Photo by Joe Carducci
From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…
Anne Applebaum in the Spectator on Russia's new dissidents:
"Though the Putinist regime is sometimes mistakenly called ‘Stalinist’, it has never been a true totalitarian regime. Its borders and its satellite channels are open, its internet is ineffectively policed and it has always tolerated some limited dissent. Although most Russian television stations are controlled one way or another by the Kremlin, a few newspapers have always been allowed to publish critical articles, so long as their circulations remain low. Alexander Lebedev, owner of the crusading Novaya Gazeta of Moscow (as well as the Independent and the London Evening Standard in this country) reckons the authorities allow his newspaper to function simply because they themselves want something decent to read. ‘They want to know what’s going on too,’ he once told me."
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David Patrikarakos in the New Statesman on Hezbollah's "state within a state" in Lebanon:
"Yet despite Hezbollah's steadfastness, the Arab spring - which had initially turned events in its favour - has proved problematic. Nasrallah's loud rejoicing as pro-US dictators toppled across the region turned to a more voluble and noticeable silence when the revolution hit Syria. Hezbollah has no choice but to stand by its patron Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, and if Syria falls then so does its main source of funding and support. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's other big backer, Iran, faces increasing international isolation over its nuclear programme. Perhaps most importantly, a party that derives legitimacy from fighting oppression cannot sustain its image while supporting a regime that murders its own people for the crime of wanting more freedom. The Israeli flags that once burned in Damascus have, for the time being, been replaced with those of Hezbollah."
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Nick Cohen reviews Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and The Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank:
"There are two reasons, apart from his dazzling style, why Frank is one of the best leftwing writers America has produced. He comes from the midwest and there is a solidity behind his work that one associates with the sturdiness of the American heartlands. He regarded the culture wars as distractions from old-style, populist economic arguments against the power and pelf of the plutocracy. (And who can now deny that events have proved him right?) Second, although he wears his learning lightly, Frank always puts in the legwork. He has trudged round the Tea Party rallies and reports that what liberals like to think about the Republican right misses the point.
It is not a racist movement, reacting against the election of America's first black president. Leftish journalists may seize on the odd Ku Klux Klannish comment from "birthers", but the language of the Tea Party as a whole is politically correct. Indeed, it refuted the racism charge when it briefly decided that its favourite for the Republic presidential nomination was one Herman Cain, a grasping and, allegedly, groping executive from the pizza trade, who was far "blacker" than Obama. Nor do the obsessions with abortion and gay marriage of the old Christian conservatives move it.
The new Republicans are utopians, who reacted to a crisis of capitalism by arguing that the fault the calamity revealed was not that America was too capitalist but that it was not capitalist enough."
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Bob Nickas's review of Everything is an Afterthought at Vice.com almost reads more like a gratuitous assualt on Patti Smith's ego..... but who's complaining.
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Cathi Unsworth reviews three novels at 3am Magazine chronicling early 60s pre-Mod London Bohemia
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David Flusfeder recalls the heyday of the art-house cinema, when projectionists could attack the punters with impunity.
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Pat Kirkham unravels Saul Bass's contribution to Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho:
"Hitchcock was widely known to give credit parsimoniously, a trait that went back to his work in silent movies but became more exaggerated dating from the early-to-mid-1960s. After Psycho, Hitchcock “seemed to harden his heart increasingly toward others associated with his continuing popularity,” and did so increasingly as his own popularity and film box office appeal waned. For example, Joseph Stefano, who wrote the Psycho screenplay, recalled, “Hitchcock never mentioned writers in any of his interviews. It was always his picture." This attitude is one of the contexts within which Hitchcock’s collaboration with Bass should be considered. It helps one better comprehend why Hitchcock hired one of the leading graphic designers in the world, a man he admired for making strong visual images, and paid him a large sum of money out of his own pocket for the work (Hitchcock had to put up the money for the production because studio funding was not available), only to find it difficult to give due credit a mere six years later."
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Matthieu O'Neill's guided tour of his Situationist library.
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Jason Heller's SST Primer for the AV Club
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Henry Rollins reveals to Nardwuar (frrom 10:52 onwards) that Chuck Dukowski invited him to get involved with Black Face, write new songs etc but he "doesn't see the point of going out and doing any more music".
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Ted Dahlin interviews Kenny ‘Stinker’ Gordon of Pure Hell at Louder Than War
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Brad Cohen in the Village Voice on mythical proto-No Wavers Jack Ruby.
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Somebody has just posted a decent transfer of Search & Destroy's maga-film, Louder, Faster, Shorter, featuring Avengers, Sleepers, Dils, UXA, Mutants.
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And here's the oral history of Crime which originally appeared in Ugly Things.
Drawing by James Fotopoulos
From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…
Japantimes.co.jp: "Seabed with 13th century Mongol shipwreck may become historic site":“The failure of the two attacks launched by Mongol leader Kublai Khan (1215-1294) against Japan, with battles fought in northern Kyushu, is often attributed here to "kamikaze," or divine winds that destroyed much of the Mongol fleets. The waters around Takashima Island are known for to hold a number of wrecks scattered over a wide area. In October, a research team of the University of the Ryukyus said it had found a wreck with much of the hull still intact, including a 12-meter-long section of the keel. It was the first shipwreck linked to the invasion attempts found with a mostly intact hull, the team said.
"I believe we will be able to understand more about shipbuilding skills at the time as well as the actual situation of exchanges in East Asia," University of the Ryukyus professor Yoshifumi Ikeda told reporters in October.”
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June Tsai at Taiwantoday.tw, "Paiwan aborigines and Okinawans meet to close old wounds":
“In 1871, a ship from the Miyako Islands of the Ryukyu Kingdom, modern-day Okinawa, encountered a severe typhoon on its return from a tributary trip to the kingdom’s capital, Shuri, and ran aground on the eastern side of the Hengchun Peninsula at the southernmost tip of Taiwan. Three crewmen drowned in the shipwreck, but 66 survivors made it ashore and stumbled into the territory of the aboriginal Paiwan in today’s Mudan Village, Pingtung County. Although initial contact was peaceful, in the end 54 of the Okinawans were beheaded. On the basis of this episode, along with similar subsequent events, Japan deployed troops to Taiwan and invaded Paiwan settlements in 1874.”
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Phred Dvorak & Takashi Nakamichi in WSJ, "End of Era for Japan’s Exports":
“The Japanese government is expected to announce Wednesday that the country recorded its first annual trade deficit since 1980. If the yen remains strong and global demand weak, economists warn that Japan could run trade deficits for years to come. The startling change is partly a result of one-time factors like the disastrous earthquake and tsunami last March, which destroyed factories, crippled supply chains and idled many of the country's nuclear reactors. But the quake seems to have accelerated trends—like a decline in corporate competitiveness—that have been bubbling under the surface for years as the export superpower slowly transforms into a nation of pensioners.”
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Ben Bland in FT, "Vietnam’s manufacturing success under pressure from wildcat strikes":
“An emphasis on breakneck growth and the channeling of cheap credit and resources to wasteful state-owned companies has also left Vietnam with persistently high inflation, which threatens to undermine the country’s appeal to manufacturers. There were 857 strikes in the first 11 months of 2011, when annual inflation averaged over 18 per cent, according to government figures released to state media. That is more than double the number of strikes in 2010 and more than in 2008, the previous record year for strikes, when inflation peaked at 28 per cent.”
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Minxin Pei in FT, "Remembering Deng in our crony-compitalist era":
“As China marks the 20th anniversary of Deng’s history-changing tour, the most ironic fact - and perhaps China’s worst-kept secret - is that pro-market economic reform in China has been dead for some time. Evidence of the demise of economic reform is easy to spot. The Chinese state has reasserted its control over the economy. Big state-owned enterprises dominate nearly all the critical sectors, such as banking, finance, transport, energy, natural resources and heavy industry. The private sector, a victim of persistent official discrimination, is in full retreat.”
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Tom Peter in CSM, "China wins $700 million Afghan oil and gas deal":
“The United States and other Western nations that have borne the brunt of the cost of the Afghan war have been conspicuously absent from the bidding process on Afghanistan’s mineral deposits, leaving it to mostly to regional powers. India is the only other nation to make a significant agreement to access Afghan minerals. In November, it won a bid granting Indian firms access to 1.8 billion metric tons of iron-ore, one of the largest untapped deposits in Asia. US benefits? While the US may not seek financial gains from Afghan minerals, it’s likely to reap political benefits from the creation of a more stable, less aid-dependent economy that could reduce the burden of America’s long-term commitments in Afghanistan. It also sidesteps many Afghans’ suspicion that the US is here to steal the country’s resources.”
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Patrick Barta in WSJ, "Activist Worked With Military Regime":
“For years, Mr. Nay Win Maung argued the best way forward in Myanmar, also known as Burma, was to cooperate with the country's military junta, slowly prodding it toward changewhile accepting some of its flaws. A nonpracticing medical doctor whose parents were teachers at a Myanmar military academy, Mr. Nay Win Maung rose to prominence as a co-founder of Myanmar Egress, a civil-society organization set up in 2006 by local intellectuals hoping to end the long-running stalemate between the government and dissidents such as Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Those efforts were profiled in a page-one Wall Street Journal article in November 2010.”
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Jamil Anderlini in FT, "Beijing makes rebel leader head of local Communist party branch":
“Wukan has become a symbol of hope for party reformers who argue that political change is essential in China. ‘I hope that the Wukan incident can push society to establish a system that is based on democracy and rule of law,’ Hu Deping, son of Hu Yaobang, the former Communist party general secretary, wrote in a commentary posted on the internet. He noted that the central government had recognized representatives chosen by Wukan residents and hoped it would respond to future challenges in a similar manner.”
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Paul Berman in New Republic, "Democracy And The Human Heart: In Memory of Vaclav Havel":“Havel was always predicting that mankind was headed toward a colossal disaster. Another peculiarity: Havel drew a few thoughts from Heidegger and his followers. Heidegger spoke about something called capital-B Being, and Havel, too, spoke about Being. Heidegger held out a despairing hope for a new god, and Havel, too, speculated about a new god. Here was something to ponder. Heidegger and the Heideggerians regularly veered off the highway into the anti-democratic right or the antidemocratic left. Heidegger was a Nazi. Sartre, the French Heideggerian, had a soft spot for Stalin. What was there in Havel’s Heideggerian inspiration that was going to keep Havel, too, from running into a ditch? Or, if you granted Havel his reliable good sense, what was going to keep his flakier admirers on the straight and narrow? Didn’t we need a stronger emphasis on rational thinking, instead of a weaker one, as he seemed to argue? …Havel… judged that capital-B Being was one of those words that does not translate into English. He had discussed the matter with his English-language translator, Paul Wilson. A vexing matter. Anyway, his big point had to do with the limits of rationalism. People had embraced science and Marxism and all kinds of modern ideas in the belief that rational analyses were guiding their steps. But something other than rational analyses always turned out to be at work. We would do better to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. We should recognize that something stands above us, beyond our understanding. He granted that, in modern times, it has become unfashionable to speak about democracy in connection to anything above us or beyond our understanding.”
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Gillian Tett in FT, "Hildebrand debacle is blow for Europe’s public bodies":
“In America it is common for individuals to move between the private and public sector worlds; once an individual has made millions on Wall Street, say, many choose to ‘give something back’ via public service. That is commendable, in many ways, and there are well-defined legal and cultural rules. When Jon Corzine, former head of Goldman Sachs, became a senator, for example, his assets were managed by a third party…. Europe however, is different: career silos are deeply entrenched. Senior bureaucrats typically spend their entire lives in the state sector, politicians inhabit a narrowly political world, and financiers are another caste altogether.”
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Soner Cagaptay in NYT, "The Empires Strike Back":
“Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, France and Turkey have competed for dominance in the Middle East. France’s rise as a Mediterranean power has been an inverse function of Turkish decline around the same sea. As the Ottoman Empire gradually collapsed, France acquired Algeria, Tunisia and, temporarily, Egypt. The French took one final bite from the dying empire by securing control over Syria and Lebanon after World War I. This rivalry subsided in the 20th century, when Turkey became an inward-looking nation state. During the era of decolonization, France lost political control of lands extending from Morocco in the west to Syria in the east. Paris, however, maintained economic and political clout in the region by supporting large French businesses, which established lucrative ties with the region’s rulers. Even Turkey once looked to France as a model: when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923, he championed the French model of hard secularism, which stipulates freedom from religion in government, politics and education. While France has dominated much of the region over the past two centuries, that is now changing.”
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Daniel Pipes at Meforum.org, "South Sudan, Israel’s New Ally":
“Starting in the mid-1990s, John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International redeemed tens of thousands of slaves in Sudan while Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group led a "Sudan Campaign" in the United States that brought together a wide coalition of organizations. As all Americans abhor slavery, the abolitionists formed a unique alliance of Left and Right, including Barney Frank and Sam Brownback, the Congressional Black Caucus and Pat Robertson, black pastors and white Evangelicals. In contrast, Louis Farrakhan was exposed and embarrassed by his attempts to deny slavery's existence in Sudan. The abolitionist effort culminated in 2005 when the George W. Bush administration pressured Khartoum in 2005 to sign the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war and gave southerners a chance to vote for independence. They enthusiastically did so in January 2011, when 98 percent voted for secession from Sudan, leading to the formation of the Republic of South Sudan six months later, an event hailed by Mr. Peres as "a milestone in the history of the Middle East.".”
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Daron Acemoglu at Hoover.org, "Why Do Nations Fail?":
“What I mean by that is, it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense. If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations. So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences.”
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Ajit Kumar Singh at Satp.org, "Bangladesh: Failed Coup":“Though it will take time to unravel all the facts, the revelation that at least two plotters have already admitted their links with the banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HuT, ‘Party of Liberation’) has once again brought focus on Islamist fundamentalist groups that continue to maintain their strong presence in the country’s military establishment. Indeed, on January 8, 2012, HuT had circulated provocative leaflets, based on the fugitive Major Zia's internet message, throughout the country. Zia had sent out two e-mails containing imaginary and highly controversial contents, styled “Mid-level Officers of Bangladesh Army are Bringing down Changes Soon (sic)”. The Bangladesh Security Forces (SFs) on January 20, 2012, arrested another five HuT cadres in connection with the failed coup attempt. This is the second attempt military revolt by hardliners under the Hasina Government since it came to power after the elections of December 2008. On February 25 and 26, 2009, shortly after the Government took charge, members of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), since renamed the Bangladesh Border Guards, staged a mutiny against their commanding officers, killing more than 74 persons, including 52 officers, SF personnel and six civilians, including the Director General of the BDR and his wife. The mutineers, backed by the Islamists, wanted to create a rift between the Hasina Government and the military, in order to overthrow the civilian Government. They failed in the face of an effective and concerted response by the military top brass.”
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Marc Engelhardt at Qantara.de, "The Radical Seed of Boko Haram"“The terrorist movement sprung from a deep-rooted aversion to western influence and 're-education', which stretches back to the colonisation of the highly traditional Sokoto caliphate in the early 20th century. The "Taliban" of Nigeria's trail of terror: A suicide attack on a UN office in Abuja on 26 August 2011 left 16 people dead To this day, many inhabitants of the region do not send their children to state schools which they believe to be hostile to tradition – and they refuse for example to have their children immunised against polio, because they suspect that the immunisation programme is part of a western conspiracy. Influenced by this, the Imam Mohammed Yusuf founded 'Boko Haram' in 2002, a religious movement that built among other things a mosque and a school on its premises. Although the sect did not initially attract attention, Yusuf pursued one goal from the outset: the establishment of a theocracy. Former pupils report that they had been educated to become Jihadists right from the start.”
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Soeren Kern at Europenews.dk, "“Andalusia Spring” Reclaiming “Occupied” Spain for Islam":
“This trend is not a new: the first babies born in Spain in 2005, 2009 and 2011 were all born to Muslim parents. Since 1990, the Muslim population in Spain has risen from just 100,000 to an estimated 1.3 million in 2011. At the same time, native Spaniards are leaving Spain in droves. The economic crisis in Spain – nearly one in four Spaniards (five million in all) are unemployed – is spurring a mass exodus of native Spaniards, who are looking for work in other countries, such as Britain, Germany and the United States.
Demographers estimate that more than 150,000 native Spaniards left Spain in 2011, on top of 128,655 who left in 2010 and 102,432 who left in 2009. A total of 1.7 million Spaniards are now living abroad. With the economic turmoil set to intensify in 2012, emigration from Spain is expected to increase even further. Islamists are also stepping up calls for an "Andalusia Spring" to reclaim "occupied" Spain for Islam, in the same way they believe they have the right to reclaim all of present day Israel, which had once been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.”
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Jan Wojcik at Europenews.dk, "Totalitarianism of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi’s Islamic utopia":
“It can be in the mainstream media news he supports democracy in Egypt or Tunisia, or in calls for democratic participation directed to European Muslims by leaders of their communities who follow al-Qaradawi’s spiritual leadership. But the way al-Qaradawi perceives the ideal of society himself is rather different to what an ordinary person would associate with democracy. His views were published in November on onislam.net under the title "Islam and the Society the World Craves” summarizing the last chapter of his book "Islam the Future Civilization”. Al-Qaradawi’s paraphrases of Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan "Islam is the solution” alone should be warning signals for all commentators who consider him democratic. "Islam is the only system which offers humanity a completely balanced and integrated system (…)” – he says. Further description of al-Qaradawi’s vision of the ideal state explains why professor of political science Bassam Tibi considers Islamist parties to be totalitarian movements: "What is meant by integration is that Islam integrates sciences and faith, truth and power, creed and activity, religion with the state, instruction and legislation, religious scruples and the duties of rulers, material creativity and moral loftiness, and military power and morale.”
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David P. Goldman briefing summary at Meforum.org, "Islamic Civilization is Dying":
“Rather than focus on Islamism and its conflict with modernity as chief culprit for this instability, Mr. Goldman pointed to the massive decline in Muslim birthrates attending the growing education of women. Iranian women, for example, used to bear 7 children on average; now the rate has fallen to 1.5, with the most highly educated subgroup approaching a fertility rate of 1.0. Such an inverted population pyramid means that fewer and fewer young people will be forced to support a growing but aging populace. This is not some pipe dream of Western demographers; President Ahmadinejad himself has called the decision by Iranian youth not to have children an act of genocide against the Iranian nation. Turkey, which also boasts a high literacy rate, including among its women, has seen the fertility rate among ethnic Turks declining to 1.5 children per woman. At the same time, Turkey's restive Kurdish population is now some 20% of the citizenry, with Kurdish women averaging 4.5 children. If this trend continues, and there seems to be no reason it will not, the inverting Turkish population pyramid will be overwhelmed by the "normal" Kurdish one, in essence creating a Kurdistan within the borders of Turkey, a situation fraught with the potential for intensified conflict. The population decline of these two Muslim countries is to be contrasted with Egypt with its 45% illiteracy rate, and where two thirds of the population lives in rural areas relatively untouched by education or opportunities for women.”
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A. Millar at Europenews.dk, "“Clash of Civilizations”: Spiritual, Not Intellectual":
“Deploying ideas like soldiers in which the generals do not believe, the "Counter-Jihad” and anti-Islamist pundits have reduced themselves to Sunday intellectuals. A speech by any "Counter-Jihad” spokesperson or anti-Islamist media pundit is liable to denounce the increasing liberalism and "Cultural Marxism” of the West as a symptom of the rot, and to suggest that they are fighting for a more conservative Christian West, before going on to tell us that we are also fighting for liberal ideas, such as women’s rights and gay rights.
Such speeches will only ever appeal to the converted – "sensible people” who are able to shut out one half of the message to find support for their gut instincts. Contrast this with the radical imam, who calls for full sharia in the West, and who speaks with passion and conviction, regardless of what anyone thinks. The imam knows what the West does not, i.e., that it is about the fire in the belly and in the eyes. It is first and foremost about integrity, conviction, and spirit.”
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Mahathir Mohamad in FT, "The west needs to go back to the capitalist basics":
“For most of the past two centuries, capitalism has had a clear narrative for Europe. For a long while Europe’s manufactured products lined the shelves of the world’s markets. They dominated world trade and business. Their people enjoyed the highest standards of living. This increase in European growth and wealth would have gone on indefinitely. But after the second world war Japan industrialized and produced cheaper yet good quality goods. Then Taiwan, South Korea and China got in on the act. Rapidly, the Europeans lost their markets. Unable to compete, the Europeans and particularly the Americans opted for the financial markets. Inventing new financial products such as short selling of shares and currencies, subprime lending, securitisation, leveraged investments through hedge funds and a multitude of others, they apparently continued to grow and prosper. But the finance market spins off no real businesses, created hardly any jobs and gave rise to no trade.”
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Gillian Tett in FT, "Ties between sovereigns and banks set to tighten further":
“Welcome to the key theme of 2012. During the past four decades, it was widely assumed in the western world that the main role of banks and asset managers was to provide funding to the private sector, rather than act as a piggybank for the state. But now, that assumption - like so many other ideas that dominated before 2007 - is quietly crumbling. And not just in Japan.”
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Gautam Naik in WSJ, "How Microbes Teamed to Clean Gulf"
“Given the enormity of the spill, many scientists predicted that a significant amount of the resulting chemical pollutants would likely persist in the region's waterways for years.
According to a new federally funded study published Monday by the National Academy of Sciences, those scientists were wrong. By the end of September 2010, the vast underwater plume of methane, plus other gases, had all but disappeared. By the end of October, a significant amount of the underwater offshore oil—a complex substance made from thousands of compounds—had vanished as well.”
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Matthew Wald in NYT, "A Fine for Not Using Biofuel That Doesn’t Exist":
“Even advocates of renewable fuel acknowledge that the refiners are at least partly correct in complaining about the penalties. “From a taxpayer/consumer standpoint, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense that we would require blenders to pay fines or fees or whatever for stuff that literally isn’t available,” said Dennis V. McGinn, a retired vice admiral who serves on the American Council on Renewable Energy.
The standards for cellulosic fuel are part of an overall goal of having 36 billion gallons of biofuels incorporated annually by 2022. But substantial technical progress would be needed to meet that — and lately it has been hard to come by.”
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A.G. Sulzberger in NYT, "Kerrey Weighs Return To Nebraska and Senate":
“More than 40 percent of former senators now live outside their home states, according to the Senate Historical Office, most in the Washington area. Such relocations are particularly jarring here in the Midwest, where leaders have long worked to stop the outflow of promising young residents and dispel the notion that opportunity is in short supply locally. Undermining that official line is the fact that the politicians pledging to stop the outflow often move out as well. In Iowa and Indiana, two states that have wrestled with brain drain, all six living former senators live out of state, according to the Senate Historical Office. In Michigan, the only state to lose population in the last census, the governor made what she called a temporary move to California to teach after her term ended last year. And in Kansas not only did the political icon Bob Dole not return after leaving the Senate but five recent former governors left the state — though two have returned — either to serve in the federal government or take jobs in the private sector.”
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Andrew Biggs & Jason Richwine in WSJ, "Why Public Pensions Are So Rich":
“A case in point is the Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS), which insists that, because Illinois teachers don’t participate in Social Security, the average teacher’s pension of almost $43,000 ‘cannot qualify as ‘too generous.’’ One might assume from such a statement that the typical Illinois teacher who retires this year after a full career will collect $43,000 per year. Not so. That average figure reflects the pension of employees who retired years or decades ago, as well as individuals who worked only part of their careers in public schools. The 2010 annual report for the TRS actually shows that the average teacher who retires today after 30 or 34 years of service had final earnings of $84,466 and collects a pension of $60,756 a year, plus annual cost-of-living adjustments, providing an income higher than 95% of retirees in Illinois.”
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Jason Zweig in WSJ, "Are Pension Forecasts Way Too Sunny?":
“If you were a better stock picker than Warren Buffett, would you be punching the clock every day as the faceless manager of a corporate pension plan? Judging by many companies' recent financial statements, they must believe their pension plans are run by such unheralded baby Buffetts. These expectations for future stock returns at major companies remain stubbornly high—often between 12% and 16%, or nearly twice what Mr. Buffett himself seems to believe the pension plan he oversees can earn on stocks. Such rosy hopes may not survive the collision with reality.”
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James Grant in Washington Post, "How austerity cured a depression":
“Now compare this with the first full year of recovery from the ugly depression of 1920-21. In 1922, under the unsung stewardship of the president best remembered for his underlings’ scandals and his own early death in office, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared. And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, produce these astonishing results? Why, by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget. Let 21st-century economists rub their eyes in disbelief. Eighteen months after the depression started, it ended.”
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David Brooks in NYT, "Where Are The Liberals?":
“This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money. Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers. Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center. Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.
You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.”
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Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, "Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies"“Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil. As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.”
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Michael Kinsley at Bloomberg.com, "About Rising Inflation, Please Remain Worried"
“Barring a miracle, there will be a fierce storm of inflation sometime in the next few years and it will wipe out a big chunk of the national debt, along with the debts of individual citizens, and the savings of others. One reason I say this is that the arguments on the other side have shifted. It used to be, “It’s not gonna happen -- so don’t worry about it.” Now it’s, “You know, a moderate dose of inflation would be no bad thing. So don’t worry about it.” Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University, is the leading spokesman for this view. He wrote in August that he would like “a sustained burst of moderate inflation, say, 4 percent to 6 percent for several years.” Five years of 5 percent inflation would reduce the value of debts by 27 percent -- if, that is, it could be sprung on people as a surprise. (And people like Paul Krugman are doing their best to make it a surprise.) If the government were to announce in advance its plan to take away from lenders a quarter of the value of their loans, they would stop lending or they would demand enough interest to cancel the loss, thereby defeating the government’s purpose of reducing the debt.”
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CT: "How they failed you"
“Gov. Pat Quinn antiseptically refers to his fellow Democrats' vote that night on the "revenue bill." Much as he refers to the new borrowing he proposes as "restructuring." One year later, though, stand back with us and look at all their carnage:
• Earlier this month, Moody's Investors Service cited "weak management practices" when it awarded Illinois the nation's lowest credit rating. Standard & Poor's added insult to injury: "If Illinois does not make meaningful changes to further align revenue and spending and address its accumulated deficit (accounts payable and general fund liabilities) for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, we could lower the rating this year. … A downgrade could also be triggered if pension funding levels continue to deteriorate or debt levels increase significantly …"
• As David Vaught unwittingly attests, lawmakers continue to spend too much of other people's money. Quinn's office now expects this fiscal year's supposedly balanced budget to finish $507 million in the red. That's right, even with $7 billion a year in new revenue from their tax hikes, this crowd still can't balance a budget.
• Let alone pay those old bills. A new report from Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka carries the headline, "Backlog persists despite new revenue." Deadbeat Illinois owes some $8.5 billion in old bills, tax refunds, employee health insurance and interfund borrowing debts. That's roughly one-fourth of the state's spending this year from its general funds.”
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John Kay in FT, "When capitalism and corporate self-interest collide"
“Elephants can dance, but rarely well. Exxon did, bizarrely, diversify into small computers. Personal computers, and the graphical user interface that enabled them to become ubiquitous, were pioneered at Xerox Parc. But these ventures did not succeed commercially. The established firms more often responds by using its market and political power to resist change. The tactic failed for music publishers, but does not always fail: see how state-supported dinosaurs have tightened their control of the banking system, or observe that the cars we drive have change donly incrementally in a century. The internet came about because the technology emerged in a brief interval in which US telecom deregulation had broken up AT&T and before changes in policy allowed three regionally dominant operators to regain dominance.”
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Dana Mattioli in WSJ, "As Kodak Fades, Rochester Develops Other Businesses"
“Alex Zapesochny, co-founder of Rochester-based medical start-up iCardiac Technologies Inc., says area residents ignored his booth at job fairs as recently as 2006. ‘They worked at large companies, and it made them risk averse,’ he says. Now, the company which measures cardiac side effects of prescription drugs, has grown to 50 employees and receives a steady stream of resumes during these times of high unemployment nationwide, many from current and former Kodak employees.”
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Andy Newman in NYT, "U.S. Takeover of Central Park? Alaska’s Idea"
“The resolution notes that before Henry Hudson arrived in 1609, Manhattan was ”a remarkably diverse and natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields,” marshes, beaches, ponds and streams that supported populations of gray wolf, elk, black bear and mountain lion. Since then, the measure says, “the unrestrained development of buildings, highways and urban sprawl on Manhattan has destroyed habitat, displaced indigenous peoples and disrupted” ecosystems.”
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Frank Furedi at Spiked-online.com, "The year when the word ‘progressive’ lost all its meaning"
“In recent years, the zombie version of progressivism has become closely linked with the idea of ‘social justice’. Social justice can be defined in many different ways, but in essence it expresses a worldview committed to avoiding uncertainty and risky change through demanding that the state provides us with economic and existential security. From this standpoint, progress is proportional to the expansion of legal and quasi-legal oversight into everyday life. From the perspective of those who demand social justice, the proliferation of ‘rights’ and redistribution of wealth are the main markers of a progressive society. Paradoxically, the idea of social justice was historically associated with movements that were suspicious of and uncomfortable with progress. The term was coined by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in 1840. His aim was to reconstitute theological ideals on a social foundation.”
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Alexander Star in NYT on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book, American Nietzsche“From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled. His hatred of Christian asceticism, middle-class sentimentality and democratic uplift was an assault on 19th-century America’s apparently most salient characteristics. For that very reason, he attracted young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past; and it’s the achievement of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “American Nietzsche” to show how that is the case. Though Nietzsche loathed the left, he was loved by it. As Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, the anarchists and “romantic radicals” as well as the “literary cosmopolitans of varying political persuasions” who welcomed him to America believed they had found the perfect manifestation of Emerson’s Poet, for whom a thought is “alive, . . . like the spirit of a plant or an animal.” To read Nietzsche was to overcome an entire civilization’s inhibiting divide between thinking and feeling. Isadora Duncan said he “ravished my being,” while both Jack London and Eugene O’Neill saw him as their Christ. Emma Goldman ended her romance with the Austrian anarchist Ed Brady because he didn’t appreciate the great author who had taken her to ‘undreamed-of heights.’”
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Susan Cain in NYT, "The Rise of the New Groupthink"
“In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.” And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010. Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning.”
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Caitlin Flanagan in NYT, "Hysteria and the Teenage Girl"
“Hysteria is the most retrograde and non-womyn-empowering condition. It’s not supposed to happen anymore (we have Title IX!), but it won’t seem to go away. Both history and myth are filled with stories of girls exhibiting bizarre symptoms around the time of puberty — from Cassandra and her raving, to the girls of the Salem witch trials, to the girls whose households were believed to be the site of poltergeist hauntings, to cheerleaders in New York and North Carolina. Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.
What no one has been able to determine is why this is so, why it is the cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down with tics and stuttering. Female adolescence is — universally — an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger.”
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Alan Licht at Vampireblues.net, "10 Films"
“Leaving aside the classics (Woodstock, The Kids Are Alright, Rust Never Sleeps, Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop, Performance, Cocksucker Blues, This Is Spinal Tap, The Last Waltz), here are 10 (or so) great music films to check out: Two Lane Blacktop (1971)–not a music film per se, although it stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson–but I always think of this laconic road movie as kind of a tour film without the concerts…and the look and attitude of Taylor and Wilson’s characters anticipates the blank generation punk vibe too…”
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Lee Hancock in NYT, "Day-Glo Meets Cowboys in Father-Son Art Show":
“The idea for the father-son show came in August, when Gary visited for a high school reunion. Pam Elliott, whose husband was a few years behind him, mentioned opening an art gallery downtown. She jokingly asked if Gary might show his work. He proposed a Christmas show. Mel offered his art, and Gary promised to bring as many paintings as he could fit in his carry-on luggage when he, his wife and their daughter flew down for the holidays. On the night after Christmas, the cartoonist and his white-haired father warmly greeted childhood pals, coffee-drinking buddies and church friends who flocked to the cozy art space. Gary, low-key in Wranglers, a black T-shirt and a sweater, reminisced about playing trumpet in the high school band with Phil Sartin, a local resident. He hugged a classmate, Sue Payne, who watched him draw his way through elementary school and recalled him “always doing dinosaurs.” He smiled when his high school art teacher, Lillian Thompson, recounted his struggles with a geometric art project. And when someone asked for an autograph on a Jimbo comic book, Gary sat down and drew a cartoon.”
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George Vecsey interview at wplucey.com:
“It is pretty well known that Pete and I do not share much these days. Probably, back a few decades, he offered more to me than I could offer to him - he introduced me to basketball people he knew - Walton, Bird, Erving, and some rogues he knew. He is very generous that way. Pete's mentor was our father, George Vecsey, a career sports writer and copy editor, and Guild organizer. (Our mom, May Spencer Vecsey, was also a Guild organizer in 1938....) My father had a lot of contact with Pete, getting him some early jobs in the business, and constantly advising him and teaching him. My father broke in a lot of people. Pete is a tribute to himself, but also to our dad. I should add, we have one sister who is a retired prep school headmaster, and another who was an official at that prep school in Georgia, and our youngest sibling, Christopher Vecsey, is a professor and author at Colgate - "the educated one," our mother called him.”
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DB’s taken his Sticker Archive on the road.
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Brad Cohan at villagevoice.com, Q&A: Scarcity of Tanks’ Matt Wascovich
“And Toothless Grin with Brewer, Byron Coley, Chris Grier (Ultimate VAG), Pete Mazich (Secondmen), Thurston Moore, Rawl Morales (Killer Dreamer/ Missingmen), Petkovic, Jerry Trebotic (Secondmen), Tom Watson and Watt? That's an insane band.
We started this group a few years ago. It's slow going with so many guys in it and us being spread out across the U.S. Watt has to mix all our parts and he's doing a great job. Who knows when [an album] will be done or come out? As of right now, it's about halfway recorded. It's pretty cool sounding, and it's a synthesis of all our different musical points of view.”
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Kevin Friedman at Oregonlive.com, "Rock critic Richard Meltzer and punk bassist Mike Watt collaborate on project":
“While Meltzer has long held a reputation as an enfant terrible of letters, his words here, while often X-rated and read with the deadpan delivery of a Staten Island wiseguy, just as frequently invoke a sense of brokenhearted sadness -- owing to lost love and the world's unflagging gravitational pull. "My heart is a lump of lard in my throat. Back off. The Heimlich maneuver will kill me. Have I ever suffered like this?" he says in "Lard." In "Bottomless." he reads, "Remembering your smile, I fall into that bottomless pit. That is ... is it heaven? Or just your tarantula-occupied psyche?" There are musings on mortality from a man who knows that most of his life is behind him, as are the dreams of youth. "All we get from life is dashed hopes, mangled and bungled dreams," he says in "Life." "I've been writing for 45 years and whatever I expected to accomplish, I've certainly accomplished a lot less," he says. "I'm contented with the realization that it doesn't get better, but I'm glad that it wasn't worse. "“
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Kearney Barton appreciation at Lightintheattic.net:
“To say Kearney was a pioneer of the Northwest sound would be a massive understatement. Maybe he was the inventor? Whatever the tag, we miss the man. He taught us about the Frantics, the Sonics, Little Bill, Don & The Good Times, and so many more, but the one that really blew our minds was Black On White Affair’s “Bold Soul Sister, Bold Soul Brother,” recorded by Kearney in February ’70 and released on his Topaz label. It’s the tune that led me to Kearney’s doorstep in 2003, hoping to convince the wizard to let us license the single for inclusion on a comp of Seattle soul from back in the day.”
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Rick Coraccio in Kapital Ink, "DMZ: My Legend Is Bigger Than Your Legend"“Those were the conditions in which we recorded our first album. Not surprisingly, it was a commercial failure. We were all hoping to get a chance to do another recording under better circumstances but it was not to be and we were eventually dropped from Sire. Some say the producers, Flo and Eddie, are responsible. It’s the comment I hear the most. Others argue that the record label whould have done more and given us a second album like they did the Dead Boys, who were signed about the same time as DMZ.”
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“From the Pen Of…”, Anthology Film Archives:
“Feb 24: John Sayles in conversation with Alan Licht and Andrew Lampert at Anthology Film Archives, following the 7:30 screening of Bill Forsyth's "Breaking In" (1989) This is the kick-off of "From the Pen Of..." an ongoing series I've been working on with the programmers at Anthology which will highlight the work of screenwriters, focusing on the 60s & 70s. Anthology will be showing a number of films Sayles scripted early in his career for Roger Corman and others as well as a few films that Sayles has selected from the era whose screenplays impressed him upon release.”
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JJ Koczan at Theaquarian.com, "Barry Richards TV Collection Vol. 1: Turn-On, Groove-In, Rock Out!"“Since it’s local access footage from the ‘70s, some of the material is pretty raw, but Brown, who remastered the video himself, did an excellent job, and even the black and white clips of Crow and The Illusion have a certain charm. Likewise, one can’t help but feel like they’re watching a historical document as Muddy Waters nails “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “Got My Mojo Workin’,” which is some of the clearest (and scruffiest on Richards’ part) video of all, shot in 1973. The DVD has all kinds of bonus footage, from still galleries and interviews to the then-Vegas performer Iron Jaw Samson opening a Pepsi can with his teeth and eating a light bulb (even more disturbing than Alice Cooper), liner notes from Joe Hasselvander of Death Row and Raven, who was a fan at the time, and the CD plays out like a résumé of Richards’ radio career, boasting interviews with The Beatles, Little Richard, Dr. John and live takes from Ace Trucking Company, Emitt Rhodes, and more. It’s a classic and heavy rock treasure trove that has to be seen and heard to be believed—and for those of us mucking our way about the seedy underbelly of the music industry, an utter inspiration. Here’s looking forward to Vol. 2.”
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Ron Hart at Blurt-online.com, "Yes New York! Mars"“Presumably, the music from the majority of the five-day May bacchanal of caustic expressionism exists only in the minds of those who were there. Except, that is, for the group Mars, who closed out the fest on Saturday, May 6th, alongside the Lydia Lunch-led Teenage Jesus. A couple of guys in attendance for the two-set gig, sound man Perry Brandston and Lust/Unlust label chief Charles Ball in particular, came equipped with devices to capture their friends in action: Brandston utilizing a Nakamichi 550 Portable Cassette Recorder, and Ball brandishing a binaural dummy. And now, for the first time, both bootlegs have been officially made available for the first time ever courtesy of the Feeding Tube label with Mars: Live At Artists Space, a vinyl-only release produced by the Bull Tongue boys: avant critic supreme Byron Coley and guitar great Thurston Moore, whose band Sonic Youth owes more than a few Mother's and Father's Day cards to the men and women of Mars.”
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Illitch at Beta-lactam Ring Records
“Dieu has smiled upon us, for a previously shelved early album (1975) by Ilitch finally has its jour in the soleil. Thierry Müller's strange musical arc is further enriched and confounded by this exploratory cosmic release. A brilliant mix of Krauty space groans and experimentalism (see also Conrad Schnitzler and Ash Ra Temple, etc) and the progressive electronics of Igor Wakhevitch.”
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Thanks to Poynter.org, Futureofcapitalism.com, Mark Hoffman, Jan Roehlk, Archie Patterson.
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• The New Vulgate
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1. FINALLY!
ReplyDelete2. The Mars LP is great. I keep coming back to an essential early Rock-n-Roll feel that the group conjures in my perception i.e. Jerry Lee Lewis style insanity
3. Managed to find a copy of Vanished Kingdoms at Oakland Public Library, per one of your post last year. AWESOME book.
4. FINALLY!