[PHOTO] Disembarking in front of the flags at the Royal York, Toronto

Cars kept streaming past the front door of Toronto's Fairmont Royal York, underneath the flags of United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Ontario, and--I assume--the hotel itself.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO considers the question of what Toronto's shortest street is.


• Centauri Dreams shares spectacular Pluto imagery.


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


• Language Log reports "You ain't no Muslim, bruv!", a phrase gone viral.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money connects the Second World War to colonialism in Hawai'i and the Philippines.


• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the first Voyager images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and on the successful insertion into Venus orbit of Japan's Akatsuki probe.


• Towleroad reports on the death of trans Warhol icon Holly Woodlawn.


• Transit Toronto notes the further spread of the WiFi network in the Toronto subway.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russia's refusal to help Circassians in Syria, looks at ethnic Russian volunteers for ISIS, and examines the implications of Saakashvili's loss of Georgian citizenship.

[LINK] Elf Sternberg on imagining Obama laughing at white premature mortality

El Sternberg, in his "Imagine if Obama laughed...", imagined on World AIDS Day what if Obama reacted to premature mortality among whites in the same way that Reagan's press secretary in the early 1980s reacted to AIDS.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:Someone in the back. RollingStone. Matt?

Matt Taibbi:Mr. Gibbs, recently the media has been tracking a rise in deaths among poor, white Americans. They're the only group that has seen this rise. What, um, what reaction does President Obama have to this issue?

Gibbs:Why, Matt? Do you have a reason to worry?

Taibbi:No, I don't. But don't you think it's frightening that so many poor, white Americans are dying this way?

Gibbs:I'm not poor and white. The president sure isn't poor or white. [The rest of the press corps laughs.] This isn't our problem.

Taibbi:Do you think, maybe, the White House could put out a statement encouraging poor, white Americans to get better healthcare?

Gibbs:[Sighs audibly.] Matt, this isn't really a problem that the rest of America wants to deal with. Let's move on.

That white Americans are actively resisting health makes it all the more tragic.

[LINK] "Icelanders flock to religion revering Sumerian gods and tax rebates"

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian writes about how Icelanders are resisting mandatory tithes by joining a neo-Sumerian sect.

Icelanders opposed to the state funding of religion have flocked to register as Zuists, a movement that worships ancient Sumerian gods and – perhaps more importantly – promises its followers a tax rebate.

More than 3,100 people – almost 1% of Iceland’s population – have joined the Zuist movement in the past two weeks in protest at paying part of their taxes to the state church and other religious bodies. Followers of Zuism will be refunded the tax element earmarked for religion.

Icelanders are required to register their religion with the state, with almost three-quarters of the population affiliated to the established Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland. There are more than 40 other registered religious bodies that qualify for “parish fees” paid through the taxation system. The amount set in next year’s budget is the equivalent of about $80 (£53) per taxpayer over a year.

“There is no opt-out. Those who are unaffiliated or belong to unregistered religions effectively just pay higher taxes,” said Sveinn Thorhallsson, a Zuist spokesperson. An opinion poll published in September showed 55% of respondents want an end to the system.

Zuism, based on the worship of Sumerian gods, registered as a religion in Iceland in 2013. But inactivity put it at risk of being de-registered by the authorities earlier this year.

A group of citizens opposed to the state funding of religion mounted a takeover, promising converts that they would be refunded their parish fees.

[LINK] "Remote B.C. town living life without Internet after provider shuts down"

Tamsyn Burgmann's Canadian Press article was republished in the Vancouver Sun, describing the troubles of a British Columbia town cut off from the Internet.

In an age when quality of life includes being connected to the Internet, residents of a British Columbia town say they've gone back 20 years after service was cut off indefinitely.

"It's the same as going from the car to the horse. We should be going forward, not backward," said Mayor Galina Durant, of the District of Stewart.

"To stay without Internet — it's like you cut a line of life," she said Tuesday.

The town of 500 people in northwestern B.C. was plunged into the past a day earlier, when a non-profit society that had served much of the community's Internet needs shut down after two decades.

The mayor and council were notified of the impending blackout, but their selected replacement couldn't meet a deadline before the OneWayOut.net Society withdrew service.

[LINK] "China stuns analysts with $60-billion pledge for Africa"

The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York notes China's new outreach to Africa, aid-wise.

Even as its economy slows, China has wowed its African allies with an impressive display of political promises and a staggering $60-billion (U.S.) in new financial support.

Chinese President Xi Jinping came to Africa bearing gifts, and he was rewarded with a standing ovation and glowing praise from dozens of African heads of state at a summit in Johannesburg on Friday. It was a clear demonstration that China remains a superpower in its influence in Africa.

Mr. Xi said everything that the African leaders wanted to hear. He spoke of political equality. He pledged that China would never impose its will on Africa. He promised $156-million in emergency food aid for Africa’s drought-afflicted nations, and a further $60-million for an African military rapid-response force. And then he made the announcement that everyone was awaiting: a total of $60-billion in grants, loans, credit and preferential financing for cash-strapped African nations.

Zimbabwean autocrat Robert Mugabe was among the leaders at the summit who heaped praise on Mr. Xi, calling him a “God-sent person” and a welcome change from Western “colonizers.”

The timing of the financial aid was crucial, since African economies have suffered badly from China’s slowdown this year. China has become Africa’s biggest trading partner, with about $220-billion in trade last year, but its African trade has slumped by 18 per cent in the first nine months of this year. China’s imports of African raw materials have dramatically declined since late last year, and Chinese investment in Africa has dropped by 40 per cent in the first half of this year.

[LINK] "The challenges of post-Chávez Venezuela"

At Open Democracy before this week's election, Pablo Stefanoni wrote about Venezuela's uncertain prospects.

"The Venezuelan nation now depends on young professionals who migrate; as in the case of the Armenian Diaspora, they are the ones who will be responsible for preserving our culture." The sentence, said by an upper-middle class lady, reflects two symptoms of current Venezuela: the escapist tendencies of some of the critics of Nicolás Maduro’s regime and, at the same time, a situation that appears to be hitting rock bottom, in which – for real or imagined reasons - emigration is being left as the only option for many young, middle or upper-class professionals.

A 2012 video, available on YouTube, refers to Caracas as a "city of goodbyes". "I spend my weekends seeing friends off," says one of the citizens appearing in the film; "I'm in love with Caracas but we cannot live together," says another; "Looks like my life has stopped being interesting", says the song in the soundtrack. At the same time, the faces and the phenotypes (white) as well as the social marks (upper middle class) reveal one of the cracks in Venezuelan society, which has been there since long before Chávez, but which has become politicized since the late 90s. Today, the crisis – due both to the absence of a charismatic leadership and falling oil revenues - encourages this kind of speech. And disappointment includes many Chavistas non-Maduristas.

The legitimacy of Chavismo was based on the powerful combination of the leader’s charisma and high oil revenues, and its outreach to the whole of Latin America. The death of the Supreme Commander, officially on March 5, 2013, together with falling oil prices, eroded the very foundations of the Bolivarian Revolution. But the high expectations nurtured by the opposition regarding the parliamentary elections of December 6, do not imply any certainty that the crisis will automatically play in their favour – at least, not as much as its leaders and supporters wish. To them, the winning card is now the "López factor": i.e., jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López who, after his recent conviction, has become a virtual martyr of democracy and freedom in his Ramo Verde prison.

Aged 44 and an economist by trade, related to Simón Bolivar through his mother’s family, a good speaker and former mayor of Chacao, Leopoldo López was imprisoned one and a half years ago under the accusation of stirring the protests in which he sought to deploy in the streets a strategy known as "La salida” (The way out), designed to force the resignation of Nicolás Maduro (whose term ends in 2019), seasoned by the so-called "guarimbas" (road-blocking and barricading). On September, 10, López was sentenced to 13 years, 9 months, 7 days and 12 hours in prison by interim Judge Susana Barreiros. "If I am convicted, you will be more afraid to read the verdict than I will be to hear it," the opposition leader said to her in the last hearing, while Caracas was eagerly awaiting the court's decision.

[LINK] "Saudis, shale and the high costs of cheap oil"

The Globe and Mail's Eric Reguly wrote last week about how the policy of Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf States, to have low prices for oil are hurting its OPEC allies.

A little more than a year ago, Saudi Arabia, the effective leader of OPEC, the 13-country cartel that pumps about a third of the world’s oil, decided that enough was enough.

The global market was drowning in oil, thanks to the American shale-oil miracle, and the Saudis were losing market share. They went on the offensive.

Production cuts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to keep the price up would be ruled out; the market would find its own level.

Not even the Saudis could have foreseen the damage the decision would inflict. In the past year, Brent crude, the global benchmark, has fallen 37 per cent to $44 (U.S.) a barrel. As late as June, 2014, Brent was trading at $110. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the oil plunge has reduced OPEC’s annual oil revenues to $550-billion from $1-trillion.

The value obliteration has divided OPEC as never before, to the point that the organization’s summit in Vienna resembled a slugfest on Friday. OPEC’s weakest countries, led by Venezuela, begged the Saudis to endorse a 5-per-cent production cut to prop up the price.

[LINK] "Solar Kiosks Help Light up Rural Kenya"

Justus Wanzala at the Inter Press Service writes about how solar power hubs are helping boost local economies in Kenya.

This market centre in the arid Lake Magadi region, Kajiado of Southern Kenya is with no grid electricity. The area is inhabited by the pastoralist Maasai community. With climate change affecting their pastoral way of life, the community is increasingly adopting a more sedentary life but without amenities.

The centre is hot and dusty. Much as the area enjoys bright sunshine during the day, the situation changes to pitch dark after sunset. But in the last two years, the market centre is witnessing a transformation. It is becoming a beehive of activity.

This is courtesy of Solar Kiosk Kenya Ltd. that installed a retail kiosk, called the SOLARKIOSK E-HUBB. The E-HUBB, designed by GRAFT (partners and co-founders of SOLARKIOSK AG, the Berlin-based mother company), is a modular solar-powered structure that can be easily implemented in remote communities.

The E-HUBB outlet enables and empowers local entrepreneurship and the sustainable development of Base-of-the-Pyramid (BOP) communities by selling essential food ingredients, vital energy services, solar and clean energy products and connectivity solutions. By the end of 2015, SOLARKIOSK will have implemented over 100 E-HUBBs on three continents.

A SOLARKIOSK E-HUBB is a solar-powered autonomous business hub. It uses solar power to generate electricity for rural off-grid communities for various uses. It is a decentralised, easy to maintain source of energy. Kiosk operators are able to use the power during the day and continue operating late into the night.

[URBAN NOTE] "Five lessons Toronto could learn from New York’s transportation shift"

Oliver Moore at The Globe and Mail wrote about a visiting New Yorker who offered Toronto some advice.

It’s often called the biggest transformation in how New Yorkers move in a half-century. From 2007 to 2013, under mayor Michael Bloomberg, transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan oversaw the addition of hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes, hectares of new pedestrian plazas and concerted efforts to calm driving. Safety improved but vehicle congestion didn’t spike. Now a principal at Bloomberg Associates, the consultancy set up by her boss when he left the mayoralty, she is part of a team that works to share the lessons they learned in New York.

Ms. Sadik-Khan came to Toronto this week in a visit hosted by the Metcalf Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to sustainability and equity. She met privately with Mayor John Tory and spoke at an event co-headlined by chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat. Some takeaways from her remarks:

Cars don’t shop, people do

If the 20th century was the heyday of the car – though Ms. Sadik-Khan says it seemed more like a forced marriage than a love affair – 21st-century cities are recognizing that the goal is not simply moving vehicles as fast as possible. Think mobility of people, not movement of cars. And remember that taking space from cars – whether to offer safe routes for cyclists or to serve as plazas – can boost the fortunes of area businesses. After pedestrianization, Times Square became one of the 10 hottest retail areas in the world.

More there.

[ISL] "The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust"

Oliver Bullough's long-form article at The Guardian examines the awkward and threatening position of Jersey, largest of the Channel Islands and one of the first jurisdictions to build an economy on offshore finance, exploiting its unusual autonomy. The problem comes when this autonomy is no longer possible. What will be left? Implications for larger economies, like the United Kingdom, are obvious.

[T]he offices of those big players form a wall of glass along the seafront of Jersey’s capital, St Helier: Credit Suisse, Citi, HSBC, Société Générale, PWC. And they oversee a vast amount of money. By 2007, Jersey – home to just 100,000 people – held almost £220bn of deposits, and administered another £221bn of funds, as well as hundreds of billions in trusts. The finance sector’s profits that year were more than £1bn, unemployment was barely 1%, and gross national income per person was significantly higher than in Britain or the US.

From the waterfront, the money spreads inland. St Helier is a prosperous resort with cafes, theatres and covered markets. It is cleaner, busier, neater, brighter than almost any seaside town you will find on the British mainland. Appearances are deceptive, however. Jersey looks rich – but it is heading towards bankruptcy.

In April, officials announced that the budget would be short £125m a year by 2019. “What went wrong?” asked the Jersey Evening Post. And that was just the start of it. By June, the annual deficit – now known on the island as the “black hole” – had been revised upwards to £145m, more than £1 in every five that the government spends. “The black hole is so big,” according to Connect, a Jersey business magazine, that “filling it will take the equivalent of shutting down every school in the island, laying off every teacher, letting the parks turn into overgrown jungles and having our roads literally fall apart.”

That is quite a hole, and the question is, how can Jersey fill it? The solutions are not pretty: voluntary redundancies, compulsory redundancies, new taxes, fewer public services.

Jersey bet its future on finance, allowing its other industries to shrivel, in the belief that it could live well in perpetuity from moving other people’s money around. If that belief was false, then does its fate await another island off the coast of France – one that has also pledged its future to finance? In short, is Jersey’s worrying present Britain’s bleak future?

[AH] On the latest about the quiet end of Norse Greenland

Norse Greenland, the five centuries between the discovery of Greenland by Viking explorers in the 10th century and the end of the colony they founded some time in the 15th century, has always been an interest of mine. The idea of an earlier crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, one predating Christopher Columbus, has long interested alternate historians. In Norse Greenland, you not only have an example of a European society established on the other side of the Atlantic, you have one that explored deeply into the continent, with Vinland stretching along the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence--my home territory, really. The question then, inevitably, arises: Why did Norse Greenland disappear? Chris Mooney's widely syndicated Washington Post article suggests that the changing climate was not the cause.

Climate change has often been cited as key element to this story -- the basic notion being that the Vikings colonized Greenland in an era dubbed the "Medieval Warm Period," which ran roughly from 950 to 1250, but then were forced to abandon their Greenland settlements as temperatures became harsher in the "Little Ice Age," from about 1300 to 1850.

Yet in a new study published Friday in Science Advances, researchers raise doubts about whether the so-called Medieval Warm Period was really so warm in southern Greenland or nearby Baffin Island -- suggesting that the tale of the Vikings colonizing but then abandoning Greenland due to climatic changes may be too simplistic. Their evidence? New geological data on the extent of glaciers in the region at the time, finding that during the era when the Norse occupied the area, glaciers were almost as far advanced as they were during the subsequent Little Ice Age.

"This study suggests that while the Vikings may have left Iceland when it was relatively warm, they arrived in the Baffin Bay region, and it was relatively cool," said Nicolás Young, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and lead author of the study, which was conducted with three colleagues from Columbia and the University at Buffalo. "So for their initial settlement, and the first few centuries when they were there, they persisted and thrived somewhat during a relatively cool climate. And so it's sort of a stretch to say that a cool climate is what drove them out of the region, when they demonstrated that they could be somewhat successful during a cool climate."

[. . .]

The researchers conclude that during the time of the Norse settlements, at least in this region around Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea, the climate was pretty cool. Granted, conditions may have been warmer in Europe at the time, but the gist is that the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" was, at best, rather inconsistent and regionally varied. That's a conclusion that other studies have also supported -- with some researchers now calling it the "Medieval Climate Anomaly" to try to avoid any confusion, much less the incorrect idea that it was a uniform warm period such as the one in which we currently live.

"There's certainly strong evidence in Europe that that was a real thing," said Young of the "Medieval Warm Period." "But it's certainly not a global event, it was patchy, with quite a bit of variability."

The new consensus that seems to be emerging, based on the lack of evidence for any catastrophic end--no massacres by Inuit or European pirates, no mass graves, no radical shift in the environment, nothing of the kind--seems to be that Norse Greenland met a quiet end, as a marginal settlement in marginal territory contracted. The Western Settlement may have emptied into the warmer Eastern Settlement, and Greenland as a whole empty to kindred Iceland or even further beyond. A Vinland that was as distant from Greenland as Norway while lacking any of the human or natural resources needed by Greenlanders just was not an option, not in the 15th century and not at any previous time.