[PHOTO] BMV in the evening, Bloor Street West

The silver moon shines over BMV Books on Bloor in the late evening.

[LINK] "NDP in reach of majority, new poll suggests"

The Toronto Star's Allan Woods reported this morning about the exceptional strength of the NDP nationally. A NDP majority?

The Forum Research poll for the Toronto Star projects the NDP with enough support to win 174 seats in the Oct. 19 election. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now sit in second place with 30 per cent support, while Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are losing support and have the backing of just 23 per cent of the 1,440 Canadians surveyed.

The poll, conducted on Sunday and Monday, may have captured both anger at the revelations emerging from testimony of Conservative officials at Sen. Mike Duffy’s fraud trial, as well as the recent stock market scare, which has heightened talk of a faltering Canadian economy, said Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff.

“Maybe you could say it’s a perfect storm for the Tories because they’re the ones who seem to have taken this on the chin,” he said. “We’ve said all along that if this economy goes south it’s over for the Tories. They’re in charge, they’re it and on top of that they’ve built a lot of their campaign around being great economic managers.”

Harper’s campaign headaches seem to have benefitted the NDP, which now has 54 per cent support in Quebec, 41 per cent in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and 39 per cent in British Columbia.

In Ontario, the province with the most seats in the House of Commons, Mulcair’s New Democrats lead with 36 per cent of respondents saying they would vote for the party. The Liberals are second with 33 per cent and the Tories have 26 per cent support.

[. . . In Québec], the once-dominant sovereigntist Bloc Québécois is in third place behind the Liberals and just ahead of the Conservatives, and is projected not to win any seats in the Oct. 19 vote.

[LINK] "Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site"

The analysis by Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz of the fakery involved in Ashley Madison's self-presentation as a site with many women is superb.

My analysis had to be entirely based on the profiles themselves, not the credit card data. There is no such thing as a “paid account” for women because women don’t have to pay for anything on Ashley Madison. As a result, I couldn’t use “paid account” as a proxy for “real,” the way analysts have done with the male data. Plus, the credit card data does not list gender — so it would have been impossible to be certain of gender ratios in the credit card information anyway.

In the profile database, each Ashley Madison member has a number of data fields, including obvious things like nickname, gender, birthday, and turn-ons; but the member profile also contains data that is purely for administrative use, like the email address used to create the account, and when the person last checked their Ashley Madison inbox.

I started my search in an obvious place. Were there any patterns in the personal email addresses that people listed when they signed up? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating fake profiles, I would use ashleymadison.com for the email addresses because it’s easy and obvious. No real Ashley Madison customer would have an Ashley Madison company email. So I searched for any email address that ended in ashleymadison.com. Bingo. There were about 10 thousand accounts with ashleymadison.com email addresses. Many of them sounded like they’d been generated by a bot, like the dozens of addresses listed as 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, 300@ashleymadison, and so on.

A quick comparison of men’s and women’s email addresses revealed that over 9 thousand of these ashleymadison.com addresses were used for female profiles, while roughly 1000 went to men or to profiles where no gender was specified.

This pattern was telling, but not damning. What it suggests is that the majority of obviously fake accounts — ones perhaps created by bored admins using their company’s email address, or maybe real women using fake information — were marked female. These fakes numbered in the thousands, which is exactly what Impact Team suggested.

Go, read.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Sochi Syndrome"

Anar Valiyev and Natalie Koch at Open Democracy describe how international sporting events like last year's Sochi Olympics are used for multiple, self-propagandizing, purposes by authoritarian elites.

'Urban boosterism' is defined as the active promotion of a city, and it typically involves large-scale urban development schemes—constructing iconic new buildings, revamping local infrastructure, and creating a new image for the city.

For long a popular tactic of free market liberals, used to justify speculative building, the logic of urban boosterism hinges on freedom of movement of both capital and individuals. Curiously, though, it is increasingly at work in settings less committed to such freedoms. Urban planners in authoritarian countries are increasingly seeking to create new images for their cities and states through grandiose urban development and the hosting of major international spectacles, such as World Fairs, Olympic Games or the World Cup.

As citizens and their leaders in liberal democracies grow increasingly fatigued by—and intolerant of—the skyrocketing expense of hosting such spectacles, leaders in non-democracies have been quick to pick up the slack and are beginning to win first-tier event bids (like the 2008 Beijing Olympics; the 2014 Sochi Olympics and Russia’s 2018 World Cup; and Qatar’s 2022 World Cup). While urban boosterism in liberal democratic settings is also used to solidify the position of 'growth machine' elites, the unprecedented $51 billion price tag for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi shows that resource-rich, non-democratic states are positioned to develop such projects on a dramatically larger scale.

[. . .]

The 'Sochi syndrome' is a sign of what we can expect as more and more non-democratic, illiberal states host these events, as illustrated by the cases of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.

According to Freedom House, in its classification system, these rank among the world’s least free countries. Boosterist agendas in Baku, Astana, and Ashgabat serve two related purposes—to distribute financial and political patronage, and to promote a positive image of the state for both international and domestic consumption.

[LINK] "Is this China’s Chernobyl moment?"

Open Democracy's Maria Repnikova describes how the contemporary Chinese response to the Tianjin explosion demonstrates the flexibility of the Chinese system, contrasted to the late Soviet respons eto Chernobyl.

[T]he Chinese authorities, while sometimes still treating information as a “ virus on the verge of infecting the masses,” now often treat crisis coverage as a potent tool to be deployed. For the past decade, Chinese authorities have refined a ‘contained transparency’ approach, focusing on guiding public opinion via selective censorship mixed with the selective dissemination of information and responsiveness to public grievances. Some media coverage is allowed, but reporting is restricted as much as possible to the official version of the Xinhua News Agency. Central officials make appearances at disaster sites and hold news conferences, albeit sometimes after a short delay, and the official press carries hopeful messages regarding disaster relief and top-level investigations. This was the approach to Tianjin.

Although censorship was pervasive after the blast, it was carefully targeted. Many critical posts were swept from the web, but many survived, even if only temporarily. Moreover, a number of traditional media platforms launched impressive investigations of the disaster, pushing the envelope of the official directive of Xinhua-only coverage. Topics they covered included the ownership structure of Ruihai, the high death toll among fire-fighters, and the links between Ruihai and the state-owned company Sinopec. These reports called, in different ways, for greater official accountability. The state’s willingness to allow these reports to circulate points to the intentionally incomplete nature of control, a sense that bounded bottom-up feedback can be helpful rather than harmful even in a state that prizes top-down control.

Finally, we are now seeing a burst of official responsiveness to public questioning and discontent. Top executives of the offending company have been detained, and the mayor of Tianjin publicly admitted responsibility for the scandal. This official responsiveness to the disaster, however, is being carefully managed to ensure that the central state can still be seen as a benevolent guardian, while the blame is placed squarely on local officials.

[LINK] "Sea level has climbed 8 centimetres since 1992"

CBC carries the Thomson Reuters report noting that sea levels have already risen in the past two decades.

Sea levels worldwide rose an average of nearly eight centimetres (3 inches) since 1992, the result of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of NASA scientists said on Wednesday.

In 2013, a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from 0.3 to 0.9 metres (1 to 3 feet) by the end of the century.

The new research shows that sea level rise most likely will be at the high end of that range, said University of Colorado geophysicist Steve Nerem.

Sea levels are rising faster than they did 50 years ago and "it's very likely to get worse in the future," Nerem said.

The changes are not uniform. Some areas showed sea levels rising more than 25 cm (9 inches) and other regions, such as along the U.S. West Coast, actually falling, according to an analysis of 23 years of satellite data.

[LINK] "Why the Rich Love Burning Man"

The radical online magazine Jacobin features an article by Keith A. Spencer critical of the extent to which the rich apparently now dominate the Burning Man festival. Thoughts?

Burning Man grew from unpretentious origins: a group of artists and hippies came together to burn an effigy at Baker Beach in San Francisco, and in 1990 set out to have the same festival in a place where the cops wouldn’t hassle them about unlicensed pyrotechnics. The search led them to the Black Rock Desert.

Burning Man is very much a descendent of the counterculture San Francisco of yesteryear, and possesses the same sort of libertine, nudity-positive spirit. Some of the early organizers of the festival professed particular admiration for the Situationists, the group of French leftists whose manifestos and graffitied slogans like “Never Work” became icons of the May 1968 upsurge in France.

[. . .]

Participation sounds egalitarian, but it leads to some interesting contradictions. The most elaborate camps and spectacles tend to be brought by the rich because they have the time, the money, or both, to do so. Wealthier attendees often pay laborers to build and plan their own massive (and often exclusive) camps. If you scan San Francisco’s Craigslist in the month of August, you’ll start to see ads for part-time service labor gigs to plump the metaphorical pillows of wealthy Burners.

The rich also hire sherpas to guide them around the festival and wait on them at the camp. Some burners derogatorily refer to these rich person camps as “turnkey camps.”

Silicon Valley’s adoration of Burning Man goes back a long way, and tech workers have always been fans of the festival. But it hasn’t always been the provenance of billionaires — in the early days, it was a free festival with a cluster of pitched tents, weird art, and explosives; but as the years went on, more exclusive, turnkey camps appeared and increased in step with the ticket price — which went from $35 in 1994 to $390 in 2015 (about sixteen times the rate of inflation).

Black Rock City has had its own FAA-licensed airport since 2000, and it’s been getting much busier. These days you can even get from San Carlos in Silicon Valley to the festival for $1500. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg flew into Burning Man on a private helicopter, staying for just one day, to eat and serve artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches.

[URBAN NOTE] "The most disturbing thing we learned from the G20"

Edward Keenan's Toronto Star article describing how, at the G20 fiasco years ago, the police collaborated with the Black Bloc is stellar.

The bad guys, the Black Bloc anarchists and vandals — the people Fenton referred to as “terrorists” — were trying to make a point, and the police reacted by proving it for them.

See, the peaceful protesters were the optimists, who gathered under the premise that our leaders — the leaders of much of the world — would listen to the people, would have to, if they gathered together in a large enough group with big enough papier-mâché puppets and loud enough chants of “Hey, hey, ho ho.”

This is the essentially generous democratic assumption behind all peaceful dissent: if enough of us speak loudly and clearly enough, our leaders will listen.

The Black Bloc do not share the faith that we live in that kind of democracy. And they make it their mission to expose that faith as misplaced. The point of their activities, which, if they don’t fit most people’s modern interpretation of “terrorism” (despite Fenton’s characterization) are certainly intended to be scary and chaotic and disorienting, is to provoke a reaction. They think the idea that police (and world leaders) serve and protect the public is a sham. Those authorities, they claim, only protect capital, and they only serve corporate interests and their own power.

And so while the innocent march and chant, the Black Bloc say to them and to the general public: if you don’t believe us, watch what happens when we smash some windows, destroy some property, light a police car on fire. See how your capitalist democracy holds up then, see how your constitution is applied, see how well your voice is heard.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO announces the impending opening of Toronto's first cat café.


• Centauri Dreams shares sharper images of Ceres from New Horizons.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the discovery of very distant Neptune-mass planet OGLE-2005-BLG-169b.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the latest from the Donbas.


• Far Outliers notes the spike in surrenders on Okinawa in June 1945.


• Geocurrents maps the relatively balanced oil-based economic development of Colombia.


• Marginal Revolution notes the use of the smartphone by refugees.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer observes the surprising casualty-heavy intensity of Russia's war in the Donbas.


• Torontoist explains the import of the City of Toronto's budget surplus.


• Towleroad notes how a fugitive priest is defending his rape of an altar boy.


• Window on Eurasia notes one moment when Russia could have prevented the fall in oil prices.

[MUSIC] Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

"Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit" (Watch on YouTube)

I never listened to Nirvana when they were a band. The musicianship of Nirvana, including Kurt Cobain, was something I only came to recognize after the fact. I did not ha to be a fan, though, for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to have not absorbed me during my adolescence.