[LINK] "Oil's swoon sparks Alberta schadenfreude in rest of Canada"

CBC's Paul Haavardsrud wrote recently about Canadian schadenfreude directed towards Alberta, now that its oil-driven economic boom has come to a halt. The questions this raises about Canadian identities and Canadian national unity and Canada's prospects are tiresomely familiar. Good essay, though.

Right now, the same low oil prices that are knocking Alberta from its economic perch are also once again waking up the familiar call-and-response of inter-regional rivalry. For Exhibit A, Anastakis says, just listen to a call-in radio show or scroll to the comments section of nearly any newspaper or web story that touches on oil.

If lower oil prices mean petro-rich Alberta gets served with a little comeuppance and gasoline prices fall at the same time, then, a common line of thinking goes, what’s not to like?

As a Globe and Mail reader recently offered: "I guess we can start calling Alberta 'Detroit West' now. Where did all that oil money go over the last few decades anyway? Didn't the Conservatives put some aside for a rainy day? Get your umbrellas out in Alberta!"

A commenter on a recent story on CBC.ca was even more direct: "Everybody here, let's all raise our hands in the air and cheer. It's about time that Alberta suffered."

The rebuttals from the Alberta side of the border often make for a smart match: “Hows [sic] Nova Scotia been doing these last few decades? Not so hot economically according to all the Nova Scotianers [sic] I talk to that have been supporting families back home with the money they make right here, in Alberta.”

As might be expected, Albertans are starting to circle the wagons against attacks from other parts of the country that seem just a shade too gleeful. While the keyboard stylings of a few commenters, as well as the odd internet troll, are certainly not a robust gauge of the mood of the entire country, the renewed visibility of both camps raises any number of questions.

[LINK] "The Parliamentary Secretary for Multiculturalism Asks Iranian-Canadians "Why Are You Here?""

Writing for the Huffington Post, Susan Khazaeli and Nicole Waintraub describe the latest small scandal of the Canadian federal government.

A Conservative Toronto MP, Chungsen Leung, recently attended an event organized by the Association of North American Ethnic Journalists and Writers. During the meet-and-greet, Mr. Leung was asked about the increasing difficulties faced by Iranians attempting to obtain a Canadian Visa. Emotions apparently ran high. At one point, in a heated exchange, Mr. Leung asked a member of the audience, "If you like Iran so much then why do you come to Canada?"

He then demanded to know: "Why are you here?" Some audience members were so offended by his comments and his dismissive attitude -- which one attendee characterized as "arrogant" -- that they decided to leave the event.

Mr. Leung is also the Parliamentary Secretary for Multiculturalism. It kind of sounds like a bad joke, doesn't it?

According to a CTV report, Mr. Leung's office claims that the exchange was a "miscommunication." His email apology expressed regret for the misunderstanding. Perhaps Mr. Leung's comments were off-the-cuff, but they were, by no means, innocuous.

Even if unintentional, Mr. Leung's comments were discriminatory and hostile. The subtext of the messaging is: "Why don't you go back where you came from?" They betray an underlying attitude that many non-white Canadians encounter when expressing views critical of government policy. This attitude becomes even more pronounced when that non-white Canadian comes from a country that, like Iran, is on the outs with Canada.

[LINK] "Bosnian-Americans shaken by indictment of six accused of supporting ISIL"

Al Jazeera America's Ryan Schuessler reports from the American city of St. Louis, home to a substantial Bosnian immigrant community.

St. Louis’ Bosnian community is reeling after the indictment of six Bosnian immigrants, three of them from the city, for allegedly sending money and military supplies to fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, including one from St. Louis.

“We are shocked by this,” said Murat Muratovic, who hosts a weekly Bosnian-language radio program in St. Louis. “We are just sad about it. That our people who survived the war and came here to seek a better future in life [could do this].”

Of the accused, Armin Harcevic and married couple Ramiz Hodzic and Sedina Hodzic lived in St. Louis County. Of the other three, Mehida Salkicevic and Jasminka Ramic lived in the Chicago area, and Nihad Rosic lived in Utica, New York.

They are accused of soliciting funds for and sending money and military supplies to fighters associated with radical groups, including Al-Qaeda, Jabhat Al-Nusra and ISIL. They are also accused of sending money to the families of fighters in Syria and Iraq who are from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro.

The St. Louis area is home to the country’s largest Bosnian population — estimated at some 70,000 people, which makes it one of the largest Bosnian communities in the world outside the Balkans. The city is also home to many Muslim Kosovars who fled brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Bosnians in St. Louis are largely credited with rebuilding dilapidated neighborhoods in southern St. Louis after they arrived. Many are now business owners, and the community makes up a vital part of the region’s economic and social fabric.

[LINK] The Economist on the assimilated German-Americans

The Economist's article "The silent minority" explores how German-Americans, despite their numbers and former influence, are very highly assimilated, and how they became this way.

German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group (if you divide Hispanics into Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, etc). In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). In whole swathes of the northern United States, German-Americans outnumber any other group (see map). Some 41% of the people in Wisconsin are of Teutonic stock.

Yet despite their numbers, they are barely visible. Everyone knows that Michael Dukakis is Greek-American, the Kennedy clan hail from Ireland and Mario Cuomo was an Italian-American. Fewer notice that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky with presidential ambitions, are of German origin.

Companies founded by German-Americans tend to play down their roots, too: think of Pfizer, Boeing, Steinway, Levi Strauss or Heinz. Buried somewhere on their websites may be a brief note that “Steinway & Sons was founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft on Varick Street”. But firms that play up their Germanic history—as Kohler does, in a short film shown at the Waelderhaus—are rare.

German immigrants have flavoured American culture like cinnamon in an Apfelkuchen. They imported Christmas trees and Easter bunnies and gave America a taste for pretzels, hot dogs, bratwursts and sauerkraut. They built big Lutheran churches wherever they went. Germans in Wisconsin launched America’s first kindergarten and set up Turnvereine, or gymnastics clubs, in Milwaukee, Cincinnati and other cities.

After a failed revolution in Germany in 1848, disillusioned revolutionaries decamped to America and spread progressive ideas. “Germanism, socialism and beer makes Milwaukee different,” says John Gurda, a historian. Milwaukee is the only big American city that had Socialist mayors for several decades, of whom two, Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, were of German stock. As in so many other countries where Germans have settled, they have dominated the brewing trade. Beer barons such as Jacob Best, Joseph Schlitz, Frederick Pabst and Frederick Miller made Milwaukee the kind of city that more or less had to call its baseball team the Brewers.

[LINK] "In Less Than Two Years, a Smartphone Could Be Your Only Computer"

I'm as dubious as many of the commenters about the thesis of Christina Bonnington's Wired article, if only because the power of a smartphone does not translate necessarily to usability. Then again, since I use desktops and tablets extensively for my own purposes, I would be dubious, wouldn't I?

With each passing season, another wave of mobile devices is released that’s more capable and more powerful than the generation preceding it. We’re at the point where anyone armed with a current model smartphone or tablet is able to handle almost all of their at-home—and even at-work—tasks without needing anything else. We’re living proof: for the last two years, WIRED has been able to cover events like CES almost exclusively using our smartphones.

Only a few years ago, this wasn’t the case. In 2011, the Motorola Atrix paired with a laptop dock for clunky, limited smartphone-based computer experience. It was a great idea, conceptually, but ahead of its time. The smartphones of 2011 and 2012 weren’t quite powerful enough to fulfill all of our computing demands.

But thanks to increased processing power, better battery life, vastly improved networking speeds, and larger screen sizes on mobile devices, the shift away from the desktop is accelerating.

“Will we always need a desktop? No, not all of us will,” says consumer trends industry expert and Kantar Worldwide’s chief researcher, Carolina Milanesi. “Some of us already don’t.”

Chipmaker ARM believes that with its new chips announced last week—a new Cortex-A72 processor and Mali-T880 GPU—we’ll be able to count on our smartphones to do all the tasks we currently need a computer to do. The company is so confident of this, it’s projecting a date when we can go phone-only: 2016. That leaves us roughly 23 months to make it happen. But most of us are already phone-first today, and given the current speed at which the industry is moving, we’ll be rounding that bend very soon.

[ISL] "How Two Small Rocks Stop Japan and South Korea Getting Along"

Bloomberg's Isabel Reynolds notes how the long-running dispute between Japan and South Korea over two islands in the waters which separate these countries stymies cooperation.

Once a source of fortune for Japanese fishermen hunting sea lions and abalone, a pair of remote rocks is stopping the U.S.’ two biggest allies in Asia from getting along.

The Sea of Japan rocks have been controlled by South Korea since 1954. None of the 1,200 fishermen on Okinoshima, the nearest inhabited Japanese island, have ever been there. While the territorial tensions can ebb and flow, a more nationalistic government in Tokyo and media reports highlighting the dispute have again brought Okinoshima into the public eye.

“It used to be that young people and the general public didn’t really care about Takeshima,” local resident Shoza Yawata, 86, told reporters in the village of Kumi on Okinoshima, 158 kilometers (98 miles) from the rocks known as Dokdo in Korean. “Recently, there has been a backlash against South Korea’s control,” he said. “As Japanese, our blood boils.”

The dispute over the islets and their fishing rights, plus South Korea’s lingering bitterness over the treatment of its women by Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II, prevents a warming in relations between two of Asia’s big economies. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who wants a more militarily-assertive Japan, has seen his calls for a summit with President Park Geun Hye shunned, leaving the U.S. a cheerleader on the sidelines urging better ties.

“Japan has zero chance of getting any Korean concession on the” rocks, said Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University in Japan.

[LINK] "The A to Z of the oil crash"

Jason Kirby of MacLean's introduces an A-to-Z encyclopedia of the consequences of the crash in oil prices on Alberta, and on Canada as a whole.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. In the months and years immediately after the end of the Great Recession, Canada’s economy was the envy of the world. Our banks were safer. Our house prices were higher (and rising!). Global investors couldn’t get enough of Canadian stocks. And people were lined up at Canadian job fairs across Europe and the U.S., hoping for a chance to come and experience Canada’s economic exceptionalism for themselves. Good times.

Good times, it’s now clear, that were too good to last. The speed with which the cracks in Canada’s economy have spread and broken apart is remarkable. Economists have been left scrambling to downgrade their forecasts for GDP growth, the job market has showed troubling signs of deterioration, and exports have continued to slide. When the Bank of Canada cut its overnight lending rate by 25 basis points to 0.75 per cent last week, a move that stunned markets, it was a tacit admission of how bad the outlook for Canada’s economy has become.

There are many reasons why this is happening now, but the key factor that has set everything else in motion is the stunning 60 per cent plunge in the price of oil in just seven months. The oil crash is—to borrow a phrase from Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz, which may become a signature of his tenure—“unambiguously negative” for the Canadian economy.

True, there are benefits for certain segments of the economy. Ontario exports are smiling, as are drivers at the gas pumps. But oil’s wild ride has exposed fissures that have been deepening for years, such as Canada’s overreliance on household debt and real estate for growth, as well as imbalances in trade and the labour market.

The factors driving down the price of oil are complex, as are the repercussions, some of which are being felt now. Some may only take recognizable shape years from now.