[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her favourite things in New York City.
  
• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Nick Nielsen arguing in favour of manned spaceflight.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the unusual chemical composition of the debris disk of HD 34700.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Finland's interest in a guaranteed minimum income.


• Language Log notes the complexities of Wenzhou dialect.


• Languages of the World shares an old post on the Roma and their language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that prison rape in the United States is a real thing.


• pollotenchegg looks at birth rate trends in Ukraine over 2013-2015.


• Savage Minds notes the difficulties of life as an anthropologist.


• Torontoist notes a dance festival in Seaton Village.


• Towleroad notes the Illinois ban on gay conversion therapy.


• Transit Toronto looks at the TTC's service in the time of the Canadian National Exhibition.


• Window on Eurasia looks at a Ukrainian nationalist criticism of Ukrainian policy after independence, and suggests that fear of a Russian nationalist backlash might lead to a Russian annexation of Donbas.

[LINK] "NDP's 'Orange Wave' in Quebec now a tsunami: poll"

The Montreal Gazette's James Mennie reports on the dominance of the NDP in Québec. The party is now entrenched.

[T]his morning, a CROP survey conducted for La Presse suggests that the NDP wave in Quebec is taking on the dimensions of tsunami, and anyone else hoping to make gains in this province is in danger of getting swamped.

The survey suggests the NDP enjoys 47 per cent support in Quebec — a staggering 27 percentage points ahead of the federal Liberals and, relatively speaking, light-years ahead of the Bloc Québécois (16 per cent) and Conservatives (13 per cent).

When asked who they thought best suited to be prime minister, 41 per cent of respondents gave the nod to NDP leader Thomas Mulcair while just 15 per cent believed Liberal leader Justin Trudeau should be sent to 24 Sussex. Conservative leader Stephen Harper, the guy who actually has the job, polled just 13 per cent.

[LINK] "Mississippi River Mouth Must Be Abandoned to Save New Orleans from Next Hurricane Katrina"

Scientific American's Mark Fischetti reports that the only way to spare New Orleans possible overflooding is to abandon the Mississippi Delta, the long tail stretching into the Gulf of Mexico. This is unsurprising, but I wonder if this is at all politically viable.

[H]ow does one reengineer the entire Mississippi River delta—one of the largest in the world—on which New Orleans lies?

Three international engineering and design teams have reached a startling answer: leave the mouth of the Mississippi River to die. Let the badly failing wetlands there completely wither away, becoming open water, so that the upper parts of the delta closer to the city can be saved. The teams, winners of the Changing Course Design Competition, revealed their detailed plans on August 20. Graphics from each plan are below.

Scientists worldwide agree that the delta’s wetlands disintegrated because we humans built long levees—high, continuous ridges of earth covered by grass or rocks—along the entire length of the lower Mississippi River. The leveed river rims the southern boundary of New Orleans and continues another 40 serpentine miles until it reaches the gulf. The levees, erected almost exclusively by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, prevented regular floods from harming farms, industries and towns along the river’s course. However those floods also would have supplied the brackish marshes with massive quantities of silt and freshwater, which are necessary for their survival.

Silt carries nutrients that grasses and mangroves need to stay lush, and it provides new material to build up the soft substrate beneath those plants, which subsides naturally under its own weight. Incoming freshwater mixes with the delta's saltwater to create the reduced salinity required by the region's vegetation. This soup also prevents pure ocean water from intruding further inland, which kills grasses and trees from the roots up.

Instead, hundreds of miles of navigation channels, cut by the Corps for more than half a century through the wetlands have torn the wetlands apart from within. So have thousands more miles cut by industry during the same period to build and maintain oil and gas pipelines running in from the Gulf.

[LINK] "A weak loonie was supposed to boost manufacturing. Here’s why it hasn’t"

Sunny Freeman of the Toronto Star reports on the reasons why a lower Canadian dollar has not helped manufacture and technology exports.

While it traditionally takes 18 months for currency changes to trickle down, it may take two years or longer this time, he said. Manufacturers are grappling with a unique set of structural challenges formed during a long period of a high dollar.

Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz has acknowledged that old economic models have not accurately predicted export levels in the post-2008 world.

“We’ve lost share of the U.S. market,” he told a New York business crowd in December.

“It’s not because we do a bad job, but simply because companies that were there before are no longer present, and the model doesn’t know that.”

[LINK] German Lopez on Vox about the need to legalize prostitution

At Vox, German Lopez makes the case for the legalization of prostitution.

When I first began looking into the research on decriminalizing prostitution, I didn't know where the evidence would take me. I was familiar with the arguments on both sides of the debate, but I had little idea what the empirical literature said.

But after reviewing dozens of studies, papers, and articles and talking to researchers, the issue is much clearer to me: Sex work should be fully decriminalized and regulated, similar to other businesses. Decriminalization isn't the perfect policy — but to me, the evidence suggests it's the best option, while prohibition doesn't appear to have any good empirical evidence behind it.

I say that acknowledging that this is a contentious issue for a lot of people. Many people on both sides of the debate look at prostitution with preconceived notions. Critics of sex work, for example, may have already made up their minds that it is inherently exploitative, so it should be banned and eradicated at all costs. On the other side, advocates may see their opponents as misogynistic, because critics characterize sex workers as women who are incapable of deciding what to do with their own bodies. It's hard for these sides to find much common ground.

I didn't have these biases. I didn't know what to think when I began looking into this topic. So as someone who approached this issue without any strong preconceptions, here's why I ended up in favor of decriminalization after reviewing the research.

The author goes into full detail at the site.

[LINK] Roberto Ferdman of the Washington Post on the links between migrants and restaurants

Earlier this month, Roberto Ferdman noted that, at least in the United States, low pay, a risign cost of living, and diminishing numbers of migrants are starting to hurt the restaurant industry.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager.

The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago, where restaurateurs said they are receiving far fewer applications than in past years. “It’s gotten to the point where if good cooks come along, we’ll hire them even if we don’t have a position. Because we will have a position,” Paul Kahan, a local chef, told the Chicago Tribune last week.

It’s also an issue in New York, where skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

And it extends to restaurants out West. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

The glitz and glamour of rising through the ranks in the restaurant industry isn’t what it used to be. Long hours, low pay and a series of other cultural and economic factors have made lower-tier restaurant work a much less desirable path than it once was, leaving many kitchens chronically understaffed.

[ISL] "Abandoned houses are part of Islanders' heritage"

Brian McInnis at the Charlottetown Guardian has a nice essay starting off with a quote from a Milton Acorn poem, with plenty of photos, talking about the architectural and historical importance of abandoned houses for the heritage of Prince Edward Island.

These old wooden structures sheltered generations of families who lived and died on the land they farmed and in the houses they were born. If they cared for the land it provided for them year after year

Times changed and as the families left for whatever reason, the houses were abandoned and nature began to reclaim the land. Those houses can still be found hidden in the woods or maybe sitting in a farmer’s field surrounded by his potato crop while others are passed by many people every day as they go about their business. Most don’t give them a second thought.

In not too many years all but small traces of these places will be lost to history and that means only a few people will know that a family ever lived, toiled and died where a house once stood. Sometimes, the only indication that a family once lived in a place is the still standing water pump or the remains of an old orchard. All other traces are gone.

[URBAN NOTE] Torontoist on the departure of Pachi and the cost of the 2024 Olympics

Torontoist's David Hains linked to the enigmatic final photo of Pachi, Pan Am/Parapan mascot, on his Instagram feed. He then posted an analysis of the Olympics, money-wise: At an estimated cost of $13 billion, what could Olympics funds pay for locally? Quite a lot, it turns out.

•Fund TCHC capital repair backlog over next 10 years to keep units in good standing ($2.6 billion).
•Build the Downtown Relief Line from Union to Don Mills (Over $4 billion).
•Build the full Waterfront LRT ($600—$900 million, depending on alignment).
•Fund Lower Don flood protection and area improvements, thus unlocking billions in real estate value (Over $900 million).
•Eliminate the TTC’s unfunded state of good repair backlog [PDF], including 372 subway cars, 201 Wheel Trans buses, 99 new buses, 66 new LRVs, subway and surface track maintenance, meeting the TTC accessibility requirement by the provincially mandated deadline in 2025, and more ($2.3 billion).
•A $400,000 condo for every homeless person in Toronto ($2 billion).
•20 new full-service community centres ($590 million).
•20 new libraries ($170 million).

(Why don't we just pay for that? Indeed, why not.)

[URBAN NOTE] On "murder city" London, Ontario

Yesterday, I read a provocative article in The Guardian that made the claim that the southwestern Ontario city of London was, from the 1960s into the 1980s, a serial killer capital.

Known as the Forest City, the town is the birthplace of Justin Bieber, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. And between 1959 and 1984, it was home to the largest known concentration of serial killers in the world.

Over the course of 25 years, the town was shaken by 29 gruesome murders. Thirteen of those murders were attributed to three killers who were eventually caught and convicted: Gerald Thomas Archer, known as the London Chamber Maid Slayer, Christian McGee, known as the Mad Slasher, and Russell Johnson, known as the Balcony Killer.

Sixteen of the murders have remained unsolved, but a new book based on recovered police files offers a new theory on this bloody chapter in the town’s history, unmasking two alleged serial killers in the process.

Dennis Alsop, a detective sergeant with the Ontario provincial police, was based in the London area between 1950 and 1979. He kept all of his notes and research on the murders hidden until he died in 2012.

“It’s unclear when it all came together, but [Alsop] established this compendium of his original diary entries from the 60s and 70s: old documents from a bygone era, Photostats, teletype transcripts and documents created from now extinct technologies that were thought lost to history,” said Mike Arntfield, a local detective with the London police service and professor at the London-based University of Western Ontario. Alsop left the cache to his son, who ultimately turned them over to Arntfield.

This collection was used by Arntfield as the basis for researches which led to the new book Murder City. The causes for this concentration were explored by Jane Sims in an article in the London Free Press, rooted at least partly in the desire to avoid wrongful convictions whatever the cost.

The Truscott hangover of bad publicity from what became a lesson in poor police investigation techniques caused “a chilling effect” in the OPP, Arntfield argues, making it more cautious about laying charges without exhaustive proof.

That led to a lack of support for Alsop, who worked alone and sometimes used unconventional techniques that were coincidental precursors to modern criminology. Often, he was stonewalled not just by suspects but by senior police management who wanted him to focus on other work, Arntfield argues.

Meanwhile, geography and demography made London a choice destination for violent crime.

A test city for consumer products, nestled along the busy Highway 401, Arntfield said criminals quickly learned through “the jungle telegraph” that London was a great place to get away with their activities

Alsop was left with the investigations when killers would scoop up victims in the city, policed by its own force, and dump their bodies in OPP territory knowing there was little information sharing between police forces.

It was also suggested to me, by someone with experience in the area, that local racism might explain a willingness to brush certain kinds of crime aside. (Eternity Mathis' Vice article this spring was widely cited.) If entire classes of people are disdained by large portions of a city's population, I suppose it might not be impossible that certain classes of crime are likewise ignored.

What say you all? Does this make any sense to you? What are your experiences of the Ontario city of London?

[PHOTO] Clouds, looking southeast from Dupont and Dufferin

[BRIEF NOTE] On being out in an uneven Ashley Madison future

Either very late last night or very early this morning, I was reminded of some consequences of the Ashley Madison data breach when Andrew from Facebook shared a Twitter update from one Adam Kushner. Tushnet shared the panicked Reddit post of an anonymous Saudi on Reddit who used Ashley Madison to hook up with other guys outside of his native country, and who now found himself scrambling to flee before he was arrested and executed. Things seem to be getting less bad at him, at least judging by his updates, but he is still left scrambling.

I am from a country where homosexuality carries the death penalty. I studied in America the last several years and used Ashley Madison during that time. (For those of you who haven't been following the story, Ashley Madison has been hacked and its users' names and addresses are on the verge of being exposed.) I was single, but used it because I am gay; gay sex is punishable by death in my home country so I wanted to keep my hookups extremely discreet. I only used AM to hook up with single guys.

Most of you are Westerners in countries that are relatively liberal on LGBT issues. For those of you who are older--try to think back to a time 10 or 20 years again when homosexuality was intensely stigmatized. Multiply that horrible feeling of stigma by a million, and add the threat of beheading/stoning. That's why I used AM to have discreet encounters.

I BEG you all to spread this message. Perhaps the hackers will take notice of it, and then, I can tell them to (at the very least) exercise discretion in their information dump (i.e. leave the single gay arab guy out of it). As of now, I plan on leaving the Kingdom and never returning once I have the $ for a plane ticket. Though I have no place to go, no real friends, and no job.

UPDATE: I have gotten enough money to get car to Riyadh and a plane ticket to the US. I got a PM from a redditor who is in the Kingdom and a paralegal at a a major US law firm with an office in Riyadh (I will be traveling there this weekend). The firm's has a big pro bono practice that specializes in refugees! And it is very pro LGBT; tor he redditis going to arrange for me to meet with an associate to explain my association. It appears I'm in good hands. I will let you all know more soon! It looks like I'll be out of here in a few days with a concrete plan of action.

UPDATE: A bunch of people are accusing me of lying because 'AM is only for married people.' AM is actually about "discreet hookups," and hence its main appeal is to married people, since premarital sex isn't stigmatized in the West. But it also appeals to gays from regressive cultures, and their website has an option specifically for gays, as you can figure out if you do 5 minutes of research.

The idiots who claim I'm lying are projecting from personal experience, and forgetting that, for many gay people around the world, being outed is a life-threatening experience. The risks for us are greater than the risks for married Westerners cheating on their spouses. That's why AM's promise of discretion appeals to us. (Seriously, you think that there are no gay Muslims on there out of 37 million users?) In any case, that people would accuse me of being a liar on the basis of no evidence--at a time when I stand a serious chance of being tortured, murdered, or exiled--makes me pessimistic about humanity.

See also here.

Right now, I am tapping put this blog post while drinking a beer on a nice rooftop patio on Church Street. I am out, I am comfortably out, and I am now at a point where I cannot imagine not being out. It goes without saying that I cannot imagine a situation eatI be destroyed by others, literally and physically. I never feared that in my worst-case imagining before I came out. I simply cannot imagine that, and am so sorry other face this even now.

Do ding out that the hypocrisy of one-time American Christian poster boy Josh Duggar was a massive hypocrite was nice, I suppose. Then again, we knew that already, and we knew that when he was dealing with actual victims. (His young sisters were not consenting adults by any stretch.) Was an unneeded confirmation of this man's hypocrisy actually needed, especially at such a cost to this man and others?

This also illuminates the ethical weaknesses of our current global society, the interactions of its inhabitants increasingly enabled by global networks even as the cultures of these particants remain divergent. In Canada, it would barely be worthy of mention if I was to hook up with guys using Ashley Madison. Canada, though, is not the world. William Gibson's famous statement about the future being here already but unevenly distributed has taken on a new meaning for me tonight.