[PHOTO] The goats of the Great Canadian Soap Company, 2016 edition

I visited Oyster Bed's Great Canadian Soap Company and its goats in 2014, and I was determined to do so again. The goats are so charming!

[PHOTO] Alley, Dovercourt at Northumberland

I was walking home last evening from Ossington station, just as evening was shading into twilight, when I passed by this alley, just east of Dovercourt Road on Northumberland. This particular alley was oddly lit, almost glowing in the back away from the street. A quick photo with my cell phone ensued.

I like this photo, but it's not exactly what I saw. It feels less luminous somehow. Perhaps it's a consequence of my limited phone technology. More likely, it's a consequence of my lack of formal training as a photographer. I used to say that I took photos to illustrate things, but now I want to do more than that, and I don't quite now how to set about doing that.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross describes how Brexit has forced him to rewrite his latest novel.


• D-Brief suggests early Venus was once habitable, and notes the rumour of an Earth-like planet found around Proxima Centauri.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the detection of storms of brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on more signs of water on Mars.


• False Steps notes an early American proposal for a space station in orbit of the Moon.


• Language Hat talks about lost books, titles deserving broader readership.


• The LRB Blog talks about the EU and Brexit.


• Marginal Revolution notes a study suggesting Trump support is concentrated among people close to those who have lost out from trade.


• Neuroskeptic reports on the story of H.M., a man who lost the ability to form new memories following a brain surgery.


• The Volokh Conspiracy engages the idea of voting with a lesser evil.


• Window on Eurasia notes the role of immigrants in Moscow's economy.

[URBAN NOTE] "China wants to revive Brazil high-speed train project: sources"

The Globe and Mail carries Alonso Soto and Leonardo Goy's Reuters article describing the interest of China in reviving plans for a high-speed rail route connecting Sao Paulo with Rio de Janeiro. The idea appeals to me, but is it actually viable, economically and politically?

Chinese firms are pushing to revive an $11-billion high-speed-train project to link Brazil’s two largest cities, shelved after the South American nation descended into recession and political turmoil, three sources familiar with the talks told Reuters.

China’s ambassador to Brasilia told interim President Michel Temer on Wednesday that Chinese train builders and operators want to participate in Brazil’s biggest ever infrastructure project, delayed repeatedly because of doubts about its viability and concession models, the sources said.

Temer was invited to ride the high-speed train connecting Shanghai and Hangzhou next month during a G20 summit when he will discuss the project in bilateral talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a Brazilian presidential aide said.

“The Chinese are working hard to revive the project,” said the aide, who asked for anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly. “Brazil is not convinced yet, but is supportive of the idea.”

A spokesman with the Chinese embassy in Brasilia said he did not know the content of the discussions between Temer and ambassador Li Jinzhang. Li did not immediately respond to email requests for comment.

[URBAN NOTE] "From slave market to Olympic venue: variations of capitalist accumulation ..."

Guilherme Leite Gonçalves and Sérgio Costa's Open Democracy essay looks at the changing functions of the port of Rio de Janeiro. In some of its broad outlines, the story that it tells is familiar.

The port district of Rio de Janeiro is one of the areas most affected by urban interventions connected to the August 2016 Olympics. Until very recently, business groups, politicians, investors and the mainstream media saw the port district as a devalued and degraded space, isolated from the rest of the city. In fact, the entire region had low market value and was of little interest for real estate investments, commercial transactions and services. Even the port itself was of little significance when compared to other Brazilian ports. Therefore, the region was located “outside” the process of capitalist accumulation.

This situation changed completely in November 2009. About a month after Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the Olympics, the Porto Maravilha project became public. This project catalyzed actions and economic, political and cultural expectations, restructuring the entire port district in order to create value.

Contrary to appearances, this phenomenon is not new. It is a new venue for a history that repeats itself. In its various stages, the port of Rio de Janeiro was marked by different landmarks of capitalist dynamic that both repelled and attracted spaces, processes and market relations, according to the needs of accumulation. This is a history marked by actors, forces and social pressures alternating in a continuous movement of commodification, decommodification and re-commodification – of people, goods and activities.

Since Rosa Luxemburg, in fact, Marxist political economists have realized that the accumulation of capital is not limited to a purely economic process between capitalists and workers in the production of surplus value. Seeing as only a relative portion of the surplus value can be appropriated in this internal transit, the system must make use of a non-capitalist “outside” to completely appropriate it.

Accordingly, the system makes use of explicit non-economic violence, including colonial or imperial policies, dispossessions, bloody legislation etc. There is, in other words, a repeated primitive accumulation throughout the history of capitalism. This repetition is required by capitalist expansion itself, which must commodify not yet commodified spaces in order to develop.

The various historical stages of this phenomenon are evident in the port district of Rio de Janeiro, as this space is incorporated in and uncoupled from a process that transforms socially constructed spaces into merchandise.

From its creation until the nineteenth century, the port took part in the classical patterns of primitive accumulation by integrating Brazil into world capitalism through the outflow of sugar, then gold and coffee, in addition to the inflow of manufactured goods and a contingent of about two million Africans that were kidnapped, enslaved and traded. This port received the highest number of enslaved Africans in the entire American continent. The right to provide such service was restricted to a private contractor: the Governor’s brother.

However, since its beginnings, the physical space of the port was itself integrated into various forms of accumulation. The first major traffic increase took place in the early seventeenth century and was connected to the outflow of sugar. In 1618, this traffic led Governor Rui Vaz Pinto to publish a legal decree establishing the use of black slaves to load and unload ships. It was clearly a mechanism meant to take over the space to create value, as only slaveholders were able to load goods in the port. This decree also represented the beginning of regular stevedoring services and established their legal system, namely the privilege or monopoly, since the right to provide such service was restricted to a private contractor: the Governor’s brother.

[URBAN NOTE] "From Bar Volo to Zipperz, Toronto’s businesses uproot as condos sprout up"

Bar Volo's relocation to a Church Street location, driven by condo development on its Yonge Street location, is hardly rare. The Toronto Star took a look at it and other businesses driven from their homes.

As multi-storey condos sprout up across the city, some long-time businesses have been uprooted.

Between January 2015 and June of this year, 97 condo projects were started, for a total of 26,750 units, according to Altus Data Solutions, a provider of real estate data and market intelligence.

Inevitably, some businesses have been caught in the crossfire of the residential development boom.

The list includes a bar beloved by beer connoisseurs, a Leslieville diner known for its western sandwiches and a downtown hostel once voted the best on the continent.

An influx of about 100,000 people per year and a pressure to build upward instead of outward are reshaping the retail and commercial landscape, said Matti Siemiatycki, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto.

“Those pressures together are creating a perfect storm that is challenging for existing businesses, an environment where change is happening very quickly and unsettling a lot of the current businesses, many of which have been there for a long time,” he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rio, city of epithets: Olympic urbanism in context"

Bruno Carvalho's Open Democracy essay looks at the impact of the Olympics on Brazilian urbanism as manifested in Rio de Janeiro.

In the mid-1990s, amid a crisis of rampant violence in Rio de Janeiro, an influential Brazilian journalist, Zuenir Ventura, published a book with the title Cidade Partida. The expression could be translated as broken or split city, as if Rio had an integrity that contemporary violence shattered. A more apt translation is an increasingly prevalent phrase used to describe urban conditions in the United States: divided city. Given the striking contrasts between Rio de Janeiro’s upper-class buildings and hillside favelas, it is not surprising that the epithet found broad resonance.

Cidade Partida challenged what was until then Rio’s most recurrent moniker, Cidade Maravilhosa—marvelous or wonderful city. Those familiar with its landscape will find explanations to be superfluous. In the 1930s, when a song about Rio titled “Marvelous City” hit the airwaves, in the 1960s when it became the city’s official anthem, and today, when crowds sing it in unison during carnival, images of Rio’s cultural and natural exuberance come to mind. But the origins of the expression betray another history. “Marvelous City” became popularized in the context of an ambitious, Paris-inspired set of urban reforms early in the twentieth century.

The phrase designated a city becoming modern, whiter, and at long last, as we read often in the press from the period, “civilized.” In this scenario, a more divided city was in fact the goal, with the poor—disproportionately non-white—pushed to the outskirts or incipient favelas, as far as possible from central areas and from view. Led by then-mayor Francisco Pereira Passos, the reforms resulted in the eviction of one-tenth of the city center’s residents. To be sure, part of the goal of the reforms was to remedy a reputation Rio had earned as a “city of death” or “foreigner’s grave,” due to the prevalence of diseases like yellow fever. The Zika virus, in this regard, produces an unmistakable echo of the past. But the notion of the marvelous city of the belle époque as the privilege of a few remained clear to many. The manifesto of a labor group in 1929 mocks the use of the epithet by “literary fops,” drawing attention instead to the dire living conditions of the working classes.

Rio once had the largest urban slave population in the Americas, and the presence of their descendants in major public spaces presented an embarrassment to governing elites. In the belle époque, World’s Fairs and Expos proliferated, and major cities served as arenas where empires and nation states could compete. Not coincidentally, the modern Olympics began in 1896 in Athens, amid this era of proliferating precursors to today’s mega-events. Rio de Janeiro at the start of the twentieth century was the third major port of the Americas, behind New York and Buenos Aires, and the capital of a newfound republic, proclaimed in 1889. The city’s compact colonial fabric, marked by varied and jumbled street life, did not befit national ambitions. The Pereira Passos interventions sought to give an urban form to the positivist ideals of “order and progress,” enshrined in the Brazilian flag. In practice, Rio de Janeiro was to be considered marvelous when undesirables were not around. A divided city was, in fact, a desired outcome of the reforms.

But as students of the past quickly learn, in the history of city planning, the improbable happens often, and the unintended happens all the time. Some spaces envisioned as exclusivist playgrounds for the elites have since become appropriated as sites of democratic congregation and social mixture. In belle époque Rio there were attempts to prohibit those not dressed “decently” from circulating in central areas. Now, these same spaces are periodically occupied by carnival revelers, political protesters or social movements. The dream of a city with central spaces reserved to the rich only partially succeeded. The aspiration of a tropical civilization in the Parisian mold waned, as more relaxed dress codes attest. In later decades, led by Rio, Brazil instead projected a far more original—even if evidently distorted—image as “the country of carnival,” or of “racial democracy.”

In the 1990s, Ventura wrote his Divided City in the aftermath of a massacre, when off-duty policemen killed twenty one people in one of Rio’s poorer peripheral neighborhoods. He spent months in this community to write a book that was bold for exposing Rio’s divisions, or the inner workings of drug traffickers and corrupt police forces, but also for an insistence on valuing the city’s imperiled traditions of circulation and cultural exchanges. Since then, far-reaching infrastructure investments have favored favelas, and in Brazil, major redistributionist policies were implemented without stirring the sort of ethnic animus that we find elsewhere (though there are many discouraging signs). After emerging from a long military dictatorship (1964–85), Brazil appeared to be in an ascendant trajectory, even as its former capital and most visible city lagged behind.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why our ravines are the city below Toronto"

I've been paying more attention to Toronto's natural environment lately. Donovan Vincent's Toronto Star article, the first in a series on ravines, takes a look at these features' role as some of the last enclaves of nature in the city.

It’s a scorching hot summer day and Jason Ramsay-Brown is standing atop an elevated lookout, peering at the expansive green valley, wildflower meadows and giant maples, oaks and pines that make up the Vista Trail in Toronto’s Rouge Park.

It’s the natural habitat for a man who built on childhood experiences to make himself one of the top ravine experts in the city.

The trail is just east of Meadowvale Rd., near the Toronto Zoo. Here the air is clean, and the only sounds are the warm breeze blowing through the leaves of towering trees, and the chirping of birds that are among the 1,700 species of plants and animals in the area.

As Ramsay-Brown walks along the 1.6-kilometre trail with a Toronto Star reporter and photographer, he points to the dog-strangling vine, an invasive plant that looks pleasant enough but can be deadly if you’re a caterpillar. Then the staghorn sumac, a flowering plant with a red cone.

“If you think about it, to have something like this within kilometres of the downtown core with this much biodiversity is pretty remarkable,” says Ramsay-Brown, 42, whose thick beard and greying ponytail give him a granola look akin to a younger Jerry Garcia, the late Grateful Dead guitarist.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links about how Donald Trump is wrong about Detroit

Donald Trump's statements about globalization being the downfall of Detroit were criticized on my RSS feed. Wired's Issie Lapowsky took him on in her "Trump's Right: Detroit Is Hurting, But He's Wrong About Why".

As Trump sees it, Detroit’s main issue is trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and which Trump says sent precious automotive industry jobs overseas. “Detroit is still waiting for Hillary Clinton’s apology,” Trump said Monday, before sneaking in a dig. “I expect Detroit will get that apology right around the same time Hillary Clinton turns over the 33,000 emails she deleted.”

But experts say blaming trade is at worst wrong, and at best a vast oversimplification of the case. Blame the unions. Blame Detroit’s dependence on a single industry. Heck, blame the robots. But, they say, don’t blame trade, or at least, do so at the risk of jeopardizing even more industries across the country.

[. . .]

The first and most glaring issue with Trump’s argument is his insistence that all of Detroit’s automotive jobs now exist somewhere overseas. Some do. But many don’t. In fact, many of them have just moved to southern states. And that’s not a new phenomenon, either.

Since the 1950s, American automakers have been relocating factories outside of Detroit to states like Kentucky and Mississippi where union presence isn’t as strong. Foreign car manufacturers have been going into those states, too. What that means is that while Detroit may be suffering from job loss, other cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee are exploding with high-tech auto industry jobs.

[. . .]

Experts say you can also argue that Detroit’s leaders were delinquent in not diversifying the city’s economy sooner, and that the big three auto makers were remiss in not responding quickly enough to foreign competition. “Detroit as a city was killed in part by itself,” Macomber says, noting that Detroit invested too much time preserving a single industry and not enough creating new ones. “The big three declined because of productivity efficiencies coupled with complacency about poor quality and variety of product.”

BLoomberg View's Paula Dwyer wrote "Trump's Fairy Tale About the Fall of Detroit".

The city collapsed mostly because it overpromised what it could deliver to public employees and others, then borrowed too much to try to make good on those deals. All of that, plus a combination of a rapidly declining tax base -- the city has lost 1 million residents since the 1950s -- overreliance on a single industry, a failing education system and municipal corruption meant it couldn't pay off its debts.

Trump promised that Detroit would come roaring back under his plans to lower corporate income taxes. His revival plans also include cuts in regulation, especially environmental rules, and a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

So let's break it down, starting with Obama's role. Rather than blame, the president gets credit from most analysts for rescuing General Motors and Chrysler. True, it was painful and costly for investors and taxpayers. He forced the companies to restructure, via quickie bankruptcies, in exchange for federal money. The companies closed plants, laid off workers, cut ties with dealers and shed obligations for retiree health care, transferring the costs (and a big chunk of stock and cash) to a union-dominated trust fund. Stockholders were wiped out, and creditors were forced to take cents on the dollar.

Today, however, the companies are profitable and competitive, even if record-high sales are slowing down a bit and the industry is still over-reliant on SUVs. As my Bloomberg View colleague, Matt Winkler, has written, the Big Three -- GM, Chrysler and Ford -- are selling more cars and trucks and are more profitable now than in 1994, when their market shares were twice today's size.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the possible detection of Proxima Centauri b

Space artist David A. Hardy shared the above 1972 painting, of a rocky world with pools of liquid on its surface in close orbit of Proxima Centauri, soon after the news broke of the possible discovery of a broadly Earth-like planet in orbit of the star nearest to our solar system. Matt Williams' Universe Today article "Earth-like Planet Around Proxima Centauri Discovered" has been frequently cited.

[T]he German weekly Der Spiegel announced recently that astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, just 4.25 light-years away. Yes, in what is an apparent trifecta, this newly-discovered exoplanet is Earth-like, orbits within it’s sun’s habitable zone, and is within our reach. But is this too good to be true? [. . . ] Citing anonymous sources, the magazine stated:

“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface — an important requirement for the emergence of life. Never before have scientists discovered a second Earth that is so close by.”

In addition, they claim that the discovery was made by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the La Silla Observatory‘s reflecting telescope. Coincidentally, it was this same observatory that announced the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb back in 2012, which was also declared to be “the closest exoplanet to Earth”. Unfortunately, subsequent analysis cast doubt on its existence, claiming it was a spurious artifact of the data analysis.

However, according to Der Spiegel’s unnamed source – whom they claim was involved with the La Silla team that made the find – this latest discovery is the real deal, and was the result of intensive work. “Finding small celestial bodies is a lot of hard work,” the source was quoted as saying. “We were moving at the technically feasible limit of measurement.”

The article goes on to state that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) will be announcing the finding at the end of August. But according to numerous sources, in response to a request for comment by AFP, ESO spokesman Richard Hook refused to confirm or deny the discovery of an exoplanet around Proxima Centauri. “We are not making any comment,” he is reported as saying.

The Pale Red Dot research project, devoted to the surveillance of Proxima Centauri in the search of detecting a close-orbiting planet, has reported on finding a possible signal.



A 2013 study did suggest a 10-20 day cycle of some sort. Such, the project acknowledges, may not be spoor of a planet at all but rather a function of the star or even the instruments used. Any planet more massive than one or two Earths would already have been detected, based on previous surveys.

If everything is as reported--if!--then there could well be a planet of mass comparable to that of the Earth orbiting the nearest star to our solar system within said star's circumstellar habitable zone. That by itself would not ensure that such a planet would be like Earth, as serious constraints to the habitability of exoplanets in red dwarf systems exist. In particular, Proxima Centauri's nature as a violent flare star means that even if a hypothetical planet did start off with the resources needed to support life, successive flares may have eroded the planet's surface into lifeless rock.

Even so, it goes without saying that the discovery of such a world would be epoch-making. Besides the potential of this world as itself, it signals remarkable things about the wider universe. If such an uncomprisingly dim and violent star as Proxima Centauri can support even a very broadly Earth-like planet, surely planets like ours must be quite common? How likely would it be that we are not alone?

D-Brief and The Dragon's Gaze have more. Suffice it to say I will be waiting for bated breath for more.

[DM] "#CensusFail, or, how #Census2016 is not as big a hit in Australia as in Canada"

At Demography Matters, I u>report briefly on the apparently wide-spread concerns over privacy and security associated with this year's Australian census.