[PHOTO] how some of my garden pots grow

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes the heavy level of pollution in Toronto Harbour following recent rains, and suggests Toronto is set to get gigabit Internet speeds.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her recent vacation in Donegal.


• Centauri Dreams revisits Robert L. Forward's Starwisp probe.


• Crooked Timber speculates that there is hope for rapid action on climate change.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on an inflated hot Jupiter orbiting a F-class star.


• The Dragon's Tales shares a vintage supercomputer pamphlet.


• Far Outliers looks at the collapse of the Comanche empire in the 1860s.


• Language Log looks at the controversial English test in France.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reacts to an overly broad pulling of computer games with Confederate flags.


• Steve Munro reacts to the state of streetcar switches.


• Torontoist looks at a queer art exhibition at Bay and Wellesley on sex ed.


• Towleroad shares a straight-married Scottish bishop's tale of same-sex love.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that remembering the Civil War does not requite keeping the Confederate flag.


• Window on Eurasia notes how few Crimeans identify with Russia and looks at Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian influence on Russia's Finno-Ugric minorities.

[LINK] "Group claiming to turn gay men straight committed consumer fraud, N.J. jury says"

nj.com's Susan K. Livio reports on an important legal finding in New Jersey against ex-gay conversion groups.

A New Jersey jury on Thursday found a non-profit group that provides gay-to-straight conversion therapy guilty of consumer fraud for promising clients they could overcome their sexual urges by undressing in front of other men, pummeling an effigy of their mothers, and re-enacting traumatic childhood experiences.

In the first case in the nation to put the controversial practice on trial, the jury concluded that Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk, the founders of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing in Jersey City and life coach Alan Downing to whom JONAH referred patients, "engaged in unconscionable commercial practices" and misrepresented their services.

Chuck LiMandri, president of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and JONAH's lead counsel, said he would appeal the decision, which he called a blow to religious liberty.

[. . . T]he victory has broader implications. The national civil rights legal advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center filed the case to take a stand against conversion therapy — a frequent target of public criticism since the passage of same-sex marriage laws and other LGBT legal protections. In 2013, New Jersey joined California by outlawing licensed therapists from providing the therapy to minors. Oregon and Washington D.C. followed. Last month, a bill was introduced in Congress would classify commercial conversion therapy and advertising that claims to change sexual orientation and gender identity as fraud.

[LINK] "Keeping Farm Fish Locked Up Keeps Ecosystem Calamity at Bay"

Brendan I. Koerner in Wired looks at how aquaculture specialists are trying to limit the potential environmental danger of aquaculture.

Aquaculture is fast becoming the main way that humans get their seafood fix. But fish aren’t cattle; they don’t turn passive when cooped up. Every year, hundreds of thousands of salmon, cod, and rainbow trout wriggle through damaged or defective cages and flee into the open seas, never to be recaptured. In addition to costing farmers millions in lost revenue, these escapees can wreak havoc on their wild brethren by polluting gene pools and spreading pathogens.

To prevent that sort of environmental calamity, Trine Thorvaldsen is studying how best to keep farmed fish from going on the lam. A labor health and safety expert at a Norwegian research institute, Thorvaldsen recently set out to determine why her country loses around 200,000 captive salmon per year. In addition to analyzing reams of incident reports and industry statistics, she also convinced numerous farmers to speak to her anonymously—no small feat in Norway, where allowing fish to escape is a criminal offense with stiff penalties. Her research has led her to conclude that avoidable human errors play a key role in Norway’s’ salmon escapes.

“There was one instance in which fish were being pumped from one cage to another, but the workers didn’t realize there was no net to keep them,” says Thorvaldsen, who is a cultural anthropologist by training; by the time anyone noticed the silly mistake, 13,000 salmon had swum away. Most of the fateful miscues that lead to mass “fishbreaks,” however, are less spectacular in nature. Workers sometimes have difficulty operating equipment, for example, and brush the vessels’ destructive propellers against the containment nets. Or they inadvertently tear those nets while using cranes to adjust the weighted tubes that maingtain the shape of underwater cages. Farmers are often unaware of these small fissures until hours later, at which point it’s often too late to dispatch recovery teams to the site. They must instead keep their fingers crossed that nearby fishermen will catch the piscine escapees before they start to interbreed with wild fish. (To encourage the recapture of escaped salmon, Norwegian cultivators have been known to offer 60-euro-per-fish bounties.)

For many years, fish farmers have pined for a technological solution to their escape problem: an alarm that can be wired into the nylon nets, to alert workers when tears are beginning to develop. But such a system has proven tough to invent and implement, largely because saltwater doesn’t play well with electrical wires. With no reliable alarm on hand, Thorvaldsen instead urges farmers to curtail errors by adhering to some common-sense workplace policies. These include making sure that laborers don’t work past the point of mental exhaustion, suspending operations when harsh weather or darkness approach, and insisting that all critical maintenance instructions be put down in writing rather than squawked over fuzzy radio channels. Thorvaldsen also wants managers to understand that certain delicate fish-farming procedures, such as using cranes, should never be rushed.

“We’ve had a lot of workers say, ‘We are under a lot of pressure, we have to do things fast, we have to deliver the fish when the boat’s there,’” Thorvaldsen says. The net tears that can result from such haste are what farmed fish dream of when they sleep.

[URBAN NOTE] "Giant goldfish swarm in Toronto waters"

None of my goldfish lived so long, alas, as to make it into the wild. The Toronto Star's Dan Taekema describes what happens to those which do so make it.

Lurking beneath the calm surface of Toronto’s ponds and waterways lies an unexpected monster of the deep — giant goldfish.

It's no urban fish tale. Rick Portiss, a fish expert with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority said goldfish consistently appear during Toronto fisheries surveys.

“They show up in the regular batches of fish, and every once in a while you get these big fat ones that look like pumpkins they’re so big and orange,” he said.

Most of these fish begin life in fishbowls or garden ponds as pets. They either escape during flooding or are released into public wetlands where they flourish.

Karen McDonald, a project manager with the TRCA said goldfish grow to the appropriate size of their environment.

“If you have a small goldfish bowl you’re not going to produce a three-pound goldfish. But when you release them into the wild and they have unfettered access to resources… they’re gonna gorge themselves. And it’s a large water body so they’re not going to be impacted by the small size of the container that they’re in,” she said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Kathleen Wynne says she’ll sign waivers to allow documentary’s release"

The affair of the TVO documentary of Kathleen Wynne strikes me as needless. What could there possibly be in it so damaging? That it will be released, as the Toronto Star notes, is for the best.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Thursday she expects to soon sign release forms that will enable some version of a controversial documentary about her to be broadcast.

“We have wanted this documentary to be released,” she said, adding her “motivation” for participating was that she wanted to show Ontarians the inner working of their government and that she is not trying to exert editorial control over the project.

She said she expects to sign the waivers as early as next week, saying she has not seen the footage.

The original documentary that was set to air on TVOntario was to offer a behind-the-scenes look at Wynne and her government in the lead-up to the 2015 provincial budget. It hit a roadblock last month after director Roxana Spicer quit the project in protest after Wynne’s office refused to sign release forms.

The film also depicted Wynne under siege during February’s Sudbury byelection scandal, when Wynne, her deputy chief of staff Pat Sorbara and local Liberal activist Gerry Lougheed urged to step aside to pave the way for former NDP MP Glenn Thibeault.

[LINK] "Venezuela’s oil industry beset by pirates and scrap thieves"

The Globe and Mail hosts Alexandra Ulmer's Reuters article describing how looting is literally gutting the Venezuelan oil industry.

When night falls over western Venezuela, armed gangs known as “pirates” sometimes ride boats into muggy Lake Maracaibo to steal equipment from oil wells.

In the country’s Paraguana peninsula, opposite the Caribbean island of Aruba, slum dwellers at times break through a perimeter wall into Venezuela’s biggest refinery and rob machinery, construction tools and cables to sell as scrap.

On the other side of the OPEC country in Monagas state, around 26,000 potential barrels were lost in March during a shutdown after state oil company employees and contractors stole copper cables and caused a tank to overflow.

Venezuela’s national crime pandemic – the United Nations says the country has the world’s second-highest murder rate after Honduras – is a growing headache for the oil industry, which accounts for nearly all of the country’s export revenues.

Hold-ups and thefts in the sector are on the rise, taking a toll on output, according to interviews with around 40 people, including oil workers, union leaders, foreign executives, opposition politicians, scrap dealers and people who live near oil installations.

Shortages of spare parts or the prospect of further theft stymie replacements of the stolen items, forcing some wells to function at partial capacity or at times even shut down, the people said.

[LINK] "Committing Crimes during Fieldwork: Ethics, Ethnography, and “On The Run”"

Savage Minds' Alex Golub takes a look, from the social sciences perspective, about Alice Grossman's controversial On The Run. I honestly hadn't thought there were such notable differences between journalistic and ethnographic conventions re: truth-checking, though maybe I just hadn't gotten deep enough into the field.

There are still some outstanding issues, of course. One is Goffman’s claim that police checked hospital records looking for people to arrest — something I’d like to deal with later on. Here, I want to focus on the claim not that Goffman was inaccurate in her reportage, but that she broke the law during her fieldwork.

This criticism comes from law professor Steven Lubet. Having loved Goffman’s book, I thought it would be easy to dismiss Lubet’s critique — especially the part where Lubet asked a cop whether details of Goffman’s book were true and the cop is like: “No we never do that to black people” and I was like: “Well I’m glad we got to the bottom of that, since police accounts of their treatment of minorities is always 100% accurate.” But in fact Lubet’s piece is clearly written and carefully argued and I found it very convincing. That said, how much of a problem does it pose to Goffman’s book?

In the appendix to On The Run Goffman describes the death of one of her key informants, and driving around in a car with some guys with guns planning to kill his murders and take revenge. This, Lubet says, constitutes conspiracy to commit murder. But was Goffman’s actions unethical? What does it mean to commit a crime? And does answering these questions say anything new, interesting, and important about ethnography?

Clearly, it’s not prudent to confess to a crime in print. But is it unethical, in general, to break the law during fieldwork? I think the answer is, in general, no. I personally believe that one should follow the laws of the country where you live just on general principles. But there are many cases when anthropologists do fieldwork in places where the laws are clearly contrary their moral intuitions, and to accepted international standards. For instance, Goffman makes a compelling claim that her field site is one of these places.

[URBAN NOTE] "Free tours of Toronto's Graffiti Alley on this summer"

blogTO's Derek Flack reports on some exciting news.

Tours of graffiti alley in Toronto are nothing new, but there's extra incentive to explore one of the city's hot spots for street art as the local BIA has ponied up to make them free this summer. Each weekend, TourGuys will lead walks through the colourful haven on Saturdays starting on July 4th at 1pm.

I know what I hope to achieve this summer.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how Russia is run by unserious people and why this is a problem

Casey Michel's Politico article "Putin’s Plot to Get Texas to Secede" got quite a few attention, and deservedly so.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union two decades ago, many Russians have come to blame the United States for their plight; a seething resentment over U.S. culpability in the loss of Russian national power is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin is so popular. It has only worsened since the United States has led an international effort to isolate and sanction Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine. Thus, over the past 15 months there has been a sudden, bizarro uptick of Russian interest in and around the American Southwest, most notably Texas, where secessionist sentiment never seems to entirely die out (TNM’s predecessor group, the “Republic of Texas,” disbanded after secessionist militants took hostages in 1997). In a rehash of the Soviet Union’s fate, numerous Russian voices have taken to envisioning an American break-up, E Pluribus Unum in inverse—out of one, many.

Nor is Texas the lone region for which Russia has cast secessionist support since the Crimean seizure. Venice, Scotland, Catalonia—the Russian media have voiced fervent support for secession in all these Western allies. (Of course, Moscow’s mantra—secession for thee, but not for me—means you’d be hard-pressed to find any Russian official offering support for Siberian, Tatar, or Chechen independence.) “Since the destabilization of the West is on Russia’s agenda, they may try to reach out to the U.S. separatists,” Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher on Moscow’s links to far-right movements in Europe, told me. Russia wants a “deepening of social divisions in the American society, destabilizing the internal political life.” And certain Texans, rather than running from the taint of an authoritarian backing, have reciprocated.

As a political tack, none of this is completely new. Nearly a century ago, British codebreakers presented the American ambassador with a decrypted cable that came to be known as the Zimmermann Telegram, helping to cajole a recalcitrant United States into the Great War. And understandably so: In the deciphered text, German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann alerted the Mexican government that, should the U.S. enter the war, “we shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer her lost territory of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.” President Woodrow Wilson’s pledge to forgo war evaporated overnight.

Just a few months ago, a cousin of the Zimmermann Telegram was delivered by a Russian government official, directed squarely at an American government once more waffling about military intervention in the European theater. The speaker of Chechnya’s parliament, Dukuvakha Abdurakhmanov, warned that should the U.S. increase its supply of arms to Kyiv, “we will begin delivery of new weapons to Mexico” and “resume debate on the legal status of the territories annexed by the United States, which are now the U.S. states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.” As to the putative destination for the weapons, Abdurakhmanov cited unspecified “guerrillas.” (Sealing his screed, Abdurakhmanov inexplicably cited Joe Biden as the creator of the current Ukrainian government.)

If his comment existed in a vacuum, Abdurakhmanov’s histrionics could be laughed off, another sign of Moscow’s ferment sapping logical discourse. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

As Michel himself notes later in the article, and as many of the commenters and linkers have noted on their own, the Russian state's interest in trying to cultivate separatist allies--even unlikely separatist allies, whether fascist or insignificant or both--demonstrate the fundamental lack of seriousness and ability on the part of the people running Russia. The people running Russia don't understand why the Soviet Union came apart; they don't understand how the European Union works; they don't understand the nature of separatist movements, critically including separatist movements; they, at best, don't care about how ridiculous this all makes the Russian state look. They just don't get it.

There has been a fondness, particularly on the right, to look at Putin and his government and see a cabal of canny geopoliticians, able to take advantage of the petty issues of the West. This, though, is demonstrably not the case. Russia has blundered into being the subject of a wide-ranging sanctions regime that has cost it substantially, in terms of present losses and future shortfalls, and might well plunge into a new warmer version of the Cold War with many fewer resources than the old Soviet Union. (Counting on China to prop Russia up may not be a good idea, for many reasons.) I would think it more likely that Russia, rather, is governed by people who do not know what is going on, run by leaders who keep making mistake after mistake, blunder after blunder, digging their country in deeper with no idea how to get out.

This can be a more dangerous situation than one where Russia is woring for a master plan. If Russia is not being run by people who know where they are going or why their opponents are doing what they're doing, the potential for mistakes and misunderstandings is obvious