A Bit More Detail

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

2018-08-14T12:59:09Z

Architectuul reports on how architects, at a time of new environmental pressures on water, how some architects are integrating water into their works.

The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about what books she is (and is not) reading these days.

D-Brief notes a new study suggesting that the prospects of planet-based life at globular cluster Omega Centauri are low, simply because the tightly-packed stars disrupt each others' planets too often.

Hornet Stories notes how some American conservatives wish to prohibit states from mandating adoption agencies not bar same-sex couples as applicants.

JSTOR Daily notes how the tattooed heads of Maori first became international trade items in the 19th century, then were returned to New Zealand in more recent years.

Language Log's Victor Mair writes about his favourite Nepali expression, "Bāphre bāph!".

The Map Room Blog notes the release of a revised vision of Star Trek: Stellar Cartography, including material from season 1 of Discovery.

Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw explains how, in 1976, he appeared on Australian television talking about the Yowie, the Australian equivalent to a Yeti.

Drew Rowsome reviews Folsom Street Blues, Jim Stewart's memoirs of the leather/SoMA scene in San Francisco in the 1970s.

Peter Rukavina writes about the newly liberal liquor laws of Prince Edward Island, allowing children to be present in environments where liquor is being served.

Window on Eurasia shares suggestions that the government of Ukraine needs to take a much more visible, and active, approach towards protecting its international tourists, for their sake and for the country's.

Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell talks about the redefinition, at least in the United Kingdom, of Euroskepticism into a movement of extreme suburban nationalists, away from rational critiques of the European Union.

comments

[NEWS] Four queer links: homophobia and adoption, Tori Amos, naturism, whisper networks

2017-11-09T22:04:13Z

Global News reports on a Edmonton couple surprised their anti-gay views disqualify them for adoption. Did they think they might not get a non-straight child?

Hornet Stories reports on how Tori Amos got her start playing piano in gay bars.

Mike Miksche reports for NewNowNext from a gay naturists' resort. The place sounds quite wholesome.

Jesse Dorris at The New Yorker makes the point that gay/bi/queer men, too, need a whisper network to warn of threats. Being out is hard, but necessary for this.

comments

[NEWS] Four queer links: homophobia and adoption, Tori Amos, naturism, whisper networks

2017-11-09T20:28:03Z

Global News reports on a Edmonton couple surprised their anti-gay views disqualify them for adoption. Did they think they might not get a non-straight child?

Hornet Stories reports on how Tori Amos got her start playing piano in gay bars.

Mike Miksche reports for NewNowNext from a gay naturists' resort. The place sounds quite wholesome.

Jesse Dorris at The New Yorker makes the point that gay/bi/queer men, too, need a whisper network to warn of threats. Being out is hard, but necessary for this.

comments

[LINK] "Indigenous children removed from homes in the 1960s begin to heal"

2015-11-04T17:43:42Z

Lauren Pelley's Monday Toronto Star article outlines a sad period in Canada history, when mass adoption of First Nations children was the kneejerk reaction to problems on reserves with little thought afterwards for the removed children or their families.

The scent of tobacco and sage fills the air as members of Canada’s aboriginal communities gather around a fire on the shores of the Rideau River.

Each takes a turn fanning medicinal smoke towards their bodies in a cleansing smudging ritual. Then, one by one, the 40 or so attendees of this Indigenous Adoptee Gathering introduce themselves to the group. Some are from Ontario, others from Manitoba or the Yukon. Some are Cree, others Métis or Ojibway.

Most are members of a stolen generation.

Beginning in the mid-1960s — and for several decades after — thousands of indigenous children across Canada were removed from their homes and typically placed with white middle-class families in Canada and abroad.

Patrick Johnston, author of the 1983 report Native Children and the Child Welfare System, dubbed it the Sixties Scoop.

comments

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

2015-11-03T20:32:18Z

blogTO notes an upcoming Instagram meetup here in Toronto.

Centauri Dreams notes the latest Voyager 1 findings on interstellar space.

The Dragon's Gaze notes exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs are more likely to exhibit high abiotic levels of atmospheric oxygen.

The Dragon's Tales reports on the news Chinese C919 jet plane, meant to compete with Airbus and Boeing.

Geocurrents maps religion in insular Southeast Asia.

Joe. My. God. and Towleroad both look at how Yusuf Mack, an American boxer who claimed he was drugged into participating in a gay porn film, has actually come out via a convincing apology.

Marginal Revolution wonders why short-term interest rates are negative.

The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla shares her updated chart showing the round worlds of the solar system.

Spacing argues for the importance of urban forestry.

Towleroad notes same-sex couples in the United States who, having made use of adoption to create a legal relationship, are now unable to marry.

Transit Toronto notes ongoing streetcar diversions on Queen Street East.

Window on Eurasia notes the harm done to Ukrainians so far by Russia and the dim prospects of this being stopped any time soon.

comments

[LINK] "Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’ Not a Closed Chapter"

2015-06-09T21:42:00Z

The Inter Press Service's Silvia Boarini describes how adoption remains a vexed issue for Aborigines in Australia, for reasons that people familiar with First Nations in Canada know all too well.

[I]ndigenous activists maintain that the ‘stolen generations’ is hardly an isolated chapter, let alone a closed one. “From the first few weeks of the invasion in the 1780s, they started removing our children and breaking down our families,” Sam Watson, a prominent Aboriginal leader and activist, told IPS. “And there are more children being removed now than ever before,” he added.

A recent report by the Government Productivity Commission, titled ‘Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage’, corroborates Watson’s interpretation. Indigenous children in out-of-home-care numbered 5,059 in June 2004 and 14,991 in June 2014. Barely five percent of the population under 17 is indigenous and yet, the report shows, 35 percent of all children removed are Aboriginal and Strait Islanders.

Mary Moore is founder of the Legislative Ethics Commission and has followed many cases of indigenous and non-indigenous child removal. She calls Australia the ‘child-stealing capital of the world’.

Many jobs depend on this ingrained practice and laws are passed to legitimise it, she says. “Removal and adoption are counter-intuitive strategies,” she told IPS. “They ignore the damaging lifelong consequences on children and they are far more costly than supporting families to remain united.”

Authorities justify removals in the name of ‘child protection’ and point to a context of ‘neglect’ and possible ‘risk’ as justifying factors. But the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander minority, overly represented at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, wants to know whose ‘neglect’ and racist policies have contributed to the widespread poverty, soaring incarceration numbers or high mental illness rates affecting their communities.

comments

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

2015-01-08T20:13:03Z

blogTO rates the top ten buildings built in Toronto over the past fifteen years.

Centauri Dreams looks at some of Kepler's candidate exo-Earths.

The Cranky Sociologists applaud Howard Becker, sociologist of deviance.

Joe. My. God. notes an Italian court's recognition of the citizenship of a foreign-born child of a same-sex Italian couple.

Language Hat notes a site promoting the Aborigine language of Yugambeh.

Language Log studies the problems of translating art language from Chinese to English.

Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrates Kirby Delauter.

Personal Reflections reflects on upcoming elections in Queensland.

Peter Rukavina shares a link tracking electricity production and consumption on Prince Edward Island.

The Russian Demographics Blog maps the origin of Russian soldiers killed in the fighting in Ukraine.

Spacing Toronto looks at how, one day in Toronto, one railroad bridge was swapped with another.

Towleroad notes how a Texan man still hasn't been charged with the murder of a lesbian couple including his own daughter after almost a year, and looks at a hate crime in Russia.

The Volokh Conspiracy notes the visit of El Sisi to a Coptic Christmas mass, the first time any Egyptian president made this visit.

Window on Eurasia suggests Russian policy towards Ukraine won't change until Russia changes, reports certain statistics from the periphery of Russia, and looks at the role of Russian media in encouraging ethnic violence.

comments

[LINK] "Children Stolen by Chilean Dictatorship Finally Come to Light"

2015-01-07T22:49:53Z

The Inter Press Service's Marianela Jarroud reports on how in Chile, young people today are growing up to discover that they were abducted from their disappeared parents by the Pinochet dictatorship. Argentina, as Jarroud notes, engaged with this at a much earlier date than its neighbour.

The suspicion that babies of people detained and disappeared during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship were stolen is growing stronger in Chile, a country that up to now has not paid much attention to the phenomenon.

“There has always been a suspicion that something similar to what happened in Argentina also occurred in Chile, and that many women who were pregnant when they were detained actually gave birth in detention centres,” a 70-year-old woman who asked to be identified simply as Carmen told IPS.

“No one dug into that issue much back then, because we were afraid, and nobody would have listened to us,” she added.

[. . .].

According to the official investigation, 40,000 people were tortured during the 17-year military dictatorship, and 3,095 of them were killed, 1,000 of whom are still disappeared.

It has been confirmed that at least 10 women were pregnant when they were detained and disappeared. They were between the ages of 26 and 29, and were three to eight months pregnant.

comments

[LINK] "Russians do not want to adopt Russian children"

2014-12-16T22:55:21Z

Writing for Open Democracy, Ekaterina Loushnikova argues that deep-seated cultural and policy inhibitions against adoption in Russia means that children who, before the 2012 Magnitsky law, might have been adopted by foreigners are now languishing.

Irina Onokhina’s family includes, apart from her own two children and five grandchildren, sixteen adopted children. Irina used to be a journalist; she worked for 33 years as a news photographer on ‘Komsomol Flame’ magazine. Her career was going very nicely, when she suddenly decided to change everything: both her profession and her life. ‘I always dreamed of having a large family,’ she told me, ‘but my husband wasn’t keen, and we divorced. Then, when I reached my 48th birthday, I thought: now what? I’d be retiring in a few years [Russian women receive their state pension at 55]; my children are grown up and have their own lives. I’m still in the prime of life, but nobody needs me.’ In 1990, to her colleagues’ amazement, Irina decided to organise a family-type children’s home. She applied to her local council for the necessary permission, but instead of support she met with incomprehension.

‘Communist Party officials came to my home and even my parents’ home, and tried to put me off. “Don’t have anything to do with these children!” they said. “You don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. They’re all disabled and mentally retarded; they steal, smoke, drink and swear! You’ll never cope with them!”

When Irina went to the committee meeting that would decide the matter, she took with her journalist colleagues with cameras and microphones. ‘When we arrived we switched on the tape recorders and set up the mikes, as though we were going to do an article about it. And it actually worked!’

[. . .]

‘It’s not so simple these days. If you want to adopt you need to do a special course, have a medical check-up, collect lots of bits of paper to show that you’re not an alcoholic or a mental case. And then there’s our notorious juvenile justice system – it’s getting so that a parent can’t even give a child a slap or they’ll end up in court! But I think inter-country adoption is a good thing, and I don’t know why they had to ban it. The foreigners mostly used to take kids with disabilities. If our government can’t treat them, why stop other people trying? Ok, so a few bad things happened, but it’s not like they don’t happen here as well. Just take a look at that!’

Irina points to a local news bulletin on the TV. ‘The young girl gave birth in secret, wrapped her baby in a polythene bag and took it out into the cold, where it died of hypothermia,’ says the newsreader in his dispassionate voice. ‘The woman has admitted her guilt and will spend the next four years in a prison camp.’ The screen shows a weeping girl hiding her face from the camera, and the material evidence of her crime – the child’s body in its polythene wrapping –lying on a table. Its life lasted only a few minutes. According to official statistics, a hundred children perish at the hands of their own mothers every year in Russia.

comments

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

2014-12-10T17:09:15Z

blogTO notes that the Union-Pearson Express train line is going to be quite expensive, perhaps unworkably so.

Centauri Dreams looks at the imminent flyby by Pluto of the New Horizons probe.

Will Baird of The Dragon's Tales reacts with upset to the confirmation that the CIA engaged in torture.

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis looks at the controversies surrounding performances of an Indonesian popular music genre, dangdut, which features sexualized female performers.

Marginal Revolution talks about which economies around the world are the most undervalued. (Sri Lanka comes up.)

The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla talks about China's plans for space, including a Mars mission.

Spacing Toronto talks about the day in 1950 when the sun above Toronto turned blue.

Bruce Sterling shares a Washington Post article noting how forests have regrown across Europe in the past century.

Torontoist notes that the city of Toronto has sought to secure heritage status for El Mocambo.

Towleroad observes that the Irish Catholic Church has severed its links to a Northern Irish adoption agency for being GLBT-inclusive.

Window on Eurasia notes a Russian expert who says that Ukrainian decentralization will be impossible at present and suggests that a new Munich arrangement over Ukraine is unlikely owing to Western distrust.

comments

[LINK] "In Korea, Adoptees Fight To Change Culture That Sent Them Overseas"

2014-09-18T19:46:40Z

NPR's Steve Haruch started an interesting discussion with his article about changing attitudes about adoption in South Korea. Overcoming the stigma of adoption and adoptees is a necessary precondition for a country that even now remains a major source of adopted children elsewhere in the world.

In the Gwanak-gu neighborhood of Seoul, there is a box.

Attached to the side of a building, the box resembles a book drop at a public library, only larger, and when nights are cold, the interior is heated. The Korean lettering on its front represents a phoneticized rendering of the English words "baby box." It was installed by Pastor Lee Jon-rak to accept abandoned infants. When its door opens, an alarm sounds, alerting staff to the presence of a new orphan.

The box, and the anonymity it provides, has become a central symbol in a pitched debate over Korean adoption policy. Two years ago last month, South Korea's Special Adoption Law was amended to add accountability and oversight to the adoption process. The new law requires mothers to wait seven days before relinquishing a child, to get approval from a family court, and to register the birth with the government. The SAL also officially enshrines a new attitude toward adoption: "The Government shall endeavor to reduce the number of Korean children adopted abroad," the law states, "as part of its duties and responsibilities to protect children."

In the years after the Korean War, more than 160,000 Korean children — the population of a midsize American city — were sent to adoptive homes in the West. What began as a way to quietly remove mixed-race children who had been fathered by American servicemen soon gained momentum as children crowded the country's orphanages amid grinding postwar poverty. Between 1980 and 1989 alone, more than 65,000 Korean children were sent overseas.

For the first time in South Korean history, the country's adoption law has been rewritten by some of the very people who have lived its consequences. A law alone can't undo deeply held cultural beliefs, and even among adoptees, opinion is divided over how well the SAL's effects match its aims. The question of how to reckon with this fraught legacy remains unsettled and raw.

comments

[NEWS] Some Monday links

2014-01-14T00:01:21Z

From Google Plus, Brian Koberlein notes that an examination of IRAS infrared astronomical data suggests that our solar system has no very large companions.

The Globe and Mail notes that Russian may close down inter-country adoptions with Canada because of our recognition of same-sex marriages and adoption.

Business Week observes that China is going to introduce an economic census to try to come up with reliable statistics.

The Star is one paper carrying the report that Gary Shteyngart said subsidy-using Canadian writers aren't risk-taking.

In a sad coda, David Pickton--brother of serial killer Robert Pickton--denies knowledge of the crimes, which occurred on the family property both brothers lived on.
These pictures of cat armour are amazing.

Der Spiegel's English-language edition notes the continuing recovery of Iceland from its economic crash.

Gothamist reports that New York City's MTA will be killing its Metrocard in favour of better technologies. Oh, TTC!

Open Democracy reports on how residents of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, surrounded by European Union member-states Poland and Lithuania, are starting to Europeanize.

comments

[BLOG] Some Friday links (1)

2013-08-02T15:30:10Z

Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster describes, after Timothy Ferris and Greg Egan, the idea of a "galactic Internet" that we just have to find a way to plug into.

Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales describes one theory for identifying life-supporting worlds on super-Earths orbiting red dwarfs from their spectrographic signatures, and another suggesting that gravitational resonances from Jupiter and Saturn prevented the formation of more, and more massive, planets in the area of Mars.

Daniel Drezner notes that austerity is controversial in Poland.

Eastern Approaches touches upon illegal--that is to say, unregulated--adoption in Poland.

Language Log considers the phonemic--vowel-like, even--qualities of the "Mc" in McDonald's. I'm amused.

The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that the United States is no longer supporting Argentina's international legal issues with the foreigners claiming its debt.

Is Towleroad essayist RJ Aguiar correct in claiming that the gay rights movement has neglected sexual freedom for more conservative marriage-type issues?

A couple of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy suggest that the fall of Detroit can be connected to the use of eminent domain to confiscate property for development. (I suspect causality is reversed.)

Window on Eurasia points to some interesting articles: one claims that Ukraine for all of its issues is more pluralistic and thus more hopeful than Russia; another talking about the unlikelihood that South Ossetia, once Georgian, will be reunited with North Ossetia inside Russia; and, a final one suggesting that anti-GLBT attitudes are rife throughout the South Caucasus.

comments

[LINK] "How the War on Gay Marriage Turned Into a War on Adoption"

2013-04-09T16:32:41Z

Esquire politics blogger Tom Junod takes on the peculiar fundamentalism of anti-same-sex marriage factions in the United States who also look down on adoption, believing that only opposite-sex partners with children product of the partners' genes count. This does go some way towards illustrating the background behind the recent statement by NOM Chairman John Eastman that families produced by adoption, like those of US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, were second-best.

I first became aware of the contempt that “pro-marriage” forces had for my own enduring union and for my own adoptive family last year, when I attended a conservative conference and accepted a pamphlet published by an adjunct to the National Organization for Marriage called “The Ruth Institute.” Entitled “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage,” the pamphlet offered a list what it called “incontrovertible statements in support of Natural Marriage”, most of which extolled the bond between children and their biological parents and decried the consequences of its ever being broken. Now, as an adoptive parent, I am well aware of the importance of biology, and believe that a child’s connection to his or her biological family should be preserved whenever possible. But the National Organization for Marriage pamphlet stunned me for not for its recognition of the biological bond between parents and children but rather for its suggestion that all families built outside that bond were the result of unseemly adult machinations — and so “inverted the purpose of marriage.” Indeed, its argument against same-sex marriage was secondary to its argument against any violation of what it regarded as the natural order, from “artificial reproductive technology” to, once again, adoption. It was a sweeping broadside, and for every truism it contained — “adopted children...tell us they long for relationship with their biological parents” — it proffered a nugget of pseudo-scientific hysteria, such as the assurance that “pre-teen girls not living with their biological fathers get their menstrual periods earlier than girls who live with their fathers.”

Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything written in a pamphlet handed out at a conservative conference by volunteers for the National Organization for Marriage. But I have been surprised, over the last two days, to hear the language of the “77 Reasons” pamphlet recurring over and over in the arguments of those lined up in defense of “natural marriage,” from demonstrators quoted by NPR on the courthouse steps (“The simple purpose of marriage is to link parents and children, and without that we’re going to have social chaos”) to the Times’ redoubtable Ross Douthat (“the share of single-parent households is ultimately a less meaningful indicator of family solidity...than the share of children living in married households with both their biological parents”). The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God’s purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.

comments

[BLOG] Some Friday links

2013-03-15T15:47:13Z

The Burgh Diaspora notes that, in different American cities, efforts are being made to promote local educational and medical institutions. Some cities may do better than others.

Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes an astronomer who thinks that Earth-like planets--roughly Earth-size with broadly Earth-like environments--may be commoner around red dwarf stars than thought.

Crooked Timber's Corey Robin notes the uncontested presence of racist and oligarchic John C. Calhoun's thinking on the American right.

Geocurrents maps, after evangelical Christians, their different missionary efforts around the world.

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux links approvingly to Mark Tushnet, who argues that of course the American government can't make ultimately definitive statements about when American military force can be used.

The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer observes that senates aren't popular anywhere in the world, it seems, but that the United States actually has a constitutional bar against abolishing its upper house.

The Population Reference Bureau's blog notes that the American metropolitan areas that experienced the strongest population growth are the ones with strong private job markets and federal funding.

Torontoist's Patrick Metzger notes that there was never a Cold War-era nuclear shelter beneath Queen's Park. Rather, it was in Aurora.

Towleroad reports that the National Organization on Marriage has just insulted two American supreme court judges by stating that the adoption that constituted their families is a second-best option next to natural procreation.

The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin argues that good arguments exist for the American Supreme Court to repudiate the court decision legitimizing the deportation of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War.

Chechen pressures on Ingushetia to merge with the Chechen republic, Window on Eurasia argues, have been enabled by the Putin regime's desire to consolidate Russia's federal units.

comments