[PHOTO] Some cacti and succulents of Allan Gardens

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that the Union-Pearson Express train line is going to be quite expensive, perhaps unworkably so.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the imminent flyby by Pluto of the New Horizons probe.


• Will Baird of The Dragon's Tales reacts with upset to the confirmation that the CIA engaged in torture.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis looks at the controversies surrounding performances of an Indonesian popular music genre, dangdut, which features sexualized female performers.


• Marginal Revolution talks about which economies around the world are the most undervalued. (Sri Lanka comes up.)


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla talks about China's plans for space, including a Mars mission.


• Spacing Toronto talks about the day in 1950 when the sun above Toronto turned blue.


• Bruce Sterling shares a Washington Post article noting how forests have regrown across Europe in the past century.


• Torontoist notes that the city of Toronto has sought to secure heritage status for El Mocambo.


• Towleroad observes that the Irish Catholic Church has severed its links to a Northern Irish adoption agency for being GLBT-inclusive.


• Window on Eurasia notes a Russian expert who says that Ukrainian decentralization will be impossible at present and suggests that a new Munich arrangement over Ukraine is unlikely owing to Western distrust.

[BRIEF NOTE] On indigenous peoples and threatening geographic marginality in Canada and Australia

Royce Kurmelovs' Al Jazeera article describing how changes in government funding to Aboriginal communities threaten to result in the shutdown of many of the more remote ones is quite alarming to me, not least because I can see certain parallels with many Canadian First Nations communities. Many of my recent posts about <a href="https://abitmoredetail.wordpress.com/tag/arctic-canada/><u>Arctic Canada</u></a> have related to the high cost of living and various failing efforts to bring this down to southern standards, while other remote reserves face similar serious issues. I suspect that Canadian First Nations might be somewhat better off, if only because they have enjoyed for a very long while many of the attributes of sovereignty that Aboriginal groups seem to have enjoyed only recently, but still. Comments? The question of cutbacks in our era of austerity is very real, and all the more threatened for their associations with ethnic biases by neglectful central governments. <blockquote>The West Australian state government may bulldoze 150 remote indigenous communities that it says are too expensive to keep open under a new funding arrangement between federal and state authorities. Canberra has offered each state a one-time, lump-sum payment to take over the responsibility of financing remote Aboriginal communities indefinitely. In an ultimatum, Western Australia was offered $90m, enough to fund remote communities through to 2017. But as of June 30, 2015, past federal funding agreements will end, effectively giving Western Australia authorities about seven months before they must start working out how to fund remote communities in the future - and which ones will have to close. Similar arrangements have been made with South Australian, Queensland, Victorian and Tasmanian state governments. All have so far remained silent on the details with the exception of South Australia, which rejected a $10m payment on the basis that it was not enough for the obligation being created. South Australia's Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation Ian Hunter warned if his government was forced to accept the new arrangement, 60 remote communities - home to 4,000 people - would have to close.</blockquote>

[LINK] "Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents"

The Atlantic's Willa Brown looks at the image of the lumberjack as a contemporary fashion statement. It turns out that when that first occupation first became a major pop-culture issue a century ago in North America, it meant much the same as it did now.

The lumberjack seems like a startlingly apt symbol for hipsters to appropriate. On one level, it’s just a neat metaphor for gentrification: Lumberjacks were, after all, an ad-hoc army of Caucasians, invading regions they imagined to be empty, sucking up the local resources, and leaving vast, bland spaces in their wake. But there’s much more to the lumberjack symbol than another glib comment on urban white culture. This particular brand of bearded flannel-wearer is a modern take on the deeply-rooted historical image of Paul Bunyan, the ax-wielding but amiable giant, whose stomping grounds were the North Woods of the upper Midwest. Paul and his brethren emerged as icons in American pop culture a little over a century ago. What links the mythic lumberjack to his modern-day incarnations is a pervasive sense—in his time and ours—that masculinity is “in crisis.”

From slaveholders fearing rebellion to patriarchs threatened by suffragettes, much of the scholarship on American masculinity focuses on men in crisis. White men are often portrayed as continuously jittery, always teetering on the edge of losing their birthright. But there are moments when this anxiety reaches a fever pitch, when the media and cultural critics turn their attention sharply to the plight of men. One such moment was at the turn of the last century, during a period of rapid urbanization and stark economic inequality.

Americans are currently enduring another prolonged bout of unease, stretching back at least six years. Since the Great Recession began, there has been a general handwringing in the media about the state of men—even the End of Men. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, and it is clearer than ever that the single-breadwinner family is finally dead. The "traditional" role of the man as the primary provider is now firmly out of reach for most Americans. Which is why it seems particularly apt that (mostly) white, young, urban, middle-class men have once again picked up a symbol invented in the early twentieth century by men very much like themselves, a symbol that has long been gathering dust.

[URBAN NOTE] "The rise of Poland's urban movement"

Writing at Al Jazeera, Igor Stokfiszewski describes for an international audience the development of the sort of neighbourhood-centered community politics and activism that I recognize in Toronto.

In late 2007, a group of residents of the Rataje district in Poznan, in western Poland, organised to defend their right to have a say in the planning of their neighbourhood. The mayor of Poznan and the city council, had proposed to transform the derelict post-industrial zone of the neighbourhood into a new residential and commercial area. Local residents, on the other hand, insisted on building a park and a recreational area. They mobilised the community, organised protests, wrote petitions and publicised the issue in the media.

The negative publicity made the situation uncomfortable enough for local officials to concede to public pressure and withdraw their commercial development proposal. This was the first sign that a new social force was emerging with the potential to affect urban policies in Poland through civic engagement.

Grassroot activities began to surface in other Polish cities around that time. Activists from Sopot in northern Poland started calling for participatory budgeting following the model of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

In Lodz, in central Poland, an informal group of active citizens organised themselves around the issue of cleanliness of public spaces. Gradually, these groups merged into a movement calling for citizen participation in the transformation of the post-industrial area of the city, just like in Poznan. Lodz used to be an important industrial centre up until 1989 when its textile industry collapsed and many industrial buildings lay abandoned and derelict.

In Warsaw, urban activists organised demonstrations for the preservation of green areas in the centre of the Polish capital; against hikes in public transport fees,;and against privatisation of municipal buildings.

In the last few years, groups like Right to the City, Inhabitants' Forum, and the Housing Movement have emerged in almost every Polish town bringing together individuals of various ages, social, and cultural backgrounds. These groups were involved in a variety of campaigns to reassert residents' rights to their neighbourhoods and towns: from writing petitions, to organising protests, pickets and demonstrations, to occupying vacant buildings, setting up squats and blocking evictions.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Gay Mayor in Poland? No Big Deal"

The election of Polish GLBT activist Robert Biedroń as mayor of the medium-sized Polish city of Słupsk got a fair amount of international coverage, including from the The New York Times' Rick Lyman.

In the end, the fact that Robert Biedron is one of Poland’s most prominent gay-rights activists seemed to play almost no role in his election as the new mayor of Slupsk, a conservative city of 97,000 near the Pomeranian coast.

“There is no reason to think that Mr. Biedron’s private life was an advantage, but it looks like it wasn’t a disadvantage, either,” said Jaroslaw Flis, a sociologist and political commentator. “Sexual orientation didn’t matter for the voters in Slupsk.”

[. . .]

“Poland is not the most progressive European country, of course, on this issue,” Mr. Biedron said Tuesday in an interview. “There is a lot of conservatism and homophobia and prejudice. But Poland is also on the track to change. The lesson of tolerance is being learned, and Polish society is changing.”

Mr. Biedron, 38, was the country’s first openly gay member of Parliament and is now its second openly gay mayor. The first, Marcin Nikrant, 26, was elected in 2011. He runs a relatively tiny village of 1,500 residents and, though not in the closet, was not as openly gay in his community as Mr. Biedron is.

“Of course they knew I am gay, because everyone in Poland knows that I’m gay,” Mr. Biedron said of the voters on Tuesday. “But it did not matter. In the campaign, none of the seven candidates tried to use it as a tool against me, not even the right-wing ones.”

[LINK] "The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like"

Coffee.

(The Atlantic's Lindsay Abrams makes the lovely, lovely case.)

The most recent findings that support coffee as a panacea will make their premiere this December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Coffee, researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

"There have been many metabolic studies that have shown that caffeine, in the short term, increases your blood glucose levels and increases insulin resistance," Shilpa Bhupathiraju, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Nutrition and the study's lead author, told me. But "those findings really didn't translate into an increased risk for diabetes long-term." During the over 20 years of follow-up, and controlling for all major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, coffee consumption, regardless of caffeine content, was associated with an 8 percent decrease in the risk of type 2 diabetes in women. In men, the reduction was 4 percent for regular coffee and 7 percent for decaf.

The findings were arrived at rigorously, relying on data from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, two prospective studies that followed almost 80,000 women and over 40,000 men from the 1980s through 2008. Although self-reported, the data is believed to be extremely reliable because it comes from individuals who know more about health and disease than the average American (the downside, of course, is that results won't always apply to the general population -- but in this case, Bhupathuraju explained that there's no reason to believe that the biological effects seen in health professionals wouldn't be seen in everyone else).

That there were no major differences in risk reduction between regular and decaf coffee suggests there's something in it, aside from its caffeine content, that could be contributing to these observed benefits. It also demonstrates that caffeine was in no way mitigating coffee's therapeutic effects. Of course, what we choose to add to coffee can just as easily negate the benefits -- various sugar-sweetened beverages were all significantly associated with an increased risk of diabetes. A learned taste for cream and sugar (made all the more enticing when they're designed to smell like seasonal celebrations) is likely one of the reasons why we associate coffee more with decadence than prudence.

[LINK] "Graduate students [at Columbia University] fight for union recognition"

Ned Resnikoff of Al Jazeera America notes that presusre is growing at Columbia University to unionize graduate students.

Hmm.

Graduate students at Columbia University are hoping to form a labor union, potentially upsetting nearly a decade of legal precedent. On Friday, some 200 Columbia students delivered a letter to the office of university President Lee Bollinger, asking that he agree to “a fair and efficient process to recognize our union without delay.”

“Like other workers, we deserve living wages, adequate benefits, clear workload expectations and consistent and transparent employment policies,” write the graduate students who signed the letter.

If the students’ unionization bid is successful, Columbia will become one of just two private U.S. universities to bargain with a graduate student union. The other university would be Columbia’s downtown neighbor, NYU, which granted union recognition to its student workers roughly one year ago.

The Columbia graduate students are hoping the school’s administration will follow NYU’s lead and agree not to challenge their bid for union recognition. Should Columbia fight the students’ efforts to organize, they will have to take their case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And if the labor board allowed the Columbia students to hold a unionization election, it would overturn a decade-old legal precedent against recognizing graduate students as workers and would have a ripple effect throughout higher education.

The labor victory at NYU emboldened some Columbia University graduate students to seek out a union of their own. They began seriously discussing the possibility of unionization in late 2014 with Uniting Academic Workers (UAW) Local 2110, the union that represents NYU graduate students and some full-time staff at Columbia University.

[LINK] "New York City restaurant serving up fancy 'scruncheons'"

CBC recently featured an interesting article about a New York City restaurant, King Bee Restaurant in the East Village, that was heavily inspired by Newfoundland and Acadian cuisine. Scrunchions, fried pork fat served as a side to fish and brewis, apparently feature prominently.

The King Bee, a restaurant on New York City's East Village, has a unique connection to Newfoundland and Labrador.

The restaurant's dishes are largely inspired by Acadian culinary history. The menu connects the lineage of Louisiana cooking to its predecessors in the Maritimes and France.

​Ken Jackson, one of the restaurant owners, spoke recently about his connection to this province with On the Go.

[. . .]

"My partner, Eben Klemm and I have been working on this for a few years, and we brought in our chef Jeremie [Tomczak], so to get him up to speed, we took a couple of trips, one to Louisiana, and one to Montreal," said Jackson.

​"And in planning for the Montreal trip, I have a chef friend here, Riad Nasr, who's from Montreal ... and he said if you're in that direction, you should make a point of going to St. John's, because there's really cool stuff happening there," he said.​

​[. . .]

While in the province, Jackson said he was influenced with several kinds of food he sampled, including partridgeberries, which he said made an impression.

"Part of Jeremie's background was in Swedish cooking. He worked at Aquavit for a number of years, so he was really familiar in using lingonberries in different ways. But then when we were in Newfoundland — we found just the perfect example of berries, and really gravitated toward the name. It was a pretty name and the ones we had there were just perfect."