[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 'Aqoul's Matthew Hogan wonders why there's so little investment in manufacturing in the Middle East and North Africa, with most of the answers centering around rent seeking, unclear comparative advantage, state repression that makes domestic expansion and foreign investment problematic, and underinvestment in human capital.


• blogTo reports that the TTC is adding more bike racks to buses on more of its routes. Maybe I should use these racks at some point.


• Daniel Drezner examines the question of what, exactly, the recent Russian-Georgian war demonstrates about Thomas Friedman's theory that no two McDonald's-hosting countries will go to war, and his commenters have at it.


• Over at Far Outliers, Joel produces an excerpt by Michael Burleigh on catastrophically radical Romania's Iron Guard and Martin Meredith on the disastrously undoing of the corrupt Americo-Liberian aristocracy.
  
• Paul Wells reported earlier that Prime Minister Harper kept the Governor-General in Canada, likely so as to expedite his request for a dissolution of parliament and a new federal election. He suggests that the election, otherwise pointless and expected even by Harper himself to be another minority government, might be called in order to take advantage of a potential breakthrough in Québec.
  
• Language Hat briefly examines (through The New York Times) the linguistic diversity of the Caucasus, including a despairing fragment from an Ossetian linguist who fears that the only master manuscript of a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled was destroyed in the bombardment of Tskhinvali.


• Matthew Blackett at Spacing Toronto reports on the happy news that the scramble intersection at Yonge and Dundas works without inflicting any human casualties at all. More coverage of the intersection should be here.