[PHOTO] Riding the subway, Bay Station, May 2013

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO shares vintage photos of the Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood.


• D-Brief notes a study of gay brothers suggesting a genetic basic for male homosexuality.


• The Dragon's Tales notes recent studies suggesting the Earth's climate was more variable than previously thought.


• Joe. My. God. notes the death of trans author Leslie Feinberg.


• Steve Munro links to a speech of his on the issues and successes of mass transit in Toronto.


• Torontoist notes that the City of Toronto is trying to shut down Uber service.


• Towleroad notes the same-sex marriage of former ex-gay leader John Smid in Oklahoma.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia has lost Central Asia to China, and suggests an isolated Putin could be dangerous.

[URBAN NOTE] "Dutch firm wants to replicate glow-in-the-dark bike path in Toronto"

Via blogTO, I've found Riley Sparks' Toronto Star article suggesting Toronto might get a glow-in-the-dark bike path on the waterfront in the very near future.

A Dutch design company hopes to bring its Van Gogh-inspired glowing bicycle path to Toronto in time for the Pan Am Games next year.

Thousands of fluorescent-paint-coated stones are embedded in the 1-kilometre-long path. The stones absorb light during the day, and at night they glow in a swirling pattern inspired by the Dutch painter’s The Starry Night.

The path gives off a soft, “poetic light,” enough for a user to see ahead but without producing significant light pollution in the wooded area, designer Daan Roosegaarde said.

Studio Roosegaarde designed the path and built it in collaboration with Dutch engineering company Heijmans.

[. . .]

The paint will glow for up to eight hours after charging in the sun. On cloudy days, both the bike path and highway lighting paint can be lit with LED lights with electricity generated by solar panels.

[LINK] "Thank Germany for Falling Prices of Solar Panels and Wind Turbines"

At Bloomberg Businessweek, Harold L. Sirkin favourably praises Germany's heavy investments in renewable energy as the sort of policy that will make it cost-effective and help save us all.

The New York Times reported that nearly 30 percent of Germany’s electric power comes from renewable energy sources, and the percentage is growing. This is not without a downside: Traditional electric utilities are struggling.

Additional large industrial countries also have been stepping away from high-polluting fossil fuels for power generation. Brazil, according to the International Energy Agency, gets more than 80 percent of its electric power from renewables, mostly sugarcane ethanol. And more than 60 percent of Canada’s electricity comes from hydropower. But these are special cases, owing to Canada’s abundant white-water resources and Brazil’s highly advanced sugarcane industry.

Germany is a special case as well, for different reasons. While it’s a global leader in hydro technology and the construction of hydroelectric power plants, Germany gets little of its own electric power from this source. It is nowhere to be found among the world’s sugarcane producers. And with Russia supplying a reported 38 percent of its natural gas imports, 35 percent of its imported oil, and a quarter of its imported coal, Germany made a wise decision to move in new directions—generating electricity from wind and sun, renewable energy sources that the U.S. has been much slower to adopt.

The situation in the United States is much different. Our largest supplier of energy imports is Canada. Saudi Arabia is No. 2, and Mexico is No. 3.

The U.S. has hardly been sitting still. Thanks to advances in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) technologies, the country has become the world’s top producer of natural gas, a clean and abundant fossil fuel. Germany, on the other hand, is threatening to ban fracking.

[LINK] "Shale Oil Fuels Indigenous Conflict in Argentina"

The story told by the Inter Press Service's Fabiana Frayssinet, recounting the resistance of an indigenous people to the environmentally destructive extraction of fossil fuels on the claimed land, sounds quite familiar. That this news comes from Argentina, not Canada, is not a surprise to me. Neo-Europes can be all of a kind.

The boom in unconventional fossil fuels has revived indigenous conflicts in southwest Argentina. Twenty-two Mapuche communities who live on top of Vaca Muerta, the geological formation where the reserves are located, complain that they were not consulted about the use of their ancestral lands, both “above and below ground.”

Albino Campo, ”logko” or chief of the Campo Maripe Mapuche community, is critical of the term “superficiary” – one to whom a right of surface occupation is granted – which was used in the oil contracts to describe the people living on the land, with whom the oil companies are negotiating.

[. . .]

Three thousand metres below Campo Maripe lies one of the world’s biggest reserves of shale gas and oil.

The land that the community used for grazing is now part of the Loma Campana oilfield, operated by the state-run YPF oil company in partnership with U.S. oil giant Chevron.

“More or less 160 wells have been drilled here,” Campo said. “When they reach 500 wells, we won’t have any land for our animals. They stole what is ours.”

[LINK] " The 'Caliphate's' Colonies: Islamic State's Gradual Expansion into North Africa"

Spiegel International describes the steady progress made by the Islamic State in North Africa. Anarchic Libya and Egypt's unstable Sinai peninsula are particular loci for expansion, while Tunisia is a notable source of manpower.

Chaos, disillusionment and oppression provide the perfect conditions for Islamic State. Currently, the Islamist extremists are expanding from Syria and Iraq into North Africa. Several local groups have pledged their allegiance.

The caliphate has a beach. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea around 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Crete in Darna. The eastern Libya city has a population of around 80,000, a beautiful old town and an 18th century mosque, from which the black flag of the Islamic State flies. The port city is equipped with Sharia courts and an "Islamic Police" force which patrols the streets in all-terrain vehicles. A wall has been built in the university to separate female students from their male counterparts and the disciplines of law, natural sciences and languages have all been abolished. Those who would question the city's new societal order risk death.

Darna has become a colony of terror, and it is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists: a disintegrating state, a location that is strategically well situated and home to the largest oil reserves on the continent. Should Islamic State (IS) manage to establish control over a significant portion of Libya, it could trigger the destabilization of the entire Arab world.

The IS puts down roots wherever chaos reigns, where governments are weakest and where disillusionment over the Arab Spring is deepest. In recent weeks, terror groups that had thus far operated locally have quickly begun siding with the extremists from IS.

In September, it was the Algerian group Soldiers of the Caliphate that threw in its lot with Islamic State. As though following a script, the group immediately beheaded a French mountaineer and uploaded the video to the Internet. In October, the "caliphate" was proclaimed in Darna. And last week, the strongest Egyptian terrorist group likewise announced its affiliation with IS.

[LINK] "Russians scorn Harper's 'shirt-fronting' of Putin"

CBC's Nahlah Ayed suggests a certain amount of confusion in Russia regarding Canada's hard-line approach to Russia over events in Ukraine. Her suggestions that the relative popularity of a hard-line approach, along with a fairly distant and disconnected Russian-Canadian relationship beforehand that was rated a low priority, seems key. Stephen Harper's denunciation of Putin at the G20 summit in Australia starts off her essay.

While not exactly a geopolitical "dust-up," as some described it, it's given Harper international headlines and a lot of applause, particularly among Ukrainians and their supporters.

In Moscow though, the incident has likely been added to a litany of Canadian "aggression" that, if not raising the ire of Russians, certainly raises many eyebrows.

Even before this latest confrontation, Russians were bewildered by what they see as Canada's "militancy" on Ukraine, putting bilateral relations "on the brink of collapse."

"Canada is neither a global player, nor a world power, its army is weak and poorly armed. Why is Canada so strongly against Russia?" asked an article in the English edition of the newspaper Pravda earlier this year.

Once seen as a largely benign, fellow Northern nation whose worst affront, from the Russian point of view, was narrowly winning the 1972 hockey series, Canada now, after nearly a year of tough talk on Ukraine, has Russians scratching their heads.

"I fail to understand why Canada is so hurt by what's going on in Ukraine. Please explain it to me. I fail to understand it," Duma member Alexander Romanovitch, a representative on the foreign affairs committee, said in a recent interview with CBC News.

[LINK] "America’s Casino-Saturation Problem"

The New Yorker's John Wolfson notes that, in the United States, casinos are starting to lose their shine. If everyone is legalizing casinos, then they stop become attractive sources of revenue. The decline of many established clusters of casinos, like New Jersey's Atlantic City, is almost inevitable if other casinos open up closer to potential markets.

Four of Atlantic City’s twelve casinos have gone out of business this year, including Revel, an estimated $2.3-billion jewel that opened just two years ago; another, the Trump Taj Mahal, has announced that it could close within weeks. An estimated eight thousand jobs have already been lost, and thousands more seem likely to follow. Since Christie’s 2010 press conference, the assessed value of all the property in the city has declined by nearly half.

While it would be easy to conclude that Atlantic City’s demise is the predictable result of decades of well-documented greed, corruption, and incompetent leadership, the city is in fact one of the first casualties of a nationwide casino arms race. Eager for new jobs and new revenues that don’t require raising taxes, states from coast to coast have turned to gambling: in 1978, only Nevada and New Jersey had commercial casinos; today, twenty-four states do. Atlantic City once had the densely populated Northeast all to itself, but now nearly every state in the region is home to casinos. And with both New York and Massachusetts poised to open massive new gambling resorts, the competition for the fixed number of gamblers there will only get tougher. “It’s a war,” Father Richard McGowan, a professor of management at Boston College who studies the gambling industry, said. “It’s remarkable to me how the states are fighting each other for gambling revenue.”

The first casino in Atlantic City opened in 1978. From that moment on, the city built its business by catering to gamblers from surrounding states. It held a casino monopoly on the region until 1992, when the Foxwoods tribal casino opened in Connecticut, and Rhode Island authorized slot machines at a racetrack not far from the Massachusetts border. A few years after that, slots appeared at racetracks in Delaware and West Virginia, and a second tribal casino, Mohegan Sun, opened in Connecticut. Even with the new competition, Atlantic City’s casino business grew at an impressive rate. “From 1983 to 1999, Atlantic City casinos were actually earning more than the ones on the Las Vegas strip,” David G. Schwartz, the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, told me. “Las Vegas was very afraid. In the nineteen-eighties, Atlantic City looked like it was going to knock off Las Vegas.” Atlantic City gambling revenues went up year after year, without exception, before peaking at $5.2 billion in 2006.

That same year, the first casino in Pennsylvania opened. The state had long been a lucrative market for Atlantic City, which lies just sixty miles southeast of the Pennsylvania border. For decades, Pennsylvania’s leaders had watched with frustration as residents drove across the state line to wager an estimated billion dollars or more a year, contributing millions in tax dollars annually to New Jersey. Finally, in 2004, Pennsylvania authorized fourteen casino licenses (twelve have so far been awarded) in locations concentrated along the state’s eastern and western borders. By the end of 2007, the first full year Pennsylvania casinos were in operation, they had taken in a billion dollars and paid four hundred and seventy-three million dollars in taxes to the state. Atlantic City, meanwhile, experienced its first-ever decline, a drop of nearly six per cent. Business at the Pennsylvania casinos continued to expand over the next few years, while Atlantic City suffered. In 2012, Pennsylvania casinos generated $3.16 billion in revenue, surpassing New Jersey as the country’s No. 2 market.