[PHOTO] Monument to North American Energy Security, Nuit Blanche

The Monument to North American Energy Security put on a memorable display at Toronto City Hall in last year's Nuit Blanche, in the reflecting pool.

>A crucial issue today centers on the extraction, transportation and distribution of energy resources worldwide, particularly gas and oil. These resources cross every border and are a critical part of every country’s international policy. In particular, current discourse revolves around the need for energy security, free North American trade and essential job creation through the expansion of energy production.

CanAmerican Energy is a company founded on the premise of exceptional leadership in the realm of global energy production and management. In the spirit of great classical monuments commemorating historical events and leaders, the CanAmerican Energy Arts Team presents a monumental celebratory sculpture, consisting of two large oil barrels connected by a pipeline, to represent Canadian-American energy independence. The Monument to North American Energy Security is to be inaugurated by the company's Vice President of Public Relations, celebrating the importance of oil independence and the successful partnership of Canada and the United States in bringing about a secure and sustainable future.

The CanAmerican Energy Arts Team was formed in 2005 as a means to offer an alternative style of communication with the general public through cultural investment and improvement. Using a broad range of traditional and digital media, the CanAmerican Energy Arts Team has enriched the cultural landscape across Canada and the United States.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes that crowd-funded transit might be coming to Toronto's Beaches.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her favourite shopping experiences in Paris.


• Centauri Dreams considers the question of how to name planets.


• Crooked Timber discusses predictions for the coming year which descend into Bitcoin debates.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that giant stars tend not to have giant close-in planets.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper noting the complicated entry of maize from Mexico into the United States.


• Livejournaler jsburbidge notes the serious costs associated with a public housing problem for the homeless of Toronto.


• Marginal Revolution notes that many Poles hold mortgages denominated in Swiss francs, and have thus been hit by the recent currency fluctuations.


• Otto Pohl describes his writing project on the 1966 coup in Ghana.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the problems with inexpensive manned spaceflight.


• Torontoist and (again) blogTO and their commenters react to the end of Target Canada.


• Towleroad notes that anti-gay American Roman Catholic cardinal Raymond Burke is also a misogynist.


• Window on Eurasia argues that a Belarusian revolution would lead to a Russian invasion of that country, and wonders about European Union policy towards Crimea.

[LINK] "A turn in the South"

The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer writes, with pictures, about a trip that he (a native New Yorker) made to the Deep South of the United States. He describes it as, almost literally, a foreign land.

In 2004, a good friend and I drove around Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. I had just gotten back from Fort Huachuca, he was getting leave from Fort Benning, and we both had family in Broward County, Florida. (And in my case, Miami-Dade as well.) We had been to the region quite a bit ... but rarely outside the confines of an Army post. So why not take my old Ford Focus and tool around the deep southeast for a few weeks before heading down to Fort Lauderdale?

It was a great trip. The South is definitely different. The first thing you notice is how the countryside is intensively farmed. In fact, there is this ah hah moment when you realize that most of the woods you have seen are actually tree farms. My buddy said, “It’s not New England,” after which we started yelling “Niner niner!” every time we spotted anything really alien. For example, take Quitman, Georgia, with the decaying mansions set back from the streets and its obvious poverty and extreme segregation. The only thing not “niner” in that town was the small market catering to Mexican immigrants.

Or consider Dothan, Alabama. The town depends on Fort Rucker for its existence, but that was not what made it not like New England. Nor did the suburban sprawl around the town; most American towns look like they’ve exploded across the countryside. What made Dothan southern was the way the sprawl had sucked all the life out of the center of the town, leaving it mostly a vasty expanse of parking lots. There was none of the quaint cuteness that would have filled a similar town in New England; but even California towns have more life in their centers.

Nice travelogue. Go read.

[LINK] "Costa Rica’s Quakers dodged US draft, now face perils of changing world"

I'd heard about the post-Confederate diaspora to Brazil before, but nothing about this much more recent Quaker migration to Costa Rica. My thanks to Al Jazeera's Ryan Schuessler.

[Marvin] Rockwell went to Monteverde 64 years ago. The year was 1951. He was 28 at the time and had just finished serving one-third of an 18-month prison sentence with three other members of his community. The men had refused to register for the draft. They were Quakers, a religious sect with a strong emphasis on nonviolence and equality that traces its roots to 17th century Protestant dissenters in England.

Taking another human life is against Quakers’ faith, but failing to register for compulsory military service in the United States was against the law.

“We and others in the meeting got to talking about it and thought, ‘Well, we ought to move out of the States,’” Rockwell said. A meeting is a congregation of Quakers. The denomination’s official name is the Religious Society of Friends.

The Quakers of Fairhope began looking for a new place to live. Canada was too cold. Australia and New Zealand were too far. The group started looking at countries in Latin America. One couple went to visit several countries in the region to scout out a new home for the community. They decided on Costa Rica, “which had abolished its own army in 1948,” Rockwell said with a grin.

A mere eight days after his sentence was finished, Rockwell joined 44 Quakers from 11 families in Fairhope as part of an exodus to Costa Rica. Some flew; Rockwell and his family drove, including his 72-year-old father and 65-year-old mother. The journey from Fairhope to San José, Costa Rica’s capital, took three months. It took one month alone to get to the first town across the border from Nicaragua — a distance of 12 miles. It was before the Pan-American Highway was completed. The Quakers from Alabama made roads when they found none.

[LINK] "Indonesia Tops Southeast Asia Luring New Factories, Survey Shows"

Bloomberg's Sharon Chen describes Indonesia's success, at least relative to its neighbours.

Indonesia will attract more new factories than any other Southeast Asian nation over the next few years, a survey of 75 manufacturers showed, bolstering President Joko Widodo’s drive to revitalize the economy.

Manufacturers plan to build 54 new plants in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy by 2019, a 68 percent increase that will allow Indonesia to overtake Malaysia and Thailand with 133 factories in total, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit survey sponsored by Baker & McKenzie and CIMB Group Holdings Bhd. The companies all currently produce goods in the region.

Widodo, known as Jokowi, has overhauled fuel subsidies to free up budget funds for infrastructure, pledging to spur investment and boost an economy growing at the slowest pace since 2009. Many companies are starting to implement their expansion plans in Indonesia after last year’s election that brought the president to power, said Mochamad Fachri, a lawyer with Hadiputranto, Hadinoto & Partners, Baker & McKenzie’s member firm in Indonesia.

“They believe that the transfer of power has been successful” and the government has shown its commitment to reforming public finances by changing fuel subsidies, he said, referring to the law firm’s clients. “Therefore, the timing is good for putting these expansion plans in place.”

The manufacturers’ plans add to signs of investor confidence in Indonesia. The benchmark Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) of stocks has climbed more than 3 percent since Jokowi’s inauguration on Oct. 20, outperforming markets in Thailand and Malaysia on optimism the president will improve the economy.

[LINK] "Why wages won't rise"

At the Christian Science Monitor, Robert Reich suggests that, among other things, globalization, a slack labour market, and rising inequality mean American wages won't rise soon. The same will be true for Canada, I'm sure.

[I]t’s easier than ever for American employers to get the workers they need at low cost by outsourcing jobs abroad rather than hiking wages at home. Outsourcing can now be done at the click of a computer keyboard.

Besides, many workers in developing nations now have access to both the education and the advanced technologies to be as productive as American workers. So CEOs ask, why pay more?

Meanwhile here at home, a whole new generation of smart technologies is taking over jobs that used to be done only by people. Rather than pay higher wages, it’s cheaper for employers to install more robots.

Not even professional work is safe. The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms is even generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions.

In addition, millions of Americans who dropped out of the labor market in the Great Recession are still jobless. They’re not even counted as unemployment because they’ve stopped looking for work.

But they haven’t disappeared entirely. Employers know they can fill whatever job openings emerge with this “reserve army” of the hidden unemployed – again, without raising wages.

[LINK] "Left-wing lock: Will the NDP and Liberals split the progressive vote?"

Martin Patriquin of MacLean's suggests that, despite a possible anti-Conservative majority, vote-splitting between the Liberals and the NDP could undermine that majority.

Bitter political enemies Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair will go at it alone in the 2015 election. The Liberal Party leader and his NDP homologue have all but ruled out any sort of non-aggression pact even as both parties chase the left-leaning electorate. “There are some very, very big impediments to forming a coalition with the NDP. Which is why I am against it,” Trudeau recently told Postmedia News.

Few people are happier about this than Conservative MP Erin O’Toole. On several key policies, he says, the NDP and the Liberals seem to be morphing into one progressive blob. It raises the distinct possibility of a split in the progressive vote in the 2015 election—and thus making O’Toole’s job on the Conservative’s re-election campaign team that much easier. Trudeau’s denial of a potential coalition aside, O’Toole sees the Conservatives bringing up the possibility of such a thing during the election campaign. “I don’t think Canadians would be comfortable with a firm left coalition of NDP and Liberals.”

The two parties are undeniably close on a variety of issues. Both were against Canada’s participation in the mission against Islamic State; both are in favour of a loosening of Canada’s marijuana laws—decriminalization in the NDP’s case, legalization for the Liberals. Both favour some form of childcare strategy, and have made loud noises about the strains on the country’s middle class. Under leader Thomas Mulcair, the NDP’s position on Israel has edged closer to that of the Liberals, while the Liberal Party has begun courting the NDP’s traditional territory of organized labour.

The Liberals’ leftward tilt is in part to regain territory in Quebec, where the party has yet to fully recover from its scandal-plagued tenure in the mid-2000s. Trudeau’s decision to oppose the mission in Iraq played well in Quebec, where support for military intervention is typically the lowest in the country. The NDP has the lion’s share of the seats in the province, and Mulcair remains the most popular federal leader, according to polls. Yet Trudeau has revived the Liberal brand somewhat in Quebec, and the party has far outpaced its opposition in fundraising numbers.

Liberal and NDP operatives tend to tiptoe around a potential split of the progressive vote—though without publicly acknowledging the similarities between the parties. “The Liberal Party must work hard to show a more responsible, more progressive vision for the country,” says Liberal Party communications director Kate Purchase, who says there will be “robust competition between the NDP and the Liberal Party.” NDP national director Anne McGrath, meanwhile, says the progressive vote can’t be split. “That would imply that the Liberals are a progressive party,” she tells Maclean’s.

[URBAN NOTE] On the global spread of the Lovebot of Matthew Del Degan

Back in October, I photoblogged the presence of Toronto artist Matthew Del Degan's Lovebots around Toronto.



Today, blogTO's Chris Bateman let his readers that the Lovebot is spreading around the world, sharing ten Instagram photographs of the Lovebot appearing in places as widely separated as Germany, Newfoundland, and Costa Rica. Some commenters there think it visual pollution. I still think it cute.

[VIDEO] "Stan by your land"

"Stan by your land" (Watch on YouTube)

This video put out by YouTube channel rootsandroutes does a superb job in explaining the etymology, historical uses, and the numerous parallels in other languages of the suffix "-stan" denoting country. Superb!