[PHOTO] In the shadow of the CN Tower, condos

Taken Friday afternoon, this photo shows the bustling neighbourhood of condo towers that stretches out to the south of the CN Tower.

[OBSCURA] On Joel Goodman's photo of a New Year's Eve scene in Manchester

The Guardian reports on this wonderful, serendipitous photo.

A photograph of a Manchester street strewn with revellers is being lauded online for artfully capturing a uniquely British New Year’s Eve celebration.

The striking image, shot by freelance news photographer Joel Goodman, first appeared in a picture gallery on the Manchester Evening News website, and was brought to Twitter’s attention by BBC producer Roland Hughes.

The image, likened in its composition to a Renaissance masterpiece, depicts police wrestling a man in the foreground, crowds watching near a Greggs bakery in the back, and a gentleman in blue, reclining on the bitumen, reaching for a nearby beer.

Hughes’ post was retweeted more 25,000 times, his suggestion the photo looked “like a beautiful painting” inspiring some on Twitter to turn it into one.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Antipope Charlie Stross wonders how technologically advanced a civilization could become without literacy.


• Crooked Timber notes paleocon Peter Hitchens' take on the history of England.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the growth of pebble-accreting planetesimals.


• Geocurrents maps Tokugawa Japan as a multi-state system, perhaps not unlike the contemporary Holy Roman Empire.


• Inkfish reports on crows given cameras which track their tool use.


• Language Hat notes some remarkable Gothic graffiti from Crimea.


• Marginal Revolution notes the very high levels of public debt in Brazil.


• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia wonder what will happen if Russia's future turns out not to be Belarus, but Ukraine.


• Spacing Toronto notes the time the Stanley Cup got stolen.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russians now perceive Ukrainians as separate, looks at the hostile Russian reaction to pan-Turkic nationalism, and notes that the origins of Russia's Central Asian migrant workers have been changing.

[URBAN NOTE] "The scars of war on Lebanon's Holiday Inn"

Al Jazeera's India Stoughton notes provocative graffiti of an abandoned hotel in Beirut. I think it good provocative, myself, but others' mileage may vary.

In the early hours of the morning, Lebanese artist Jad El Khoury, who goes by the name Potato Nose, entered the carcass of Beirut's abandoned Holiday Inn through the military base that now occupies the ground floor.

He climbed the 26 flights of narrow service stairs, then descended down the side of the building on ropes. Over the course of the next two hours, he painted a series of cartoonish, blue-and-white creatures on the building's facade, composing them around the bullet holes and craters caused decades ago by shelling.

When Beirut residents awoke to discover Khoury's artwork last month, they responded passionately, with many expressing anger at his alteration of the landmark building.

"It was really surprising," Khoury, 27, told Al Jazeera. "But I understand that many people will see it like I am doodling over history, which is not the case. I opened up a debate that was already there - should we fix all the scars of the war, or should we keep them?"


For 40 years, the skeletal remains of the Holiday Inn have towered over central Beirut, an ever-present reminder of Lebanon's devastating 1975-1990 civil war. A symbol of cosmopolitan prewar Beirut, the derelict, shell-scarred building now stands incongruously beside the glitzy downtown.

[LINK] "Saudi Clash With Iran, Worst Since 1980s, Risks Deeper Conflict"

It goes without saying that the potential for a general war in the Middle East between the Iranian and Saudi spheres of influence, as described by Bloomberg's Donna Abu-Nasr, is horrific.

Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate Iran raises the specter of deepening conflicts in the volatile Middle East after the biggest meltdown in relations between the two regional powers in almost three decades.

The Saudi government and staunch ally Bahrain severed diplomatic ties, giving Iranian ambassadors 48 hours to leave after protesters set the Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire over the weekend following the execution of Saudi cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a critic of the kingdom’s treatment of its Shiite minority. The United Arab Emirates reduced its representation to the level of charge d’affaires.

The clash exposes again the fault lines in the world’s tinderbox and risks worsening conflicts in Yemen and Syria, where Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran are fighting proxy wars. The widening rift follows Saudi criticism of the U.S.-led deal last year over Iran’s nuclear program. It also comes as the collapse in the oil price strains domestic finances in a region that accounts for more than half of global reserves.

"The temperature right now is rising and I’m not sure we are seeing the end of escalation of tensions here," Robert Jordan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

[LINK] "Oil Giants Punish Venezuela through Dutch treaty"

Frank Mulder's Inter Press Service article is highly critical of investment treaties, at least as they apply to a Venezuela that is in conflict with global oïl companies. Noel Maurer's reaction would be interesting.

Venezuela doesn’t want investment treaties anymore if they give investors the right to drag the country before a commercial court. “The system has been set up to break down the nation-state.”

All is not going well for Venezuela. While the country is torn apart by poor governance, poverty and polarisation, it is attacked from the outside by oil firms claiming tens of billions of dollars.

The method these firms use is called ISDS, or Investor-State Dispute Settlement. This is a mechanism by which investors can sue a state by means of arbitration, which is a kind of privatized court. Many lawyers stress the advantage that plaintiffs don’t have to go before a local judge whom they feel they cannot trust. You can choose a judge for yourself, the opponent does the same, and the two of those choose a chairman. They are called arbitrators. The case is heard at a renowned institute, like the World Bank. How could it be more fair?

But Bernard Mommer, former vice-minister for oil in the time of Hugo Chavez, now the main witness in different claims against Venezuela, has to laugh a bit. “I won’t say that Caracas is a neutral venue. But don’t be so foolish to say that Washington is neutral. The whole arbitration system is biased in favour of investors.”

After Argentina, no country has been sued as much as Venezuela: until 2014 at least 37 cases have been filed against this Latin American state. However, the fine they can expect now exceeds all of the others. ConocoPhillips, a Texas-based oil company, claims 31 billion dollars and seems to be on the winning side. According to critics, that case represents everything that’s wrong with the ISDS system.

[LINK] "A day out in Calais"

Hugh Brody's essay at Open Democracy describes, from the perspective of an anthropologist, the infamous refugee encampment in Calais.

So many of the worst forces of this moment in history converge on that few acres of ground that is known as The Jungle, a piece of Europe where loss and grief are concentrated. A patch of land that brings shame on every level of British and French governance.

I have worked in some of the worst slums and resettlement sites in India, and in the poorest of southern Africa’s shanty towns, but I had never encountered a place as grim and soul-destroying as the sprawl of tents, shacks, squalor and boredom that defines the Jungle. This is a society outside society; a combination of anarchy and dispossession. There are no regulations, no civil authority, that can be seen. Just the French police waiting for riots to suppress. There is nothing to do for the 5,000 people who are stuck there other than attempt to deal with the squalor and find the bare minimum of things to meet their needs; and there is nowhere to go except the ever more hazardous attempt to break through the fences and find some way of hitching a hidden and dangerous ride across the channel. This is both dire poverty and entrapment. It is achieved by a complex of cruel indifference.

We walked along the Jungle’s streets and tracks, some just passable for a car, many now deep in mud and pools of water. A truck had arrived to pump out the small row of portaloos that serves as the community toilets (no wonder there are human faeces dotted around in the few patches of grass and bushes that remain). The stench was unbearable – even the hardened residents were pulling the edge of a shirt or sweater to cover their faces. There were lines of men at the short rows of stand-pipes where a thin supply of cold water is available for open-air, public washing. There were groups of men standing together, as if waiting for something to do or something to happen. Some women and children were gathering at a small area reserved for them, to meet one another without the problem of men, and to collect things that had been donated. The conditions in which many of the women have to live are grotesque: hidden away even from the diminished freedom of a camp, living in fear, trapped within the trap. When we were there the population was made up of 4,000 men, and just 400 women. No one was sure how many children are there, but we saw a few who ran around chucking pebbles at one another, finding some way to play.

Yet this society outside society has grown, as all human systems will, to meet some of the people’s needs. Made from whatever building materials can be found there are some restaurants, a bar, a church, mosques, a minimal library and even an improvised hamam, a steam-bath. Migrants who have been stuck there long enough to give up hope of getting anywhere else somehow manage to build the starting-point of an economy. Reinforcing the feeling that this is indeed a place where many are stuck.

[LINK] Christopher Reynolds of the Toronto Star on the problems of WeChat

In "The biggest social media app you’re not using", Christopher Reynolds notes the failure of WeChat to take off in North America.

This does surprise me a bit. I had noticed a trend earlier towards the decline of local alternatives to Facebook and thought it a harbinger of globalization, i.e. the shift to a few major social networks worldwide. Will WeChat continue to resist? Might it yet push overseas, and if so, how?

WeChat, the mobile messenger app that’s been downloaded to more than a billion smartphones in China, is struggling to break into the North American market in the face of entrenched Western players and cultural differences.

About 650 million active users message each other, buy products, book travel and read news daily via the online social network that is perhaps more aptly described as an ecosystem.

Despite exponential gains in East Asia and a promotional campaign launched with high hopes in the U.S. in 2014, WeChat — owned by Shenzhen-based Internet giant Tencent — opted to cut off advertising overseas in 2015 as user growth plateaued.

User acquisition in the West “has sort of come to an end,” Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-ping told reporters in March.

Ning Nan, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, highlighted Tencent’s lack of customer base or local networks in the U.S. as a key barrier to competing against instant messaging heavyweights like Facebook.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Public Library gives commuters a ticket to read"

Jim Coyle's Toronto Star article is delightful.

Besides being a sweet way to travel, trains are machines made for stories.

The clickety-clack cadence, the lulling sway, the passing landscape of pastoral calm or gritty urban clutter — the factories, apartment blocks, laundry lines and fleeting glimpses of other people’s lives.

A mind in transit is a mind ripe for narrative.

Stephen Leacock knew that, or he wouldn’t have started a story by writing, “It leaves the city every day about five o’clock in the evening, the train for Mariposa.”

Anne Bailey knows it, too.

Bailey is Toronto Public Library’s director of branch libraries. It was her idea to have the library install a book-lending kiosk at Union Station, where there are trainfuls of prospective readers.

“We’re tossing ideas around all the time,” she says of TPL, which watches what other libraries are doing; what banks or airports are trying in an increasingly mobile, self-service world; what other service providers are offering wherever people congregate or pass through in numbers.

[URBAN NOTE] "In Liberty Village, here comes the neighbourhood"

I quite enjoyed Sarah-Joyce Battersby's Toronto Star article noting the coalescence of King Street West's condo-dominated Liberty Village district into a true neighbourhood.

When Emily Runions moved to Liberty five years ago, she felt like the only mom in the village.

“We would go to the park and you would see the dogs going down the slide more than you would see the kids going down the slide,” said the 30-year-old.

Dogs still vastly outnumber the likes of Runions’ 8-year-old daughter but there are signs young families are setting up in the condo enclave.

A thriving maternity and children’s store, Love Me Do, opened three years ago. Mud outlines the sidewalks where impatient walkers manoeuvre around strollers. And the biggest sign?

“You actually do see kids in Liberty Village,” said Todd Hofley, president of the Liberty Village Residents Association. “If you go to brunch at the Brazen Head . . . you’ll see lots of families in there.”

Hofley, also the condo board president for Liberty Tower, has watched the number of children in his development go from zero to more than 40 in the past five years. Now more than 10 per cent of the units are home to children, ranging from babies to teenagers, he said.

[LINK] John Lorinc on fixing the federal vote

John Lorinc's essay at Spacing Toronto is a must-read.

If the federal Liberals have endured anything even faintly resembling a controversy so far in these early halcyon days of their majority, it occurred over the holidays, with some punditry ping-pong on the question of whether the government should hold a referendum on electoral reform, and specifically Justin Trudeau’s pledge to move to a post-first-past-the-post democracy. The prime minister’s non-whip whip, Dominic LeBlanc, roundly rejected calls for a plebiscite, and the government is promising legislation by the spring of 2017.

There’s a good reason why this little seasonal food fight made your head hurt. While the Liberals’ patronage of the electoral reform cause seems like a step forward, I still find it difficult to tease apart the government’s stated interest in this subject and the way their positioning generated a political dividend during the election, delivering those voters who are very invested in this issue.

How many voters is hard to say. After all, the election also produced a crisp and cathartic outcome, with strong voter turnout (68.5%). Trudeau, in turn, appointed a highly representative cabinet. And two months on, the polls continue to suggest that Canadians are evidently supportive of the early days direction. It all looks like evidence of a system that worked in spite of its flaws.

Two or three years hence, when the Liberals get around to tabling reforms, the bloom will have come off the Trudeau rose and they’ll have less political incentive — plus a track record that will almost certainly include mistakes, reversals, and even a scandal or two — to make changes that could impair their re-election prospects.

My fervent hope is that the Liberals, and Democratic Institutions minister Maryam Monsef, don’t get so tangled up in the partisan debate over changing the way voting works that they fail to deliver on other important reform pledges, such as online ballots and other voting options designed to increase turnout.

[NON BLOG] Thoughts on a ring pawned

Early last month, I pawned the ring that my then-partner gave me six years ago (or is it seven), for $C 52. I took it to one of the strip of pawnshops on Church Street by Queen that G. had introduced me to, actually. It seemed fitting.



I'm not quite sure why we exchanged rings in the first place. We weren't engaged, we weren't married, I was reluctant to make the expenditure in the first place. I was with G. for four years, but for the last two of those years I think on reflection that I may have been in the Relationship more because I liked the idea of a relationship. Perhaps, as a friend of mine suggested when I talked about it recently, we exchanged rings to try to fix something that was broken?

The money was useful, but as important for me was the act of divesting myself of something useful. I broke up with G. five years ago, have not been in contact with him for three, and had no interest at all in personally regifting this. Was it really just simple reluctance to make a definitive break from the past? The relief I felt after selling it honestly makes me think the home economics of Marie Kondo are entirely correct.

[DM] "A note on public health, or, how you get what you pay for"

At Demography Matters, I note the revolutions in public health concerning HIV/AIDS, PrEP and TaSP, and note the continuing survival of the pandemic shows that we get what we want to pay for.