[PHOTO] Corner store flowers, Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto

These bright flowers outside Master Supermarket, on 329 Roncesvalles Avenue, caught my attention on grey Sunday.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the latest findings from repurposed Kepler.


• The Dragon's Gaze examines the stars of the apparently most habitable exoplanets found by Kepler and speculates as to the impact of stellar cosmic rays on the habitability of worlds in red dwarf systems.


• The Dragon's Tales examines the differences between carbon emissions from different Indonesian fires.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how black pain has been ignored at least as far back as the end of slavery, when black families tried to reunite.


• Marginal Revolution notes North Korean incomprehension of American motives.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer applauds the Mexican soda tax.


• Towleroad notes crime in the United Kingdom visited on users of Grindr.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the good bits of the 1990s are underestimated by many Russians and warns that Kadyrov's appropriation of North Caucasian traditions risks encouraging Islamism.

[MUSIC] More David Bowie in memoriam

The above GIF is, as described by Wired, Britihs Illustrator Helen Green's "Time May Change Me".

[I]t comprises 29 colored pencil drawings of Bowie during various stages of his chameleon-like career. There’s Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Major Tom. And then there’s Bowie as Bowie, visually reinvented again and again.

CBC's list of the top ten Bowie songs is worth visiting.

As well, Paul Wells' article in MacLean's, "Life after ‘Let’s Dance': Paul Wells on David Bowie", looks at Bowie's career after his big 1983 hit.

His early years are getting most of the attention in the wake of his death. This is as it should be: his albums from the 1970s were consistently daring and managed to become, almost despite their audacity, the soundtrack for a decade.

But while he had legions of fans who prefer to act as though nothing that mattered came after Diamond Dogs and Low, Bowie himself didn’t really have that luxury. He had to live through the three decades after the Serious Moonlight tour ended, a day at a time. He chose to reject nostalgia and to keep reinventing himself, again and again, from assorted motley shards of the zeitgeist. The construction of “the Bowie character” was always a work in progress.

Not that Let’s Dance didn’t knock him for a loop. Its worldwide sales were well north of seven million copies. He had never had an audience that large. Nor any that distracted: before 1983, the complexity of his assorted personas would have made it difficult for anyone to be a casual Bowie fan, but suddenly his admirers were legion. He freely admitted to Rolling Stone that the goal of the next album, Tonight, was “to keep my hand in, so to speak,” with that mass audience. The results, on Tonight and 1987’s Never Let Me Down, were mixed at best: a couple of disposable hit singles, a reggae-tinged ballad duet with Tina Turner, a (strikingly sombre) Beach Boys cover. One track featured the actor Mickey Rourke rapping. It was all caked in layers of MTV-era studio processing, with plenty of gated reverb on the drums. Already by 1987 Bowie was weary of trying to please a crowd. “I stayed away from experimentation,” he told Rolling Stone mournfully. “Now, I think I should be a bit more adventurous.”

He would be as good as his word. He executed his return to a life of experimentation in three steps. First, in 1989, Tin Machine released their first album. This was, the members insisted, a real band, one whose singer just happened to be David Bowie. (The others included the sons of television comic Soupy Sales, Hunt Sales on drums and Tony Sales on bass.) Tin Machine never amounted to much, but it sounds better in retrospect than it did at the time, because despite the Italian suits the guys wore on their first album cover, their rough, guitar-driven sound foreshadowed the grunge rock of the ’90s with uncanny foresight.

[LINK] "'The Pass System' explores dark chapter in Canadian history"

Joanna Smith's Toronto Star article explores yet another shameful episode in Canada's treatment of its First Nations, the imposition of a pass law that had no legal basis. This is astounding.

Charles Sawphawpahkayo wanted to get married.

To do that, the man from a reserve near Duck Lake, Sask. now known as Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation would need to travel to the bigger town of Battleford, about 140 kilometres away as the crow flies.

Before he could leave, however, Sawphawpahkayo, presumably an adult, would need the written authorization of the local Indian agent, who signed the required permission slip—issued by the Department of Indian Affairs — on June 3, 1897.

The agent granted him 10 days away from the reserve.

The yellowed document is one of many featured in a new documentary film called The Pass System, for which director Alex Williams spent five years piecing together a dark and little-known chapter of Canadian history that had the federal government — fully aware it was acting without any legal authority — forbid First Nations in the prairies from leaving their reserves.

“Canadians largely talk about settlement and pioneers and use benign and heroic language to describe what happened here and what actually happened is quite brutal and if they were to have experienced what First Nations experienced they might have a different opinion about Canadian history,” said Williams, who grew up in Saskatoon.

[LINK] "Expert says Michigan officials changed a Flint lead report to avoid federal action"

Mark Brush's Michigan Radio article about the latest stage in the scandal of the lead-contaminated water of the Michigan city of Flint, the apparent cover-up of the contamination in EPA reports, is infuriating.

The Environmental Protection Agency says it’s conducting a full review of what happened in Flint.

For more than a year, state officials assured city residents their water was safe. Those assurances turned out to be wrong.

And it wasn’t until some residents got outside experts involved -- who not only found elevated lead levels in the drinking water, but that blood lead levels were also rising in Flint kids – that the state admitted there was a problem.

One of the more troubling charges made against the state is that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality knowingly dropped lead test samples to avoid exceeding a federal drinking water standard.

[. . .]

State officials maintain they followed the testing rules for lead under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

But others say that’s just not true.

Marc Edwards is an expert on water treatment at Virginia Tech University. He said the first and most important step did not occur in Flint.

The city is supposed to test homes known to either be serviced by lead service lines, or that have lead pipes or pipes with lead solder in them.

Large water systems are supposed to test the "worst-case-scenario" homes to see if they have a problem.

That’s the point of the federally-mandated Lead and Copper Rule. Large water systems are supposed to test the “worst-case-scenario” homes to see if they have a problem.

“They did not do that, and that is the primary reason that they missed the worst of the lead problem,” says Edwards.

Edwards lays the blame squarely on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality – not the city of Flint.

[LINK] "Panama's Prosperity Has a Dark Side"

Bloomberg View'a Mac Margolis reports about hidden corruption and crime in Panama.

Last year was one most of Latin America would rather forget. The region trailed the world in economic growth, led on inflation, and posted the highest fiscal deficit after the Middle East and North Africa, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

So two cheers for Panama. The fastest-growing economy in the Americas expanded by almost 6 percent in 2015, compared with a nearly 1 percent drop for Latin America as a whole, and it will likely repeat that performance this year, according to the World Bank.

Cue the applause for the expanded Panama Canal, which -- by the time the overhaul is finished, expected to be later this year -- will double shipping capacity and allow for much larger container ships to traverse the waterway, consolidating the country's historical role as an entrepot for the global economy. The anticipated knock-on effects already have studded this slender country of 4 million people with skyscrapers and grand public-works projects.

The breakneck pace of the project, which began in 2007, has come at a price. Bribery, graft and dirty politics are all too common in Latin America, but a noxious combination of the three has dogged the Central American dynamo in what ought to be its finest hour. And unless Panama can shake the curse, its glory may prove fleeting.

[LINK] "African Sunshine Can Now Be Bought and Sold on the Bond Market"

Bloomberg's Anna Hirtenstein reports.

Africa’s off-grid solar industry has been turned into an asset class for the first time, bundling contracts for thousands of the sun-powered rooftop electricity systems to sell as bonds.

Dutch investor Oikocredit International and Persistent Energy Capital LLC, a New York-based merchant bank, jointly decided to try to replicate the U.S. model of securitizing residential solar panels. They are working with the London-based developer BBOXX Ltd.

“I worked in commercial banking in the U.S. for several years and was involved in the securitization of residential solar, specifically SolarCity,” said David ten Kroode, renewable energy manager at Oikocredit, which is based in Amersfoort, Netherlands. “We thought it was an interesting model that could be replicated in Africa.”

The International Energy Agency estimates that there are 1.2 billion people on the planet without access to energy. Off-grid power systems have been touted as an efficient way of electrifying rural areas of Africa and Asia, rather than laying expensive transmission lines to extend national grids. Rooftop solar panels can power a few lightbulbs and small appliances such as a television, fan and mobile phone charger, bringing electricity to many households for the first time.

The U.S. solar bond market has attracted about $560 million in investment, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. SolarCity was the first company to securitize a portfolio of solar leases in 2013. The second-largest U.S. solar company by market value has raised $450 million from sales of notes backed by monthly payments for its rooftop solar systems, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

[LINK] "Reform the EU? Changing the U.K. Matters More"

Bloomberg View's Marc Champion points out that British complaints about the European Union really relate to the failings of Britain proper.

Last week Britain's David Cameron made a rare visit -- for a Western leader -- to Hungary's pariah-like Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Cameron can't be picky: He needs all the friends he can get to secure agreement for the "fundamental" change to the EU he has promised Britons so they can vote to stay in the bloc in a referendum.

Reaching a deal next month as planned now appears to hinge on Cameron's demand for a four-year delay before new EU arrivals can claim welfare benefits in the U.K. He has already conceded that he'll have to compromise: Outright discrimination against EU citizens won't be accepted by Poland, or even Hungary -- no matter how cloyingly helpful Orban sought to appear on Friday. So Cameron will have to reform Britain at the same time he reforms the EU. That's an idea worth exploring more.

There are many reasons why host nations are disturbed by immigration and, in the U.K., one of these is a sense of unfairness. It seems unfair that foreigners should be able to come to the U.K. to claim benefits without having paid tax there first; unfair that low-skilled British workers should face competition from illegal immigrants willing to work under the table; unfair that schools and hospitals should suddenly be overwhelmed, extending waiting times and class sizes for locals.

I'm with the FT's Martin Wolf in thinking that the whole renegotiation is a charade. But why not use it as an occasion to fix some of these very real U.K. problems, which aren't even just about intra-EU migration?

The way Britain's welfare system is structured is indeed uniquely accommodating for immigrants. It is the only nation in the western EU (to which 98 percent of intra-EU migrants go) that doesn't require people to pay into social security insurance funds, or simply work, for a given period of time before they can claim unemployment and associated housing benefits. It hands out child benefit in cash. It offers tax credits to top up the incomes of low-paid workers. And none of this is conditioned on prior work.

[LINK] "European Space Agency Reiterates Its Plan to Build 3D Printed Base on the Moon"

The Dragon's Tales linked to this report suggesting the European Space Agency plans to use 3-D printing to build a base on the Moon.

For a while, the European Space Agency has been talking about the possibility of creating a base on the moon, using 3D printing for a large part of its construction. So far it’s been a lot of speculation, but this month the ESA reaffirmed that they are very serious about the plan – they intend to have a lunar base by the 2030s. At a recent symposium entitled “Moon 2020-2030: A New Era of Coordinated and Robotic Exploration,” the agency laid out plans for a series of missions, starting in the early 2020s, that will hopefully culminate in a human-occupied moon base.

The two-day symposium brought together more than 200 scientists and space officials from 28 countries to discuss what the ESA is calling a “comeback to the moon.” The plan is for a series of missions, beginning in the 2020s, that will start by sending robots to the moon, where they will communicate with astronauts back on Earth. The data gathered from these robotic missions will pave the way for humans to follow. Ultimately, the ESA sees a moon colony as a stopping point in the mission to get humans to Mars and to further explore the rest of the solar system.

[URBAN NOTE] "Unearthing the City Grid That Would Have Been in Central Park"

Marguerite Holloway's article in The New Yorker tells a fascinating story about the early mapping of Manhattan, and the recent recovery of that project.

On an overcast day in November, 2014, just before Thanksgiving, two men dug a rather large hole in a lawn in Central Park. They started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by midday the hole was big enough for them both to stand in. As they dug, they filtered excavated soil through a screen. They found eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese porcelain, blue earthenware fragments, and the rim of a pearlware teacup, as well as the stem of a clay pipe and brown, olive, aqua, and purple glass shards. And they unearthed a roughly three-foot-tall, nine-inch-square white stone, two sides of which were inscribed with numbers.

The ceramic and glass remnants were unexceptional, but the white stone was anything but. It was a discovery akin to finding a marble statue submerged in a remote lake or a lamppost in the wild woods of Narnia. Hundreds of stones like this one were fastidiously implanted across the island two centuries ago, but not a single one seemed to have survived, in its original position, amid the construction and endless reconstruction of New York City. The stones were set at the intersection of every street and avenue to chart the bold nineteenth-century plan that gave Manhattan its great grid. The carved marble sign in Central Park marks an intersection that never came to be, one of many spliced out of the grand plan when city residents demanded an antidote to the grid.

Central Park has long kept its grid memory secret. But in little more than a year since that November morning, three more marble street monuments have been discovered in the curvaceous green core of the island.

In 1807 the Common Council asked the state to appoint three commissioners to plan the city’s development. (The aldermen were hoping to avoid the disagreements and political reversals that occurred at the local level; and they did maintain some say by recommending three men who should serve as the commissioners.) They hired a young Albany native named John Randel, Jr., to survey the island and draft the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, an eight-foot-long blueprint for the grid, which was to run from North (now Houston) Street to 155th Street. After Randel handed it in, the Common Council hired the exacting surveyor to inscribe the grid in the rural landscape. Randel resurveyed the island with instruments of his own invention, placing wooden stakes or pegs at every one of the more than fifteen hundred planned intersections. Once done with that task, he and the bane of his meticulous existence—his unruly, ever-shifting, drink-loving crew—set about replacing the pegs with less easily vandalized or purloined markers. At some fifteen hundred and fifty intersections, according to Randel’s notes, the men set “monumental stones”; at nearly a hundred others, where they encountered bedrock or boulder, they placed iron bolts.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Hells Angels era in Leslieville goes out with a sale"

As Brad Wheeler noted in The Globe and Mail, even the Hells Angels are being priced out of downtown Toronto.

Along the gritty, drab stretch of Eastern Avenue between Carlaw and Logan Avenues, more than one shabby storefront has a sign of warning to any would-be intruders: “Beware of Dog” at one place, and, at another, “Dog on Duty.” But there was a time in the neighbourhood when an angry pitbull would be the least of a punk’s concern.

For at 498 Eastern Ave. was an inelegant cinderblock establishment known to be the downtown clubhouse for the Toronto chapter of the fearsome Hells Angels. But these days, on the concrete-shielded steel front door, the outlaw bikers’ logo is barely discernible – a fading scar that remains after the gang was booted from the building after a police raid in 2007. The ownership of the land and building – commandeered by the federal government under proceeds-of-crime legislation – has been in dispute since then, but a court decision recently gave Ottawa permission to sell the 30-by-120-foot property.

The plot and its eyesore pile have now been conditionally sold, sealing the fate of a colourful part of Leslieville’s rough-and-tumble past that existed right under the noses of long-time area residents, who barely even noticed the quietly operating hooligans in their midst.

So long then, Angels, we barely knew you.

[AH] On John Quiggin's imagining a different First World War

Last week, John Quiggin engaged in a bit of alternate history writing at Crooked Timber. There, he imagined a war equivalent to the First World War starting in 1911, one that ended in a v victory of the Central Powers and could even conceivably be blamed on the Entente powers.

Looking back at the Great War raises lots of questions. Was it, as most observers concluded in the aftermath of the war, the inevitable product of a clash of rival imperialisms, or of rising class tensions. Or should we prefer the views of the revisionists who stress the war guilt of the Entente powers, and particularly of France? Or was it, perhaps, a tragic and avoidable accident?

Starting with the now-dominant revisionist case, there’s no doubt that French aggression against Morocco, going back to the first Moroccan crisis of 1905-06, was the proximate cause of the war. Not content with the effective control over Moroccan affairs gained in that episode, France used the rebellion against the Sultan to establish a formal “protectorate”. The contemptuous dismissal of the Algeciras conference agreement as a “scrap of paper” presaged the entire French war strategy. Most notable was Joffre’s invasion of Belgium (doubtfully accepted as necessary by Poincare, who had just displaced Joseph Caillaux as Prime Minister). The postwar emergence of an anti-Semitic dictatorship, headed by Marshal Petain, is seen as representing an inherent French tendency to authoritarianism and aggression, reflected in everything from the Bonapartes to l’affaire Dreyfus

The other Entente powers come off little better on this account. Lloyd George was already the dominant figure in the British government and signalled his aggressive intent with the Mansion House speech. The fall of Herbert Asquith as a result of a sex scandal propelled Lloyd George into the Prime Ministership at a crucial moment. His ascension ensured that there would be no negotiated peace. The Entente with the Czarist empire adds weight to the indictment. The aim of encircling and crushing the nascent democracies of the German-speaking world could scarcely be more obvious.

But it is the documents unearthed from wartime archives that are seen by revisionists as sealing the case. The Sykes-Picot agreement, carving up the Middle East, the Constantinople Agreement handing the centre of the Islamic world to Russia, and the offers to Italy under the Treaty of London make the case for Entente war guilt seem unarguable.

I'm not necessarily convinced by the exercise. As commenters note, you may need deeper reasons for Britain and France to adopt more aggressive policies towards Germany, particularly (on Britain's part) to justify invading Belgium. The explanation as to why the war starts in the first place does not ring true to me. Likewise, it does not make intuitive sense to make that a war waged by Britain and France in 1911, three years before 1914, against a relatively weaker Germany, would end worse for the two powers in any case.

What say you?