A Bit More Detail

[FORUM] What are your city's myths of things lost?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:27:52 GMT

The always-thoughtful blog Castrovalva has a very interesting post up ("Invisible Cities") wherein he links to pieces by China Miéville and Michael Moorcock memorializing London as a fantasy city, describing its complexities both as they were and as they changed.

Says Miéville (in part):

A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

Says Moorcock (in part):

[There are] the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.

That this can be said in the same way about Toronto, simply because the city is so young: A hundred years ago, most of the land area of what is now the city of Toronto was farmland, occasionally a village or a small town. The ongoing project Imagining Toronto could make the point, I think, that Toronto's starting to acquire this now, achieving a new resonance in literature and music and popular culture generally, as neighbourhoods and entire districts change, but still, we're so young. Give us a century or two to take root, and then we'll catch up to London and Paris and the other great historical cities.

That's Toronto. What about your cities? Are they as dense with history as London (are you in London?), are they not, is there great change happening and if so what kinds, is there a lot of nostalgia for the old or happiness with the new?

Please, discuss.

[PHOTO] Sorry, no big photo post today

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:00:21 GMT

Maybe tomorrow? Things got busy.

[DM] "A brief look at Iranian demographics"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:04:34 GMT

I've a post up at Demography Matters, examining Iran's recent demographic trends--some rural areas have TFRs as low as many regions in southern Europe--and their implications on the country's economic and political scene. Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] My take on Iran?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:20:26 GMT

This post will be fairly superficial, informed by only three Asia Times articles, but what the hell? The only thing that I can say for certain is that the Islamic Republic is currently stifling the people of Iran and that a new regime woujld be wonderful, but how likely is that?

Pepe Escobar ("Iran's streets are lost, but hopes remain") suggests that the opposition to Ahmadinejad and the religious oligarchy isn't a thing only of the young, but rather includes conservatives and business classes upset by recent economic mismanagement, potentially creating a broad coalition aimed against the Islamic Republic as currently constituted.

Shahir Shahidsaless' "Miscalculations abound in Iran" also argues that the recent election helped created a broad coalition against the established order, but argues that even if the lowest possible number of Ahmadinejad voters that's still a huge number of people opposed to the anti-government coalition. Culture--and political--wars are ungoing.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi's "Crunching the numbers" takes a critical look at the criticisms of the election as fraudulent, arguing that many of the claims made by the anti-Ahmadinejad coalition might be inaccurate, and that their nemesis might have won fairly.

So what will happen? If the military remains under the control of the established order, there won't be a revolution now or for some time to come. Maybe there will be a gradual softening; maybe there will be a sharp shock. Who knows? I'd just hope that it would come quickly, for everyone's sake. A stable, prosperous, and hopefully secularizing Iran would be a much better policeman of the Persian Gulf than Saudi Arabia, I'd like to believe.

[MUSIC] Why I'm going to sell off the Pet Shop Boys' latest album without even burning it

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:07:17 GMT

Yes leaves me unimpressed. The album just sounds like so much sonic wallpaper, unworthy of sustained listenings, unworthy my unfortunate expenditure of money. Very was their last great original album, I think, and the B-sides collection Alternatives is their last good album full stop. They've had good singles since then--"New York City Boy" comes to mind--but they're only a singles group now. Frankly, my money's better spent buying these singles as downloads.

[LINK] "The Newsweekly’s Last Stand"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:03:34 GMT

The Atlantic's Michael Hirschhorn has an article up examining why newsweekly magazines like Time and Newsweek are declining while The Economist, perhaps uniquely, is rising. His answer?

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.

[LINK] Some Friday links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:18:42 GMT

Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton breaks down the minutiae of recent Toronto city politics.

Centauri Dreams examines the possibility of planets evolving in a distant binary star system, something with obvious relevance for the Alpha Centauri A/B pair.

Crooked Timber reports on the shameful news that the Washington Post was promoting its web of contacts to people who wanted in on the Washington scene.

The Dragon's Tales reports on a recent study claiming that climate change on Earth isn't linked to the Sun's position in the galaxy.

Far Outliers introduces the reader to the corruption of the Japanese Buddhist clergy by nobles towards the end of the first millennium CE.

Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros describes the pointless show surrounding Bulgaqria's recent arrest of a controversial Kosovar leader, Hashim Thaci.

Gideon Rachman takes a look at the culture of Britain-bashing in Iran.

The Invisible College celebrates 400 years of Netherlands-American relations.
Lawyers, Guns and Money critiques Spain's former conservative leader Aznar.
Noel Maurer points out that the Honduran coup was botched.

Remember that odd little triangle of unclaimed land between Egypt and Sudan by the Red Sea? Strange Maps introduces us to the fine details.

The Volokh Conspiracy links to an interesting article describing how France became McDonald's biggest market.

Window on Eurasia points out that Russia is increasingly following the American pattern of appointing non-diplomats as ambassadors.

[PHOTO] U of T Admissions and Awards Office, 315 Bloor Street West

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:13:33 GMT

U of T Admissions and Awards Office, 315 Bloor Street West
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The building that is now the University of Toronto's Admissions and Awards Office (315 Bloor Street West was, as described by Plaque 80 in Wayne Cook's list, once a cutting-edge centre for climate research.

The British Army began regular meteorological and magnetic observations on this campus in 1840, stimulating colonial society's fascination with science. After the Province of Canada took over the program in 1853, it built a new observatory, which became the headquarters of the Meteorological Service of Canada. Superintendent G.T. Kingston set up a system of stations, many telegraphically linked, which enabled the Service to issue both storm warnings and daily forecasts by 1876. Opened in 1909, this building was the Service's headquarters until its centenary in 1971.

[MUSIC] Lenny Kravitz, "Black Velveteen"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:16:09 GMT

"Black Velveteen," the final single released from Lenny Kravitz's successful 1998/99 album 5, is the only Kravitz song that I can bother to care about. I tend to agree with the general consensus that 5 is an indifferent and disappointing album, but the sample-heavy electro-rock of "Black Velveteen" gets me.

After I take in the music I next go to the song's lyrics, which turn out to be more disturbing than I'd have thought on a first casual listen. Sexbots, it seems, are in. Really.

Black velveteen
Simple and clean
Oh what a bad machine

Black velveteen
Supple and lean
The 21st century dream

Ready to please
Free from disease
She's waiting on her knees

This sexbot has a "[n]ice piece of kit/Electronic clit/Just sit down for a fit, doesn't mind doing dishes and recommends nightspots and will dance and have sex any time, will be better than any anything living. Misogyny, anyone? I was all but certain that this was a critical commentary on the future of gender relations, and indeed, this 2000 interview with Kravitz confirms that he intended this song as a critical commentary on the future of intimacy in a high-tech and amoral world.

"Black Velveteen" is about technology and we're getting so pulled in by computers and technology and our kids have their face in the computers all day. We have our face in computers all day and the human relationship is being diminished by this so I figured, well ok, we're so into computers, and we're so into technology and now we're also beginning to play God and get into cloning and all kinds of things. So we don't like to have relationships we like to have them but we don't like to keep them and we don't know how to keep them. We give up quickly. Divorce is an easy option. So why not just create your own mate? And synthesize a human being. You get tired of it, you turn it off and put it in the closet, you know, like the vacuum cleaner. (laughs) You pull it out when you want it. Oh you don't want this one, and then you want, you start, it's probably going to happen one day. We're going to get to a really sick point of designing fake people.

Even so, "Black Velveteen" still leaves me feeling a bit awkward, by the detail in the song but mostly because of the knowledge that, yes, we're getting close to this goal. I wonder if the way I feel re: "Black Velveteen" is the way that Swift's contemporaries felt about "A Modest Proposal".

[LINK] Two Michael Jackson links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:38:00 GMT

Two people on my Livejournal friends list have made Jackson-related posts which deserve further propagation.

brunorepublic covers the exciting news that Michael's abusive svengali father, Joe, has launched a new record label that's bound to be successful. "In essence, he motivates the artist with pain until they achieve the desired results. It's not easy to reach the top. Many people simply lack motivation; they aren't able to push themselves there. So, Papa Joe does the pushing for them, and he pushes hard! After just a few years of physical and emotional torment, it's amazing what people will do for a moment of relief. Their desire for success is genuine. When they perform, you can really see it in their eyes."

Elsewhere, lord_whimy examines the extent to which Jackson's transgressiveness related to his talent. "I think transgression has become a cheap artistic tactic, a short cut: it's all impact, no resonance. It's too obvious. It starts out novel, but then quickly becomes tiresome. There's a law of diminishing returns that sets in with transgression: once it gave us Bowie, but now it gives us Insane Clown Posse. Jackson's transgressions did nothing to serve his art; he was great in spite of them, not because of them."

[BRIEF NOTE] Another science-fiction cliché

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:04:02 GMT

A while ago, mindstalk made a post about the cliché of the inevitability of Empires in Space.

The usual line is that with poor communications, a feudal structure is good for long-range government. This never felt right, but I was thinking about it in the past day. Really... what? Europe's feudal realms were in rather smaller areas than the Roman Republic at its pre-Imperial height. Roman used pro-consuls and pro-praetors, so there was local autocracy, but appointed by the Senate, not hereditary. And why couldn't a democratic/republican federation handle the needed decentralization?

I remember an essay jointly authored by Niven and Pournelle, part of their explanation of the back story of their 1974 novel The Mote in God's Eye, in which they had an Empire of Man to play the role of an ecumenical state.

Another Niven story, like the previous novel set in Pournelle's CoDominium story-telling universe, reminded me of another cliché. This story features a pilot who was born on a world populated by Inuit, a glaciated world settled by Inuit coming from across Earth's Arctic regions, there to maintain their traditional lifestyles ...

Pardon?

When I take a look around my study, looking at novels and RPG supplements and the Internet, I find that white people--frequently Asians as well--inhabit all kinds of worlds, from glacier worlds doomed to forever present only half of their surface to a dim red dwarf star to Earth-like garden worlds orbiting beautiful bright stars just like the Sun to stranger asteroid warrens or habitats in close orbit of degenerate white dwarf stars, all worlds which contain at least a certain number of perils and drawbacks not found on Earth. Are we to believe that colonists drawn from the stocks of what we in Canada call the First Nations are going to insist on colonizing worlds exactly like that of their ancestral Earth homeland? Maybe Inuit colonists might love a pleasantly warm world to live on, one with warm winter breeze and fertile land and--if you really insist--plenty of marine pseudo-mammals to hunt.

This all fits into a larger pattern of seeing First Nations people are archetypes, as being incapable of being really modern or post-modern or whatever. The best-known example of this I can think of is Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager, a character in touch with his native roots a spiritual man from a peaceful world prone to using dream quests to find solutions to problems. Really.

Why can't there be other First Nations stereotypes in science fiction? Imagine cut-throat Yupik capitalists, or Quechua-speaking technologists, or Haida bioengineers, or Aborigine literary critics, or the Mapuche Star Empire. But no, the First Nations are defined substantially by the knowledge that they and their peoples can't truly be modern, are incapable of developing societies characterized by cities and Weberian bureaucratic structures and research-and-development facilities and mass media. They should be happy, some writers seem to presume, being the spiritual foils to the oh-so-tired civilization built on their homelands.

[PHOTO] To keep the pigeons away at Bathurst

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:56:03 GMT

To keep the pigeons away at Bathurst
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The above-ground segment of the Bathurst TTC station is pleasantly bright, a large construction of glass and metal that, while modernistic, at least could help sufferers of SAD. This openness also means that pigeons can easily fly in, and out, of the station. (I've seen a couple at track level.) How can you keep them from roosting? Spiked signs help.

[DM] "On rural Canada's evolution"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:46:51 GMT

Over at Demography Matters, I've a post up examining the specifics of the population dynamics of rural populations in Canada and likely futures. Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] Anniversaries

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:41:38 GMT

Today is Canada Day, the national holiday that celebrates the beginnings of Canada's development as an independent nation-state. It's unfortunate that Toronto's gala has been canceled on account of the ongoing city workers strike, but still, the afternoon has had pretty decent weather and the popular mood seems to be good.

Today is also Shakespeare's first birthday.

Shakespeare posing
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

It's a good day.

[DM] Two Foreign Policy Links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:02:28 GMT

Over at Demography Matters, I've a post up referring readers to two articles at Foreign Policy regarding gender roles and the demographic transition. Go, read.

[LINK] "Murdering journalists"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:33:49 GMT

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, highlights an article by Ralph Peters in which he suggests that killing journalists might well be okay in the nearish future.

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies.

Long-time readers of this blog might remember my 2003 fisking of a foolish article that Peters wrote attacking Europe as decadent, et cetera, because the continent didn't embrace the Iraq war.. More recent readers might remember the map of a Middle East with redrawn borders that helped trigger another wave of anti-Americanism across the region. Great guy, don't you agree?

[BRIEF NOTE] Forty years since Stonewall

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:17:58 GMT

Slap Upside the Head commemorates the fact that Sunday was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City that helped galvanize the American, thus international, gay movement. There had been increasing militancy following the 1950 foundation of the Mattachine Society and the rise of 1960s student radicalism, but the protest of patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village against police harassment spectacularly accelerated this change.

Raymond Castro was a regular at The Stonewall Inn in 1969, finding it a haven from a world where gay men and women could be arrested for kissing or holding hands in public. Inside the bar, where plywood covered the windows, warning lights served as a signal for couples to stop dancing.

When police raided the bar in the past for selling liquor without a license, patrons normally submitted to arrest or dispersed quietly. But on June 28, Castro recalled, people fought back.

As officers tried to throw him in a police wagon, Castro used the vehicle as a spring to push back, knocking them to the ground.

"They literally carried me into the ... wagon and threw me in there," recalled Castro, now 67. "It must've been the motivation of the crowd that inspired me to resist. Or maybe at that point enough was enough."

The several days of disturbances that followed the uprising at the bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village became one of the defining moments of the gay rights movement. Thousands of people are converging on the city for gay pride events to mark the riots' 40th anniversary, while a bill is pending in the Legislature to make New York the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Castro said the demonstrations became a catalyst for years of progress allowing gays and lesbians to live more open lives — although he didn't see it at the time.

"I never thought 40 years ago that it would turn out to be much of anything," he said in a phone interview. "I had no clue of history being made."

[LINK] "Yale Makes First Quantum Processor?"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:52:14 GMT

Will Baird's The Dragon's Tales reports that a research team at Yale claims to have made the first solid-state quantum computer processor.

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.

"Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons," said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics & Physics at Yale. "But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor."

Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics & Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits ("quantum bits"). While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states. These states are akin to the "1" and "0" or "on" and "off" states of regular bits employed by conventional computers. Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a "superposition" of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

One reason that I read Will Baird's very informative blog is because it lets its readers know about amazing innovations and discoveries like the above. Wow.

[LINK] "Tim Hortons makes move back to Canada"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:41:08 GMT

This news will certainly pleased a very large number of Canadians.

Tim Hortons Inc. (THI-T28.62-0.13-0.45%) is returning to the land of hockey, where seemingly every street corner houses, well, a Tim Hortons.

Tims, the coffee and doughnuts icon, is currently incorporated in the United States, but it's returning to its Canadian roots to take advantage of falling corporate tax rates.

Co-founded in Hamilton in 1964 by hockey legend Tim Horton, the company announced yesterday that it is proposing to reorganize itself as a Canadian public company.

“Will other corporations do this? Maybe, maybe not,” Brian Yarbrough, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis, said in an interview.

Apart from the tax issue, there are compelling administrative reasons for Tims to restructure, given that the company derives more than 90 per cent of its revenue from its Canadian operations, Mr. Yarbrough said.

“However, the tax rate is the biggest thing they are going to see the most savings from.”

After the immediate costs of the reorganization are absorbed, Tim Hortons' tax rate could initially be two or three percentage points lower than its current tax rate of 33 per cent in the U.S., he said. “And as tax rates continue to come down in Canada, obviously … that will benefit them even more.”

Up to this point, Tim Horton's was run as a subsidiary of American-owned Wendy's. No more.

[LINK] Maurer on Honduras

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:39:38 GMT

In two follow-up posts, Noel Maurer considers (1, 2) continues to consider the question of the coup's legality, and seems to have come to the conclusion that it was legal.

[T]he Supreme Court has the power to remove officials from office when it determines that they have broken the law. President Zelaya pretty clearly broke the law when he refused to obey an order from the Supreme Court to call off the referendum, and as I pointed out earlier, the Honduran constitution clearly (if stupidly) bans any consultatory referenda touching on presidential term limits.

So my new version is: Zelaya broke the law, the Supreme Court called him on it, and the military took the initiative in enforcing the Court's order. (Maybe too much initiative.) That interpretation will depend on how closely the armed forces and the Supreme Court cooperated in the ouster. (The more it looks like the Court got the ball rolling, the more legal the coup will seem.) Given the legal fog, the Obama Administration seems to be taking a pitch-perfect tone here.

[PHOTO] Rainbow Flags at the Bay

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:35:26 GMT

Rainbow Flags at the Bay
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Bloor Street East entrance to The Bay's flagship store had the flags, too. Is there any more visible sign of Pride's mainstreaming?

[LINK] "Waiting for the penny to drop"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:12:51 GMT

Over at Spacing Toronto, John Loring takes a look at the short- and long-term consequences of the federal government's refusal to help fund the TTC's purchase of new streetcars.

With the death of "the ask," the Conservative world-view emerged triumphant: municipal transit expenditure is appropriately funded by local taxpayers under the patriarchal guidance of the province. If Ottawa wants to get involved, it can and will, but those are strictly political calls. As for the City of Toronto’s special relationship with the federal government (a fantasy encouraged by Paul Martin), well, don’t even go there.

There was also an element of three-card monte in council’s hasty attempt to make the best of John Baird’s proffered olive branch. The TTC shuffled back some of its capital spending projects to make room for the streetcar buy, while city officials scoured the 2009 capital budget for quick-turnover projects that might pass muster with guardians of the Harper government’s fiscal stimulus package. The fairly explicit message from the mayor and city bureaucrats on Friday was that it’s all going to be a wash.

[. . .]

Think about this story from Baird’s perspective: the City of Toronto, invoking its own exceptionalism, decides to flout federal funding guidelines, is then forced to back down, but gets a second chance. Outside Toronto, the Tories will receive no love for that magnanimous gesture. And inside Toronto, well, they still look and act like a party that has no traction with 416 voters.

Does anyone in the Harper inner sanctum think that giving Miller $400 million in infrastructure funding will buy them a riding or two in the next election? Of course not.

Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] An unconstitutional democratic coup on Honduras?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:01:11 GMT

The background to the ongoing Honduran coup sounds surprisingly well-managed.

The Honduran Congress late Sunday officially voted Mr. Zelaya out of office, replacing him with the president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, who said Monday that he would resist pressure from other nations demanding the reinstatement of the ousted president, news agencies reported.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the last senior member of the administration to visit Honduras, just three weeks ago, said that the United States was working toward “full restoration of democratic order in Honduras.”

She said that the situation in Honduras “has evolved into a coup.” But when pressed by a reporter, she refused to say explicitly that the United States was demanding that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power, although senior administration officials pointed out that the United States had signed on to an Organization of American States statement on Sunday that included such a demand.

[. . . ]

Mr. Zelaya, 56, a rancher who often appears in cowboy boots and a western hat, has the support of labor unions and the poor. But he is a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest. His term was to end in January.

The Honduran military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the country’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”

Mr. Zelaya’s ouster capped a showdown with other branches of government over his efforts to lift presidential term limits in a referendum that was to have taken place Sunday. Critics said the vote was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.

Early this month, the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations. The prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal issued orders for the referendum ballots to be confiscated, but on Thursday, Mr. Zelaya led a group of protesters to an air force base and seized the ballots.

Well-managed at first glance, though. As Noel Maurer notes, there doesn't seem to be any constitutional basis for what happened.

Article 205, Section 12: [Congress has the power to] accept the constitutional oath of office of the elected President and Vice-president of the republic, and other appointees they select; grant them permissions and accept or reject thier resignations and fill vacancies in the case of the complete absence of one of them;

Article 205, Section 20: [Congress has the power to] approve or disapprove the admistrative conduct of the executive branch;

Article 242: In the case of a temporary absence of the the President of the Republic, the Vice-president will carry out the functions of the President. Should the Presidency be permanently vacant, the Vice-president will exercise the powers of the executive branch for the remainder of the constitutional term. Should the Vice-presidency also be vacant, the powers of the executive branch will be exercised by the president of the National Congress.

Thus, the need to declare that President Zelaya had “resigned” before giving the executive powers over to Roberto Micheletti. (The office of Vice-president is currently vacant, so having the power pass to Micheletti is kosher ... it's the whole removing of Zelaya what appears to be illegal.) Note that while Micheletti says that everything is constitutional, this article from the Honduran press cites no clauses or precedents.

Did I mention that Venezuela mobilized its military? Not that it can do anything, but still ...

This will be interesting to watch.

[LINK] "How gay is your neighbourhood?"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:18:35 GMT

In the Sunday Star, Isabel Teotonio and Patrick Cain wrote about the ways in which Toronto's GLBT community was diffusing beyond the urban core, as judged by the number of same-sex marriages.

Date, sex and partial postal code data for same-sex couples married in Toronto was released to the Star recently under access-to-information laws. The information goes back to June 2003, when same-sex marriage was legalized.

The data, current to last month, covers 11,128 individuals; a little fewer than half were American and a handful were British.

The postal code data sheds light on different neighbourhood patterns of Toronto's own married lesbians and gay men.

Gay couples are most common in the Gay Village around Church and Wellesley Sts. and in east downtown, with clusters in Rosedale and the University of Toronto area.

Lesbians are also prominent downtown, with clusters in east-end neighbourhoods such as Riverdale, South Riverdale, Leslieville, the Beach and east Danforth. Rates are also high in the U of T area, Cabbagetown and Roncesvalles.

Generally, socioeconomic factors explain why lesbian and gay enclaves form in different areas, says sociologist Adam Green, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Because women typically earn less, lesbian enclaves appear in less wealthy areas and farther from main streets. Gay men, who are bigger earners, are traditionally more visible downtown, says Green.

Even when it comes to socializing, lesbians are less visible, he says, pointing out that gay men tend to mingle at bars and bathhouses, whereas women often gather at private parties and events.

While two women living together are likely to have lower incomes than a pair of men, professor David Rayside warns economics may not entirely explain the clustering.

The Toronto Star's Map of the Week blog has more statistics, chronicling the number of marriages over time.

[BRIEF NOTE] Two Rainbow Flags

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:14:09 GMT

When I visited the Inti Raymi Festival last weekend in Christie Pits park, I was very surprised to see the Rainbow flag proudly displayed.

The Andean Rainbow Flag
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

It turns out that the Incan flag and the gay pride flag actually look quite a lot alike.

The Gay Pride Rainbow Flag
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Go figure.