[PHOTO] Looking north at Dundas and McCaul

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO suggests five things the world can learn about Toronto.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the moa of New Zealand became extinct when the country was home to only a couple thousand people.


• A Fistful of Euros links to satirist musician Wolf Biermann's performance in the Bundestag.


• Geocurrents maps oddly-shaped American electoral regions.


• Language Hat notes the long history of a Chinese-influenced literary language in Korea.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that North Korea is exporting labourers to Qatar to work on World Cup facilities there.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that the Russian invasion of Ukraine might be explained by fear of political contagion.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the search for binary asteroids.


• Understanding Society considers the complicated relationship between modern sociologists and the great luminary pioneers of the field.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Kazakhstan is not ready for the eastern Ukrainian scenario.


• The Financial Times' World blog notes pseudohistory regarding ancient achievements of Hindus.

[LINK] "The Grapes of Wrath: France's Great Wines Are Feeling the Heat"

Spiegel International carries Ullrich Fichtner's article describing how climate change--specifically, decreasing precipitation--is starting to harm the French wine industry.

In the soft light of the chandeliers at Château Ausone, Alain Vauthier veers away from the issue at hand, taking flight into distant centuries, reaching for safe anecdotes, digressing into tales of the Wars of the Roses and racehorses, broken tractors and the bold adventures of his ancestors in Algeria. Against a backdrop of gold-colored silk tapestries, he mentions the '47 Cheval Blanc he once drank, finds excuses to talk about lobsters and the early days of television, and to complain about French highway tolls that make it cheaper to fly with budget airlines -- anything to avoid talking about the real issue, the issue one no one wants to talk about.

Twice, he says: "I'm not one of those who deny climate change," and yet, in his elegant way, that's exactly what he is doing. It's all very complex, he says, an older man in a short-sleeved shirt who, as a winemaker, has managed to be ranked 273rd on the list of the wealthiest Frenchmen. Vauthier says there is certainly no "bon problème," the term used in the region to refer to climate change until recently. But he does recognize that there is a "faux problème," one that has been invented. Global warming hasn't actually been all that disadvantageous, he says, at least not here in Bordeaux, or Bordelais, as the French call it, and certainly not in the vineyards of his Château Ausone, which is permitted to use the classification Saint-Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classé "A" for its wines.

Seven hectares, only seven (17 acres), are the source of its fame. The vineyard produces 12,000 bottles a year, and in good vintages, every one of those bottles is worth at least €1,500 ($1,910) in Tokyo, Hamburg and New York, even before the wine has aged. The business, if that's what you can call the castle, has been in the hands of only four families in the last 400 years. The Vauthiers have been there for the last two centuries. Their cheerful château is perched on a rocky plateau above a world that looks like an oil painting, with its soft tiers of hillside vineyards extending into the wide Dordogne Valley, sprinkled with the silhouettes of church towers. It's a location that Hugh Johnson, once anointed the pope of wines, characterized as "clearly the most promising in all of Bordeaux." If it's true, then Vauthier runs the best vineyard in France.

[. . .]

He pours a 2006 Ausone into the glasses, a wine as dark and dense as blood with a retail price of €600 per bottle, an edgy, promising and still untamed wine with sharp notes of Cabernet Franc.

As he takes a sip and spits it out again, Vauthier says, as if he had suddenly changed his mind: "The storms, well, perhaps they are getting worse." He won't forget the bad weather they had in the June before last, when a hailstorm came up from the southwest and descended upon a 12,000-hectare (30,000-acre) stretch of land. "Twelve-thousand hectares," says Vauthier, "that's never happened before." Within minutes, 5,000 hectares of top-quality Bordeaux grapes were destroyed, "literally hacked to pieces," says Vauthier. "Perhaps, monsieur, this is your climate change."

Extreme weather is becoming more common in all of France's wine-growing regions. Heavy rains and hailstorms frequently come on the heels of summer heat waves and dry periods. Winters and nighttime temperatures are so mild that the plants are never able to rest. Few winegrowers continue to deny these tangible phenomena.

[LINK] "How My Little Pony Became a Cult for Grown Men and Preteen Girls Alike"

New York's Lisa Miller has a nice article examining the reasons why My Little Pony has of lately become a hit across various demographics (age, gender). A commitment to good writing and to creating interesting content for girls by the originator of the current incarnation, Lauren Faust, is key.

My daughter noticed when she was approximately 3 that adventure stories were for boys. Magical powers are bestowed upon certain special, deserving boys — Peter Pan, Peter Parker, Harry Potter — while other boys (Luke Skywalker, King Arthur, the boy-esque Bagginses) inherit potent tools that aid them in their fight for right. Some boy-heroes work alone (Superman, Spider-Man), others in teams (X-Men, Avengers); the girls, if they're there at all, feel obligatory, ancillary, like sidekicks. But Lauren Faust's career tracks closely with a sea change in entertainment for girls, starting with the makeover of the movie princess, who no longer cools her heels, locked up or asleep, as she attends to her prince, but outfights and outshoots her brothers (Brave), defies convention (Maleficent), heals the sick (Tangled), and copes with the existential consequences of supernatural gifts (Frozen). At this very moment, dissertations are being written (“Hermione Granger and the ­Heritage of Gender”) about the magical Muggle-born who bravely claims a place for girls in worlds — of wizards, of English boarding schools — that were formerly hostile to them, and Pixar is putting the finishing touches on Inside Out, to be released this summer, which unfolds inside a girl's brain. The YA shelves are filled with girl vampires, girl warriors, girls who can fly, and orphaned sisters destined for greatness. There's Wicked, of course. And for my money, the most exquisite indicator of the ascendancy of the underage superheroine is Broadway's Matilda, a musical adaptation of a Roald Dahl tale, featuring a cranky, sensitive, brainy girl with a finely tuned sense of justice, who, when pushed past her limit, resembles the Hulk more than any little girl in the history of myth.

Faust was a lonely child who spent a lot of time in her room in suburban Maryland playing with her beloved My Little Pony dolls. Her first pony, which she bought with her own money when she was 7, was called “Peachy.” “I wasn't so much a Barbie girl. I wasn't into combing hair and changing clothes,” Faust told me. She loved her ­brother's X-Men comics, too, and didn't see why stories for boys and for girls had to be so different. But Hasbro earned her devotion forever when Faust learned it also produced ponies with unicorn horns and wings. “That was the real clincher for me. I was already reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and I realized: My Little Pony isn't just horses. It's fantasy.”

Faust found her tribe and her vocation at CalArts, but she remained infuriated — “as a feminist and on a practical level” — that girls' entertainment was so belittled by her peers, deemed “automatically stupid and automatically lame and automatically unworthy.” She saw the problem differently: Girls didn't dislike cartoons because of their gender; they disliked them because they understood they were being condescended to. “I didn't like growing up being told things for girls were stupid and therefore I was stupid,” she told me. She caught an episode of a Strawberry Shortcake reboot one afternoon in the mid-aughts. “Not one single person who worked on this show cared about it. They thought, This is a dumb show for little girls, and I need a paycheck so I'm just going to crap something out and go home.”

The Powerpuff Girls proved Faust's point. Created by her husband, Craig McCracken (and originally named The Whoopass Girls), Powerpuff was a superhero cartoon featuring three bubble-shaped female avengers of preschool age — “sweet little kindergarten girls beating people up,” says Faust, who worked on the show, first as a storyboard artist, then as a writer and a director. During its six-year run, Powerpuff developed a cult following among kids and their parents as well, at the very moment that it became cool among some grown-ups to demonstrate interest in Japanese anime at dinner parties and to smoke a little weed and tune in to the Cartoon Network after the kids were in bed. Powerpuff was nominated for five Emmys and won two.

When, in 2008, a Hasbro executive invited Faust to pitch a My Little Pony reboot, the first thing she did was to pull Peachy off the shelf. Within six weeks, she had made a “Bible,” 40-plus pages of sketches rendering the universe that had existed in her 8-year-old mind. And the thing that Faust insisted on most of all was that her main characters, her core six, be dimensional — differentiated from one another and flawed. Most shows for girls have “one archetype,” Faust told me. “She's nice and she's sweet and she cares about her friends and she likes to share. And the only difference between any of them is this one likes pink and this one likes blue. That's the range of personalities girls get to have. But that's incorrect. There are lots of different ways to be a girl.”

[LINK] "Bangladeshi migrants eke out a living in Rome"

Al Jazeera's Nishtha Chugh writes about the lives of Italy's large and growing community of Bangladeshi migrants.

[Italy] is now home to a growing number of Bangladeshi migrants, many of whom have been smuggled or trafficked into the country.

According to the Italian Bureau of Statistics (ISTAT), in 2009, 11,000 Bangladeshi migrants were living in the country on unverified documents. New estimates released since then by various independent sources suggest their number could now be as high as 70,000. With 122,000 residents, Italy has the second largest Bangladeshi community in Europe after Britain.

"In scale it may not seem comparable with the crisis involving migrants from North Africa making a perilous attempt to reach Italy in overcrowded boats. But due to fewer economic opportunities at home, many Bangladeshis are resorting to equally desperate measures and facing similar levels of risk in the hope of a better life in Europe," said Dr Md Mizanur Rahman, senior research fellow in migration studies at National University of Singapore.

Poverty and high unemployment have made migration an integral part of Bangladeshi society and culture, Rahman said. "Male members are now invariably expected to migrate to cities or overseas to uplift the family financially," he said.

It took Faisal 11 months and 1,600,000 Bangladeshi takas ($20,535) to reach Rome from Dubai, where he and his father were employed as construction workers. By air, the two cities are six hours apart and a one-way ticket costs about $400.

In 2011, things took a turn for the worse when his father lost use of his hands in an accident months before Faisal's visa was due for renewal. The responsibility for providing for his elderly parents, four sisters, wife and two children now rested on him.

"Poor men have poorer luck, you see," Faisal tries to force a smile. "I didn't get my [visa] extension and going home was not an option. I had too many mouths to feed."

[LINK] "Voting in the Donetsk People’s Republic"

Open Democracy's Ilya Vasyunin writes about the recent elections in the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, in eastern Ukraine. From the description of the events, the whole thing sounds not quite credible at the same time that it seems like it will cement the separation of the region from Ukraine.

There were originally seven pretenders to the post of head of the DPR, but only three made it to the elections – the acting premier Aleksandr Zakharchenko; Aleksandr Kofman – the deputy to the Parliament of Novorossiya’(the federal ‘state’ that the DPR and LPR nominally constitute); and Yury Sivokonenko – deputy to the DPR’s High Council. Aleksandr Kofman is a former manager in the retail company ‘Rush,’ which owns the EVA network of perfume shops in Ukraine. Yury Sivokonenko is a former instructor of combat training in the Berkut (Ukrainian riot police).

Out of the three candidates, acting ‘prime minister’ Aleksandr Zakharchenko conducted the most noteworthy campaign. Two days before the elections, he met with students from several higher institutions in the building of Donetsk Polytechnic University. He answered their questions on bursaries, halls of residence and degrees, while simultaneously encouraging them to turn out on election day. He also promised that the DPR would award degrees of its own making, without Kyiv’s participation; in response to which, the students worried whether such degrees would be recognised outside the bounds of the unrecognised republic?

‘Prime Minister’ Zakharchenko said that negotiations with Russia were ongoing, but he said that Iosef Kobzon (a Soviet-era crooner and current Duma deputy) had been in Donetsk a few days earlier, and had promised that he would do everything possible to ensure that DPR degrees were accepted not only in Russia but the whole world. The halls of residence that were currently being partially occupied by militia would be returned to students in the next two–to-three weeks. As for bursaries, they would be paid again after the New Year. ‘Pensioners are currently not getting pensions, they’re going hungry,’ Zakharchenko explained, ‘students, the most aware and intelligent group of people, will have to wait.’

‘Will there be military departments in the university?’ asked one of the students. To which, Zakharchenko replied: ‘I invite you to the zone of military activities; learn to hold a weapon in your hand. Every man should know how to do this, and to dig trenches.’ And drawing on his combat experience, the ‘prime minister’ continued, ‘it is a characteristic of youths to dig trenches “two bayonets” deep. This is wrong. Trenches need to be dug to human height and even a little more. The deeper you dig, the longer you live,’,

‘Prime Minister’ Zakharchenko had reason to reach out to the youth vote.

‘Prime Minister’ Zakharchenko had reason to reach out to the youth vote. By the decision of the DPR Electoral Commission, the voting age was lowered from 18 to 16 (‘like in the referendum in Scotland’ – announced the head of the commission, Roman Lyagin). But the commission could not confirm how much the number of voters had increased after the vote was granted to 16-year-olds.

Indeed, the lack of exact lists of voters was one of the main concerns with the electoral process. They were based on the lists used for the carrying out of the May referendum, which were themselves comprised of lists taken before the elections in 2012. According to the lists made in 2012, there are 3,198,000 eligible voters in the territory controlled by the DPR. This is exactly how many ballots were printed.

[LINK] "Does Putin's Russia Have a Future?"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky writes about futurology in contemporary Russia. As elsewhere in the world, futurology relates at least as much to concerns about the present as to serious predictions about the future. Things are not expected to be good, as noted in two linked scenarios.

Russia's present is too unbalanced to discuss, and President Vladimir Putin prefers to rehash the past. That increases the temptation to talk about the distant future, to fathom where the country's current trajectory is leading. Some smart commentators in Moscow have also given in to this temptation, and their scenarios are bleak.

The Russian ruble is down 30 percent against the U.S. dollar so far this year, causing runaway inflation -- 7.13 percent since the start of the year -- and a panic on the social networks. "Ruble Apocalypse Now," trumpeted Moscow's MK tabloid. A nationalist legislator has even revived a doomed proposal to ban the circulation of dollars in Russia. Another legislative proposal, which is much more likely to pass, imposes new taxes on small businesses. At a minimum of $130 per square meter of floor area per quarter, the taxes threaten to kill off many restaurants and hair salons, but the government desperately needs more revenue as oil prices plummet. A two-month-old truce in eastern Ukraine is falling apart, raising the specter of more Western sanctions and unacknowledged Russian casualties.

Good news is scarce, and there's no reason to expect things to get better in the near term. That may be why Putin's speeches have grown heavier on historical references. A recent major anti-Western tirade was mainly about the past, and yesterday, in remarks to Russian historians, he presented a spirtited defense of the 1938 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact[. . .]

[. . .]

Commentators such as Movchan and Inozemtsev know full well it's impossible to make accurate predictions even for the next year or two: Russia's strategic direction depends too much on the will of one man. As with most people in Russia, however, they see Putin's power as unshakable and project his increasingly nostalgic vision of Russia's role in the world into the future. It is, indeed, hard to see what force could topple Putin in the immediate future or change his mind about breaking with the West and making a doomed bid for self-sufficiency. Therefore the scenarios of economic gloom and political sclerosis.

[LINK] Five links about Berlin and East Germany, before and after the Wall

• National Geographic considers the largely positive change in reunified Berlin in the past 25 years.


• Bloomberg notes Angela Merkel's statement that the end of mass migration from the former East Germany to the West shows how East Germany has caught up.


• The New Yorker makes the case that, while falling short of complete convergence, East Germany's post-1989 economic history is one of rapid growth and success generally.


• MacLean's describes controversies surrounding popular culture in pre-fall East Germany.


• The Guardian notes the many ways in which elements of East German culture, like daycares and working mothers and careful planning for sports teams, have become incorporated into overall German norms.

[LINK] "Scientists Discover Genes That Helped Turn Fearsome Wildcats Into House Cats"

Wired's Nick Stockton writes about the evolutionary pressures which resulted in domesticated housecats, as revealed by a study examining genetic differences between domestic housecats and their wildcat relatives.

Cats are different than other domesticated animals. Unlike other species tamed for either food or labor, cats specialized in becoming mooches. Sure they catch mice, but it’s not like they do it for our sake. Despite these differences, many scientists believe that cats, like all domesticated animals, inherited certain genetic mutations from ancestors who were unafraid of humans. A new study identifies some of the genes that may be responsible for the differences between house cats and their wild ancestors.

[. . .]

By comparing the wildcat and house cat genomes, and looking for places where the house cat genome had undergone rapid changes, the researchers found three possible genetic links to that change in temperament. Compared to wildcats, house cats have more mutations on genes known to mediate aggressive behavior, form memories, and control the ability to learn from either fear or reward based stimuli. Cats with these traits would have mated with each other, repeatedly passing them along from parent to kitten until a significant population became distinct from their still-aggressive cousins.

“There’s a big difference between house cats and wildcats,” said Stephen O’Brien. “A house cat will sit on your lap, but a wild cat will hand you your behind.” These genes were most active in the neural crest, a group of embryonic cells that become the spinal cord in adult vertebrates.

Not all of the genetic differences were related to behavior. Living with humans put other selective pressures on cats, including the addition of vegetables to their diet. “Wildcats are pretty unique in the mammal world because they are hyper carnivores,” said Carlos Driscoll, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health and co-author of the study. “It’s not just that they don’t like eating non-protein foods, but it doesn’t seem to do them any good if they do.” House cats, on the other hand, do eat some plant matter, which probably came about from picking through our ancestors’ rubbish. This is reflected not only physiologically—house cats have a slightly longer large intestine than wildcats—but also in genes that control the digestion of fatty plant matter, which are more active in domesticated cats.

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC union vows to make next federal election the 'transit election'"

blogTO and Torontoist were two blogs highlighting the TTC transit workers' union report calling for mass transit to become a Canadian election issue. I'm inclined to think this a good thing.

Whether the candidates choose to talk about it or not, the next federal election will focus on Toronto's transit problems, according to TTC union boss Bob Kinnear.

"The transit election," as he calls it, will be an effort to get better funding for the TTC.

"We don't have to wait another five or 10 or 15 years to improve transit in Toronto, we can start now," said Kinnear at a press conference Monday morning at city hall.

Kinnear and the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) released 68 recommendations on how to improve public transit in the city. Much of what he's calling for has to do with funding. He said there is no other North American transit system that gets less money for operations than the TTC.

But Kinnear stressed his union was neither for or against SmartTrack, mayor-elect John Tory's plan to add rail lines and stations, mainly along existing GO Transit corridors.

He did raise an issue about which transit body will be responsible for integrating SmartTrack. "When you integrate a new system that is not going to be maintained by the TTC," Kinnear said, "there are serious concerns."

Kinnear said there was a $270-million funding gap in the TTC. He said the problem is worse than people think.

"Toronto has an unprecedented transit crisis," he warned, urging more sustainable funding from the federal government.

"Ottawa, we have a problem. No let me rephrase that. Ottawa, you have a problem."

[LINK] Corey Robin on migration restrictions after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Corey Robin's Crooked Timber post criticizing restrictions on migration, starting from two books (Caroline Moorehead's Human Cargo and Seylah Benhabib's The Rights of Others) to consider the ethics of said. The recent hardening of frontiers is not good.

[Caroline] Moorehead is a British writer who has been reporting on human rights since the early 1980s. Working in an already crowded genre, she differs from those showy journalists of alarm who view the distress of others as an opportunity for overwrought prose and self-display. Though a vital presence on the page—indeed, we occasionally see her intervening in the lives of the refugees she profiles—she is devoted to the quiet narration of disquieting fact. Each of Moorehead’s chapters focuses on a different set of migrants trying to make their way across a different border. Wherever they are—in Sicily, northern Britain, Finland, Tijuana, Australia, southern Lebanon, Cairo or Guinea—she is with them. If her brief is universal, her eye and ear are local, attuned and affixed to the toll of state policies and their historical context. Inevitably, she brings to mind the great Martha Gellhorn, the subject of her last biography, whose “small, still voice” carried a “barely contained fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed.”

In the past century, Moorehead argues, no historical force has had more immediate effect on immigration politics than the cold war. Throughout that conflict, exiles and refugees were treated as political gold, especially in the West. Eager to expose the tyranny of the Soviet Union and its allies, the anti-Communist powers spearheaded international conventions and institutions that firmly established the refugee as a victim of repression, unable to go back to her native land because of “a well-founded fear of persecution.” The persecutors were presumed to be “totalitarian Communist regimes, and the refugees were therefore, by definition, ‘good.’” Whether Soviet scientists or Vietnamese boat people, refugees were happily received by the United States, Western Europe and other countries. Indeed, during the 1970s, some 2 million people from Indochina found a home in the West. (Though the United States, it should be pointed out, never rolled out the red carpet to the victims of its interventions in Central America.)

With the end of the cold war, millions of people living under former Communist rule could move more freely, whether out of fear of repression and civil war or in the hope of economic opportunity. Mass migration, free and forced, has always been a central element of capitalism, from the Europeans who colonized the Americas in the seventeenth century to the Indians who settled in Africa in the nineteenth. Once the Communist world succumbed to the free market, that economic migration accelerated—though not, Moorehead writes, as much as we might think. “Most people today, as in the past, are not mobile. Somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the world’s population can be counted as international migrants…the proportion is no higher and no lower than at any time in the last fifty years.” Still, the promise of economic betterment—and the need for cheap labor—remains a potent lure, reinforced by the threat or reality of persecution and violence in the Third World.

Released from the constraints of the cold war, prosperous nations have devised more elaborate measures to control, limit and regulate this movement of peoples. (Ironically, for all the recent talk of global flows, the cold war may have paved wider lanes of traffic.) Racism and xenophobia are, of course, permanent fixtures of immigration politics, albeit in varying degrees of intensity. But the end of the cold war allowed Western governments to indulge an image of the refugee as an economic and cultural parasite—crawling across or burrowing beneath the border in order to sap the nation’s affluence and identity. September 11 and the “war on terror” have only hardened this impulse. “The whole notion of security, once seen as a matter of keeping refugees safe…has shifted. Now it is the refugees themselves who are seen to pose the danger.”