[PHOTO] The William Alexander Farlinger tombstone

The William Alexander Farlinger tombstone
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Found in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, it's the head that caught our eyes.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• blogTO explores the lower Bay TTC subway station, built and then closed off decades ago.
  
• Centauri Dreams looks at a white dwarf in our very general neighbourhood that may go supernova relatively soon.


• Charlie Stross considers the question of how businesses can gain consumers' goodwill and how quickly they can lose it.


• Edward Lucas praises Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation and posits it as a model for the future.


• Far Outliers examines how the British and Tahitians managed their 1767 first contact and what things were like on Fiji after the 2000 coup.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh argues that the Euro will face serious problems in southern Europe, especially in Spain.


• Hunting Monsters reports on worrying political tumult in Somaliland.


• The Pagan Prattle reports on yet another revival of the Satanic cult abuse meme.


• Window on Eurasia reports that the remittances sent by migrants to Russia from poorer post-Soviet states have decreased by a third, causing serious issues in their homelands.

[BRIEF NOTE] So, we're having another election, who cares?

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has gotten himself and his government in trouble.

Putting the best possible pre-election gloss on forecasts of deeper red ink for Ottawa, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is assuring Canadians the light at the end of the deficit tunnel should be visible by 2015.

Mr. Flaherty refused to promise when the Conservatives might balance the budget – blaming a murky economic outlook – but insisted the Tories are the only party that can be trusted to bring Ottawa back into surplus without raising taxes or cutting transfers to provinces.

The Conservative Finance Minister used an earlier-than-usual economic update released Thursday to stump for an apparently inevitable fall election campaign, warning the Liberals are not up to the task of balancing the books. The update said this year's deficit has soared to nearly $56-billion and predicts shortfalls will be deeper and more persistent than Ottawa had previously acknowledged, adding nearly $70-billion more to Canada's debt.

[. . .]

The Finance Department predicted budget shortfalls would dwindle to a “manageable” deficit of $5.2-billion by 2014-15 – just 0.3 per cent of economic output.

“With overall spending of around $300-billion [at that time], that would be a very modest deficit to deal with,” Mr. Flaherty said.

But then he warned it would nevertheless be a struggle to get this under control. “That is not to say that returning to balance will be easy,” Mr. Flaherty said in a speech to a Victoria, B.C., business crowd.

“It will require leadership and sustained discipline, especially with such a historic degree of uncertainty for the months and years ahead.”

Although Mr. Flaherty had last week said he would lay out a path to balanced budgets – “how we will move back to surplus” – the effort presented Thursday fell well short of this.

This news, it should be noted, has helped trigger a series of attacks by the Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc that may yet presage another federal election a year after the last one. Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star thinks that Harper might no longer be able to pull it off.

The mathematics of a Conservative campaign based on the spectre of a post-election unholy alliance between separatists, socialists and the federal Liberals does not easily add up to a majority.

There are no guarantees such a campaign would result in a decisive Conservative victory and many reasons to doubt that it would or, at least, not without exacerbating tensions on the unity front.

In the heat of last year's parliamentary crisis, the prospect of a Liberal-NDP coalition designed to govern with the support of the Bloc Québécois briefly propelled the Conservatives into majority territory.

But rekindling those passions in the hope of channelling widespread fatigue with short-lived minority Parliaments into a Conservative majority could be a lose-lose game both for the Prime Minister and the fractious country he seeks to continue to govern.

Me? I don't care. The Liberals and Conservatives seem relatively similar, though I'd still definitely vote Liberal, and the NDP doesn't have a chance of being anything other than the junior partner in a coalition government. Alas, I can't vote for the Bloc; the Bloc, it seems, actually stands for something, but their candidates don't stand here. Tant pis

[LINK] "GM opts for Magna in Opel deal"

This news wasn't very surprising, but still: a Canadian firm now owns a huge chunk of the German automobile industry. Wow.

General Motors is to sell Opel, its lossmaking European subsidiary, to Canada’s Magna International and Russia’s Sberbank, ending months of uncertainty over the carmaker’s fate that had threatened to overshadow this month’s German elections.

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, whose government threw its weight behind Magna’s bid, welcomed GM’s decision on Thursday, saying the result showed the government’s “patience, clarity and decisiveness” had paid off.

Under the agreement, Magna and Sberbank will take a 55 per cent controlling stake in Opel, GM’s European employees will take 10 per cent, while GM itself will retain a minority 35 per cent stake. Magna has promised to extend Opel’s reach into Russia via an agreement with Gaz, the carmaker owned by the Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, to build Opel-derived cars there.

GM’s decision surprised German government officials and even some executives at Magna and GM, after conflicting signals in recent weeks from the carmaker, which had been weighing up a plan to keep Opel after talks with Berlin hit obstacles over conditions attached to its financing of the deal.

The Detroit carmaker’s 13-member board failed to endorse the Magna bid last month, but agreed to the deal at a second meeting on Wednesday after a “deep dive” into data about the sale, according to a person involved in the talks.

[LINK] "Brazil Emerges From Recession, Led by Domestic Demand"

"And I, for one, welcome our new Lusophone overlords."

Brazil’s gross domestic product grew more than analysts forecast in the second quarter, pulling the economy out of its first recession since 2003 thanks to rising domestic demand.

Brazil’s economy expanded 1.9 percent from the previous quarter, the statistics agency said today in Rio de Janeiro. Analysts expected 1.7 percent growth, according to the median estimate of 35 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. GDP fell 1.2 percent from a year earlier, less than the 1.4 percent drop forecast. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and BNP Paribas revised their 2009 GDP forecasts higher following the announcement.

Six straight months of job growth, coupled with tax breaks and record low borrowing costs, are driving consumer spending, helping Latin America’s largest economy rebound from the global financial crisis faster than was previously expected.

“The significant growth in family consumption shows the economy is out of recession and ready to expand,” Newton de Camargo Rosa, chief economist at Sul America Investimentos, said in a telephone interview. “Entrepreneurs are starting to realize demand growth is sustainable and will resume investment plans, which will also contribute to growth.”

As people who commented on this article at Facebook observed, Brazil's obviously doing something right: competent economic management goes a long way.

[BRIEF NOTE] On jadedness

Castrovalva's ever-thoughtful Richard takes on what he calls the subject of modern Spenglerism, named after early 20th century German writer Oswald Spengler, that phenomenon of recognizing/believing in a fixed cycle of civilizational being existing independently of--ignorant of--human volition. His immediate target? Anti-humanist British philosopher John Gray? His daring beliefs, Richard suggests, actually reflect only common wisdom presented in a sort of world-weary fashion and don't necessarily address critics or issues of substance.

If the current recession can be described as a counterpart to the great depression, it's hardly surprising that writers might respond to the times in a similar fashion to what is described above, which was why I found myself wondering whether John Gray might not count as our modern Spengler. Gray is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the spirit of our times; a self-styled contrarian whose arguments actually reflect an essentially mainstream view. Having had to live under a 'third way' government without any idea of political narrative and whose pragmatic approach to government resulted in little more than inconsistency, I do grow slightly weary of Gray tilting at windmills of Enlightenment political thinking.

More:

Firstly, while Gray is certainly correct that communist denialists tend to exculpate their ideology by claiming the cultural revolution as an aberration, he comes quite close to some of Marx's tactics in that last paragraph, suggesting that objections to his ideas represent a covert proof of them. Popper disdained that sort of circular argument in Freud and Marx and would doubtless take a similar view of the above. Even without that, it seems a little disingenuous to cite communism as an Enlightenment project without mentioning that the ideas of pluralism and democracy that opposed it had the same pedigree; those ideas being the ones that provide the normative basis against which Gray himself can critique Kant for racism or Comte for conservatism. More pressingly, it's doubtful that the opponents that Gray is addressing here really exist in any meaningful form; believers in a Marxist or Hegelian conception of progress as a form of historical inevitability must be few and far between. His references to the Euston Manifesto ignore the problem that its signatories were a relatively small group without substantial influence; had they or like-minded individuals not existed recent historical events would have run exactly the same course. For all their references to democracy, it somewhat strains credulity to take the view that the political elites that instigated the Iraq war were especially motivated by ideals of progress rather than by religious faith or simple expediency. Certainly, if that was the case it left precious little trace on the domestic policies of either the British or American governments of that time.

The whole Castrovalva post is great, and comes highly recommended by me as a suggestion as to one trend that's going on. For me, it's value lies in the fact that it makes me consider whether or not I'm committing these mistakes of interpretation and communication. Integrity's important, y'know.