[FORUM] How concerned are you with the local weather?

My country of Canada is synonymous with snow, yet scenes like the one depicted below were passingly rare.

The below picture shows how much snow Toronto got for Christmas; that encrustment of snow by the foot of a light post at Dupont and Bartlett was actually it.

Meanwhile, the picture below was taken in February.

My previous [FORUM] question on the seasons was posted in a winter that was doubly exceptional, in North America for its warmth and in Europe for its coldness. Winter ended almost two weeks ago, and now we face the prospect of a spring coming after a snowless winter (still a decent amount of precipitation, mind) and unknown prospects this summer (will it be warmer still?).

How freaked out do you feel about this? Why? Do you think it’s the harbinger of a shift? Do you think it’s isolated? What has happened in your area of the world, weather-wise, this previous season?

Discuss.

[CAT] Five Shakespeare pics

I’ve been sitting on these pictures of Shakespeare for some time. None except the first–I think–are of any value artistically. The poses they record are all that matter, now.

Shakespeare, yawning.

Shakespeare, curious.

Cat belly

Shakespeare, looking.

Any advice as to how this last picture might possibly be salvaged? I hate the colour but love the pose.

[PHOTO] Three Toronto photos

Sedan on College at the Spadina lights, paused in front of the 7/11, December 2011.

Looking west at the southwest corner of College and Dovercourt, December 2011.

Nativity illuminated, on Dovercourt between College and Dewson. This area is on the western fringe of Little Italy and is currently in a heavily Portuguese-Canadian area. Displays of this kind aren’t uncommon outside of the holidays.

At Wilson TTC station, seconds before the arrival of the 29 Dufferin southbound. The last time I was here was in 2006. Time passes. (January 2012.)

[PHOTO] Three Toronto photos

Sedan on College at the Spadina lights, paused in front of the 7/11, December 2011.

Looking west at the southwest corner of College and Dovercourt, December 2011.

Nativity illuminated, on Dovercourt between College and Dewson. This area is on the western fringe of Little Italy and is currently in a heavily Portuguese-Canadian area. Displays of this kind aren’t uncommon outside of the holidays.

At Wilson TTC station, seconds before the arrival of the 29 Dufferin southbound. The last time I was here was in 2006. Time passes. (January 2012.)

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On unrecognized epidemics of sexual abuse of the gender non-conforming

On Monday, I linked to Morocco-born Abdellah Taïa‘s biographical essay in the New York Times describing how he, an “effeminate little boy” was also a “boy to be sacrificed”, how his non-conformity with the gender norms of his conservative Moroccan origins left him open to abuse by everyone. Not a woman to be sequestered, certainly not a proper man, young Taïa’s effeminacy marked him as an acceptable sexual object. It all culminated for him one night in a scene out of Biblical Sodom, when one night Taïa’s home was surrounded by men clamouring to have sex with him.

It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: “Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to have sex with you.”

They kept yelling for a long time. My nickname. Their desire. Their crime. They said everything that went unsaid in the too-silent, too-respectful world where I lived. But I was far, then, from any such analysis, from understanding that the problem wasn’t me. I was simply afraid. Very afraid.

I’m willing to bet that this sort of blatant, almost socially acceptable if not socially expected, sexual abuse of gay children was exotic to most of Taïa’s readers, at least in North America and Europe. I fear that the lurid explicitness of Taïa’s description blinded many of these readers–including me–to the fact that very similar things go on in their countries.

The general consensus is that, while, non-heterosexual men and women are no more likely to molest children than their heterosexual counterparts, non-heterosexual children suffer substantially higher rates of harassment and assault–including sexual assault–than their heterosexual peers. The problem is very serious.

Martin and Hetrick (1988) in their study of gay and lesbian teens reported that the third most frequently reported problem for gay teens was violence. Over 40% of their sample had suffered violence because of their sexual orientation, and 49% of the violence occurred within the family. Others have obtained similar findings (Harry, 1989). They also reported that 22% of gay teens in their sample had been sexually abused. Consistent with sexual abuse of female children, most were abused or raped by male relatives. Most blamed themselves or were blamed by others because of their sexual orientation.

In a 2005 post at the Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway notes the existence of two categories of sexual molesters of children, fixated and regressed. Fixated molesters haven’t progressed beyond beyond childhood, basically. Regressed molesters?

[T]he regressed molester is very different. His attraction to children is usually more temporary. Unlike the fixated molester, the regressed molester’s primary sexual attraction is toward other adults. But stressful conditions that go along with adult responsibly or difficulties in his adult relationships may overwhelm him, causing his sexual focus to “regress” towards children. This regression sometimes serves as a substitute for adult relationship, and his attraction to children may vary according to the varying stresses he encounters in his adult life demands.

In some cases, he may temporarily relate to the child as a peer, much as a fixated offender relates to children. But more often, he is simply lashing out against the stresses in his life, and the child becomes a convenient target. The offender may find a sense of power in his sexual relationship with a child that he doesn’t get with an adult. When that happens this relationship with the child is often violent. But regardless of the nature of the relationship, the gender of the child is often irrelevant — it’s the easy access and vulnerability that makes the child a target.

Regressed offenders are typically heterosexual in their adult relationships. Unlike our three percent sample, they date women and marry them. They often are parents, stepparents or extended family members of their victims. By all appearances — and by their own self-identification — they are straight.

Regressed molesters describe their attraction to young boys as lying in their non-masculine physical appearance: “the young boys did not have any body hair and that their bodies were soft and smooth.”

I’m willing to bet that non-gender-conforming behaviour is also a risk factor for children–in fact, one recent study indicates just this.

Some of the childhood abuse victims in the study were gay, but most of them were straight—nearly 60 percent of them identified as heterosexual, and another 25 percent of them identified as “mostly” hetero, compared to about 10 percent who identified as gay or lesbian. (Unfortunately, the study didn’t also ask them if they identified as transgender).

Previous studies on gender identity and abuse focused squarely on “small samples of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults recruited through gay and lesbian community venues.” They hadn’t looked into how homophobia affects kids who aren’t gay, but are perceived—or feared—to be so. Homophobia is so pervasive that even the perception that a kid might be gay can inspire homophobic parents to “become more physically or psychologically abusive in an attempt to discourage their child’s gender nonconformity or same-sex orientation,”the study posits. Outside influence hurts, too. Some parents may abuse their children because they “think others will assume their child will be gay or lesbian.”

Is Abdellah Taïa’s experience of attempted sexual abuse on the grounds of his childhood gender non-conformity really so foreign? Or does it represent a phenomenon that only now, as the bullying and abuse of non-conforming children is confronted really for the first time, people are starting to pick up on everywhere? I say that having this phenomenon hidden from any kind of public discussion is just another way of tacitly accepting it.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On unrecognized epidemics of sexual abuse of the gender non-conforming

On Monday, I linked to Morocco-born Abdellah Taïa‘s biographical essay in the New York Times describing how he, an “effeminate little boy” was also a “boy to be sacrificed”, how his non-conformity with the gender norms of his conservative Moroccan origins left him open to abuse by everyone. Not a woman to be sequestered, certainly not a proper man, young Taïa’s effeminacy marked him as an acceptable sexual object. It all culminated for him one night in a scene out of Biblical Sodom, when one night Taïa’s home was surrounded by men clamouring to have sex with him.

It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: “Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to have sex with you.”

They kept yelling for a long time. My nickname. Their desire. Their crime. They said everything that went unsaid in the too-silent, too-respectful world where I lived. But I was far, then, from any such analysis, from understanding that the problem wasn’t me. I was simply afraid. Very afraid.

I’m willing to bet that this sort of blatant, almost socially acceptable if not socially expected, sexual abuse of gay children was exotic to most of Taïa’s readers, at least in North America and Europe. I fear that the lurid explicitness of Taïa’s description blinded many of these readers–including me–to the fact that very similar things go on in their countries.

The general consensus is that, while, non-heterosexual men and women are no more likely to molest children than their heterosexual counterparts, non-heterosexual children suffer substantially higher rates of harassment and assault–including sexual assault–than their heterosexual peers. The problem is very serious.

Martin and Hetrick (1988) in their study of gay and lesbian teens reported that the third most frequently reported problem for gay teens was violence. Over 40% of their sample had suffered violence because of their sexual orientation, and 49% of the violence occurred within the family. Others have obtained similar findings (Harry, 1989). They also reported that 22% of gay teens in their sample had been sexually abused. Consistent with sexual abuse of female children, most were abused or raped by male relatives. Most blamed themselves or were blamed by others because of their sexual orientation.

In a 2005 post at the Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway notes the existence of two categories of sexual molesters of children, fixated and regressed. Fixated molesters haven’t progressed beyond beyond childhood, basically. Regressed molesters?

[T]he regressed molester is very different. His attraction to children is usually more temporary. Unlike the fixated molester, the regressed molester’s primary sexual attraction is toward other adults. But stressful conditions that go along with adult responsibly or difficulties in his adult relationships may overwhelm him, causing his sexual focus to “regress” towards children. This regression sometimes serves as a substitute for adult relationship, and his attraction to children may vary according to the varying stresses he encounters in his adult life demands.

In some cases, he may temporarily relate to the child as a peer, much as a fixated offender relates to children. But more often, he is simply lashing out against the stresses in his life, and the child becomes a convenient target. The offender may find a sense of power in his sexual relationship with a child that he doesn’t get with an adult. When that happens this relationship with the child is often violent. But regardless of the nature of the relationship, the gender of the child is often irrelevant — it’s the easy access and vulnerability that makes the child a target.

Regressed offenders are typically heterosexual in their adult relationships. Unlike our three percent sample, they date women and marry them. They often are parents, stepparents or extended family members of their victims. By all appearances — and by their own self-identification — they are straight.

Regressed molesters describe their attraction to young boys as lying in their non-masculine physical appearance: “the young boys did not have any body hair and that their bodies were soft and smooth.”

I’m willing to bet that non-gender-conforming behaviour is also a risk factor for children–in fact, one recent study indicates just this.

Some of the childhood abuse victims in the study were gay, but most of them were straight—nearly 60 percent of them identified as heterosexual, and another 25 percent of them identified as “mostly” hetero, compared to about 10 percent who identified as gay or lesbian. (Unfortunately, the study didn’t also ask them if they identified as transgender).

Previous studies on gender identity and abuse focused squarely on “small samples of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults recruited through gay and lesbian community venues.” They hadn’t looked into how homophobia affects kids who aren’t gay, but are perceived—or feared—to be so. Homophobia is so pervasive that even the perception that a kid might be gay can inspire homophobic parents to “become more physically or psychologically abusive in an attempt to discourage their child’s gender nonconformity or same-sex orientation,”the study posits. Outside influence hurts, too. Some parents may abuse their children because they “think others will assume their child will be gay or lesbian.”

Is Abdellah Taïa’s experience of attempted sexual abuse on the grounds of his childhood gender non-conformity really so foreign? Or does it represent a phenomenon that only now, as the bullying and abuse of non-conforming children is confronted really for the first time, people are starting to pick up on everywhere? I say that having this phenomenon hidden from any kind of public discussion is just another way of tacitly accepting it.

[LINK] “Is Brazil big enough for Facebook and Orkut?”

Facebook has surpassed Orkut in Brazil, just as Facebook has surpassed other social networking sites in other countries. Local alternatives have stopped, are stopping, or will stop being viable alternatives to the global juggernaut.

(On a related note, apparently Tumblr’s doing well in Brazil.)

Not long ago we were making the prediction that Facebook would become the dominant social force in Brazil. Over time Brazilians seem to have started to identify themselves with Facebook and looked at it as the best place to start their online lives over from scratch, helping lead to its widespread adoption.

At the beginning of 2012, numbers revealed that Facebook attracted 36.1 million visitors, that is an increase of 192% on the year, while Orkut received 34.4 million visitors during the same month.

“Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market” comScore.

When Orkut came along in 2004, Internet use was stagnant in Brazil and the social network gave the people their first taste of social media, with a simple interface and Portuguese language option making it easier to use in comparison with MySpace – soon Orkut became a part of the social culture. But it seems that it wasn’t enough for its users… In terms of innovation, Orkut failed, while Facebook is offering new applications, games and the ability to connect with people beyond Brazil.

The shift of power between Facebook and Orkut is significant especially because Google was confident about its dominance in Brazil. The battle for dominance has become even more interesting now Google is attempting to overtake Facebook in the form of Google+ (4.3 million members).

[. . .]

At the same time, Tumblr is used by 49 million Brazilians, but Tumblr’s main audience is in the US with 249 million visitors, followed by Brazil and UK (34 million). The founder and CEO David Karp announced that this service is now serving 120 million people and 15 billion page views every month. According to thenextweb.com, the average Tumblr blog is re-blogged nine times, helping to distribute user content to wider audiences mainly via RSS, Twitter, Facebook.

Experts are convinced that while the North American market is almost saturated, markets like Brazil or India could help Facebook hit 1 billion users by August.

[URBAN NOTE] “Prehistoric Toronto: Glacial Lake Iroquois”

Torontoist’s Daniel Sellers has a neat post examining the history of Glacial Lake Iroquois, Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor that–so long as the ice dam held–had a shoreline well to the north of Toronto’s existing waterfront.

For 100 years, Casa Loma has sat just a short, steep ridge away from the intersection of Spadina and Davenport roads, and gazed out over downtown Toronto. But, at one time, the view looking south from what is now the castle grounds would have been all water as far as the eye could see; in the very late Pleistocene epoch, Davenport was the beach above vast Lake Iroquois.

“I think a lot of people go up and down that ridge every day and don’t even give much thought to it,” says Rob MacDonald of heritage conservation consultants Archaeological Services Inc. “But that was [a] shoreline 12,500 years ago.”

Some 8,000 years before that, a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada, and had managed to extend as far as present-day Ohio at the tail end of its slow creep south. Then it began to melt and retreat, and, eventually, huge basins in the Great Lakes region, formed by previous glaciers and further gouged out under the movement of the Laurentide, would fill with meltwater.

An early version of Lake Erie appeared. Further west, the lakes we now call Michigan and Huron made up the bulk of glacial Lake Algonquin. Lake Iroquois formed in the basin of today’s Lake Ontario; it was bounded by ice to the northeast and drained through New York state’s Mohawk River.

The glacier continued to recede.

By about 12,000 years ago, the ice over the St. Lawrence River had disappeared. Lake Iroquois, finding this new, lower outlet, drained quickly and dramatically to as much as 85 metres below present-day water levels; an ancient shoreline now found at the bottom of Lake Ontario is evidence of this.

This smaller lake would not last long, either. After millennia beneath a heavy glacier more than a kilometre thick, Toronto was going through a process called isostatic rebound.

[LINK] “Jane Jacobs & the Republican Radicals”

Jason Epstein at The New York Review of Books‘s blog comments on the political philosophy of New York-born and long-time Toronto resident Jane Jacobs. Epstein, it seems, would call her a conservative in the sense that Jacobs was a pragmatist uninterested in sweeping ideologies. This conservatism, he argues, is quite distinct from the ideologies of neoconservatives.

A team of filmmakers planning a documentary on Jane Jacobs asked me recently about the original reviews of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was Jane’s lifelong editor and close friend and had just written an introduction for the 50th anniversary edition of her famous critique of city planners such as Robert Moses and their destruction of vital city neighborhoods. I told the filmmakers, whose film was planned for the anniversary, that writers like Jane are usually attacked by beneficiaries of entrenched institutions and that she was no exception. But I also said that I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response to Jane’s book from New York’s so-called Upper West Side intellectuals, most of whom had recently transferred their zeal from the Marxist left to the capitalist right; many had previously supported and hoped to strengthen the moderate social welfare state but were now fiercely opposed to it.

It was one of these New York intellectual friends, a proto neocon, who first suggested that I read Jane’s article in Fortune defending vital city neighborhoods from rapacious planners, the seedling that became Death and Life. Though I had never been a socialist and have my doubts about capitalism as a necessary evil I shared my friend’s enthusiasm for Jane’s critique. But I was puzzled when he went further by denouncing Washington’s plan at the time to fluoridate the water supply as an intrusion on one’s right to let one’s teeth rot. I wondered whether he was joking—surely he would not go so far in his flight from the left as to oppose protective chemicals in the drinking water, or would he?

[. . .]

Jane of course would have found such extremism absurd. One of her biographers accurately called her a genius of common sense. She belonged to no faction or party. Her mind was so finely made as T.S. Eliot said of Henry James, that no idea could violate it and none did. She was a skeptical empiricist from head to foot. She would have been disgusted by today’s right-wing Jacobinism which calls itself conservative.

My new right-wing friends in those early days danced the classic revolutionary two step. As they defended personal autonomy from an intrusive state they also pursued institutional power for themselves: funding from the CIA and right wing foundations, jobs from the Luce magazines, conservative think tanks, crackpot millionaires, invitations to Nixon’s White House: the well traveled revolutionary route from catacombs to Vatican, from barricades to Tuilleries and Kremlin. As for Jane, her only power base except for a brief tour at Luce’s Architectural Forum was her own writing.

Go, read and comment.

[URBAN NOTE] On Mayor Rob Ford’s latest (abortive) conflict of interest

The National Post‘s Natalie Alcoba notes that Rob Ford has backed down somewhat. He still wants to run a slate of councillors, it seems, but he’s not going to use his official phone number for it.

Mr. Ford issued a statement Tuesday evening in response to a complaint by Councillor Josh Matlow, who said using city resources for campaign purposes breaks the code of conduct.

“As many of you know, one of my greatest passions is promoting and encouraging people to become involved with local government,” the Mayor said in the statement, which made no more mention of a slate. “It was my intent to provide my direct personal line.”

Councillor Matlow, who had earlier in the day denounced turning the Mayor’s office a “perpetual campaign hotline,” said he received a call from Mr. Ford.

“He unreservedly apologized to me. I found him to be very gracious and I consider the matter closed,” said Mr. Matlow (St. Paul’s). “It’s important that while there may be differences of opinion, we need to find common cause and work for Toronto.”

The comments in question were made during the weekly Newstalk 1010 radio show the Mayor hosts with Councillor Doug Ford on Sunday. “I’m only one person,” Mr. Ford lamented, before reciting his City Hall phone number for listeners who might want to run for office. “We need to run a slate next time. We have to get rid of the other 24 councillors,” he said, referring to the group that quashed his subway plans in favour of light rail transit.

He talked about meeting “great candidates” over the past couple of weeks, including Ken Chan, who came second to Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam in Toronto Centre-Rosedale, and Jon Burnside, who lost to Councillor John Parker in Don Valley West.

The Mayor’s public appeal for interested candidates came as no surprise to some councillors, who say they have already been warned about a Ford nation campaign to unseat them in 2014. Indeed, while councillors on both sides of the spectrum talk about consensus and moving on from the transit vote, the Mayor talks about a “with us or against us” approach.

Open File’s John Michael McGrath wondered before news of the apology what should be done with Rob Ford. He just doesn’t seem to understand the basic concept behind “conflict of interest.”

The key issue is that Ford told listeners that interested candidates could call his city-paid office line.

(Using city resources for an election campaign is a breach of the city’s Code of Conduct for councillors, and according to the council expense policy is illegal under the Municipal Elections Act.)

[. . . U]nlike the last time an Integrity Commissioner matter came to council, it’s not clear that Ford would risk any punishment more than needing to apologize to council over the breach of the code, and it’s doubly uncertain that anyone is interested in bringing another allegation against the mayor under the Municipal Elections Act. So while this kind of thing is worth noting in passing, it does raise the question of whether the Integrity Commissioner needs to be strengthened somehow to impose something closer to a real punishment on councillors when they serially violate the Code of Conduct.

These multiple issues suggest to me that either Ford doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept the ideas behind the Code of Conduct.