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Nov. 7th, 2014
Tbis will be the last of my Prince Edward Island photos this year.
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Nov. 7th, 2014 10:23 am- Bad Astronomy notes the astoundingly successful imaging of the nascent HL Tauri system and its young planetary system.
- Centauri Dreams briefly notes some of the challenges of SETI, notably the possibility of very different life and intelligence.
- The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how exoplanetary systems are structured mathematically.
- Eastern Approaches notes political turmoil in Georgia.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money mocks Bank of Canada governor Stephen Peloz's proposal that the unemployed should work for free.
- John Moyer notes that the understanding of poverty in popular culture in North America is off. Poor people do not own chalets on the lakeside, as in one rom-com.
- Torontoist notes that the North by Northeast music festival will be setting up shopping on the grounds of the substantially empty MaRS research complex near Queen's Park.
- Window on Eurasia notes Crimean Tatar controversies in Russian life and looks at the effect of migration to Moscow.
News that Spadina Avenue music joint El Mocambo was set to closer triggered, as the CBC noted, the place's purchase by a Canadian businessman and television celebrity.
The Globe and Mail's Ann Hui has more about the background.
While the idea of keeping El Mocambo going, at least for a little while until its viability can be determined, does appeal to me, I wonder if there are other motives. Self-promotion, perhaps?
The El Mocambo was slated to close its doors for good on Thursday night, until a new investor stepped forward to buy the legendary music venue.
Dragons' Den cast member Michael Wekerle put down a deposit to buy the Spadina Avenue music haunt, and El Mocambo has accepted it.
The $3.78-million purchase is set to close by middle of January 2015, according to Wekerle.
"I made the decision within a week and bought it within a day," Wekerle told CBC News.
The Globe and Mail's Ann Hui has more about the background.
For months, owner Sam Grosso had been looking for a way to keep open the historic building with its trademark green and yellow palm tree sign, which he could no longer afford to keep afloat. “I knocked on a lot of doors … and the doors kept shutting,” he said.
But when he put the famous neon sign up for sale, Mr. Wekerle, the 50-year-old CEO of Difference Capital took notice.
“I heard that the sign was up for sale, so I drove by and saw the building was for sale,” Mr. Wekerle said. In a deal finalized on Wednesday, he bought the club for $3.7-million.
The heavily-tattooed CEO, who likes to describe himself as “Mick Jagger meets Warren Buffett,” said he made the purchase because of his love of music, as well as the importance El Mocambo has played throughout Toronto’s music history.
While the idea of keeping El Mocambo going, at least for a little while until its viability can be determined, does appeal to me, I wonder if there are other motives. Self-promotion, perhaps?
At Vice, Mark Galeotti writes about the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on regional and global criminal networks.
Just as the Kremlin was setting up its new administration in newly annexed Crimea, so, too, were the big Moscow-based crime networks sending their smotryashchye—the term means a local overseer, but now also means, in effect, an ambassador—there to connect with local gangs. In part, they're interested in the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement of the massive inflow of federal development funds perhaps $4.5 billion this year alone—and the newly-announced casino complexes to be built near the resort city of Yalta. They're also looking to the Black Sea smuggling routes and the opportunity to make the Crimean port of Sevastopol the next big smuggling hub.
These days, the Ukrainian port of Odessa is the smugglers' haven of choice on the Black Sea. There's Afghan heroin coming through Russia and heading into Western Europe through Romania and Bulgaria, stolen cars coming north from Turkey, unlicensed Kalashnikovs heading into the Mediterranean, Moldovan women being trafficked into the Middle East, and a whole range of criminal commodities head out of Odessa Maritime Trade Port, along with its satellite facilities of Illichivsk and southern ports. Routes head both ways, though, and increasingly there is an inward flow of global illicit goods: Latin American cocaine (either for retransfer by sea or else to be trucked into Russia or Central Europe), women trafficked from Africa, even guns heading to the war zone.
The criminal authorities of Odessa, who have more than a nodding relationship with elements of the "upperworld" authorities, have done well on the back of this trade, charging a "tax" in return for letting their ports become nodes in the global criminal economy. But all of a sudden, they face potential competition in the form of Sevastopol. The Crimean port may currently be under embargo, but it has powerful potential advantages. The main criminal business through Odessa is on behalf, directly or indirectly, of the Russian networks; if they chose to switch their business, then perhaps two thirds of the city's smuggling would be lost. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol, and military supply convoys—which are exempt from regular police and customs checks—are a cheap and secure way to transport illicit goods. Finally, the links between the gangsters and local political leaders are at least as close in Crimea as in Odessa. So, if the criminals of Sevastopol can establish reliable shipping routes and are willing to match or undercut Odessa's rates, we could see a major realignment of regional smuggling.
Why does it matter if the ships dock at Sevastopol rather than Odessa? Because if the former can offer lower transit costs and new routes, then not only does it mean the Crimeans can take over existing smuggling business, it also makes new ventures economically viable. For example, already, counterfeit cigarettes are being smuggled to northern Turkey, having been brought into Crimea on military supply ships. Perhaps most alarming are unconfirmed suggestions I have heard from Ukrainian intelligence services—admittedly hardly objective observers—that some oil illegally sold through Turkey by Islamic State militants in Syria might have been moved to Sevastopol's private Avlita docks for re-export.
Ashfaq Yusufzai's Inter Press Service article describing the consequences of civil war on Pakistan's frontiers is depressing.
Residents of the Khyber Agency, one of seven administrative districts that comprise northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), are in the worst possible predicament: either course of action they choose now, they say, could result in death.
As Pakistan’s military offensive against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) expands slowly from North Waziristan Agency to the restive Khyber Province, civilians must decide whether or not to defy a Taliban ban on travel.
If they stay, they risk becoming victims of army shelling and gunfire, aimed at rooting out terrorists from the Afghan-Pakistan border regions where they have operated with impunity since 2001. If residents attempt to flee, they will face the wrath of militants who rely on the civilian population to provide cover against a wholesale military bombardment of the region.
At the end of October, members of the TTP issued a warning to local residents that their houses would be blown up if they followed the army’s evacuation orders, which came in the form of pamphlets dropped from helicopters ahead of a three-day deadline to militants to lay down their arms or face a major offensive.
Literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, some residents have chosen to heed the Taliban’s threat, while others are risking life and limb to escape the embattled zone and find refuge in safer areas.
This Window on Eurasia summary of a Russian-language article predicting a Chinese victory over Russia if it came to war over Siberia is alarmist. I don't see it easy at all at avoid escalation to a nuclear conflict, for instance. It does seem to reflect a new post-Crimean sense of Russian vulnerability, though.
“Of course,” he continues, “a peaceful form of expansion (economic and demographic) would be preferable, but a military variant is not excluded.” Beijing’s military preparedness moves strongly suggest that Chinese leaders are thinking about it. Indeed, “in recent years, the Chinese army has been carrying out exercises which it is simply impossible to treat as anything but preparation for aggression against Russia.”
China is no longer dependent on Russia for arms. Not only has it long demonstrated its ability to steal American and European technology in that area, Khramchikhin says, but its own domestic product has so improved that Russia no longer enjoys unquestioned superiority over China in the military field and in some areas is already far behind.
The only sector within that branch where China continues to purchase significant amounts of Russian military technology is the navy which it would use in the event of operations against Taiwan and the United States. It is “obvious” that there isn’t going to be a naval war between China and Russia; if and when it occurs, it will be between two land forces.
[. . .]
Despite the warm words between Moscow and Beijing in recent months, it is important to point out, Khramchikhin says, that recently, military technology cooperation between the two countries has broken down, partially because of the rapid degradation of the Russian military industrial complex and partially because China wants to have a free hand against Russia.
Qualitatively and quantitatively, the armed forces of Russia and China are “now approximately equal,” but China is moving ahead in many areas. It already vastly outnumbers Russian forces, its training programs are better and more intensive, and its weapons systems are improving relative to those of Russia as well.
Thus, Khramchikhin concludes, “we have no chances in a conventional war” with China, something Beijing understands. Russia still has vast superiority in strategic nuclear forces but even there it is losing ground, especially in terms of the number of intermediate ballistic missiles which might be used and perhaps, although the data are unavailable, in tactical nuclear weapons.
[LINK] "China's Missing Babies"
Nov. 7th, 2014 06:32 pmBloomberg View's Adam Minter points out that Chinese fertility is not going to pick up with the revision or even abolition of the one-child policy. Chinese parents, just like parents in other developed societies, are reluctant to have many children.
In one of the signature reform measures of his early presidency, Xi Jinping declared last November that China’s notorious “one-child” policy would become a “two-child” policy for couples where either husband or wife was an only child. While the change didn’t abolish the often brutally enforced population control measure, it was a start. Chinese officials hoped the announcement would usher in a mini-baby boom, predicting as many as 2 million additional births per year to parents who had long been denied full reproductive rights.
Xi’s government, of course, wasn’t merely expressing its love of children. The point was to find a quick fix -- let them have more kids! -- to a looming demographic disaster: By 2050, one in four Chinese will be 65 or older, placing intense pressure on families, social services, and the economy. Yet what’s fast becoming clear is that there’s no easy solution to China’s population problems.
The proof is in data released on Wednesday by China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. Of the more than 11 million Chinese couples that became eligible to have a second child, only 700,000 have applied to do so. (Around 620,000 were approved.) No national-level data was provided as to how many children have been born to those couples. But the city of Chongqing, whose population of more than 33 million is sometimes called the world’s largest, was disappointed to claim a mere 5,015 births as a result of the reform.
Why aren’t Chinese parents embracing the chance to have more kids? The biggest problem is one familiar to parents worldwide: It’s expensive to raise children in China, and only becoming more so. While hard data on this point is lacking, the anecdotal evidence is persuasive -- and is embraced by Chinese government organizations and state media. A December 2013 report from the state-run All-China Women’s Federation, for instance, claimed that urban Chinese families earning between RMB 4,000 and RMB 10,000 per month were, on average, spending RMB 3,000 per month on their kids. The rising costs are driven by a number of factors, especially expensive school fees.
Surprise! From the CBC.
A Health Canada study has found no link between exposure to wind turbine noise and negative health effects in people.
Wind turbine noise did not have any measurable effect on illness and chronic disease, stress and sleep quality, Health Canada said.
However, the louder the wind turbine noise was, the more people reported being very or extremely annoyed, the department reported in a summary released today of the Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study.
The $2.1-million study, conducted with Statistics Canada in southern Ontario and Prince Edward Island, was launched in 2012. At that time, groups such as Wind Concerns Ontario had alleged that growing numbers of wind turbines were making people ill.
[. . .]
The study involved an adult in each of more 1,238 households at varying distances from wind turbines. The participants answered a questionnaire in person, and health measurements were taken, including blood pressure, heart rate, measures of sleep quality, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples.
The researchers also measured 4,000 hours of wind turbine noise in order to calculate indoor and outdoor noise levels at different homes in the study.
Anne Kingston's cover article in MacLean's is damning about everyone: Jian Ghomeshi, the CBC that enabled their star to be a monster unfettered, the people who knew something was up.
Now, the private Ghomeshi—the version given a free pass by his employer but well known within arts and media circles as “kind of dark with women,” as a friend of one of his accusers put it to her—was suddenly public. It was a case of everybody knew—except for the hundreds of thousands of listeners who started the day with his soothing voice, and who, understandably, trusted in the person presented to them by the CBC.
No one saw that disconnect more clearly than the dozen or so people who worked on Q. Although Ghomeshi was not the boss at the show, he was the “talent”—and the place operated as his fiefdom of sorts, a workplace with exacting standards and often cruel punishment for those who didn’t live up to them. “The culture was horrifying because of Jian,” says a former female producer. “He was a master of mind games,” says another former staffer. One day, Ghomeshi would be jovial and generous; the next, cold and dismissive. His chronic lateness kept staff on edge; he kept people waiting for hours. Everyone bridled—at least privately—at his mood swings and his penchant for playing staff against one another. The predominantly female staff found themselves reduced to tears by his tirades. The trauma and unhappiness within the unit was known within CBC, says a longtime CBC employee not associated with the show. And yet, CBC management never intervened. A producer who has alleged that Ghomeshi fondled her and told her he wanted to “hate-f–k” her reported she was told by the executive producer to try to work around it; Ghomeshi wasn’t going to change. This week, two more women—one a former Q staffer, another a current CBC employee—alleged Ghomeshi was abusive and sexually aggressive. One was afraid to speak out. The other says she told a supervisor but nothing happened. Even when Ghomeshi reportedly went to the CBC this spring about a story in the works about his interest in “rough sex,” management simply took his word for it that it was consensual.
But if Q staff saw a pattern of manipulation, it’s easy to see why they didn’t challenge it. “Nothing in Jian’s world happened by accident until recently,” says a former staffer. Anyone who disagreed with Ghomeshi could be cut off, says one producer: “If he perceived intellectual disagreement of any kind, he would freeze you out for days or weeks, which would make it impossible to do your job.” People who dared to confront him about his bad behaviour would be targeted. Ghomeshi could get angry and was often petulant, especially when he felt slighted. Story pitches would be subject to extra scrutiny, tiny faults would become a pretext for rewriting an entire script, and he would stop responding to emails and phone messages. Some staff came to believe that Ghomeshi was subtly telegraphing on air who was in his bad books by refusing to use their nicknames, as he usually did, when he read out the show credits at the end of the week.
Ghomeshi also had a reputation for being thin-skinned: “He could have an auditorium full of people applauding him, but if he goes out into the hall and somebody says, ‘You suck,’ it eats him alive,” says Roberto Veri, who worked as a Q producer in the show’s early days. “He’s a narcissist, very self-involved.” One former CBC employee who issued a critical tweet about an episode of Q, years after she’d left the corporation, reports that she received an angry phone call from the host.
There were occasional attempts to deal through official channels. And there was a widely shared view that management were unwilling to, or simply incapable of reining in the man who had become the face of CBC Radio. One former Q staffer saw the problem as systemic: “This whole economy at CBC is screwed up, and this guy took advantage of it. People are on contract; they don’t have secure jobs, and even those who do are led to feel lucky they do.”
[META] What do you think about Medium?
Nov. 7th, 2014 11:43 pmIn May and then again in September, I blogged about Livejournal's efforts to become something like Medium, a blogging platform for long-format journalism and writing.
(This hasn't happened.)
I have been thinking about starting to put content, not links but posts involving writing and analysis, over on Medium. What are my reader's opinions of that platform?
(This hasn't happened.)
I have been thinking about starting to put content, not links but posts involving writing and analysis, over on Medium. What are my reader's opinions of that platform?