A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports suggestions the bizarre happenings at Boyajian's Star could be explained by an evaporating exomoon.


• Centauri Dreams looks at how the crowdsourced evScope telescope is being used to support the Lucy mission to the Jupiter Trojans.


• The Crux explains the phenomenon of misophobia.


• D-Brief shares suggestions that an asteroid collision a half-billion years ago released clouds of dust that, reaching Earth, triggered the mid-Ordovician ice age.


• Dangerous Minds shares video of a perhaps underwhelming meeting of William Burroughs with Francis Bacon.


• io9 makes the case for more near-future space exploration movies like Ad Astra.


• Joe. My. God. notes a Trump retweeting of the lie that Ilham Omar celebrated on 9/11.


• JSTOR Daily notes how fire could destroy the stressed rainforest of the Amazon.


• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how few judges in the US have been impeached.


• The LRB Blog looks at how the already tenuous position of Haitians in the Bahamas has been worsened by Dorian.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the importance of the integrity of official maps in the era of Trump.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the political importance of marriage ceremonies in Lebanon and Gaza.


• Drew Rowsome interviews the Zakar Twins on the occasion of their new play Pray the Gay Away, playing in Toronto in October.


• The Russian Demographic Blog shares statistics on birthrates in the different provinces of the Russian Empire circa 1906.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on the first experiment done on the photoelectric effect, revealing quantum mechanics.


• Window on Eurasia looks at growing anti-Chinese sentiments in Central Asia.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at "The Hurtful Dog", a Cyanide and Happiness cartoon.

• The City of Mississauga is encouraging residents to take part in a postal campaign to push for independence from Peel Region. Global News reports.


• A Montréal city councillor wants the city to try to get a world's fair in 2030. CTV reports.


• April Lindgren at The Conversation considersthe important role that local media in Thunder Bay can play in dealing, with, among other issues, Indigenous concerns.


• Amy Wilentz considers at The Atlantic whether France, after the devastation of Notre-Dame in Paris, should perhaps contribute to the reconstruction of the cathedral of Port-au-Prince, a decade after its destruction in the earthquake that devastated an already poor ex-French Haiti.


• Ben Rogers at Open Democracy makes the case for seeing London, despite its position as a global city, as also a metropolis inextricably at the heart of England, too.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the good news: The Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in 4.5 billion years, not 3.9 billion!


• The Dragon's Tales notes that a new Chinese ground station built in Argentina has not made the promised outreach to locals, with no visitors' centre and rumours aplenty.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog explains the importance of doing literature reviews.


• Far Outliers notes the Pakhtuns, a Muslim ethnicity of the British Raj in what is now Pakistan noteworthy for being a major source of recruits in the Indian Army.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes Iris Murdoch, particularly her emphasis on learning as a process of engaging with something greater on its terms.


• Gizmodo reports on how space sciences appreciate the work done by the noble rover Opportunity on Mars.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how early 20th century African-American artists have represented Haiti in the works.


• Language Hat takes note of some of the mechanisms by which linguistics can neglect the study of indigenous languages.


• Language Log takes a look at the Latin motto of the University of Pennsylvania, a source still of unintentional humour.


• Marginal Revolution takes a look at the high levels of dysfunction in Nigeria, from fighting between herders and farmers to the incapacity of the national government.


• The NYR Daily takes a look at the concept of internal exile, starting with Russia and spiraling out into the wider world.


• Peter Rukavina shares a photo of a payphone that is one of the few remaining used artifacts of old Island Tel.


• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper considering the demographic peculiarities of the societies of the semi-periphery as contrasted to those of the core.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes</> the surprisingly large amount of information astronomers will be able to extract from the first image of an Earth-like exoplanet.


• Window on Eurasia notes that North Caucasians in Russia no longer stand out as having higher-than-average birth rates in Russia.

• CBC notes the underrepresentation of politicians of visible minority background in the city councils of Mississauga and Brampton.


• MTL Blog reports on the different plans of the different political parties in the Québec election for mass transit plans. (I really like the Québec Solidaire plan's ambition.)


• Catherine Tse at the SCMP takes a look at the different sorts of businesses run by young wealthy people, often socialites, of Asian immigrant background in Vancouver.


• Henry Grabar at Slate writes about a paper examining the tactics adopted by different groups in New York City--Hasidic Jews, Chinese, and Bangladeshis--faced with high real estate prices, from intensification to diffusion to underground housing.


• Christian Portilla at VICE writes about how gentrification is undermining the basis for the Miami neighbourhood of Little Haiti, driving out long-time residents.

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• Global News outlines the state of the Machias Seal island territorial dispute between Canada and the United States.


• Faced with mounting costs owing to an aging and dispersed population, is Newfoundland and Labrador headed for bankruptcy? What would happen then? The National Post reports.


• The selection of names of beers from the new brewery of Dildo, NL, has been undertaken with great care. Global News reports.


• The Island Review shares an extract from the new book by Robin Noble about the Orkneys, Sagas of Salt and Stone. http://theislandreview.com/content/sagas-of-salt-and-stone-orkney-unwrapped-robin-noble-extract
  
• Ayanna Legros makes a compelling argument for the recognition of Haiti and Haitians as not being somehow foreign to their region, but rather for including them in Latin America.

There were airplane boarding passes and luggage tags from Haiti, Florida, Ethiopia, Salt Lake City and New York; Greyhound bus tickets from Albany and Indianapolis; a Delaware driver’s licence and a U.S. Social Security number; Florida detention records; immigration documents from Orlando; and medical laboratory test records for a Delaware man.

Dampened by rain and dried by sun, the scraps of papers discarded while fleeing for a new life in Canada offer insight into the journeys made by asylum seekers. They may have been thrown away as simple garbage from a life abandoned or been purposefully left behind for fear of complicating an expected refugee claim in Canada.

Canadian officials said this week that there have been about 250 people crossing each day at Roxham Rd. in the past few weeks, with a one-day peak of 500 about a week ago.

About 85 per cent have been Haitian nationals worried that the U.S. government intends to get rid of a special immigration designation, known as a Temporary Protected Status, that prevents deportation back to Haiti and nine other countries.

Among them is the Baptiste family — mother Sophonie, father Michel and son Colby — who stepped off a Greyhound bus at 6 p.m. Wednesday along with an elderly grandfather, an aunt and a cousin after deciding to leave behind the life they had built over the past decade in Queens, N.Y.

In Haiti, they ran a successful home renovation business that was abandoned over fears of kidnapping. Colby Baptiste said he was employed by Honda and was a registered real estate agent in New York before the family decided to seek refuge in Canada.

Pushing them to take that decision was a letter they received from immigration authorities advising them to prepare for the expiration of their Temporary Protected Status and an eventual return to Haiti.

With tears welling in her eyes, Sophonie Baptiste said she saw Canada as a more generous and open country and was confident her family would be able to rebuild once again.

The Francois family are among nearly 7,000 asylum seekers — most of them Haitian — who have flooded across the Quebec-New York state border since mid-July when the Trump administration announced it might end their “temporary protected status,” which was granted following Haiti’s massive 2010 earthquake. They are among the first few hundred the government has relocated to this eastern Ontario processing centre.

Few here have heard of Justin Trudeau and no one says they saw his now-controversial January Twitter message welcoming immigrants facing persecution. The tweet was heavily criticized by the Conservative opposition for sparking the American exodus.

But many here say they uprooted their new American lives because of something more primal: they were driven by fear of the anti-immigration politics of President Donald Trump.

“I decided to come to Canada because the politics of migration in the United States changed,” says Haitian-born Justin Remy Napoleon, 39. “I was scared. I came here to continue my life.”

Like Frank Francois, Napoleon says he feared deportation over Trump’s policy shift, so he left his adopted home in San Diego, flew to the eastern seaboard and boarded a bus for the northern border. It wasn’t the first time he decided to start over in another country. He left Haiti in 2006 for the Dominican Republic and then went to Brazil.

Napoleon says he dreamed of coming to Canada from as far back as his time in Haiti. When he crossed the border earlier this month, “I thought I was entering a paradise.”

Const. Daniel Cloutier, a Cornwall police spokesman, says almost 300 Haitians have arrived recently and, so far, there have been no problems and none are anticipated.

About 3,800 people crossed into Quebec in the first two weeks of August following the 2,996 who crossed in July after the Trump administration said it was considering ending “temporary protected status” for Haitians in the U.S. following their country’s massive 2010 earthquake.

Last week, federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced a temporary shelter would be set up in Cornwall.

The newcomers are being housed at the Nav Centre, which is run by Nav Canada, the private non-profit corporation that owns and operates the country’s civil air navigation service. The military is erecting tents on its grounds.

The centre sits on more than 28 hectares of parkland abutting the St. Lawrence Seaway and is billed as a government conference centre with all the amenities of a luxury resort. Its website boasts 560 “comfortable” rooms, as well as a swimming pool, sauna, fitness centre and outdoors sports fields.

Amid the federal government’s assurances it has everything under control at the Canada-U.S. border, where thousands of would-be refugees are crossing over in droves, is an aggressive campaign to combat one element seen to be behind the most recent wave: the viral spread of potentially deliberately misleading information about Canada’s refugee and asylum systems.

The Liberal government has said it is aware of misinformation spreading via instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and through other social media platforms.

Much of the misinformation has targeted the Haitian population living in the United States with “temporary protected status” granted to more than 50,000 Haitians, primarily in the wake of 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 222,570, injured another 300,000 and displaced almost 100,000.

With that status likely to expire without renewal in mere months, however, many have packed their bags, made their way to Champlain, N.Y., and walked across to Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que. – seemingly, according to the Canadian government, encouraged by false information.

“The misinformation that Haitians in the United States, for example, could get permanent residency easily in Canada if they have temporary protected status in the United States. That’s completely untrue,” Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said in an interview with Global News.

“Those [are the] kinds of myths we’re working really hard to dispel, and we’re engaging all available means to attack that misinformation.”

Videos on YouTube are also spreading misinformation about Canada’s system.

When Andrea Mora took her grown daughter Karla to get her green card two years ago, she could barely contain her excitement on the drive to the immigration office. "The happiness…" Mora tells me in Spanish. "We were looking so forward to the interview." Finally, she would have her entire family together in the US.

But instead of walking out of the immigration office with a green card, Karla was given a deportation order on the spot. She was a victim of the sort of misinformation and sometimes deliberately misleading advice that experts say is all too common among immigrants looking for permanent resident status.

Mora, who asked that I change her name, came to the US 11 years ago from Costa Rica to be further from her alcoholic husband and closer to her eldest daughter, who is married to a US citizen. After being sponsored by her daughter, Mora now has resident status. She was hoping to sponsor her younger daughter, Karla, who came to the US on a tourist visa. So she borrowed money from friends to get the $5,000 to pay a notario—a term for a notary or immigration consultant—who advised her and helped them fill out the paperwork to apply for Karla's residency.

But notaries don't have law degrees. The one that Mora saw not only filled out the paperwork incorrectly, she also promised an outcome—a green card—that attorneys familiar with the case say would never have been possible.

Those errors led to her interviewer at the immigration office not just turning her application down but telling her to leave the country. Heaping injury upon injury, the notario's high fees meant that Mora is still paying back the friends who lent her money two years ago.

• Apostrophen's 'Nathan Smith notes that his husky loves the winter that has descended on Ottawa.


• blogTO notes Toronto's continuing housing price spikes.


• D-Brief notes that chimpanzees apparently are built to recognize butts.


• Dead Things reports on discoveries of the first land vertebrates.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the weird patterns of KIC 8462852.


• Marginal Revolution considers Westworld's analogies to the Haitian Revolution.


• Steve Munro looks at the latest on the TTC budget.


• Window on Eurasia notes the controversial nature of the new official doctrine of Russia's nationhood.

Lucio Garcia-Mansilla had long heard about the former Club Med property tucked along the Haitian Riviera, 123 acres lined with lush vegetation and a mile-long expanse of white sand.

But it wasn’t until decades later — when Haiti’s investment climate began to welcome international brands — that the Argentine founder of Colombia-based Decameron Hotels & Resorts would get there.

As Garcia-Mansilla waited, the property’s fortunes changed, usually not for the better: Club Med, the French resort chain, was boarded up in 1987 as the dual threat of an AIDS epidemic and the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship finished off what was left of Haiti’s once-thriving tourism industry and ravaged the economy. It became a virtual ghost town where weeds and algae replaced partying guests at the swimming pool, and a small maintenance crew kept watch from a utility room. Club Med tried again, reopening in 1997, only to close a year later as the economy tanked.

In 2006, the doors opened again — this time as the privately owned Club Indigo, a beach resort whose patrons were U.N. peacekeepers, locals and visitors from the Haitian diaspora. But it struggled even as it used just half of Club Med’s 400 rooms.

Then came Haiti’s monstrous earthquake in 2010, and after that, an aggressive push by Haiti’s new government to promote tourism as an important way to rebuild the shattered economy. International brands including Best Western, Marriott and Spain-based Royal Occidental Hotels & Resorts and NH Hotel Group signed on as investment opportunities beckoned.

Race was central to constructing and maintaining slavery in France’s colonies, as it was across the colonial plantation world more generally. Key distinctions between subjects racialised as ‘white’ and ‘black’ shaped economic patterns, legal affairs and social relationships. Enslaved Africans were sought-after merchandise among the French merchants and plantation owners who made fortunes from the sale of what they crudely referred to as ‘ebony wood’. A legal text governing master-slave relations was created called the Black Code (1685). This outlawed relationships between free and enslaved persons, restricted the movements of slaves, and defined the harsh punishments to be used against slaves for any minor infringement or attempt to escape. The original colonial system placed a small white minority in control of a large but enslaved African majority, and was from the start a regime of terror, brutality and exploitation.

Yet the Black Code was not completely successful in its attempt to segregate and subjugate. This is evident in multiple forms of resistance, including poisoning, slave-led uprisings and ‘marronage’ (fugitive slaves). A growing free black and mixed-race population also began to emerge, posing a challenge to the stark, racialised binaries on which the colonial system was based. In response, additional colonial legislation was passed to restrict the activities of free people of colour. A total of 128 categories of skin colour were meticulously catalogued, from black to white, from ‘Sacatra’ to ‘Quarteron’.

The resentment provoked by this apartheid-esque system exploded with the arrival of French revolutionary ideas to the colonies, culminating in the mass revolt of the enslaved Africans in Saint Domingue. This became known as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The French Atlantic world was transformed with the birth of Haiti as the first black-led, post-slave, post-colonial nation state. One of the most radical aspects of Haiti’s independence was the article in the 1805 constitution that abolished distinctions of skin colour, with all Haitians henceforth identified as black. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the constitution’s creator, did this to help unify a nation still deeply marked by the structural racism of its French origins.

The French colonial bureaucracy took the opposite stance after it abolished slavery in the rest of France’s plantation colonies in 1848. In contrast to Haiti’s assertion of blackness, French republicanism embraced a ‘neutral’ identity based on the idea of assimilation to French cultural values and a desire to forget the slave past. This rhetoric of neutrality towards racial difference masked the reality of continued exploitation, including forced labour, indenture, and the use of detention centres. These and other practices effectively created a two-tier system of national identity based upon racial divisions. Numerous individuals who grew up during this period have testified to the profoundly alienating effects of a colonial education that worked to deny their history and erase their identity.

The idea of democracy was even more anachronistic looking before [the late 18th century revolutions, which in any case did not lead to full implementation of democracy and certainly not its normalisation, but did take steps in that direction. Earlier in the eighteenth century, even Rousseau did not think of democracy as the ideal. Even allowing that his advocacy of elective aristocracy is in accord with representative democracy, it does not look as if he expected republicanism to sweep through Europe. His text on a constitution for Poland was for an aristocratic state on the verge of extinction as Prussia, Russia, and Austria arranged its complete partition between 1772 and 1795. It was not a model for European republics, nor was it any more democratic than the existing aristocratic commonwealth with a limited monarchy. Montesquieu, Smith and Hume looked upon republicanism as a form of government appropriate to liberty, but not as necessarily superior to monarchy, and maybe less desirable than monarchy in the circumstances of most modern states.

What was wrong with the republican model for eighteenth century thinkers about liberty, if they themselves have sometimes been taken up as republican, or at least partly republican, thinkers? The answer can be summarised with reference to a city state where Rousseau himself spent time as a secretary to the French ambassador, Venice. Those looking for an example of a modern republic in the eighteenth century were likely to look at Venice. Another possible example was the Dutch Republic, but at least for Montesquieu (who I will take it was not deviating far from any prevailing judgement) it was a more a confederation of city republics which struggled to achieve unity in times of danger. By the eighteenth century the glory of the Golden Age, of Rembrandt and Spinoza, of recent independence after a long war from Spain, of a model of financial and commercial progress, was in the past, and no one thought of the Dutch Republic as a major European power.

Furthermore its relative youth, going back no further than the 1560s, mattered to eighteenth century thinkers who though that successful model states are states that maintain themselves over centuries, preferably with a largely unchanged constitution. That Athens had only a couple of centuries maybe as an independent and democratic republic was important compared with the much longer life of Sparta’s oligarchic republic. That Roman republicanism gave way to a thinly disguised version of monarchy in the Emperor system after five centuries mattered, as did the apparent weakening of republicanism and democratic life after the defeat of Carthage.

Two centuries of republican life in the United Provinces was small compared with about one thousand years of the Venetian Republic, which like the Dutch Republic was past its greatest period of influence, but could be taken as more of a model with an apparently little changed constitution over a long life by the standard of any European state. By the tine of Enlightenment political writing Venice was a museum of a glorious past as a dominant commercial and naval power, with an eastern Mediterranean empire. Montesquieu comments unfavourably on a constitution which he thought allowed the aristocracy to act as government executive, legislator, and judiciary, with the special powers of secret committees to defend the state undermining liberty.

His criticism is more than justified by the greatest Italian witness of the time, Giambattista Vico (whose thought anticipates much in Rousseau and Montesquieu). Vico thought of Venice as the model of aristocratic republic in which the aristocracy regards itself as more than human and the common people as less than human. It precedes the situation in which democracy encourages the spread of an idea of a common humanity, an idea that Vico thought could only maintain itself through democracy giving way to a human monarchy, legislating and judging with regard to the welfare of all.