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Trees on streets and boulevards reduce crime. Do we know the how or why of this particular correlation, nope. But we do know that trees on private lots also tend to reduce criminal activity, with the proviso that they are over 42 feet high. The studies linked are quite fascinating and most definitely worth a read.
But recent research suggests the opposite: trees don’t give burglars and highwaymen a place to hide, rather they may reduce crime in a neighbourhood.
One piece of research from 2001 focused on a public housing project in Chicago, where some buildings had trees out front, others did not. The research found that buildings with fewer trees or barren yards had more crime reports, while buildings with trees had fewer crimes. Because residents of the project were randomly assigned to various apartments, the differences in crime couldn’t be attributed to factors like income.
A more recently published article in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning focused on Cincinnati. The city’s trees were being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. Researchers took advantage of the spread of the beetle to study the relationship between trees and crime. They found that when a tree is killed and removed, crime in the area tends to go up.
I’ll take Pluto every time thanks. :)
Listening the radio, I heard this interview and appreciated the revisiting of colourful part of Canadian political history. Thankfully the Current on CBC radio one now fully transcribes their episodes, so I can share the highlights of the interview here.
“AMT: Remind us, what did the Liberal sponsorship scandal involve?
DANIEL LEBLANC: Well, it was kind of—officially, it was national unity program to increase the visibility of Canadian symbols, Canadian signs in Quebec. And let’s remember, this is after the 1995 referendum which was a squeaker, the “no” side won by about 50,000 votes. And Jean Chrétien, the prime minister of the day wanted to make Canada relevant to Quebecers. It was a very simple idea to put up flags and you know there was hot air balloons in the form, in the shape of maple leaf for example, and a bunch of cultural events and sporting events were sponsored by this program in exchange for putting up Canada banners at their event sites. But ultimately, it became embroiled in scandal. There was the advertising firms that were the intermediaries between the government and the events, some of them kickbacked money to the Liberal Party. There were some fraud and some of the events as well were quite close to the Liberal Party of the day. So it became known as a slush fund scandal and you know it kind of became bigger and bigger as time wore on. And you know it led ultimately to the Gomery inquiry in 2004, 2005, which created massive problems for the Liberal Party, especially in Quebec where they lost most of their seats after, during the 2004 election. So it’s kind of a scandal that was about you know more than a decade ago, but it did have a huge impact on Canadian politics of the day.
[…]
CHANTAL HÉBERT: Canadians or Quebecers, I think, would take from that sentence the word past rather than the wrestling of chains because so much happened to the Liberal Party over the post-sponsorship decade that Justin Trudeau’s party—in Quebec in particular—certainly bears little resemblance to the party that Jean Chrétien or even Paul Martin led in so many ways. You know when I think about—in hindsight, because now that all these years have gone by—the sponsorship scandal probably was over time a good thing for the Liberal Party. It forced it to renew itself at the time when it desperately needed to do so. Think of it like a brush fire, a really bad one and what grows after the fire is extinguished. That’s literally what just happened to the Liberal party in Quebec and possibly Justin Trudeau’s victory in Quebec—he did win the majority of the seats—would not have happened if the Liberal Party had just gone on and on, on the path that it was set when Jean Chrétien retired.
AMT: Well, tell me a little bit more about that, Chantal. What happened to the Liberal Party insiders in Quebec who then were caught up in this scandal? How did they—what happened after the brush fire?
CHANTAL HÉBERT: Okay. So let’s first go back to that time when Jean Chrétien leaves and Paul Martin comes. The sponsorship has not yet hit the party in the way that it will hit. And at that point, on this week before the sponsorship report from the auditor general comes out, the polls show the Liberals in Quebec at 55 per cent under Paul Martin and the Liberals have been riding very high on Quebec at the tail end of the [unintelligible] era, on the basis of Chrétien’s last decisions and particularly the decision not to sign up for the war in Iraq. But the internal workings of the party were already broken. This is a party that been ongoing a civil war between two factions: Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And if you want to go back even further, between John Turner and Jean Chrétien as of 1984. By the time Paul Martin becomes prime minister, he sets up the Gomery commission thinking that there is distance between him and the sponsorship stuff because there is really two parties, two warring factions within the party and because it’s two main characters. Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin are from Quebec. Quebec is a battleground where people are gunning for the other faction and the sponsorship affair takes place in the middle of that and that kind of forces everybody off the ice. Within a couple of years, there is no Liberal left that is elected in ridings where the vast majority of voters are Francophones in Quebec. They are pushed back to the west end of Montreal. After the Orange wave, there is not even a seat left in the [unintelligible] region, which is a highly Federalist region. So by the time Justin Trudeau becomes leader, there is no Liberal party.”
Listen to, or read the full transcript at the link below.
About the composer (Francisco Tárrega) – Today’s guitar repertory contains centuries of music of various forms and stories. One particular man from Spain has redefined the modern guitar as a serious solo instrument by transcribing music from piano, contributing to the development of technique, composition of music, and furthering pedagogical studies. His name, Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909), is synonymous with the Spanish guitar.1 If one examines the music of Tárrega, different influences from Chopin to the folk music of the Iberian Peninsula utilize and require different performances of particular aspects of the music. Understanding the history also yields information to determine an appropriate affect of the piece. I believe these nuances help bring out the characteristics of and strengthen the affects of Tárrega’s pieces.
Our river valley in Edmonton is particularly amazing during the fall.
Hey folks, just contemplating on the gradual change in the weather here. Summer has had her last gasp and now the parade of crisp mornings and cool afternoons has begun. Autumn is my favourite season, especially once we’ve had a killing frost or two, as it cleans the damn mosquitoes right up.
Now begins the ritual of trying to ascertain whether it too cold for to go out in shorts or not each morning. My reasoning is thus – we here in Alberta have the potential for a very long winter season from October to March most years and that, dear friends, is entirely to long a spell to exclusively wearing pants.
I do have limits, usually -5 centigrade is the lowest I’ll go before I shelf the shorts and bring up the long pants for the 
winter. The other wardrobe factor, of course is the hated closed toe shoes (we won’t mention the socks either :P). We hates them and will put off the transition for as long as safely possible. The Birkenstocks stay on till there is more than a centimetre of snow that stays on the ground (stuff that falls and melts doesn’t count:) ), till then, the sweet freedom of sandals reign supreme.
Other concerns include getting the back to school work schedule down, making time for piano and voice practice and getting the yard and car ready for the long dark cold ahead. This year though, I think we’re going to add lights to our backyard fence that will really brighten the winter nights. :) It should be all good, and as an added benefit more light to see the frozen dog poo that needs collecting. :)
If you have not already subscribed to Tom’s Dispatch, I urge you to do so at your earliest opportunity. Tom’s Dispatch features a talented group of individuals who research and write with honesty, clarity, and integrity. Adding them to your online reading can only add to your understanding of the world.
This excerpt is from an essay by Bill Moyers titled “Money and Power in America”.
“The movers and shakers — the big winners — keep repeating the mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world. Those are part of the story, but only part. As G.K. Chesterton wrote a century ago, “In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality.”
Exactly. In our case, a religion of invention, not revelation, politically engineered over the last 40 years. Yes, politically engineered. On this development, you can’t do better than read Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science.
They were mystified by what had happened to the post-World War II notion of “shared prosperity”; puzzled by the ways in which ever more wealth has gone to the rich and super rich; vexed that hedge-fund managers pull in billions of dollars, yet pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries; curious about why politicians kept slashing taxes on the very rich and handing huge tax breaks and subsidies to corporations that are downsizing their work forces; troubled that the heart of the American Dream — upward mobility — seemed to have stopped beating; and dumbfounded that all of this could happen in a democracy whose politicians were supposed to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. So Hacker and Pierson set out to find out “how our economy stopped working to provide prosperity and security for the broad middle class.”
In other words, they wanted to know: “Who dunnit?” They found the culprit. With convincing documentation they concluded, “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many.”
There you have it: the winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the system. And when the fix was in they turned our economy into a feast for the predators, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers, investors, and taxpayers.” The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is that the United States is looking more and more like the capitalist oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by.
Bruce Springsteen sings of “the country we carry in our hearts.” This isn’t it.”
Oh you darn Men. Is there anything you cannot do?
Given the calibre of many male self-identified feminists, one would have to conclude that the answer is generally “no”. If tomorrow Patriarchy absconded (woo!) and humanity somehow got its collective head around the notion that women are people and were treated as such – then I think men could be feminists (although with patriarchy gone there might not be the need for feminism), but that is the only case that I can think of at the moment.
The problem facing male feminists is the differing ways in which the sexes are socialized. Different language, nuances, and expectations are foisted upon girls and boys by the societal environment around them. This is what the social construction gender looks like .
Like it or not, metrics like these are used in society to evaluate your efficacy in terms of being in one particular sex role, or the other. Gendered socialization is inescapable as it is the societal air we breathe toxic as it may be. So take a moment and consider how your perception of the world is right now and then then imagine if the the prism of how you look at society and how society looks at you is the other coloured box.
Thus bringing us to the fundamental point – women and men experience life quite differently, concomitantly life treats women and men differently. This wouldn’t be a problem if both sets of traits were equally valued in society, however, one set of traits is given precedence. And not just your ordinary precedence, but a precedence in a supererogatory degree.
This ‘precedence’ is what feminists like to call patriarchy. Patriarchy is simply the structuring, adjudicating, and maintenance of society for the benefit of one class of people who possess (in theory) the traits mentioned in the blue box. Those who are assigned the other box are assigned less importance and worth and treated accordingly in society. Thus, in a patriarchal society, the experiences of women and men are quite different.
Men doing feminism have to be very aware that how they interact with society is not the way it works for women. This point needs to be hammered home because, let’s be honest here, a good portion of dudes just don’t get it (sample the RPOJ tag for evidence of this assertion). 
Can men be effective in helping women push back the patriarchal tide? Absolutely! Being a feminist ally, and standing up for women, but not leading the charge is what dudes can do to make things better in society.
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Mystro
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