[PHOTO] Ed Mirvish books for sale at Honest Ed's

Honest Ed's still stocks Ed Mirvish's two books, his 1993 How To Build Empire on an Orange Crate: Or 121 Lessons I Never Learned In School and the 2002 There's No Business Like Show Business: (But I Wouldn't Ditch My Day Job).

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO reports on the mysterious alleged new neighbourhood of Bricketowne.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly wonders whether things or fun are ultimately preferable.


• The Dragon's Tales provides updates on the war in the Donbas.


• Commenters at Joe. My. God. have fun with the Catholic priest who compares gay sex to trying to eat a bagel with your ears.


• Language Hat links to the story of a woman who learned Uzbek.


• Marginal Revolution notes slow economic growth in the European Union.


• Peter Rukavina suggests that this year, the southeastern Prince Edward Island communities of Murray Harbour and Murray River are where it's at.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at historical waves of emigration from Russia.


• Torontoist looks at the efforts of the city government in the 1940s to regulate traffic.


• Towleroad notes how British rugby player Keegan Hirst has had a good time of it since coming out.


• Window on Eurasia notes some Central Asian migrants returning from Russia bring HIV infections with them, suggests Russians are not innate fans of authoritarianism, notes the dim demographic prospects for Russia, and looks at Russian women marrying Chinese men.

[URBAN NOTE] "Galleria Mall on Dupont sold to condo developer"

blogTO's Amy Grief reports on what may be the end of the Galleria Mall.

[T]here are reports that Freed Developments has purchased the Galleria Mall, a lagging mall in desperate need of refurbishment.

A representative from Galleria confirmed that as of August 14, the building's new owner is 2470347 Ontario Inc. with Avison Young Property Advisors and Managers Inc. as the property manager. As of present, Freed Developments has yet to comment.

Instead of getting a makeover, the mall could get a complete overhaul, and a new life, as some sort of mixed use condo tower likely thanks to one of the most fashionable developers in the city.

This wouldn't be Freed's first foray onto Dupont. The company has already acquired land west of Spadina and has submitted a rezoning proposal with plans to construct two high-rise condo towers at 328 Dupont with a total 560 residential units.

[LINK] John Ivison in the National Post on the rise of the NDP

John Ivison writes.

We’re nearly two weeks into the 42nd general election and it’s clear already the ballot question is: “to change or not to change?” Polls suggest people say the economy is the issue that will decide the election. It is a narrative Harper is keen to advance. “Who do you trust on the big issues?” he asked Friday as he extolled his “proven experience in keeping Canadians safe and the economy strong.”

Yet other polls suggest nearly half of all Canadians approve of Conservative management of the economy. If that really were the lone theme of the election, Harper would be sitting around his swimming pool, rather than being asked when he stopped lying to the Canadian public.

The real barometer of public opinion is the question of whether it is time for another party to take over in Ottawa. A poll by Ipsos Reid suggested that two in three voters think it is. That change voter is split but, ominously for Harper, most of those people think the two main opposition parties should gang up on the Tories, if they win a minority (86 per cent of NDP supporters and 84 per cent of Liberal voters support the parties co-operating to form a government to prevent the Conservatives taking power again, according to Ipsos).

Tom Mulcair appears to have digested that he doesn’t need to be the greatest — just the most ready to deliver change.

[LINK] "Nunavut's social housing faces billion-dollar shortfall"

CBC's John Van Dusen reports on the appalling housing shortfalls in Nunavut.

More than 3,000 households in Nunavut are estimated to be homeless and waiting for g​overnment-assisted housing, according to the Nunavut Housing Corporation. Under the government agency's definition, a household can mean parents with children, a single person, or some other family arrangement.

Getting through the backlog can take years.

[. . .]

Half of Nunavut lives in social housing, many of the units overcrowded.

"I've seen as high as 22 people staying in a three-bedroom unit that was 1,200 square feet," said Lori Kimball, the president and CEO of the Nunavut Housing Corporation.

Right now, there are 2,313 households on the waiting list to get into social housing, though Kimball estimates the need is much higher. Many don't bother applying, she says, because of the severe shortage.

[LINK] "Alberta and Norway: Two oil powers, worlds apart"

Friday in The Globe and Mail, Brian Milner and Jeff Lewis compared the differing strategies of Norway and the Canadian province of Alberta to their oil windfalls. Norway banks it, Alberta spends it. Why? They do a good job contrasting and comparing.

Faced with the steepest decline in oil and gas spending in a decade and a half and the biggest job losses since the global financial meltdown, the centre-right Norwegian government is pledging to tap more of the country’s accumulated resource wealth in an effort to stanch the bleeding.

The sudden decline in its fortunes has put a spotlight on Norway’s unusual handling of its gusher of resource cash over the years, parking 100 per cent of the government’s revenue from royalties and dividends in a fund that is barred from investing a krone in the domestic economy.

It’s a vastly different approach compared with Alberta and other energy producers, which set little aside from their energy windfall and are now facing bleaker fiscal and economic conditions without much of a cushion to soften the blows of tumbling oil prices.

The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, the province’s rainy-day umbrella, barely has enough capital to deal with a few scattered storms. Norway’s equivalent, which was partly modelled on Alberta’s when it was set up in the early 1990s, could handle a deluge of almost biblical proportions.

Consider the fortune amassed by Norway’s prosperity fund. Norway’s petroleum treasure chest holds assets totalling some seven trillion kroner ($1.1-trillion), making it the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. It’s a potential shock absorber of a size and scope not available to any other energy producer outside the Arabian Peninsula.

[LINK] "For Tanzania’s coffee farmers, climate change is a buzzkill"

Al Jazeera America's Tom A. Peter looks at how climate change is undermining the coffee industry of Tanzania.

For the last 20 years, Fredrick Damien has watched as his coffee trees have produced fewer and fewer beans. Back in the 1990s, his half-acre farm at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro turned out as many as 330 pounds of coffee a season, but now he’s happy to harvest 200 pounds of beans. He’s tried planting other crops to make up for the shortfall, but in this region coffee is the only viable cash crop.

“I’m trying to put more effort into growing bananas, but I’m mostly just asking God for a miracle,” he says.

The culprit cutting into Damien’s bottom line is one that he only vaguely understands and that has no easy solution: climate change. Over the last 60 years, rising nighttime temperatures have taken a toll on coffee production in this remote corner of Africa, reducing yields by roughly half. Countries throughout East Africa and other coffee growing regions around the world are likewise expected to experience reduced yields if current trends continue. As the world feels the effects of global warming more acutely, coffee farmers, the vast majority of whom live on razor thin margins, are likely to be among the hardest hit.

“We are feeling very worried because we don’t have any other alternatives [to generate income] like mining. We just have coffee. If the weather keeps changing we will have nothing else to do,” says Mary Faustimi, general secretary of the Mamsera Agriculture Marketing Co-operative Society, in the Kilimanjaro region. “We’ve tried to mitigate the effects of climate change. We’ve stopped cutting down trees, and we’ve done what we can, but it’s frustrating because now it depends on other people."

[LINK] "Strapped for Cash, Some Greeks Turn to Ancient Source of Wealth"

National Geographic's Nick Rome looks at how more Greeks are turning to the looting of ancient sites to make ends meet.

Recently police in Greece have noted a spike in a surprising kind of crime: People with no prior criminal record are looting Greek antiquities.

One sign of the problem: a sharp rise in applications for metal detector permits. Because metal detectors are used to find ancient coins and artifacts, the Greek government tracks purchases of the devices and typically grants use permits only to people without a criminal record. “The numbers have increased, and this is related to the economic crisis,” Lieutenant Monovasios said.

As the Greek economic crisis has intensified over the past five years, police detectives with the Greek Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage have noticed not only that illegal excavations and thefts of archaeological artifacts increased, but also that the typical profile of looters has changed.

Before the crisis, many looters were members of criminal networks that also trafficked in guns and narcotics. Now it appears that regular people with access to tools for digging are unearthing pieces of Greece's past and selling them for quick cash.

[. . .]

“We need more staff, more people,” said Evgenios Monovasios, a lieutenant in the Security Police Division of Attica. He estimated that in all of Greece there are roughly 60 employees who work exclusively to prevent and disrupt looting. While cooperation with local police departments across Greece expands this capacity, it’s difficult to monitor more than a fraction of the country’s vast and varied landscape, which ranges from the mountainous north to hundreds of islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas.

[LINK] Julia Ioffe on the Mothers of ISIS

At the Huffington Post, Julia Ioffe examines the cases of four Western mothers whose children went off to fight with ISIS and died. What happened? How do they cope? What do they hope to accomplish? All is there, in a sensitively written article.

Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions. Over 3,000 are from Western countries. While some go with their families’ blessing, most leave in secret, taking all sense of normalcy with them. After they’ve gone, their parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. It is sorrow at the loss of a child, it is guilt at what he or she may have done, it is shame in the face of hostility from friends and neighbors, and it is doubt about all the things they realize they did not know about the person whom they brought into the world. Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss. What they want, more than anything, is to make sense of the senselessness of what happened to their children—and, perhaps, for something meaningful to come from their deaths.

In April, I visited Christianne Boudreau in Calgary, and she told me how hopeful she had been when Damian discovered Islam. At 46, Boudreau is still vaguely girlish, with a slender nose and bright, probing brown eyes. Her first husband left the family when Damian was ten, and the boy retreated into his computer from a world that exasperated and excluded him. When he was 17, he tried to commit suicide by drinking antifreeze.

Shortly after his release from the hospital, Damian told his mother that he had discovered the Quran. Although Boudreau had raised him Christian, she welcomed his conversion. He got a job and became more social. “It grounded him, made him a better person,” she recalls. But by 2011, Boudreau noticed a change in her son. If he was visiting and his new friends called, he would only answer the phone outside. He wouldn’t eat with the family if there was wine on the table. He told his mother that women should be taken care of by men and that it was acceptable to have more than one wife. He spoke of justified killings. In the summer of 2012, he moved into an apartment with some new Muslim friends right above the mosque in downtown Calgary where they all prayed. He became a regular at the gym and went hiking with his roommates in the wilderness around the city. At the time, the conflict in Syria was in its infancy, and all Boudreau saw was her often-troubled son going through another phase, one she hoped he would outgrow. In November, Damian left Canada, telling his mother that he was moving to Egypt to study Arabic and become an imam. To Boudreau’s distress, he quickly fell out of touch.

On January 23, 2013, Boudreau was home from work nursing a bad back when two men knocked on her door. They told her they were Canadian intelligence agents. Damian was not in Egypt. He had traveled to Syria with his roommates and joined the local branch of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra. After the agents left, Boudreau says, “I was physically ill.” In the days and weeks afterwards, the only thing she could think to do was to scrounge around jihadist websites, searching for her son. “How sick and twisted is that?” she says.

Most young people who run away to join radical groups in Syria make takfir—that is, they sever all ties with non-believers, including their parents, who stand in the way of their jihad. But, starting in February, Damian called his mother every two or three days, often while he was on watch. “You can hear all the noises in the background,” Boudreau says. “You can hear people yelling at each other in Arabic.” Once, Damian told her there were planes flying low, which he said meant that they were about to drop bombs. He began to run while Boudreau was still on the phone. Mostly, though, Damian was careful about what he told his mother, and she still doesn’t really know what he was doing there. Every possible scenario turns her stomach.

Much more there.

[LINK] "The Kremlin’s Manichaean delusion"

At Meduza, Alexey Kovalev describes the extent to which "fringe anti-Western conspiracy theories" have been embraced by Russia's government. This is alarming, not least because policy based on these beliefs is quite unlikely to actually work.

[Canadian lawyer Christopher] Black's interest in the air traffic controller is not insignificant: testimony by "Carlos the Spanish air traffic operator" is one of the earliest versions of the MH17 catastrophe touted by RT and other Kremlin-aligned media, which were immediately exposed as fake. There's no evidence that WikiSpooks is Kremlin-funded or in any way aligned, but its motivation is explicitly expressed in their mission statement: any fact promoted by the “official narrative” via the “commercially-controlled media” is inherently false and must be disputed. Hence, to WikiSpooks and other similar websites, the position that Russia or Russia-backed rebels shot down MH17 is false simply because it is endorsed by the American government and must be confronted, even if it leads to a jumble of contradictory versions of the same event, based on spurious evidence.

A link at the bottom of the WikiSpooks article indicates that it was reprinted from the website of the Strategic Culture Foundation (where, in turn, it was borrowed from the website of the Gorchakov Foundation, a Kremlin-funded NGO). The Strategic Culture Foundation is a supposedly independent think tank that “provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research, and policy commentary on Eurasian and global affairs.” Some headlines are generic for any news website ("Donald Trump: Unexpected Impact on US Presidential Race," "Afghanistan on Brink of New Wave of Escalating Tension"), but a closer inspection reveals a strong anti-American and anti-Western undercurrent.

While the English version of Strategic Culture Foundation's website looks relatively ordinary, its Russian version (there's also a Serbian one) is outright bizarre. The 'About' section states harmlessly enough: “Benefiting from the expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, critical thought, and progressive ideas.” But right beside this text is an op-ed by Dmitry Sedov full of diatribes so astonishingly racist that you want to rub your eyes to make sure you've understood. “The trumpeters of democracy from [liberal radio station] Ekho Moskvy don't need those grants," Sedov says of supposed US government funding for aspiring journalists in the Baltic countries to counter "propaganda" out of Russia. "They are already covered in chocolate like the negroes in Harlem!” In another piece, titled “America's Dark Side,” published on August 6, Sedov (whose credentials are unclear, as no biography is provided and his writings can only be found on SCF's website, or reprinted on other loyalist outlets) explains that the US, led by a black president, is falling to the onslaught of "black racism": there are bars that are off-limits to "dogs and whites" and armed gangs of "black fascists" facilitate white flight from major American cities.

[DM] Some more updates

I've a post up at Demography Matters providing updates to past stories covered there.

[URBAN NOTE] "The slow death of purposeless walking"

The BBC Magazine featured an essay by one Finlo Rohrer talking about how people no longer go walking for the sake of going walking, but instead go out with intent. (His conclusion, that people should go out walking with the goal of not having a goal, is nearly paradoxical but is so in a way that works.)

Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.

Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.

Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.

Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.

Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it.