Too busy hustlin'?

Violent crime in the US has been decreasing since the early ’90s, and finding the reason why hasn’t proven easy. Freakonomics famously argued it has to do with abortion being legalized (unwanted kids = criminals), but that can’t be the whole answer. 

Richard Florida (U of T) argues there's an increasingly strong link with the degree of diversity in an area. So more gays, for example, is linked with a decrease in violent crime. More surprising is that the percentage of first-generation immigrants in an area is also a strong predictor of reduced crime.

I haven’t looked at the data or the methods used (he doesn’t even give standard errors!), but that’s amazing. Would be worth comparing with other rich countries. Here in the UK there’s lots of hand-wringing about how immigrants are changing society (more than in the US I believe). One difference is the greater variety of immigrants here - in the US there's a heavy ratio of Mexicans, here the most visible immigrants are Eastern Europeans (Poles) and South Asians (Pakistanis and Indians). Also would be worth seeing in the US whether the origin of immigrants matters for this link. 

More importantly, is it a causal effect of having immigrants (as he implies)? Or is it that immigrants are attracted to places that are not in decline, and places in decline have increasing crime rates. In either case studies like this make me happy because they reinforce my worldview. Open borders and unrestricted immigration, that’s my cause. Obviously I’m wrong (social chaos would ensue) but we’re so far from the right level that we just need to push for more.

Gratuitous rap video:

Marriage equality in New York

Something that is striking about the success of marriage equality in New York is how clearly it's connected to the success of past movements. One thing I took away from the excellent Sean Penn film about Harvey Milk was a sense for how 1970s gay rights activists had focused their energies on increasing gay visibility and actively encouraging people to come out of the closet. This wasn't, and isn't, an easy or obvious thing. In the abstract, no one should have to hide who they are, but in many, possibly a majority of cases, coming out of the closet would mean mental or even physical abuse in the family, and rejection in the community. The movement to encourage people - often young people - to come out was really putting individuals in harm's way in the theory that there would be future payoffs for the gay community as a whole.

Of course, pioneers like Milk were proven right a long time before New York legalized gay marriage, but after reading the Times piece on the politics of this recent victory, I'm struck by how tangible the connection is. Describing a meeting between Cuomo's most trusted advisers and top Republican donors:

It sounded improbable: top Republican moneymen helping a Democratic rival with one of his biggest legislative goals.

But the donors in the room — the billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by the hedge fund managers Cliff Asness and Dan Loeb — had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure.

Such a thing was possible only because Singer's son is gay, and out of the closet. An even more stark example is how the marriage campaign got the recalcitrant senator Carl Kruger, who had a history of voting against marriage equality and antagonism with the gay rights movement, to change his vote:

Some gay activists, assuming he was a lost cause, had taken to picketing outside of his house and screaming that he was gay — an approach that seemed only to harden his opposition to their agenda. (Mr. Kruger has said he is not gay.)

But unbeknown to all but a few people, Mr. Kruger desperately wanted to change his vote. The issue, it turned out, was tearing apart his household.

The gay nephew of the woman he lives with, Dorothy Turano, was so furious at Mr. Kruger for opposing same-sex marriage two years ago that he had cut off contact with both of them, devastating Ms. Turano. “I don’t need this,” Mr. Kruger told Senator John L. Sampson of Brooklyn, the Democratic majority leader. “It has gotten personal now."

Mr. Sampson, a longtime supporter of same-sex marriage, advised Mr. Kruger to focus on the nephew, not the political repercussions. “When everything else is gone,” Mr. Sampson told him, “all you have left is family.”

Nine days before he was assasinated, Harvey Milk recorded a will that began:

“This is Harvey Milk speaking on Friday November 18, 1978. This tape is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. …I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for—an activist, a gay activist—becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid or very disturbed…. Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time, I feel it’s important that some people know my thoughts, and why I did what I did. Almost everything that was done was done with an eye on the gay movement. …”

“I cannot prevent some people from feeling angry and frustrated and mad in response to my death, but I hope they will take the frustration and madness and instead of demonstrating or anything of that type, I would hope that they would take the power and I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights. … All I ask. is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door…”

Not only was his courage extraordinary, so was the courage that he asked of others. But he was right, and those gay lawyers and architects are the sons and daughters of people with power, and because of that, last night the number of same-sex couples with the right to marry in the United States doubled.

Ronald Reagan on Scott Walker and the situation in Wisconsin

Shameful intolerance in California

Absolutely heartbreaking. I have nothing else to say about this, than that.

The Great Stagnation

Great Bloggingheads pairing with Matthew Yglesias and Tyler Cowen discussing Cowen's new e-book The Great Stagnation:



Cowen's point is that growth has been generally slower since the 1970s than during the period before because all the "low hanging fruit," (easily exploitable economic opportunities) has been used up. Growth in the period since can be accounted for mostly by hard-won scientific and technological discoveries.

Moving forward, Cowen seems to be pessimistic that real growth will only get harder to achieve. My question is: am I the only one who has the feeling that major technological changes are right around the corner? Leaving aside singularity talk, take two of the major problems threatening government and consumer balance sheets: health care and energy.

There is nothing a doctor does today that can't be done by a sophisticated enough computer program, maybe a sophisticated enough MRI machine, and a technician. Get rid of the need for a lot of doctors, and you have real savings. This never comes up in the health care debate: sufficient technology could be the one thing that will bring health care spending under control. Seems like pie-in-the-sky now, but might look more like "low hanging fruit" in the future.

Or take this optimistic look at the future of solar energy from the Guardian, via GOOD:



If technology can make the health care and energy production much cheaper, leaving people with extra money to spend on other things, how can that not translate into economic growth? Maybe I've got my head in the clouds, but this really doesn't seem far off.

UPDATE: Is that doctor Watson? 

Conversation Mode

I want to quickly note the sheer awesomeness of Google's work on its conversation translator app:



For someone like me, who loves to travel but has to put a huge amount of effort into picking up a new language, this is about as revolutionary as a new technology gets. One can happily imagine what it will look like when it matures. 

The teachable moment

When something as disturbing and consequential as the recent shooting in Tucson happens, the public discussion that follows tends to be governed by two general human tendencies. The first, and most self-evident, is a tendency to find meaning, even if the event itself may be meaningless. You see this in the stages of grief and you see it in the public reaction to an event like this. Our brains will not accept pure randomness, instead we see a series of "teachable moments."

The second tendency, called "confirmation bias," is something that is always with us. A Scientific American article describing a brain imaging study that supports the theory, describes confirmation bias:

...we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence...'Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones...'

When something like this happens, we feel the incident has meaning and then quickly discover the meaning to be supportive of our previously held views.

The best illustration of this I can think of came from an old This American Life episode. I'm foggy on the details and may be messing bits of this up, but essentially it told the story of two people, both witnesses to a mass shooting at a restaurant. One was a police officer who was wounded. He went on to become a gun control activist. The second was a woman dining with her parents, both of whom were killed. She became a politician and outspokenly pro-gun, explaining that had she had a gun that day, she would have stopped the shooter before so many people were killed (the state in question, I don't remember which, had some form of gun control policy at the time that prevented her from carrying one). Same event, two opposing lessons.

My own bias brings me to the now familiar liberal version of this teachable moment: conservative leaders and pundits have gone too far with over-the-top rhetoric and violent imagery since the election of Barack Obama, and there has to be some kind of norm of civility. And even if you don't agree there is a connection between the actions of Loughner and the political atmosphere, you should at least agree that such an obviously troubled person should never have been able to so easily buy a semi-automatic weapon.

As an antidote for my confirmation bias, I sometimes make an effort to understand and as best I can, explain the perspective of the other side. I find it particularly difficult in this case. Arizona already has incredibly lax gun laws, so you can't say: "if only someone else was able to legally carry a gun, they could have stopped him." And not only has the sheriff blamed the political atmosphere, so has the heroic woman who wrestled the second ammo clip from the shooter, probably preventing an even greater tragedy. On top of that, the video of Giffords commenting on the infamous Sarah Palin crosshairs map, is almost eerie in its foreshadowing:



As far as I can tell, the central lesson conservatives have drawn from this incident is liberals are dicks. In other words, liberals are unduly using this tragic moment to score political points, even while it's obvious that Loughner isn't a Tea Partier or political in any way. Or, if we must bring up the influence of heated political rhetoric, then both sides deserve equal blame since crosshairs were used in a Democratic political ad.

But that is a response to the response. What does the incident itself mean for conservatism? Is it the case that for conservatives this tragedy is simply a case of shit happens? What is this teachable moment teaching conservatives? Or maybe there really is nothing to take from this that can confirm that bias.

Dust Lane

When Yann Tiersen played a show at Club Soda in Montreal a couple years ago, I couldn't miss it.

Other than Tiersen himself, someone I remember well from that show was the woman next to us. She was clearly unhappy with what she was hearing. Her eye-rolling and body language of displeasure was so expansive it seemed she was trying to make even the band notice her, that she hated what they were doing. Why someone would pay for a ticket only to mock and jeer at the performer would normally have been hard to understand, but not in this case.

The first thing I noticed at that show was the absence of an accordion, making one suspect he wasn't going to perform songs from Amelie. The second was the electric guitar Tiersen played through most of the show. Anyone expecting gentle accordion and piano instrumental pieces, and that included us, was in for a surprise. Tiersen has many fans who normally listen to classical music exclusively, but what we saw could only have been described as an indie rock show. A superb and innovative indie rock show. I happen to be an indie rock fan, and clearly the woman next to us wasn't, but her attitude couldn't have been farther from ours at that show.

After the show I went looking for a recorded version of what we heard, but couldn't find one. I had started to think the tour was a one-off thing without an album to accompany it, until I finally got a copy of the 2010 album Dust Lane. The album has more old Tiersen-esque sounds - accordion, strings - than I remember from the show, but the distorted guitar and full drum kit are conspicuously present. Some songs, such as "Till the End," have an anthemic, "Godspeed" quality. Some are more indie-pop, like the Stars or Death Cab. Mostly it's something only Yann Tiersen would write, even if it's decidedly not Amelie.

Yann Tiersen has been among my favorite song writers for some time, and what I love most about him is his eclecticism and experimentation. Dust Lane is no exception. My concert-going neighbor probably wouldn't like the album any more than the show, but she's clearly a fool. 

Cities

There's a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine on a physicist's search for the laws that govern the growth of cities. He became interested in the subject after discovering how the size of an animal can predict its metabolism:

...he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

The article also makes an argument that dense cities are inherently green:

...that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability. According to the data, people who live in densely populated places require less heat in the winter and need fewer miles of asphalt per capita. (A recent analysis by economists at Harvard and U.C.L.A.demonstrated that the average Manhattanite emits 14,127 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide annually than someone living in the New York suburbs.) Small communities might look green, but they consume a disproportionate amount of everything. As a result, West argues, creating a more sustainable society will require our big cities to get even bigger. We need more megalopolises.

Incidentally, there's a Radiolab episode that deals with the subject, and being Radiolab, it goes without saying that everyone should listen:



I agree that "we need more megalopolises," and it's always worth pointing out how the intuitive sense that cities consume more than their fair share of resources is simply wrong, and actually the reverse is true.

What Nauru Means

There's an old This American Life episode that deals with the tiny island nation of Nauru. I was reminded of it when I came across this graph recently:

Rank	Country	Unemployment rate (%)
1	Nauru	90
2	Liberia	85
3	Zimbabwe	80
4	Burkina Faso	77
5	Cocos (Keeling) Islands	60
6	Turkmenistan	60
7	Djibouti	59
8	Zambia	50
9	Senegal	48
10	Nepal	46

It's a shocking story - great radio, as usual for This American Life - that helps to understand how such a staggering unemployment rate is possible. It's well worth a re-listen. What happened on Nauru makes you question your faith in humanity, particularly Australia, but also the people of Nauru themselves.

Millions of years of seabirds leaving droppings on the island gave Nauru a rich phosphate deposit. After independence in the '60s, the Nauruans continued the strip-mining started by their various colonial masters. Phosphate mining briefly made Nauru one of the richest per-capita countries in the world, though they squandered all that wealth on various failed investments, most humorously on a musical who's Wikipedia article begins:

The 1993 West End production is considered one of the biggest disasters in the history of London theatre...The project, a highly fictionalized account of Leonardo da Vinci's creation of the Mona Lisa, was the brainchild of Duke Minks, an advisor to the Republic of Nauru and former road manager for the 1960s pop group, Unit 4 + 2. He convinced government officials to invest £2 million — derived from profits earned from their major export, bird droppings rich in phosphates — in the production, a fact later gleefully exploited by the critics in their scathing reviews.

Whatever happened to all the money, by the '90s the phosphate had dried up and Nauru was left with nothing to show for having strip-mined 70% of the entire island. Its own life support systems were decimated. Everything had to be imported, including drinking water. Out of desperation, the government turned to alternative forms of revenue, including an outrageous case of the Australian government refusing a boat load of Afghan refugees off Australian shores and instead paying Nauru to house them in the most appalling conditions imaginable.

There's something about this story that I find deeply unsettling, other than the unjustifiable behavior of Australia towards refugees. Nauru feels to me like an allegory for an approaching global environmental apocalypse. In recent years, I've mostly been converted to the Church of Economic Growth and Technological Improvement, which has made me a generally more optimistic person, but environmental issues continue to frighten me. The people of Nauru got rich and enjoyed a quickly improving standard of living at the expense of its environment. It ultimately led to a crash in quality of life and even a complete collapse of its own life-support systems.

There's no question that modern civilization is living beyond its means, environmentally speaking. Global warming is the most obvious, but what is happening to the oceans also feels to be of biblical proportions. Nauruans took too much too fast from its natural environment. The world as a whole is doing the same. Nauru could be just a microcosm of something happening at a global level.

Getting the Obama-GOP tax cut story right

I usually like Neil Macdonald's reporting for the CBC, but I thought his latest story for the National and a column on CBC.ca about the Obama-GOP tax deal, fell flat. He doesn't seem to try to accurately represent the current American economic debate.

Macdonald thinks the current U.S. budget predicament is simple: Americans know the budget has to be balanced, but they don't want to give anything up to do it, so they do nothing. He understands the tax deal Obama just worked out with Republicans in the same way.

This narrative contains elements of truth, but it's only one part of the story. Many economists, particularly the sort of economists a Democrat like Obama would be receptive to, point out that the crises level of near 10% unemployment is the result of shock-induced low demand. The best way to fill this demand gap and reduce unemployment is through government spending, but short of that, getting money to regular people to spend themselves - tax cuts, helicopter drops, or whatever - would work too. Tax cuts for the very wealthy won't have the same stimulative effect because the rich won't immediately go out and spend the extra money, but giving the high income tax cut to Republicans was the only way to get the middle class cuts, plus a bunch of other stimulative stuff, like an extension of payments for the unemployed. Ezra Klein has a graph illustrating the deal the president got:

All of this, of course, will have to be paid back, but history has proven the best way to reduce overall debt is by growing the economy. Economic growth should be the current priority. Balancing the budget is important in the long run, but right now, Keynesian economics says making sure the budget isn't balanced is more important.

Macdonald thinks U.S. debt is approaching unrepayable levels, yet interest rates for government bonds are very low. He thinks the Fed is recklessly printing money, yet inflation is near zero. Apparently the markets disagree with him on both fronts. How could it be that such a good journalist would leave these crucial facts out?

Macdonald is right that what happens to the U.S. economy affects the rest of the world, Canada especially. All the more reason to get the story right.

A North American Union

Every so often you come across an article like this in the Globe and Mail:

The Harper government is bracing for a backlash over a border security agreement it is negotiating with the United States, anticipating it will spark worries about eroding sovereignty and privacy rights, a document obtained by The Globe and Mail shows.

Conspiracy theorists in both the U.S. and Canada have long fretted about their leaders' participation in back room dealings to form a North American Union. Interestingly, the idea ruffles the feathers of people all over the political map. American conservatives think there are too many Mexicans in the U.S. already, Canadian liberals oppose the rightward shift in immigration and social policy needed to harmonize Canada with its more dominant neighbor, and conservatives of all countries have nationalistic alarm bells that go off at the thought of any sacrifice of sovereignty to such a union.

And yet, I do think it is inevitable. Events always seem to make more integration, not less, the obvious policy. In this case, hold-ups at the border since 9/11 are seriously affecting cross border trade. Canada and the U.S. have the biggest trade relationship in the world and it's in no one's interest to have it slow down. The only real solution is to harmonize border security. This is, conspiracy theorists will point out, if not part of a master plan, at the very least a step onto a slippery slope. I think they would be absolutely right.

But would that really be such a bad thing? A North American Union, at least in the case of Canada and the U.S, makes a lot more sense than a European Union. For one thing, most people speak the same language and share a common culture. While there might be linguistic and cultural barriers to a worker in Athens relocating to Berlin, the same can't be said about Buffalo and Calgary. For most people, the only real tangible effect of a NAU would be to suddenly find their freedom of movement greatly expanded.

I'm not saying a North American Union is a cause people should go out and fight for, but I do think it's time to start questioning the nationalistic orthodoxy that requires our leaders to sneak around in order make perfectly sensible policy.

The Perfect Taj Picture

The Taj Mahal is really everything it is cracked up to be. When we went to Agra to see it a couple of weeks ago, we were both sort of surprised that it actually does live up to the hype: it really is the most beautiful building in the world. I enjoy the fact that there is a building out there that everyone agrees is the most beautiful, though I wonder if people that travel in architectural circles have some cynical view of that. Anyway, when you see the most beautiful structure in the world, the main thing is to get a good picture, and April happened to overhear the secret of the perfect Taj photo: on the far side of the reflecting pool, rest your camera on the ground and tilt up towards the building. Now you know.

Sanders on taxes and trade

I agree and disagree with what Bernie Sanders says here:

The Estate Tax issue is, to me, Sanders' strongest example of a policy tailored to benefit only the most wealthy Americans. I can't think of a tax that, while being a useful way for a government to raise money, is so morally justified. You can argue that a person who worked hard should get to keep his money, but why should his children get to keep his money, or his children's children, who haven't even brushed elbows with hard work. Very large inheritance should be taxed for no other reason than to prevent the growth of an aristocratic class. And to take it a step further, Michael Kinsley argued in the Atlantic a while back that if the Boomer generation really wants to live up to their parents' legacy - a generation that lived through a Great Depression, defeated fascism and saw the collapse of communism - they should give up all their inheritance to taxes and use the windfall to pay off the debt. I see no reason to disagree with that.

Where I think Sanders falls down is when it comes to trade. He seems to take it for granted that a product made it China is equivalent to a job lost in America. Even if international trade was as zero-sum as Sanders perceives it to be, I would find it hard to muster a lot of rage at the thought of a very poor Chinese person feeding her family with income earned by making cheap sneakers for Americans. But the main point is that there is a broad consensus among economists that trade among nations is not zero-sum. While t-shirts and sneakers might be made it China, some people point out that American manufacturing isn't really in long term decline at all. It's easy enough to look at the tag on your jeans, but not so easy to know where machinery components were made.

Finally, and this may be beside the point, if Bernie Sanders was a character from Seinfeld, he would be Frank Costanza.

Robin and Batman

An interesting part of the fallout from the Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables is the degree to which diplomats are concerned with the petty insecurities of nations. Canadians, for example, “'always carry a chip on their shoulder' in part because of a feeling that their country 'is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’" This strikes me as true enough, though Tony Blair might have disputed who the real Robin is.

Deriving a sense of personal prestige from a sense of national prestige, though irrational, is real and not unique to any nation. People outside of the U.S. think 'American exceptionalism' is ludicrous: We would never fall for such a stupid idea here...we're just exceptional like that.

The fact is that a country as underpopulated as Canada will always have a hard time playing Batman. It reminds me of how rural Canadians resent Toronto for being so dominant. Toronto is dominant because it's where all the people live. Don't live where bears outnumber people if you want to feel a part of a powerful society.

Luckily there is a policy that will solve Canada's national inferiority complex once and for all: open the borders. Canada is vastly underpopulated. There are a lot of people in the world that would jump at the opportunity to move here. Double the population, triple it, quadruple, and suddenly the importance of the country on the international stage will zoom to supersize. Batman? I'm talking the Silver Surfer.

Crossing the Green Line

A story on NPR points out how Israel's security interests are leading it to commit more resources to green energy:

It's something that is obvious when you think about it - Israel's relative strength in the region, and leverage with the west, is inversely proportional to global oil demand - but it's not something that normally comes to mind when thinking about Israel. It's nice to know that there is at least one country who's immediate security concern is, or at least should be, ending the world's addiction to oil. And this isn't just any country, it's a tiny place that happens to be a world leader in cutting edge technology.

The story points out how Israel has been slow to start investing in alternative energy, but there is really only one thing that can get a country to invest big and move quickly: national security.

Mini doc featuring The Werneckes

Here's a nice mini documentary from Vancouver. One of my songs, as The Werneckes - Looking Forward to April, from the album of the same name - is featured at the end. More of my stuff, and other music can be found at fundamentalfrequency.com.

Beautiful Work from Without Illusions on Vimeo.

G8-G20 Protests - Saturday, Part 3

We walked up University Ave. towards to see what lay in store for us. Another line of cops? Most likely. We’d heard that things had gotten harrier down there, but given the well-maintained lines of riot police I’d seen earlier today, I didn’t expect anything too hairy. On our way North we saw a topless woman with a microphone, reporting in front of the barricade around the American consulate. The police didn’t seem to mind. Maybe a few of them were fans of the naked news themselves.

As we approached the corner of College and University the inevitable line of police came into view. All of 10 metres away stood our bikes, now unreachable. I went up to the friendliest cop I could find and asked him if we could get through to grab our ride home. He said “no” with a smile. I asked him when the cordoned-off area might become accessible. He laughed: “Come back in a couple of days.”

We went south and ducked west, hoping that maybe westerly police line blocking College St would be behind our bikes. My friend knocked my hat off my head in frustration. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I explained. “The more I think about it, it’s actually a horrible idea! Why on Earth would we lock our bikes next to the designated protest zone?” He was right – looking back, it was a horrible idea. Though annoyed, I found everything more funny than tragic – after all, as long as our bikes were in one piece it wouldn’t be the end of the world; home is, after all, only 30 minute walk away.

Coming East on College St, up to the westerly line, we finally saw our bikes. Unfortunately we also saw a riot police less than 10 metres in front of them. We lamented the situation aloud. My friend made a video of the whole event. I briefly considered asking the riot cops, but as I’d learned earlier that day, given the right circumstances and the right officer, you might be able to hold a conversation with a regular cop, but never with 21^st century legionnaire. Put a cop in riot gear and they seem to lose their humanity, their ability for independent thought. To call them “riot police” is something of a misnomer – they’re infantry, armed, armored, and distinctly disinclined to verbally engage The Enemy.

I’m not sure what the protesters who had gathered by the Western line wanted. Clearly something was happening in Queen’s Park – there was a bunch of police there and reinforcements, including cavalry, were trickling in. The protesters we saw were only a few dozen-strong. Mostly they just appeared to be telling the police that they should be ashamed of themselves, though for what, precisely, I’m not sure. Did they know something we didn’t? What had these guys done that was so bad, aside from block protesters from going to a particular part of town? I assumed they were supposed to feel a general guilt for being The Man, for working against The People. The crowd (or more specifically a small subset of the crowd) sang “What the world needs now is love, sweet, love. No, not just for some, but for everyone.” True that.

The riot police were relieved of their duties by some regularly-dressed cops. Did someone decide that this crowd wasn’t a security threat (which it obviously wasn’t)? As they marched north I surmised that they were probably needed elsewhere. Holding the Western line was probably a waste of armor.

With the situation improved, I decided to try my luck again. I told one of the cops where our bikes were and offered to give him the keys to unlock it. He said “give me a few minutes and we’ll see”. A minute later he took our keys and headed over to our bikes. One of the protesters, the most vocal one so far, screamed “Hands off our bikes!” We yelled back “No! They’re helping us get our bikes!” The protester was caught off guard “Oh… in that case can you get her’s?” she asked, pointing to her friend. It looked like the cop was going to say yes. Good man.

We thanked our one-man bike-retrieval-unit and rode home. Our G20 experience, at least the “run around and see what’s going on” portion of it, was over. We’d seen a lot of anger and volume, but few physical confrontations. We’d seen some wanton destruction, but not too much, all things considered. From our perspective the police seemed to be on their best behaviour – I can imagine how pissed off I’d be, standing around in riot gear, having people yell at me for no conceivable reason, rage at my sheer presence. I rode home feeling a sense of satisfaction – while freedom of movement was moderately disrupted, free speech remained intact. While I was angry with the Black Block for their indiscriminate vandalism and obvious provocation, I was pleased with the general all-around level of restraint – better to let a few windows get smashed than beat up a crowd.

It was Saturday, 6PM. Over the coming days my pride in the police would all but disappear.

G8-G20 Protests - Saturday, Part 3

We moved along Wellington until we got to Yonge. Looking North, there seemed to be some action. Some protesters wanted to come south. A mass of riot-gear armed cops held them back. They seemed peaceful enough, but the cops soon pushed them back and took up as much of Yonge as they could. Why they were trying to occupy as much of Yonge as possible didn't make any sense to me. I didn't realize that Yonge was, in fact, the seat of much destruction, and that they were driving people away from the scene. The cop-tactic of forming a rectangle seemed to be the rule of the day. Their batons and riot gear, backed up by tear gas didn't make me want to challenge it.

We noted a bunch of "outs", places to run so we couldn't get fenced in, but by the time the cops started moving we just decided to head south where they hadn't covered yet. At this point no protesters had been "kettled" - that would come later.

We ended up on Bay and King, right back at the spot of the burnt car, minus most of the car, but with a giant burned mark where it once stood to remind you what went down. Some people had taken pieces of it, souvenirs, I suppose. A war souvenir, maybe? I picked up something too - it was a disgusting, burned, drenched, floor-mat. I put it back.

The standoff scene that I had now grown accustomed to repeated itself. This time, though the cops weren't taking more space, they were simply blocking a large, orderly group of from what I could tell mostly labour protesters from going south, from getting only one block farther and reaching the fence. Why these protesters didn't just peel off and split up in smaller groups and go around seemed strange to me - like earlier that day, all I could think was if you really wanted to let your voices be heard as close to the fence as possible you should just get there on your own. Perhaps it's the principle of the thing. For whatever reason, they decided to hold a standoff with the cops, which remained calm and emotionless. Well, for the most part - when a buddy of mine suggested we play "red rover" he couldn't help but laugh behind his gas mask.

I couldn't see it but the Starbucks at the northeast corner was smashed in.

We hung around the cops a bit, looked for outs just in case they moved, but they didn't really do much. A bunch of protesters dressed in pink danced, to no avail. A broken plastic screen on a bust stop was smashed - no doubt by the car-torching anarchists. People were sitting/standing atop it. I resisted my natural urge to climb everything in sight.

Someone was discussing getting lifted up to the security camera so he could cover or spray-paint it. He hated those cameras. would rather cover it so that's not technically vandalism, but he found a can of spray paint, and that would do the job. My friend and I declined to help him.

I thought about the police tactics, and the efficacy of keeping people from reaching the fence. I came to the conclusion that all you have to do is stick a row of cops anywhere and some protesters won't bother going to the fence, they'll just try to get through, demanding passage as their civil right.

What was the goal of the protesters? Was it to tell the G20 that their capitalist, Earth-raping ways were no good? Was it to demand women's rights or free Palestine? Was it to add bulk to the mass group in a show of solidarity? Was it to smash the state? Or was it to simply exert the right to dissent, the right to demand that Toronto not be turned into a city controlled by the police? I saw more of the latter than anything else - the protesters vented their anger against the cops, not at anyone who actually could do anything, just because they were there. They chanted, shamed them, and begged them to join them. The protests stopped being about capitalism, women's rights or the environment. They were just about telling the cops to go home, telling them that they didn't need to stand guard, and that they were working with the bad guys.

This, for me, was one of the central take-home lessons of the day - more than anything, the protesters wanted their voices heard and they didn't want anyone saying this couldn't be done.

We decided that the standoff wasn't going anywhere and retreated back down Bay St towards the fence, where anyone on our side could be, if they weren't more interested in the King St. blockade. We passed the main downtown Scotiabank, which was spray painted with "capital kills", windows smashed in methodically. The spider-cracks in the glass, some which stretched metres, were eerily beautiful.

By the fence people were taking just hanging out. Someone was walking around in a Tibetan flag. No one was actively protesting, as far as I could tell, unless touching the fence and having your picture taken counts. On the way back to our bikes I called my girlfriend. She informed us that things were getting really hairy near Queens Park.

Shit. That's where we left our bikes.

G8-G20 Protests - Saturday, Part 2

Well fed, my buddy and I decided to head south.

The goal we had in mind was simple: how far could we get? It looked like it was possible to head through the police blockades if you're just a few people, and even easier to go around them. If the goal of the protesters was getting to the fence, could they do it?

As it turned out, the answer was yes - anyone moving in small groups with a moderate degree of knowledge of Toronto's structure could walk right up to the fence, which was mostly along Wellington. We were baffled why no else though of this. Maybe if we were in a large group this would be hard. After all, for two people with no signs to veer off path is one thing, to take a massive blimp or coat hanger down Bathurst is another.

Over the past few days, the laws granted to police regarding people near the fence were frightening. Within five meters, the police had the legal right to ask you why you were there, to search you, and if refused and didn't leave (or maybe just refused - it was unclear to me), you could be arrested on the spot. Furthermore, in court, the police's word was God - no witnesses could save you from whatever the cops said on the stand.

As we neared the fence, we stood back, as far from it as could be. Yet for all the hype about having to be away from the fence, it turned out that no one cared. People (from what I could see regular folks who weren't protesting) walked next the fence. Some even walked up to it and touched it. This was clearly not what I had imagined.

We moved away from the fence a bit and decided to walk along King. As we approached Bay we saw a line of cops. Maybe the protesters were coming down there. Had they broken through? Were they getting to the fence?

Then I heard the Band. I never saw the band, but from the way they sounded I was sure it was the Anarchist Marching Band (or at least parts of it) from yesterday, their jovial arpeggiated tune heralding the coming of red and black flags. I was only half a block away and there was a dozens of cops in the way, yet we could see the flags wave while people clad in black ran through the intersection, then quickly away. As they left smoke began to rise.

We had just witnessed the lighting of the cop car in the middle of King and Bay. A handful of cameras were on the scene, but not too many. Police moved in and yelled at us to get back. We complied.

Standing half a block we waited, while our cameras and video recorders did their job. Would the protesters be hemmed in by the cops? The cavalry came in, dwarfing the yellow-jacket cops on bikes. We saw riot police put on their masks and march to the scene, flicking out their batons. As we took pictures one of the more conversationally-inclined cop asked us "So we're the bad guys, eh?" My friend responded that he didn't think so, and that there's no reason for setting a car on fire. I didn't think so either - up to now all the action taken by the police was marked by personal restraint - God knows I would've wanted to smash some guy's face in if he was yelling at me for hours.

I was both disheartened and excited - the protests would not be remembered for violence, not the peaceful chanting I saw yesterday and earlier today. No would remember that earlier this morning, Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amnesty International demanded a better world. Yet seeing the beginnings of "who knows what" was admittedly thrilling. And besides, I'd never seen a burning car before.

From all the way back there was some confusion. Was it one car on fire or two? Where were the anarchists? Did they move south? Were they diverted? We wondered aloud to each other if they had reached the fence.

The car was set on fire a little before 1PM, and it took nearly 20 minutes to put it out. By this the things had moved elsewhere. We down to Wellington to see if the fence had been reached, or even breached. No sign of anyone here. Police on horseback came marching through, followed by a truck carrying water bottles and hay. Horses relived themselves. We couldn't help but laugh.