orange Order of Canada, an ultra-Protestant and fiercely anti-Catholic fraternity. Facing both official prejudice and a restrictive job market, Irish Catholics turned inwards, founding densely populated and impoverished neighbourhoods such as Corktown and Cabbagetown.

In his paper, the Irish Canadian, Patrick Boyle complained that Toronto “was in the hands of an Orange mob, aided in their work of blood and ruin by an Orange Mayor.” Boyle backed his claim by detailing transgressions committed by Orangemen in the past decade: an 1856 attempt to blow up the House of Providence, an 1858 St. Patrick’s Day riot that ended in the murder of an Irish Catholic, and an 1858 incident in which an Orange mob attacked the National Festival of Ireland.

The Hibernian Benevolent Society had been founded in 1859 to celebrate and protect Irish Catholics. Members of the Fenian Brotherhood, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, quickly infiltrated the Society and politicized its ranks. The Irish Canadian insisted that Irish Catholics “are a law-abiding, peaceable people, desirous that all classes of community shall enjoy the fullest political freedom” and warned the Orangemen that “the men whom you threaten are not school-boys, to be frightened by big words.” The Irish Catholics were not prepared to “lie tamely down and suffer the hell-child of Orange Ascendancy.”

In the days leading up to the Guy Fawkes celebrations of 1864, rumours began to circulate that the Orangemen were planning to burn effigies of Pope Pius IX, Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, and the recently deceased Duke of Newcastle.

Many observers feared street violence would break out. Invoking a riot that had killed 11 that spring in Belfast, the Irish Canadian claimed that on November 5, 1864, “the [Orange] lodges met and determined to follow the example of their brethren” in Ireland. The Hibernians publicly declared they would prevent any such demonstration, by force if necessary. It was only the intervention of Mayor Francis Henry Medcalf and several other Orange leaders that prevented the Order’s rank and file from carrying out their bonfire. Celebrations were held, but, save for a small flute band’s evening parade, took place entirely indoors.

The Orangemen’s restraint did little to cool the tempers of the Hibernians, who, in spite of the Catholic Church’s opposition, were determined to demonstrate that evening. Reports vary, but between 300 and 600 Irish Catholics gathered at Queen’s Park, “armed to the teeth with guns and pikes.”