[PHOTO] Moon over Spadina Avenue

[LINK] "Letter from Iran: diplomacy trumps hostility?"

At Open Democracy, Linda Briskman argues that the negotiated end to sanctions is a plus for Iran, and the world.

People living in sanctions-supporting countries have failed to acknowledge the humanity of Iranians, thanks to a largely biased western media. There are few who would know that sanctions exceed economic hardship and include shortages of life-saving medicines. In spite of the fact that food and drugs are exempt from sanctions under international agreements, the situation reveals otherwise, with the universal right to health severely compromised. Foreign banks have hesitated to conduct business even when knowing that financial transactions were for medical imports. The shortage of vital imported medications, including for cancer sufferers and children with haemophilia, has been a source of anguish for patients and their families.

There have been detrimental effects on Iran’s youth. A priority for Iran in entering nuclear negotiations, says President Rouhani, is to create an environment conducive to doing business and to address the government’s concern about youth unemployment.

The signing of the accord and the eventual loosening of the shackles of sanctions is a remarkable exercise in peace-building through negotiation and diplomacy. The next stage is building trust to create an enduring legacy for the process that has begun.

[LINK] "The Dead Sea is dying"

Al Jazeera's Creede Newton reports on the decline of the Dead Sea, at best slowed down by new proposals.

The Dead Sea, a unique body of water marked by mineral-rich, unusually salty water - nearly 10 times saltier than the world's oceans - is dying. Its water level is dropping by roughly one metre each year.

"We think that the current situation is an ecological disaster," said Gidon Bromberg, director of EcoPeace Middle East (EPME), an organisation that brings together Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian environmentalists to protect their shared environmental heritage.

"It's unacceptable: The unique ecosystem is in severe danger, threatening biodiversity, and you see dramatic sinkholes opening up along the shore," Bromberg said, referring to the large, unpredictable cavities that have appeared recently. Some are so cavernous that they swallow entire structures.

According to Bromberg, the two main reasons for the dropping water level are mineral extraction by Israeli and Jordanian companies in the artificially shallow southern basin, and the fact that 95 percent of the Jordan River - the Dead Sea's main source of replenishing water - is being diverted. The river used to provide 1,350 million cubic metres of water each year (mcm), but that flow has dwindled to just 20 mcm.

[LINK] "Catalonia Attacks ‘Infinite Cynicism’ as Spain Curbs Powers"

Esteban Duarte of Bloomberg examines ongoing controversies in Spain over federalism. I can easily imagine ways this could spiral out of control.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has introduced rules that effectively revoke the powers of the Catalan government, the regional president’s right hand man said, before a vote that could fuel separatists’ bid to split from Spain.

Rajoy is forcing regional officials to get approval from the central government before paying commercial creditors, Francesc Homs, the head of the Catalan’s presidency department, said in an interview in Barcelona Wednesday. The national government in Madrid has also ruled that laws only come into force once they’ve been published in the Spanish Official Gazette, preventing regional leader Artur Mas from introducing legislation using the Catalan equivalent, Homs said.

Mas’s bid for independence has set him on a collision course with Rajoy who says that his plans are unconstitutional. Mas has framed the Sept. 27 regional election as a ballot on independence after Rajoy blocked his attempt to hold a referendum last November.

“When someone says we could get the region’s autonomy suspended, I tell them they’ve actually done it already,” Homs said. The central government is acting with “infinite cynicism,” he added.

[LINK] "Japan's Central Bank Is China's Biggest Cheerleader"

William Pesek of Bloomberg View notes the extent to which the Japanese economy depends on China's, to the extent that a Chinese slowdown could really hurt Japan.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has a new strategy to support his country's listing economy: talking up China's.

It's a marked break with what other Japanese officials are saying. Finance Minister Taro Aso and economy czar Akira Amari have been eager to blame China's slowdown for Japan's woes. It's somewhat surreal to see them urge Beijing to implement economic reforms when they've done nothing of the sort in Tokyo -- and with more time on the job than their Chinese counterparts.

Kuroda, however, is guilty of taking things to the opposite extreme. Speaking in New York, he challenged the negativity shrouding Asia's biggest economy, saying he's "reasonably sure" China will grow between 6 percent and 7 percent this year and next -- a prediction that hardly anyone else has endorsed. Kuroda has effectively lashed his credibility, and his legacy, to China's trajectory. It's not hard to understand why he might have felt he had no choice.

Kuroda has to contend with three big problems. The first is demographics. Just as his predecessor Masaaki Shirakawa warned, Japan's consumer prices are bound to fall as its population ages. The second is a dearth of confidence: Monetary policy has been rendered comatose by the public's hesitance to borrow and banks' hesitance to lend. The third is China's slowdown -- a variable far beyond Tokyo's control, but no less critical for Japan's fate.

[. . .]

The fact that China isn't crashing should put most of the world at ease. But even a moderate slowdown could prove a lethal blow for Japan. China's combination of deflation and currency devaluation is reducing the odds that the trillions of dollars of monetary stimulus Kuroda has pumped into markets since April 2013 will ever gain any traction.

[URBAN NOTE] "Exploring Black Creek, Toronto’s mini-LA River"

Spacing Toronto's Jake Tobin Garrett has a nice photo essay exploring the largely channelized Black Creek.

I’ve been reading a lot about the LA river recently because of the announcement that Frank Gehry is working with the City of Los Angeles on plans to revitalize the river (plans that some say may clash with previous plans to renaturalize part of it.) So I decided to check out one of Toronto’s own mini-LA rivers, Black Creek.

My first glimpse of Black Creek was before I knew it was Black Creek. I saw it as I passed by on the new UP Express on my way to Newfoundland for a friend’s wedding last month. There, outside the window of the train, I saw a large concrete channel marching down the centre of a street, a trickle of water down its middle. What is that, I thought. It looked so un-Toronto to me.

Turns out it’s part of Black Creek, one of Toronto’s most polluted waterways and the smallest subwatershed of the Humber River, into which it flows.

According to this little history on the Black Creek Conservation Project website, Black Creek was channelized following Hurricane Hazel in 1954 as a way to prevent flooding and whisk stormwater away faster. It was apparently fully surrounded in its open concrete channel by 1965. The effect is pretty dramatic. It’s horrific and beautiful at the same time, in the way that weird, concrete urban things often are where nature has started to reinsert itself in all the little nooks and crannies.

[URBAN NOTE] "How to ‘get’ and repair Uno Prii Annex grooviness"

The Globe and Mail's Dave Leblanc describes how 44 Walmer Road, a tower built in the 19860s from designs by architect Uno Prii, has been sensitively repaired.

Reporting for The Annex Gleaner in May, 2001, modern-architecture enthusiast Alfred Holden lamented the loss of the “curvilinear, circle-patterned balcony railings” at 44 Walmer Rd., and called them the 1969 apartment building’s “most artful and distinguishing feature.”

An Annex resident himself, Mr. Holden had written often about the whimsical designs of Estonian-born architect Uno Prii (1924–2000) and had interviewed the architect at his home, where sculpture, pottery and paintings by Prii’s own hand were in full view.

Mr. Holden argued that, just as the Eaton Centre’s flock of geese were off-limits to alterations – artist Michael Snow successfully sued mall management in 1982 when the fiberglass waterfowl were dressed in red ribbons for Christmas – architectural elements such as metal balcony railings could, perhaps, be considered art as well.

He urged unhappy building residents, who had spoken to a law student, to make waves and create a precedent.

[URBAN NOTE] "How to Bring a Wheelchair to a Sex Club: A look at Toronto’s Deliciously Disabled"

Torontoist's Kaitlyn Kochany has a nice article examining the Deliciously Disabled movement, on-line and in sex clubs.

First of all: it wasn’t an orgy. Despite what you might have read in the Sun, the Star, and Vice, the party that went down at Buddies in Bad Times on August 14 is more correctly referred to as a “play party.” The 125 people who sold out the event could flirt, dance, laugh, be in various stages of undress, make out—and they could have sex, too, if they were all consenting adults.

Why was this a big deal? Those 125 people were attending Deliciously Disabled, the first fully accessible play party in Canada, if not the world. The party was different from the usual hook-up club scene in a number of ways. There were attendants onsite, to help operate Hoyer lifts and move people from wheelchairs to couches or beds and back again. There were volunteers who provided ASL translation. The bathrooms and entryways could accommodate 300-pound motorized wheelchairs. And, for the first time, people living with disabilities were at the centre of a sexual event designed to include them right from the beginning. “This event and space was for me. I was not an afterthought,” says Andrew Morrison-Gurza.

Morrison-Gurza is a Richmond Hill-based consultant who focuses on sexuality and disability. Earlier this year, he created Deliciously Disabled to further his work, which includes blogging and speaking about his lived experience as a queer man with cerebral palsy. “The brand started back in January, when I did a shoot for Now Magazine’s Love Your Body issue. They didn’t have anyone with a disability and I approached them.” After the shoot, the magazine asked Morrison-Gurza how he wanted to be described in his bio. At first, he went with his usual “queer and disabled” explainer. “And then I said, nope, you know what? I’m going to say I’m deliciously disabled.” A brand was born.

Stella Palikarova, who works on experiences and expressions of disability, came up with the idea for the play party. Last fall, she partnered with Oasis Aqualounge and began searching for venues that could accommodate disabled guests. (Oasis, with its narrow doorways and many stairs, wasn’t going to work.) “I did some poking around in terms of what, if any, accessible sex clubs exist in Toronto. I came up short.” The theatre-slash-event space Buddies in Bad Times was finally chosen after months of searching.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that stars commonly ingest hot Jupiters.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the spread of robots.


• Far Outliers shares terms for making shoyu.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ashley Madison nearly bought Grindr.


• Language Log notes the changing usage of "hemp" as a political term.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the plan to save New Orleans by abandoning the Mississippi delta.


• The Russian Demographics blog notes the genetic distinctiveness of the Denisovans.


• Towleroad notes the pulling-down of a Warsaw rainbow monument.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the American debate over birthright citizenship.

[VIDEO] Bureau of Proto Society

Bureau of Proto Society is amazing. I found it via io9 (http://io9.com/a-group-of-historians-debates-how-the-world-ended-but-1727359489):

The short anime comedy Bureau of Proto Society takes us to a post-apocalyptic bunker, when the last remnants of humanity live isolated from the world. The bunker’s historians gather each day to try to debate how the world ended—and once you see their historical sources, you’ll understand their confusion.

Sadly, this short, by writer/director Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Patema Inverted) isn’t embeddable, but you can watch it at the Japan Animator Expo website, where it will be available for the next few weeks. (Click the English flag in the upper right hand corner if you don’t speak Japanese and be aware that theres a minute-long opening before the actual short starts.) It’s a very funny film, packed with pop culture references, and snazzy ending.

[META] What blogs do you read?

What blogs do you read?

Let me know in the comments. I like coming across new things.