[PHOTO] Lone feather, Dufferin at Dupont

[LINK] On the opposition of the Conservative Party to marriage equality and LGBTQ rights

Facebook's Kathleen Smith had a post that began to go viral this morning, sharing an excerpt from the Conservative Party's manifesto explicitly opposed to LGBTQ equality.



This passage can be found on page 28 of the party's February 2014 policy declaration, available right here.

Smith's words deserve to be shared.

If this policy read "we support legislation that denies equality to people of colour", there would be outrage. If it said "we support legislation that denies the equality of women", we would be screaming in the streets.

It is NOT okay that the CPC doesn't recognize the power of the Supreme Court to rule on constitutional and Charter matters - which is the responsibility of the court - nor does the party, and therefore this government, recognize the equality of LGBTQ persons.

Because by including in their policy book that they support legislation dictating marriage only be recognized as between one man and one woman, they are clearly stating that they do not recognize the full equality of LGBTQ persons.

PLEASE share this! Make everyone you know aware that the Harper Conservatives do not recognize the rulings of the court, the equality of LGBTQ persons, and support legislation that denies equality to LGBTQ persons.

[LINK] "The Great Sushi Craze of 1905"

My thanks go out to Jason from Facebook who shared a link to a two part essay by one H.D. Miller, at the Eccentric Culinary website, looking at the forgotten history of Japanese cuisine. Until 20th century racism kicked it, sushi and Japanese cuisine generally were popular among Americans. There is a whole history of restaurants lost, recovered in this well-sourced essay.

Missionary publications, like the Baptist Missionary Magazine, regularly printed stories about everyday life in Japan, along with accounts of the missionary efforts. Likewise, missionaries who returned from Japan were frequent speakers in churches, lecture halls and on the Chautauqua circuit. This is how the majority of Americans became acquainted with Japanese culture in the 19th century, through the missionaries.

In addition to the experts and the missionaries, American artists flocked to the country starting in the 1870’s. Japanese handcrafts and art, especially ceramics, silk and woodblock prints, were the primary exports that funded the modernization efforts of the Meiji Emperor. Japonisme, caused by the arrival of these goods in the West, blew a giant hole in the European art world, and Impressionism burst out of it. Everyone from Monet to Van Gogh was captivated by Japan, and American painters were no exception. Some of them, such Henry Humphrey Moore, Winckworth Gay, and William Heine moved to Japan to live and work for a few years. The Japanese aesthetic even extended beyond the purely visual, influencing poets like Ezra Pound, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Finally, for rich Americans, Japan had even become the final stop of an outsized version of the Grand Tour. Ulysses S. Grant led the way. Two months after he quitted the presidency, Grant embarked on a two-and-a-half year tour of the world, with long stops in London, Paris, Berlin, Cairo, Bombay, Beijing and Tokyo. Enthusiastic crowds turned out to greet the ex-president nearly everywhere — 50,000 people in London, 10,000 in Norway. But no one seemed more enthusiastic than the Meiji Emperor, who broke imperial protocol by stepping forward and shaking Grant’s hand, something never before done or imagined by a Japanese emperor.

For his part, Grant reciprocated the affection.

[. . .]

Simply put, Grant, like every other 19th century American was besotted with Japan.

It’s from Grant’s trip around the world that Americans got one of their earliest accounts of Japanese high dining, given to them in James Dabney McCabe’s 1879 bestseller, A Tour Around the World by General Grant: Being a Narrative of the Incidents and Events of his Journey. McCabe described for his readers an elaborate multi-course state dinner, including a flight of dishes he identified as “shashimi”, perhaps the first time the word appeared in English.

[LINK] "Egyptian-Ethiopian disputes stall Renaissance Dam"

Al Monitor's Walaa Hussein looks at continuing tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over the latter country's plans to dam the Nile.

Persisting differences among Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan keep delaying the studies, which Egypt hopes will prove that the dam's construction will cause extensive problems for Egypt and Sudan. The differences revolve around details in the fine print of the offers submitted by the two consultant offices chosen to conduct the studies: the French BRL and the Dutch Deltares. The seventh round of negotiations ended July 22 in Khartoum without any signed contracts, however.

Alaa Yassin, spokesman for an Egyptian delegation of experts on the Renaissance Dam, said in an interview with Al-Monitor, “Our official position is that this dam is harmful to Egypt, and its storage capacity has no technical or economic justification. The differences remain unresolved, and a great deal of time has been consumed. We were supposed to finish the studies in no more than six months, but around a year has passed without signing the contract related to the consultants that will conduct the studies.”

[. . .]

From September 2014 until March 2015, the three countries managed only to select the two consultant offices, but never signed any official contract with them. Members of the experts committee cannot agree on the proposals submitted. The resulting delay prompted political leaders in the three countries — Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Sudanese President Omar Bashir and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn — to sign an agreement in March 2015 in which principles were defined in the hope of resolving their differences.

The disagreements also revolve around the office’s country of origin, as there was a Sudanese-Egyptian desire to exclude any consultancy from the United States. While Ethiopia proposed to select BRL, Egypt was leaning toward Deltares. Even after agreeing to hire both French and Dutch consultants, disputes over the division of tasks between the two intensified. While Ethiopia insisted that the French company be the main contractor and the Dutch the subcontractor, Egypt did not agree and insisted that the Dutch office take part in the process, with specific tasks.

[LINK] "UAE allocates land for Abu Dhabi's first Hindu temple"

Al Jazeera reports on the decision of Abu Dhabi to allow the construction of a Hindu temple in that UAE state.

The Indian government has lauded a decision by the United Arab Emirates to allocate land for the building of the first Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi.

[. . .]

On Sunday, Modi became the first Indian premier to visit the country in 34 years, meeting with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

The trip is seen an important step in burgeoning trade relations between India and the UAE, and the decision to allocate land for a temple in Abu Dhabi underpins the strategic vision of the two nations.

The UAE, a federation of seven emirates, is home to about 2.6 million Indian expatriates who comprise a third of the total population and outnumber the local Emirati population. Annual Indian remittances from the UAE are estimated at $14bn.

[LINK] "Japan Exports Its Way to Irrelevance"

Bloomberg View's William Pesek argues that Japan's economic policies, relying as they do on export-driven growth, leave it at a disadvantage relative to--among others--China.

There's a difference between bad economic news and the devastating variety that Japan received Monday. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might have been able to weather the second-quarter data showing a drop in Japanese consumption and a 1.6 percent decline in annualized growth. But it's not clear his government can recover from the latest news about sputtering exports, which fell 4.4 percent from the previous quarter.

An export boom, after all, was the main thing Abenomics, the prime minister's much-heralded revival program, had going for it. The yen's 35 percent drop since late 2012 made Japanese goods cheaper, companies more profitable and Nikkei stocks more attractive. But China is spoiling the broader strategy. The economy of Japan's biggest customer is slowing precipitously, which has imperiled earnings outlooks for Toyota, Sony, and trading houses like Mitsui.

But Abe needs to recognize, as China already has, that this is only the latest sign of a broader reality: Asia's old export model of economic growth no longer works.

China's devaluation last week raised fears of a return of the currency wars that devastated Asia in the late 1990s. That's a reach, considering that exports are playing less and less of a role in China. McKinsey, for example, found that as far back as 2010, net exports were contributing only between 10 percent and 20 percent of Chinese gross domestic product. The services sector is growing in size and influence to rebalance the economy -- not fast enough, perhaps, but change is nevertheless afoot.

[LINK] "Here’s How Brazil Is Giving Every Citizen Free Mobile Data"

The title of Ian King and Christiana Sciaudone's Bloomberg article is slightly misleading, in that the free data access being considered is limited in scope. This might well expand in the future, at least based on precedents elsewhere in the world.

Once considered the next great growth engine for the smartphone industry, Brazil is on the decline. With its economy shrinking and unemployment on the rise, many Brazilians are making do with dumb phones. They find the cost of an Internet-connected device prohibitive, particularly when they factor in mobile data fees.

One possible solution borrows from a technical breakthrough made by AT&T half a century ago. The Brazilian government is working with local companies and Qualcomm, the world’s largest mobile phone chipmaker, on a modern version of toll-free calling. A new 1-800 system for mobile data allows Brazilians to access their bank accounts for free on smartphones without incurring data costs. The government of São Paulo plans to extend free data services to some official websites by the end of the year.

Banco Bradesco, one of the country’s biggest banks, began exploring a free data program after observing that many customers had stopped using the company’s app and were switching back to such traditional banking services as phone calls and visits to the teller. A survey of those customers found that they couldn’t afford data plans and didn’t have access to Wi-Fi during work hours, when banks are open. Bradesco teamed up with technology giant Qualcomm, and together they spent a year negotiating with Brazil’s four main phone-service providers. The bank purchased data packages wholesale and started rolling out the program in 2014. Bradesco customers can check account balances, transfer money, and pay bills without buying a data plan. “The response was excellent,” says Mauricio Minas, a vice president at the bank.

[. . .]

Sponsored data has been tested in other emerging markets, with some success. Internet.org, a pet project of Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, provides free access to a limited group of websites—Facebook being one—in Colombia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. Two of China’s largest mobile operators began offering one-day free access to Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace in 2013 to get people hooked on the shopping site and to encourage data use.

[URBAN NOTE] Pico Iyer on the emptiness of Pyongyang and Las Vegas

At the New York Review of Books website, Pico Iyer has a provocative essay comparing the North Korean capital of Pyongyang with the American city of Las Vegas.

Any of us could, of course, list the differences between the two cities of mirages. The one is a shameless efflorescence of capitalism that is, for its enemies, a glittering symbol of the decadence and emptiness of the West; the other the world’s last by-the-book, state-controlled monument to Stalinist brutality, whose forty-story blocks are consciously designed to cow citizens and remind them that it’s a privilege never to leave their hometowns without permission or to be executed simply for glimpsing a foreign newspaper.

The one is a sort of adolescent’s Girls Gone Wild vision of freedom run amok, in which visitors are encouraged to believe that you can do and be anything you like, for a night; the other is a terrifying model of order and regimentation in which even the woman who chatted me up on a showpiece subway train might well have been a prop set there by the government. While drunken frat boys get themselves photographed next to bikini-clad showgirls dressed as flamingoes on Las Vegas Boulevard, in Pyongyang every visitor—on every visit—is obliged to get up in jacket and tie, pass through a dust-cleaning machine, and bow before the embalmed figures of the nation’s two departed leaders. When Hunter Thompson wrote, “For the loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth,” he hadn’t been to Pyongyang, where even the sometime-winners are abruptly sent before the firing squads.

Yet both cities are products of a mid-twentieth-century spirit that saw what power and profit could be found in constructing mass fantasies ab nihilo—in the deserts of the West, out of the rubble of the Korean War. And both serve even now as billboards of a kind, “theoretical and practical weapons of the system,” as Kim Jong Il had it in a 180-page treatise on architecture, with buildings designed less to be lived in than to be marveled at by friends and enemies alike. Pyongyang is at once a playground for the local elite and a perpetual reminder to the 90 percent of North Koreans who are not permitted to visit of what awaits them if their talent or patriotism—or beauty—are strong enough. But both cities are haunted by a kind of lottery consciousness, which declares that power and glamour can be yours only if divine whim (or a throw of a dice) so decrees.

[URBAN NOTE] "Olivia Chow leads Adam Vaughan in Spadina-Fort York, Forum poll suggests"

The Toronto Star's Donovan Vincent reports on a recent poll, admittedly based on a small sample size, that predicts the NDP's long-time Olivia Chow will displace Liberal incumbent Adam Vaughan in the federal riding of Spadina-Fort York.

A new poll by Forum Research gauging voter support for candidates in the hotly contested federal riding of Spadina-Fort York, has the NDP’s Olivia Chow with a commanding lead over Liberal Adam Vaughan.

A total of 345 voters in the reconfigured riding were surveyed, and among those decided or leaning toward voting for a candidate, six in 10 (57 per cent) chose Chow. The poll showed fewer than three in 10 picking Vaughan, the incumbent in the former riding of Trinity-Spadina.

Conservative candidate Sabrina Zuniga drew 10 per cent support, while the Green candidate Sharon Danley saw 4 per cent support. One per cent said they’d support “another party.’’

A total of 5.5 per cent said they were undecided.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes that Union Station's old GO concourse is going to be under construction for the next two years.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to papers on hunting for large-scale artifacts like Dyson spheres, searches for signatures of self-destructive civilizations, and speculation on how to discover Kardashev III civilizations.


• Languages of the World reports on Google's ability to translate Russian sentences.


• Language Log reports on one woman who can correlate the languages she reads in and the content to her health.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the importance of Confederate memorials.


• Marginal Revolution discusses the stagnation of the economy of Japan.


• Savage Minds reports on an anthropology conference in Papua New Guinea.


• Transit Toronto describes how this summer's adaptation of transit to the Pan Am/Parapan games is fading out.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes how a ridiculous lawsuit intended to make Yelp pay contributors was dismissed.


• The Way The Future Blogs reports that Frederik Pohl's Gateway series is being adapted to television.


• Why I Love Toronto reports on local Toronto-area craftsmakers.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia's economic decline is leading to dropping numbers of Muslim pilgrims, and looks at the relationship between Russia and the Donbas republics.

[AH] Would we understand the solar system better if we found Pluto later?

Since the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, Charon and their system, I've been thinking a lot of dwarf planets.

I still agree with what I wrote in 2009 about the essential meaninglessness of the classification "planet". That in itself does not says anything about the classification of "planet" says very little about what that world is actually like. Are worlds like Europa and Titan and Enceladus less interesting because they happen to orbit larger bodies about the sun? Is Mercury more interesting? All these worlds are worlds.

I do think that there's no particular reason to classify Pluto as a planet, on account of its small mass and its failure to clear its orbit. Pluto is not like the rocky worlds of the inner solar system, not like the ice and gas giants of the outer solar system, and not even like most of the large moons inwards? It is a low-mass icy body, and quite frankly, if it is to be considered a planet, why not Ceres?.

To an extent, the identification of Pluto as a planet stems from the specific circumstances of Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto. Tombaugh was looking for Planet X, what he thought to be a body as massive as the Earth located outside of the orbit of Neptune. As Robert Coontz noted at Nature, even at the time there was some skepticism about the identification. The mystique carried through regardless, even as the mass of Pluto gradually shifted downwards.

What if Tombaugh never found Pluto in the 1930s? His discovery was highly contingent on, among other things, Percival Lowell's determination to remain involved in astronomy after the humiliation of the Martian canals. What if Pluto, brightest of the dim Kuiper Belt Objects, was found later, perhaps in the 1950s when images of other like dwarf planets--Eris, Haumea, Quaoar--were taken but not recognized by other astronomers? Might we have avoided the blind alley of Pluto as Planet X and instead come to an earlier realization of our solar system's nature, if Pluto was seen as but one of several large massive icy outer-system objects?