[PHOTO] Lily behind bars

Lily behind bars (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Lily behind bars (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Lily behind bars (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[DM] "On the slim likelihood of a Chinese takeover of the Russian Far East"

Over at Demography Matters, I've a post up that's a brief synopsis of an article that suggests strongly that, no, the Chinese are not going to take over the Russian Far East through immigration: there's just no reason for this to happen.

[LINK] Three Facebook links

• In the Business Week blog post "Facebook Climbs Toward Profitability" by Douglas MacMillan, we find out that--at last!--Facebook is becoming financially viable. "This doesn’t mean the social network is a profitable operation yet. Rather, the cash it generates from advertising and other forms of revenue now exceed the cost of servers and other capital expenditures required to keep Facebook running. One-time costs, like the reported $50 million acquisition of Friendfeed last month, and operational expenses like personnel, are not included in this equation. Outside investments in the company, like the $200 million it raised from Digital Sky Technologies in May, are not accounted for either."


• Writing in the National Post, meanwhile, Neil Seeman points out the obvious reality that choosing your Facebook friends wisely is essential. "When we dumb friendship down, on Facebook or in everyday life, we risk confusing people who may misconstrue what is signified by that relationship. This, in my view, is the best reason not to friend your patient or your client. When in a trust relationship (what lawyers fancily call a "fiduciary duty"), your client or your patient may be vulnerable."


• Finally, UTalk Marketing analyses the demographics of social networking platform users. "[S]ocial networks and blogs now account for more than 67% of all online activity. The likes of Facebook and personal blog sites such as Wordpress are growing twice as fast as any of the other four largest sectors (search, portals, PC software and email). [. . .] Twitter users are more interested in sex, LinkedIn users watch soap operas and MySpace users don’t exercise, according to one study from Anderson Analytics. [. . .] Social network users’ top three interests are music, movies and hanging out with friends, and they use social media most to stay in touch with friends, family and classmates.

[MUSIC] Mitsou, "Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer"

I've sure I've mentioned somewhere in the past that Québécois popular culture, for all its richness, really hasn't penetrated English Canada to any significant degree. Literature has certainly done well, with people like--say--playwright and actor Gratien Gélinas gaining recognition, while the Anglophone/Francophone 2006 coproduction Bon Cop, Bad Cop was one of the most successful films in Canadian history. Still, official bilingualism aside, there just isn't that much that has crossed the language frontier. Mitsou, as it happens Gélinas' granddaughter, is one of the rare exceptions with her 1990 single "Bye bye mon cowboy". Her music, driven by her sexpot image and controversial music videos featuring nudity and sexuality, didn't last long commercially, don't seem to have been as successful, but there are still some gems. Actually, I can only think of one, her "Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer" off of her 1994 album YaYa.

"63 Ossington, from Ossington Station south to King" (Watch on YouTube)

The lyrics are fairly simple. Their core can be found below.

Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer
J'ai toujours envie de toi
Oh toi que j'aime

I have always wanted to love
I still want you
Oh, I love you

Still, I like her breathy delivery and the stuttery synth music. Sometimes, this song can make me feel shivers. The way that she ties it in to HIV/AIDS prevention is also interesting, with the others featured in the video revealing their HIV status at the video's end and the song "[becoming] the theme song to promote AIDS awareness in Québec, and all proceeds from the sale of the single went towards AIDS research."

"Comme j'ai toujours voulu aimer" is a simple song, ephemera, really. That doesn't change the fact that I like it, still, and that doesn't change the fact that I wouldn't have come across it if I hadn't been lucky enough to see it while I was watching MuchMusic one day in the mid-1990s. I'd not have had this simple pleasure. As an Anglophone, I enjoy a peculiar amount of linguistic privilege, in Canada as in the wider world. I have French, true, but I don't have nearly the amount of access to la francophonie that I'd like to have. There really hasn't been any pressing need to do so. As a result, things get missed.

It's funny, isn't it, how privilege can sometimes lead to missing out on something?

[LINK] "Québec, Catalogne, et Écosse: des comparaions boiteuses"

Montréal's La Presse reproduces an interesting article, "Québec, Catalogne, et Écosse: des comparaions boiteuses" by Joseph-G Turi, that argues that the frequent comparisons of Québec nationalisms and separatisms with those of catalonia and Scotland overlooks the fact that not only are Québec's movements considerably stronger, but Québec's has more powers than either region and Québec's overwhelming Francophone nature has no comparisons with a bilingual Catalonia and an Anglophone Scotland.

[LINK] "The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil"

The Financial Times' Martin Sandbu has come up with a long article that explores the idea that Farouk al-Kasim, an expatriate Iraqi engineering now living in Norway, helped save his adopted country from being ruined by oil wealth, eventually leading Norway in its creation of its highly successful preparation for this boom.

Poor countries dream of finding oil like poor people fantasise about winning the lottery. But the dream often turns into a nightmare as new oil exporters realise that their treasure brings more trouble than help. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, one time Venezuelan oil minister, likened oil to “the devil’s excrement”. Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, his Saudi Arabian counterpart, reportedly said: “I wish we had found water.”

Such resignation reflects bitter experience of the way that dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.

This is better understood today than it was 40 years ago. When al-Kasim arrived in Oslo, no one was worrying about how oil might challenge Norway – in part because they didn’t think any would be found. The Geological Survey of Norway had dismissed the possibility just 10 years earlier.

The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical – plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”

His was a lonely, contrarian voice. After examining exploration results, he wrote a report that warned Norway was sleeping, that even though no one had found oil yet, it was only a question of time. And time was short: the country’s leaders needed to prepare Norway to become an oil nation, but they were doing nothing. “I was a constant reminder that they were doing everything wrong,” al-Kasim says pointedly. Only his closest colleagues would listen.