[PHOTO] My carrots

Grown in outdoor pots, these specimens are stubby but are mine.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes the end of long-running Toronto literary journal Descant.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the Russian acquisition of another SSBN.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a Los Angeles Times article examining child labour on Mexican farms.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper examining surnames in Catalonia for mobility.


• Livejournaler moiraj mocks, with facts, the predictions of Canadian conservative journalist Diane Francis.


• The New APPS Blog considers the biopolitics of inexpensive medical tests.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw started a discussion about the attractiveness or not of villains, even before the Sydney tragedy.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes how Mexico City made construction issues for its subway Line 12 into a net positive.


• The Russian Demographics Blog debunks a myth about Russian premature mortality for the 1923 cohort that still tells of terrible things.


• Strange Maps notes the significant problems of explorers trying to map northeastern, Arctic, Canada.


• Torontoist notes Toronto's Black Lives Matter march while Towleroad notes the lack of a GLBT-black coalition.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian economic problems are worsening the government's relations with republics like Tatarstan, wonders how long Kadyrov will stay in power in Chechnya, and suggests Belarusian bases might be used to threaten Ukraine.

[URBAN NOTE] "Detroit’s Art Museum Shoulders $350 Million Burden"

Bloomberg's Chris Christoff notes the recent experience of Detroit's main public art museum in the context of its bankruptcy. The collection has survived, barely.

Detroit’s world-class art collection became a fulcrum for the city’s bankruptcy settlement, with such cherished works as Vincent Van Gogh’s “Self Portrait” leveraging an $816 million deal to fund city pensions.

Now, the Detroit Institute of Arts must raise as much as $350 million to fulfill its end of the bargain and sustain it after a local arts tax expires in 2022. That’s a tall order for donors who’ve already dug deep for the museum. The effort may be aided thanks to the 129-year-old museum’s brush with liquidation.

“When I first came here, I had to tell people what a great collection this was, how valuable it was,” said Graham Beal, DIA director since 1999. “I don’t have to do that anymore.”

Detroit’s record bankruptcy began in July 2013 as the city piled up deficits and $18 billion of debt, and it made the cultural centerpiece a damsel in distress, her cry heard by art-lovers worldwide. The museum’s rescue by private foundations, the state of Michigan and a relentless federal judge who hatched the plan to save it may become municipal-finance legend.

“You want to say Detroit was the only place that liquidated its art?” said Mariam Noland, president of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, one of the donors to the bankruptcy agreement. “That would never have gone away.”

[LINK] "Putin’s Friends Reap Billions in Deals as Economy Teeters"

Writing for Bloomberg, Henry Meyer, Ilya Arkhipov and Alan Katz note how the Russian economy has been taken over by an oligarchy linked personally to Putin. The pie might well be about to shrink, but they'll have more of it.

Having grown rich on government contracts during the boom in Putin’s Russia, friends of the president are benefiting anew as times grow tough. Lucrative orders keep rolling in for the favored few even as western sanctions and a collapse in oil prices push the economy to the brink.

The development has polarized Russia’s oligarchy and pitted Putin’s small circle against less well-connected rivals in a battle for money and privilege.

Companies linked to [Arkady] Rotenberg and another Putin confidant, Gennady Timchenko -- both targeted by U.S. sanctions for their ties to the president -- are landing a growing amount of state contracts. Together, they have won at least 309 billion rubles of work since U.S. sanctions were imposed in March, filings show. That figure -- which works out to about $8.1 billion at the average exchange rate over the period -- is 12 percent more than they received in all of 2013.

A Rotenberg-affiliated company is also about to secure a 228-billion-ruble order to build a bridge to Crimea, which Russia annexed in March, according to a high-ranking government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the contract hasn’t been officially awarded.

[. . .]

In all, companies linked to Rotenberg and Timchenko have received orders since March that are equivalent to more than a fifth of what the government spent on contracts in the first nine months of the year.

[LINK] "Russians do not want to adopt Russian children"

Writing for Open Democracy, Ekaterina Loushnikova argues that deep-seated cultural and policy inhibitions against adoption in Russia means that children who, before the 2012 Magnitsky law, might have been adopted by foreigners are now languishing.

Irina Onokhina’s family includes, apart from her own two children and five grandchildren, sixteen adopted children. Irina used to be a journalist; she worked for 33 years as a news photographer on ‘Komsomol Flame’ magazine. Her career was going very nicely, when she suddenly decided to change everything: both her profession and her life. ‘I always dreamed of having a large family,’ she told me, ‘but my husband wasn’t keen, and we divorced. Then, when I reached my 48th birthday, I thought: now what? I’d be retiring in a few years [Russian women receive their state pension at 55]; my children are grown up and have their own lives. I’m still in the prime of life, but nobody needs me.’ In 1990, to her colleagues’ amazement, Irina decided to organise a family-type children’s home. She applied to her local council for the necessary permission, but instead of support she met with incomprehension.

‘Communist Party officials came to my home and even my parents’ home, and tried to put me off. “Don’t have anything to do with these children!” they said. “You don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. They’re all disabled and mentally retarded; they steal, smoke, drink and swear! You’ll never cope with them!”

When Irina went to the committee meeting that would decide the matter, she took with her journalist colleagues with cameras and microphones. ‘When we arrived we switched on the tape recorders and set up the mikes, as though we were going to do an article about it. And it actually worked!’

[. . .]

‘It’s not so simple these days. If you want to adopt you need to do a special course, have a medical check-up, collect lots of bits of paper to show that you’re not an alcoholic or a mental case. And then there’s our notorious juvenile justice system – it’s getting so that a parent can’t even give a child a slap or they’ll end up in court! But I think inter-country adoption is a good thing, and I don’t know why they had to ban it. The foreigners mostly used to take kids with disabilities. If our government can’t treat them, why stop other people trying? Ok, so a few bad things happened, but it’s not like they don’t happen here as well. Just take a look at that!’

Irina points to a local news bulletin on the TV. ‘The young girl gave birth in secret, wrapped her baby in a polythene bag and took it out into the cold, where it died of hypothermia,’ says the newsreader in his dispassionate voice. ‘The woman has admitted her guilt and will spend the next four years in a prison camp.’ The screen shows a weeping girl hiding her face from the camera, and the material evidence of her crime – the child’s body in its polythene wrapping –lying on a table. Its life lasted only a few minutes. According to official statistics, a hundred children perish at the hands of their own mothers every year in Russia.

[LINK] "Stephen Harper, a son—and antagonist—of Ontario"

Veteran political journalist Paul Wells writes in MacLean's about how for Stephen Harper, his birth province of Ontario plays a unique role. He looks to particular Ontarian traditions of small-c conservatism, as Wells explains at length, and is disappointed when these are not only unactivated but Ontario is actively undermining his national goals.

This preoccupation with the fate of Ontario goes back a long way. Much of it is simple conviction. After 11 Liberal years, the province is paying $11 billion a year in debt servicing. Nobody knows how Wynne plans to meet her 2018 target to eliminate the provincial budget deficit. Don Drummond, the former bank economist, was hired by McGuinty to find answers and proposed really serious cuts to the size of the provincial government. Wynne has explicitly charted a different course, preferring “growth” (pronounced “magic”) as the path out of deficits.

Harper would not have governed the way McGuinty did, and certainly not the way Wynne has. But he was brooding over politics in Ontario before either of them were around to annoy him. In 2000 the Canadian Alliance, led by Stockwell Day, lost the only federal election it would ever contest under that name and leader. Harper had publicly predicted the Alliance wouldn’t do well, but the predicted result still made him furious. The object of his anger was “eastern Canada” — basically, Ontario.

Eleven days after the election, the National Post published a bitter column from Harper. Sure, the Alliance had no clear strategy, policy or tactics, Harper admitted, and yet he clamed “this had little if anything to do with the election result.” The real fault lay with the Reform movement’s “rejection by the very electorate that, in creating the Canadian Alliance, it had twisted itself into a pretzel to please.” Which electorate? “Eastern Canada,” which “appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.”

[. . .]

You start to see Harper’s irritation with an Ontario government that is often portrayed as being allied with a new Quebec government and which, in style and philosophy, is far closer to David Peterson and Jean Chrétien than to Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, or Stephen Harper. It is a longstanding (and perfectly reasonable) belief of Western conservatives that divergent philosophies held in Ottawa and Queen’s Park dilute the effectiveness of one government, if not both. I remember a Preston Manning news conference, perhaps 15 years ago, at which he argued that since Mike Harris felt one way about some issues and Jean Chrétien felt another, Chrétien should smarten up. Manning used to throw the odd Hail Mary pass like that.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ask A Native New Yorker: Is Queens Doomed To Be The Next Brooklyn?"

Gothamist's Jake Dobson writes about the homogenizing effect of gentrification, in New York City's boroughs and in the wider world.

Have you ever noticed that all gentrified neighborhoods are alike, but each ungentrified neighborhood is cool in its own way? Like I could drop you in any hipster area anywhere in the world—Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo—and you'd be surrounded by the same scene: coffee bars with people tapping away at Macbooks, an upscale dive bar filled with guys with beards, a bunch of restaurants selling farm-to-table food. Even the graffiti would look the same!

Why is that? Why doesn't gentrification look different everywhere? Maybe it's because it has the same basic ingredients in each place: students and artists and gays looking for an affordable place to live, and the small business owners they attract who cater to their tastes. Or more likely, because a lot of gentrification is engineered by property owners and banks working from the same template, and it's a lot easier to copy a place which has produced investment returns, like Williamsburg, than it is to try a new idea. Or, ultimately because capitalism is all about commodification, even when the commodity that's being sold is authenticity. That's some next-level post-modern Marxist critique right there!

Media plays a sad role in this. But they have a good excuse: they do it for the money! Allow me to explain: the New York Times is not a monolithic business. In reality, it is composed of many important bastions of journalism, like the international section, the Metro desk, Science, etc. These are valuable and very important for our democracy. But these sections are expensive to run and often lose money, so they must be supported by more advertiser-friendly areas of the paper, like Style and Real Estate, or the odious billionaire ball-cupping that gets done at DealBook.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the end of the Wildrose Party of Alberta

Facebook's Mike shared the news that many members of Alberta's right-wing Wildrose Party were crossing the floor to the governing Progressive Conservatives, including the party leader.

The executive of the Wildrose party is holding a teleconference Tuesday night after Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith met with her caucus to discuss uniting with Premier Jim Prentice's Progressive Conservatives.

David Gray, the party's vice-president of communications, said caucus members were meeting at 1 p.m. to discuss an offer from the PCs to merge with the party.

Former Wildrose MLA Joe Anglin said he expects that of the 14 members of the caucus "seven to nine" will be crossing.

But Jeff Callaway, the vice-president of fundraising for the Wildrose, says four of the party's MLAs are expected to cross the floor — including Smith.

I have no idea how the party can survive this. I have no idea why it's happening, even. All I can speculate is that these politicians have decided that trying to promote the Wildrose Party, which has never quite managed to break through to challenge the Progressive Conservatives, was a less productive use of their time than trying to join the party that actually ran things.

Thoughts?