[PHOTO] Yellow leaves, Dupont Street

[URBAN NOTE] "Finding a safe place to call home in Toronto after fleeing Hungary"

The Globe and Mail's Wency Leung reports on the plight of refugees--here, a Hungarian teenager and his family--looking for a home in Toronto.

Upon arriving as asylum seekers, Laszlo [Sarkozi] and his family initially took up shelter at the Roycroft Motel, a drab place on noisy Kingston Road. But after several months of sharing a cramped room with his parents and two younger brothers, it was time to move on.

The Sarkozis, who were denied refugee status but were granted the right to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, have called three places home in the five years they have been in Toronto, all of them in the eastern part of the city known as Scarborough. Laszlo, now 16, describes each:

The first apartment, it had bedbugs – the entire building. And just the general area was not very child-friendly. I remember walking to school once and there were drops of blood on the sidewalk, like someone had been stabbed. The police were called a couple of times for a few people who were always hanging out right beside the building. There was always a lot of screaming.

The second place [near Eglinton Avenue and Kingston Road] was much better. It was a townhouse. But the owners did not like us at all. We asked them to change the lock. They didn’t change the lock. We actually were living under the same lock as the previous people and they could have easily come in and opened the door any time. We asked them to fix the windows because they were not keeping cold air out properly. They didn’t. And when we asked them how much hydro would be, they said the bill should be $100, $150 every two months. No matter how much we conserved, it ended up being $1,000 or $1,500.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Making Transgender Reassignment Surgeries More Accessible Matters"

Torontoist's Erica Lenti reports on how Ontario is making transgender reassignment surgeries more accessible to the people who need it, actually covering them.

Marcel’s body does not match his gender identity. It’s a fact he has spent years contemplating, and a truth that has cost him thousands upon thousands of dollars to consolidate.

In 2010, at the age of 22, Marcel (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) came out as transgender. First, while still a student, he started hormone replacement therapy. The testosterone would help him build muscle, grow more body hair and lower the pitch of his voice. By 2012, he took a 9-to-5 job to supplement the cost of a bilateral mastectomy—a surgery that, when performed at a private clinic, can cost upwards of $6,000. His friends donated about a third of the money he needed for the procedure, and his sister helped out, too; the rest came out of his pocket.

The cost of a more intensive procedure, phalloplasty (better known as “bottom surgery”), was out of reach, fundraising friends or otherwise. That would have to be funded by the government.

Those in Ontario who seek to physically transition, like Marcel, are met with a figurative brick wall. As it stands, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto is the only institution in the province where transfolk can be assessed and recommended for surgery that is covered by government health insurance. With almost 1,200 on the waiting list for a referral, many wait on standby. Marcel was told he would have to wait at least two years to see a professional at CAMH.

The Ontario government is trying to change that. On November 6, health minister Eric Hoskins announced a proposal that would open up the assessment and referral process to 600 other qualified institutions. The proposal comes months after the province vowed to expand services beyond CAMH in order to shorten a wait list that has been growing at a rate of 100 names per month. Though it could be months before the proposal becomes legislation, it is a step forward in trans healthcare that has been a long time coming—one that is, for many, a matter of life and death.

[LINK] On how the family of a Paris terrorist prayed for his death

The National Post shared Andrew Higgins and Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura's article in The New York Times noting how the family of a Paris terrorist wished him dead. That must be so hard.

When the family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud received word from Syria last fall that he had been killed fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant it rejoiced at what it took to be excellent news about a wayward son it had come to despise.

“We are praying that Abdelhamid really is dead,” his older sister, Yasmina, said at the time.

Their prayers — and the hopes of Western security officials — were not answered. Abaaoud, then 26, was in reality on his way back to Europe to meet secretly with Islamic extremists who shared his determination to spread mayhem. He has since been linked to a string of terrorist operations that culminated with Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Militant photo via APThis undated image made available in the Islamic State's English-language magazine Dabiq, shows Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud. .

“Of course, it is not joyous to make blood flow. But, from time to time, it is pleasant to see the blood of disbelievers,” Abaaoud declared in a French-language recruiting video for the ISIL released shortly before his supposed death.

During his travels back to Europe at the end of last year, European security services picked up his trail and tracked his cellphone to Athens, Greece, according to a retired European military official. But they lost him, and soon after that he appeared to have made it back to Belgium, where he had grown up in a moderately successful family from Morocco.

[LINK] "Evan Solomon on guillotines, long knives and politics"

Last week, Canadian political journalist Evan Solomon wrote about how the NDP and Conservatives need to renew themselves.

Sixty seconds to debate whether Canada should join the fight in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State. Sixty seconds to make a point about the fairness of income-splitting. Sixty. Seconds.

“The one-minute rule for caucus debate simply doesn’t allow meaningful discussion of complex issues,” Conservative MP Mike Lake wrote in the extraordinary letter he sent colleagues as he was making his failed pitch to be interim leader of his party. “On many occasions, a lack of a good hearing within caucus led to the frustrated [MP] venting outside of caucus. Both scenarios are extremely corrosive.”

Of all the critiques that have emerged about Stephen Harper’s authoritarian style, Lake’s candid revelation that MPs were limited to political haikus behind the secret, closed doors of caucus is, perhaps, the most devastating.

Of course, all parties come together publicly around policy; that’s understandable. And with almost 160 MPs and 60 senators, there was a genuine need for Harper to impose discipline on the debate, but Lake reveals that this was more than a matter of time efficiency. It was emblematic of what he called a “corrosive” internal culture that finally ate away at Harper’s own team and, ultimately, his hold on power. The Conservatives now face a very tough road to renewal.

The NDP faces similar questions about renewal, and a more complex problem of leadership. This week, senior NDP members quietly met to go over their first post-election report on what went wrong. Will Tom Mulcair get to lead the party into the next election, or should he announce he is stepping down before the April leadership review?

[LINK] On Australia fining Japanese whalers off Antarctica

The National Post carries this Associated Press article. Now, to enforce it!

An Australian court fined a Japanese whaling company 1 million Australian dollars ($700,000) on Wednesday for violating a court order that it stop hunting whales in an area off Antarctica.

Federal Court Justice Jayne Jagot found that Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha, the company that operates Japan’s hunting ships, had repeatedly breached a 2008 court injunction to stop killing whales inside Australia’s exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from Australian-declared territory in Antarctica.

Commercial whaling was banned in 1986, but Japan continued to kill whales under an exemption for scientific research. The country does not recognize Australia’s territorial claim on the waters off Antarctica, and kept up its annual hunt despite the 2008 injunction until the International Court of Justice ruled last year that the hunts were not truly scientific.

[LINK] "For the Don Cossacks, Russia’s Civil War is not yet over"

Open Democracy carries Svetlana Bolotnikova's article noting controversies surrounding Don Cossack identity and historical memory in a confused Russian situation.

Last month, the Fifth World Congress of Cossacks took place in Novocherkassk, in the heartland of the Don Cossacks in southern Russia. 120 delegates from the Cossack diaspora attended, to discuss the possibility of closer economic links with overseas Cossack communities and offering their members a faster Russian citizenship process.

One prominent figure, however, was missing. The congress took place against the background of official harassment of Vladimir Melikhov, one of the most internationally respected Cossack leaders and the founder of two anti-Bolshevik resistance museums. This summer, the FSB searched Melikhov’s museums and property, seizing cartridges, a number of deactivated rifles and First World War bayonets, as well as several signal rockets.

With one in Podolsk, a town outside of Moscow, and the other in the village of Yelanskaya, in the Cossack heartland, these museums keep the spirit of the pre-revolutionary Cossack nation alive (‘For our faith, our Tsar and our Fatherland’ as the Cossack motto goes).

The official reason given for the Melikhov search was to look for evidence relating to criminal charges against Yury Churekov, the chief, or ataman, of an unregistered group called the Caucasus Line Cossack Host. Churekhov was arrested in June for attempting to smuggle arms into Russia via eastern Ukraine.

In 2014, Churekov, together with Sergei Popov, leader and ideologue of the Russian Caucasus Unity movement, fulfilled Melikhov’s long-held ambition of creating a dedicated Cossack political party, which they christened Brotherhood.

[URBAN NOTE] "Berlin Just Showed the World How to Keep Housing Affordable"

At CityLab, Feargus O'Sullivan writes about Berlin's imposition of rent controls to protect poor tenants.

Beginning January 1, many Berlin housing project residents can expect a cut in their rent. The cost of public housing in the city is just too high, the Berlin Senate ruled today, and from now on the rent tenants pay will be directly linked to how much they earn.

In a city with high numbers of public housing residents, the effect of the new rule could be striking. Of Berlin’s current 3.5 million residents, about 250,000 people live in housing projects, spread across some 125,000 apartments. The city also has 280,000 apartments owned by four state property companies that will likewise be subject to the new rules.

From now on, low-income tenants in these homes will have a guarantee that rent rises will not price them out. The number of these protected apartments will also go up. Today’s ruling binds the Berlin Senate to build 30,000 new public housing units within the next 10 years, while the proportion of affordable housing owned by the state property companies will also be pushed up.

The new law, thoroughly explained in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper yesterday, will work as follows. People on low incomes living in social- or state-owned housing will pay no more than a third of their gross income in rent. For tenants in a few buildings with especially high energy costs, that ceiling will be dropped to 25 percent of gross income.

More there.

[WRITING] "Writing in and from the Field"

Another interesting Savage Minds' essay on writing is Ieva Jusionyte's meditation on fieldwork, in the context of her work on borders.

This morning, as I am sitting down to write this blog entry in my rental apartment in Nogales, I peer through the window: The sun has illuminated the dark brown border wall that coils over the hilly landscape and reminds me of the spiked back of a stegosaurus. Six months ago I arrived in Southern Arizona to begin fieldwork with firefighters and paramedics for a new ethnographic project about emergency responders on both sides of the line, as the international boundary which abruptly separates Mexico and the United States is locally called. Though ethnographic fieldwork takes many forms – I am conducting interviews, participating in the daily activities at the firehouse, volunteering at a first aid station for migrants, teaching prehospital emergency care at a local fire district, and engaging with the first responder communities in Arizona and Sonora in multiple other ways – my primary activity continues to be writing.

I have always been a morning writer. When I was working on the manuscript of my first book, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (University of California Press 2015), I would shut the doors of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the forested suburbs of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was fortunate to spend my research leave, and would sit at my large desk, facing the barren trees outside, until noontime. I did it every day of the week for several months during a long and cold winter. The manuscript was complete and sent off to my editor on the eve of spring.

But during fieldwork keeping a regular writing routine has been difficult. The topic of our research inevitably shapes how, where and what we write, and my study of fire and rescue services under heightened border security is no exception. Often I spend the entire day on shift with the crew at the fire station, riding along with them to the scenes of emergencies. Other days there is training, community events, long drives to do interviews at more remote fire districts. Having a background in both journalism and in anthropology affects how I go about conducting research. Instead of dividing my time into chunks for doing fieldwork and writing up fieldnotes, I tend to pursue the story as far as it takes me before I finally sit down to reflect on the new material. I think of it as combining the in-depth view of an anthropologist with the fervor of an investigative journalist. It can be exhausting.

Because of this, I write anywhere and everywhere, whenever I have a minute to jot down my thoughts and observations. I scribble names, places and dates in my pocket notebook, in a handwriting that has become illegible, especially when the entries are made while riding in the back of a fire engine or on a 4×4 truck plowing through the dirt roads to where the fence between the U.S. and Mexico is nothing more than a Normandy barrier and four-strand barbed wire. I type abbreviated notes on my cell phone during stops at gas stations along the I-19 connecting Tucson with Nogales, and whenever pulling out my phone to quickly enter some text seems more polite – and less intrusive – than opening my notebook. When I am driving and I can’t pull over to jot down a thought that I want to keep, I record voice memos; I have done so passing through Border Patrol checkpoints on Arivaca Road and on Sasabe Highway, back when I used to count the times I was stopped and to document what the agents were saying.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO notes Yonge Street probably beats out Davenport Road as Toronto's oldest street.


• The Dragon's Tales notes simulations of Earth's early atmosphere that might help us determine if exoplanets host life.


• Joe. My. God. notes an American Christian who thinks France deserved ISIS.


• Language Hat notes how song lyrics help preserve the Berber dialect of Siwa, in Egypt.


• Languages of the World's Asya Pereltsvaig reposts an old article of hers on the English language of the islands of the South Atlantic.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the complexity of solidarity with France in our post-imperial era.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer suggests well-timed American aid helped Greece enormously.


• Savage Minds notes the return of the Anthrozine.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian is now widely spoken by ISIS and looks at the exact demographics of traditional families in Russia (largely rural, largely non-Russian).

[MUSIC] On why music matters so much, as shown by the Bataclan (#parisattacks)

There's much still to be said about the November 2015 Paris attacks. One point I'd like to elaborate upon relates to the attack on the Bataclan theatre, where 89 people waiting for a performance of Eagles of Death Metal were murdered. A statement made in passing by American Secretary of State John Kerry, contrasting the Bataclan massacre with the Charlie Hebdo massacre by suggesting that whereas the latter attack had some rationale, the Bataclan attack was just pure terror. He later backtracked under criticism, as reported by The New York Times.

Secretary of State John Kerry is drawing criticism for contrasting the latest terror attacks in Paris with the mass shooting in January at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

“There’s something different about what happened with Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Mr. Kerry said on Tuesday, speaking without notes to American Embassy employees in the lobby of the embassy in Paris. “There was a sort of particularized focus, and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘O.K., they’re really angry because of this and that.’

“This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate,” he continued. “It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong; it was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for.”

Mr. Kerry’s comments were swiftly assailed by conservative critics in print and on social media. National Review called them “abhorrent” and “despicable.”

I've blogged here quite a lot over the years about the amount of meaning I derived and still derive from popular music, about how even when I was a solitary listener disconnected from fandom (and much else) I was able to get a sense of community and identity through pop music. (Eurythmics, thank you for helping me make it to my 20s.) Being a consumer of music is not the same kind of thing as being a producer of music, just as being a consumer of any cultural product is not the same as being a producer of any cultural product. Even so, the act of consumption matters: It's a profound marker of identity, of the consumer's voluntary decision to belong to a particular community. As noted by Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic, the communal enjoyment of music at a concert can be hugely enjoyable. It's not for nothing that the rave has become so huge, I think.

Do you remember the article in The New Yorker that I linked to Monday, the one noting how Daesh used the traditions of Arabic poetry to accrue cultural capital? That article also noted that instrumental music is banned from the territories of the Islamic State, as un-Islamic. If the rich and vast and enormously popular tradition of Arabic popular music is actively rejected by Daesh, the people who listen to it or--worse--make it being subject to punishment, how much worse Western popular music? The concert-goers at the Bataclan were murdered because they had made the choice to reject the ideals of Daesh. They were martyrs.

Earlier this week, I shared a meme image on Facebook that happened to be built around what turns out to be an authentic quote from Salman Rushdie.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

Music matters. Let's make the choice to have it matter even more.