[PHOTO] McDonald's Fries

McDonald's Fries
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I took this picture of the signature red cup of McDonald's french fries against the background of a Meal Deal bag (I got the fish), outside of Dupont and Dufferin's Galleria Mall.

These french fries have long struck me as occupying an interstitial space, for they are of potato and yet not potato. If ever human beings learn how to actually manufacture in full the holy host, the technology's origins might well be traced back to a humble multinational corporation founded by one Ray Kroc.

[LINK] "Raitt makes emotional apology over taped cancer remarks"

This was probably inevitable..

Fighting back tears, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt offered an apology Wednesday for calling the medical isotope issue ``sexy'' and described how she lost her own father and brother to cancer.

``Today I want to personally communicate my deep regret for wording I used in a private discussion earlier this year which was inadvertently recorded. As somebody who has had in their personal life been deeply affected by cancer, my intent was certainly not to show any disrespect for cancer victims, survivors or their families,'' Raitt said during a brief statement to reporters.

``However, it's clear that these remarks have been interpreted in that way, so I want to offer a clear apology to anyone who has been offended by what I have said.''

The emotional MP said when she was 11 years old she watched her father die from colon cancer and 20 years later she watched her brother die from lung cancer.

``As you can see it's a very personal issue for me and it's one that I really don't take lightly,'' she said fighting tears.

Based on the press and popular reaction, it looks like most of Canada shared with me the same lack of knowledge about alternate meanings of the word "sexy" that could be non-ridiculously used in this situation. Certainly the Prime Minister's Office had to do something to end this mess, and I suppose that they were lucky that Raitt had something in her personal background that could be used to this end.

[LINK] "What went wrong with Latvia?"

The Financial Times' Simon Kuper examines the background behind Latvia's peculiarly sharp economic collapse, and concludes that a desire to quickly catch up to Europe economically without paying attention to the actual economy's fundamentals.

Few countries in history have risen and fallen as fast as Latvia. From 1991 to 2004, this country of 2.3 million people went from Soviet republic to member of the European Union and Nato. From 2004 through 2007 Latvia was probably Europe’s fastest-growing economy, with annual expansion above 10 per cent. People who had lived in rundown Soviet communal apartments, sharing one bathroom between several families, were suddenly buying BMWs.

Now Latvia probably beats Iceland to the title of Europe’s worst-hit country. The Latvian central bank predicts that the economy will shrink by 18 per cent this year; Iceland expects its decline to be a mere 10.6 per cent. Altogether, economists predict Latvia’s gross domestic product will drop by about a quarter between 2008 and 2010 – not far off the 30 per cent that the US shrank during the Great Depression. If other countries have economic hangovers, Latvia is in intensive care, having years of champagne pumped from its stomach.

[A]s late as 2004, few Latvians lived like Europeans. Some still inhabited Soviet communal apartments. Now they wanted their rewards. Daunis Auers, a British-Latvian political scientist at the University of Latvia, identifies the difference with the Icelandic collapse: “In Iceland there was a lot of speculation on the markets. But in Latvia people were finally buying the western consumer products they had been promised since 1990.” The money was flooding in to help them do it. It came from Latvians working in Britain and Ireland, from the EU, from foreign investors, but, above all, from Scandinavian banks.

Lending to a country whose last successful experience of capitalism had ended before 1940 was a leap of faith. Nonetheless, Scandinavian banks threw money at Latvians. Some of the boom-era television ads for consumer loans are legendary. One featured a beautiful blond family at a drive-in window, where instead of ordering hamburgers, they get loans to buy their fantasies. The payoff line: “And of course: a trip to Egypt!” Other connoisseurs prefer the one that shows a young man and an old man driving BMWs. The old man exclaims: “I’ve saved all my life to buy a car like this!” The young man says: “And I just leased it!”

Peasants in the countryside mostly just sat out the boom in the homes they had been given after the USSR collapsed. However, Riga’s impatient new middle classes put out both hands to catch the money. They almost all borrowed in euros, paying interest rates of just a few per cent while Latvian inflation was at 15 per cent. In other words, they were being paid to borrow. Better yet, there was no capital-gains tax on property, which, incidentally, made buying apartments an excellent way to launder money.

Kuper comes up with a simple set of rules that would help a national economy undergo a spectacular bubble.

1) Run high inflation; 2) Borrow profusely; 3) Import much more than it exports; 4) Build an economy on speculation in assets; 5) Put no public funds aside for a rainy day; 6) Meanwhile, peg its currency to a stable currency.

This doesn't sound wildly different from what happened to Iceland, actually.

[BRIEF NOTE] "Nunarput utoqqarsuanngoravit" ("You Our Ancient Land!")

I'd like to thank Will for informing me that Greenland's left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party is forming Greenland's new coalition government.

Greenland's pro-independence leftist party Inuit Ataqatigiit, which won the Danish territory's legislative election on June 2, has agreed to form a coalition with two centrist parties, it said Sunday.

The three parties will hold a majority with 19 of 31 seats in the local parliament, the Landsting, IA leader Kuupik Kleist said in a statement.

IA, which ousted the social democratic Siumut party after 30 years in power, will hold 14 seats, the Democrats four seats and the Kattusseqatigiit Partiiat one seat.

Even though Siumut and IA had served in a coalition together as recently as 2007, Kleist had ruled out forming an alliance with Siumut after it became embroiled in a slew of scandals in recent months.

Final details still needed to be worked out on the government coalition and the cabinet portfolios were to be divided up Monday, Greenlandic radio KNR reported.

This comes just as the self-rule agreement with Denmark that I blogged about last year comes into force on the 21st of this month.

The question of what would happen if Greenland became an independent state--importantly, as a viable state, since its current economy heavily dependent on Danish subsidies would make independence spectacularly risky--doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of Canadian policymakers. European policymakers seem to have given the issue some thought, for even though Greenland left the then-European Community in 1985, some people in the European Union are interested in forging new relationship based on common interests in fishing, in energy and mineral resources, in the island's strategic position, and so on. Perhaps, like Iceland now, an independent Greenland will use its independence to move into the comforting embrace of a much larger bloc capable of protecting its interests? But, of course, Canada and the European Union are not the entire world, not even the entire Arctic world ...

(The title of this post is Greenland's national slogan, incidentally.)

[BRIEF NOTE] First Eurabia, then Rusostan

Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble reports on a journalist who, writing in the Moskovskaya Pravda, came up with an article titled "Moskvabad – Capital of Rusostan."

According to Kirill Grishchenkov, “more than half of the marriages in [the Russian] capital are inter-ethnic,” with a large share of those being between ethnic Russian women and Muslim immigrants and with a sizeable proportion of their children lost to the titular nationality of the country (www.mospravda.ru/issue/2009/06/09/article17616/).

And as a result, he says, these “family unions of Muscovites with arrivals from post-Soviet Asia and non-Russian regions of Russian can influence our life already in the near future.” Indeed, he says, the Russian capital is falling into what he calls “a vicious circle,”
from which it will be difficult to escape.

The number of Muslim immigrants is increasing, and their “non-drinking” lifestyle and “romantic” approach is attracting ever more ethnic Russian women. And as the latter marry the former, the city becomes even more attractive as a place for Muslims to come and settle, thus increasing the likelihood that ethnic Russian women will contract even more mixed marriages.

These trends will accelerate further, Grishchenkov says, if Russia forms some kind of “Euro-Asian Union” with Central Asian states, members of whose indigenous populations would then be able to move to Moscow and other Russian cities even easier than they can do at the present time.

This sort of thing is inevitable, really, given the unsettled national frontiers in the former Soviet Union, continuing Russian identity crises, substantial immigration from nominally Muslim countries once part of the Soviet Union, and the war against the Chechens. Certainly Eurabia is a pretty widespread meme, as easily it can be disproved on numerous grounds--like, say, the fact that Muslims behave like real people, not mindlessly machiavellian automatons. The expected references to Israel are included, interestingly, with particular reference to Israel's bigoted lack of civil marriage.

Exactly what impact their arrival in significantly greater numbers than today would have is of course difficult to say, the “Moskovskaya Pravda” journalist continues; “there are many possible scenarios.” But he argues that the “overall tendency is already obvious, and in the worst case, the fate awaiting [Russians] could be like that of contemporary Israel.”

There, the Moscow journalist says, the Palestinians are increasing more rapidly than the Jewish population, not only because they tend to have more children but also because in Grishchenkov’s words some “naïve Jewish girls” are willing to marry them and “in this way increase the Arab population of Israel.”

“It is interesting,” Grishchenkov writes, “that that part of the Israelis who as before believe in the idea of an Orthodox Jewish state are making passionate efforts to limit [such] inter-ethnic marriages.” And no one is upset, he continues, with their frequent and very open discussions about the dangers such marriages pose to the Jewish state.

“But here in Russia,” he continues, “which as before remains true to the ideas of the Communist International, the very raising of such a question is viewed as somehow shameful.” That should change, Grishchenkov says, or in the relatively near future, ethnic Russians will “cease” to feel themselves at home “in their own country.”

It seems to me that Grishchenkov might like to be one of the people running--at least advising--this wise new Russia and chasing the riff-raff out. If nothing else, the fact that he has authored this far-seeing article proves that he is amply qualified to determine who should belong to his nation and who certainly should not.