[PHOTO] Streetcars in their natural habitat, Roncesvalles Carhouse

The Roncesvalles Carhouse, just west of the intersection where Roncesvalles meets the Queensway, looks fetching at night.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the need for opponents of Trump to fight, not just the man but the root causes.


• Centauri Dreams notes a study suggesting Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound to Alpha Centauri A and B.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos depicting the devastation of Gatlinburg by fire.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that stars with close-orbiting rocky worlds seem to have above-solar metallicity, and considers the albedos of exoplanets.


• Far Outliers looks at how Poland's Communist government tried to undermine Pope John Paul II in 1979.


• Joe. My. God. notes a lawsuit lodged against the American government demanding the release of information regarding the Russian information hack.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes poor working conditions in Bangladesh.


• Marginal Revolution notes a Yoruba tongue twister.


• The Planetary Society Blog links to China's planned program of space exploration.

[LINK] "Who's Killing the Women's Land Movement?"

Vice's Allie Conti looks at the reasons for the decline of the women's land movement, a back-to-the-earth movement started by lesbians in the 1970s that now seems to currently be on its last legs. The general drift of non-heterosexuals to cities, as well as the declining popularity of traditional lesbian identities among the young, are equally responsible.

[A]fter the Vietnam war, as thousands of Americans moved away from cities to adopt an agrarian lifestyle, scores of lesbians simultaneously became disenchanted with the emerging women's liberation and gay rights movements, which many perceived as being either homophobic or misogynist. They reacted by forming closed-off, utopian societies—farms and communes where women often took on traditionally male activities like mechanics and engineering, in what would come to be known as the women's land movement. But like religious sisterhoods and lesbian bars, these male-free communities, which once boasted thousands of members, are in clear decline today.

Young queer people who want to get back to the land today have more options than women like [Susan] Wiseheart, who decades ago relied on the women's land movement to provide safety in numbers and reclusion from a society once hostile to their sexuality.

Terri has long since moved on from Aradia, but Wiseheart has remained, and says she never plans to leave. It is, after all, her life's work. But once she's gone, it's unlikely that anyone will be willing or able to continue her mission. Signs of that are written across Hawk Hill—where chickens, dogs, donkeys, guinea fowl, cattle, horses and a flock of sheep once roamed its fields, calling it a farm today would be a categorical misstatement. Wiseheart now lives there with a few friends, also in their sixties and seventies, and a straight woman helping to pay the bills while they seek out a lesbian renter.

"We're still sometimes nervous, because we live in a fundamentalist Christian area," she explains. "We've managed to be safe and fine so far. We just don't want to be advertising it widely."

Meanwhile, there may be few modern women left willing to live a relatively cloistered life on a lesbian-only tract of land in the Ozarks. Young queer people who want to get back to the land today have more options than women like Wiseheart, who decades ago relied on the women's land movement to provide safety in numbers and reclusion from a society once hostile to their sexuality.

[LINK] "Tango and the gender question"

Open Democracy hosts Yessika Gonzalez's article looking at the queering of the Argentine tango.

With the internationalization of tango, its slum origins were forgotten and a strictly codified dance was exported with clearly defined roles between man and woman. In the traditional milongas—the venues where people in Argentina go to tango—women generally sit on one side of the dance floor to show their potential dance partners that they are available. The man invites the woman to dance with a head motion and the women either accepts or rejects the proposal. So begins a dance in which the man leads and the woman follows the marked steps, embellishing the dance with several adornments.

In recent years, however, people have begun to champion the so-called Queer Tango - queer meaning “strange”, “different”, or even “eccentric”. But since the word was traditionally used pejoratively against people on particular gender and sexual grounds, it was eventually appropriated by the LGBTQ community. The Queer Tango therefore does not aim only to create spaces for the gay community to express itself through tango, but it allows all people, regardless of their sexuality, to explore themselves and go beyond social gender norms. As the Buenos Aires Queer Tango blog explains:

“Queer Tango is a space for tango open to everyone. A space for meeting, socializing, learning, and practicing that seeks to explore different forms of communication between those who dance. The queer tango does not presuppose the sexual orientation of its dancers, nor their taste for occupying one role or another when dancing.”

[El Tango Queer] es un espacio de tango abierto a todas las personas. Un lugar de encuentro, sociabilización, aprendizaje y práctica en el que se busca explorar distintas formas de comunicación entre quienes bailan. El tango queer no presupone la orientación sexual de los bailarines ni su gusto por ocupar un rol u otro a la hora de bailar.

Although, at its inception, only men danced the tango, in the traditional milongas of today, same-sex partners have been victims of discrimination and have even been thrown out of the dance floor. In fact, the birth of many “queer” milongas came as a response to these attacks.

[LINK] "Agroecology Booming in Argentina"

The Inter Press Service's Fabiana Frayssinet reports on the popularity in Argentina of agroecology, a variant on organic agriculture.

Organic agriculture is rapidly expanding in Argentina, the leading agroecological producer in Latin America and second in the world after Australia, as part of a backlash against a model that has disappointed producers and is starting to worry consumers.

According to the intergovernmental Inter American Commission on Organic Agriculture (ICOA), in the Americas there are 9.9 million hectares of certified organic crops, which is 22 per cent of the total global land devoted to these crops. Of this total, 6.8 million of hectares are in Latin America and the Caribbean, and three million in Argentina alone.

The Argentine National Agrifood Health and Quality Service (SENASA) reported that between 2014 and 2015, the land area under organic production grew 10 per cent, including herbs, vegetables, legumes, fruits, cereals and oilseeds.

Legumes and vegetables experienced the largest increase (200 percent). In Argentina there are 1,074 organic producers, mainly small and medium-size farms and cooperatives.

“The organic market is starting to boom. We have been producing since 20 years ago, when this market did not exist in Argentina and we exported everything. Now we sell abroad, but about 50 percent remains here,” said Jorge Pierrestegui, manager of San Nicolás Olive Groves and Vineyards, an agroecology company that produces olives and olive oil on some 1,000 hectares in the Argentine province of Córdoba.

“Opting for organic was a company policy, mainly due to a long-term ecological vision of not spraying the fields with poisonous chemicals,” Pierrestegui said.

[LINK] "Vera Rubin, astronomer who proved existence of dark matter, dies at 88"

The Washignton Post's Matt Schudel provides a fitting obituary for Vera Rubin, the astronomer whose observations of the wider universe confirmed the existence of dark matter (whatever it is).

Vera Rubin, an astronomer who proved the existence of dark matter, one of the fundamental principles in the study of the universe, but who battled sex discrimination throughout her career, died Dec. 25 at an assisted living facility in Princeton, N.J. She was 88.

She had dementia, said a son, Allan Rubin.

Dr. Rubin’s groundbreaking discoveries, made primarily with physicist W. Kent Ford, have revolutionized the way scientists observe, measure and understand the universe.

The concept of “dark matter,” an unknown substance among stars in distant galaxies, had existed since the 1930s, but it was not proved until Dr. Rubin’s studies with Ford in the 1970s. It is considered one of the most significant and fundamental advances in astronomy during the 20th century.

“The existence of dark matter has utterly revolutionized our concept of the universe and our entire field,” University of Washington astronomer Emily Levesque told Astronomy magazine this year. “The ongoing effort to understand the role of dark matter has basically spawned entire subfields within astrophysics and particle physics.”

[LINK] "Star-Gazing Women Made Trail-Blazing Discoveries"

National Geographic's Simon Worrell interviews Dava Sobel, an author whose new book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars takes a look at the late 19th century women whose observations basically created the framework for our understanding of stars and the universe.

Tell us about the glass universe—is this the ultimate glass ceiling or something else altogether?

[Laughs] It’s both. It’s about women and astronomy and also about a unique collection of half a million photographs on glass plates that are stored in the Harvard College Observatory. Women are traditionally underrepresented in science, so it’s interesting to look back to the 1870s to 1890s and find that as many as 20 women at a time were working at the Harvard Observatory.

You don’t think of Harvard as a place that’s particularly friendly to women, especially then. The observatory was a wholly disowned subsidiary and made their own rules and went their own way. The director, Edward Pickering, was very much in favor of higher education for women and for giving women a chance if they were interested in doing astronomical work. There had been a tradition of women working in the observatory, but the earliest were family members of the astronomers, the resident observers. By Pickering’s time, women he hired were reporting for seven hours a day, six days a week, and had no family connection to the place. They were just capable and interested.

Were they the ones that took the pictures?

No. At the beginning, there was a real separation of duties. The men would operate the telescopes partly because of propriety. You couldn’t have the women in there with the men, up all night. [Laughs] But by 1896, that changed with women coming in from college-level programs in astronomy, who had learned to observe. The first woman to use the telescopes was Annie Jump Cannon in 1896.

[URBAN NOTE] "The boredom and the terror of gang life in Chicago’s violent 2016"

The Toronto Star carries John Eligon's article from The New York Times looking at the terrible urban violence in Chicago.

The young men who call themselves Gangster Disciples skirted by an empty lot. They marched past a “Stop the Violence” mural painted on a corner store, coming to a halt when they saw members of a rival gang, the Black Disciples.

It was late September on a busy South Side intersection, and now tensions were escalating, gang members who were there recalled.

There were glares, they said. Then words.

“You’re a rat,” a Black Disciple said to one of the Gangster Disciples who he believed had given the police information about him.

Things were about to blow.

It had been exactly 90 days since some of these same men had sat across from one another in an airy church hall to broker peace and confront a hard truth: The gang war they had inherited and were viciously continuing was helping to unravel parts of this city, where the levels of violence were reaching horrific new heights.

With 768 murders as of Tuesday, according to the Chicago Tribune, 2016 has been Chicago’s deadliest year since 1997. Toronto, which has a comparable population, has seen fewer than a tenth as many homicides this year, at 67.

[URBAN NOTE] "Peel Regional Police Chief Jennifer Evans under fire for refusal to end carding"

The Globe and Mail's Sean Fine looks at the controversy surrounding the refusal Peel Regional Police Chief Jennifer Evans to stop the much-criticized--justly much-criticized, I think--policy of carding.

She started as a 19-year-old cadet with Peel Regional Police and grew up in the force. But, by her own account, the most important moments in the education of Chief Jennifer Evans happened during her work outside the force – at inquiries into why police failed to stop Canada’s most notorious serial killers. Asked to examine the cases of Robert Pickton and Paul Bernardo, Chief Evans concluded that communication failures allowed both men to continue to target women.

Yet today, the 53-year-old chief finds herself under fire for the very thing she learned to value most: the collection and sharing of information. She says her ability to listen is a point of pride, but her critics say she doesn’t hear them.

The conflict can be traced to the racially charged issue of carding. The Peel force has called the practice “street checks” or “street interviews” since it officially began in 1993. Now it is simply the “collection of identifying information.” The civilian board that oversees the force – the chief’s boss – passed a motion last year asking her to suspend the practice, no matter what it’s called. She told the board no.

Chief Evans, one of just a handful of female police leaders in Canada, says she was hired for her decision-making ability. And, though her $289,000-a-year contract is up for renewal next October, she is not one for backing down.

The dispute over carding has sparked a wider debate over whether the Peel force is in step with the times and the community it serves. The country’s third-largest municipal force has had to examine its own demographics – four out of five officers are white, though Peel Region, which comprises the town of Caledon and the cities of Brampton and Mississauga, is the country’s most multiracial (57 per cent are minorities) – and account for a reputation for violating people’s rights. Chief Evans is feeling the heat from the police board, the mayors in her region and community groups who question whether she is standing in the way of change.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vacant lot in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to house new rental building"

The Globe and Mail's Frances Bula looks at how even Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is sharing in the housing construction boom of the wider Vancouver metropolitan area, perhaps at the expense of the deprived people who live in that neighbourhood.

A prominent long-vacant lot on the edge of the Downtown Eastside is about to be developed by the company also building the Trump Tower.

But because of a city zoning policy put in years ago and the developer’s preference for something different, the new building at the rapidly transforming corner of Hastings and Abbott across the street from the Woodward’s project will be a rental.

“It is an important and underutilized corner of the city,” said Phillip Scott, the director of development for Holborn Group. He said rental residential is a good fit for the diversified company, adding that “the larger scale of rental building projects such as this helps to deliver amenities and …sustainable living space.”

The 132-unit building is being designed by architect Gair Williamson, who has done a number of unique projects in the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown and Strathcona, including The Keefer, the Paris Block and the Paris Annex, and projects that combine social and market rentals.

The Holborn lot, which used to house a one-storey building that had a food market in its last incarnation, has sat vacant for years. In the decade since Holborn bought the site, the area has changed dramatically.