a new low in topical enlightenment

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Issue #138 (Sept. 20, 2012)

East of Centennial Ridge, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci

















Photo by Nunzio Carducci



Notes on Convention
Joe Carducci


The dumbest thing about the Republican Convention was the Mitt Romney camp’s determination to eradicate the least reference to the Ron Paul candidacy. It was juvenile. The Paul votes weren’t announced by the dingbat at the podium during the roll call, and only the Nevada delegation managed to smuggle in a Ron Paul sign into the place and during their Paulist announcement of their votes C-SPAN cut suddenly to a wider shot so that a Romney sign could be seen as well. That Romney now trails Obama, given present economic conditions, is due this in-your-face delivered not just over the course of four days in Tampa, but from the beginning. We learned in August that, whattaya know, heretofore never-won-anything Ron Paul took Iowa last winter and was therefore the frontrunner at the start. The party structure does exist I guess as it managed to delay that explosion for over six months. The newsmedia barely noted this since they are never more Orwellian than during the horserace of a campaign. Even in the Republican Party only former RNC chair Michael Steele seemed to object.

The low points in each convention tellingly were faked voice-votes, each of which audibly called for a roll call tally of votes. The Republican facial vote involved a rules change to raise the bar the Ron Paul candidacy had met to one it had not met, so as to prevent his name being put forth from the floor. The Democratic facial blew up in Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa’s face. He had to ignore three votes and he seemed to stall, waiting for divine intervention or at least Bruce Springsteen to spare him from being the face of forcing the Israel plank back into the platform. My brother Mark was at the Republican Convention and the word from the Texas delegation was that the presumed vote result was visible on RNC chairman Reince Priebus’ teleprompter before the voice vote was taken. The L.A.’s mayor’s problem seemed to be there was nothing on his teleprompter, but I think he could see his national ambitions go up in smoke.

The old political conventions were confabs of pols and ghost-payrollers who voted as they were told by the party bosses of their state, city, or county. They often voted first for some also-ran favorite son, so as to drive up the cost of their votes as the contending candidates bid for delegates over the course of the next rounds of voting until the nomination was secured. These were real conventions where nobody knew nothing and you could hardly see through the smoke to know what a-hole from which of the fifty hellholes was in your way. That was something television had to cover! As radio had done. And the newspapermen were the only bipeds more cynical than the bosses. Television though is a pandering magic mirror, someone once wrote, and of course pandering is a crime. Or it was before Television had its way with our standards.

After the 1968 Democratic Convention everything changed. The TV networks brought in their middle American anchors from Nebraska and Texas with their practiced reaction shots: “Jiminy cricket, Walter, that shore in’t how we do it back home!” And those student protestors and their demanding naiveté were also products of network television. So anyway, the parties don’t work the same way anymore. Network news divisions chase the last bit of drama completely out of the picture, and then have their own network heads cut the coverage for lack of drama. This year’s one-hour-a-night wasn’t even justified and won’t likely be repeated in four years. It took a Clint Eastwood to prank the smooth-running Romney-induced network-approved prime-time coma. Reporters were more affronted than Mitt when Eastwood made a Paulist anti-war point (and got the hall to cheer it). Being politicos with virtually no culture they even sought to float the idea that Eastwood was senile. They didn’t speak the word because the senile vote in large numbers Walter, and as we all know nobody gets elected president without winning the senile vote especially as the baby boomers begin to retire. But really, seriously, has anyone ever proven themselves lucid and inspired over a longer period of time in a more competitive shark tank than Clint in Hollywood? Dan Rather rose to the top of the Tiffany Network because… well, because CBS was the network of “The Beverly Hillbillies”, and “Hee-Haw”, not to mention “Rawhide”. How sharp does one need to be in an aquarium-ful of tropical fish.

The Democrats don’t have to put up with the networks’ handling of their message. Reporters hesitate to slow the velocity of the point made unless as message professionals they believe they can help it along. Where they get that idea one has to wonder. I often think of the old post-Chicago dems when stiffs like McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis routinely secured the nomination by not being Kennedys about anything but policy. The Dukakis convention featured a mauve, eggshell and teal color scheme! I was reminded of that by the dramatic full-throated American-ness of this Democratic Convention. I’ve never seen so many atheistic, world-gov types pray so fervently or chant “U-S-A” like the most boorish of ugly Americans. In their smoke-free backrooms now, the Democrats must wonder how many times they have to buy these damn votes. Republicans have bought votes with military spending and education and health schemes, but they may have a flicker of shame as they do whereas vote-buying all that remains of the ideology of the Democratic Party. And you’d think somebody’s head would roll at the DNC when the RNC pulls off skilled live music accompaniment (G.E. Smith’s band) whereas the DNC piped in tired hits and then “climaxed” with an even more tired Foo Fighters performance!

One thing Bill Clinton did for his party was to convince it that half of that Wall Street money was theirs if they asked for it, and that the military is the leading edge of socialism in America if you let it. I loved all those shots of old-timer veterans looking like they were photoshopped into their delegations. Whatever the fad for cross-dressing, the Democratic Party has hardly changed at all. But we’re coming off the 20th-century high-watermark for socialism whether one refers to China, Russia, India, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Argentina, Canada, or the U.S. And so the Democrats are stuck in a defensive crouch, reactionaries in this new century where centralization and meritocratic hierarchies are threatened by instant informational access and horizontal manufacturing diy. The Republicans have a weakness for hierarchies too, but they do have a debate going on within that isn’t merely tactical or strategic. If Romney loses, four years after McCain, another middle-of-the-road establishmentarian, perhaps a Paul-libertarian-conservative brain transplant might be possible. The Republicans at mid-century were only reluctantly convinced to sally forth into the world to fight Communism. The putative next Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, can probably be counted on to keep her party’s peace with the hundreds of overseas military bases and the entangling alliances-to-come in Asia, Arabia and Africa.

The Dems used to want to cut Defense spending; now they seem to think just the wealthiest Americans can float the social needs of the rest of us. The Paulists in power wouldn’t seem likely to make the parallel mistake of thinking cutting the Defense budget might be enough. Certainly the budget numbers are leading us into a dead end. The Democrats seem obsessed with reinflating the bubble and stoking the greed they depend on to tax. Their moral critique of both is increasingly contingent. Ron Paul expects the currency to collapse into its essentially worthless unbacked federal credit. The Fed, the ECB, and the Chinese all just gunned their national credit cards in the same week. Party on…


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Andy Kroll & David Corn at Motherjones.com, "“Fuck You, Tyrants!”: Ron Paul Supporters Rebel on Convention Floor".



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Seth Lipsky in WSJ, "The Gold Standard Goes Mainstream".


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Hanna and Her Editors
Joe Carducci

One thing of interest that I’ve noticed, kind of spins from my essay in NV 134, " “Magazines, Women and Women’s Magazines”". There has been a flurry of work by Hanna Rosin, her book, The End of Men – And the Rise of Women, and the original cover story in The Atlantic called “The End of Men – How Women Are Taking Control of Everything” which I referenced, plus her Sept. 2 essay in the New York Times Magazine, “Who Wears the Pants in This Economy”.
I really didn’t intend to read the Times Mag essay after
having read The Atlantic piece, which followed other recent gender stoops there. But the Magazine’s essay read as if written by another writer. And then to confirm my suspicion this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review trashes Rosin’s book in a review by Jennifer Homans who is an historian of ballet. Also in the Book Review this week is ex-ballet dancer and over-sharing memoirist Toni Bentley’s similar dispatch of Naomi Wolf’s latest best smeller, Vagina – A New Biography. All these onanistic soft-headed conceit-maintenance projects seem a female version of the laziest literary products of male prerogative back at its post-Pill/pre-feminism high watermark around 1970 by Jerzy Kosinski-types. Anyway, I just intended to underline here the evidence in one writer on one topic at two magazines that the Times Magazine editors will apparently make you rethink and rewrite what The Atlantic editors will simply cheer on. I did not know that.


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Bumrush the Sensitivos
Joe Carducci


In closing, this fortnight, I think it’s worth reiterating my point about how contemporary Western multicultural etiquette ominously tracks with what unreconstructed pre-modern Islam demands of infidels and djimmi. I wrote about this in my essay, "“An Etiquette of Djimmitude”", in
NV 119. This week it seemed that if it wasn’t for a real commitment to the First Amendment, President Obama and Secretary Clinton might have fully prostrated themselves before the irate Arab street. If the First Amendment doesn’t hold, the Second better. Broadcast media’s amnesiac parameters, and further, web-sourced “memory” forgets our own history for us. Unbeknownst to us, we the Christian West, also had a Church Universal which expected to rule this profane realm too. The Church’s power over the Holy Roman Empire’s Barons and Kings qualified as progress in its day, but that progress birthed mercantile and secular power centers which required more freedom of action and thought. The Church had it within its doctrine the ability to adjust its posture and concede space and legitimacy to these gathering centers of social power. In fact R.R. Palmer in his study, Catholics & Unbelievers in 18th Century France, notes:
“By and large the religious did not believe in their doctrines with the intensity, the sense of personal discovery and conviction, with which the philosophes believed in theirs. The implications of this fact are many. On the one hand, it made Catholics often more reasonable than philosophes, more willing to persuade, examine, or remonstrate, less given to sarcasm, mockery and abuse.” (R.R. Palmer)

Earlier Palmer paints his portrait of Voltaire-the-abusive without granting there was much cause on the part of the Church and its defenders. Was this true in the 18th century? From here today we know the direction our history took; Palmer was writing in the 1930s. The Church was split by Reformation and lost its royal entry to state power in nation after nation. Much blood had been spilled in the centuries before Voltaire ridiculed the Church, and more was to be spilled by defenders of the state Church even as Palmer wrote, in Spain. And the philosophes’ descendents would take state power to their own extreme in the nations unlucky enough to be ruled by scientific socialism.

But ridicule backed by growing power of modern social elements is what broke the spell of theocratic Europe. Why would any free descendent of this bloody, vituperative process imagine that tender respect offered to Islam, which has every ambition to power the Vatican had and more, will lead it to return respect?! In a recent New Yorker Salman Rushdie writes about the early weeks of hiding out from Khomeini’s fatwa over his novel, The Satanic Verses.  Rushdie is a fairly arrogant person, and he mentions Voltaire in passing, but Rushdie isn’t even willing to approach the clarity of a Christopher Hitchens, nevermind Voltaire himself, even as this strange faith singles him out for death.

Knowing nothing about Islam in 1989 I thought the fatwa was just comeuppance. It’s always seemed to me that if one leaves a faith one shouldn’t try to pull it down behind one. That isn’t really leaving it behind. But I thought that as one of these descendents of modern Christendom. Rushdie found himself in a no-man’s land of his particular immigrant nightmare. His former religion still refuses to allow archeology or any science near its sites or texts. In Mali now, as in Bosnia then, even Muslim sites are destroyed as totemic pagan pollution. Rushdie seems most annoyed today that back then the actual book that he wrote got lost in both the rage of the Eastern street and the Western news-stream; it was considered to have been a simple insulting of a great religion. A joke from then proves him correct:

Did you hear, Salman Rushdie has written a new book.”
Really?”
Yes, it’s called, Buddha You Fat Fuck.”

I still love that joke! But we laugh understanding the absurdity of that idea. In Islam there is no absurdity and it’s not funny. Rushdie is right that his book got lost in the shuffle. But today the West knows far more about Islam. There’s no excuse in this West for us to stop the jokes, cartoons, movies, and invective. It’s the best thing we can do for Muslim civilization, and the only thing we can do for ours.











Along Sand Lake Road, Medicine Bow, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci











From the Desk of Joe Carducci...


Andrew Kramer in NYT,"Nation Rich in Land Draws Labor From One Rich in People".
“Skeptics of further economic ties between Russia and China point to deep mistrust dating to border skirmishes fought along the Ussuri River in 1969 that froze all development for decades. The border, in fact, was only fully demarcated in 2009. Russians also harbor fears that broadening economic cooperation will lead to a wave of Chinese immigrants taking over sparsely populated territories, a concern heard in this village, too. ‘Why are these people here?’ said Nadezhda A. Kolyesova, a saleswoman out for a stroll recently through Ostanino, a picturesque jumble of wooden homes overlooking a pond, birch forests and the Golden Land farm. ‘I have nothing against them,’ she said. ‘But Russia is for Russia, and China is for the Chinese.’ After some contemplation, she conceded, ‘I suppose it’s all right, so long as they don’t enslave our children in the future.’ The farm has a policy of giving free vegetables to any local who shows up, mostly older people. The Chinese workers live in makeshift dorms made of plywood and scrap lumber, and patronize the village store for cigarettes, vodka, sausage and ice cream. Once, a fight broke out between young Russian and Chinese men. No romances have been reported, but the consensus of several grandmothers at the local market was that, in fact, Russians and Chinese can live peaceably side by side in rural Russia.”


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Brian Spegele & Wayne Ma in WSJ, "For China Boss, Deep-Water Rigs Are a ‘Strategic Weapon’".
“When China launched its first deep-water oil rig in May, Cnooc Ltd. CEO Chairman Wang Yilin delivered a message to employees and his Communist Party superiors about what it meant to Beijing's ambitions abroad. ‘Large-scale deep-water rigs are our mobile national territory and a strategic weapon,’ he told a crowd gathered at Cnooc's glittering headquarters in central Beijing as well as rig workers by videoconference. State-controlled Cnooc is using the rig to drill three wells this year in the South China Sea—an area with overlapping claims by China and other surrounding nations and an increasingly sore friction point between Beijing and Washington. Mr. Wang now is spearheading Cnooc's $15.1 billion offer to acquire Canada's Nexen Inc., a blockbuster deal that needs U.S. regulatory approval because of Nexen's energy assets in the Gulf of Mexico.”


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Gideon Rachman in FT on Zheng Wang’s book, "Never Forget National Humiliation – Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations".
“The Communist party, which was wedded to a class-based view of history and prided itself on its internationalism, did not stress nationalism. Politically, it was more convenient for the communists to blame the misfortunes of China during the 19th and 20th centuries on the decadence and weakness of the country’s own rulers. That all changed, however, in the post-Mao era. Once the Communist party had effectively embraced capitalism, inequality and globalisation, it needed some new source of political legitimacy. This search for a new political narrative became much more urgent after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. A nationalist view of history was promoted by the party, as part of a conscious response to Tiananmen. History textbooks were rewritten and a whole panoply of new museums built all over the country – with the explicit purpose of showcasing past national humiliations. There is an Opium War museum in Guangdong; a Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Nanjing – and a lavish new history gallery in the Beijing National Museum, which presents China’s past as a story of national humiliation, redeemed by the courage and strength of the Communist party. Dr Zheng believes that the leaders who promote a nationalist discourse are not driven simply by a cynical search for legitimacy. He argues the top Chinese leadership has internalised nationalist views – and the rather paranoid opinion of foreign powers that goes along with them.”


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Kathrin Hille in FT, "The ascent of the bureaucrat".
The principle of favouring those who fall into line is at play in selecting the next leadership. Li Keqiang is seen as a prime example. His biography closely mirrors that of Hu Jintao, the current party chief and state president, and Mr Li’s mentor. Their families come from the same province, and, like Mr Hu, Mr Li rose through the Communist youth league and served as provincial governor and party secretary…. He was identified as a candidate for top office early on. ‘When he became Communist party youth league head at Peking University in 1982, everyone knew already that he was going to be a senior leader one day,’ says Peng Dingding, a freelance writer who knew Mr Li as a student. However, Mr Li’s administrative career is short on achievements and long on disastrous events. An old saying calls for officials to start a posting with ‘three fires’, a metaphor referring to outstanding policies. But after Mr Li took over as governor of Henan in 1998, three fires in the central province claimed hundreds of lives and earned him the nickname ‘Three Fires Li’. Mr Li was later promoted to the province’s party secretary, an office he held until 2004. Under his watch, an Aids epidemic raged in the inland province. The problem had been created before his arrival by a commercial blood-selling scheme propagated by the previous administration to boost the local economy. Residents in many of the poorer, rural parts of the province were encouraged to sell blood to merchants who extracted the plasma and then injected the donors with the remaining blood. As infections spread in the late 1990s, entire villages were left to die. According to Henan health officials and Aids campaigners, Mr Li’s government focused on covering up the epidemic, and suppressing attempts by victims to seek help and by doctors and non-government organisations to inform and assist people. In a widely reported example, Gao Yaojie, a doctor, identified the problem early but was put under house arrest by provincial authorities and prevented from educating villagers and seeking policy debate higher up.”


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Simon Rabinovitch in FT, "China gears up for next investment boom".
“Since Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Chinese leadership transitions have, like clockwork, been accompanied by a big jump in government spending. Despite concerns about the country's current slowdown, there are signs that this politics-fuelled investment boom will reassert itself next month when a new cast of officials takes over at both central and local levels. ‘The connection between the economy and the government transition is extremely close in China, perhaps even closer than it is in western countries,’ says Cai Hongbin, dean of Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. Already, provincial and municipal governments have unveiled spending plans totalling more than Rmb10tn ($1.6tn). The National Development and Reform Commission, a central planning agency, has also approved about Rmb1tn worth of urban rail, road and waterway projects.”


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Harsh Pant at YaleGlobal, "South China Seas – New Arena of Sino-Indian Rivalry".
“In a bold display of power and with the help of its friend Cambodia, China prevented ASEAN from even issuing a joint statement for the first time in the organization’s 45-year history. China succeeded in playing divide-and-rule politics, thereby ensuring that the dispute remains a bilateral matter between Beijing and individual rival claimants. When China suggests that it would like to extend its territorial waters – which usually extend 12 nautical miles from shore – to include the entire exclusive economic zone, extending 200 nautical miles, it is challenging the fundamental principle of free navigation. All maritime powers, including India, have a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons and respect for international law in the South China Sea. China has collided with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Philippines in recent months over issues related to the exploitation of East China Sea and South China Sea for mineral resources and oil. India’s interest in access to Vietnam’s energy resources puts it in direct conflict with China’s claims over the territory. In an ultimate analysis, this issue is not merely about commerce and energy. It is about strategic rivalry between two rising powers in the Asian landscape. If China can expand its presence in the Indian Ocean region, as New Delhi anticipates, India can also do the same in South China Sea waters. As China’s power grows, it will test India’s resolve for maintaining a substantive presence in the South China Sea.”


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Jeff Smith at YaleGlobal, "A Forgotten War in the Himalayas".
“A close confidant of the president, Galbraith wrote to Kennedy requesting his ‘frank protection’ on this ‘major political decision.’ His concerns were not misplaced: The State Department initially rejected his proposal, requesting further time to examine the border dispute. ‘The McMahon line… is indeed sanctioned by all recent usage,’ Galbraith vented in another letter to Kennedy. ‘What a hell of a time to have to start a study.’ Days later the ambassador got his wish. With ‘slightly reluctant permission’ from the White House, Galbraith announced on October 27: ‘The McMahon Line is the accepted international border and is sanctioned by modern usage. Accordingly we regard it as the northern border of the [North East Frontier Agency] region.’ Fifty years later, Galbraith’s basic formulation remains official US policy. The US position on Aksai Chin, the “western sector” of the Sino-Indian border dispute, is noncommittal by comparison. At the time, Galbraith ‘resolved to maintain silence on the west,’ concluding: ‘The fact that the Indians had not discovered a Chinese road [in Aksai Chin] for two years seemed to suggest a tenuous claim.’ Today, the US considers Aksai Chin a disputed area ‘administered by China but claimed by India.’”


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Kenneth Payne in Times Literary Supplement on David French’s book, "The British Way in Counter-insurgency, 1945-1967".
“As the Empire waned, British displayed an improvisational approach to countering insurgencies, stretching the rule of law with the elaboration of oppressive emergency legislation, conducting detention without trial, forcing the migration of populations, and engaging in the coercion and collective punishment of those sympathetic to the insurgents. There were also undoubtedly brutal and extrajudicial abuses of individual human rights. French reaches the sensible conclusion that these were not centrally orchestrated, but that many of the transgressors escaped unpunished. There was no systematic British ‘dirty war’, he notes, but there was certainly an atmosphere within which elements of the security forces could operate contrary to international norms. In the end, the charge that the British interpreted minimal force somewhat cavalierly sticks – but at the same time some perspective is necessary, and can be found in the chapter where French provides comparative statistics on the British and French casualties. Certainly, the French adopted a much more robust approach to tackling colonial rebels, and killed very many more. Their concept of guerre revolutionnaire emphasized the need to control the population forcibly and was, some French military theorists felt, dangerously close to a totalitarian approach. This, after all, was the era of great totalitarian philosophies in which unimaginable violence and destruction were meted out on a grand scale in order to control societies worldwide.”


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Veronica Khangchian at Satp.org, "Manipur: An Ever-present Danger".
“Significantly, according to an August 28, 2012, report, the URF has called on Manipuri students to look towards the fast developing regions of China and Southeast Asia to pursue higher studies and employment, arguing that ‘mainland India’ has repeatedly disowned them. The URF cited the present incidence of threat and intimidation against the people of the Northeast, in apparent retaliation to the Kokrajhar (Assam) riots, as evidence of the perverse attitude of mainstream India. The PLA’s close links with the Communist Party of India – Maoist is also emerging as a cause for urgent concern. Security agencies believe that the CPI-Maoist is making rapid inroads into the North-East, immediately to gain access to the arms market in the neighbouring Yunan Province of China, as well as in Myanmar and the Southeast Asian countries. According to a June 2, 2012, report, the Maoist were ready to spend INR 2 billion for arms and training, an amount that would tempt any insurgent group in the Northeast. The CPI-Maoist is likely to become a member of a Strategic United Front (SUF) comprising major insurgent groupings in South Asia, and including the groups in India’s Northeast. Indian Security agencies apprehend that members of Chinese intelligence agencies may participate in the meetings of the proposed SUF in the guise of representatives of the Wa State Army – the largest illegal arms manufacturer in Myanmar.”


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Rahila Gupta at Opendemocracy.net, "Sexual violence in Indian cities".
“But the rapid and uneven transition in other cities has not only forced a realignment of the interface between the public and private domains but created starkly different communities with starkly different value systems – India shining, technologically advanced, leading the field in the new economies and the old India driven by superstition, religion and conservatism. Although these binaries are not mutually exclusive, it has given rise to parallel, niche lives. Women find themselves trapped in an explosive mix of traditional attitudes and new roles when overlapping economic and social systems – feudalism, agrarian economy and neo-liberal capitalism – come crashing into each other. These different Indias, living side by side, are like gated communities rarely interacting with each other, but when they do the consequences can be dire. If the young woman in Guwahati had been taken home by a chauffeur driven car, a facility available to most middle class women, she would have escaped that mauling. Gurgaon, a satellite city of Delhi, crammed full of malls and transnational companies built on agricultural land epitomises this clash. In the remains of the agricultural community not yet displaced by technological developments, there are high levels of female infanticide, caste violence and women trafficked from even poorer parts of the country to make up for the shortage of brides caused by infanticide. At the same time, women working in the malls and transnational companies, who frequent pubs after work, are exposed to harassment and violence from men because, ‘Public spaces have historically been thought of as male spaces and Guragaon's men find it particularly difficult to deal with the fact that an increasing number of women - armed with their own resources - seek to share such spaces on equal terms.’”


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Paul Adams in FT, "Society is evolving faster than the political system".
“Last month’s Eid festival marking the end of Muslim fasting was celebrated with a national holiday for Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike. The predominantly Hindu government, perhaps fearful of the communal violence that erupted at the time of independence and flared up again in 1999 when a popular reggae singer died in police custody, seeks to promote national unity by emphasising communal diversity. The problems facing Mauritius appear moderate, even compared with many parts of the developed world. Yet society is evolving faster than the political system and many Mauritians believe it is time to stop differentiating between the four main communities and embrace a non-racial national identity. ‘We don’t yet have real citizenship in this country,’ says a retired newspaper editor and social commentator.”


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Seyla Benhabib at Qantara.de, "Debate on Muslim Identity in the West".
“The Turkish migrant community became more and more religious, as a result of developments in Turkey itself, as a result of the rise of the AKP, but also because, beginning in the 1980s, many of the German conservatives started introducing Koran-schools. The Koran-schools were first introduced into Germany to teach the Muslim community – the Turkish community, as well as the Moroccan and Afghan communities – by the CDU-CSU, who thought that it would be a good idea for them to have increasingly religious education. To this day, there is a big debate about whether or not the way to integrate the Turkish community is to build the institutions of the so-called Islamic community. Partially, this is the dynamic of Germany, which recognizes Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism as official religions.”


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Daniel Dombey in FT, "Eastward turn stirs Turks’ fear of catching instability".
“Today, however, the fear expressed in Istanbul and Ankara is that Turkey is instead importing instability from its neighbours. The latest focus of that angst is the arrest last week of seven alleged Iranian agents accused of informing Tehran on Turkey's military installations, its battle against Kurdish militants and its support for Syrian rebels. The affair has grown in importance; reports say the police have uncovered a 100-strong espionage network. The case highlights the strains between Ankara and Tehran. Never wholly comfortable neighbours, the two governments are at loggerheads over a Turkey-based Nato radar station designed to neutralise Iranian missiles. And then there is Syria, a daily issue of life and death.”


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Farnaz Fassihi in WSJ, "Prized Guests Slam Iranian Policies".
“Iranian media, which had touted Mr. Morsi's visit as a diplomatic coup that could signal a shift in improving Egypt-Iran relations, censored his speech. The simultaneous interpreter at the conference first stumbled then refrained from translating Mr. Morsi's comments on Syria.
Only a few Iranian websites published the full speech. One called Mr. Morsi an ‘immature and new diplomat.’ Iran and Egypt haven't had d Syria's delegation walked out of the conference room during the speech. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, in an interview with Iran's Arabic news channel Al Alam, said Mr. Morsi had violated the summit's principles by meddling in another country's affairs. Mr. Morsi also praised the four caliphs of Sunni Islam at the start of his speech, an unusual evocation by an Arab leader. Iranians interpreted the comments as a jab at the Islamic Republic, a Shiite theocracy that doesn't recognize the first three caliphs as legitimate.”


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Husain Haqqani in WSJ, "Manipulated Outrage and Misplaced Fury".
“At the heart of Muslim street violence is the frustration of the world's Muslims over their steady decline for three centuries, a decline that has coincided with the rise and spread of the West's military, economic and intellectual prowess. During the 800 years of Muslim ascendancy beginning in the eighth century—in Southern Europe, North Africa and much of Western Asia—Muslims did not riot to protest non-Muslim insults against Islam or its prophet. There is no historic record of random attacks against non-Muslim targets in retaliation for a non-Muslim insulting Prophet Muhammad, though there are many books derogatory toward Islam's prophet that were written in the era of Islam's great empires. Muslims under Turkey's Ottomans, for example, did not attack non-Muslim envoys (the medieval equivalent of today's embassies) or churches upon hearing of real or rumored European sacrilege against their religion. Clearly, then, violent responses to perceived injury are not integral to Islam. A religion is what its followers make it, and Muslims opting for violence have chosen to paint their faith as one that is prone to anger. Frustration with their inability to succeed in the competition between nations also has led some Muslims to seek symbolic victories.”


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Raymond Ibrahim at meforum.org, "Egyptian Father Kills Three Daughters with Snakes".
“While Emirates24 gives the story a Western spin—saying the man doubted his wife's fidelity, the true parentage of his daughters, and did not want to pay child-support—the Egyptian show, Al Haqiqa (‘the Truth’), which devoted an episode to this matter, never mentioned this angle, but rather portrayed him as killing his daughters simply because they were girls. Among the many people interviewed who verified this was the maternal grandmother, who said that, beginning with the birth of the first daughter, the man became hostile saying ‘I hate girls’ and had to be placated to return to his wife. This scenario was repeated more dramatically with the birth of the second daughter. When he discovered his wife was pregnant with a third daughter, he tried to poison the pregnant woman but failed. He then spent a year plotting how to kill the girls without getting caught and had even tried with different snakes earlier, which proved ineffective, until he finally succeeded. After stressing that the father was clearly not insane, but acted in a very deliberate manner, the host of Al Haqiqa, Wael Ibrashi, explained that ‘this matter deserves discussion, since these mentalities are present in Egyptian society. We never thought that these understandings that existed in pagan [jahiliyya] times concerning female infanticide would ever return, but they have returned.’ By ‘pagan times,’ or jahiliyya, Ibrashi was alluding to a famous narrative: according to Muslim tradition, pre-Islamic Arabs used to bury their newborn infants alive, if they were daughters, but the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, outlawed female infanticide.”


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Ekrem Guzeldere at Qantara.de, "Nothing Left But the Colour".
“The Association of Afro-Turks was founded in 2006 by Mustafa Olpak in Ayvalik, in the North Aegean region. His family came to Turkey from Crete in 1924 as part of an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Because they were Muslims, they were categorised as Turks. Olpak himself suffered bullying at school and dropped out for a year as a result, but he finished his education in the end. He had been married to a ‘white’ Turk for 25 years when her family suddenly announced, ‘The Arab isn't going to get any of the inheritance.’ Black people are often called Arabs in Turkish. Olpak divorced his wife. It wasn't the only racist comment or example of discrimination which he'd experienced in his life. Alev Karakartal, is an Afro-Turk woman who now lives in Istanbul. Speaking at a conference there in early June 2012, she described the strategy with which many Afro-Turks confront discrimination. ‘By entering into mixed marriages,’ she said, ‘Afro-Turks try to have lighter-skinned children, so that eventually their colour will disappear altogether.’ But Olpak responds, ‘We have nothing else left aside from the colour. There's nothing left culturally anymore.’”


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Jeffrey Gettleman in New York Review of Books, "The War Against the Nuba".
“The Nuba Mountains are one of the most culturally distinct parts of Sudan, a region of traditional, often animist African beliefs and home to dozens of languages. Until the 1970s, most Nuba didn’t use money; they would, for example, barter a handful of tobacco leaves for some steel wire. Many didn’t bother with clothes. This was deeply embarrassing to a Muslim country trying to appear modern, and in the early 1970s, the Sudanese government forbade merchants to sell anything to a person who was naked. The Nuba are famous for their traditional wrestlers, massive men who grapple for honor and riches in dusty rings, usually surrounded by hundreds of passionate fans.”


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Adam Nossiter in NYT, "Islamists Struggle to Run North Mali".
“The Islamists allied with Al Qaeda appear to have gained a firm military hold in the north, and have subdued the local population with a brutal application of Shariah law, including public beatings, amputation and a stoning death. What is left of the Malian Army, divided by a military coup, has made no move to dislodge them after five months of occupation, and a talked-about West African regional intervention has yet to coalesce. But the Islamists’ grasp on administering the vast desert region, which is larger than France, seems much less secure, members of the delegation said. The delegates — members of an unofficial group of concerned citizens called the Coalition for Mali — unexpectedly found themselves listening to demands from the Islamists that the government in Bamako send back bureaucrats to run state services. ‘They asked for the state to resume its functions, because it’s too complicated for them to manage,’ said Daouda Maïga, who used to run a state development program in Kidal, a region of nearly 70,000 people before the Islamist takeover emptied it. ‘They are not used to running things.’”


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Samir Yousif at Opendemocracy.net, "The failure of democracy under Islamism".
“During the demonstrations and in a hidden and unpublicized way, Qatar managed to be part of the Arab Spring. The Qatari Al-Jazeera Satellite TV paved the way. The significant financial support that came from Qatar to the well-organized Islamists guaranteed it a permanent seat in the newly evolving power centre. While the youth were engaged in bringing down the regime, the Islamists were planning to take full advantage of the outcomes of regime change. To achieve that, they used the financial support that was coming from Qatar, exactly as Qatar had planned. Through such 'investments' Qatar is expanding its influence beyond its borders, and it is benefiting considerably from such developments. From the other side, it is noted that the newly evolving system in Tunis was unaware of such developments. The Islamist Leader Rachid Ghannouchi dismissed any plans to participate in the coming elections as he landed in Tunis Airport coming from London. By saying that, he succeeded in distracting attention away from the Islamists and their plans in the upcoming elections.”


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WSJ Weekend Interview: "Mohammed Ibrahim".
“He says it's never ‘comfortable’ to deliver such blunt messages, but unlike the global aid-giving establishment, he doesn't mind throwing a few sharp elbows. That brings us to Mr. Ibrahim's broader ‘disappointment’ with the West: the ‘decline of capitalism over the last 20 years,’ for which he blames ‘the collapse of communism.’ How's that? ‘The demise of the Soviet Union was probably the worst thing that could have happened to capitalism,’ which until the 1990s ‘had been under pressure, with the presence of a competing system, to demonstrate that it can deliver what is best for the people.’ Mr. Ibrahim says Western governments have since relaxed into a cronyism of business loopholes and selective bailouts. ‘We now see a very strange phenomenon where we have capitalist institutions—companies—that have been allowed to privatize profits and socialize their losses. Is that capitalism?’”


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Paul Moreno in WSJ, "How Public Unions Became So Powerful".
“FDR pointed out the obvious, that the government is sovereign. If an organization can compel the government to do something, then that organization will be the real sovereign. Thus the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 gave private-sector unions the power to compel employers to bargain, but the act excluded government workers. It declared that federal and state and local governments were not "employers" under its terms. Postwar prosperity and the great increase of public employment revived the public union idea. By 1970, nearly 20% of American workers worked for the government. (In 1900: 4%.) The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees led the effort to persuade a state to allow public-employee unionization, and Afscme prevailed in Wisconsin in 1958. New York City and other cities also permitted their workers to unionize. President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order 50 years ago that broke the dam. The order did not permit federal employees to bargain over wages (these are still set by Congress), or to force workers to join a union or to strike (no state or city allowed that), but Kennedy's directive did lead to unionization of the federal workforce. And it gave great impetus to more liberal state and local laws. Government-union membership rose tenfold in the 1960s.”


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Sebastian Mallaby in FT, "Regulators should keep it simple".
“In an uncertain world, grand risk-mapping ambitions can be taken only so far. The OFR can usefully press companies to improve the quality of their data, which are often scattered among incompatible IT platforms. But regulators cannot be expected to measure all the risk in an economy; nor should they spend unlimited resources on an effort that will only disappoint. In the US and the UK, the growth of financial regulation has far outpaced that of the financial industry, as armies of supervisors seek to discover risks and neuter them. The trend is not sustainable.
For banks as for hedge funds, costly attempts to gather complex data may be counterproductive. Mr Haldane constructs a sample of about 100 global banks in 2006 and asks which of two measures predict the odds of failure in the crisis: a simple leverage ratio, measuring assets over equity; or a more complex, risk-weighted one. The answer is that the simple metric performs better. The vast expansion of the Basel rules over a quarter of a century may have achieved nothing.”


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John Kay in FT, "The law that explains the folly of bank regulation".
“But Mr Haldane’s analysis represents a fundamental challenge to this orthodoxy. The likely explanation of his discovery that more complex rules are worse is to be found in Goodhart’s law. This proposition was first set out in the 1970s by the economist Charles Goodhart, in the context of the implementation of monetary policy. Prof Goodhart suggested that any measure adopted as a target loses the information content that appeared to make it relevant. People change their behaviour to meet the target. These responses change the relationship between the target – the measure of money supply, or the value at risk – and the objective that policy makers seek to influence: the availability of credit, or the risk exposure of a bank. The target becomes a bad measure of success in reaching the objective as soon as it is adopted as a target. That is why the risk-weighted measure of Basel, which was a regulatory target, proved to be less reliable than the leverage ratio, which was not.”


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WSJ: "Speech of the Year".
“While Americans were listening to the bloviators in Tampa and Charlotte, the speech of the year was delivered at the Federal Reserve's annual policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 31. And not by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The orator of note was a regulator from the Bank of England, and his subject was ‘The dog and the frisbee.’ In a presentation that deserves more attention, BoE Director of Financial Stability Andrew Haldane and colleague Vasileios Madouros point the way toward the real financial reform that Washington has never enacted. The authors marshal compelling evidence that as regulation has become more complex, it has also become less effective. They point out that much of the reason large banks are so difficult for regulators to comprehend is because regulators themselves have created complicated metrics that can't provide accurate measurements of a bank's health. The paper's title refers to the fact that border collies can often catch frisbees better than people, because the dogs by necessity have to keep it simple. But the impulse of regulators, if asked to catch a frisbee, would be to encourage the construction of long equations related to wind speed and frisbee rotation that they likely wouldn't even understand.”


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Fred Bergsten & Joseph Gagnon in FT, "Time for a fightback in the currency wars".
“China is by far the largest currency aggressor but has not been the major perpetrator of late. Three distinct groups are now involved. First are other Asian countries, including Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia. Second are major oil exporters including the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Algeria. Third are rich countries near to the eurozone, most notably Switzerland but also Denmark and Israel. If Mitt Romney is elected US president, he will be able to label many countries as currency manipulators on his first day in the Oval Office, not just China, as he has promised. These countries all exhibit rapidly growing levels of foreign currency reserves as well as significant current-account surpluses. They buy US dollars and euros to suppress the value of their own currencies, keeping the price of their exports down and the cost of their imports up. Thus they subsidise exports and tax imports, enabling them to maintain or increase trade surpluses and pile up foreign exchange reserves. These tactics, in effect, export unemployment to the rest of the world.”


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John Cochrane at The Grumpy Economist, "How not to blow it with phase-outs".
“A physician wrote with a comment, on my statement that economists don't calculate total marginal rates often enough: ..I certainly did. As a solo general surgeon in private practice, in 2004, with a gross business income before taxes of roughly $500K, I figured that the 39.6% Federal + 9.98% state top income tax rates + 6% [state] sales + Medicare which no longer peaked out, + property taxes, medical license fees, malpractice fees which were already at $100K for me and headed higher, and no scholarship help for the 4 out of 10 kids in college at the time, my marginal rate was somewhere north of 70%. Once I 'retired' from surgery and became a biology professor, making around $50K, my gross income was one tenth as much, but now one of my kids got a full-ride scholarship at [University], another got a half-ride scholarship, and another got a couple thousand that would not have been given under my earlier circumstances. By my 'going Galt', I figure that the .gov took at least a $200K hit (I remember previously paying $161K in fed. income taxes alone), whereas my disposable income was only about half of what it had been before. So you can bet that we non-economists, with all the individually detailed information at our disposal do indeed make these kinds of calculations, even if they're tough for economists to do in aggregate. At least for me, the argument that a simple 36% federal income tax is below the Laffer curve hump is lame, given other factors.”


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E.J. McMahon at Publicsectorinc.com, "Shiller on government jobs: who’s ‘framing’ whom? ".
“Shiller believes in a big government multiplier - the notion (far from universally accepted among economists) that a dollar spent on government will yield more than a dollar of growth, sometimes a lot more. As a result, he is also a big fan of government spending as economic stimulus. ‘If state and local governments had not cut back so much, the broader economy would be stronger today,’ he writes in his latest Times piece. ‘That would be true even if they had raised taxes to avoid incurring more debt.’ Shiller has made this argument before... But to support it this time around, he engages in a bit of data mining:

From July 2008 to July 2012, the number of state and local employees nationwide fell by 715,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reality is actually worse than that figure suggests. The total ended up 1.31 million people below where it would have been had public sector employment simply kept pace with population growth. The situation did not improve as the financial crisis eased and the economy picked up. From March 2009 to March 2012, the nation's total nonfarm employment increased 0.6 percent. State and local government employment, by contrast, fell 2.9 percent.’

If you stretch that time frame back a couple of years, however, the statistics tell a somewhat different story. Early in the Great Recession, private and local government continued adding jobs even after the private sector had begun shedding them. Between July 2007 and July 2008, when private firms shed just over a million jobs, the nation's state and local government sector gained 344,000. Over the next 12 months, while private employment plummeted another 5.9 percent, state and local government declined by just 0.7 percent.”


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James Hagerty in WSJ, "Assessing Fannie’s Past and Future".
“There already is a consensus among Democrats and Republicans that Fannie and Freddie represent a failed experiment in state-sponsored mortgage lending. The Obama administration is forcing them gradually to reduce their mortgage holdings. The Republican platform calls for ‘scaling back the federal role in the housing market and avoiding taxpayer bailouts.’ Deciding what sort of housing-finance system should replace the one now dominated by Fannie and Freddie is an arduous task. The basic question: Should the U.S. return to a free market in home loans? The history of Fannie and Freddie suggests that Congress will find it difficult to do that.”


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NYT: "Cutting Government, Blindfolded".
“The release of the sequester details, however, might change the equation and transform the debate from abstract politics into a concrete and eye-opening reality. An across-the-board 9.4 percent slashing of the defense budget will mean $6.9 billion from the operation and maintenance of the Army, and $4.3 billion each from the Navy and the Air Force. There are huge cuts to equipment, as well as cuts to chemical and nuclear demilitarization. The cuts to domestic spending, mostly at 8.2 percent, are even broader. A few examples: $1 billion from special education funds; $2.3 billion from low-income rental assistance, likely affecting 277,000 households; $86 million from food safety and inspection; $735 million from the F.B.I.; and $136 million from the Secret Service. With American embassies now under siege, $129 million would be cut from embassy security, construction and maintenance. Medicare providers would be cut by 2 percent, or $11 billion. And there would be cuts to Congressional expenses (though the salaries of lawmakers would not be touched).”


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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, "The Day Health Insurance Died".
“Two weeks ago, amid a clamor from investors, she stepped down as chief of America’s biggest private health insurer, WellPoint. But Mrs. Braly should be remembered for another long-running act of futility – trying to explain to Washington how insurance works. If people can wait till they’re sick, Mrs. Braly took the trouble to explain, the insurance business can’t exits. If the cost of health care is not passed along to customers, the industry will be bankrupt. WellPoint charged young women slightly more than young men because they see the doctor more often. It canceled the coverage of four breast-cancer victims (out of 200,000) because they purchased their policies after they were sick. That an insurance company behaved like an insurance company left Washington incredulous. ‘There was a wall. I couldn’t pierce the wall,’ complained Sen. Dianne Feinstein after one hearing with Mrs. Braly. ‘How much money do you make?’ was the penetrating demand of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who groused afterward, ‘It was like she was completely oblivious to the public reaction.’”


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WSJ Weekend Interview: "Gloria Romero".
“Ms. Romero credits the CTA for its savvy and chutzpah. The union has killed or hijacked nearly every reform bill that has popped up in the legislature. In 2010 it even sank a bill to let high school teachers volunteer to be evaluated by students. ‘Nobody would see [the evaluation] except the teacher, and CTA fought it tooth and nail. They really were of the opinion that 'we run the place.' . . . Their basic argument was that it's the nose underneath the camel's tent. So you can't do anything, because once you do something,’ the lid on reform is ‘lifted. So they just kill it.’ This year the unions torpedoed a bill (introduced by Democratic State Sen. Alex Padilla) that would have made it easier for districts to fire teachers who molest students. Same for legislation to strip pensions from teachers who have sexual relationships with students. The unions claimed the bills infringe on due process and First Amendment rights. Ms. Romero did manage to get ‘one past them and it was a big one.’ In 2010, her last year in the Senate, she wrote the nation's first "parent trigger" law allowing parents to take over underperforming schools and transform them by gathering a majority of parent signatures.”


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Michael Grunwald in Time, "One Nation Subsidized".
“The rise of the Tea Party and the weakness of the Obama economy have fueled a Republican narrative about Big Government as a threat to liberty, redistributing wealth from honorable Americans to undeserving moochers, from taxpaying ‘makers’ to freeloading ‘takers.’ In fact, most Americans are makers and takers – proud of our making, blind to our taking. Republicans often point out that only half the country pays income taxes, but just about all Americans pay taxes: payroll taxes, state and local taxes, gas taxes and much more. The problem is that we pay in $2.5 trillion and pay out $3.8 trillion. And those trillions of dollars don’t all go to undeserving moochers, except insofar as we’re all undeserving moochers.”


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Ian Lovett in NYT, "Critics Say California Law Hurts Effort to Add Jobs".
“Environmentalists in this greenest of places call the California Environmental Quality Act the state’s most powerful environmental protection, a model for the nation credited with preserving lush wetlands and keeping condominiums off the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. But the landmark law passed in 1970 has also been increasingly abused, opening the door to lawsuits — sometimes brought by business competitors or for reasons unrelated to the environment — that, regardless of their merit, can delay even green development projects for years or sometimes kill them completely. With California still mired in what many consider its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the law, once a source of pride to many Californians and environmentalists across the country, has turned into an agonizing test in the struggle to balance environmental concerns against the need for jobs and economic growth.”


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Tim Black at Spiked-online.com, "The immorality of compensation culture".
“And of course, everyone knows who is responsible for this upsurge in cynical-looking lawsuits: it’s Claims Direct, or the National Accident Helpline, or some other part of the ever-growing army of ambulance-chasing lawyers intent on making a fast buck off the back of someone twisting their ankle on school-sports day. Or is it? In their new report, The Social Cost of Litigation, Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow argue that it is not so much the existence of the unscrupulous no-win, no-fee lawyers that drives the compensation frenzy. Rather, they say, it is the fact that a culture of litigation and litigation-avoidance is now considered a perfectly normal part of social life. Informal relationships based upon trust, such as those between doctor and patient, have been supplanted by formal relationships founded upon mutual suspicion. ‘I’m not so worried about the very obvious, easy target – the lawyers who flourish in this culture’, Furedi tells me. ‘The more worrying thing is the normalised and institutionalised aspect of it. Which is why in the report we focus on the social costs rather than the financial costs.’ Nowhere are these social costs more apparent than in the public sector, where, in both healthcare and education, avoiding lawsuits has become routine. It is no longer exceptional for a doctor or a teacher to be concerned that their behaviour or one of their decisions might end up subject to a legal complaint; rather, such recourse is almost expected these days.”


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Liz Alderman in NYT, "French President Must Cut Deficit, but How? ".
“Mr. Hollande has reached a pivotal moment as the Continent’s debt crisis flares anew. He is pledging to push the country’s deficit down to 3 percent of gross domestic product by the end of next year, to adhere to the rules of euro zone membership and prevent the nation from getting caught up in the euro’s latest troubles. But as a Socialist president who ran a campaign against austerity, Mr. Hollande is facing rising discontent as he prepares to assemble the package of tax increases and spending cuts required for that effort. How he performs could very well determine whether the ailing French economy succumbs to a spiral of decline the way that many other euro zone countries have done.”


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Nicola Clark in NYT, "Energy Policy in France Divides Governing Coalition of Socialists and Greens".
“Desperate to secure the votes needed to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right incumbent, the Socialists agreed last year not to field any candidates in around 60 constituencies. In exchange, the Greens accepted the Socialists’ goal of reducing France’s dependence on nuclear power for energy to 50 percent from 75 percent by 2025 — far short of the Greens’ own goal of zero.
The Greens then made major gains in parliamentary elections in June, securing 17 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly and enough electoral weight to form their own parliamentary group. ‘The Socialists are starting to realize that they gave a very generous gift to the Greens,’ said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for Political Research in Paris, who noted that the Green presidential candidate, Eva Joly, was eliminated in the first round of voting, with a humiliating 2.3 percent of the vote. ‘The Greens are a small party, but they have been very well paid.’”


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Hans Steketee at Opendemocracy.net, "How the Swiss see the ‘Swiss option’".
“Once upon a time, Switzerland was eying up EU membership, but after a referendum in 1992 its application is on ice. The Swiss were too attached to their historical neutrality and their own coin. Being a rich country they did not want to become a net contributor in the EU and above all they were afraid that their coveted system of direct democracy, where citizens can vote directly on all sorts of policies, would be submerged by EU legislation and jurisdiction. Now Switzerland keeps the EU at arm's length. Unlike other non-EU-member states - Norway, Lichtenstein and Iceland -Switzerland is not a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which governs the internal market's free movement of goods, persons, services and capital. Instead, Switzerland has gained ‘à la carte’ access to the common market via a series of bilateral treaties, including the Schengen passport-free zone, reached during years of tough negotiations with Brussels.”


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Roger Scruton in Times Literary Supplement on Alain Badiou’s book, "The Adventure of French Philosophy".
“Badiou’s genealogy may give an accurate account of where he is coming from. But there is much more to recent French philosophy than the ‘moment’ that joins Sartre to Deleuze in an unbroken stream of (for the most part) leftist jargon. Unmentioned are Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Etienne Gilson, Rene Girard, Gustave Thibon and Simone Weil – all lucid and powerful thinkers, but excluded no doubt for being Christians. Unmentioned are the advocates of traditional philosophy such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Jacques Bouveresse, or people such as Raymond Aron, Alain Besancon, Alain Finkielkraut, Francoise Thom and Chantal Delsol, who have seen through the newspeak and tried to expose what it hides. Unmentioned is Stephane Courtois and Le livre noir du communisme which advocated a moment of owning up, in which the French post-war intelligentsia could confess to the evil done by their favourite allies and to the unserious nature of their own political games with them. Badiou’s intellectual world is one in which Christians, conservatives, liberals, traditionalists and representatives of la douce France are not just unmentionable but strictly imperceivable.”


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Thomas Nagel in New York Review of Books on Alvin Plantinga’s book, "Where the Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion, and Naturalism".
“He holds, first, that the theistic conception of the relation between God, the natural world, and ourselves makes it reasonable for us to regard our perceptual and rational faculties as reliable. It is therefore reasonable to believe that the scientific theories they allow us to create do describe reality. He holds, second, that the naturalistic conception of the world, and of ourselves as products of unguided Darwinian evolution, makes it unreasonable for us to believe that our cognitive faculties are reliable, and therefore unreasonable to believe any theories they may lead us to form, including the theory of evolution. In other words, belief in naturalism combined with belief in evolution is self-defeating. However, Plantinga thinks we can reasonably believe that we are the products of evolution provided that we also believe, contrary to naturalism, that the process was in some way guided by God.”



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Ronald Radosh in Commentary, "When the Radical American Left Loved Israel".
“The support for Israel on the American left came to an end for a few reasons. For those friendly to the Soviet Union – which in the postwar era was the dominant force on the left – Stalin’s decision to revert to the original Arab position, and to work for Soviet influence through Egypt and other Arab nations, led pro-Soviet fellow travelers and the American Communists to again argue that Israel was simply a cat’s-paw of American imperialism in the Middle East. For independent leftists such as [I.F.] Stone, the positive view of Israel began to fade after the 1967 war. His belief in Israel’s viability and right to exist diminished as he developed pangs of guilt about the result of the spoils of war won by Israel, after its victory gave the Jewish state land it had not previously possessed. As the Palestinian nationalists now used their situation to make the refugee situation their main focus, and used the plight of those dispossessed by the Israeli victory to demand anew ‘the right of return,’ American leftists began to argue that Israel was no longer a legitimate state.”


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Ian Johnson at NYbooks.com, "Jesus vs. Mao? An Interview With Yuan Zhiming".
“I studied Mao’s works quite a bit. One of the things he taught was hatred: The first sentence in the first essay in the first volume of his collected works is ‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.’ This is the mentality of most Chinese. You can see this in China’s foreign policy. If you’re their enemy, even if you help them they’ll accept the aid but they won’t change their view that you’re their enemy. They don’t have the idea of yi (righteousness). Just li (benefit). Chinese never relax with foreigners. This is what Mao taught us. From the time we were young we learned this. When I was small we’d watch movies, and when the movie would start I’d ask my mother and father who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, because it had to be divided into that sort of binary relationship. And the bad people, everything about them was bad. Every feeling was dirty. They looked ugly.
This [way of seeing things] includes contemporary directors, like Zhang Yimou. He made a film last year called The Flowers of War about the Nanjing massacre. He was up for an Oscar but didn’t get one. I think one reason is that he had Mao’s value system internalized. The Japanese are the bad guys, of course, but in his portrayal the Japanese troops from A to Z are bad. They don’t have any humanity in them at all. Bad people can’t be 100 percent bad and good people can’t be 100 percent good. But that’s how Chinese see the world.”


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Ian Johnson in New York Review of Books, "China’s Lost Decade".
“China’s production methods are also unsuited to building ultra-complex machines: when assembling an iPad or a running shoe or even a car, if the first batch is defective, the manufacturer can adjust the production line and toss out the lemons. This works for much production in China but, obviously, wouldn’t work with aircraft. That leads Fallows to another memorable quote: ‘The Chinese can go to the moon long before they build an airliner.’ A moon shot is a one-time event and requires brute engineering, while a jetliner is an immensely sophisticated amalgam of hardware and software that has to work flawlessly for decades.”


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Patrick Chovanec in WSJ, "China’s Solyndra Economy".
“On Aug. 3, the owner of Chengxing Solar Company leapt from the sixth floor of his office building in Jinhua, China. Li Fei killed himself after his company was unable to repay a $3 million bank loan it had guaranteed for another Chinese solar company that defaulted. One local financial newspaper called Li's suicide ‘a sign of the imminent collapse facing the Chinese photovoltaic industry’ due to overcapacity and mounting debts. President Barack Obama has held up China's investments in green energy and high-speed rail as examples of the kind of state-led industrial policy that America should be emulating. The real lesson is precisely the opposite. State subsidies have spawned dozens of Chinese Solyndras that are now on the verge of collapse. Unveiled in 2010, Beijing's 12th Five-Year Plan identified solar and wind power and electric automobiles as ‘strategic emerging industries’ that would receive substantial state support. Investors piled into the favored sectors, confident the government's backing would guarantee success. Barely two years later, all three industries are in dire straits.”


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Andrew Jacobs & Adam Century in NYT, "As China Ages, Beijing Turns to Morality Tales to Spur Filial Devotion".
“Despite the demands of an increasingly fast-paced society, the Confucian idea of filial devotion is deeply embedded in Chinese society. Tradition dictates that children live with their parents and care for them in their old age, a convention that historically provided a safety net. But the custom is rapidly fraying as children struggle with the logistical and financial burdens of caring for their aged parents. This has proved particularly challenging in recent years to the huge numbers of only children born after the introduction of strict family-planning rules in the late 1970s. One result, demographers say, is a skyrocketing number of so-called empty nests filled by older people who live alone while their children build their own roosts in distant cities. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, empty nests now account for more than 50 percent of all Chinese households; in some urban areas the figure has reached 70 percent. A 2011 report by the official Xinhua news agency said that nearly half of the 185 million people age 60 and older live apart from their children — a phenomenon unheard of a generation ago.”


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Thomas Fuller in NYT, "In Vietnam, Message of Equality Is Challenged by Widening Wealth Gap".
“Much of the ire has been focused on Vietnam’s version of crony capitalism — the close links between tycoons and top Communist Party officials. This criticism has been able to flourish partly because news of abuses has leaked out as state companies, which remain a central part of the economy, have floundered, helping precipitate Vietnam’s serious financial woes. Activists and critics have also been able to use the anonymity of the Web to skirt tight media controls that had kept many scandals out of public view. As criticism has mounted, some of the relatives of Communist Party officials have stepped back from high profile roles. Ms. Huong left her state-run company in June, three months after her appointment, and the daughter of the prime minister recently left one of her posts, at a private bank. Government officials, meanwhile, are sounding defensive.”


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John Naughton in Guardian, "Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science".
“Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards ‘truth’, then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.  Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative ‘progress’, he saw discontinuities – a set of alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases – for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics – correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did – and should – work.”


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Abigail Zuger in NYT on Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s book, "An Epidemic of Absence – A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases".
“This hypothesis argues that our modern obsession with eradicating germs has backfired into an explosion of disease, specifically all the ‘new’ diseases that have replaced infections to undermine our health. The modern immune system, the idea holds, is stymied by the sudden absence of its customary microbial targets. With nothing constructive to do, it is crazily spinning its wheels, resulting in soaring rates of food allergies and asthma, arthritis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis and diabetes, even heart disease and cancer — not to mention alopecia, the premature baldness from which Mr. Velasquez-Manoff suffers and which led him to the subject in the first place. (In an opinion article in The New York Times last month, he suggested that an immune disorder might account for many cases of autism.) Clearly, if true, the hygiene hypothesis is the single greatest medical story of our time, undercutting a century of putative progress. Is it true? Probably some of it is.”


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Greta Anand in WSJ, "A Woman’s ‘Untreatable’ TB Echoes Around the World".
“Her six-year journey to all-but-incurable TB exposes a blind spot in an Indian medical bureaucracy that, for decades, neglected to implement widespread testing or treatment for drug-resistant strains. As a result, a curable disease has mutated into a killer. The global community is worried about the danger. Health officials have urged India and other countries with increasing drug resistance to take stronger action. And this year the U.K. added India to the list of countries whose citizens must be tested for TB to obtain a visa of six months or more.”


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John Strausbaugh at Chiseler.org, "Izzy and Moe".
“When roughly four of five of New York City’s fifteen thousand licensed taverns and saloons shut down, an estimated thirty thousand speakeasies rose up to replace them. They ranged from the classic dingy hole-in-the-wall of lore to lavish hot spots like Jack and Charlie’s ‘21’ Club, where Mayor Jimmy Walker had his own booth. Some speakeasies were so far from secret that they were world-famous, their addresses were listed in every tourist guide, and the only people the lug behind the door refused to admit were those he had very good reason to suspect were law enforcers. Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village was thick with speakeasies geared for the tourist trade, early examples of the theme bar. At the Pirate’s Den a doorman dressed like a buccaneer let tourists into a gloomy place hung with chains and rigging and lit by ship’s lanterns, where staff costumed like eye-patched sea dogs periodically staged mock fights with their cutlasses and pistols. Nearby were the zany Nut Club, something like a forerunner to today’s comedy clubs; the Indian-themed Wigwam; and the Village Barn, a basement on West Eighth Street featuring square dances, hoedowns and live turtle races. Poisoning from the bad alcohol served in many joints — often just grain alcohol colored to look like whiskey — could be deadly. By the end of the decade more than six hundred New Yorkers a year were dying from it.”


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Sept. 23, EncoreWesterns: "Joel McCrea". “Six-gun salute” features Ride the High Country (1962).


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Ken Emerson in WSJ on Gary Rosen’s book, "Unfair to Genius – The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein".
“Arnstein, Mr. Rosen writes, was ‘a crank, a noodnik, and a loser.’ He was briefly committed to a mental hospital and certified a lunatic. Even Arnstein himself once confessed in court: ‘Reading my testimony, anyone would get an idea that the person testifying is of a disordered mind.’ Though he never won a case, Mr. Rosen argues that Arnstein's quixotic claims ‘engaged some of the finest legal minds of his era, forcing them to refine and sharpen their doctrines.’ Those minds included noted jurists Jerome Frank and Learned Hand. Frank went so far as to invoke Jonathan Swift and Friedrich Nietzsche in warning against creating a bad precedent ‘merely because we may think Arnstein is nutty.’ One of Arnstein's suits was squelched by an opposing legal team that included William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who would go on to lead the Office of Strategic Services and godfather the CIA. Even earlier, copyright issues had engaged many legal luminaries, Mr. Rosen reminds us. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney set standards for determining originality and similarity in popular songs years before he handed down the Dred Scott Decision in 1857, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s Supreme Court opinion extended copyright to incidental entertainment in restaurants and hotels.”


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Gene Sculatti at Rocksbackpagesblogs.com, "Where Were You in ’62 ".
“The Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’ was but one of many audio delights grabbing air in 1962. It comprised, along with Marvin Gaye’s no less propulsive ‘Stubborn Kind of Fellow,’ the Miracles’ ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’ and Mary Wells’ three Smokey Robinson-penned Top-10 sides, Motown’s first full round of hits. The year also marked the start of several careers and partnerships that would define popular music for decades: the debut of America’s two longest running pop institutions in the Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and the 4 Seasons’ ‘Sherry,’ and the collaboration between Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Dionne Warwick that tore up convention in the apocalyptic ‘Don’t Make Me Over.’ The dance floor shook too. Not since the Twenties heyday of the Charleston, Black Bottom and Varsity Drag had so many dance crazes crowded the charts: Little Eva’s ‘Loco-motion,’ Dee Dee Sharp’s ‘Mashed Potato Time,’ the Orlons’ ‘Wah-Watusi,’ Joey Dee’s ‘Peppermint Twist’ and Chubby Checker’s terpsichorean trifecta (‘Slow Twistin,’ ‘Limbo Rock,’ ‘Popeye the Hitchhiker’). While girl-group sounds had broken through the previous year, and wouldn’t dominate till two years later, 1962 is when the genre’s genius, Phil Spector, first asserts himself, with spellbinding results in ‘Uptown’ and ‘He’s a Rebel’ by the Crystals and ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’ by Darlene Love.”


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Chuck Dukowski Sextet interview at "Verbicide.com".
How about the overall music writing process? There is certainly no one sound in the band that fades into the background — do you each contribute equally to the songwriting?
  
Chuck: Yes, we do all contribute to the songs — sometimes equally and sometimes not. We are all open to every other band member’s ideas. With Haunted, we all co-wrote the songs [by] building on seed ideas from one or another member. This is the first time since Wurm that I’ve had such an open collaborative dynamic in a band.

How has this process changed since 2007 when you released Eat My Life? Band members have changed, Milo has grown up, and you seem to have phased out the reed instruments.
 
Chuck: The reed instruments phased out during the recording of Reverse The Polarity. Lynn got sick, but luckily Milo found his full voice on guitar at the same time. On Haunted you get to hear Milo as a fully realized player.”


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"Meat Puppets" in Trust #155

The first review of my new book appears in Deutsche also in this issue; what can this mean?

Jan Roehlk on Life Against Dementia in Trust #155, August / September 2012:

Life against Dementia – Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1975 – 2011 - Joe Carducci

Joe Carducci war Mitarbeiter bei mehreren Plattenfirmen und Mailordern seit Ende der 70er bis Mitte der 80er, darunter Systematic, Thermidor und SST. Er verlegte sich dann aufs Schreiben. Sein letztes Buch war ein Portrait der verstorbenen SST Fotografin Naomi Petersen und für 2013 kündigt er schon ein Buch mit seinen Arbeiten zum Thema Filme an. Das aktuelle Werk ist eine voluminöse historische Sammlung seiner Texte, unterteilt in die Bereiche Politik, Musik, Filme, Sports, Songs (er schrieb einige Songs für die Minutemen), Comics, abgerundet mit Interviews, die er print und online gab. Über das Buch verstreut sind Zeichnungen und Fotos. In dem Vorwort sagt er ungewöhnlich ehrlich, dass es eine Nachfrage für dieses Buch nicht wirklich gäbe. Natürlich sind für mich die Texte zu Musik am interessantesten, es geht natürlich viel um SST Bands, man erfährt spannendes von Saint Vitus (auch sind seine Linernotes zu The Obsessed hier versammelt), Minutemen, Descendents, Meat Puppets. Aber mir haben auch seine Film-Texte gut gefallen, bei dem Bereich Sport, in dem es u.a. um Baseball geht, musste ich passen. Seit einigen Jahren arbeitet er an den wöchentlichen Blog ‘The New Vulgate’, dort sind einige Schriften schon mal veröffentlicht wurden. Das Englische ist wie bei allen seinen Büchern nicht einfach, das machte mir hinsichtlich der Politik-Texte, bei denen es sowohl um internationale als auch nationale Themen (wie die Tea Party) geht, etwas zu schaffen. Gleichwohl ist das Buch für (den Einstieg in) das Verständnis des Denkens von einem der ungewöhnlichsten (indie-) Musikschreiber der Gegenwart (neben G. Marcus und D. Diederichsen) bestens geeignet und schafft erste Zugänge zu seinem Gesamtwerk. (Jan) 22,95 $, Redoubt Press, PO BOX 276, Centennial, Wyoming 82055, USA”


Dolf Hermannstadter’s Trust review of my last book, Enter Naomi – SST, L.A. and All That…, was posted in English.


Flipside’s "Hudley interview" from Trust #154 at Hudleyflipside.org




"Descendents" in Trust #153


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Saccharine Trust at "theelectricsunshine".


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Alan Licht book-signing for "Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy", Monday, September 24th, Housing Works Bookstore/Cafe, 126 Crosby St., NYC, 7pm, free.


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Thanks to Futureofcapitalism.com.
















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), Michael J. Safran
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer


Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Issue #137 (Sept. 5, 2012)

South of Sheep Mountain, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci



















The Inceville Outlet and the Western Actuality
by Joe Carducci




Thomas Ince has finally got his biography. It’s a good one too, part of the University Press of Kentucky’s Screen Classics series; I wrote about their Warren Oates biography in NV 7. Thomas Ince – Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer
is good at making clear aspects of the earliest years of Southern California filmmaking which are hard to keep straight and so are usually bypassed or got wrong. But they are so fundamental to what Hollywood became that skipping them is the same as being wrong. Brian Taves, an archivist at the Library of Congress, writes well and pauses in his biographical narrative to consider key surviving Ince productions just to keep things grounded in the art form just then realized as movies moved from one-reel films (approx. 10-14 minutes) to two-reelers and then five-plus-reel features. (Taves promises to catalog every surviving Ince film on the web). Thomas Ince’s story is difficult to tell and as he died suddenly at age 44 in 1924, it is anti-climactic, especially as Taves takes the trouble to debunk the fanciful rumors regarding how he died and who done it. Taves is convincing when he concludes Ince died of natural causes. Ince’s life then, had no “Ince punch,” as he called his film “specials” climactic scenes, usually occurring as his characters reached their moments of truth against major second-unit backdrops of floods, volcanoes or earthquakes.

Ince was the son of actors and his brothers Ralph and John also acted, wrote and directed, but Thomas, whose wife acted for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, gravitated to the producer role which was then somewhat undefined. All roles were undefined then, and there were often no credits at all. At first nickelodeon actors were slumming and hoping for a quick return to the stage so they sought to hide their involvement with film. Producers also neglected credits to forestall the development of a star system that might cost them money. And as the best nickelodeon players filled out their personae they often became their own writers and directors and producers. Griffith, the first true film dramatist, in addition to working out the film director’s language in his own two-reelers was soon depended on to “supervise” slates of Biograph productions that would be directed by others. Ince did this as well but unlike Griffith he stopped directing. He often took credit for directing in the early teens but generally touted his “personal supervision” of slates of films, this to help brand of the studio itself. All this accounts for the rather hazy sense of who Ince was and what he was responsible for in these years of director-worship. Gradually every surviving film from the silent era is coming available via DVD, TCM, or the web and someday a somewhat better sense of his accomplishment as a film producer if not as a filmmaker will be available.

The evolutions of the first major film studios proceeded from dozens of smaller, often fly-by-night producers, distributors and exhibitors. And the producers spread from Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey studio, to New York to Philadelphia, Florida, Chicago, Colorado, Texas, Northern and finally Southern California.
Which partly explains how so many early movies were lost. Film negatives were neglected, sold at auction, lost in fires... Unstable nitrate prints were not returned from overseas, ripped to shreds or ignited in projectors, or worn out and dumped into the ocean off the Santa Monica pier. Even when stored properly film prints and negatives were chemically unstable and required regular maintenance and transfers. The film business has never been regular. Even recent films have become discolored and otherwise corrupted. Photographic film was problematic right up until its replacement by digital processes. But photographic film was also a miracle of chemistry, engineering, light and eye.

Ince in New York was an actor between plays in 1910 when a friend got him work with IMP (The Independent Motion Picture Co.) which was run by Carl Laemmle and was pointedly not a member of the Motion Picture Trust (Edison, Vitagraph, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, Star-Melies, American Pathé, Eastman Kodak, and the major film distributor). The Edison Trust sought to keep motion picture production to a closed group of well-capitalized companies that agreed to pay Edison patent royalties. The most aesthetically advanced early producer of film, American Mutoscope and Biograph, resisted the Trust but then cut a deal and joined. Ralph Ince was already an actor at Vitagraph and soon to be a director, and Thomas’ wife Elinor (Kershaw) was appearing before Biograph’s cameras, but Ince seems to have had his own cinematic epiphany at IMP. Soon he was directing Mary Pickford whom Laemmle had just signed away from D.W. Griffith and Biograph. According to Taves IMP, under pressure from the Trust was already planning to leave New York and sent Ben Turpin to scope out the west coast.

George Spoor and G.M. Anderson formed Essanay in Chicago in 1907 and by fall 1909 Anderson’s “Bronco Billy” company was making one-reel westerns in Colorado until 1911 when it moved to California, bouncing between southern and northern California until finally settling in Niles Canyon near San Jose in 1914. (Essanay merged with Vitagraph, Lubin and Selig which were ultimately absorbed into Warners.) Also at Essanay, first as a lighting tech and then also script editor, was Alan Dwan. He moved to the American Film Company and went out to their westerns company in Tucson and then followed it to San Juan Capistrano, California where he was pressed into service as director in May 1911 making over 200 one-reelers as well as supervising films directed by Marshall Neilan and Wallace Reid until he signed with Universal in mid-1913. The next year he signed with Famous Players, Adolph Zukor’s pre-Paramount attempt to bring legit plays and players to the screen. Dwan told Peter Bogdanovitch he was excited at the prospect, having acted in school, “But the theatre actors were terrible. They couldn’t work our way.” (Allan Dwan – The Last Pioneer)

The New York Motion Picture Co. was founded in 1908 by a film distribution exchange when the Edison Trust cut off their supply of films. NYMPCo established a company to make westerns in Los Angeles in 1909 under the Bison brand. Ince left IMP for the NYMPCo and arrived in Edendale, now Echo Park, in October 1911. Under pressure from the Edison lawsuits NYMPCo, IMP, Nestor and other producers merged to form Universal in June 1912, and according to Taves despite being the largest shareholder NYMPCo lost out to Laemmle who took control of Universal and the Bison brand. The former owners of NYMPCo formed Kay Bee and renamed their western company Broncho. Apparently much of Bison’s personnel were saved for Broncho for being largely made up of Oklahoma hardcase cowboys and Indians who ran Universal off the Inceville property.

Taves writes, “Westerns then comprised nearly a quarter of the films made in the United States. The West was not distant history, but a part of contemporary life, still evident in many states.” Ince made some westerns at Edendale and then in the Santa Monica mountains with various actors who specialized in playing Indians or westerners, but cast primarily by the lights of eastern dudes’ best guesses.

However, the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show ended the 1911 touring season in Pomona and settled into Venice, California for the winter. The Hundred and One, a touring band of Oklahomans, included several hundred working cowboys and Cherokee Outlet Indians with the performing skills, as well as horses, buffaloes, cattle, tipis, arrows, ropes and guns enough to put on a show. There’s no overestimating the effect the Miller Brothers Oklahoma empire had on Hollywood. Beginning in 1870 the Millers were pushing longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to leased Indian lands in the north section of Oklahoma territory. Old man Miller was a Kentucky slaveholder who fought for the South. Disgusted with Reconstruction he named his first son Wilkes Booth Miller and moved west where he found the last open rangeland in Oklahoma Territory; he and his sons had to work with the tribes of the Cherokee Outlet. This they managed to do well enough to have their family weddings and burials honored by Indian ceremonies. The story of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch is well told by Michael Wallis in his book, The Real Wild West – The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, though there are periodic eruptions of p.c. critique bemoaning the racism and rough justice of the Millers. That’s like complaining that it’s hot in the summer. The only Americans back then who weren’t racist by contemporary standards were New England WASPs who needn’t cross paths with anyone darker than a Dutchman.

Wallis writes that the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago featured two Wild West authorities of note:

“One of those was thirty-two-year-old Frederick Jackson Turner, a history professor from the University of Wisconsin. The other was William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, the flamboyant showman and quintessential westerner. The buckskinned Cody and his Indians and daredevil entertainers... were not official exposition participants. That did not bother the old buffalo hunter, whose troupe performed twice daily just outside the walls of the exposition, in front of a covered grandstand that could hold eighteen thousand spectators. Turner, however, was an invited participant. On the muggy evening of July 12, 1893, he read his academic essay ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ to an audience of bored historians at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Neither man knew the other.” (Michael Wallis, The Real Wild West)

Over the decades the Millers, racist blood-brothers of the Ponca, found their off-season roundups evolving into touring Wild West shows showcasing such early 20th century talent as Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Bill Pickett, Hoot Gibson, Lucille Mulhall, Jack Hoxie, Yak Canutt, and Ben Johnson Sr, as well as Native American talent such as Princess Wenona, Chief White Eagle, Chief Iron Tail, and even Geronimo on loan from prison. Before the Wild West show hit the road the 101 Ranch was already renowned via visiting notables such as Theodore Roosevelt.

Movies... motion pictures... the living picture... began in the 1890s with “actualities” brought before the stationary camera in the Black Maria studio which spun to follow the sun for Edison’s Kinetoscope. In 1894 “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Annie Oakley were filmed there. Soon the camera was moved around the city and environs to show “actualities” in their place: Railway Station Scene (1897) ran 28 seconds, What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (1901) ran a full minute to show a staged “actuality” of a young woman whose dress is blown up as she steps on a subway grate. Things got fictional fast, and outright theatrical overnight as early studios used painted backdrops for their actors in staged presentations as in a theater. Taves quotes from Ince’s memoirs where he describes arriving at the NYMPCo studio in Edendale:

“The furniture was bad enough, but when I thought of stationary birds poised in mid-air as the backdrop for a moving picture, I gave way to a moment of discouragement.” (Thomas Ince)

Art Acord was a Wild West show veteran and rodeo champ. He was raised in Utah other than a few years in Oklahoma. Buck Rainey writes in the Acord entry in his handbook of silent western stars:

“Art was in New York in 1909 appearing with the Dick Stanley/Bud Atkinson Wild West Show as a trick roper, bulldogger, and bronc buster. Here he met Adam Kessel, who was in the process of organizing the Bison Film Company. Kessel talked Art into accepting a job as stuntman, double, and rider.... In his book One Reel at a Time Fred Balshofer stated that he set up movie making at Edendale, California, in 1909. The company had Acord, Hoot Gibson, George Gebhart, and others. In addition to acting, Acord and the other players spent Sundays writing stories to be turned into movies. For each one accepted the film company would pay $10. Art was the leading moneymaker.”
(The Strong, Silent Type)

Acord hired out to Biograph’s D.W. Griffith on his first California winter production trip in early 1910 and Robert Henderson’s book, D.W. Griffith – The Years at Biograph, describes Griffith warding off angry San Juan Capistrano Mexican-Americans who took the actors recreation of their annual religious procession as ridicule by having Acord ride their orneriest bronco. Gebhart had discovered the Santa Monica mountains location and NYMPCo’s westerns improved. The area that became Inceville was 28 square miles leased after Ince’s first two-reel film, now made featuring the services of Hundred and One personnel, War on the Plains (1912) became a big hit. The now “101 Bison” brand focused on 2-reel productions and made it the new movie drama standard. The Edendale studio was turned over to Mack Sennett for NYMPCo’s new “Keystone” division.



The late 1911 arrival of the Miller Bros.’ ranch-hands and Indians to Ince’s aborning studio model at Inceville above Sunset at Pacific Coast Highway changed everything and sent Hollywood onto its trajectory away from the early east coast, French and Italian cinema styles. The Hundred and One crew were in Hollywood for only three years but in those years the American cinema’s concern for realism in acting and action was worked out by Francis Ford and others, notably the wrangler/stuntmen/actors who mapped out the “gags” and quickly evolved a distinct second-unit culture in which the reality of the setting’s physical space was as carefully portrayed as the action played out against it. When the 101 left Hollywood this model was sustained by Ford who left for Universal where he directed and starred in westerns, civil war films and serials. In Tag Gallagher’s essay, "Brother Feeney – Francis Ford, " he writes:

“Reviews of Ford’s pictures generally made the same points: ‘vigorous action picturesque... convincing fighting... highly commendable.’ Yet judging from two surviving titles, Blazing the Rail (2-reel Bison, November 22, 1912) and The Burning Brand (2-reel Broncho, January 1, 1913), there was something more: empathy for human beings, expressed with a direct simplicity that, however histrionic the acting, always respects the privacy of the individual tragedy. It was a quality brother John’s pictures would also possess.” (Senses of Cinema)

In Scott Simmon’s lengthy discussion of Ford and Ince’s The Invaders (1912) in his book, The Invention of the Western Film, he notes the film’s unusual mix of simplicity and sophistication right down to the question of who its title is describing and then summarizes:

“The argument The Invaders makes about history is the argument that Ince was making about film production itself: Individual heroics are less important than group action. No single individual is essential to the process of filmmaking. Ultimately, of course, the Hollywood industry would buy neither side of this argument. In filmmaking it soon settled on the star system, which regarded certain individuals as unique and irreplaceable. In its view of history, it would promote individual heroes. You couldn’t have one without the other. There’s quite a lot to be said for Ince’s attempt to do without both.”
(The Invention of the Western Film)

In 1914 as William S. Hart tells it in his memoir, My Life East and West, Ince met with him as a stage actor looking to make a more realistic western referencing his own pre-theater background and inspired by Inceville, and explained to him that the run of westerns he was finishing with the 101 staff had triggered a glut and burned out the market. Hart was disheartened:

“I didn’t have any more to say. We walked all around the camp. When we were leaving, I talked in Sioux to some of the Indians, and Tom was so astonished. He walked back and said to a young Indian: ‘What did he say?’ The Indian just smiled and would not answer, until I told him in Sioux to do so, and then he replied, truthfully, that I had said that I was going away from here, but that I wanted to stay here.” (My Life East and West)


Ince reluctantly agreed to try Hart out in some two-reelers. They made two before producing the five-reel feature, The Bargain (1914), which was directed by Reginald Barker. What followed was a ten-year string of modern “specials” often directed by Hart himself, working with Ince and Gardner Sullivan or Lambert Hillyer scripts. The Hart films were released thru NYMPCo, Triangle, Paramount, and his final bow, Tumbleweeds (1925), was United Artists first release.

The other early Western realist star was Harry Carey. He’d been part of Biograph since 1910 in New York. At the end of 1915 he moved to Universal and by 1917 Francis Ford’s brother John, now 24, began directing some of Harry Carey’s two-reelers and features. Carey was the best of the new naturalistic untheatrical acting style. He was not raised in the West as Hart had been but in many ways he turned himself into one once he’d moved to Southern California. Francis Ford and Harry Carey were the patriarchs of what came to be called the John Ford company (Dudley Nichols, George O’Brien, Victor McLaglen, Frank Nugent, John Wayne, Yakima Canutt, Ben Johnson, Ward Bond, et. al.) which probably lasted into the sixties TV work of Andrew McLaglen, Victor’s son. The second unit culture survived its own studio system decadence of the 1960s (all those comic western fistfight melees), and it is surviving CGI fx, though chastened.

But Ince himself alienated talent like Ford and Hart and then seemed unable to make the jump to major studio status when he’d been ahead of the titans Carl Laemmle, who hired away Ford, Carey and the Bison brand to turn Universal into the next westerns powerhouse, and Adolph Zukor at Paramount.
Ince signed on for distribution with Paramount after the failure of Triangle, formed when Mutual Film and NYMPCo set up Ince, D.W. Griffith, and Mack Sennett to produce high end product for $2 tickets at their own theaters. Ince left Paramount to form Associated Producers, similar to United Artists, also formed in 1919, with notable filmmakers like Alan Dwan, Mack Sennett, Marshall Neilan, Maurice Tourneur, and others. Taves writes:

“Ince found that the interruptions necessary to manage distribution made his own task as a producer almost impossible, and desirability of a more steady income also argued in favor of aligning with a distributor.” (Thomas Ince)

Ince, like many early producers obscured the credits due those who wrote and directed his productions so as to turn his name into a brand that might cut through the clutter in the market; this made the producer-supervisor the supernova that dominated the early star system. But Ince died young having built the modern film studio from the production side beginning at NYMPCo’s Bison company in 1912. (Remember that Henry Ford himself only introduced the assembly-line to that other new motion-based product manufacturing sector in 1913.) But it was the distribution-side that killed him, and the story foretells most Hollywood business narratives. Ince then resembles Francis Ford except that Ford never claimed to be an organization man. The movies themselves have happier endings than their authors, whether those be heroic individuals or humming factories of apparats.


Now that Thomas Ince has his biography, the one we’re waiting for is the Francis Ford story. That Ford’s tale is the great lost creation story of American film.


--This review uses material from Carducci's next book, Stone Male - Requiem for the Living Picture.



(Illustrations: Thomas Ince, Thomas Ince biography; Art Acord; 101 Ranch Wild West poster; Inceville; Thomas Ince and William Eagle Shirt; Big Rock’s Last Stand promotional slide; Anna Little, William Eagle Shirt, Francis Ford)



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Westerns timeline:

1894 – Buffalo Bill & Annie Oakley filmed for Edison
1903 – The Great Train Robbery
1908 – first “Broncho Billy” one-reeler produced
1909 – Francis Ford, Tom Mix debut
1910 – Harry Carey, Art Acord, Hoot Gibson debut
1912 – Ford either directs or appears in over 70 films
1914 – William S. Hart debuts with Ince; John Ford becomes Francis’ propman
1917 – Straight Shooting, Harry Carey’s first feature directed by John Ford
1927 – John Wayne is John Ford’s propman


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Brian Taves interview at
"Filmthreat.com".

In your view, what were Ince’s best surviving films? And which of his lost films would you most wish to locate?
"
Previous writing about Ince has tended to emphasize the early Westerns, both at Inceville (and) after Ince brought William S. Hart to the screen. However, their realism was also reflected in Ince’s ethnic stories, such as the urban immigrant tale “The Italian” (1915), and bringing the first Asian performers to Hollywood stardom, Tsuru Aoki and Sessue Hayakawa – even as “yellowface” dominated American filmmaking…. “The Empty Water Keg” (1912) and “The Invaders” (1912) are examples of his best westerns, and “The Drummer of the 8th” (1913), “Granddad” (1913), and “The Coward” (1915) of the Civil War films that were also popular with the 50th anniversary of the conflict; he would film “Barbara Frietchie” (1924) near the end of his career. “The Wrath of the Gods” (1914), set in Japan, was the first of the Aoki-Hayakawa films, and the recently restored “The Bargain” (1914) was the first of the Hart westerns. Best remembered of the Hart films is “Hell’s Hinges” (1916), and its critical perspective on religious faith was placed in the context of women’s rights in “Keys of the Righteous” (1918) and “Hail the Woman” (1921). While Ince’s “Civilization” (1916) linked Christianity to pacifism, once America entered the war, Ince made distinctive wartime films. Among these is the espionage thriller “False Faces” (1919), with Lon Chaney, and also emphasizing submarine warfare was “Behind the Door” (1919), which astonishingly brutal even by today’s standards: the villain, guilty of rape and mass murder, dies as he is skinned alive by the vengeful hero. Some pictures looked to the future: “Dangerous Hours” (1920) examined domestic terrorism, while “The Dark Mirror” (1920) forecast film noir, but was entirely the product of American, not European talent.”



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“Francis Ford and John Ford: The Brothers” at Homages, Ripoffs and Coincidences

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Tom Nolan in WSJ, Learning to Love Baby Peggy Again.

"Just as remarkable is the fact that that performer is still with us—and scheduled to discuss her career, with director Iwerebor, after MoMA's Sept. 5 screening. 'I was probably one of the 20 top stars [of that era],' says Southern California resident Diana Serra Cary, 93, who, as 'Baby Peggy' Montgomery, made some 50 two-reeler comedies and six feature-length movies before her 7th birthday. 'I started out at $75 a week when I was 20 months old. At the end of six months... the studio upped me to $150 a week.... At 5 years old, I was making a million dollars a picture.' ...
[T]hrough the first years of sound movies, the Hollywood establishment, she saw, was doing all it could to disparage and bury the achievements of its silent past. 'The industry people were in a state of panic.... They didn't want to sink in a [new] world they didn't know anything about.... Every opportunity they had, in the press and every other way, they relegated silent films to the Stone Age; they said they were no good, and everybody in them was no good.... You were made to feel that you'd appeared in something dreadful. And I just put the lid down on it, completely... for the next 30 years.' The grown-up Mrs. Cary penned 'The Hollywood Posse' (1975), a well-received history of Hollywood's cowboy stunt-riders (her father had been Tom Mix's double); then an account of movie child-performers ('Hollywood's Children,' 1979), and at last her own memoir ('What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy?,' 1996)."


















"Symbiosis" by Michael J. Safran

















.
From the Desk of Joe Carducci...


Jonathan Chait in New York, "The Vast Left-wing Conspiracy is on Your Screen".

“Several years ago, a trio of researchers working for the Inter-American Development Bank set out to help solve a sociological mystery. Brazil had, over the course of four decades, experienced one of the largest drops in average family size in the world, from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 children in 2000. What made the drop so curious is that, unlike the Draconian one-child policy in China, the Brazilian government had in place no policy to limit family size. (It was actually illegal at some point to advertise contraceptives in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.) What could explain such a steep drop? The researchers zeroed in on one factor: television. Television spread through Brazil in the mid-sixties. But it didn’t arrive everywhere at once in the sprawling country. Brazil’s main station, Globo, expanded slowly and unevenly. The researchers found that areas that gained access to Globo saw larger drops in fertility than those that didn’t (controlling, of course, for other factors that could affect fertility). It was not any kind of news or educational programming that caused this fertility drop but exposure to the massively popular soap operas, or novelas, that most Brazilians watch every night. The paper also found that areas with exposure to television were dramatically more likely to give their children names shared by novela characters. Novelas almost always center around four or five families, each of which is usually small, so as to limit the number of characters the audience must track. Nearly three quarters of the main female characters of childbearing age in the prime-time novelas had no children, and a fifth had one child.”



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Marc Cooper in Pacific Standard, "The Governor’s Last Stand".

“MC: There’s a trace of trashing the electorate here.
Brown: I’m not trashing the electorate.

MC: But you are saying that there is contradiction or confusion among the electorate, that people want things but don’t want to pay the bill.
Brown: People wanted houses they couldn’t afford. Or take credit-card debt. The people who went into World War I didn’t understand the cost of what they wanted either, marching away into trenches. They had bands [greeting soldiers] as they disembarked in England. They were marching away to be in these trenches for the next several years, blood running, disease. And they didn’t know, did they? And they were all good Christians, by the way—the czar was a good Christian, the kaiser was a good Christian. The Italians. Not good. Then they were in the trenches gaining a few feet here or there. We often don’t know what we’re doing—that’s called being human. Oedipus didn’t know he was sleeping with his mother and that he killed his father. He didn’t know that. That’s why he had to pull his eyes out. It was a bad experience.”



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Michael Mishak in LAT, "California Teachers Assn. a powerful force in Sacramento".

“It may seem unorthodox for an unelected citizen to sit with Sacramento's elite as they pick winners and losers in the annual spending sweepstakes. But few major financial decisions in California are made without Nuñez, who represents what is arguably the most potent force in state politics. The union views itself as ‘the co-equal fourth branch of government,’ said Oakland Democrat Don Perata, a former teacher who crossed swords with the group when he was state Senate leader. Backed by an army of 325,000 teachers and a war chest as sizable as those of the major political parties, CTA can make or break all sorts of deals. It holds sway over Democrats, labor's traditional ally, and Republicans alike. Jim Brulte, a former leader of the state Senate's GOP caucus, recalled once attending a CTA reception with a Republican colleague who told the union's leaders that he had come to ‘check with the owners.’ CTA is one of the biggest political spenders in California. It outpaced all other special interests, including corporate players such as telecommunications giant AT&T and the Chevron oil company, from 2000 through 2009, according to a state study. In that decade, the labor group shelled out more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses — roughly twice that of the next largest spender, the Service Employees International Union.”



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Rob Portman in WSJ, "The Regulatory Cliff Is Nearly as Steep as the Fiscal One".

“After three years of bureaucratic excess, the Obama administration has been quietly postponing several multibillion-dollar regulations until after the November election. Those delayed rules, together with more than 130 unfinished mandates under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, could significantly increase the regulatory drag on our economy in 2013. The Labor Department, for example, is working on a regulation that would increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers, to ‘protect’ them from investment help. This regulation, known as the Fiduciary Rule, would tighten restrictions and increase litigation risks for businesses that offer investment guidance on a commission basis, rather than the more expensive fee-for-service model. A study last year by the Oliver Wyman Group found that the Fiduciary Rule could result in higher retirement account minimums and cause 7.2 million individual retirement account (IRA) holders to lose access to investment advice. Even the Labor Department was unable to show that the rule's illusory benefits outweigh its substantial costs. After other lawmakers and I urged the White House to step in, this rule-making was delayed temporarily. But the Labor Department has told interested parties to stay tuned for another iteration of this rule. Then there is the mega-rule on the shelf at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) that could block business expansion in many areas of the country. Proposed in 2010, the Ozone Rule would impose a limit on ozone (which creates haze from emissions from cars, power plants and factories) so strict that up to 85% of U.S. counties monitored by the EPA would be in violation.”



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Lawrence Summers in FT, "The US state will expand no matter the election result".

There will be disagreement over what constituted ‘normal’ levels of spending in the past and indeed over what constitutes ‘spending’. But there is a widespread view in both parties that it is feasible and desirable that in the future the federal government will be no larger as a share of the overall economy than it has been historically. Unfortunately, this aspiration is unlikely to be achieved. Even preserving the amount of government functions the US had before the financial crisis will require substantial increases in the share of the economy devoted to the public sector.”



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Harvey Silvergate in WSJ, "Gibson Is Off the Fed’s Hook. Who’s Next? ".

“Did Gibson acquiesce in this settlement solely to end the expense, distraction, danger and agony of a federal criminal prosecution—the usual reasons for shouting ‘uncle’ to Uncle Sam? We will never know. Why? Because federal prosecutors required, as part of the ‘criminal enforcement agreement,’ that Gibson not only ‘accept[s] and acknowledge[s] responsibility for the conduct’ alleged, but also that the company's ‘public statements regarding this Agreement will not contradict the statement of facts’ set forth in an appendix to the settlement agreement. Put another way, Gibson is now forbidden to tell the world the whole truth about its conduct and its reasons for settling a case it previously claimed publicly, including in an opinion piece in this newspaper, involved no criminal conduct on its part. In exchange for agreeing to read the government's script, Gibson regained its ability to conduct business without a federal sword of Damocles dangling over its corporate head. This naked effort by federal prosecutors to control both news and outcomes, not to mention their own reputations, does not surprise those familiar with the modern federal criminal justice system.”



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John Kass in CT, "Taxing bikers: The wheels begin to spin".

“Good news, beleaguered taxpayers! A consensus is building in support of our plan to collect revenue from the One Percenters of the Commuter Class — the bicyclists who pay nothing, not even fines when they zoom past stop signs, as politicians smooch their sweaty behinds. On Wednesday, I responsibly proposed a series of bike fees to help City Hall find much-needed revenue: The Rahm-PASS, the bike boot, bike parking, bike tolls and a bicyclist license. And now it's time for readers — even those who wear tight-fitting spandex shorts and those little bike cleats — to get their writes. Before cyclists get taxed, they should start taxing (expletive deleted) writers. … How on earth did you get hired at the Trib? I've seen photos of you, and it probably wouldn't kill you to hop on a bike every now and then. Keep up the awful work. Joshua M. Dear Josh — I'll make you a deal. I'll get on a bike the moment you pay your bike toll and get a Rahm-PASS. No more free riding for you my friend. It's fee riding from now on, the Chicago Way.”



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WSJ: "Cheesecake Factory Medicine".

“No one did more to sell the Affordable Care Act than Peter Orszag, the former White House budget director who claimed during 2009-2010 that as much as a third of health spending is ‘waste’ that doesn't improve outcomes. But now that he's repaired to Wall Street and writes an online column, he's deriding the idea that better incentives can reduce costs and sneering at the ‘health-care competition tooth fairy.’ So get a load of Mr. Orszag's Tinker Bell alternative, which he called the ‘most important institutional change’ after ObamaCare passed in 2010: the Independent Payment Advisory Board composed of 15 philosopher kings who will rule over U.S. health care. Who are these Orszag 15? Well, nobody knows. The board was supposed to be up and running by the end of September, but the White House is avoiding naming names for Senate confirmation until after the election. No one knows, either, what this group of geniuses will propose, but that too is part of the grand Orszag plan. ObamaCare included dozens of speculative pilot programs that are supposed to make health-care delivery and business models less wasteful. Mr. Orszag's payment board is then supposed to apply the programs that ‘work’ to all of U.S. medicine through regulation, without Congressional consent or legal appeal. Seriously. It doesn't take a mythical childhood metaphor to mock this theory. Mr. Orszag's style of central planning—in what was already the heaviest regulated U.S. industry before ObamaCare—has failed over and over again in Medicare since the creation of the fiat pricing fee schedule in the 1980s.”



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Matt Ridley in Wired, "Apocalypse Not".

“Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: ‘The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.’ Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.”



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Yuval Levin in National Review, "The Hollow Republic".

“This difference of opinion about mediating institutions is no trifling matter. It gets at a profound and fundamental difference between the Left and the Right. The Left tends to believe that the great advantage of our liberal society is that it enables the application of technical knowledge that can make our lives better, and that this knowledge can overcome our biggest problems. This is the technocratic promise of progressivism. The Right tends to believe that the great advantage of our liberal society is that it has evolved to channel deep social knowledge through free institutions — knowledge that often cannot be articulated in technical terms but is the most important knowledge we have. For the Left, therefore, the mediating institutions (and at times even our constitutional forms) are obstacles to the application of liberal knowledge. For the Right, the mediating institutions (and our constitutional forms) are the embodiment of liberal knowledge. The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them. The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.”



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Doug Donaldson in Saturday Evening Post, "The New American Super-family".

“The driving force behind this trend is financial pressure, particularly rising housing costs, health insurance premiums, and college debt. About 8.7 million young adults ages 25 to 34 became part of multigenerational households in 2009, an increase of 13 million over 2007. Now, more than one in five young adults lives in multigenerational households. But it’s not just the young who are coming home to roost. Many elderly parents of boomers are moving in with their children as well. All told, the number of multi-gen households grew about 30 percent during the past decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And a Pew Research Center report found that 51 million Americans lived in homes of two or more adult generations in 2009, compared with 42 million in 2000. That’s a 21 percent increase in less than a decade, but more importantly it reflects a turning back to what used to be, well, normal.”



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George Will in Washington Post, "Why government needs a diet".

“Because nothing is as immortal as a temporary government program, Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW), a creature of the stimulus, was folded into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working through the CPPW, disbursed money to 25 states to fight, among other things, the scourge of soda pop. In Cook County, Ill., according to an official report, recipients using some of a $16 million CDC grant ‘educated policymakers on link between SSBs [sugar-sweetened beverages] and obesity, economic impact of an SSB tax, and importance of investing revenue into prevention.’ According to a Philadelphia city Web site, a $15 million CDC grant funded efforts to ‘campaign’ for a ‘two-cent per ounce excise tax’ on SSBs. In California, an official report says that a $2.2 million CDC grant for obesity prevention funded ‘training for grantees on media advocacy’ against SSBs. A New York report says that a $3 million grant was used to ‘educate leaders and decision-makers about, and promote the effective implementation of... a tax to substantially increase the price of beverages containing caloric sweetener.’ The Rhode Island Department of Health used a $3 million grant for ‘educating key decision-makers to serve as champions of specific . . . pricing and procurement strategies to reduce consumption of’ SSBs. In government-speak, ‘educating’ is synonymous with ‘lobbying.’ Clearly some of the $230 million in CDC/CPPW anti-obesity grants was spent in violation of the law, which prohibits the use of federal funds ‘to influence in any manner... an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation.’”



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Ben Kesling in WSJ, "Tootsie’s Secret Empire".

“The 116-year-old company, run by one of America's oldest CEOs, has become increasingly secretive over the years, severing nearly all of its connections to the outside world. Tootsie Roll shuns journalists, refuses to hold quarterly earnings calls, and issues crookedly-scanned PDFs for its earnings releases. The last securities industry analyst to maintain coverage of the company stopped last year because it was too hard to get information. ‘I think the only way you can get a tour is by jumping over the fence and sneaking in,’ said the last analyst to attempt the task, Elliott Schlang of Cleveland firm Great Lakes Review. The chairman and chief executive of Tootsie Roll is Melvin Gordon, a bespectacled man in his 90s who has headed the company for 50 years. He runs it with his 80-year-old wife, Ellen. Decades of acquisitions have given Tootsie Roll a product gallery of mostly antique—though profitable—candy brands, including Charleston Chew, Sugar Babies, Junior Mints, and Blow Pops, in addition to the company's chewy, brown namesake.”



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Futureofcapitalism.com: "Health Care Costs Sinking".

“The Wall Street Journal has an article about a cardiology patient who had three echocardiograms. Cardiogram A cost his insurer $373. Cardiogram B, six months later, ‘cost his insurer $1605,’ but the patient, who had a high-deductible plan, ‘had to pay about $1,000 of the larger bill out of his own pocket.’ Cardiogram C, earlier this year, and the most recent of the three, cost $265.31. The Journal makes from this a headline and news article about how health care costs are rising because of the transition to B from A, attributing the higher costs in B to the fact that independent medical practices are being bought up by hospitals. But the transition to C from B, which the Journal buries toward the end of the article, may be the more newsworthy one: the news that because patients are increasingly paying for their own health care through these high deductible plans, prices are actually being driven down as consumers shop around. It all depends on how the story is framed.”



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Zach Dorfman in Dissent, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Isolationism".

“While recently driving through an agricultural region of rural Colorado, I saw a giant roadside billboard calling for American withdrawal from the UN. Yet in the last decade, the Republican Party, with the partial exception of its Ron Paul/libertarian faction, has veered into such a belligerent unilateralism that its graybeards—one of whom, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, just lost a primary to a far-right challenger partly because of his reasonableness on foreign affairs—were barely able to ensure Senate ratification of a key nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. Many of these same people desire a unilateral war with Iran. And it isn’t just Republicans. Drone attacks have intensified in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere under the Obama administration. Massive troop deployments continue unabated. We spend over $600 billion dollars a year on our military budget; the next largest is China’s, at ‘only’ around $100 billion. Administrations come and go, but the national security state appears here to stay.”



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Lee Sandlin in WSJ on Ann Keating’s book, "Rising Up From Indian Country".

“By the time the main line of Ms. Keating's story begins, the Country had achieved a certain fragile balance, where the people of several ordinarily hostile tribes, together with a large number of white traders who had married Indian women, all mingled. But by the early 19th century, this peace had started to unravel. Large numbers of white settlers were pushing into the frontier, with the backing of the American government. Their presence prompted the first major nativist political movement among the Indians, led by a mysterious figure known as the ‘Shawnee prophet.’ The prophet believed that settlers wanted the Country for themselves and that the treaties offered by the white government were nothing more than empty exercises in chicanery. It would be hard to argue that he was wrong there. But he went further and called for Indians of all nations to cleanse themselves of white influence altogether: no intermarriage, no trading for white goods, no alcohol. Even some of his most militant followers thought this was excessive. Fort Dearborn, which was both a garrison and a trading post, became the center of growing unrest. Ms. Keating takes us through the inner workings of the fort from a unique vantage: a white trader named John Kinzie who had spent most of his life in the Country. Kinzie understood the anger of the local population, because he shared it: He wanted the newcomers to stay out and leave the Country the way it had been. On the other hand, he didn't have any use for the Shawnee prophet and his followers either—after all, if they succeeded, he would be out of business. Much of the entertainment of ‘Rising Up From Indian Country’ comes from watching Kinzie dealing and double-dealing with both sides in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep afloat as the situation deteriorated.”



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T.H. Breen in "Times Literary Supplement" on P.J. Marshall’s book, Remaking the British Atlantic, and Kariann Yokota’s book, Unbecoming British.

“From strikingly different interpretative perspectives, the two historians argue persuasively that for at least three decades following the end of the war, Americans found it harder to sever ties with Great Britain than they had imagined at the start of the conflict. Americans had obtained national independence, but however fervently they may have hoped to begin the world over again, they quickly discovered that Britain’s defeat in America had not seriously compromised the Empire’s military might. It still dominated Atlantic commerce.”



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Christopher Caldwell in FT, "Ivory towers will be toppled by an online ‘tsunami’".

“A great consolidation of personnel must be the result of this technological shift. Once courses are online, best practices will emerge. The US will no longer need hundreds or thousands of organic chemistry professors. Network effects will bring a stampede of students to the courses of the best universities. Students will abandon even excellent professors at excellent universities to learn code-writing the “MIT way” or the ‘Stanford way’, if they believe that is the idiom their future bosses are most likely to speak in. Certain drawbacks of online courses are obvious. They lack human contact. They are still ill-suited to teaching humanities. Even as an argument rages over whether standardised tests play too big a role in forming the US meritocracy, online learning turns such tests into the end of education itself. The world’s gilded youth will continue to be educated at Oxbridge-style, or Ivy-style, universities. But the new online system will work perfectly well for most of those who cannot afford such an option – and in some cases better. We are not all Renaissance men. There are teenagers in Chinese villages who belong in MIT’s code-writing classes but might be three years of learning English away from drawing the slightest benefit from a Shakespeare course. There are mute, inglorious Miltons around the world who are never going to get the hang of writing code. Much praise of the traditional university is meant to disguise the system’s shortcomings. When administrators talk about the capacity of classmates to inspire, they often mean that there is more sex, hashish and beer on campus than there used to be.”



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James Morris in Wilson Quarterly on Andrew Delbanco’s book, "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be".

“Even at colleges embedded within elite universities, the number of humanities majors in graduating classes is shrinking. Between 1990 and 2009, for instance, the proportion of such majors dropped at Stanford from 20 percent to 15 percent, at Brown from 37 percent to 24 percent, and at Yale from 50 percent to 33 percent. Education in the humanities is not antithetical to the sciences, which are to be embraced for their separate understanding of the natural world. But the humanities will never be the sciences, despite attempts to impose on them a scientific rigor. The humanities don’t generate new knowledge, as the sciences repeatedly do. They maintain and burnish the old knowledge, the truths about humanity that carry no date and every date, and they display that knowledge for discovery and contemplation and challenge by new generations.”



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David Hawkes in Times Literary Supplement on Susan Hegeman’s book, "The Cultural Return".

“The ‘cultural turn’ to which Susan Hegeman’s title alludes was originally a Communist political tactic, developed in the 1920s by the Italian Party leader, Antonio Gramsci. During periods when the political route to power seemed blocked, Gramsci argued that revolutionaries should turn their attention to the cultural sphere: the arts, the academies and the press. By working to undermine the hegemony of bourgeios culture while simultaneously developing a proletarian alternative, they would engage in a ‘war of position’ designed to prepare the ideological ground for the total expropriation of capital once political circumstances permitted. The post-war Left took up this project with enthusiasm. Even as leftist parties failed at the polls, their cultural surrogates came to dominate, particularly in the most sophisticated and avant-garde movements.... Yet the Left’s rise to cultural power was accompanied by its descent into economic and political impotence. This was not what Gramsci had intended.”



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Gautam Naik in WSJ, "Journals’ Ranking System Roils Research".

“The impact factor, or IF, is routinely used by researchers in deciding where to publish and what to read. It guides promotions, tenure decisions and funding committees around the world, who assume someone publishing in a high-impact journal must be doing superior work. Thomson Reuters calculates the IF by dividing the number of citations of research papers in a journal in one year by the total number of papers published in the same journal in the two previous years. So while the IF captures the citation rate of a journal as a whole, it says nothing about the quality or veracity of any individual paper. Nonetheless, more and more countries today use the IF system to grade scientists. A few years ago, Qatar University began offering cash bonuses to its academics linked to the IF of the journal in which they publish. Critics say that pushes academics to seek trendy fields of research and to try to publish in journals with the highest IF, instead of those that offer the best audience for their work. ‘It distorts the entire scientific enterprise,’ says Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal.”



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Nicholas Wade in NYT, "Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say".

“Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword. The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin. The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that ‘we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.’ Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages ‘fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,’ they report.”



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Philip Ball in Prospect, "Riddled with irregularity".

“Language has a logical job to do—to convey information—and yet it is riddled with irrationality: irregular verbs, random genders, silent vowels, ambiguous homophones. You’d think languages would evolve towards an optimal state of concision, but instead they accumulate quirks that hinder learning, not only for foreigners but also for native speakers. These peculiarities have been explained by linguists by reference to the history of the people who speak it. That’s often fascinating, but it does not yield general principles about how languages have developed—or how they will change in future. As they evolve, what guides their form? Linguists have long suspected that language is like a game, in which individuals in a group vie to impose their way of speaking. We adopt words and phrases that we hear, and help them propagate. Through face-to-face encounters, language evolves to reconcile our conflicting needs as speakers or listeners: when speaking, we want to say our bit with minimal effort—we want language to be structurally simple. As listeners, we want the meaning to be clear—we want language to be informative. In other words, speakers try to shift the effort onto listeners, and vice versa.”



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Yoram Hazony in WSJ, "The God of Independent Minds".

“This dichotomy between reason and revelation has a great deal of history behind it, but I have never accepted it. In fact, as an Orthodox Jew, I often find the whole discussion quite frustrating. I will let Christians speak for their own sacred texts, but in the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament") and the classical rabbinical sources that are the basis for my religion, one of the abiding themes is precisely the ever-urgent need for human beings, if they are to find what is true and just, to maintain their capacity for independent thought and action. Almost every major hero and heroine of the Hebrew Bible is depicted as independent-minded, disobedient, even contentious. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph's brothers, Moses and Aaron, Gideon and Samuel, prophets such as Elijah and Elisha, and exilic biblical figures such as Daniel, Mordechai and Esther—all are portrayed as confronting authority and breaking the laws and commands of kings. And for this they are praised. But aren't these biblical figures just disobeying human institutions in response to commands from on high? Not at all. Very often the disobedience we see in Hebrew Scripture is initiated by human beings with no word from God at all.”



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Tom Bartlett at Chronicle.com, "Dusting Off God".

“A heavenly reminder seemed to make subjects significantly more magnanimous. In another study, researchers found that prompting subjects with the same vocabulary made some more likely to volunteer for community projects. Intriguingly, not all of them: Only those who had a specific dopamine receptor variant volunteered more, raising the possibility that religion doesn't work for everybody. A similar experiment was conducted on two Israeli kibbutzes. The scenario was more complicated: Subjects were shown an envelope containing 100 shekels (currently about $25). They were told that they could choose to keep as much of the money as they wished, but that another member of the kibbutz was being given the identical option. If the total requested by the participants (who were kept separated) exceeded 100 shekels, they walked away with nothing. If the total was less than or equal to 100, they were given the money plus a bonus based on what was left over. The kicker is that one of the kibbutzes was secular and one was religious. Turns out, the more-devout members of the religious kibbutz, as measured by synagogue attendance, requested significantly fewer shekels and expected others to do the same. The researchers, Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle, ventured that ‘collective ritual has a significant impact on cooperative decisions.’”



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Tim Black at Spiked-online.com, "An ugly rerun of the Satanic panic".

“The state trusts parents to look after their kids even less today than it did 20 years ago. So it perhaps comes as little surprise that this week the Department of Education, backed by the Metropolitan Police and assorted charities, including the NSPCC, issued a report just as viciously suspicion-sowing as the Satanic ritual abuse theory proved to be all those years ago. Its title is carefully phrased, but the implications are clear: National Action Plan for Tackling Child Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief. It defines so-called ‘child abuse linked to faith or belief’ as follows: ‘This includes belief in witchcraft, spirit possession, demons or the devil, the evil eye or djinns, dakini, kindoki, ritual or muti murders and use of fear of the supernatural to make children comply with being trafficked for domestic slavery or sexual exploitation.’ And how does the government plan to address this supernatural version of child abuse? Principally by doing two things. First, it wants to make sure we all think that there is a problem. This is to be done by ‘raising awareness’ of the phenomenon of witchcraft-inspired child abuse within a community, something it intends to do through ‘faith leader champions’ and ‘training’ parents. And second, having fomented suspicion in a community’s midst, the state wants to encourage social workers and teachers to look out for ‘indicators’ of faith-linked abuse, such as children talking of ‘deliverance’ or of being in a ‘cave’. (This is eerily familiar to anyone who remembers that the NSPCC dished out its own list of Satanic ritual abuse indicators to Rochdale social workers in the early 1990s.)”



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Fernando Cervantes in Times Literary Supplement on John Lynch’s book, "New Worlds – A religious history of Latin America".

“The evangelization of Latin America began well before the implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63). The aim of the ‘missionaries’ (a term the early mendicant friars never actually used) was not so much conversion, as incorporation. To those who received them, the enthusiasm with which the majority of natives flocked to receive baptism was clear evidence that they already belonged to Christ. The friars, accordingly, opted to instruct their converts not so much by the imposition of a given set of doctrines, as by the enactment of ritual practices that the natives soon came to claim as their own. In tune with the bulk of European immigrants, the majority of Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars, like the Jesuits who arrived some decades later, had no qualms about deferring to what they perceived as the superior knowledge of native leaders – not only about the physical environment, but also about the local spiritual forces. As they embraced and gradually sifted a large number of conflicting systems of explanation, the newcomers often took over roles previously played by indigenous leaders. In the process, they instilled in the minds of their neophytes an image of Christianity as endowed with a power that seemed stronger than the local spiritual traditions, but not incompatible with them. This was essentially a liturgical culture, one where enacted worship had a much more lasting impact than any show of force. The performative qualities of indigenous religions found strong parallels in European liturgical traditions. The indigenous Christian cultures that emerged from the interaction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds were spontaneous developments, fed by the imagination of Europeans who found it perfectly natural to appropriate the symbols and values of their converts.”



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MercoPress: "Argentina wants to cut Falklands’ squid catches".

“Argentina is planning the incorporation of Chinese jiggers to catch Illex squid next season, a decision rejected by the local fishing chambers but which according to the Buenos Aires financial media is linked to the sovereignty dispute over the Falkland Islands and surrounding waters. The Argentine Federal Fisheries Council approved resolution 7 opening a registry for 20 additional jiggers, 10 of them from China, apparently part of the June deal between Premier Wen Jiabao and Cristina Fernandez that also contemplates the possibility of supplying, servicing and unloading catches in Patagonian ports.”



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Kathrin Hille in FT, "China sees benefit in making friends".

“Cambodia, which this year chairs the 10-nation Asean group, blocked an attempt by the Philippines and Vietnam to include a reference in the summit communiqué to a recent stand-off with China in the South China Sea. ‘We co-ordinated very well with Cambodia in that case and ... prevented an incident which would have been detrimental to China,’ says Chen Xiangyang, a foreign policy expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Analysts say Cambodia's move to do China's bidding is a glimpse of things to come as Beijing seeks to build foreign policy alliances it long eschewed. Deterred from such alliances by the collapse of its pact with the Soviet Union in 1961, China decided in 1982, when it started opening up after more than a decade of self-imposed isolation, it should follow a policy of non-alignment. But following the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab spring and the growing US push to reassert its presence in Asia, this strategy is being challenged at home. ‘The situation in China's backyard has become more complicated, and there is a feeling that things are running out of control,’ says Mr Chen. ‘Following the increase in Chinese power, we will need more friends. Otherwise we run the risk of isolation.’ Some Chinese scholars believe Beijing has already started watering down its non-alignment dogma.”



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Tyler Cowen in NYT, "Two Prisms for Looking at China’s Problems".

“The Austrian approach raises the possibility that there is no way for China to make good on enough of its oversubsidized investments. At first, they create lots of jobs and revenue, but as the business cycle proceeds, new marginal investments become less valuable and more prone to allocation by corruption. The giddy booms of earlier times wear off, and suddenly not every decision seems wise. The combination can lead to an economic crackup — not because aggregate demand is too low, but because the economy has been producing the wrong mix of goods and services. To keep its investments in business, the Chinese government will almost certainly continue to use political means, like propping up ailing companies with credit from state-owned banks. But whether or not those companies survive, the investments themselves have been wasteful, and that will eventually damage the economy. In the Austrian perspective, the government has less ability to set things right than in Keynesian theories. Furthermore, it is becoming harder to stimulate the Chinese economy effectively. The flow of funds out of China has accelerated recently, and the trend may continue as the government liberalizes capital markets and as Chinese businesses become more international and learn how to game the system. Again, reflecting a core theme of Austrian economics, market forces are overturning or refusing to validate the state-preferred pattern of investments.”



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Choe Sang-Hun in NYT, "One Man’s Tale of Two Koreas, Changed Allegiances, Torture and Fear".

“Tortured by his own government in the 1980s for supporting its archenemy, North Korea, Mr. Kim now lives under the protection of the South, which assigned him a full-time government bodyguard. The reason: North Korea, which once considered Mr. Kim such an asset that it smuggled him out of South Korea for a meeting with the North’s founder, now wants him dead. The threat to his life is apparent retribution for a change of heart. He renounced the Communist police state in the 1990s and has worked tirelessly ever since to help North Koreans build an underground pro-democracy movement, using the border between the North and its ally China as his base of operations.”



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Rufus Phillips in WSJ on Fredrik Logevall’s book, "Embers of War".

“In a different vein, ‘Embers of War’ provides an unbalanced account of the rise of South Vietnam with Ngo Dinh Diem as its leader. In 1955, there was a contest for power in South Vietnam, which I saw firsthand as a U.S. intelligence officer between Diem and various sectarian forces led by a gangster group called the Binh Xuyen. The Binh Xuyen controlled the national police and the streets of Saigon with 7,000 well-armed men. They also controlled all gambling, the opium dens and prostitution. Diem attempted to replace the police chief, which brought on armed conflict between the Vietnamese army, which supported Diem, and the Binh Xuyen, whom the French secretly supported as a way of maintaining influence. When the contest appeared in doubt, U.S. Ambassador J. Lawton Collins, very much influenced by the French hatred of Diem as a die-hard nationalist, recommended to President Eisenhower that we replace Diem with a ‘coalition’ government in which undoubtedly the Binh Xuyen would have continued to play a role. While Collins was in Washington pleading his case, war broke out in Saigon between the Binh Xuyen and the army, who quickly drove the former into the swamps surrounding Saigon. Collins was overruled and U.S. support for Diem continued.”



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Lien-Hang Nguyen in NYT, "Exploding the Myths About Vietnam".

“If we are to learn from the past, then, it’s worth parting the bamboo curtain that has long concealed decision making in North Vietnam to dispel some ingrained myths of that oft-invoked war. It is commonly believed that North Vietnam decided to go to war in 1959-60 to save the southern insurgency from eradication and that the Communist Party enjoyed the unflagging support of the Vietnamese people until the war’s end in 1975. But recent evidence reveals that the party’s resolution to go to war in South Vietnam was intimately connected to problems at home. Revolutionary war was an effective way to deflect attention from domestic problems, including a devastating land reform campaign, a dissident intellectual movement and an unsuccessful state plan for socialist transformation of the economy. One of the greatest misconceptions of the Vietnam War is that Ho Chi Minh was the uncontested leader of North Vietnam. In reality, Ho was a figurehead while Le Duan, a man who resides in the marginalia of history, was the architect, main strategist and commander in chief of North Vietnam’s war effort. The quiet, stern Mr. Duan shunned the spotlight but he possessed the iron will, focus and administrative skill necessary to dominate the Communist Party.”



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James Hookway in WSJ, "Wealthy Vietnamese Face Backlash as Economy Worsens".

“Some of Vietnam's Communist leaders have never been entirely comfortable with their country's pro-market reforms. Waves of liberalization have often been followed by periods of inaction. Analysts now worry that combating politicians and a hostile public might thwart the reforms needed to recapture the stellar growth rates that once made the country one of world's most sought-after emerging markets. Plans for privatizations have stalled as bad debts have rippled through the banking system. Meanwhile, top executives at some state-owned enterprises have been arrested and charged with mismanaging state resources after the global financial crisis sent many businesses into a financial tailspin, exposing the shortcomings of Vietnam's bid to catch up with its neighbors after decades of war and Marxist economic planning.”



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Floyd Whaley in NYT, "A Youthful Populace Helps Make the Philippines an Economic Bright Spot in Asia".

“With $70 billion in reserves and lower interest payments on its debt after recent credit rating upgrades, the Philippines pledged $1 billion to the International Monetary Fund to help shore up the struggling economies of Europe. “This is the same rescue fund that saved the Philippines when our country was in deep financial trouble in the early ’80s,” said Representative Mel Senen Sarmiento, a congressman from Western Samar. The Philippines has certainly had a steady flow of positive economic news recently. On July 4, Standard & Poor’s raised the country’s debt rating to just below investment grade, the highest rating for the country since 2003 and equivalent to that of Indonesia. The Philippines is the 44th-largest economy in the world today, according to HSBC estimates. But if current trends hold, it can leap to the No. 16 spot by 2050. The Philippine stock market, one of the best performers in the region, closed at a record high after the recent S.& P. rating upgrade, and the country’s currency, the peso, reached a four-year high against the dollar at about the same time. The gross domestic product of the Philippines grew 6.4 percent in the first quarter, according to the country’s central bank, outperforming all other growth rates in the region except China’s.”



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James Hookway in WSJ, "In Thailand Today, Teen Monks Express the Spirit to a Rock Beat".

“Each year as monsoon rains sweep their way over Thailand, tens of thousands of teenage boys shave their heads and are ordained as Buddhist monks in a traditional rite of passage. Some find their life's vocation during the few weeks they spend in the monastery, and they become full-time monks. Others post videos of themselves on YouTube, as they play air guitar to hard-rock tracks like Yngwie Malmsteen's ‘Iron Clad,’ or recite religious chants to thumping hip-hop beats. The Buddhist faith practiced by more than 90% of Thailand's population is going through something like culture shock as the country quickly modernizes alongside East Asia's other booming economies. With more Thais going online, often through mobile phones, some of the country's novice monks are becoming online media stars, jarring an older generation that doesn't quite know what to make of it all.”



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Evan Osnos in New Yorker, "The Burmese Spring".

“The Burmese people have been subjected to the whims of despotic leaders for so long that ‘government’ has been included in a traditional lament about the ‘five evils’ in life, along with fire, water, thieves, and enemies. Their history has not been without glory: the first major Burmese kingdom, which flourished at Pagan, in the eleventh century, created spectacular Buddhist temples and pagodas more than a century before comparable cathedrals appeared in Europe. The Burmese went on to conquer present-day Laos and Thailand. But in 1885 a British general arrived with enough pith-helmeted troops to force the final king out of his palace on an oxcart, and declared Burma a minor province of India.”



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Economist: "Indian banks – Hold your nose".

“One of India’s strengths is its companies. In general they are profitable, well-run and have healthy balance-sheets. But the country has long had pockets of indebtedness, too. A tradition of ‘promoters’—as individuals or families with controlling stakes are known—can lead firms to borrow rather than dilute down their masters’ stakes by issuing shares. A rabble of public-sector walking dead, from Air India to local electricity boards, bleed cash yet still get access to state-owned banks. And a boom in infrastructure projects, from roads to power stations and airports, is being paid for with debt. Some of these projects are now in trouble because of red tape and a slowing economy. All of this fuels concern that India has a bigger bad-debt problem than the rather stable level of banks’ official ‘non-performing’ loans suggests. Just how big is unclear because many loans have been labelled as ‘restructured’. This means their terms have been softened but that they are not formally recognised as bad debts.”



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Victor Mallet in FT, "India pursues Mars ‘fantasy’".

“India and China have raced to launch moon shots and other space projects over the past decade, but China has moved ahead of its Asian rival and in June this year put its first woman astronaut into space as part of a mission to test docking procedures for a proposed manned space station by 2020. Mr Singh once justified India’s investment in space by saying that ‘a base of scientific and technical knowledge has emerged as a critical determinant of the wealth and status of nations and it is that which drives us to programmes of this type’. But India suffered a setback in December 2010 when a rocket carrying a communications satellite veered off course and exploded in the second launch failure in less than a year. News of the Mars plan sparked contrasting reactions on newspaper websites. Some Indians mocked ambitions they regard as a waste of resources amid so much hunger and poverty, while others expressed pride that their country was competing with space powers such as the US, Russia and China.”



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Biman Mukherji & Tom Wright in WSJ, "India Bets on Rare-Earth Minerals".

“Beijing, they say, wants to force electronics and green-energy companies to set up production in China in return for access to the minerals. In March, the U.S., Japan and the European Union asked the World Trade Organization to facilitate formal consultations with China over the matter. The standoff has left India, currently the world's second-largest producer and home to large deposits of rare-earth minerals, with a window of opportunity to boost production to fill the dropoff in China's exports. State-owned Indian Rare Earths Ltd., which suspended mining in 2004 due to its inability to compete with China on price, is building a rare-earth processing plant in the eastern state of Orissa. A company official said the plant should begin operations in September. The government also has two ships prospecting off the southern coast of India for reserves on the seabed. Rare-earth deposits are abundant on the ocean floor but have never been mined on an industrial scale.”



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Vikas Bajaj in NYT, "A Developer Versus the Gods".

“To John Sims, the Himalayas, with some of the finest mountain slopes in the world, seemed like the perfect place to build India’s first Western-style ski resort. But he got his first clue about the uphill challenge he faced when the local gods — or at least the holy men who claimed to speak for them — came out against his project here. In the seven years since, Mr. Sims, an American hotel developer with years of experience working in India, has encountered seemingly endless setbacks. Some opponents claimed falsely that the 115-acre project would take over the entire valley. Others complained that the developers had underpaid landowners for their property. The state of Himachal Pradesh, which had once championed the $500 million proposal, moved to scrap it after a different political party took over. Now, a court has allowed it to go forward but has given the developers just six months to secure environmental permits from a government that has repeatedly stalled the project. ‘My fundamental complaint is only this: Why did you invite us?’ Mr. Sims said. ‘Why did you take our deposit? Why did you encourage us to spend money and then make a 180-degree turn?’”



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Natasha Doff in Moscow News, "Russia’s Far East dilemma".

“The region that spans an area twice the size of India on Russia’s Pacific coast has long caused management issues for the Moscow-based federal government, some 6,000 kilometers away. After vague attempts to develop it during the Soviet Union, the area fell into disrepair during the economically turbulent 1990s and has since seen its population drop by some 14 percent. A decade ago, the federal authorities might have gotten away with leaving the region to stagnate, as it has with many other areas in the country’s vast hinterlands, but now pressure is building up from across the region’s southern border: resource-hungry China with its 1.3 billion-strong population. The Chinese have already begun to make their presence felt in the region, with many cities home to large Chinese districts and streets adorned with bilingual signs. Russia has responded by stepping up its political and military presence in the region, but the necessity of developing it is taking on greater and greater precedence.”



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Maryna Rakhlei at EUobserver.com, "Vladimir Vladimirovich Lukashenka".

“The Belarusian and Russian leadership are acting as if there were no moral laws, no neighbouring countries, no international agreements and – no tomorrow. For this reason, domestic policy can lie solely in the hands of the elected heads of state and their clique. The majority, minority, the dissidents and well-wishing international organisations can be disregarded. The Pussy Riot case showed it very clearly. For Putin not just a handful of opposition leaders, but any citizen with a critical and active political stand is a thorn, even if not an immediate threat to his power. And yes, he himself is not a pussy. That’s exactly what happened in Belarus in the last decade. First the opposition politicians were silenced, now everyone should go into ostrich mode. Here let’s not forget that a triplet twin is on the way. Kyiv gets less media attention but cultivates the same tendencies.”



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Frederic Raphael in Times Literary Supplement on Bernard Wasserstein’s book, "On the Eve – The Jews of Europe before the Second World War".

“Zionism, with its socialist and secular overtones, was a marginal ‘solution’ for most Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, until soon before the outbreak of war in 1939. The great alternative seemed to be Communism. In the light of the revelation of the extent and brutality of the Terror, it has become difficult to imagine why so many signed up to Lincoln Steffen’s view that the Soviet Union represented ‘the future that works’. Wasserstein makes Jewish enthusiasm for Communism entirely understandable. In 1920 all religious activity, including that of the Orthodox Church, was being dismantled in the USSR. At last, it seemed, Jews were to be no different from anyone else.”



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Philip Ebels at EUobserver.com, "For the United Statelets of Europe".

“Alfred Heineken did more than just brew beer. He also thought about things, like the future of Europe and how best to proceed. ‘I propose a United Europe of 75 states,’ he wrote in a pamphlet published in the summer of 1992, ‘each with a population of five to 10 million inhabitants.’ Heineken, a creative old man with a lot of time and money on his hands, was famous for having wacky ideas. And the one about Europe was quickly forgotten. Alas. Because 20 years later, it is more relevant than ever. It has been said before, but never was it truer than today: European states are too small for international affairs and too big for everyday life. The time is long gone when Germany or France was able to fend for itself on the global stage, let alone Luxembourg or the Netherlands. That is why today, there is Nato, the EU, and - for the time being - a single currency.”



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Angus Kennedy at Spiked-online.com, "Why the elite wants to obliterate borders".

“A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.
First it is under attack from supranationalism, that is, from institutions like the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Security Council, and, most dramatically, the European Union. So while nations retain sovereignty at a formal level, increasing degrees of ‘material sovereignty’ have been acquired by supranational organisations. Baudet argues, for instance, that the official aim of the EU ‘is the negation of the concept of statehood’, because the nation state is held responsible, most notably by German theorists, for war. The EU’s immanent federalist logic leads to the necessary extension of its bureaucratic power (taking more and more countries into its orbit). Or – as an illustration of the attack on the democratic basis of national sovereignty – take the contempt in which the ECHR holds Britain for denying convicted prisoners the right to vote: this despite the fact that parliament voted 234 votes to 22 against the proposal. It seems the ECHR is happy to demand Britain change laws upheld by its own democracy. Second, self-government is also under attack from below. Firstly, in the form of multiculturalism and its official support, legal pluralism (where the law is applied with cultural ‘sensitivity’ rather than justly). Secondly, from cultural diversity, which rejects the idea of a British or a Dutch identity in favour of overlapping multiple, provisional and lightly held, identities.”



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WSJ Interview: "Guy Sorman".

“Three years ago, on a television talk show, the future French president suggested that Mr. Sorman take his liberal economic ideas and himself out of France. ‘This was a kind of anti-Semitic, bourgeois attack,’ says Mr. Sorman, who is Jewish. He says Mr. Hollande afterward told him he went too far and apologized, ‘and I said, 'I don't know if you went too far, but it does express your deep conviction.'’ ‘For me,’ he adds, ‘Mr. Hollande is quite the conservative bourgeois type of provincial France—the people who hate money, who hate capitalism, who hate business. They think all these ideas are quite foreign to French culture and French genius.’ Much of the French right has also stayed faithful to what's called ‘a certain idea of France.’ From Charles de Gaulle on, presidents have glorified the small shopkeeper and kept their distance from more cosmopolitan CEOs of multinationals. As with Europe, Mr. Sorman takes a longer view. Upon coming to power in 1981, France's first and last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, nationalized industry and banking, thrice devalued the franc and threatened to pull France out of the European common market. Two years later, he reversed course. The current crop of Socialists ‘are not extremists anymore,’ says Mr. Sorman. ‘The big difference today with the 1980s is that nobody believes in socialist solutions. This alternative has disappeared. The only alternative is status quo—or a return to traditions of French entrepreneurship.’”



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Joseph Harriss in American Spectator, "When France Lost Its Crown Jewel".

“But the rebellion unexpectedly accelerated in 1942. Oddly enough, it was thanks to the Allied landing in North Africa. Algerians liked the cut of American uniforms, the zip of their jeeps, the taste of their chewing gum. They saw how easily GIs brushed aside the Vichy troops who briefly opposed them, making the French look like losers. They noticed the easy, democratic relations between officers and men. And they read American leaflets dropped over Algeria: ‘We come to your country to free you from the grip of conquerors who seek to deprive you of your sovereign rights, your religious freedom, and the right to lead your way of life in peace.’ (Just who those ‘conquerors’ were wasn’t explicit, but the Algerians had their own ideas about that.) Nor was the French cause helped by the Atlantic Charter’s call for all peoples to choose their own form of government.”



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Lauro Martines in Times Literary Supplement on Michael Mallett & Christine Shaw’s book, "The Italian Wars, 1494-1559".

“The international character of the Italian Wars made them a school for armed conflict. They tested for the first time the panoply of resources that would go into modern warfare: handguns and the sustained use of the new gunpowder artillery, more disciplined infantry units, novel forms of fortification, underground explosives, and daring approaches to deficit financing for war. The French, Spanish and German noblemen who fought as officers in the Italian Wars carried the lessons of their experience directly into the French Wars of Religion (1562-98), Spain’s Eighty Years War in the Low Countries (1567-1648), and indirectly into the Thirty Years War (1618-48).”



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Steven Ozment in NYT, "German Austerity’s Lutheran Core".

“On the one hand, we’re told, the 1920s legacy of destabilizing inflation explains Germany’s staunch aversion to expansionary monetary and fiscal policies today; on the other hand, the Nazi taint on the interwar years seems to prove for some that, even in 2012, the intentions of democratic Germany can’t be trusted when it comes to Europe’s well-being. But rather than scour tarnished Weimar, we should read much deeper into Germany’s incomparably rich history, and in particular the indelible mark left by Martin Luther and the ‘mighty fortress’ he built with his strain of Protestantism. Even today Germany, though religiously diverse and politically secular, defines itself and its mission through the writings and actions of the 16th century reformer, who left a succinct definition of Lutheran society in his treatise ‘The Freedom of a Christian,’ which he summarized in two sentences: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none, and a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all.’ Consider Luther’s view on charity and the poor. He made the care of the poor an organized, civic obligation by proposing that a common chest be put in every German town; rather than skimp along with the traditional practice of almsgiving to the needy and deserving native poor, Luther proposed that they receive grants, or loans, from the chest. Each recipient would pledge to repay the borrowed amount after a timely recovery and return to self-sufficiency, thereby taking responsibility for both his neighbors and himself.”



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David Goodhart at Demos.co.uk, "The British are the new Irish".

“Jonathan Freedland's claim that the Olympic success marks the end of British decline, seems almost the opposite of the truth. North sea oil is running out, the financial services sector is in crisis, the armed forces can no longer project power; on most of the conventional indicators decline looks set to accelerate. But we have found a story about ourselves that suits our reduced circumstances. An inventive people, comfortable in their own skins, who can throw a good party. The British are the new Irish. England is the only country in Olympics history to host the games without the name of the host country ever being said in the media. This would never happen if the Olympics were held in Scotland or Wales (at English expense). ‘Scotland’ or ‘Wales’ would be emblazoned across the front pages on repeated ad nauseum on broadcast media. Similarly no English Olympian was actually called ‘English’. The words ‘English’ and ‘England’ were studiously avoided by every single British media outlet. This may be seen where gold medals were won by a team comprising both English and Scottish competitors.”



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Gabe Fisher at TimesofIsrael.com, "BBC spent almost £333,000 concealing Mideast ‘Balen Report’".

“The British Broadcasting Corporation has spent almost £333,000 in legal costs associated with its efforts to conceal the Balen Report, a 2004 internal inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose contents were never released to the public. The BBC was recently forced to reveal the legal fees as a result of a Freedom of Information request from conservative news site The Commentator, which reported on Sunday that the total amount was £332,780.47, more than $500,000. The real figure is likely higher, because in-house hours and Value-Added Tax were not calculated into the released figures, the website said. The Balen Report, written by veteran journalist Malcolm Balen, was originally commissioned in response to allegations that the BBC had an anti-Israel bias in its reporting. It was never released, leading to a series of legal battles to divulge its contents.”



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Hilal Khashan at meforum.org, "Lebanon’s Shiite-Maronite Alliance of Hypocrisy".

“Neither Lebanon's Shiites nor Maronites felt at home under Ottoman domination, and Sunnis relegated both communities to inferior social status. Both communities found relative freedom in their mountain enclaves although they occasionally suffered from both the excesses of regional governors who burdened them with taxes and their local feudal leaders who impoverished them and denied them education, especially in the case of the Shiites. The strong Maronite church moderated some of the adverse effects of feudal leadership, mainly because it took it upon itself to contribute to the education of the community, building numerous schools as early as the eighteenth century, especially the famous La Sagesse school in 1875. The church also played a crucial role in maintaining the cohesion of the community and preparing it for statehood. For example, Patriarch Elias Huwayik was instrumental in promoting the creation of Greater Lebanon, and in 1919, he travelled to the Versailles Peace Conference to pursue his objective. The Shiites were less fortunate since they did not have their own religious establishment to take care of basic communal needs. The Sunni Ottoman state did not even recognize a separate communal status for the Shiites. Many Shiite clerics had modest education, and they generally had little impact on the affairs of the community. Shiites had to wait until 1926 to have their own religious court, thanks to the efforts of the French High Commissioner in Lebanon, Auguste Henri Ponsot, who wanted to empower them as a countervailing force to the Sunni community's growing pan-Syrian orientation. The Shiites only won their separate clerical institution in 1969 when Imam Musa Sadr established the Shiite Higher Islamic Council, despite Sunni protests. Under the French Mandate, Lebanon's Sunnis opposed the country's creation in 1920 and continued to demand reunion with Syria until after the Coastal Conference of 1936. During this period, the Maronites came to believe that they needed to foster good relations with the Shiites in order to provide ‘an ideological alternative to the Sunni-pan-Arab conception of Lebanon.’”



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Damien Cave in NYT, "Syria Seen as Trying to Roil Lebanon".

“But for many in Lebanon, the arrest of Michel Samaha, a former minister of information, revealed the hand that Syria aims to play. The arrest on Aug. 9 of Mr. Samaha, a Christian with close ties to Mr. Assad, suggested that Syria saw chaos and bloodshed in Lebanon as beneficial, part of a strategy apparently intended to distract the international community’s attention from Syria and to raise the stakes if the Assad government collapses. ‘Assad is trying to say to the world, when Syria is destabilized, the region will be, too,’ said Boutros Harb, a member of Parliament with the pro-Western March 14 coalition, who was the target of an assassination attempt last month. ‘It’s him asking: Are you capable of handling this regional chaos? And if you’re not, protect my regime.’ The evidence presented against Mr. Samaha has been considerable. Security officials told reporters that he had been caught with explosives that he had driven in from Syria after making plans to target ‘big crowds’ and Sunni leaders who support the Free Syrian Army. (Mr. Samaha initially confessed, then recanted.) A senior security official said in an interview that the evidence included about 90 minutes of video footage showing Mr. Samaha meeting with an informer whom he had hired to carry out the attacks. In two videos, Mr. Samaha described his plan in general terms, the official said, and in a third he can be seen in a Beirut parking garage, transferring more than 200 pounds of explosives from his car to the car of the informer. The Lebanese official, who asked not to be identified because the courts have not made the evidence public yet, added that the final recording shows Mr. Samaha paying the informer $170,000. That was how much the Syrians had promised, he said. While the Shiite response has been relatively muted, Hezbollah defended Mr. Samaha until investigators described the evidence.”



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AlBawaba.com: "The Gangs of Amman: where tribes are more powerful than the state".

“The souq was quiet when we saw it but residents tell of a very different story. They have witnessed the gang battles between the two major tribes in the area, the Harahsheh and the Abu Rmeileh. These are not just families with a grudge: they are hundreds of members strong and they are heavily armed with Uzis and AK47s. Jebal al Nasr is not some anomaly either, last month a 22 year old police officer was gunned down when one of the tribes in Muwaqqar, North West of the capital, attacked the police station. 500 heavily armed members of the Khreisha clan launched an assault after one of the family members was arrested. So far no one has been charged and many in Jordan believe the government is too weak to take on the tribe head-to-head. Back in Jebal al Nasr we talk to Rafat, owner of a clothes store just off the main street. He speaks to us on the condition of leaving off his last name as he is too afraid of revenge attacks on his business. He tells us that small arguments about the price of a t-shirt can turn into all-out warfare if the tribes get involved.”



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Brendan Harrison in CSM, "Arms, drugs, and human trafficking: What does the future hold for northern Mali".

“The degeneration began with a January 2012 rebellion by ethnic Tuareg separatists. Although their grievances can be traced back at least to the French colonial period, the immediate catalyst for the present uprising seems to have been the return of battle-hardened Tuareg fighters from Libya, where they had fought for the ousted government of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. As the new conflict wore on in February and March, there was frustration within the Malian military over the government’s perceived inability to aid its own troops and stop the uprising in the north. Mutiny and a coup ensued, leading to disarray in the country’s leadership. President Amadou Toumani Touré was forced into hiding. Amid this chaos on the government side, the rebel National Movement for an Independent Azawad (MNLA) was able to make unprecedented gains in the northern region. On April 6, the MNLA proclaimed the creation of an independent Tuareg state, declaring, ‘Mali is an anarchic state. Therefore we have gathered a national liberation movement to put in an army capable of securing our land and an executive office capable of forming democratic institutions.’ Armed conflict makes for strange bedfellows. As the MNLA captured more territory, it formed a partnership with the enigmatic Salafist militant group Ansar Dine. Frequently, Ansar Dine would enter cities that had already been captured by the MNLA, tear down the Azawad flag, and raise a black Salafist flag in its place. Eventually the MNLA realized that Ansar Dine had made off with its revolution.”



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Andrew Jacobs in NYT, "Live From Nairobi, China Puts Its Stamp on News in Africa".

“The overseas newscasts of CCTV have shed the shrill ideological bombast of the Maoist years, adopting the professionalism and slick production values of their Western counterparts. But ideology often still trumps impartiality. During the protests that wracked the Arab world, for example, China’s coverage strenuously avoided the word ‘democracy’ and emphasized the chaos that accompanied the demise of authoritarian governments, news media analysts say. In a widely circulated blog post during the early days of the uprising in Libya, Ezzat Shahrour, the Beijing bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic, complained that Chinese coverage was faithfully relaying the propagandistic outbursts of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. ‘Every time I see Chinese media reports on the Arab revolution I feel like my blood pressure is starting to rise,’ he wrote. CCTV and Xinhua coverage of the unrest has since become more evenhanded. But they still find plenty of occasions to echo Beijing’s view of the advantages of single-party rule. When pitching their services in Africa, Chinese officials stress what they see as Western bias. ‘Although they are geographically far apart, China and Africa have long learned about each other through Western media,’ Li Changchun, the propaganda chief, said during a seminar with African news media executives. ‘However, Western reports did not always reflect the truth.’ Chinese news media officials chose to set up shop in Nairobi because of its role as a news hub for the English-speaking countries in East Africa.”



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David Sirota in Harper’s, "The Only Game in Town".

“As an investment, then, monopoly broadsheets and tabloids remain a jackpot for a particular kind of buyer: the industrialist or polico who wants to control the core commodity on which most other news products rely. If any metropolis perfectly embodies all these contradictions, it is Denver. In rapid succession, the Mile High City has enjoyed both the benefits of vigorous competition and the profound drawbacks of becoming a one-newspaper town. Recall that Denver played host to one of the last great newspaper wars of the modern era. On one side was the Rocky Mountain News, founded in 1859, and on the other was the Denver Post, founded in 1892. As local folklore has it the real battle started in 1926, when the older paper was purchased by one of the era’s Citizen Kanes, E.W. Scripps. His war of attrition against the Post went on for decades, and by the late 1990s, his successors were offering customers penny-a-day subscriptions simply to bleed their old rival.”



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Archie Patterson at Rocksbackpagesblogs.com, "euroRock in Opposition".

“The next step in the US during the late ‘50s, early ‘60s was a regionalized, independent scene consisting of indie labels and artists, followed by contract songwriters (the Brill Building bunch in NYC), musicians (the Wrecking Crew in LA) and promoters, aka, ‘hit men’, paying DJ’s to play the latest ‘Picks to Click’ on AM radio and make them ‘Hits’. It was not a corporate, commercial enterprise until the ‘do-your-own-thing, man’ psychedelic 60’s, when in November 1965; Jefferson Airplane ‘sold out’ and signed a recording contract with RCA Victor for a previously unheard-of advance of $25,000. That ushered in the era of sex, drugs and the rock for profit and big business.... When the band Henry Cow left Virgin Records and began ‘Rock in Opposition’ (RIO), I was in touch with Chris Cutler and helped distribute most all of the original founding bands in that collective. Eurock promoted and distributed all of their records, and the magazine printed the original RIO documents. Rock In Opposition was not conceived to be a social or political organization, but more a musical collective that served as an intervention into ‘rock’ culture encouraging free expression, experimentation and distribution. Chris Cutler and the band Henry Cow were the primary instigators of the original RIO collective. They had a political consciousness, sometimes present in their music. However, if RIO was political, it was only in the sense that it actively opposed the ‘business of music as usual’, which served primarily as a market mechanism to generate profit, producing and marketing music for mass consumption. The original RIO collective staged their first concert on March 12, 1978 at the New London Theatre. It featured Henry Cow (England), Stormy Six (Italy), Samla Mammas Manna (Sweden), Univers Zero (Belgium) & Etron Fou Leloublan (France). The Concert was promoted as – ‘Five Rock Groups The Record Companies Don’t Want You To Hear’.”
After that first concert, Henry Cow disbanded. The collective subtracted one, and added 3 new groups to their ranks – Art Zoyd (France), Art Bears (England, featuring former Henry Cow members) & Aksak Maboul (Belgium).”



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Ed Huerta interviews "Joe Baiza" at Jackaboutguitars.com.

“EH: What got you interested in music?
JB: I went through different periods…when I first got into music, I was about 4 years old. I used to get up early in the morning and watch t.v. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and we had this big t.v., like a big box, like it was a piece of furniture. So I’d get up in the morning – I wasn’t in school yet and my mother was asleep still, and I’d watch like cartoon shows and ‘Captain Kangaroo’ was on back then. Things like ‘I love Lucy’, then ‘Password’ would come on and that was boring to me. I didn’t understand it (laughs). So one day my mother wasn’t awake yet and I was looking at the t.v. and there was like a drawer of some sort, a panel under the screen and I pulled it open and somehow I figured out it was a record player. ‘WOW! What’s this thing?’ So there were 45’s in there and I figured out how to work it and I put the 45’s on and listened to them. They had those little yellow plastic inserts and there were only like three inserts and I could play three records. We had about 15 singles. Elvis Presley, I forget which song. Johnny Cash, Prez Prado, stuff like that, from that time and I remember struggling with that little plastic insert, trying to get it in and I remember listening to that Elvis Presley record and I felt weird. It got me all excited, like jumping on the couch and stuff. It made me want to jump all around the living room.”



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Mike Stax at Ugly-things.com, "The Early Years of Lester Bangs".

“Lester devoured all the offbeat literature and music he could lay his hands on. ‘My most memorable childhood fantasy,’ he later wrote, ‘was to have a mansion with catacombs underneath containing, alphabetized in endless winding dimly-lit musty rows, every album ever released.’ He fed his vinyl addiction with regular bus trips to Ratner’s Records in downtown San Diego where they carried a wider selection of obscurities than was available anywhere in El Cajon. At Ratner’s, Lester would paw through the bins looking for the wildest and most out-there looking jazz and rock’n'roll albums and then ask the lady behind the counter if she’d play them for him. ‘I’d listen to about 16 seconds of clamor and say ‘I’ll take it’ while everybody in the place snickered,’ he wrote. More vinyl came in from mail order record clubs which Lester would sign up for indiscriminately, taking advantage of the cheap and free records they offered but refusing to fulfill his obligations to buy the designated number of records per year. ‘He had record clubs all over the country coming down on him,’ remembers Roger Anderson. ‘They finally took him to court. I forget what happened. It might have got dropped because everyone lost interest at the last minute, or he might have had his wrist slapped.’”



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Obituary of the fortnight.

Charles Ball (1951-2012)

"My big brother Charles died last night. He was just 61, but an interval of drug abuse in New York in the seventies took its toll on his formidable mind while Hepatitis C ravaged his body. Charles graduated from Mercersburg Academy and Sarah Lawrence College. He also studied at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, a paper short of his Masters. I will forever think of Charles as a college student; and as he cared little for gainful employment, Charles always lived like a college student. It was what he did best. Charles was never without a book, and always the sort of book that only scholars read. When it wasn’t a book, it was music. No one loved music more. In a stint as a record producer for Lust/Unlust Music, Charles was elated when his punk single was named 'Best New Record Below 14th Street.'"


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Thanks to Steve Beeho.

























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• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), Michael J. Safran
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