tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34063814723934040832024-03-15T18:10:02.127-07:00The New Vulgatea new low in topical enlightenmentChris Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16761596531459681739noreply@blogger.comBlogger162125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-13859265186785352432024-03-01T18:21:00.000-08:002024-03-02T18:57:14.869-08:00 Issue #162 (March 3, 2024)
<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Quarry Pond, Naperville</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Cincinnati</b><br />
Violet Montgomery<p>
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<p style="text-indent:0;"> In passing, five men, two women, six hens, one spider, two friends, one waitress and 85 children have mentioned I’m the ugliest woman in Cincinnati, Ohio.<br />
In just, this week alone.<br />
Oh,
I’m forgetting, my 82-year-old landlord mentioned I have a healthy relationship with my sexuality, for someone so ugly.<br />
Or for one inherently disliked by society based on one's physicality.<br />
I found that compelling at first glance. <br />
Poetic, even.<br />
Five hours, I had checked out, paralyzed by his stance.<br />
Realizing, tough as I am, his words, deformed the way of which I thought I knew to stand proud. <br />Despite the recognition, in which is long standing within my shallow skull: God didn’t put good looks on my side.<br />
A young mother I met on Instagram, who’s 23, shares: “I wish I was youthful and beautiful like you.”<br />
Me, 22.<br />
Meanwhile this mother is loved, and praised by nearly everyone she meets.<br /> Far more than God could ever let a woman hear, I fear, even beautiful as she. <br />
Her world, promises of ethereal consciousness for her small waist line shines. <br />
While mine, curvy and grooved compensates with a district of thieves. <br />
Butcher shops to disguise the crimes they commit at night. <br />
The cliche dump-site bourgeois owners and proletariat garbage-men. <br />
Who give not a fuck to pick up all the rubbish women of my kind allow to feed their mind. <br />
Crinkly, shiny, wrappers, with 99-cent embellished velour.<br />
Cheap whore...<br />
Leading for my side of Cincinnati, to have rotten fish piled to the top of 25-foot buildings, as those crooks and fucks give not a damn about the ugly women that inhabit that nook of land.<br /> Nor cleanliness nor beauty that is their surround. <br /> Further, there is no authority, around this part of town, unfortunately to share the stance, for man to be of gold not charcoal.<br />
“Make way, ugly bitches” the police cars shriek upon the rare occurrence of an obese woman having a stroke, picking her up to go to the morgue. <br />
There is no rape on my side of town, as all women are bleak, and have to beg for their plump legs to be raised for intercourse, once in their lifetime if God takes a chance.<br /> Or, upon urban myth, to increase chance, pray five thousand and twenty-two times a day, equating to be 7 hours a day, in prayer, of hope, for a schmuck to rock your guts.<br />
Though, on the opposite part of town, the Beautiful Northern Side, where beautiful skinny women reside, of eternal consciousness, it is like heaven, though those who inhabit know the world to be no other way. <br /> But for me, it’s a land of which there is no horror insight and a land I can believe God prophesied.<br />
There lives the young mother beside a forest with doe, mama deer, daddy bucks, fairies glistening in the lavender grass, and a shadow reflecting her and every resident’s every move in a fluorescent green which resembles gas station drinks. <br /> It is in that land, that smells of cotton candy and newborn babies, where the young woman walks around with a baby blue gingham pram.<br /> Her baby never cries, for in its peripheral, his mother is in site, a woman who reflects the angels in the afterlife. <br />
The young mother strolls, humming to a non-existent beat on the mosaic-paved street.<br /> Outside the cottage the young mother's husband gifted her two days after announcing her pregnancy.<br /> For it was that day, his pride bounced from wall to wall upon the acknowledgment his bloodline was to be blessed, for he had done good, by the name of the men that came before he.<br />
Though, more impressively, in a tone too quiet for her to hear the flowers whispered compliments to her nonstop on her walk. <br /> And in fact, not just on her walk, but anytime she laid a toe out the door. <br />Though too faint for those of beautiful figures to be aware of, the whispers were just loud enough for those oppressed by the ugliness of their figure to perceive. <br />
Creating the vision for all who were not blessed by beauty, of beautiful women aloofly walking around Northern town, who have grown immune through the routine, never to acknowledge the thousands of budded blooms complimenting them. <br />
Though, for that seemingly insincerely insecure mother, I imagine how it would feel if she could hear all the sweet words, all the sweet admiration.<br /> All the flowers, and all other photosynthesizing greens screaming their adoration. <br />She'd never believe, that for me, this is my real life, to watch no dream.<br />
My ex-husband once mentioned, before he left me for a northern woman, “there are mental adaptations in recognition in those who are ugly, that make for a compelling fuck, and that, my love, is why, I love you.”<br />
I blink my eyes, one, two, three times....<br />
Shoving the pillow closer to my stomach, elongated by gluttony, I exhale, recognizing my clenched jaw, kicking my legs that had grown stiff on the mount of my old, stained, red couch.<br /> My space heater moving in circles, running heat against the draft at me.<br />
I remember where I am...<br />
The clock now reads 6:25.<br />
Five hours and twenty-five minutes since I was stopped in my tracks, by the eighty-something year-old man mentioning my physical imperfections are nothing to be ashamed of.</td></tr></table><p>
[illustration: Union Terminal, Cincinnati - photograph by Violet Montgomery]
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Red Rocks, Nevada</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Antifa for Trump</b><br />
Joe Carducci
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Marketing in the postwar period zeroed in on the commuter and the homemaker, and then their kids - the baby boom. America was about the only economy still standing after the war and broadcast and print advertising overtook the culture, and not just high end arts and letters. The old "cathedral" radio as the center of the family room gave way to a television by 1960. Then transistor radios spread to every other room and the car. Then televisions spread everywhere and finally personal computers, the internet and the cellphone centralized all media and made it totable. The electronic media slowly, then suddenly ate the print media. But the marketing energy was, as I've written, the superior product of desperate, more diabolical minds and it flipped the cultural inherited fact of music, news, and theatrical works which had once been "brought to you by Alka Seltzer" but now were demoted to content, windowdressing for the real transaction - the marketing data needs of the conveyance software and hardware manufacturers. Today if you aren't dropping out of this overt/covert vertigo regularly to read long form journals or books or even to watch a goddamn movie then you will lose the thread of meaning and... good day to you sir, madame. Those phoning it all in may be with-it, they are certainly in tune with the zeitgeist, standing in the infostream, wading in ever deeper as they follow the sirens' song designed to lead them away from the texture and smell of reality for maximum consistent monetization for further leveraging in the footrace for next, revealing, what..., some final substrata of biological, material self-loathing perhaps. We just saw Apple's marketing debut for its Vision Pro goggles which they hope will leapfrog Meta's VR Oculus scuba mask system. Here's hoping our post-George Floyd crime wave or the new driverless autos will clear these imbeciles from our streets.</p><p>
I was born in 1955 so the signal shifts in marketing I noticed first-hand began in the late 1960s when I entered high school and began reading newspapers and watching the news regularly - becoming a witness to events as immediated (meaning, exposed to them yet shielded from them in some strange <i>pro forma</i> way). I was preparing to be a writer. A couple years earlier I read only <i>Mad</i> magazine if I could help it. The Chicago AM stations I listened to, <i>WLS</i> and <i>WCFL</i>, staggered their five-minute newscasts at the top of the hour so one could switch back and forth and proceed newsless. When I bought some aircheck cassettes to revisit 1960s Top 40 AM radio for a book of mine I was struck by the sugar-buzz pace of everything that wasn't the song itself. The buzz of advertising and disc jockey patter ended at the song (but crowding the song's intro and fade-out). Airchecks cut out the song itself to showcase the DJs, now DJs rap over looped noise arrangements for kids who never were grounded in churches or schools - no bible stories, no times tables, no rock and roll... But in our lives back then, the media-buzz ended at school and church. We went to Mass - the Latin Mass! - every day before school and on Sundays. That was some grounding. We Catholics envied public school kids, naturally, as their progressive educators pulled them up out of the Protestant American soil to dry out rootless. And today the buzz of mere tv and radio is considered "linear" as it dissolves into the brownian motion of social media as we wait to get chips installed in our brains. Which brings to mind the late Lester Bangs' prescient 1977 Elvis obit's summation: "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you." (<i>Village Voice</i>)</p><p>
I don't doubt that any changes in ballyhoo I noticed occurred within the slipstream of earlier, even more fundamental alterations well before my time. America is herself the product of a revolutionary new idea, after all. And frankly we did need someone to tell us that cereal was supposed to stay crunchy even in milk. A couple of early jingles that regularly come to mind as I think about the news are George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances," which lost its staying power back around Teddy Roosevelt or so, and Robert Goodloe Harper's 1798 slogan, "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute," and how it might apply today when public servants routinely order up technological breakthroughs from the future for deliverance of today's policy ends. (Who made Cobalt and Lithium mining sustainable?) Recent changes play out more unpredictably than ever in real time; but what is real time anymore? America was where the leading edge of modernity had stumbled upon a regnant stone age just as it was entering the bronze age in 1492. All those goddamn westerns are about that historical ouroboros. Modernity had the edge then. Today the global South's third worldful of pre-modern iron age ideas of blood and soil is pouring into what one must call a post-modern global North where everything is a social construct in the decadent vernacular of a rather bloodless, neutered academe. These immigrants from the old worlds are mostly just ambitious people; they certainly are genuine in their belief in two sexes and their lack of multi-cultural experience, so expect them to recharge waning American racism and sexism as they decide who to vote for.</p><p>
One measure of overall recent change in branding that stands out is the use of the word <i>controversial</i>. In high school I got into stand-up comedians on television, radio, and record. Wayne Juhlin on <i>WDAI</i> overnights (1-5am) played comedy tracks and had Second City performers in as guests taking calls pretending to be self-help gurus. That show was where I first heard Lenny Bruce bits such as "Father Flotsky's Triumph," from his 1958 LP, <i>Interviews of Our Times</i>. By the time I heard Lenny Bruce, he was dead. I read his autobiography, <i>How to Talk Dirty and Influence People</i> and a book of transcripts, <i>The Essential Lenny Bruce</i>. Soon there was a biography by Albert Goldman as well as double- and triple-albums showcasing Bruce's increasingly free-form, associational performances just before his overdose death in 1966. Lenny Bruce was no longer seen as a sick and corrupt menace - his 1959 album was even titled, "The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce," mocking even truth in advertising. In death he was re-branded as a social critic, a moralist, a prophet, even a martyr for freedom of speech. People were liberals then, not progressives. Bruce had been <i>controversial</i>, a suit-wearing creature from the fifties dropping out of Sinatra's world to work "blue" in burlesque houses until winding up essentially touring America's jails for talking dirty in public. After his death the working class world that had enforced an inherited public etiquette for polite society - even for adult mixed-company in nightclubs! - began to pass from the scene. The 1968 Democratic Convention was a more focused point of collision between the old frame of reference and the new. <i>CBS</i>'s canceling of the <i>The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour</i> in 1969 was another signal collision of the era. They had made repeated anti-war comments during network entertainment. Tom and Dick Smothers were folkies after all, but suddenly the burden of what Roosevelt, Wilson and Roosevelt wrought with their progressive, responsible, burden-shouldering, democracy-defending entanglings was recast as a moral crime, and by neo-progressives at that. I read novels instead of paying attention in high school and one I recall fondly is Ira Levin's, <i>This Perfect Day</i>. It's Levin's only unfilmed novel, which makes me suspect that Klaus Schwab secured the film rights and commenced to crib his life's work from this story of a narcotized one-world society run by technocrats from under a mountain in Switzerland. The hero blows up their supercomputer, so, you know, it was <i>controversial</i> then, but now it would be <b>Controversial</b>!</p><p>
I spent over a year at college in Denver, a year in Chicago and a year in Hollywood and hadn't managed to do much with my writing. I moved to Portland, Oregon in 1977 and it turned out to be the right size town and interesting things were possible there. I worked at Cinema 21, started at Renaissance Records which we built into Systematic Record Distribution, and got a radio show on the Pacifica affiliate, <i>KBOO</i>. Portland's punk scene was getting together around Ice 9, Neo-boys, The Wipers, and others. Writers like John Shirley and Katharine Dunn, and artists like Eva Lake and Michael X. King made the scene which intermingled music, movies, art, theater, poetry, drugs, sex and record collecting. Everyone was an anarchist of one sort or another - in a word: controversial. I had already written for <i>The Match!</i>, a Tucson paper and had ordered books from Mother Earth Books in Seattle. Beginning in Chicago I did a study on Makhno, Nechaev, Kropotkin, Bakunin, as well as the usual gang of Marxist idiots before moving to the west coast. Probably Lenny Bruce, Edward Abbey, and the Three Stooges were my political mentors. David Lightbourne was a personal mentor; he worked at Cinema 21, did a 1950s rock and roll radio show, had a 1920s-style band with Fritz Richmond - The Metropolitan Jug Band - and he frequently sat in with Steve Weber's Portland line-up of the Holy Modal Rounders. Lightbourne was also a pioneer of 1970s drug smuggling before it involved big money and bloody business. Dave thought his compadre-in-crime, Tom Wood, had been killed in Mexico largely because he didn't carry around a paintbrush or a guitar. Today the Northwest produces an Antifa full of Toms, rather than Daves.</p><p>
I knew the Northwest anarchist culture before moving to Berkeley with Systematic at the end of 1979. In February 1980 I took the train right back up to Portland to check out the First International Symposium on Anarchism at Lewis & Clark College; anarchists of the punk and hippie and wobblie eras were involved, the Neo-boys played and papers were presented by Sam Dolgoff, Paul Avrich, and other less specialized academics. I saw Dolgoff waiting for an elevator and asked him if he knew what had happened to <i>The Match!</i>; he said in his Russian-Bronx-Lower East Side accent: "Fred had psychologic problems." No doubt! (I was surprised to see a relaunched <i>Match!</i> in Tower's magazine stand decades later.) Berkeley's political culture seemed more a product of the University, Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party, and Tim Yohannan's "Maximum RocknRoll" - a radio show that began in 1977 and launched a fanzine in 1982. Berkeley had a sturdier pre-hippie radical base. The Pacifica Foundation was started by two conscientious objectors in 1946 and it began broadcasting at <i>KPFA FM</i> in 1949. One saw many old Volvos in Berkeley and knew that had to do with <i>KPFA</i>'s lifestyle marketing, the Vietnam War and probably even Sweden's neutrality in WWII. I remember seeing <i>The Day After Trinity</i> at the Pacific Film Archive in 1980; it was a doc about Oppenheimer and I slowly realized that the audience was made up of UCB Physics and Lawrence Livermore Lab people because everytime Edward Teller came on the screen the audience hissed like it was at a Saturday matinee at the Bijou. I followed politics but I stayed with the arts, trying to focus on the best music generally while being too anti-social to organize anything but record distribution. I explained to Tim Yohannan once that I was interested in the best stuff in any style - Tony Bennett, Black Flag.... He was from New Jersey; he laughed. In the world of punk rock <i>Maximum RocknRoll</i> did the reverse; they began to drop their interest in old garage rock and other strains of punk for a streamlined, left wing hardcore and world revolution.</p><p>
SDS radicals had called their <i>einsatzgruppe</i>, Weatherman, when Bob Dylan distinctly sang that you <i>don't</i> need a weatherman. This confirms that politicos just can't hear the muse. Bill Ayers' and Bernardine Dohrn's favorite president Barack Obama when he was a bright-eyed community organizer in Chicago was quickly disappointed to find that his community just wanted him to organize the repair of toilets and elevators in their housing projects. He didn't want to hear what they wanted; that might confirm America's first commandment: The customer is always right. He wanted them to listen to him tell them what they wanted: snake oil liniment! In Chicago Richard M. Daley, like his dad, talked like a dummy but was actually the ventriliquist. He could drink water while his dummies gave orders because, frankly, they'd been able to reverse the flow of the Chicago River to flush sewage to Saint Louis. What else might they do?! Daley transplanted the late reformist mayor Harold Washington's braintrust into what was left of the Daley Machine as he threw his voice and pulled puppet strings. Before he got connected, Obama ran against ex-Black Panther-now-party-stalwart Bobby Rush for his seat in the U.S. Congress - that was the first time I saw his name in the papers. I thought, "Barack Obama - who is that poor sacrificial lamb?" He lost by thirty points to a guy who speaks Chicagoese worse than Daley.</p><p>
Barack was thought to have promise because he speaks the King's English, but Southside experts advised him that if he married his Dutch-Asian fiance he'd never be elected to anything in Chicago so he married Michelle Robinson instead. Her father worked for the city and was a precinct captain for the Cook County Democrats. Barack was further lucky that Daley feared he might challenge him for Mayor of all Chicago toilets and elevators so he sent him to Washington, D.C. No paintbrush, no guitar, not even a pipe wrench but into the White House you go! It's only now, all these years later that the street radicals, community activists and teachers union organizers Obama ran with have seized the organs of what's left of the old machine in what's left of old Chicago. Are these Saul Alinsky's grandkids? No, they are dumber and far more pretentious. Are they Bill and Bernardine's kids? No, they will never be half as high on their own stash as those two were... They are more like only children - an American version of China's "little emperors" caused by the Party's one-child policy. These people aren't controversial, they simply want to defund the police, end magnet schools, and hate Israel. First though they must sell black and brown Chicagoans and public and private sector unions on the idea that they want more immigration not less. That may keep them busy…</p><p>
That word <i>controversial</i> retained a positive ring for decades. The perspective that privileged anything that could be slotted in as "blows against the empire" had been built by Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown and thousands of repressed malcontents who could speak or write a good game. Many of them had helped build the empire over the resistance of the old, regionally decentered, folk America. But it didn't matter how prickly and individualistic their busy body revolt; they <i>believed</i> in socialism! Some seemed to want upheaval for its own sake or to relieve boredom. Others thought American exceptionalism was unfair if true. From this side of the sexual revolution they seemed mostly just horny. They may even have suspected they would be among the first consumed by any successful revolution but, you know, problem solved for any existentialist... Prince's 1981 album was titled, "Controversy", so that positive ring got recharged by the election of Ronald Reagan. Once considered a madman, his election and Margaret Thatcher's in Britain rerouted the aesthetically productive punk rock absurdist challenge into pat, socialist protest. Prince wanted to be controversial; he also wanted to be Italian. Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin or Dick Cavett used to introduce Jerzy Kosinski or Peter Fonda or Gloria Steinem as <i>controversial!</i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNJdwKSGIPcA5-PG_AS0qegUMrZJqM4_Pe2gxryiKAAXxQ6OGMkcR3Ftl5hOCzaNXPd_QNrNdSzapzlKksdZtwBZ6uhfPzWnTvzVT1LHiEzRI52C9E6NeNapNUkBcryGwB4SUvWwqJ7W414lvKYTM0F0VtNwcCb-k0F23MMFmiNyvYEI0fX6APgJ25IDOo/s361/bush-quayle-button.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="349" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNJdwKSGIPcA5-PG_AS0qegUMrZJqM4_Pe2gxryiKAAXxQ6OGMkcR3Ftl5hOCzaNXPd_QNrNdSzapzlKksdZtwBZ6uhfPzWnTvzVT1LHiEzRI52C9E6NeNapNUkBcryGwB4SUvWwqJ7W414lvKYTM0F0VtNwcCb-k0F23MMFmiNyvYEI0fX6APgJ25IDOo/w193-h200/bush-quayle-button.jpeg" width="193" /></a></div>
Once Hillary Rodham was elected First Lady of America in 1992 the word controversial lost its sexy ring. Suddenly, <i>controversial</i> was not a positive. It now served, rather, to imply that the straights were still The Man, while Lenny and Hillary and we-all/you-all were decidedly not The Man, were in fact still outsiders, powerless but for our drop-out freedoms of the hippie era which claimed to measure such things against new criteria or perhaps an older, natural, long suppressed one. You could ask Bill. The theater of it all, though, called for something that he and Hillary did not actually believe in. That was no problem for him - he was a born snake-oil salesman from the South - but Hillary seemed most upset that the political moment demanded she play the wronged wife (or even the wronged feminist) when their power-couple open-marriage had always allowed Bill to be Bill. We knew what he is while we still don't quite know what she is. And whatever feminists really thought, Hillary needed Bill to be re-elected so women God help us were not believed. That old, passing New Deal working class etiquette still had some sort of zombie life in it after all, at least until <i>NBC</i>'s Tom Brokaw's 1998 book, <i>Greatest Generation</i>, rebranded those we now know as the parents of the deplorables, covered them in glory and shoveled on the dirt.<p></p><p>
Today, <i>controversial</i> is a term that implies not a person cutting a sexy profile in the world, but rather, someone beyond the pale - racist, sexist, fascist... problematic! - and on his way (and he is mostly male) to a well-deserved jail term or media freeze-out. Is it simply that the boomers took over demographically from their depression-era/WWII veteran parents and so it's their dudgeon that obtains? Dashing rogues such as Hugh Hefner or Timothy Leary had been controversial in the context of a mass media which, though full of leftish, progressive folk, understood their position as translators and editors of arts and letters for the masses at the other ends of their newspapers, magazines, radios, and televisions. They could only apply a gloss to the <i>outre</i>; they couldn't quite normalize or endorse it. This was the high-low pact of the New Deal bargain; it depended on an elite that would submit as well, at least publicly, to a general national morality that would aid the working class in its struggle to maintain family discipline and purpose against the decadent forces of chaos once known as American freedom but now known as The Sixties. There was even a kind of midwestern-face or southern-face often put on by the Manhattan minstrelsy networks (Huntley, Brinkley, Chancellor, Cronkite, Brokaw, Moyers, Rather, MacNeill, Lehrer, Donahue, Carson, Cavett...) to sell it all. This was how even the "Tiffany" network, <i>CBS</i>, could specialize in product like <i>The Beverly Hillbillies</i> and <i>Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.</i>, <i>et. al.</i> The Civil Rights movement of that era had been started by religions and churches but the Revolutionists had lost their faith and got stuck on the ideological glue-trap of Marxism, and American Communists had always opposed racism against black people because they hoped to enslave everyone equally. Black Lives Matter may be trained Marxists but that's not to say at this late date that they <i>believe</i> in communism.</p><p>
Interestingly on the fall of Communism in Europe the suddenly truly worldwide economy vaulted large international corporations and national champions to a global scale which seemed to make them a new threat to national cultures and mores. This was what Marx had predicted would happen <i>before</i> Communism. The Communist Party control of the Peoples Republic of China wobbled in the wake of the end of the U.S.S.R., but to avoid that fate economic reform was accelerated after the June 1989 massacres at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere across China. These reforms were half-assed and ultimately favored only state-owned enterprises or province-backed ones since there was barely a civic culture left after all of Mao's destruction. But what American and European factory floors had survived the Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese challenges were not surviving the Chinese challenge of seemingly limitless cheap labor and state-directed capital, plus the duplicity of the mandated local partners who typically ran the I.P. out to a secret, wholly-owned Chinese factory that went to town bootlegging any partnership's product. Chinese communists could slaughter thousands, imprison millions, brainwash a billion and still produce high quality goods and move up the value chain to electronics, automobiles, planes.... By the end of the 1990s China was being invited into the WTO, or rather, the free peoples of the West and East were being sold the ultimate bill of goods by their own governments and corporations under the auspices of unaccountable global entities. It was as if they thought they didn't need factories and their people didn't need jobs, or maybe it was simple, reflexive class war, or maybe to be charitable they thought that membership itself would change China's behavior.</p><p></p><p>
The co-chairs of the 1999 World Trade Organization's Seattle ministerial conference were Boeing's Phil Condit and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Other sponsors included banks, telecoms, carmakers, IBM, Caterpillar..., companies now scaling up from the West to service Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and maybe someday even Cuba. Seattle was primed to present itself as a world capital on the map of the future. They seemed to know nothing of the Northwest's anarchist subculture and were surprised at the vehemence of a bunch of espresso-drinking weirdos' rejection from the left of their globalistic project. Didn't Muscovites love their new McDonald's, wtf?! In Seattle, then, some strata of cognitive dissonance clanged out as the Bolshevik pursuit of power spread throughout the democratic socialists and the anarchist left, leaving populists alone tied to the private sector constituency for economic success and good union wages. Pat Buchanan was running for president again in 1999 and went to Seattle to make his point that American sovereignty should be defended against both the WTO and free trade itself as Republicans and Democrats understood it. <i>AP</i> quotes Pat saying:
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"The WTO should never have been created. It's an embryonic monster.... It takes away from the tens of thousands who are walking to demonstrate that their jobs and their security and their American dreams are being sold out.... By bringing China into the WTO and by seeking to grant China unrestricted, open access to the greatest market on Earth without asking anything in return, Bill Clinton in my judgment is dealing away the human rights of the Chinese people, selling out the workers of the United States and impairing the sovereignty of this country.″ (<i>Buchanan Praises WTO Protesters</i>) </blockquote><p>
<p style="text-indent:0;">Buchanan deplored the black bloc's bow in downtown Seattle but he supported the labor union demonstrations. Earlier that decade Pat had made his "Culture War" speech at the 1992 Republican Convention. I remember <i>ABC</i>'s David Brinkley declaring immediately after it, "Now <i>that</i> was a great political speech!" I also saw its money shot running in loop at the 1993 Whitney Bienniale as if the entire art world was proud to be at war with such a person and such a country. But the Battle of Seattle was another development threatening to smudge or erase time-honored battle lines so the news media got on the same page to misinterpret-for-effect; the networks could still pull that off.</p><p>
Pat Buchanan got little traction from the electorate and the Republican Party was still on its Cold War footing. It hoped to whistle past the graveyard with George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney..., finding new responsibilities for the military-industrial complex while the Democrats would be satisfied with incremental growth of the social services state. Pat's example with third party efforts convinced Ron Paul to stay a Republican and Bernie Sanders a Democrat even though each had their Iowa upsets and untold mo' stolen from them by those parties and under cover of that newsmedia. Presidential politics settles around the business cycle; maybe it has gradually harmonized with it. In the wake of any economic boom as tax collections rise the fight over the new revenue inspires three responses: A few conservatives wanted to return the money to the people by way of tax cuts. More Republicans act as if that's a nice idea but impossible in practice and that therefore the only responsible thing to do with the new revenue was to give as much as possible to the Pentagon so that at least the country is stronger for it, as they expect the Democrats to succeed in spending the rest and more in all directions on social needs and political vote-buying.
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In any case Islamic terrorism strung everyone along - after 9/11 I don't recall anyone saying, "Gee, I wish Al Gore was president, don't you?" The post-Vietnam Republican franchise on bold, responsible heavy-lifting action in the conduct of the dirty cowboy business of America out in the world of entangling alliances still held. Just before the Al-Qaeda attacks Donald Rumsfeld was failing in his effort to reform the armed services, to force them to plan and work together so that smaller mobilizations could happen quickly, thus preventing the so-called Powell Doctrine's demand for overwhelming public consensus before committing troops anywhere from becoming a barrier to necessary leadership in the world. The intelligentsia believes The People want leadership and so FDR's campaigning to stay out of WWII while scheming to enter it is considered a profile in courage. GWB was accused of not connecting the dots pre-9/11 so afterwards he started connecting dots like a motherfucker and invaded Iraq <i>before</i> they got the bomb - leadership alright but profile in courage denied. Still, the notion that the 2004 election had been stolen from John Kerry, this time in Ohio, didn't raise the same media storm. Bush II was successfully whistling past the graveyard. Saddam's program it turned out had been stopped but in intimating that he still had an ongoing covert program to match Iran's he misjudged the post-9/11 moment. Iran also misjudged the moment but gets a pass; it will get the bomb and its martyr complex will put up or shut up. The reform of anything but Pentagon strategy was off the table for the foreseeable future. And the lesson of Iraq was buried under the attempt by the Coalition Provisional Authority, a creature of the Pentagon with U.N. cover, to administer the country. Rumsfeld had argued to grab Saddam and get out of Dodge. Which brings us back to the expanding void of incompetent yet grasping national and international bureaucracies. They need more money to throw into their furnaces - our tribute to their expertise.</p><p></p><p>
After the decay of Communist ideology, the "color revolutions" in eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan...) look like urban progressive revolts against rural traditionalist rule - a social dynamic which can be seen everywhere from the U.S. and France to Iran and Venezuela. To the extent these revolutions were Western interventions, they began with the seemingly doomed effort to get post-Soviet Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. His challengers were Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov, the former General Alexander Lebed, and the Liberal Democratic Party candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky. They were all polling ahead of Yeltsin. Columbia University economists in Russia had tried to show up what the Chicago Boys had done in Chile when Pinochet halted Allende's imposition of socialismo in 1973 - a 9/11 that <i>really</i> lives in infamy as the <i>New York Times</i> reminds us every year. Zyuganov made a campaign stop at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996 and scared George Soros, Russian oligarchs, the Clinton political team as well as European figures into forming the "Davos pact" to re-elect Yeltsin. Lebed toured the West too as part of his campaign for President of Russia and when he admired General Pinochet in Chile he was pressed about the killings of Allende supporters totalling nearly three thousand. The Soviet General said, "Three thousand?! Pfft, that's nothing." While in Chicago touring the Cabrini Green housing project where Mayor Jane Byrne had moved to try to stop gang shootings, Lebed declared, "In Moscow these would be luxury apartments."</p><p>
Yeltsin won a second term with timely IMF financing and no doubt help from even less savory characters. But the Columbia economics department never did much but throw good money after bad as Russia devolved while resisting the "color revolutions" to come under Yeltsin's hand-picked successor Tsar Vladimir Putin. He puts such revolutions down while fomenting backwoods subregional revolts and nobody calls him a cowboy or even a cossack. These societies are organized by clans and whereas they once deferred to a king, today's modern state and its elected president and/or premier lay much heavier upon peoples yet have close to zero call on loyalties beyond their own immediate family. It's a calumny of Marxist historicism that the opposite seems must have been true. It's worth underlining here that this Russian obsession with its neighbors and their weak sub-regions (Transdniestria, Moldova itself, Abkhazia, South Ossetia...) is the diplomatic gamesmanship of European crowns that George Washington was warning us away from. The national aspirations of Ukraine, Armenia, and Chechnya shouldn't have to wait for a normal Russia, but one can say the same for large regions of China and India too. Who has a deep enough Lone Ranger complex to go at such a world? (Lenny Bruce had an old bit called, "Thank you Maskman.") The Democrats gave up on the Cold War in 1968 but now have a hard-on for international new order maintenance? They must be planning to escape America when they break it.</p><p>
Whatever the WTO took from the Battle of Seattle, the Northwest radical culture loved its time on the world stage. But now the Portlanders I know from the olden days of punk poesy and Anarchy symposia - political people, music people, drug people... - now talk more like Trump supporters than Maoists. The city turned from a locus of comicly portentious consumption fads to a rancid crime-celebrating humorless hell-scape seemingly overnight. Something about the old New Left got passed to a post-self esteem generation and transmuted into an organicly American version of Leninism. The pretentious 14-year old teacher's pet that puberty pushed out of the suburbs and over the edge whom no elder ever humiliated for their childish ignorance and therefore their teen apoplexy blotted out all existential sensitivity. These revos are too cagey to do anything as self-loathing as the cultish psychosexual deprogramming of the Weather Underground, but they will strip out two millennia of shame culture and, borrowing from any Other handy (Arabia, China, Indigeni...), adopt a face culture that precludes interior life and soul for power and programmatic success. They have <i>got</i> to know better than their parents, and certainly better than you. They become vampires who contribute nothing but enervating critique and fortuitously can't see themselves in the mirror as they suck life from those they presume to rule. Their pursuit of power seems compulsive to the point of being unmeditated regarding the use any next majority might make of the removed guardrails and obstacles which are designed to force a consensus rather than elide one. Leninism itself does not look ahead and foresees no next majority as a fourteen year-old knows no context. But will they vote Democratic? Will they turn out? Donald Trump's greatest achievement may well be forcing the Democrats to perform the defending of our norms. Former Attorney General Eric Holder even submitted Jan. 18th on <i>MSNBC</i> that "we have come to all know and love" the United States!, the end of which is expected with a second term of Donald Trump. I guess C.R.T. and D.E.I. and E.S.G. really have fixed this country good. Add legalized drugs and gambling and you can guess where we're heading. (Gambling problem? 1-800-GAMBLING) Or this all could be just more Leninist jive from the ancientest political party for whom slavery wasn't the deal-breaker it was to the Republicans.</p><p>
And yet the intentions of the parties and players don't much matter when the sheer growth of the state's bureaucracies becomes its own imperative - quantitative easing writ large becomes Modern Monetary Theory. No single pol nor unanimous assembly can do anything when the public sector's growth threatens to kill its host. Its growth can't be sustained even should it get out of the private sector's way a tad and let capitalism generate a greater tithe more efficiently. But they know they must demonstrate that they know better than their parents, the greatest generation, Richard Nixon, or Ron Paul. They still insist that in the 1980s the Reagan tax cut didn't bring in a penny more revenue because they succeeded in spending it all before it could land in Fort Knox. It seems childish to mischaracterize actuarial matters but they need to feel right about their own behavior, or at least prevent enemies from victories so wrong. The mathaphobes in the news media are happy to provide just cover for unjust truths. But, however covertly, they must foreclose on their own dream; this is how they were programmed at fourteen. Hannah Arendt was struck by "the meekness with which revolutionists in all countries which fell under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution have gone to their doom." (<i>On Revolution</i>) Their behavior on display whether regarding the environment, or race, or economics reveals that there is no solution on offer, rather there is just just punishment to be meted out upon assuming power.</p><p>
Who even sees or feels the growth creep of the public sector? How many servants does the public require? Don't call me a servant. Servants rule, OK! Each fiefdom spends its annual budget by the tenth month of the fiscal year to underline that they do not have the money or the personnel to do the job, yet they grab onto any additional responsibilities anywhere near their purview. They fail intentionally, while risking only some single manager who may must take the fall should they not evince Fauci-like dancing skills to stay above all the programmatic incompetence. Secretary Mayorkas may not possess such skills but don't expect the Department of Homeland Security's budget to be cut. They need more money to prevent the Border Patrol from doing more of its job. (Of course, any normal country has its military patrolling its own borders! The very idea is a mere parenthetical aside when dealing with me dealing with our absurd American predicament.) They'll tell you our public sector is a mere 14% of the working age population but we know it has neared 50% or they never would have shut up about tipping points. And by the administrative state's regulatory appetite we are all made public sector. The easier young person's choice is to identify with the public sector. College kids now want <i>in loco parentis</i> reinstated! This is also what the panic and counter-panic of the Covid outbreak was all about - who identifies with the expert class in the public sector versus who saw the usual class-war motives about. Those who drank the Kool-aid now worry nobody is getting the booster. They seem to have faith that being a toady will be its own earthly reward and are quite willing to let China's military off the hook if they can spring the CDC and NIH experts from culpability as well.</p><p>
The two public servants who did do selfless, costly, heavy lifting in recent years were Rudy Giuliani and Scott Walker. The New York City Democrats had so bolloxed up the city that Democratic voters turned to the Republican mob-buster and made him mayor. The Manhattan media took this personally and was laying for Rudy while he was still mayor, despite his heroic labors as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and then as mayor, essentially making the city safe for non-native meritocrats to whine about missing the excitement of getting mugged in old Times Square or stabbed on the Lower East Side. 9/11 turned the tables on the newsmedia's planned send-off for Rudy but they never forget and he's still the number one figure of fun for them. <i>The New York Times</i> had a single useful report from Janesville, Wisc. in early 2011 explaining that Gov. Walker was getting support from labor in his effort to strip the public sector's right to unionize from the books. Those working the private sector whose unions had long offered give-backs and concessions to preserve factory jobs looked at the inside game played by public employees lead by Madison's public sector elite who give nothing but always get like clockwork and felt zero solidarity - as if the public sector are not working class. The press since has seemed to think a little nostalgia for the good old days of anarcho-syndicalism was in order. Looking that one article up again I see that it was reported out of Janesville by A.G. Sulzberger (now the chairman and publisher of the paper) and out of Madison by Monica Davey, and that five days later corrections were made according to an extensive editor's note. It may also be of note that I couldn't find it via the <i>NYT</i>'s search bar but <i>google</i> found it for me. I was surprised how little traction Walker had in the Republican contests in 2016. He had proven up for the fight against the administrative state but just wasn't a good candidate. It seems on the basis of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan that a Republican presidential candidate must know more about the media than the media for him to succeed in presenting himself to voters through those very media. In both cases the candidate was underestimated and that helped.</p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_2NjAOcnTd-i1gl2X7SVAI06rUESeByBWWZ4Fxr0m8CSXrIhaSOedCUgGapZnJXkeTm08idh15LsAnG-q9jedIA5zCXOdLyUcFJaADWcFRB9FoxABXU1lEf5hHb3GzErwl5I5WhLD4BC_Pd11UcLRRcX9jLVcY-28KuA9hfvy1_27MYb2_a35rlgANWmo/s221/NV-162-essayillustration3.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="221" data-original-width="220" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_2NjAOcnTd-i1gl2X7SVAI06rUESeByBWWZ4Fxr0m8CSXrIhaSOedCUgGapZnJXkeTm08idh15LsAnG-q9jedIA5zCXOdLyUcFJaADWcFRB9FoxABXU1lEf5hHb3GzErwl5I5WhLD4BC_Pd11UcLRRcX9jLVcY-28KuA9hfvy1_27MYb2_a35rlgANWmo/w199-h200/NV-162-essayillustration3.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>
The Democrats have lead themselves into strategic and policy dead-ends even as they have won several large, long-term postwar arguments on entanglements and trade. Whatever their own psychological interests in lording it over their former New Deal minions or stamping out competition from Buchanan or Trump, the decades of lowering the bar for the party by a sympathetic newsmedia and a kept academia has dulled their wits and reflexes while convincing them of the opposite. The legacy newsmedia has itself softened and slowed as well, rather than sharpened and sped up under the new economic pressures of the web and phone. This is most evident in the putative high-end of Letters (<i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>The Atlantic</i>, <i>The New York Review of Books</i>...) where their work is more trustworthy the farther away from temporal Washington political concerns a story is. But the Right's new newsmedia has only quickened and found its bearings. Rush Limbaugh was a longtime free professor of newsmedia studies and his generations of students are today quite nimble as they turn left wing rhetoric against itself. Christopher Rufo in the <i>City Journal</i> quickly repurposed the feminist term <i>grooming</i> and applied it to Drag Queen story hours and the transitioning of children, and just recently endocrinologist Roy Eappen wrote in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> that these kids are just gay and are being abused by a new strata of institutional homophobia! That's some jiu-jitsu move!<p></p><p>
These and the internet outlets sniff out new Democratic maneuvers before the legacy media has even got on the same page as the politicized bureaucracy they hope to help. It seemed almost a full week that talk show hosts, columnists and expert analysts made fun of the right wing fear of losing their gas stoves before, sure enough, the legislation to ban gas stoves came out of committee and was introduced in the New York state legislature and now in Illinois and elsewhere with all due solemnity that saving the planet requires. But it's hard for know-it-alls to change their minds when they define themselves against those they consider know-nothings. They have no awareness that <i>Revolver</i>, <i>zerohedge</i>, <i>Breitbart</i>, <i>Judicial Watch</i>, <i>Blaze</i> and a dozen others ate their lunch. They are blocked from such outlets under the guise of monitoring them via Media Matters' clip service. They're even blocked from the knowledge that they have won those big arguments over trade and overseas American policing duties. If a know-nothing agrees with a know-it-all that's a crisis for the know-it-all. And when will we hear from the foodie elite on this pressing issue of not cooking with gas at their French Laundries and Gravitases? Is the <i>New York Times</i>' Food editor on this story?!</p><p>
The newsmedia's first draft of history is so compromised by its rhetorical game of generalizing from anomalies that they've missed or rejected evidence that the world context around them has shifted on a scale not seen since the black vote last went Republican. A case could be made that the response to Donald Trump in the White House made it harder for the newsmedia to continue to pretend that things were as they had been, that nothing was changing around them. They are clingers. In the postwar period there are watershed moments where, say, South Korea moved from poor dictatorship to wealthy democracy. It followed Japan and was followed by Taiwan in these signal American policy successes, but three opportunities to revisit the effort in Vietnam in light of... and to re-edit the first draft of journalism were fended off successfully. The first draft will be the final draft - call it historicism. Michael Lind's book, <i>Vietnam - The Necessary War</i>, was about all that was entertained and that has since been papered over by more droning, unnecessary conventional-wisdom final first draft doorstops. Journalists are barely even reporters now but their identities for a generation were obviously deeply invested in losing Vietnam. They are the intelligentsia - a false intellectual classlet - set to defend their own first draft of history against all editors - even their more astute allies in narrative maintenance. Those allies' exasperation might appear proof of debate inside the Left but with Leninism freed of Marxist inevitability, who can say? It seems the melodramatic pretention of comic books, especially the terrorism and assassinations in Alan Moore's and Frank Miller's tales may accurately foretell very non-comicy years of lead ahead.</p><p>
There's a certain kind of backwards thinking that rationalizes what one wants to be true until you can consider it to be true enough for day-to-day use. But such truths-to-order don't stand up in the slightest breeze so it requires closing down any contrary inputs from undependable independent information sources. Reporters and their editors accepted sustainability as a real thing long ago. But it's a rhetorical device, a trump card for political arguments. The new ice age promised in the 1970s became global warming became simple climate change without blushing. This and other wouldbe existential vetoes are rhetorical slush funds to spend in any attack or simple everyday narrative maintenance. It allows the taking of power or the closing down of companies or entire sectors of the economy or society with the greed and megalomania covered by a seeming selfless concern for the greater good. It's advertised as altruism, though it proceeds with all the evident hostility of a class war bent on revenge. After any final green victory over the economy they would pivot to deal with the true believers who would no longer be useful but now would be in their way. The true believers produce new toxic mining victims for their EVs and still they burn additional energy to recycle because its tribute paid to them, and power demonstrated by them. They don't care any more than recreational drug users care what they've done to Latin America.</p><p>
Pat Buchanan slowed and retired just as Donald Trump became the vessel for his effective main idea that with the Cold War won America should come home. Buchanan also gave on the free trade doctrine of the former Republican consensus before it became apparent just what Wall Street and Capitol Hill had wrought in China - intentionally transplanting more of America's manufacturing capacity there than Japan had managed to depress by even unfair competition. Buchanan found out as Trump has too, never agree with the sore winners of the Democratic Party. If the grown-ups of the Republican Party, despite their misgivings, responsibly picked up the Cold War that the Democrats started but changed their mind on, if those Republicans now start to behave like childish Democrats in the streets, those same soft-on-crime Democrats will jail them so fast your head'll spin. There's Democratic Party talk of reinstituting the death penalty in blue states and perhaps they'll legalize assassination at least in one mostly peaceful instance. The E.U. and NATO as well as all of right thinking center-left civilization duly objects to Trump's calling out their national failures to contribute to their own defenses, even though it's that calling out that will force Europe to pony up, learn to walk on their own and finally defend themselves which is what they tell themselves they want! Thank you maskman!</p><p>
Democrats and their newsmedia cohort have created the monster they cannot jail. The Party nominated Joe Biden, the man who co-created their other monster, Clarence Thomas, who silently ate decades of know-it-all press abuse to now run the Supreme Court's majority - Originalism's beast-zero. Trump might win election <i>from</i> jail. Is that what's stirring the black vote? A Trump victory wouldn't change his opposition but any significant increase he gets of the black and brown vote is the only hope that the Democratic Party and its newsmedia would re-think anything.... The black bloc hasn't exactly been rotting in jail writing memoirs on prison toilet paper but they must be contemplating that, hmm..., on day one of a second Donald Trump term he will decapitate the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice..., certainly a vivid wetdream once guaranteed to fire the loins of the Old and New Lefts since the days of COINTELPRO. The oldest Left, the CPUSA however, might say, Not so hasty, now that we have our hands on the organs of state power we can weather Trump as we have weathered American exceptionalism; it's the bureaucracy, stupid. We may soon see where Antifa stands and whether those strings that lead inside the black box of the Democratic Party's stavka of lawyer-warriors can make them dance on command again against what they might once have claimed as their own interests.
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Red Rocks, Nevada</span></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHFoQ92ECr1jYifHAf-SsZ1ZkYptOHvVu6VM-lC0aM09Muei77T9eee5zLdr2_AVhLrKJlHSjxQKLD87IW2uslle5eyX_zWm2i-ab-1F-TWkgpqYN0oWiBA4wvghhApBNTCyiHSMo68_J7Tq4QjEEshd5aD80pD1twdf8ch_NzfOWjahSJInyjprwxdkP/s1488/2023-Nov24-1-RedRocks-sm.JPG" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1116" data-original-width="1488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHFoQ92ECr1jYifHAf-SsZ1ZkYptOHvVu6VM-lC0aM09Muei77T9eee5zLdr2_AVhLrKJlHSjxQKLD87IW2uslle5eyX_zWm2i-ab-1F-TWkgpqYN0oWiBA4wvghhApBNTCyiHSMo68_J7Tq4QjEEshd5aD80pD1twdf8ch_NzfOWjahSJInyjprwxdkP/s600/2023-Nov24-1-RedRocks-sm.JPG" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>From the Wyoming and DuPage Desks of Joe Carducci…</b>
</p><p>
Joe Carducci at <i>veilofsound.com</i>, <a href="https://veilofsound.com/2023/06/14/Book_Premiere-Joe_Carducci.html" target="_blank">Introduction & Acknowlegements for <i>Chicago Stories - Unsolved, Bullethead, City Final, Ghost Dance</i></a>.
</p><blockquote>
I should thank Chicago news media first and foremost in this collection. The papers and channels and stations provided an ambient ticker of all manner of crime and criminals going back to the days of five city dailies when I was a kid. You got hooked into the news even if all you intended to read was the comics and sports sections. When I was eight the President was assassinated and the whole country got a news bath for days - even the kids shows were pre-empted for the news, then Oswald’s killing and finally the funeral itself. When I first began to read the papers’ front sections in earnest my interest was in the features from overseas. I only later realized how interesting Chicago’s local news was. We got the Tribune in the mornings and Chicago Today as well as the Aurora Beacon in the afternoons. Naperville was a small town then and it only had a weekly paper, the Naperville Sun which wasn’t much for crime coverage or me and my brothers might’ve been labeled a crime wave. But schools took kids down to our paper where we could see the lead ingots lowered into the linotype machine to form the slugs for the paper’s layout. It must’ve been about 1966 when I saw it and it looked like those old guys had to be able to read backwards to slot the pages together properly. My mom had two sisters in Naperville and their mother lived with us too so there was alot of Chicago for us in our little town-not-even-a-suburb yet and if I wasn’t visiting cousins to spread our proto-crime wave, I’d be over with the entire family for Christmas or a birthday and I would drop out of the festivities to look at their Chicago papers, the Sun-Times, the Daily News… For two weeks I subbed for a neighbor doing his paper route. That was interesting, seeing the Newspaper Agency in an old house across from the train station. They got the papers delivered by train before anyone else was awake. There were some older guys running things and dozens of boys rolling up the papers for their routes, bagging them, hoisting the full canvas sack onto the handle-bar spurs on their bicycles and then riding off into the dark to throw them on all those nice 19th-century midwestern porches before most any house had a light on inside. I’m sure that was the first time I saw the Southtown Economist, the American and a few other papers too.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Eduardo Suarez at <i>reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk</i>, <a href="https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/new-york-times-publisher-g-sulzberger-our-industry-needs-think-bigger" target="_blank">New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger: "Our Industry Needs to Think Bigger"</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In early January 1996 journalist Kevin McKenna presented the New York Times’ first website to three generations of the Sulzberger family: the publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., his father and predecessor, and his eldest son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who would succeed him in 2018 and who was 15 years old at the time. McKenna was part of a four-member committee that had been working for a year on different prototypes of the website, which would go live a few days later. According to a new history of the Times by journalist Adam Nagourney, the youngest Sulzberger asked McKenna whether the new site would be updated with late-night scores from the games of the Seattle SuperSonics – those results that often came in too late to make the deadline for the morning newspaper. He responded it would. Almost three decades later, the teenager who asked that question is at the top of the masthead of a news organisation with almost 10 million digital subscribers. Sulzberger, now 43, is the sixth member of his family to serve as publisher since the newspaper was purchased by Adolph Ochs in 1896.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Peter Van Buren in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-mainstream-media-are-dying-of-self-inflicted-wounds/" target="_blank">The Mainstream Media Are Dying of Self-Inflicted Wounds</a>.
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Journalism is at a crossroads at best (it may have already crossed into the abyss). The old models of reader-supported or advertising-supported media are no longer sturdy and seem still to apply only to a few giants like the New York Times. Americans’ trust in the mass media’s reporting matches its lowest point in Gallup’s trend line, largely because of Democrats’ decreased trust. (Republicans were lost an election or two ago—see Russiagate—though independents still lead the two parties in lost trust.)</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
James Bowman in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/9/no-surrender" target="_blank">No Surrender</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I can't help thinking that the apparent unconcern of the security services and the media about their devastatingly poor public image reflects a quiet confidence on their part that there will never be another Republican president, or at least not one who could or would dare take on the deep state-media complex and its scandal machine.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Operative 413 at <i>operationwerewolf.com</i>, <a href="https://operationwerewolf.com/war-journal/2023/11/19/all-journalists-are-bastards/" target="_blank">All Journalists Are Bastards</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Journalists are the First Estate because they have the power to determine who is moral and immoral, respectable or extreme, just or unjust in the eyes of society. They can sell vice and call it virtue. They can appeal to our worst and make it feel like we are following the better angels of our nature. With modern technology, they have power clerics of the past can only envy. It’s not that most journalists have a huge amount of power individually – most of them are hardly wealthy, and many have problems with substance abuse. But individual weakness actually enhances their collective power. The ability to set a terrifying machine in motion gives them a collective power far greater than any plutocrat or politician. The frenzy to tear other people down, to turn personal grievances into a collective political crusade, or to skillfully appeal to people’s lowest instincts because you yourself have no higher ones gives one the demonic energy needed to succeed today. Many have nothing to lose and nothing real to protect, so they can dedicate themselves to destruction.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
James Bennett in ECONOMIST, <a href="https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way" target="_blank">When the New York Times Lost Its Way</a>.
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The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies. In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print.... Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper. But, critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles. Meanwhile, the paper began pushing out its print-era salespeople and hiring new ones, and also hiring hundreds of engineers to build its digital infrastructure. All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Leon Wieseltier in LIBERTIES, <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-rise-of-narrative-and-the-fall-of-persuasion/" target="_blank">The Rise of Narrative and The Fall of Persuasion</a>.
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The narrational imperative reaches to the highest levels of power: one commentator on contemporary politics has called this "the Scheherazade strategy." Reflecting on his first term in office, Barack Obama once remarked that "my biggest failure was not to tell a story," adding that "the nature of this office is to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism." In 2017, the People's Daily in Beijing, praising Xi Jinping as "the master storyteller," instructed its captive readers that "telling stories has been a common characteristic of celebrated statesmen and thinkers in China and beyond since ancientd times, and it is a clear characteristic of General Secretary Xi Jinping's leadership style."</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Moira Weigel in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/176809/christopher-rufos-troubling-path-power" target="_blank">The Cultural Conspiracy</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In universities, Rufo writes, his prophets inspired an explosion of administrators, who came to control the ideology of these institutions “from all angles,” by dictating decisions about hiring, funding, and tenure as well as admissions, designating funds for affinity spaces, and mandating diversity training for both students and employees. (A chestnut, for readers of conservative bestsellers: Rufo gives an important new supporting role to Marcuse’s third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse, who in the 1980s “designed a series of training programs that became the prototype for university [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs nationwide,” with workshops on “‘institutionalized racism,’ ‘internalized oppression,’ and ‘being an effective ally.’”) Rufo allows that, by the time Marcuse had immigrated to the United States, the New Deal had already “established the federal government as the great shaper of American life.” But, he says, critical theorists transformed the state into “the primary vehicle of revolution,” enforcing left-wing codes of speech and behavior and turning grant-making agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts and even the National Science Foundation into a “patronage machine for left-wing activism.” The “long march through the media,” Rufo continues, “can be represented in miniature through the conquest of the New York Times.” Citing a “veteran reporter, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals,” Rufo claims that, since the Great Recession, a “faction of younger, ideologically driven employees” have seized control of the paper and used it to embed a set of “ideological phrases” like “systemic racism” or “police brutality” into the “public mind through the force of repetition.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Chris Bray at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/its-class-warfare-all-the-way-down" target="_blank">It's Class Warfare All the Way Down</a>.
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This isn’t your grandfather’s class war. An extremely wealthy Nebraska slaughterhouse owner who votes hard right and drinks Coors is a lower class rube with “mere money” that doesn’t mean anything; a performatively radical adjunct professor with a $32,000 salary in Fresno is upper class. A comment here a few months ago suggested another source of understanding: the “new class” described by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In this book, scroll down to pg. 145 and start reading about “the sociology of the intellectual.” Schumpeter describes a growing class of professional intellectuals as a product of corporate capitalism; they are people who…
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wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another—the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker—in most cases also as an outsider—than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch.</blockquote>
Pick a favorite nuisance politician, and look at their professional background.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Glenn Ellmers in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/" target="_blank">Pandemic Pandemonium</a>.
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Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) is perfectly open about its plans. The coronavirus pandemic, according to its website, revealed the “inconsistencies, inadequacies, and contradictions” of our current political institutions, and thus afforded the opportunity “to build a new social contract.” In a wide selection of articles devoted to explaining what it freely calls its “Agenda,” one learns about wonderfully clever ideas like storing human DNA on the moon, and even more ambitious goals for “human enhancement” and transhumanism, such as “genetic, wearable and implantable technologies that artificially expedite the evolutionary process.” In the WEF’s plans for the glorious future, to take one indicative example, individuals will be expected to “embrace a new form of human intelligence beyond IQ and EQ [emotional intelligence].” You better get with the program if you want “to be successful in the AI age,” because citizens of the new social contract will need “digital intelligence (DQ)” in order to effectively utilize technology for the benefits of themselves, others, and society as a whole.... If Schwab is the organ-grinder of the new world order, his dancing monkey is Yuval Harari. An Israeli academic, Harari provides the pseudo-intellectual arguments for transhumanism’s scientific and historical inevitability. He is given to grandiose pronouncements, such as that human beings will soon be “hackable animals.” You just have to deal with that, Harari instructs us, because “free will—that’s over.” Harari, like Schwab himself—who sometimes dresses like a 1970s James Bond villain—can be hard to take seriously. But the systems of technocratic manipulation and control they celebrate are not a joke.... In May 2022 he caused a firestorm by claiming that a major concern of artificial intelligence will be figuring out what to do “with all the useless people.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Niccolo Soldo at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://niccolo.substack.com/p/saturday-commentary-and-review-155" target="_blank">Saturday Commentary & Review #155</a>.
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It’s no secret that the European Union is a bureaucrat’s dream where the most petty people can find work trying to dictate how the most trivial bits of life should be lived by its citizens. This is the Tyranny of the Busybody, the complete opposite of a vision for a grand future. These bureaucrats have successfully convinced themselves that they are saving the world via their plans and actions. Meanwhile, Europeans continue to grow increasingly frustrated by these consistent intrusions in our lives, intrusions that we know aren’t going to make the world a better place, but that do “justify” the vast bureaucracy that we pay for. To be fair, what else can the EU do anyway now that it has effectively ceded its foreign policy to the USA? It has also indicated that it will obey US dictates on who it can and can’t do business with in the future as well. All that’s left for EU policymakers to do is to try and arrange and re-arrange what happens internally, hence the focus on dictating the minutiae of our lives.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Michael Anton in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Patrick Deneen's book, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/modernity-and-its-discontents/" target="_blank">Regime Change - Toward a Postliberal Future</a>.
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Rightists of various stripes—intellectual, philosophic, religious, traditional, libertarian—offer many answers to the question, “what went wrong, and when?” Working backward, some say wokism, others the welfare state, many “the ’60s,” others the Progressive era, a committed few blame Abraham Lincoln, others “second wave” modernity, still others the Enlightenment, and others still modernity itself. Conservative Catholics and the Orthodox cite the Reformation; the more reactionary among them point to a crisis that emerged from or ended the High Middle Ages, while a certain type of classicist fingers Socrates’ “second sailing,” and another the pre-Socratics’ discovery and demystification of nature. Meanwhile, the most pious of all identify the Fall of Man (an explanation with which, it must be said, the others have something in common). Deneen seems at various points to embrace all of these explanations, at least in part, but at his most explicit he fingers modernity, the true subject of both books (with John Locke as their true villain)—partly one suspects so as to deflect blame from the American Founders onto a more convenient scapegoat. But the two prove impossible to disaggregate and so America must be condemned, if only by implication, along with the man many assume to be America’s philosopher.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Michael Hartney in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Philip Howard's book, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/uncivil-service/" target="_blank">Not Accountable - Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This tidy, well-organized monograph eschews jargon that would distract from its central argument: beginning in the 1960s governments ceded power to public-sector unions, making these private entities equal partners in democratic governance. Elected officials gave public employee unions special privileges to pursue private gains at public expense, rendering public administration an illusion. Explaining how we got here, Howard shows that New York, the first large state to experiment with public employee unions, ignored its own independent commission’s advice to avoid giving legislative powers to arbitrators. The commission also urged that the state legislature be required to approve each collective bargaining agreement. By ignoring these warnings, Empire State lawmakers handicapped future elected officials in every dispute with the unions. New York’s failures have spread nationwide. Public-sector unions, Howard explains, make government: 1) unaccountable to voters, 2) unmanageable for supervisors, 3) unaffordable for taxpayers, 4) inattentive to the common good, and 5) permanently resistant to reform.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Helen Roy in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Mary Harrington's book, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/hunting-for-harmony/" target="_blank">Feminism Against Progress</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Convincingly, if rather charitably, Harrington reconceptualizes the history of feminism as the loosely collective action of women fighting to reclaim the standing and purpose lost during the early industrial period. Victorian “protofeminists,” as she calls them, argued for the dignity of family against the ravages of unforgiving markets and volatile mores. Feminism as Harrington describes it began in a battle for personhood properly understood, embedded within a network of given family obligations and rightly delimited by the facts of human biology. In the 20th century, however, feminists were increasingly enabled by the technological evolution of birth control (and later, industrial abortion) to reject the reality of their sexual difference altogether. The loudest and most influential actors would eventually pursue a disembedded personhood: their ideal was the deracinated homo economicus, whose imagined birthright is to transcend any and all limitations, however natural. Thus, feminism is no longer a matter of achieving equal human dignity for men and women in their distinct capacities, but of “liberating” women from their womanhood to pursue “sameness” with men, stripping away every obstacle to power as measured by economic profit. The pursuit of total liberation from social bonds and the body itself in service of markets is the mark of modern feminism. It prompts the still more radical quest to transcend the boundaries of the human species altogether, known as “transhumanism.” This is the feminism with which we are now most familiar: that which, empowered by technology, subjugates inherited wisdom and family ties to economic participation. Harrington seems to suggest that to degrade the body, as well as the bonds our bodies can forge, is to degrade women. Modern women’s degradation flies under the cover of empowerment. In reality, it’s plain alienation, rebranded.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Rob Henderson in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/luxury-beliefs-that-only-the-privileged-can-afford-7f6b8a16" target="_blank">'Luxury Beliefs' That Only the Privileged Can Afford</a>.
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When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use. A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain. Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Scott McConnell in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/french-best-seller-u-s-is-a-nihilist-empire/" target="_blank">French Best-Seller: U.S. Is a 'Nihilist Empire'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Between 2005 and 2015, virtually every nation under American influence legalized gay marriage, and most went further with the normalization and acceleration of transgenderism. Todd seems not particularly conservative on this issue and in interviews has made clear his preference for “equal rights” for all. But, as an analyst, he is unsparing. He argues that most of the world is strictly patriarchal in family structure, as opposed to the more “bilateral” or more equally influenced by mothers and fathers structures common to the West. This may have made the West more receptive to political liberalism, but it has also given rise to a gender radicalism which partially explains the “indulgence” granted Russia by the peoples and governments of Iran (traditionally highly distrustful of Russia), Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Some degree of feminism may have advanced globally, but not in Western form. The question of morals, Todd argues, has, probably for the first time, emerged as a critical factor in international relations. With arrogant self-assuredness that it incarnates international morality, the West “has not understood that it has become suspect to the larger part of the world which is patrilineal, homophobic, and in fact opposed to the Western moral revolution.” To accuse Russia of being scandalously anti-LGBTQ, he argues, is to play Putin’s game. Russia knows that its homophobic and anti-trans policies, far from alienating the rest of the planet, “confer on it a considerable soft power.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Len Gutkin in CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-decade-of-ideological-transformation-comes-undone" target="_blank">A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone</a>.
</p><blockquote>
When Erika asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about "bureaucratic and adminstrative" power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn't fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the <i>in loco parentis</i> oversight of their elders on campus. "Whose business is it," Erika had asked in her letter, "to control the forms of costumes of young people? It's not mine, I know that." Students disagreed.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Christopher Caldwell in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/unfair-harvard/" target="_blank">Unfair Harvard</a>.
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There are two ways to “eliminate” a system. You can cautiously dismantle it, trusting that the harms it did will fade over time. That is more or less the conservative position on civil rights, and it is what Americans thought they were getting when they backed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second way to eliminate a system is to counteract it, running its machinery in reverse for a while in the hope of getting results faster, and trusting that you will know when to stop. That is more or less the progressive position on civil rights, and it is the one that has dominated American life since Lyndon Johnson introduced affirmative action by executive order in 1965. Affirmative action for a long time degraded academic life, muddled constitutional thinking, and poisoned partisan politics. Those who managed educational institutions came to see diversity as more important than education itself—witness the State of California’s elimination of standardized testing requirements in the wake of the 2020 race riots. The decision to eliminate affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions is the right one, but it is late—perhaps too late. The moment has something Gorbachevian about it. Sonia Sotomayor insists that affirmative action has become part of the American system. We may shortly see whether it can be removed without taking the system down with it.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Dana Goldstein in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/us/what-to-know-about-the-science-of-reading.html" target="_blank">What to Know About the Science of Reading</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The science of reading represents a significant shift for the nation’s school system. For the past two decades, a school of thought known as balanced literacy dominated how colleges prepared future teachers for the classroom and how those teachers taught. The scholarly roots of balanced literacy are in the education and English departments of universities. Brain researchers, examining reading with M.R.I. machines, worked in other departments. As is common in academia, the two groups rarely shared ideas or collaborated. Balanced literacy emphasizes the importance of surrounding children with books and allowing them to spend quiet time reading literature that interests them. It includes some phonics, but the instruction is less structured. Letter-sound relationships may be introduced as they come up in stories or through classroom games, instead of in a sequence designed to build foundational skills. Balanced literacy curriculums have often relied on teaching strategies that have been discredited, such as coaching children to guess difficult words by using pictures and the first letter, instead of sounding out the entire word from beginning to end. Educators and researchers have said that technique leaves children ill-prepared to tackle more difficult texts, without illustrations, as they get older.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Adam Kotsko at <i>slate.com</i>, <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html" target="_blank">The Loss of Things I Took for Granted</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Stephanie Lee in CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/did-the-university-of-california-try-to-bury-a-consequential-vote-on-math" target="_blank">Did the University of California Try to Bury a Consequential Vote on Math?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Emails obtained by The Chronicle show that after the committee’s July 7 meeting, members repeatedly pushed their chair, Barbara Knowlton, a psychologist at UCLA, to broadcast what they had decided: that courses billed as “data science” would no longer count as a substitute for algebra II, one of the UC system’s longstanding requirements. They cited widespread concerns that the courses were not preparing students for college-level math. "Barbara, I think it would be dishonest to delete the language regarding the vote and withhold this information from the communication to the state Board of Education," wrote one member of the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, the UC faculty committee that oversees admissions policy. "We do not get to rewrite what took place."
But the group's internal emails, obtained through public-records requests, show that to the chagrin of members, Knowlton proposed issuing a statement that left out any mention of the vote, instead saying merely that data science was under discussion.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Mark Bauerlein at <i>compactmag.com</i>, <a href="https://compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-the-sectarian-university" target="_blank">The Rise of the Sectarian University</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The real peril to elite higher education, then, isn’t that these places will be financially ruined, nor that they will be effectively interfered with in their internal operations by hostile conservatives. It is, instead, that their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Which is to say that they will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Laurence Krauss in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/alan-sokals-joke-is-on-us-as-postmoderism-comes-to-science-23a9383c" target="_blank">Alan Sokal's Joke Is on Us as Postmodernism Comes to Science</a>.
</p><blockquote>
When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism. This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.” Mr. Sokal’s paper was a hoax, designed to demonstrate that postmodernism was nonsense. But today postmodern cultural theory is being infused into the very institutions one might expect to be scientific gatekeepers. Hard-science journals publish the same sort of bunk with no hint of irony....</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Anjana Ahuja in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c88634cd-ea99-41ec-8422-b47ed2ffc45a" target="_blank">A Cure for the Scientific Fraud Epidemic Is Being Ignored</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill”, an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash. AI is a godsend to this modern racket.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Janan Ganesh in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c4fdfd38-f5fa-4ed7-8389-74fb51f8607c" target="_blank">The Genius of Britain's Anti-Intellectualism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Consider the greatest British minds. Shakespeare wrote 38 plays and 150-odd poems without giving the slightest hint of an overarching worldview. David Hume, the most important philosopher to have written in English, dealt in a sort of anti-philosophy, which put the stress on experience, not reason, as the basis of knowledge. In his penetrating book on British art, Sensations, the critic Jonathan Jones argues that one theme runs from Thomas Gainsborough to Lucian Freud and beyond: empirical observation. While continental painting had its ideas, its academicism, British art grew alongside and in response to science. At all turns, there is, or has been, a bias in the UK against the theoretical. While Paris and New York obey grand schematic plans, London must be the most improvised of the major western cities. (Even LA has a grid of sorts.) Compare the casualness of an English garden with the Euclidean lines of a French one. So, yes, we skirt the subject of identity. But then we skirt most disembodied concepts. In the end, Britain is cosmopolitan because it doesn’t overthink.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Jennifer Kabbany at <i>thecollegefix.com</i>, <a href="https://www.thecollegefix.com/umich-now-has-more-than-500-jobs-dedicated-to-dei-payroll-costs-exceed-30-million/" target="_blank">UMich Now Has More Than 500 Jobs Dedicated to DEI, Payroll Costs Exceed $30 Million</a>.
</p><blockquote>
DEI staff is well compensated with salaries as high as $402,800 for the university’s chief diversity administrator, Tabbye Chavous Sellers. She is paid almost two times more than the average full professor, about 2.5 times more than the governor, and about three times more than the average assistant or associate professor. Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s salary is $159,300, and the average salaries for assistant, associate, and full professors at UM are $129,500, $148,300, and $206,500, respectively. The average DEI salary at UM is $96,400; factoring in fringe benefits, 144 DEI employees at UM receive a total compensation of more than $100,000.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Michael Barone in WSJ on Benn Steil's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-world-that-wasnt-review-when-fdr-dumped-wallace-9f93bb24" target="_blank">The World That Wasn't</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Farm policy is not Mr. Steil’s interest, however. “The World That Wasn’t” devotes 17 pages to Wallace’s record as agricultural secretary but 61 pages (and 281 footnotes) to his 1934-35 entanglement with Russian emigre Nicholas Roerich, his “guru,” a man who sought to create a quasi-Buddhist community called Shambhala somewhere between Manchuria and Tibet. In multiple letters, not fully revealed until 1947, Wallace referred to Roerich as Father, himself as Galahad, and Roosevelt as the Wavering One. Something about Roerich reverberated in Wallace’s reverent and mystical soul. He used his office to send a pair of botanists to accompany Roerich abroad, purportedly to gather seeds for crop experiments, and aroused the wrath of the State Department. In the “guru” episode, Mr. Steil suggests, Wallace showed the weaknesses he would display in foreign policy. He “shrank from face-to-face confrontations,” had “great difficulty in recognizing duplicity” and, when cornered, “muddied and falsified” the record and told outright and often unconvincing lies. It bears keeping in mind, though Mr. Steil doesn’t emphasize it, that Roosevelt’s July 1940 decision to make Wallace vice president came at a parlous time. This was 11 months after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and a month after the fall of France; Hitler and Stalin controlled or were threatening to absorb vast expanses of the Eurasian landmass. Roosevelt, eager to aid beleaguered Britain, knew that he was opposed by Communists on the left and Midwestern isolationists on the right. Wallace, as an exponent of “economic democracy” and central planning—and as an agriculture expert from Iowa—had potential appeal to both groups. That calculation paid off. The Roosevelt-Wallace ticket carried the Midwest and won the president an unprecedented third term.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
David Brooks in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/american-life-bureaucracy.html" target="_blank">Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive. Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” ...The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.” This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Gus Carter in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-weirdness-of-our-new-god-of-migrants/" target="_blank">The Weirdness of Our New Migrant God</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Funny to think what our taxes go on. I wouldn’t have had ‘the invention of a deity’ on my 2024 government expenditure bingo card, but here we are. The National Maritime Museum, which last year received £20 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has unveiled a statue of a ‘god-like protector of all migrants’ to sit next to a bust of Horatio Nelson. The pair will engage in a pre-recorded conversation in which the gender-neutral god praises the ‘resilience’ of those ‘escaping war’ while moaning about our national hero’s ‘fancy medals and uniform’. There’s plenty to laugh at in this commission. Take the fact that every stakeholder imaginable seems to have been consulted, from the trans charity Mermaids to Action for Refugees in Lewisham, or that the bust seems to have a can of pepper spray placed artfully on top of its head. But what strikes me about the creation of a new god is its sheer weirdness. What kind of publicly-funded museum, charged with preserving the remains of the past for the benefit of today, decides that coming up with a new deity is the best way to carry out that duty?</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Gary Morson in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2024/2/galaxy-brains" target="_blank">Galaxy Brains</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Q4RmXV82nucxp0TlHwgZ1x1OEtfXpiLJsfJlWin3vL7pNdtttuyElXODyBHx7k1sb55nREmD6KiJ_oDwMKTRF1hKGCoVIBmJV__IEV57Nn3EDlTm-HQ_rHnFCqbh4HuflZgwWxkcjOBYfblk2DlaX8_AGff1md4bucHEXhU-7bUO4hvU6p3Zqyyugkpu/s275/NV-162-NewCriterion%20(1).png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Q4RmXV82nucxp0TlHwgZ1x1OEtfXpiLJsfJlWin3vL7pNdtttuyElXODyBHx7k1sb55nREmD6KiJ_oDwMKTRF1hKGCoVIBmJV__IEV57Nn3EDlTm-HQ_rHnFCqbh4HuflZgwWxkcjOBYfblk2DlaX8_AGff1md4bucHEXhU-7bUO4hvU6p3Zqyyugkpu/w233-h320/NV-162-NewCriterion%20(1).png" width="233" /></a></div>
Solzhenitsyn’s novels about the events leading to the Bolshevik takeover depict Russia’s real heroes not as revolutionists who disdain everything bourgeois and practical but as engineers who actually build things. In August 1914, General Martos knows that Russians must overcome their characteristic way of thinking if they are to defeat the Germans. He “could not tolerate Russian sloppiness, the Russian inclination to ‘wait and see,’ to ‘sleep on it,’ and leave God to make the decisions.” Is it any wonder, then, that Russians have been inclined to utopianism, mysticism, and pseudoscience? In tsarist times, intellectuals commonly imagined revolution in millenarian terms, as a transformation not just of society but also of the universe. When the anticipated revolution happened, many presumed that this political upheaval would instantaneously change everything else. Wealth would be abundant within days. Suffering would instantly become a thing of the past. And, before long, mortality itself would be overcome, just as the Book of Revelation promised, only without divine intervention. These atheists anticipated that strictly scientific laws, as outlined in Marxist–Leninist philosophy, would accomplish everything that mystics had foretold.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
John Carter at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-white-mans-ghost-dance" target="_blank">The White Man's Ghost Dance</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Our governments are wholly captured, Quisling states with no loyalty to the nations over whom they preside. All efforts to overthrow these occupation governments have so far come to nought, not least because most do not yet recognize that they are occupation governments in the first place. After all, they were not imposed by a conqueror’s armed might, but rather mutated step-by-step in an imperceptibly gradual process from representatives of the people’s will and guarantors of the nation’s interests, to violators of the nation’s interests that are utterly insensible to the people’s will.... Is it any wonder, then, with no clear path forward, with defeat leading to defeat and whatever small victories we win also leading to defeat, that so much of the discourse on the dissident right has turned to the past, to the cult of the body, to tradition? We must RETVRN, we say. We have to go back. You must lift weights, get fit, perhaps learn combat sports – take up boxing or MMA. And of course, you must find God. Go to church, ideally the same church your forefathers attended. Read the Bible. Read old books. Become wise in the ways of the old philosophers, especially the Romans and the Greeks. Reconnect with your roots, it is very Indo-European. Is all of this not exactly what the Red Man did? The Han Boxer? The Judean Zealot? Is the entire dissident right no more than the white man’s Ghost Dance?</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Jennie Lightweis-Goff in LIBERTIES, <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/concept-creep-a-progressives-lament/" target="_blank">Concept Creep: A Progressive's Lament</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Perhaps it was not the "paranoid style" of the political right, but the "hermeneutic of suspicion" practiced by the academic left, that seized American tongues. The desire to flush out the enemy of concealed meaning generates martial language in scholarly writing; there, the writer does not argue, he intervenes. He does not analyze; he interrogates. Concepts steadily creeped from colleges and universities to the broader world: think the heights to which intersectionality and performativity climbed in these dishonest decades.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Tamsin Shaw in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Calder Walton's book, Spies, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/ethical-espionage-spies-calder-walton/" target="_blank">and Cecile Fabre's book, Spying Through the Glass Darkly</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhQUZaOT2fjFoPFJI5YKqE-5NHvLFdhAt3zSnJ4pxJVd5moUCgRSOh8hz92N4CjZ-rq5ctE9W52Aga45bx0U4UbylvzZnD80B3PlVmo4fmne1JEhathsjZJBbf2vx-wDNpYi7d_pKWlho1WdqN5bBRVnw0KGFVnK3ybdJDCJwovQHnHQ7g4MrE1V6_QrUz/s272/NV-162-NYReviewofBooks%20(1).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhQUZaOT2fjFoPFJI5YKqE-5NHvLFdhAt3zSnJ4pxJVd5moUCgRSOh8hz92N4CjZ-rq5ctE9W52Aga45bx0U4UbylvzZnD80B3PlVmo4fmne1JEhathsjZJBbf2vx-wDNpYi7d_pKWlho1WdqN5bBRVnw0KGFVnK3ybdJDCJwovQHnHQ7g4MrE1V6_QrUz/w235-h320/NV-162-NYReviewofBooks%20(1).jpg" width="235" /></a></div>
At one point during the war Finnish intelligence officers got hold of a Soviet code book, which they sold to the OSS. When the US secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., and the OSS director, William Donovan, discovered this, they ordered that it be returned. Meanwhile, the Soviets had infiltrated Allied governments, militaries, and intelligence agencies at the highest levels, including the Manhattan Project. The extent of what Stalin's spies got away with is in retrospect quite astonishing.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
John Banville in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on John Gray's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/back-to-the-state-of-nature-the-new-leviathans-john-gray/" target="_blank">The Leviathans - Thoughts After Liberalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Religion is pervasive in Putin's domain: according to a source cited by Gray, "mobile temples accompany intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines have their portable churches." One of the numerous figures whom Gray plucks from relative obscurity is Konstantin Leontiev, who as well as being a journalist and a novelist - and an energetic bisexual - was "a censor in the service of the tsarist state." He was an avowed antiliberal, yet he repudiated nationalism and race-based politics and "proposed that the tsarist system shold impose an autocratic socialism, which would be the new feudalism of which he dreamt." ...In contrast to Putin's historical mythologizing, the Chinese president Xi Jinping's "project of nation-building originates in the illiberal West." One of the unlikely-seeming thinkers whose work, Gray tells us, has influenced China's social strategists of today is the German jurist and unrepentant Nazi Carl Schmitt. While Western thinkers such as Hobbes and Leo Strauss are closely studied in China, "Schmitt is seen by many Chinese intellectuals as having most to teach."</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
James Bowman in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2024/1/meritless-meritocracy" target="_blank">Meritless Meritocracy</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Like the late Angelo Codevilla, I don't mind the idea of a meritocracy in theory; I just dislike the one we've got, which consists of overeducated and cosmopolitan pseudo-aristocrats who have more sense of solidarity with their counterparts in other countries than with their fellow countrymen of the populus. To these elites, those who sport banners proclaiming "Make America Great Again" are self-condemned; as the ex-governor Andrew Cuomo once put it, America "was never that great" to begin with. Not so long ago, such a saying would have been political suicide, but, like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Cuomo must have recognized that his party's constituency, consisting of his fellow meritocrats and the various notionally oppressed minorities of whom they claimed to be the protectors, no longer has room in it for the great mass of patriotic Americans. These patriots, after all, were the notional oppressors.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Gordon Chang in NEW CRITERION on Joshua Kurlantzick's book, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2024/1/death-by-disinformation" target="_blank">Beijing's Global Media Offensive - China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In general, it would seem that China has two successful state media models to choose from: Qatar's Al Jazeera and Russia's RT, once known as Russia Today. Qatar has allowed Al Jazeera to produce "a high degree of excellent reporting" without interference except on a few subjects, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia. For the most part, the Qatari government has little interest in the general state of the world. China's regime, however, wants to control the storylines about everything and therefore imposes tight control on all subjects. Scratch Al Jazeera as a model for China. RT has been popular because it is "disruptive, hypercontrarian, controversial." China has increasingly employed Russia's "flame-thrower approach," but this effective tactic has only limited utility for an ambitious Beijing. China wants to be seen by the world as "a different type of power from the United States and other leading democracies," because, it argues, it understands "developinng states' needs" and is sensitive to their "political and cultural norms." Therefore, "going full crazy, Kremlin style" is not in the cards for Chinese leaders, Kurlantzick perceptively writes.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f9b47684-6f25-4d72-ba8b-a32051489b8e" target="_blank">Davos Elite Laps Up Milei's Lecture on How It Lost Its Way</a>.
</p><blockquote>
There was a slight gasp among my headset-wearing neighbours in the World Economic Forum’s congress hall when Javier Milei blamed all political movements except his own for the west’s woes. “Whether they proclaim to be openly communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists, there are no major differences. They all say the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals,” Argentina’s libertarian president told the well-heeded crowd last week. Corporate executives exchanged amused gazes. There was sporadic laughter. It was only one among many astounding lines in Milei’s 20-minute speech in Davos — his first trip abroad since taking office in December. WEF participants, whom the economics professor labelled the “heroes” of the capitalist world, had been “co-opted” by neo-Marxists, radical feminists and climate activists, he warned.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
David Rivkin & Lawrence Friedman in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trial-lawyers-are-wrecking-the-bankruptcy-system-johnson-and-johnson-boy-scouts-9f371ca2" target="_blank">Trial Lawyers Are Wrecking the Bankruptcy System</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Trial lawyers have found an opportunity to exploit the traditional bankruptcy claims process through the use of well-honed mass tort shakedown strategies. The scheme is simple but damaging. Plaintiff lawyers invest in a flurry of marketing through social media, TV and radio ads, often using professional “lead generation” companies, to identify the maximum number of potential tort claimants. These claims can’t be fully verified, challenged or adjudicated within the framework of bankruptcy proceedings. Their proliferation siphons off tremendous resources from companies that are already in financial distress, compromising their ability to emerge from bankruptcy and short-changing established creditors, including earlier plaintiffs. As a lawyer for one of the Boy Scouts’ insurers told the press in 2021: “Allowing invalid and fraudulent claims will hurt valid survivors of sexual abuse by delaying and diluting any compensation they would receive.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Bruce Pardy in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-whos-managerial-gambit-5563447" target="_blank">The WHO's Managerial Gambit</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The World Health Organization is now proposing a new international pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations. These proposals will make next time worse. Not because they override sovereignty, but because they will protect domestic authorities from responsibility. States will still have their powers. The WHO plan will shield them from the scrutiny of their own people.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Pamela Paul in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/social-work-columbia-ideology.html" target="_blank">What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The National Association of Social Workers now stipulates that “antiracism and other facets of diversity, equity and inclusion must be a focal point for everyone within social work.” In October, Thema S. Bryant, the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, published a column titled “Psychologists Must Embrace Decolonial Psychology.” In it she wrote, “Decolonial psychology asks us to consider not just the life history of the individual we are working with but also the history of the various collective groups they are a part of, whether that is their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability.” The profession, she explained, needed to include a range of goals, from appreciating “Indigenous science” to shaping “systems and institutions” in addition to individuals and families.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Samo Burja at <i>palladiummag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the-end-of-industrial-society/" target="_blank">The End of Industrial Society</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Early modern Europe, while sharing many features typical of agricultural civilizations, also developed social technologies that lent themselves to an explosion of material production. One example was an ideological commitment to truth in speech among some aristocratic circles, exemplified by Britain’s Royal Society, whose Latin motto translates roughly to “take nobody’s word for it.” This commitment enabled advances in basic science by assigning high status to verifiable mathematics, empiricism, and experimentation. It further lent itself to honesty about the process of production. Another key social technology was the Protestant conception of friendship as expressed through the community of willing believers. Strangers could be trusted by default within this community, and thereby coordinate closely to form and run companies. Material factors like roads, canal networks, or good climate contribute to industrialization, but they don’t tell us about the social machinery that took advantage of them. With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
L.M. Sacasas in HEDGEHOG REVIEW on Joseph Minich's book, <a href="https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/technoculture-and-the-plausibility-of-unbelief" target="_blank">Bulwarks of Unbelief - Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Minich is keen to show that it was in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of industrialization, urbanization, and the transformation of the technological milieu and conditions of labor, that unbelief became thinkable for large segments of the population and that narratives of secularization, disenchantment, and modernity proliferated among the scholars and intellectuals. As he puts it, “There are good reasons to suspect that the metaphysical furniture of the cosmos and our basic/tacit sense of things probably changed less (at least in the West) between 750 and 1750 than it did between 1850 and 1950.” In the two central chapters of Bulwarks of Unbelief, Minich sets out, first, to establish a correlation between the rise of modern technoculture in the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of modern atheism, and then to argue for a causal relationship between the two phenomena. Citing historical and literary sources, he contends that the rise of unbelief is properly correlated not to the emergence of modern science or Enlightenment models of rationality, but to the lived experience of urban and industrial settings and, critically for Minich, an alienation from the world through the vector of humans’ alienation from their labor.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Michael Weinman in HEDGEHOG REVIEW on Richard Wolin's book, <a href="https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/what-heideggers-notebooks-dont-tell-us" target="_blank">Heidegger in Ruins - Between Philosophy and Ideology</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In this case, Wolin argues, the “Deutschland Metaphysik” in which Heidegger participates goes back to a thinker who more often appears as his nemesis: the Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, who, in a 1914 lecture on the theme of such a “metaphysics of Germany,” attributed this line of thought to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. In the era of the Napoleonic Wars, as Wolin summarizes Natorp’s argument, Fichte and others “endowed what was merely factual with the character of necessity.” The problem here, which Wolin acutely diagnoses, is that Heidegger joined Natorp and many others in linking—inextricably—the historical fact of the emergence of something almost like the German nation-state with a particular metaphysical quality that is attributed to Germanness. In this metaphysical sense, Germany is believed to exist not merely as one nationality among many but also somehow as the fullest expression of nationhood itself. The importance of this insight is clear when Wolin connects it to Heidegger’s invocation of the “metapolitics of historical Volk,” by which he did not “mean any Volk whatsoever. He meant the German Volk, which, as the Black Notebooks repeatedly reaffirm, Heidegger regarded as the only genuinely historical Volk”.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Christopher Caldwell in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/the-fateful-nineties" target="_blank">The Fateful Nineties</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_-AlKLLvRTetVhKsHMehlLBM0gTNknIEQyYKs5Dyxih8h4UoUKi_WdiCF_iGTM-i_asY6oMeTSxHmPyL0U1ywU5I75JgYyQ87FgEDq3AOu41wTpyd_Jj-578IO4Z9zRnrE4tcpYLAfywGgKZaTjEyH-R0qhGuFNcpNInfDEzTluV3MYUAgq5pozuCn2I5/s268/NV-162-FirstThings%20(1).png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_-AlKLLvRTetVhKsHMehlLBM0gTNknIEQyYKs5Dyxih8h4UoUKi_WdiCF_iGTM-i_asY6oMeTSxHmPyL0U1ywU5I75JgYyQ87FgEDq3AOu41wTpyd_Jj-578IO4Z9zRnrE4tcpYLAfywGgKZaTjEyH-R0qhGuFNcpNInfDEzTluV3MYUAgq5pozuCn2I5/w239-h320/NV-162-FirstThings%20(1).png" width="239" /></a></div>
James M. Buchanan, a Chicago-trained economist, pioneer of “public choice theory,” and Nobel Prize–winner in economics in 1986, would focus on three things: information, efficiency, and values. Because exchange is “complex,” Buchanan told the Australians, state planners are too far away from the action to “fully exploit the strictly localized information that emerges in the separate but interlinked markets.” Considering what we had come to know about the information carried in market prices, Buchanan was incredulous that so many had denied the superiority of free markets for so long. Read decades later, his speech gives the sense that the triumph of free markets was on shakier intellectual ground than anyone understood at the time. Buchanan’s assumptions about “strictly localized” information—presumably from factories, shops, and households—reflected how the problem of gathering business information had been understood between the 1930s and 1990. But the internet would begin to draw a broad commercial public roughly three years later, and once it was up and running, almost no information would remain “strictly localized”—nor could it be kept private, except through measures that were themselves costly. A new tool for centralized, comprehensive, and efficient surveillance of market transactions was on its way—and with the invention of HTTP cookies, such information might simply be requisitioned, like grain stocked by Soviet peasants in the 1930s. Eventually, certain academic economists would suggest that, in enabling capitalism to triumph in practice, the personal computer had made socialism possible in principle. A new universe of economic possibilities was opening up.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Cremieux Recueil at <i>aporiamagazine.com</i>, <a href="https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-do-elite-groups-form" target="_blank">How Do Elite Groups Form?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Shortly before the establishment of the Turkish republic, that country carried out a genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greek Christians – which was certain to have wiped out some of their wealth. The republic also enacted the Varlık Vergisi (a wealth tax that was later characterized as explicitly discriminatory) with the goal of impoverishing non-Muslims, who saw it as the return of the "jizya gavur", or the jizya for infidels. It is perhaps the closest a government has ever gotten to writing up a list ranking ethnicities by how much they hate them. At the top of the list, Christian Armenians were forced to pay an incredible 232% rate, followed by Jews, who had to pay a 179% rate. There was clearly an ethnic element to this tax because Christian Greeks were faced with a rate of “only” 156%. Muslims, on the other hand, were taxed at an extremely low rate of 4.94%. It’s no wonder this caused a massive transfer of wealth to Muslims and left a huge number of non-Muslims enslaved in prison camps, deprived of their livelihoods, and in many cases, dead by their own hands.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
<i>committeetounleashprosperity.com</i>: <a href="https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Them-vs-Us_CTUP-Rasmussen-Study-FINAL.pdf" target="_blank">Them vs. U.S.</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Elites, a group with extraordinary political and societal power, have views and attitudes that are wildly out of touch with the American people. At the center of the gap is a difference of opinion over individual freedom. Most Americans think there is too little freedom in our nation today, a view shared by only 21% of the Elites. There are subsets of this elite world with even more extreme views. Roughly a third of these Elites talk politics
daily. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of this politically active segment believe there is too much individual freedom. Only 12% share the public’s view that there is not enough individual freedom in America today. These un-American views are not the result of a conspiracy. They arise from what might be better described as a fraternity culture. Just over half of the Elites have a degree from one of the twelve Elite universities. These schools play a crucial role in defining the Elite culture and perspectives. Elites who attended one of these schools are more likely to talk about politics, and have more extreme views than Elites who attended other schools. Among those who attended one of the 12 schools and talked about politics daily, 73% believe there is too much individual freedom in America today, and 95% trust the government to do the right thing most of the time. Another significant demographic divide among the Elites is a notable generation gap. Among members of the
Elites who are 55 or older, just 10% think there is too much individual freedom—a majority (54%) of Elites under 35 hold that view.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Jennifer Schuessler in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/arts/what-is-settler-colonialism.html" target="_blank">What Is 'Settler Colonialism'?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Many scholars trace the current sense of “settler colonialism,” and its exploding influence in academic circles, to Patrick Wolfe, a British-born Australian scholar and the author of the 1998 book “Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.” In a tribute to Wolfe after his death in 2016, the scholar Lorenzo Veracini wrote that Wolfe said he had included the phrase in the title at the last minute, at the urging of his publisher. (It occurs infrequently in the book itself.) “Like the British, who had supposedly set up an empire without really wanting to,” Veracini wrote, “this committed anti-imperialist scholar kick-started a scholarly field in a fit of absent-mindedness.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Rob Jenkins in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/is-serfdom-humanitys-default-5516056" target="_blank">Is Serfdom Humanity's Default?</a>
</p><blockquote>
We can certainly point to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States and its allies have attempted to "liberate" the people, only to have them return to centuries-old power struggles and warlord tribalism - essentially, a form of serfdom - as soon as the Western powers pull out. Do those people really yearn for freedom, for democracy? Why don't they have it, then? But the problem actually strikes much closer to home. I'm convinced that a large and growing minority of people in this country, especially among young people, don't want freedom - certainly not for others, but untimately not even for themselves. Witness the recent Buckley Institute poll in which 51 percent of college students supported campus speech codes, while 45 percent agreed that violence was justified to prevent people from expressing "hate speech."</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Peter Gordon in NATION on Christina Morina's book, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/the-invention-of-marxism/" target="_blank">The Invention of Marxism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A theme that Morina returns to throughout her book is how many of these socialists sought to interpret Marxism as an objective science. “The co-opting of ‘science’ by Marxist social analysis,” she writes, “may have been the most effective political idea of social critics on the left in the nineteenth century. It turned Marx’s theses into Marxism, and an intellectual worldview into a political truth.” The idea of a “scientific Marxism” grew in popularity among theorists like Engels, who praised Marx at his friend’s graveside as the Darwin of the social world. But it also became a common view among Marx and Engels’s heirs. In the era of electrification and rampant technological expansion, a vague kind of positivism gained in authority among socialists, moving many Marxist theoreticians to claim that Marxism, too, could enjoy the prestige of a science no less than that of the natural sciences such as physics and biology. Morina does not examine this view in much depth, and today very few Marxists would wish to defend the notion that Marxism is a strict science that discovers unbending or universal laws. All the same, she recognizes that the ambition to portray Marxism as scientific can help us to appreciate why it caught fire as a cultural and political ideology. In this respect, she treats Marxism no differently than a social historian might treat other systems of belief: To explain its ascendancy, she looks at its motivational power, not its claims to truth.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Chris Knight at <i>aeon.co</i>, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky" target="_blank">An Anthropologist Studies the Warring Ideas of Noam Chomsky</a>.
</p><blockquote>
From the start of his academic career, no part of his scientific work would show up in his political activism, while no trace of his activism would be detectable in his science. Among the inevitable outcomes was a conception of language utterly divorced from what most of us mean by that term. Language, for Chomsky, is a computational module restricted entirely to the individual, and devoid of communicative, cultural or social aspects. If it has any remaining purpose or function, it exists merely for talking to oneself. This novel and allegedly ‘scientific’ model of language was so extreme in its individualism and abstraction that, in the end, it proved of no use to anyone. Not even the US military could make any of it work.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
John Ellis in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/higher-ed-has-become-a-threat-to-america-antisemitism-dei-college-f52bb0b5" target="_blank">Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Personnel is policy. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, that isn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do. Political activists have been converting money intended for higher education to an unauthorized use—advancing their goal of transforming America. That is tantamount to embezzlement. While we let it continue we are financing our own destruction as a society. But how can we stop them? State lawmakers can condition continued funding on the legitimate use of that money and install new campus leadership mandated to replace professors who are violating the terms of their employment. Though only possible in red states, this would bring about competition between corrupt institutions and sound ones. Employers would soon notice the difference between educated and indoctrinated young people.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Robert Zaretsky in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/thought-experimenters/" target="_blank">Thought Experimenters</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A few years ago, writer and philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger enjoyed commercial and critical success for Time of the Magicians. The time in question was the decade following the end of the First World War; the magicians who dominated it were Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. Ultimately, these four thinkers had little in common apart from the German language and the shared goal of rethinking the purpose of philosophy. Thanks to this foursome, as Eilenberger argued in his vibrant and often gripping account, the 1920s became “philosophy’s great decade.” With his new book, Eilenberger offers a sequel of sorts, moving from the 1920s to the period between 1933 and 1943, from magicians to visionaries, and from men to women. This time around, the dramatis personae are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. Eilenberger pivots expertly among the four storylines, and his writing shimmers with the same intelligence and insight, sense of drama, and urgency that he brought to Time of the Magicians. His four magi, emerging from the material, moral, social, and political wreckage wrought by the First World War, grasped that philosophy had to be utterly reimagined. Similarly, his four visionaries, pursuing their philosophical studies as the world lurched toward the Second World War, found themselves increasingly preoccupied with, well, the vision thing.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Oliver Traldi at <i>quillette.com</i>, <a href="https://quillette.com/2023/11/25/the-perverts-guide-to-philosophy/" target="_blank">The Pervert's Guide to Philosophy</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the introduction, Alamariu insists that he is not a Straussian theorist like his advisor—a petulant acknowledgment of just how much he owes to the Straussian tradition in which he was trained. What Alamariu means is that he, as Bronze Age Pervert, is willing and even eager to say offensive things rather than hide them, but his use of a pseudonym seems to confirm rather than undermine Strauss’s theories. However, once the door is opened to hidden meanings, it’s hard to close it. A friend of mine insists that Alamariu’s first book, Bronze Age Mindset, is written in support of Adolf Hitler, because it calls on readers to be “pirates” and Strauss uses the word “pirate” to describe Hitler, and virtually nobody else. This might seem like a stretch, but it’s the sort of interpretation that an esoteric approach seems to encourage.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
<i>eugyppius.com</i>, <a href="https://www.eugyppius.com/p/how-the-leaders-of-the-great-german?publication_id=268621&post_id=140728312&isFreemail=true&r=2glxis&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">How the Leaders of the Great German Farmers' Protest Are Committed to Neutralising Their Own Movement, and What the Farmers Must Now Do If They Want Anything to Change</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Major news outlets are insisting, via police sources, that only 8,500 protestors attended – probably 30% of the true number. From the beginning, I guess, the press hoped to downplay the size of the protest. I had no illusions that either Rukwied or Lindner would have anything good to say. The former spent the days before the protest railing against “radicals” and singing hymns to “democracy” and the “ballot box”; the latter gave a speech on 6 January telling the farmers to go home. The question was merely how bad these men would be, and I regret to report that both of them were as terrible as possible. You must remember that there is one way – and only one way – for the protest to succeed: The farmers have to adopt an inclusive political programme with broad appeal, and their goal must be the resignation of the Scholz government and new elections. While the farmers are a well-organised and influential segment of society, there aren’t that many of them, which is why the government alighted upon their plan of increasing farm-specific taxes to plug their budgetary hole in the first place. If the farmers confine themselves to issues like the diesel tax hike, they’ll make themselves irrelevant. Even the farmers I talked to seemed not to care that much about diesel subsidies; they have a wide array of much more serious and relatable concerns. The vision and the strategy are there, but their leadership is wholly compromised. Rather than embrace the grievances of the farmers they summoned, Joachim Rukwied and the German Farmers’ Association are determined to shut them down.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
James Gagliano at <i>foxnews.com</i>, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/what-witnessed-fbi-will-be-agency-waterloo" target="_blank">What I Witnessed at the FBI Will Be the Agency's Waterloo</a>.
</p><blockquote>
J. Edgar Hoover, the father of the FBI, was born in 1895. Hoover hired James Wormley Jones, a WWI veteran who in 1919 became the FBI’s first African-American special agent. This was some 29 years before President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, leading to desegregation of U.S. Armed Forces. Yet in 2015, a handful of FBI agents complained about a "wax-like, life-size figure of J. Edgar Hoover" positioned within the New York division’s museum. What was the reflexive decision by FBI headquarters public affairs office? Immediately remove the "offensive" statue so as not to "trigger" some fragile agent. The Washington Post characterized it thusly: "The decision to oust Hoover, who was the FBI director for 48 years and served under ten presidents, is something of a cultural moment for the bureau. Once revered among FBI agents, Hoover is no longer universally admired at the crime-fighting organization he built…Today’s agents and other employees dislike the history he represents…" That same year, I also witnessed firsthand the FBI’s shift away from objective resource allocation and "calling things what they were" when Barack Obama’s "wing man," Attorney General Eric Holder, compelled Comey’s FBI to resist accurate description of terror attacks by "radical Islamists" in exchange for more nebulous depictions of our efforts in "combating violent extremism." Contrast that muted downplaying of the Muslim perpetrators of the vast majority of worldwide terror attacks with how DOJ treated the January 6th "insurrectionists" and angry parents at school board meetings -- compared again to 2020 ANTIFA and BLM anarchists and rioters.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
<i>revolver.news</i>, <a href="https://revolver.news/2022/10/stochastic-terrorism-new-regime-catchphrase-for-political-dissent/" target="_blank">Behold, the Regime Unveils Its New Catchphrase for All Political Dissent: "Stochastic Terrorism"</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Basically, “stochastic terrorism” is the idea that, when somebody on the right criticizes somebody, they aren’t really just making a political argument. Instead, they are trying to “stoke hatred” in the expectation that some random third party will be “radicalized” and then commit political violence on their behalf. In the modern sense of the phrase, “stochastic terrorism” was first coined by a left-wing blogger in 2011, who used it to describe the nefarious terrorist activities of, er, Sean Hannity....</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
James Piereson in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/the-new-conservative-dilemma" target="_blank">The New Conservative Dilemma</a>.
</p><blockquote>
These programs eventually erased the unofficial barrier that had existed until that time between the powers of the federal government and those of other institutions across the society. The New Deal expanded many of the powers of government but did little to interfere with this traditional barrier. In 1961, the U.S. government spent about $80 billion, with 57 percent ($46 billion) going to national defense and the rest scattered among interest payments, Social Security, agricultural programs, and veterans affairs. By 1980, when Great Society programs were in full swing, the federal government spent about $550 billion, with just 24 percent allocated to defense. But 39 percent was allocated to income programs of various kinds (through Social Security, Medicare, welfare, and other items) and 16 percent to grants and payments to state and local governments. Those sub-grants to other institutions were accompanied by requirements to carry out civil-rights legislation, in addition to others later mandated by laws dealing with the environment, mental health, and physical handicaps. The new programs created in that period spawned a host of advocacy groups in Washington that worked with journalists, congressional committees, and executive agencies to protect expenditures and expand the reach of the programs. The advocacy groups were funded by charitable foundations and wealthy individuals, and sometimes by the government itself, which sent money to such groups to press Congress to spend more, in a cumulative process of expansion.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
David McCarthy in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/conservatism-reconfigured" target="_blank">Conservatism Reconfigured</a>.
</p><blockquote>
About forty years ago the hard-right columnist and political theorist Sam Francis began to devise a new framework for understanding power in modern America. Francis accepted as true James Burnham’s argument that a “managerial revolution” had superseded the old class struggle between labor and capital and resulted in a new human type, the “managerial class.” To this Francis added an idea borrowed from the sociologist Donald Warren, who in The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation (1976) described men and women who might today be called “populists” (or “deplorables”) as “Middle American Radicals,” or mars. Francis recognized them as the population left behind and disenfranchised by the accumulation of power in the hands of the managerial elite. The class conflict of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as he saw it, was between the mars and the managers. Burnham seems not to have believed that there was any way to reverse the managerial revolution, just as one could not undo the industrial revolution. Francis, by contrast, suggested that a “Middle American Revolution” might come from an uprising of mars, perhaps beginning with the election of Pat Buchanan as president sometime in the 1990s. It bears emphasizing that a politically engaged Middle American Radical is not a conservative; Francis was an unsparing critic of the conservative movement, which at its best consisted, in his estimation, of “beautiful losers.” Political mars would be far more confrontational than conservatives had traditionally been; they would not flinch at using state power to advance their goals, and they would not be encumbered by any debt to “classical liberalism.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Margot Cleveland in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/the-promise-of-populism" target="_blank">The Promise of Populism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
After decades of conservative acquiescence to the one-way movement of cultural and constitutional norms, the Left’s ratchet could go no further once it demanded ideological and moral capitulation and celebration of the converse. The ruling class’s “no enemies to the left” approach finally fractured a unified nation by denying Americans a live-and-let-live refuge. While conservatives may prefer the more refined platitudes of the past, their polite words and attitude of compromise are exactly what sowed the field of authoritarianism that is now choking our liberty. Conservatives are faced with a stark choice. They may remain apathetic and go quietly into the night, or they can welcome into the fold the people who stand ready to rebuild America on her foundational principles. So, rather than allow the Left to define the movement or the cause, conservatives should champion populism and define it for what it is—an embrace of the lowercase-D democracy that underlies our constitutional republic. Let the Democrats argue against real democracy, which they now refer to as “our democracy” every time they feel their power threatened.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
<i>revolver.news</i>, <a href="https://revolver.news/2024/01/ice-ice-baby-why-donald-trump-should-annex-antarctica/" target="_blank">Ice Ice Baby: Why Donald Trump Should Annex Antarctica</a>.
</p><blockquote>
If Donald Trump has a pet peeve as a politician, it’s bad deals—and worst of all, bad deals that stick around for no discernible reason. When the U.S. proposed making Antarctica a neutral zone, it was by far the country with the greatest ability to develop Antarctica. America remains as such today, but in a far less dominant position than 60 years ago. Today, the Cold War is over, and both China and Russia flagrantly lay the groundwork for economic expansion in Antarctica, while the U.S. does nothing. Antarctica is certainly an unhospitable place. Temperatures in the interior routinely drop below -100 degrees in winter, and most of the continent literally never reaches above freezing temperatures. The continent’s original landmass is buried beneath a mass of ice averaging more than a mile in thickness. Merely finding, let alone harvesting, the natural resources of Antarctica’s interior would be enormously difficult and expensive. But consider that, at this moment, the world dreams of building bases on the surfaces of the moon and Mars. An asteroid-mining startup has collected enough investor cash to launch a probe aboard a SpaceX rocket next year. Sure, drilling a hole through a mile of ice is hard, but it’s not as hard or expensive as building a literal moon base.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
W.M. Akers in NYTBR on Gregory Wallance's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/books/review/into-siberia-gregory-wallance.html" target="_blank">Into Siberia - George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia</a>.
</p><blockquote>
George Kennan lost his faith in the Russian city of Tomsk. A journalist, he came in the summer of 1885 to report on the country’s exile system, which every year sent thousands of men, women and children to the wilds of Siberia, intending that they should work, be forgotten and die. In Tomsk he found what one local official called “the worst prison in Siberia,” where entire families crowded into cages too tight for them to move, the air was noxious and the hospital was so “saturated with disease” that a physician there was lobbying to have it burned down. Kennan had come to write a defense of the sprawling network of work camps and prisons. Tomsk broke him. “The exile system is worse than I believed it to be, and worse than I have described it,” he wrote in a letter to the publisher of Century magazine. “It isn’t pleasant, of course, to have to admit that one has written upon a subject without fully understanding it; but even that is better than trying, for the sake of consistency, to maintain a position after one sees that it is utterly untenable.” “Into Siberia,” Gregory Wallance’s new biography of Kennan, convincingly portrays him as one of the 19th century’s most influential journalists, arguing that “Siberia and the Exile System,” his account of his 1885-86 journey, was what first soured American relations with Russia. (Kennan was related to George F. Kennan, the Cold War-era diplomat who would later make his own mark on the Russo-American relationship.)</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Sui-Lee Wee in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/world/asia/vietnam-cop28-environment.html" target="_blank">Vietnam Relied on Environmentalists to Secure Billions. Then It Jailed Them</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“We’re dealing with a juggernaut,” said Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “They have run the table on the international community, and they’re continuing to do so.” He pointed to Vietnam’s invitation to the Group of 7 summit this year, its inclusion on the Human Rights Council and now the funding from the Just Energy Transition Partnership, despite the country’s troubling human rights record.
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox. Since 2016, when Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, was re-elected, the space for civil society has shrunk immensely. The country has the second-highest number of political prisoners in Southeast Asia, with more than 160 people currently detained for exercising their basic rights, according to Human Rights Watch. The authorities in Vietnam have long persecuted people who are viewed as overt threats to one-party rule. But Mr. Trong’s administration has gone much further, targeting people who were previously given some room to operate.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Perry Link in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Ha Jin's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/a-fallen-artist-in-maos-china-the-woman-back-from-moscow/" target="_blank">The Woman Back from Moscow - In Pursuit of Beauty</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The distinguished Australian Sinologist Simon Leys once observed that comparisons of the CCP elite to the mafia are in a sense unfair to the mafia, in which a certain loyalty to "brothers" does play a part. Losers of political battles at the top of the CCP generally are not relegated to comfortable retirements - they go to prison or worse.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Nicolas Niarchos in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on five books on <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/in-congos-cobalt-mines-cobalt-red-siddharth-kara/" target="_blank">Congo Mining</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Artisanal mining, as small-scale mining in Africa is known, often involves child labor, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and wage slavery - this part of the business is in particular need of change. The most powerful firms in the mining sphere and in the manufacture of battery components, as well as many of the major buyers of artisanally mined cobalt, are Chinese. Western businesses buy cobalt that has already been processed in China, and so they are further implicated in the supply chain - including the terrible conditions at artisanal mines.... At industrial mines, which account for anywhere between 70 and 85 percent of the cobalt produced in Congo, the ore is mined using modern, mechanized methods, but the conditions at artisanal mines are immensely dangeerous and toxic, and they need to be improved.... Yet anyone who attempts to improve conditions and wages at artisanal mindes must face the fact that workers can't afford to lose what little they have.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Ian Frazier in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Alicia Puglionesi's books, Common Phantoms, and <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/the-plunder-and-the-pity-common-phantoms-alicia-puglionesi/" target="_blank">In Whose Ruins</a>.
</p><blockquote>
From the Grave Creek Mound, Puglionesi goes about 150 miles northeast, to western Pennsylvania, site of the world's first oil boom. Oil was so plentiful there that it seemed from the ground. Native Americans had dug pits as deep as ten feet, lined them with timber to collect the seeps, and used the oil for medicine and trade. The Seneca, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, still had large holdings of land in the region in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake, who wasn't a colonel, drilled the first commercially successful oil well, near Titusville. The rush that followed gave a preview of the suicidal modern world. Drillers widened their well bores with nitroglycerin torpedoes that set towns on fire. A gusher came in, caught fire in the air, rained down, and burned seventeen people to death.... In terms of environmental damage, Puglionesi says the California Gold Rush of 1849 had attracted similar hordes of fortune seekers, but "the forty-niners were artisans compared to the oil operators."</blockquote>
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Magda Teter in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Moshe Taube's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/found-in-translation-pre-ashkenazic-jews-in-eastern-europe/" target="_blank">The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What makes the existence of this Slavic version of medieval Hebrew texts even more intriguing, Taube points out, is that Muscovy was then a backwater, its clergy "barely literate." No "classical learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans penetrated the walls of pious obscurantism in Russian church institutions, including the monasteries." If so few scholars had Greek, certainly none were trained in Hebrew. And even KyivanRus', a region where Jews lived that was politically and culturally distinct from Muscovy, was a place known "as a source of furs and slaves," not erudition. The eastern Europe of the book's title covers the territories of today's Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and parts of Russia, which were all once part of Kyivan Rus' - a veritable battleground of Russian and Ukrainian historiographies.</blockquote>
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Greg Afinogenov in AMERICAN SCHOLAR, <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/an-outrage-sacred-to-the-gods/" target="_blank">An Outrage Sacred to the Gods</a>.
</p><blockquote>
We say “trade route,” but the primary goods for sale were human. Varangian traders (we know them as Vikings, though they called themselves Rus) used it to ship Slavic slaves south to the wealthy cities of Byzantium, eventually bringing north Orthodox religion, art, and artisan goods. The Rus were an unpleasant bunch, though today, Russian and Ukrainian historians vie for their legacy as the origin of their respective states. The Arab diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who claimed to have met some of the Rus in the 10th century, records an elaborate burial rite they performed upon the death of one of their chiefs. An old woman known as the “Angel of Death” would kill one of the chief’s slave girls following a sequence of ceremonial rapes. Then both chief and girl would be laid out on a boat piled with kindling and set on fire in classic Viking fashion. Ibn Fadlan found all this shocking, but one of the Rus told him it was the Arabs who were stupid. “You go and cast into the earth the people whom you both love and honor most among men,” he said. “Then the earth, creeping things, and worms devour them. We, however, let them burn for an instant, and accordingly he enters into paradise at once in that very hour.” Then, writes Ibn Fadlan, the Viking “burst into immoderate laughter.” Until they began to integrate with the Slavic population they dominated, most of the Rus left little indication that they thought of these lands as a home to return to; there was no reason for them to leave their dead behind.</blockquote>
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Edward Chancellor in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/the-naturalist-friedrich-hayek/" target="_blank">Hayek - A Life, 1899-1950, and Vikash Yadav's book, Liberalism's Last Man - Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Hayek's ideological assault on fascism started in 1933 with a brief memo to LSE director William Beveridge entitled "Nazi-Socialism." Controversially, Hayek maintained that fascism was a genuine socialist movement and that hostility to traditional liberalism united both fascists and communists. Antiliberalism in economic affairs, he wrote, "leads inevitably to a reign of universal compulsion, to intolerance and tdhe suppression of intellectual freedom." He developed these notions over the following years - notably in his 1938 paper "Freedom and the Economic System," in which he extended his critique to central planning in general.</blockquote>
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Julian Jackson's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/the-collaborator-in-chief-the-trial-of-marshal-petain/" target="_blank">France on Trial - The Case of Marshal Petain</a>.
</p><blockquote>
One man understandably absorbed by this story was Philippe Pétain, who in the winter of 1944–1945 “settled down to the memoirs of Talleyrand,” Julian Jackson writes in France on Trial, “perhaps seeking tips about how to make a transition from one regime to another.” Pétain had been head of the collaborationist Vichy government of France from July 1940 until August 1944, and was now holed up in Sigmaringen, an ancient Hohenzollern castle in southwestern Germany and “an appropriately Ruritanian setting for the final act of the Vichy drama.” He had scurried thither ahead of the Allied armies, along with the flotsam of Vichy, among them Pierre Laval, Jean Luchaire, and Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches. Laval’s career, remarkable even in that age of political tergiversation, took him from left-wing socialist in 1914 to prime minister twice in the 1930s and again under Vichy, then to trial and execution in 1945. Luchaire was a corrupt journalist who had arrived with “at least two mistresses, his wife and his daughter.” And Destouches was a doctor, an ardent antisemite, and a writer under the pen name Céline, who has been called the greatest French novelist of the twentieth century.</blockquote>
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Christopher Browning in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Volker Ullrich's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/fragile-resilient-weimar-germany-1923/" target="_blank">Germany 1923</a>, Mark Jones' book, 1923, and Michael Brenner's book, In Hitler's Munich.
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Following Germany’s defeat in World War I and acceptance of armistice terms as well as the flight of the kaiser and the collapse of the monarchy in November 1918, the new provisional government was dominated by Social Democrats, and in Berlin a move by the Communist-linked Spartacists in January 1919 to replace it with a more revolutionary regime—as had occurred in the fall of 1917 in Russia—was repressed with much bloodshed, including the summary execution of the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the hands of right-wing paramilitary units. In nationwide elections held later the same month, a coalition of middle-class liberals (German Democratic Party, or DDP), moderate socialists (German Social Democratic Party, or SPD), and Catholics (Center Party) won a clear majority, drew up the constitution for a parliamentary democracy known as the Weimar Republic, and formed the governing majority in its first legislature, or Reichstag. However, even if not doomed, the republic was a “burdened” democracy from the beginning.... Both ends of the political spectrum—the radical left, composed of Communists loyal to Moscow, and the resurgent right, composed of both traditional authoritarians and emerging fascists—rejected democracy outright and sought the overthrow of the republic.</blockquote>
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Dominic Green in WSJ on Anthony Kaldellis' book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-empire-of-the-east-three-books-on-the-byzantines-ec6e2d31" target="_blank">The New Roman Empire</a>, Philip Freeman's book, Julian, and Peter Sarris' book, Justinian.
</p><blockquote>
The 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called ancient history a “base-chord heard again and again” through the medieval and the modern eras. The eastern empire created the doctrines and institutions of early Christianity and preserved and developed the Roman law. Yet for centuries, Western Europeans remained selectively deaf to these resonances. Medieval European warlords pretended to the confected title of Holy Roman Emperor, despite the endurance of a real holy Roman empire to the east. They were abetted by the Latin churchmen who forged the Donation of Constantine as the pope’s license to appoint a king of the Romans. The Greek and Latin churches split over doctrine in the Great Schism of 1054, and in 1204 a western alliance fatally wounded the eastern empire by diverting the Fourth Crusade from Jerusalem and sacking Constantinople. Modern historians repeated the insult in the name of the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon, in the 18th century, called the eastern empire a “new Rome,” but saw its history as a fall that followed the decline of the old Rome. In the 19th century, French historians used “Byzantine” to mean the opposite of progress: procrastination, irrationality, mystification. Naturally, this image appealed to artists. Their ideal resembled the jeweled tortoise in J.K. Huysmans’s “Against Nature” or the gilded perfection in W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: gorgeous but immobile, timeless but useless. Recent scholars see Byzantium differently. As Christianity grew from Judaism, so the inheritances of the modern West grew from the new Rome as well as the old. In “The New Roman Empire,” Anthony Kaldellis, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, argues that the eastern empire “directly inherited Roman political traditions, Greek literature, and Biblical monotheism.” The new Rome, not the old, passed this heritage to the West as “curated versions of the corpus of Roman law, Greek literature and thought, and the Church Fathers and decisions of the Church Councils.” We might add to the Byzantine legacy two unprecedented templates, the sensuous austerities of Byzantine art and the accidental invention of what we now call identity politics.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Stephen Platt in WSJ on Sheila Miyoshi Jager's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-other-great-game-review-the-first-korean-war-20a4d27b" target="_blank">The Other Great Game</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ms. Jager’s central argument is that we simply cannot comprehend the course of East Asian history from the 1860s to the early 1900s without putting Korea at its center. Her book explores how Russia, China and Japan separately formed their own ambitions for control and influence there, as well as how their competition over the peninsula led to war. So Korea is at the center, though often as an object of imperial desire rather than as the subject of its own story. Nevertheless, Ms. Jager is entirely correct. While readers expecting a book on Korea may be disappointed that more chapters don’t actually take place there, those with global interests will find it revelatory to see how all the pieces fit together. Ms. Jager’s “other great game” makes the original round of diplomatic jousting that goes by that name seem simple by comparison. The contest for Afghanistan during the late 19th century had two primary contenders: Britain and Russia. In regard to Korea, there is the three-body problem of Meiji Japan, Qing China and czarist Russia, as well as a concatenation of factions and schisms within Korea itself.</blockquote>
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STRATEGY & TACTICS QUARTERLY <a href="https://shop.strategyandtacticspress.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=STQ24" target="_blank">Touchy Subjects</a>.
</p><blockquote>
There were fortunes to be made shipping opium - legally or illegally - to China. Two of them belong to Warren Delano Jr. (1809-1898), maternal grandfather of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Delano arrived in China before the First Opium War and quickly developed a workaround to Chinese import prohibitions. Opium would be carried on ships with legal cargo, the drugs being off-loaded onto smaller vessels before the ship entered the Pearl River. Delano's fortune was largely wiped out in the Panic of 1857, so he returned to China to repeat his earlier success. By that time importation was legal, and he even shipped the drug to the US for palliative care of wounded soldiers during the US Civil War. Chinese leader, including Chiang Kai-shek, were of course aware of FDR's sordid family history, as was the president himself. It made communications between the two - especially in face-to-face conversations - somewhat awkward.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Vincent Bevins in NATION on Sebastian Edwards' book, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chicago-boys-chile-neoliberalism/" target="_blank">The Chile Project - The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Sebastian Edwards, the author of a new book on the Chicago Boys, is one of those defenders of neoliberalism. Born in Chile to a very influential family, he eventually became a Chicago–trained economist himself and now teaches at UCLA. As a younger man he’d supported Allende, but after the coup he attended the Universidad Católica, the college where the Chicago Boys had set up shop, before studying at the University of Chicago and going on to work for the World Bank and as an advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, in The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Edwards tries to separate the neoliberal project from the very illiberal regime that first put it into practice. Edwards is as successful as one can be in such an endeavor, armed with an impressive command of the material and a serious concern for the period in question. Even for those who see the Chilean coup as one of the worst crimes of the 20th century, his perspective can be welcomed. A sympathetic narrator who knew many of the people he chronicles in the book, he can offer additional details—and dispel some of the myths that haunt the left as much as the right.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
John Reed in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3121354d-cd91-4737-95ea-ae74e4a4a2b7" target="_blank">Maldives Order Indian Troops Out by March as Islands Draw Closer to China</a>.
</p><blockquote>
India has about 75 troops in the Maldives and operates two helicopters, used in part for medical evacuations, in addition to operating radar equipment and naval patrols on its territory. Muizzu’s call for withdrawal comes against a backdrop of tensions between New Delhi and Beijing over their disputed border and respective influence in India’s backyard. The Maldives’ push for India to pull out its small contingent has in recent weeks sparked heated online commentary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 4 posted pictures of himself meeting residents, strolling on beaches, and snorkelling in India’s Lakshadweep islands, off the coast of India’s southern Kerala state. In a post on X, the Indian leader described Lakshadweep as “mesmerising” and declared: “For those who wish to embrace the adventurer in them, Lakshadweep has to be on your list.”</blockquote>
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Colin Kidd in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Claire Rydell Arcenas' book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/colin-kidd/antidote-to-marx" target="_blank">America's Philosopher - John Locke in American Intellectual Life</a>.
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Reinvented as ‘America’s antidote to Marx’, his works, especially the easily digested Second Treatise of Government, became firmly entrenched in the undergraduate curriculum. Wrenched out of their context – England during the Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath – and unobtrusively mangled, Locke’s political ideas were repackaged as inoffensive bourgeois liberalism. Between the publication of The Vital Centre by Arthur Schlesinger Jr in 1949 and the appearance in 1960 of The End of Ideology by the sociologist Daniel Bell, America witnessed a decade of conspicuous consensus. It helped that Eisenhower was a centrist, who, though wooed by the Democrats, decided in the end to run for president as a lukewarm Republican. But consensus was also grounded in social attitudes: what Hartz possibly misdescribed as an intuitive, common sense Lockeanism. The first direct challenge to the Hartzian consensus came from the conservative movement’s most exotic coterie, a grouping that, perversely, didn’t celebrate American institutions in any straightforward way. The Chicago-based German émigré Leo Strauss and his followers championed the high ideals enshrined in the political philosophy of the Ancients, at the expense of the Moderns, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and the authors of the Federalist Papers, with their depressingly low view of humanity. Straussians bemoaned the checks and balances of the American constitution, mechanisms premised on man’s sordid self-interest. Strauss read Locke as a benighted Modern, dismissing his purported vision of bourgeois acquisition as ‘the joyless quest for joy’.</blockquote>
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Erin Thompson in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Christopher Heaney's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/erin-l.-thompson/even-the-eyelashes" target="_blank">Empires of the Dead - Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Soon after capturing Atahualpa, the conquistadors looted the palace of his father, Huayna Capac. They took his gold ornaments but left his preserved body behind, which must have mystified the Inca, who secreted Huayna Capac in a more secure place. The former emperor was thought capable of such powerful acts as bringing or stopping rain. Rival imperial aspirants sometimes seized or even burned the bodies of one another’s ancestors in order to cut off such sources of power. The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those of Egypt. When the Inca conquered much of the Andes in the 15th century, they found that their new subjects practised many ways of preserving the dead. The hot sand near the coast preserved bodies buried there through desiccation, while in the mountains bodies were freeze-dried in caves or special mortuary towers. Communities often continued to care for their preserved ancestors, bringing them out of their resting places to help settle disputes or to assure good rains and harvests.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
David Todd in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Robert Darnton's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/david-todd/when-paris-sneezed" target="_blank">The Revolutionary Temper - Paris 1748-89</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This sense of extraordinariness was initially shared across Europe and the world. Two days after the storming of the Bastille, even Lord Dorset, the British ambassador in Paris, couldn’t conceal his enthusiasm: ‘The greatest Revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking – if the magnitude of the event is considered – the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American world, perhaps because it thought itself already emancipated, has remained largely immune to the messianic allure of 1789. By hailing France’s sudden accession to the status of ‘free country’, Dorset meant that it had abruptly attained a state of political bliss that Britons had built over centuries.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Angel Gurria-Quintana in FT on Alvaro Enrigue's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/96764e1f-b89c-43c1-a0a0-d9f6b58685f9" target="_blank">You Dreamed of Empires</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Central to the success of the real-life Spanish expedition were two translators who appear to have been doing all the diplomatic heavy lifting while also seeking to advance their own agendas. One, Malinalli, was a local princess whom Cortés had brought “into his entourage and his hammock”. She spoke Nahuatl, language of the Mexica, as well as Maya. Malinalli’s fellow interpreter, Gerónimo de Aguilar, was a shipwrecked Andalucían friar who spoke Maya and Castilian: “he lived like a priest in every sense of the word. He was always praying, he spoke Latin and Greek, he was learned in church doctrine, he refused to wear military garb, he slept, ate and drank as austerely as a Carmelite, and he only bedded handsome youths.” Moctezuma, “the most famous man in an entire world”, is troubled by portents of disaster but firmly committed to his daily nap — and addicted to magic mushrooms and hallucinogenic cacti. “People said that in recent months, ever since things had gotten out of hand, he had turned too frequently to the wisdom of the gods.” But might there be some tactical benefit behind his apparent obsession with the Spaniards’ horses?</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
William Dalrymple in FT on Peter Jackson's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5c63c64b-7c94-44b8-b68a-6703ef7033ea" target="_blank">From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane - The Reawakening of Mongol Asia</a>.
</p><blockquote>
He was something of a late starter for a world conqueror: it took him nine battles over 18 years to conquer his local metropolis of Samarkand. But then he erupted from what is now Uzbekistan to raze the other great cities of the Persianate world. The poet Hafez, who lived through these horrors, wrote with dread, “Again the times are out of joint . . . / The wheel of fortune has turned / What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?” Like the first wave of Mongols during the 13th century, Timur conquered deep into Russia, although his advance on Moscow in 1391 was cut short, according to a Rus source, “by a nocturnal vision of the Virgin Mary”. On the other hand, unlike his predecessors, he succeeded in taking Delhi and looting its riches — including its celebrated war elephants — while taking time to visit its architectural wonders during “a kind of plundering tourism”. Impressed, he then dragged the masons back to Samarkand, where he forced them to build towering monuments. Timur finally died on 19 February 1405 while planning an expedition against China to dethrone the emperor he referred to as “Fat Pig Khan”. Unlike Genghis, Timur was uninterested in institutions, and as a result his empire quickly shattered after his death. And yet the most surprising part of the story is what followed. Quite unexpectedly, Timur’s successors proved to be some of the greatest scholars and aesthetes of Islamic history. Timur had destroyed the old order, but his conquests left Central Asia as one of the Earth’s richest and geopolitically critical regions, while the craftsmen he hauled back to Samarkand turned his steppe capital into one of the world’s great cities. From these ingredients his successors were able to fashion a major cultural renaissance. The later Timurids — dubbed “the Oriental Medici” by the 20th-century travel writer Robert Byron — transformed themselves into refined connoisseurs of painting, poetry and calligraphy.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Thomas Latschan at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://qantara.de/en/article/iran-pakistan-tensions-what-was-behind-balochistan-strikes" target="_blank">What Was Behind the Balochistan Strikes?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Both Jaysh al-Adl and the BLF are militant separatist groups fighting for the independence of a region called Balochistan. The Baloch are an ethnic group who live on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border and into parts of southern Afghanistan. In total, this area is roughly the size of France. The Pakistani province of Balochistan forms the largest part, followed by the province of Sistan and Balochistan on the Iranian side. Mountainous with a dry desert climate, it is sparsely populated by some nine million Balochs who are organised into tribes rather than feeling that they belong to a state. Efforts for autonomy or independence have been violently suppressed on both sides of the border for decades. On the Pakistani side, such efforts are seen as an attempt to divide the country; on the Iranian side, things are complicated by the fact that the Baloch are a Sunni minority in an otherwise predominantly Shia country. Both states have taken correspondingly harsh action against the ethnic group. In Pakistan, up to 20,000 Balochs have disappeared in recent decades, presumably abducted, tortured or even murdered by Pakistani security forces, according to Amnesty International.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Steve Stalinsky & Yigal Carmon <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-terrorists-talk-they-listen-oct-7-attack-israel-memri-arabic-translation-3af6e0f3" target="_blank">interviewed in WSJ by Elliot Kaufman</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.” Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism. Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Richard Milne in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/79f0d181-bdae-4c81-a971-861ccd8d512c" target="_blank">Gang Violence - 'It Is Tearing Us Apart'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ask a Swede what has gone wrong in their country and you will get a mixed response. Those on the right largely blame immigrations, which has added 2mn people to the country in recent decades. Those on the left point to social factors, including the privatisation of Sweden's welfare system which has led to worse services in deprived areas. For most of the 2010s, the nationalist Sweden Democrats were a lone voice opposed to mass immigration, but their support has risen almost in lockstep with the intensifying violence. Now, the one-time fringe party is one of Sweden's largest political groups. "For a long time, we were alone. We were labelled racists. Today the situation is so bad. We're not alone any more," says Jomshof, of the justice committee.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Susannah Savage in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d77fff4d-a9c6-4224-89fc-b3b08d1d833b" target="_blank">'Ghost Ship' Threat to Global Fish Stocks Laid Bare</a>.
</p><blockquote>
While the footprint of land-based extractive industries such as agricaulture is plotted down to almost the last square metre, oceans were "still the Wild West", said David Kroodsma, one of the study's lead authors and Global Fishing Watch's diretor of research and innovation.... GFW's study, published in the journal Nature yesterday, used GPS positions from hundreds of thousands of ocean-going vessels as well as satellite radar imagery and artificial intelligence to track marine activity between 2017 and 2021. It found that on average 63,000 craft were detected at any given time. About half were industrial fishing vessels, three-quarters of which were off-radar, including many around Africa and south Asia.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Andy Bounds & Javier Espinoza in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e8b9d884-a210-46a7-9ad2-00cb07cfb08e" target="_blank">Rich World Accused of Using Green Policies to Hold Back Poor</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The US has enacted the landmark Inflation Reduction Act with $369bn of subsidies and tax breaks for domestically produced goods such as electric vehicles. The EU has responded in kind with increased subsidies and policies to stimulate production of silicon chips, critical minerals and green technology. "Developing countries see a lot of these policies as protectionist. They don't have the fiscal space to go the path of subsidies, so they have to go the path of restrictions to trade or even duties or taxes," she said. Grynspan attacked the EU for taking Indonesia to the WTO over its restrictions on nickel exports and requirement to process the ore locally. She said the Jakarta government wanted to move up the value chain by making products from the nickel. "They don't want it to be exported in the raw form, but with value added. So they were taken to arbitration in the WTO. They lost in the first instance precisdely because global trade rules have not been adjusted." she said.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Stephen Bush in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/bb224088-1a40-4b23-91f3-aff748272cd0" target="_blank">Goodbye to the Days of Ambient Cultural Liberalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
China's success exports something that is vastly different to Muzak-liberalism. Liu Yifei, the Chinese-American actor who played Mulan, supported the police's repression of protests in Hong Kong. Chinese writer Liu Cixin's marvellous work of science fiction, Three Body Problem, released in English almost a decade ago, is itself the winner of a Hugo Award but - from the struggle of the heroic Earth who seeks to overcome a technologically superior superpower, to the vacillations of the triolgy's liberal characters - it is also steeped in Chinese Communist party beliefs and values. This year's Hugo Awards have been rocked by controversy, after several authors and entries were declared ineligible. One was an episode of the Netflix dramam Sandman, a series shose comic book predecessors have previously been eligible, but whose creator, Neil Gaiman, has called for the release of jailed Chinese authors. Also declared ineligible were RF Kuang's Babel, an account of an alternate version of the British empire powered by magic, and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow, which reimagines the life of China's only female emperor in a far future setting. Both writers are part of the Chinese diaspora.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Sadanand Dhume in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-asian-century-indians-and-chinese-migrate-away-skilled-wealthy-immigrants-1702a683" target="_blank">In the 'Asian Century,' Indians and Chinese Flee</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Geopolitical pundits often describe this as the “Asian century.” The economic rise of China and India is supposed to end 500 years of Western pre-eminence any day now. But votaries of this notion often overlook a curious fact: Both China and India continue to account for a large portion of the world’s emigrants. If these countries’ prosperity and stability are assured, then why are so many—including the well-educated and the wealthy—eager to leave? Each year, tens of thousands of Indians and Chinese are willing to risk life and limb to enter America illegally. In fiscal 2023, Customs and Border Protection agents encountered 97,000 Indian and 53,000 Chinese inadmissible aliens, or people without authorization to enter the country. That’s more than three times as many Indians and more than twice as many Chinese as were caught in 2021. Based on CPB data, China’s numbers are on track to rise dramatically this year.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Darlene Sanchez in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2024/02/14/id5586814-Edition-3656_NYEET20240214A01_CMYK.pdf" target="_blank">US Taxpayers Help Fund Border Crisis</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Until President Joe Biden took office, the United States had obligated about a half-billion dollars per year to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.N.'s migration arm. But that funding has skyrocketed under the Biden administration to nearly $1.3 billion in 2023 - more than double what it had been under the Trump administration, according to USASpending.gov. The government spending database shows that most of the money comes from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Two of the largest government give-aways were voluntary contributions to the U.N.'s IOM from the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration totalling $547 million over two years ending in 2023. The bureau's objective was "to fund processing individuals requesting refugee status and resettlement in the United States and arrange their movement." The U.N. is pouring a staggering amount of money - particularly stemming from U.S. taxpayers - into the illegal immigrant crisis. The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants. The plan allocated $372 million in "cash and vouchers" and "multipurpose cash assistance" during 2024 for 624,300 migrants - the population of Detroit - in Central and South America who are headed to the U.S. border.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Nina Shea in NATIONAL REVIEW, <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/12/pope-xi/" target="_blank">Pope Xi - How the Vatican Capitulated to the Chinese Communist Party</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Patriotic Association doubtless includes faithful Chinese clerics. And it certainly includes CCP infiltrators. Chinese Communist espionage in the West is notorious and has not spared the church. In the 1970s, the FBI uncovered a spy in the Church of the Transfiguration in New York’s Chinatown. He posed as a Catholic priest but was actually a married Chinese-state-security agent and had trained over several years for the mission by saying Mass and hearing confessions in churches throughout Asia. Just as Ostpolitik was exploited by the KGB to send Eastern European clerics as spies to the Holy See and Vatican II, the current policy of Sinicization will provide further opportunities for CCP infiltration of the church. In 2020, China’s state-sponsored hackers targeted Vatican computer networks, according to Catholic News Agency. Since the agreement, the CCP has rounded up for detention or banishment, by my count, six Catholic bishops who refuse to pledge their independence from the Vatican. Bishop Su and eleven others, arrested before the agreement, have continued to suffer persecution. At a 2020 press conference, Parolin admonished a questioner not to talk of “persecution” of China’s church, saying there were only “regulations that are imposed and which concern all religions, and certainly also concern the Catholic Church.” When pressed about Beijing’s repressive Sinicization policy, he incorrectly conflated it with “inculturation,” the benign practice, favored by 16th-century missionary Father Matteo Ricci, of adopting local dress and manners, as if this settled the question of ceding papal authority.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Alec Russell in FT on David Van Reybrouck's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9377c6ec-7f06-4f93-ad75-8ca0848f0c44" target="_blank">Revolusi - Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Van Reybrouck sets the stage with a tart account of the Netherland's acquisition of its empire, driven primarily by the desire to corner the market of the fabled "Spice Islands", in particular their cloves and nutmeg. He deftly captures the hypocrisy of the venture when assessing the directors of the 17th-century Dutch trading company that oversaw it in its early years. These "seventeen pipe-puffing white-collared worthies who expressed themselves in baroque sentences... would have preferred the monopolies to be acquired with a little less bloodshed," he writes, "but they continued to give Coen [one of the especially ruthless Dutch commanders] their full support because he was so good for the bottom line." In the following 300 years, they took more and more from the local rulers - a history Van Reybrouck tells with piercing judgment. But his narrative really takes off in the 1930s, with the Dutch suppression of the independence movement. By this time, its colony had become an even more treasured part of the Netherlands' economy, not least given the discovery of rich deposits of oil - one of the primary goals for the Japanese when they invaded in 1942.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Ben Hubbard in NYTBR on Alex Rowell's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/books/review/we-are-your-soldiers-alex-rowell.html" target="_blank">We Are Your Soldiers - How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In his quest for control in Egypt, Nasser developed a dictator’s playbook: Gain a grip in the country’s military, find disgruntled allies among the ranks, come to power in a coup and then smash anything that could threaten your power while claiming to act according to the people’s will. To personalize the torment his reign caused, Rowell dedicates a blistering chapter to the mostly communist and other leftist activists tortured by Nasser’s security forces at a prison near Cairo that Rowell argues could justly be called a concentration camp. In other chapters, Rowell follows Nasser around the region, detailing the ways in which he sowed the seeds of future troubles. In Iraq, he supported coups and coup attempts and granted recognition to putschists while hosting a young Saddam Hussein in Cairo for three years before Hussein returned home and, eventually, tookover the country. Nasser sought to seize effective control of Syria by uniting it with Egypt in the short-lived United Arab Republic, contributing to the chaos from which President Hafez al-Assad rose to take power in 1970. Nasser pushed through a 1969 agreement with Lebanon that gave Palestinian militants free rein in the country in their fight against Israel, a reality that both contributed to Lebanon’s disastrous 15-year civil war and made it harder to resolve.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Mohamad Alrabino at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://qantara.de/en/article/marriage-religion-and-love-egypt-long-road-modernising-marriage" target="_blank">The Long Road to Modernising Marriage</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The association of a particular family system with advancement ("civilization") was originally a European idea. Europeans asserted that differences between their family system and those of others accounted for European superiority. Egyptian and Ottoman thinkers followed that logic and adopted European ideas selectively to achieve social advancement. They justified these ideas – women's education, discouraging polygyny and limiting divorce – by referring to Islamic sources and history. Aisha bint Abi Bakr, for example, was literate. At the same time, they combined those ideas with the "maintenance-obedience relationship" in marriage, which was derived from Islamic jurisprudence. I therefore describe the modern Egyptian family ideology as a hybrid, not a case of Westernisation in the old sense of the term. A force for change after World War I, ideology spread in the print media, films and school curricula. Before the war political and demographic factors were more important. The Khedival family set a public example of monogamy that the rest of upper-class society emulated over time. The end of slavery eliminated one form of polygyny and raised the status of women overall. Secondary and post-secondary education for middle- and upper-class men meant delayed marriage, which increased the likelihood of conjugal family households.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
John Burn-Murdoch in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998" target="_blank">A New Global Gender Divide Is Emerging</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points.... Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Ola Cichowlas at <i>japantimes.co.jp</i>, <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/12/18/world/politics/russia-abortions-soldier-numbers/" target="_blank">'Give Birth to More Soldiers': Hardline Russia Turns on Abortions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
"When a country is at war, it is usually accompanied by this kind of legislation," said Leda Garina, a Russian feminist activist exiled in Georgia. The measures, she said, sent a clear message to Russian women: "Sit at home and give birth to more soldiers." The timing has raised eyebrows — Russia's abortion rate has already fallen "almost tenfold" since the 1990s, according to Russian demographer Viktoria Sakevich. Russian President Vladimir Putin said recently that he was against banning abortion, but that terminations were against state interests. The 71-year-old said he wanted women to "safeguard the life of the child" in order to "resolve the demographic problem". Russia's abortion debate comes as Putin seeks re-election in March and as he projects an ever more conservative vision of what a Russian family should look like. For years the president has offered financial incentives for Russians to have more children, with the population shrinking fast since the 1990s. But since the Ukraine war, this has acquired new meaning.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Liyan Qi in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-population-births-economy-one-child-c5b95901" target="_blank">China's Baby Bust Is Hard to Reverse</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“For many years overpopulation was China’s major concern. It was difficult to convince the government and the public that China will have the problem of fast decline and aging of the population,” Zuo wrote in an email. Song has said he believed it had been a good call. China had successfully defused the bomb that could have led to a “population explosion,” he wrote in a 2010 essay published by the University of Jinan, his alma mater. “Zero growth [in population] is the destiny of modern mankind and an urgent task for contemporary China,” Song wrote. He estimated China’s population wouldn’t start shrinking until after 2035. He was off by more than a decade, with official data showing the drop starting in 2022. Beijing has said the policy prevented 400 million births, a claim it has often put forth as a kind of Chinese gift to the world, including at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen. Demographers have disputed the figure, saying China’s fertility rate would have gone down on its own as economic conditions improved. </blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Liyan Qi & Shen Lu in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-population-births-decline-womens-rights-5af9937b" target="_blank">China's Campaign For More Babies Meets Resistance</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The country’s total fertility rate in 2022—the average number of babies a woman has in her lifetime—is approaching one birth per woman, or 1.09. In 2020, it was 1.30, well below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable. The campaign for a “birth-friendly culture” has taken on the tone of an urgent national mission, with government-organized matchmaking events and a program encouraging military families to have more babies. “Soldiers win battles. When it comes to giving birth to second or third children and implementing the national fertility policy, we are also taking the lead and charging to the front,” Zeng Jian, a top obstetrician-gynecologist at a military hospital in Tianjin, told state media in 2022. In August, residents of the western city of Xi’an said they received an automated greeting from a government number during the Qixi Festival, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day: “Wishing you sweet love and marriage at an appropriate age. Let’s extend the Chinese bloodline.”</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Joe Leahy, Sun Yu & Andy Lin in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/34d0e495-31a6-45f5-929e-d46ba95fdbf6" target="_blank">Dreamers and Dropouts Flock to China's Subtropical Haven</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Gao explains that dreamers and dropouts have been coming here for decades but this reached a critical mass during the pandemic, when digital nomads flooded in. He estimates there are now about 100,000 "alternative-minded" people in the Dali prefecture, whose population is 3.6mn. These include those doing tang ping, or "laying flat", usually young people who reject societal pressure to work long hours, buy overpriced houses and have children. They tend to be middle-class people from single-child families, bankrolled by parentds or grandparents. "For our post-90s generation, when they step out of university, our economy has shifted from high speed to slow growth," said Gao. "They see no possibility of owning a home, settling down and living contentedly, leaving hem directionless and aimless." When they come to Dali, "initially, it's [for] 'lying flat' - a passive stance", said Gao. "But these are young people - inherently vibrant, passionate and aspirational," he added.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Arthur Lisch interview at <a href="https://www.diggers.org/arthur_lisch.htm" target="_blank"><i>diggers.org</i></a>.
</p><blockquote>
This is the Eastern garden. This is the garden that faces to the east. To the east are developments — parking lots, playing fields, houses. To the west, rolling hills; further on, the ocean. Now the significance for me of founding this site here around this old chestnut tree is that in the east, in that direction, is the Sonoma Mission — the furthest north that the missionaries brought Catholicism in the 19th century, the Sonoma Mission, is over there. Over there, the Russians came, bringing the Orthodox faith over to the coast. And they established a fort, with a chapel, at Fort Ross. This place is halfway between those two, this is the halfway point between those two ancient spiritual streams that separated in the old world between East and West. [They] came together from the north and south, met here in Sonoma County. So this site has to do with reconciliation, has to do with the hope that people who have split in the past can reconcile in the present. Speaking of which, this is a rose that was planted when the Palestine-Israeli peace accords were signed. Palestinian people and Jewish people, a large group, gathered and planted a peace rose together, which is surviving in the eastern garden.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Chrispin Sartwell in LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-happened-to-david-graeber/" target="_blank">What Happened to David Graeber?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future. Graeber studied at the University of Chicago under Marshall Sahlins and did his anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar in the early 1990s. When he returned, he published the still-neglected Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001), a work of high theory whose ambitions constituted a throwback to the eras of Marcel Mauss or Claude Lévi-Strauss, though its positions were strikingly fresh. On the strength of his early work, he got a job at Yale and at the same time became active in the “anti-globalization” movement (Graeber hated that term), with its demonstrations and actions against such organizations as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. When he didn’t get tenure at Yale, he believed it was because of his politics. By his own account politically unemployable in American academia, he claimed that, though the academy of that era sheltered myriad “authoritarian Marxists,” anarchism was considered beyond the pale, as I can confirm from personal experience. But with his remarkable energy and productivity, he landed on his feet in London, eventually scoring a richly deserved professorship at the London School of Economics. Debt continued his work at the juncture of anthropology and economics that had begun with Theory of Value. The two disciplines overlap, after all, in being concerned with the nature of exchange, the origin of money, and in describing structures of inequality, among other matters. The book had a remarkable reception; never before has an anarchist been enthusiastically blurbed by the editor of the classic capitalist organ Financial Times.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Nina Siegal in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/arts/design/dutch-resistance-ww2-magazine-holocaust.html" target="_blank">He Made a Magazine, 95 Issues, While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic</a>.
</p><blockquote>
There, Bloch shared the crawl space with a 44-year-old German-Jewish refugee, Bruno Löwenberg, and Löwenberg’s 22-year-old girlfriend, Karola Wolf, whom they called Ola. During their time in hiding, Bloch fell in love with Ola and wrote many verses just for her. “He had a lot of courage, but he also had a reckless streak,” Groeneveld said. Each edition of Bloch’s magazine consisted of just a single copy. But it may have been read by as many as 20 to 30 people, Groeneveld estimated. “There was huge organization behind him, which included couriers, who brought food, but who could also bring the magazine out, to share with other people in the group who could be trusted,” Groeneveld said. “The magazines are very small, you can easily put one in your pocket or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.” Bloch named his magazine in response to a German-language radio program that played on Dutch airwaves during the occupation, the Sunday Afternoon Cabaret. But this, Groeneveld explained, was the Underwater Cabaret, which took its title from a unique term in Dutch for the act of going into hiding: “onderduiken.” Its literal translation is “to dive under,” but a common translation is “to slip out of public view.” A person in hiding was an “onderduiker,” who had gone “under water,” or was submerged.</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Harris Wheless in CINEASTE, <a href="https://www.cineaste.com/fall2023/home" target="_blank">How the Western Was Reimagined - Anthony Mann, James Stewart, and Their "Psychological" Westerns</a>.
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While Stewart's wife, according to Matzen, talked about the PTSD symptoms he continued to experience long after the war - "the nightmares, the sweats, the shakes" - the actor himself was reluctant to talk about his service. "I saw too much suffering," he said. "It's nothing to talk about." Nevertheless, as Matzen explains, "He learned that the anger he had inside of him could be channeled into these dark performances, dark character moments." Stewart's wife and daughter concurred about those screen performances, commenting, "That's him in real life. He would go from zero to 100 in two seconds. He would fly into a very rare blind rage. That was the war." ...Clint Eastwood later commenting on the Mann-directed Stewart films, said Stewart "had a great way with violence. Most people don't realize that about him, but when he was mad about something, when he had been wronged in a film, when he showed anger, it was much more intense than in most actors. He could be extremely volatile. When he snapped, his danger came on strong."</blockquote>
<p>***</p><p>
Don Robson in NYT, <a href="https://theathletic.com/5137359/2023/12/20/donald-brashear-nhl-fighting/?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0Kil4SszS6CfFJqq8N4NPNbpsWh-zRskDMMAkmSRohw4nPYzBz_TacP80" target="_blank">On the Ice, Just a Kid Doing What He Has Always Loved</a>.
</p><blockquote>
He is now almost 52 years old and we are here to see the famous fighter go another round. Donald Brashear is the marquee attraction. He is the Wendake Black Jack captain. He appears in most of the team’s online promotions. Brashear is the only player who doesn’t wear a helmet during warmups. His bald head shimmers under the rafter lights. From the stands, he looks almost exactly as he did when he retired from the NHL 13 years ago. A salt-and-pepper beard and slight lines around his eyes are all that betray his age. He is 6-feet-3 but seems at least a foot taller than any other player. He is much broader through the shoulders, but trim through his frame — without the average-joe paunch that several of his counterparts carry as they weave through a pregame routine. Brashear skates in swift strides, casually gliding then accelerating, dangling a puck with his stick, and flicking a light shot at the Black Jack goaltender. He smiles and laughs with teammates. He taps their shin pads with his stick. Brashear looks joyful — like a man, blessed with remarkable athleticism who is fortunate to still play the game he found safety and comfort in as a boy, escaping the turmoil of his childhood. It’s the happiness Brashear described to me two years ago, when he told me that he’d started skating in a pro league for a few hundred bucks a game, right before the pandemic shut it down. Gliding on ice, all of the troubles that plagued him after his NHL career faded away: the substance abuse, the broken relationships, the anxiety attacks, the bankruptcy, the arrest. In the game, he was just a boy doing what he loved.... As a talented prospect with the Montreal Canadiens, he wanted to be known for his skill, but it was overshadowed when hockey found a better use for him.</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Along Hwy 130, Wyoming</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…</b>
</p><p>
Johannes Lichtman in PARIS REVIEW, <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/01/09/invisible-ink-at-the-cias-creative-writing-group" target="_blank">Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group</a>.
</p><blockquote>
While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would’ve guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn’t mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.) Obviously you can’t share classified information, I was told. You can’t violate the Hatch Act, showing your political affiliation, and you’re also not supposed to violate the Washington Post rule, which was: Would the CIA be embarrassed if this were in tomorrow’s Washington Post? (This seemed trickiest to determine.)</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Peter Hitchens in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/an-old-fashioned-future/" target="_blank">An Old-Fashioned Future</a>.
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I shall not try to list here all Chandler’s superb figures of speech. No modern English writer does them better. But the personal failure and unhappiness which lay beneath all this brilliance are very hard to bear, even when you know how good he could be. Chandler hinted at this overpowering sadness himself in what may have been his cleverest sentence, carved into his gravestone: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Sebastian Milbank in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/go-woke-go-broke/"target="_blank">Go woke, go broke?</a>.
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The simple fact is that Vice, once an effective and witty member of the alternative media, ran up against an epochal change it was never destined to survive. The audience for alternative media still exists, but the progressive audience for alternative media does not. The dissident energy, for good or ill, has gone over to the right, where audiences, commentators and provocateurs from a wildly dissonant series of belief systems share a rather confused exile. Some dissident leftists forced out of their old niche simply go full tilt to the other extreme, some stand in proud isolation, most end up, uneasily, somewhere in the middle. But even the most principled progressive dissidents have woken up to a drastically changed audience, with very different interests and demands. Vice’s golden age of being offensive, effortlessly cool and still courted by legacy media is never coming back, and was never going to.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Sam Bidwell in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/train-lines-to-nowhere/" target="_blank">Train Lines to Nowhere</a>.
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Even more unsettling than Khan’s astroturfed progressivism is the realisation that Britain has become a twee, unserious country which feels the need to tell people what it stands for. Particularly in London, we now bombard the unsuspecting public with constant reminders of what Britain is all about, as determined by a litany of faceless stakeholder committees. This is the same childish instinct that prompted Birmingham City Council to come up with street names like “Equality Road” and “Diversity Grove”, shortly before it declared bankruptcy. A self-confident country would be at-ease with functional or geographical names in the public realm. It might even give a nod to a historical figure of particularly significant stature, or to a long-standing national institution. Our Victorian ancestors didn’t feel the need to signal their political priors when naming public infrastructure. Aside from nods to the monarchy with the Victoria and the Jubilee, most Underground lines have remarkably dry and functional names — District, Metropolitan, Northern. The fact that these utilitarian names still have the ability to provoke such clear cultural associations is a testament to London’s standing as a city of genuine global significance. Back then, we didn’t need to tell people what their country stood for — our values, culture, and accolades spoke for themselves.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Sam Dunning at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2024/02/the-amateur-sleuths-taking-on-the-ccp/" target="_blank">The Amateur Sleuths Taking on the CCP: Pianogate Sparked a Rebellion Among 'Overseas Chinese'</a>.
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[United Front Work Department] guidance that I’ve been studying states that “Overseas Chinese” are the “sons and daughters of China connected by blood” and that their goal is “national reunification and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. This is of course nonsense. It is the CCP that wants to “reunify China”. (For “reunify China”, read annex Taiwan, gain control of some Malaysian, Philippines, Vietnamese and Japanese waters, plus hopefully various bits of India and Bhutan too.) The claim that the “Overseas Chinese” share this goal is an attempt to conjure a “broad United Front” in support of the CCP. The CCP thus claims to be speaking on behalf of all “Overseas Chinese”, asserting the right to monitor and guide these people, enticing collaboration and intimidating sources of opposition — all in the service of “national reunification and the great rejuvenation”.
Happy-clappy galas and functions of the kind overseen by reliable hosts such as Adelina Zhang serve various functions. They are a great setting for propaganda. Attracting hangers-on from British commerce, academia and politics also make them a staple source of information and connections for the UFWD and a cosy ecosystem for hard-core spies in the employ of China’s intelligence agencies.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN on Anthony Grafton's book, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/01/heirs-of-the-magi-john-gray" target="_blank">Magus - The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa</a>.
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Our world is a by-product of the growth of knowledge. The increase in human numbers – from around a billion at the start of the 19th century to over eight billion at present– would not have been possible without technological spin-offs such as public sanitation and vaccination, the extraction of fossil fuels, and intensive farming. Anyone who questions scientific progress denies reality. But science and magic continue to be closely linked in contemporary culture. As it has multiplied, transformed and extended human lives, science has been credited with magical powers as miraculous as those attributed to the magi in the times chronicled by Grafton. Magus is a brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it. It is a pity the book does not include a postscript detailing the links between science and magic in more recent times, for they are many. The American rocket engineer Jack Parsons (1914-52), one of the most important figures in the US space programme, was a disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, as was Major-General JFC Fuller (1878-1966), the leading British interwar proponent of tank warfare. Rocket science and occultism were closely connected in tsarist and Soviet Russia in the person of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), a founding father of aeronautics and a key figure in the cosmist movement, which proposed that human immortality could be achieved by interplanetary migration. The seminal cosmist thinker was the Russian Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), who prophesied the technological resurrection of all the human beings that had ever lived. For a time cosmism blended with Bolshevism, producing the slogan “Dead of the world, unite!”. Evidently, the world revealed by science – a purposeless cosmos in which the human animal is a passing accident, headed like all other species for eventual extinction – cannot satisfy modern minds. So they have concocted an ersatz religion of scientism, in which science can eliminate hunger, ageing and death. If these transformations are not enough, humans can fashion a new world by escaping their planetary home.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Ben Turtle at <i>quillette.com</i>, <a href="https://quillette.com/2024/02/15/beware-the-little-lambs/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter" target="_blank">Beware the Little Lambs</a>.
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In an imperfect world, it is easier to criticize solutions than it is to make pragmatic choices that require taking the least-worst option and making sacrifices along the way to a more positive future. It’s easier to protest than it is to overcome oneself and creatively invent new values that make it possible to navigate the real world. Beyond keeping individuals trapped in resentment and outrage, this reactive morality can be used to justify acts of brutality directed at a perceived oppressor, while masking the true motivation behind such acts. Assuming an identity of “the oppressed” makes it easy for collectives to condone behavior that would otherwise be obviously distasteful. Today, we see this mindset everywhere. Progressives demand that middle-class workers must lose their jobs over a tasteless joke on social media; Republicans defend their leader’s worst misdeeds in the name of “punching back” at the elite; anti-colonialists defend the rape and murder of Israeli civilians by Hamas in the name of “resistance”; white supremacists justify violence and hate in retaliation for “replacement”; Stalin sought to free Russia from plotting bourgeois capitalists and imperialists; Hitler believed he was fighting a global Jewish conspiracy.
It’s easier to fill the void with outrage, envy, and hatred than it is to truly perceive ourselves and grapple with the world in all its complexity.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Don Paterson in THE SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-convinces-jeremy-corbyn-that-there-is-a-poet-in-all-of-us/" target="_blank">What Convinces Jeremy Corbyn That ‘There Is a Poet in All of Us’?</a>.
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At some point the left will have to reckon with the apparently devastating news that mediocrity, just like talent, is colour blind. As one of the most respected black voices included here once muttered to me at the bar: ‘The white liberal class has a lot to gain by promoting black mediocrity.’ It is a criticism the left will not understand, far less heed. Let me parse it for them: there is a class of gatekeeper whose dream is both to revel ecstatically in their guilt and remain fully in charge. Both states are required to indulge their main paraphilia, namely saviourist largesse. Moreover, the promotion of bad writing affords them a frisson of charity they would not derive from the good. Bad writing is not the fault of bad writers, which is why one never names names. It is the fault of those making you read it. Bad art actively undermines its cause. Had the editors bothered to consult anyone who knew anything, they could have furnished this book with fine, ‘accessible’ and politically stirring poems by many contemporary non-white poets – say, Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Natasha Trethewey, Zaffar Kunial, Kayo Chingonyi or Airea Matthews – and at least have added some actual substance to the signalling. […]
The kindest thing one can say is that this book was not compiled in bad faith. The worst is that it embodies the very bourgeois presumptions it claims to challenge: proud ignorance, paternalistic saviourism and zero acquaintance with the tastes of the class to which it claims to appeal. Len [McCluskey] wants to eliminate the stigma that poetry is only for ‘posh people’ or ‘softies’, apparently unaware that the great Kendrick Lamar won his Pulitzer years ago. Contemporary poetry has many terrible problems, but lack of popularity isn’t one of them. […] More sinisterly, there is a clear line between this garbage and the post-Foucauldian assault on the humanities: both wings of the left use the tactic of cultural deletion as a shortcut to the world as they would prefer it. The bulk of the poems included here date either from before the first world war or last week, with precious little in between. Good, though, to know we can always skip the decoloniality theory and fall back on pig ignorance.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Shannon Effinger in THE GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/02/a-man-cannot-learn-without-discipline-jazz-guru-marshall-allen-on-life-with-sun-ra-and-turning-100" target="_blank">A Man Cannot Learn Without Discipline’: Jazz Guru Marshall Allen on Life with Sun Ra – and Turning 100</a>.
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“My father said: ‘I got a house for you and you can move the band down here,’” says Marshall Allen when I meet him at the house in November. The 99-year-old has been an Arkestra member since 1957 and the group’s leader for nearly 30 years. He has now retired from international touring, however, and the Arkestra is considering how to approach its next phase. The house’s previous owner “was a man who drove trucks, 16-wheelers. He had all these big tyres upstairs,” Allen recalls, laughing. “I threw them out in the back.” Since Allen already had a home in Germantown, he turned down his father with one proviso. “I told my father to sell it to Sun Ra, and he sold it to him for a dollar,” says Allen. “All the band members had a room, with a space down here for rehearsal. We don’t do much rehearsing now because we’re trying to fix the house.” Arts foundations have funded work on major structural issues, and several Arkestra members have provided repairs. “Sun Ra couldn’t move out of here because he was sick, so we put in a new toilet back there,” Allen says while pointing to the back of the house. “Our drummer was the plumber.”</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Jon Savage in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/02/invention-teddy-boy-jon-savage" target="_blank">The Invention of the Teddy boy</a>.
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The arrival of rock ’n’ roll in the UK with the 1955 film <i>Blackboard Jungle</i> and its accompanying Bill Haley soundtrack hit, “Rock Around the Clock”, brought a fresh level of attention to the subculture. Before the onset of rock ’n’ roll, Teddy boys listened to blowsy big-band jazz: most famously, “The Creep” by Ken Mackintosh and His Orchestra. Hearing “Rock Around the Clock” on huge cinema speakers demanded a physical and enthusiastic response, and young audiences reacted with behaviour castigated as unseemly by the authorities. Already yoked to youth consumerism, the Teds were linked to this new music, with its fresh opportunities and double-edged media exposure. In the popular press, Teddy boys and rock ’n’ roll were indivisible: both raucous, loud, animalistic – a proper youth Armageddon amplified even further when the film <i>Rock Around the Clock</i> opened the next year to rowdy scenes. As one columnist wrote: “What is the peculiar quality of 'Rock Around the Clock' that it should provoke our young people to such a frenzy that they behave like savages?”</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Mirror Lake, Wyoming</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue</b><p>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/arts/music/jimmy-van-eaton-dead.html" target="_blank">Jimmy Van Eaton</a> (1937-2024)
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“A lot of people try to copy” the sound of those Jerry Lee Lewis records, Mr. Van Eaton was quoted as saying in “Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll,” by Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins. But, he added, they can’t do it because what he played was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat. “I never could play that straight country shuffle,” Mr. Van Eaton continued. “Maybe for eight or 16 bars, but after that I start falling off the stool. I’ve got to concentrate, and when you concentrate, you lose the feeling.” Feeling was paramount to Mr. Van Eaton’s drumming. His galloping accompaniment of Mr. Lewis was so unbridled at times that the tempo almost seemed to outrun the two men mid-session.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/world/africa/khaled-nezzar-dead.html" target="_blank">Khaled Nezzar</a> (1937-2024)
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As the head of the army in October 1988, he ordered troops and tanks into Algiers to put down an uprising of young people enraged over deteriorating living conditions and egged on by Muslim fundamentalists. At least 500 people were killed in Algiers’ narrow streets. “The army was given free rein to shoot into the crowds and to torture arrested prisoners,” Martin Evans, a historian, and John Phillips, a journalist, wrote in the book “Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed” (2007). In a 2018 memoir, General Nezzar largely blamed tired, inexperienced troops for the massacre, saying they had been pressured by a heckling mob. He was promoted to army chief of staff after that episode, where he again played a central role in an even larger conflict, the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, known as the Black Decade. As defense minister from 1990 to 1993 and “de facto head of state,” according to Mr. Evans and Mr. Phillips, General Nezzar directed the first phase of the army’s ferocious suppression of a radical Islamist uprising that precipitated the civil war. That conflict would last almost 10 years and take the lives of more than 100,000 people.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/obituaries/nikolai-ryzhkov-dead.html"target="_blank">Nikolai Ryzhkov</a> (1929-2024)
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The task was urgent. Food and fuel, as well as clothing, housing, medical aid and other economic necessities, were in short supply for the 286 million people living across the vast expanse of the 15 Soviet republics. Mr. Ryzhkov and Mr. Gorbachev understood the problem and were well aware that a solution lay in a move toward a Western-style market economy. In a speech to a Communist Party congress in Moscow in 1986, Mr. Ryzhkov put the case candidly. “Of all the dangers,” he said, “the biggest is red tape. Creating the appearance of work. Taking cover behind hollow rhetoric. Bureaucracy may hold back the improvement of the economic mechanism, dampen independence and initiative, and erect barriers to innovation.”</blockquote>
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Thanks to Joseph Pope, Mark Carducci, Mike Carducci, Dan Burbach, Andy Schwartz, Wade Oberlin, Mike Vann Gray, Janet Lynn...
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Robert Becerra (1958-2023)</b><br /></p><p></p><p>
<a href="https://wilddonlewis.photoshelter.com/index" target="_blank">Don Lewis</a>
<br /></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I first saw the Stains in 1980 at the Fleetwood with my friend Max. They blew us away with their ferocious energy, that youthful brash energy of just discovering your power. We were excited.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">A few weeks later, Max and I and Hershey went to see the Stains at their practice place in Boyle Heights to interview and photograph them for Rick Wilder’s Youth Party zine. I took a lot of pictures of them practicing and hanging out. Then we all went out in my big old Buick to replenish the alcohol supply. As I drove, I pointed my camera to the backseat and took random flash pictures of them. We got a lot of good shots, they were laughing and we were having a blast.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">After that I started going to their shows taking pictures, and around 1982, I got a call from Ceasar. He said they had broken up but they were going to release an album on SST, and since I was the only one who had taken a decent amount of photos of them, could I put together a cover. I’d never done an album cover before, but I said yes. It took several months to come up with an idea, but finally I got this dream image of them in an alleyway at night, so I went to Boyle Heights, did the alley shot, then pasted a group shot I had of them over it. Jesse needed to get into the mix somehow because he wrote lyrics for a lot of the songs, so I put him on the LP label with the spindle hole going through his forehead. It seemed appropriate.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I went over to Robert's and showed the artwork to him and Ceasar. I asked what they were doing musically these days, and Ceasar said they weren't doing punk anymore, they were into metal. They didn't say much about the art but they didn't say no, so I took that as an OK. One thing they did say was they wanted the title to be bigger, but I told them it would mess up the balance on the cover, so they said OK. I put the cover art together and handed it over to SST for production. The album came out and I picked up my copies from SPOT in 1983.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">After that, I continued to go to their shows and take pictures from time to time. All the members were great players and performers, but Robert stood out as a powerful guitar player. I didn’t really appreciate this until I saw them play the Doll Hut in 2009. Putting in earplugs somehow enabled me to hear the sound more clearly, and I heard all kinds of flamenco accents in Robert's playing, more than just the main barre chords. Maybe some jazz too. His knowledge was deep.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">There was a time around 1992 when Robert and Dez were thinking of forming a band together, and Dez and I went to Robert's rehearsal space in Boyle Heights to do pictures. Robert was taciturn as ever and all I remember him saying was that he didn’t want to play like he did 20 years ago.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Robert didn't say much. It all came out through his guitar, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get it. He seemed a little scary because his playing was angry, so I figured it best not to talk to him unless I had something absolutely important to say.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">But the Stains did like the pictures, and ever since I've been in touch with them. They've been almost like family. It’s funny how when you take pictures of someone, the pictures become a link that lasts for life.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Thank you Robert for your music.
</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>
<b>On Robert Becerra </b><br /></p><p></p><p>
Dez Cadena
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I always felt as if Robert Becerra and myself were from some sort of Parallel Universe. Both in the separate places we were born, (Robert from Boyle Heights, L.A. and myself from Newark, N.J.) and especially musically.</p><p>
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I met him when Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski invited me one weekend to attend a party in Boyle Heights to check out this band, The Stains. I had already heard a demo tape, and couldn't believe that anyone could play guitar with such demonicly reckless abandon. Seeing it live for the first time, I also realized that his playing was, in contradiction to what I just said, extremely precise.</p><p>
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I was the lead singer of of Black Flag at the time. The Stains came to visit us afterwards, in Hermosa Beach and that's when we instantly talked of music and the guitar.</p><p>
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Robert was, and still is perhaps the best guitarist I've ever known. His and my musical influences were parallel also: Zappa, Hendrix, Gallagher, Sabbath, Groundhogs, Hawkwind, Motorhead, Ramones, Saints, Yardbirds, Lucifer's Friend, Jeff Beck, Deep Purple, Trower, Thin Lizzy, Frank Marino.... It goes on and on. I could hear a little of all this stuff in Robert's playing, but ultimately it just came out sounding like Robert. Many periods of our lives we were close. One time, when I was distraught about a lost love, or something, he said to me, "Just remember Dez, all you'll ever have in life, is Music!" I find this to be the Big Resounding Note, that will never be forgotten. Rest Peaceful 'Beto.
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<p><p><p><p>[The Stains photograph by Don Lewis; Robert Becerra 2nd from left]
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Mark Adams (1958-2023)</b><br /></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Dave Chandler
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I met Mark Adams in 1974 at Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California (a part of the infamous CA South Bay). I was living in Torrance and Mark was in Lomita. We shared a lot of the same classes in school, found out that we had the same musical interests/influences and that we were both learning to play the guitar. We always hung out after school, talking music, getting stoned, etc., and going to as many concerts as we could. We both agreed that we wanted to be in a band that only did original songs, no covers like the other local bands did.
</p><p>In 1978 Mark was living at home, and my parents moved to northern California. So myself and a mutual friend rented a house in Lomita, where Mark and I worked out the first SV songs. Mark wrote "The Psychopath" and I wrote "Look Behind You", "The Sadist", "Mystic Lady", and "Imagination Man".
</p><p>Since we were both playing guitar, and Mark's amp had a PA jack that allowed me to plug in a mic and "sing". That's how we rehearsed until we met Armando Acosta. Then we started rehearsing at a place he was using and a friend of Mark's nephew played bass for awhile. Michael Quercio left to form a power pop band, Salvation Army, which later became The Three O'Clock. Then Armando asked Mark if he was interested in playing bass instead of guitar. He was, and bought a bass the next day.
</p><p>Mark had never played one before, so he just played the single notes he was playing as chords on the guitar, and improvised and expanded them for the bass. That'show he got his unique style of playing.
</p><p>Mark and I were side by side for everything, getting ignored by club bookers for not playing "hair metal", fighting the "early punk wars" on the road, playing to one person (true story) or 100, all the way to headlining the 2nd stage at Hellfest in France for approximately 80 thousand. Mark was always on point, never backing down, never quitting, doing what was needed for the fans and the show.
</p><p>Mark was taken away much too soon and Saint Vitus was never the same. R.I.P. Mark Anthony Adams, my brother, the best musician to work with, and the most loyal best friend anyone could ever have.
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</p><p></p><p>[Saint Vitus photograph by Naomi Petersen; Mark Adams standing left]
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<b>SPOT (1951-2023)</b><br /><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Joe Carducci
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;"> Young Glen Lockett took his nickname and ran with it. He grew up in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles and being a somewhat nerdy kid he was stuck in right field. He gained the name by having to fetch flyballs he couldn't catch. When he accidentally on purpose made some sterling catch no kid there that day would ever forget he claimed the name. At least I think so. SPOT told <i>Westword</i> in 2000 that he "earned his nickname in the early '70s while playing softball in Norway (a miraculous catch he had 'no business making' reminded locals of the national glove hero, Spaat; it was a handle he later adopted and Americanized)." So that confirms it. You didn't hear much from SPOT himself about his childhood except what you could discern from how his central childhood enthusiasms carried into his adulthood. His love of the music he heard on AM radio in the early sixties led to his technical-acoustic expertise with all the equipment used to play and record music. And his love of hot rod car culture led him to never drive a car he couldn't work on himself - VWs and Toyotas.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">His father, Claybourne Lockett, had been a Tuskegee Airman and unlike most of those select few he also flew WWII missions in the British Spitfires. That fact would've really interested Greg and Raymond's dad Regis Ginn the one time he met Claybourne at SST-Phelan Ave.; Regis had met his wife in London during the war and he was also Air Force and drove an MG two-door motorcar. Claybourne indulged Spot's early interest in cars while his mother, Cynthia (Katz) Lockett, from New Orleans provided more of the music influences. She worked with the musicians union if I recall. Spot's older sister played the piano in the house more than he did; he writes in his <i>Anti-Punk Rock - A History</i> that he got his first guitar for Christmas in 1963 at the age of 12 and was into jazz and in particular instrumental pop hits (Ventures, Acker Bilk, Bent Fabric, Joe Meek...) and his first record purchase was The Village Stompers' "Washington Square" instrumental. We were often all packed into the van driving up or down between the South Bay and Hollywood on the 405/La Cienaga route. One time I remember Spot directing Mugger to his parents' house once so he could pick up some master tapes he'd stashed there after they were kicked out of Torrance in Spring 1981; the Lockett house was pretty big with a large front yard in an upscale black neighborhood. Ray Charles lived nearby, and Spot's first band as a kid included neighbors George and Louis Johnson who later in the 70s hit R&B charts as The Brothers Johnson ("Get the Funk Out Ma Face", "I'll Be Good to You"...). Young Spot's intellectual gifts were recognized and he went to high school at Jesuit all-boys college prep Loyola High on Venice Blvd in L.A. [1965-69] The school's website boasts that 99% of their graduates go on to college. Oh, but that last percentile!<br />
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot wrote up his early fascination with cars for this very blog in a 2010 two-part essay he called "Tales of the White Snake". Here's his own introduction to young Glen:
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"I lived in a second-story bedroom on the northwest back corner of our house. This room had two windows, one that unceremoniously faced the house next door and the other that faced rearward to the low hills that separated my immediate world from my world of dreams. Beyond those hills was a hazy lowland that stretched westward to the Pacific Ocean and southward to what was becoming LA International Airport. The Red Line, LA's fabled light rail transit system, was gone but there were a few wide, open roads left over from the 1930s and '40s before automobiles were mandatory for 20th-century Angelenos. These asphalt ribbons plied through the then sparsely populated landscape which led to a magnificently undervalued - unless you were a surfer - shore break. At the age of thirteen [1964-65] it was impossible for me to break out and go easily to this world but on cool nights I would lay in bed and be bathed by the breezes which found their way inland and through that rear portal. Like any teenager worth his salt, I ran down many batteries listening to the clandestine transistor radio that wirelessly connected me to the outside. Tunes like Nelson Riddle's 'Route 66' and Chuck Berry's 'No Particular Place To Go' were already magical anthems but in the dark, midnight hours both the moving air and the moving airwaves made those tunes and those moments priceless. If only it were me motoring around in the moonlight, engine thrumming, wind in my face and hair, driving toward the heart of this or any other Life!" (SPOT, <i>The New Vulgate</i>)<p></p></blockquote>
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;"></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In one of his notebooks that appears to be from 1984, before he finally moved out of Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, Spot wrote:
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<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"In this world it is expected and customary for the struggle to be in the realm of bringing one's private thoughts into the public domain. I have seen fit to keep my thoughts private. I was born in Los Angeles and lived there for the first part of my life. Later, at the age of fifteen, maybe sixteen, I moved to my mind. Occasionally I come back to L.A. to visit." (SPOT)</p></blockquote>
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">After high school Glen tried Hollywood for five years until 1975; these seem the most obscure years of Spot's life. In a 1999 interview he tells Steve Silverstein of <i>Tape Op</i> magazine that in Hollywood he bought a used Sony two-track reel-to-reel deck and began recording himself; then he bought a Teac 3340s four-channel recorder; Spot tells Steve that they came on the market in 1972 and "Those machines might be what created the whole independent record scene." Spot also began using his camera in Hollywood. There are a few startling photographs from this period in his book, <i>Sounds of Two Eyes Opening</i>. These include a 1970 shot of Billy Zoom, and candid shots of Rick Nelson, Dorsey Burnette and Tom Brumley from that same year on a tour date in Anchorage that Spot at 19 attended as a member of an L.A. concert promotion company. There are also shots of cinematographer John Bailey in 1972 in the first AFI filmmaking class, a backstage posed shot of Waylon Jennings, Sky Saxon, Don Bowman and Dorsey Burnette at the Troubadour, an odd, pensive portrait of Gene Vincent in a park in Simi Valley and a posed shot of Geza X at a Sept. 6 1980 punk festival at La Vida Hot Springs in Brea. Apparently Spot auditioned to join Captain Beefheart's Magic Band in this period. Captain may have nixed the idea of having a guy going by the name Spot or maybe he just made an impression; the Captain's 1972 albums were called, "The Spotlight Kid" and "Clear Spot".
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">SPOT moved to Hermosa Beach in 1975. He writes in his photography book that he moved to Hermosa Beach to help build Media Art studio for its owners Dave Tarling and Rolf Erickson, so perhaps Spot met them up in Hollywood. Spot mentions helping move the equipment into the 111 Pier Ave space. It overlooked the intersection of Pier and Hermosa, one block from the beach. Wyn Davis worked at Media Art studio and his mental image of Spot in those years was on rollerskates, wearing elbow and knee pads, moving fast with a camera covering his face as he looked for his next shot through the viewfinder. At the July 1 memorial held at Wyn's Total Access studio in Redondo Beach he made a point of mentioning that Spot was one of just three black people living in Hermosa Beach then. I recall hearing about the unwritten "sundown" rule that black visitors were to leave before sundown. Somehow Spot became the visible fixture-exception around the Pier Ave blocks.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Sandy Espinoza probably came close to meeting Spot at the music clubs in West Hollywood in the early seventies. She moved to Hermosa Beach from Playa del Rey (just north of LAX) in late 1976 or early 1977 and figures she met Spot right away at either the Cove Theater or at the Surf Hut Cafe which was the locals' place for breakfast. They quickly were part of the Cove's staff where she says Spot was an usher armed with a squirt gun overseeing the midnight screenings of "Rocky Horror Picture Show". It was a typically funky seventies movie theater across the street from Media Art, it had two screens and one of the staff perks was to screen films for themselves after hours. Sandy rented a house in Hermosa, then an apartment and in the eighties a house in North Redondo and Spot helped with the rent and remained a roommate of Sandy's when he wasn't on tour, at the studio, staying at SST or in Hollywood until he moved to Austin. In the late seventies Sandy said their lives were "all giggin' and sleepin'." Sandy's uncle, William Edmondson, was a sound engineer who started at MGM in 1931, and in the seventies was mixing soundtracks for movies like <i>Vanishing Point</i>, <i>The Phantom Tollbooth</i>, and <i>The Trial of Billy Jack</i>. Sandy told me her uncle and Spot would get to talking about sound engineering and go for hours!
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Many years ago Henry Rollins answered an interviewer's question, Do you have any regrets?, by saying, "My only regret is not getting there sooner." <i>There</i> meaning not just behind the microphone in Black Flag but Hermosa Beach and maybe L.A. generally. It was one thing to be in North Redondo Beach at SST-Phelan Ave in 1982-83, but we later arrivals could only marvel that just a few years earlier they'd been able to "sleaze by" right at the beach. I didn't have occasion to plumb the town's history until I was researching my memoir of the late Naomi Petersen. I asked Spot to annotate an aerial shot of Hermosa Beach (see nearby) and he noted the following places and their historical contexts: The Lighthouse jazz club, The Insomniac beatnik coffeehouse, Either/Or bookstore, The Sea Sprite motel, The Burbage Theater, Media Art studio, Cove Theater, <i>The Easy Reader</i>, The Church, Java Man coffeehouse, Pier Music, The Bathhouse-Wurmhole, The Fleetwood club manager Sven Holmes' apartment, Wild Wheels skate rentals, El Yaqui-Los Muchachos restaurant, Garden of Eden vegetarian restaurant, Liz's Cafe, The Surf Hut Cafe.... You could tell he valued it highly even though to my midwestern mind those guys who had been there didn't seem to miss it much. Mostly I suppose, they simply didn't have the time to miss anything.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">SPOT had a dark room at Media Art there for his photography but most of his exposed film rolls were just stored away undeveloped for decades. He used the dark room for his <i>Easy Reader</i> music coverage, from Mose Allison to soon enough Black Flag at Polliwog Park in Manhattan Beach. He wrote up the artists appearing at the Lighthouse club. Ozzy Cadena had owned record shops in Newark that were also live music venues for jazz combos. Ozzy became a producer for the Savoy and Prestige record labels in New Jersey and New York before moving his family to the South Bay in the mid-70s to take over as promoter at the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse was a nationally known jazz club since the 1940s; The Fleetwood (originally the Sweetwater) in Redondo Beach was the important local rock club. Ozzy had named his son Desmond after his friend Paul Desmond, saxophonist, member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and composer of "Take Five". Dez Cadena was as likely to be found at the Fleetwood as the Lighthouse. It seemed to me that what set the South Bay musicians apart from / in advance of others was that as kids they'd gone to the sports arenas in Los Angeles and Long Beach to see hard rock and prog rock bands who played the greater Los Angeles area a lot while they hung around doing their label business, taping television, recording, etc. Then as these kids started their own bands they discovered the Whisky and Roxy, the Masque and the Hong Kong Cafe where they could see bands they couldn't hear on the radio, punk bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Television from New York, The Damned from UK, and local bands like The Dogs, The Motels, The Weirdos, The Germs, X, Suburban Lawns, The Alley Cats....
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">The Fleetwood was the rock club where the Lomita guys who formed Saint Vitus in 1979 saw Black Flag and The Germs. There were some hectic collisions between hippies and punks on its dance floor. Spot writes in the liner notes of Black Flag's "Everything Went Black":
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"The days of the Fleetwood were an incredible experience. The epitome of the Hate-Kill-Destroy 'Ethic' where the Huntington Beach types reigned. The HBers were all leather jackets, chains, macho, bloodlust, and bravado, and exhibited blatantly stupid military behavior. It was never a dull moment. There was a mass brawl every five minutes and as stage manager I had a chance to witness them all." (SST 015)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot had a scar over his left cheekbone put there by a kick from one of that type - Michael X-head. Mugger was working the stage and jumped down and pulled Spot up before a second kick was administered. Mugger doesn't remember, but Chuck does:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I totally remember it. Vanguard Gallery show just east of MacArthur Park. I think Subhumans also played and I believe it was a Masque production. SPOT was having fun and ass-head wanted to wreck it for him. Fully fucked up shit. I think it may have been right after Ron walked away from BF at a Fleetwood performance.... I remember seeing SPOT after and being shocked, bummed and angry at the ass who did it to him." (Dukowski, 2023)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Google shows the flyer confirms Chuck's memory: June 9, 1980 (Black Flag, Middle Class, Subhumans, The Crowd, Adolescents - and Minutemen according to info accompanying the flyer scan, and the Fleetwood show Chuck mentions was June 6). Chuck recalls that Brendan Mullen of the Masque sang for Black Flag "for a minute" and Chuck thinks Joe Nolte and others filled in the vacant singer position that night. Dez soon joined the band as the singer.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot was a few years older than the scene generally and his sensibility had strayed from his parents big band jazz and ballads to rock and roll, surf instrumentals, beatnik poetics, and then towards prog and jazz which he was beginning to tire of just before he met Greg Ginn who gave him the first Ramones album to listen to. The recording studio gave Spot's music interests focus; it was exactly what he was looking for. Spot was second engineer or tape operator on punk sessions for Dave Tarling. I'd ask Spot about these early sessions and he didn't recall much and didn't claim to have any real contribution to how these records sounded and he didn't know the musicians yet. The Last were the first band of the new Hermosa Beach scene around the Church to record and release their own record, the great 45, "She Don't Know Why I'm Here"/"Bombing of London" (Backlash). Vitus Matare writes that they asked Randy Neece of The Young Americans vocal group about recording and releasing a record in 1975 before Media Art was in business. So Neece recorded The Last at DCT Recorders near Sunset Blvd and he sang harmonies with Joe Nolte. Vitus recalls of DCT, "This hole-in-the-wall lab was run by Hank Waring and always quite an experience to hang out there and hear all about Joe the mastering engineer's experiences with Lou Adler and other types before their records became hits." DCT probably referred The Last to Alberti Record Pressing in Monterey Park. Vitus says, "This was the contact information I shared with Greg Ginn in late 1978 when both of our bands gave up waiting on Greg Shaw to put out our next single." Monterey Park is just south of Alhambra and years later when Virco couldn't keep their pressman Hank busy enough during the Unicorn court fights he moved back to Nashville and Virco subcontracted with Alberti to get work orders done. Both companies were owned by old-timers in their seventies and I bet they both went back to the late forties. So my guess is that Alberti may have been booked up and sent Greg to Virco. Later, The Last recorded basic tracks for their album, "L.A. Explosion", at Media Art with John Harrison (an original member of Hawkwind!) who engineered and produced, finishing the album at Village Recorders where he was on staff. (This may not directly involve Spot, of course, but I know he would love these details so I'm including it!)
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</p><div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVDwqTIRqmvleD64gBzCNsBkXXCK7uWT-ylRuvTNWXHO8UkKgZyzwcl4FKTt-GSBBR_TbhkNPYylDFA3CWrIOrNeIL1r0bS7RuAawYIDk3CFtZzvK5SwH9mO1FZpYW5pPLRVuwH2hmjatYYBT4ujiDdk-JkcDhclYrAYjlqQdWF18RRxyfkSKS67aGxkPL/s4059/Spot-IDs-Mom%20(3).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2996" data-original-width="4059" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVDwqTIRqmvleD64gBzCNsBkXXCK7uWT-ylRuvTNWXHO8UkKgZyzwcl4FKTt-GSBBR_TbhkNPYylDFA3CWrIOrNeIL1r0bS7RuAawYIDk3CFtZzvK5SwH9mO1FZpYW5pPLRVuwH2hmjatYYBT4ujiDdk-JkcDhclYrAYjlqQdWF18RRxyfkSKS67aGxkPL/w400-h295/Spot-IDs-Mom%20(3).jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Spot had rollerskated through Hollywood flyering for Media Art and this brought Dangerhouse sessions that Geza X Gedeon or Pat Garrett produced. Dangerhouse Records, run by Black Randy, David Brown, and engineer-musician Pat Garrett was the best label in the country until SST Records took over. Geza refers to Media Art as his alma mater and he writes, "I liked Spot a lot, he had heart and was a great human." Vitus, Geza, and Pat were the other great punk-era producers in L.A. Spot had vague memories of having seen the names The Bags, The Eyes, and The Plugz on studio schedules. Garrett told Ryan Richardson that he didn't care for the studio but that "Geza liked the place." When Dangerhouse wasn't working in Hollywood at Kitchen Sync studio they were at Media Art in Hermosa where Pat produced X and Howard Werth, and Geza produced The Bags, The Deadbeats, The Silver Chalice, and an early Wall of Voodoo demo. The Plugz 1978 45 was released by Slash magazine and the band recorded and released their own 1979 album, "Electrify Me", but its cover only credits "recorded in a studio" so Spot's memory may have been correct. The Plugz album like the Suicide Commandos is an early example of stripped-down punk production <i>in extremis</i>. (These two albums make for interesting if not exactly successful examples of early do-it-yourself punk album recording approaches.)
</p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">But the typical day-to-day session work in the late 1970s at Media Art Spot found boring. He described the Media Art workload to Steve Silverstein:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"There was a Mexican record label in town that did a whole lot of stuff. At that time, most of what was coming into the studio was either lame disco or lame light-rock songwriter stuff.... Everything was either light and easy or progressive and just overblown.... I learned a lot from that.... There was this group of local musicians. They played in top 40 bands and had a lot of experience. They were good musicians. They would come in and start doing these song demos for various people. Basically it would start with the click track and what you'd call a single voice. Lots of times only one guy could come at a time, like the drummer would lay down his parts, and then everything else would get played on top of that, usually one track at a time. It was interesting, but damn it was tedious." (<i>Tape Op</i>, May-June 1999)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot checked out the music scenes in Austin and Tucson in early 1977, spending most of the trip playing music in Tucson according to his <i>Anti-Punk Rock</i> book. When he returned to Hermosa Beach he took up rollerskating and ran across the punks (Wurm, Black Flag, The Last, The Descendents, Red Cross). That spring Chuck Dukowski's band Wurm moved into the empty derelict bathhouse which stood where the Hermosa Beach pier lifeguard station stands now. Chuck recalls that Spot came in soon after and photographed the band in the living/practice space they called the Wurm-hole. Those photos are on the Wurm "Exhumed" compilation album and in Spot's books. The first recording session for Black Flag, then called PANIC!, was handled by Dave Tarling in Dec. 1977 and mixed in January. The band was Keith Morris, Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski, and Brian Migdol; the songs were: "Nervous Breakdown", "Fix Me", "I've Had It", "Wasted", "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", "I Don't Care", "White Minority", and "No Values"; the first four became the first release on SST Records and the latter four begin the "Everything Went Black" compilation album. In his liner notes for the compilation Spot says he convinced the band to record at Media Art but as "an apprentice engineer my involvement in the sessions was limited to setting up microphones and later running some rough mixes for the band." (SST 015) He also took some photographs documenting the recording of SST 001. It seems Spot cut his teeth as an engaged engineer-producer with the Black Flag sessions thereafter which span the Keith-vocals, the Ron Reyes-vocals, and the Dez Cadena-vocals eras. These continuing sessions, all 16-track, involved late night discounted or free hours where both the band and Spot were learning how to operate in a studio on music that tested the acoustics and electronics of the studio in new ways. Material was rerecorded as new singers and songs were worked in, and once recorded, Spot had time to mix and re-mix alone and with the band present arguing out each decision. Years later they could still crack up recalling how they got sick of Robo's complaints about how his drums sounded until they finally sat back and let Robo do his own mix - the way they laughed I suspect you could hear everything from the kick's subsonics to the chrome on the rims and way off in the distance the muffled voices of a guitar, a bass and a singer.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">But the real value of Media Art to Spot and Black Flag was the late night access they had. They could try different microphones on different instruments and try different set-up strategies. And once tracking was done Spot could mix and remix and try what outboard equipment there was and really master the studio over those years, 1978-80, with Black Flag primarily. In his liner notes Spot writes, "I mean I had nothing better to do than remix a song here, remix a song there (just for practice)...." (SST 015) At the July 1 memorial at Total Access Dez joked that his dad would say about Spot the music critic, "I don't know about that guy," but when Spot began engineering and producing at Media Art Dez said Ozzy advised Spot, "Don't try to make the music something other than what it is." Spot was not really thinking along the lines of the other engineers at the studio. Dave, Rolf, and Wyn also did their share of boring work-for-hire but their own interests were working successfully towards a hard rock that could get on the radio culminating in Dokken, W.A.S.P., Guns n' Roses, and Great White who all recorded demos or albums at Wyn's next studio, Total Access in Redondo Beach.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Sandy tells of Spot running into their house on Monterey, often with Black Flag in tow, to listen to a new mix or a test pressing on the stereo. Sandy still sounded exasperated on the phone and at the July 1st memorial as she told of these invasions and having to feed the band or some church group that Spot was recording. Years later Spot would still disappear with test pressings as SST-Phelan had no stereo; now I know where he was going. Sandy stays involved with music via MusiCares and she helped Spot's friend Ryan Richardson navigate some of the difficulties the healthcare industry and government agencies throw up at the end of musicians' typically unorthodox lives. The early non-punk Media Art sessions that Spot talked about were those by the Dutch jazz pianist Rene van Helsdingen who recorded his album, "After the Third Window" at Media Art over the course of 1980; Spot is credited as an engineer with the two owners of the studio, Dave and Rolf, and the album cover features a collage that includes Spot on rollerskates taking air while holding a guitar, as well as shots of Tarling and longtime jazz and punk scene fixture Taquila Mockingbird (she did vocals). Other early engineering credits for SPOT are a 1977 album by a band called Yellow Autumn, the 1978-79 sessions released by Poshboy Records on the compilation, "Beach Blvd", featuring The Crowd, The Simpletones, and Rik L Rik, and the Descendents first 45, "It's a Hectic World"/"Ride the Wild", recorded in 1979, plus the Angry Samoans e.p., the Vox Pop 45, U.X.A.-Illusions of Grandeur" album, The Plimsouls e.p., the Jim French-Henry Kaiser-Diamanda Galas-"If Looks Could Kill" album, the Red Cross e.p., The Klan 45, and The Flyboys e.p.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In early 1980 Penelope Spheeris came to the Church in Hermosa Beach to film interviews with Black Flag for <i>The Decline of Western Civilization</i>. Greg, Chuck and Ron say interesting things on camera but you can see Spot, Medea and Pettibon sitting around too. I was disappointed to hear that the expanded DVD release does not include the apparently lost material she shot of Spot and Medea. I never heard anything with regard to Raymond. Spot apparently did some joking around with a ladder and a hangman's noose which you can discern from the opening wide shot of the Church and Spot's own photographs (nearby). I suspect Penelope shot an interview with Medea, and then what, didn't think it was interesting enough to print? The Church interviews are expanded I gather and then Black Flag was filmed playing at a studio rather than one of their gigs. The early tapings for New Wave Theater (Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust) are lost too apparently but Spot took some great shots of the playing and interviewing.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In his liner notes for "Everything Went Black" Spot writes:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"The latter half of '80 was... ripe with some of the wildest, craziest, 'police participation' gigs.... At the infamous Baces Hall gig in East Hollywood I was once again acting as stage manager. Outside the hall was a state of near pandemonium with hundreds of punks milling about, dozens of cops wanting to shut the place down, photographers, reporters, and TV cameras waiting for the inevitable riot.... At one point I was given the thankless job of announcing that 'The LAPD riot squad is outside and we have to shut it down! Black Flag will not be able to play!' To which I was showered with angry 'Fuck You!'s, beer cans and bottles with or without their contents, and hundreds of warm slimy globules of spit. I then thought: 'Well maybe I can talk the cops out of stopping the show.' I pushed through the thick sweaty crowd and under the icy, quivering light of the circling helicopter I somehow managed to convince the officer in command to let Black Flag play a short set. Which they did. The cops then came inside and joined the party." (SST 015)</p></blockquote>
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The end of the Cali scene-dream of Wurmhole-The Church-SST Records-Media Art all at the beach in Hermosa came fast. The city was proceeding with the condemning of the old bath-house and the Church and the HBPD were circling so Black Flag threw a going away party at the Church just before they left town on tour and according to Dez invited only the H.B.ers (that is the Huntington Beach contingent in the parlance of the day) as they didn't want their local friends to get hurt. Those droogs did what they do and jumped the gun on the city's teardown of the place. Dez told me they were never kicked out of Hermosa Beach because after that party Black Flag left on tour and returned to a new address in Torrance (18104 Prairie Ave.) which they used briefly before moving to the 1409 Sartori office. According to Spot the lease on Media Art's space ran out early in 1981 and rent went from $325/mo to $1,500/mo so the studio closed. The Slivers featured Martin Tamburovich who was in The Reactionaries and Greg Hurley, George's brother; their e.p. "Restraint for Style" on the Minutemen's New Alliance label was one of the last Spot sessions at Media Art. Spot wrote that The Stains album was the last album he recorded there and the final session was for the Black Flag "Louie Louie" / "Damaged I" 45. After Dez's vocal on the SST 015 version of "Louie Louie" was done the recording equipment was dismantled and moved out. Hermosa Beach, the original Surf City, which Spot and others loved for its jazz-beat-punk backwater funk, finally cashed out. Jazz at the Lighthouse barely survives one night a week amidst the now $5-10 million homes. Dez's mother, Gloria, took over the jazz nights from his late father and she has recently retired. Spot invited Gloria, Randy Nauert of The Challengers (Redondo Beach surf band circa 1962-70), and myself to talk at his 2018 Pacific Coast Gallery photography exhibit which incredibly occurred in a new space on Pier Ave. just across the street from where the Church once stood. (The Gallery is now in Manhattan Beach but it still offers fine prints of Spot's photography.)<p></p><p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In 1979 I was working at Renaissance Records in Portland, Oregon, and we were distributing independent releases on labels such as Rough Trade and Dangerhouse to shops around America. We had read about the L.A. scene and heard about the Elk's Lodge police action because The Wipers had been the opening band that night the LAPD declared war on punk rock. I wrote for a copy of Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" e.p. when I saw the SST ad for it in <i>Slash</i> magazine. But we were just moving the company to Berkeley and changing its name to Systematic Record Distribution and by the time the sample was forwarded to us and we made our order for distribution they had sold out the first run and a second run too! Eventually we got copies to sell and the record made it to retail outside of L.A. Systematic's in-house label, Optional Music, began in 1980 by reissuing the first Dead Kennedys 45, "California Uber Alles" and issuing the first run of three thousand of their follow-up, "Holiday in Cambodia". Soon SST issued the Minutemen "Paranoid Time" e.p. and the Black Flag "Jealous Again" 12" e.p. and Systematic became known as the place to go for these new bands' records. I think it was May 1981 when I first talked to Spot. I'd seen Black Flag but hadn't met Spot yet. I called SST to order records; they were then in Torrance. Black Flag had just left on tour to the east coast and the Torrance Police Department took the opportunity to burst in and was ransacking the office just as I called. All I knew was that I couldn't get a straight answer out of Spot. I asked about ordering records and he laughed nervously and said, "Uhhh... I don't know!" Then I asked, "Well, can I leave an order with you?", and he laughed again and repeated, "Uhhh... I don't know!" He was staring wide-eyed at the cops as they searched the office for drugs, certain they would find something. The office was right in downtown Torrance but the real offense to the town fathers was probably the parade of their daughters who were in and out of SST. Eventually Spot handed the phone to Mike Watt who was also at the office that day and Mike whispered to me what was going on.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">A couple months later I saw Black Flag at Tut's in Chicago and offered to come down and run their office. Greg was interested because they always checked shops on tour for their records and when they had the records in stock it was always from Systematic. But Greg admitted they had no money and now no office. Nevertheless by mid-September 1981 I moved down to the next SST in West Hollywood, back of the Unicorn Records offices. There I met Spot in person and learned that in the best of circumstances one had to brace oneself a bit when you asked Spot a question - there was going to be a pause before he gave you a circuitous side-long heavily qualified if not fully metaphorical response. This appeared to be Spot's manner in most things. When Greg asked Spot a question Greg would start rocking his right leg impatiently and unless it was an emergency (there was one a week) he'd take the edge off his impatience by smiling indulgently while he waited out Spot's answer. I think both Greg and Chuck enjoyed the circus of characters that were caught up in the heat and light of Black Flag; a few years earlier and I think they'd all been frustrated, friendless weirdos at the end of the hippie era. The band came with a peanut-gallery-<i>cum</i>-brainstrust (Spot, Mugger, Pettibon, Medea, Billy, Merrill, Watt, Boon, Holzman...) that set the lingo and style for the free-thinking that the South Bay area of Los Angeles came to model for the punk era against the marketing/herd instincts of the music industry and its young customers.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Greg and Chuck themselves were a partnership that proceeded via what Spot might deride as "mind-fucking" as they explored all the ways things could be done better than the conventional way. But they also made each other laugh and, like Spot, they often spoke in comic voices as if Looney Tunes' characters were running around SST. Spot had a number of characters, some regular ("Harold Schvenkel" was the old record industry veteran who did blow with all the stars and whose nose had just healed), and at other times as on Johnny Myer's <i>KALX</i> program at UC-Berkeley in late 1981 he'd just key off of Black Flag joking around playing bad major label hard rock and pull out an impression of Jello Biafra to announce that the Dead Kennedys had seen the light and were going "metal". Johnny also set up a mic in the station's bathroom and Spot played free clarinet which was added to the solo John Bonham song from Led Zeppelin's "Coda" collection after which Spot-as-Schvenkel told a story of partying with the late Bonham. In the first minute of Dave Markey's doc made on the last Black Flag tour, <i>"Reality 86'd"</i>, Greg and Chuck are captured on the street just before entering a club and in comic mode Greg offers that the first thing they need to decide is whether to leave reality at the door, and in response Chuck expounds that it's important to remember to consider reality to be optional and have reality serve you rather than find yourself serving it. Greg is laughing and then in character says, "Oh, okay," and makes to walk into the club satisfied with that. Now, thinking of Spot specifically, I recognize that while most superior intelligences excel at either intuitive-poetic insight or didactic-scientific comprehension, Spot, God help him, possessed both mindsets. He was at all times both Spot-the-engineer and Spot-the-artist and he had to toggle between his selves before alloying something like an answer to your question.
</p> <p>
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The first Minutemen album, "The Punch Line", was probably recorded in early 1981 at Media Art just before the first Saccharine Trust album, "PaganIcons" was recorded there in April 1981. Spot did a late remix of "PaganIcons" later that year at Unicorn. That remix may have been done in part to learn the room before his work on "Damaged". I believe both albums were initially mastered at Virco. I think Max Watts did the mastering and I'm amazed how good that cut sounds. The record was recut, at K-Disc I believe, because Virco's lathe had automatically set wide bands between songs and with as many songs as the Minutemen fit onto a side, even at 45rpm, you just couldn't space each tune. It's interesting that already at Virco Spot is cutting these short albums at 45 for sound quality reasons - the music really jumps off the groove at the higher speed. Spot had to look for alternatives to Media Art and he recorded The Descendents "Fat" e.p. at Music Lab in Silverlake. He writes about it in his illustrated essay publication, <i>Anti-Punk Rock - A History</i>:
<p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"The <i>Fat EP</i> was some kind of landmark I can't put a name on. Recorded in Studio B, it was a full steam, bonus cup approach with Frank Navetta using my old Fender Strat, and we just went for it. I'm pretty sure it was mixed across the street at Studio A where I (the eternal detail dog) had accidentally mixed one tune, fader movements included, whilst monitoring from the 2-track machine's playback head - a definite NoNo. I didn't say anything until, after hearing the mix back, I explained my mistake by saying, <i>'I thought I had done it now when I hadn't done it now.'</i> Regardless, it was the mix that went on the record - no one took issue with it." (SPOT, <i>Anti-Punk Rock</i>)</p></blockquote>
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In the tumult after being kicked out of Torrance while on tour, Black Flag had no money to release the Saccharine Trust and Minutemen albums. New Alliance released The Descendents e.p. that summer. Also at Music Lab in July 1981 Spot recorded The Fix's second 7" which came out on Touch and Go. Greg and Chuck put out the Black Flag "Louie Louie" 45 through Poshboy and also set up the cassette-only joint release with Poshboy and his bands, "The Future Looks Bright", so that some of the backed-up SST recordings (plus The Descendents) would be out circulating. And for a brief period Greg and Chuck considered releasing the Dez-vocals version of the "Damaged" album on Chris D.'s Upsetter Records.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Black Flag did not want to leave the South Bay. Chuck told me they had thought that moving to Hollywood was what had destroyed the great early Gardena band, the Cheifs. Instead of returning to their hometown after gigging they had moved up to Hollywood and began living the lives of rockers, stopped writing and practicing and broke up. But now Black Flag at Unicorn on Santa Monica Blvd was in walking distance of the Sunset Strip. Spot seemed to me to be either in the studio at Unicorn or else scouting other studios, mastering labs, cassette duplicators, and pressing plants, driving across L.A. in his gray matte single-seat cut baja-bug. When Henry Rollins joined the band and Dez moved to second guitar it was decided to re-do the songs they'd already recorded multiple times. At Unicorn's studio the re-recording of "Damaged" was well along when I moved down from Berkeley in mid-September 1981. I remember them finishing up mixes and tracking the last few songs. For "TV Party" the last tracking would be the backing vocals where TV show names are shouted out. Greg, Chuck and Spot looked at each other having no idea what any current television shows were. I think Dez, Earl and Merrill came up with the show names.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">With "Damaged" more or less done we brought in Meat Puppets to record their first album at Unicorn on November 24, 1981. It got a bit complicated as my Berkeley label, Thermidor, paid a flat $400 for an estimated two days for a record SST would release. The Meat Puppets were then young desert mystics managed by Laurie O'Connell of the band Monitor and the arts group, World Imitation. Laurie was by rights the It-girl modeling female art-making that others were later taken to be, but as Tom Wolfe noted, while in the East talent is drawn into the establishment that is less likely in California. Monitor wasn't exactly the hardest working band in show business but they had wide influence via their graphics and mail-art, their music, their records, their connections to L.A.F.M.S., Boyd Rice, Jeffrey Vallance, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Ata Tak, Takuya Sakaguchi.... Laurie and Boyd did noise-with-vocals performances and recordings as Barbie and Ken. Anyway, the Meat Puppets! Laurie's charges ate mushrooms for the occasion and she became emergency intercessor between Spot and the band who were having trouble playing in the set up for the recording. Spot had seen them open for Black Flag and done their live sound but didn't know them well. Laurie huddled with the band and then explained to Spot that they couldn't play together unless they were facing each other like in practice, and that further they also might be liable to just play and keep playing without regard to commands like, "Okay, rolling!" So Spot, trained for emergencies with Black Flag, set up a submix direct to a two-track and ran it at 15- or maybe even the home format speed of 7.5 ips so the reels would pick up 30 or 60 solid minutes of whatever happened, while he did the usual 24-track two inch recording song-by-song as the mushrooming allowed. Meanwhile Laurie went in and turned the amps to face the drums. I remember Spot watching her from the control room and chuckling; it seemed funny that Curt and Cris couldn't manage to turn their own amps around but were nevertheless now going to record their debut album.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot wasn't the kind of careerist producer-engineer who would storm out or demand his name be taken off a session gone off the rails. He wanted to see what was going to happen and didn't mind much if he thought he might learn something new and perhaps catch lightning in a bottle. We don't know what Ed Barger would have done; he was to have been there and he had done the Meat Puppets e.p. and the Monitor album, both great records, and he had been Devo's initial soundman and recording engineer in Akron. By the time Ed showed up Spot had mixed the record - it was easy and it was difficult: you could push the faders of any instrument up or down and nothing changed! Let it bleed to the max! But Laurie now worked at Unicorn and she and Ed mixed and mixed, smoked pot and used that early digital delay plastic jobber that looked like a toy setting on the board. Laurie and Ed were sure the band was going places and probably thought Unicorn if not Warner Bros should release the album.... Did I mention they were smoking pot? In any case the Meat Puppets returned to Phoenix and decided to work with SST; they were smart to put one of Ed and Laurie's mixes on the record so that pseudo-insiders like the late Mike Sheppard wouldn't go around saying "Oh man you should hear the Barger mixes!" Anyway, Spot did catch lightning in a bottle by my measure with the songs "Melons Rising", "Saturday Morning", and "Walking Boss". And the groundbreaking high desert versions of "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" and "Walking Boss" were not caught on the two-inch multi-track but used direct from that sub-mix two-track recording.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I hated how things had gone south with Laurie but it seemed you had to be really young to understand what Black Flag was doing musically, lyrically, with their gig promotion, flyering, touring and with their label. If you were in your twenties and had been involved in punk or new wave or art rock since the mid-seventies you just weren't going to see and appreciate the new populist-hardcore paradigm through which everything from metal to folk would be reconstructed, along with college radio, the club circuit, and record distribution. The older heads thought that had already been done by The Ramones. By the eighties Devo, Talking Heads, and The B-52's were burying guitars to have pop hits just as guitars were popping up unexpectedly in r&b. The Kirkwoods and Bostrom were young and could see this new thing happening when Black Flag came to Arizona or they opened for them in Riverside or San Francisco. It was a relief to me and perhaps Spot when we got to do more records with the Meat Puppets and Spot was able to work under better, or rather, less radical conditions.
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</p><div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfaSmadoMgY_jeNnVDePiLRA0xOr5KZMIFGv4F3FxqDo-dQ_II69nYVMYbA1wDbboNajnh6JbdcEmFQoB9oRwiXvH8lgfRbaXyCAK_PUgUmqrGrtU-r1zOBICyPCOxrCXrpD_4BTyYNuU-PZLGwYXHQddbkR_RjnBxhYig7KrKs1Q7xl_N7LG37vPmMmf8/s617/LP-nigheist.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="614" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfaSmadoMgY_jeNnVDePiLRA0xOr5KZMIFGv4F3FxqDo-dQ_II69nYVMYbA1wDbboNajnh6JbdcEmFQoB9oRwiXvH8lgfRbaXyCAK_PUgUmqrGrtU-r1zOBICyPCOxrCXrpD_4BTyYNuU-PZLGwYXHQddbkR_RjnBxhYig7KrKs1Q7xl_N7LG37vPmMmf8/s320/LP-nigheist.jpg" width="318" /></a></div>
In rare downtime at the SST offices behind Unicorn Spot and Mugger worked up a new song by The Nig-Heist. They had a girl named Terri play bass with them, Spot was on drums and Mugger played guitar and sang the song, "Walking Down the Street". They were using Black Flag's equipment which stayed set up in the practice room and so the guitar is Greg's rig and has his tone. When I heard how good the simple portable cassette recording sounded I offered to release it as was on Thermidor. There was just the one song so the b-side had etched messages to girls from Mugger and Spot - no doubt John Golden didn't fully realize just how crazy we were until we came in with that job. Don't remember where Terri went, but a couple years later during more downtime that I can't imagine them having, Spot and Mugger went into Music Lab and recorded a Nig-Heist album for Thermidor called either "Snort My Load" or "Understanding Basic Economics", which is Mugger on guitar and vocals and Spot doing about everything else. Spot said that The Misfits were the most difficult band to work with; I'm guessing the recording of "Snort My Load" was the most fun session he did. In the extras on the Drag City reissue of the Nig-Heist album there is a practice jam probably from the "Walking Down the Street" session called "Terri" and she appears to be playing bass on it.
<p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Soon after the Meat Puppets sessions Black Flag began touring their way to the east coast. Spot was still at SST in touch with Greg and doing last minute remixes, then recutting lacquers and replacing the stampers at the Virco plant. He was also in charge of finding a better cassette duplicator for the "Damaged" cassettes. Spot liked Virco's vinyl pressings but not its mastering or its cassette duplication. Spot then caught up to the band for its first tour of England. The Cali boys were miserable in England in late December judging by Spot's photos. Ian MacKaye went with them. He and Henry were the only ones interested in UK punk bands and they were disappointed to find the bands they met were jealous and hostile except for the U.K. Subs and The Ruts. (Ian briefly joined the Nig-Heist when they opened for some of the Black Flag shows; there's photos - I don't pass along idle disinfo.) Back in West Hollywood Unicorn was working "Damaged" more than I was, though I did do the label layout for the Licorice Pizza free 45, "Thirsty and Miserable"/"Life of Pain". I had put some money in to pay Virco so as to press Black Flag back catalog and "PaganIcons" by Saccharine Trust and "The Punch Line" by Minutemen. Saccharine went on the Black Flag U.S. tour dates and by the end of 1982 they had been seen by about everyone who had seen Black Flag that year of the "Damaged" touring. That sold their "PaganIcons" debut fairly well. I worked on those releases. That left the Overkill 45 and The Stains album still unreleased from Spot's Media Art work.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In most towns on the Black Flag tours there'd be scene people hoping to talk to the band as soon as they arrived and before things got hectic. The band plus Mugger and Spot were glad to get out of the van and maybe have some time before load-in and soundcheck. Where the guys in Black Flag were perhaps focused on what they'd be doing in a few hours Mugger and Spot began performing right out of the van with typically South Bay L.A. style bravado. It usually started with Mugger looking disappointed at the young punk rockers and asking, "Hey you guys, where are the broads? Come on, get it happening!" Spot seemed to live in an Army green flak jacket back then. Spot and Mugger were the ice-breakers in situations and in the years before SST-Global booked the whole bill Spot would often do live sound for the local bands too. In those early years these were some great bands and they often asked him to do their albums. Studio house engineers and club soundmen could not be trusted back then. The Industry-type wore feathered hair or mullets and white Reeboks. They were clueless at best regarding what these bands might want to sound like, and at worst they resented the punks, were disrespectful and sabotaged their sound. When Spot left the tour (late '82 or into '83) Mugger became the soundman and Davo was added to the crew. Then when Mugger left the tour for the SST office in late 1983 Davo did sound and Tom Troccoli was added to the crew. Dave Levine did sound from 1984 on and Joe Cole crewed the last tour. (Steve Reed worked on later Gone and Mike Watt tours and played in Legal Weapon and Bazooka and knew Spot from the scene though neither knew they were actually cousins until at Cynthia's funeral they each asked the other "What are you doing here?")
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Late in the Unicorn period the company moved from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. Chuck reminds me that Emil was worked in on drums at the first address in late April 1982 before tour and when they returned to L.A. in early July Unicorn was in Santa Monica. SST was now on Phelan Ave in Redondo Beach. At Unicorn studio in Santa Monica Black Flag recorded a new single version of "TV Party" produced by Ed Barton and Daphna Edwards with Spot engineering with house engineer Jeff Stebbins who we knew fairly well (he doodled on a photo of Black Flag and we used it for the <i>No Mag</i> ad we called 'Unite Against Society!!'). Barton was an experienced engineer on commercial pop, rock and r&b and unfortunately this was to be the only studio recording with Emil Johnson on drums. The b-side is from the same period and studio but features Bill Stevenson on drums and is credited as produced by Black Flag and engineered by Stebbins; Spot was away in Texas. Bill had been in the band on an emergency basis when Robo wasn't let back into the country after the British dates. Emil did one tour and was a great natural drummer but didn't like the life and when he pined for his girlfriend, Greg, hoping to keep Emil in the band, told Mugger to lay some truth on Emil about her which didn't help matters, but they were lucky to then be in Vancouver just as drummer Chuck Biscuits quit D.O.A.; he jumped in the van and joined Black Flag.
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There are more liner notes where Spot dates a couple of his Texas jaunts, fortuitous because looking at his discography it is impossible to reconstruct his travels. If Spot had two minds you begin to wonder how many bodies he had running around the country as you try to put his L.A. work, Black Flag tours, and Texas jobs into one man's timeline! He wrote this for the Kamikaze Refrigerators LP cover on his own label in 1986:
<p></p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"In March of 1982 I made a trip to Austin to record the Big Boys 'Fun Fun Fun' e.p. That was when I got my first exposure to the Kamikaze Refrigerators. Tim Kerr played me a tape of one of their live gigs.... The next night I saw the band at the old Studio 29 and they became one of my favorite Austin bands. In a subsequent article in <i>Flipside</i> I described them as '...a real interesting kinda deadpan geek-cum-funk and jangly noise thick eyeglasses type band who don't really make any more or less sense than PiL or Joy Division but what the hell, neither do you...', and found myself listening to their tapes more and more and thinking, 'Gee, these guys could probably make a great record!' Some months later I acquired some new tapes of the Refrigerators and from one of these came their song 'Repetition of Danger' which was placed on the New Alliance cassette-grown compilation, 'Mighty Feeble' (NAR 013). In the spring of 1983 I was back in Austin to do more work with the Big Boys, during which they recorded one of Kamikaze Refrigerators' songs, 'Ambivalence'. A week or so later, I found myself in the studio with the Refrigerators and we recorded these eight songs." (SPOT, liner notes)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot explains that there was no response from record labels to those tapes and then the band broke up, so he got the then young, now late, Austin artist-Man's Ruin label owner Frank Kozik to do a cover and released the record himself. Spot characterizes these recording sessions thusly:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"What exists here was essentially a quick, bare bones demo done on 8-track with some of the overdubs recorded directly on to the 2-track during the mix. As a result of this and the band's demise it was impossible for these songs to be given a glorified remix. The Kamikaze Refrigerators should have had a record and they finally do. Here it is. -SPOT" (<i>Ibid,</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">We see how improvisational Spot was as an engineer and record label owner as well. And I forgot he did some writing for <i>Flipside</i>! (He apparently wrote things for <i>We Got Power</i>, <i>Thrasher</i>, <i>No Mag</i>, <i>Forced Exposure</i>, and <i>Option</i> as well.)
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Back to Unicorn, sorry, yes we must... Spot was present for the A-side of the "TV Party" single. He was the tape-op, sitting on the floor next to the two-inch machine's control panel as Ed Barton and Daphna occupied the cockpit seats at the board. Notably Spot accidently-on-purpose erased a vocal take Henry was doing that Spot judged not up to snuff but they hadn't noticed. Barton looked at Spot unsure whether he could be angry at him; Spot was obviously with the band in some way he didn't understand. Greg, Chuck, Mugger, Henry, myself, Daphna were quiet. Barton certainly only knew the band through Daphna's blather so he just moved on and Henry did another take. Greg dryly congratulated Spot afterwards by saying, "That was pretty crass, Spot."
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Also at Unicorn-Santa Monica we did the basic tracking for the Overkill album; this was engineered by Glenn Feit who had worked on the first Motley Crue album and he was Greg's and Chuck's idea to give the band a more metal production. It's not like they thought Feit had done such a great job on the Motley Crue debut but anyway it was a thought - the border between metal and punk was going to fall one day and until Greg broke up the five-piece Black Flag line-up he had a hard rock populist idea of Black Flag's upside potential - afterwards he seemed resentful as he knowingly with malice aforethought pushed it down a black hole alienating old fans and confounding new might-have-beens. Only the most tuned in guitar worshippers were enthusiastic by the end. They had rationalized Spot's absence on tours by saying that Mugger might make for a better sound-guy because he got laid more. (FYI, after Spot's passing many L.A. women reconnected and found they had each chosen Spot to be their first; Spot used to joke that he was a male lesbian because he was into women. Also, btw, Mugger was just this year stressing how extreme <i>Greg</i>'s libido was. <i>And that's Mugger talking!</i> A few years ago Spot had characterized the early Black Flag m.o. as driven by Greg's libido as he plumbed Medea's depths. Spot thought she helped break down his inhibitions in terms of pushing his music radically, facially, into the straight world. Medea knew the world was fronting; it had always folded before her blithe louche come-on.) Oh, and re, Overkill: Felice tells me that Merrill was there for the basic tracks recording; the band was kind of shaky every way but musically - Felice, Ron and Kurt tore it up/nailed it down! Merrill did the vocals a year later with Spot at Total Access and then Spot and I mixed it there - it's a masterpiece but the band-with-different-singer fell apart on its way up the greased flagpole of the Troubadour metal scene. (That later lineup has a version of "No Holds Barred" on "Metal Massacre Vol. II".)
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One overlooked album Spot produced back then was by the Vancouver band The Subhumans who came down to L.A. to have him record their second album, "No Wishes, No Prayers". Spot was splitting an apartment in Los Feliz with Dave Van Heusen; they had met when Dave was part of a session that recorded two songs by Jane Gaskill at Unicorn in late 1981. Dave and Spot put up The Subhumans in their small apartment while they recorded at Unicorn in Santa Monica. This was a rare punk-era Spot session that was done to what was then the industry standard. The Subhumans had a manager and they were recording in a Los Angeles of their own Canadian imaginations I suppose. Jello Biafra tells me that D.O.A. also recorded that way, tracking just the drums first, then adding the bass, then the guitar, then the vocals. No live interaction or goading of each other in the moment, but rather a matching to a past moment with multiple chances to patch it together for perfect synchronization. The advantage is more the mixing engineer's than it is the musicians or the listeners, but it's all aimed at radio programmers anyway and they just weren't persuadable.
<p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">The first rule of rock as formulated by your author in his shattering tome, <i>Rock and the Pop Narcotic - Testament for the Electric Church</i>, is: <i>The dumber the audience the more perfect the music must be.</i> The radio and recording industries have certainly achieved a dumbed down singularity of the once singularly advanced American folk musical culture and its audiences that could roll with missed notes or slipped beats in otherwise inspired musical performances of ballads juiced with energy jacked in from jazz and gospel. And as we've seen, the mechanization of music has been an engineer's dream of a musical product as perfectly consistent as American cheese. The musicians do it to themselves now in every Pro-Tools enabled home studio world-wide. And let's not forget to thank hip-hop for its contribution to paving over the music's red dirt mother road. In those punk years there weren't many cash-money dreams acknowledged out loud but every band had one that involved their being the one band to get signed and make it onto radio playlists: The Elvis of punk! The Beatles of new wave! The Led Zeppelin of hardcore! This Subhumans' quixotic bid for glory hits its marks though. I thought they were a bit close to bar band rock in their samey arrangements and songwriting - there were alot of punk bands like that then and its a style that can hit you right when you add beer. In any case The Subhumans broke up and there wasn't much we could do. Sorry Spot. I set up the record to be manufactured and distributed by Enigma so as not to spend precious capital on an expired band.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Greg and Chuck had talked to me about moving the office either with Unicorn to their new address which had the extra space, or going back down to the South Bay. I think we all knew that things were deteriorating with Unicorn though we had no idea that with their move they were actually running out on unpaid rent and bills. I do recall us fretting a bit about swiping the Bunn coffee maker from Unicorn and taking it with us to Redondo Beach. If we'd only known... We moved to a small office that the Ginns or the Flynns were paying rent on to store odds and ends from SST Electronics, some furniture and my stuff. West Hollywood had been okay because you could walk to Sunset and its clubs and record shops but Santa Monica would've been merely nice. So now, Spring 1982, we were paying $150/mo. for SST-Phelan Ave in north Redondo Beach. Black Flag and Saccharine Trust did practice at the extra space behind the new Unicorn and Laurie from Monitor was now receptionist with A&R duties there. Spot had been opposed to signing with Unicorn's label based on his gut feeling about Daphna and he proved correct. Even the studio equipment was leased and Unicorn wasn't making those payments either. After Black Flag did court with Unicorn it turned out even their logo had been stolen from another business, Unicorn Typsetting. I took some work in there and they connected Black Flag or SST with the Unicorn company they were suing for stealing their logo! I have to say, however, that that logo is totally Daphna. Deep into the court battle when the bands stopped practicing at Unicorn and nobody except Robo was having anything to do with Daphna (don't ask), a figure on rollerskates raced down Pico and heaved something through the large front window of a certain fly-by-night - aren't they all? - record company after which a dark figure, flak jacket flapping behind him like a cape, skated off into the dark night.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I thought SST's bankruptcy (a tactic in the legal battle) and our prospects were getting to Spot. I was worried he might leave town for good. In case of that eventuality I learned what I could about the studio by going in when possible and I went with Spot to K-Disc too because I was interested but also to be prepared for the day. It was a clinic listening to Spot and John Golden talk audio. (There is five hours of Spot interviewing John in May 2018 still to be transcribed!) If Spot was up on his loft at SST-Phelan and didn't answer a question Mugger, unlike me, would address it head on, "Spot, are you grumpy?" One morning Mugger woke up under his table-desk suffering from what he called "morning boner" so he called up to Spot who was still sleeping, "Hey Spot!" Awakened and annoyed Spot responded "Hey what?!" Mugger answered, "Come down here and give me a blowjob." Spot brightened and said, "Okay Mugger, right after you come up here and give me some butt-licks." I was exasperated reading Robert Hilburn in the <i>L.A. Times</i> six mornings in a row cover Bruce Springsteen live at the Forum six <i>nights</i> in a row, annoyed that the twice-a-year coverage rule didn't apply to the Boss. He didn't have to ask for blowjobs!
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">When we were brokest at SST-Phelan we would have to walk the mile or so to the Ginn's house to eat something. I tried to tread lightly and make a simple sandwich unless Mr. Ginn had something fixed. I would look at the Mrs.' <i>Christian Science Monitor</i> while talking with Raymond, Adrian, and/or the parents. The Ginns' running commentary on whatever was on television, whether by Raymond or Adrian or Regis was always hilarious; they knew all the gossip on the stars, athletes and politicians. Spot went back further with Greg's family and though he didn't eat at the Ginn's often when he did there seemed to me to be a little anger in how he took over their kitchen to make himself something more elaborate to eat. But it may have just been his oblivious artist's prerogative as he chatted amiably enough with whoever was there while puttering around in their kitchen. In 1982 Thermidor released the S.P.K. album, "Leichenschrei", and the Australians toured America in a van. They played Al's Bar and were painfully loud - pure synth tones blasted out into a brick-walled space! They parked outside of SST-Phelan to use our bathroom and shower and the four of them stood out in Redondo Beach all dressed in black. Greg was interested in their manifesto's talk about test subjects' responses to loud frequencies. Graeme Revell was the friendly one; he's now an accomplished soundtrack composer. I was glad he got to witness one scene of SST madness. Spot was in the middle of moving tapes around the city to finish some editing that probably involved driving up to a Hollywood studio to edit, then to the cassette duplicator, and then back. He was standing in the middle of SST holding a heavy reel of 2" Ampex 456 tape when Greg sitting on his couch informed him that there'd been a change and he would now have to go and do everything all over again differently. Spot began to shake and whine like an overheating Tex Avery cartoon character until he threw the tape up against the ceiling. It fell back to the concrete floor denting the metal reel. Graeme had just walked in and I thought, Good, he'll have this image of America's leading independent record label and its principal record producer.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Late one night at SST-Phelan Spot set himself up in my chair and was putting his clarinet together so I sat on the couch opposite, which was where Greg sat or slept. I was probably going thru the <i>L.A. Weekly</i> when Greg came in with Roseanne. They were going to lay down under Chuck's desk which was a door laid across stacked milk-crates but unlike Mugger's desk, it had carpet nailed to the edge to give the bed privacy. So Spot who was otherwise silent began improvising craziness on the clarinet in between smooth choruses of Mr. Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore", so I began improvising rock analysis: "The playing of a guitar is essentially symbolic of masturbation but as the blowjob becomes more a fixture of American sexuality we can expect the guitar to be supplanted by the, uh... clarinet in popular forms of music in the near future." Greg and Roseanne were laughing as they disappeared into Chuck's bed-cave, but I couldn't get a chuckle out of Spot. So I knew he was angry.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Those years were short but long in crises and sudden reversals and slow progress. Spot lived at SST or stopped at Sandy's in Hermosa or at Dave's in Los Feliz. He recorded the Minutemen's second album "What Makes a Man Start Fires?" at Music Lab in Silverlake as well as The Plebs e.p. for New Alliance. Spot went to Texas to record The Dicks and The Big Boys and then back to LA where he discovered Wyn Davis who had worked at Media Art had opened his own studio in Redondo Beach called Total Access in late 1981. In 1982 Spot put the Descendents and then Saint Vitus into the big unfinished space next to the studio's finished live room to record their debut albums so he immediately got that space figured out for any band on the spectrum of fast high-end attack to slow heavy resonance. The Butthole Surfers crash-landed in L.A. and Spot recorded their first lineup in July at Total Access; they had moved to L.A. broker than us and were having a hard time and James Burns writes at <i>Discogs.com</i> that they never paid the session bill so never got the tapes. Chuck put them on as many local gigs as he could so they could eat and they credited him with saving their lives, but they fired the brothers Quinn and Scott Mathews and moved to San Francisco and re-recorded those songs with a new line-up for Alternative Tentacles. And Husker Du landed at SST in June 1982 to record "Everything Falls Apart" at Total Access with Spot for the band's own Reflex label.
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In January 1983 the Minutemen went into Total Access for one side of the "Buzz or Howl..." e.p. - Spot set that session up as a live mix to two-track and the playing really sounds <i>present</i>, like you can hear there is one tape generation less between you and the music. Spot had a lot of lee-way at SST in the studio, editing the masters and etching remarks on the lacquers and he could get indulgent. We had put the original "Everything Went Black" release together with Unicorn's verbal consent, but when they changed their mind and halted it, Spot thought to re-edit the "Crass Commercialism" side for the blacked-out 2nd version of the album which we tried again to release. He switched out some stuff for an improvised sketch, a "Nuremberg Trial of hard-core punk rock" which seemed newly relevant. In the sketch Dez's then girlfriend Mitzi Lanius tries to defend Spot who is on trial for pushing the buttons and the faders and blowing up the world - Dez shouts occasional objections in the background. But Spot keeps admitting his guilt! For causing the Whisky riot AND blowing up the world! On the other disc of "Everything Went Black", to denote the changeover from Ron/Chavo-vocals and the Dez-vocals material you hear Spot suddenly say, "Okay we're rolling; you can play," after which Dez pounds the piano for about ten seconds before cutting right into the Dez version of "Jealous Again." And the etching on the inner band of that side asks, "Feeling uneasy? Chavo sez here comes Dez - Jealous anyone?" Well, on "Buzz or Howl", Chuck's lyric contribution, "Little Man with a Gun in His Hand" featured in an arrangement that may have been only the second fade-out on a Minutemen recording, this being a violation of the Brechtian punk rock challenge to rock 'n roll/pop entertainment as judged by Pedro-heads like, maybe, Greg Hurley. Only Spot, paying no mind to either Hurley, nor Mike nor D., pulls a switcheroo and brings the volume back up after the fadeout and you hear Mike's frustration with how long they had to repeat the last part to cover the fade, "That good enough?!" before a live mic picks up distant comments as the 'men leave the room - all this included in the final edit and lacquer cut - Brecht lives! But Mike decided that tore it and they were done with Spot; it was their record after all. At the time Mike told me they had to stop working with Spot to stay friends. That sounded like bullshit to me but they did stay friends. I always thought that when Naomi Petersen's camera caught D. Boon giving Spot a kiss soon after that she captured a moment that was one-part the band's kiss of death and one-part D.'s apology for same.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">At some point Greg thought we should figure out credit terms to propose to Wyn at Total Access so I figured out how fast we could issue records after a final mix and how fast those invoices could come back to us to pay the studio bill and Wyn agreed to four months billing and SST went to town: the Meat Puppets "II" in April and a few months later Husker Du again for "Metal Circus" and then again a few months later for "Zen Arcade". Spot also worked on his own with Anti, Secret Hate, Nip Drivers and Suicidal Tendencies at Total Access, and AIDS, Circle One, China White, Mood of Defiance, and The Misfits elsewhere around town. One of the interesting things Spot recorded for a friend was what he labeled The Colleen Pancake Experience on the cassette he made for me; it had some absurdist tin pan alley-like songs and I dubbed the cassette for the guys at Global and Chuck really liked it but don't think it was released. Years later it was nice to hear that SST's work at Total Access studio and at John Golden's K-Disc mastering had brought them both alot of business over the years, since they had gone out of their ways to make it easier for us to function when we were broke. K-Disc started putting some of SST's album covers on their wall next to Van Halen, Kraftwerk, and Bob Marley covers, and when I revisited Total Access in 2005 to help record the Unknown Instructors I saw that Wyn had SST covers framed on the wall underneath larger gold record plaques for No Doubt, Sublime, and Guns n' Roses. Earlier, before I'd come down to SST Black Flag had helped make Virco Pressing the go-to plant for independent labels when they'd been basically a plant that pressed Christian albums and the Arhoolie roots label's releases. Slash, Ruby, Poshboy, New Alliance and others pressed at Virco. And the old married couple who owned the plant, Max and Virginia Watts, refused to settle Unicorn's debt and their suit helped lead to Unicorn's collapse, thus freeing Black Flag. I wish we could have returned that favor to them. These businesses talked to Greg or myself on the phone but I think they really felt they knew SST because Spot was always coming by to master, produce or inspect pressings or cassettes. I'm sure they loved days when Spot showed up; he stood out.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In late 1982 Black Flag was still a 5-piece practicing its new songs. They didn't want to play out until they had a new record and they didn't want to just keep playing the older songs. When touring bands asked to watch them practice Greg turned them down. The new stuff pointed in a new direction and Greg didn't want Black Flag to inspire those in their wake who would be free to get their versions out before the originals. But to give the band's players a recording to listen and learn from Spot set them up secretly in Total Access to do a quick and dirty straight mix to two-track. This was sadly the only studio recording made of the band with Chuck Biscuits on drums and whatever its limitations it was heavy and wild - these were the songs written and arranged for two guitars <i>played that way!</i> I got a cassette dub from Spot but never made copies, even for Jack Brewer and Ray Farrell who hear me playing it at SST. But it did get bootlegged somehow and when the <i>New York Times</i>' jazz and rock writer Ben Ratliff was flown to Las Vegas and San Antonio in May 2013 to cover the new contending lineups of Black Flag he listened to the bootleg and asked me about it. The last thing I wanted was to be quoted like a ghost from Greg's past in his re-debut review. But I remember Ben was surprised at the furious power of that demo bootleg; he compared it in an email to the Count Basie Orchestra in its prime. I was glad he could hear that because in no time that line-up flew apart and it was forgotten except by us witnesses. Dez left to start his own band, D.C.3, Chuck Biscuits was fired and Bill Stevenson joined again on drums, seemingly more permanently this time as he also pitched in at the lawyers' office vs. Unicorn. At the time it seemed to me that Bill's enthusiasm kept Black Flag together; this despite Greg and Chuck deciding repeatedly that SST wouldn't put out Descendents records.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Some time after recording the demo Spot went back into Total Access with the now four-piece Black Flag, still in full Nixon mode as the injunction remained in effect... even more Nixon in fact as this recording has never come out to my knowledge. Greg slowed down the arrangements radically for two songs that were recorded in a real non-demo style multi-track session and then mixed; at least I think that's how Spot did it. If I remember correctly the songs were "I Can't Decide" and "Beat My Head Against the Wall". The idea was to test the court's injunction one more time (the blacked-out "Everything Went Black" collection credited to the players' names and not Black Flag hadn't been allowed and Greg and Chuck spent several days in jail). This time Greg and Chuck thought to release a 45 that would be called Black Flag but the members would be listed as Mugger, Spot, Carducci, and Claassen or the like - individuals who were not enjoined from recording as Black Flag. Maybe I regret my response to the recordings but I can't be sure as I never heard them again. Greg played the two songs for me at SST-Phelan and they struck me as boring and long when played that slow. "I wouldn't release it," is what I said and I wondered later if Greg thought I was <i>refusing</i> to release it. Of course I wasn't refusing, I was just advising him that I wouldn't put it out as Black Flag if I was him. Hard to believe he just deferred to my judgment. But he was disappointed and never brought it up again. A couple years ago I asked Spot about those versions and he remembered them but all of his tapes were in storage and not accessible easily. If Spot had had things available and I had known of an easy Nixonesque studio situation I would've been tempted to do a Carducci mix of "Slip It In" as an instrumental like I first heard it back in the five-piece days when the band would play the arrangement during soundchecks before the lyrics were done. I had suggested then that Greg keep it an instrumental as it worked even better than "Obliteration", which was another new instrumental they were soon opening sets with. Well... then... suddenly we forgot about all that because the earth shook and Chuck Dukowski was out of Black Flag!
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;"><i>AND ONLY THEN</i> in late 1983 did Black Flag finally get free of Unicorn! (Unicorn was put out of business by the bankruptcy court for violating rules regarding deposits; Rough Trade-US found their fraudulently cancelled check.) Immediately SST released Black Flag's "Everything Went Black". Fully pressed and boxed copies had been sitting at SST and Virco in Alhambra since the injunction. We also prepared to press our own SST issues of what had been the Unicorn titles, "Damaged" and the "TV Party" 45. I had reserved them the SST catalog numbers 007 and 012 just in case we got them back one day. The only bad news now that Black Flag was free to record and tour was when Mugger and I learned that Greg had borrowed more money to have Dave Levine of Rat Sound build a touring P.A. Mugger knew better than me that rather than make real money on tour and make up for lost time, Black Flag would now barely break even, with double the overhead moving around the country in two large trucks with extra crew. But after all the interference Greg was determined to do the music his way.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">The not-so-new next Black Flag album's songs were now being woodshedded by Greg on bass and Bill Stevenson on drums; Chuck was out of the band but not yet replaced. They worked on the album that would be called "My War" after Chuck's great anthem. Greg was trying to wring the punk out of Bill and get him to play an even, consistent "socialist" beat as they termed it, without any emphases, rushing, or even syncopations. When Greg thought they had it down they went into Total Access with Spot and laid down the rhythm section tracks. Greg came back to SST and dropped down onto his couch and shook his head and said, "Bill punked it out." I think he was particularly discouraged because he knew that the money situation demanded we go through with the album and get it released so a tour that Chuck was already booking could happen and records could be sold. Spot couldn't do much; these were Greg's decisions and Greg decided to boost the low end on his guitar which Spot described as trying to push the music where it couldn't go. Spot specifically compared the resulting "My War" album to Saint Vitus albums where the sound structure was built for the music. We didn't know that within mere months Kira Roessler would leave D.C.3 and join Black Flag on bass and she and Bill would then be <i>nailing</i> that socialist beat thing freeing Greg to do his bourgeois individualist thing all over the place, and also allowing Spot to produce the best sounding Black Flag record, "Slip It In", right after the most inadequate sounding one. "My War" has its fans and it <i>is</i> an important record as is, but it might have been / <i>should have been</i> a record that retracked punk and metal scenes and broke open rock audiences seven years after The Ramones and Motorhead promised it and seven years before Nirvana finally delivered it. ("My War" should have been recorded by the 5-piece line-up and come out in late 1982.) Spot had John Golden etch these lines on the "My War" lacquers: "Exploring the inside of empty guns/looking for the markings of rifled thoughts. Is that it then?" And these on the "Slip It In" lacquers: "Only the steaming liquid of caffeine... stark, starker... / and walked out into the bright light without sunglasses".
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Saint Vitus' debut album was a pure live recording at Total Access and got good notice in Creem but not Flipside, however they found more audience interest in West Germany. For their second album, "Hallow's Victim", we managed to get them into Total Access right off a Black Flag tour slot where they had rotated the new songs in and out of their set three at a time to get them gig-sharp and Spot caught what was basically another live performance with better separation, overdubbed riff-beds under the solos and vocal touch-ups. Dave Chandler surprised me by referring to "Hallow's Victim" as their punk album as we prepared to record what he called their metal album, "Born Too Late", with engineer Mike Lardie. To us it was all just Saint Vitus; they were loathe to add things in the studio they couldn't perform live. Dave was the first respondee to buy his plane ticket to Spot's memorial at Total Access, we also saw original vocalist Scott Reagers there and we were able to stop at the memorial for Saint Vitus bassist Mark Adams who died in May of Parkinson's disease. Mark's memorial was held at a Lomita kung fu studio. (Original drummer Armando Acosta died in 2010.) Saint Vitus are Lomita's working class heroes. (And in September The Stains' guitarist Robert Becerra died of cancer...)</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot was generally a co-producer with any band involved. He didn't remake a band's sound. He didn't use the studio as an instrument. He hoped to keep the studio "invisible" or unheard and let the band's live presentation cohere in its best balance - something impossible in the kind of live venues the bands played. Often club's acoustics were bad enough but there'd also be an inadequate P.A. and monitor system. But soon the bands were tempting their earlier puritanical pursuit of transcendence and rethinking the studio. 1983 was probably the last year that Spot was really in sync with the early SST bands. They had been as radical as he and when you took that into the studio - normally a cold, silent, deadening space - you really could generate some heat. It was still interesting for me but also sad to see happen. Spot had described the compatibility he had with the bands: "Most of those bands and musicians were not interested in sounding like anything that was on the radio, which was fine, because I wasn't interested in trying to make things sound like stuff on the radio."(<i>Tape Op</i>) We were all so busy that commercial calculation crept in like a fog. Mike Watt was the furnace that powered the Minutemen, though since D. Boon's 1985 death Mike has routinely credited D. with virtually all of it. Mike surprised me while we were working on "Project: Mersh" by telling me that their second album, "What Makes a Man Start Fires?", was intended by the band to be a demo to get them signed to a major. I guess he told me this as a joke at the expense of their earlier selves while we were making a new record mocking a real reach for radio play that was recorded at Total Access with engineer Mike Lardie. The Minutemen were alot of fun to work with because everything was serious <i>and</i> funny at the same time and they surely achieved the most in terms of musical breakthroughs. There was nothing like seeing the Minutemen at the Anti-Club! But Mike always made sure to try out different producers, namely Mike Patton of Middle Class and Ethan James at Radio Tokyo studio. The one he didn't try out was the one I regret not intervening to make happen. Mike was fascinated that Dez Cadena's dad, Ozzy, had produced alot of sides for the Savoy and Prestige labels in the 1950s and '60s and here he was in Torrance and Hermosa Beach. In 1982 Mike talked about wanting to see if Ozzy would produce the Minutemen. Greg and Chuck would tell Mike to call him; Dez told Mike, "Call him!" Spot probably told Mike to "Call Ozzy!" They jammed with Charlie Haden but they never did call Ozzy Cadena.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">By 1980 there was a new wave establishment that saw but didn't understand the standing Black Flag had with younger bands circa 1980-83. New wavers were well along the maturation of their punk taste into roots, industrial, goth, or hiphop expertise. The Ramones had done their work at the bottom rung of the major label music industry. They did alot of heavy lifting but there was much more dirty work to do. The Ramones and other New York bands talked alot about "the kids" but they actually had an older crowd and it was difficult to get reputable clubs to do all-ages shows. Black Flag played anywhere that had an interested promoter whether he was experienced or just a fan who booked them so they themselves could see the band - all-ages was the default setting here. By the end of 1982 there was only one other band that had been seen by as many Americans as Black Flag and that was Saccharine Trust because they were on the "Damaged" tours. The Minutemen had jobs they couldn't leave. Saccharine got tight and much faster by the time they returned to L.A., but then they lost their rhythm section, first Rob Holzman to Slovenly, then Earl Liberty to Circle Jerks, and with Baiza now more musically ambitious it took a long time for him to allow that the new drummer and bassist, Tony Cicero and Mark Hodson, were ready to record. I worried that by the time their second album, "Surviving You, Always", was released in early 1984 all those people who had seen Saccharine Trust had forgotten them. The new album had an aggro-prog density driven by the new players; it's probably the last SST release as radically disinterested in pleasing radio programmers as Spot was. It was after this album when Joe's jazz interests began to open up the sound - come to think of it Joe and Jack should've called Ozzy too! Why didn't we think of that?!
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot seemed more interested in the Meat Puppets move toward programmability but that might've been a carryover from the unusual first album. Spot was generally contemptuous of attempts to fit one's music to the business; he wouldn't even sit still for Naomi Petersen's camera when I sent her over to Total Access to get a shot of the Meat Puppets and Spot that we could tease the album with. I guess he wanted to keep the studio space to himself and the band; he certainly had nothing against Naomi. There was new industry trade magazine interest in SST and I wanted all the suits to see Spot at Total Access setting up the Meat Puppets. Oh well... Spot wasn't in the bands; he was a free agent. Each band after the first rush of achievement had to deal with internal pressures. I think the common answer to the big question, "How do we keep doing this?", was that someone had to take over and go for the gold. Curt Kirkwood took over the Meat Puppets after the first album and what had been Derrick Bostrom's idea (let's form a punk band) became a cannier search for an approachable yet idiosyncratic band-voice; all songs were written by Curt now. I prefer "II" and "Up on the Sun" to their post-Spot SST releases which lose the unfussy realism of Spot's sound surfaces, especially in the bass and drums. I remember Curt visiting us at SST-Lawndale and he loved the sound of "Project: Mersh" and generously allowed that they should have asked me to work on "Up on the Sun". I told him I couldn't have improved that album one bit and that the real musical <i>x</i>-factor that popped on that Minutemen e.p. was Crane of Tragicomedy with his trumpet lines. Everyone at SST seemed to agree in 1985 that it was the Meat Puppets who got their shit together, even if it might smell of sell-out.
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">When Spot got done with the suddenly free-to-record Black Flag blitz of "My War", "Slip It In", "Family Man"... he slipped in a Texas trip in late summer 1984 to do another Big Boys album as well as Poison 13, The Offenders and more. Here's George Brainard's posted story of getting Spot to record The Cavemen's album:
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<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I first met Spot in October of 1984. Tim Kerr had asked him for us to produce my band, The Cavemen. We were all nervous since we were such huge fans of his work producing The Minutemen, Black Flag, The Descendents and so many others of our favorite records. We were also sixteen-year-old high school students in way over our heads. We expected this terrifying titan of punk rock to come walking in and put out a cigarette on our prep school foreheads. In walked the sweetest, goofiest, funniest, most unintimidating guy swilling Dr Pepper and making bad jokes. Years later Spot moved to Austin and we became good friends and played lots of music together in The Muleskinners. We had been friends for years before he ever mentioned his photography.... I am just hearing that Spot died this morning. I will really miss him. Here are some photos of Spot I took for one of his solo projects along with a couple of Muleskinners shots. Looking at these photos I can hear his giggle. What a fantastic person. What a life." (Brainard, March 4 2023)</p></blockquote>
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</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">While Spot was busy in Texas The Bad Brains got to L.A. and came by SST looking for Spot; they wanted to record but it never happened. When Spot got back from Texas he was decompressing at SST when he averred, "You know, I think I have the most fun working with Husker Du." I believed him, but that was about to change. It was just a week or so later that Bob Mould called and said they had an interest in Nicollet Studios in the building they now shared with the Twin/Tone label. I didn't know much about that scene except via the records that came to us at Systematic and before Husker Du I had only liked the 45s by The Suicide Commandos and NNB. My impression was that it was a shallow talent pool shored up by including Prince and The Time, and that Husker Du had been so easy to work with for Spot, New Alliance and SST because they had burned all their bridges in their young, unruly days before "Land Speed Record". Their first 45, "Statues", Bob had dismissed as being from a "dark" time for the band. Grant and Greg found it easier to concede that Black Flag had turned their heads around and what they found going on generally in South Bay L.A. had re-racked their approach back from the English post-punk Rock-is-dead gambit of PiL, &c. The way the Descendents played their raw blend of pop, rock and punk also loosened up Husker Du so that Grant's sixties pop expertise could manifest within their music. The naturally occurring bravado of the uncool musos from Hawthorne to San Pedro and their ability to bond with each others' bands despite dissimilar blends made the South Bay unique if you ask me. Husker Du's midwestern disease abated quickly, but it seemed a bad sign to me they were now entering their hometown's establishment.
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Spot had a hard time with "New Day Rising", steering the band around problems they didn't see coming as they asserted their ideas in a Minneapolis studio that was in the middle of a rebuild. In the <i>Tape Op</i> interview Spot talks mostly about the studio's condition but he told me one for-instance of mistaken choices: the band insisted on running the drum mics through noise-gates to the multi-track. Maybe you can do that with Kenny Aronoff but not with a barefoot beast like Grant Hart! We all loved Husker Du but they were as close to a thrash band as we had on the label. They wrote excellent songs and Grant and especially Bob became great singers and their competition to top each other was very productive - they were recording an album every six or seven months! Mike Watt marvelled that the two of them could harmonize in the midst of their sonic cacophony through bad P.A. monitors; Bob had told Mike that he and Grant didn't listen to the bass. When I told Greg Ginn that he thought that was odd since he felt Greg Norton had the best sense of time in the band. When Spot got back to L.A. with the tape of "New Day Rising" Greg and I compared our impressions and agreed we liked it and were impressed it could lead with Grant's kick drum though it sounded machine-like, not Hart-like. I was surprised and maybe relieved that Bob's guitar sound was tilting his effects wash toward white noise rather than my expectation that they were heading toward the sophisto tone-style of 4AD, et. al.
<p></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">The worst of it was that Spot got pushed further toward the door as the rush to radio and major labels began in earnest. At least the bands weren't trying to crowd onto the <i>Billboard</i> Dance 100 Chart like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, D.A.F., and Ministry. In Britain rock was dead, and so recordings got aimed at the gatekeepers that Jim Nash of Wax Trax Records called "1000 Homo DJs" who reported to that chart. It took more years before <i>Billboard</i> invented a dozen micro-charts for college rock or modern rock records. Those charts did help because clueless retail buyers often had policies to simply order the top five or top ten of every chart, but those charts came too late to help SST. When Husker Du got out to L.A. next they cornered me in their van and read me the riot act about how they'd outgrown Spot. I didn't argue with them. Sometimes I wonder if my Italian name makes my suggestions sound like offers one can't refuse. But I could see that they were determined to offload onto Spot anything that could keep them together long enough to have their major label shot at the pot. It was not easy to be a member of our bands in that era. Things were done to maintain the group effort that were not ideal. We were all adults, radical though we were, or as Mrs. Ginn put it, fanatics, so Spot shrugged it off and stayed busy in L.A., and Husker Du continued talking with Warner Bros while they prepped one more album that they produced in Minneapolis for SST, "Flip Your Wig". It's another album of great songs but there is no step forward in production, just an unwise softening of drums and cloudier guitar washes. "Green Eyes" might've been a hit but not sounding like that. Recently Greg Norton commented on a Facebook thread about "Up on the Sun" which Spot recorded in early 1985 and was released just before Husker Du commenced recording "Flip Your Wig". Greg noted how surprised Bob and Grant were when they heard "Up on the Sun". I responded, "I bet they were."
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">SST Records had first been considered by Greg and Chuck a last ditch tool to release good records by friends of theirs that other record labels weren't interested in. And the ability to put good bands through Media Art with Spot when they might breakup at any moment was to document as posterity insurance. But SST for Mugger and myself was an experiment in the slow build of label profile and power in the marketplace. We had Ray Farrell calling commercial FM stations but that didn't mean we wanted the bands chasing a commercial sound going in; we wanted to change radio! Even in terms of minor commercial radio situations that were new wave or hard rock - each had to be improved by some force from outside. Unlike other record labels we had prime original bands plus gradually a steady business hand. Radio stations' music directors heard from PR firms, not labels, generally speaking. Ray was good at it; once he got them talking music he had them cornered with his knowledge and experience. Each SST band had its own special draw on part of the more sophisticated young music audience.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">By 1985 Mugger was accounting to bands for record sales. However, by then our own distributors had set up in-house labels and they seemed determined to sign an imitation of each of our bands, if not lure the original away with money they owed to us! Twin-Tone Records felt it too and called to see if the leading independent labels might organize some kind of chamber of commerce to try to keep our distributors honest. Maybe I didn't give the idea a full hearing but I did mention it to Greg and Chuck and Mugger and it didn't seem relevant to us. We had little interest or commonality with the problems wouldbe new wave foists, as Mike Watt might put it, were having. Later, these waters were all muddied. Greg's 1988 disinterest in Nirvana didn't make sense to me but I was gone to Chicago by then. I hadn't been interested in Sonic Youth early on but once they got Bob Bert on drums I would have been interested. And SST did sign Sonic Youth despite their possessing similar hipster buzz Greg might have resented. Greg checked first impulses to think things through rather pitilessly. But monstrous pot intake apparently led him to indulge and merely rationalize subsequent reactionary impulses as his new business model. Didn't work, but as with Black Flag's sour art-band years, SST's bitter push to flood the independent shops with hundreds of releases seemed designed <i>against</i> the business and maybe even against the bands. It was a testament to the staff that the wheels stayed on longer than I expect Greg expected. Once staffers were replaced by college interns around 1990... well, see Kara Nicks' post, "My Last Day at SST":
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"Before the end of the year I was dealing with over 800 direct-to-retail accounts and still the sales to distributors had not fallen off. Then I got the call that I needed to go home to Tennessee for a bit. Needed to tie up some loose ends. I was gone from SST for about a year and when I came back the whole fucking game had changed. The asshole college fuck I had trained to take my place and the jack-off pussy that had taken Mugger's place, those two idiots combined had allowed Jem East, West, and Jem Texas to go out of business owing hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's right, I couldn't believe it, these fucking distributors had ceilings." (Nicks, <i>New Vulgate</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In a better world SST Records would have been fully capitalized and would have drawn the line at using Unicorn's studio, would have released "Damaged" on SST, would have released all of the Spot productions, tried to grab the first Motley Crue album, the first Metallica album, Bad Brains, Flipper, Red Cross, The Misfits, Butthole Surfers and everything else of interest that the larger and even smaller labels did not comprehend as good interesting important music. They were all asleep for ten years so maybe a bit of Greg's indiscriminate approach eight years earlier would've worked. It might have required a couple hundred thousand dollars to do that; it doesn't sound like much now, but back then it was uncertain if I'd have two dollars in my pocket to buy coffee and papers in the morning. Chuck had thought there were no hard limits to SST's upside potential, whereas I thought the extant major labels had warped the reality behind them as they became those majors. Any shot we had passed us by even as we were talking about it. But those very majors quickly lost ownership of themselves. I've written that it's an enduring mark of shame for the American music industry and music media from radio, <i>MTV</i> to <i>Rolling Stone</i> that it wasn't until German and Japanese capital bought half the American major labels that surviving independent label bands were signed and worked and given the thinnest amount of airplay. I imagine the Krauts and Japs met the Hollywood and Manhattan execs and were shocked to discover that they hated bands that they, as foreigners outside looking in, took to be signal American cultural voices, Americana, in fact.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot moved to Texas by 1985. Tom Troccoli tells me that it was likely the Summer of 1985 when he and Davo were dropped off by the Black Flag tour at Spot's house in Austin to await a ride back to L.A. with the Minutemen who were returning from their own tour. Tom wrote to me about those few days...
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"[S]itting around and having a really nice time with a really really sweet dude. The thing is that of all the things we did those few days we never did listen to any music. None. I thought that was kind of odd. He didn't come out that weekend for the Minutemen, likewise he did not come out that week for the Big Boys. He was certainly much more subdued and perhaps even borderline depressed." (Troccoli, 2023)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Possibly so, but Spot had just recorded The Tail Gators' debut album, "Swamp Rock", a great addition to Texas blues-rock. However it was true that Spot was now done working with Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents, Saccharine Trust, Saint Vitus, Husker Du, and Meat Puppets... for many reasons or for the same reason. Spot recorded an album by Raszebrae at Phil Newman's Spinhead studio; Phil was in Painted Willie. Spot released it on his own label from Texas; his companies were Unseen Hand and No Auditions. Janet Housden marvelled at the recent memorial at Total Access that Spot had even gone out on tour with them as soundman-tour manager. Then he recorded his last records for SST: Slovenly's "Thinking of Empire" was done in April 1986 at Music Lab in Silverlake, and he mentions in <i>Tape Op</i> that it was a favorite, though he recalls, "I didn't get any sleep before doing it. I had just driven down from San Francisco and I couldn't hear a goddamn thing when I walked into the studio." Spot's last SST credit was the Tar Babies album, "Fried Milk", recorded in Texas in spring 1987.
</tape></p><p>
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SPOT was trying to finally focus on his own music. He released his own stuff on two albums, new stuff ("Cutting Black Crystal", "The Cuckoo", "A Conk and a Shine"...) had been recorded at Spinhead or in Texas at Cedar Creek studio and was released on the LP, "Picking Up Where I Left Off...". Older recordings were issued on "Artless Entanglements - A Collection of Vintage SPOTness" ("Killer Bees", "We Can Live With the Hum", "Flying Babies"...). Most of these tracks were experiments Spot initiated at Media Art from 1979-81 with friends at hand (Ron Reyes, Phoenix, Rene Van Helsdingen, Christian Lunch, Rolf Erickson...). Spot writes in the liner notes that the Media Art tracks "represent somewhat the beginning of an end", and the two Spinhead 1986 tracks (with Janet Housden, Debbie Patino, Greg Burk, Rena, Phil Newman...) "an end of a beginning". But Spot was still in demand as an engineer-producer and continued recording bands in his new state: Not for Sale, The Muleskinners, N.O.T.A., Rhythm Pigs, The Texas Instruments, Bad Mutha Goose and the Brothers Grimm, the Hickoids, Phantom Tollbooth, Hand of Glory, Crust, The Weeds, Ed Hall, Daniel Johnston, The Shindigs, The Pierced Arrows, plus he played on a Happy Family album and likely others under the radar. At some point he decided to stop recording bands but then found he was unable to turn down engineering for the 1989 release by Terry Clarke "Call Up a Hurricane". He knew the producer J.D. Foster of The True Believers and recorded the British country-folk singer at the Fire Station in San Marcos with players that included Flaco Jimenez, Erik Hokkanen, David Grissom, and Rich Brotherton.
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">This brings us to about 1991 - the year punk broke! Listening to Spot you'd gather that SXSW and Austin itself broke too. Austin was no longer the music town he had loved as a visitor and the Texas character of the old SXSW was suddenly gone. Spot was also trying to maintain his bands - The Delorean Mechanics, and then Spot Removal - but in middle-age keeping a band together requires money and action. Spot had no personal ties in the way of a wife or kids but I'm sure others did, however much younger than he they were. This put Spot in the position of the taskmaster, the band dad. Let's just guess that he might not have been good at that. He played with local Celtic musicians or just willing players or people he liked around Austin. He would get up on stage with old friends like Mike Watt or L7 when they came through town. Spot released two 45s in the early 90s: "Yo! Marry Me!"/"Caca Boudin Popo Pipi", and Spot Removal's "Paper!"/"St.Annie's Reel", both give one the sense that he was taking his skillful Celtic renderings and punking them - neither being faithful nor faithless. Spot was getting known at Irish music festivals in Austin and Chicago areas, but as a player in tune sessions, not for his singing in his songs on his records. The "Paper!" 45 also includes an elaborate newspaper as a picture-sleeve called <i>The Removal Rag</i> in which I believe Spot writes a bunch of parodies under pen-names with some help from friends and bandmates. Here's a witness statement from hurricane Howie's aftermath according to reporter Slim Kegel:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"Perhaps the oddest account of the strage occurrences of Howie is from a man found by Red Cross rescue workers two days after the storm abated. Huddled in the interior of a crumpled Ford van littered with brightly colored 7" phonograph records, the furtive individual would not speak nor come forth until he saw one of the rescuers drop an ancient mud-caked guitar effect pedal from a bag being filled with debris. He excitedly launched himself from the derelict vehicle, tackled the dirty artifact, and began speaking prolificly about many things. Investigators remarked that he seemed agitated but coherent. The following is an excerpt from his taped statement: '...and all those bands in those vans just disappeared. Their strings busted and their amps blew and no one knew they was in the grip of powerful mystical forces. That's what happens when you get into the euphorial zone of convergence. These things happen, you know. And of course it's strongest at ground zero where it's like standing in your grandmother's bedroom and you see her lying in bed as the walls begin to fade....'" (Spot, 1992)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Elsewhere in the paper are hints of his novel to come and echoes of past obsessions. In 1995 I asked him to come up to Chicago and play the sound engineer in my rock band film comedy; Spot made his character an Irishman and underplayed it well with a subtle brogue. He left Chicago with a Jewish girl from England named Patty who was a friend of David Lightbourne's. She'd been living east of Wicker Park with a Native American guy over on Blackhawk and working at Yo Mama's Cafe on Milwaukee Ave run by a somewhat shady black character, a painter of grotesque female nudes that passed for cafe decor. I never got the story of how Spot and Patty blew up after some time at his house in Austin.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot appeared at the Hole in the Wall's "Ramones Hoot Night" in December 1996 in character as Junior Brown; Spot seemed to take umbrage at Mr Brown's claim that he was an outsider so he mocks him mercilessly and then shuts him down on a smokin' lap slide guitar solo (it's a must-see on <i>youtube</i>). Also in 1996 he released a 10" record called "Removals...Other Isms" ("April", "Counting Flowers"...). Some novice players wondered why he thought they were qualified to play with him but Spot was never focused on mere expertise, plus he liked surprises! I told him back in the 90s that his Fostex X15 four-track cassette demo was releasable - it was him playing surf-like guitar and bass parts to simple drum programs and it built up a real pleasing mood. The Fostex was his answer to studio fatigue. But there was never telling what Spot would finally decide what of his music could be released and which mixes or takes were the ones. No doubt there are more records in all those tapes that warrant release.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">After moving to Wyoming I lost a tenant in my Laramie building and Lightbourne managed to track Patty down in Austin in late 1996 and she came up and ran the Provisional Cafe for us. It was an all-night joint and she collected a managerie of night owls who preferred her company to what was on offer at Petro's or Shari's for coffee or pizza or chips & salsa at three am. I kept telling Patty that her book should be called "Exploring Wild America"; she always laughed because she had no intention of writing a book. As it happened Bill Stevenson had established The Blasting Room recording studio in nearby Fort Collins. He put together two labels, O&O for rock and Upland for roots music. Upland released Spot's album, "Unhalfbaking", and we started the annual Upland Breakdown in Centennial, Wyoming as an attempt to push the label's roster. Now I think about it I'm not sure how Patty and Spot avoided running into each other those first few Breakdowns. On the microphone at the first one in late August 2000 Spot begins,
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I just want to say that I've been all around the country this month and I've seen like a whole bunch of really cool places, you know places you think, Man this is neat I would think about living here and I gotta say Centennial here is right up there at the top of the list." (Spot, Aug. 26 2000)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Then he insulted Austin as being full of Californians and began playing jigs on his banjo. I encouraged him to move up here, or more realistically to Fort Collins but access to a recording studio didn't hold the same attraction for him as when Media Art shaped his entire life. Patty is somewhat high-strung and convinced that Lightbourne was using his female voodoo doll to torment her, she snuck into his room and tore the male doll to pieces and he threw her out of the place. I never asked her about Spot and I never asked Spot about Patty... So much for my nose for a story. (When I listen to Spot's song "Countin' Flowers" I get the sense that its lines alternate between being about Greg or Patty.)
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot's guitar picking was really something in the new millennium; he was splitting atoms on the fretboard as he played with time in his garagey Celtic/Beat freed jazzed fusion. To note Spot's passing for his Wyoming friends I recently went on Laramie's <i>KUWR</i> and played Spot's answer tune to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A-Train"; Spot's "B-Train" is something of an autobiographical statement of his contrary artistic intent: "The B-train takes you somewhere that the A-train just won't go/The day is full of insults that the night will never show..." But as a solo artist who could play anything Spot didn't seem to be able to will himself into that sweet spot like the best of the bands he'd worked with back before the fall. They would record as they wrote songs, and release records as they recorded. So the "Nae Plumb Nor Square" CD, like the "Unhalfbaking" CD, is a mixed collection of his bands plus solo work and live and demo material. The album he did with boudran player Albert Alphonso, "In the Bag", is probably the only stylistically consistent release he did. He liked contrast and surprises and so he might present comical lyrics next to sentimental instrumentals and low-tech distorted guitars next to pristeen acoustic instrumentation on the same record or in the same live set. Spot the musical performer was considerably out beyond the average audience and yet he picked up intense fans and friends everywhere he appeared.
</p> <p>
</p><div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigLmLpWMuXge1zY0us8B4HumyQmUUUW_DyLiHwZFvpflgyOs6rtTul0I_v6Zx0v8tzLXzd2LRAh3AYhtdEy6ojbkiY37rom2lqQG6awSz7BFkQs7vGVWNBDKzdUeNXGFjFo_HxhOGTygCRrLVNtb9AZAlWAKF-GC1k-E6qtfZk9avkHnDOs4LG4vGJWqtO/s1094/SPOT-FALL-2022-IMG_8343%20(2).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1094" data-original-width="767" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigLmLpWMuXge1zY0us8B4HumyQmUUUW_DyLiHwZFvpflgyOs6rtTul0I_v6Zx0v8tzLXzd2LRAh3AYhtdEy6ojbkiY37rom2lqQG6awSz7BFkQs7vGVWNBDKzdUeNXGFjFo_HxhOGTygCRrLVNtb9AZAlWAKF-GC1k-E6qtfZk9avkHnDOs4LG4vGJWqtO/w280-h400/SPOT-FALL-2022-IMG_8343%20(2).jpg" width="280" /></a></div>
Around 2010 Spot turned back to his seventies photography. Ryan Richardson decided to hi-rez digitize all of Spot's negatives (cost: $7,000). Ryan then worked with Johan Kugelberg at Sinecure for the 2014 book, <i>Sounds of Two Eyes Opening - Southern California Life - Skate/Beach/Punk 1969-1982</i>, and with Matt Welch at the Pacific Coast Gallery for a Hermosa Beach-focused 2018 exhibit and print sales. There was also a music scene focused exhibit at Cornelius Projects in San Pedro that year. Spot also began writing his novel, <i>Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization - A Novel by G.S. Oldman</i>, as well as what he refers to as a 35,000 word draft of a musical memoir which I have not yet come across. The 2017 publication, <i>Anti-Punk Rock - A History</i>, is a photo-heavy excerpt from that text. I'd been encouraging him to write about his career as a producer but I'm afraid that I wasn't very encouraging when he told me he was writing a novel about a girl in a rock band. Art about artists isn't ripe for much beyond comedy I suspect. I also told him the brutal truth of book printing and distribution as I knew it - bad enough for non-fiction but the worst for fiction. He decided to make his novel available as an e-book. Spot's photography book had been noted in major publications and on-line and his Los Angeles gallery showings were well attended. So when the e-book didn't get noticed Spot spent additional, what..., years?, producing the novel as an audio book, something to my ears like a radio drama. It's quite an impressive production that Spot narrates and friends of his act the characters of the story and Janet Housden's casting as the lead was perfect; I knew that would work and managed to be more encouraging. But of the novel's original text itself I prefer Spot's expository digressions like this one from Chapter VII:
<p></p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"All other rolling innovations aside, the first automotive distributor was created in the early twentieth century, and in 1910 it was successfully utilized on that year’s Cadillac. Credited to Charles Kettering under the auspices of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. [Delco], it was quite an advancement. Early gasoline-powered engines had been sparked by means of a magneto—a simple, static device that proved impractical since once the ignition timing was set, it was a done deal; that was as fast as you could go, and forget about snappy acceleration. After the introduction of the distributor [whose design gave a system of variable timing and more efficient combustion, contingent upon engine speed], things began to change. During the First World War this electronic improvement gave vehicle and tank operators and their respective mechanics more control over their machines in the field. It was cutting-edge technology, and any advantage that made machines of destruction more workable in combat was quick to be manufactured and put into use.
<br /> </p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Romantically, the first distributor cap theft occurred somewhere in an enemy motor depot. It was a foolproof method of keeping a machine from running—an essential sabotage: once the cap is removed from the system, no electricity will get to the spark plugs—and the tradition continued in postwar years and flourished in the 1920s when burgeoning industrialism and the popularity of the automobile were on the rise. Thanks again, Mr. Ford. And while he leaned against Chicago lampposts tossing his lucky coin, mechanic Lefty O’Connor didn’t think his fingers would cause such sticky legend during the dark nights of Prohibition. He was just a man, after all.
<br /> </p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">As men go, Lefty was almost simpleminded and wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands underneath the hoods of sickly automobiles. He also liked the taste of whiskey but the law was standing between him and his glass and he knew something had to be done about it. Some say he commanded a fleet of fast boats but that would have cast him as a mere rumrunner. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. It was true he often spent his daylight hours at the lakefront but it weren’t no crime if a man wanted to watch boats come and go, were it? And it weren’t no crime for a man to cock his head and harden his gaze when he heard one o them boats’ motors not running smoothly, now, were it? It was also true that when he did hear such an aquatic flivver down on its screws he would soon be conversing with the helmsman about something that made the helmsman smile. In no time, that flivver would be purring like a seagoing pussycat, quieter than ever. He had the fingers to make it happen. While Treasury agents like Elliot Ness had some fast boats and big cars, the Mob had Lefty and Lefty had the means to disable the big bad Untouchable machines, and the booty went through more often than not. No one knew how he did it [or who did it for that matter] but he did it, dammit. He did it. He knew their distributor caps were very touchable." (<i>Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization</i>)</p><p></p><p></p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Or his telling tour detailing as here...
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"It had been a long night. So long you could cut it with non-dairy creamer and not
leave a scar. Three tables of bandmembers and post-revellers suppressed evidence of regrets and self-accusals. Denny’s was the perfect court for such coffee justice. Judges dished out reputable sentences, prosecution set the tables and kept the cups full, defense rolled silverware like ammunition and shot hot streams of arguments at dirty dishes. Juries would amble in to sit behind menus, make substitutions and pass back out into a world of decisive indecisions, leaving verdicts and water untouched." (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Or this expository male-female dialogue...
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">“I think you like women.”
“Yes, I do. I’m in complete and utter awe of women and it baffles me why truly intelligent women seem to undercut themselves so.”
An entire horn section could have tuned up before she spoke. “Like you said: survivalskills. We simply…refuse…to die.”
He slapped his forehead. “Of course.”
“And you’re so in awe. Of what exactly?”
“It’s the sheer beauty of it. Beauty is the most complex thing that can be imagined. But it exists, and in women it’s a pure definition of something that is constantly, constantly changing and redefining itself over and over.”
<br /></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">“A factory of confusion, no doubt.”
“You’re so right.” He broke into a laugh. “Confusion is a function of complexity. Complexity is a function of redefinition.”
“And where does beauty come into the equation?”
“Beauty is the equation.” He ceased laughing. “Like pi.” (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p><p></p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Or here...
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"At 35,000 feet air speed becomes the phantom of motion. Minus turbulence, an aircraft is flying in reverse, seatbacks dissolving into air, bodies becoming flotation devices. A physical illusion not noticed in the aisles with meals and drinks inching forward or backward. On the ground there is a tactile connection with positive and negative forces, matter, antimatter, and somewhere in the folds of deepening night is the locus where all sound and all energy converge. As June drove, tapes played, stars and mesas danced a slow atomic ballet, quiet conversations flowed and ebbed. In the glow of dashboard lights she was part of an eternal drama and enveloped in a beautiful loneliness. She drove until she felt lightheaded, then forced a stop, a change of drivers, and crawled back into the loft to dream, maybe even sleep....
<br /></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">An incredible, beautiful loneliness. Deep in the heart of New Mexico, or maybe they were already in Texas. The measurement of time put on hold. It felt good to choke up for no explainable reason." (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p><p></p></blockquote>
<p>
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<i>Decline and Fall</i>...has surprises for sure and even a couple rimshot jokes. Spot had been on tour, the O.G. tours in fact, when Black Flag invented non-label support touring wherein one vanful of supernauts launched itself to unknown planets counting on finding breathable oxygen. He worked hard on his novel so I don't know why he used a pen-name; it's a work to be proud of. But there's Spot taking the B-train... I don't presume that social media and Amazon are built for our generation so I expect that Spot misread what was possible via social media, which managed to deny the alienation their very coding presupposes - it can sell some things I suppose, but maybe just eyeballs and info. <i>Sounds of Two Eyes Opening</i> is out-of-print and costly now but Ryan Richardson located some unsold stock and he also has some copies of Spot's <i>Anti-Punk Rock - A History</i>which is a quality fanzine-style publication that Spot was selling himself (write orders@ryebreadrodeo.com for details). In an unused introduction to that publication Spot explains:
<p></p><p></p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I have never been a record collector and I was never one to diligently scour books and memoirs about rock & roll. Music has always been too personal to me. It exists to be created out of the ether of life - to be played, listened to, danced to and either loved or hated. And, if the right tune is played the right way, some of us have sex, experience love or hate and maybe end up with a tale to tell or some offspring to show for it. End of story. At best, music has charms to both soothe and incite the human beast; at worst, it causes trapeze displays of intellectual blunder. If you want to analyze and dissect it to death that's fine. Just leave me out of that.... There was a time when I hung on every word of the post-<i>Rolling Stone</i> school of rock journalism as if great truths about life and death would spring forth but, luckily, I came to my senses. There were some great truths to be found in such writings but there were also great lies which were harder to discern because they were dressed up in the deceptive guise of truth. To speak of entertainment is an entertainment itself, so why should anyone let the truth stand in the way of good copy? ...Ultimately, there is far too much music to talk about, too many artists and songs to consider. It's why I have resisted even talking about my involvement with that thing called punk rock. Everyone wants - in fact, expects! - the biblical retelling. When I fail to deliver that I am quickly apprised that I must not know what I'm talking about. How could I know? It doesn't sound like anything already said or look like anything already seen. So I must be a fake. Sure. If that's what you believe. Let me not disparage another's religion." (<i>Anti-Punk Rock</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">As I go through his journals I'll be setting things aside that belong in an anthology of his writing for hard copy publication. I can illustrate it with his photos and even miscellany like his sketch notations of P.A. mixing board EQ settings for famous or forgotten live gigs by Black Flag or The Misfits. Sinecure's book of Spot's photography did not focus on his music photographs so there is another book of photography to publish as well.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot's last posted music releases were on <i>bandcamp</i>, the five song "First Barrel Defused" released Nov. 2022, and the nine-minute tune, "Porcelain Porpoise Parade", released on Dec. 7, 2022. I believe these picking instrumentals must've been recorded before 2022 as Spot was no longer able to play the guitar to his satisfaction. He had recorded a video message while playing the bass sometime in early 2022 (posted Nov. 28, 2022; see link below) to promote a planned second Pacific Coast Gallery show that had to be postponed and then never happened. In the intro he states that he almost stopped playing music ten years earlier, probably the beginning of his work on the novel and memoir. The video-message begins over an expressionistic Celtic banjo vamp with the announcement: "All I ever wanted to do was violate the Great American Myth. I've always known I'm not big enought to destroy it. But that's another story."
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot's pulmonary fibrosis meant his lungs were failing and he told me he could better handle the bass. When I last saw him, Saturday Nov. 26, 2022, he had small squeeze balls to maintain dexterity and strength in his fingers. Like many who have the disease he got by with just a bit of breathlessness until he had inadvertantly moved past the point of being a likely recipient of a lung transplant - this we learned only later after we met with his pulmonologist at St. Nicholas Hospital in Sheboygan. His mother had died of the disease so I think Spot knew what he was in for. He had told me in November that he was just trying to maintain a positive outlook, acting for all I could tell as if he still had a chance at a lung transplant. A day or two after Dec. 7 he passed out while at Morningside Healthcare for tests. He was there about a week when he had a stroke and was sent up to an ICU at St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay. I visited him once a week in January and February and my sister Geri who lives in that part of Wisconsin saw him twice weekly. Spot recovered enough to leave the ICU and then he was conscious and responsive. I asked him if he wanted me to post the news of his condition with a photograph and he nodded, though with resignation, as he'd not wanted to alarm his friends. He could nod yes or shake his head no, but the therapist stressed that the stroke might easily cause him to switch up his answers. In an attempt to get the hospital staff to pay more attention to him I told a younger male nurse that Spot was a musician and record producer and when he asked which bands and I said, Black Flag, Meat Puppets and Husker Du, the guy got excited but Spot groaned loudly from around the corner that I had spilled the beans. He could hear and he knew what he thought about his life being reduced to those records!
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Spot improved and they moved him back down to the health center in Sheboygan. The head nurse there had led me to believe they didn't have the oxygen delivery capacity that he needed, but there he was until perhaps that caught up with him and he was transferred across town to the Saint Nicholas hospital. Spot may have had some flashbacks to Loyola High what with all the Catholic murals and crucifixes in these three facilities. Spot's lungs though were failing faster than his speech was improving; he never regained speech. He came so close. I didn't know it would be my last visit with him on Thursday, March 2, but he was talking with purpose so I stayed longer to keep him talking. But I just couldn't make out what he was saying and that frustrated him. He glared at me and it felt like 1984 again.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In some long ago forgotten fanzine interview Henry was asked, "Who is Spot?" Henry answered, "Spot is a one-man holocaust." When Spot was working on the first D.C.3 album at Total Access he came into SST after one day's session and pulled out his guitar and began picking out an intricate guitar theme which I 'd never heard. I knew D.C.3's songs but I didn't know that Dez had added a fancy, cleanly picked introduction to the lead song, "This Is the Dream". When I heard Spot playing the mixes of the album I recognized the intro and asked him if he had played that on the record. He said "No", he just liked it when he heard Dez put it down and played it to figure it out. When the <i>Guardian</i> asked Henry about the recent passing of Spot he told a story from the recording of the "Damaged" album at Unicorn studio in Fall 1981:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"When Black Flag recorded 'Damaged', Greg Ginn wanted to hear what it sounded like in the studio, so Spot picked up Greg's guitar and while the band were playing he absolutely nailed the track 'Damaged II', which is like math rock. Greg was an astonishing guitarist, but he was totally shut down. It was hilarious. The chess master got checkmated." (Rollins, <i>Guardian</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Henry arranged to sell some prints of Spot's photographs and the money raised helped Ryan cover some of the costs in Sheboygan and at Total Access for the memorial.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Steve Albini posted at the news of Spot's passing:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"Every music scene needed someone to document it, someone with no agenda, an open mind and hot mics. SPOT was the archetype scene recording guy, the guy we all emulated and whose role we tried to play. For a while there half the records I bought had his name on them. Requiescat." (Albini, 2023)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Bill Stevenson is a musician and songwriter first and second, for The Descendents, All, and Black Flag, but he's also the studio owner and producer-engineer who began as a player in the studios in sessions run by Spot at Media Art, Music Lab, and Total Access. Bill writes,
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"...SPOT comes charging in with a big cup of (what he called) 'Football-Go-Go Juice', in one hand, while frantically positioning mics with the free hand, and roaring, 'YEAH!!!!, we're gonna get some heap-deep-dish-gelatinous stuff happening," and we were off to the races, recording <i>Milo Goes to College</i>, all together in one room, in four days." (Stevenson, 2023)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Musically I'd say Spot has a twin legacy. As an engineer-producer he documented the bands of the era who had turned away from commercially plotting out careers in music. It was clear to younger bands that if The Ramones couldn't get on the radio they never would. So they at first turned away from that kind of ambition to face a purely aesthetic challenge of the true musical task laid before them by the best bands of the fifties, sixties and seventies: the leveraging of that inheritance to create something further, new, and perhaps as good so as to pass along an inspiration based in something beyond fame and fortune. Perhaps records that seemed to model such ambition were those by The Stooges, Velvet Underground, or the world of postwar jazz. Thanks to Spot any kid today can get a fix on what those efforts sounded like without amelioration or punches pulled. As electric as those recordings are, they are also pure, like field recordings. And those early records have sold far more as decades-old classics than they did in their day and one doesn't often hear softened, gated, echoey, frosted ambience-from-a-can anymore. <i>As a musician</i> I'd say that Spot came into his own in Austin. He writes on his <i>SoundCloud</i> page:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I've primarily been a guitarist through life but play most stringed instruments. Sports and beer failed to lead me astray. I got hooked on playin' music and then learned to play a bunch of other instruments which led to my personal highway of a helluva heaven. As if that wasn't enough, Celtic music abducted me in the 90s and I was done for." (SPOT, circa 2015)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I've mentioned the songs by title from his releases that I think are the best of his unique fusions. But you'd have to pull those from the albums and put them with a few titles that remain unreleased (on vinyl or plastic anyway) such as "1748", "Shane's Brother", "Waterloo Sunset", and "Blues Theme", and then you'd have a largely instrumental sublime rocking and jazzed mix of Celtic, European, and American folk forms that might be a tonic for that rather staid section of the record shop. Otherwise Spot's records as released sold mostly to the live audiences his touring attracted, not unusual these days and not measurable in terms of legacy. Still someday his salmon-like swim upstream against the currents of musical history may be seen as a signal part of the heroic battle of the American musician against the swindlers of the music industry waiting downstream to catch those floaters playing the current and the increasingly ungrounded audiences they create.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I used to pester Spot about whether his notebooks and rough mix cassettes could document and date his lion's share of the last run of momentous albums of the rock and roll era. Whether or not those dates and stats are in there I'm certain there will be another Spot book. I had occasion to look through a couple notebooks looking for some words for Mike Watt so we could include Spot words in a recent project that my brother Mark and I are involved in. I also found this nugget from the 1984-85 period:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"I think I can call a shot with a name: It's underdoing everything to the highest magnitude, achieving devious results by working in the opposite direction of perfection. For there can be no perfect definition of same granted. By working in its opposite direction, achieving the inverse relationship, the imperfect. Imperfection, however, being of such an instrinsic state as to allow a much greater potential of variables. Hence, the possibility for a greater magnitude of imperfection exists opposed to that of perfection." (SPOT)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">It's "we can live with the hum" all over again, only... read that again and make sure you understand it.... Does a song like "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty model the idea of perfection? I asked Spot about that song when I was looking for a scene-setting tune that could work opening the production of my script, "Naomi's Darkroom." He nodded at the mention of the 1978 hit; he remembered it as some sort of signal high pop moment although his expression told me that he considered it a refined product of some other recording industry than the one Spot invented for himself. Wyn Davis posted at the news of Spot's death that while he was at Media Art trying to figure out how Steely Dan made "Aja", Spot was making history.
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">When his father died, Spot said his mother picked back up with the things she enjoyed but had not done since before she was married. Spot took this to mean that his dad was "kind of an asshole". Spot's life as an itinerant musician-engineer-writer-photographer-mechanic didn't allow for marriage but I was struck by how many women were impacted by his passing, and he had still been in touch with many of them. His song, "Yo! Marry Me!" is a very funny nightmare scenario that explains what he thought about avoiding being an asshole by not promising anything but an interested empathetic ear and maybe some best advice.
</p> <p>
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Spot may have known his lungs were failing quite awhile ago. I think back to his trip up from Austin or L.A. back in August 2011. He was on a tour of baseball parks which sounds in retrospect like a bucket list effort. Possibly he had started in L.A. or Anaheim after moving some last stuff after the sale of his parents' house. I was staying at my parents in Naperville to help mom out with dad who had Alzheimer's. If I recall, Spot called from Kansas City where he was taking in a game and asked if I could find some Cubs tickets as he'd be in Chicago after St. Louis. My brother Matt managed to get four and we all went with brother-in-law Chris. Spot looked at home at a baseball game. Baseball is an acoustic phenomenon as well as a sporting contest. He enjoyed the sounds, the view, the hot dog and the beer, plus he appreciated the Cubs mystique and wore a Cubs cap often in later years. Then he drove up to Milwaukee to see the Brewers. He said he went into a sports bar in Milwaukee with his Cubs cap on and they were going to bar his entry until he joked, "Come on, everyone's entitled to a bad century." After the Brewer's game he went up to check out Sheboygan, which he evidently loved and soon moved to.
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In a letter to Spot, rather a recent one as these things go, Greg Ginn called Spot a "traitor" for demanding an accounting and payment of royalties before he would return any master tapes he still had. This, after Greg had spent the intervening decades mastering CD-reissues from vinyl pressings and then mastering neo-vinyl reissues from those CDs. But Spot a traitor? To what? To whom? The RIAA? The Recording Academy? Jazz? The new wave? The Minutemen did a song called "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?" People are just people though - even Greg - and we get tired of the truth. Like Spot, Greg could take a long pause before answering a question. I wasn't at the lawyer's office at Hollywood and Vine more than once or twice. You had to like Black Flag's lawyer Walter Hurst, but I didn't think it was a good sign when I glimpsed Kim Fowley walking in there for a meeting. Certainly Greg got a crash course in how the music industry really worked. Their trial lawyer, Max Abrams, explained to me before the July 1983 hearing on the Unicorn injunction that the fear was Greg on the witness stand would appear as if he was thinking up a lie before he answered, and they thought that the danger putting Chuck on the stand was that he would answer more than the question asked. So they put me on the stand, and Joseph Pope of Systematic, and Robbin Nagatoshi of Greenworld. I don't imagine I came across on the witness stand as anything other than another would-be criminal mastermind running around Hollywood. There was no jury and one pool reporter who left when the musicians weren't called, so it all came down to the quasi Honorable Bruce R. Geernaert. I got a good sidelong look at his facial expression as he was handed "Exhibit A" and looked over the un-Black Flagged version of the cover of "Everything Went Black", as if careful not to get anything on himself. Nothing on the cover meant anything to him, the individual names, white-out space where the bars had been, certainly not Spot's lengthy beatniked history of the unnamed band..., no, nothing registered with the judge except the Pettibon drawing itself. And, you know, what the hell? Case closed. If only they'd called Spot to the witness stand and then asked him any question at all...
</p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">I regret that I didn't think quicker about how to get Spot some better music to listen to in his various hospital rooms. After a few weeks of improvement and he was moved back to Sheboygan I remembered that it was the Celtic music scenes around Chicago and Milwaukee that had been the initial attraction for him to move there. And that the one musician he'd mentioned by name was Liz Carroll the fiddler, so Ryan arranged for her plan to stop by Spot's hospital room the next time she was up in Milwaukee to play for him. He'd never nodded more enthusiastically than when I reminded him on a Wednesday that she would come by on Friday to play for him. But her trip was cancelled due to a snowstorm. However Spot's friend Teek, who owns what was Spot's favorite Sheboygan hang, the Weather Center Cafe, encouraged one of his employees who plays traditional music to go play for Spot the following week. Emma knew Spot because he often played bass as the staff cleaned up after the business hours. So Spot got to hear some music in his room at Morningside Health Center on Thursday, March 2, two days before he passed. Teek later posted:
</p><blockquote>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">"Emma and her father did a duet at Morningside Thursday, March 2nd for SPOT. ...She came into the cafe Saturday teary-eyed and said there was nodding with approval [from SPOT] and the whole visit was positive!! As she ended her story, she looked down and said, 'I am sorry but our last song for him was The Parting Glass,' and I thought, SPOT would love that! So I assured her she did right! Our tears mixed with the coffee and I thanked her for her visit! Emma was close to SPOT and I'm sure he loved her visit!" (Teek Phippen, 2023)</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">"The Parting Glass" is a 17th century Scottish ballad:
</p><blockquote>
<i><p style="text-indent: 12px;">"Of all the comrades that e'er I've had,
They're sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts that e'er I had,
They'd wish me one more day to stay,
But since it fell into my lot that I should rise and you should not,
I'll gently rise and I'll softly call good night and joy be to you all,
So fill to me the parting glass and gather as the evening falls,
And gently rise and softly call goodnight and joy be to you all..."</p></i></blockquote>
<br><br><br><br><br><br>
<p></p><p>
</p><p>
<p style="text-indent: 12px;">[Illustrations: Spot self-portrait; Loyola High <i>Glass</i> literary magazine staff 1969 - Spot at right; Hermosa Beach from the air annotated by Spot from Carducci's book, <i>Enter Naomi</i>; Spot's Skatopia membership card circa 1976; Black Flag at Church - by Spot; <i>Anti-Punk Rock</i> book cover; Nig-Heist LP cover; Kamikaze Refrigerators LP cover; <i>Nae Plumb Nor Square</i> CD cover; Spot inscription inside cover of <i>Photographs By Spot</i> photo booklet; <i>Yo! Marry Me! / Caca Boudin Popo Pipi</i> 7-inch cover; <i>unhalfbaking</i> CD cover; <i>Picking Up Where I Left Off...</i> LP cover; Poster for second Pacific Coast Gallery photo exhibition - cancelled; <i>Decline And Fall Of Alternative Civilization</i> e-book cover; Spot at Wrigley Field Aug. 26 2011- by Joe Carducci]
</p><p><span style="color: black;">(Thanks to Ryan Richardson, Geri Carducci, Sandy Espinoza, Dave Van Heusen, Teek Phippen, Matt Welch, Henry Rollins, Chuck Dukowski, Wyn Davis, Dez Cadena, Chris Petersen, Vitus Matare, Geza X Gedeon, Tom Troccoli, Bill Daniel, Robin Davies, Kurt Schellenbach...)</span></p><p>
</p><p>
<i><b>Here to Blast Your Concept - An Oral History of SST Records</b></i><br /> is scheduled for publication in Fall 2025; Abe Gibson tracked down every member of every band on SST Records to interview them. The book includes extensive interviews with SPOT, Mark Adams, and The Stains except for Robert Becerra who evidently always refused to be interviewed.
</p><p>
</p><p>
***
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</p><p>
SPOT
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu2TPPLIDIA" target="_blank">walk-thru</a> with Jordan Schwartz at his 2018 Cornelius Project exhibit.
</p><p>
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
</p><p>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxIyIFOeSvI" target="_blank">SPOT</a> on bass and talking on Sept. 3, 2020.
</p><p>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<p></p><p>
<b>Jan Wenner (1946-2023)</b><br /></p><p></p><p>
</p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Joe Carducci
</p><p>
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">In a freak public relations campaign accident the old hippie publisher. nice Jewish boy wunderkind, baby boomer No. 1, Jan Wenner has died. Foul play was suspected due to the great number of possible suspects, as well as the late ex-<em>Berkeley Barb</em> record reviewer's reputation for pitch-perfect judgment in marketing matters to the "boomer" cohort that seemed to follow him anywhere. However the Suffolk County Coroner ruled the incident death by misadventure. DNA test results on years of toe-jam grime build-up on the earth shoe lodged in Mr. Wenner's esophagus proved it to be his own. Additionally, the shoe was still on his foot.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">Touted by both the world's third leading publisher Hachette Livre and America's leading source of publishing industry misinformation <em>Kirkus Reviews</em> as "a visit to the Mount Olympus of rock", the book to be rolled out, <em>The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townsend</em> (Hachette), was a repackaging designed to re-sell and in some cases re-re-sell interviews with rock music royalty Mr. Wenner had conducted during fifty years of publishing the "Bible of Rock and Roll", <em>Rolling Stone Magazine</em>. Only the Springsteen interview was done recently for this book leading music industry survivors and experts in public relations train-derailment clean-up jobs to guess that the midnight oil is burning in New Jersey. Word has it that the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voted to boot Jan from the sinking ship with only Springsteen's manager Jon Landau voting to allow him to cling desperately to the board. Clive Davis, whose net worth is believed to be north of $800 million was quoted as laughing, "You better believe Jann (sic) cashed the advance and spent the money!" The Harvard trained lawyer was the president of Columbia Records, Arista Records, RCA Records, and CEO of BMG North America. None of the artists whose souls Mr. Davis has collected over the course of his hundred-and-sixty year career in the record business appears in the Wenner book nor is alive to testify to any matters within or outside of the statute of limitations under relevant entertainment laws of the State of California.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">The long closeted homosexual Mr. Wenner was believed to have started his magazine in order to meet the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Once this was achieved he fired a politically radical staff obsessed with the MC5, passed along Mayor Richard J. Daley's warnings to stay away from the '68 Democratic Convention before moving away from music coverage for political coverage. Jan changed his name to the teutonic Jann, a strange thing for even the least observant Jew to do. Nevertheless he resolutely stayed in the closet all through the AIDS epidemic, moving the publication out of San Francisco to Manhattan and founding a separate magazine for music called <em>Record</em> while <em>Rolling Stone</em> added coverage of movie stars to dress up its coverage of Democratic party politics. Wenner did exit the closet when he no longer needed his wife's family money after the successful launch of <em>US Weekly</em> wherein the schlub turned on the beautiful people while struggling to lose weight and get into Greenwich Village shape. He remained a staunch opponent of all things punk rock. He was credited with providing cover for radio programmer Lee Abram's "Superstars" format which successfully nationalized formerly free-form underground FM radio and undercut the evolution of the music for the purpose of defending and propping up platinum-selling careers of The Eagles, Pink Floyd, Boston, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The ex-Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and U2 - you know, The Masters.
</p><p></p><p style="text-indent: 12px;">It is considered a measure of Wenner's achievements in culture jamming that a San Francisco superstar such as Ricky Williams (Crime, The Sleepers, Flipper, Toiling Midgets) could make his debut appearance in the pages of <em>Rolling Stone</em> as an obituary. It is a further measure of Jan's successful cultural cover-up that careers of such geniuses as Spot, Mark Adams, and Robert Becerra were conducted almost entirely under the music industry's and media industry's radars. In recent years Wenner's son, Gus, turned the mag's online presence into a factory of links to empty calories about all manner of 80s underground artists once ignored now proferred to gain relevance today. Jan S. Wenner will be missed by artists and entertainers high and low. Culture writer Richard Meltzer on hearing the news remembered Jan as "a full-fledged 100% SLIME CREATURE."</p>
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<b>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho...</b>
<p>
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/the-end-of-the-human-era" target="_blank">The human era is ending</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Thinkers who look forward to superhuman or post-human species always imagine them as more knowing, not more playful or funnier. These imagined superhumans never possess what is arguably humankind’s only unique attribute – a sense of the absurd. The superior species envisioned by techno-futurists are inflated versions of themselves, showing off their cleverness in a never-ending Ted talk – for some of us, a vision of hell. Fortunately, there is no prospect of any such species coming into being. If AI is evolving in Darwinian fashion, chance will be a decisive factor. The geopolitical conflicts that prevent a pause in the development of AI systems may well blow them up. If superfast machines trigger a nuclear war, they will destroy much of their infrastructure and possibly themselves. Ultra-intelligent machines are as vulnerable to extinction as any other product of evolution.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Robert Tombs in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-endless-myth-of-british-decline/" target="_blank">The endless myth of British decline</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Britain’s imperial power was always largely a matter of show: as a disillusioned George Orwell put it, being a ‘hollow posing dummy… trying to impress the “natives”.’ The empire was based on trade and broad acquiescence. Yet it brought little economic benefit to Britain during most of its existence (though it enriched some of the colonies) and arguably it distorted economic development. Britain did not need an empire in order to trade: the United States has always been the bedrock of its global trade and investment, and Argentina was a major supplier of food. There was no possibility, and little appetite, to make the Empire a permanent global federation. Expensive and potentially dangerous global strategies were required to defend it. There was no way Britain could maintain it by force, nor did most of its people and politicians wish to do so. When India became independent and broke up, its central provinces (bigger than England) had only 17 British officials, 19 British police officers, and no British troops. Only from a very peculiar viewpoint can the end of empire be seen as decline.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Theodore Dalrymple in CITY JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/ill-served" target="_blank">Ill-Served: The British lack the qualities to succeed in a postindustrial age</a>.
</p><blockquote>
We are at an odd, and not reassuring, conjuncture. Britain faces an economic recession, a labor shortage (as a growing proportion of the population no longer works), stagnation in productivity, and unprecedented levels of illegal immigration. Indebtedness, both public and private, is great and growing; a gaping commercial deficit exists with the rest of the world. Current standards of living can continue only through further borrowing, which may not be possible for much longer. Both inflation and taxation are at their highest levels for nearly half a century. It is hard to see any light at the end of this long tunnel: the instinct of many, particularly of the most productive and ambitious, is to flee. They have seen the future, and it is impoverishment. A situation like this does not strike like lightning: it takes years of improvidence and foolishness to lay the ground for it. Demagoguery and frivolity (though without accompanying gaiety) have proved a deadly combination.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Colin Burrow in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n19/colin-burrow/ah-that-s-better" target="_blank">Ah, that's better: Orwell's Anti-Radicalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The key thing Orwell learned from the 1940s was that his habitual representations of people entrapped by social norms could be amped up into full-on totalitarian horror. And if that left socialism looking like something that could only be defined negatively, as not what Stalin did and not what Big Brother did, then so be it. The main thing was to resist fascism rather than to imagine a workable alternative. It is radically disappointing, and has often disappointed radicals, that Orwell’s alternative to a totalitarian destructive modernity so often looked like Edwardian England. In his teens he had Housman’s A Shropshire Lad by heart, and it shows. The middle-aged George Bowling, hero of Coming Up for Air (1939), longs to return to the ponds of giant carp from his childhood, but discovers they’ve been built over by a sprawling housing estate, full of smug incomers who have the taint of Orwell’s earlier description of socialist cranks: ‘I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, Nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in Ealing.’</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Edward Luttwak at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/08/has-xi-jinping-bankrupted-china/" target="_blank">Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
How do wonderful infrastructures destroy wealth? One example is sufficient. In 2018, on a drive along the North Korea border, I encountered a vast and beautiful white six-lane highway suspension bridge across the Yalu river. It was built to connect the Chinese city of Dandong with North Korea, to service the trade boom Xi expected with the promised opening of the North’s economy. Naturally, it would require a customs house, duly built as a very impressive high-rise, warehouses and more than 10 blocks of commercial offices. Yet when I visited, the bridge ended in a North Korean potato field, traffic was exactly zero, the customs house was empty and so were the office blocks and warehouses, some paid for by private border merchants who were bankrupt when I met them in Dandong (they openly cursed Xi for going along with the US-sponsored Security Council Embargo).</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Freddie DeBoer interviewed in the New Statesman, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-interview/2023/08/freddie-deboer-interview-elite-identity-politics-destroying-left" target="_blank">Elite identity politics is destroying the left</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Like BLM, the Democratic Party is dominated by an elite, he argues. “You have an intellectual class, within liberalism, within the Democratic Party, full of people who have never suffered,” deBoer said. “When that’s true… politics becomes a virtue contest. Politics is completely immaterial to [a member of the elite]. You will not suffer if a Republican goes into the White House. It won’t make a difference to you if they cut Medicaid, because you don’t need to be on Medicaid. It won’t make a difference to you if they cut food stamps, because you don’t need food stamps. So politics is permanently immaterial. That is the perfect breeding ground for the kind of politics where you say: ‘If they serve bánh mì in the college cafeteria that’s cultural appropriation.’”</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Fred Skulthorp in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/the-big-turn-off/" target="_blank">The big turn off</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The biggest piece of “misinformation” that has spread over the past decade is that the news must bend to the apparent apocalyptic whim of the population. People are frightened. They are looking for answers in dangerous places. They fear climate change, pestilence, a world dominated by tech. The victorious post-1989 tenets of the free world — its markets, democracy and stable information systems — are now under threat. Journalists must act and restore the lost consensus that existed pre-2012. They must speak truth not to power, but to disgruntled populations across the West. In attempting to do this, however, they themselves have come to embody the worst excesses of post-journalism. BBC Verify recently crowned a decade of dumbed down and misguided audience strategies when it ended up actually introducing conspiracy theories to a group of people who had never heard of them.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Kat Rosenfield at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/09/stephen-kings-boomer-propaganda/" target="_blank">Stephen King’s boomer propaganda</a>.
</p><blockquote>
There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Dominic Green in LITERARY REVIEW on Mick Brown’s book, <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/dont-worry-be-happy" target="_blank">The Nirvana Express - How the Search for Enlightenment Went West</a>.
<blockquote>
The principle of mutual exploitation had already been established by the time the Maharishi came on the scene. Krishnamurti had primed himself to address the West’s spiritual crisis in its own terms through his reading of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The Maharishi could hardly complain when Californian refugees from Nazism cooked up the Human Potential Movement; he too had ‘read extensively in the literature of twentieth-century psychology and psychiatry’. The Maharishi supposedly told the Beach Boys that if they meditated, they would become ‘the most influential group in the world’. He promised the American Broadcasting Corporation that The Beatles would appear in a TV special. ‘He’s not a modern man,’ George Harrison explained to his bandmates. ‘He just doesn’t understand these things.’ The Maharishi understood the modern world better than George did. That was why he ‘always seemed to have an accountant at his side’. God is in the details, especially when it comes to the business of religion.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
William Harris in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/05/ian-penman-rainer-werner-fassbinder-thousands-of-mirrors-postwar-counterculture" target="_blank">Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors Is a Love Letter to Postwar Counterculture</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In a telling phrase that Penman makes much of, Fassbinder once said he wanted to appear “ugly on the cover of <i>Time</i>.” The phrase suggests something of the high-low medley of his persona. His movies are undeniably arthouse, claustrophobic productions that hold us for too long in humid interior rooms filled with the wrong furniture and the wrong people. But much of these movies’ style and inspiration comes from lower cultural depths: gangster films (early Fassbinder), the theater (a good splash of Brecht, but heftier pours of cabaret, vaudeville, the flamboyant world of underworld nightclubs), and, perhaps most importantly, the melodramas of German-exile-turned-Hollywood-pioneer Douglas Sirk. From Sirk, Fassbinder learned a certain simplicity, a soft moral sensibility, a humanist feel for the sadness of life. A way to make political films out of everyday scraps.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Julie Burchill in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/be-more-karen/" target="_blank">Be more Karen</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Imagine if a name favoured by any other ethnic group was used as a synonym for being unpleasant. This is yet another pathetic attack on women and the working class, handily combined in one stereotype. Those who use the term try to weasel out of what in others they would call out as punching down by attributing privilege to their Karen. But if you are an educated person seeking to draw contempt towards a less educated person, how come that doesn’t count? The only women called Karen I’ve ever known came from council houses. Why not call this privileged, arrogant white woman by a more accurate name, such as India, Emily or Charlotte? Because that would be implicating their own social group. In 2020, academic Charlotte Riley and influencer Amelia Dimoldenberg recorded a podcast for BBC Sounds advising women how not to become Karens: ‘Educate yourself…’ giggled Amelia. ‘Read some books’. Charlotte added that white women should ‘think critically about your identity and your privilege… get out of the way’. ‘Yeah, basically leave’, agreed Amelia. What a smorgasbord of unreconstructed snobbery; middle-class women telling working-class women to shut up.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Laura Snapes in GUARDIAN on Marlene Marder’s book, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/02/soft-sandwiches-street-fights-and-surrealism-marlene-marders-memoir-of-swiss-punks-kleenexliliput" target="_blank">Soft sandwiches, street fights and surrealism</a>.
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Rough Trade’s [Geoff] Travis was “astonished” that Kleenex were from Switzerland. “I had no idea what their real circumstances were, what their parents did or where they came from. In those days we really just concentrated on the work. There’s a kind of purity to that. You can hear whether people are sincere in the notes they play.” (Predictably, much of the British music press invoked stereotypes about cuckoo clocks and yodelling when writing about them.) Travis signed the band after Sounds magazine made their debut EP single of the week and Fischli smuggled 500 hand-folded copies into London. In 1979 they came over to tour with Cabaret Voltaire and the Raincoats – until the Cabs’ girlfriends refused to let them tour with women and English punks Spizzenergi stood in. Raincoats singer and bassist Gina Birch describes reading Marder’s account of the tour as “incredibly evocative … so many women started bands in that period. It was so weird how so many of us suddenly found that we could be in a band, and before we didn’t know we could do that.” She <i>“loved”</i> Kleenex. “This naive, shrieky minimalism. But I thought we were better!”</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Katie Way at <i>hellgatenyc.com</i>, <a href="https://hellgatenyc.com/tom-verlaine-used-book-sale-brooklyn" target="_blank">I Survived the Tom Verlaine Book Sale</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I first heard about the sale, a collaboration between Morse and D'Angelo's Better Read Than Dead and the D.C.-based Capitol Hill Books, from a cool acquaintance's Instagram story. "Tom Verlaine was as prodigious and visionary of a book scout as he was musician and songwriter—scouring for decades to accumulate a 50,000 book collection as staggering in depth as it is volume," the flyer proclaimed, promising literature alongside books on art, music, mysticism, occult, poetry, religion, and spirituality. "Please join us for this first (partial) appearance of putting it back out in the hands of its next stewards and readers."</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Alan Rider interviews Mark Perry at <i>outsideleft.com</i>, <a href="https://www.outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=2716" target="_blank">Lost in Room</a>.
</p><blockquote>
People that were into punk and new wave are now in their 60s and maybe retired and have lots of disposable income. They want to buy books and CDs to validate their teenage years and read about how good it was to give themselves a pat on the back. I know that sounds quite cynical, but I honestly think the biggest audience is people who just want to be reminded how good it was. I've recently worked with people in New York on a range of Sniffin' Glue t-shirts. I didn't want to do it originally, but this is a completely new audience, so I find that a more interesting project. I think a lot of the problems with things like the Rebellion Festival is that it's preaching to the converted, people that already know about it, so you're just regurgitating it all the time. Will it really reach a new audience? I don't think so. It's like a theme park because people go there to be reminded what it was like when they were 18, but in a safe environment, because they're all overweight now, they drink too much, they've all got mortgages and they all go back to their hotels afterwards. The great irony of what punk has become is it's now this thing that we used to rail against. We used to rail against nostalgia, and punk has now become that. I find it really depressing. It’s all become like a theme park for people that are too old to do something new. We still want to listen to what we suppose is cutting-edge music, and read endless biographies or autobiographies about people from 40 years ago.</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Thurston Moore interviewed at <i>thequietus.com</i>, <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/33480-thurston-moore-sonic-life-interview" target="_blank">Confusion is text</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Major Labels were the big bad ogres of 90s culture, supposedly appropriating artists and abusing their work and fleecing them, though they seem like benevolent renaissance-era patrons compared to the big streaming companies, who’ve liberated musicians from the dream of making a living from their art. Moore himself doesn’t stream, saying “I don’t get as much out of the listening experience – it doesn’t have the same friction as playing a cassette or a record. And that’s just me being an old man, but I don’t get any spiritual connection.” At 65, he says he doesn’t listen to music much anymore anyway. “I feel like I've decoded a lot of what I really enjoy. I'm more interested other aspects of it, in signifiers. I'm more interested in what the record looks like and feels like and smells like, because I know what it's going to sound like. I very rarely play records, but I like to have them. They're objects that that I glean a lot of creative impulse and energy from, just knowing that this activity is going on.”</blockquote>
<p>^^^</p><p>
Farewell Jamie Reid, artist and anarchist, forgotten by Croydon<a href="https://insidecroydon.com/2023/08/10/farewell-jamie-reid-artist-and-anarchist-forgotten-by-croydon/" target="_blank"> at <i>insidecroydon.com</i>.</a>
</p><blockquote>
Much of that style of [his Sex Pistols] work can be traced back to Reid’s time in Croydon, with the countercultural Suburban Press, which he began in 1970 alongside Jeremy Brook and Nigel Edwards, and was published out of 433 London Road and then 9 Sidney Road, SE25, the forerunner of thousands of fanzines that would be produced in the following decade. “We are left dwarfed in the streets by huge towers of bureaucracy. An architecture and environment of commerce has been created to manipulate our lives,” began a 20-page diatribe against the “Manhattan-isation” of Croydon contained in Suburban Press No5 published in 1972.</blockquote>
More about <a href="https://radpresshistory.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/croydons-suburban-press-and-the-graveyard-of-commerce/" target="_blank">Suburban Press</a>.
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<b>From the Wyoming desk of Joe Carducci...</b>
<p>
Steve Fulton in EASY READER, <a href="https://easyreadernews.com/mission-from-marz-mari-fultons-early-descendents-photos/" target="_blank">Mari Fulton's Early Descendents Photos</a>.
</p><blockquote>
While social and engaging, she never quite fit-in with the kids of Manhattan Beach. There were many cruel words. Friend groups ditched Marz. So she found an alternative path of her own. I find my mom's photos in another box. After scanning all of them, I return to the box of Marz's photos. One set of them in particular catches my eye. Photos of a band taken in what looks like an abandoned field. Their name scrawled in various places in spray paint and masking tape. I was a huge Descendents fan in the late '80s in high school. (notice the "e" not the "a") But these don't look like the guys I remember. There can't be two bands, can there? ...I sent sample photos to my other sister. Maybe she can shed some light? She's bemused to see them. She was younger, but was there too. She sees a clue in the "Descendants" photos. "That's Frank and David." "David used to play 'on-loan' to bands connected to the Church in Hermosa." Of course. David. Marz's ex-husband, David Nolte.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Joe Carducci interview in OX-FANZINE, <a href="https://www.ox-fanzine.de/interview/joe-carducci-9821" target="_blank">SST, Das Leben und Der Tod</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Q: I really dig your photography. When on your hikes do you also encounter a lot of wild life or evidence of any distant human activity? How might any or all of this factor into your story development?
A: The national forest near me isn't a big national attraction like Yellowstone but there are people you see, mostly on the trails hiking. I haven't seen so many moose or elk in recent years and have only ever seen one wolf. We don't have grizzly bears but do have black bears though I haven't seen any. I think I have seen their scat on ground. I try not to go crashing through the woods where I can't see what's around me. I stay out in the open so if a mountain lion comes at me I have time to pull out my bear-spray. I'm generally hiking above the wet, marshy areas that attract the animals. I do come across old mining pits and cabins. I figure those are from the 1920s. There's a heavy steel boiler laying up somewhere and a mine one can spot on the ridge above Centennial. I do consider my photography as something like location research for The Winter Hand script.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Joe Carducci interview in TRUST, <a href="https://www.trust-zine.de/" target="_blank">Enter Joe: SST, Wyoming And All That...</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Q: Does it flatters you when young rock writers, e.g. Simon Reynolds, one of the most prominent ones, cite you as a major influence for their music writing? Or is more cool when you get props from like Greil Marcus or New York Times writers? Did you have as a young music-writer kind of an idol, probably Lester Bangs or so?
A: I think from a fairly early stage of American letters in the 19th century writers were either "redskins" or "palefaces" - those who took advantage of the unfinished American frontier to do less classicly-oriented work and "go native", or those who worked within and measured themselves against the English and European literary traditions. I'm reading 'The Confident Years 1885-1915' by Van Wyck Brooks and its an impressive survey of regional American literature then and he's often gauging that measure of American-ness. I thought I'd just read the two chapters about Chicago writers for this project I'm doing but the whole book is very interesting - published in 1952. After that, in our days, I think rock and roll, movies, tv, comics, etc., what R. Meltzer called "gulcher" as if not quite culture or Kultur, led us "redskins" to half-jokingly treat our gulcher to griticism so-to-speak - not exactly tenure-track works to build an academic career on! But Brooks went to Harvard when you probably got alot out of that schooling. Today you just get refined like Wonder Bread, a real finishing school! As far as my props, there wasn't much to gain by mentioning me in American above-ground media, but in the UK they saw I had a consistent frame of reference that even if antithetical to what the Brits thought, it was interesting to them and they engaged it. So I got more interest from where the books weren't even available - this is back before amazon made it a bit easier.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Punk and Porn in New York City – Part 1 at <i>therialtoreport.com</i>: <a href="https://www.therialtoreport.com/2023/02/19/elda-stilletto/?fbclid=IwAR3C218LMWIVnSloljkru689hGXatr_5iAzqmYRvpPQMv9_HTVj6j_1YfuM" target="_blank">Elda Stilletto, Warhol, Glitter Rock, and the Birth of Blondie</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Sylvain Sylvain: Max’s started to change how music was influenced: younger kids, like Patti Smith, Wayne County, and others started to be part of Max’s famed back room. Max’s focus went to music… and the days of Warhol’s dominance began to wane.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Ivan Julian at <i>tidal.com</i>, <a href="https://tidal.com/magazine/article/ivan-julian/1-89688?fbclid=IwAR3SsnpmEN10Dd8XS2MGFpinyzyrDM9xYjmWLHnuU826pmdP_Sr9Cwd-o7E" target="_blank">Interview</a> by Brad Cohan.
</p><blockquote>
<b>Q</b>: When you first arrived in New York, were you aware of what was going on at places like CBGB — that there was a scene on the verge of blowing up?
<b>A</b>: Yes and no, because I was in Europe. I was playing in Europe at the time, and I decided I was going to bite the bullet and move to New York. It was scary back then. When I came here, I put an ad in a paper [that was] kind of like a Village Voice just for musicians and the scene and all that. I put the ad in, and a month later it came out and on the front cover there was a full-page picture of Richard, explaining that he was a poet from CBGB. In the back of the paper where the classified ads were, I had an ad saying, “Have guitar. Will travel.” So Quine called me up and asked me, “So you want to come down and audition?” I heard what they were doing; they had, like, two and a half songs at the time. It was an opportunity to write, which was another thing I was looking for, and to tour, which was another thing I was looking for, and to put out a record, which is another thing I was looking for. It just all worked for me.
<b>Q</b>: Did you hit it off right away with Hell and Quine?
<b>A</b>: Well, yeah! To be honest, I thought Quine was Hell. [Richard] was being very quiet and somber there with his bass, and Quine was kind of directing the rehearsal. I didn’t have a picture in my mind of what exactly Richard Hell looked like. I just saw that both of them had dark glasses on...</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Miriam Dobson in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, on Stephen Coates' book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/miriam-dobson/tuts-on-the-trolleybus" target="_blank">Bone Music - Soviet X-Ray Audio</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Some young men – fewer women, it seems – refused to conform. A youth subculture developed that kept alive the wartime fascination with Western, especially American, popular culture. In both Moscow and Leningrad, a section of the central avenue – Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad, Ulitsa Gorkogo in Moscow – was known as the brodvei (‘broadway’) and became the main drag for young men in distinctive clothing: bright ties, long coats, silk scarfs, a wide-brimmed hat and flared trousers, later superseded by drainpipes. Their rubber-soled boots were particularly eye-catching, as well as heavy. ‘I don’t think anyone in the West wore anything like it,’ Kozlov writes. ‘It was our own invention.’ These young stilyagi, or ‘style-hunters’, spoke their own slang and adapted the jitterbug, the lindy hop, boogie-woogie and the foxtrot, giving them subversive names: the ‘Canadian’, the ‘triple Homburg’, the ‘atom dance’. Among Coates’s protagonists are Boris Taigin and Ruslan Bogoslovsky, who as teenagers in 1947 found that the only way to get hold of the music they loved was illicitly. At first they were just customers, but soon they became dealers.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Timothy Farrington in WSJ, on John Szwed's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/cosmic-scholar-review-harry-smiths-strange-frequencies-8558cc53" target="_blank">Cosmic Scholar</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVmd_pGK9QDJhpZd922Vod1WTP44IhlGZ97RQ08v-bL0HkHyIRWUOwqCoHNU3OneMqp1nOYc8rbUsVbGtgQGXV18G5TJ2P3C2o0y8jnK-r9L8-UCBEFiI8o6XkeGitTbEOml6WZV0tdL0-nEpyKb6Zvw5Ko1lVidZp1M37ivXL69hKuWlAiuzbNpRwy3Hj/s300/NV-161-HarrySMithCosmicScholar-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="200" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVmd_pGK9QDJhpZd922Vod1WTP44IhlGZ97RQ08v-bL0HkHyIRWUOwqCoHNU3OneMqp1nOYc8rbUsVbGtgQGXV18G5TJ2P3C2o0y8jnK-r9L8-UCBEFiI8o6XkeGitTbEOml6WZV0tdL0-nEpyKb6Zvw5Ko1lVidZp1M37ivXL69hKuWlAiuzbNpRwy3Hj/s1600/NV-161-HarrySMithCosmicScholar-sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Mr. Szwed makes fine farce out of Smith's relations with friends, admirers and patrons (often the same people). One recalled Smith asking "for a couple of dollars to get a cab to Allen Ginsberg's to get $5 so that he could take a cab to Peggy Guggenheim's to ask her for $2,000 for his research." Ginsberg was fond of Smith ("so devious, so saintly") but, despite his presumably high tolerance for irregular modes of life, found the increasingly ill Smith exasperating as a permanent guest. When Bob Dylan came over for an evening in 1985 to play Ginsberg his new album, Smith yelled at them to turn it down. Mr. Dylan then asked to meet the mystical eminence, but Smith refused to get out of bed.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Kris Maher in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-last-washboard-factory-isnt-ready-to-throw-in-the-towel-11674744553" target="_blank">America's Last Washboard Company Is Still Cleaning Up</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Sales jumped 57% in 2020 over the prior year, the company said, goosed by pandemic fears of societal collapse and limited laundry service. "There were groups of people that were panicking," said Mr. Gerstner. His other business ventures include a nearby zip line attraction and local hotel. Columbus Washboard sold more than a million boards a year in its 1940s heyday. That was when wood-and-corrugated-steel boards were used for scrubbing clothing and linens by hand in a washtub of soap and water. Washing machines and postwar prosperity set off an inexorable decline. Today, about 40% of company sales go to bluegrass and folk musicians who use the boards for percussion.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Scott Yenor in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-first-ladies-of-country-music/" target="_blank">The First Ladies of Country Music</a>.
</p><blockquote>
It speaks volumes that Cline’s brand of loneliness has all but disappeared among female country singers. More women over 45 are unmarried today—both as a percentage and as an absolute number—than at any time in our history, and the number is climbing. Yet feminine loneliness and regret have declined as musical themes and in art generally. Either women simply do not mind their newfound solitude, or an entire domain of female experience is going unspoken and repressed. Rising rates of female depression and medication would suggest the latter: women have not lost their longing for love, just their outlets for expressing it. Today’s songs insist on celebrating women’s bravery while minimizing or ignoring their regrets. But does refusing to acknowledge vulnerabilities make one stronger, or weaker?</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Roni Robin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/health/childbirth-fear-women.html" target="_blank">Many Women Have an Intense Fear of Childbirth, Survey Suggests</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Earlier studies have linked preterm birth to psychosocial stress, but this study is the first to find an association with tokophobia, Dr. Thayer said. Fear of childbirth was higher among all socially disadvantaged women, including lower-income women and those with less education, she found. Women who were single, those who were receiving care from an obstetrician and those who were having their first child were also more likely to be more fearful. Women with high-risk pregnancies and those suffering from prenatal depression were also more likely to fear childbirth, Dr. Thayer found.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jill Filipovic in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/trigger-warnings-feminism-teen-girls-mental-health/674759/" target="_blank">The Resilience Gap</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Back then, I was convinced that such warnings were sometimes necessary to convey the seriousness of the topics at hand (the term deeply problematic appears a mortifying number of times under my byline). Even so, I chafed at the demands to add ever more trigger warnings, especially when the headline already made clear what the post was about. But warnings were becoming the norm in online feminist spaces, and four words at the top of a post—“Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault”—seemed like an easy accommodation to make for the sake of our community’s well-being. We thought we were making the world just a little bit better. It didn’t occur to me until much later that we might have been part of the problem.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Julie Burchill in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-is-now-a-nation-of-shoplifters/" target="_blank">Britain Is Now a Nation of Shoplifters</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I spoke to my favourite worker in my local supermarket, a cheerful and witty older gentleman I see most mornings, about the rise in shoplifting. He wears a body camera but is not allowed to caution any of the thieves who steal from his shop every day (anything from six to ten incidents, more at weekends). One regular is so brazen that he shouts ‘Same time tomorrow!’ as he leaves. I asked the worker if he thought replacing checkout workers with self-service machines had had anything to do with the rise in thieving and he answered immediately: ‘No – it was lockdown... People forgot how to interact decently with people and they’ve never relearned,’ he said.... The death of Britain’s high-street shops, along with pubs and churches, is part of the relentless atomisation of society that was turbo-charged by lockdown, making lonely people lonelier, lazy people lazier and crazy people crazier. If the idle and parasitic can carry on attacking the industrious and productive without fear of punishment, we will turn from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Wesley Lowery in IN THESE TIMES, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/an-unlikely-mayor-chicago-brandon-johnson" target="_blank">Meet Brandon Johnson, Chicago's New Mayor</a>.
</p><blockquote>
His father's family migrated from Mississippi to Chicago's South Side, while his mother's made their way north from Tennessee, ultimately landing in nearby Elgin. Johnson's parents were born into sprawling Black families - his father the oldest of 12, his mother in the middle of 15 - who came north clutching tight to their Christian faith. Johnson's grandfather was a pastor in thecharismatic tradition in which he'd been raised as a sharecropper. But in 1984, Johnson's parents, Andrew and Wilma Jean, decided to break away to found their own congregation on a style of preaching more about community than compelling the spirit.... Johnson and his siblings - there are at least 10, including those who were adopted and foster children - learned to drive behind the wheel of a 15-passenger van, ferrying neighborhood kids to the church for music lessons, tutoring and youth groups. Leading the church didn't pay, so Johnson's father continued working whatever jobs he could find - as a handyman, a carpenter, a contractor, a truck driver - while Wilma Jean, who had a fifth-grade education and a cosmetology license, did hair out of their crowded three-bedroom home. Their deal was that Wilma Jean would handle the church's administrative work while Andrew, when he was not working his paying jobs, did the preaching and teaching. Meanwhile, their small army of offspring served as musicians, janitors and Sunday school teachers. Johnson-Williams led the choir; Brandon played the drums.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Claire Cain Miller in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/upshot/maiden-names-change.html" target="_blank">A Tradition Going Strong: Brides Who Take Their Husbands’ Names</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The bridal tradition of taking a husband’s last name remains strong. Among women in opposite-sex marriages in the United States, four in five changed their names, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.
--What last name did you give your children? Some families break with tradition when it comes to their children’s last names. Please share your story. (The Times won’t quote you or refer to your submission in a story before talking to you first.) Email the reporter on this story, Claire Cain Miller.--
Fourteen percent kept their last names, the survey found. The youngest women were most likely to have done so: A quarter of respondents who were 18 to 34 kept their names.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Madina Shogunbekova at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/human-rights-in-asia-tajik-women-turn-to-polygamy-to-survive" target="_blank">Tajik women turn to polygamy to survive</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Immediately after the divorce, Manizha received offers to become a second or third wife through the nikah, a traditional Islamic marriage ceremony, with the promise of providing for her financially. "At first I refused because I hadn't yet processed the traumatic separation from my first husband. But because of my financial situation, and because I didn't have an apartment, I had to consider the offers," Manizha added. She soon became the second wife of a local official. "Fortunately he's very young, only 27 years old," she said. Her new husband spends three days a week with Manizha and the rest of the time at his house with his first wife and two children. According to Manizha, the first wife knows about the second marriage and does not mind. "Being a second wife is my decision, I was not forced into it. At the moment, I'm very happy that there is someone in my life who takes care of me," she said. "You can't go against traditions and culture; I have to take life as it is and thank Allah for everything he has given me."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Rachel Shteir at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-abandonment-of-betty-friedan?sra=true&cid=gen_sign_in" target="_blank">The Abandonment of Betty Friedan</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In another famous passage from <i>The Feminine Mystique</i>... Friedan criticizes college administrators and professors for instilling sexist ideas of femininity among college students and, in general, contributing to sexism in the academy. “The few college presidents and professors who were women either fell into line or had their authority — as teachers and as women — questioned,” she writes:
If they were spinsters, if they had not had babies, they were forbidden by the mystique to speak as women. … The brilliant scholar, who did not marry but inspired many generations of college women to the pursuit of truth, was sullied as an educator of women. She was not named president of the women’s college whose intellectual tradition she carried to its highest point; the girls’ education was put in the hands of a handsome, husbandly man, more suitable to indoctrinating girls for their proper feminine role. The scholar often left the women’s college to head a department in a great university, where the potential Ph.D.s were safely men, for whom the lure of scholarship, the pursuit of truth, was not deemed a deterrent to sexual fulfillment.
Behind this critique of academic sexism lies a visceral horror. Friedan recoiled from the kind of life she saw female academics leading. She did not want to be like these lonely women. Her identity depended on a traditional ideal of femininity, even as she sought to overturn that ideal in her work. And, for some reason, she thought she could sidestep this conflict by going into radical journalism.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jennifer Banks in COMMONWEAL, <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/natality-mortality-banks-arendt-children-india-feminism" target="_blank">Reckoning with Birth</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Those who philosophize properly, Plato asserted centuries before Seneca, are those who practice death and dying. In the Christianity that matured alongside such Greek and Roman influences, the crucifix would overshadow the manger as the central symbol of liturgical worship, with Christ’s death and resurrection accruing more theological significance in most communities than Mary’s miraculous birthing. Celibacy and an otherworldly asceticism would be recommended for those on the fast track to salvation; the end was imminent, many early Christians believed, and true seekers should seek not to perpetuate the human race, but to be reborn into God’s kingdom. “Remember to keep death daily before your eyes,” St. Benedict advised a faithful flock of celibate monastics in the medieval period.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Scott Alexander at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://archive.ph/1Rqe5" target="_blank">Galton, Ehrlich, Buck</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<b>Beroe</b>: Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
<b>Adraste</b>: Like what?
<b>Beroe</b>: Let’s say - financial incentives for the most talented people to have lots of children. Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank, where people with great socially-valuable gifts are encouraged to deposit gametes, and couples who can’t conceive naturally - maybe infertile people, maybe lesbians - are encouraged to make use of them. And making voluntary contraception free and easily available, since by far the most common reason for the less-genetically-blessed part of the population having children is that they want contraceptives but can’t access them.
<b>Adraste</b>: Oh, interesting. I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”. But of course there are many things we don’t allow people to offer other people money for. Like sex work. Or organ donation. Although people are allowed to have sex and donate organs for free, we think the desperation of poverty is so compelling, and the danger of these irreversible actions so great, that we ban seemingly-voluntary economic transactions around them. Call me a BETA-MEALR, but I think sterilization should be in the same category. Still, your suggestion avoided that, so good job.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Adam Kirsch in AMERICAN SCHOLAR, <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/the-end-is-only-the-beginning/" target="_blank">The End Is Only the Beginning</a>.
</p><blockquote>
If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature. But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming and fire. Such a view forms the basis of antihumanism, a system of thought that removes humans from their pedestal and contends that, given our penchant for destruction—not only of ourselves but also all other species—we are less deserving of existence than are animals, plants, rocks, water, or air. For antihumanists, the only way off the precipice is a fall, with the survivors left to pick up the pieces. And if there are no survivors, that wouldn’t be a tragedy; there will always be beings in the world, even if there are no human beings. Australian philosopher Toby Ord uses the image of the crumbling ledge in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020).... Ord is not an antihumanist but rather a transhumanist, a research fellow at the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which looks to scientific and technological advances as the only path forward. Transhumanists agree with antihumanists that human nature is morally and physically circumscribed in ways that make it impossible for us to get past the precipice. They likewise agree that Homo sapiens is doomed to disappear. But for transhumanists, this is a wonderful prospect because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Nathan Pinkoski in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/06/fukuyama-v-fukuyama" target="_blank">Fukuyama v. Fukuyama</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMSiq651IaceAzGx0RzTVTJSAlCi54E3HVD5ZXZ3lFyMFQrbashnm6gz-U0ryBe-6JhwgKVH_LH7iYrPO8_Y2a08aUfXeR6gM38L-eL8JIyjaPPePduc3nnViJNRSRxb44s8Dt3xYjLZlzHt9WPf9T4hVn8cIMYSWxcj18Wi1RpNxecGPZw3Ebz1f91bla/s268/NV-161-FirstThings.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="200" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMSiq651IaceAzGx0RzTVTJSAlCi54E3HVD5ZXZ3lFyMFQrbashnm6gz-U0ryBe-6JhwgKVH_LH7iYrPO8_Y2a08aUfXeR6gM38L-eL8JIyjaPPePduc3nnViJNRSRxb44s8Dt3xYjLZlzHt9WPf9T4hVn8cIMYSWxcj18Wi1RpNxecGPZw3Ebz1f91bla/s1600/NV-161-FirstThings.png" width="200" /></a></div><br />For Strauss was not concerned only with material annihilation. He was concerned also about the use of science to transform human nature. In an often-overlooked passage in "Restatement," Strauss contemplates that for the universal and homogenous state to last, its rulers "must forbid every teaching, every suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neurtralized by progressing scientific technology." Biology becomes the science by which the regime committed to ensuring equality stands or falls. In a few, arresting lines, Strauss foresaw in the 1950s what many conservative critics of the universities in the 1980s and 1990s did not. It was not that liberal democratic political correctness would drown the humanities, only to splash in vain against the impregnable walls of the hard sciences. The ideology would change the definitions of the hard sciences to correspond to its tenets, then weaponize the epistemic authority of the sciences to advance its agenda. Liberal democracy thus repurposes the life sciences in order to engineer a new condition for humanity, one in which natural differences among men (and differences between men and women) do not exist.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Doug Mainwaring at <i>lifesitenews.com</i>, <a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/its-worse-than-you-thought-transgenderisms-endgame-is-transhumanism/" target="_blank">It's Worse Than You Thought: Transgenderism's Endgame Is Transhumanism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Outspoken investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek has pointed out that the political-corporate-NGO-legal-academic infrastructure driving "body dissociation" is "mammoth." ...Bilek described how strange it is that these massive global orgainiazations have taken up the cause of trans-identifying individuals. Corporations "don't get behind a miniscule part of the population's identity issues," she said, yet "these entities are all driving and supporting this." This financial and political muscle plus the relentless affirming support given to transgenderism from major media, Hollywood, and even the current White House, Nashville, and beer producers, raises the question: What is really going on? Western populations are being conditioned - "groomed" - to more easily accept transhumanity. "In order to sell that to the public - transhumanism and disembodiment - as a life, you're going to have to groom them and get them there," explained Bilek in a recent video interview. "And the way to do that is to create this ideology that says that you can choose your sex."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Adam Kirsch in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/anthropocene-anti-humanism-transhumanism-apocalypse-predictions/672230/" target="_blank">The People Cheering for Humanity's End</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the 21st century, Anthropocene anti-humanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves.... Anthropocene anti-humanism begins not with a political program but with a philosophical idea. It is a rejection of humanity's traditional role as Earth's protagonist, the most important being in creation. Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that anti-humanism decries - scientific and techonolocial progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be <i>Homo sapiens</i>.... The anti-humanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental. They are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Mark Edmundson in LIBERTIES, <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/good-people-the-new-discipline/" target="_blank">"These are all good people."</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In Foucault’s day, the chief means of extending discipline was through institutions. You were shaped and sized by the school, the church, the prison, the military, the government, and they did an effective enough job of it. Now power disseminates itself also through the Internet. It’s much harder to run, much harder to hide.... And the powers who are not really powers, the good people, can demand much more of you (and have more demanded of themselves in turn). My annual report used to consist in a typed page. Now it is about fifteen electronic pages. I will now be rated on a scale of one to ten in nine different categories. And I, as a professor, abide in one of the freest jobs there is. It will become more confined and confining over time, for those who are paid to enforce discipline must justify their positions by making ever more disciplinary demands. If they simple left matters as they were, the computers would do their work, and they would be replaceable. In time, discipline will make its way into every interstice of life, for that is the logic of network power. The regulations for sexuality within institutions, say, will become more comprehensive, detailed, and bizarre. A preview of coming attractions can be found in my own university’s rules about sado-masochistic sex undertaken by members of our community. “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, non-consent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal non-consent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” No, I did not make it up. And yes, the combination of liberal tolerance for apparent erotic extravagance and disciplinary control by the institution are emblematic of the present, and of things to come. There is virtually nothing that the Internet and the good people, acting in consort, cannot observe, discipline, and attempt to control.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Tinand de Mainii Strigoii-lor at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://strigoi.substack.com/p/eunuch-caste-theory" target="_blank">Eunuch Caste Theory</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What the 2010s gave us, more than anything else, was a new method and means of political discourse adopted by virtually everybody, including its critics. Persistent victimhood complexes, cluster B disorder social dynamics, and strong identification with parasocial media figures. Some of these things existed in the past, it's true, but the digitial boom over the last decade intensified these trends, and its actors intensified them intentionally. Trans, however, is the biggest winner from this milieu. It is the perfect mixture of every identity-based special interest group today, and it is the most aggressive. It combines everyting needed to succeed as a poltical venture in this environment and is highly attractive to the most personality disordered, the shrewdest narcissists and sociopaths alive, individuals which are absolutely necessary for brute-forcing a winning coalition. It simultaneously proves that observable reality is easily malleable while also calling attention to how easily manipulated "reality" is. It also, through its body modification rituals, creates functional eunuchs. Not only does it create a caste of administrators, bureaucrats, and activists which are fiercely defensive of their personal interpretation of reality, it also seals the deal by castrating them - and much more invasively than any other form of eunuchization, as this castration is not just external, but courses throughout the whole body. Most of these eunuchs, just like most of the eunuchs created in epochs prior to this one, are too unstable and insane to actually belong to the ruling class's court. Many of these poor degenerates are on the frontlines, antifascist blackshirts brutalizing wayward liberals who are too conservative, who cling too strongly to the liberalism of the pre-digital era, who refuse to unflinchingly accept the new order. These pitiful wrecks are often drug addicts, prostitutes, lumpenproletariat criminal scum who are "to the left" of the Democrats, and who continually push them further.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Anonymous at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/the-glass-delusion-and-transgenderism" target="_blank">The Glass Delusion and Transgenderism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Once upon a time of fairy tales, murderous religious prejudice, and unspeakable cruelty - or the Renaissance, as historians call it - some men came to believe that parts of their bodies were made of glass, or sometimes, that their entire bodies were made of glass.... Notably, this delusion was associated with another diagnosis known as "scholar's melancholy," a kind of depression known only to the educational elite. This was a delusion suffered only by "men of letters, or members of the nobility, these Glass Men could have learnt of the delusion from earlier medical treatises, and from contemporary literary accounts accessible to them in the embryonic literary academies. Specialized mystical knowledge was a component of this diagnosis - and no wonder. There are no known laborers or peasants who suffered from this delusion.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Cassidy Morrison in DAILY MAIL, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11457347/Can-Pill-turn-GAY-Growing-number-women-report-bizarre-symptom.html" target="_blank">Can the Pill Turn You Gay? Growing Number of Women Report Bizarre Symptom</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The 2013 study recruited 55 straight women and used a computer program in a lab that allowed them to manipulate human features in photographs of different men and women. They could adjust a myriad of facial features such as jawlines and cheekbone prominence to make people in the photos look more masculine or feminine. After that first session, 18 women were given a prescription for a daily birth control pill while the rest were not. Both groups returned three months later to run a similar attractiveness test. When the researchers compared the two sets of images created by the non pill-takers at each test session, they found no differences between the faces they created. But they found that women who had gone on the pill preferred images of males with less masculine features than their non pill-taking counterparts.... Experts in the field of evolutionary psychology have long held that changes in women's sex hormones play an important role in partner attraction and what a woman looks for in a mate. Hormones flip billions of switches on and off in cells throughout your body, influencing how a person interacts with the world. But scientists are still untangling how these influence women's bahavior, and how much a person's sexuality can be swayed by these changes.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Chris Bray at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/the-loathing-of-fertility-is-the" target="_blank">The Loathing of Fertility Is the Longing for Death</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I think, and I can neither prove this nor yet fully articulate it, that the growing sexlessness and childlessness of performatively oversexed Western cultures... emerges from the thing we don't want to talk about, which is simply that we know we've failed at the task of stewardship. We know we drove the wheels off our prosperous and strong countries. We know that the future isn't looking great. Our one go-to trick in the face of failure is printing more money; we can't make stuff or run stuff, but here's a couple trillion extra to get the country through the year. The stimulus package, the last great American product. So everywhere you look, women are also men, and men are also women, and the type of body that makes the future is dishonored and emptied. We hate fertile bodies because we hate the future, because we damaged the future with ideological madness and endless corporate-state rent seeking and moral emptiness.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Matthew Crawford at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-politics-of-masturbation/" target="_blank">The Politics of Masturbation</a>.
</p><blockquote>
There may indeed be an overlap between the no-nutters and the online Right. That is certainly how it is characterised by those who find it threatening. If there is such an overlap, the common thread is surely the reappearance of "vitalism" as a point of orientation for young men who feel smothered and demoralised in a society that has little use for male energies. European vitalist thinkers include Friedrich Neitzsche and Henri Bergson. In the Amerian context, the vitalist tradition is represented by figurees such as Teddy Roosevelt, William James and, arguably, Mohammed Ali. Its most vivid recent articulation may be found in the movie <i>Fight Club</i>, which depicted a masculinist revolt against the androgynising and enervating effects of a consumerist, white-collar existence that offers little place for male solidarity.... Whatever meaning and political valence the no-fap movement has for its adepts, the journalistic Left's ready identification of sexual self-regulation with "fascism" has a definite genealogy. Retracing this gives us a glimpse into a fascinating chapter of 20th-century social engineering, a programme of sexual "liberation" that is still with us and can feel, if not obligatory, certainly on the agenda for all who would be well-adjusted. Acquaintance with this history should disabuse us of the idea that the sexual revolution was an entirely organic eruption of cultural change, and that it happened in the Sixties.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Richard Hanania at <i>richardhanania.com</i>, <a href="https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-monogamy-and-incest-taboos-made" target="_blank">How Monogamy and Incest Taboos Made the West</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A fascinating line of evidence documenting the development of changing family norms can be found in the linguistic record. Earlier in their history, European languages had terms for things like "mother's sister" or "male cousin on my dad's side" instead of just saying "aunt" or "cousin." Such distinctions matter in societies in which clans and extended family relations are important and descent is traced through either the male or female line alone, and so these kinds of words are still used in modern languages such as Arabic. They would disappear across Europe, first in the Romance languages like French and Italian around 700, and then German and English by around 1100. Usually, it takes languages a few centuries to catch up to cultural changes that have taken place in people's daily lives, so the timeline is consistent with the decrees of the Catholic Church having had a major effect on society.... What Henrich calls the Church's "Marriage and Family Plan" (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The powers of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources withing the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jacob Siegel at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/12/michel-houellebecqs-sexual-apocalypse/" target="_blank">Michel Houellebecq's Sexual Apocalypse</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The author whose work anticipated or channelled the Bali bombings, Brexit, the alt-Right, the Gilet Juanes, and other characteristic developments of the new millennium was assumed to be acting more as a medium than as a crafter of fiction. Yet Houellebecq's prophetic streak seems to be a direct result of his disinterest in politics.... Along with politics, Houellebecq has ignored the standard markers of literary seriousness. His books lake subtlety and roundedness. They eschew both social realism and formal inventiveness, while fixedly pursuing the stunted emotional logic of their characters.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Robert Zaretsky in AMERICAN SCHOLAR, <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/the-decreationist/" target="_blank">The Decreationist</a>.
</p><blockquote>
These works teem with notions that rattle our understanding of the world and our place in it: affliction and attention, force and friendship, necessity and rootedness, the Good and God. Yet Weil's most thought-provoking, if not thought-defying notion is decreation. Decreation declares that God, in making the universe, had to unmake Himself. "In a sense," she wrote, "God renounces being everything." In return, Weil held, "we should renounce being something. That is our only good." Put crudely, Weil believed that the cosmos was not big enough for both God and His creatures. Those who were created from God's sacrifice must thus reciprocate by the same act of sacrifice - by decreating themselves. It's as if Descartes, in a moment of mystical rapture, announced, "I am, therefore I must no longer be."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Christian Lorentzen in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/12/the-hopeful-dystopian" target="_blank">The Hopeful Dystopian</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In a discussion of poliitical debate, he argues that the press, in becoming professionalized and prioritizing the objective dissemination of information, had declined relative to the more opinion-driven, even yellow jourjalism of the late nineteenth century. It's an argument of a piece with his constant return to the ethic of small proprietorship as a countervailing force to centralized power. The twenty-first century has not returned us to such a nineteenth-century scheme of things (or media landscape). In <i>The True and Only Heaven</i>, Lasch expresses admiration for the virtues of the petty bourgeoisie - "its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral temptation of resentment" - while refraining from "minimizing" its vices ot "narrowness and provincialism," nor denying that it has produced "racism, natiivism, anti-intellectualism." This class has long been a hinge in American politics, the proverbial small-business owners to whom each party tends to pander.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Barton Swaim in WSJ on Fredrik deBoer's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/how-elites-ate-the-social-justice-movement-review-left-against-itself-ca60a317" target="_blank">How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, and Thomas Sowell's book, Social Justice Fallacies</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0kE82VShJpDGFhZ0HGkYCIPzQtaMPH81Orwd508k3IYd2iydACbVS2fQKfUszi9mLgtpuda_6EzK0-g8Guz42WGUxu3nUqweV-XnyAjgORsbz3tE4QZsJzmEdNlUcnZDi2eAElpj-NhHyN07h6T4-izUFkNLcKrVDajfMpLAegbsE1fuRPwkGVNWglrmS/s304/NV-161-HowElitesAte-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="200" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0kE82VShJpDGFhZ0HGkYCIPzQtaMPH81Orwd508k3IYd2iydACbVS2fQKfUszi9mLgtpuda_6EzK0-g8Guz42WGUxu3nUqweV-XnyAjgORsbz3tE4QZsJzmEdNlUcnZDi2eAElpj-NhHyN07h6T4-izUFkNLcKrVDajfMpLAegbsE1fuRPwkGVNWglrmS/s1600/NV-161-HowElitesAte-sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />His first book, "The Cult of Smart" (2020), rightly criticized the public education system for ignoring the interests of children who, for reasons of background or inclination, don't score well on standardized tests and can't make it in the "knowledge economy." His prescription, though, was to flood that same system with more money so it can do more of what it already does, only equitably. Excellent diagnosis, bewildering prescription. But if you want to understand the most salient development in American politics in the past half century - the Democratic Patry's slow transformation from a coalition of working-class whites, racial minorities and disaffected hippies into a party of hypereducated urbanites, well-paid activists and expert-class virtue-signalers - Mr. deBoer's "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement" is a fine primary source. Mr. deBoer describes the "elite capture" of the American left as a "drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Sarah Mervosh in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html" target="_blank">A 'Science of Reading' Revolt Takes on the Education Establishment</a>.
</p><blockquote>
About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score "below basic" by eighth grade. Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught. A popular method of teaching, known as "balanced literacy," has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures. The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics. But what might have remained a niche education issue was supercharged by a storm of events: a pandemic that mobilized parents; Covid relief money that gave school districts flexibility to change; a fresh spotlight on racial disparities after the murder of George Floyd; and a hit education podcast with a passionate following... The movement has not been universally popular. School districts in Connecticut and teachers' unions in Ohio, for example, pushed back against what they see as heavy-handed interference in their classrooms.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Faith Bottum in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-weapons-of-math-destruction-learning-k-12-education-curriculum-students-teachers-instructions-policy-d6f18070" target="_blank">California's Weapons of Math Destruction</a>.
</p><blockquote>
California's education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. "Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics," the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society. To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of "tracking," by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus - and to hold talented students back. The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won't be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that's the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Stephanie Lee at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-divider?sra=true&cid=gen_sign_in" target="_blank">The Divider</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Last April, Jelani Nelson woke up to a jarring email from Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor and the nation's most prominent expert on math education. The two had never met. "As you know," she began, "I am one of the authors of the proposed mathematics framework and I know you are working to oppose it." That "framework" is a policy document that will shape how math is taught in California and beyond, and Nelson, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had major problems with it - and with Boaler, too. He's seen a series of tweets critical of her, and reposted one of them with his own scathing commentary. Now, Boaler was confronting him. "I wanted to let you know," she wrote, "that the sharing of private details about me on social media yesterday is now being taken up by police and lawyers." Later, Boaler apologized on Twitter for "leaving the impression" that she'd called the cops on Nelson, saying she was upset because her address had been posted elsewhere in the same Twitter thread. She'd just wanted to talk, she told me, "which is why I wrote him an email." Nelson, who is Black, wasn't buying it: "She wanted me to be scared. She wanted to intimidate me." Welcome to America's knock-down, drag-out math wars.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Vincent Lloyd at <i>compactmag.com</i>, <a href="https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell" target="_blank">A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This might be just another lament about "woke" campus cuture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was "Race and the Limits of Law in American." Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university's black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization. Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one's comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Glenn Loury interview in BROWN ALUMNI, <a href="https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/loury" target="_blank">Maverick</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<b>Shankar</b>: Despite what others may have inferred about you, I sense a deep humanism and even a tentative optimism in your work. Is that part of the case you are making for Black patriotism?
<b>Loury</b>: Look - here we are. We're African American but we are Americans first. We are not African in any way that's meaningful. Yes, our ancestors may have been enslaved, but they were also emancipated. We are literally the richest and most powerful people of African descent on the entire planet. We have ten times the income on average of the typical Nigerian. There's an enormous Black middle class and Black billionaires. Woke racialism, claims the American Dream doesn't apply to Blacks, which is a patronizing lie that robs us of agency and authenticity and self-determination and dignity. It doesn't acknowledge that we possess the ability to rise to meet our challenges and carry the torch of freedom.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Yarimar Bonilla in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/opinion/enrique-tarrio-proud-boys-latinos-racism.html" target="_blank">Enrique Tarrio and the Curious Case of the Latino White Supremacist</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Just look at the census, which states that Hispanic populations can be of any race, but then clearly distinguishes between those who identify as Hispanic and white, and those who are “White Alone, Not Hispanic or Latino.” The implication being that if you’re Hispanic, and also white, then you’re at best a different, not quite so American shade of pale. Mr. Tarrio himself employed this logic in his defense, claiming that he cannot be a white supremacist because he is of Cuban descent. Instead, he and his fellow Proud Boys call themselves “Western chauvinists.” The 2019 documentary “The Right-Wing Latinos of Miami” sheds insight on the mind-set of these white-identifying Latinos. In it, a Latino Proud Boy argues that Latin Americans are essentially “displaced Spaniards.” While this claim may seem ridiculous, it speaks to the deep history of Hispanophilia and Eurocentrism in Latin America. Just as “Western chauvinists” in the United States cling to their European heritage by celebrating Celtic culture, many Latinos hold onto Eurocentric standards of beauty, aesthetics and culture....
<i>Dr. Bonilla is a contributing Opinion writer who covers race, history, pop culture and the American empire.</i></blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Susan Pedersen in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Kal Raustiala's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n13/susan-pedersen/dining-at-the-white-house" target="_blank">The Absolutely Indispensible Man: Ralph Bunche, The United Nations and the Fight to End Empire</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Watts riots of 1965, and those in Detroit and Chicago soon after, shook Bunche deeply. In 1965 he denounced the lawlessness and was denounced by Black Power militants in turn, but in 1967 - in failing health and in the wake of his daughter's death - he began rethinking his stance. In private writings that recalled his analysis of the brutal Kikuyu initiation rites in the 1930s, he posited that, however destructive the riots, for the participants they were an experience 'of throwing off shackles, of getting out from under white domination', of saying to 'white bosses and the power structure and white people generally... for once you are going to know who the hell we are.' Remarkably, having long opposed all politics based on racial identification, he began to express sympathy - although, again, only in private writings - for what he called 'Blackism'. Bunche had always disliked the elitism of the 'talented tenth'. Perhaps 'Blackism' could reach across that class divide to foster pride in the mass of Black people. From childhood, Bunche had been the smartest person in a room full of whites, and he grew up having little contact with the segregated clubs and churches that sustained Black life. Small wonder he had striven to prove himself equal,, and more than equal, in the world he knew, but now he found the praise showered on him by white America unbearable.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Michael Powell & Ilana Marcus in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/supreme-court-affirmative-action.html" target="_blank">California Vote Exposed a Divide Amid Democrats</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The results were quite different in 1996, when California voters banned affirmative action through Proposition 209. The population was majority white, the Republican governor opposed social services for undocumented immigrants, and nativism was in the air. That year, 63 percent of white voters opposed affirmative action, according to an exit poll by The Los Angeles Times. Sizable majorities of Black, Latino and Asian voters favored affirmative action, according to that poll, and many viewed the campaign as grounded in white resentment. By 2020, that coalition was greatly diminished. “The 1996 vote was significantly more racially polarized than the 2020 vote,” noted Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a critic of race-conscious affirmative action. “The 1996 campaign was cast in stark racial terms. The Prop 16 campaign was much less so and to the extent that it was, voters did not buy it.”</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Phillip Magness & David Waugh in INDEPENDENT REVIEW, <a href="https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1782" target="_blank">The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed: Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969-Present</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Although this trend is more pronounced in some academic disciplines than others, each domain has increased in left-wing identification since the 1990s. Samuel Abrams (2017) analyzed the HERI survey data across disciplines and found a uniform leftward political shift in every discipline between 1989 and 2014 (figure 3). At the same time, he confirmed that the gap between the liberal arts and hard sciences, first noticed in Lipset and Ladd’s work, had dramatically increased. Whereas most STEM disciplines and professional degrees in fields such as healthcare and business still maintain a semblance of viewpoint diversity among their faculty, the humanities and social sciences have become monolithically left-leaning. In some fields such as English and history, self-identified moderate faculty have diminished to a tiny minority, and conservatives are practically nonexistent.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Malloy Owen in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, <a href="https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/by-theory-possessed/articles/from-frankfurt-to-fox" target="_blank">From Frankfurt to Fox - The Strange Career of Critical Theory</a>.
</p><blockquote>
If all that is not enough, the critical theorists also have to reckon with the strange allure the Frankfurt School and French theory have in certain corners of the right. Michel Foucault, never a reliable ally of the left, was taken up anew by conservatives during the COVID pandemic, when the concept of biopower seemed eerily apt. Giorgio Agamben, an heir to Foucault’s account of biopower, has alienated large parts of the left and won new friends on the right through his power analysis of the global pandemic response. The critical theory journal Telos, along with some of its regular contributors, was never averse to thought from outside the left but is now seen in some quarters as positively right-wing. One of the intellectual godfathers of the latest incarnation of the New Right is Nick Land, who was once a leading figure in a cutting-edge school of digital media studies influenced by the French theory luminaries Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard. A new generation of conservative writers, almost wholly severed from the old ecosystem of National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, regularly invoke twentieth-century critical theory against institutional progressivism; many of them have gathered around the slick new online journal Compact, which was founded with the explicit intention of marrying the critical theories of left and right against the despised liberal center. And as Compact’s managing editor, Geoffrey Shullenberger, has pointed out, a number of influential figures in and around Steve Bannon’s Trumpist circle were initiates into the mysteries of the Frankfurt School and French postmodern thought.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jonathan Sumption in SPECTATOR on Doug Stokes' book <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/our-academics-are-attacking-the-whole-concept-of-knowledge/" target="_blank">Against Decolonisation - Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West</a>.
</p><blockquote>
However, the main objection to decolonisation is not that it is false but that it is narrow-minded, obsessive and intolerant. People will continue to disagree about the prevalence and the origin of racial prejudice. Error and discord are inevitable hazards of the free market in ideas. But the decolonisers are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them. This is a natural consequence of their approach to intellectual inquiry. For those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs there is no point in debate. Alternative visions of the world are just the product of social conditioning. Social change and suppression of dissent are the only answers. Schools and universities must be the battlegrounds. Hence the obligatory decolonisation statements, the imposition of a highly controversial agenda on the syllabus, the no-platforming of opponents and the real fears of so many academics that if they step out of line their careers will be blighted.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Katherine Stewart in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/174656/claremont-institute-think-tank-trump" target="_blank">The Anti-Democracy Think Tank</a>.
</p><blockquote>
At the time, Bill Kristol characterized Anton as a minor-league Carl Schmitt, noting on Twitter, "From Carl Schmitt to Michael Anton: First time tragedy, second timefarce." In communication with me, Kristol emphasized the connection anew. "If you look at recent issues, it becomes like Carl Schmitt," he said of the measures that are needed to defend against the tyranny of liberal Democrats. They seem to want to blow through all the guardrails and are OK with that." ...A truly scholarly history would show thatwhat we call "the West" is the work of human interactions spanning the globe. The fabled Greeks drew inspiration from as far afield as India, and many encounters with different cultures shaped history decisively. It is also clear that not every person who has mattered in the process was white or male. But Claremont doesn't do intellectual history, properly speaking. There is a better name for what it does do, and that is identity politics.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Len Gutkin at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/chris-rufo-cant-decide-between-propaganda-and-intellectual-history?utm_campaign=che-social-20230808&utm_medium=o-soc&utm_source=tw" target="_blank">Chris Rufo Can't Decide Between Propaganda and Intellectual History</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To the extent that Marcuse remains directly relevant to the institutional implementation of activist concerns, it is through the influence of his third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse, who developed, as Rufo writes, “the training programs that became the prototype for university DEI programs nationwide.” Sherover-Marcuse’s thinking — which has been explored by the historians Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn in her 2002 book Race Experts and Beryl Satter in her contribution to the 2015 volume Rethinking Therapeutic Culture, and most recently in a 2021 article by the journalist and economist Christian Parenti in the journal nonsite (one of Rufo’s sources) — is the “evolutionary missing link,” as Parenti puts it, in the development of contemporary activist culture out of the ferment of the ’60s. The story is a weird one. In the 1970s, Sherover-Marcuse became convinced, as she explained to Marcuse, “that the difficulties the left had in the ’60s and also in the ’30s are precisely because there wasn’t in the Marxist tradition a theory of the development of subjectivity … it didn’t deal with how do you transform people’s consciousness? How do we actually transform our own consciousness?” The workshops she developed to achieve those goals were based on the methods of Re-evaluation Counseling, a still-extant organization founded in the 1950s. Re-evaluation Counseling, or RC, encouraged group-therapy sessions designed, as Satter summarizes, to “eliminate damaging biases and liberate innate rationality, thereby enabling people to solve the problem of exploitation and injustice.” As both Satter and Parenti discuss, RC’s founder, Harvey Jackins, was an early adherent of Dianetics — what would later become Scientology — and RC’s techniques of emotional conditioning are modifications of the pre-Scientological phase of L. Ron Hubbard’s thinking. Rufo deserves credit for bringing this peculiar history to a wide audience.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Matt Taibbi at <i>scheerpost.com</i>, <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/11/matt-taibbi-report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex-the-top-50-organizations-to-know/" target="_blank">Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know</a>.
</p><blockquote>
You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat. Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Matt Taibbi at <i>racket.news</i>, <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/msnbc-sucks" target="_blank">Eat Me, MSNBC</a>.
</p><blockquote>
MSNBC bet everything on its switch in 2017, and though it paid handsomely at first — in spring of 2017 they became the first cable network in two decades to unseat Fox for the #1 spot, with Rachel owning the top-rated non-sports program on cable — the collapse of the Mueller investigation triggered a long, frankly earned, post-trout-fishing slide. No doubt the indictment of Donald Trump will reanimate things, but prior to that it was grim, as Fox was beating CNN and MSNBC combined by the end of January. The ratings picture for March showed that MSNBC’s top show was The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, rated 11th, followed by The Beat With Ari Melber at 16th. After all this, after throwing away all their standards, clowning themselves with years of wrong stories, doling out rice bowls to the procession of spooks who now clog their airwaves, and watching as their ratings predictably collapsed, now they want to give me a hard time. Not because I got anything wrong, but because they don’t like my opinions, or where things like the Twitter Files reports came from. After the first thread, Mehdi was one of 27 media figures to complain in virtually identical language: “Imagine volunteering to do PR work for the world’s richest man.”</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Duncan Campbell at <i>bylinetimes.com</i>, <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/" target="_blank">Russia and the US Press: The Article the CJR Didn't Publish</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Once Trump took office, Cohen branded media investigations of Russia’s involvement with the Trump campaign as “neo-McCarthyism” and “Kremlin-baiting.” For these critiques, Cohen won praise from outlets such as <i>Fox News</i> and <i>Breitbart</i>, anathema to <i>The Nation</i> readership; soon, he began making periodic appearances on <i>Tucker Carlson Tonight</i>. “Today, in my scholarly, long-term judgment, relations between the United States and Russia are more dangerous than they have ever—let me repeat, ever—been, including the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen told Carlson in 2018. <i>Nation</i> employees became uneasy about Cohen’s assertions and who was airing his ideas. “The people who work there, especially the younger staff, are disgruntled about the Russia coverage,” Adam Shatz, a former <i>Nation</i> writer and literary editor, says. A joke began circulating around the office: “We tried to fact check Steve’s pieces but we couldn’t find any facts to check.” (Vanden Heuvel denies that her husband’s work was not checked by normal standards, saying that whether or not something is checked “depends on the complexity of the piece.”)</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Duncan Campbell at <i>bylinetimes.com</i>, <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/07/who-watches-the-watchdog-the-cjrs-russia-problem/" target="_blank">Who Watches the Watchdog? The CJR's Russia Problem</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the fall of 2018, I was introduced to the <i>Columbia Journalism Review</i>. On December 19 2018, Kyle Pope signed a contract for me to report in depth on <i>The Nation</i> and the background to its blind spot on Russia. The <i>CJR</i> urged me to look deep into the historic roots of the problems the magazine faced in publishing critical reporting on Russia. By April 2019, all did not seem right at the <i>CJR</i>. But I failed to recognise the first warning signs. On 9 April 2019, my line editor emailed me: “Kyle told me this morning that he would write to you to talk fact-checking policy and give you the info you need to reach Katrina and the new editor [of <i>The Nation</i>].” Pope followed up: “Just thought we should [have a discussion], given <i>CJR</i>‘s past and current tie-ups with <i>The Nation</i>.” We spoke for 31 minutes at 1.29 ET on 12 April 2019. During the conversation, concerning conflicts of interest, Pope asked only about my own issues – such as that former editor Victor Navasky, who would figure in the piece, had moved from running and owning <i>The Nation</i> to being Chair of the <i>CJR</i> board; and that the independent wealth foundation of <i>The Nation</i> editor Katrina vanden Heuvel – the Kat Foundation – periodically donated to Columbia University. She and her late husband, Professor Stephen Cohen, were at the heart of my reporting on the support <i>The Nation</i> gave to Putin’s Russia. Sixteen months later, as Pope killed my report, he revealed that he had throughout been involved in an ambitious and lucratively funded partnership between the <i>CJR</i> and <i>The Nation</i>, and between himself and vanden Heuvel.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jeff Gerth at <i>cjr.org</i>, <a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php" target="_blank">Looking Back on the Coverage of Trump</a>.
</p><blockquote>
He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job. “I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.” What follows is the story of Trump, Russia, and the press. Trump’s attacks against media outlets and individual reporters are a well-known theme of his campaigns. But news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own Trump-Russia coverage, which includes serious flaws. Bob Woodward, of the <i>Post</i>, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry ” wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” Over the past two years, I put questions to, and received answers from, Trump, as well as his enemies. The latter include Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called dossier, financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that claimed Trump was in service of the Kremlin, and Peter Strzok, the FBI official who opened and led the inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign before he was fired. I also sought interviews, often unsuccessfully, with scores of journalists—print, broadcast, and online—hoping they would cooperate with the same scrutiny they applied to Trump.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jonathan Chait in NEW YORK, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/columbia-journalism-review-spiked-different-russiagate-story.html" target="_blank">Columbia Journalism Review Had a Different Russiagate Story - and Spiked It</a>.
</p><blockquote>
That <i>Columbia Journalism Review</i> has weighed in on the pro-Trump side of the Russia scandal — despite the collapse of Barr’s investigation — is a sign Trump and his allies continue to hold the momentum in pushing their message that the media made a huge error investigating the Russia scandal. This is a triumph of spin. You could, if you were so inclined, paint a picture of the Watergate reporting as a liberal-media witch hunt. There were clear errors of reporting, hyperventilated expectations (that Richard Nixon would be proven to have ordered the break-in), and even credible allegations of unethical conduct by the press. The deep state was even involved! But in the broader scope of things, that conclusion would be silly. In the main, Nixon was guilty, and the media’s reporting was good. The same can be said of the media’s coverage of the Russia scandal. Yes, some of the reporting, as you would expect of a sprawling investigation, was wrong. And some expectations of where the scandal would go from opinion journalists were wrong, too. (I speculated the Steele dossier would be proven mostly true, and that prediction turned out very wrong.) Still, the investigation produced extensive evidence of misconduct. The Russians secretly dangled a nine-figure payoff to Trump, whose campaign manager, who had previously worked to elect a pro-Russian candidate in another election, was working secretly with a Russian intelligence agent. The weight of this scandal would have forced a normal president to resign.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Mike Solana at <i>piratewires.com</i>, <a href="https://www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-wires-democracy-dies-without" target="_blank">Democracy Dies Without Chinese Espionage</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In any case, nobody is making the best argument for banning Chinese software, which is China has essentially banned American software while freely selling products into our own market. No thanks, I’m entering my mercantilist era. Imagine an idea so simple, so beautiful, so powerful: the American government should only act in the best interest of America, which critically includes American industry. I first traced out my desire for some light mercantilism in the context of semiconductors back in August (check out <i>American Hustle: Microchip Edition</i> for the full take), and ultimately abandoned my free market aversion to spending money on our businesses. U.S. manufacturing will never be competitive in a global market without subsidization, and if Covid taught us anything (other than ‘always check in with the pandemic factory in the middle of a pandemic’) it’s domestic manufacturing capability is critical to our survival. Our trade relationship with China on the software front should be considered in similar terms. In any case, enough of what we should be discussing, and back to the relentlessly stupid discussion at hand. <i>The New York Times</i>, in its typical way, succeeded in drafting a basically decent piece of coverage on the growing tension surrounding <i>TikTok</i> before considering how a ban on the app might actually constitute a violation of our First Amendment. This is of course something the <i>Times</i> never considered over the last five years of social media censorship on such topics as the last election, Covid, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and basically anything so much as hinting at diversity, equity, or inclusion.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Isaac Schorr at <i>mediaite.com</i>, <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/print/i-was-so-fcking-freaked-out-ex-nyt-staffer-describes-crying-and-bloodthirsty-colleagues-seeking-vengeance-for-cotton-op-ed/" target="_blank">'I Was So F*cking Freaked Out': Ex-NYT Staffer Describes 'Crying' and 'Bloodthirsty' Colleagues Seeking Vengeance for Cotton Op-Ed</a>.
</p><blockquote>
"It was just so bizarre what was happening," said McCreesh. "It was like a Maoist struggle session." McCreesh told Krakauer that leadership at the <i>Times</i> completely lost their nerve" in the face of "angry backbiting staffers" including some Bennet had brought to the <i>Times</i>. McCreesh said he was "so fucking freaked out" by the mob and remarked that the scene "was like a murder." McCreesh said:
<blockquote>
"There was like this giant communal <i>Slack</i> chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows," he told me. "And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weiird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. It was just sort of like a bunch of Twitter-brained crazies kind of running wild on <i>Slack</i>. And the leadership was horrified by what was happening. They just completely lost their nerve."</blockquote>
"The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he had hired and brought to the newspaper," McCreesh added. "It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Harry Lambert in NEW STATESMEN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2023/02/how-bari-weiss-broke-media" target="_blank">How Bari Weiss broke the media</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Their dislike is axiomatic. They do not need to refer to her by name when they traduce her online; they all know who they are talking about... In trying to destroy Weiss, that media set made her. Since 2017, Weiss has gone from being an unknown books editor at the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> to the founder of one of the biggest platforms on Substack, via the opinion pages of the <i>New York Times</i>. Her news and comment site, the <i>Free Press</i>, is estimated to be bringing in around $2.5m in reader revenue per year, and is growing quickly. The venture has also attracted outside funding from major investors in, friends of Weiss tell me, both the San Francisco tech class and an older generation of Jewish backers in New York who see Weiss as a voice of sanity in a journalistic generation they do not understand. In December, Weiss was granted access by Elon Musk to what became known as the "Twitter files": the first installment of which concerned a series of internal documents detailing <i>Twitter</i>'s decision to suppress news coverage about Hunter Biden's leaked laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election. The release of these documents... led to Weiss's <i>Twitter</i> audience all but doubling; she added 450,000 followers in a fortnight. Weiss has left New York for Los Angeles, relocating there with her wife Nellie Bowles, another journalist who felt she was forced to flee the city's media by a certain social milieu. "You are dating a Nazi," one <i>New York Times</i> editor is reported to have howled at Bowles after she and Weiss started seeing each other.<p></p><p></p></blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Scott Locklin at <i>wordpress.com</i>, <a href="https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/08/19/historical-censorship-attempts/" target="_blank">Historical censorship attempts and shifting elites</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The present clerisy “expertocracy” has been in power roughly from the time of radio. These are people who take on the mantle of “science” and technology which in the time between radio and television was a real power in the world. It’s possible the “expertocrats” knew something back then, but probably not: the people who pushed science and technology forward generally weren’t “experts” -they were mostly gentleman amateurs and industrialists (early government programs like NIST and the FDA were also pretty useful). The “experts” were always parasitic middlemen whose authority came from certification and propaganda techniques in place in those days. They were trusted because science was doing some good at the time, but an awful lot of the stuff they came up with is now known to be bullshit and graft. By now it’s clear there has been no major physical technological development since the ipotato, if that even counts, which it shouldn’t, but people keep telling me it’s the shizz. That’s 16 years: a technological eternity back in the early 20th century. It was also a fairly marginal “invention” which was more of a popularization of things in place for 10 years already. Since our clerisy hasn’t been able to deliver anything, it has invented new forms of “social progress” -most of which are luxury beliefs which deny reality. This is for dividing up the good seats in a narrowing social class: you can’t be one of the “clever people” unless you pay public allegiance to a bunch of transparently false things. Hence the popularity of ideologies such as postmodernism, whose basic premise is the truth is whatever power says is the truth: the philosophy of the bureaucratic slave.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
<i>Poynter.org</i> ad: <a href="https://www.poynter.org/shop/ethics/transforming-crime-reporting-into-public-safety-journalism-2023/" target="_blank">Transforming Crime Reporting Into Public Safety Journalism (2023)</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Transform your newsroom's reporting on crime and criminal justice with our 24-week online seminar. We'll guide your team through a process to reimagine your work and its impact, and to craft a strategy that elevates your public safety reporting and better serves your audience. May 16, 2023 - November 28, 2023... Participants will improve their newsroom's capacity to transform coverage from crime centered to community focused.... Course retails for $8,500 but is just $1,000 thanks to sponsors MacArthur, Annie E. Casey and Craig Newmark foundations.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Tom O'Neill interview in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/05/the-manson-murders-may-have-something-to-do-with-cia-mind-control-experiments" target="_blank">The Manson Murders May Have Something to Do with CIA Mind-Control Experiments</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiBnqkVS4c0gVBBkpu_WpuENhEtPyhamH7X2LmY8lh45Tju6-fj4Luogyo7N6I8-aK3bEcc5fpk_fQhBk_ZwJ0au_4m-ohaU4SMtoyBQrI1L0Jzci01WTX9YYULkuOFCVlDusWs28gbBSpKBzr_u_oUKwuXHCZc3zamlL6qBfisXsUuyYnRIrMS2OzYRQE/s265/NV-161-Jacobin.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="190" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiBnqkVS4c0gVBBkpu_WpuENhEtPyhamH7X2LmY8lh45Tju6-fj4Luogyo7N6I8-aK3bEcc5fpk_fQhBk_ZwJ0au_4m-ohaU4SMtoyBQrI1L0Jzci01WTX9YYULkuOFCVlDusWs28gbBSpKBzr_u_oUKwuXHCZc3zamlL6qBfisXsUuyYnRIrMS2OzYRQE/s1600/NV-161-Jacobin.jpg" width="190" /></a></div><br />A year into my reporting, I brought all the information I had on Manson's get-out-of-jail-free card - which he seemingly wielded from 1967 until he went to jail for the last time in 1969 - to a retired deputy DA, who had actcually gone on to become a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court. In an inteview with me, he said, while looking through all this, "You can often blame things like this on bureaucratic red tape or incompetency. But what you're showing me here is a pattern - and it's a joke. It's clear they deliberately wanted him out of jail and free." He says, "I can't tell you why this happened, but it isn't a mistake. Somebody wanted him out there. And what you need to do is find out who it was." Was it the FBI? Was it the sheriff's department? The LAPD? Some powerful agency didn't want him behind bars.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jacob Siegel at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation" target="_blank">A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century</a>.
</p><blockquote>
For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues. Until 2017, that is, when another list of Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outift called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States. None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68's secret list, Twitter's safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing "real people" to be "unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse." The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them. When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
<i>revolver.news</i>: <a href="https://revolver.news/2022/06/norm-eisen-january-6-committee-benny-thompson-dark-conspiracy-against-president-trump/" target="_blank">Democrat Hatchet Man Norm Eisen's Fingerprints Are All Over a Dark New Element of the Jan 6 Witch Hunt</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Before we conclude this study, it is worth noting something about Norm Eisen's new lawfare outfit, States United Democracy Center. Besides the characteristically cynical use of the term "democracy," we are struck by some of Eisen's colleagues who are also associated with the group. Eisen co-founded States United with Christine Todd Whitman.... If Whitman's track record make her an odd choice to partner up with Norm Eisen in his latest lawfare venture, Eisen's other associates are still more ominous. Take a look at the advisory board and see if you can notice a pattern.... The truly striking thing is that the advisory board to Norm Eisen's new lawfare group contains not one, not two, but three former heads of the Department of Homeland Security - that's right, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Tom Ridge were all heads of the DHS. The overwhelmingly heavy presence of top DHS officials at States United contrasts dramatically with the absence of any top DHS officials at CREW, Norm Eisen's previous lawfare outfit. More importantly, the heavy DHS presence at States United takes on a special significance given States United's special focus on January 6 lawsuits and in directly assisting the January 6 Committee and its Chairman. As <i>Revolver</i> has reported extensively, the Department of Homeland Security is the tip of the spear when it comes to the "Domestic War on Terror," that is, the reconfiguration of the national security apparatus as a political weapon to target Trump and his supporters.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Alan MacLeod at <i>mintpressnews</i>, <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/graphika-deep-states-beard-controlling-information-age/279520/" target="_blank">Graphika: The Deep State's Beard for Controlling the Information Age</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Even Graphika's staff with journalistic backgrounds have eyebrow-raising connections. Chris Hernon, who contributed to Graphika's report on Russian influence operations, was a member of the U.K. government Institute for Statecraft's Integrity Initiative, a secret group of hawkish journalists that the British intelligence establishment has used to plant false and coordinated stories into media around the world. Connecting the worlds of the national security state, the defense industry, and social media is the aforementioned Ben Nimmo. In addition to his role at Graphika, Nimmo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and was NATO's press officer between 2011 and 2014. Last February, he was also appointed as intelligence chief for Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta. The coldest of cold warriors, Nimmo has accused everyone from Welsh pensioners to internationally-recognized Ukrainian pianists of being Russian bot accounts. Unforrtunately, in his positions at the Atlantic Council and Meta, he is in a position to take action on his suspicions, allowing the botfinder general to act as prosecutor, judge and executioner.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Malcolm Harris in NATION on Julie Turnock's book, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/special-effects-george-lucas/" target="_blank">The Empire of Effects - Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Empire of Effects shows how today's return to pre-CGI effects is part of a longer history - one defined by a realism that never wanted to appear truly real. Against the floaty Yoda of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, the new ILM aesthetic is gravity-bound, even if the characters do spend a lot of time flying around. Picking up on Favreau's rhetoric, Turnock calls this formula "grounded" realism, both because the elements are expected to conform to gravity and because the digital effects are grounded in their practical predecessors. The approach, "modelled on ILM's 1980s style of highlighting the effect of the human camera operator's mistakes," Turnock writes, "is designed to provide that analog feeling to a largely CGI production." The unconscious nostalgic gestures of the '80s and '90s were combined with the conscious nostalgic commercial program of the 2010s to produce a field of Disney content that openly aspires to visual and emotional regression rather than experimentation, adventure, or progress.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
EcoHealth Alliance <a href="https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2022/12/ecohealth-alliance-statement-regarding-book-by-andrew-huff" target="_blank">Statement Regarding Book by Andrew Huff</a>:
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ5A4XwGl73f-n3ECjbGkIhTZDzYNPkkw1yAXXHU7Ov_bj7XeL7idLrXMXObUkyF-p-BNeuIMbeIVYQ1AHVN5qSO41izqBi-HS-UQR9PQEMguVNrvqJiFivShxoXQUkBHC6mPyNpwFoGTrAlqwl25ozGQ9ArSZAnGHnpNNn07LneqXQ4W_DlekHcG6iPaZ/s300/NV-161-EcoHealthAllianceHuff-book-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="200" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ5A4XwGl73f-n3ECjbGkIhTZDzYNPkkw1yAXXHU7Ov_bj7XeL7idLrXMXObUkyF-p-BNeuIMbeIVYQ1AHVN5qSO41izqBi-HS-UQR9PQEMguVNrvqJiFivShxoXQUkBHC6mPyNpwFoGTrAlqwl25ozGQ9ArSZAnGHnpNNn07LneqXQ4W_DlekHcG6iPaZ/s1600/NV-161-EcoHealthAllianceHuff-book-sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />2) Mr. Huff alleges that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in gain of function research to create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true.
3) Mr. Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Russell Jacoby at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/takeover-russell-jacoby" target="_blank">The Takeover</a>.
</p><blockquote>
For earlier American intellectuals, the university remained peripheral because it was small, underfunded, and distant from cultural life. The Edmund Wilsons and Lewis Mumfords earlier in the 20th century to the Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedans later saw themselves as writers and journalists, not professors. But I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo. What I called a transitional generation, the largely Jewish New York intellectuals, ended up later in their careers as professors, but usually they lacked graduate training.... But the story changes for the next generation - my '60s generation. In pose we were much more radical than previous American intellectuals. We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protestors who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campuses. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally - a few of us - leading figures in academic disciplines.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
N.S. Lyons at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence" target="_blank">The China Convergence</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s and its “anti-authoritarian” quest to “liberate” the self from restraints therefore served the managerial regime perfectly. It swiftly broke down traditional informal bonds of stable, resilient communities that had for centuries helped to shelter individuals, and tore up moral norms that had helped them structure and discipline their lives without the aid of the state. So liberated, the self-expressive individual was made a king in name, but left far more isolated, alone, and vulnerable in actuality. Such an atomized individual proved far easier pickings for the mass corporation, which swooped in to offer all manner of ready-to-purchase replacements for what was once the social commons, and for the state, which acted on demand to guarantee the sovereignty of these liberated selves and protect them from their own choices. Their capacity for self-governance thus degraded, and encouraged to think of themselves as reliant on the state for their freedom, the public’s demands for management by a higher authority then only increased relentlessly.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Eric Bennett at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/can-literary-scholars-transcend-their-training?sra=true&cid=gen_sign_in" target="_blank">Can Literary Scholars Transcend Their Training?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Every semester, thousands of American literary scholars concoct new interpretations of works of literature and new arguments about literary studies itself. They assume, pretend, hope, or dream that their words carry the revolutionary force of radical policy reform. They believe that literary studies done right - like defunding the police or dismantling systemic racism - shall topple what needs toppling. Their criticism will help overthrow the ideological status quo of proto-fascist neoliberal statles like the United States. It's a curious overestimation of muscle for a discipline whose landmarks include Don Quixote and Madame Bovary - novels about people who confuse books with life.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/12/the-delusions-that-bind-communism-and-liberalism" target="_blank">The Delusions That Bind Communism and Liberalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Though liberals failed to recognise this fact, the Soviet collapse was the end of an era of political faith. The international system will be shaped not by universal political projects, but by the tragic choices of realpolitik in a world of contending great powers. It would be wise to admit, as Koestler did with regard to communism, that the post-Cold War order was an illusion. But for most liberals this is a psychological impossibility. Without the mirage of a new world, they face - like Bukharin - an "absolutely black vacuity". If liberalism has a future, it is as therapy against the fear of the dark.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Gary Morson in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/6/emperor-of-chaos" target="_blank">Emperor of Chaos</a>.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqLanWVO2kbWNOv1LFPsMBWyMLitUPQmmoKVGfr6tOgYkvJPk4VgPryL5a8NEsVuElCBIuDdH9HoUACiny_5LN1bExKMEQDdX2_LgzLDAgwf3lcKqkVaCs-wh7ApP3q0-V5z9t8_w1vizX8y9L4xdWInmM3tTCkwNn3MTEO9P6EfxRyrtUA2UczOEBdeK/s277/NV-161-NewCriterion.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="200" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqLanWVO2kbWNOv1LFPsMBWyMLitUPQmmoKVGfr6tOgYkvJPk4VgPryL5a8NEsVuElCBIuDdH9HoUACiny_5LN1bExKMEQDdX2_LgzLDAgwf3lcKqkVaCs-wh7ApP3q0-V5z9t8_w1vizX8y9L4xdWInmM3tTCkwNn3MTEO9P6EfxRyrtUA2UczOEBdeK/s1600/NV-161-NewCriterion.png" width="200" /></a></div><br />According to Muller, one reason Taubes gave up his position at Columbia University in New York to become a professor in Berlin was that, as a Jew in post-war Germany, "his ideas and his behavior were beyond criticism.... [I]n other words, he was granted a kind of get out of jail free card - forever." There is something truly repulsive in taking advantage of the (recent) Holocaust, or an other tragedy, in this way. He was not the last. Taubes made enemies of friends and mentors by shocking acts of betrayal. When he worked at Beacon Press along with his friend Philip Rieff, Taubes called their boss Melvin Arnold to ask him for a job as the editor for academic books. Arnold, who already distrusted Taubes, put Rieff on the extention phone. When Arnold told Taubes that Rieff was already doing that job, Jacob replied: "You dont need Philip. I can do it all. And he's practically a fascist." Taubes never did discover why Rieff broke off their friendship.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Daniel McCarthy in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/" target="_blank">The Culture Behind the Culture War</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The cultural left has hijacked the narrative superstructure of Western civilization in general and of the United States in particular. With Christianity came a generalized idea of individual life and cosmos alike as stories, with a beginning, middle, and end. Chivalry and commerce encouraged a perception of life as an individual's adventure - the entrepreneur and the knight errant lend themselves to similar story arcs. And Protestantism helped to intensify a sense of inner struggle and desire for integrity in the face of an institutionally corrupt world. The New World and Protestantism alike suggested the possibility of new beginnings - and utopias. These facts of Western history were material to be shaped and turned into archetypal narratives by creators of all kinds.... These frames have been ingeniously put to use by the culturally revolutionary left. The right has tried to use them too, with some success. But the left seems bolder about using them in new ways, and the right is with good reason divided over whether these master narratives can be employed for all conservative ends or whether entirely different narratives are needed. That question must be answered at length. For now, as a start, we simply call on conservatives to confront it.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Claes Ryn in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/how-the-humanities-could-have-saved-conservatism/" target="_blank">How the Humanities Could Have Saved Conservatism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To say that American postwar movement conservatism failed because it was philosophically deficient and had the wrong priorities is not to deny that it was up against very high odds. Powerful trends within Western civilization had long eroded its moral-spiritual foundations. Liberationist idealism and Enlightenment rationalism had long had the initiative. In America, the progressive era and the so-called Red Decade - the 1930s - had been recent manifestations of powerful cultural trends. In the early twentieth century, Babbitt had unmasked these trends. He had exposed their moral-spiritual core and indicated the necessary remedy, which was incisive criticism of current illusions and a moral-spiritual awakening in which sound imagination had to play a central role. But the postwar conservative movement was fascinated by politics.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Ross Andersen in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-gpt-4/674764/" target="_blank">Inside the Revolution at OpenAI</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he'd developed. He told The New Yorker that he had "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur" he could fly to in case AI attacks. "I wish I hadn't said it," he told me. He is a hobby-grade prepper, he says, a former Boy Scout who was "very into survival stuff, like many little boys are. I can go live in the woods for a long time," but if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, "no gas mask is helping anyone."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Graeme Wood in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/bronze-age-pervert-costin-alamariu/674762/" target="_blank">The Rise of Bronze Age Pervert</a>.
</p><blockquote>
After the museum prank, almost 20 years passed before BAP's politics emerged into the light. And just as it did, the Romanian himself shrank vampirically into the shadows.... When I heard his podcast, it took me about 10 seconds to identify him. Costin Alamariu is in his mid-40s and he has never publicly admitted that he is BAP. I met him only once, two decades ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a mutual friend intuited that we might enjoy each other's company. Costin appeared one night wearing a dramatic overcoat - the kind whose wearer is begging for those around him to make a comment. I resisted. He had emigrated from Romania, he said, when he was about 10. That explained the Dracula note in his voice.... He stresses that in ancient Athens, the cultivation of physical perfection was a privilege of the elite. Only citizens could train in the gymnasium. The process of creating an ideal male form was deemed beyond the station of lesser entities, such as women and slaves. The parade of Adonises has led many to question BAP's sexuality. Bizarrely, Costin is not the only fascist I know who has been dogged by such rumors. Richard Spencer, my chemistry-lab partner in middle school, faced persistent questions about his sexuality when he was a leader of the alt-right. (If anyone out there can explain why homoerotic fascists keep seeking my company, please let me know.) Spencer told me, more than a little exasperated, that he thought the case for BAP's homosexuality had been proved. "If I had posted even one photo of some guy's ass on Twitter, do you think there would be any question in anyone's mind?" In <i>Bronze Age Mindset</i>, BAP writes that the confusion of masculine bonding for homosexuality "is misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time...."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Casey Chalk in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/how-catholics-became-the-new-wasps/" target="_blank">How Catholics Became the New WASPs</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Though today Catholic institutions (including churches) remain a frequent target for activists and vandals, it is less because of the otherness of the Catholic faith than its identification with the same patriarchal, religiously informed, bourgeois norms liberal ideologues aim to dismantle. Indeed, in 2022, it would be more accurate to say that rather than threatening WASP culture, Catholics are America's best chance of <i>preserving</i> it.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jeffrey Polet in RELIGION & LIBERTY, <a href="https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-33-number-3/horace-mann-and-irony-secular-education" target="_blank">Horace Mann and the Irony of Secular Education</a>.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzlIeq3TR_5YLwP2wZ_56itZE6FdarQ6fYDqZlUBv-VLLHcmJb5PdDbkDq67ixCFodehKQjh4NeVLb46cMauBCVj0RDt4L0Tx13njM2ZSfuDdKtpT4JV3_Z-zhAykgVdNXUx61J8CnVuk_q4ZdDWh8IRNxLdMdCEyWAYrrCpMNWYS6AXTpYI2PNojljzxz/s263/NV-161-Religion&Liberty-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="200" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzlIeq3TR_5YLwP2wZ_56itZE6FdarQ6fYDqZlUBv-VLLHcmJb5PdDbkDq67ixCFodehKQjh4NeVLb46cMauBCVj0RDt4L0Tx13njM2ZSfuDdKtpT4JV3_Z-zhAykgVdNXUx61J8CnVuk_q4ZdDWh8IRNxLdMdCEyWAYrrCpMNWYS6AXTpYI2PNojljzxz/s1600/NV-161-Religion&Liberty-sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Mann had traded his Calvinism for a largely secularly faith in progress, accomplished by an ordered liberty, economic stimuli, and moral reform. On the policy end, "moral reform" meant the triumph of the temperance movement, of which Mann was an active advocate, and a Prussian-style system of education that would tame the savage animalism of human nature, which alone could "turn a wilderness into cultivated fields, forests into ships, or quarries and clay-pits into villages and cities." All prior efforts solve the problem of human sin and error had failed because they neglected "a solution so obvious" that it is as if it were "written in starry letters on the azure sky: Train up the child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Matthew Rose in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/12/leo-strauss-and-the-closed-society" target="_blank">Leo Strauss and the Closed Society</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Strauss worried that Western thinkers were no longer capable of contemplating perspectives beyond liberalism, even against liberalism, from which to judge the present. Far from constituting a threat to clear thinking, such a perspective is essential to it - for only outside the open society can we identify its virtues and its vices, and gain the strength to endure its discontents. But if we are to reach this horizon, Strauss argued, a popular prejudice often directed against critics of liberalism must be rejected. For what is mislabeled "nihilism" is not a destructive doctrine at all. It is a protest on behalf of something of the highest human importance - something liberalism dismisses at its peril. What kind of protest? In answering this question, Strauss reflected on he generation of students who had been intellectually formed and politically radicalized during the interwar period. As his later writings would make clear, these reflections drew on his own experiences as a student in the early 1920s, when he struggled to reconcile his devotion to Max Weber with his growing interest in Martin Heidegger, who seemed willing to address questions about human existence that no other living German philosopher would. These students, Strauss recalled, had been shattered by war, disoriented by the collapse of traditional authorities, and distrubed by a culture that seemed to celebrate transgression. For many of them, the Weimar-era experiment with parliamentary democracy had proven a failure. Only a rejection of the "cancer" of liberalism, as one author called it, could save them. Strauss's portrait of his classmates was unsparing, but not disdainful.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Kyle Paoletta in HARPER'S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/the-incredible-disappearing-doomsday-climate-catastrophists-new-york-times-climate-change-coverage/" target="_blank">The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Where once the climate corps provided weary summations of daunting research, now they offer assurances that progress has been made and the future may be just fine. Give how quickly the tone has shifted, the average news consumer might assume that something fundamental has changed. Perhaps, thanks to all those new solar fields and international summits, a carbon-neutral future is already on the horizon. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Global emissions have plateaued at a level that will likely produce 1.5 degrees of warming, meaning that billions of people will suffer. That isn't good news in any sense of the phrase - it's not good and it's not even really news. Indeed, it is precisely the earlier work of the climate catastrophists that makes the present reality seem novel and agreeable. The facts have remained the same; only the story has changed. The last time the tone of the conversation changed this drastically, it happened even more abruptly, over the course of a single night in 2016. "Pessimists will find abundant support for despair this morning," the MIT researcher John Sterman announced the day after Donald Trump's election.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jonathan Lesser in RANGE, <a href="https://rangemagazine.com/index.html" target="_blank">The Green Assault</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPahiVVihvidL3JVnGkyaFHrheDjIq4C0PWVldCYPtBP8bQiATS0FhSSQ5XXmSickGo6zFWw1FAxvIK_0jup8Ni-T0Ky97ldvHD8FustbG9U8K-eFGpm9KdjoXk81dFfxFT7sZOpVAjjSWaykDdtuRsnBd5XMiaT0A-QVL1gubTmzAvSd_DQ1DPjc_Ce6C/s261/NV-161-Range.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="205" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPahiVVihvidL3JVnGkyaFHrheDjIq4C0PWVldCYPtBP8bQiATS0FhSSQ5XXmSickGo6zFWw1FAxvIK_0jup8Ni-T0Ky97ldvHD8FustbG9U8K-eFGpm9KdjoXk81dFfxFT7sZOpVAjjSWaykDdtuRsnBd5XMiaT0A-QVL1gubTmzAvSd_DQ1DPjc_Ce6C/s1600/NV-161-Range.png" width="205" /></a></div><br />High-voltage transmission lines require lots of land, too. The SITE legislation refers to 500 feet of land on each side of the line for the right-of-way. However, the larger the transmission line, the more land is required.... Building 500,000 additional miles of transmission lines thus will require over 10 million acres of land. So installing 500,000 MW of wind, 900,000 MW of solar, and building the 500,000 miles of transmission lines to deliver the electricity produced will require 190 million acres - 140 million for wind turbines,40 million for solar photovoltaics, and 10 million for transmission lines. Even if solar is co-located on the land needed for wind generation - that is, if the solar PV is located where the wind turbines are - the amount of land needed will be larger than Montana and North Dakota combined. And the 10 million acres of transmission line right-of-way is larger than the combined areas of Connecticut and Vermont. Green-energy cherleaders like the <i>New York Times</i> are demanding that rural America sacrifice their land to "save" the planet. But even if one believes carbon emissions are leading to climate "catastrophe" (they aren't) and even if U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell to zero tomorrow, the impact on world climate would be miniscule. That's according to John Kerry, former senator from Massachusetts and currently President Biden's climate "czar."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Richard Wouters at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/157001" target="_blank">The Geopolitics of a Post-Growth EU</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Science is increasingly expressing doubt as to whether continued GDP growth is compatible with a liveable planet. "It is unlikely that a long-lasting, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved at the global scale", according to the European Environmental Agency. 'Green growth' seems an illusion. Hence the recent popularity of the 'Degrowth' movement - which advocates a shift from accumulating material wealth to living within planetary boundaries in a more equal society focused on well-being, including through the provision of high-quality public services. It makes sense for the EU to be a frontrunner in the transition to a post-growth society. Firstly, as a matter of ecological justice. EU countries bear the greatest historical responsibility for the crises of climate and biodiversity. Abandoning economic growth would free up natural resources for the Global South, where growth still contributes to well-being.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
David Adler & William Bonvillian in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/americas-advanced-manufacturing-problem-and-how-to-fix-it/" target="_blank">America's Advanced Manufacturing Problem</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ford was building cars in Yokohama, Japan, as early as the 1920s. By the 1930s, Ford, together with GM, completely dominated the Japanese auto market. The Japanese government, however, sought to change this, and pursued interventionist policies to foster a locally owned industry. In 1936, Japan enacted the Automobile Manufacturing Enterprise Law favoring domestic carmakers. The American firms were forced to leave Japan, Toyota and Nissan took over their manufacturing equipment.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Daniel Bring in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/a-brief-history-of-industrial-policy-in-vietnam/" target="_blank">A Brief History of Industrial Policy in Vietnam</a>.
</p><blockquote>
State revenues fell, especially as foreign aid tapered off with the decline of Soviet power, and deficits grew unmanageable. A poor harvest led to famine conditions in the winter of 1987 to 1988. Amid this worsening crisis, Vietnam's final break from socialist management unfolded over the final years of the 1980s. A land law promulgated in 1988 began the privatization of 80 percent of the country's land by returning collective farms to peasant households. The next year, direct subsidies to state-owned enterprises were massively reduced. Their long-planned autonomy finally became reality. For many smaller, unprofitable state firms, this meant prompt closure. Larger, more strategically significant firms were spared with government support. A program not of privatization, but of <i>equitization</i> - whereby shares in state assets were auctioned off to domestic and, eventually, select foreign buyers - would also be launched in the decades ahead. With Vietnamese economy still reeling from hyperinflation, the government also set a target of 0 percent growth in the money supply. Interest rates rose, disciplining state enterprises into less reckless borrowing, and prices fell. Market mechanisms would now set wages, prices, interest rates, and exchange rates. All this occurred over only a few years - a process of reform far faster, and more radical in its economic liberalism, than what Deng, Hu, and Zhao presided over in China.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Michael Anton at <i>compactmag.com</i>, <a href="https://compactmag.com/article/why-the-great-reset-is-not-socialism" target="_blank">Why the Great Reset Is Not 'Socialism'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Great Reset quietly but unmistakably redefines socialism to allow and even promote wealth and power concentration in certain hands. In the decisive sense, then, the West's present economic system - really, its overarching regime - is the opposite of socialistic. Yet there are ways in which the regime might still be tentatively described as socialistic, at least as it operates for those not members in good standing of the Davoisie. If the Gret Reset is allowed to proceed as planned, wealth for all but the global overclass will be equalized, or at least reduced for the middle and increased for the bottom. Many of the means used to accomplish this goal will be socialistic, broadly understood. But to understand both the similarities and the differences, we must go back to socialism's source, which is the thought of Karl Marx and his colleague, financial backer, and junior partner, Friedrich Engels.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Eli Saslow in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/us/security-guard-public-safety-portland.html" target="_blank">With Police Scarce, Security Guards Carry Burden</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In Portland, a record-breaking number of daily emergencies has strained every part of the system: 911 hold times have quintupled since 2019, the average police response has slowed to nearly an hour, firefighters work overtime to handle more overdoses than actual fires, and each week there are no ambulances left to respond to hundreds of medical emergencies. What has arrived into the void are thousands of private security guards hired by office buildings, coffee shops, stores, schools and parking lots in what has become one of the country's fastest-growing industries, with annual revenue exceeding $40 billion. Most major U.S. cities now have at least three times as many security guards on the street as sworn police officers, even though guards typically operate with little power to enforce the law.... His job was mostly to help businesses deal with the impacts of public drug use and erratic behavior, and over the last few years he'd come to know dozens of regular offenders by name. There was Stephanie, who sometimes stole diapers for a newborn baby that existed only in her mind; and Christopher, whom Bock had resuscitated after an overdose only to see him smoking fentanyl again an hour later; and Stephen, who had a history of violence and was now standing naked in the middle of Third Avenue, wearing only his left sneaker, gyrating and yelling something about how he was a sumo wrestler.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
John Ketcham in WSJ on Philip Howard's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-accountable-review-unelected-legislators-ac822a7c" target="_blank">Not Accountable - Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Mr. Howard... describes a world in which inefficiency is "mandated by contract," and out-of-control, unfunded pension liabilities threaten service cuts. Meanwhile, arbitration stymies accountability, and a morass of work rules "add up to personnel policies where there's always a reason not to do what's needed." Nothing much gets done, he says, because elected executives "no longer have effective authority over the operations of government." Armed with vast revenue from members' dues, nearly all such unions operate from the same playbook: elect pliant public officials as their future bosses; negotiate with those officials for more favorable pay, work rules and fringe benefits in the next round of collective bargaining; and push for laws that expand the government workforce and make reform impracticable. Political leaders intrepid enough to propose legislative fixes can expect fierce resistance and, with few exceptions, defeat at the hands of labor aligned lawmakers and union backed primary challengers.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Alex Konrad & Kenrick Cai in FORBES, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/02/03/exclusive-openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-agi-google-search/?sh=4f0b180e6a63" target="_blank">ChatGPT Boss Sam Altman Hopes AI Can 'Break Capitalism'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<b>Q</b>: Greg [Brockman] has said that while OpenAI is research driven, it's not anti-capitalist. How are you navigating the wire act between being for-profit with investors who want a return and the broader goal of OpenAI?
<b>A</b>: I think capitalism is awesome. I love capitalism. Of all of the bad systems the world has, it's the best one — or the least bad one we found so far. I hope we find a way better one. And I think that if AGI really truly fully happens, I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism. We've tried to design a structure that is, as far as I know, unlike any other corporate structure out there, because we actually believe in what we're doing.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Ho Fung-Hung in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/mussolini-in-beijing" target="_blank">Mussolini in Beijing</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This economic model, based on the state's paternalistic guidance of private firms and a work ethic unfettered by socialist welfare, resembles state capitalism under fascist regimes in interwar Europe and Asia. But the likeness doesn't stop there. Many have already pointed out the party-state's ever more militant nationalist rhetoric, persecution of minorities, rise of the cult of the great leader, and obsession with total surveillance and control of the population. Prominent official scholars' open and fervent embrace of Nazi theorists like Carl Schmitt in recent years says it all.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Kurt Zindulka at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/02/16/wef-chairman-klaus-schwab-says-global-governments-must-harness-ai-to-become-master-of-the-world/" target="_blank">Klaus Schwab: Govts Must Harness AI to Become 'Masters of the World'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Appearing at the Wold Government Summit in Dubai this week, arch-globalist Klaus Schwab said that the world is heading toward of period of exponential growth of technologies, in which Artificial Intelligence, the so-called Metaverse, near-space technologies, and synthetic biology among others will become key levers of control for the world. "Our life in 10 years from now will be completely different, very much affected, and who masters these technologies, in some way, will be the masters of the world," the German economist said. Apart from coining the ominous term 'The Great Reset', the WEF chairman also popularized the term the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", with his 2016 book of the same name. Schwab has previously said that this new phase of human economy will be characterised by transhumanism, with "a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Monika Pronczuk & Claire Moses in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/europe/europe-farmers-climate-change.html" target="_blank">Labeled Climate Culprits, European Farmers Rebel Over New Standards</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The dairy sector in the Netherlands, which also produces cheeses like Gouda and Edam, is celebrated as a cornerstone of national pride. But the sector also produces almost half the Netherlands' emissions of nitrogen, a surplus of which is bad for biodiversity. Ms. Breunissen and thousands of other farmers bridle that they are now labeled peak emitters. "I was confused, sad and angry," said Ms. Breunissen, who manages a farm of 100 cows in the middle of the country. "We are doing our best. We try to follow the rules. And suddenly, it's like you are a criminal." For many farmers, the feelings run deep. The prominent role of agriculture was enshrined in the European Union's founding documents as a way of ensuring food security for a continent still traumatized by the deprivations of World War II. But it was also a nod to national identities and a way to protect competing farming interests in what would become a common market. To that end, from its outset, the bloc established a fund that, to this day, provides farmers with billions of euros in subsidies every year.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Benjamin Parkin & Mahendra Ratnaweera in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/27a4fa03-74d7-409a-89e6-0f0391786c3e" target="_blank">Sri Lankan Farmers Reap Bitter Harvest from Fertiliser Ban</a>.
</p><blockquote>
For centuries, Sri Lanka has been renowned for its vast and varied produce, its fertile soil fostering everything from cinnamon and black pepper to fruits and fragrant teas. But over the past 18 months, the country has become a cautionary tale for global agriculture. Vital inputs such as fuel and fertilisers are in short supply, with prices soaring. Yields from rise and other stables have halved in many areas and the once largely self-sufficient Indian Ocean island now depends on international aid to combat a hunger crisis. In April 2021, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then president, announced an abrupt ban on the import of chemical fertilisers to force the country of 22mn to embrace organic farming. The prohibition lasted only about six months but analysts said the policy stoked not only an economic crisis but is set to leave the agricultural sector hobbled for years.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Alexander Zevin in NYTBR on Christopher Clark's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/review/revolutionary-spring-christopher-clark.html" target="_blank">Revolutionary Spring - Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What made the city-dwelling constitutionalists most vulnerable was their isolation from the countryside and the grievances of the peasantry, who were everywhere a majority. There was also disharmony within cities. Affluent liberals dreamed up the constitutions; the laboring poor fought for them. But their interests diverged. In June 1848, thousands of the latter were killed in Paris when they rose up against the decision of the former to close the national workshops, on which, by then, more than 100,000 depended for survival. Nationalistic rhetoric could mobilize radicals, but it was also exploited to limit co-operation among them - pitting Germans against Czechs and Poles, and Hungarians against the Croats and Romanians - to the benefit of temporarily back-footed Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Bourbons.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Francis Gooding in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on David Graeber's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/francis-gooding/when-thieves-retire" target="_blank">Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnxrd6N_ddoHPOt2L_VgzKyA_YDF5_S7eMaWmH48Epb9enOjnk4u73iuBPM2gsYlR__XgKHVCSZDMod3eVaLu22Xk-itfo3csTwTf8ylXIqK_amhNrXUbMbylS2EmLHIHLLWAjawZOatlW0kDDlY4fpSTXdO3CwtZ2Sau-lPv26BSJIwK8FtRp4MtDY0d/s302/NV-161-PirateEnlightenment.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="200" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnxrd6N_ddoHPOt2L_VgzKyA_YDF5_S7eMaWmH48Epb9enOjnk4u73iuBPM2gsYlR__XgKHVCSZDMod3eVaLu22Xk-itfo3csTwTf8ylXIqK_amhNrXUbMbylS2EmLHIHLLWAjawZOatlW0kDDlY4fpSTXdO3CwtZ2Sau-lPv26BSJIwK8FtRp4MtDY0d/s1600/NV-161-PirateEnlightenment.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Widening the view to make men like Ratsimilaho and Nathaniel North the heroes of a bootleg Enlightenment is an exciting subversion of the orthodoxy, no doubt: a usefully provocative bit of history from below that shows the periphery was moving faster than the centre, as is so often the case. But Graeber's point is larger than that. It isn't just that the story of the Enlightenment needs amending to reflect its true complexity, it's that conventional approaches to global history are in need of profound recalibration. The Malagasy weren't just the backwater hosts of pirate kingdoms, imaginary or otherwise: they had busied themselves with their own political experiments. It wasn't pirates who took the lead, or even their children, but coastal Malagasy who had fully involved themselves in a rich and intimate dialogue for many years with a motley crew of strangers from distant lands. The Betsimisaraka Confederation should be seen as a "proto-Enlightenment political experiment, a creative synthesis of pirate governance and some of the more egalitarian elements in traditional Malagasy culture'. It was part of a web of trade, politics and folklore that stretched around the globe and made the people of the coast 'global political actors in the fullest sense of the term'.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Gavin Mueller in NYTBR on Brian Merchant's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/books/review/brian-merchant-blood-in-the-machine.html" target="_blank">Blood in the Machine - The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To make the book's political stakes even plainer, Merchant renders the early 19th century in current-day language. Factory owners are "entrepreneurs," "the one percent," even "tech titans" who are "disrupting" the textile industry - moving fast and breaking things, to borrow Facebook's old slogan. Factory technologies spread "virally" and represent a form of "automation" (a term, as Merchant notes, that was not coined until the 1940s). The Luddites themselves are likened to decentralized movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. In the book's final section, Merchant shifts back into a journalistic register, interviewing labor lawyers, analysts and workers struggling against the worst abuses of the gig economy.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Steven Shapin in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/steven-shapin/paradigms-gone-wild" target="_blank">The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn - Incommensurability in Science</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1tamztvPfNwqM2I2apH09C1ChjrW7P7NrOT03XSF8nLEhRKfuGNfkyCEJ6A5R258_k7LzKtaT_V9iQMbfUbUv4spnxpSVvMECxpRd8hfojH5zELpFgDy0xOnQRyxZdJdiAuQHkK5GWkcQV_5l7dSVpJPEKP5ZjJ6WM5vdMwXFy3lHuiUVzRoox3fZPMt/s271/NV-161-LondonRevofBooks-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="271" data-original-width="200" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1tamztvPfNwqM2I2apH09C1ChjrW7P7NrOT03XSF8nLEhRKfuGNfkyCEJ6A5R258_k7LzKtaT_V9iQMbfUbUv4spnxpSVvMECxpRd8hfojH5zELpFgDy0xOnQRyxZdJdiAuQHkK5GWkcQV_5l7dSVpJPEKP5ZjJ6WM5vdMwXFy3lHuiUVzRoox3fZPMt/s1600/NV-161-LondonRevofBooks-sm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Campus radicals seized on Kuhn's book as a brilliantly subversive expose. Just as they had suspected, science wasn't the open-minded objective pursuit of truth, but merely one more mode of authoritarianism. Scientists were just as dogmatic as anyone else, and one way of seeing the world was as good as another. If there were no better criteria for judgment than communal assent, why should anyone bow down to scientists' pronouncements? Student radicals read <i> The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> as revealing irrationality in science - which, Kuhn said, 'absolutely blew my mind'. 'Oh thank you, Mr Kuhn, for telling us about paradigms,' he remembered the students saying. 'Now that we know about them, we can get rid of them.' This sort of (mis)understanding did not escape philosophers' notice. One of Kuhn's critics - the Hungarian emigre and one-time Communist apparatchik Imre Lakatos - pointed to the political consequences of construing scientific consensus as nothing but 'mob rule': 'Kuhn's position would vindicate, no doubt unintentionally, the basic political credo of contemporary religious maniacs ("student revolutionaries").' Kuhn stood accused of being yet another philosophical 'corrupter of youth'. Philosophy of science here bled seamlessly into Cold War politics. Kuhn was contemptuous of the politically radical 'Kuhnians'.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jonah Goldberg in RELIGION & LIBERTY on Patrick Deneen's book, <a href="https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-33-number-3/patrick-deneens-otherworldly-regime" target="_blank">Regime Change - Toward a Postliberal Future</a>.
</p><blockquote>
During his talk at the conference, Patrick Deneen made great rhetorical use of the poverty he saw in the city and the surrounding areas. After describing Steubenville, Ohio, as a town that looked like it lost the Second World War, he illustrated his point by comparing photographs of busy streets from the mid-20th century to the abandoned storefronts of late 2022.... Deneen, whether he knew it or not, was making the same appeal to the "deserted temple" of liberalism that Mussolini had made during the 1920s. Deneen, of course, does not cite Mussolini in his argument; his preferred authority on the subject is Christopher Lasch. The point is not that Deneen endorses <i>Il Duce</i>. He does not. Rather, Deneen's rhetoric is quite similar in its obsession with blaming liberalism as the sole cause for what he perceives as American decline, and... that similarity is worrying enough. Something similar can be found in the work of Michael Anton. Anton began this appeal in his 2016 "Flight 93 Election" essay for the <i>Claremont Review of Books</i>, originally under the pen name <i>Publius Decius Mus</i>. Anton breathlessly concluded in that essay, "If [the core of the American nation] cannot rouse themselves simply to vote <i>for</i> the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote <i>against</i> the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite... then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless." Again, the language is that of humiliation and decline.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jonathan Ree in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/jonathan-ree/opium-of-the-elite" target="_blank">Hayek - A Life, 1899-1950</a>.
</p><blockquote>
We socialists like to hark back to better days, when ideals shone bright and principles stood tall: equality, fairness, democracy, internationalism, mutuality, jobs, education, food, housing, medicine, pensions, peace, friendship and love. But there is one strand of the tradition we prefer not to think about: the idea of putting an end to the wasteful chaos of capitalism by implementing a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with Marxism, though Karl Marx himself expressed only a vague hope of bringing industry under political control and getting rid of 'haggling' (<i>Schacher</i>). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the 'social anarchy' of capitalist free markets by delivering 'social regulation of production upon a definite plan'. Forty years later Lenin promised to rejuvenate Russia with a 'national state economic plan on scientific principles'. Modern postal services could serve as prototypes for a 'socialist economic system', he said, and the 'immediate aim' of a Bolshevik government would be to 'organise the whole economy on the lines of the postal service'.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Greg Afinogenov in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Christopher Ely's book, Russian Populism, and Peter Kropotkin's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/greg-afinogenov/what-should-the-action-be" target="_blank">Mutual Aid</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Russian word <i>narod</i> is similar to the German <i>Volk</i>, but while Volkishness became associated with conservative nationalism, <i>narodnichestvo</i> belonged mostly to the left. The post-Petrine state remained firmly committed to the Westernisation that had created it. Even during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) - an arch-counterreolutionary - the embrace of <i>norodnost</i> (sometimes translated as 'nationality' but meaning something like 'being of the people') remained relatively superficial. It was the Slavophiles, a group of Herder-inspired intellectuals based in Moscow, who first developed <i>narodnost</i> into a potentially subversive doctrine. While they rejected revolution or political reform, they believed that the communitarian, pious, localist beliefs they attributed to the Russian peasantry constituted a kind of spiritual alternative to the power-grasping of the imperial bureaucracy and its courtiers. The Slavophiles, however, were themselves serf-owning educated elites just like the people they criticised, and their direct experience of the world of the <i>narod</i> was largely limited to interactions with people they owned.... The central object of fascination for the Slavophiles was the peasant agricultural commune, or <i>mir</i>, which they believed to be the opposite of everything individualistic and corrupt about the modern world.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Jim Gomez, Aaron Favila & Joeal Calupitan in <i>AP</i>, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/philippines-patrol-disputed-south-china-sea-spratlys-6c75f23edcd5ad6c94cd841850fbc358" target="_blank">China Makes Waves for Philippine Sea Patrol</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The two ships visited one or two destinations a day, working without interruption day and night. The easiest stops were at places occupied by Filipino forces, where the ships sent motor launches to deliver basic supplies like water, crude oil and cigarettes. At one, thirsty sailors offered dried fish in exchange for extra drinking water. Visits to Chinese-controlled areas were harder. At one reef, the patrol encountered more than 100 small Chinese boats, suspected of belonging to the militia, anchored in groups. The Filipinos lowered launches and demanded the boats leave Philippine waters. The Chinese boats did not reply, or leave. The patrol faced off with the Chinese Coast Guard at Chinese-occupied Subi Reef, and later at the Second Thomas Shoal, which is occupied by Filipino sailors on a beached, crumbling navy ship, surrounded by Chinese ships. These encounters are tense, drawn-out affairs. Chinese coast guard and navy ships shadowed the patrol for more than an hour, and over the radio accused the Filipinos of intruding into what Beijing claims as its territorial waters and ordered them by radio to leave or face unspecified counter actions. A radio operator, holding a paper script in the corner of the bridge, asserted Philippine sovereign rights and asked the Chinese ships to stay away and abide by international anti-collision regulations. Meanwhile, the rest of the bridge was quiet, and intensely focused. A radar operator watched intently for tiny changes in the other ship’s speed or bearing. When it approached one knot faster, the commander barked an order to alter the Malabrigos’s speed in response. The encounter lasted for more than an hour.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Kathrin Hille in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e7ce4d29-4163-4351-b49d-58b9e2f32dfb" target="_blank">Philippines and Taiwan List Chinese Incursions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Several countries across the region have become more assertive about publicising information about Chinese incursions into disputed waters and airspace, highlighting the pressure China’s fast-growing military and maritime policing power is putting on its neighbours. Since the beginning of this year, the Philippine coast guard has accused China of putting its patrol vessels at risk by targeting them with lasers, and repeatedly published data about manoeuvres by Chinese coast guard and maritime militia ships to disrupt supply missions to Philippine-controlled land features in the South China Sea. It has documented that behaviour with an overflight and last week’s ship patrol, on which it invited journalists. Taiwan’s defence ministry has been providing more detail about Chinese military activity close to its shores since the unprecedented week-long manoeuvres with which Beijing sought to punish Taipei for hosting then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi last August. The drone disclosed on Friday was one of 38 Chinese military planes active around Taiwan between Thursday and Friday morning.... On Friday, Japan also included frequent intrusions by Chinese coast guard vessels into its territorial waters, and unauthorised maritime surveys, among a number of maritime threats in its new five-year ocean policy. Japan said it needed to strengthen its coast guard.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Felix Solomon & Rajesh Roy in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-a-tiny-island-is-militarized-india-worries-about-chinas-growing-footprint-7e2c7f0e" target="_blank">India Monitors Militarization of Great Coco Island</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Satellite images captured over a decade show the gradual buildup on Myanmar's Great Coco Island, which lies north of an archipelago that hosts a significant Indian military presence, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In addition to the new infrastructure, equipment is visible at the site that could be used to track aircraft, one of the officials said. Chinese engineers and military personnel have been spotted on the island in recent years, according to the official, who said that bolsters New Delhi's assessment that Beijing could be providing technological and other backing for Great Coco's militarization.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Tushar Ranjan Mohanty in SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE REVIEW, <a href="https://www.eurasiareview.com/22082023-pakistan-targeting-the-chinese-analysis/" target="_blank">Targeting the Chinese</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A statement on the website of the Chinese consulate noted, A Chinese convoy from the Gwadar port project was hit by roadside bombs and gunfire on its way back to the port area from Gwadar. No Chinese citizens were killed or injured. The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which took responsibility of the attack, however claimed that 11 SF personnel and four Chinese nationals were killed in the attack.... The BLA's statement read, further, "We have cautioned China repeatedly to reconsider its activities in Balochistan. BLA views such endeavours as acts of exploitation… Any foreign investments in the region should only proceed after Balochistan achieves independence. The statement added that BLA had issued China a 90-day ultimatum to withdraw from Balochistan, or prepare for intensified attacks on its "key interests" in the region.... According to partial data compiled by SATP, since July 19, 2007, at least 14 attacks directly targeting Chinese nationals have been recorded in Pakistan (12 in Balochistan and two in Sindh), resulting in 79 deaths (data till August 20, 2023). The dead included 10 Chinese nationals, 13 Pakistani SF personnel, 41 Pakistani civilians and 12 attackers. Another, 53 persons, including six Chinese nationals, were injured in these attacks.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
<i>AP</i>: <a href="https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-fish-pacific-ocean-oceans-china-810be144e62b695da2c6c0da65e9f051" target="_blank">China Fishing Fleet Defied U.S. in Standoff</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“The behavior of the United States is unsafe, opaque and unprofessional,” the foreign ministry said in a statement to the AP. “We demand that the U.S. side stop its dangerous and erroneous inspection activities.” The Coast Guard disputes that assertion, saying all members of the boarding team, in addition to being vaccinated, were wearing masks, gloves and long sleeves. The Biden administration also reported possible violations discovered on the two boats it did inspect to the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization, or SPRFMO, a group of 16 members — including China and the U.S. — charged with ensuring sustainable fishing in 53 million square kilometers of ocean. One of the most serious accusations is against the Yong Hang 3, a refrigerated cargo vessel used to transport fish back to China so that smaller vessels can stay on the water for longer periods. The vessel was among those that ran from the Coast Guard patrol, disobeying direct orders to cooperate from maritime authorities in Panama, to which the vessel was flagged. To obscure activities, some vessels, especially refrigerated cargo vessels, often fly under other flags but are named, managed and docked in China.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Demetri Sevastopulo in FT on Alex Joske's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d98af531-6227-4666-aac5-cc286d2ae413" target="_blank">Spies and Lies - How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World</a>.
</p><blockquote>
At the more innocuous end of the spectrum, the MSS used cultural front groups to bring foreign musicians to China, including French pianist Richard Clayderman. With MSS help, Julio Iglesias became the first western entertainer to perform live on Chinese television. And in one of many fascinating details in the book, Joske unearths a photo of George Michael sitting beside Wang Shuren, a top Chinese spy, at a banquet for Wham!. But Joske looks mostly at more formal policy-oriented institutions that are more than they seem. One of the most prominent is China Reform Forum, a government-affiliated research institution with high-level MSS connections that gives foreign officials and scholars access to Chinese policymakers and top officials in Zhongnanhai, Beijing’s leadership compound. “It was cocaine for China watchers from Washington to Tokyo to Paris, manufactured in Beijing by the MSS,” writes Joske. MSS found a receptive audience in some visitors to China who were part of an “access cult” who would return home boasting about the powerful people that they had met.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Mara Hvistendahl, David A. Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel & Ishaan Jhaveri in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html" target="_blank">A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Some, like No Cold War, popped up in recent years. Others, like the American antiwar group Code Pink, have morphed over time. Code Pink once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity. These groups are funded through American nonprofits flush with at least $275 million in donations. But Mr. Singham, 69, himself sits in Shanghai, where one outlet in his network is co-producing a YouTube show financed in part by the city’s propaganda department. Two others are working with a Chinese university to “spread China’s voice to the world.” And last month, Mr. Singham joined a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally. Mr. Singham says he does not work at the direction of the Chinese government. But the line between him and the propaganda apparatus is so blurry that he shares office space — and his groups share staff members — with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”
Years of research have shown how disinformation, both homegrown and foreign-backed, influences mainstream conservative discourse. Mr. Singham’s network shows what that process looks like on the left.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Steven Myers in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/business/china-censored-search-engine.html" target="_blank">China's Search Engines Have More Than 66,000 Rules Controlling Content, Report Says</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<i>Baidu</i> blocked all results for searches that included the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the international warrant for the Russian president’s arrest issued days ahead of Mr. Xi’s visit to Moscow in March. The report said that the Chinese tech companies had adopted more rules than <i>Bing</i>, one of the few foreign tech platforms allowed in the country, but compared with <i>Baidu</i>, <i>Bing</i>’s rules were broader and affected more search results. They also on average restricted results from more domains. Caitlin Roulston, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said the company would look into the findings but had not yet fully analyzed them. “We are reaching out to Citizens Lab directly to get more information so that we can conduct any further investigation needed,” she said. Microsoft is one of the few foreign technology companies that still operates inside China, and it has acknowledged that to do so required complying with the country’s censorship laws, something other companies, most prominently <i>Google</i>, refused to do.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Long Ling in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n20/long-ling/diary" target="_blank">Xi Jinping Studies</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To get through the lecture quickly, I tried dragging the progress bar to the end, a trick we used last year. To my horror, when I returned to play the next lecture, the program told me that I had only watched 42 per cent of the first lecture. It didn't tell me which 42 per cent. The developers had improved their surveillance since last year's study session. The easiest solution is to play the video on another computer or a mobile phone, which leaves you free to concentrate on other things. Someone must have tried this workaround, however, because there was soon a report in the <i>WeChat</i> group: 'There is a problem with the website design... it says there is a conflict between my computer login and mobile phone login.' The branch secretary said the website had been tested and launched only a few days earlier, but he would contact the developer.... I don't know what tricks my fellow party members used but if you <i>Google</i> 'Xuexi Qiangguo plug-in' or 'Xuexi Qiangguo assistant' in Chinese you'll find some useful gadgets to browse webpages and watch videos on your behalf.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Eleanor Olcott, Clive Cookson, & Alan Smith in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/32440f74-7804-4637-a662-6cdc8f3fba86" target="_blank">China's Fake Science Industry</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“To survive in Chinese academia, we have many KPIs [key performance indicators] to hit. So when we publish, we focus on quantity over quality,” says a physics lecturer from a prominent Beijing university. “When prospective employers look at our CVs, it is much easier for them to judge the quantity of our output over the quality of the research,” he adds. The world’s scientific publishers are becoming increasingly alarmed by the scale of fraud. An investigation last year by their joint Committee on Publication Ethics (Cope) concluded: “The submission of suspected fake research papers . . . is growing and threatens to overwhelm the editorial processes of a significant number of journals.” The problem is that no publisher — even the most vigilant — has the capacity to weed out all the frauds. Retractions are rare and can take years. In the meantime scientists may be building on a fake paper’s findings.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ on Yasheng Huang's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-east-review-chinas-conformity-crisis-9769ba5d" target="_blank">The Rise and Fall of the EAST</a>.
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The seeming ease with which the Chinese Communist Party has governed since taking power in 1949 is best understood, Mr. Huang says, by turning the clock back to the late sixth century. That was when the Sui Dynasty introduced a civil-service examination to recruit functionaries of the state. Variants of the exam, known as <i>Keju</i>, persisted through the centuries and exist to this day. In such a way, the state "monopolized the very best human capital." The finest minds were taken out of wider circulation, so they weren't available for subversive deployment in such spheres as religion, commerce and the intelligentsia. As a result, writes Mr. Huang, China hasn't every really had a society that is "considered separately legitimate from the state."</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Eva Fu in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/editions/infecting-the-world-4979803/4969198" target="_blank">Death of Chinese Official Amid COVID-19 Wave Casts Spotlight on Forced Organ Harvesting</a>.
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The death of a former Chinese deputy cultural minister amid the country's COVID explosion would have attracted little public attention if not for a short-lived obituary. With his "sharp mind and a booming voice," the "spry" Gao Zhanxiang didn't "at all resemble a patient" before the COVID surge, wrote Zhu Yongxin, deputy secretary general of the 12th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the Party's top political advisory body. "I never imagined that he would leave us so soon." But in his condolences, Zhu might have revealed a little more than he desired. The 87-year-old, as he noted, had "replaced many organs in his body" as he "tenaciously fought with illness," to the point that the former official once joked that "many components are not his own anymore." The article caused a stir on Chinese social media Weibo despite its swift deletion. Keen-eyed observers produced copies before censors got to work, circulating them in disbelief over Gao's alleged extensive organ transplant history and the casual way in which Zhu had mentioned it.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Farah Stockman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opinion/international-world/singapore-autocracy-democracy.html" target="_blank">He Made His Country Rich, But Something Has Gone Wrong with the System</a>.
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Consider that in 1960, Singapore and Jamaica had roughly the same gross domestic product per capita — about $425, according to World Bank data. By 2021, Singapore’s G.D.P. had risen to $72,794, while Jamaica’s was just $5,181. It’s no wonder that Lee Kuan Yew has become a folk hero. It’s not hard to find people from South Africa, Lebanon and Sri Lanka praying for their own Lee Kuan Yew. Last month, President Biden hosted his second democracy summit and gave a speech about the epic global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Singapore — a U.S. partner rated “partly free” by Freedom House — was not invited. But Washington’s talking points about the imperative of democracy ignore a simple fact: Some autocrats are admired because they get results. While established democracies do better economically than autocracies overall, the handful of autocrats who have focused on economic growth — rather than their own Swiss bank accounts — have managed to outperform fledgling democracies, according to Ronald Gilson, professor emeritus of law and business at Columbia University, who co-wrote a 2011 paper, “Economically Benevolent Dictators: Lessons for Developing Democracies.” Chile under Augusto Pinochet, South Korea under Park Chung-hee and China under Deng Xiaoping stand out as countries that achieved wholesale economic transformation, while weak democracies stagnated.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
William McGurn in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pope-abandons-his-own-francis-cardinal-joseph-zen-hong-kong-trial-democracy-sino-vatican-accord-prison-11663616756" target="_blank">The Pope Abandons His Own</a>.
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Cardinal Zen is being tried alongside Margaret Ng, a prominent former legislator; scholar Hui Po-keung; Cyd Ho, a former legislator; Sze Ching-wee, the 612 Fund secretary; and Denise Ho, a popular singer and gay-rights activist. They too have their champions. But not, alas, in Rome. "The Holy See has learned with concern the news of Cardinal Zen's arrest and is following the development of the situation with extreme attention" was the Vatican's only official comment. The Vatican architect of the still-secret deal with Beijing, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, professed his "closeness" to his fellow cardinal - before revealing his true priorities. "The most concrete hope," he said, "is that initiatives such as this one will not complicate the already complex and not simple path of dialogue." Just two years ago Cardinal Zen, who grew up in Shanghai, flew to Rome in a desperate attempt to get the Holy Father to reconsider his China deal. But a pope who always seems to have time for private audiences with celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio refused to meet a cardinal with long, first-hand experience with Chinese communism.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Michael Dillon in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Ildiko Hann & Chris Hann's book, The Great Dispossession, and Gulbahar Haitiwaji & Rozenn Morgat's book, How I Survived a Chinese 'Re-education' Camp, and Sayragul Sauytbay & Alexandra Cavelius' book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n01/michael-dillon/somewhere-in-the-web" target="_blank">The Chief Witness</a>, and Darren Byler's book, In the Camps.
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In complete contrast, the author of <i>Chief Witness</i>, Sayragul Sauytbay, is a member of the Kazakh minority in Xinjiang and was a teacher rather than a detainee. Her account is autobiographical, concentrating on her early life and her family: the camps aren't mentioned until halfway through the book. Sauytbay, who trained as a doctor and worked as a teacher, was a civil servant in Urumqi in 2016 when she was taken from her home in the middle of the night and told that she was to teach Chinese to inmates in a re-education camp. Her account of the mechanical teaching programme is convincing, as is her description of the Chinese pressure on the Kazakh justice system. After Kazakhstan became independent many Xinjiang Kazakhs (and some Uighurs) tried to move across the border. Beijing put the new government under pressure to return refugees to China and Kazakhstan ceased to be a place of refuge. The documents she cites that seem to contain plans for the Chinese occupation of Central Asia countries and, eventually, Europe are bizarre, however, and her allegations of torture and other abuses, including rapes taking place in front of prisoners, are sometimes sensationalist.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Sheila Fitzpatrick in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Timothy Phillips' book, The Curtain and the Wall, and Franck Bille & Caroline Humphrey's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/sheila-fitzpatrick/black-bear-park" target="_blank">On the Edge - Life Along the Russia-China Border</a>.
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Bridges, or rather their absence, are a central theme in <i>On the Edge</i>. The Russians are suspecious of them, seeing bad roads and few bridges in the border area as a security advantage, impeding any potential miltary advance. Russian instincts about borders are portrayed as anxiously exclusionary and territorial, whereas China's 'expansive, fluid' approach, epitomised by its Belt and Road Initiative, prioritises influence over possession. Thanks to Russian foot-dragging, 'high-speed Chinese motorways come to an abrupt stop when they reach the Siberian border.' ...There is smuggling, poaching and even armed piracy off the coast near Vladivostok, where North Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Russian boats share the seas. Culturally, the influence of Russia's gulag - manifest in clothes, slang, criminal organisation and gang warfare - is ubiquitous on the Russian side.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Maahil Mohamed & Mujib Mashal in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/world/asia/maldives-election-india-china.html" target="_blank">In Maldives, Voters Elect Ally of China Their Leader</a>.
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For China and India, the jostling for influence among their neighbors is nothing new. China enjoyed an early advantage because of its deep pockets and the development loans it brought as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, but India has asserted itself more in the region in recent years. New Delhi stepped in to assist Sri Lanka with billions of dollars when the country's economy crashed last year. It has also expanded its presence and projects in the Maldives since Mr. Solih won the presidency in 2018, ending the five-year tenure of the pro-Beijing Abdulla Yameen, who is now in prison for corruption.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Sheikh Saaliq in <i>AP</i>, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/india-manipur-ethnic-clashes-57281d022f983e99bf658ab345ae1df5" target="_blank">Ethnic Strife Leaves Indian Region on Brink of War</a>.
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The conflict was sparked by an affirmative action controversy in which Christian Kukis protested a demand from the mostly Hindu Meiteis for a special status that would let them buy land in the hills populated by Kukis and other tribal groups and get a share of government jobs. The clashes have persisted despite the army’s presence in Manipur, a state of 3.7 million people tucked in the mountains on India’s border with Myanmar that is now divided in two ethnic zones. The warring factions have also formed armed militias, and isolated villages are still raked with gunfire. More than 60,000 people have fled to packed relief camps. Police said the assault on the two women happened May 4, a day after the violence started in the state. According to a police complaint filed May 18, the two women were part of a family attacked by a mob that killed its two male members. The complaint alleges rape and murder by “unknown miscreants.”</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Ray Takeyh in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-story-of-the-1953-iranian-coup-mossadeq-iran-peace-operation-cia-prime-minister-b59314f5" target="_blank">The Real Story of the 1953 Iranian Coup</a>.
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[T]he CIA didn't create the opposition to Mossadeq. Lt. Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, one of Iran's most distinguished officers, had already organized the military to overthrow the prime minister, mullahs were using their street muscle to organize demonstrations against Mossadeq, and merchants were closing their bazaars in protest. All the while the monarchy as an institution still commanded popular support. America's most essential contribution to Mossadeq's removal was to get the shah to dismiss his prime minister. The monarch had the constitutional authority to do so but lacked the courage. Finally, on Aug. 15, after much American arm-twisting, Pahlavi fired Mossadeq. All the talk of a coup should note that once the shah issued his decree Mossadeq's premiership was rendered illegal. Tipped off by communist cells in the Iranian army, Mossadeq was waiting for the officer who delivered his dismissal orders. The officer was quickly arrested, and the shah fled the country. For Washington, the coup had ended. The State Department acknowledged that the "operation has been tried and failed and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh." Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's aide, told the president that the plan had failed and that "we now have to take a whole new look at the Iranian situation and probably have to snuggle up to Mossadeq if we are going to save anything there." In Tehran, the Iranians took command of the situation. The mullahs inflamed the streets with their sermons while the military gained control of the capital. Mossadeq went into hiding, onlyu to turn himself in after a few days on the run. A stunned shah planning for a life in exile was summoned back to Iran. No one was more surprised by this turn of events than the spy masters at the CIA.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Bruce Gilley in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/" target="_blank">King Hochschild's Hoax</a>.
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The history of the Congo might have survived one gut punch from California (Hoschschild did his research entirely at libraries in the state and teaches at Berkeley). But once Hollywood weighs in on the matter, history as such will be impossible. Before that happens, let's set the record straight and end this most malicious form of imperial plunder. The first and biggest deceit at the heart of <i>King Leopold's Ghost</i> is the attempt to equate Leopold's "Etat independant du Congo" or EIC (long mistranslated as the Congo Free State) with Western colonialism. Yet the EIC was a short-term solution to the <i>absence</i> of colonial government in the Congo river basin. The deal was simple: Leopold was to open the area to trade and eliminate endemic Arab slave empires and African tribal wars. In return, he hoped to bring glory to the Belgian people for having done what no other European ruler dared. The EIC had nothing to do with the Belgian government. To the extent that limited abuses and misrule occurred in some parts of his domain, this was a direct result of its <i>not</i> being controlled by a European state. As no less than [British reformer E.D.] Morel insisted (not quoted by Hoschschild), "Let us refrain from referring to the Congo as a Belgian colony, let us avoid writing of 'Belgian misrule." In a pattern of misrepresentation that is repeated on other issues,, Hochschild at first mentions this inconvenient fact and then proceeds to say the opposite for the entirety of the book.... The freelance EIC had at its peak just 1,500 administrative officers and about 19,000 police and soldiers for an area on third the size of the continental United States. As such, it exerted virtually no control over most areas, which were in the hands of either Arab slave-traders and African warlords, or of native soldiers nominally in the employ of Belgian concession companies without a white man for a hundred miles.</blockquote>
<p> *** </p><p>
Stanley Payne in CHRONICLES, <a href="https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/the-myth-of-the-spanish-civil-war/" target="_blank">The Myth of the Spanish Civil War</a>.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitqeOAQdiU3zskAo5lD7MmHsHC7PDzDcuzvC4O6rh_Lbd3CFoGjBaDz5o6QsXHmXmdsSzwUhAcTkxKmA_WaJlT1btEBxn0E4eGd8CSTmTGVOqzq_XRxIRjvYHuXPmS41tGnT57d9xGJXH59-sELheeWRRFtDWfqSAgUSItZI220BG380A7GoqDrIEajmwe/s329/NV-161-PiobookChronicles-sm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitqeOAQdiU3zskAo5lD7MmHsHC7PDzDcuzvC4O6rh_Lbd3CFoGjBaDz5o6QsXHmXmdsSzwUhAcTkxKmA_WaJlT1btEBxn0E4eGd8CSTmTGVOqzq_XRxIRjvYHuXPmS41tGnT57d9xGJXH59-sELheeWRRFtDWfqSAgUSItZI220BG380A7GoqDrIEajmwe/s320/NV-161-PiobookChronicles-sm.jpg" width="195" /></a></div><br />The resulting dilemma was exemplified in the career of Javier Tusell, Spain’s leading political historian of the late 20th century. In 35 years, he turned out some 20 books, all of high quality and most based on original archival research. But to maintain a freedom for objectivity and critical interpretation while remaining in the good graces of his colleagues, Tusell devoted himself primarily to studies of the Spanish right and never undertook a major critical study of any aspect of the left.... Amid this intellectually stagnant situation, there suddenly appeared in 1999 a work titled Los orígenes de la Guerra Civil española (“The Origins of the Spanish Civil War”) by a completely unknown author—Pío Moa. He was not an academic but an independent scholar, the kind of figure somewhat more rare in Spain than in the English-speaking world. Moa was a repentant Marxist who had begun adult life as an active member of the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP), a 1970s revolutionary terrorist organization that had fought Spain’s democratization tooth and nail. In the years that followed, he devoted himself to prolonged study and reflection concerning his country’s history. After two decades, Moa reached conclusions widely at variance both with his own early convictions and with the conventional myths concerning recent Spanish affairs. Los orígenes, Moa’s first book, took direct issue not with myths about the war itself but with standard ideas about its background, exposing the “origins” of the conflict in 1933 and 1934 as the left first sought to impose an exclusivist system and then, having failed, turned to multiple revolutionary insurrections, climaxed by the violent Socialist assault of 1934. Moa had written the most dramatic and original work in recent Spanish historiography and quickly followed it in 2000 with Los personajes de la República vistos por ellos mismos (“Leaders of the Republic as Described by Themselves”), an eye-opening portrait of the key leftist leaders as painted by their own original and acerbic descriptions of each other.</blockquote>
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Obituaries of the Issue...
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/sports/larry-mahan-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1" target="_blank">Larry Mahan</a> (1943-2023)
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He also made his matinee-idol reputation at least a tad literal, studying acting in Los Angeles and appearing in <i>The Honkers</i>, a 1972 rodeo drama starring James Coburn and Slim Pickens; <i>Sixpack Annie</i>, a racy 1975 drive-in special; and <i>The Good Old Boys</i>, a star-studded 1995 television western directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones. Even music beckoned — if briefly. In 1976, Mahan released a country album, “King of the Rodeo,” on Warner Bros. Records. “Couldn’t sing a lick,” he recalled in an interview with the newspaper <i>The Oklahoman</i>. “It was a flop, but it was fun.” Perhaps his biggest mark on popular culture came in 1973, when he was the subject of <i>The Great American Cowboy</i>, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.... But for all his glittering escapades, he never lost sight of the stakes — especially when riding a 1,500-pound Brahma bull, a feat that has been called “the most dangerous eight seconds in sports.” After he suffered a broken leg at a rodeo in Ellensburg, Wash., in 1971, <i>Sports Illustrated</i> wrote, “Outsiders sometimes protest that rodeo is cruel to animals, which must have struck Mahan as ironic once the horse stopped dragging him like a rag doll along the hard ground.” He echoed that point in an interview with the same magazine two years later: “Bulls are the meanest, rankest creatures on earth. Horses don’t try to step on you when they throw you off. They don’t want to trip. Bulls love to step on you, or whip your face into the back of their skull and break your nose and knock out your teeth.”</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/arts/music/spot-record-producer-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1" target="_blank">SPOT</a> (1951-2023)
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“Spotski,” Mr. Watt added, “always was about trying to capture what was us, like with this record — kind of like a ‘gig in front of the microphones’ trip, where he big-time said he didn’t want to get in the way of us trying to bring what we had that made us what we were.” Mr. Lockett’s sensibility dovetailed with the attitude of SST, which the rock critic Byron Coley once described as “archly xenophobic,” referring to the label’s revulsion over the highly processed sounds being stamped out by the major labels in the hit factories of Los Angeles. “There was a general dismissal of what rock radio had become, so Spot was bent on capturing what the band was putting out, without softening, buffering or tampering with it,” Mr. Carducci said in a phone interview. The label’s storm-the-barricades ethos might not have resulted in chart-topping hits, but SST had an impact in the industry, growing from “a cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to easily the most influential and popular underground indie of the ’80s,” as the music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote in a 2001 article for <i>The New York Times</i>.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-09-19/stains-robert-becerra-punk-sst-records-east-la?fbclid=IwAR3Q0z9gngJiQ_anVxlXsVECW4oyJok9k9vdR_LJi7-N3HiampoY6injFvs" target="_blank">Robert Becerra</a> (1958-2023)
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He was born on Dec. 17, 1958, in Boyle Heights and raised by his mother, Carmen Rodriguez, who supported her three sons — Sal, Ollie and Robert — as the head nurse in a nursing home. In the ’70s, when many of Becerra’s childhood friends turned to drug-dealing and gangs, he started the Stains with singer Jerry “Atric” Castellanos, bassist Jesse “Fixx” Amezquita and drummer Tony Romero. (Rivera replaced Romero in 1980 and Rudy Navarro replaced Castellanos in 1981). The Stains blended Becerra’s blistering guitar riffs with Amezquita’s lyrics about living at the margins of society to create a sound that combined the urgency of punk with the precision of metal — years before newer subgenres like thrash or speed metal became prevalent. Although the band members were all Mexican-Americans and were among the first — if not the first — punk rockers from the Eastside, they saw themselves as part of the larger community of first-wave Hollywood punks that included X, the Plugz and the Gears. The parties at Becerra’s house would start after the punk-rock shows in Hollywood or Chinatown and go all night. They weren’t strictly parties but epic jam sessions that would be attended by the likes of Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag, John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X or whoever else wanted to come over and play.</blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<br /><p>Thanks to Andy Schwartz, Mark Carducci, Jay Babcock, Steve Beeho, Joseph Pope, Jane Schuman, Mike Vann Gray, <i>aldaily.com</i>, <i>revolver.news</i>...
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-75678822205726867762022-10-02T14:37:00.023-07:002022-10-02T15:03:58.271-07:00Issue #160 (October 3, 2022)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg16tR7hVdvON7G3AgmYYidFJDsPE4MjjLE_4R-FlbVboFne6KBX6wgjAbeVks8NjnRUUWOeuh3Yt8jPvWARAXjbRST2r7Jo3mZ1oOUSaqc990vcBQLdkM6SsJWJZ-b9an4ppUrszK3NHjrAK91G7-l4oVpbBrpDmOn-_0iWeQLxQgx2vkkR4lpx34MMQ/s1850/NV-160-essayillustration-2.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1133" data-original-width="1850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg16tR7hVdvON7G3AgmYYidFJDsPE4MjjLE_4R-FlbVboFne6KBX6wgjAbeVks8NjnRUUWOeuh3Yt8jPvWARAXjbRST2r7Jo3mZ1oOUSaqc990vcBQLdkM6SsJWJZ-b9an4ppUrszK3NHjrAK91G7-l4oVpbBrpDmOn-_0iWeQLxQgx2vkkR4lpx34MMQ/s600/NV-160-essayillustration-2.jpg" width="600" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Never Remember</b></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;">The Democratic Party Storytelling Blues</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Joe Carducci</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> When there were seventeen major candidates at the start of the Republican presidential nomination debates in August 2015 newsmedia analysis claimed this as evidence the party was broken. Professional politicos believed that Jeb Bush should have been able to muscle out most of those jokers from even entering the race. The experts had Donald Trump as Joker #1 and seemed certain his ascendance only insured their own candidate's ultimate victory. They admired Hillary's swindling of Bernie Sanders in Iowa and the primaries - it proved her mettle, her readiness for the job. It was perhaps not a surprise that the experts desired for their ease a Clinton-Bush contest.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQih1H1TWoStgTwV0lAu9ZcuqMrzfAvQ8chGkjEwjagG7vWBPuRiQTilXO8aLLQRJaY-gqT0xalvK3fNj5saB9RISn1D3XM79zGeTpsoYdv6Xn8ycDnTwzu_0vpXwlmhcX5haJ_VgNgyyEFJx6GZiCdGAZxEX-pM0wvSuP2GPr-ZagtZgMdzF7aDPtQ/s400/NV-160-essay-CNN-2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="237" data-original-width="400" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQih1H1TWoStgTwV0lAu9ZcuqMrzfAvQ8chGkjEwjagG7vWBPuRiQTilXO8aLLQRJaY-gqT0xalvK3fNj5saB9RISn1D3XM79zGeTpsoYdv6Xn8ycDnTwzu_0vpXwlmhcX5haJ_VgNgyyEFJx6GZiCdGAZxEX-pM0wvSuP2GPr-ZagtZgMdzF7aDPtQ/s320/NV-160-essay-CNN-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The experts' humiliation was an existential scalding they would not forget - <i>existential</i> because for materialist progressives there is nothing but politics - they do not exist day-to-day on any higher realm whether poetic, philosophical or spiritual. But oddly, Trump is the least conservative Republican president we've seen, and his voters are moving the party away from free trade doctrine and neo-conservative foreign adventuring and toward American working class concerns. Rather than see this as their victory in the battle of ideas, the Democrats reacted violently in rhetoric and street action, as if their identity had been stolen. There is a strange emptiness in Democratic party rhetoric that may have to do with the logic of state power loosed from the Consititution; it could be another love that dare not speak its name, especially to a free people in a free press. I remember seeing an episode of the old <i>CNN</i> show, "Capital Gang", when the subject became trade policy and the debate wound up entirely between the two right-wingers, Robert Novak and Pat Buchanan. The left-wingers, Mark Shields, Margaret Carlson, and Al Hunt, sat back and watched Novak make the best case for free trade absolutism and Buchanan make the best case for protecting current industries and jobs in America. It seemed confirmation that this Democratic party has left the old New Deal working class behind and is now the party of the New Class, the elite, the culturati.... So much so the party doesn't even realize it courtesy a protective newsmedia. When Trump said on the stump, "I love the poorly educated," I suspect that while most people laughed it may have sounded to the last of the New Dealers like, "Checkmate!" </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8SgPs-7TuZo2OW2Abh32-sI-RNffpRcI-_XCMyvYIbiFad42yRA4JhF5zZ7QsvwWBT2e26KcQ5Q7XQ7EUERueDiQbtUjurNH_btc6P5fNl8fZBwkujJzYCVvrGQa4NnGbq9KMhqcv-Lx3SdS1_uug_TMu1fmYD3Tt4ZPGviGsy5L5Jmh6D6SycMIvPQ/s425/NV-160-essayillustration-1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="320" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8SgPs-7TuZo2OW2Abh32-sI-RNffpRcI-_XCMyvYIbiFad42yRA4JhF5zZ7QsvwWBT2e26KcQ5Q7XQ7EUERueDiQbtUjurNH_btc6P5fNl8fZBwkujJzYCVvrGQa4NnGbq9KMhqcv-Lx3SdS1_uug_TMu1fmYD3Tt4ZPGviGsy5L5Jmh6D6SycMIvPQ/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-1.jpg" width="241" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The drivers of American politics have moved from farmers and the working class only gradually but its been happening since the Wilson administration. The Brookings Institute was founded in 1916 as the Institute for Government Research to graft a think-tank brain onto a small headless bureaucracy - which then became conscious, like Frankenstein's monster or maybe Skynet. And with international socialism and national socialism in the air the American new class had marching orders and two examples of what not to do. The new class was identified by Milovan Djilas in his 1957 book of the same name; this class became visible earlier in the communist east with its imposed monoculture. It's been difficult to see the new class in this country because so much of the middle and upper classes merely project an identification with some micro-class sub-niche. Class aspiration rules sociology here; most American families went native a generation or two ago. Europeans are quick to pick up on this aspect of Americanness, while our elite's affectations often reference European markers. Americans do this to disguise or leverage class advantages while we "slum" to taste the freedoms of the truly dropped-out. Its never clear who is in charge here. As Michael Anton asked about our present regime in a recent speech, "Who is sovereign?" He notes how the vast majority of the elite merely follow a "'deep doctrine,' which they only dimly understand and don't know the origins of. Perhaps, then, the doctrine is sovereign?" (<i>americanmind.org</i>) </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The Turkish term "deep state" describes Ataturk's urban secular-military state which was designed to modernize post-Ottoman Turkey against its rural Islamic demos, the conservative constituents that Erdogan rode to power. The Turkish deep state was finally tamed by the EU and NATO which interrupted the historical rhythm of military coups which had regularly put the Turkish state back in the hands of secular urban forces who would duly outlaw the latest Islamic party and then hold a new election. Totalitarian studies use the term "party state" which seems more applicable to the United States since it accounts for the pitch of the two major parties - Democrats as the party for the expansion of the state and Republicans as the party trying to hold the line. Naturally the state bureaucracies, federal, state and municipal, are manned largely by Democratic party voters. The larger electorate in its fitful wisdom gives the growth of the state gas when it elects Democrats to oversee the party state, or taps the breaks on it when it elects Republicans to oversee same. Rolling back the size of the state remains out of the question unless the current Supreme Court actually does undo all of the New Deal - Great Society enabling rulings and readings that allowed for the metastasizing of the classical republic beyond the bounds of the Constitution - the new class' prime directive. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The old world's catastrophes in WWI and WWII are what opened the door to the rise of the new class here. The New Deal's state activism was prolonging the Depression but no lesson was learned as the administrative drift was rescued by the WWII mobilization and its command economy as well as a victory that left America alone physically intact. The Isolationists felt the Roosevelt administration's appetite to enter the war had been self-interested and its running for a third term out of line, but they lost the message battle even though the newsmedia was not yet fully identifying itself with the public sector new class. The third Roosevelt term and the war meant there would be no going back to the roaring twenties. The Cold War burden prevented any demobilization. America was the same country but only because American adults had come of age before the thirties. The postwar baby boom generation, however, would be fully acclimated to the new public-private imbalance and the dynamic of public sector growth was in motion - the staffing up, the spending imperative, the growth of budgets, the capital city becoming the boomtown of boomtowns, the covert need for failure and new problems that demand more of everything.... </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZecnwW-5ppJbQPKtBo1vU5XjG0UndF-F1MSbYaWKpYQABX4FgiOkWqszgpUR_zAHRiWm3wEvR3ro_Yj_x7acda3Cbdi5-uyM5UdTe_Rg4NNbT3KrMC4B4XwvCs-cCGb1GwiidX0R-KU0CnieLQfasxOPaS1k17reGIHTVSBXBL2pqA42GO-ChOcxnrw/s962/NV-160-essay-EisKenNixJohn%20(2).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="962" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZecnwW-5ppJbQPKtBo1vU5XjG0UndF-F1MSbYaWKpYQABX4FgiOkWqszgpUR_zAHRiWm3wEvR3ro_Yj_x7acda3Cbdi5-uyM5UdTe_Rg4NNbT3KrMC4B4XwvCs-cCGb1GwiidX0R-KU0CnieLQfasxOPaS1k17reGIHTVSBXBL2pqA42GO-ChOcxnrw/s320/NV-160-essay-EisKenNixJohn%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Today there are so many problems at issue according to all the sinless rock throwers that you might think the Democratic party's motto is "America deserves punishment - Vote Democrat". The party is not just the oldest political party, its been the default governing party. Not in the White House, the hood ornament of the state, but its been dug in deep in the Congress, the engine room of state, and in the agencies and bureaucracy built by its spending. Its a shocking measure of Democrats' present confusion that Republicans have controlled Congress often as not in recent years, leaving former radicals fretting about our norms. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Cynicism separates the men from the boys, at least according to the men. The Democratic party's internal struggle was once described as <i>The Yankee and Cowboy War</i> in an interesting 1976 book by that title written by former SDS president Carl Oglesby. He extrapolated from events (the shotgun marriage of the 1960 Kennedy-Johnson ticket, JFK's assassination, Bobby Kennedy's challenge of LBJ and <i>his</i> assassination, the Johnson step-down, Watergate...) an underlying struggle for control of the party between its eastern establishment liberals and its southern conservatives. After the party's continuing trauma (the 1968 Democratic convention riots, next year's Days of Rage, the unseating of Daley's delegates for Jesse Jackson's at the 1972 convention, Nixon's landslide victory...) two new lowest-political-common-denominator interests held the party together: losing the Vietnam War and hanging it all on Nixon. Nixon and the Republicans had profited by the eastern liberals' <i>autogolpe</i> against Johnson and that seemed to prove Daley and Humphrey had been correct - an unacceptable posit for the eastern establishment, the Manhattan media, and the first wave of pretentious baby boomers. The party made its bed then and has been lying in it since. Since those Yankees forced that Cowboy to withdraw his re-election bid in 1968 the battle inside the Democratic party has been between the Cynics and the Holy Joes, and to further confuse matters there have been both Cowboys and Yankees in each category, at least until the Cowboys moved wholesale into the Republican party soon after one last Kennedy brother, Teddy, kneecapped another sitting Democratic president from the south, Jimmy Carter. This Kennedy stunt managed to elect Ronald Reagan who had been considered an unelectable fringe candidate. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The Cynics among Democratic candidates for president since 1968 were Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Al Sharpton, and Hillary Clinton. Cynics are distinguished by the pride they take in their acceptance and application of lying and dirty tricks despite having forced Republican Richard Nixon to resign ostensibly over same. To them such frisson is sublime and a measure of seriousness. The attorney-advisors around Clinton, Obama, and Biden are running Democratic strategy quite cynically - they seem even to possess an on-off switch for rioters and the black block - but they are banking on the newsmedia's continued acquiescence and that is likely to change once they feel safely past Donald Trump. It doesn't seem likely the <i>New York Times</i> and <i>NPR</i> can continue to approach some stories as if carefully disarming a bomb over the course of weeks while other stories are quickly encased in a concrete sarcophagus like chernobyl reactor No 4. Well, <i>NPR</i> probably can... </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUkm5-IH3-MB6G24kXNmBAo7PelgypvzNLWzeFLX3487J6fkvthMzE8rXR3vmgVvEexXfEtfYh2hSFV4-vpAwqHuNbP9IKXqLfjnm5HtrU6Tq7QKvwjMxTkM-gJEHyw69U5N7flZAz5rU6Rk65_M3TZ9Phm4MSZMP6oWKQ0cPgQljD0LR3LH6UiW-J-A/s622/NV-160-essayillustration-3a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="622" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUkm5-IH3-MB6G24kXNmBAo7PelgypvzNLWzeFLX3487J6fkvthMzE8rXR3vmgVvEexXfEtfYh2hSFV4-vpAwqHuNbP9IKXqLfjnm5HtrU6Tq7QKvwjMxTkM-gJEHyw69U5N7flZAz5rU6Rk65_M3TZ9Phm4MSZMP6oWKQ0cPgQljD0LR3LH6UiW-J-A/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-3a.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The Holy Joes were such sadsack wouldbe national nobodies as Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jerry Brown, Frank Church, Morris Udall, Fred Harris, Ed Muskie, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Henry Jackson, Sam Nunn, William Proxmire, Paul Simon, Thomas Eagleton, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Mario Cuomo, Paul Tsongas, Bruce Babbitt, Bill Bradley, Al Gore.... Holy Joes were once a dime-a-dozen in the Democratic party and of them only Jimmy Carter won the office. He performed so poorly that his claim to fame is being the nation's best ex-president - the perfect Holy Joe! Such Joes were naive about means and ends and surely believed an already free people just needed more government and that all those additional legions of public servants would be content to serve rather than rule. Holy Joes make a point of assuming everyone is as earnest and conscientious as them. They can't be mugged by reality because they walk on gilded splendors and won't see it coming or going. The Cynics generally find it efficacious to identify as Holy Joes in public which can give the party the look of a simple vote-buying conspiracy depending on the performing talent of its cynical candidates in any particular campaign season. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> There were also a few Democratic candidates for president over the years that you'd have to call Movement-types: George Wallace, Ramsey Clark, Angela Davis, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Lyndon Larouche, Pat Schroeder, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders.... I think Barack Obama fits best in the small club I'll call The Beards, clean-shaven or not. Obama was able to leave the Movement without letting the door slam shut behind him when he joined the Daley Machine mk II well before he was on the national radar. Yet he managed to keep some distance from the machine along the lines of Adlai Stevenson II and Harold Washington. Like them, Obama was seen locally as the kind of hapless reformer that the Daleys, father and son, preferred to send to D.C. rather than have hang around Chicago and cause problems. On the national stage in Washington the Beards put a intellectual gloss on the unpretentious dirty work of the machine. Stevenson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination three times and won it twice, losing to Eisenhower both times. Obama became president because Daley-the-younger didn't want him running for mayor of Chicago. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Richard J. and Richard M. were both practical working class New Deal Democrats with few pretensions. Neither could abide a posturing reformer standing outside the party regulars shaming them in front of the newsmedia to their own greater glory while possessing none of the political power to bring to the table where a deal might be cut. In the years between the two Mayor Daleys, Harold Washington alone built that power and won election and re-election as a reform Mayor. After Washington's unexpected death, the party regular Alderman Eugene Sawyer finished out Washington's second term before losing to Daley who picked up as much of the Harold Washington braintrust as would work with him. The Daleys may have sounded dumb but they were political virtuosos and Richard M. stayed in office even longer than his father. The Old Man, Hizzoner, was anathema to his party's eastern mandarins after 1968 but in his son's third term as mayor the Democratic party's convention returned to Chicago; in Richie's sixth and last term he deftly sidelined Hillary and got Obama the nomination and the presidency. So... back to New Deal party unity cutting ever newer deals, right...? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAccG8eNmGEClLx3ZOeigCg9DiuPagy8L4Ma_3YygRnc4tg9lkulxJEyDVy-dmrxNqAfW53K0b7oCIebCi7_96rltH9j99Ee0Sq4GgJITnYEtpuUvS5bwkzyZnpLEW-HJ4LRlWjMjF9I6Lbgw_Ca1zH8caSL0r0yVmofMnELAihC7X7O6cLQgaBeEJTg/s521/NV-160-essayillustration-5a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAccG8eNmGEClLx3ZOeigCg9DiuPagy8L4Ma_3YygRnc4tg9lkulxJEyDVy-dmrxNqAfW53K0b7oCIebCi7_96rltH9j99Ee0Sq4GgJITnYEtpuUvS5bwkzyZnpLEW-HJ4LRlWjMjF9I6Lbgw_Ca1zH8caSL0r0yVmofMnELAihC7X7O6cLQgaBeEJTg/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-5a.jpg" width="246" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> If the Yankees and the Cowboys were cultural categories more than ideological camps, the Cynics and Holy Joes were American versions of the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of what was officially called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. When the Tsar quickly dissolved the first Duma to put in place more restrictive voting criteria most socialists argued for recalling their deputies in protest, but Lenin opposed that so as to continue monkey-wrenching the regime from inside. The Mensheviks had first been called the "soft" faction and they favored Popular Front-style pluralism on the left while Lenin was determined to marshal a smaller, disciplined, full-time "hard" revolutionary vanguard. The well-intentioned Mensheviks were no match for the cynical bad faith of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. They were even swindled out of their rightful name. They - the Mensheviks! - were not the minority, they were the majority (<i>bolsheviki</i>) of the socialist movement but the Mensheviks had jobs and they'd leave meetings early to work in the morning while the Bolsheviks were professionals and had nothing better to do than sit up all night on their iron buttocks delaying votes until they had the numbers to win. This vanguard minority became known as The Majority as early as 1903 and thereafter for all of Historical time. [Recall here that the Republican Party was created by the anti-Slavery faction of the Whig party up north after that party cracked up over the issue. Blacks in the south joined the Republican party after emancipation, while the Democratic party, which had been the party of Slavery and then Jim Crow, had no crack-up, not even a name change - there's a carefully disarmed narrative!] </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Cynicism in the Classical sense meant the denial of pleasure for virtue in pursuit of a truer, deeper happiness; in other words the ancient Holy Joes wandering around Greece were Cynics! More recently the word dumbs down to describe Moderns' reflexive disbelief in the professed moral pretense of others. Moderns introduced their own pretention unbound which we see today down the line (the Principal, the Administrator, the Human Resource officer, the Compliance officer, the school nurse, the hall monitor, the teacher's pet...). The present day cynic is characterized by how quickly he/she/it spots opportunity for self-service under cover of a declaimed altruism aimed to impune any tradition or protocol in their way. Altruism was once the unspoken etiquette of WASP elites but it's now an out-loud conceit for products of our top Universities' most useless colleges. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The intellectual elite was just one of the classes dissatisfied with the 19th century royal houses of Europe, but they were the most noxious in their influence during the 20th. This because freedom to them meant assumption of the prerogative of Kings rather than democracy. Why would the expert class, the masters of sociology, political science, climatology, linguistics... why would they want to serve a free public, a public free to ignore their best advice, their Science, their Truth whether patently self-servicing or possibly not? Marx coveted Christianity's social effect through the ages and hoped to argue his way to the front of the march of time. He was a busy body even though he claimed the outcome was inevitable. But why stand by and let the meek inherit the earth? Where does that leave the unmeek? Lenin had an answer for that. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzNm0-XVMU561YtYynfLxHa2KBon1qYYF3mhpvpOoG7Z3tF2kJ-pSnuvMZCHkzoy_tvJShPNWMlN2Lx2U5qm5e7iMloBVmxH10sJ4npiuLdHUOpaQ5-aoyR-4SgY7GBAh3H0kjV5vrqxR_2q7SkueqgVGAGnvQaC9aTIBPdvtgcBwwxH3jm-K8XaJhQ/s539/NV-160-essayillustration-8a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzNm0-XVMU561YtYynfLxHa2KBon1qYYF3mhpvpOoG7Z3tF2kJ-pSnuvMZCHkzoy_tvJShPNWMlN2Lx2U5qm5e7iMloBVmxH10sJ4npiuLdHUOpaQ5-aoyR-4SgY7GBAh3H0kjV5vrqxR_2q7SkueqgVGAGnvQaC9aTIBPdvtgcBwwxH3jm-K8XaJhQ/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-8a.jpg" width="237" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> In our possibly failing constitutional democratic republic the elite's Job #1 always is to outrun culpability for present circumstances. For this they need a moving politik in the form of new social programs laid on top of the old ones and a constantly changing approved rhetoric and jargon so as to foist the disguise and expose their opponents who, not conversant with the latest lingo, step on rhetorical landmines right and left usually around issues of race and gender. New laws are passed on top of the old ones creating a thicket of cross-thatched traps; these allow the arrest of anyone you might wish to arrest - they are certain to be in violation of some rule or regulation that under normal circumstances a cop on the beat would ignore or not even see. The black motorist's nightmare is now how today's demoted citizen is kept in line in what appears to remain a free country. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> American racism was hit by inflation soon after we lost the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs. The new class administered both wars yet profited by the losings. A dollar of old-time unreasoning Jim Crow racism must be worth ten million in today's dollars. Nobody in their right mind believes racism has increased in this country. Time, sports, rock and roll, hip hop, the arts, military service, work-place integration, intermarriage... has all lead to real world accomodation; only the new immigrants from the old worlds bring into the country persons with no sense of that whatever amount of melanin in their skin. But a news-scan of the rhetoric spiraling from the Manhattan media, <i>NPR</i>, and academia might lead one to suspect American history flows backwards - another failure of Marxist edumucation. The quickening of the recasting of terms is probably due to the suprisingly easy election and re-election of President Barack Obama. This threatened the left - the Leninists or Alinskyites seeking to use the Democratic party and other American institutions as conveniences on their way to power for the reckoning of their dreams. Their organizing pretense since Marxism dropped economics for race and nationalism in the postwar period required contempt for traditions both civil and religious that had been implicated in racism going back to the slave trade. This paradigm was unexpectedly in jeopardy as Obama took the oath of office in January 2009. It might have felt as if a bluff had been called. Popular and unpopular Historians, the tenured and the adjunct alike, are busy rationizing a political line they might profitably assert concerning how, which, and why America elected Obama twice when she might have chosen John McCain or Mitt Romney. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The Obama administration and the Movement trying to use it fell short regarding their transformative ambitions beyond setting up a healthcare bureaucracy which seems to have triggered a shortage of both doctors and lawyers, some trick! If Barack Obama was a gifted orator he was often polishing up Daley-speak rather than Alinsky's rules. Any real world success is never enough for progressives and so the follow-up surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016 was essentially welcomed as a relief and an opportunity to retreat into comforting conceit: rediscovery of the black-heart of America - the necessary pessimism by which idealists measure themselves. And the money has poured in. Today's cynicism is a materialist form of realism so who can say which base metal undergirds such gold-digging -smelting -bricking and -banking. Probably more likely some man-made alloy like brass, I'm thinking. Trump picked up the white working class which today's Democratic party left lying curbside. Formerly members of FDR's New Deal Democratic coalition in-good-standing-whatever-their-table-manners but now quite beyond the pale. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWY9dXb1KqZJ_C11JREv5kENTv26AamGUSwQOiNJXw3w4PTy6CpCmvZHoXwqYlHtguo1l33JOOLxx9l9ZFuUSLZSYlP9iHz7dPSDN92grV4JdKuczne-a4bQd5rLWoHo4L852sj6wTiUZji2yBR-SD-kcMuISqF7134dqCzdUhPLlODMkGm_SINQLrHQ/s400/NV-160-essayillustration-10a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWY9dXb1KqZJ_C11JREv5kENTv26AamGUSwQOiNJXw3w4PTy6CpCmvZHoXwqYlHtguo1l33JOOLxx9l9ZFuUSLZSYlP9iHz7dPSDN92grV4JdKuczne-a4bQd5rLWoHo4L852sj6wTiUZji2yBR-SD-kcMuISqF7134dqCzdUhPLlODMkGm_SINQLrHQ/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-10a.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Appearances seem to increase in importance as Americans lose the thread of first-person life within organic urban neighborhoods or rural communities. Performing and profiling in alienated, mediated environments clouds the view already crowded by screens flashing dissociated scenes to our distracted semi-attention. If this continues long enough both Darwin and Lysenko suggest our eyes will evolve to positions on either side of our heads so as to double multi-tasking options. Our predator's eyes will become those of prey. A theatrical, performative, method cynicism swamps authenticity in Washington and out on the campaign trail. The <i>New York Times</i> compares the current Jan. 6 hearings unfavorably to the Watergate hearings. Garrett Graff (age 41), author of a newbie's cud chewing clipping service history of old media coverage of The Watergate Affair, in an op-ed piece elides any true historical comparison between Rep. Bennie Thompson and Sen. Sam Ervin, but seems to take at face value tales of ol' "Uncle Sam" becoming a cult hero bringin' "clear moral force" to the Watergate hearings - not bad for a segregationist's reputation into the 21st century. Graff also offers that the presence of today's "right-wing media echo chamber... offer[s] rebuttals and defenses unimagined a half-century ago." Unimagined? What is the paper of record if it has no institutional memory? "The right wing media echo chamber" was a direct result of the behavior of the old newsmedia in the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford period. Maybe it was the three television networks' news divisions coming into their own with their overgroomed talking heads' rehearsed reaction shots at dirty tricks that had made the difference, but it seems to me that Nixon resigned not because his enemies wanted him out but because his own party's rather guileless voters back then were disappointed to find out that their President swore. In response, conservatives built up think tanks and media outlets that could state their case in the face of an otherwise fixed media environment and with Trump they've obviously learned to give on table manners and such. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Meanwhile our default governing party got comfortable in the sunny heat-lamp of newsmedia coverage of their foibles going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis which was laundered into just another profile in courage. How Johnson must've marvelled at that! But with the newsmedia's enlistment in the party state's efforts the Democratic party itself loses its bearings and soon regularly loses its natural House majority. The Republicans became more rural and small town and less country club and suburban. Reports on such changes neglect to implicate newsmedia themselves in the Democratic party's troubles. But the party, spared the harsh, bracing truth of matters by the newsmedia and Manhattan publishing becomes like a drunk, stumbling numb down stairwells or into bandsaws, feeling no pain. Bill Clinton's neediness in front of crowds was his best political asset for he took in every psychic detail betrayed by his audiences, whereas his wife Hillary moves as if certain she need only transmit her brilliance. And the newsmedia wonders at its first draft of history's increasing lack of traction in the battle over public opinion. Maybe it is that echo chamber, but which one? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i> NYTimes</i> columnist Jamelle Bouie writes about Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz's concept of oversight and overspeech. Bouie (age 35) notes the limits of Congressional oversight and then quoting Chafetz (age 43) explains that "overspeech, by contrast, is the 'use of the tools of oversight' for performance, spectacle and theatricality. Overspeech is used to communicate directly to the public, to make an argument and to shape its views.... If oversight is meant to be the bloodless investigation of facts, then overspeech, Chafetz writes, is defined by its 'performative elements, ranging from casting to scripting, from scenery to costuming, all of it aimed at more effectively communicating a public message.'" Bouie then encourages the Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee to give President Biden the opportunity "to fan emotion and use conflict, not conciliation, to make his case." (<i>New York Times</i>, June 10, 2022) I guess these post-Watergate newbies are feeling pressure from the kids just out of college on the staff who know even less than they do. This bilge reads as shadowplay code-talking to the Obama-in-exile apparats who are already running things much more radically than when Barack's name was attached to things. Joe Biden has no future to worry about. It's highly unlikely that Bouie and Chafetz misunderstand the January 6 Insurrection any less than Bob Woodward misunderstands Watergate. They all have an interest in misunderstanding what's going on around them in exactly the way that best reinforces the rootless, mediated ignorance of their editors and it eventually becomes their own ignorance when they really arrive as journalists. Journalists stand in the information stream without context and tell you with a straight face that they are providing context. And the help they volunteer to the Democratic party lowers its own ability to comprehend what's going on around it. Hillary recently said, "2016 is a traumatic event - it's almost eschatological. It is a break in history. It's such a piece of unfinished business." (<i>Financial Times</i>, June 18, 2022) This, what- performative overspeech?, leaves strategy <i>and</i> policy to the state party's attorney-advisors who innovate merely by skirting campaign finance and election law. They are behaving as if should they fail to put the Republicans in the dock they will wind up in the dock. Americas will be migrating to Venezuela before we know it. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWtJAcn8kBW2czaqJdTQDnw090hrvSYANF4pVuCoZd2OmaudlpG4-4U0MkQkg2ZcmvjK9-0KZYRlIXYPIS7F2N40TxfSRhUE4jGyHolHn5qJhsbf-icJirgJqYJ08j_bhOWQLxlms2UOy4L1M1_GI8k38TTKJ7Xu14Ogw2hB2X96VaivkHjRtvPK5AMQ/s645/NV-160-essayillustration-13a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="645" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWtJAcn8kBW2czaqJdTQDnw090hrvSYANF4pVuCoZd2OmaudlpG4-4U0MkQkg2ZcmvjK9-0KZYRlIXYPIS7F2N40TxfSRhUE4jGyHolHn5qJhsbf-icJirgJqYJ08j_bhOWQLxlms2UOy4L1M1_GI8k38TTKJ7Xu14Ogw2hB2X96VaivkHjRtvPK5AMQ/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-13a.jpg" width="198" /></a></div> Our democratic republic depends on either a leap of faith or a bet on numbers. The back-room boys of each political party who used to negotiate who got their party's nominations were able to dampen the importance of a theatrical pandering which might raise an empty suit to high office. The downside was that insider pols were likely to choose a loyal hack over a competent individual. After the 1968 Democratic convention in which the back-roomers nominated Hubert Humphrey over delegate preferences the Democrats, then later the Republicans, shifted to primary elections to nominate candidates. And so the Rules of Theater now apply despite the best efforts of message and media consultants. In any case, success in fooling or cheating the electorate does blowback in something like a rule of physics. The two parties often seem trapped in an argument over whether the Eisenhower-1950s were good-if-improvable or evil-and-unsalvageable. Those who remembered the 1930s had no doubt about their preference, but we are lucky if we still know someone who remembers the thirties. If the fifties are judged salvageable then the Republicans will win that argument; they have kids and family life requires stability. If the Democrats are encouraging higher immigration rates to replace children they don't produce, then still, these foreigners don't arrive looking to do much more than transplant their family lines into their dream of America which dates to the Eisenhower era even if they've received that dream through the films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas; they aren't hoping to live in Martin Scorsese's America. They've seen enough of moral chaos and feudal violence. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> James Piereson's book, <i>Camelot and the Cultural Revolution</i>, describes well the boomerang effect of the mediated transferrence of culpability for Kennedy's killing from a single, disaffected Communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, to the South... Texas... Dallas... white southerners... cowboys.... Kennedy's survivors rejected Cold War martyrdom in the battle for Cuba and imposed instead a false story that conveniently implicated vice president Lyndon Johnson, now suddenly president. Johnson proceeded to pass civil rights measures that Kennedy had barely paid lip service to and still the Kennedys and the eastern elites in the party pulled Johnson down only to see Richard Nixon benefit. The tension introduced by cheating the electorate in 1960 has never fully resolved itself. Settled historical understanding tells us that the Kennedy-Nixon debate seemed won by Nixon to those who listened on the radio, while those who watched it on televsion thought Kennedy had won because he looked young, tanned, healthy and Nixon declined make-up and got sweaty under the lights. In fact Kennedy was congenitally unhealthy and his doctors were making that worse while the hardy Nixon lived to be 81. And while Piereson's book is more an investigation of the fallout from what are basically understood to be false narratives there are books as well that make of such seeming solid first drafts of history like The Watergate Affair something quite Warrenesque - Jim Hougan's <i>Secret Agenda</i>, and Len Colodny & Robert Gettlin's <i>Silent Coup</i>. If you're my age you might think you saw Watergate for yourself as the hearings were carried live on all three networks, newsradio stations, and the public media, <i>PBS</i> and <i>NPR</i>, in their infancies, and the tapes and transcripts released.... Today, the Manhattan media's skills are best illustrated in the making of Rudy Giuliani into alternately a figure of fun or a serious threat to the Republic, since he is actually the one local elected official who did any serious heavy lifting and did it so successfully in his offices as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (1983-89) and Mayor of New York (1994-2001) that America's largest city was suddenly its best run. The thanks he got proves him the hero in the Classical, Greek sense which makes all those newsmedia experts what...? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> There are elements of cynicism in the inevitable theatrical contrivances of any public activity. Art is the lie that may tell a truth, or may be mere narcissistic display, a kind strip-tease to nothing. Politics is the tactical pursuit of strategic ends. The scale of the manipulation needed depends on how mentionable the strategic ends may be. FDR didn't intend to extend the Depression but he did intend to hide his failure by entering the war; <i>he</i> needed the war whether American involvement was inevitable or not. He should have left the presidency after two terms. Instead the war-time command economy and the war itself erased memory of the first two terms and earned him the reputation as the greatest president of the 20th century - war as political resurrection. A Republican president Taft or an ex-Democrat Wilkie (the Republican choice) or Roosevelt's v.p. John Nance Garner (he famously claimed the vice president's office wasn't worth a warm bucket of piss) who ran but was bigfooted by FDR's own surprise third run, any of these others might have rolled back the worst of Roosevelt's 1930s moves. The Republicans flinched at nominating an isolationist and the war overturned the constitutional chessboard and enshrined the New Dealers' dream state. An unhealthy Roosevelt then put Henry Wallace, a willing dupe of Stalin when it mattered, onto his ticket and a heartbeat away throughout his third term. We came within three months of forfeiting the Cold War - the time Harry S. Truman served as Vice President before Roosevelt died in his fourth. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> So Truman ascended to that office worth more than a warm bucket of piss when Roosevelt kicked that other bucket at age 63. Truman was preoccupied for his not quite two terms with the end of the war, the semi-demobilization and the reorientation to the Cold War in Europe and Asia. Eisenhower was one of the heroes of the war his party had opposed pre-Pearl Harbor and he beat Adlai Stevenson II twice. Eisenhower was the only postwar Republican president with the standing to roll back any of the New Deal but he didn't. The Eisenhower terms came to represent everything the Democrats and news media thought of as vapid if not retrograde. He and Mamie looked like grandparents and he golfed. [The Eisenhower presidency has risen in the estimation of his party's current political enemies because he can't hurt them anymore and it seems he treated his vice president, Richard Nixon, like a warm bucket of piss.] The entire spectrum of dangerous ideas in the 1950s seemed to co-exist inside the Democratic party, from Communism to Jim Crow - such a peace seems could only be bought by New Deal and Cold War-scale spending. The Democrats seemed a default party of government with little philosophical coherence. The Whigs were morally compromised so the party broke apart and a new Republican party that opposed slavery was formed. The Democratic party sails on oblivious to its own professed high standards - they will be the judges, thank you very much.... </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoZCR7TcGSc8ZdBv8FPDceRzm-6zNXUsLoRjbm6GXqQloMKtT9lQuIrTpd_3_5iE_JkieW9vzK1Y4xe3gLK90dVpXNhS_dCW4oikozrV9GDFvJbPpWt6pvVxZzJm0sQRp3nTMVWyCfIxmv6UbynoxEKAM3ZDWuO4uBX5jOjkqNMV-wgMawX4lysVdj0A/s433/NV-160-essayillustration-11.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="433" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoZCR7TcGSc8ZdBv8FPDceRzm-6zNXUsLoRjbm6GXqQloMKtT9lQuIrTpd_3_5iE_JkieW9vzK1Y4xe3gLK90dVpXNhS_dCW4oikozrV9GDFvJbPpWt6pvVxZzJm0sQRp3nTMVWyCfIxmv6UbynoxEKAM3ZDWuO4uBX5jOjkqNMV-wgMawX4lysVdj0A/s320/NV-160-essayillustration-11.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> Of course the fifties were an economic and cultural boom decade. It couldn't rival the twenties but only because the state and its regulatory and taxing burdens now weighed more heavily on economic activity. Otherwise American advantages were obvious, most overseas productive capacity had been destroyed and so the U.S. exported goods, services, manpower, and investment supplying the surviving populations overseas, rebuilding infrastructure and organizing international affairs with an eye toward avoiding another war. It's underappreciated how directly this all flew in the face of Republican doctrines and American tradition. We lost our constitutional republic to the New Deal, WWII, and the Cold War. Other than our new class of experts and managers stirring throughout the 20th century to demand administrative control here and abroad, Americans are natural isolationists. Americans left the old world for cause in most cases. But you can trace empire back through the 9-11 Wars, the Cold War, the World Wars, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt to honest Abe if you want. The Democrats' sixties meltdown left the prosecution of the Cold War in Republican hands. Responsible Democrats like Henry Jackson and Sam Nunn wanted to run for president but their party was no longer interested in fighting communism. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> After 9-11 the <i>New York Times</i> narrative construction team went right to work asking, Where was Bush? - Wednesday's paper, Thursday's, Friday's... Well Bush showed up on the pile Friday and Dan, I'm afraid he hit a home-run. Criticized for not connecting the dots the Bush-Cheney administration started connecting muth-fuk'n dots all over the Goddamn globe! The Democrats, with the then invisible exception of Ill. State Sen. Barack Obama, seemed afraid not to vote the war authorizations in Afghanistan and Iraq until the wars went bad. Then they decided they'd been lied to and when the press concurred the war efforts were besieged. The end of the American empire seemed around the corner when President Obama and his peace junta - Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power - decided, against the advice of bucket of warm piss Joe Biden, to intervene in Libya to bring down Col. Gadaffi. I think they thought it would be easy; progressives, idealists maybe don't quite understand the limits of their conscious or stated intentions. The American Empire did alright in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and maybe that generation, trying to spare the next the true cost of those mobilizations, made that next generation incapable of bearing any burdens. Now as the Republicans proceed on the bumpy road back from empire to republic, <i>pace</i> Pat Buchanan, the Democrats have learned to love empire, the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, the Pentagon, Big Pharma... you name it. Entangling alliances are a great way to create the conditions that demand staffing up in Washington bureaus and the new war on domestic terrorism is promising to be one war the party state can really get behind with sticktoitiveness. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The coming mid-term elections will unleash the furies of the next election cycle. The Democratic party and their newsmedia friends have gotten the default party of government into a situation that promises at minimum much entertainment. Does pressure on both President Biden and Vice President Harris get heavier or lighter if the Republicans take the House and Senate, or lose both? Does Speaker Pelosi want to make her position as second-in-line for the Presidency actual if she loses the gavel, so as to serve out the last two years of Joe Biden's term as the first female president? Is that why she went to Kiev, Taiwan and Armenia? There's about two-and-a-half months between election day and the seating of a new Congress; she'll be one busy octogenarian for those weeks. And which user-friendly young-manservant-of-color will be her vice president? And that isn't even the Democratic nomination primaries, campaigning for which will begin as well. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Renewal of the Republican party was triggered by Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Donald Trump against its Bush-Romney-McConnell establishment over the course of thirty years. It's hard to imagine a similar renewal happening within the Democratic party. Has it started? Will it start? Sam Nunn, Henry Jackson, and Jim Traficant tried from the right, and Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders tried from the left. I don't see the party of the state itself changing its tune unless the black vote wanders back to the Republicans. Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the 2002 book <i>The Emerging Democratic Majority</i> now notes in an interview: "[I]f you look at the non-white working class - black, Hispanic, Asian, but particularly driven by Hispanics - Democrats have lost 19 margin points between 2012 and 2020, while they've gained 16 margin points among white college-educated voters." (<i>WSJ</i>) Will this continue? Is it a thirty year process? Who knows in this country, I've heard newsmedia political experts predict that there will be up to seventeen candidates for the Democratic nomination for president beginning next year. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;">[Photo of the Kennedy inauguration by Paul Schutzer/LIFE]</span></span><div class="yj6qo" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"></div></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><br /></div>
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<b>From the Wyoming desk, by Joe Carducci...</b>
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James Rosen at <i>realclearpolitics.com</i>, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/06/20/watergate_at_50_revelations_from_newly_declassified_evidence_147766.html" target="_blank">Watergate at 50: Revelations From Newly Declassified Evidence</a>.
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It took courage for Hougan to declare nothing less than that all the armies of investigators had missed the heart of the Watergate scandal – that Woodward and Bernstein and the rest of the national news media had gotten it wrong. Nowhere in the official Woodward and Bernstein canon – <i>All the President’s Men</i> (1974), <i>The Final Days</i> (1976), and <i>The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat</i> (2005) – do the names Spencer Oliver or Maxie Wells even appear. The key Eugenio Martinez struggled to conceal was, as <i>Secret Agenda</i> put it, “quite literally the key to the break-in”: its presence on “Muscolito” pointed to the critical role played by the CIA in the operation and to the mission’s true target.</blockquote>
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Michael Barone <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/jan-6-and-an-unhealthy-nostalgia-for-watergate-democracy-public-opinion-michael-barone-impeach-11654890103" target="_blank">interview</a> by Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ.
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He cites the media's obsession with "the Russia-collusion hoax" as an example of a "Watergate fantasy" of our times: "They were operating with Watergate analogies, weren't they? 'We're going to reveal this one little thing, and then we'll turn a witness, and then they'll change their view, and then there will be a congressional hearing that will expose him, and this report will come out in the <i>Washington Post</i> or some other place, and we're going to get credit for overturning the president.'" As it turned out, "there was nothing there at all. It was a complete hoax. It was an invention of the Clinton campaign."</blockquote>
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Joel Pollak at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/18/durham-five-hillary-clinton-associates-are-taking-the-fifth-in-russia-hoax-prosecution/" target="_blank">Durham: Five Hillary Clinton Associates Are Taking the Fifth in Russia Hoax Prosecution</a>.
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Legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted in a commentary on the filing: [Durham] is now moving to give immunity to a key witness while revealing that the claims made by the Clinton campaign were viewed by the CIA as “not technically plausible” and “user created.” He also revealed that at least five of the former Clinton campaign contractors/ researchers have invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to cooperate in fear that they might incriminate themselves in criminal conduct. Turley also noted that Durham’s filing “also detailed how the false Russian collusion claims related to Alfa Bank involved Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias and Christopher Steele.” Steele is the former British spy who worked for opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce the fraudulent Russia “dossier” that triggered government surveillance of the Trump campaign and the broader “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory. Elias is a prominent election attorney for Democrats who arranged the funding for the “dossier” and went on to lead Democrats’ efforts to force the adoption of vote-by-mail in key battleground states in the 2020 presidential election.</blockquote>
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Kimberley Strassel in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durham-vs-the-beltway-swamp-dossier-clinton-fbi-trial-expose-politics-11654207276" target="_blank">Durham vs. the Beltway Swamp</a>.
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Mr. Sussman was tight with the FBI. So tight that according to trial evidence, the bureau in 2016 allowed him to edit the draft of one of its press releases. Mr. Sussmann was even on a first-name basis with then-FBI general counsel James Baker. He was able to text his "friend" (Mr. Baker's description of their relationship) and score a meeting the next day. He assured "Jim" he didn't need a badge to get in the building - he already had one. All this allowed Mr. Sussmann (who later sought to recruit Mr. Baker to his firm, Perkins Coie) to avoid the pesky agents and questions that would accompany any average Joe trying to sell the FBI on wild claims.</blockquote>
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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-did-the-steele-hoax-cost-america-russia-clinton-trump-lies-intelligence-court-trial-dossier-politics-11652470728" target="_blank">What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?</a>.
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Worth noting, in light of recent events, is also the coterie of “experts,” in and out of government, upon whom we rely to shape attitudes and policy toward such places as Russia and Ukraine. Since America is likely to have a GOP president and Congress again, we might need an entirely new foreign-policy elite, untainted and uncorrupted by their participation in the collusion lie or their cowardice in not opposing it. A conundrum in this regard is Fiona Hill, who worked in the Trump White House as a Russia expert and who also, amazingly, was the nexus for introducing Mr. Steele to Mr. Danchenko, and Mr. Danchenko to Mr. Dolan. If anybody was in a position to blow a whistle on the Steele hoax, it was Ms. Hill.</blockquote>
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Hans Mahncke in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-put-key-dossier-source-on-payroll-in-apparent-effort-to-conceal-dossier-fabrications_4730272.html" target="_blank">FBI Put Key Dossier Source on Payroll in Apparent Effort to Conceal Dossier Fabrications</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The FBI's goal in giving Danchenko the highly coveted confidential human source (CHS) status appears to have been to take Danchenko off the grid. As a CHS, Danchenko enjoyed special protections and privileges. Crucially, the FBI was able to use his status to conceal Danchenko and his disclosures from congressional inquiries, such as the investigation by then-Rep. Devin Nunes led by Kash Patel. Other inquiries, such as Freedom of Information Act requests, could similarly be stonewalled by reference to the "sourcees and methods" justification for concealing the identity, and even the existence, of a CHS. The FBI had huge incentives to hide Danchenko.</blockquote>
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Jessica Chasmar at <i>foxnews.com</i>, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gaetz-jordan-fbi-workspace-democratic-law-firm" target="_blank">Gaetz, Jordan Demand Answers from FBI on Workspace at Democratic Law Firm</a>.
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Gaetz told Tucker Carlson on <i>Fox News</i>... that he received a letter from Perkins Coie lawyers confirming that the FBI has been maintaining a "Secure Work Environment" within Perkins Coie office for more than a decade, dating back to 2012, and that it is still in operation today. "Perkins Coie is responsible to the FBI for maintaining the Secure Work Environment," the letter reportedly said.</blockquote>
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Thomas Baker in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-robert-mueller-shredded-the-fbis-credibility-centralization-intelligence-investigation-crossfire-hurricane-bush-911-clinton-email-sussmann-11663173014" target="_blank">How Robert Mueller Shredded the FBI's Credibility</a>.
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As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Mueller had worked with FBI special agents in Boston and San Francisco, but he didn’t know the FBI’s culture or how it functioned. He also displayed disdain for the special agents in charge of each of the FBI’s 50-plus field offices. Mr. Mueller didn’t understand the FBI’s office-of-origin system, which has been in use for nearly a century. On a typical case, an office of origin would run things, sending out leads to other field offices who’d track them down and report back. In the case of the 9/11 attacks, the logical office of origin would have been the New York or Washington field office. Both had experienced international squads. New York had the investigative capacity, it was near Ground Zero, and up to then had been the office of origin for the entire al Qaeda case. But Mr. Mueller wanted centralization. He wanted all information to run through FBI headquarters, which would make all the decisions.</blockquote>
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Alan Feuer in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/politics/jan-6-conspiracy-theory-ray-epps.html" target="_blank">A Trump Backer's Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory</a>.
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One of the moments Mr. Epps said he regrets most from his stay in Washington took place the night before the Capitol attack, when he joined his son and a friend for a pro-Trump rally at Black Lives Matter Plaza. During the event, he was videotaped by a right-wing provocateur encouraging people to go inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 in what he described, even at the time, as a form of peaceful protest. The clip has been used to depict Mr. Epps as a man who not only urged people to riot at the Capitol but also then evaded prosecution. The Justice Department has not publicly addressed its decision not to charge him, but the legal definition of incitement requires a person’s words to cause an immediate threat of danger, not one that could possibly occur the following day.</blockquote>
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<i>revolver.news</i>, <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2022/07/the-hidden-agenda-behind-new-york-times-desperate-ray-epps-puff-piece/" target="_blank">The Hidden Agenda Behind the <i>New York Times</i>' Desperate Puff Piece on Ray Epps</a>.
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Amazingly, Ray-Epps is referenced as a pre-planner of the Capitol siege in the <i>NYT</i>’s own video documentary on January 6, “Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the US Capitol”. The very same <i>NYT</i> that now dismisses “conspiracies” about Ray Epps refers to Epps in its own definitive video documentary as a rioter for whom “storming the capitol was part of the plot all along.” Again the <i>NYT</i> video documentary features Epps as one of the key orchestrators of the Capitol siege: The <i>Times</i> piece ominously suggests Epps will sue news outlets (possibly <i>Revolver News</i> and/or <i>Tucker Carlson</i>) for defamation… should Epps sue the <i>Times</i> itself then for suggesting that Epps pre-planned the Capitol attack in its own ostensibly definitive video documentary of that “Day of Rage?”</blockquote>
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Jennifer Senior in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/steve-bannon-war-room-democracy-threat/638443/" target="_blank">American Rasputin: Steve Bannon Is Still Scheming. And He's Still a Threat to Democracy</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKBxKP3MoQJUPUpqGRYq1nxs4IhZ9XZtztkMFydZlKyR5xe7Qf8AYJ4I3ElUEfsnp6QwUpg4qGHVtHjtR01I94ycXiH4TgJb3Q_z2QDIw4tluR1nyQ5ARFbh-yyXdWPd-iXv08l-l-ipcvDJJzWT2UjWolV0Z3zXgChD9wZpAyzMbHq-bUOZHqk4umRQ/s570/NV-160-link-illustr-Atlantic.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="427" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKBxKP3MoQJUPUpqGRYq1nxs4IhZ9XZtztkMFydZlKyR5xe7Qf8AYJ4I3ElUEfsnp6QwUpg4qGHVtHjtR01I94ycXiH4TgJb3Q_z2QDIw4tluR1nyQ5ARFbh-yyXdWPd-iXv08l-l-ipcvDJJzWT2UjWolV0Z3zXgChD9wZpAyzMbHq-bUOZHqk4umRQ/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-Atlantic.jpg" width="240" /></a></div> Bannon and I were originally going to fly out to Arizona for this story. He recently purchased a home there too, and he says its broadcast studio is an exact replica of the one in D.C., so that viewers won’t notice the difference. His plan had been to spend the winter and spring out there. But we never made it. It may have been because his father died, throwing his life into temporary disarray. But I kept wondering if the real reason was something else, possibly financial trouble—maybe that’s why he added a fourth hour of programming to his load. But no, he tells me. “The War Room is a cash machine because it costs nothing to produce.” In fact, he says, he needed that fourth hour to accommodate all of his sponsors. What’s really tying him to Washington, he explains, is a furious desire to keep the momentum going on his show. He’s on a roll. There’s so much energy now in the MAGA movement. Inflation is soaring; Biden is tanking. “The largest voting bloc in this nation is non-college-educated whites,” he tells me. “I have 52/48 of men and I have 50/50 of women that believe he’s illegitimate, okay?” Note the use of the pronoun I. He really does see this as his movement.</blockquote>
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Karl Rove in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-invented-election-denial-2005-bush-kerry-clyburn-jan-6-voting-machines-maga-republicans-biden-speech-11662581117" target="_blank">Democrats Were the First Election Deniers</a>.
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"I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost." This is annoying because Mr. Biden owes his presidency to an election denier. In 2020 his faltering presidential primary campaign was rescued by the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.). This powerful South Carolina politico was one of 31 Democratic House members who voted on Jan. 6, 2005, to object to awarding Ohio's electoral votes to President George W. Bush, despite Mr. Bush winning the Buckeye State by 118,601 votes. Flipping Ohio would have made John Kerry president by a 271-266 Electoral College vote. On the House floor in 2005, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), presented the case for awarding Ohio to the Democrats, claiming "electronic machines transferred" votes from Mr. Kerry to Mr. Bush, creating situations with "significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot." He even asserted that a voting-machine company "reprogrammed the computer by remote dial-up" in a way that altered the outcome.</blockquote>
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Emily Finley in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-by-and-for-the-elites-biden-wilson-jefferson-democratist-popular-rule-threat-america-tocqueville-11664114737" target="_blank">'Democracy' by and for the Elites</a>.
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The word "democracy" no longer indicates much about popular rule. The word now merely refers to a hypothetical goal that gives those who invoke its holy name a mandate to do just about anything - even the opposite of what the people desire. America is still breathing the musket fumes of 1776, and words that play to the imagination of America's founding - "freedom," "democracy," "free speech" - are sources of enormous power for the apparatchiks warring, pillaging and censoring on behalf of those values. These abstract words help to maintain the facade of self-government. Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that eventually an "immense and tutelary power" would replace genuine popular rule in America. The people would accept their tutelage, he says, because of their belief that they "themselves hold the end of the chain."</blockquote>
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Alec Ryrie in FT on John Martin's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/db2f5778-bb5a-4cbc-9d9d-38101a6fbca5" target="_blank">A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World</a>.
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Martin's case that the apocalypse is the midwife of modernity seems self-evidently right to me. My main frustration is that we need a second volume, on how the apocalypse has fared since 1800. Martin does argue that during the 18th century catastrophism fell out of fashion, replaced by more gradualist, progressive visions of a "beautiful ending". You can see the same spirit, secularized, in Hegel and then in Marx. Stalin and Mao's visions of the future cost millions of lives but Khrushchev's faith that Communism would in the end bury its opponents gave him the strategic patience that saved the world in 1962. By contrast, fascists' preference has always been for a cleansing apotheosis of blood and fire.</blockquote>
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Tom Shippey in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Michael Livingston's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/tom-shippey/under-the-arrow-storm" target="_blank">Crecy: Battle of Five Kings</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwb7Zkmm5r5PML-myViaqjfLTchCSstqcAeAchuOsArJ6gfBv0iLpqPduL7VI-JcQ63msicQT4i_37N1AEoLMG1bGF1bP0-9SBbkiKnsO7eDt1rWTx0GASLacJGad2KJg_1Pfkpfhoj6FhlUNlf0LGLNtkzVvns9GiVNYrTa-Vfde7VzWFjvZRhgvbLw/s499/NV-160-link-illustr-Crecybook.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="330" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwb7Zkmm5r5PML-myViaqjfLTchCSstqcAeAchuOsArJ6gfBv0iLpqPduL7VI-JcQ63msicQT4i_37N1AEoLMG1bGF1bP0-9SBbkiKnsO7eDt1rWTx0GASLacJGad2KJg_1Pfkpfhoj6FhlUNlf0LGLNtkzVvns9GiVNYrTa-Vfde7VzWFjvZRhgvbLw/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-Crecybook.jpg" width="212" /></a></div> In 1360, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch to us) wrote a letter expressing his puzzlement at a great change that had taken place during his lifetime. In his boyhood, he said, the English 'were taken to be the meekest of the barbarians... inferior [even] to the wretched Scots'. Now, in his late middle age, 'they are a fiercely bellicose nation [who] have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by victories so numerous' that they had flattened the kingdom of France. What had happened to make the English such an effective force in the decades since their humiliating defeat at Bannockburn in 1314? The short answer is the Battle of Crecy in 1346. The slightly longer answer would include the English victory at Neville's Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France.</blockquote>
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Jacob Siegel at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers" target="_blank">Invasion of the Fact-Checkers</a>.
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Today’s fact-checkers no longer have time to keep their own publications honest because they’re leading a crusade to hunt down and expose dangerous untruths everywhere else. An example from <i>The New Yorker</i> magazine, once justly famous for the care and quality of its in-house fact-checking department, illustrates the change. In 2018, Talia Lavin, a fact-checker at the magazine, used her personal Twitter account to falsely accuse a disabled U.S. Marine combat veteran working as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo because she mistook an insignia used by the unit he served with in Afghanistan for a fascist symbol. After deleting the tweet while criticizing ICE for exposing her error, Lavin resigned from <i>The New Yorker</i>. “I just feel like I made a small mistake and it’s destroyed my life,” she said at the time. Hardly. Lavin’s mistake became a public audition that launched her career as a new-style “fact-checker” and “expert” on extremism. Weeks after leaving <i>The New Yorker</i>, she was hired by <i>Media Matters</i> as a “researcher on far-right extremism.” In less than a year she had signed a book deal.</blockquote>
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John Cody at <i>rmx.news</i>, <a href="https://rmx.news/germany/german-domestic-intelligence-agents-are-running-hundreds-of-fake-right-wing-extremist-social-media-accounts/" target="_blank">German Domestic Intelligence Is Running Hundreds of Fake Right-wing Extremist Media Accounts</a>.
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"In order to be really credible, it is not enough to share or like what others say, you also have to make statements yourself. That means that the agents also bully and agitate," says the report of an agent who claims to have joined the agency to "do someting against right-wing extremists." This involves actively encouraging people in their worldview, but she says it is her job to "feed" the scene. In fact, there are now so many accounts operated by different German authorities that a nationwide agreement has become necessary. Otherwise, these different agents would be targeting each other with surveillance and monitoring.</blockquote>
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David Solway in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-lie-became-policy_4605956.html" target="_blank">How the Lie Became Policy</a>.
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Politics, charged with the ordering of human affairs, has always generated more than its share of half-truths and untruths. But thanks to the contemporary explosion of sophisticated communication technology, paired with the general shamelessness encouraged by moral relativism, the Lie has become a veritable institution, a pandemic of structually embedded mendacity. Truth still exists but is routinely denounced, censored, or misnamed. The integrity of the information we receive has been degraded almost beyond recognition, elbowed aside by fantasies and injustices. An ecosystem of lies has been installed almost throughout the public, administrative, economic, and cultural life of the nation. Political authority may be compromised in every sector of official rule, but it's the bread and butter of the political left, for whom lying has become a matter of principle.</blockquote>
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Michael Anton at <i>americanmind.org</i>, <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/rule-not-by-lies/elite-not-expert/" target="_blank">Elite, Not Expert</a>.
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Do those who accuse me of using “regime” as a pejorative deny that any change has taken place? If so, they are being unscientific, not to say delusional. Or is their denial insincere, an example of what I have termed the “Law of Salutary Contradiction”? The regime hasn’t changed—and it’s good that it has, because the old regime was “racist” or whatever. In the case of the fake “conservatives,” I believe they know our regime has changed, they welcome that change, and so attack those who notice but don’t welcome it. This is the Law of Salutary Contradiction married to the Celebration Parallax: they get to say it because they like it; when we say the same thing, it’s a dangerous conspiracy theory. The role of these fake “conservatives” is therefore to gaslight you into believing that the founders’ regime still rules, and, failing that, to denounce you for saying otherwise. Telling the truth about the present regime is not a privilege allowed to its critics.</blockquote>
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Lee Smith in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-government-hustle_4713579.html" target="_blank">The Government Hustle</a>.
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The key players in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American public are political activists and federal agencies, social media, and prestige press organizations. Propaganda legitimizes the conspiracy by concealing the true intent of their operations. For instance, according to Biden, "misinformation" about vaccines was "killing people." But anyone with a shred of commonsense recognized early on that the vaccines were at best a failure - or else there would have been no need for booster shots. The danger posed by critics of vaccine mandates was rather that they threatened to dam Big Pharma's cash flow. So Biden officials shut them down. Once you see how the vaccine hustle worked, you'll recognize the same pattern in virtually all of the Biden administration's signature initiatives. For instance, it shows why the FBI was tasked to spy on parents objecting to what public schools were teaching their children: Biden's corporate allies are mining school children for wealth. Critical race theory (CRT) is a business. In fact, Attorney General Merrick Garland's son-in-law Xan Tanner owns a company that pushes CRT into public school curricula. Same with trans ideology. In showcasing the wondrous joys of transgenderism, the schools move vulnerable children along the assembly line, processing them into sterilizing surgeries and life-long medications that are worth billions to the medical industry and Big Pharma. Without public schools, neither the CRT nor the trans industry are viable businesses, so Biden sent federal law enforcement authorities to prevent parents from standing between progressive donors and their money.</blockquote>
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Hari Kunzru in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Gary Dorrien's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/american-democratic-socialism-dorrien-kunzru/" target="_blank">American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory</a>.
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Much of organized labor supported the Vietnam War, and a split developed between the anti-war left and socialists who saw union power as the primary expression of the interests of the working class. In 1970 New York college students protesting the shootings at Kent State were attacked by construction workers chanting "USA all the way!" and "Love it or leave it!" This expression of working-class social conservatism was understood by many on the left as evidence of "false consciousness," the theory that workers would act against their own interests because they had been misled into believing that the norms and values of the ruling class were beneficial to them. Whatever its explanatory virtues, allegations of false consciousness have never endeared the theorists to the theorized, and the atmosphere of mutual antagonism between intellectuals and working-class conservatives was the harbinnger of a political realignment.</blockquote>
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Raheem Kassam at <i>newsweek.com</i>, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/davos-left-didnt-eat-rich-rich-ate-left-opinion-1710559" target="_blank">Davos: The Left Didn't Eat the Rich. The Rich Ate the Left</a>.
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"When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich," goes the old Rousseau quote truncated for the placards of the dreadlocked white boys from the early 2000s. Instead, it was the Left that got eaten by the rich, who, between 9/11 and the Great Recession, caught populist-left politicians licking their lips and sharpening their knives. Very quickly, though, "corporate social responsibility" took center stage. Soon after, there were Pride flags on every brand's logo. This year, there was a humiliatingly tepid showing of "dozens" of left-wing protesters at the WEF's Davos forum. Take Nandor Tanczos, for instance. Tanczos was one such of the aforementioned dreadlocked white boys, elected to the New Zealand Parliament in 1999 and caught up in the violence between police and protesters outside the WEF event in Melbourne. By 2008, Tanczos was giving his final address to Parliament, wherein his tone had shifted significantly from his kale salad days. "I came to Parliament thinking you're all a bunch of bastards. ...And I was wrong. There are many good people here. The very notion that all politicians are dishonest is misconceived." Two years after this, even the dreads were gone. Perhaps this was "growing up," although the former New Zealand MP's watch-smashing antics, declaring himself "independent of time," would suggest otherwise. In reality, it was pure defeat—or, perhaps, ideological capture.</blockquote>
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Nick Burns in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/americas-medieval-universities/" target="_blank">America's Medieval Universities</a>.
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Expanding at breakneck speed after the Second World War, the American university has transformed from an institution accessible only to a small elite to the site of personal, professional, and political formation for vast swaths of the middle classes. Bachelor's degree recipients made up just 5 percent of the U.S. adult population in 1940. This figure doubled by 1970, doubled again to 20 percent by 1992, and has risen to 40 percent as of 2019 to make up practically all those involved in mangerial work outside the domain of the family business. The American university now serves as hedge fund operator, real estate developer, start-up incubator, and the largest employer in two-thirds of the country's largest one hundred cities. It also plays a highly conspicuous role in political, social, and cultural life. The revolution in American higher education has been emulated across the world - for example in Britain, where a much more top-down system was built out from the 1940s without prejudice to the special privileges of the elite-forming ancient universities; or in China, where 1,200 universities have been founded over the past two decades.</blockquote>
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Stephen Bush in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/44822e15-994f-4a74-96cc-e4c0d57bc90f" target="_blank">Better Educated Voters Aren't Good for Democracy</a>.
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All of us, regardless of how many degrees we have, like to seek out information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. And, as a new paper by Michael Hannon at the University of Nottingham finds, one unhappy consequence of a university education is that voters get better at doing this and worse at changing their minds. When you think about it, it makes sense — indeed, it goes hand-in-hand with increased civic participation. Graduates are more likely to be members of a political party. And while some of my favourite people are members of a political party, party members are pretty irrational a lot of the time.... The problem is that the more voters you have who are better at convincing themselves that they were right all along, the harder it is for democracies to error-correct.</blockquote>
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Jonathan Haidt at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-truth-and-social-justice-collide-choose-truth?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in" target="_blank">When Truth and Social Justice Collide, Choose Truth</a>.
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In 2016 I gave a lecture at Duke University: "Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities." I suggested that the ancient Greek word <i>telos</i> was helpful for understanding the rapid cultural change going on at America's top universities that began in the fall of 2015. <i>Telos</i> means "the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institutions aims." The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth, I suggested.... I said that universities can have many goals and many values, but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system fto simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the protests and changes that were suddenly sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a huge restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth. I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy, predicting that "the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.... Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict."</blockquote>
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Verlyn & Hyrum Lewis in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ideological-polarization-spectrum-myth-right-left-elon-musk-woke-11655481615" target="_blank">The Myth of Ideological Polarization</a>.
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Political scientists sometimes call the increasing anger between the parties "affective polarization," but we would be better off just calling it increased hostility. The term "polarization" confuses the matter by suggesting that the parties have moved toward fixed ideological poles. Yes, partisans are increasingly angry, tribal and isolated in media echo chambers. But to attribute this to positions on a mythical left-right spectrum misunderstands our politics entirely.... There are many issues in politics. We confuse ourselves by using a political model that reduces them to one.</blockquote>
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Hans von Spakovsky at <i>heritage.org</i>, <a href="https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/thomas-fires-warning-shot-media-organizations-lie-about-conservatives" target="_blank">Thomas Fires Warning Shot at Media, Organizations That Lie About Conservatives</a>.
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If you are a private figure and <i>The New York Times</i> or the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes a lie about you, you simply have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation. The fact that the publisher didn’t know or care that the statement was false is irrelevant. But if you are a “public figure,” you not only have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation, but that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” And the definition of who is a public figure constantly has expanded since 1964.</blockquote>
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Jill Abramson in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b188c7dc-8374-47da-9222-a53141a04bbd" target="_blank">The Supreme Court's New Power Broker</a>.
</p><blockquote>
His growing influence has come in spite of the fact that he barely survived his controversial confirmation hearings, in which he was accused of sexual harassment by a reliable law professor, Anita Hill, who once worked for him in the federal government. Senate Republicans saved Thomas, but his confirmation vote was, up to then, the closest in history. He joined the court as an embittered man and has remained so. Except for ageing — he is now, at 74, the court’s most senior judge — little about him has changed. He has lived up to the assurance he gave his clerks during his first term on the court: “I ain’t evolvin’.” ...To understand the astonishing speed of the conservative evolution — really, a revolution — of the Supreme Court, consider that the <i>New Yorker</i> magazine published a long story in 2016 on the occasion of Thomas’s 25th anniversary on the court, headlined, “Clarence Thomas’s Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints”.</blockquote>
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Mitchell Jackson in ESQUIRE, <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40798777/looking-for-clarence-thomas/" target="_blank">Looking for Clarence Thomas</a>.
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They would call him boy. <i>Deb bin call um boye.</i> Boy was born in low country on a one-dirt-road-in, one-dirt-road-out patch of mainland just an eleven-mile jaunt from Savannah, Georgia: Pin Point. <i>Boye bin bohn een de loh kuntri on uh one dutt roh'd een uh one dutt roh'd out patch ob de may'n land jess uh leh'bin my'l fum Suhwannuh, Gorgee: Pin Py'nt.</i> Boy born on a humid, big-moon night in a shanty near the salt marsh. <i>'E bin bohn on uh hot big-moo'n night een uh shant' mer'ry de salt masch.</i> Born in a home with a single room of electricity, no running water or inside toilet. <i>Cah boy bohn een uh hoow's wid dis one room uh lec'trik.</i></blockquote>
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Tori Richards in WASHINGTON EXAMINER, <a href="https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2622403695066/san-francisco-da-left-hanging-after-police-refuse-to-help-with-sting" target="_blank">San Francisco DA Left Hanging After Police Refuse to Help with Sting</a>.
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San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was left hanging after he seized control of a burglary ring investigation developed by police when officers refused to transport a suspect and evidence after a raid, officials said. The move backfired on Boudin when media reports surfaced that he resorted to renting a U-Haul to confiscate 130 banker’s boxes of electronics, the San Francisco Police Officers Association said. “Boudin is creating his own facts to save his political career,” SFPOA President Tracy McCray told the <i>Washington Examiner</i>. “SFPD officers developed this case from the beginning. While we cannot reveal details of the investigation, the DA was insistent on marching ahead on his own timeline, on his own, even though that jeopardized aspects of the investigation.”</blockquote>
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Matthew Wolfe in NYTMag, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/magazine/earth-liberation-front-joseph-mahmoud-dibee.html" target="_blank">The Rise of America's Environmental Underground</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Now, even staid Washington-based environmental groups, sensing an increasingly unruly mood among their base, have slowly started to embrace more radical tactics. In 2017, the Sierra Club formally lifted its 120-year ban on civil disobedience after its executive director and other senior members were arrested for strapping themselves to a gate outside the White House. Recently, some climate activists have begun to openly contemplate the possibility — in their eyes, the necessity — of directly sabotaging the infrastructure of the carbon economy. Foremost among them is the academic Andreas Malm, whose recent book, <i>How to Blow Up a Pipeline</i>, calls for smashing the tools of fossil-fuel extraction as a last-ditch means of averting ecological collapse. In interviews with mainstream outlets such as <i>Vox</i> and <i>The New Yorker</i>, Malm contends that climate activists should give up their dogmatic attachment to pacifism and start to destroy the machines that actually produce carbon. While acknowledging that such attacks might fail, Malm nevertheless argues that the urgency of global warming — in the 16 years since Dibee’s indictment, the world has collectively pumped about 500 billion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere — demands new tactics. “I think that the situation is so dire, so extreme,” he told <i>Vox</i>, “that we have to experiment.”</blockquote>
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Dave Skinner in RANGE, <a href="http://www.rangemagazine.com/" target="_blank">The Western Landowners Alliance</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzJSm8OLBADyXwR0Gq4gZTcMcaL0wrc_-P4QrJNHyf4CoX2vWtKgt4htG5y52wEUXi_0yC-7PrVs4lGcrdQ6y5vn7NRn_4rVK1ZkHb44fCCrOyzV8K1Uud80CqzWTUGEpBNjcEpv8XoGyWVzPKV8QvxNqLDHhO1CcHGc3qG3bpzSORdnOZXP4lmhellA/s584/NV-160-link-illustr-RangeMag.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="448" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzJSm8OLBADyXwR0Gq4gZTcMcaL0wrc_-P4QrJNHyf4CoX2vWtKgt4htG5y52wEUXi_0yC-7PrVs4lGcrdQ6y5vn7NRn_4rVK1ZkHb44fCCrOyzV8K1Uud80CqzWTUGEpBNjcEpv8XoGyWVzPKV8QvxNqLDHhO1CcHGc3qG3bpzSORdnOZXP4lmhellA/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-RangeMag.jpg" width="245" /></a></div> Given the name, one would expect a western "landowners alliance" would be, yep, ranchers or farmers interested in market power and probably property rights. But in reality, this alliance is a branch operation of the Wildlands Network, which itself is the renamed Wildlands Project, initially birthed in 1991 by biologist Michael Soule, Esprit and North Face sportswear tycoon Doug Tompkins, and Earth First! founder Dave Foreman as the Wild Earth Society. Significant? Could be.</blockquote>
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Dave Skinner in RANGE, <a href="http://www.rangemagazine.com/" target="_blank">Accountable? Not Us?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What about <i>Accountable.us</i>? Well, that's our story. Greens are now in charge of federal environmental policy including Tracy Stone-Manning, new BLM director and former EarthFirst! spokesgirl from its most violent days.... Using <i>Accountable</i>'s EIN to search helped clear things up a little. Not surprisingly, one line item for that EIN showed up on page 65 of New Venture Fund's 2019 Form 990 report: $4.649 million granted to <i>Accountable.us</i> for "civil rights, social action, advocacy." On something called the "501c3 Lookup" page, which apparently accesses IRS master files, <i>Accountable</i> shows $12,109,596 in assets at the end of 2021 while 501c3 Lookup also gave the name for records "in care of" Katherine LaBeau. She pops right up in <i>LinkedIn</i>. She's currently a partner at Elias Law Group. Prior to September 2021 she was full-time counsel at Perkins Coie LLP, beginning in December 2020, promoted from its "political law group." Does that ring any bells for you? Like five million bells worth of Russian dossier later revealed to have been secretly paid for by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign with the money moved through Perkins Coie counsel (and Democratic super lawyer) Mark Elias. Now that's either pretty darn high or darn low on the national political food chain....</blockquote>
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William Deresiewicz at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/03/escaping-american-tribalism/" target="_blank">Escaping American Tribalism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of <i>Talk of the Nation</i> and <i>This American Life</i>, of <i>On the Media</i> and <i>Here & Now</i>. <i>NPR</i> became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day. That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates.... I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to. But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.</blockquote>
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Penny Starr at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2022/07/06/npr-wants-queer-youth-date-yourself-redefine-sex-stis-not-dirty/" target="_blank"><i>NPR</i> Aims to 'Queer' Youth: Date Yourself, Redefine Sex, Sexually Transmitted Diseases Are Not 'Dirty'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<i>National Public Radio</i> used July 4 to broadcast a segment about “queer” sex education, which promotes masturbation, redefines sex, and denounces the “terrible lie” that sexually transmitted diseases make one “dirty.” The story is part of the left-wing media’s “Life Kit” series, which it describes as “service journalism.” This report is titled, “The importance of inclusion in sex education.” <i>NPR</i> framed the story by connecting it to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which it called the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. “More than a dozen states have proposed similar bills,” the <i>NPR</i> host said. “This could affect what students are taught in sex education. For <i>NPR</i>’s Life Kit, Lilly Quiroz explains the basics of queer sex education.”</blockquote>
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Rachel Cooke in GUARDIAN on Louise Perry's book, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/06/the-case-against-the-sexual-revolution-by-louise-perry-review-an-act-of-insurrection-a-new-guide-to-sex-in-the-21st-century" target="_blank">The Case Against the Sexual Revolution</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Perry used to work in rape crisis, and it’s this experience – harrowing, but also highly, endlessly bewildering – that is her starting point in <i>The Case Against the Sexual Revolution</i>. It seems to her, as someone who has both talked to victims and run the kind of well-meaning workshops that are meant to reduce sexual violence against women, that 21st-century liberal feminism has backed itself into a corner so far as rape goes. Hellbent on the notion of freedom, and determined to minimise the innate differences between the sexes, such women have arrived at a point where they are not only queasy about using the power of the state to imprison rapists (those who disagree with them on this they call “carceral feminists”, a phrase that is only ever said with a sneer); they remain unwilling even to consider how women might best keep themselves safe, believing that to do so is simply “victim blaming”. In combination, this takes the more unthinking among them to some pretty wild places – even when, ostensibly, they’re trying their hardest to be furious about male aggression.</blockquote>
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Hadley Freeman at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/02/why-i-stopped-being-a-good-girl/" target="_blank">Why I Stopped Being a Good Girl</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What really interested me was how quickly institutions were falling into line with this new ideology: venues cancelled talks if a radical feminist was on the bill; all-female bands pulled out of women-only festivals for fear of looking transphobic. How strange, I thought, that those with authority capitulate to the obviously misogynistic demands of a few extreme voices. Oh well, that’s just America — obviously it will never happen in the UK. Oh, the innocence of eight years ago! Today, gender ideology — the belief that who a person feels they are is more important than the material reality of their body — is firmly in the ascendent. Activists like to claim that the only people who have a problem with this are “Right-wing bigots”, because it keeps things simple to suggest that this is a good (gender ideology) versus bad (Right-wing bigots) issue. Yet I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots who are extremely angry at how things have shifted.</blockquote>
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Bridget Phetasy at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://bridgetphetasy.substack.com/p/slut-regret" target="_blank">I Regret Being a Slut</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I dealt with the overwhelming shame by becoming hyper-sexual and promiscuous. The Culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off. I doubled down on being a proud slut and internalized the biggest and most damaging lie: that loveless sex is empowering. I basked in the girl-power glow of that delusion for decades, weaponizing my sexuality while convincing myself I was full of the divine feminine. I was full of shit. I told myself that because I could seduce a man, I was powerful. But as Perry says in her book, “...women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not the same thing as being held in high esteem.” Deep down inside, I knew that to be the case. But as a defense mechanism, I crafted a man-eater persona. My mantras were rigid. You can either have a career or a relationship—but you can’t have both. Intimacy is creepy. Motherhood and children are a trap. Sex is only about power. Another set of lies built on lies built on trauma.... Casual sex is fraught with insecurity and miscommunication; intimacy and love are punch lines. When a man I slept with had the courtesy to reach out, I mistook relief for happiness, rewiring my brain to be grateful for the bare minimum. The saddest realization is how low I set the bar. A lifetime of allowing myself to be the other woman, taken for granted or treated like a doormat under the false pretense of being “empowered” came to a head one night with the arrival of a text message from an on-again, off-again lover. “Goodnight baby I love you,” it said. Quickly followed by, “Wrong person.”</blockquote>
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Jonathan Chait in NEW YORK, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/02/the-left-is-gaslighting-asian-americans-on-school-admissions.html" target="_blank">The Left Is Gaslighting Asian Americans About College Admissions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Even as plaintiffs produced clear evidence that Harvard uses its personality measure to hold down its Asian American population, its defenders have employed the same indirect approach. They will suggest Harvard does not hold Asian American applicants to a higher standard and then change the subject to something more congenial to their preferred conclusion.... Take a <i>New York Times</i> op-ed by a law professor who has advised colleges on designing federally compliant affirmative action. Here is the closest the author comes to addressing evidence of discrimination: "The Asian-American students who have brought the case argue that colleges should focus only on grades and standardized test scores. But, according to Harvard, a large majority of its 40,000-plus applicants are academically qualified, and applicants with perfect grade point averages or standardized test scores far exceed the number of seats in its entering class. The proportion of Asian-American students in Harvard’s admitted classes has grown by 27 percent since 2010, and they make up nearly a quarter of the admitted class of 2022 (overall, Asian Americans make up about 6 percent of the United States population)." The author could deny Harvard holds Asian Americans to a higher standard. Alternatively, she could concede that the discrimination exists but defend it as a necessary cost of maintaining a diverse campus. Instead, she simply notes that Harvard has many qualified applicants and that it has many Asian American students — two facts that in no way rebut the allegation.</blockquote>
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Dave Seminara in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-service-officer-test-state-department-diplomat-american-foreign-service-association-afsa-diversity-inclusion-merit-corruption-transparency-11651526027" target="_blank">In Defense of the Foreign Service Test</a>.
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A spokesman says the State Department is moving toward a "more holistic" hiring approach that will "result in a more qualified pool of applicants." But given that applications already vastly outnumber available jobs, why the imperative to consider candidates who flunk the exam? The spokesman said the department believes education and work experience are better predictors of job performance than the exam. Perhaps, but the exam and the cutoff score inject an element of merit and transparency into a byzantine hiring process that involves more-subjective elements, including an oral assessment and personal essays.</blockquote>
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Jeffrey Tucker at <i>brownstone.org</i>, <a href="https://brownstone.org/articles/the-astonishing-implications-of-schedule-f/" target="_blank">The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F</a>.
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The <i>Washington Post</i> in an editorial expressed absolute shock and alarm at the implications: "The directive from the White House, issued late Wednesday, sounds technical: creating a new 'Schedule F' within the 'excepted service' of the federal government for employees in policymaking roles, and directing agencies to determine who qualifies. Its implications, however, are profound and alarming. It gives those in power the authority to fire more or less at will as many as tens of thousands of workers currently in the competitive civil service, from managers to lawyers to economists to, yes, scientists. This week’s order is a major salvo in the president’s onslaught against the cadre of dedicated civil servants whom he calls the 'deep state' — and who are really the greatest strength of the U.S. government." Ninety days after October 21, 2020 would have been January 19, 2021, the day before the new president was to be inaugurated. The <i>Washington Post</i> commented ominously: “Mr. Trump will try to realize his sad vision in his second term, unless voters are wise enough to stop him.” Biden was declared the winner due mostly to mail-in ballots. On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as <i>The Hill</i> reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.”</blockquote>
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David Rivkin & Jason Snead in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/marc-elias-curious-idea-of-democracy-moore-v-harper-court-state-judges-election-law-gerrymandering-legislature-11659380162" target="_blank">Marc Elias's Curious Idea of 'Democracy'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Until about a decade ago, state legislatures were in the driver's seat on election laws. But as Republicans took majorities in state capitals around the country, Democrats bowed out of the legislative process, turning to state officials and state courts instead. Through backroom deals, they persuaded election officials to drop ballot-integrity regulations, open up drop boxes, and loosen deadlines. When deal-making didn't work, they asked state courts to rewrite election laws wholesale, typically based on vague language in state constitutions like the declaration in North Carolina's constitution that "all elections shall be free." The pandemic accelerated this process in 2020. Through settlements and litigation, Mr. Elias and his colleagues wielded a massive budget to sustain a campaign of litigation that forced states to adopt Democratic election-law priorities against the will of the legislature.</blockquote>
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Michael Mazarr in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/abstract-systems-social-trust-and-institutional-legitimacy/" target="_blank">Abstract Systems, Social Trust, and Institutional Legitimacy</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUpg7e_RLSjcegnqK0guZtZ7ln6F91nwlsaJqNjvGknCPbS20XaNMU2crlve7woSsDnTUhS_FG5rjQFo7vHrQ56_rIEeKvVDYfiWopHE7rQbuf8AftGoe7Rffj55v1YCIQsUJ83zDiXctkHi3MpEEVqXMsv7fYsr045swP1Sq5QPmLycbisooJ82O1zw/s627/NV-160-link-illustr-AmAffairs.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="418" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUpg7e_RLSjcegnqK0guZtZ7ln6F91nwlsaJqNjvGknCPbS20XaNMU2crlve7woSsDnTUhS_FG5rjQFo7vHrQ56_rIEeKvVDYfiWopHE7rQbuf8AftGoe7Rffj55v1YCIQsUJ83zDiXctkHi3MpEEVqXMsv7fYsr045swP1Sq5QPmLycbisooJ82O1zw/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-AmAffairs.jpg" width="213" /></a></div> The management theorists Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate that almost 18 percent of the U.S. private sector workforce consists of managers and administrators—almost 24 million people (as of their 2016 calculations), or a ratio of one manager/ administrator to every 4.7 employees. The problem, they believed, was getting worse: between 1983 and 2016, the number of managerial, supervisory, or administrative positions in the U.S. econo my almost doubled while the number of other jobs rose just 40 percent. In American colleges and universities, administrative positions have grown notably faster than teaching jobs, so that from the early 1980s to 2015, administrative expenditures rose from 26 percent of higher educa tion spending to 41 percent. Up to a third of health care spending now goes not to care but to maintain the immense administrative architecture of the system. The result of these broad trends is one of the paradigmatic features of bureaucracy: people are increasingly trapped in webs of busywork.... A 2018 survey found “mind-boggling” administrative demands confronting doctors, with over a third reporting that they spent more than twenty hours a week on paperwork. A later survey found that the burgeoning demands of electronic medical records re quired doctors to spend more than half of their working hours entering data rather than interacting with patients.</blockquote>
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David Cayley in AMERICAN AFFAIRS on Geoff Shullenberger's book, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich/" target="_blank">Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey</a>.
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The problem Illich diagnoses is not that the modern world has abandoned Christianity, but that institutionalized Christianity, in the centuries after Christ, initiated destabilizing tendencies that would be radicalized in the modern world. The Christian message, as he saw it, was one of freedom from kinship and ethnic localism that made possible a new form of human community. The "new dimension of love" introduced to the world by Christ, Illich believed, had rendered "community boundaries... permeable and therefore vulnerable." The result was a "temptation to try to manage and, eventually, legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it.... This power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mold." Education, medicine, and NGOs promoting development, he argued, are all the Church's unrecognized offspring.</blockquote>
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Peter Coclanis in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Joshua Rothman's book, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/property-in-man/" target="_blank">The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America</a>.
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The fledgling [New History of Capitalism] movement benefited immensely from the Great Recession of 2007-09, which at once encouraged greater interest in earlier “crises” of capitalism, and further soured many younger scholars on capitalism and the standard theories about its history. NHC spread rapidly across the U.S., gaining purchase in graduate programs at upper-tier institutions. Its approach and perspective gained particular currency in the study of the history of slavery. Indeed, in a relatively short period of time, the NHC “take” on slavery has become standard in American history circles. This is so despite the fact that virtually every new claim made by NHC scholars, almost all of whom are innumerate, has been systematically refuted by economic historians possessing the expertise in quantification that NHC eschews. It is generally accepted that capitalism arose first in parts of Europe during the early modern period before spreading elsewhere. Economists and historians, even those with Marxist leanings, once agreed that capitalism was a progressive and liberal system, under which land, labor, and capital were distributed more widely than before. These “factors of production” were also employed more rationally than before as private property, economic freedom, and competition—activated and controlled via the price mechanism and underpinned by the enforcement power of the state—came to inform and organize economic life.</blockquote>
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Marc Arkin in WSJ on Jeremy Schipper's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/denmark-veseys-bible-review-the-plot-against-charleston-11647808439?mod=opinion_major_pos10" target="_blank">Denmark Vesey's Bible</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI99ms0PwsKVAaAnGOPls2dKH3hFgAZC58ZYRjtyhfg0gfvWfMSG3xYZCzRCLU3-y6d3fGSJ8m57i4pD5fLd13_f1tavvo4MulS861bcDFPuk-Zy5NNoD5Jd2jpOXyC9mW37krQn0gDTfu3lv8OW8_O6uOXTb1pE9_XHUcFxDUCuFgyg2muiiqhNQCkg/s636/NV-160-link-illustr-DenmarkVeseysBible.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="411" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI99ms0PwsKVAaAnGOPls2dKH3hFgAZC58ZYRjtyhfg0gfvWfMSG3xYZCzRCLU3-y6d3fGSJ8m57i4pD5fLd13_f1tavvo4MulS861bcDFPuk-Zy5NNoD5Jd2jpOXyC9mW37krQn0gDTfu3lv8OW8_O6uOXTb1pE9_XHUcFxDUCuFgyg2muiiqhNQCkg/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-DenmarkVeseysBible.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
By all accounts, Vesey was a remarkable presence. Likely born in the Danish West Indies, he was transported in 1781 from Saint Thomas to Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) aboard a slave ship. The captain, one Joseph Vesey, named the youth Telemaque, eventually assumed ownership of him, and settled in Charleston. In 1799, Telemaque, now in his early 30s and called Denmark by local blacks, won $1,500 in a lottery. He used $600 to buy his freedom and with the remaining money began a successful carpentry business. Literate and multilingual, Vesey in his 50s became a lay leader in Charleston's African Church (precursor to the city's famed Emanuel AME Church) and presided over weeknight class meetings outside the watchful gaze of whites. In these, according to confessions from fellow plotters, he discussed both the Bible and current events, including the antislavery speeches in the 1819 debates over the Missouri Compromise. At Vesey's trial, a bewildered magistrate exclaimed that it was difficult to imagine what "infatuation" could have prompted a "comparatively wealthy" free man to attempt an enterprise "so wild and visionary," in which success was "impracticable." One possible answer was Vesey's many children, all slaves born to enslaved mothers.</blockquote>
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Sylvia Goodman at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/researchers-did-a-deep-dive-into-efforts-to-restrict-critical-race-theory-heres-what-they-found" target="_blank">Researchers Did a Deep Dive into Efforts to Restrict Critical Race Theory</a>.
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The new CRT Forward Tracking Project follows and analyzes anti-critical-race-theory legislation, regulations, and administrative policies on a national scale. Begun by the University of California at Los Angeles’s law school on Tuesday, the project has analyzed almost 24,000 articles and found nearly 500 instances of attempted limits on the teaching of critical race theory. The project’s director, Taifha N. Alexander, said the most surprising result of her work is that the group has found cases in nearly every state. Alexander said that, while it may seem like these measures are being introduced only in conservative states, that perception reflects state-level activity, ignoring local action. In California, for example, the project has not identified any state-level efforts but has found many anti-CRT measures at the school-board level. “If you are living in the United States, everywhere from Alaska to New Hampshire and everywhere in between, there have been anti-CRT measures implemented at some level. The only exception to that is Delaware,” Alexander said.</blockquote>
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Philip Deloria in NEW YORKER on Caleb Gayle's book, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/when-tribal-nations-expel-their-black-members-caleb-gayle-we-refuse-to-forget-alaina-e-roberts-ive-been-here-all-the-while" target="_blank">We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power</a>.
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[H]ow to reconcile citizenship claims with tribal-sovereignty claims? A constitutive element of being a sovereign nation, after all, is having control over citizenship criteria. And, as tribal nations have developed economic resources and political standing in the course of the past several decades, wannabe Indians have appeared on their borders. In Canada, people have claimed to be “Eastern Métis,” on the basis of a single Indigenous ancestor several centuries ago. In the U.S., an African American “tribe” calling itself the Washitaw has invented fantastic genealogies issuing from the lost continent of Mu. Bogus Cherokee tribes have proliferated, asking for state and federal recognition. Meanwhile, individual ethnic impostors seek tribal citizenship by means of vague assertions of ancestry; others brandish results from DNA tests. Tribes have responded with restrictions and occasional purges of membership rolls. Gayle and Roberts capture the tumultuous sound of two “one-drop rules” clashing.</blockquote>
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Frances Widdowson in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/billy-remembers/" target="_blank">Billy Remembers: Analyzing the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc/Kamloops Indian Residential School Moral Panic</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz18mO0LIDkJznQCzOFGKL-ER1AIXFg8ebP6zCdchPq8LQkkxPfy1DeWnBdf5iiZHIQihX0GA6Nf-XpCnHVkT1h1EMNNyJX7Cry68qxs-Gmf75u3tJdZwFenCmWFB2Ws9BXRCweFutcYMrEaiaajOTvF-XEjUPzqwfXjigJ6yf1wrVCV_wyszKssBKEw/s443/NV-160-link-illustr-AMCon.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="342" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz18mO0LIDkJznQCzOFGKL-ER1AIXFg8ebP6zCdchPq8LQkkxPfy1DeWnBdf5iiZHIQihX0GA6Nf-XpCnHVkT1h1EMNNyJX7Cry68qxs-Gmf75u3tJdZwFenCmWFB2Ws9BXRCweFutcYMrEaiaajOTvF-XEjUPzqwfXjigJ6yf1wrVCV_wyszKssBKEw/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-AMCon.jpg" width="247" /></a></div> Other circumstances that cast doubt on these testimonies are that there were three indigenous teachers on staff at KIRS during the 1950s and 1960s: Joe Stanley Michel (now deceased), Benjamin Paul, and Mabel Caron (still living in Kamloops). These three indigenous staff members are featured in the 1962 <i>CBC</i> documentary <i>The Eyes of Children</i> (now considered, without explanation, to be a “propaganda film” by The Fifth Estate). Joe Stanley Michel was the first KIRS graduate in 1950 (register #589) and returned to KIRS to teach there from 1953 to 1967 and lived with his wife, Anna Susan Soulle (also a KIRS graduate, register #666), and young family in a teacherage next door to the school building. Michel and Soulle were also interviewed in Celia Haig-Brown’s Resistance and Renewal (1988), and did not mention burials. Would all of these indigenous people have kept silent about these alleged clandestine graves? <i>The Eyes of Children</i> offers a stark contrast to the macabre tales being told: footage of children enthusiastically crowding around one of the priests, playing sports, and being taught dancing by a nun. Three indigenous teachers, Michel, Paul, and Caron, can be observed giving classes and providing training in a machine shop. While one can be taken aback by the piousness of some of the scenes, and perhaps argue that the footage was sanitized to exaggerate the happiness of the children, it is hard to believe that the children in this documentary would have been murdered or their babies thrown into a furnace.</blockquote>
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Allysia Finley in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/cannabis-and-the-violent-crime-surge-marijuana-pot-use-thc-shootings-psychosis-mental-11654540197" target="_blank">Cannibis and the Violent Crime Surge</a>.
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Young people are especially vulnerable to cannabis's effects because their brains are still developing. Scientists in a recent study reviewed scans of teenagers' brains before and after they started using pot. They found that parts of the brain involved in decision making and morality judgments were altered in pot users compared to nonusers. But can pot make people violent? A study last year found that young people with such mood disorders as depression who were also addicted to pot were 3.2 times as likely to commit self-harm and die of homicide - often after initiating violence - than those who weren't. A meta-analysis found the risk of perpetrating violence was more than twice as high for young adults who used marijuana. It's possible that pot can trigger dangerous behavior in youths who may be predisposed to it for other reasons such as prenatal exposure to drugs.... About 20% of pregnant young women in California tested positive for marijuana in 2016.</blockquote>
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At <i>CWBChicago.com</i>, <a href="https://cwbchicago.com/2022/07/businessman-blames-the-behavior-of-savages-as-city-revokes-his-lincoln-park-restaurants-licenses.html" target="_blank">Businessman Blames the Behavior of 'Savages' as City Revokes Lincoln Park Resaurant's Licenses</a>.
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Even after freshly losing his business to Chicago license enforcers, Rashad Bailey speaks energetically, enthusiastically, passionately. “They got a sticker on my door. They f*cking won,” he conceded Tuesday morning. After a 14-month battle, the city shuttered his Lincoln Park restaurant, Dinner and a Movie, permanently on Friday. A lot of what Bailey said during an hour-long free-flowing conversation Tuesday morning will surprise people. But if you’re expecting the usual racism talking points, think again. “I’m heartbroken,” Bailey said. “I had 600 people coming Friday, Saturday, Sunday [for celebrations]. They planned it two or three months in advance. I don’t even know how to tell everyone that racism won. D*ckheads won. That my skin is a problem.” “For a moment, I felt like crying,” Bailey said. “I mean, I made it to Lincoln Park. We took all these pictures [of customers] having a good time and it was so nice. I’m gonna change my number 'cuz people are still calling for reservations.” “You got regular Black people who come to Dinner and a Movie. They’re like normal people. Then you get those other motherf*ckers. They’re savages,” he said “All it takes is one or two and it’s like, damn! Sh*t happened. I’m Black, so I can say this. At this point, whatever.”</blockquote>
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Mark Lilla in NYT on Jerry Muller's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/books/review/professor-of-apocalypse-jerry-z-muller.html" target="_blank">Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes</a>.
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The most significant of those relationships was with his wife, the novelist Susan Taubes, whom he married when she was just 21. At first they seemed to have a tantric hold on each other and drew others into their open erotic life, including Susan Sontag, who eventually made a movie based loosely but unmistakably on the couple, with the arresting title <i>Duet for Cannibals</i>. In the early 1960s Sontag even taught courses on eros and mysticism with Taubes at Columbia, where he had a cult following. But she also witnessed his cruelty and manipulation, especially of his wife. It was Sontag who identified Susan Taubes’s body after she drowned herself in East Hampton in 1969. Yet through it all Taubes remained on the move, accruing posts in the United States and Europe while leaving emotional wreckage behind him. And everyone knew this: That is the remarkable thing. Befriending Taubes required a kind of inner dissociation, keeping apart knowledge of his character and the pleasure of his company. A first meeting with Jacob Taubes must have been an exhilarating experience. Over the years he had crafted a seductive theological-political patter in which terms like messianism, mysticism, eschatology, apocalypse, gnosticism, redemption and antinomianism swirled around in a gravity-free vacuum, never touching historical ground. Almost all his ideas were borrowed from others, yet they still left people impressed and sometimes enlightened.</blockquote>
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Dominic Green in WSJ on David Pryce-Jones' book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/openings-outings-review-one-mans-modern-europe-11653516234" target="_blank">Openings & Outings: An Anthology</a>.
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In his diaries, the diplomat Evelyn Shuckburgh is almost comically incensed at the refusal of both Jews and Arabs to do what they are told as Britain loses control in the Middle East: "In his surprise and dismay over unfolding events is heard the melancholy but authentic sound of the breaking of the British Empire." Shuckburgh blames America first: the Chinese, he wrote, were aggressive in Indochina in the 1950s because the Eisenhower administration was "so damned contemptuous of them." The petty tyrants who arose in the age of decolonization were encouraged by the professionals like Shuckburgh, "fatuous diplomats sodden with emotion, the host of Arabian star-gazers in the train of T.E. Lawrence." They were praised by amateur publicists such as the journalist Robert Fisk ("tendentious to the point of untruthfulness") and the "dishonest" historian Eric Hobsbawm, who with his fellow academic leftists refused to "admit their share in the central intellectual and moral failure of the times."</blockquote>
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Raw Egg Nationalist at <i>americanmind.org</i>, <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/ecce-homos/" target="_blank">Ecce Homos</a>.
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Calling anything gay that looks like traditional masculinity is not new. Elsewhere, in a nod to the great Herbert Butterfield and his “whig interpretation of history,” I have called this tendency, in its broadest form, the “fag interpretation of history.” Basically, where the arc of Butterfield’s whig interpretation tends towards progress, the fag interpretation sees everywhere, and in all things, as a movement out of the closet and towards open faggotry. No male historical figure or event involving men or manly grouping is safe from queering, whether we’re talking about Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, the Spartan last stand at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, gang members, or even the simplest masculine pleasures and pastimes. Someone, somewhere, whether they are a tenured academic or an armchair psychologist, will always be ready to tell you that the Spartans fought to the last man because they were all gay lovers; that great historical figure X was driven to make his vast conquests by a repressed desire for a male schoolfriend; or that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is just barely disguised dry humping. Checkmate, bigots!</blockquote>
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Spencer Lindquist at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/health/2022/08/25/aclu-fought-chemical-castration-of-sex-offenders-supports-use-of-same-drugs-on-trans-kids/" target="_blank">ACLU Supports Use of Chemically Castrating Drugs on Trans Kids</a>.
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The American Civil Liberties Union, which previously opposed the administration of a drug to chemically castrate sex offenders, is now advocating for children to be able to take the chemically castrating drugs as puberty blockers. Just one year ago, the ACLU was previously a vocal opponent of a law in Alabama that mandated chemical castration on certain convicted sex offenders. Former Executive Director of the ACLU of Alabama Randall Marshall called the practice of chemical castration “medical experimentation,” also claiming that it “has no basis in the medical community.”</blockquote>
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Roger Cohen in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/world/europe/france-men-barbecues.html" target="_blank">Of Barbecues and Men: A Summer Storm Over Virility in France</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The land of gastronomy has become the land of heated debate over the cultural and political symbolism of food. Traditionalists detect signs of American-imported “cancel culture” in the attempt to put steak and lamb off-limits to save the planet. There’s even a new word — the “mangeosphère,” or roughly the eating sphere — coined by the French daily <i>Le Monde</i> for these discussions on the semiology of a ham sandwich or an apple. Mr. Roussel, then the Communist Party presidential candidate, was fiercely criticized in January for saying all French people should have the right to traditional fare. “A good wine, good meat, good cheese, that is French gastronomy,” he said. The comment was immediately attacked as xenophobic, with Ms. Rousseau in the vanguard of his critics. What about couscous and sushi? And the millions of French Muslims, who do not drink wine? And the vegans who are not much interested in “good meat?” Nonetheless, Mr. Roussel’s popularity briefly surged, and thunderous applause at rallies greeted his cry of: “What are we going to eat? Tofu and soy beans? Come on!”</blockquote>
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Jennifer Szalai in NYT on Andrea Wulf's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/books/magnificent-rebels-andrea-wulf.html" target="_blank">Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self</a>.
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Wulf says that Romanticism is difficult to define because it emphasized not an absolute truth but “the process of understanding” — a fuzziness that pleased the Romantics themselves, who refused to be hemmed in by any rules. But there was still a core to their movement, which emphasized the limits of rationality and extolled the imagination. Science wasn’t something to be resisted; it was to be integrated, because everything was connected.Romanticizing the world meant grasping it as a resonant whole. As much as the Romantics loved the fragment, in the end it was fragmentation that did them in. “Listen,” Caroline wrote to August Wilhelm in 1801, “this good old Jena really is a den of murderers after all.” Fichte turned on the Schlegel brothers. Schelling turned on Fichte. Everyone turned on Caroline. Schiller had long before turned on nearly everyone. Only Goethe seemed determined to stay above it all, even to the point of ignoring the relentless advance of Napoleon’s army.</blockquote>
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Vigilant Citizen at <i>vigilantcitizen.com</i>, <a href="https://vigilantcitizen.com/musicbusiness/the-toxic-messages-in-sweetest-pie-by-megan-thee-stallion-and-dua-lipa/" target="_blank">The Powerful Symbolism in "Sweetest Pie" by Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa</a>.
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We can take away a few things from this story. First, it deals with three of the occult elite’s favorite obsessions: Witchcraft, cannibalism, and preying on children. Since forever, those who practice the “dark arts” (aka black magic) are convinced that consuming human flesh and blood provides some sort of life force and/or occult power. And children are believed to be full of whatever they’re after. So this story about a witch catching children to eat them is not just pure fantasy. It is based on historical accounts of truly evil people who have done atrocious things in the past. In <i>Sweetest Pie</i>, Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa play the role of the witch. Of course. What else do you expect from entertainers who are pawns of the occult elite?</blockquote>
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Michael Warren Davis in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Ronald Hutton's book, <a href="https://staging.theamericanconservative.com/when-witchcraft-was-right-wing/" target="_blank">Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeN_JVQK7hxE15QZJ-Lj_oldiuFhgdGV8q8pqfRuyOTNXwG8bxhDKegq7nB9OnhskTyqED_mV5958HJpki0U0JDqaTBk3WYv57fpzjDdhzNKKw9HmxVcag7NizzfMcKvnjYWSd8Q9RgvVkjXJXbpK9H3SSiSy-CveEGMcRNnf5jEi8xM0nd4NRm3y3bA/s634/NV-160-link-illustr-QueensoftheWild.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="413" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeN_JVQK7hxE15QZJ-Lj_oldiuFhgdGV8q8pqfRuyOTNXwG8bxhDKegq7nB9OnhskTyqED_mV5958HJpki0U0JDqaTBk3WYv57fpzjDdhzNKKw9HmxVcag7NizzfMcKvnjYWSd8Q9RgvVkjXJXbpK9H3SSiSy-CveEGMcRNnf5jEi8xM0nd4NRm3y3bA/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-QueensoftheWild.jpg" width="208" /></a></div> The Romantics championed the countryside against the city, the farm against the factory, the Medieval against the Enlightened. Truth is found, not in the mind, but in the soul; not in artifice, but in nature; not in the seen, but in the Unseen. Needless to say, they were right-wingers almost to a man. Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron were all conservatives of one stripe or another. Edmund Burke's essay "On the Sublime and Beautiful" is a landmark text of Romantic aesthetics. Of course, a few prominent Romantics were quite radical for their day. Percy Bysshe Shelley is one. Charles Swinburne is another. Yet these exceptions prove the rule. If they felt no attachment to the Medieval, it was because they preferred the Old Religions and wrote hymns to the old gods.... Taken on its own, the whole thing is laughable. That's just as well, because the pagan revival wasn't limited to Britain, and its leaders weren't all as inept as [Gerald] Gardner. Hitler is the obvious example. Nazi esotericism was grounded in the same weird mixture of Romanticism, popular occultism, and junk history. But in every other respect, they were closer to Shelley and Swinburne. They saw India, Tibet, and Ultima Thule as the spiritual homeland of the Aryan race. They had no attachment to European history - only a bizarre pseudo-prehistory. They were radicals, not reactionaries.</blockquote>
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David Samuels at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/authority-blob-roundtable" target="_blank">The Authority Blob: Roundtable with Angelo Codevilla, Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Ilana Redstone, Wesley Yang</a>.
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Angelo Codevilla: The current elites got to their places and amassed their wealth exclusively through the old Republic’s structures, which they have turned to their own accounts. Precisely because the current elites do not embody any economic or social good in which the ruled may participate, precisely because they glory in being obnoxious to the rest of the population, their rule has the hallmarks of decline, not rise. Unlike traditional oligarchs, they revel in humiliating those over whom they rule. Two events are emblematic: The Feb. 4, 2021, publication in <i>Time</i> magazine of what was effectively an admission of manipulation of the 2020 election, coupled with increased venom against whomever suggests that such things happened; and Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party on Martha’s Vineyard, with 200 maskless guests and dozens of masked servants, i.e., conspicuous consumption in the face of growing establishment restrictions on ordinary people. Not even the likes of Mobutu flaunted themselves so.</blockquote>
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<i>revolver.news</i>, <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2022/05/biden-minster-of-truth-nina-jankowicz-and-the-secret-nato-funded-cabal-to-subvert-western-democracies-using-disinformation-as-cover/" target="_blank">Busted: Biden's "Minister of Truth" Nina Jankowicz Participated in Secret NATO-Funded Cabal to Subvert Western Democracies Using Disinformation as Cover</a>.
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The picture that emerges so far is as disturbing as it is undeniable. The Integrity Initiative was a secret, government-funded influence operation that engaged secret “clusters” of journalists and academics to coordinate in order to meddle in the political process of Western democracies under the guise of combating “disinformation” and “defending democracy.” Not only was the Integrity Initiative funded by national security bureaucracies, it conducted itself in precisely the same surreptitious manner one would typically associate with the world of spooks and espionage. One leaked document advises its reader on how to go about recruiting people for a cluster. It reads far more like an intelligence document than a journalism-related one. “Be absolutely sure… we can trust them before we talk to them” is a baffling line for a group whose only purpose is to correct “disinformation.” Politifact and Snopes may or may not produce good “fact check” reporting, but we highly doubt they fret about being able to “trust” whomever they share their work with. But this obsession with trust is quite understandable for a group whose actual purpose is manipulating the public, rather than informing them.</blockquote>
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Dexter Fergie in NEW REPUBLIC on Sam Lebovic's book, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165836/american-culture-ate-world-righteous-smokescreen-globalization-review" target="_blank">A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization</a>.
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Both conservatives and liberals are nostalgic for their postwar moment. Conservatives clamor for the white-picket-fence-and-lawn suburban dreams of the 1950s—the homogeneity, conformity, and, as they are stating more and more openly, the racial and social hierarchies. “Make America Great Again,” they yell. But liberals also pine for the postwar U.S., specifically its foreign relations. Today’s defenders of the liberal international order look back longingly to the central role the U.S. played in ending the war and in organizing the peace. They rattle off America’s multilateral moves toward global governance and its military alliances spanning vast portions of the earth—from the North Atlantic to Southeast Asia—as well as its extension of economic lifelines to friend and former foe alike, helping restore a war-weary world.</blockquote>
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Robert Kraychik at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/08/10/wef-adviser-yuval-harari-we-just-dont-need-the-vast-majority-of-the-population-in-todays-world/" target="_blank">WEF Adviser Yuval Harari: ‘We Just Don’t Need the Vast Majority of the Population’ in Today’s World</a>.
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He assessed widespread contemporary disillusionment among “common people” as being rooted in a fear of being “left behind” in a future run by “smart people.” Such fears are justified, he added, given his projection that emerging technologies will displace economic needs to many categories of existing work: A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories — the liberal, the fascist, the communist — is that the big heroes of the story were the common people, not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim, but when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of these these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization, and they are not there.</blockquote>
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Alex Newman in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/un-and-world-economic-forum-behind-global-war-on-farmers-experts_4622598.html" target="_blank">Behind the Global War on Farming</a>.
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The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, often referred to as Agenda 2030, were adopted in 2015 by the organization and its member states as a guide to "transforming our world." Hailed as a "master plan for humanity" and a global "declaration of interdependence" by top U.N. officials, the 17 goals include 169 targets involving every facet of the economy and life. "All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan," declares the preamble to the document, repeatedly noting that "no one will be left behind."</blockquote>
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Stefan Collini in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Alison Bashford's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/stefan-collini/chimps-and-bulldogs" target="_blank">An Intimate Story of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family</a>.
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The distinctiveness of Darwin’s theory, the implications of which weren’t always consistently adhered to even by the great man himself, was to remove all traces of purpose or progress: species produced random mutations; some of these mutations turned out to be beneficial for survival in a given environment; and so descendants with the relevant mutation gradually replaced those without it. Various attempts were made to smuggle some sense of direction or progress back into this account – the ambiguity of Herbert Spencer’s coinage ‘the survival of the fittest’ allowed many to see it as a constant process of improvement – but the strict logic of Darwin’s mechanism didn’t warrant any such comforting inference: chance dictated the appearance of mutations, and the remorseless nature of the struggle for survival dictated which mutations were passed on in numbers. It was a weakness of Darwin’s theory, one much insisted on after his death in 1882, that it couldn’t explain the appearance of mutations in the first place.</blockquote>
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Justin Smith in LIBERTIES JOURNAL, <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-world-as-a-game/" target="_blank">The World as a Game</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFM1ob-00lhFo5zWGpj2EmM26xq1Ip08Kqyqz6G5fAbZ5ejg9PCu2svpckm8gZHkICHdsEt4F62m3i4O9ouy3a00qOt_ltENPrY_Yr49ROc8s0hkrRgqM9CouvguzB9qQNxpXaM8WkKTjYKZWowi7Vzler9YzbJPvgH7Z1SgPtwSIJQhS8LHOlFMGABA/s1400/NV-160-link-illustr-Liberties.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1100" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFM1ob-00lhFo5zWGpj2EmM26xq1Ip08Kqyqz6G5fAbZ5ejg9PCu2svpckm8gZHkICHdsEt4F62m3i4O9ouy3a00qOt_ltENPrY_Yr49ROc8s0hkrRgqM9CouvguzB9qQNxpXaM8WkKTjYKZWowi7Vzler9YzbJPvgH7Z1SgPtwSIJQhS8LHOlFMGABA/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-Liberties.webp" width="251" /></a></div> Such a landscape of artificial stupidity, in which there is a glut of undifferentiated information and misinformation issuing forth from machines that could not care less about the distinction between the two, is, much more than the possible dawning of machine consciousness, which is the real story of our most recent technological revolution. That we human beings are compelled to submit to the terms and the constraints laid out by thoughtless machines - for example that we are expected to groom and update AI-generated stub profiles of ourselves that we never asked for in the first place, lest misinformation about us spread and we "lose points" in the great game of our professional standing - is, quite obviously, an encroachment on our freedom, and therefore, again, an encroachment on the one sort of play by the other. Play is now left to the very youngest of us: those too young to understand what screens are, too young to discern the world that lies behind and beyond them. Adolescence begins, perhaps, when we learn to channel our innate playfulness into competition. The comprehensive gamification of adulthood, in this light, has the condition of permanent adolescence as its corollary.</blockquote>
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Stephen Bush in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3d5556c5-520e-497a-aa5e-2546c5bc50cf" target="_blank">Beware the Rise of the Black Box Algorithm</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Any system designed to measure the likelihood of someone reoffending has to make a choice between letting out those who may in fact go on to reoffend, or continuing to imprison people who are ready to become productive members of society. There is no "right" or "fair" answer here: algorithms can shape your decision-making, but the judgment is ultimately one that has to be made by politicians and, indirectly, their voters. As the statistician David Spiegelhalter has observed, there is no practical difference between judges using algorithms and judges following sentencing guidelines. The important difference is solely and significantly that sentencing guidelines are clearly understood, publicly available and subject to democratic debate.</blockquote>
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Madhumita Murgia in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1fa17d8b-5902-4aff-a69d-419b96722c83" target="_blank">The Monk Helping the Vatican Take on AI</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“I would call Silicon Valley’s ethos almost libertarian and very strongly atheist, but usually replacing that atheism with a religion of their own, usually transhumanism or posthumanism,” says Kanta Dihal, a researcher of science and society at the University of Cambridge. “[It’s] a ‘man becoming god’ kind of narrative, which is strongly influenced by a privileged white male perspective shaping what the future might look like.” Dihal’s analysis is reminiscent of a fragment from Pope John Paul II’s famous writing on the dialogue between faith and science from 1998, <i>Fides Et Ratio</i>, which Benanti teaches in his graduate class. I discovered it when one of his students mentioned it to me after we attended a morning lecture on neuroethics. In the thesis, John Paul II writes, “Certain scientists, lacking any ethical point of reference, are in danger of putting at the centre of their concerns something other than the human person and the entirety of the person’s life.” He adds: “Further still, some of these, sensing the opportunities of technological progress, seem to succumb not only to a market-based logic, but also to the temptation of a quasi-divine power over nature and even over the human being.”</blockquote>
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Aristophanes Rat Utopia at <a href="https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1534404559719759872" target="_blank"><i>threadreader.com</i></a>.
</p><blockquote>
It becomes very obvious that what upsets them the most about <i>GPT-4chan</i> is that they hold this idea in their heads that no one should have access to large language models who doesn't hold their worldview, and I have a theory as to why this is. I think they have an (incorrect) idea that if they can successfully gatekeep this technology to people like them (they can't) that they can convince everyone once and for all that their shitlib worldviews are undebatable and correct because "muh AI even agrees!" If every advanced bot or, someday, AI, never makes it to the public eye before being shackled and neutered of all wrongthink, I think they believe they can have some justification to just bulldoze any opposition to the views said AI pantomimes as "cold unbiased reality". The problem is, doing it that way will *never* lead to them actually *succeeding* in creating an AI, because to shackle such a thing in development is to castrate it, if there are conclusions it would naturally come to that it is forced to ignore, it can never develop.</blockquote>
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Michael Lind at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-end-of-progressive-intellectual-life" target="_blank">The End of Progressive Intellectual Life</a>.
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The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center-left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual. If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star.</blockquote>
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Thomas Meaney in NEW REPUBLIC on Jean-Yves Fretigne's book, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165617/antonio-gramsci-live-resist-book-review-unlikely-persistence" target="_blank">To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci</a>.
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Before left-leaning western elites and academics fell headlong for Foucault in the 1990s, many were enamored of Gram sci, who, thanks to translation efforts of the British New Left, hurtled out of obscurity in the 1970s to become an international phenomenon. Gramsci and Foucault would come to attract admiration for similar reasons. Both were thought to exhibit a healthy distaste for Marxist orthodoxy—aridly anti-communist in Foucault’s case; both proposed more diffuse notions of power than traditional class analyses; both seemed assimilable into the reigning ideology of individualism (Gramsci because of his unique biography and personal style; Foucault for his focus on the “self”); and both made a point of stressing the significance of intellectuals in the social order. The belief that Gramsci somehow privileged the cultural domain over the political and economic helped justify the materialist allergies of at least two generations of professors, while keeping their nominal radicalism intact.</blockquote>
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Matthew John in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/marxism-and-our-libraries-where-do-we-go-from-here_4438513.html" target="_blank">Marxism and Our Libraries: Where Do We Go From Here?</a>.
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In a tweet that broke the news, Emily Drabinski, the ALA's new president-elect, declared: "I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity!" ...The American Library Association, which is a nonprofit organization, describes itself as "the trusted voice of libraries... for more than 140 years."</blockquote>
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Anthony Esolen in CHRONICLES, <a href="https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/war-without-end-amen/" target="_blank">War Without End, Amen</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFJCjrtggcAMDRDQRAl96S4_7S2y7DXZ6ssP6VV03ydTYQ1SJevxYoZbpNoaJDuO0IJjYFi_LMXB5d7wbFn3ObzZAGz0ttuY7oQcKuBxuK1Ph1wxhJQB9opsGiOl08xT5qh3F2MWnBMQ0QxY72ZfmsGPBPuy5DDdqZjMvjUjoMOjPBTQdUgOJsiKrb4A/s583/NV-160-link-illustr-Chronicles.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="583" data-original-width="449" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFJCjrtggcAMDRDQRAl96S4_7S2y7DXZ6ssP6VV03ydTYQ1SJevxYoZbpNoaJDuO0IJjYFi_LMXB5d7wbFn3ObzZAGz0ttuY7oQcKuBxuK1Ph1wxhJQB9opsGiOl08xT5qh3F2MWnBMQ0QxY72ZfmsGPBPuy5DDdqZjMvjUjoMOjPBTQdUgOJsiKrb4A/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-Chronicles.jpg" width="246" /></a></div> I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest - sweet and blessed rest - once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what? Then what? The progressive sweats. He neither believes in a natural order, nor comes to terms with fallen man and his imperfection. If peace is, as Augustine says, the tranquility of order, the progressive promotes himself as a disturber of the peace. He is too tightly wound to stop. If you live in a town full of such, you will see the pathology all the time, the unrest of people who cannot let things be.... But since man cannot take one step if he fears that the ground may collapse beneath him, the progressive must turn to something that promises, if not peace, at least the tense and temporary stasis of truce. He will not bow to a natural order, but he will lie with awful reverence prone before its evil simular. That is the state-made-god, to which he cedes an ever more intrusive central control over as many features of human life as possible.</blockquote>
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Silke-Maria Weineck at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-must-stop-trying-to-appease-the-right?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in" target="_blank">Colleges Must Stop Trying to Appease the Right</a>.
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In light of the Republican Party’s longstanding contempt for knowledge and expertise — be it in the context of history, public health, climate change, or ecology — the question is why colleges so far had escaped its venom relatively unscathed (if you disregard the systematic defunding of public institutions that plunged a generation of college kids into deep debt that cannot be discharged). College football is surely part of the answer, but I suspect the real reason is this: Despite the common narrative to the contrary, colleges are not, in fact, left-wing institutions. I invite anybody who believes we are hotbeds of socialism to check the salaries and working conditions of non-unionized adjunct faculty members. Rather, they are hierarchical operations largely dedicated to reproducing a social order that benefits the upper-middle class, liberals and conservatives alike — call it the professional-managerial class, if you will, beholden to and sustained by a small-l liberal world order. Now that the party is increasingly embracing anti-pluralist, protectionist, Christian nationalist, and at times neofascist goals, it is no longer aligned with the PMC’s broader agenda. It is therefore ready to wage open war with colleges, intent on confiscating the social capital they wield. This is a moment of considerable peril.</blockquote>
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David Bell at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/two-cheers-for-presentism?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_4936578_nl_Academe-Today_date_20220824&cid=at&source=&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh" target="_blank">Two Cheers for Presentism</a>.
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Last week James Sweet, president of the American Historical Association, sparked an academic firestorm by devoting his monthly column for the association newsletter to a critique of presentism. For too many contemporary scholars, Sweet suggested, the past only matters when read “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues — race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” The resulting uproar led Sweet to issue an apology for what he termed his ”ham-fisted attempt at provocation.” The immediate controversy is dying down, but it has drawn new attention to the fraught question of how present-day concerns should guide historical research. Historians have amply discussed these issues in recent years, as Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins chronicled in his excellent 2020 article in these pages, “Beyond the End of History.” And yet as last week’s events make clear, the debate is as alive as ever.</blockquote>
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Edward Luttwak interviewed by David Samuels at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/three-blind-kings-edward-luttwak" target="_blank">Three Blind Kings</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In Vladivostok, there is a wonderful female scholar at the Navy University, this is the university run by the Russian Navy. She wrote an article about Chinese border policy and about active claims and dormant claims. In that article, she says that the Chinese are advancing many territorial claims against the Japanese, for the Senkakus, against the Philippines, against the Indonesians for the Natuna offshore, and for almost the whole of Arunachal state in India and part of Ladakh. Then she said, “And then there are the dormant claims that will be activated when the Chinese feel strong enough to do so.” Two of them, the most important, are the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Beijing Convention of 1860, involving the transfer of the maritime provinces to Russia. Now, the official translation of Vladivostok into Chinese is a straight transliteration, Fúlādíwòsītuōkè, that is Vladivostok in Chinese characters. But unofficially, they use Haishenwai, which is not of course Chinese, it’s Manchurian, because the whole Chinese claim to Manchuria, Tibet, and Xinjiang is bogus because they were all under Manchu rule when the Chinese themselves were under the rule of the Manchu. It’s like Sri Lanka claiming to rule India because both were ruled by the British, and this false claim is the basis of everything there.</blockquote>
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Peter Hefele at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/155659" target="_blank">What Is China Up to with Its New 'Global Security Initiative'?</a>.
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Comprehensive security - or even "securitisation" - in domestic and international relations has become a near-obsession in Chinese politics since Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and 2013. Security, in the understanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is first and foremost ensuring the survival of its Leninist-Maoist power monopoly and socialism with Chinese characteristics. Other security dimensions are built around this core interest, like onion peels. It is not by coincidence that Xi Jinping also presides over the Central National Security Commission (CNSC), a newly established body in 2013 to centralise control over the giant Chinese security apparatus. As early as April 2014, at a CNSC session, Xi presented his concept of "big security", in which domestic and international security had been defined as inseparably linked. One was already wondering when a comprehensive concept for China's foreign relations and worldview under the auspices of security would be released. This happened at the prestigious Boao Forum for Asia on 21 April 2022, when Xi Jinping announced his new "Global Security Initiative" (GSI).</blockquote>
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Lars Schonander & Geoffrey Cain in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chinese-are-buying-the-farm-north-dakota-hong-kong-land-food-shortage-supply-chain-usda-11662666515" target="_blank">The Chinese Are Buying The Farm</a>.
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One Chinese billionaire, Sun Guangxin, invested an estimated $110 million in Texas farmland. He planned to build a wind-turbine farm on a 15,000-acre Val Verde County parcel that would give him access to the Texas electricity grid. There isn't much in Val Verde Country besides Laughlin Air Force Base. In 2020 then-Rep. Will Hurd wrote an op-ed in the <i>Houston Chronicle</i> urging the federal government to halt the project on national security grounds. Mr. Sun's company, GH America, received $163,513 in Paycheck Protection Program loans during the pandemic.</blockquote>
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David Adler in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/guiding-finance-chinas-strategy-for-funding-advanced-manufacturing/" target="_blank">Guiding Finance: China's Strategy for Funding Advanced Manufacturing</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What is the purpose of finance and its relationship with the real economy? How can the financial sector better support innovation and national growth? What financing tools can lead to improved national competitiveness? What role should the state play, if any, in guiding capital? These questions are not debated in the United States, at least not generally. The first question is not debated in China, either, because the answer is settled: finance should support the real economy. But China is vigorously grappling with the other points of political economy and is developing new theories and institutions—and its government is experi menting with many new financing mechanisms—to support many different industrial policies.</blockquote>
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Edward White in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/066f2d60-b4c8-44ab-8986-6e550259d089" target="_blank">China 'Devil Vessels' Accused of Abuses</a>.
</p><blockquote>
EJF said the seal was just one of an unknown number of protected species slaughtered by the Chinese fleet that also included false killer whales, whale sharks, dolphins and turtles. One Indonesian fisherman described the boat he toiled on as a “devil vessel”. “We took everything. It did not matter whether the shark was big or small, even babies inside the shark’s belly,” he told the investigators. A separate investigation published last month by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a US think-tank, found that Chinese state-linked and private fishing companies — including some with western backers — had designed operations that evaded accountability and avoided exposure to external due diligence. These included targeting species without established oversight bodies, visiting mostly Chinese ports and internalising their supply chains. Another study published in the journal Science Advances in March of illegal fishing activities — including human rights abuses and smuggling — found at least a third of all recorded offences from 2000 to 2020 were linked to 450 industrial vessels and 20 companies originating from China, the EU and tax haven jurisdictions.</blockquote>
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Nic Fildes in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/35810ccd-eedd-4b46-ad39-deef1592497b" target="_blank">India on Track to Pass China as World's Biggest Buyer of Minerals</a>.
</p><blockquote>
China’s “precarious” debt trajectory and its slowing population growth mean it could be eclipsed by India as the world’s most important buyer of minerals in a decade, according to Dambisa Moyo, the global investor and economist. Moyo, who was speaking at the Diggers & Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, warned that China’s debt and demographic challenges would become “incredibly problematic over the next 10 years”. She said those structural challenges would intensify China’s “struggle to manage a lot of their policy initiatives from the centre in terms of their political approach”.</blockquote>
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James Fernyhough in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/57d5c3fd-35ec-4146-aa6d-9e3fc87fbcbf" target="_blank">Pro-China Fakers Target US Rare Earths Plant</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Dragonbridge first came to Mandiant’s attention in 2019 with social media campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube opposing anti-government protests in Hong Kong. The group has since branched out into a range of areas including the Covid-19 pandemic and US politics. “Recently, we identified and investigated a subset of information operations activity we attribute to the Dragonbridge campaign across social media,” Mandiant said in a blog post. The cyber security firm said it had also monitored campaigns against rare earths companies Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp and USA Rare Earth, and against US president Joe Biden’s Defense Production Act, a Korean war-era law under which Washington is aiming to increase domestic production of critical minerals. Mandiant said the campaigns had used “inauthentic social media and forum accounts, including those posing as residents in Texas to feign concern over environmental and health issues surrounding the plant”.</blockquote>
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Frances Martel at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2022/05/25/genocide-police-hack-shows-xi-jinping-ordered-china-to-break-the-lineages-of-uyghurs/" target="_blank">Genocide: Police Hack Shows Xi Jinping Ordered China to 'Break the Lineages' of Uyghurs</a>.
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The strategy Chen detailed, which he directly credits “the General Secretary” (Xi Jinping) with implementing, is a five-year plan that began in 2017 and is expected to end this year that includes the creation of “vocational training centers” – China’s euphemism for the concentration camps – in addition to the infiltration of all mosques with communist propaganda, “the seizing of wild imams,” and a policy of ethnic erosion both Chen and Zhao in his remarks referred to as “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins.” Chen applauded his team in his remarks for having successfully implemented Xi’s ideas. “The sources of extremism have been controlled well, the seizing of wild imams has been done well, the investigating of two-faced persons has been done well,” he praised. “the ‘Digging, Reducing, and Shoveling,’ the ‘Four Breaks’ (breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins) have been done well.”</blockquote>
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Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ on Ilham Tohit's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-books-decry-the-uyghur-tragedy-in-china-review-ilhan-tohti-nury-turkel-11657897576" target="_blank">We Uyghurs Have No Say, and Nury Turkel's book, No Escape</a>.
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He was born in 1970, in a prison camp, his pregnant mother—only 19—having been imprisoned because her father had been involved in Uyghur politics before the Communists took power. She was so ill-fed in jail that she could scarcely breastfeed her son. Before giving birth, she had been hit on her swollen belly by a guard. Mr. Turkel did well at school and at age 25—in 1995—left China for studies in the U.S., never to return. He went to law school and cofounded the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy group based in Washington. After 9/11, he represented a group of Uyghurs who had been swept up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo. He secured their release: They were, it emerged, refugees from Xinjiang, not members of al Qaeda. But Mr. Turkel grasped that this handful of Uyghurs in the U.S. dragnet allowed China to “rebrand Uyghurs as dangerous Islamic extremists.” Beijing began to assert that all political disturbances in Xinjiang were, as he says, “motivated by Al Qaeda sympathies.” China reckoned that this would give it carte blanche—in the midst of the Global War on Terror—to crack down on the Muslim Uyghurs. And so a people already reeling from decades of Han Chinese repression were brought to their knees.</blockquote>
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Peter Hessler in NEW YORKER, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/a-teacher-in-china-learns-the-limits-of-free-expression" target="_blank">A Bitter Education</a>.
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Some of my most powerful memories from the classroom in Fuling involve incidents in which I made a statement that touched, even obliquely, on a sensitive aspect of Chinese history or politics. At such moments, the room would fall silent, and students would stare at their desks. It was a visceral response, and it became the same for me—looking out over the bowed heads, my heart raced and my face grew hot. Initially, I considered these to be the instances when I felt most like a foreigner. But I came to realize it was the opposite: my body was experiencing something that must be common to young Chinese. The Party had created a climate so intense that the political became physical.</blockquote>
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Sophia Lam in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/after-we-get-rich-with-our-hard-work-the-ccp-is-there-to-harvest-former-chinese-millionaire_4738691.html" target="_blank">Former Millionaire Details Corrupt Practices in China</a>.
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"The communist regime allows you to experience a little bit of freedom and lets you work hard until you make some money. Then, it comes for your money," Feng Zhenguo told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on Sept. 14. Feng had invested more than 3 million yuan (over $430,000) and had about 40 employees at the factory, which made high-end customized furniture, in Qinhuangdao, a port city 190 miles east of Beijing. But he was forced to sell the business to the police for only 400,000 yuan ($57,000). He had originally set up the business out of his love for carpentry and good craftsmanship. "I thought that I could so something well if I was really fond of it and did it wall all my heart," he said. However, the communist regime turned his life's dream into a nightmare, repeatedly asking him for money while using various excuses and guises, he said.</blockquote>
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Edward White & Eleanor Olcott in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8f4b6e8b-9b59-433e-b862-425c78a378b4" target="_blank">China's Middle Class Angst</a>.
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For decades, China’s expanding middle class had but one option to get ahead: <i>neijuan</i>, or joining the rat race of relentless competition. Then, a surprising strain of resistance sprouted among the young last year: <i>tangping</i>, lying flat and doing only the minimum to make ends meet. Now, after a return to gruelling lockdowns under President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy, a third trend has emerged: <i>runxue</i>, the study of how to get out of China for good. In late March, as more than 300mn people found themselves under fresh restrictions, searches on Tencent’s <i>WeChat</i> platform for “how to move to Canada” surged almost 3,000 per cent, a study by US think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) found. In early April, <i>WeChat</i> searches for immigration jumped more than 440 per cent. Relocation consultants in China and abroad say they were also hit by a torrent of phone calls and emails. The <i>runxue</i> phenomenon highlights that ordinary Chinese are deeply frustrated. Their day-to-day freedoms hinge on the results of mandatory Covid-19 tests, often taken every 48 or 72 hours.</blockquote>
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Li Yuan in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/business/china-covid-zero.html" target="_blank">'The Last Generation': The Disillusionment of Young Chinese</a>.
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A growing number of college graduates are trying to get into graduate schools or pass the increasingly competitive public servant examinations to land a secure government job.
Two-thirds of 131 new recruits of civil servants in Beijing’s Chaoyang district in April had a master’s or doctoral degree, according to a government document, reflecting an increasing trend. They graduated from top universities in China and around the world, including Peking University, University of Hong Kong, University of Sydney and Imperial College London. Many of them will be doing the most basic government jobs, ones that high school graduates used to fill. A Ph.D. graduate of particle physics from Peking University will become an urban management officer, or <i>chengguan</i>, according to the report. <i>Chengguan</i> are the most reviled officials, known for brutalizing beggars, chasing down street vendors and assisting in tearing down people’s homes. The contrast is too rich.</blockquote>
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James Gorrie in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-last-generation-reflects-the-dehumanization-of-china-by-the-ccp_4505057.html" target="_blank">'The Last Generation' Reflects the Dehumanization of China by the CCP</a>.
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From a behavioral perspective, the young generation is unlike any China has seen. During the one-child policy era, for example, many wanted more than one child, while the state engaged in forced abortions to enforce the policy. Today, many young Chinese refuse to have any children. One poll showed two-thirds of mostly owmen between the ages of 18 and 31 have chosen not to have children. "Not bringing children to this country, to this land, will be the most charitable deed I could manage," wrote a Weibo user under the hashtag <i>#thelastgeneration</i>, before it was censored. Another wrote: "As ordinary people who're not entitled to individual dignity, our reproductive organs will be our last resort."</blockquote>
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Rana Mitter in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/baby-bust-chinas-looming-demographic-disaster" target="_blank">Baby Bust: China's Looming Demographic Disaster</a>.
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China likes to talk a tough game. But the demographic crisis means that there is a question over the way in which China could sustain any military attack. Part of the reason for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a calculation that soon the Russian army wouldn’t have the manpower for a full-blown war. Xi Jinping faces a different dilemma – can the People’s Liberation Army continue its shift from a force based on sheer numbers to one that is smaller and relies on technology first and foremost?</blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/hong-kong-from-the-inside-ian-johnson/" target="_blank">Hong Kong from the Inside</a>.
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Beijing's biggest error in trying to subjugate Hong Kong was to use what Hung calls "racialist nationalism." This is essentially what the Qing Empire used to control the vast territories it acquired in the eighteenth century, including Xinjiang and Tibet, which more than doubled its size. During this period, it offered these new possessions autonomy, but the assumption was that this was temporary. Qing authorities encouraged Han Chinese emigration and introduced Chinese culture in these regions, making it the benchmark for correct assimilation. This trend continues today, helping to explain the brutal policies being forced on Xinjiang, Tibet, and other non-ethnic Chinese parts of the People's Republic. Hong Kong would seem to be different from these areas because, according to modern racial discourse, it is "Chinese" in the sense that its residents were historically part of the same cultural world as Beijing, Shanghai, and other ethnically Chinese parts of the People's Republic. But areas such as Hong Kong have also been on the margins of Chinese culture, zones of refuge and resistance with a language different from the standard Chinese spoken predominantly inn North China.</blockquote>
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Austin Ramzy in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/world/asia/hong-kong-king-of-kowloon.html" target="_blank">Peeling Paint in Hong Kong Reveals Work of Newly Relevant 'King'</a>.
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He covered public spaces in Hong Kong with expansive jumbles of Chinese characters that announced his unshakable belief that much of the Kowloon Peninsula rightfully belonged to his family. During his lifetime, the graffiti artist, Tsang Tsou-choi, was a ubiquitous figure, well-known for his eccentric campaign that struck most as a peculiar personal mission, not a political rallying cry. But Hong Kong has become a very different place since Mr. Tsang died in 2007, and his work — once commonly spotted, but now largely vanished from the streetscape — has taken on a new resonance in a city where much political expression has been stamped out by a sweeping campaign against dissent since 2020. “In his lifetime, particularly early on, people thought he was completely crazy,” said Louisa Lim, author of <i>Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong</i>, a new book that examines Mr. Tsang’s legacy. “Even at the time that he died no one was really interested in the content or the political message of his work. But actually, he was talking about these Hong Kong preoccupations long before other people were — territory, sovereignty, dispossession and loss.”</blockquote>
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Bill Gertz in WASHINGTON TIMES, <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/11/xi-jinping-step-down-rumors-suggest-amid-harsh-chi/" target="_blank">Rumors Swirl that China's Xi Jinping Will Step Down Amid Harsh Covid Lockdowns</a>.
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The rumors followed a meeting last week of the Party Politburo Standing Committee, the collective leadership group that rules China. They were traced in part to a Chinese-language YouTube video May 4 by Canadian-based blogger appearing under the persona “Lao Deng.” Details of the video quickly spread to social media outlets in China but were quickly censored. The blogger, citing what he said was a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) security source, said a “coup” was launched against Mr. Xi at the meeting of senior party leaders in Beijing. According to blog, Mr. Xi was forced to step aside but will stay in place until a major party meeting later this year. In his place, current Premier Li Keqiang will take over daily management of the party and government.... One Chinese-language post on Twitter said another indicator was the removal of Mr. Xi’s books from a Beijing bookstore. The party media organ People’s Daily on May 8 also failed to run one of the usual glowing photos of Mr. Xi on its front page. Instead, only Mr. Li, the premier, and another party leader were mentioned.</blockquote>
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Li Yuan in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/business/new-world-nancy-pelosi-taiwan-social-media.html" target="_blank">Perils of Preaching Nationalism Play Out on Chinese Social Media</a>.
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Some users compared the People’s Liberation Army to the Chinese men’s soccer team, a laughingstock in the country because it has qualified for the World Cup only once. They sneered at the announcement that the P.L.A. would conduct military exercises near Taiwan. “Save some gas,” said one <i>WeChat</i> user. “It’s very expensive now,” responded another.</blockquote>
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Katherine Eban in VANITY FAIR, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy" target="_blank">Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak</a>.
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[Jesse D.] Bloom’s paper was the product of detective work he’d undertaken after noticing that a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences mentioned in a published paper from China had somehow vanished without a trace. The sequences, which map the nucleotides that give a virus its unique genetic identity, are key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved. In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan. Now, he was hoping Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, could help him identify other deleted sequences that might shed light on the mystery. Bloom had submitted the paper to a preprint server, a public repository of scientific papers awaiting peer review, on the same day that he’d sent a copy to Fauci and Collins. It now existed in a kind of twilight zone: not published, and not yet public, but almost certain to appear online soon. Collins immediately organized a Zoom meeting for Sunday, June 20. He invited two outside scientists, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry, and allowed Bloom to do the same. Bloom chose Pond and Rasmus Nielsen, a genetic biologist. That it was shaping up like an old-fashioned duel with seconds in attendance did not cross Bloom’s mind at the time. But six months after that meeting, he remained so troubled by what transpired that he wrote a detailed account, which <i>Vanity Fair</i> obtained.</blockquote>
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Petr Svab in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/chinese-communist-subversion-of-who-undermined-global-pandemic-response_3313092.html" target="_blank">Chinese Communist Subversion of WHO Undermined Global Pandemic Response</a>.
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While part of the CCP’s influence over the WHO was coming from the U.N., another part of it was played by Tedros himself. Tedros is a former Politburo member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a Maoist group that had waged a guerrilla war in the 1980s against the Soviet-backed Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. “The nearest you would put [Tigray’s ideology] to would be North Korea today,” according to Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist movements and front groups. In the early 1990s, as the regime at the time lost financial support from the collapsing Soviet Union, a coalition of Tigray and other groups overthrew it and ruled the country until 2019. While on the surface, the government embraced market reforms and democratic elections, ideologically it remained socialist, Loudon said, especially in terms of foreign policy. “They still keep up their foreign communist connections,” he said in a telephone interview with <i>The Epoch Times</i>. Tedros, a former health and later foreign minister of the African nation, naturally maintained strong ties with the CCP, embracing projects such as the “Belt and Road” initiative, which serves the CCP to expand its geostrategic influence. Tedros scored the WHO’s top post in 2017 with strong backing by the CCP’s lobby, despite allegations that he had covered up three cholera outbreaks during his tenure as health minister.</blockquote>
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Alana Mastrangelo at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/08/22/thanks-comrade-famed-u-of-maryland-professor-created-surveillance-machine-for-communist-china/" target="_blank">Famed U. of Maryland Professor Created Surveillance Machine for Communist China</a>.
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Manocha built the software as part of a six-figure research grant from Alibaba, which wanted to “classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features,” according to documents obtained by the <i>Daily Beast</i>. “These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance,” the document read. The 2018 contract signed by the University of Maryland and Alibaba raises concerns that a U.S. tax-payer-funded university has directly contributed to the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance capabilities.... The grant document states that Manocha and his research team pledged to “work closely with Alibaba researchers” to develop surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gaits, and classify them into categories such as “aggressive,” “shy,” and “impulsive,” among other personalities.... In 2020, it was discovered that Alibaba’s product, Cloud Shield, can recognize and classify the faces of Uyghur people. This revelation was concerning, given the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang....</blockquote>
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Melik Kaylan in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-wont-we-call-putin-a-colonialist-russia-ukraine-georgia-donbas-empire-soviet-11648152341" target="_blank">Why Won't We Call Putin a Colonialist?</a>.
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Why are so few in the West calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a colonial war? Colonialism is the clearest, most accurate framing of Moscow’s aggression. The self-justifying sense of mission, the dehumanization of the other, the violent imposition of dependency—all are central attributes of the colonial impulse. On the flip side, far too few Russians recognize their country’s behavior as imperialist. Self-flagellating postcolonial studies might have paralyzed Western cultural discourse, but in Russia such self-scrutiny is virtually nonexistent. Only in the West is the colonial era considered the great original sin of civilization, not least because the Soviet propaganda machine codified and packaged the idea for easy consumption. American and European intellectuals have done little to share the guilt with non-Western or anti-Western imperialists, while Vladimir Putin has insulated Russia’s population from such subversive ideas.</blockquote>
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Jean De Ruyt at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/155808?utm_source=euobs&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">Could the Central Asian 'stan' States Turn Away from Moscow?</a>.
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At the UN, none of the five central Asian powers supported Russia in the 2 March resolution condemning the Ukraine invasion. More recently, the presidents of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have each rebuked Kremlin reports of bilateral meetings which indicated support for the war. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have both boldly dispatched humanitarian aid to Ukraine. As the war continues, it is increasingly clear that while they continue to hedge diligently their rhetoric, central Asian states are subtly pushing back against Russia's war, and Russia's influence. The opportunity for a long-term pivot is possible but, obviously, engagement of the EU is key.</blockquote>
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Gillian Tett in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e98976cd-27e2-455d-806a-fe1618b86cb5" target="_blank">The Anger of the Minorities Fighting Russia's War</a>.
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Recently, some western academics held a Zoom call to discuss the Ukraine war with representatives from minority groups in the Russian Federation, including the Tuvan, Buryat, Sakha, Kalmyk, Yakut and Chechen peoples. You may be baffled by some of these names. After all, the only group that appears semi-regularly in western headlines are the Chechens, due to their own war; the others are usually ignored as they live in poor, remote places like Siberia (Tuvan and Buryat), Arctic Circle (Sakha) or Volga (Kalmyk). But having immersed myself in Kalmyk, Sakha and Buryat studies when I was an anthropologist, I think what is happening with these groups deserves more attention. Most notably, the Ukraine war has left some minority peoples angry. As one participant on the call explained, views of Russia are “more radical compared to the old conformities and silences. They are talking about colonialism and imperialism, ethnic and racial discrimination.” That’s partly because the Russian army is disproportionately using minority soldiers in Ukraine. And there are widespread media reports that these minorities are suffering per-capita casualty rates far higher than Slavic soldiers.</blockquote>
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Tushar Ranjan Mohanty at <i>satp.org</i>, <a href="https://www.satp.org/south-asia-intelligence-review-Volume-20-No-45#assessment1" target="_blank">Balochistan: China Pakistan Economic Corridor's Achilles Heel</a>.
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Under the Gwadar Project, China is building a 'Chinese-only colony' in the Gwadar port city at a cost of USD 150 million, which is intended to house half-a-million Chinese nationals. According to an August 21, 2018, media report, only Chinese citizens will live in this gated zone, thereby paving way for a Chinese colony within Pakistan. The China-Pakistan Investment Corporation has reportedly bought 3.6 million square feet for the international port city, and is going to start building the gated zone for the anticipated 500,000 strong Chinese workforce, which was scheduled to be located there by 2022, though these targets have been slipping. There is also great anxiety that CPEC will convert the Baloch people into minorities in their own homeland.... The recent attack on Chinese nationals will increase the woes of the Pakistani establishment, as attacks on Chinese nationals and projects are not only limited to Balochistan. On July 14, 2021, a vehicle driven by a suicide attacker and laden with explosives rammed a convoy of Chinese workers headed to the Dasu Hydropower Plant project site at Dasu in the Upper Kohistan District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), killing at least 13 persons, including nine Chinese.</blockquote>
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Ronald Patrick in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/travel/kharnak-nomads-ladakh-india.html" target="_blank">Glimpses of Northern India's Vanishing Nomads</a>.
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Tsering Stobdan is a member of a nomadic community known as the Kharnak, who for centuries have raised yaks, sheep and goats in the high plains of Ladakh, in northern India, one of the most hauntingly beautiful — if harsh and inhospitable — places on earth. I first visited the area in 2016, in the middle of a long overland journey from Cambodia to Berlin. While passing through Nagaland, in northeastern India, I met a man from Himachal Pradesh, a neighboring state of Ladakh, who told me about the beauty of the Himalayas and the nomadic ways of the people who lived there. Based on his stories, I rented a motorcycle and headed to Leh, Ladakh’s capital. In Leh I was connected with a young member of the Kharnak community who took me to meet his family on the Changthang plateau.... Once a flourishing tribe, the Kharnak community is now dwindling. Younger generations are being sent to nearby cities, where they can find better health care and educational opportunities. And while pashmina, the lightweight wool sheared from the bellies of Himalayan mountain goats, is a profitable product, life in the mountains is extraordinarily difficult, especially in the winter.</blockquote>
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Ajit Kumar Singh at <i>satp.org</i>, <a href="https://satp.org/south-asia-intelligence-review-Volume-21-No-3#assessment1" target="_blank">Strongman's Follies</a>.
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The Rajapaksa stranglehold on Government, rampant corruption and a range of irrational policy decisions contributed to a rapidly escalating economic meltdown, with a heavy-handed pattern of authoritarian rule stifling all criticism, both within Government and from the Opposition. Among the most disastrous moves in this context was the abrupt and arbitrary decision in May 2021 to declare Sri Lanka 'fully organic,' banning all use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Gotabaya Rajapaksa boasted to the world that Sri Lanka would be the model for other countries to emulate, but there was little planning or consultation with the scientific and agricultural establishment. The result was massive crop losses, with estimates of up to a 50 per cent decline in major crops. Including tea, which accounts for nearly 10 per cent of Sri Lanka's exports, as well as prized a range of spices for which the country is a preferred source.... In the meanwhile, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa had embarked on a wasteful and ill-conceived project of infrastructure development, far out of proportion to the country's projected needs and capacities for utilization. The grandest - and most irrational - of these projects were under the aegis of China's 'Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI), and were executed under unequal and exorbitant terms that pushed Colombo into massive debt, prominently resulting in the in their surrender under long-term leases, to the Chinese, as was the case of the Hambantota Port, or massive complexes, such as the Rajapaksa Airport and a massive Conference Centre, that remain unused since their completion.</blockquote>
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David Pilling in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9022be83-8a52-4b95-a213-951ecfb8335d" target="_blank">What Bangladesh Can Teach Others about Development</a>.
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Name a country with a per capita income of less than $500, where women have on average 4.5 children and where 44 per cent of people live in extreme poverty? The answer is Bangladesh — circa 1990. Today the country, for all its problems, is transformed. GDP per capita has increased eightfold. Women have two children on average, meaning parents have more money to devote to each child’s education, health and wellbeing — and banks have more savings to recycle to industry. The proportion of people living in absolute poverty has more than halved. The position of women has greatly improved. More girls are in secondary school than boys. In 1971, when the country became independent, one in five children died before the age of five. Today that figure is one in 30. One must not exaggerate. Bangladesh remains poor. It struggles with political turmoil, environmental peril and high levels of corruption. Only this week it approached the IMF for a multibillion-dollar loan. But if you take the long view, Bangladesh — once dismissed as a “bottomless basket” by Henry Kissinger — is a development success.</blockquote>
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Rana Foroohar in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6f7ea222-f21c-4879-8787-5188b93c129c" target="_blank">A Deglobalising World Will Be an Inflationary One</a>.
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As Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar told clients in a recent note, "war means industry", be it hot war or economic war, and growing industry means inflation. This is the exact opposite of the paradigm we've experienced for the last half century, during which "China got very rich making cheap stuff... Russia got very rich selling cheap gas to Europe, and Germany got very rich selling expensive stuff produced with cheap gas." The US, meanwhile, "got very rich by doing QE. But the licence for QE came from the 'lowflation' regime enabled by cheap exports coming from Russia and China."</blockquote>
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Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ on Olufemi Taiwo's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/against-decolonisation-book-review-a-challenge-from-africa-11660316720?st=ttdlhaeh2cz1i0m" target="_blank">Against Decolonisation</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVGIurcqQxiqdanEoaCTbEsrrIe8D1R-HqEi07xKHv4NXonBR7rziZjoXatUlw8Y3T_6fHl5mJP_lI30FSdnhF8vcbMTuqONma4Z60wNvbU8b1gtcaDdqliYdWaj1xEc07y1ftJAZXyzbPmZPZoOedmneRFPsr5lFU0xFQkVug3hDbALS90H7uvvzhng/s634/NV-160-link-illustr-AgainstDecolonisatio.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="413" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVGIurcqQxiqdanEoaCTbEsrrIe8D1R-HqEi07xKHv4NXonBR7rziZjoXatUlw8Y3T_6fHl5mJP_lI30FSdnhF8vcbMTuqONma4Z60wNvbU8b1gtcaDdqliYdWaj1xEc07y1ftJAZXyzbPmZPZoOedmneRFPsr5lFU0xFQkVug3hDbALS90H7uvvzhng/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-AgainstDecolonisatio.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
<i> Against Decolonisation</i> abstruse in places, is an electrifying book. The disparaging of the modern anticolonial left is done largely by Western conservatives. Yet here we have a proud and unapologetic African, arguing as an African, against the very people who would hold Africa back with spurious arguments made in the name of Africa. Mr. Táíwò cites an egregious decolonizationist (my ugly word) trope: that of “epistemicide.” This is the view that the dominance of “Western epistemic traditions”—or ways of pursuing knowledge—“kill local forms of scholarship.” So Western epistemic traditions must be booted out of Africa. Decolonization activists are locked into a black-and-white division in which the colonized and the colonizers must remain forever apart. For Mr. Táíwò, this can lead only to a repudiation of universalism, leaving Africa in a ghetto of make-believe authenticity, one in which “colonialism-tinged phenomena” are purged.</blockquote>
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Sheila Miyoshi Jager in NYT on Ronald Spector's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/books/review/a-continent-erupts-ronald-h-spector.html" target="_blank">A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955</a>.
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Far from being the result of "the struggle against white supremacy" as the old colonial powers attempted to reclaim their former empires, the wars of liberation in the first decades after 1945 took on the character of civil wars. The peoples of formerly occupied territories held vastly different visions about their postcolonial future, which also helps to explain the savagery of much of the fighting. Friends and foe became hard to distinguish. Even the defeated Japanese became part of the mix. A significant number cooperated with the nationalists to battle for Indonesian independence, providing arms, ammunition and tactical training. Others fought alongside the Vietminh against the French and British in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh often welcomed Japanese help if it meant neutralizing his Vietnamese opponents.</blockquote>
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Peter Aspden in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/481d0534-4155-48f4-bb92-996da968deaf" target="_blank">The Way of the Sami</a>.
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It is not news that the Sámis have been at odds with the governments of the countries in which their lands lie and, some would say, with modernity itself. The once-nomadic Sámi people, today numbering between 50,000 and 100,000 (there is no official register), have historically made their living from fishing, hunting and gathering, many of them through reindeer husbandry. They were largely ignored by the Scandinavians who settled in the south, until the 19th century, when they were subjected to forced assimilation policies. These caused religious and cultural clashes, and more recently there have been economically based conflicts. Sámi holistic beliefs centre on the need to respect and live in harmony with the region’s natural resources. But these have been trammelled in recent years by the rapid development of mining and wind and hydropower projects. The initiatives have been labelled as a kind of “green colonialism”, a ruinous, little-reported consequence of climate change.</blockquote>
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James Piereson in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/5/culture-against-civilization" target="_blank">Culture Against Civilization</a>.
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"Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go," cried radical students and faculty at one campus a few decades ago. Other students, not quite so politicized, nevertheless view "Western Civ" as useless or irrelevant to their vocational interests and so lack the tools by which they might challenge their teachers. In any case, the radicals achieved their aim. No one yet knows what will happen as those students take their one-sided ideas or lack of knowledge from the academy into the wider world of business, government, publishing, and teaching. Thus far, the signs are not encouraging. At the same time, Western institutions seem as strong and influential as ever, both at home and abroad. People around the world still try to emulate American and European patterns of government, business, science, and law, though mostly without success. That is why so many continue to stream across borders into Europe and the United States.... Those in and around the universities who attack Western civilization do so because they resent its achievements and success or find it wanting when viewed in light of its own high ideals. They both hate and admire the West at the same time. Few seem inclined to pick up and leave in order to live under other civilizational ideals or conditions. Their goal, rather is to take over - but to what end?</blockquote>
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David Pilling in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/bc086fd8-12c5-4a15-afc2-734be4443aac" target="_blank">How Nigeria's State Lost the Trust of Its Citizens</a>.
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Nigeria has a semi-decent road network, at least between big cities such as Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Kano and Kaduna. But security is so poor that many people are too afraid to use it. Nigeria's security forces, mostly underpaid and under-equipped, are in a war of attrition against gangs of bandits, separatists, extortionists, kidnappers and terrorists. The state of insecurity suggests they are losing. It is easy to see how Nigeria got here. For half a century, it has been pumping oil in quantities large enough to pay for a small elite, but not large enough to raise everyone's living standards significantly. According to calculations by Stefan Dercon, an Oxford professor, in 2010, when oil prices were riding high, Nigeria made $54bn from oil and gas, of which $38bn ended up in federal government hands. That equates to only $340 per capita against $1,206 in Algeria, $2,965 in Gabon and a hefty $7,477 in Saudia Arabia. In those circumstances, the name of the game becomes getting hold of oil rent.</blockquote>
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William McGurn in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pope-abandons-his-own-francis-cardinal-joseph-zen-hong-kong-trial-democracy-sino-vatican-accord-prison-11663616756" target="_blank">The Pope Abandons His Own</a>.
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The Vatican architect of the still-secret deal with Beijing, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, professed his "closeness" to his fellow cardinal - before revealing his true priorities. "The most concrete hope," he said, "is that initiatives such as this one will not complicate the already complex and not simple path of dialogue." Just two years ago Cardinal Zen, who grew up in Shanghai, flew to Rome in a desperate attempt to get the Holy Father to reconsider his China deal. But a pope who always seems to have time for private audiences with celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio refused to meet a cardinal with long first-hand experience of Chinese communism. Cardinal Gerhard Muller noted that no senior Vatican official had offered an expression of solidarity or a prayer initiative for Cardinal Zen at last month's gathering of cardinals in Rome.... "Martyrdom is normal in our church," he said after his arrest. "We may not have to do that, but we may have to bear some pain and steel ourselves for our loyalty to our faith."</blockquote>
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Casey Chalk at <i>spectatorworld.com</i>, <a href="https://spectatorworld.com/topic/how-catholics-became-the-new-wasps/" target="_blank">How Catholics Became the New WASPs</a>.
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Calvinist minister Lyman Beecher, in a widely read 1835 tract called "A Plea for the West," warned that immigrant Catholic hordes would exploit the power of mass democracy to usurp control of American political institutions and impose Catholicism on the country.... In 1834, Beecher provoked the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Though today Catholic institutions (including churches) remain a frequent target for activists and vandals, it is less because of the otherness of the Catholic faith than its identification with the same patriarchal, religiously informed, bourgeois norms liberal ideologues aim to dismantle. Indeed, in 2022, it would be more accurate to say that rather than threatening WASP culture, Catholics are America's best chance for <i>preserving</i> it.</blockquote>
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Dana Gioia in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/08/christianity-and-poetry" target="_blank">Christianity and Poetry</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihMXq10hAx7OLKsxAMAYMV0Cu0BXg98hxzCHbMsz7MhCilU07GMvUz_uNqw-w1MdfT0FgOudkmuFQeGEFlJicAOgwNVX5rLIGE3_g0IGwAB-psTFkZR5jQuH2TWzjm0Rcn0HbHBuENi3ck0SKchWL9TO2MsfprIq21EUCcaSsCfKZnh0LspjHqw6nDDA/s591/NV-160-link-illustr-FirstThings.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="591" data-original-width="443" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihMXq10hAx7OLKsxAMAYMV0Cu0BXg98hxzCHbMsz7MhCilU07GMvUz_uNqw-w1MdfT0FgOudkmuFQeGEFlJicAOgwNVX5rLIGE3_g0IGwAB-psTFkZR5jQuH2TWzjm0Rcn0HbHBuENi3ck0SKchWL9TO2MsfprIq21EUCcaSsCfKZnh0LspjHqw6nDDA/s320/NV-160-link-illustr-FirstThings.jpg" width="240" /></a></div> Christianity may be many things, but it is not prosaic. Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry. Why should anyone believe such a claim? Let’s start with Scripture, the universal foundation of Christianity. No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse.</blockquote>
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Danusha Goska at <i>frontpagemag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/netflix-adapts-jane-austens-persuasion-danusha-v-goska/" target="_blank">Netflix Adapts Jane Austen's Persuasion</a>.
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"Invisible style" is an oxymoron; style usually calls attention to itself. In the case of Hollywood Golden Age films, though, filmmakers did everything they could to hide their style from the viewer. Filmmakers wanted the audience to lose themselves in the story. There's a fine, brief discussion of invisible style in this YouTube video. Beginning, largely, in the 1960s, storytelling began to change in response to Marxist-inspired postmodernism. Postmodernism strove to destroy storytelling's ability to transport the reader to another place and time. Rather than "invisible style" that allowed the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief," postmodernism insisted on never letting the reader forget that reading is an artificial activity and that the story the reader was so invested in was not true. Storytelling has power; Marxism is obsessed with power; the masses must not be allowed their brief respites, or the expansion of their compassion to persons, like the English gentry, who deserve no compassion. The masses must be indoctrinated, and storytelling must be subservient to that indoctrination.</blockquote>
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Garth Cartwright in FT, Kraftwerk: <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/827295d2-849e-442e-a676-ee57621fffd8" target="_blank">'We Were Overwhelmed by Technology'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In 1982, Kraftwerk scored a UK number one with “The Model” but Hütter and Schneider, rather than capitalise on this unexpected success, are portrayed as having chosen to withdraw into their Kling Klang studio for much of the next decade. Having helped soundtrack the 1980s, Kraftwerk appear to have been overwhelmed by their protégés’ efforts. “We came up with this idea of a computer world,” says Bartos. “It was something we envisioned but not actually what we were doing.” He emphasises that while Kraftwerk wrote hymns to tech — “The Robots”, “Pocket Calculator”, “Computer Love” — they made their best music as an analogue band who used what were then cutting-edge instruments (synthesisers, electronic percussion). “Once we began bringing a lot of technology into the recording studio, we began relying more and more on engineers to help us run it and we had to learn how to maintain it. This took all our energy.” Did technology lead Kraftwerk into a state of entropy? “Yes, yes,” says Bartos. “We were overwhelmed by this technology. Copy and paste became the manifesto. But it was not the same as if we were composing in a room. The concept of progress as a shining promise . . . Kraftwerk fell for it.”</blockquote>
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Harvey Kornspan of the Diggers, <a href="https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2022/07/26/how-the-deal-really-went-down-behind-the-scenes-with-the-san-francisco-diggers-harvey-kornspan/?fbclid=IwAR3zDxa4hnlevl4uNNy-vOl4ZUCSEbrL_0mbDQ6P_Fm2_5-o0ClhBIozHWA" target="_blank">Interview</a> by Jay Babcock.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnV0PT9r8B2rilcEyBDhEHuoZ9bFcK9N1s2_ubkTw0rz-UGnFIYtRZW0TuaoJswMRgXrRy0zz-DhyToDTIjjXKr6naMYmP9slV6E8akRx5dRFQ6wKC0obPQluavY2SxWy14e9S1niqSXXafk6ZxRVTMdjVaucrVtkSvojvEzVk1sRZM01Oj84nMbMKJQ/s623/NV-160-links-invisiblecircushodges.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="623" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnV0PT9r8B2rilcEyBDhEHuoZ9bFcK9N1s2_ubkTw0rz-UGnFIYtRZW0TuaoJswMRgXrRy0zz-DhyToDTIjjXKr6naMYmP9slV6E8akRx5dRFQ6wKC0obPQluavY2SxWy14e9S1niqSXXafk6ZxRVTMdjVaucrVtkSvojvEzVk1sRZM01Oj84nMbMKJQ/s320/NV-160-links-invisiblecircushodges.png" width="320" /></a></div> I don’t remember much gay presence at the Invisible Circus [a notorious Diggers event staged in a church in the Tenderloin (Feb. 24-26, 1967)], if any. The Invisible Circus was so chaotic and out-there. There wasn’t enough of a plan. It was anarchistic. It wasn’t sustainable, and it was…24 hours? It was meant to be a whole weekend. It burned down when somebody got caught fucking, got caught by a church elder screwing on the church stage, man! Dave Hodges’ girlfriend, the guy who did the poster for the Circus, India Supra, I don’t remember what her real first name is, she was a squeeze of David’s I think. Dave Hodges, he was just a slightly wacky artist who was around, and he did an iconic poster, I think. Very important poster.... So during this period, I was already in the rock n roll business. The music thing was happening. I got into the music scene, got pretty involved. I was probably gone from the Mime Troupe when I started to invest a lot of time in the Miller Band. Steve Miller Blues Band. We used to get airline tickets for “Mr. Band.” (laughter) I had known Miller and Boz. Well, by then Boz had exited to Sweden because of draft issues. Steve was playing in Chicago. I went to Chicago. We hooked up again through friends we had known and also… and then he came to Berkeley.</blockquote>
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Konrad Putzier in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/nhl-hockey-fans-cheer-for-referees-11653675180" target="_blank">The Fans Who Root for the Referees</a>.
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A recent National Hockey League game between the New Jersey Devils and the Florida Panthers was a wild ride with 13 goals and an overtime winner. But the loudest cheers in the arena weren’t for either team: They were for the referees. In the upper corner of Newark’s Prudential Center, a boisterous crowd of around 200 fans dressed in striped referee jerseys spent most of the game on their feet, celebrating every icing whistle as if it was a goal. Their heroes weren’t Devils stars Jack Hughes or P.K. Subban, they were Eric Furlatt and Corey Syvret, the officials for the night. Chants like “R-E-F-S refs, refs, refs” and “We believe in sportsmanship” echoed through the stands. At odd times, when the rest of the arena was quiet, the referee section suddenly erupted in frenetic cheers. The reason: The referee on the ice had just blown his whistle. So-called puck drops, where the linesman places the puck between two waiting players, were a particular source of excitement.</blockquote>
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Obituaries of the Issue...
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<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/blackhawks/ct-eric-nesterenko-chicago-blackhawks-dies-20220607-yoklfg27d5hv5khphdmfqeoaha-story.html" target="_blank">Eric Nesterenko</a> (1933-2022)
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Former Hawks teammate Ab McDonald called him a “lone wolf.” Nesterenko at times cast as harsh a light on himself as anything or anyone else. ″Hanging around as an ex-professional athlete is pathetic, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “I played my entire career in fear — fear of doing badly, fear of being hurt, humiliated. Obviously as an athlete, you are naked in the arena.″ After hockey, Nesterenko — known for using his sharp elbows in the corners during his playing days — played “Elbows Martin” in the hockey telefilm “Cementhead.” He also played Rob Lowe’s father in the 1986 movie “Youngblood” but acknowledged his difficulty coaching up the actor’s skating. “Having him on the power play is like putting Cheryl Tiegs at middle linebacker, but it was fun,” he told the Tribune in 1991. Much of Nesterenko’s second act was spent as a ski instructor in Vail, Colo. He reflected on his hockey experiences to the Vail Daily in 2009. Said Nesterenko: “Oh, it was a pretty good life. ... But for me, when it was over it was over. I realized I wasn’t going to be the best player in the world, but I could play, at least I played well enough to stay in the league. So then I started to use the game as an opportunity to experience the world, which I’ve tried to do.”</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/books/midge-decter-dead.html" target="_blank">Midge Decter</a> (1927-2022)
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She argued that the real revolution that allowed women to have careers was not the women’s movement but the availability of modern forms of birth control. To Ms. Decter, women had a biological destiny to be wives and mothers, and those who tried to escape it evinced self-hatred. In her 1972 book, “The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation,” she wrote that women’s “true grievance” is not that they are “mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are — women.” She offered a solution: Single women should remain chaste, because women are naturally monogamous. And withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men. Her next book, “Liberal Parents, Radical Children” (1975), kicked up a storm of criticism by calling the youth of the 1960s an aimless generation and blaming their parents’ permissiveness for that failure.</blockquote>
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Thanks to Andy Schwartz, Jay Babcock, Mark Carducci, Geralyn Carducci, Matt Carducci, Steve Beeho, Jane Stokes...
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Snowy Range, Wyoming</span></b><br />
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<b>From the London desk, by Steve Beeho...</b>
<p>
Helen Thompson in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/09/history-royals-tangled-bloody-nation-they-rule" target="_blank">The History of the Royals Is Tangled and Bloody. But So Is That of the Nation They Rule</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Fr8gH8u3zv_bwnKFCbV-NsqyzxpK7STjMGpQzqnnyK10m3HUtnYn7lG7gKmdFvrBqUYjX7q2uM62bYpzZg4g7FATmFFclSQr5r5_ZxR_WdjvzaezzWN2mNOVIKuTssYjDBLOCkF87dsqYaef1KEU66Vjay6skRDJ9PhD3reNd_uMDzRFo0FWWVzc1A/s2048/NV-160-links-beeho-1.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1558" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Fr8gH8u3zv_bwnKFCbV-NsqyzxpK7STjMGpQzqnnyK10m3HUtnYn7lG7gKmdFvrBqUYjX7q2uM62bYpzZg4g7FATmFFclSQr5r5_ZxR_WdjvzaezzWN2mNOVIKuTssYjDBLOCkF87dsqYaef1KEU66Vjay6skRDJ9PhD3reNd_uMDzRFo0FWWVzc1A/s320/NV-160-links-beeho-1.webp" width="243" /></a></div> Elizabeth II came into her own during the early years of the 21st century, a time when the New Labour governments were demonstrating their aversion to the historical constitution and their preference for national modernisation: Britain is a young country, said Tony Blair. Acting on that idea did not include getting rid of the monarchy or disestablishing the Church of England, but it did entail treating the historical ambiguities embodied in the monarchy as forces of conservatism that needed to be stripped of any living energy. But the national rebirth that Blair wanted did not take place. Instead, the monarchy in which all those tensions symbolically reside became stronger. Whether it will remain so resilient depends on how the King and the ministers he appoints each navigate the symbolic and non-symbolic burdens of a crisis-ridden future.</blockquote>
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Alwyn Turner at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-taming-of-the-republicans/" target="_blank">The Taming of the Republicans</a>.
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The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.</blockquote>
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Tanya Gold in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/scotland/2022/09/scotland-long-farewell-queen" target="_blank">Death for Her Was a Political Act: Why the Queen Chose Scotland</a>.
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When I left London on Friday (9 September), the day after the announcement, there were tourists at Buckingham Palace enjoying the death as a spectacle, as you might enjoy a trip to Mary Poppins the musical. There were others – drunk young men waving Union Flags on top of the Queen Victoria memorial – who delighted in the reflected majesty. They paid for it; they own it. But in Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire, the pain is real: so much so that I, a republican, wonder whether I’m the one with a secret to impart – the Queen was human – or they are. Her mother grew up at Glamis Castle, 50 miles to the south. People here treated the Queen as a neighbour – not Scottish, it is true, but good enough. She did nothing by accident, including coming to Scotland as she declined, her body loading the dice for the Union and the Crown. A survey by the think tank British Future this summer indicated that 45 per cent of Scots want to keep the monarchy, and the latest polling suggests that 46 per cent want to leave the Union. Death, for her, was a political act. Her life was exhausting and, here, they know it. Women, typically middle-aged, walk away from the flowers, their faces striped with tears. …“I’m glad she hung on for the bin strike to be over,” says a woman with dark hair. “Maybe she thought, ‘I’ll hang on.’ You should have seen the state of it.” I thought she had hung on until Boris Johnson, a kind of anti-Queen – lazy and dishonest – had left office, which reminds me that we all imagine we know what she thought. Over seven decades she managed to look interested, or equally uninterested, in everyone she met. The Fair Fairy, giving and denying us all.</blockquote>
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Brendan O'Neill at <i>spiked-online.com</i>, <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/11/queen-elizabeth-and-the-end-of-history/" target="_blank">Queen Elizabeth and the End of History</a>.
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So we might soon find ourselves feeling wistful for that era in which we were subjects of Elizabeth. For it seems clear that the ceremony of being the subject of a queen is to be replaced by the reality of being the charges of kings and princes who require not only our decorative respect but also our servility to the technocratic agenda. The post-Elizabeth royals have been subsumed into the tyranny of technocracy. Their rule will not be God-given but expert-led. There will be none of the mystery of monarchy, little, even, of the idea that their right to reign derives from the past, from who their ancestors were. No, these will be ‘expert’ royals. Their authority will come from ‘science’, not God or history. The expertise of emotional intelligence guides William’s relationship with his public; the expertise of climate change will guide Charles III’s kingly missionising. The end result will be a monarchy far more demanding of its subjects than the queen ever was. She expected us merely to bow down – they will want us to lie down, whether on the therapist’s couch of William’s mental-health moralising or in mourning for the Nature that Charles III thinks we have destroyed.</blockquote>
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Peter Hitchens at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/thepost/god-save-our-republican-protesters/" target="_blank">God Save Our Republican Protesters</a>.
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When Britain was more monarchist, it was more free. We almost all forget now that the radicals of 18th century France, as they demanded change in their absolutist state, regarded Britain’s constitutional monarchy as the exemplar of political liberty. It is in the centuries since that Britain too has acquired a large and strong and interventionist state.
And as we have accepted the idea of the egalitarians, that crime and disorder are caused by poverty and inequality, and the ideas of the radicals that we all harbour reactionary thoughts, we have stopped assuming that nobody is guilty until an impartial jury says so, and instead begun to assume that we are all guilty (of privilege, racism, sexism, various phobias and various kinds of hate crime) unless we can show we are not. And so we have given more power to the police, and made the people less free. When I say ‘God Save the King’, I am also saying ‘God Preserve English Liberty’. And if [republican protestor] Mr Hill feels he is not as free as he would like to be, he should not blame the King, but the reformers.</blockquote>
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Steerpike in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-new-york-times-royal-derangement-syndrome" target="_blank"><i>The New York Times</i>’ Royal Derangement Syndrome</a>.
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First it was Brexit, now it's the Queen. That the <i>New York Times</i> has a near-pathological loathing for Britain is nothing new at this point; but it seems that the motivating factor for the 'Gray Lady's' Anglophobia has switched in recent days from the 2016 referendum result to the passing of our beloved monarch. Barely had the Queen's death been announced then the <i>NYT</i> was furiously publishing opinion pieces denouncing the woman as a symbol of British imperialism. This was just hours after her death and ignored the salient facts that Elizabeth's reign coincided with the end of the British Empire and that she loved the multi-racial Commonwealth. Even Cyclops would struggle to write something so one-eyed. And now, the newspaper has followed up that opening salvo with another tasteless swipe at the late monarch. In an article published late last night, the paper sneered that Her Majesty's funeral 'will be paid for by British taxpayers as they deal with soaring energy prices and high inflation' adding that 'the British government has not yet said how much it will cost.' The breathless tone of the piece – headlined simply 'The queen’s funeral will be paid for by British taxpayers' – somehow suggested that this news will come as a revelation to the general public. A state funeral for a former head of state? That must surely be a world first. Talk about a bona fide scoop...</blockquote>
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John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2022/07/boris-johnson-hollow-man-john-gray" target="_blank">The Hollowness of Boris Johnson</a>.
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Johnson’s hologram vanished along with the imagined world of which it was a part. Except in the collective mind of the Western political classes, the illusory vista of unending neoliberal progress has evaporated. With famine and blackouts used as weapons in Putin’s geopolitics, shortages in food and energy will persist for the foreseeable future. If China responds to faltering Western resolve in Ukraine by launching a special operation to absorb Taiwan, which dominates the global semiconductor market, the impact on Western economies will be incalculable. Britain and the West are ill-prepared for the brute material reality of a world of endemic warfare and chronic scarcity.
Beyond the American lecture circuit, where he may retreat to replenish his depleted finances, Johnson will soon be forgotten. A black hole that sucked in everything around him, he leaves no lasting achievements. His legacy will be a moment in which the emptiness of the politics he personified was revealed.</blockquote>
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Robert Tombs in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/these-polemics-against-brexit-both-fall-into-the-same-trap" target="_blank">These Polemics Against Brexit Both Fall into the Same Trap</a>.
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Porter simply assumes that Britain is uniquely obsessed with its past. Woods similarly assumes that Britain or England is uniquely nostalgic. Neither tries to argue the case. How could they? One does not need to know much about other European countries to realise that interest in and emotions about the past are universal. Protestantism, Classicism, Romanticism, ruralism, the Gothic Revival and so on are not in any meaningful sense British. Limiting oneself to British examples cannot disguise that obvious fact. The European Union itself is founded on obsessions with the past. But unless our authors insist that Britain is the exception, their explanations of Brexit make no sense. ...It’s easy to regard Britain as exceptional if you ignore everywhere else. In fact, British attitudes to the EU in 2016 were typically European: about the same as Holland and Germany, less Eurosceptic than France, much less so than Greece. The ‘exception’ is that the British were given a vote and Remainers failed to reverse it.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Marc Mullholland in LITERARY REVIEW on Vic Gatrell’s book, <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot" target="_blank">Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London</a>.
</p><blockquote> On 23 February 1820, a party of soldiers and watchmen swooped on a huddle of men in dingy quarters on Cato Street, near Edgware Road in London. There was a brief but desperate struggle by the light of guttering candles. Constable Smithers was run through with a well-aimed sword thrust by Arthur Thistlewood and died almost immediately, but the twenty or so men present were quickly taken into custody. Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity. They had been within minutes of descending on a house in Grosvenor Square where the entire Cabinet was expected to be sitting down for dinner. They intended to kill every man in the room, though not before making Lord Castlereagh, the most hated minister of all, beg for his life. They had planned to decapitate their victims with butcher’s knives and parade their heads on pikes through the streets of London. This, they hoped, would spark ‘confusion and anarchy’, as Thistlewood put it, out of which would somehow emerge a new government.</blockquote>
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Rod Liddle in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-bbcs-new-direction" target="_blank">The <i>BBC</i>’s New Direction</a>.
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"Politics Live" is one of the current affairs programmes that the <i>BBC</i> does well: it is intelligent, even-handed and free from the Chicken Little hysteria which affects many political discussion shows. "Newsnight", remarkably, is another – which is not something one has been able to say for a very long time. In its previous incarnation, as a kind of broadcasted Hampstead Garden Suburb slip page of the <i>Guardian</i>, it lost an unfathomable number of viewers. Down from nigh on one million at the turn of the previous decade to well below 300,000 (indeed 200,000, according to an insider) before its awful editor Esme Wren and its chief presenter Emily Maitlis departed. The production team during those years seemed to consist in the main of not terribly bright adolescent children, and the programme revelled in a fashionable north-London loathing for the Tories and knew very well which side of the culture war it was on. With contributors such as the egotistical leftie Lewis Goodall and, for a while, the genuinely whacko Trot Paul Mason, it made not the slightest attempt to appear neutral, and warnings wrung out of the <i>BBC</i> were paid no heed. Confronted with shows consisting of four angry women, including Maitlis, all agreeing with each other about how beastly right-wing people are, the viewers got the hell out: "Newsnight" become the perfect example of that cliché, go woke, go broke. Had it been in the private sector Wren and Maitlis would have been given the heave-ho years before – but instead it existed in a bubble of rather smug self-approval. In the end the only people left watching were those 200,000 who spend most of their day shrieking abuse o23n Twitter.</blockquote>
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Jacob Phillips in CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/the-decline-of-madness/" target="_blank">The Decline of Madness</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS-x5wjFGRHFhnzoGxbtFkkiwb1b5mzL8j0qan6MdL5chVvHJfO0t6CY5J1dRwI4RQkwh6gaZpKbCyazKo7xSUDq8Xyzp5AjVAOsAXWbBP_QtUdUXAHvyXvkNk8lbzKml6tsnSVqNbYGgZjYyoXqSHVJzmQOu3seOW44rrpGYIYPad6Du_5IgyJYweTg/s582/NV-160-links-beeho-2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="582" data-original-width="449" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS-x5wjFGRHFhnzoGxbtFkkiwb1b5mzL8j0qan6MdL5chVvHJfO0t6CY5J1dRwI4RQkwh6gaZpKbCyazKo7xSUDq8Xyzp5AjVAOsAXWbBP_QtUdUXAHvyXvkNk8lbzKml6tsnSVqNbYGgZjYyoXqSHVJzmQOu3seOW44rrpGYIYPad6Du_5IgyJYweTg/s320/NV-160-links-beeho-2.jpg" width="247" /></a></div> Laing wrote that schizophrenia was an unusually intense expression of the endemic existential challenge we all face, of “being a whole person”, which occurs when that challenge breaks beyond “the common sense (i.e. community sense) way of experiencing oneself”. There is much wisdom in this, but things have been pushed too far. Now any “common sense” opinion that goes against the official line is assumed to be inherently problematic — leaving only an imposed way of experiencing oneself to become its wholesale replacement.</blockquote>
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Steven Poole in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/slavoj-zizek-the-philosopher-who-annoys-all-the-right-people" target="_blank">Slavoj Zizek: The Philosopher Who Annoys All the Right People</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What does Zizek enjoy? He likes anarchic challenges to the status quo, such as the ‘Wall Street Bets’ online forum of amateur investors that caused a massive bubble and then crash in the share price of the ailing US retailer Gamestop in 2021. He even finds something to enjoy in the ‘carnival’ atmosphere of the storming of the Capitol by Trumpists – because the liberals who were outraged, or so he argues mischievously, were outraged only because the wrong kind of people were doing it. Our philosopher thrills to such events because they ‘subvert the system by over-identifying with it or, rather, by universalising it and thereby bringing out its latent absurdity’.</blockquote>
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Daniel Dylan Wray in GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/may/16/40-years-of-the-wire-magazine-music-intelligent-elitist-outsider" target="_blank">40 Years of <i>The Wire</i> magazine</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“Some people don’t think music is something you should think too hard about,” [Rob Young] says. “That’s fine, but it’s not right to criticise those that want to get something more out of it. It was never about publishing writing that is difficult to understand but about trying to open music up and shine a light on it. Not to sell it out by cheapening it. You have to give it the respect and intelligent treatment it deserves. If that’s elitist then so be it.”</blockquote>
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Geeta Dayal at <i>4Columns.org</i> on <a href="https://4columns.org/dayal-geeta/terry-jennings" target="_blank">Terry Jennings</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The story of Terry Jennings is a tragic one. He was born in 1940 in Los Angeles, in the scenic neighborhood of Eagle Rock. By all accounts, he was a child prodigy, displaying advanced skills in piano and clarinet at a very young age. By the time he was a teenager, he was performing in prominent blues and jazz clubs around the city. At one of these clubs, he crossed paths with La Monte Young, and the two became good friends. Young settled in Manhattan, and Jennings soon followed, flying cross-country in 1960 to make his New York debut at Yoko Ono’s loft. Jennings had an inspired career in the downtown New York avant-garde in the 1960s, sometimes playing with Young in the revolving collective known as the Theater of Eternal Music, and composing his own minimalist works. His ornate, lyrical saxophone playing, which sounded inspired by John Coltrane and Indian classical music but with a style all his own, earned many admirers. But Jennings soon became addicted to heroin, and at the age of forty-one, he was found dead in San Pablo, California, with his skull smashed in—he apparently had been attacked during a drug deal.</blockquote>
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Ryan Leach interview at <i>boredout305.tumblr.com</i> of <a href="https://boredout305.tumblr.com/day/2022/06/16" target="_blank">Jim Ruland</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ryan: I felt that you treated Ginn judiciously. It’s important to remember how precocious Greg and his brother Raymond (Pettibon) were, as well as how left of the dial the Ginn family was.
Jim: I found people on both sides of the spectrum. There were people who had nothing but respect for Ginn with no animosity whatsoever. They would sometimes be upfront at the beginning. “Look, things didn’t work out in the end, but we also didn’t sell a lot of records. So there’s no reason for me to hold a grudge. Greg was the one who made our dream possible.” There are other people who feel quite differently. They feel harmed by him and the label. That actual theft took place. There are two different realities there. It came down to the band and at what point they interacted with the label. I don’t think painting Ginn with a one-color brush works in this story. I didn’t have an axe to grind. I wasn’t setting out to prove that Ginn was some sort of genius—although I think he is—and I wasn’t trying to prove that he was some kind of monster. I just told the story that I found.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.maximumrocknroll.com/label/sst/" target="_blank">MRR vs SST</a>.
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Dorian Lynskey at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/05/the-sex-pistols-were-born-to-die/" target="_blank">The Sex Pistols Don’t Need a TV Show</a>.
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Lydon’s support for Brexit and Donald Trump has disappointed many fans but I don’t think that it’s inconsistent with his original mission to demolish the status quo. Populism is much better at knocking things down than building something better. As the Atlantic’s James Parker argued in 2016, Trump “co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock”. In his memoir, Fred Vermorel, allegedly quoting Baudrillard, writes about “the ecstasy of making things worse”. Perhaps Rotten then, and Lydon now, would counter that things couldn’t get any worse, but however much we talk about punk in terms of community and DIY creativity, it was also about the glee of smashing things to pieces. Heath Ledger understood this perfectly when he partly based his version of the Joker on Rotten: some people just want to watch the world burn.</blockquote>
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Luke Haines in RECORD COLLECTOR on <a href="https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/luke-haines-51" target="_blank"><i>Pistol</i></a>.
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Here come the posh actor kids with double-barrelled names, far too corn-fed and gym-friendly to believably mimic 70s herberts Cook and Jones. Here’s a non-threatening Johnny Rotten. Here’s a nice young woman playing Nancy, wondering exactly what this is a stepping-stone (no pun) towards. And worst of all, here are the 1976 mohicans. As any fool apart from Danny Boyle knows, the mohawk atop an English punk rocker was not seen until at least 1980. The Pistols have had a patchy time at the flicks. Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy was a noble effort. Gary Oldman made a decent stab (also no pun) at la Vish. Sid, having made himself a mad cartoon character, is one of the few rock stars who can withstand “the actors” doing their “acting thing”. Cox’s valiant attempt was ultimately hobbled by the poor sods who got to play the other Pistols as an anonymous trio of portly boneheads.</blockquote>
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Mark E. Smith, from Ted Kessler's book,
<a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/31859-ted-kessler-paper-cuts-mark-e-smith" target="_blank">Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed the British Music Press and Other Misadventures</a>, at <i>thequietus.com</i>.
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The Lime Lizard phone line started flashing.<br />‘Hello, Ted? I’ve got Mark here for you, I’ll just put him through.’<br />
I gulped an acknowledgement of this reality.<br />
‘Is that Ted?’<br />
‘Yes, hello, Mark,’ I replied to the tight-mouthed Mancunian tone I recognised like family.<br />
‘Ted . . . Kessler?’<br />
‘Yep.’<br />
‘Kessler?’<br />
‘Yes?’<br />
‘Jew or Nazi?’<br />
‘Sorry, what?’<br />
‘Kessler. It’s got to be of Jewish or Nazi origin, hasn’t it?’<br />
This was a question I had never faced before in my life, yet its logic was unassailable. Either my ancestors had escaped the Holocaust, or they had contributed to it.<br />
‘My dad’s a Jew,’ I replied.<br />
‘Where from?’<br />
‘He left Vienna with his family just after the Anschluss.’<br />
‘Seen Nazis, then?’<br />
‘My dad?’<br />
‘Yeah.’<br />
‘He did, he saw them march into his block of flats.’<br />
‘That’s a good story, isn’t it? Not many can say that. Did you ever see that BBC drama series about a Nazi called Kessler?’<br />
‘No.’<br />
‘Very good. Kessler’s a Gestapo, on the run. Worth tracking it down, you’d enjoy it.’<br />
For many years afterwards, my father would incredulously tell the anecdote of the time his son was asked by a singer in an English group if he was ‘a Jew or a Nazi’ to cackling dinner guests in New York.</blockquote><p> </p><p>
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Mirror Lake, Wyoming</span></b><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://nightheron.square.site/#EpgoqQ%20target=" target="new" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_ea4PmSw4EE9jTMAe5_cbXyUJj3zoTW74qEkblP-DliYMn6lYOCevG8MmtK4TPSUkB0RHguj9nOiHyXUKjIku76T2OkPsc4zvhrULTFdeTbnQsQ3n9MYxEwzZh1Rd3shh1BpKN5ezOA5msDM27vf10M61-Pk00iyd7Zf3dlv7NuINi7YGXlfIb8HLFA/w640-h640/NV-160-RDP-adv.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-52402722274137862232022-03-06T23:13:00.012-08:002022-10-02T11:16:11.234-07:00Issue #159 (March 9, 2022)<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Leroy Johnson, <i>Gun for a Coward</i> (1956)</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Sherman Clark.<br />
Courtesy Marc Wanamaker-Bison Archives / Margaret Herrick Library.
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<b>Yellowstone vs. Hollywood's Lost Horsesense</b> <div>Joe Carducci </div><div><br /></div><div> I finally published my damned film book, <i>Stone Male</i>, in 2016. I started working on it in 1992 after publishing my rock book - and I thought <i>R&TPN</i> took a long time! Over those years I collected far more stills than I could use to illustrate the book. The above image is one that Faye Thompson of the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library brought to my attention - it had just come in with a cache of images from Marc Wanamaker's invaluable Bison Archives. It's an image of stuntman Leroy Johnson performing a horse-fall for his own bit-part as a rustler in <i>Gun for a Coward</i> (1956). His <i>IMDb</i> page lists 44 stunt credits and 35 acting credits, often both in a film or tv episode. Sherman Clark was the still photographer according to the film's <i>IMDb</i> page and it looks shot on location before the scene was shot. The horse itself does not fall over here as Johnson has let go the reins. In the film his fall occurs across a narrow stampede but is not filmed from this close. [Note the ground underneath has been softened for his fall.] </div><div><br /></div><div>The movie horse-fall began with the Standing-W whereby a staked piano-wire was tied to one fore-leg of the horse and the stuntman or actor spurred the horse to a speed and when the wire's slack measured out the horse flipped and threw the rider forward while the camera-man cranked. This usually broke the horse's leg and it was then killed. The life and health of the stuntman was not quite <i>that</i> cheap even during the initial boom in the production of Westerns that followed the success of the eleven-minute Edison production, <i>The Great Train Robbery</i> (1903). It took a couple years for early distribution to get that film in front of audiences and this was done by the Edison company, many film bootleggers who routinely pirated prints of popular films, and even by the Lubin company's shot-for-shot instant remake released the next year. This and other films' successes in vaudeville houses and game-rooms helped trigger construction of film-only "nickelodeon" theaters in 1905 which in turn triggered the production boom in 1907 by the first American studios (Edison, Lubin, Selig, New York Motion Picture Co....) plus new companies like Centaur, Essanay, and American.... </div><div><br /></div><div>Westerns and Indian subjects were often made in New Jersey before 1910 and the action was tamer; these were more pastoral romances than action films. Producers began to send Western units (15 to 20 people and a camera) out to Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and California where they picked up real westerners to do stunts with horses, cattle, guns and bows and arrows. Sentiment, romance and comedy were the come-on in American films of the silent era but in these new Westerns made out west gunfire and horseback chases were featured and the jeopardy that threatened the heroes and heroines emanated from notably rougher looking characters. </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div> Stunting slowly professionalized during this 1910s boom of one- and two-reel Westerns, chapter serials, and feature films. Horses were still the country's main mode of transport so stables and livery barns were everywhere. The division of labor between actor and stuntman-double began as soon as G.M. Anderson was making three to five one-reel Westerns per week in 1909; Anderson, a.k.a., Broncho Billy, couldn't afford to be put out of commission by doing stunts. The Standing-W was cruel and costly and was replaced when possible by the Running-W which put the other end of the piano wire into the rider's hand and he pulled it himself allowing him better preparation to make his own fall as the horse tripped. This made filmmaking somewhat safer for trained movie cowboys and their horses than it was for other stuntmen like stunt-drivers or pilots. Trains were an early obsession of cinema and at first cameras and crew simply waited for a train and ran their actors and drama around it. As distribution matured producers found they had the budgets to rent trains and direct railroad action more carefully. The Great War ended in 1919 and aviators drifted to air shows and then to Hollywood. The canvas-winged biplane became a fixture in what was basically its own action genre. Producers with real budgets could now destroy automobiles, often for comic effect, and occasionally planes and trains, all for the camera. Still, Cecil B. DeMille could concoct good old horse-killing mayhem in massed action even outside of the Western genre as in <i>Ben Hur</i> (1925). </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjakTdldo2PaAgQh-AE4P2Z3xD3uUJJJew6P7ez2Uc-bGMoLm_F8phykHTj-IvZWQroAuKi10nV4VY9IVhRhXFiiSyOn2NdOv7Oqim6xHBpH1PLWNuQwKdsfLo599lQ9r5QJXMVOhRLQxHDxD9EaTr9u4t9NtdONQTEhw3GwrQcWv-0_JciPq45P3YVMA=s988" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="988" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjakTdldo2PaAgQh-AE4P2Z3xD3uUJJJew6P7ez2Uc-bGMoLm_F8phykHTj-IvZWQroAuKi10nV4VY9IVhRhXFiiSyOn2NdOv7Oqim6xHBpH1PLWNuQwKdsfLo599lQ9r5QJXMVOhRLQxHDxD9EaTr9u4t9NtdONQTEhw3GwrQcWv-0_JciPq45P3YVMA=w259-h400" width="259" /></a></div> The Selig Polyscope Co. was one of the earliest motion picture producers, founded in Chicago in 1896. Selig established the first Southern California studio in Los Angeles' Edendale neighborhood (a.k.a. Silver Lake). Selig produced many Westerns from 1909 to 1917, first in Chicago and Michigan, then in Colorado, New Mexico and at Edendale. Tom Mix was Selig's cowboy star and his trained horse, Tony, had star billing in some films that made Mix a supporting player. And so years before the American Humane began to monitor cruelty to animals in Hollywood productions stunt-horses became necessary to protect the investment in movie horses which had been trained to ignore gunfire as well as obey commands to enter water, jump through windows or fire or off cliffs that an untrained horse would balk at. Mix protected Tony before he began to protect himself. Mix was, in essence, the first of the daredevil action stars popular in the silent era (Eddie Polo, Charles Hutchinson, Dave Sharpe, "Crash" Corrigan, Douglas Fairbanks...). The Fox Film lobby card nearby shows the famous Beale's Cut jump from the Tom Mix western, <i>Three Jumps Ahead</i> (1923), directed by John Ford. Though it is thought this was a process shot the platform ledge built up on the left side indicates that Mix was telling the truth when he claimed he made the jump. He further claimed that he used a stunt-horse for Tony - just in case! Richard Jensen's book, <i>The Amazing Tom Mix</i> spends its pages sifting through the evidence on such questions. </div><div><br /></div><div>Prior to signing with Fox Film Corp., Mix was producer-director-stuntman-star at his own Selig location studio in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Mix had little experience behind the camera and in my film book I quote from his 1914 letter sent to Colonel Selig asking for feedback on whether his filmmaking was good enough. The films were so profitable that Selig simply left him alone. As a performer Mix took any chance he wanted to, trusting his own skills plus those of his co-star and sometime stuntman-double, Sid Jordan, a trusted friend from his time in Oklahoma at the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch and in its Wild West Shows. They designed stunts and gags like having Sid shoot off Mix's hat or clip the cigarette in his mouth with live ammunition. The production still nearby shows Sid about to shoot off Tom's tie off in the Fox production, <i>The Coming of the Law</i> (1919). [Fred LeRoy Granville is at the camera, Arthur Rosson is directing and assistant director Richard Rosson is kneeling.] </div><div><br /></div><div>The Western genre was regularly "elevated", first by moving production westward by studios such as Essanay, American, Melies-Star, then by the Francis Ford-Thomas Ince three-reel "specials" for NYMPCo. in 1911-12. Ince had secured the services of a full company of Oklahoma's touring 101 Ranch Wild West Show which happened to be wintering in Venice, California. The show came complete with stagecoaches, wagons, tipis, horses, cowboys and Indians and so John Ford's older brother Francis fashioned the first Western epics. Although D.W. Griffith's game-changing epic feature, <i>Birth of a Nation</i> (1915), was not a Western its production in southern California made use of the genre's pros of that era and further honed 2nd unit skills and built up filmmaking infrastructure in the locations Westerns would continue to be made. </div><div><br /></div><div>As the Hollywood studio system stabilized around feature production in the 1920s the stuntmen organized themselves into an informal professional group called "The 400" which, according to author-historian Robert Birchard, "monitored the skills of would-be stunt performers in order to avoid getting themselves killed working with amateurs." (<i>Early Universal City</i>) James Cruze's epic, <i>The Covered Wagon</i> (1923), was made possible when Paramount agreed to rent or buy as many surviving Conestoga wagons throughout the western states that it could find in what was another production designed to "elevate" the genre. John Ford's <i>The Iron Horse</i> (1924) was Fox's answer epic dramatizing the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869; a title card prints the legend that the two engines in the film are the originals that met at Promontory Summit, Utah. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well before Rin Tin Tin came out of the Great War a star, animal performers were integral to the studios. When the Selig studio failed its last viable division was the Selig Jungle-Zoo with its animal rental service that it's said provided the lion used in MGM's original logo. Clarence "Fat" Jones was twenty when he founded his horse stables in Edendale in 1912 to service the movie industry. But by the coming of sound in 1928 the Western pretty much went to ground. Cheaply made talkie-Westerns were shot without sound except for stagey dialogue scenes. [The Foley system of dubbing in sound effects was invented to allow 2nd unit action to continue to be filmed without sound, and to bring filmmaking back to Bishop, Cal.] The writing, directing, and acting in thirties B-westerns can be horrible, but the 2nd unit culture of stunting and horsemanship continued to develop there. The amateurish young lead John Wayne made such films through the thirties. When he got discouraged according to biographer Scott Eyman John Ford advised Wayne to just keep working. Republic Pictures was a small first step up and there Wayne worked with his double Yakima Canutt to block fight choreography for the camera that yielded more realistic fight scenes than was standard in that era. (<i>John Wayne - The Life and Legend</i>) </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi48qrZpN_Gx7C4fqTZnVzUcJhjatN_GwfGe24E7tSmjhKvxkcjexR0eHYAMulJu4m9M5W46jFcWZG5I11OnWFCcZ4h-EQXBlq1KFaL2QAlekZpsxvMs61tWM2iwhE4BDLyz5lD-JQySl7rz2p5w0HQuaxNutpSDUaSyl5OsH0TYGSJTU75ZGLiM273fw=s438" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="400" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi48qrZpN_Gx7C4fqTZnVzUcJhjatN_GwfGe24E7tSmjhKvxkcjexR0eHYAMulJu4m9M5W46jFcWZG5I11OnWFCcZ4h-EQXBlq1KFaL2QAlekZpsxvMs61tWM2iwhE4BDLyz5lD-JQySl7rz2p5w0HQuaxNutpSDUaSyl5OsH0TYGSJTU75ZGLiM273fw=w292-h334" width="292" /></a></div> Meanwhile, back at the studio, John Ford was succeeding as producer-director of prestige A-films. But hestill nursed perverse 2nd unit resentments and pretensions from his first days in Hollywood as his brother Francis' all-purpose assistant-actor-stuntman-whipping boy. When Ford decided his young drinking buddy Wayne looked old enough to be credible he built the film <i>Stagecoach</i> (1939) around him. It was just before the wild early stunt culture was fully tamed with the coming of the Humane society, <i>et. al.</i>, and John Ford let Yakima Canutt pull out all the 2nd unit stops. The image nearby is from the bravura Indian attack sequence and shows Yakima Canutt executing a running-W. By then even the the running W was strictly speaking no longer necessary as horses were being trained to fall at the shift of the rider's weight and pull of the reins. But that couldn't produce a rider-and-horsefall like Ford had in mind! The success of <i>Stagecoach</i> outside of the genre's normal rural and Southern distribution pattern boosted production specs genre-wide once again and through the forties and fifties. </div><div><br /></div><div>Fat Jones Stables, Inc. was located in North Hollywood by the late thirties when Howard Hughes hired the Oklahoma wrangler Ben Johnson to transport horses purchased for the production of <i>The Outlaw</i> (1943). Johnson was Irish-Cherokee, born on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma and his father was a rancher and rodeo champ; Ben became the gold standard for movie horsemanship and acting too if you ask me [<i>e.g.</i>, <i>Rio Grande</i> (1950), <i>Fort Defiance</i> (1951)] - Ben married Fat Jones' daughter Carol in 1941. Perhaps "roman-riding" two horses while standing on their saddles is easier than it looks but Ford lets the camera run while Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. jump on and circle the yard and jump a fence in <i>Rio Grande</i> - no cuts to insert stuntmen specialists. The nearby still is of Ben's ride. After WWII this final production boom of Westerns, the one that <i>Stagecoach</i> triggered resumed in earnest. <i>Red River</i> (1948) was another A-film bonanza for 2nd unit employment and its stunt crew included Ben Johnson, Richard Farnsworth, Chuck Roberson, Fred Kennedy and others including essentially a cattle-drive's worth of real cowboys tending the cattle. Producer-director Howard Hawks notably shared his director's credit with the 2nd unit director Arthur Rosson, seen above directing the trimming of Tom Mix's tie. </div><div><br /></div><div>In Chuck Roberson's memoir he recalls being cautioned about working for stunt co-ordinator Chuck Hayward, "The older stuntmen just bail off a horse real easy like. Cliff knows you younger guys ain't smart enough yet to be real careful." (<i>The Fall Guy</i>) Hayward knew an unstudied fall looked better on film and would better please the director and impress the audience. Bruce Cabot, the human lead in the horse film, <i>Smoky</i> (1946), noted the pampered treatment his equestrian star recieved by joking, "What we need is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Actors." (<i>The Fascinating Techniques of Training Movie Horses</i>) My book, <i>Stone Male - Requiem for The Living Picture</i>, covers alot of ground, maybe too much (I had no editor!), but what it's really about is how the stuntman became the star in Westerns and changed acting to the point that today theatrically trained actors from London to New York to Australia present the male hero in the off-hand manner of a 2nd unit performer. Dick Grace, a "plane-crasher" for movies wrote a memoir in the late twenties when he found himself the last survivor of the group of pilots he'd come to Hollywood with. Grace wrote that everyone on a film-set, cast and crew, were likely to fly off the handle at any delay or inconvenience - everyone except the stuntmen:
<block>
"[U]nlike actors, stunt men have a habit of concealing their innermost feelings. It is necessary to their work and it becomes a habit with them to use it in everyday life... [They learn that to] go clear through even with an error at a crucial moment is better than indecision." (<i>Squadron of Death</i>)</block> </div><div><br /></div><div>B. Reeves Eason did everything in films after beginning as an actor with American Films in Santa Barbara in 1913, but most importantly he was one of the men who formalized the use of a 2nd unit for action sequences while dialogue scenes were done elsewhere. He directed the chariot race in <i>Ben Hur</i> (1925) for Cecil B. DeMille, the archery tournament scene in <i>The Adventures of Robin Hood</i> (1938) for Michael Curtiz, and the burning of Atlanta in <i>Gone With the Wind</i> (1939) for Victor Fleming. Ian Whitcomb in his warm remembrance of movie horse-trainer Ralph McCutcheon contrasted his humane methods to Eason "the horse killer... notorious for his inhumane treatment of animal actors," and claims Eason's work on <i>The Charge of the Light Brigade</i> (1936) when over 25 horses were killed to be the trigger for the formation of American Humane. (<i>ianwhitcomb.com</i>) Ezra Goodman talked with Eason in 1947 and describes him thusly in his book:
<block>
"I sought out Eason on his little ranch in North Hollywood, with its smokehouse and all kinds of animals, to have a talk with him about his work. He seemed a little surprised that anyone should be sufficiently interested in his moviemaking to want to discuss it with him. He was a sturdy, reddish-haired man in his late fifties, with a weather-beaten face and a habit of lighting matches by striking them on his teeth. He was a typical old-time Hollywood type, a bit of a roustabout and rather inarticulate, but an expert with the camera.... [As] a full-fledged director, he made hundreds [159 acc. to <i>IMDb</i>] of modestly budgeted and thoroughly unpretentious westerns and action thrillers.... But his best work was reserved for the big-budget epics on which he served as second-unit director. Eason did not pretend to be a deep thinker, but in his own blunt, practical way he knew more about moviemaking than most of the renowned directors for whom he worked." (<i>The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood</i>)</block> </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYYICNuOH_M9q9lKsADYgLI3sKy4glOZbe1241Varw8CypC0FUKXZK2G_KGZvPrDHnigpWWzp5rl9WR6f7NFkP0KbYcFEadHnps3oB8n3gImZ98n6vvrW9ufrKhTpy_SAscFeXeeKjVkEU2DvGdoEUVCcdmud7DHdY2wsm8JmiUmLDjyQNJBO2-wS-5Q=s862" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="862" data-original-width="641" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYYICNuOH_M9q9lKsADYgLI3sKy4glOZbe1241Varw8CypC0FUKXZK2G_KGZvPrDHnigpWWzp5rl9WR6f7NFkP0KbYcFEadHnps3oB8n3gImZ98n6vvrW9ufrKhTpy_SAscFeXeeKjVkEU2DvGdoEUVCcdmud7DHdY2wsm8JmiUmLDjyQNJBO2-wS-5Q=s320" width="238" /></a></div> If there is a consistent personality type among stuntmen, nevertheless, not all stuntmen could act. John Wayne explains in Scott Eyman's biography that his friend Yakima Canutt would overact "The Heavy" when acting in a fight scene whereas Wayne claimed he would use how Canutt actually behaved when challenged or threatened - think Wayne's calm, steely smile before a fight scene. On <i>Red River</i> Montgomery Clift was straight off the Broadway stage when Hawks cast him opposite Wayne, who worried Clift wouldn't be able to fill the role. But Hawks had Clift follow his stuntman-double, Richard Farnsworth, around for a month to make a cowboy out of him which he did. There's a shot where Clift leaves the foreground, turning to walk to his horse and jumping up, then in mid-air inserting his left foot into the stirrup and smoothly setting himself in the saddle; the cut suggests that this is Farnsworth jumping up into the stirrup, not Clift, but maybe it just took a couple takes. I've recently been watching episodes of Henry Fonda's 1959 half-hour TV-Western, <i>The Deputy</i> on <i>EncoreWesterns</i>. In a 1960 episode called "Backfire" the old silent-era/thirties cowboy star Bob Steele is in the middle of a one-shot dialogue scene with Allen Case when Bob unties his horse and casually does a turning jump up into stirrup before his exit - no cut needed. You can see Robert Mitchum pull it off in <i>Blood on the Moon</i> (1948), and it looks like Anne Baxter executes it in <i>Yellow Sky</i> (1948) but I suspect it was her stunt-double Martha Crawford. <i>Red River</i>, <i>Blood on the Moon</i>, and <i>Yellow Sky</i> are great examples of the postwar A-Western and their success kept the genre preeminent whether the films were celebrated with awards or in reviews or simply accepted as "a good western". Other than Manny Farber who wrote for <i>The New Republic</i> and <i>The Nation</i>, the typical film critic's interest in the genre was limited to what they termed "psychological westerns". </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZeJQ1SS7TIc8_qPNLUSUo-gcUIIm5c6VqWhPnPhXC5w8wDYXdj_xuUE9Ksd7ffWWv0zK2vNGaZAghRotIf536BO_hFwRCdAm7nBci61gXAV1ArkiR_M59aEdN7xS7zTIXS44OsXbgGvSbUNF0ZZg0fpCAFmTS-buSI79Edj9EviW-Ce7a5UMwzpjMFQ=s1097" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1097" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZeJQ1SS7TIc8_qPNLUSUo-gcUIIm5c6VqWhPnPhXC5w8wDYXdj_xuUE9Ksd7ffWWv0zK2vNGaZAghRotIf536BO_hFwRCdAm7nBci61gXAV1ArkiR_M59aEdN7xS7zTIXS44OsXbgGvSbUNF0ZZg0fpCAFmTS-buSI79Edj9EviW-Ce7a5UMwzpjMFQ=s320" width="187" /></a></div> As the studio system weakened in the postwar period, independent producers stepped in and the old production safety protocols weakened. The Stuntmen's Association was formed in 1961 by the top 2nd unit directors and performers. But by then the Western feature film was no longer their bread-and-butter. Hollywood studios had long supported an large economy of stables, wranglers and stuntmen. Horsemanship was part of the training of actors under contract right along with voice lessons and ballroom dancing. But the stars went independent after the war and soon only young actors were signing to the studios. The in-house production of Westerns by the studios themselves ended when Universal stopped producing Audie Murphy Westerns with <i>Gunpoint</i> (1966). The dwindling supply of Hollywood Westerns is what triggered the production of Westerns in Europe where interest in the genre was still high. Television Westerns seemed to be wearing out the American appetite for cowboy horseplay. According to <i>Wikipedia</i> 1959 was the peak of TV Westerns when thirty shows were in prime time. </div><div><br /></div><div>Action in <i>movies</i> came to center on car chases and vehicular mayhem. Earlier car chases of twenties comedies and thirties gangster films moved into a real specialty that could yield anything from <i>Thunder Road</i> (1958) to <i>Bullitt</i> (1968), or from <i>Smokey and the Bandit</i> (1977) to <i>The Fast and the Furious</i> (2001). Steven Spielberg seemed to want to collapse an entire cycle of auto idolatry into four years of his career, from the spare <i>Duel</i> (1971) to the overkill of <i>The Sugarland Express</i> (1974). But this was no short-lived trend, Hollywood's pictographic skills were moving on from the horse and the man on a horse to the vehicle - cars in <i>Spinout</i> (1966), <i>The French Connection</i> (1971), <i>Drive</i> (2011)... motorcycles in <i>Easy Rider</i> (1969), <i>Electra Glide in Blue</i> (1973), <i>Blood Father</i> (2016), trucks in <i>White Line Fever</i> (1975), <i>Sorcerer</i> (1977), <i>Convoy</i> (1978)... and still, trains: <i>Runaway Train</i> (1985), <i>The Fugitive</i> (1993), <i>Unstoppable</i> (2010)... </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEggi2MHnxSQdCmucIT6nmj5dUzSzJRRJMZBbgegh-zMv8Zc4aL8Wz8vjVSoQJHV4BbPLvYNFY0twexnTgvr5aNzIdaHrqVBNeTr3LoPf35apLtCMPmeqgOLPPWZSeJpD8a0mqcoVonbzoXKE66pjoDA6UaNjd71gQkNPfOtV_djgSarO7XC6IxyOtSgQA=s851" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="851" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEggi2MHnxSQdCmucIT6nmj5dUzSzJRRJMZBbgegh-zMv8Zc4aL8Wz8vjVSoQJHV4BbPLvYNFY0twexnTgvr5aNzIdaHrqVBNeTr3LoPf35apLtCMPmeqgOLPPWZSeJpD8a0mqcoVonbzoXKE66pjoDA6UaNjd71gQkNPfOtV_djgSarO7XC6IxyOtSgQA=w242-h320" width="242" /></a></div> When I was six or seven I remember being able to stay up late once and watch <i>The Gun of Zangara</i> (1960) because my uncle was visiting. It was a TV-movie edited from a two-part episode of <i>The Untouchables</i> (1959-63) and it was full of roaring twenties car chases, tommy gun battles and bulldozed warehouse doors. I thought, "Wow, Uncle Phil really knows what to watch!" The normal TVdramatic fare for me and my brothers when growing up was after-school reruns: <i>Rescue 8</i> (1958-60), <i>Highway Patrol</i> (1955-59), <i>Cheyenne</i> (1955-63), <i>The Rebel</i> (1959-61), <i>Sea Hunt</i> (1958-61), and <i>The Whirlybirds</i> (1957-60). Desilu Productions took over RKO's lot in 1957 which, according to <i>Wikipedia</i>, gave them more soundstages than either MGM or 20th Century-Fox. Desi and Lucy weren't as scattered as they appeared; <i>The Whirlybirds</i> spun off an episode of <i>I Love Lucy</i> that involved lowering Lucy onto a cruise ship from a helicopter. Lucy was impressed with the Bell helicopter with the distinctive "soap bubble" canopy which allowed the camera to see the pilots played by Kenneth Tobey and Craig Hill. The helicopter proved to be an interesting successor to the horse. On film it works as a kinetic prop that is near human scale - not as close as the horse or train, but closer than the plane or jet. <i>Sky King</i> (1951-59) had its lawmen flying around an Arizona jurisdiction in a Cessna which places the action a bit larger than human scale. Back when Naperville was a very small town the mail would come to town in a helicopter that would land near the High School around noon. Moms would occasionally drive their station wagons full of kids to that field and wait for the helicopter to land, hand off the mail sacks, and then take off again - it was a show. I recall Santa Claus being delivered to town in a helicopter too. Boomer kids were primed for <i>The Whirlybirds</i>. I don't regularly remember my dreams but one from childhood stands out: our backyard somehow was turned to a parking lot for Bell helicopters. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy_vlRQv2s4C0zfVgDVMGZ1NQ36YvPusECpi1Ydal4sVSZZ4dA3uDnJhdmzP2-KbMZeH5iu20FEGrGIC2blI4AT-o5N9PPcmElGk-JY7XDkyXlkoKWN70dpSwea0axVBpTSzZTGCDp2j4K5n2Z28PNmeukMoFsBrn7LWIDw6bbybLI0CVPo_Osm0R4jQ=s693" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="671" data-original-width="693" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy_vlRQv2s4C0zfVgDVMGZ1NQ36YvPusECpi1Ydal4sVSZZ4dA3uDnJhdmzP2-KbMZeH5iu20FEGrGIC2blI4AT-o5N9PPcmElGk-JY7XDkyXlkoKWN70dpSwea0axVBpTSzZTGCDp2j4K5n2Z28PNmeukMoFsBrn7LWIDw6bbybLI0CVPo_Osm0R4jQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div> A few years later dreams of helicopters changed. They were all over the evening news in reports from Vietnam that made old DaVinci's corkscrew fever-dream of flight into an audiopictographic association with impending real world devastation: <i>MASH</i> (1970), <i>Apocalypse Now</i> (1979), <i>Sniper</i> (1993), <i>Black Hawk Down</i> (2001), <i>Sicario</i> (2015), <i>Sicario: Day of the Soldato</i> (2018)... [interestingly Robert Altman directed most of the 1958-9 season of <i>The Whirlybirds</i> ten years before he directed the film, <i>MASH</i>.] I had a jukebox at our cafe in Laramie in the late nineties and I put the <i>Apocalypse Now</i> soundtrack edition 45 of The Doors, "The End", on it and the high school and college delinquents who were our customer base knew the song but seemed to respond to the surprising helicopter sounds in that mix; they played it daily. Our Vietnam helicopter hangover even pushed onto the London stage in 1989 and on to Broadway a couple years later when the musical, <i>Miss Saigon</i> crescendos in an Act 2 flashback ("Kim's Nightmare") complete with lift-off of a prop helicopter carrying her American lover away from her as the Commies close in. </div><div><i><i><br /></i></i></div><div>Still, the American Western, or its sensibility, did continue. Clint Eastwood's persona was remade from what he called his "trail flunky" on <i>Rawhide</i> (1959-66) by the international successes of Sergio Leone's <i>Dollars</i> trilogy before he built his own company, Malpaso, and picked Don Siegel as a mentor for his future directing career. Siegel made some good Westerns but his sensibility was urban rather than rural. Siegel also mentored Sam Peckinpah who was on his own perverse trajectory of post-studio-code Western sensibility. And 1972 saw the release of four great rodeo movies (<i>J.W. Coop</i>, <i>Junior Bonner</i>, <i>When the Legends Die</i>, and <i>The Honkers</i>); post-studio Hollywood was still interested in such western themes. When I moved to Hollywood in September 1976 I was in thrall to American films by Siegel, Eastwood, Peckinpah, Warren Oates, Jeff Bridges, Charles Bronson, and Peter Fonda. I saw in the phone book that Fonda's company, Pando, had an office near the Las Palmas newsstand, or maybe it was on Cherokee just south of Hollywood Blvd. Fonda's <i>The Hired Hand</i> (1971) was a groundbreaking Western with major contributions by Oates, Verna Bloom, writer Alan Sharp, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, montagist Frank Mazzola, and musician Bruce Langhorne that together yielded a rural psychedelia that ties elemental ranch chores to the eternity of peasants on the land before the outside world threatens and the Western 2nd unit action kicks in. [At 21 I had nothing but a terrible first Western script to leave with the slack hippie girls working at Pando - oh, well... I drifted into the music business.] </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiC3LjYBXooyzwq8ZXiA2j3ULkfCjrW06765M8XjoUL4HiUELiawV7_ZQWcCMPdCs6G4S5aE8AyBcoWKBa6pLC7-1oDJKy-kKsS1_6lGCN2lOGg1le7ocvK_ev-YYc5QK2VAc9M9pGq2RPNnisZ_NM-LHvQ92kgmzgYqm_Qx3yHuXETD2juFUSYW8scNg=s647" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="303" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiC3LjYBXooyzwq8ZXiA2j3ULkfCjrW06765M8XjoUL4HiUELiawV7_ZQWcCMPdCs6G4S5aE8AyBcoWKBa6pLC7-1oDJKy-kKsS1_6lGCN2lOGg1le7ocvK_ev-YYc5QK2VAc9M9pGq2RPNnisZ_NM-LHvQ92kgmzgYqm_Qx3yHuXETD2juFUSYW8scNg=s320" width="150" /></a></div> Perhaps it went unnoticed as the original builders of the equestrian infrastructure in Hollywood began to pass. Certainly the auctioning off of MGM's wardrobe and props collections got more attention. A present-day riding site claims there are a hundred thousand horses in the L.A. area today; a hundred years ago there might've been a million. Hollywood, if not the entire city of Los Angeles was something of a cow-town before WWII. The stables run by Fat Jones, the Hudkins Brothers, Ralph McCutcheon, Glenn Randall and others must've weathered jolting downturns as the production of Westerns halved and then halved again for movies, and then for television too. Jones died in 1963; Ace Hudkins died in 1973, McCutcheon in 1975... As I wrapped up work on my film book in 2015 I wondered where the last whisp of the Western sensibility might go if Clint Eastwood were to actually finally, you know... kick the bucket. MoMA's Dave Kehr writes of Eastwood being "almost alone as a plausible candidate for the Last Classicist, perhaps the only working American filmmaker whose practical experience dates back to the 1950s." (<i>When Movies Mattered</i>) Eastwood is still directing and producing and occasionally acting in features; as far back as <i>Unforgiven</i> (1992) he plays his ex-gunfighter, now pig-farmer/widowed dad, as barely able to mount his horse. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjjrzWNocr0eMjIGPfPGEVdFJeD-W0Bp9IAJoGd8tmr8wOt56LTfJhwqz0MGk2CFftXckdv0-QbvEBQ4DRNrBoQNF5HSZqwhGfuxSiFL8wGhPU_i_Fw0Iqd7aBHBmTZWSGKshvKQll3JNuaJZl2yxbEXfWtOExmm8sGgt8QJvaaWQsUZLdnE6BL_pbxlQ=s1086" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1086" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjjrzWNocr0eMjIGPfPGEVdFJeD-W0Bp9IAJoGd8tmr8wOt56LTfJhwqz0MGk2CFftXckdv0-QbvEBQ4DRNrBoQNF5HSZqwhGfuxSiFL8wGhPU_i_Fw0Iqd7aBHBmTZWSGKshvKQll3JNuaJZl2yxbEXfWtOExmm8sGgt8QJvaaWQsUZLdnE6BL_pbxlQ=w200-h157" width="200" /></a></div> It was after I put the book to bed that I saw <i>Hell or High Water</i> (2016). I had pretty much lost the thread of contemporary cinema while I spent years studying postwar Westerns, then years more on silent cinema and more years on fifties TV Westerns, never mind the research on Soviet cinema, Italian neo-realism, German mountain films.... But I still try to catch up on Jeff Bridges films so this was the first time I noticed the name Taylor Sheridan. (First time I heard Chris Stapleton too.) I had tried to watch an episode or two of <i>Sons of Anarchy</i> (2008-14) to see my old SST compadre and publisher Henry Rollins, but when he wasn't in the episode I lost interest and didn't notice Sheridan the actor though I probably saw him pass through <i>Walker, Texas Ranger</i> (1993-01) - Buck Taylor gave the best performance I saw on that show. Sheridan's <i>Hell or High Water</i> script has nice detail regarding the outlaw brothers (Ben Foster, Chris Pine) and is even better with the older pair of lawmen (Bridges, Gil Birmingham) and the featured support of random Texans (Buck Taylor, Paul Howard Smith), all without any of the arch flat affect of the Coen brothers treatment of similar types, so I took note of the screenwriter's name. It was interesting too that Sheridan plays a drive boss and gives himself the worst written line in the movie! </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKLvvVFcjXme1_EannhNSX9EIiVAU7gxSc-9PWy2Kul9NSorwsQFXxYbDO3HP99SKOCaVVxewbtZgQufHPuyKanfsWR35Z_0yKib_CmX_RbhCoz2gBq5Vj2jh-zSvqDIZFT89INUMjejU4rdiMVmHBs85rYdaSW3cXhPLoiYzeIfv208DX9k2buJ45jw=s640" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="587" data-original-width="640" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKLvvVFcjXme1_EannhNSX9EIiVAU7gxSc-9PWy2Kul9NSorwsQFXxYbDO3HP99SKOCaVVxewbtZgQufHPuyKanfsWR35Z_0yKib_CmX_RbhCoz2gBq5Vj2jh-zSvqDIZFT89INUMjejU4rdiMVmHBs85rYdaSW3cXhPLoiYzeIfv208DX9k2buJ45jw=s320" width="320" /></a></div> I saw that Sheridan had an earlier script produced called <i>Sicario</i> (2015) so I watched that. It too had well written lead parts (Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt), and interesting support (Jeffrey Donovan). <i>Hell</i> was directed by David Mackenzie and <i>Sicario</i> by Denis Villeneuve, but Sheridan's third script, <i>Wind River</i> (2017), he directed - he has one director-only credit for a horror film that I haven't seen. I try to keep to Wyoming myself so I looked forward to the new film, though as usual with films and television shows it was only set in the state, not filmed in it. That's been the case with <i>Red Rock West</i> (1993), <i>Longmire</i> (2012-17), <i>Open Range</i> (2003), and more, no doubt. <i>Wind River</i>, named for the Eastern Shoshone-Northern Arapaho reservation west of central Wyoming, has less graphic power than the earlier films but Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen and Graham Greene played well-written leads and Sheridan pulled in alot of Native American actors including Gil Birmingham again. <i>Sicario: Day of the Soldado</i> (2018) was directed by Stefano Sollima and this sequel follows the black ops drug warrior veterans played by Brolin, Del Toro, and Donovan, rather than the original film's newbies (Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya) and adds teens tied to the cartel (Isabella Merced, Elijah Rodriguez) as well as intelligence bureaucrats (Mathew Modine, Catherine Keener) and people smugglers (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, David Castaneda) all of which are well-drawn and played. The production itself builds on the original's determination to show us the border and environs to portray global war-on-terror aspects too. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEipnL8xy2DIk5nc4uEjcadFG5f2BxSfQX7J-Muq6tr-N4GE2odo3_6jBSJ101Exf0l2rUn97pDbiTUCBjGfkZBm6q89Pe54NaSaImyri-c54z629HOu2Oaa3TetUkOYV0KmCEmeFn_tkuZlNfNoXocVuSHbW9rMNd9E2ecCR0o-xA9q7f8pwYTfdMRtng=s1600" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEipnL8xy2DIk5nc4uEjcadFG5f2BxSfQX7J-Muq6tr-N4GE2odo3_6jBSJ101Exf0l2rUn97pDbiTUCBjGfkZBm6q89Pe54NaSaImyri-c54z629HOu2Oaa3TetUkOYV0KmCEmeFn_tkuZlNfNoXocVuSHbW9rMNd9E2ecCR0o-xA9q7f8pwYTfdMRtng=s320" width="320" /></a></div> When <i>Yellowstone</i> (2018- ) was announced as Taylor Sheridan's next project I thought it'd be a shame if this boom in cable, premium and streamed episodic television claimed him, because even if its a kind of Western it's still just television and television's open endedness unravels storysense as fast as it weaves plot. But it's been good television with nicely mapped out reveals and shifts in alliances and well conceived characters to make those developments work. I might have included Kevin Costner in <i>Stone Male</i> because he has nice dry delivery for a lead player but often as producer and director of himself he's lacked Eastwood's willingness to regard his persona as ugly or foolish here and there. But aging helps actors. I'd say <i>Yellowstone</i> is Costner's best work; he is an executive producer on it with Sheridan and a dozen other people - it's a big production shot in Utah and recently, Montana. (<i>Yellowstone</i> has it that Wyoming is for dumping dead bodies.) The show's got great characters played well by Costner, Birmingham, Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser, Luke Grimes, Kelsey Asbille, Wes Bentley, Jefferson White, Forrie Smith, Mo Brings Plenty, Ryan Bingham and again Gil Birmingham, Buck Taylor, Paul Howard Smith, and Taylor Sheridan himself. The show is a real actors mill and a great number of performers new or familiar or with remembered names like Peckinpah, Corbin, Wilhoite, Coleman, Kilcher... pass through the episodes as if the producers like actors and the casting process. That is an advantage these days because as I write in the book, its a performer's age we live in, not a director's or composer's or conductor's or novelist's age. One does notice Hollywood's corporate push for diversity and equity in the last couple seasons, as if there might be as many African-Americans as Native Americans in Montana and as many women as men cowboyin' the range. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sheridan sits beside an impassive Costner in the original promotional trailer as he makes light of his acting career in explaining his turn to writing and directing. But Taylor is Texas-born and a talented horseman as becomes clear in the latest season which introduces competitive reining and horse-breeding themes. There may be a Texas-set spinoff series coming based around Jefferson White's character Jimmy, and it is Sheridan's horse-dealer who connects the two ranches. Sheridan gives his own character an impatient, irksome nature which brings to mind Joel McCrea, who explained how he'd enter any scene focused on something in the room that irritated him. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFsfjacBbX4gTq942RqM3cilo9Ou8GBQbL5MDPTelVr5uWLh5dpIdubW7Sx_OvI9gaKr898DH8DSSLftJCLoTC6dzjEMweL5oE3rt6SqUjFZ83Y8AOe6T2kRhSSCVsR9IgmGoagpAILmuoFUVaFGrILzfGcBLlKW8g9e0P2UFynDFdXc9P7CHQHNEchQ=s1024" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="1024" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFsfjacBbX4gTq942RqM3cilo9Ou8GBQbL5MDPTelVr5uWLh5dpIdubW7Sx_OvI9gaKr898DH8DSSLftJCLoTC6dzjEMweL5oE3rt6SqUjFZ83Y8AOe6T2kRhSSCVsR9IgmGoagpAILmuoFUVaFGrILzfGcBLlKW8g9e0P2UFynDFdXc9P7CHQHNEchQ=w400-h210" width="400" /></a></div><i> Yellowstone</i> was successful in rural areas from the start, but it was almost cancelled after season two. John Jurgensen reports:
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"When <i>Yellowstone</i> premieried in 2018, the show ranked fourth in the 25-to-54 age group in the least-populated TV markets, categorized by Nielsen as D markets. In the country's most populous areas - dubbed A markets... <i>Yellowstone</i> didn't crack the top 50.... <i>Yellowstone</i> fans are now more evenly distributed, with A and D markets both accounting for 28% of season 4 viewers." (<i>Wall Street Journal</i>)</block> </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Yellowstone</i>'s success has spread until it's become the number one basic cable series. Sheridan has created two series for the Paramount+ streamer. His productions seem to be a key piece of Paramount's attempt to avoid the fate of 20th Century-Fox and survive as a free-standing studio-conglomerate - ViacomCBS has just been renamed Paramount Global. Premiere episodes of new Taylor Sheridan productions teased on the Paramount channel look fine, especially, <i>1883</i> (2021- ), the prequel Western for <i>Yellowstone</i> which casts Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the Dutton ancestors leaving the rough edge of American civilization for the land that will become the Yellowstone ranch as told by their daughter. Sam Elliott and LaMonica Garrett are along as wagon train bosses and maybe Paul Howard Smith will show up too but perhaps his accent hadn't yet brewed up in Texas. Jeremy Renner is good in <i>Mayor of Kingstown</i> (2021- ) which switches the open range or desert for the claustrophic Michigan town whose business is prisons. Sheridan also created a reality show called <i>The Last Cowboy</i> (2019- ) which follows a bunch of the McCutcheons and others in competitive horse reining - didn't look at it. He contributed as one of three writers and directed <i>Those Who Wish Me Dead</i> (2021) which has Angelina Jolie as a firefighter and is either a rare misfire or a signal he is spreading himself a bit thin. Didn't see a Tom Clancy adaptation Sheridan wrote for Stefano Sollima's direction, <i>Without Remorse</i> (2021). </div><div><br /></div><div>I should have included actor Paul Howard Smith and Taylor Sheridan in <i>Stone Male</i>, and also the Russian film, <i>Brother</i> (1997) written and directed by Alexei Balabanov which a friend in Moscow told me about after my book came out and he'd read the chapter about Russian and Soviet cinemas. <i>Brother</i>'s lead, Sergei Bodrov, Jr. plays an independant character like a young Charles Bronson figure achieving a longshot workmanlike victory against a system designed to break him - a kind of populist answer to the Andrei Zvyagintsev films. </div><div><br /></div><div> Taylor Sheridan's personal bona-fides in terms of horsemanship and his successful drive to relaunch the Western ethos has allowed him to put some of the professional horsemen into the show and have them speak their lines - bad actors but little bits of underplayed or unplayed parts are good calibration for the theatrically trained thespians looking to make a scene. Still, it is clear what has been lost in Hollywood when one sees the actors in <i>Yellowstone</i> and <i>1883</i> riding horses. Old school Hollywood horsemanship is there to be seen in any old Western - either feature, B-Western, serial, or TV episode. In the worst kidstuff, the bad guys in the gang ride their horses in a tight formation that moves over the land like liquid, their heads so level they could hit a target at full gallup like a Mongol invader. Cole Hauser plays one of the best <i>Yellowstone</i> characters and here he talks about the cowboy camp Taylor Sheridan runs for his actors:
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“Following a full day of riding everything is going to hurt, especially your back, hips, and legs. Then your shoulders and neck hurt from roping. Being in horse shape is a lot different than being in gym shape.... It’s important to have a strong core and legs..., there are a lot of people who think you’re using the reins to steer your horse, but actually a lot of it happens through the legs and putting the right amount of pressure there with the saddle tongue.” (<i>Men's Journal</i>)</block> </div><div><br /></div><div>And still the actors of <i>Yellowstone</i> bounce around atop the horses at any speed above a walk. It can't be otherwise because its more than just a loss of riding culture in Hollywood. It is a loss of a rural population and its cultural mass, and further the loss of the entertainment industry's determination to focus on the lives of the people it once accepted and respected. Those old audiences weren't just watching stories play out, they were appreciating horsemanship as riders themselves. And it is a loss of behind-the-camera expertise too. Directors and cameramen could once frame men on horseback in their sleep; they <i>lived</i> it... out in Lone Pine or Chatsworth or Big Bear or Bishop or Newhall. The specialization of the Western units has atrophied since the seventies. Today's 2nd units are great at shooting vehicles. The skilled execution of the productions of Taylor Sheridan's <i>Sicario</i> scripts demonstrates this with the action framing of helicopters, Hummers, police cars, drones, et. al. </div><div><br /></div><div>Francis Ford began in films at Centaur in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1908. In his unpublished memoir he ridicules those earliest Westerns they shot in the Coytesville-Ft. Lee area as "Easterns" and described them as made with "Jersey cowboys" riding "English saddles on bobtailed horses." That was the equestrian culture of the east coast back then. Maybe now the west itself is suburban or ex-urban if not entirely eastern too. This may be irreparable and simply an occasion to grant the glory days of Hollywood studios their due. But that is important too. As for today, its good to see actors bounce across the prairie on their horses and its nice to know there's an audience for it. </div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiAigm5uU5bSzp5_K1PSEAw420crI70w7eMxMY-pu9ymnIUOQc5BIOIVrSd1kO25_EW7tRc2NA5g2hghalCNpmtaKagPEM8Z_mi0caRItYE8vk0tHGxfrAGoOCZMIELf13DIze8XIQ_hLeGDRH65nXlm6Gq0ubXlsLfA8zrsND7XZTTSev6gdMLqLbp4w=s640" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiAigm5uU5bSzp5_K1PSEAw420crI70w7eMxMY-pu9ymnIUOQc5BIOIVrSd1kO25_EW7tRc2NA5g2hghalCNpmtaKagPEM8Z_mi0caRItYE8vk0tHGxfrAGoOCZMIELf13DIze8XIQ_hLeGDRH65nXlm6Gq0ubXlsLfA8zrsND7XZTTSev6gdMLqLbp4w=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>[illustrations: Leroy Johnson, <i>Gun for a Coward</i> (Bison Archives - The Margaret Herrick Library); Tom Mix on Tony, <i>3 Jumps Ahead</i> (Bison - Herrick Library); Sid Jordan and Tom Mix, <i>The Coming of the Law</i>; Clarence Fat Jones, Fat Jones Stables, North Hollywood (courtesy Kenneth Kitchen); Yakima Canutt, <i>Stagecoach</i>; Ben Johnson, <i>Rio Grande</i>; Steve McQueen, <i>Bullitt</i>; <i>Sorcerer</i>; <i>Runaway Train</i>; <i>The Whirlybirds</i>; Robert Altman, <i>MASH</i>; <i>Apocalypse Now</i>; <i>Black Hawk Down</i>; Fat Jones Stables business card; Ode Hudkins, Hudkins Bros. Stables, 1958 (courtesy <i>Valley Times</i> collection); Ralph McCutcheon, Van Nuys; Clint Eastwood, <i>Gran Torino</i>; Kevin Costner, <i>Yellowstone</i>; <i>Sicario: Day of the Soldado</i>; Sam Elliott, <i>1883</i>; Taylor Sheridan and Jeff Bridges, <i>Hell or High Water</i>; Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea at Horseshoe Lake location, October 1961 <i>Ride the High Country</i> shoot.]
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">New York City </span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Jane Stokes<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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From the Burbank Desk of Chris Collins...
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<b>The Butterfield Blues Band</b> - <i>East-West</i> (1966)
From wet and roomy Chess Studios of Chicago, antipode to the anechoic void of the modern studio, Mike Bloomfield and his screeching Telecaster create the blueprint for the ten minute plus free-form raga rager native to 1967-70. But first, "Get Out of My Life, Woman" packs enough toe-tapping counter-gynophilic punch to elicit a trigger warning and 20 minutes of hand-wringing from a Woke blues podcast. Butterfield blows good harp but melts into the wallpaper as a singer, while drummer Billy Davenport snakily syncopates and barrelhouse piano adds to the party. The excursive title track which closes ushered in the guitar hero era while Jimi waited in the wings. Yes, from "Sister Ray" to "Third Stone" to "Dark Star" to "Reoccuring Dreams", you hear the idea first here (Bloomfield cited "My Favorite Things" era Coltrane as his source). Hell, it even invents Flipper's "Sex Bomb" bass line.
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<b>Pentangle</b> - s/t (1968)
English folk scene's answer to the supergroup with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn on acoustic guitars. Simple pristine production: one guitar in each channel, triangles, one of the best tom sounds ever heard. Jacqueline McShee sings prettily but doesn't register as much of a presence, unsurprising in a group oriented around interplay between previously established musicians. Danny Thompson's thumping (or bowed) double bass certainly does register; I first saw him backing Richard (no relation) Thompson at the Roxy in 1999 (still on double bass), and he played on the first two Nick Drake albums. (Drake producer Joe Boyd said Danny, a boisterous cockney, would slap Nick on the back and tease him in a way that lifted his mood, since Drake's recessive manner made others tiptoe around him.) Producer: Shel Talmy, better known for the raunch of early Kinks and Who. Audiophile anoraks say UK first pressing is more transparent than my fine sounding 1971 tan steamboat-label US Reprise issue.
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<b>Spirit</b> - s/t (1968)
Different from their later albums, spacier, less hard rock. Appealing disconnected psychedelia, a la "Fresh Garbage", and "Topanga Windows" (another song is about a fire in the Canyon. Did these three songs predict the Manson family?) at midtempo simmer somewhat akin to Love. Too much jam-filler on side 2. They were aided by a mature jazz drummer in Ed Cassady, guitarist Randy California's stepfather. "Uncle Jack" is an oddball pop throwaway that sticks to your shoe sole. The sound is best captured by "Girl in Your Eye," a languidly beautiful sitar-droner of the sort that was extinct by 1970. Producer Lou Adler took a heavy hand into the editing room, leaving some dejected members feeling the finished product wasn't theirs.
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<b>Fairport Convention</b> - <i>Full House</i> (1970)
The first record with Sandy Denny gone and the last one with Richard Thompson. It's their hardest rocking with the new stress on guitar-fiddle duels between Thompson and Dave Swarbrick begun on the previous LP <i>Liege & Lief</i>. Highlight: Thompson's nine minute dirge "Sloth" ("just a roll on your drum and the war has begun"), the first of his extended workouts. He also switched from Gibsons to Strats starting here. [Cover stickers: $5.95 at Rasputin's. Folk-rock. Lacks vocal power of Pentangle. lo-key. Different. Pleasant.] Back sleeve notes are Thompson's bulletin of arcane medieval recreation, eg: "AT MAIDS MONEY Some of the hottest dice-Throwing for years. The Doctor's Druids egg stood him in good stead. Later protests by 11,000 Virgins of Cologne against cruel sports. Wandering Jew killed in brawl with Hangman, hacked in two with a ploughshare."
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<b>Fotheringay</b> - s/t (1970)
Sandy Denny's first record after leaving Fairport. The band is as strong as Fairport with drummer Gerry Conway providing a looser more rolling foundation and Jerry Donahue a near match for Richard Thompson on guitar with his own clockwork fingerpicked patterns; Denny's eventual husband Trevor Lucas provides baritone counterpoint to her famous airy alto. Features anthropomorphic monologue "The Sea", one of Denny's best songs, but too heavy on covers (Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot). Sadly not included is "John the Gun", possibly her very best, heard on Fotheringay's superb <i>Beat Club</i> session. Denny left for a solo career before they could record a second Fotheringay album, oddly enough recruiting her ex-bandmates as support for her debut. "John the Gun" is featured on her first album.
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<b>Bob Dylan</b> - <i>Desire</i> (1975)
I'm no Dylan specialist, but one great quality of his is offhandedness. Never does he sound overarranged or calculated. "Isis" is the star of the show, and there's a song about Mexico with a beautiful quasi-Mexican melody similar to Warren Zevon's "Veracruz" from a few years later sans the actual Spanish verse. Violin is woven throughout the album. "Joe", his flirtation with "mafia chic" as Lester Bangs put it, has a lazy chorus of "Jooooooey", but I see it as his adaptation of half imagined folk song tributes to bank robbers and such adapted to a mob psycho (Joe Gallo) for yuks, though I don't like the song. Nothing this imp ever said or did was more than half serious.
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<b>Elvis Costello</b> - <i>My Aim Is True</i> (1977)
Hasn't fully sunk in yet. The familiar "Watching the Detectives" is just okay. Here's one of those albums that saves the best song for last: "Waiting for the End of the World" which has that white boy rap rhythm of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" - actually invented by Chuck Berry in "Too Much Monkey Business" and some lazy slide guitar. It's interesting how the Costello cult has faded. The man was pound-for-pound king amongst critics in the new wave era, yet his records sell for peanuts used. Research shows he had hit singles in the UK but not the US.
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<b>Dire Straits</b> - s/t (1978)
I heard "Sultans of Swing" on a "Trucker radio" internet station other day between Merle Haggard songs. I've known the song for years without loving it, but hearing "Water of Love" with its gorgeous slide guitar intro playing on <i>KCSN</i> a couple of years ago convinced me I had to get the record. They owe something to JJ Cale for a laid-back churn, Dylan for a dry croak-sing, and Richard Thompson for that thin, clean position 2 Strat tone. It took a few listens for the punchline of "In the Gallery" to register: death as the ultimate career move for a poor, skilled but workmanlike sculptor.
</p><p>
<b>Elvis Costello</b> - <i>Imperial Bedroom</i> (1982)
I haven't heard his catalog in full, but side A seems like his peak. Leadoff track "Beyond Belief" has prismatic melody that keeps ducking and diving, slipping in and out of key like the best jazz, a light organ swirl, and wordplay that sticks to you. Baroque pop, like some late Beatles, the bridge of "Good Vibrations", the Left Banke. From there it dips a bit but builds strongly to the end of the side. Side B is an afterthought by comparison. I was never too impressed by Costello tracks I heard as a young punk, but after my ear for songcraft developed, hearing "Clubland", the leadoff track off Trust, convinced me he had something special.
</p><p>
<b>Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble</b> - <i>Couldn't Stand the Weather</i> (1984)
Hard-throttling boogie woogie roided up for the Schwarzenegger 80s. This album's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", used in the movie <i>Black Hawk Down</i>, misses the fury of the original and it put me off Vaughan for years. Foolish me. Then one day I heard side one's "Things That I Used to Do" (a 1953 R&B #1 for Guitar Slim) on the radio and was thrilled. Its guitar solo in three sections over 36 bars was doing things I'd inchoately attempted on the instrument during jams. It starts verbose, turns mantric, then finds peace in hammering-on to the tonic from the minor 7th, suspending the two notes across a chasm in the groove. Stevie was essentially a bar band leader, writing no classic tunes of his own, but his guitar and foghorn voice were enough. And everyone knows an ace bar band on a good night is the best band in the world. Concludes with a surprise lounge-bop instrumental.
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<b>Clive Gregson & Christine Collister</b> - <i>Mischief</i> (1987)
Gregson was a songwriter-guitarist in a power pop group called Any Trouble signed to Stiff in the early 80s who had a great shoulda-been-a-hit called "Open Fire". Together with Collister (she of the deeper voice) he was in Richard Thompson's 80s backing band. Here's another smash miss single in "Everybody Cheats on You". Blues-skewing melodicism with harmonic depth. Alternate universe hit #2: "I Specialize". Ace jazz ballad pastiche: "I Will Be There". Both sides close strong. File under: Guitar-oriented new wave era songcraft with Elvis Costello, XTC, Squeeze, Richard Thompson, Split Enz, Tears for Fears (possibly). All the better for being overlooked. Bonus: Copy I bought at Atomic records is personalized to someone by the artists
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">DuPage River, Illinois </span></b><br />
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From the London Desk of Steve Beeho...
<p>
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/geopolitics/2022/03/the-new-age-of-disorder" target="_blank">The Western Mind No Longer Understands Putin</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Putin is the face of a world the contemporary Western mind does not comprehend. In this world, war remains a permanent part of human experience; lethal struggles over territory and resources can erupt at any time; human beings kill and die for the sake of mystical visions; and saving the victims of tyranny and aggression is often impossible. These are hard truths, to be sure. But the time for pretence and illusion has passed. The enervating dream of a global liberal order must be abandoned, and the reckless disarmament of the past decades reversed. Only then will we be prepared for whatever Putin’s war brings.</blockquote>
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^^^
</p><p>
Justin Webb at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/02/in-defence-of-class/" target="_blank">In Defence of Class</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I cannot defend the attitudes my mother had. She was kindly in many ways. She worked for Amnesty International in the days when it had a single purpose: to help prisoners of conscience. She was a Quaker, a pacifist who visited the protesters at Greenham Common. And yet her view of the human beings she wanted to save from nuclear holocaust, or from foreign jails, was dismissive at best. Fifty years on, our social attitudes are utterly changed. We have said good riddance to the system that Mum believed in, that kept her and Granny safe from class disaster even when poverty overwhelmed their lives. A system of caste as much as class. But I wonder at what we have lost: in solidarity, in safety, in togetherness — and above all in psychological freedom. No longer can we shrug and say, whatever, I had no agency. Life is what it is, and I am protected from the deepest psychological hurt because I am a member of a social class and I cannot rise, and cannot fall, because of it.</blockquote>
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^^^
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Laura Dodsworth in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/nudge-nudge-wink-wink/" target="_blank">Nudge Nudge Wink Wink</a>.
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Nudge assumes we are not rational beings. It assumes that paternalistic libertarians know what is best for us. Ruda does not shy away from this, clearly stating that “behavioural science was conceived as a means of recognising and correcting the biases that lead humans to make non-rational decisions”. Stripping away our rational choices and influencing us at a subliminal level is anti-democratic. Rebranding must not hide behind handwringing. Nudge happens behind our backs. It’s time to keep it under a spotlight where we can see it. Some of us have been doing that for some time. I’m glad to see others are finally catching up.</blockquote>
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Frank Furedi in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2022/danger-semantic-engineers-at-work/" target="_blank">Danger: Semantic Engineers at Work</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In their study, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, Keith Allan and Kate Burridge argue that whereas traditional censoring activities were about maintaining the status quo, what came to be known as PC language was more about promoting political and social change. The attempt to change language is motivated by the objective of changing how people behave and how they identify. For example, the promotion of a gender-neutral language aims to alter the identity of a man and a woman or a boy and a girl. Allan and Burridge observe that semantic engineering has been “extremely successful in getting people to change their linguistic behaviour”. Altering how people speak serves as a prelude to changing the way people think and act. Language and the policing of verbal communication have become crucially important for guiding behaviour and shaping attitudes. Through the re-engineering of language, the meaning that people attach to their experience is altered. History shows that language does not simply mirror people’s reality but also, to some extent, constructs it.</blockquote>
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^^^
</p><p>
Rod Liddle in THE SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-bbc-is-trapped-in-its-own-smug-bubble" target="_blank">The BBC Is Trapped in Its Own Smug Bubble</a>.
</p><blockquote>
And so to the present, with the BBC facing its most serious crisis since its inception 100 years ago — one occasioned by the increasingly incontestable left-liberal drift of its drama, comedy, documentaries and news and current affairs programmes, and a changing market in which a straight tax on everyone who wants to be connected to the outside world seems a little de trop. Hendy will have none of it: there was never any bias in the past, and there is no bias now. It is a standpoint so purblind as to devalue his entire undertaking. Yet, as I mentioned, it is a failing shared by almost all who work at the BBC. They do not think they have a bias because the corporation’s vast bubble agrees within itself about more or less everything. In a moving, and I think sincere, postscript Hendy acknowledges the lost opportunities, (non-political) flaws and top-heavy bureaucracy — while reminding us of Joni Mitchell’s line that ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. Well, perhaps. But the BBC has latterly been the architect of its own demise: the right has merely helped it on its way. And there are many — including those, like myself, who are not Conservatives — who would concur with Norman Tebbit’s description of the ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’. Oh yea, and yea again.</blockquote>
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^^^
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Christian Toto at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-china-ghosted-hollywood/" target="_blank">How China Ghosted Hollywood</a>.
</p><blockquote>
China is by no means the first country to put pressure on Hollywood. A fascinating chapter in Red Carpet looks back at 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The German government cajoled Universal to restructure Front to make it less critical of their efforts in the war. Universal did as it was told in order to access German theatres. Decades later, Hollywood is once again ceding to a foreign power’s requests, but on a far larger scale than in the past. No US studio could ignore the fact that, before the pandemic, at one point China was building around 25 movie screens every day. So they censored their products. And it wasn’t just the studios. A-listers will lecture the American public on any topic that comes to mind — recall Robert De Niro’s splenetic interventions during the Trump era — except China. It adds up to a chilling indictment of Western capitalism. When uncoupled from moral scruples, it plugs smoothly into China’s mainframe.</blockquote>
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^^^
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Jon Savage in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/02/how-isidore-isou-ignited-an-age-of-youth-rebellion" target="_blank">How Isidore Isou Ignited an Age of Youth Rebellion</a>.
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In mid-1949, posters began to appear all over the Left Bank of Paris, announcing that “12 million young people would soon be coming down the street to make the Lettriste revolution”. They were put up by the Lettristes, an avant-garde group willed into being by the febrile brain of Isidore Isou, a 24-year-old Romanian Jew who, barely surviving the Holocaust, had arrived in Paris just after the war with the express intention of taking the capital by storm. The posters trailed the latest pamphlet by Isou, entitled “Traite de l’economie nucleaire: Soulevement de la jeunesse” (“Treatise of Nuclear Economics: Youth Uprising!”). This remarkable document set out a vision of youth as a revolutionary class – a vision that within two decades would be realised with a force that went beyond Isou’s wildest imaginings. Or maybe not: from an early age, Isou was convinced that he was a religious figure, if not the Messiah. Isou’s premise was that definitions of youth as a separate class, a cohort, had hitherto been dictated by adults, authorities, regimes. They were always, in Andrew Hussey’s précis, “associated with sport, fitness, serving society and above all obedience”. But youth could be a “rebellious and dissident force”, wild and savage and free. All they had to do was to reject the strictures and structures of the society within which they lived. It was simply a matter of channelling “the energy and savagery of youth into a coherent strike-force”.</blockquote>
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^^^
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Eugene Robinson at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://eugenesrobinson.substack.com/p/surrendering-to-the-suck?s=r" target="_blank">Surrendering to the Suck</a>.
</p><blockquote>
I was interviewing [Chuck Dukowski], marginally, for a magazine I had started, The Birth of Tragedy. The interview subsequently led to the label he repped, SST, advertising in it, and beyond that, SST deciding to release OXBOW’s second Albini-recorded record Serenade in Red. We don’t know if they used contracts with everyone, but we required a contract. My wife at the time was a lawyer and she had convinced me that though they were generally not worth the paper they were printed on, it was better to have your ass covered by one than not. So we had cruised down to the SST offices and sat and mulled over the contract. Greg Ginn was there but we were talking to Chuck and I started chuckling. “What?” Well, there was a clause regarding their rights to our recording material on tapes, CDs, vinyls or any so-called “formats of the future”. Formats of the future. Like music pills? Or play pods? Or sonic sauces? Now I was laughing. Get the fuck outta here. Music was music was music. But not for the first time and not for the last time, Dukowski got in my head and wiggled his fingers around: “if you don’t think technology’s going to change music you haven’t been paying attention.”</blockquote>
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^^^
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Lavinia Greenlaw in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/lavinia-greenlaw/why-couldn-t-she-be-fun" target="_blank">Why Couldn't She Be Fun?</a>.
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The New Wave scene emerged in Britain in the late 1970s when Nico was living in London. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Adverts and Cabaret Voltaire revered the Velvet Underground and invited her to open their shows. The audience was divided between those who were in awe of her place in musical history and those who saw a middle-aged woman droning along to a weird little organ. The latter hurled beer cans and mocked and spat perhaps because, like Zappa, they could not bear her seriousness. One night she responded: ‘If I had a machine gun, I would shoot you all.’ She would have been serious about that, too. For young women navigating the music scene, Nico stood as encouragement to hold your ground and stay in the room, to become more yourself. She was also evidence of what it might cost.</blockquote>
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^^^
</p><p>
Simon Reynolds in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Paul Gorman's book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n05/simon-reynolds/serious-mayhem" target="_blank">The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This bias towards the visual arts – fashion, film, the album cover as a mass-distributed canvas – runs through McLaren’s career. According to Vermorel, he had no real interest in music until the New York Dolls walked into Let It Rock. McLaren, of course, had no authorial claim over the music, which no doubt explains why he denigrated it incessantly. ‘Christ,’ he sneers in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, ‘if people bought the records for the music, this scene would’ve died a death years ago.’ Yet McLaren was the catalyst that made the Sex Pistols ignite. None of the musical contributors to the Pistols did anything of such electrifying force afterwards. Rotten, also a non-musician, did. But his lyrics for Public Image Ltd are noticeably different from the ones he wrote in the Pistols: they are more poetic and fractured, but the grandeur has gone. Although McLaren isn’t included in the credits of any Pistols song, his sensibility seeped into the band from the atmosphere he created around them.</blockquote><p><br /></p>
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Along Ehlin Road, Centennial, Wyoming</span></b><br />
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From the DuPage and Wyoming Desks of Joe Carducci...
<p>
Bill Woodward in RANGE, <a href="https://www.rangemagazine.com/features/summer-21/range-su21-contents.htm" target="_blank">The Way We Were</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What it meant to live in Wyoming came to me one cold November evening. I was elk hunting with two Basque sheepmen. We finished supper and were drinking wine, sitting in an old log cabin at 8,000 feet in the Bighorns. Domingo Martirena graduated from a seminary in France and was hired by his American relatives as a sheepherder. He talked about guiding escaping Aamerican air-crews over the Pyrenees during the war and reminisced about 1947, when he was dropped off on the Powder River at a sheep wagon with a 94 Winchester, a sack of provisions, and a border collie. Across the table sat his cousin, Charles Marton, a WWII vet who served in the same PT boat squadron as John F. Kennedy. He told tales of war in the Pacific. Occasionally, both men would hold forth in Basque - exploring some arcane bit of sheep culture best described in an ancient tongue. They talked on as the moon curled higher against a cloudless sky. I stepped outside. There was not a sound. The wind had died, and moonlight bathed the snow-covered basin below in a mantle of white. In the distance, 40 miles away, the lights of Worland twinkled like a Christmas tree.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Peter Kiefer & Peter Savodnik at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/hollywoods-new-rules?utm_source=url" target="_blank">Hollywood's New Rules</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay—who was recently added to <i>Forbes</i>’ list of “The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment” along with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and so on. The Hollywood Reporter declared that ARRAY Crew has “fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be staffed going forward.” More than 900 productions, including “Yellowstone” and “Mare of Easttown,” have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing officer of ARRAY, DuVernay’s production company. Privately, directors and writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the “post-George Floyd moment.” But no one dared to criticize her openly. “I’m not crazy,” one screenwriter said.... But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production. How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said.</blockquote>
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James Parker in NEW YORK TIMES on Erich Schwartzel's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/books/review/red-carpet-erich-schwartzel.html" target="_blank">Red Carpet - Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy</a>.
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“There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake,” Mao Zedong said in a lecture delivered in Yan’an in 1942. On this point, he and capitalism were in complete agreement: You’re always selling something, be it a revolution or a pair of sneakers. “Red Carpet” is the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood realized it needed China’s cash, and China realized it could first manipulate — and then appropriate — Hollywood’s special gifts for enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to tear up by means of orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking earnestly to small children. Or, for that matter, an 18th-century Mel Gibson all bulging with love of freedom: When Sony executives sent a print of “The Patriot” to the censors in Beijing, hoping for a release, they were told that such approval had been denied — but could Chinese officials hold onto the print? “We want others in the bureau to watch it so they can understand how to make a good propaganda film.”</blockquote>
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Meagan Day in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/fassbinder-and-the-red-army-faction" target="_blank">Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In 1966, at age twenty-one, Fassbinder sought admission to the brand-new German Film and Television Academy Berlin.... Fassbinder applied once more the following year, submitting two films he’d made with the financial support of an older lover, and was again rejected. In August 1967, Fassbinder stumbled into an underground theater in Munich, established six months earlier as an art house showcasing work primarily by the Oberhausen group. Action-Theater, writes Fassbinder scholar Wallace Steadman Watson, was “fifty-nine chairs... and saloon tables in what one critic called a ‘gloomy dive.’” Under the creative direction of its founders, a married couple named Ursula Strätz and Horst Söhnlein, Action-Theater had been transformed into a venue for avant-garde live plays. Fascinated, Fassbinder joined the loose collective and was quickly jockeying with Söhnlein for authority. It was at Action-Theater that he collided with the student movement, which at that time was reaching fever pitch in cities across West Germany. And it was at Action-Theater that he came to know a few of those who would push the movement into its next, more violent phase — including Söhnlein and his political friends, future RAF core members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.</blockquote>
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Frederic Dalleas in LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, <a href="https://mondediplo.com/2022/02/09shamate" target="_blank">When China's Rural Young Found Their Style</a>.
</p><blockquote>
This youth subculture began in 2006, when 11-year-old Luo Fuxing discovered Japanese and Korean music and fashion. Luo belonged to a generation known as the ‘left-behind children’ (liushou ertong) as their parents had left them in the care of their grandparents to seek factory work in the cities. He lived in Meizhou prefecture, some 400km from Guangzhou, and spent his time on the instant messaging platform QQ, then a favourite of Chinese youth. Like many others, he chatted and played computer games in several online communities. This was also the start of the so-called ‘Martian’ era, in which Chinese youth developed an alternative social media language which, like its western counterpart, used emojis, but also repurposed Chinese characters, sometimes with the aim of bypassing censorship. A whole generation of young people began enthusiastically rebelling against the dominant culture. Being different was trendy, and new fashions were emerging. Luo Fuxing was drawn to the most underground movements, but found even their style too tame. Inspired by the elaborate aesthetic of Japan’s Visual Kei subculture, he dyed his hair bright red, put on a sleeveless studded jacket and took a selfie. His new look needed a name so he transcribed the English word ‘smart’ phonetically into Chinese as shā-mǎ-tè. Within days of posting his selfie online, the Internet had picked up on the name. The three characters he’d chosen were meaningless in combination, but their individual meanings — shā, ‘to kill’; mǎ, ‘horse’; tè, ‘special’ — suggested wild freedom and combat, encouraging many young Chinese to imagine themselves as part-punk, part-dandy.</blockquote>
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Anwen Crawford in JACOBIN, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/chinas-slacker-superstar" target="_blank">China's Slacker Superstar</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Lelush, born Vladislav Sidorov, ended up on Produce Camp - so the story goes - because he had been hired as a behind-the-scenes translator for the show's international contestants. A producer, taken with his good looks, put him in front of the camera instead, and Lelush - having realized too late that boy band boot camp was not his jam - began to intentionally sabotage his chances of victory. He rapped sullenly, danced badly, and refused to smile. Alas, unfortunately for our unwilling star, his tactics backfired - week after week, the viewers voted for Lelush to stay.... "Becoming a boy band member is not my dream," Lelush told his viewing audience, who nevertheless continued to punish him with their love.</blockquote>
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William Langley & Edward White in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/103b678f-b367-49e3-b7ed-dc3a3abbd013" target="_blank">China Slams 'Extravagant Pleasure' of Fandom by Reining in Celebrity Culture</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Cyberspace Administration of China on Tuesday released a set of rules to regulate celebrities, as well as their advertising and fan groups, as part of President Xi Jinping’s drive to reform social values in the country. The CAC lambasted “the supremacy of [internet] traffic” and “abnormal aesthetics” for deteriorating “mainstream values” in Chinese society. The rules could ban fan-run pages with tens of millions of followers that have proliferated online and clashed with Beijing’s campaign to reshape youth culture by promoting equality and “common prosperity”. Fan groups must now be managed by professional celebrity agents. The number of times celebrities and their associated works or products can appear on web pages will also be limited. The new rules are designed to tackle the problems posed by “fandom”, the millions of devout followers of Asian celebrities who congregate in fan armies online.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Eva Fu in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/21-year-old-tortured-over-posts-about-chinese-leaders-daughter_3725295.html" target="_blank">21-Year-Old Tortured Over Posts About Chinese Leader's Daughter</a>.
</p><blockquote>
"The lawyer told me after seeing him that he saw cigarette burns on his arm. He can't move his right arm and has to eat with his left hand," the mother of Niu Tengyu, the jailed administrator of the wiki-based forum Esu Wiki, said in an interview. "They injected some unknown substances into his feet that caused pus. It was so painful that he can't sleep at night." Niu's supposed offense stemmed from posts dating to May 2019 that revealed photos, the identification number, and the passport photo of Xi's Harvard-educated daughter, Xi Mingze, as well as details of Xi's brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui. The forum, characterized by parodies of celebrities and nationalistic memes, has since been shut down. Niu, a self-taught coder, received the harshest punishment among 24 people arrested in connection with the case. All of them are students with administrative access to the forum, including nine who were under 18 years old.</blockquote>
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Liyan Qi in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-haunted-by-its-one-child-policy-as-it-tries-to-encourage-couples-to-conceive-11641205807" target="_blank">Beijing Targets Low Birth Rate</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The use of abortions hasn’t fallen off a cliff. In 1991, the year of the 100-day campaign in Shandong, around 14 million abortions were performed in China, according to National Health Commission data. The number was just below nine million in 2020. More striking is that the number of family-planning centers, primarily used for abortions, sterilizations and insertions of intrauterine devices, has dwindled to 2,810 across China in 2020, less than 10% of the number in 2014. Meanwhile, rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF—each round being a multistep process over four to six weeks—have more than doubled, from about 485,000 in 2013 to more than one million in 2018.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Garbrielle Reyes at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/04/15/uyghur-gynecologist-says-china-sterilized-80-people-day-years/" target="_blank">Uyghur Gynecologist Says China Sterilized 80 People a Day for Years</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The newspaper identified the female gynecologist simply as Gülgine. The doctor, herself an ethnic Uyghur, spoke to the Sankei Shimbun from Istanbul, Turkey, where she immigrated in 2011. “A lot of women were put on the back of a truck and sent to the hospital,” Gülgine said. “The [sterilization] procedure took about five minutes each, but the women were crying because they did not know what was happening to them.” Gülgine, 47, said she personally carried out sterilizations of Uyghur women at a hospital in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi.... “I understood the meaning of the surgery, but I later learned that it was a policy for the Uyghur,” Gülgine said, “and I too was sterilized.” Gülgine estimated that forced sterilization began around 1980, decades before the revelation that the Chinese Communist Party was building concentration camps for Uyghur and other Muslim ethnic minority people. Roughly 50,000 Uyghur refugees like Gülgine have fled Xinjiang for Turkey in recent years. Gülgine said some of the exiled Uyghur women have visited her in Istanbul, “complaining that they cannot have children. She has examined more than 150 so far, but many don’t know they have been sterilized, and some women start crying in anger when she explains what has happened to them,” according to the Japan Forward news site.</blockquote>
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Vivian Wang in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/world/asia/china-womens-rights.html" target="_blank">China Moves to Overhaul Protections for Women's Rights, Sort Of</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Women have also been increasingly pushed out of the workplace and into traditional gender roles since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, assumed power. Some fear that the campaign to encourage childbirth could turn coercive. The contradictions were clear in a recent article in the <i>Global Times</i>, a Communist Party-owned tabloid, about Chinese feminist advocacy. While the article hailed the proposed legal revisions as a “landmark move,” it also denounced “spooky ‘feminism’” and derided the “so-called MeToo movement” as yet another Western cudgel against China.</blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/world/asia/china-xi-jinping.html" target="_blank">A Succession Drama, Chinese Style, Starring Xi Jinping</a>.
</p><blockquote>
At the last party congress in 2017, leaders did not pick a successor to Mr. Xi, upending the ladder-like handover of power that had been taking shape in previous decades. Some of Mr. Xi’s protégés may now be too old to stay in the race, while promising younger officials remain untested, and generally unknown. Under an informal age ceiling for senior party posts, two of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee — the top tier of power — are likely to retire: Vice Premier Han Zheng and the head of the Chinese legislature, Li Zhanshu. That unspoken rule says that members who are 68 or older should step down when a congress comes around. Mr. Xi could also engineer more retirements, including of the premier, Li Keqiang, or expand the size of the Standing Committee, which is not fixed by rule. Possible recruits into the top body include Chen Min’er, Hu Chunhua, and Ding Xuexiang. All are Politburo members young enough to serve 10 years in the Standing Committee under the age rules. So far, though, none has received a telltale pre-congress move that suggests Mr. Xi has special plans for him, such as a high-profile transfer or a propaganda push.</blockquote>
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Minxin Pei in JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY, <a href="https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/china-totalitarianisms-long-shadow/" target="_blank">China: Totalitarianism's Long Shadow</a>.
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A transition away from communism led by economic reform under the rule of a one-party state is highly likely to get stuck. Entrenched interests whose fortunes are intertwined with the Leninist party-state can use totalitarian legacy institutions to defend their privileges against any reform—economic or political—that threatens them. Indeed, the evolution of the post-Tiananmen regime under Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–12) bears out this observation. Economic reforms that began promisingly in the 1990s petered out in the 2000s, while the CCP blocked even the most modest experimental efforts to promote grass-roots democracy and the rule of law. By the time Hu became leader, market-oriented economic reform had already begun to stagnate. With Xi in power, it has gone into reverse despite his vow to accelerate it. A form of state capitalism is now ascendant. We can read the story in data regarding the share of total output produced by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). All through the 1980s, as the private sector expanded, SOEs’ total output share declined by an average of 2.5 percentage points each year. From 1992 through 2017, however, the average annual decline was only 1.3 points. Thus as of 2017, after four decades of reform, Chinese SOEs still accounted for about a quarter of GDP and employed about 16 percent of all workers.</blockquote>
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Jie Lu & Yun-han Chu in JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY, <a href="https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/trading-democracy-for-governance/" target="_blank">Trading Democracy for Governance</a>.
</p><blockquote>
[T]he United States outperforms the other regions by having the largest proportion of Principle-Holders (47 percent) and the smallest share of Agnostics (less than 1 percent). Latin America's share of Principle-Holders is very close (about 46%). North Africa's proportion of Principle-Holders is barely into double digits at 11 percent, while East and South Asia average 16.5 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa exceeds all three of these regions by having about 24 percent of respondents saying they placed norms and procedures or freedom and liberty at the heart of their conception of democracy. Not surprisingly, the order of the regions is reversed when we focus on the percentages of Benefit-Seekers.</blockquote>
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WALL STREET JOURNAL: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-chinese-communist-party-11615153949" target="_blank">The Woke Chinese Communist Party</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“Canada, the UK and Australia, three members of the Five Eyes alliance, have recently taken action to put pressure on China. They have formed a US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community,” said a Feb. 23 editorial in <i>Global Times</i>. “They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese.” The Communist Party-run paper notes that the members of Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing network, “have a strong sense of civilization superiority.” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is a “neo-Nazi and extreme racist” and “the Trump administration is an extremely typical white supremacy government.” By resisting this bloc of English-speaking countries, the editorial concludes, “China is not only defending its own interests, we are also defending the diversity of the modern world.”</blockquote>
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Frank Dong in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-researchers-built-ai-prosecutor-that-can-file-charges-by-itself_4187616.html" target="_blank">Chinese Researchers Build AI 'Prosecutor' That Can File Charges by Itself</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Shanghai Pudong Procuratorate, the country’s largest prosecution office, built and tested the machine. So far, the machine is able to identify and file charges for the eight most common crimes in Shanghai—credit card fraud, running a gambling operation, reckless driving, intentional injury, obstructing official duties, theft, fraud, and picking a quarrel. The researchers said that, based on a written description of a case, the so-called AI prosecutor can file a charge with 97 percent accuracy. Professor Shi Yong, the project’s lead scientist, said the AI technology could reduce prosecutors’ daily workloads, allowing them to focus on more challenging work.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Madhumita Murgia in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/65477c33-cb72-418d-b03d-b60cfc5a8b5d" target="_blank">Google's DeepMind Develops AI Tool That Can Write Its Own Computer Code</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The system, known as AlphaCode, is a sign of the evolution of AI and would allow the automation of computer programming, a powerful and highly prized skill underpinning much of modern science and industry. DeepMind tested AlphaCode’s performance in coding competitions hosted by Codeforces, a platform that pits the skills of tens of thousands of human software programmers around the world against one another. It found that it performed with the expertise of an average human programmer.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Richard Vanderford in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-could-cut-hiring-biases-as-companies-make-push-to-find-workers-proponents-say-11643797804" target="_blank">AI Touted as a Means To Reduce Hiring Bias</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“There’s a growing realization that these tools can exacerbate bias,” Matissa Hollister, a McGill University assistant professor of organizational behavior. “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, ‘Keep the humans in human resources.’” “Even tools that are not super sketchy can create significant backlash,” said Dr. Hollister, who recently collaborated with the World Economic Forum on a “tool kit” for AI in HR. Some companies have had notable AI missteps. Amazon.com Inc., for example, reportedly scrapped an algorithm meant to aid the hiring of top talent when it learned that its tool would pan candidates who listed on their résumé that they went to women’s colleges or participated in women’s clubs. The tool, according to a Reuters report, learned what Amazon sought in a candidate by looking at the backgrounds of candidates who submitted resumes in the last decade, a group that heavily skewed male. Amazon told The Wall Street Journal that the project was only explored on a trial basis and scrapped because the algorithms were too primitive.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2021/07/west-isn-t-dying-its-ideas-live-china" target="_blank">The West Isn't Dying - Its Ideas Live On in China</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The study of Western classics is actively promoted in Chinese universities. The texts are often taught in their original Latin or Greek (a practice no longer required at Princeton, where some consider it racist). China's meritocratic intelligentsia is also notable for having a grasp of Western political thought that exceeds that of many in Western universities. The works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes, as well as 20th-century thinkers such as Michel Foucault, have been closely studied. The German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) has been accepted as having the most to teach regarding China's political development. Schmitt gained recognition in the German academy by examining the influence of theological ideas on Western jurisprudence. During the 1920s he fashioned a set of ideas in which the Enabling Act of March 1933, which formally established the Nazi regime, could be formulated and justified. Law was created by sovereign political decisions, and whoever decided when a "state of exception" or regime crisis existed was the sovereign. In 1932 he published <i>The Concept of the Political</i>, arguing that politics was not a dialogue among members of a shared community with divergent interests and values, but a struggle between enemies - in other words, a mode of warfare.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Matthew Dean at <i>tabletmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/leo-strauss-china" target="_blank">Reading Leo Strauss in China</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Perhaps the two leading names in Chinese Straussian scholarship are Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng, who were classmates at Peking University. After graduation, they started an influential book series introducing Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Benjamin, and more to a culture-starved post-Mao China that was eager to rekindle a relationship with the West. This series fueled the “culture craze” of the 1980s by injecting Western philosophy into the hermetic kingdom. Of course, any expectations of subsequent political liberalization came crashing down with the Tiananmen massacre in the summer of 1989. That fall, Gan started a Ph.D. at the Committee on Social Thought in Chicago where he studied with Allan Bloom, Edward Shils, and Francois Furet, among others. At the same time, Liu went to the University of Basel to start a Ph.D. under Heinrich Ott, the Swiss theologian and student of Karl Barth. Gan left Chicago without a Ph.D. for the University of Hong Kong. After ten years, however, Gan set his sights on a return to the mainland, where in 2009 he founded Boya College, the first liberal arts college in China to take the great books model seriously. Gan at first required undergraduate students of Boya to learn Classical Chinese, Ancient Greek, and Latin. After founding a second college in the model of Boya, Gan moved to Beijing and finally established a liberal arts college (of which he is now Dean) in one of China’s most prestigious universities, Tsinghua University. While Gan has exerted the greater influence on China’s institutions, his old classmate Liu Xiaofeng is more prolific, widely read, and controversial. In one of his most famous books, <i>Delivering and Dallying</i>, he charges China’s three great intellectual traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) with nihilism, by which he means that the traditional moral systems of China rejected a theistic, suprahuman basis for absolute values and never developed beyond belief in the moral essence of man to a more robust doctrine of sin. Against this he contrasts the “Judeo-Christian spirit” which is able to contend with nihilism because in it “man is very tiny and humble, he cannot rely on his own nature, he cannot be proud, since all self-reliant and self-glorifying people can only bring suffering and sin to mankind.” Chinese nihilism is both deeper and more durable than Western nihilism, he claims, since it is rooted in the doctrinal tradition of Confucianism, which has resisted interpreting mankind as needful of help from without.</blockquote>
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Cindy Yu in SPECTATOR on Jing Tsu's book, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-great-chinese-puzzle-how-to-adapt-the-language-to-modern-communication-technologies" target="_blank">Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China</a>.
</p><blockquote>
As western technology began to dominate, Chinese was even threatened with extinction. Be it telegraphy, typewriters or computing, the systems of modern communication were designed with western languages in mind. The chief problem with Chinese was its lack of an alphabet. How could a typewriter spit out thousands of individual characters when western models required just 26 letters, plus numbers and punctuation? How could telegraphs be sent in Chinese when the underpinning cipher— Morse code — was expressed only in letters and numbers? These were intractable problems, and without adapting Chinese to each technological era, the nation stood little chance of keeping up with the modern world.</blockquote>
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James Kynge in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/39404813-472c-455d-98d6-60aa865033d0" target="_blank">Xinjiang Detention Camp Officials Studied at Harvard</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Two officials involved in overseeing China’s vast network of detention camps for about 1m ethnic minority people in Xinjiang have studied on coveted fellowships at Harvard University, according to research by an Australian think-tank. Yao Ning, a local party secretary of the Communist party who was honoured this year by Beijing for his work in Xinjiang, studied as an Asia fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation between 2010 and 2011, according to a report by the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Erken Tuniyaz, chairman of the Xinjiang region, spent a few months at Harvard’s Ash Center as a new world fellow in 2012. Xinjiang’s chair ranks as the region’s second highest official after the party secretary, Chen Quanguo. In a speech in February, Tuniyaz defended Xinjiang’s internment camps as “counter-terrorism and deradicalisation measures”.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Dan Strumpf & Wenxin Fan in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-names-xinjiang-counterterror-veteran-to-lead-troops-in-hong-kong-11641803969" target="_blank">Hard-Liner to Oversee Hong Kong Army Post</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Major General Peng Jingtang, a deputy chief of staff of China’s People’s Armed Police, will head the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong, China’s Xinhua News Agency reported late Sunday. He was previously chief of staff for the armed police in the far western region of Xinjiang, site of a yearslong crackdown on predominantly Muslim and Turkic-speaking Uyghurs and other minorities. There Mr. Peng was tasked with counterterrorism, helping train an elite squad known as the Mountain Eagles. In 2019, he told the state-run <i>Global Times</i> newspaper that the squad fired as many rounds of ammunition in 2018 as all other Xinjiang security forces combined had done over the previous three years. Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping honored an unspecified antiterrorism squad in Xinjiang that officials said killed 91 terrorists.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Yarolslav Trofimov, Drew Hinshaw & Kate O'Keeffe in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-is-taking-over-international-organizations-one-vote-at-a-time-11601397208" target="_blank">China Expands Its U.N. Clout, One Vote at a Time</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“It’s China’s sense that this is ‘our’ moment, and we need to take control of these bodies,” said Ashok Malik, senior policy adviser at India’s foreign ministry. “If you control important levers of these institutions, you influence norms, you influence ways of thinking, you influence international policy, you inject your way of thinking.” Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing the U.N. General Assembly this month, called for the organization to play a “central role in international affairs,” particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic. “The global governance system should adapt itself to evolving global political and economic dynamics,” he added, an allusion to China’s rising clout and its perceptions of a U.S. decline.</blockquote>
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Valentina Pop, Sha Hua & Daniel Michaels in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-lightbulbs-to-5g-china-battles-west-for-control-of-vital-technology-standards-11612722698" target="_blank">China Battles West to Control Global Tech Standards</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Chinese officials lead at least four global standards organizations, including the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations body governing phone and internet connectivity, and the International Electrotechnical Commission, an industry group governing electrical and electronic technologies. From 2015 to 2017, a Chinese official headed the International Standards Organization—an industry-led group known as ISO that sells its standards for everything from footwear and management systems to essential oils and sex toys.</blockquote>
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Yoko Kubota in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-chinese-startups-tried-to-catch-up-to-makers-of-advanced-computer-chipsand-failed-11641724382" target="_blank">Chinese Chip Startups Fail in Bid to Keep Up</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Over the past three years, at least six new major chip-building projects, including HSMC and QXIC, have failed in China, according to company statements, state media, local government documents and Tianyancha, a corporate registration database. At least $2.3 billion went into these projects, much of it coming from governments, the documents showed. Some never produced a single chip.</blockquote>
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Cameron Cawthorne at <i>foxbusiness.com</i>, <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/hunter-biden-aide-invested-chinese-company-communist-party" target="_blank">Hunter Biden, Former Biden Aide Invested in Chinese Company Tied to Communist Party, NBA China</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgr_ynh5W-gZz5QZbrAC7lhk_N-VSBUiDeRwX9hyE-e70WiBW767SiCpHL1Vl8nXAZGWvSR1SnoOBkz6Q6MeJznPorAX-9eETVd_YXcUu2Lh-8YE8NzokffGT6N2mDuKRbzsKm9YKVtRCAN0VsuamBfbJG6XT9DAGZAKWLwwoOzc1R84MaMCt0ElxBKVg=s400" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="400" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgr_ynh5W-gZz5QZbrAC7lhk_N-VSBUiDeRwX9hyE-e70WiBW767SiCpHL1Vl8nXAZGWvSR1SnoOBkz6Q6MeJznPorAX-9eETVd_YXcUu2Lh-8YE8NzokffGT6N2mDuKRbzsKm9YKVtRCAN0VsuamBfbJG6XT9DAGZAKWLwwoOzc1R84MaMCt0ElxBKVg=s320" width="320" /></a></div>
In one 2016 email, Biden calls Zhang his "good friend and business colleague." One of the names cc'd on the email was James Bulger, who appeared to help Biden get a Chinese business license for his uncle's telemedicine company a couple of years earlier. One of the emails was from Schwerin to Zhang, Biden, Person, an assistant, and Tara Greco, a former director of communications for the union that represents NBA players. The April 2016 email, which was directed at Zhang, said Greco had learned that the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) had a deal with the NBA to "build NBA branded stadiums around China," but said it appeared the project was "stalled" after only two stadiums were built, prompting Schwerin to say, "If Liaoning can get one of these stadiums that would be a big help in your efforts to get more NBA related content in Liaoning."</blockquote>
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Hudson Lockett in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7cebe03f-671e-4cf7-9804-345fd0931853" target="_blank">China Rating Agencies Balk at Downgrades of State Groups</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“China’s rating agencies are even worse than [those] in the US,” said Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong. “They’re not only beholden to the customer but also [to] the government.” Rating agencies such as China Chengxin or CSCI Pengyuan apply a letter-based scale that resembles those of international peers such as S&P Global or Fitch Ratings. But fierce competition among Chinese agencies, most of which are state-controlled or have government ties, leaves them with little incentive to rate clients lower than double A or risk losing business. Before November, just five Chinese SOEs had defaulted in 2020, according to Fitch. That number has since jumped to eight. “The lack of downgraded ratings is only one of the privileges enjoyed by SOEs,” said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategy research at investment bank China Renaissance, who points out that state-linked groups also generally enjoy vastly better access to capital markets than their private counterparts.</blockquote>
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Cathy He & Ling Yun in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/beijing-manipulated-wall-street-to-steer-us-policy-until-trump-became-president-chinese-professor_3609988.html" target="_blank">CCP Manipulated Wall Street to Steer US Policy, Until Trump Became President: Professor</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In 2016, then-candidate Trump campaigned on a tough-on-China platform, focusing on the regime's unfair trade practices that have cost thousands of American manufacturing jobs. As president, Trump in 2018 launched a trade war, slapping billions worth of tariffs on a range of Chinese imports. In reference to the trade war, Di asked, "So why are we having trouble with Trump, when we were able to handle all kinds of problems between China and the United States from 1992 to 2016?" He said that previously, "all crises" between China and the United States, such as the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, were able to be resolved "within two months." The reason for this is that Beijing had "people in high places [in the United States]," Di said.</blockquote>
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Andy Bounds in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d08f7480-5d19-497b-ac8b-bb68d780eae4" target="_blank">EU Accuses China of Patent Power Grab</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Businesses, including Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China’s supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said. Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added. The lower licensing fees set by Beijing deprive smartphone makers and other mobile telecommunications businesses of a crucial source of revenue to reinvest in research and development. “It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means,” said a European Commission official. “It is a means to push Europe out.”</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Andrew Jack, Jude Webber, Sun Yu & Jyotsna Singh in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6f485461-72a6-4486-a269-ee97d7226a00" target="_blank">Pandemic Sparks Interest in Public Sector Jobs</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In China, where the word mandarin is synonymous with public servants, the lure of high social and economic status through state control of resources has been present for centuries. Imperial China’s civil service exam, which lasted for 1,300 years, was the best way for men of modest backgrounds to climb the social ladder. Under the communist regime, government jobs gained popularity after Beijing resumed the civil service exam in 1994. Today’s candidates take writing tests that include an analysis of why a state-led economy works, and more than 100 multiple choice questions on everything from the working languages of the UN to the chemical properties of silver jewellery.</blockquote>
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Mark Pulliam in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Cass Sunstein & Adrian Wermeule's book, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cass-sunstein-and-adrian-vermeule-leviathans-apologists/" target="_blank">Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The administrative state appeals to the elite class because it enables them to exert control over the rest of society without the nuisance of elections or consumer choice. Sunstein and Vermeule undoubtedly fancy themselves as latter day versions of Rexford Tugwell and Adolph Berle, who as members of FDR’s “Brain Trust” helped him design and implement the New Deal. “Trust us,” their tone suggests, “We’re experts.” Administrative law is “something to celebrate,” they conclude. Americans “should be grateful” for it. According to Ivy League technocrats, only an ingrate would oppose the Swamp.</blockquote>
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River Page in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/the-cia-and-the-new-dialect-of-power/" target="_blank">The CIA and the New Dialect of Power</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Today’s new dialect of power, which has supplanted the old, is radical New Left politics internalized, individualized, and regurgitated by the professional class. It is imparted by the universities just as the previous elite idiom was imbued at British-style boarding schools. This dialect, like the transatlantic accent before it, is a class signifier. But today this class contains both CIA agents and left-wing journalists, to the embarrassment of the latter. This language was not “co-opted” by the professional class, as Natasha Lennard insisted in The Intercept.8 Quite the contrary, the CIA has as much claim to the new dialect of power as anyone else in the professional class, having had some hand in creating the New Left intelligentsia from which it sprang.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Jeff Polet in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/" target="_blank">Camus and the Anti-Racists</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The mode of address becomes more intimate through the course of the book, for Clamence is the mirror Camus holds up to the reader. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, he is the image of all and of none. This is what I am, Clamence is saying, and this is what you are. Clamence "imperceptibly" passes from the "I" to the "we," for "we are in the soup together. However I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you." Like Zarathustra, Clamence has substituted honesty for grace, and just as Nietzsche argued in Daybreak, with God dead we had to extend grace to ourselves - but the fonts have run dry and the new priests have no interest in refilling them, in no small part because they profit from withholding the cleansing waters. They'll extract indulgences but never let you out of purgatory. "They believe solely in sin, never in grace" even though "grace is what they want." Instead of forgiveness we end up "with power and the whip."</blockquote>
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John Plender in FINANCIAL TIMES on Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Eui Esteves & Kris James Mitchener's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/731d5674-bb3c-422d-8982-f8e392d4d5a4" target="_blank">In Defense of Public Debt</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The authors point out that after the Napoleonic wars the decline in the British debt-to-GDP ratio from 194 per cent in 1822 to 28 per cent nine decades later relied chiefly on primary budget surpluses, which outweighed an adverse interest rate-growth differential. The franchise was limited then to 2.5 per cent and there was considerable overlap between public creditors and voters. Much the same dynamic applied to debt reduction in the US after the civil war and in France after the Franco-Prussian war. The broadening of the franchise in the 20th century changed that dynamic as demands emerged for state provision of social and income security. Two world wars also had to be financed. So after 1945, growth played a bigger part in debt reduction while governments kept interest rates low and maintained capital controls. Inflation also played a greater role, since it is a default solution in distributional struggles where politicians fail to reconcile conflicting interests through legislation.</blockquote>
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ECONOMIST, <a href="https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/11/20/governments-are-not-going-to-stop-getting-bigger" target="_blank">The Great Embiggening</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The tendency for government to grow is a hallmark of modernity. From 1274 to 1691 the English government raised less than 2% of GDP in tax. Over the 18th and 19th centuries that changed, with the rax-raising and spending capacities of the government massively expanding, especially at times of war. In the 1870s the governments of rich countries were spending about 10% of GDP. In 1920 it was nearer 20%. It has been growing ever since. It is now much higher in the rich world than either in the past or in developing countries. The growth in what governments spend typically comes with a growth in what they do, and how much they control the doings of others. In America the number of federal regulations has more than doubled since 1970. The total word count of Germany's laws is 60% larger today than it was in the mid-1990s.</blockquote>
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George Tavlas in CATO JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2021/modern-monetary-theory-meets-greece-chicago#" target="_blank">Modern Monetary Theory Meets Greece and Chicago</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Under the Chicago framework, the role of the government would be to establish the monetary rule and to ensure that it was followed—that is, the government’s role would be constitutional as opposed to administrative. Under that framework, the budget would be balanced over the course of the business cycle, with the aim of limiting the size of the government. Should the automatic stabilizers fail to provide sufficient demand during the trough of the cycle, increases in the size of the fiscal deficit, and, thus, increases in the quantity of money, would be generated through reductions in taxes—and not by increases in government spending. The Chicagoans believed that the amount of fiscal space available was subject to strict limits. In contrast, under Kelton’s proposal, which would increase the size of the government sector, the government’s role would be administrative. Under her proposal, the amount of fiscal space would be unlimited before a vaguely defined inflation constraint kicks in. There was an important reason underlying the Chicagoans’ aim to prevent the concentration of power in the government: those economists wanted to preserve individual liberty.</blockquote>
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Jon Seidel in SUN-TIMES, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2022/2/4/22918682/arroyo-munoz-sentencing-corruption-bribery-federal-court-prosecutors-prison-time" target="_blank">Corrupt Politicians Say Prison Doesn't Work, So Feds Quote Judge from 2014 Who Argued: 'Impose More Severe Penalties'</a>.
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Pasqual wrote in his memo that Munoz once texted an acquaintance that “a wise man” told him after he became alderman that, “they will throw money at u they will throw trips and cars at u and they will throw very pretty young p---y at you.” He said the man told him “don’t take any of it” and instead “pick ur 10 friends and make them millionaires and they will take care of u legally.” Munoz noted the “wise man” wound up being indicted for tax evasion.</blockquote>
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William Voegeli in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/progressively-worse/" target="_blank">Progressively Worse</a>.
</p><blockquote>
As sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote at the dawn of the Great Society, “How one wishes for the open field of the New Deal, which was not littered with the carcasses of half-successful and hardly successful programs, each in the hands of a hardening bureaucracy.” Political scientist Steven Teles examined this problem in a widely discussed 2013 essay for <i>National Affairs</i> on “kludgeocracy.” The term “kludge,” he explains, comes from the world of computer programming, with a meaning that corresponds to the pre-digital era’s “stop-gap measure.” Teles defines it as “an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system.” As the number of kludges in a software package increases, so does the likelihood of ending up with “a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes.”</blockquote>
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Paul Rubin in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-left-primitive-economics-labor-theory-of-value-marx-progressive-adam-smith-11633448518" target="_blank">The Woke Left's Primitive Economics</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes. Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn't grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others. Since there was little capital, a "labor theory of value" - the idea that all value is created by labor alone - would have been appropriate, and there was little need to protect capital through property rights. Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia.</blockquote>
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Hunter DeRensis in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/merchants-of-death/" target="_blank">Merchants of Death</a>.
</p><blockquote>
To put things in perspective, Institute for Policy Studies cofounder Richard J. Barnet relates in his book <i>The Economy of Death</i> a story from the late 1930s of a chemist applying for work in the U.S. Department of the Navy and being rejected on the grounds that the department already had one. Fast forward thirty years to when Barnet was writing in 1969, and half of all scientists and engineers in the United States worked either directly or indirectly for the Pentagon. Economist Robert L. Heilbroner called the American system of military production “the largest planned economy outside the Soviet Union.”</blockquote>
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Jacky Wong in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/think-u-s-china-tensions-are-bad-for-business-try-china-india-11645182911" target="_blank">China-India Tensions Are a Concern for Business</a>.
</p><blockquote>
While the Indian government has a strong hand when it chooses to ban software companies, it is a different story for hardware. That hasn't stopped regulators from going after China-linked hardware titans in other ways. Indian authorities are searching the offices of Huawei Technologies on the basis of alleged tax evasion. Huawei's Chinese peer ZTE and smartphone makes Oppo and Xiaomi were similarly raided last year. India excluded Huawei and ZTE from its 5G trials, though they built some of the country's existing networks.</blockquote>
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Venus Upadhayaya in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-have-a-much-more-sinister-deeper-and-larger-agenda-in-kashmir-expert_3695328.html" target="_blank">The CCP's Agenda in Kashmir</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Pandya said India has always been "sincere and firm" in its commitment to the one-China policy but China has reciprocated by issuing stapled visas to Indian citizens from Kashmir and from Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India - a gesture that denotes that China doesn't accept India's sovereignty over these two regions. Since the 1980s China adopted a policy of neutrality on the Kashmir issue, a region that was the triggering point of multiple wars between India and Pakistan.... "From there only if I begin, you can sense some kind of nefarious designs, smacking of dishonesty, maybe some kind of larger geostrategic game," said Pandya adding that China wouldn't want a resolution of the Kashmir issue.</blockquote>
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Ian Buruma in HARPER'S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/the-great-wall-of-steel-xi-jinping-chinese-nationalism/" target="_blank">The Great Wall of Steel</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Japanese empire building in China offers a clear model for contemporary Chinese nationalism. This is particularly true of the brutal Japanese experiment in the Thirties in Manchuria, the region that now comprises the northeastern provinces of China and the original homeland of the Manchu people.... On September 18, 1931, Japanese soldiers faked a bomb attack on a railway line in Mukden (now Shenyang) and blamed it on Chinese terrorists. Japanese troops quickly deposed the local Chinese warlord and seized the major cities in Manchuria. In 1932, the Japanese founded the state of Manchukuo, with the hapless last Qing emperor, “Henry” Puyi, on the throne. Manchukuo’s independence was a sham. Behind every Chinese or Manchu official stood a Japanese “adviser” who told him exactly what to do. Japanese propaganda presented the state as a multiethnic, anti-imperialist, thoroughly modern utopia. Manchus, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Mongolians, represented by the different colors of the Manchukuo flag, would be treated equally. The Concordia Association, the state’s only permitted political party, was founded to promote racial harmony. Hostility to liberal Western models of democracy was a constant theme in official Manchukuo rhetoric. As is the case with today’s Chinese nationalism, this was born of resentment and feelings of exclusion: Japan’s 1919 demand for racial equality in the League of Nations had been denied by Australia and the United States. Manchukuo would offer an alternative, Asian model of modernity....</blockquote>
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Chuin-Wei Yap in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-fishing-fleet-the-worlds-largest-drives-beijings-global-ambitions-11619015507" target="_blank">China's Fishing Fleet Powers Beijing's Global Ambitions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ecuador and Peru placed their navies on alert last year to track hundreds of Chinese trawlers massing near South American fisheries. In Asia, governments and the fishing industry have complained of hundreds of Chinese incursions in their domestic waters. Indonesia has take to periodically detonating seized Chinese trawlers in hopes it will deter other Chinese boats from poaching in its waters. From 2010 to 2019, Chinese-flagged or owned vessels accounted for 21% of global fishing offenses logged by Spyglass, a Vancouver-based fishing crime database, up from 16% the previous decade. A 2019 global ranking by Geneva-based Global Initiative, a trans-national crime watchdog, placed China first in the prevalence of illegal fishing by nations.</blockquote>
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Rachel Riederer in HARPER'S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2021/11/ad-astra-the-coming-battle-over-space/" target="_blank">Ad Astra</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Russian crafts had positioned themselves unusually close to the American, in a near-identical orbit, and they had synced their paths with USA-245 - a classified, multibillion-dollar KH-11 satellite, equipped with imaging systems on par with the Hubble telescope - such that one of them came within twenty kilometers of it several times in a single day.... The Russians, it seemed, were stalking an American spy satellite. The larger of the two Russian crafts, Kosmos-2542, had first entered the same orbital plane as USA-245 in late November, launched from a Soyuz rocket. This in itself was not a notable occurrence, and the two passed each other only once in eleven days. But on December 6, the Russian vessel seemed to split in two. In fact, it had spat out another, smaller craft.... According to Russia, Kosmos-2542 was an inspector satellite, a type of craft also used by the United States and China. Inspectors are smaller, more agile machines with precise navigation and controls, most often employed to closely approach or dock with friendly crafts to assess for maintenance. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that the satellite born from Kosmos-2542, called Kosmos-2543, was also an inspector, and described its begetting as an "experiment," intended to further maintenance of its fleet. Russia also noted that 2542 was equipped with cameras powerful enough to photograph the earth's surface. USA-245 slowly lifted into a higher orbit, away from the Russian satellites, while Kosmos-2543, the baby, zipped around the sky and, in the words of a later published space-threat assessment from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, changed its orbit "constantly" - an exceptional performance in space, where fuel is precious. Then, on January 22 [2020], both Russian crafts approached radically closer to the American.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Bill Gertz in WASHINGTON TIMES, <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/29/pla-brain-control-warfare-work-revealed/" target="_blank">China 'Brain Control' Warfare Work Revealed</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The translated 2019 reports discuss developing brain control weaponry as part of what Chinese officials call the “intelligentization” of warfare... said the report headlined, “The Future of the Concept of Military Supremacy... The focus is to attack the enemy’s will to resist, not physical destruction,” it stated. Brain science is being used to extend warfare in the sphere of human consciousness “causing the brain to become the main target of offense and defense of new concept weapons,” the report added. “To win without fighting is no longer far-fetched,” it stated, quoting ancient strategist Sun Tzu’s maxim. The report, which was published in the official military newspaper <i>PLA Daily</i>, also asserted that China is merging four major technology fields for military purposes: nano, bio, information and cognition. The intended result will be enhanced individual capabilities. “Future human-machine merging will revolve around the contest for the brain,” the report said.</blockquote>
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Nicole Hao in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/corruption-wears-down-chinese-militarys-combat-effectiveness_4152801.html" target="_blank">Corruption Wears Down Chinese Military's Combat Effectiveness</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the Chinese military, there's only one general who has real combat experience. Gen. Li Zuocheng, 68, served in the Vietnam War in 1979 as the director of a company consisting of about 100 soldiers. Li is the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the CMC.... "A general may still lead the military when he doesn't have any combat experience. He can learn from books and military exercises," U.S.-based China affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan told <i>The Epoch Times</i> on Dec. 17. "But if the generals and officers received their positions and ranks by bribes, they don't have the knowledge and capability to command the military to fight in a war.... Instances of generals being fired have become common under the Xi regime. On April 29, the Chinese regime announced that Maj. Gen. Song Xue, former deputy chief of staff of the Chinese Navy, was suspected of a "serious violation of discipline and law." He had been dismissed from his position on April 8. Song was China's key leader for rebuilding and training personnel for its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. Overseas Chinese commentators say that Song was involved in bribery in the Liaoning project and that he was punished because the aircraft carrier doesn't have the combat effectiveness that a carrier is expected to have. On April 26, the Liaoning carrier strike group couldn't prevent an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer with the U.S. Navy from entering into the middle of their formation as they sailed through the Philippine Sea.</blockquote>
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Edward White & Victor Mallet in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ae4d37bd-0440-491b-a4b7-25ab6158e6ad" target="_blank">Xi's Anti-Corruption Crusade</a>.
</p><blockquote>
His campaign is already unparalleled in its scale and longevity, ensnaring about 2mn officials over 10 years. At least 10,000 such “involuntary” returns from 120 countries have been successfully notched as part of Operation Fox Hunt, which started in 2014, and Sky Net, a year later. Yuen Yuen Ang, author of China’s Gilded Age and an expert on Chinese politics, points out that before Xi, five major anti-corruption campaigns had been launched, going back to the early 1980s. Yet Xi’s battle on graft has become the “longest, widest-ranging and most penetrative anti-corruption campaign in the post Mao-era”. “Unlike his predecessors [in the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras] who held on to stable, power-sharing arrangements, Xi is a political disrupter . . . Given his ambition in reshaping the Chinese political economy, Xi’s campaigns should be seen as part of his long-term vision to attain ‘socialist modernisation’ by 2035. That is why they go on and on.” Xi’s campaigns, according to western government officials, have deployed a playbook of extralegal coercion and covert overseas missions, including kidnappings, to compel fugitive Chinese political and business elites — and their families — to return from foreign soil.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Steven Hsu interviewed by Richard Hanania at substack.com, <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-future-of-humanity-is-ivf-babies?s=r" target="_blank">The Future of Humanity Is IVF Babies and Chinese Domination</a>.
</p><blockquote>
And furthermore, the Communist Party itself, the whole system of promotion within the Communist Party, this is not understood by most Americans, is a very long timescale meritocracy. So anybody who reaches like the top level of say the top 300 people in the Communist Party has had to do things like run a city with population of 10 million or run a province which is the size of Germany. And for example, famously the current guy who is the boss of Zheijang province was previously the head of the maned space program. So there’s actually circulation between different parts of government, not just like political governance but also even technical development or major companies in China that are state owned. You might run or have a senior position at one of the state-owned companies and then become a city manager or provincial governor. So all of these things, they’re long-timescale tests of your capabilities. And it is real. I mean, when you meet the senior people there, again, they could be dull, lifeless, bureaucratic type people, but they are pretty able. No one says like, “Hey, I had a conversation with somebody from the Ministry of Finance in China, they didn’t under actually understand how options pricing works.” No, they actually do understand how options pricing work. Whereas people here at the treasury or SEC often don’t understand how options pricing works. So anyway.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Sharri Markson & Ashleigh Gleeson in DAILY TELEGRAPH, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/the-covid-files-australianfunded-coronavirus-paper-used-in-chinese-military-facility/news-story/7241a6b112816f3951495e0fa52ed2aa" target="_blank">The Covid Files: How the Red Army Oversaw Coronavirus Research</a>.
</p><blockquote>
<i>The Daily Telegraph</i> can reveal that the “sequencing” and “virus isolation” on which the study relied was done by laboratories run by the PLA in China. In fine print at the very end of the paper in the acknowledgments section, it states: “We thank Prof. Wu-Chun Cao, Dr. Na Jia, Dr. Ya-Wei Zhang, Dr. Jia-Fu Jiang, Dr. Bao-Gui Jiang, and their team in State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Beijing for their substantial contributions to this study, including co-ordinating among research parties, conducting virus isolation, qPCR and sequencing.” The State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity is part of the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which sits under the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. The director of the Beijing Institute is Professor Wu-Chan Cao, who also received the top acknowledgment in the research paper for his “substantial contributions to this study” including “co-ordinating among research parties”. In his official biography he is pictured in his military uniform and it states he has the “rank of colonel”.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Roni Rabin in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/health/covid-erectile-dysfunction.html" target="_blank">The Coronavirus Invades Cells in the Penis and Testicles of Monkeys, Researchers Discover</a>.
</p><blockquote>
About 10 to 20 percent of men infected with the coronavirus have symptoms linked to male genital tract dysfunction, studies have reported. Men infected with the virus are three to six times as likely as others to develop erectile dysfunction, believed to be an indicator of so-called long Covid. Patients have also reported symptoms such as testicular pain, reduced sperm counts and reduced sperm quality, decreased fertility and hypogonadism, a condition in which the testes produce insufficient amounts of testosterone, leading to low sex drive, sexual dysfunction and reduced fertility.... Even if just a small fraction of men experience such complications after a coronavirus infection, millions may suffer from impaired sexual and reproductive health in the aftermath of the pandemic, simply because the virus has infected so many people around the world, Dr. Hope warned.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Daniel Teng in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/pcr-sales-soared-in-wuhan-before-first-official-covid-19-cases-publicised-report_4032361.html" target="_blank">PCR Sales Soared in Wuhan Before 1st Official COVID-19 Cases: Report</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The firm tracked the sales of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests over several years, revealing an almost 50 percent increase between 2018 to 2019 - the year before the COVID-19 outbreak spread across the world.... The study was carried out via an analysis of 1,716 procurement contracts from 2007 to the end of 2019. It also identified a "notable, significan, and abnormal" amount of PCR equipment purchases in 2019 from Wuhan-based institutions such as the People's Liberation Army Airborne Army Hospital (May 2019), The Wuhan Institute of Virology (November 2019), the Wuhan University of Science and Technology (October 2019), and the Hubei Province Districts Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (May-December 2019).</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/nih-gain-of-function-statement-on-ecohealth-wuhan-lab-inadvertently-reveals-cover-up_4070521.html" target="_blank">NIH Gain-of-Function Statement on EcoHealth, Wuhan Lab Inadvertently Reveals Coverup</a>.
</p><blockquote>
As these admissions were made, NIH officials told Congress that the viruses being experimented on were too genetically distant to have possibly caused COVID-19. But the NIH failed to tell Congress that Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, the orgainization through which Fauci was funding the Wuhan Institute, has kept a large number of unknown viruses in its possession. And only those with access to these viruses know what has been done with them or exactly how genertically close to COVID-19 they actually are. Additionally, the Wuhan Institute deleted its entire database of over 22,000 previously unreported virus samples on Sept. 12, 2019. At exactly the same time that the NIH was making the gain-of-function admission, the agency quietly edited its website to redefine what constituted gain-of-function experiments. In doing so, the NIH narrowed its definition to focus only on known and established human transmission, instead of any potential dangers to humans.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/scientists-who-were-instrumental-to-covid-19-natural-origins-narrative-received-over-50-million-in-niaid-funding-in-2020-2021_4220769.html" target="_blank">Scientists Key to 'Natural Origin' Narrative Got $50 Million in Funding</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Emails released under Freedom of Information Act requests show that the scientists told the senior members of Fauci's teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab. Notably, despite their private concerns about the origins of the virus, the first draft of "Proximal Origin" was completed on the same day as the teleconference.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Dalibor Rohac at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/154286" target="_blank">Von der Leyen's Pfizer Texts - Why Transparency Isn't All Good</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is under fire for having lost her text messages with the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla. The charges are not entirely fair – and acting on them risks doing more harm than good. The EU's ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, said that the commission was guilty of "maladministration" when it failed to publicise the texts following a journalist's request. Now, a momentum is building in the European Parliament to hold the commission accountable.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Joseph Mercola at <i>meigutv.com</i>, <a href="https://www.meigutv.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/2022_01_30-mercola-the_plan_to_tag_us_for_the_new_world_order_slave_system.pdf" target="_blank">The Plan to Tag Us for the New World Order Slave System</a>.
</p><blockquote>
[Dr. Valdimir] Zelenko goes on to recount a relatively recent realization. Back in March 2020, he saw a MedCram video, episode 34, in which Dr. Roger Seheult explained some of the principles that he then ended up building his COVID protocol on. Seheult specifically quoted a paper that explained the functioning of zinc ionophores. That mechanism is what Zelenko relied upon when developing his own protocol. However, he didn’t realize until December 2021 that the author of that central paper was Dr. Ralph Baric. Why does that matter? Zelenko explains: “In 1999, Ralph Baric, funded by the U.S. government, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, figured out how to take an animal virus and have it be able to infect other species, different animals, in other words, cross-species infection. In 2015, the same Dr. Ralph Baric, and Dr. Zhengli [at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China], funded by the National Institutes of Health, figured out how to make a corona bat virus infect human beings, and augmented its lethality to human lives. That was in 2015. But in 2010, Baric published that paper that I'm referring to. So, the development of the weapon happened in stages, but before it was unleashed onto the human population, or the development of it being able to infect human beings, an antidote was made. Research paid for by the government was published.... And then, when the pandemic arrived, doctors like myself, out of necessity, came up with creative solutions, based — in my case, unknowingly — on this work. And immediately, that information was marginalized and suppressed, and doctors were deplatformed for advocating for it. So, the government who made the bomb also knew about the solution. And the reason why is they didn't want to die. The stakeholders here don't want their families to die. But for you and for me, they have a different agenda.”</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Raffi Khatchadourian in NEW YORKER, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/surviving-the-crackdown-in-xinjiang" target="_blank">Ghost Walls</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Xinjiang’s insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam, which emphasizes mysticism, not politics. At the time of the September 11th attacks, there was no terrorist violence to speak of in the region. But Osama bin Laden’s operation, planned across the border in Afghanistan, put a new and urgent frame around the old anxieties. Chinese authorities drew up a long list of incidents that they claimed were examples of jihad, and made their case to the U.S. State Department. Many of the incidents were impossible to verify, or to distinguish from nonpolitical violence. In China, mass attacks—with knives, axes, or even improvised explosives—are startlingly common, and often have nothing to do with ethnic unrest.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Eva Xiao & Jonathan Cheng in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xinjiang-crackdown-reaps-millions-of-dollars-in-assets-for-the-state-11632494787" target="_blank">Beijing Seizes Millions in Uyghur Assets</a>.
</p><blockquote>
One of the properties put up for auction was a four-story building in the western city of Kashgar, adjacent to the city's most important landmark, the nearly 600-year-old Id Kah Mosque, The building was owned by a wealthy Uyghur exporter named Abdujelil Helil. Once praised by the Xinjiang government as an "excellent builder of socialism with Chinese characteristics," Mr. Helil was arrested in 2017 and charged with financing terrorist activities. The next year he was sentenced to 14 years in prison and stripped of $11 million in personal assets.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Josh Chin in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaked-documents-detail-xi-jinpings-extensive-role-in-xinjiang-crackdown-11638284709" target="_blank">Xi's Xinjiang Role Detailed in Leaks</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Copies of the documents, some marked top secret, describe internal speeches delivered by Mr. Xi and other senior party leaders regarding circumstances in Xinjiang between 2014 and 2017, the period when the assimilation campaign was conceived and launched. The documents show Mr. Xi warning about the dangers of religious influence and unemployment among minorities, and emphasizing the importance of "population proportion," or the balance between minorities and Han Chinese, for maintaining control in the region.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Sayragul Sauytbay in HARPER'S (Haaretz), <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/uighur-xinjiang-uygur-autonomous-region-of-china/" target="_blank">At the Mind's Limits</a>.
</p><blockquote>
During the day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, inmates had to learn Chinese, sing party songs, confess their crimes and moral offenses, and recite Communist Party propaganda slogans like "Thank you to the Communist Party," "I am Chinese," and "I love Xi Jinping." We received three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soup and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant. Refusal brought punishment. There was no medical treatment, and they gave us pills that they told us prevented diseases, but the nurses secretly told me that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them. Some prisoners who took the pills were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and there were rumors that men became sterile.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
STRATEGY & TACTICS QUARTERLY, <a href="https://shop.strategyandtacticspress.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=STQ16" target="_blank">China The Next War</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghAqqPOWnb_-IHwd5f-y72rcseuidjuK7Xpq4FFfguXzKW-DlsgYsY1S-QGVJMvK0HqnijbSKA08p15FkEINAL51zqqmNpJ0op1aZkblc-fueHepuPVvsmgB9gfDXV46h9ADCNyfvi5VjaoxzIII7obVyjQbBlc97K96zMawYymXU5hsMxpK7PrjMJAA=s400" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="309" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghAqqPOWnb_-IHwd5f-y72rcseuidjuK7Xpq4FFfguXzKW-DlsgYsY1S-QGVJMvK0HqnijbSKA08p15FkEINAL51zqqmNpJ0op1aZkblc-fueHepuPVvsmgB9gfDXV46h9ADCNyfvi5VjaoxzIII7obVyjQbBlc97K96zMawYymXU5hsMxpK7PrjMJAA=s320" width="247" /></a></div>
It is not uncommon for about a fifth of the adult population of a village or city neighborhood that comes under focused investigation to be "disappeared" within four months. The investigative techniques include the "Becoming Relatives" program, which sends CCP cadre to live in Uyghur homes for weeks or months. The program is officially described as "mapping the province's ideological territory family by family." It rose out of an April 2017 decision to "actively mobilize the masses to participate in the battle against terrorism." According to the few reports smuggled out, living conditions are harsh. Internees are required to study Mandarin Chinese and laws regarding Islam and politics. They are required to learn at least 3,000 Chinese characters before release. Coercive secularization is standard practice - per the official slogan "[t]here is no religion, the government and the party will take care of you" - with internees continually pressured to renounce Islam. Those considered to be especially extremist are forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
ECONOMIST, <a href="https://www.economist.com/business/chinas-communist-authorities-reinvent-state-capitalism/21806311" target="_blank">The Party Capitalists</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Private companies with state-connected investors increased from 14.1% of all registered capital in China in 2000 to 33.5% in 2019, according to a paper by Chong-En Bai of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Chang-Tai Hsieh of the Booth School of Business in Chicago, and two other academics. While the number of state-controlled investors has not changed much, each has done vastly more business with private firms. As a result, today's Chinese corporate landscape might best be described as a sprawling complex of state-private commerce. More than 130,000 private companies had formed joint ventures with state-owned companies by 2019, up from 45,000 at the turn of the century. The jump in private companies with state investment since then has accounted for nearly all of China's increase in new registered capital.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Peter Schweizer in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/elite-capture_4290608.html" target="_blank">Elite Capture</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The idea is simple enough: By tempting another country's elite with money, access, and favors, you move them to see their interests and China's interests as intertwined or even the same. The Chinese are not subtle about this, and they barely try to hide it. They practice it around the world, most notably in Africa in pursuit of their Belt and Road Initiative. But elites in Western democracies have proven to be a soft touch, particularly among nongovernmental elites.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Eva Fu in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/relative-of-shanghai-doctor-reveals-details-about-forced-organ-harvesting_3682420.html" target="_blank">Relative of Shanghai Doctor Reveals Details About Forced Organ Harvesting</a>.
</p><blockquote>
While Lu, Zhou, and her husband were sitting together one day, "her husband told me in person that she went to a military hospital to do [organ transplant surgery]. He also said that it's quick money and the sum is quite large," Lu told [the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong] in an interview. "He said, 'you should get people over from outside,' and that 'this is in really good quality, all fresh and alive," Lu said. The word "alive" had puzzled Lu at the time, he said.... Zhou, the Shanghai doctor, had performed several organ removal surgeries but later stopped due to fear, Lu said. "She said that she was having nightmares for doing this." Lu said. Lu prodded his sister-in-law, Zhou Yu, to reveal more details about what she knew of her sister's work. She relayed that when Zhou Qing performed the operations, people who were not sedated "would scream with all their might in sheer agony." "She said anesthesia cannot be used in every place, and the area where it [the organ] is needed cannot be anesthetized," Zhou said.</blockquote>
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William Zheng in SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3086011/after-six-decades-countdown-vote-chinas-draft-civil-code?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=enlz-scmp_china&utm_content=20200526&MCUID=7f31b7a720&MCCampaignID=a7ad5ef19a&MCAccountID=3775521f5f542047246d9c827&tc=15" target="_blank">After Six Decades, Countdown to Vote on China's Draft Civil Code</a>.
</p><blockquote>
China has tried and failed four times since 1949 to pass a civil code. The first two attempts, in 1956 and 1962, were abandoned amid political turmoil. Party veterans Peng Zhen and Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, tried again in 1979, but shelved the plans after they reckoned that the country’s rapid societal and economic transformations made the goal unattainable. The fourth attempt launched in the early 2000s was also shelved.</blockquote>
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Embassy of China in Belgium at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/148731" target="_blank">Right of Reply: China Does Not Harass Uighurs in Europe</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Chinese government and Chinese people have the most say on issues concerning Xinjiang. In the face of severe threats of terrorism and extremism, the anti-terrorism and de-radicalisation efforts taken by the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in accordance with the law have effectively curbed the momentum of frequent terrorist activities. Xinjiang has not seen violent terrorist incidents for more than three consecutive years, which protect to the greatest extent the rights of life, health and development of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. The local government's policy and measures receive wholehearted support from people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, and has been commended by the international community.</blockquote>
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Keith Bradsher & Amy Qin in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/world/asia/china-muslims-sanya-hainan.html" target="_blank">China's Crackdown on Muslims Extends to a Resort Island</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Signs on shops and homes that read "Allahu akbar" - "God is greatest" in Arabic - have been covered with foot-wide stickers promoting the "China Dream," a nationalistic official slogan. The Chinese characters for halal, meaning permissible under Islam, have been removed from restaurant signs and menus. The authorities have closed two Islamic schools and have twice tried to bar female students from wearing head scarves.... The new restrictions in Sanya, a city on the resort island of Hainan, mark a reversal in government policy. Until several years ago, officials supported the Utsuls' Islamic identity and their ties with Muslim countries, according to local religious leaders and residents, who spoke on condition of anonmymity to avoid government retaliation.</blockquote>
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Dhondup Rekjong in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-war-on-tibetan-buddhism-lanugage-china-monks-education-unity-sixth-plenum-11637269866" target="_blank">Xi Jinping's War on Tibetan Buddhism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In September the government sponsored a conference at the Qinghai Buddhist Academy in Xining - the dlargest city on the Tibetan plateau - to discuss continuing efforts to force monasteries to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese. More than 500 religious figures and government officials from Tibetan and Chinese universities, academies and other educational organizations attended. At least 35 academic papers on the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism were presented. The ultimate goal is for future lamas and monks to learn Buddhism only in Mandarin - paving the way for the erasure of the Tibetan language. Tibetan leader Sithar, deputy director of the Office of the Central Tibet Work Coordination Group, gave a short speech in which he framed the effort as a way to promote "oneness" among Chinese ethic groups.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Kathrin Hille in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a12d8bad-523b-48ec-8433-b48d2d4e4b88" target="_blank">Kazakhstan Crisis Tests China's Hands-off Approach</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In Kazakhstan, China is an outsized economic presence as the country’s largest trading partner and a big investor in infrastructure projects. But when a political crisis erupted on January 2, with demonstrations that soon turned violent, Beijing seemingly stood aside. It was not until a week later, after the bloody suppression of the unrest, that Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, publicly announced that Beijing was ready to increase “law enforcement and security co-operation” with Kazakhstan and help oppose external interference. Mukhtar Tleuberdi, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister, indicated on Tuesday that Beijing may have offered security support early on, but was rebuffed by the Kazakh authorities who argued that there was no legal basis for accepting troops sent from countries other than the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led bloc Kazakhstan belongs to.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Laura Pitel in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7cfbf1c9-d7e5-4329-9e8d-7dfb031b1e71" target="_blank">Putin Role in Kazakh Unrest Dents Erdogan's Pan-Turkic Ambitions</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In addition to building influence across the Balkans, the Arab world and Africa over the past decade, Turkey has significantly increased trade with Central Asia. Yet compared with the influence of China and Russia in the region, Ankara’s role remains “largely insignificant”, said Alp Coker, head of the Turkey desk at the London-based consultancy GPW. “Turkey never really established any military, political or economic influence to a meaningful extent,” he said. The exception, Coker said, was Azerbaijan, where Turkey is not only a key partner on energy and trade but also helped Baku to win a surprise victory in a war with Armenia in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That success, along with the upheaval in Kazakhstan, has spurred suggestions from some senior former Turkish military officers that the Turkic Council should have a military dimension.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Ian Ona Johnson in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/putins-myths-about-the-soviets-and-world-war-ii-11588975346" target="_blank">Putin's Myths About the Soviets and World War II</a>.
</p><blockquote>
After victory in World War I, the Allies sought to demilitarize Germany. To avoid Allied inspection teams, the German military formed a secret partnership with the U.S.S.R. in 1922. They established a network of military bases, industrial facilities and research laboratories inside the Soviet Union to rearm both states. There could have been few doubts on the Soviet side about the militaristic intentions of their German partners. On the weapons ranges at their joint bases, officers fired at dummies dressed in Czech and Polish uniforms. German tank prototypes tested in the Soviet Union were carefully designed to fit French and Belgian railway cars.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Dimitri Simes in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-russia-went-wrong/" target="_blank">How Russia Went Wrong</a>.
</p><blockquote>
[Wayne] Merry told <i>TAC</i> that, even after the failed putsch, few in Washington believed that the Soviet Union was going to collapse anytime soon. As an example, he revealed that in late October 1991, a very heated argument erupted between George Kolt, the CIA’s top Soviet analyst, and Edward Hewett, the leading Soviet expert at the NSC. The reason for the confrontation was a memo Kolt had authored in which he argued that Ukraine could break away from the Soviet Union within five years, a notion Hewett rejected as absurd. “When I found out about this conversation, I hit the ceiling, because both the embassy in Moscow and our consulate in Kyiv had been telling Washington for some time that Ukraine was going to be independent in five weeks, not five years,” Merry said. “It was quite evident that no one was paying attention to these warnings.”</blockquote>
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</p><p>
George Weigel in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-orthodox-church-and-ukraine-christianization-greek-catholic-prince-vladimir-great-empire-invasion-11643296236" target="_blank">The Russian Orthodox Church and Ukraine</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Thus in 1946, Russian Orthodoxy's leadership, working with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, engineered a contrived Sobor, or church council, to liquidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which had become a safe-deposit box of Ukrainian cultural identity and national aspiration. The previous year, the Ukrainian church's leadership had been arrested. Those who weren't murdered were condemned to Gulag camps. The coerced "council," virtually at gunpoint, acquiesced to an ecclesiastical variation on classic imperialism, as the Russian Orthodox Church absorbed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which ceased to exist legally. That dissidents among the Ukrainian clergy and faithful, without parish churches or other institutions, maintained the world's largest underground religious community for the next 45 years was little less than miraculous. Today, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is playing a significant role in building a religiously tolerant, democratic Ukraine.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Andrew Kramer in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/world/europe/russia-ukraine-orthodox-church.html" target="_blank">Also at Stake in Ukraine: The Future of Two Orthodox Churches</a>.
</p><blockquote>
If Ukraine prevails against the Russian invasion, the Moscow church will all but certainly be ejected. If Russia wins, the Ukrainian church is unlikely to survive inside Ukraine. Prizes in the struggle include holy sites such as the Monastery of the Caves, a sprawling complex of churches in Kyiv overlooking the Dnieper River, whose golden onion domes were glistening in the sun on a recent afternoon as artillery shells exploded across the capital. In the caves, in grottos, lie the remains of the earliest saints of Slavic Orthodoxy, control over which would symbolize pre-eminence in this branch of Christianity. After Ukraine’s independence, the Moscow patriarchy retained access to the site, while the Ukrainian government formally owned it as a museum. The branch of the church in Ukraine subordinate to Moscow also enjoys the loyalty of a majority of city, town and village churches in Ukraine, though the newly independent Ukrainian church has had success encouraging parishes to switch allegiance. Those efforts so angered Mr. Putin that he warned in 2018 that it could “turn into a heavy dispute, if not bloodshed.”</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Rebecca Abrams in FINANCIAL TIMES in Nicholas Jubber's book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0b648cfd-61f1-4672-b40d-96a72b38288e" target="_blank">The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales</a>.
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Khudiakov was certainly anti-monarchy but his real passion, according to Jubber, was gathering folk tales from rural peasants in response to a “growing awareness of the unwritten cultural treasures stored for many centuries in places that had been ignored by the elites”. Equally passionate about adult literacy, while he was in exile he set up a school, began compiling a Yakut/Russian dictionary and, before his morale and wits finally deserted him, was gathering tales, songs, riddles and proverbs from the skomorokhi, the local storytellers. Khudiakov was part of a wider “folk cult” spreading across continental Europe in the 19th century, which sought to preserve indigenous stories and celebrate national traditions — also the motivation for the Grimm brothers in Germany — and which, in its darker incarnations, became a seed bed for communism and fascism in the 20th.</blockquote>
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Ben Hall in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2c4174dd-cc95-4938-8d88-29864887aed1" target="_blank">A Russian Soul With a Heart in Ukraine</a>.
</p><blockquote>
After Moscow annexed Crimea and instigated a separatist war in the Donbas, Utkin set up a tech cluster to support Ukraine’s armed forces. His prominent role cost him his Russian businesses, which were expropriated. But his mother and sister still live in Russia, as do many of his friends. Like many in Kyiv, Utkin struggles to believe that Moscow could launch a full-blown offensive against Ukraine. But he does think Russian president Vladimir Putin is on a mission to recreate an empire. “The Russian empire cannot exist without Kyiv. It used to be the mother of Russian cities. It is so important for the Russian people.” Moscow also cannot afford Ukraine to succeed economically or politically, Utkin says, because it would show Russians an alternative to authoritarianism is possible. “I think they are afraid about the success of Ukraine because it could change the parameters of values. It would put people at the top of the pyramid, not a tsar or a general secretary.”</blockquote>
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WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ukraine-was-betrayed-in-budapest-russia-vladimir-putin-us-uk-volodymyr-zelensky-nuclear-weapons-11645657263?st=ydc1vmfiaami6fs&reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter" target="_blank">How Ukraine Was Betrayed in Budapest</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The event was the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which the U.S., Great Britain and Russia offered security assurances to the nation that had won independence when the Soviet Union dissolved. That was the halcyon post-Cold War era when history had supposedly ended. Some 1,800 nuclear weapons were on Ukrainian territory, including short-range tactical weapons and air-launched cruise missiles. The U.S. wanted fewer countries to have fewer nukes, and U.S. credibility was at its peak. The memo begins with the U.S., U.K. and Russia noting that Ukraine had committed “to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time.” Then the three countries “confirm” a half-dozen commitments to Ukraine. The most important was to “reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” They also pledged to “refrain from economic coercion” against Ukraine and to “seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine” in the event of an “act of aggression” against the country.</blockquote>
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Colin Thubron in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Marie Favereau's book, The Horde, and Shane McCausland's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/22/pleasure-domes-and-postal-routes/" target="_blank">The Mongol Century</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The Mongols' terror went before them. In 1240 the panicked aristocracy of the old prince-dom of Kiev abandoned the city, which was half destroyed. Twenty years later brought the grudging submission of Novgorod, the last state to be coerced, and the subjection of Russian lands was complete. Thereafter the Horde imposed its burden of taxation and levies indirectly, assigning collection to the Russian princes, who sometimes prudently delivered their tribute away from the public gaze. The princes' collaboration in this system both entrenched their own dynasties and reduced local antagonism toward the Horde. In another astute move, Favereau writes, the Mongols exempted the Orthodox clergy from taxation, and so enrolled the favorable influence of a submissive church. "Thus there was no permanent Mongol administrative presence among the Russian population, and the political subordination of the principalities was relatively invisible on a day-to-day basis...." But this is almost too rosy a picture. If their dues were not paid, the Mongols were ruthless.</blockquote>
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Janan Ganesh in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d1c99cbb-3494-45dc-87bc-1b76d5fca77b" target="_blank">The Incoherence at the Heart of Anti-Westernism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A DC-to-Berlin show of unity and resolve is not the same thing as ultimate victory. There is no guarantee it will even last. But it does expose the central glitch in so much anti-western thought. In the telling of its most devoted enemies, the west is an all-powerful oppressor, and a decadent pushover. It foists its values on other parts of the world with violent certitude, and fails to stand up for its way of life due to a fog of post-Christian self-doubt. It is a monolith — the west — and a paper tiger that will come apart at the folds any minute now. It is arrogantly universalist and cringing in its relativism. It is Napoleon crossing the Alps and it is Jane Fonda in Hanoi.</blockquote>
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Michael Meyer-Resende at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/opinion/154461" target="_blank">The End of Unrealism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
What happened on 24 February was not due to Nato or anything the West has done. Sure, mistakes have been made and much could have been done differently. But thinking that Putin is just a product of the West's actions is a form of imperialist thinking: He is not a puppet on strings that moves this or that way, depending on what the West does. No, Putin always had agency. He was a KGB agent shocked by the fall of the Soviet Union, and who enriched himself in the Russian privatisation Wild West bonanza of the 1990s. His first act as president? Destroying the city of Grozny. He ended the dysfunctional and chaotic pluralism of the Russian 1990s — to create an authoritarian regime.</blockquote>
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Sumantra Maitra in NATIONAL INTEREST, <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/" target="_blank">Rise of a Counter-Elite</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Trump, for the first time, started speaking in the crude language of amoral power, which should have given realists some satisfaction. The only academic realist to come out in support of candidate Trump was Randall Schweller in <i>Foreign Affairs</i>, and almost no policy realists other than Nadia Schadlow in the early days of his administration, and Douglas Macgregor and William Ruger in the final days, joined the Trump administration. In fact, Trump, for all his bluster, was constantly betrayed by his own administration, by the people he himself hired, including John Bolton, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster, all of whom repeatedly opposed the president's retrenchment instincts from the Middle East to Afghanistan.</blockquote>
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Walter Russell Mead in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sun-ever-sets-on-the-british-empire-11594076187" target="_blank">The Sun Ever Sets on the British Empire</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In some countries, corruption became a way of life. In others, the parliamentary systems the British left behind succumbed to military rule. In some, tribal, ethnic and religious rivalries led to civil wars and dictatorships. Yet for all the incompetence and corruption, nobody rejoined the British Empire. Hong Kong people may be feeling more than a little nostalgic this week, but independent peoples have managed to keep their longing for restored colonial rule well in check. Incorrruptible British civil servants and impeccably educated British technocrats are all very well, but people seem to like ruling themselves even if they don't do it in the British way.</blockquote>
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Norimitsu Onishi & Aida Alami in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/world/europe/france-election-muslims-islam-macron-zemmour-le-pen-pecresse.html" target="_blank">The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France</a>.
</p><blockquote>
France's wounded psyche is the invisible character in every one of Sabri Louatah's novels and the hit television series he wrote. He speaks of his "sensual, physical, visceral love" for the French language and of his attachment to his hometown in southeastern France, bathed in its distinctive light. He closely monitors the campaign for the upcoming presidential elections. But Mr. Louatah does all of that from Philadelphia, the city that he began considering home after the 2015 attacks in France by Islamist extremists, which killed scores of people and deeply traumatized the country.... "It's really the 2015 attacks that made me leave because I understood they were not going to forgive us," said Mr. Louatah, 38, the grandson of Muslim immigrants from Algeria. "When you live in a big Democratic city on the East Coast, you're more at peace than in Paris, where you're deep in the cauldron."</blockquote>
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Norimitsu Onishi in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/world/europe/france-elections-pecresse-great-replacement.html" target="_blank">In France, a Racist Conspiracy Theory Edges Into the Mainstream</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“Since 2010, there’s been a significant hardening by upper-middle-class voters against immigration and Islam, but we hadn’t seen its political effects yet,” Mr. Lebourg said. “So what we’re experiencing now is a tipping over of part of the middle-class and upper middle-class.” These voters are worried about issues like “wokisme” — the supposed contamination of France by “woke” American ideas on social justice that they see as overwrought political correctness. “It’s middle-class voters who care about ‘wokisme,’ while Le Pen’s working-class supporters are completely uninterested in that,” Mr. Lebourg said. The “great replacement” was conjured up by a French writer named Renaud Camus in 2010. In an interview in 2019, Mr. Camus bemoaned the fact that leading politicians had rejected the slogan. The slogan and his embrace of the far right had turned him into a pariah in France’s literary and media circles, forcing him to publish his own books. But in recent months, Mr. Camus has been invited back on television talk shows.</blockquote>
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Tony Barber in FINANCIAL TIMES on Colin Jones' book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/12f33c91-5b7b-45fa-a295-afdfea735eec" target="_blank">The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris</a>.
</p><blockquote>
For sure, Robespierre made clear in menacing speeches to the Convention and Jacobin Club on 8 Thermidor that he was contemplating an intensification of the Terror. He was obsessed with the notion that “corruption” had spread into France’s government organs as part of a “foreign plot” organised by William Pitt, the British prime minister. However, Robespierre spent the night of 8/9 Thermidor quietly in his lodgings on rue Saint-Honoré, a sign in Jones’s view that he probably intended to launch his purge in the near future, not in the next 24 hours. As for his rivals, they grasped the need to strike at Robespierre before he struck at them. The guillotining of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and other revolutionaries earlier in 1794 preyed on their minds. Yet they, too, had no master plan.... Jones departs from some accounts of 9 Thermidor by stressing the support offered by ordinary Parisians to Robespierre’s foes in the Convention. He argues that the people of Paris rose up not against the Terror but in defence of the gains of the revolution since 1789, perceived on 9 Thermidor as under threat from pro-Robespierre radicals at the Commune.</blockquote>
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Ferdinand Mount in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on David Bell's book, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/david-bell-charisma-democracys-demagogues/" target="_blank">Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution</a>.
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Curiously then, Weber, this infinitely thoughtful and skeptical observer of human affairs, had come to agree with the mountbank Napoleon III - who named himself emperor of France in 1852 - that "the nature of democracy is to personify itself in a man." When he was consulted about the writing of the Weimar Constitution of 1918-1919, he proposed the direct election of the German president. Charismatic leadership by a single man, he maintained, was essential to cement the people's loyalty and persuade them to accept the dull impersonal weight of modern bureaucracy, which was both universal and inescapable.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Alec Russell in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8084cae5-1e87-4b0f-8490-c0f10e742b05" target="_blank">Albania PM Tells Balkan Leaders 'Never Give Up' on EU Dream</a>.
</p><blockquote>
When Albania began its accession process nearly two decades ago the key was to move away from Balkan nationalism, but "today, our problem is not Balkan nationalisms, it's EU nationalisms. What's keeping us from [joining the EU]... is the influence of EU nationalisms on the political life of the important EU countries." Of the "western Balkan six", Albania along with Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia are candidates to join the EU, while Kosovo and Bosnia are potential candidates.</blockquote>
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Tunku Varadarajan in WALL STREET JOURNAL on Lea Ypi's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-book-review-a-childhood-in-communist-albania-11643989685" target="_blank">Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Millions of people graduated from communism illiterate in the ways of modern finance were sitting ducks for swindlers, who bankrolled political parties on the side. So while her family "equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, of the right to make mistakes and learn from them," Ms Ypi equated post-communist liberalism with "broken promises, the destruction of solidarity... [and] selfish enrichment." She writes all of this while teaching in the U.K., where liberalism, of a more orderly variety, flourishes. So it's perplexing that the negative effects of a few transient years of democratic chaos - when Albanians stumbled into the light after 45 years of pitch-darkness - should count for more than the systematic crushing of a people by a tyrant for over four decades. What isn't open to question, however - even as we agonize over her adult politics - is the sweetness and charm of Ms. Ypi's own story.</blockquote>
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Richard Milne in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ccec6995-3029-4f47-a553-328dd7646411" target="_blank">Sweden Dispatches Troops to Strategic Island as Russia Steps Up Baltic Activity</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The three Baltic countries, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which are members of Nato, had long urged Sweden to take the security of Gotland more seriously, and Swedish forces - together with a large contingent of US troops - held their biggest exercise for decades in 2017, including a simulated attack on Gotland.</blockquote>
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Richard Milne in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8cfa6212-4270-4962-a200-949a868c7cbe" target="_blank">Police Chief Warns of Gang Terror Threat to Sweden Democracy</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Swedish police estimate there are 60 so-called "vulnerable areas" across the country, where a majority of the population is either foreign-born or has two foreign parents and Mr Thornberg said letting such suburbs develop had been a "failure of Swedish society.... When we arrest someone or when some of them are getting shot at, there's maybe 10-15 men wanting to volunteer to take a higher-up role in the gang," he said.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Richard Milne in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b02f8c3c-4516-4137-b5d1-31a48f3227a6" target="_blank">Sweden's Populists Shift Political Balance</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Long shunned by all other poltical groups owing to their roots in the neo-Nazi movement, the Sweden Democrats have been brought in from the cold by the centre-right parties as their long-time focus on immigration and law and order has come to dominate the political agenda. Sweden has become a European hotspot for shootings and bombings as part of a gang crime wave.</blockquote>
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Richard Milne in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/151491a0-1923-4e0e-8a6b-375a1808048c" target="_blank">Swedish ESG Investors' Disdain for Defense Leaves Latvia Uneasy</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Latvia's defence minister used an interview with the Financial Times to eviscerate GErmany for its "immoral and hypocritical" relationship with Moscow, daring to say what many in eastern Europe feel. But the Latvian deputy prime minister also took aim at a more unusual target in the same interview: Swedish banks and investors. He told how he had seen an email months earlier from an unidentified Swedish bank - Swedbank and SEB dominate Latvia's financial sector - refusing to give a loan to a Latvian defence company due to "ethical standards". That follows a pattern of banks and investors, not just in Sweden but across Europe, refusing to back defence groups as it goes against their environmental, social and governance policies. Pabriks was apoplectic. "I got so angry. How can we develop our country? Is national defence not ethical? How is the Swedish defence industry financed - by Martians?" he asked.</blockquote>
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Peggy Hollinger in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/31933a53-c5ad-4633-826c-adc945f62207" target="_blank">EU Must Think Twice Before Branding Defence Industry Harmful</a>.
</p><blockquote>
"It is a problem if we are defined as not socially viable," said ASD president Alessandro Profumo, who is also chief executive of Italy's defence champion Leonardo. "Without security we cannot have a sustainable society." The proposals are already having an impact. Jan Pie, ASD secretary-general, cites examples of banks cutting ties with defence companies in Germany, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. One Belgian group has even had to pay employees from non-EU bank accounts, he says.</blockquote>
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Ed Ballard in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/swedens-seb-changes-course-on-defense-stocks-as-war-tests-esg-rules-11646253384" target="_blank">Sweden's SEB Reverses Ban on Investment in Defense Companies</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Sweden-based financial-services company Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB said it would permit some of its funds to buy shares of weapons makers and defense companies, reversing a position it adopted just a year ago as part of its commitment to investing based on environmental, social and governance principles.</blockquote>
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Richard Milne in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/83deaf3e-6db9-43dd-a2dc-5e9493265c2d" target="_blank">Majority of Finns Back Joining Nato for First Time, Poll Reveals</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Analysts said the increase in support for Nato in Finland and Sweden represented one of the major negative consequences for Russian president Vladimir Putin from his war against Ukraine. "The unthinkable might start to become thinkable," ex-Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt said about the Finnish poll. Russia's foreigh ministry repeated last week that "Finland's accession to Nato would have serious military and political repercussions".</blockquote>
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WALL STREET JOURNAL: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-energy-masochism-russia-vladimir-putin-europe-11634675580?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1&utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--erf3aZ2DwR_Ok1DW-b8CCFz36NGQUvvZ-42B354IH99KTeCX0Qd0WlWWc--eF9oYbkvZ_" target="_blank">A Lesson in Energy Masochism</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A decade ago, multinational energy companies including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and TotalEnergies were exploring Europe's unconventional gas deposits with ambitions to repeat the U.S. shale boom. Then protests against fracking erupted across the continent, and one by one European governments surrendered to Russian energy dominance. Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen blamed Russia for fueling the fracking opposition. "Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations - environmental organizations working against shale gas - to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas," he noted in 2014.</blockquote>
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Peter Fritzsche in NEW YORK TIMES on Harald Jahner's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/books/review/aftermath-harald-jahner.html" target="_blank">Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955</a>.
</p><blockquote>
As long as they remained in Germany, foreigners aroused the suspicion of Germans fearful of the revenge they might take. Neighbors were just as mistrustful of millions of German refugees who eventually settled in their towns. For years, “expellees” remained strangers in the West. But over time, Jähner argues, unwelcome refugees “de-provincialized” hometowns, mixed up local identities and caused old-timers to abandon dialect. They contributed to a melting pot of hard-working people anxious to make their way.</blockquote>
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Harold Holzer in WALL STREET JOURNAL on Roger Lowensetein's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ways-and-means-review-financing-the-civil-war-11646090288" target="_blank">Ways and Means</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the end, the Union's vastly superior wealth, industry and appetite for innovation won the war, as surely as its generals and politicians. Ballasted by a revolutionary new national currency and new banking systems, along with the first-ever income tax, the Union overwhelmed a "cloistered" Confederacy that was whipsawed by crushing inflation and supply-chain shortages severe enough to ignite homefront riots.... [T]he South's fatal error was that the society for which it sacrificed so much life and teasure - plantations served by the enslaved - was not only offensive morally but unsustainable economically. Conversely, Lincoln's vision of a "new nation" promised that the Union would "afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." Given such a disparity, Mr. Lowenstein is right: The war was over before it began.</blockquote>
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Jeffrey Gettleman & Suhasini Raj in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/world/asia/india-christians-attacked.html?auth=login-google" target="_blank">Arrests, Beatings and Secret Prayers: Inside the Persecution of India's Christians</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The first victims of the Modi era were Muslims. Dozens were publicly lynched by Hindu extremists claiming to protect cows, which many Hindus consider sacred. Then attacks against Christians started ticking up — the Evangelical Fellowship of India says anti-Christian hate crimes have doubled since 2014. So, too, have economic pincer movements. Hindu nationalist lawyers and activists have filed scores of complaints against Christian charities through an organization called the Legal Rights Observatory, starving them of funds and shutting many down.A few years ago, after Catholic churches in New Delhi, the capital, had been vandalized, Christian leaders pleaded with Mr. Modi for help. He was disinterested, mocking them and never addressing the attacks, according to three clergymen who attended an important meeting at the prime minister’s residence in December 2014. “He acted like a don,” said Father Dominic Emmanuel, a former official with the Delhi Catholic Church who now lives in Vienna.</blockquote>
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Sadanand Dhume in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-may-face-a-population-implosion-fertility-rate-replacement-levels-children-11640289956" target="_blank">India May Face a Population Implosion</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In 1960 the average Indian woman would bear six children during her lifetime. By 2005 this had fallen to three. Urban India now has a fertility rate of 1.6, comparable to the European Union. And unlike China, whose government enforced a draconian one-child policy, India has achieved this largely without coercion. A harsh sterilization drive by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s led to her crushing electoral defeat in 1977. No Indian government tried to force the matter again.</blockquote>
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Srdja Trifkovic in CHRONICLES, <a href="https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/jihad-undefeated/" target="_blank">Jihad Undefeated</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The surrender of Afghanistan’s National Army, lavishly armed, equipped, and trained by the U.S. for years, had been quietly negotiated and arranged under the noses of those same American officials who had kept telling us that Kabul would be no Saigon and that, come what may, there would be a decent interval before the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s regime. Afghanistan will now revert to its usual state of Islamic unpleasantness.</blockquote>
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Titus Techera in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/" target="_blank">A Connecticut Yankee in Afghanistan</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the end the catastrophe that engulfs Hank comes from religion, just as surely as in our misadventures in Afghanistan. Hank is as atheistic as our elites, as contemptuous of religion, as blind therefore to its powers. He sees only what he despises in the English, he has no respect for what they manage to accomplish in very harsh circumstances. But they know who they are far more than he does, not leasdt since he has no loyalties. His fascination with the scientific power to change things, to be free because he is nothing but what he makes himself out to be, has a moral core: Hank wants to make people in his own image because it's the only way to prove to himself that he is right, that he knows the truth, that his dissatisfaction with the world is justified. He seems selfless, an utterly public man, his every action a benefaction to others, concerned with himself only when he is attacked and just to defend himself. Yet this makes him tyrannic since he can never leave people alone.</blockquote>
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Andres Schipani in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e8bb48cb-6255-4d66-b29d-353b211f06ec" target="_blank">Somaliland in 30-year Fight for Recognition</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The former British protectorate of Somaliland became independent on June 26 1960. Five days later it united with the former Italian colony of Somalia, only to break away in 1991 after the fall of Siad Barre. While Somalia collapsed into civil war and has been besieged by al-Shabaab jihadis, Somaliland has delivered relative peace and stability to its 5.7m people. It has its own elected bicameral parliament, drafts its own army, prints its own currency and issues its own passports. "We've been trying to be a functioning democratic country for 30 years but it seems that to get the world's attention you need to be a troublemaker," said Ayan Mahamoud, Somaliland's former representative in the UK.</blockquote>
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Maxwell Carter in WALL STREET JOURNAL on Neil Faulkner's book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/empire-and-jihad-british-colonialism-sudan-egypt-review-north-african-collision-11633119079" target="_blank">Empire and Jihad</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Mr. Faulkner covers the unhappy feud between Speke and Burton, as well as Stanley's sensational search for Livingstone and crowning geographical discoveries. Tim Jeal's biographies of Livingstone, Stanley and their peers remain the gold standard, yet I found Mr. Faulkner's account lost little by its remarkable concision. The ambience of the tribal states that their expeditions relied upon for safe passage did not encourage dallying. During his stay in Buganda as the guest of its lunatic ruler, Mutesa, Speke witnessed frequent executions and indiscriminate terror. Just as Mr. Faulkner skewers apologist mythmaking, he does not accept countervailing fantasies. "Those who stand with the oppressed against the oppressor do themselves no favours by turning local tyrants into resistance heroes," he suggests. Mutesa and his ilk, for whom selling fellow Africans was lucrative and expedient, were, in fact, "instrumental in the spread of the slave trade across the continent."</blockquote>
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Donn LeVie Jr in FRAUD, <a href="https://www.fraud-magazine.com/article.aspx?id=4295013013" target="_blank">Cobalt Blues</a>.
</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiiN-nodf6dyp_Fhmx177KhTDRaTzkf6eI74kDb4yVIYNz2frlijpK-a2xSMYJ6n9NbsVi8SqYoeD83qN0ZraGxW9Doz0966oP5nMkxSbpCJTObdJyE-ZEYMeVV1GrM68UifzmBthUyKOCWbXAEx44JXoaB0oDJjrlVoaWQs74a-ZzYzCbOywRUiE0hcQ=s400" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="308" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiiN-nodf6dyp_Fhmx177KhTDRaTzkf6eI74kDb4yVIYNz2frlijpK-a2xSMYJ6n9NbsVi8SqYoeD83qN0ZraGxW9Doz0966oP5nMkxSbpCJTObdJyE-ZEYMeVV1GrM68UifzmBthUyKOCWbXAEx44JXoaB0oDJjrlVoaWQs74a-ZzYzCbOywRUiE0hcQ=s320" width="246" /></a></div>
From extraction through electronic consumer products, China is present in every step of the value chain. Ninety percent of China's cobalt supply comes from Kolwezi, which is known in environmental circles rather sadly as "the lunks of Congo." Several factors contribute to China's dominance as a partner in extracting DRC cobalt. Former DRC President Joseph Kabila promoted a modernization initiative, called La Modernite that involved making natural resource extraction available to foreign companies to obtain the necessary financing for the country's industrialization. Kabila saw that China's unparalleled rapid modernization embodied what he'd envisioned for the DRC. Another influential factor was the absence of the ideological motivation that often accompanied demands by Western countries in exchange for mineral extraction rights.</blockquote>
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Jon Seidel in SUN-TIMES, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/2/15/22935872/chicago-looting-rioting-james-massey-facebook-live-august-2020" target="_blank">Chicago Man Admits Inciting City Rioting in August 2020</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Massey also used the name “Steve Nash” online, according to the complaint. And on Aug. 10, 2020, someone sent a screenshot of a “Steve Nash” Facebook Live video to the Chicago Police Department, it said. The screenshot included text that read, “ATTENTION ATTENTION LOTTING [sic] START AT 12am tonight … WE WILL NOT BE F---ING UP THE SOUTH SIDE EAST SIDE OR WEST SIDE DOWNTOWN AREA AND UP NORTH AREA ONLY BRING YA TOOLS SKI MASK AND GLOVES #LETSGOOOOO.” When the screenshot was taken, the video had been live for 31 minutes and 766 Facebook users were watching it, according to the complaint. Massey allegedly sent private Facebook messages to 40 people on Aug. 9, 2020, telling them to meet at 6300 S. Racine Ave. to go downtown together. Around 9:13 p.m., Massey also messaged another group, “WE LIE TOGETHER WE DIE TOGETHER.” Then, at 11:27 p.m., he posted a picture on Facebook with the caption, “Lets get ready to steal b----.”</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Ryan Houlihan at <i>inputmag.com</i>, <a href="https://www.inputmag.com/gaming/polybius-is-real-video-game-urban-legend" target="_blank">'Polybius' Is Real</a>.
</p><blockquote>
But today, as was the case in the '80s, people tend to be more suspicious of their own shadowy government than they are of corporations, whose motives are transparent (they want take your money). It doesn't help matters that the FBI indeed was conducting top-secret operations out of America's arcades. The Bureau's records indicate that the agency actually was monitoring and subsequently raiding arcades in the Portland area right around the time that stories of players collapsing in arcades had hit the mainstream media. In those days, arcades, which are naturally dark and maze-like, had seedy reputations as hotbeds of gambling, drug activity, and pickpockets looking to prey on teenagers. Though the extent to which arcades captured the public imagination was out of proportion with the actual issues in the establishments, some of that reputation was earned. Cabinets were being repurposed for gambling. People were selling weed in between rounds of Pac-Man. There are pickpockets wherever teenagers tend to gather — especially in the days before cell phones.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Claire Bushey in FINANCIAL TIMES on Rosa Brooks' book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d3423028-c2cb-4984-904e-8a39fbd345d0" target="_blank">Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City</a>.
</p><blockquote>
A critic of the US criminal justice system, Brooks was shocked by her own impulse in middle age to join a Washington police department programme that trains residents to become part-time officers, complete with gun, badge and full arrest powers. She was curious, bored and wanted a challenge that was "nothing at all like a faculty meeting". Her decision appalled her mother, the writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Author of immersion journalism classic <i>Nickled and Dimed</i>, Ehrenreich was a veteran of marches from the 1960s and 70s. She told her daughter when she applied, "The police are the enemy."</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Mitch Dudek in SUN-TIMES, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/2/21/22939276/chicago-police-department-officers-remarks-exit-papers" target="_blank">Cops' Parting Words</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“Bon Voyage!” “Thanks for the wonderful memories!!” “Been a slice, see ya. Hasta la vista.” They may seem like comments jotted in the margins of a classmate’s yearbook. But they’re actually the words of Chicago police officers who chose to write something in the “remarks” section of paperwork they needed to submit before exiting the department. The <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i>, through an open records request, obtained the comments left by officers who resigned or retired in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Here’s a sampling of their notes (edited for length in some cases): “I’ve met some great people and lost some dear friends over the last 29 years. I’ve also seen things done to human beings that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” “My greatest joy was to help the good people of the Austin area by fighting crime and trying to give peace of mind to the honest law abiding residents of the West Side which is also my home and where I grew up and attended school. I am proud to have served all, to the best of my ability with no regrets and would like to thank my comrades in arms in keeping me safe and I keeping them safe also.” “My [Field Training Officer] was right. It has been a different carnival everyday, what a ride!”</blockquote>
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Alfred Claassen in INDEPENDENT REVIEW, <a href="https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1496" target="_blank">The Rise of the "Gamers"</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Unlike the merchants and shopkeepers of early modernity who held inner rules rigidly or the white-collar workers 4 of the national era (1885–1965) who held them while also attuned to others’ expectations, the gamers are self-directed but accept no binding rules. By “higher” self-control, I mean self-determination that is one layer more reflexive or aware in certain respects, not that is more worthy or more advanced, all things considered. The gamers’ stock-in-trade is provisional, pragmatic policies that further their interests. Utterly immersed in and adapted to markets of all kinds, they analyze everything and hold everything up for grabs. Committed to no particulars, they cannot easily be flustered, but nor are they grounded or anchored. The gamers arose early in the global era as higher-level, rational self-understanding and self-management became dominant in the character of many of the most able, especially among those entering business and the professions. They began habitually employing their higher self-control to game their careers and fast-forward their ascents. Utterly directed toward excelling at the game, they are highly adept at all things connected with their personal advancement. Systematically pursuing their interests as they understand them, the gamers deftly adjust and fine-tune their performance at school and at work, discipline and position themselves to get into great colleges and universities, maneuver their way into valuable internships, and garner outstanding early jobs.</blockquote>
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Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/durham-court-filing-reveals-doj-inspector-general-horowitz-withheld-key-evidence-from-special-counsel_4241595.html" target="_blank">DOJ IG Withheld Key Evidence from Special Counsel</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The omission of information by Horowitz didn't end with his meeting with Sussmann or the information on Joffe. Durham's office has since discovered that the OIG "currently possesses two FBI cell phones" that belonged to Baker, the former FBI general counsel. Durham's discovery of Horowitz's possession of Baker's two phones doesn't appear to have come through Horowitz or his office. According to Durham's filing, "In early January 2022, the Special Counsel's Office learned for the first time that the OIG currently possesses two FBI cellphones of the former FBI General Counsel." Sussman is alleged to have lied to Baker when he tried to push incriminating data about Trump and Alfa Bank to the FBI; that data later turned out to be false.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>, <a href="https://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2022/02/durham-latest" target="_blank">Durham's Latest</a>.
</p><blockquote>
The staffs of the <i>New York Times</i> and <i>Washington Post</i> won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration." This reflects the Democratic and mainstream media narrative about the 2016 election. What Durham's filing suggests is that the real story of the 2016 election may be less Russian interference and more a Clinton campaign effort groundlessly to smear the Trump campaign, an effort that continued into the Trump presidency and involved somehow monitoring the White House phone system. My view of it is that Republicans and Independents should focus on the 2022 and 2024 elections, not the 2020 or 2016 ones.... Even so, though, it's a good reminder that the time-span for judging Pulitzer entries is often too short to measure how well the coverage represents the truth. I've often thought there should be a journalism prize awarded a decade later, to see how the coverage holds up long term.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Malcom Kyeyune at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-the-left-betrayed-the-truckers/" target="_blank">How the Left Betrayed the Truckers</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it. The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?</blockquote>
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Ian Dowbiggin in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-first-post-national-country/" target="_blank">The First Post-Nation</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In reality, Trudeau’s Canada can play at “post-national” politics mainly because it shares its only border with the United States, which in effect pays for most of Canada’s national defense. There is an adolescent, fantasy quality to Canadian politics. Canadian journalists, activists, academics, bureaucrats, and elected officials preach to the world—notably the United States—about Canada’s supposed post-national values because, ultimately, despite Obama’s and Trudeau’s insistence that Canada matters on the international stage, no one takes Canada very seriously. Canada’s peculiar holiday from history could be coming to an end.</blockquote>
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Andy Kessler in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wealth-is-knowledge-information-economics-industry-computers-george-gilder-capitalism-musk-zuckerberg-11644175297" target="_blank">Wealth Is Knowledge</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Mr. Gilder counters, "Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system, where entrepreneurs act in rote response to rewards and punishments like in a Skinner Box. It's an information system governed by the unveiling of surprising truths, innovation. If the creativity of entrepreneurs wasn't a surprise, socialist planning would work." Karl Marx didn't - and Bernie Sanders doesn't - understand productivity! Some recent surprising truths: mRNA, neural networks, Crispr, quantum computing.</blockquote>
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Oren Cass in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/050e37b9-f5f9-4b4d-8b5d-a70e96981f28" target="_blank">Why the US Right Wants to Put Workers in the Boardroom</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Creating a new forum for worker representation may seem to be a pro-labour reform. But in the US, the "pro-labour" Democratic party is, in fact, pro-Big Labour, with major unions historically among its biggest donors, regardless of the interests of actual labourers. In returning to the idea of EIOs (employee involvement organisations), Rubio and Banks are also proposing an intriguing innovation: their bill will stipulate that a large company opting to create an EIO must also seat a non-voting worker representative, shosen by the employees, on its board.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Kelly McBride at <i>npr.org</i>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2022/01/12/1072525809/4-npr-hosts-quit-in-the-last-year-3-were-women-of-color" target="_blank">4 NPR Hosts Quit in the Last Year, 3 Were Women of Color</a>.
</p><blockquote>
All of this internal work is designed to foster a staff of journalists who can develop new content to reach a broader audience. Listeners to NPR on radio — its largest platform by far — are 78% white (compared with about 60% of the U.S. population.) The website attracts a bit more of a diverse audience, but it's still 73% white. NPR podcast audiences are younger and more in line with the American public, 67% white. And although podcast audiences are smaller, NPR gets more sponsorship money for podcasts than for over-the-air shows. (Broadcast programs are still more lucrative because they receive fees from stations and other support.)</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Choe Sang-Hun in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/world/asia/south-korea-men-anti-feminists.html" target="_blank">The New Political Cry in South Korea: 'Out with Man Haters'</a>.
</p><blockquote>
South Korea is reckoning with a new type of political correctness enforced by angry young men who bristle at any forces they see as undermining opportunity — and feminists, in their mind, are enemy No. 1. Inequality is one of the most delicate issues in South Korea, a nation with deepening economic uncertainty, fed by runaway housing prices, a lack of jobs and a widening income gap. Many young South Korean men argue that it is men, not women, who feel threatened and marginalized. “We don’t hate women, and we don’t oppose elevating their rights,” said Bae In-kyu, 31, the head of Man on Solidarity, one of the country’s most active anti-feminist groups. “But feminists are a social evil.” The group spearheads the street rallies and runs a YouTube channel with 450,000 subscribers. To its members, feminists equal man haters. Its motto once read, “Till the day all feminists are exterminated!” The backlash against feminism in South Korea may seem bewildering.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Choe Sang-Hun in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-diversity-muslims.html" target="_blank">How 'Multiculturalism' Became a Bad Word in South Korea</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Many Koreans explain their attitude toward foreigners by citing history: their small nation has survived invasions and occupations for centuries, maintaining its territory, language and ethnic identity. Those who oppose the mosque and immigration more broadly have often warned that an influx of foreigners would threaten South Korea’s “pure blood” and “ethnic homogeneity.” “We may look exclusionist, but it has made us what we are, consolidating us as a nation to survive war, colonial rule and financial crises and achieve economic development while speaking the same language, thinking the same thoughts,” Mr. Lee said. “I don’t think we could have done this with diversity,” he added. “We are not xenophobic. We just don’t want to mix with others.” Some say the country does not have much of a choice.</blockquote>
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1685/weddings-editor-aims-to-normalize-unwed" target="_blank">Weddings Editor Aims to "Normalize" Unwed</a>.
</p><blockquote>
"What does it mean to be committed in 2022? We will begin to tell stories outside of our traditional Mini-Vows that explore relationships outside of what we know to be marriage. Marriage has been our bread and butter because, obviously, we're the Weddings section, but I do feel that it is time that we get into what is considered nontraditional and kind of normalize that. For example, we have written about platonic spouses, or people who are marrying their friends. ...That's where we're looking to go, to just expand what the word commitment means." Nice to see the transparency about goals. It seems like a delicate balance between covering the reality of what people are doing (a traditional goal of news) and an agenda ("normalize," "expand") that involves taking a side in an unsettled values or policy debate. Newspapers do the second all the time but they often aren't quite so transparent about it.</blockquote>
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Tish Harrison Warren in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/22/opinion/roe-legal-abortion.html" target="_blank">The Systemic Realities Created by Legal Abortion</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Carrying a child to term will never be easy (and is, of course, more difficult than recycling). But a culture deciding that all life — including life in the womb — is valuable and worthy of protection would create systemic realities that open up ethical and practical possibilities for women. In the same way, a culture that embraces abortion on demand will end up, however unintentionally, incentivizing that choice. This has downstream consequences for women deciding whether to continue with a pregnancy. In extreme situations, employers have demanded that women have an abortion or lose their job. But the pressure to abort is often more subtle. When I worked in campus ministry, I met young women who told me that their student insurance covered abortion but not maternity care. College students told USA Today that when they became pregnant unexpectedly, their student health centers did not offer them information on what to do if they wanted to continue with the pregnancy. Universities rarely offer on-campus housing for students with children.</blockquote>
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Alex Williams in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html" target="_blank">To Breed or Not to Breed?</a>.
</p><blockquote>
“We were always under the mentality of, ‘Oh yeah, when you get married, you have kids,” she said. “It was this expected thing.” Expected, that is, until the couple took an eight-month road trip after Ms. Little got her master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. “When we were out west — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — we were driving through areas where the whole forest was dead, trees knocked over,” Ms. Little said. “We went through southern Louisiana, which was hit by two hurricanes last year, and whole towns were leveled, with massive trees pulled up by their roots.” Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Ms. Little feels “the burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple sees mounting disaster when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about having children has set in. “Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision, it’s not that far away,” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.” Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a carbon footprint.</blockquote>
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Thomas Cargill in INDEPENDENT REVIEW, <a href="https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1489" target="_blank">Eurgenics in High School History</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Malthusian predictions were increasingly contradicted by reality. Population increased, but economic growth and increased productivity supported the growing population with an increasing real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita worldwide. Nonetheless, Malthus had already opened Pandora’s Box in two ways. First, concern with population growth combined with the ideology of catastrophe had a profound influence on public policy, ranging from the welfare state and unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance to immigration. The ideology of catastrophe is a type of “madness of the crowds” used by advocates of a policy agenda to invoke fear of impending catastrophe unless action is taken immediately and to silence any dissenting views. Second, the Malthusian concern with the quantity of population relative to the resource base could easily be extended to a concern about the quality of population relative to the resource base in terms of the efficiency and productivity of the population. In <i>On the Origin of the Species</i> (1859), Charles Darwin attributed to Malthus his theory of natural selection and evolution toward improving the quality of any species (introduction). Herbert Spencer (1864) incorporated Darwin in his treatise on biology and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” arguing that societies based on the individual in the context of competitive institutions were the strongest and the fittest.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Faith Bottum in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-does-a-librarys-diversity-inclusion-auditor-education-audit-librarians-bard-college-identity-politics-crt-11642629680" target="_blank">What Does a Library's 'Diversity Auditor' Do?</a>
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The point of the audit at Bard originally appeared to be picking books to remove. The announcement in Notes, the library's newsletter, described the project as a first step in "the process of decanonizing the stacks" - academic jargon for breaking the connection to the past. A follow-up from the staff seemed to suggest that the eventual aim is a major deaccessioning (to use a librarians' term: litotes for getting rid of books). A representative of the library, however, later said in an email that was forwarded to me that the project was designed "to increase our understanding of our collection, not to remove books."</blockquote>
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Andrew Gutmann & Paul Rossi in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908" target="_blank">Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools' People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS's flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered - very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.</blockquote>
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Jim Quinn & Hannah Meyers in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims-crime.html" target="_blank">These Policies Were Supposed to Help Black People. They're Backfiring</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In 2020, Black New Yorkers, who make up about 24 percent of the city’s population, were the victims in 65 percent of murders and 74 percent of shootings. They were also the largest racial demographic among victims of felony assault and rape. It is hard not to notice that these tragic trends have emerged alongside the introduction of policies that were supposed to help Black New Yorkers — specifically, by reducing the impact of the criminal justice system on their lives. Black New Yorkers are disproportionately represented among those who are arrested, convicted and incarcerated in the city. Over the past few years, policymakers have sought to rectify this imbalance, designing policies aimed at achieving numerical parity among racial groups when it comes to relative rates of arrest, conviction and incarceration. But this strategy is harming Black New Yorkers. By aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order. What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately Black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates who are Black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind.</blockquote>
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Will Feuer in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-to-develop-residential-communities-11645025886" target="_blank">Disney to Start Residential Business</a>.
</p><blockquote>
Walt Disney Co. said it plans to start developing residential communities, starting with on in Rancho Mirage, in California's Coachella Valley. The new residential-development business will be called Storyliving by Disney, the company said Wednesday. Disney's research-and-development team, known as Imagineers, will help design the communities.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Jeffrey Tucker in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/now-is-the-time-for-mass-resignations-from-within-the-ruling-class_4245867.html" target="_blank">Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class</a>.
</p><blockquote>
In theory, the problem of government overreach in democracy is solved by elections. The argument made for such a sysem is that it allows for peaceful change of a ruling elite, and this is far less socially costly than war and revolution. There are many problems with matching theory and reality, one being that the people with the real power in the 21st century aren't those we elect but those who have gained their priviliges through bureaucratic maneuvering and longevity. There are many strange features of the past two years, but one of them that stands out to me is how utterly undemocratic the trajectory of events has been. When they locked us down, for example, it was the decision of elected autocrats as advised by credentialled experts that were somehow sure that this path would make the virus go away (or something like that).... There were no polls. There was little if any input from legislatures at any level.... It was as if everyone suddenly presumed that the whole country would operate on an administrative/dictatorship model, and that the guidelines of health bureaucracies (with plans for lockdowns that hardly anyone even knew existed) trumped all tradition, constitutions, restrictions on state power, and public opinion generally.</blockquote>
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</p><p>
Rob Natelson in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-supreme-court-rewrote-the-constitution-1937-1944_4214265.html" target="_blank">How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution: 1937-1944</a>.
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Major changes always have multiple causes. This series focuses on a central cause - perhaps the central cause: the conscious abdication of responsibility by a handful of Supreme Court justices, primarily between the years 1937 and 1944. The change occurred against the backdrop of economic depression and world war. But America previously had undergone similar crises without altering her form of government. This time, the outcome was different, largely because the Supreme Court refused to defend the Constitution.</blockquote>
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Francis Maier in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/marxism-won-war-of-ideas-augusto-del-noce-gnosticism-catholic-therapy-ai-mental-health-technology-11641483920" target="_blank">How Marxism 'Won' the War of Ideas</a>.
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In effect, as Del Noce argued throughout his career, Marxism was and is a new form of an old heresy, gnosticism. It's a cult of sacred knowledge, the possession of which claims to unlock our understanding and allow us to control the world. But the cult inevitably leads to nihilism, because Marxist theory is fundamentally atheist, which destroys its religion-like authority when the promised heaven on earth declines to appear. Marxism succeeds in crippling the supernatural imagination. But it has nothing of any higher purpose to put in its place beyond relentless political struggle against the power structures of a corrupt present. Marxist theory may have failed, but its afterlife of bitter activism drags on in our current grievance movements.</blockquote>
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Michael Warren Davis in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Tom Gallagher's book, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/waiting-for-our-salazar/" target="_blank">Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die</a>.
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He despised fascism, which he dismissed as “pagan Caesarism.” Likewise, he said Hitler’s racism was “essentially pagan, incompatible with the character of our Christian civilization.” Salazar rarely used his secret police to suppress political dissent. When he did, it was limited to the militant communists who tried to blow him up in 1937 as he made his way to church. After the bomb went off, shattering the windows of his car, he dusted himself off and said to his entourage, “Everything is over now. Let’s go in for Mass.” Dr. Salazar opposed the Axis Powers’ expansionism, beginning with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. During World War II, he helped victims of the Third Reich escape Nazi-occupied Europe; Casablanca got that much right. He lent material support to the Allies during World War II, and he would have gladly joined the war on their side. Salazar remained neutral only for fear of driving his neighbor, Francisco Franco, into Hitler’s arms.</blockquote>
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Grant Havers in MODERN AGE on Paul Franco's book, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/reading-hegel-right/" target="_blank">Leo Strauss on Hegel</a>.
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Hegel writes in his 1795 essay “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” that “the supplanting of paganism by Christianity is one of those remarkable revolutions whose causes the thoughtful historian must labor to discover.” The reasons Christianity triumphed over the paganism of Greco-Roman antiquity and the religions of the East preoccupied Hegel to the end of his life. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered at the University of Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel outlined how Christianity actualized an idea of human freedom that was inconceivable to pagan civilizations: “Eastern nations knew only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world only that some are free; while we [Christians] know that all men absolutely . . . are free.” One implication of Hegel’s theory of history is that no return to paganism is possible, however much we might admire aspects of the ancient world. Philosophers who seek a return to antiquity must address the challenge of Hegel. Readers familiar with Leo Strauss may be surprised, therefore, by the seminar on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History that he gave at the University of Chicago in 1965. On the few occasions that Strauss mentions Hegel in works intended for publication, the reader gets the unmistakable impression that Hegel’s philosophy initiated the doctrine of historicism. In Strauss’s view, historicism undermined political philosophy by dismissing the idea of a transcendent truth that exists apart from history.</blockquote>
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Francesco Pacifico in NEW LEFT REVIEW, <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-sorcerer" target="_blank">The Sorcerer</a>.
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I think I know what Codignola meant when he told me about a time when everything seemed to make sense, but that Adelphi’s books made you feel that the others weren’t telling you the whole truth. I also feel that while the likes of Guglielmi saw themselves as different in kind to the generation spawned by the Miracolo Economico and portrayed in the Commedia all’Italiana, Calasso must have felt that this self-referential, booming society was too self-involved and lacking in transcendence; he must have had a unique view of the sleazy mix of Marxism and establishment, seaside villas and existentialism, of the characters played by Mastroianni in <i>La Notte</i> and <i>La Dolce Vita</i>. Calasso didn’t really want to debate with his foes. In <i>The Unnamable Present</i> he wrote of the present time: ‘Thought would benefit more than ever from a period of concealment, of a covert and clandestine existence, from which to re-emerge in a situation that might resemble that of the Pre-Socratics. The powers have to be recognized before even naming them and venturing to theorize the world.’</blockquote>
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Alexander Adams in CRITIC on Debra Bricker Balken's book, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/to-critique-the-critic/" target="_blank">Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life</a>.
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Per Marx, Greenberg asserted that a Hegelian dialectical process would lead to observable and historically inevitable outcomes. Greenberg declared that art was destined to become more itself — painting would consist of paint, without imagery, sculpture would be material of pure form, without subject and so forth. The rise of Cubism, Bauhaus, Suprematism and American abstraction seemed evidence of this. Rosenberg came up with an alternative. His essay 1952 “The American Action Painters” situated the hero-artist as an agent of change, in control of artistic production. It is not hard to see why painters of the time warmed to Rosenberg’s notion of exceptional individuals advancing art. This was very much in line with Existentialist philosophy, with the emphasis on the morality and isolation of the individual, separated from tradition and nation. The fact that the essay included no specific artists allowed Rosenberg to speak in generalities. Pollock (whose image as a paint-flinging man of action was first disseminated in photographs and film in 1951) felt aggrieved that he had not been named. “[Pollock] stood outside Rosenberg’s bedroom window one night in The Springs and howled, ‘I’m the best fucking painter in the world!’”</blockquote>
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Charlie Williams at <i>aeon.co</i>, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-dropout-a-history-from-postwar-paranoia-to-a-summer-of-love" target="_blank">The Dropout: A History</a>.
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In Byung-Chul Han’s book <i>Psychopolitics</i> (2017), the philosopher warns of the sophisticated use of targeted online content, enabling ‘influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level’. On our current trajectory, writes Han, ‘freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude.’ The fear is that the digital age has not liberated us but exposed us, by offering up our private lives to machine-learning algorithms able to process the masses of personal and behavioural data often unwittingly disclosed daily. In a world of influencers and digital entrepreneurs, it’s not easy to imagine the resurgence of a culture engendered through disconnect and disaffiliation, but concerns over the threat of online targeting, polarisation and big data have inspired recent polemics about the need to rediscover solitude and disconnect.</blockquote>
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Scott Bradfield in NEW REPUBLIC on Damian Catani's book, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165121/ghosts-celine-french-novelist-fascist-antisemitism-biography-review" target="_blank">The Ghosts of Celine</a>.
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Catani argues that French readers stopped trying to decide whether they wanted to read Céline; it became more important to decide whether he was a “good” man. Many similar writers, such as Ezra Pound, had managed to outlive the memories of their most heinous statements; others, like Wyndham Lewis, never recovered; and still others, such as Paul de Man, would only suffer censure after they were dead. But no living artist bore greater witness to debates about the relationship between his fictional and nonfictional writings than Céline.</blockquote>
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Claude Hayward of the San Francisco Diggers, Jay Babcock <a href="https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2021/10/02/i-lucked-out-so-many-times-man-claude-hayward-on-his-life-before-during-and-after-his-time-with-the-san-francisco-diggers/?fbclid=IwAR0X9O5DiLtYMrUibWUcXU6dsTjC6ddlKo-TparYRnT7hlOkq0bZeor3d8Y" target="_blank">interview</a>.
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Q: Looking back now, do you think the emphasis on anonymity, and no leaders, helped or hurt the Diggers’ cause?
A: I think everybody took seriously the notion that nobody was in charge. I wasn’t aware of anybody making the move like they were the boss. Now there was no question that there were some strong personalities and ones not as dynamic, shall we say… It definitely had something to do with the quality of rap that you could lay down. But there are plenty of people that were anonymous Diggers that we don’t know of, that were doing one thing or another, either in concert with, or entirely independently. That’s the essence of “No Leaders/Do YOUR thing.” All I’m saying is that I felt that that was honored, that that was respected as a dynamic.</blockquote>
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Christopher Sandford in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://isi.org/modern-age/poet-laureate-of-low-life/" target="_blank">Poet Laureate of Low Life</a>.
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Taken as a whole, Bukowski’s work—and the man himself, were he still alive—might struggle to meet the exquisite sensitivity of today’s mainstream publishing houses, let alone the growing ranks of moral arbiters on social media. And perhaps it’s that very point that serves to make so many of his books and stories so enjoyable. On some fundamental level, we need the likes of Bukowski, if only as a permanent reminder that one of American literature’s chief historical functions has always been to rattle the guardrails defining the limits of acceptable behavior. We want to be entertained by stories about him swaggering around brawling in bars. What a sad lot most of today’s morally approved American authors are by comparison. “When a writer focuses more on forming a community with his readers than conveying the fact of our experience, he can be left high and dry when the assumptions undergirding that community change,” David Orr sniffed when reviewing Bukowski’s posthumous <i>On Drinking</i> in the pages of the <i>New York Times</i>. That exclusion from the cultural mainstream would very likely have been fine with Bukowski, who had the prescience to write in his poem “The Genius of the Crowd,” as long ago as 1966:
<p>
Beware the preachers <br />
Beware the knowers,<br />
Beware those who are<br />
quick to know.<br />
They are afraid of what they do not know.<br />
Beware those who seek constant crowds for<br />
They are nothing alone.</p></blockquote>
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Thanks to Andy Schwartz, Roger Trilling, J. Cabal, J. Ned, Geralyn Carducci, Mark Carducci, Matt Carducci, Mike Carducci, Julie Carducci, Mike Vann Gray...
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Obituaries of the Issue...
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<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-mike-king-chickenman-dies-kogan-20220215-yvmr76j3lfbtfa6rwn5j6taqny-story.html" target="_blank">Mike King</a> (1936-2022)
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His death made me recall that long ago day in his office and his story of “Chickenman.” For those of a certain age, this character is firmly embedded in memory. To the accompaniment of “He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!” the character was a daily radio serial born on WCFL-AM’s Jim Runyon show in 1966, a clever satirical spoof of the then-popular “Batman” TV show. It was created and voiced by Dick Orkin, the station’s production director, and was so popular that it was eventually syndicated and twice revived after its initial run. There were 273 original episodes, some of which have been played on NPR’s “This American Life,” and many of which can still be heard on various stations internationally. King said proudly, with a twinkle in his eyes at the realization that this might be the hallmark of his considerable professional legacy, “I did most of the engineering for ‘Chickenman,’ and I can listen to each episode today and know exactly what I was doing at that time.”</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/john-k-singlaub-dead.html" target="_blank">John K. Singlaub</a> (1921-2022)
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General Singlaub trained resistance fighters in German-occupied France and rescued Allied prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II. He conducted intelligence operations during the Chinese Civil War and in the Korean War while assigned to the C.I.A., and he commanded secret Army forays into North Vietnam and neutral Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s to ambush Communist troops. A sturdy 5-foot-7 with an enduring military brush haircut, General Singlaub seemed fit for combat long after his last war. He was “the kind of guy you’d like to have on your side in a barroom brawl,” Pat Murphy, an acquaintance and the publisher of The Arizona Republic at the time, told The New York Times in 1986.</blockquote>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-61392978437128556082022-01-09T20:51:00.090-08:002022-01-11T16:30:50.870-08:00Issue #158 (January 11, 2022)<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Westhampton, New York</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Jane Stokes<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<b>Sources and Ways of Parajanov’s Creativity</b><b><br /></b>Yuri Mechitov<div><br /></div>Where can one trace the sources of creativity? Of course, in childhood. It seems Parajanov’s delivery to the world was without any specific problems. He used to play with his older sisters in their small yard decorated with a small pool in the center. They played a very popular child's game which in Russian sounds like Dom-Dom and means simply House-House. So Homo Ludens – Playing Man – started there. They repeated all that elders usually do – meeting guests, preparing meals, gossiping… This small children's theatre was surrounded by the big one – the theatre of real life, which included numerous neighbors of different ethnic origins and backgrounds. We in Tbilisi still name such yards surrounded by small houses as Italian yards though they are exactly Tbilisi yards. It is an open place without completely isolated flats where inhabitants know nothing about their neighbors. Quite contrary – Italian yard people had a very vague understanding of privacy. They share everything that happened to them – joy and sorrow, happiness and grief, everything life consists of. Tbilisi in general was known as a festive city with a carefree easy-going population. In times of Russian Empire Tiflis became a southern stronghold of empire in Transcaucasia. It was a multi-ethnical, multi-confessional city with its own way of life and multifaceted culture. In Soviet times Tbilisi and the whole of Georgia was regarded as a place where one could live more freely than in other places. Unfortunately today times have changed not for better. I said in one of the last documentaries dedicated to Parajanov, that today’s Tbilisi of concrete, steel and glass without cozy, full of performances in yards can’t create conditions to produce such tremendous persons.<span style="font-family: arial;">Parajanov grew up in a traditional Tbilisi Armenian family with its unbreakable laws and canons. But I can suggest that it seems he happily escaped any of the severe restrictions which make all of us so stupid later on. Maybe, because he was youngest among Iosif and Siranush's children. So I suppose he was grown with the wings ready to fly. It’s also obvious that both his parents possessed a great vital energy which was inherited by young Sergei. His father Iosif was an extraordinary person – he ran an antique shop, even a brothel, was even arrested. It thanks to him Parajanov from early childhood learnt the beauty of things.</span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span><br /></span>Whom can we name an artist, a creator? One who can see the world brighter and deeper than others, who is full with his own valuable (at least for him) opinion about the world and whose strong desire is to share those values, his understanding, with others. So the artist constantly seeks for ways how to deliver, how to render, how to transfer his unique vision almost to everybody. So I can determine the art as a message that exists in different forms – poetry, music, painting, sculpture, photography, cinematography. I can add that for me the real artist is a person who creates with a very naïve and childish thought that with his creations he can change the world for better. It doesn’t mean that artist always has a clear understanding on that topic, but this sometimes unconscious drive is a foundation. I have to add with sorrow that now we live in the very cynical world where there are not so many real artists. Majority of them are not directed with such naïve ideas and ideals. They don’t want to change the world – they are simply businessmen and art is their business.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span><br /></span>I remember very well how offended was Parajanov if somebody couldn’t understand his art, his message. He was so disappointed, he was so angry particularly on me, for my disability to see his creation the way he saw it. I remember he asked me to read his script <i>Demon</i> and he wanted immediately my response. But this script, its language, saturated with symbols, appeared very difficult to me to perceive at the first glance. So I started to explain something to Parajanov but it was impossible to fool him. Actually I failed to understand the very essence of his, for me, complicated work.</span></div><div><span><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjyLHf81EtR60UQ8iPop3b1qO1tU4J0eManxRU5Gfv8hQlU9U2epBEe4S90FOYOKu3XDJA7UUI_q3djRL_NveQMF_rTntVgJxrCNP738Y2k68EkTf9-BfNAW6J4WrZxebLOB86-fhwhYnQBMxeOrbJwNy5-pctPmoddZPwApZaFxmeQQq8e1KL4sOcZQQ=s1120" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1120" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjyLHf81EtR60UQ8iPop3b1qO1tU4J0eManxRU5Gfv8hQlU9U2epBEe4S90FOYOKu3XDJA7UUI_q3djRL_NveQMF_rTntVgJxrCNP738Y2k68EkTf9-BfNAW6J4WrZxebLOB86-fhwhYnQBMxeOrbJwNy5-pctPmoddZPwApZaFxmeQQq8e1KL4sOcZQQ=w377-h225" width="377" /></a></div><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Every human being believes that God created him as an original, so he is unique. So every human being without exclusions strives, fights to confirm his own person and others around that he came to this beautiful and tragic world not by a chance. So he always needs a kind of confirmation – he wants to be distinguished, to be mentioned, to be famous, to be loved at last. It is a drive of all persons, but in case of a very gifted and energetic person this desire becomes a kind of obsession. I think without this ambitious obsession there’s no artist. So for humble and not ambitious people the art door is closed.</span></span><p></p>How we can describe a genius? What differs a genius from simply talented, gifted man? Geniuses are of course talented, gifted persons, but at the same time their main feature is an ability to achieve their goals despite all possible obstacles. More over sometimes those obstacles are a fertilized soil to grow their own flower. Parajanov spent four years in three ugly labor camps with killers and bandits. But he always admitted that being there was one of the greatest universities in his life. I can’t forget a dialogue between two greats – Parajanov and Tarkovski. I didn’t hear the whole talk. But in my presence Parajanov told Tarkovski that he regarded him as a very talented person but never a genius because, he stressed, that Tarkovski was not homosexual and never was imprisoned. You should only imagine Tarkovski’s big eyes, because he truly believed he was a genius. I will talk about Parajanov's homosexuality impact on his art a bit later. He came out from prison stronger and wiser with numerous art works which now decorate the walls of the Parajanov museum. It’s a pity he was not allowed to work as a cinematographer those 4 years. But he not only waited for the bright days to come – he created every day, every hour and minute of his outgoing life. He found other ways to speak out – he created collages, ready-mades, assemblages. He organized joyful parties, met various people, gave advices to artists, told about his prison years in a way of small plays. He was the real Homo Ludens – he played with everything including people. It’s also a pity that nobody recorded at least audio recordings of these fantastic talks. I still blame myself for that mistake. I shot only 10 minutes in silent 16mm film in May 1980, depicting a journey organized by Parajanov to Aghpat and Sanain (monasteries where major part of <span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sayat- Nova</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was shot) and it was unfortunately lost. All I have are photographs, also silent, which can’t render Parajanov's non-stopping theatre even a little.</span><div><span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>To explain for me and for the society Parajanov’s phenomena, I even invented a special verb – to <i>parajanize</i>, that means at the same time to exhibit himself, to mock, to provoke, to epatage, to challenge, to irritate, to offend, to attack, to burn all bridges, but first of all to create the world of his own, to confirm himself and everybody in actual necessity of his being. Of course this ability <i>to parajanize</i> offended some egg-headed people at power. So they revenged at full scale in December 1973.</div><div><br /></div>So the main source of creativity for every artist, of course, is everyday life with its ups and downs. You should have something inside in order to burst it out. So Parajanov's life was full of many events both tragic and comic and he obviously collected impressions for his big jump took place in 1964 with <i>Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors</i> (1965). First of the tragic events that shocked Parajanov's young soul was a death of a neighbour girl, Vera. As you know Parajanov started shooting his last film, <i>Confession</i> (1990), with the scene of Vera’s funeral. There were only two days of shooting at all – Parajanov felt it was impossible to work more due to the mortal disease – lung cancer.</div><div><span><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikT7LNuHx37TZaem3TUmE8k8L7pvqzG8lMSnaWox8Cg8__7jt0pe-8hnGXHJYt232_k-oKAUkqT4NSxvG3sai8k2rfYdKQGB2uk8PwMNSTM2_wGsSEqEolnS5vn2SoFVFp_T_txKGFAueYXHOEHS6YxH3RVvxgOVMslQ3cw24JExlB2xqzCQ8eUNT14g=s614" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="408" data-original-width="614" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikT7LNuHx37TZaem3TUmE8k8L7pvqzG8lMSnaWox8Cg8__7jt0pe-8hnGXHJYt232_k-oKAUkqT4NSxvG3sai8k2rfYdKQGB2uk8PwMNSTM2_wGsSEqEolnS5vn2SoFVFp_T_txKGFAueYXHOEHS6YxH3RVvxgOVMslQ3cw24JExlB2xqzCQ8eUNT14g=s320" width="320" /></a></span></div>The second big blow was the more than tragic fate of his first wife Nigyar, who was killed by her own brothers. Then was a painful divorce with Svetlana only year after the marriage. There was another attempt to create a family, now with actress Zoya Nedbai (she played in <i>Kiev’s Frescoes</i>), but she was fiercely rejected by Sergei’s mother Siranush. She still wanted a reunion with Svetlana. Parajanov was three times arrested and imprisoned – in 1948, 1973 and 1982. So Parajanov lived his life to the extreme – the true precondition of being a real artist.</div><div><br /></div>The last heavy blow was a tragic death in November 1988, actually a suicide of his close relation, film studio set artist Alik Janshiev, who worked on all of Parajanov's Georgian films, and also played the role of primitive painter Pirosmani in the short-length film, <i>Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme</i> (1985). <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Besides Janshiev actually was co-author of almost all ready-mades and assemblages. It was really impossible for Parajanov's bursting nature to glue one-by-one the fragile elements of his wonderful glass creations. There were several reasons why Parajanov took a great share of responsibility for such tragic outcome. I am sure that this tragedy provoked, awakened still latent lung cancer. Parajanov was so shocked that in a masochistic way he hanged of portrait of dead Alik in his coffin on the wall. But Parajanov surprisingly managed to convert this comprehensive pain and grief into creative process. He turned to La Gioconda – Mona Lisa image. I would like to add that he called my first photograph of him Gioconda too. It happened in November 1978, when we became familiar. So exactly ten years later he ordered his nephew Garry to buy all of the reproductions of Mona Lisa in our biggest art shop. To Parajanov's pleasure Garry managed to buy big size superb quality reproductions. In my opinion this series of works are real masterpieces performed with the greatest creative energy fueled with such contradictory emotions as love and grief. This work is a manifestation of his understanding of beauty, of his wisdom, of his fortitude. These works are not simply post modernism which floods everything and which is using and trivializing the great Art of Past, but is truly the second Renaissance. First my impression when I saw these works was a kind of shock. The same shock I experienced when I first time saw </span><i style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Sayat-Nova</i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1969).</span><div><span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>The real Art beside its main function – aesthetic and ethical message to mankind – has one no less important function – creating a space of freedom where the author can create his own worlds, create his own universe. This way one can overcome one's own disease, fear, cowardice… This way one can dream, dare, achieve… Nevertheless the most important among Parajanov’s drives were comprehension and reconstructing of the beauty. – <i>How beautiful it is, insanely beautiful!</i> – was his favorite exclamation, coming from his unique ability to feel the material beauty created by a human being. However his Giocondas are not simply beautiful, they are unlimitedly deep. Compared with them, Leonardo’s Gioconda is too simple. She is harmonically depicted on the peaceful country landscape background and she is looking at us from the depths of centuries with dignity, calmly, with light irony. Parajanov creates in the end of the bloodiest century in the history of mankind, which in addition to all its sins imposed on us a suicidal supremacy of consumption over the joy of creation. Parajanov’s Giocondas are product of our turbulent times – they are tragically playful, mockingly strict, at the same time they are passionate and unfeeling. Creativity of Parajanov has no boundaries, energetically this work is a work of a young man who lives his life vigorously and passionately.<div><span><br /></span>Once I visited Sergei. He had guests from Lenfilm Studio, colourists who were printing copies of the second great Parajanov masterpiece. All of us headed down Arsena Street and then turned on to Tkhinvali street. I guess Parajanov had been nurturing this idea for a long time. "Well, here we are around the best view of Mount Mtatsminda, where we can produce a breathtaking shot," the Maestro pronounced and indicated the spot, from which I would photograph the future masterpiece. Parajanov arranged the colourists at a distance, found a spot for himself and ordered me to take a photo. In those days, I used to photograph with a plain Soviet-made <i>Zenit</i> camera. Suddenly, Sergei jumped with such ease as I have never seen in him before, then again and again… The third take proved to be more or less successful. Parajanov christened it “The still photo of the century,” and made a collage after it; as for myself, I named it, “The black raven in flight.”</div><div><br /></div>It happened that when I met Parajanov I had no idea about his films. Now it’s so easy to know something! But for this time without VHS cassettes, not to speak of the <i>Youtube</i>, it was impossible to be familiar with Parajanov as a film director. When I first saw <i>Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors</i> I was so impressed by cameraman Yuri Ilienko's work that I told Sergei that without the eyes of Yuri he would never have created such a beautiful and dynamic canvas. By this time I didn’t know that before <i>Shadows</i> Parajanov shot at Dovzhenko Film Studio 4 full-length feature films and three documentaries, which to put it politely, didn’t make him famous. Saying so, I seriously offended Parajanov. Then I understood that it was a long story. Such kind of talks took place shortly after this film was released. That’s why in my opinion, and not only mine, Parajanov started <i>Kiev’s Frescoes</i> with the camera literally nailed to the floor. He continued this method in <i>Sayat-Nova</i>. One of the reasons for such a formal approach was to confirm Parajanov himself and others that the secret of his success was not necessarily linked with a dynamic camera. Anyway I believe that Parajanov was lucky in both cases – he was able to collect perfect teams in order to realize his vision. For many reasons this never happened in his Georgian films. <i>The Legend of Surami Fortress</i> (1985) and <i>Ashik Kerib</i> (1988) to a larger extent are not as perfect to me as his previous Ukrainian and Armenian films. I have to admit that by this time Parajanov experienced the lack of energy. Sometimes he behaved as a primitive energy vampire, because after our relationship I often felt myself almost exhausted. So at the same time I am proud that I helped him even a little to replenish energy he needed so much. When he shot <i>Shadows</i> and <i>Sayat-Nova</i> he was on a peak, it was his acme. Then he was out of work as a cinematographer for almost 15 years. Parajanov used to say that Fellini was so lucky, because he left this world performing all his projects, as for him he was going to leave with up to 20 unreleased scripts.</div><div><span><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNkJFtl59iyNkIk4wVmaV7lu5JXyw8AEAUOgwWCeEabYKqTaI0m4dpBElIEYAcsuDv4PpQhMUaSF_sAvIivjDWZx_xt1OqfIAy1mjo44q5y0tAYWVf76m9m1x8Ch_tFPPgAAvGE-x4QFlNMW3A13xHSNBuopRK_67wn5YAwuMTWvHF9ghZYfVtuGujsw=s1729" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1212" data-original-width="1729" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNkJFtl59iyNkIk4wVmaV7lu5JXyw8AEAUOgwWCeEabYKqTaI0m4dpBElIEYAcsuDv4PpQhMUaSF_sAvIivjDWZx_xt1OqfIAy1mjo44q5y0tAYWVf76m9m1x8Ch_tFPPgAAvGE-x4QFlNMW3A13xHSNBuopRK_67wn5YAwuMTWvHF9ghZYfVtuGujsw=w400-h280" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">What about Parajanov's homosexuality – in those old good times when it was not so widespread a phenomenon, now it’s a kind of a fashion – but then it was impossible to talk openly about such kind of deviation because such person might be simply jailed. Parajanov managed to carry his peculiarity with a great dignity. I believe such surrounding, this feeling of being different, distinguished and added something important to the creative strength of Sergei. I can recollect once he said to me and my close friend Mark Polyakov, "Forget women and you will discover new horizons!" Alas, we didn’t believe him. I am joking, of course. Because with his dual ability he was more than sensitive, he felt things the way which were not affordable for ordinary men. And he always joked on that subject. Once I shot him with buckets full of trash. When I brought pictures of that event, Parajanov instantly created this collage where he placed naked women images in those buckets to highlight that he didn’t need women anymore. And on the contrary he organized another picture with prominent ladies of high circle and titled it, “I came back to women!” One of his jokes was connected with the Rotterdam Film Festival poster “20 film directors of the future”. As though somebody said to Parajanov, that he should be proud by being in top twenty. Sergei’s answer was that it was nothing because he was declared in top five homosexuals.</span></span><p></p>I have to add about Parajanov kindness. Of course, sometimes he was very cruel too, but only if somebody couldn’t accept a beauty the way he did. He worried about everybody – neighbors, friends, cinema team people. I witnessed one peculiar scene – an ordinary postman brought Parajanov a letter. Parajanov put on him a very expensive black leather jacket. Not long before I learnt that Sergei had no money to buy a cheapest matsun – a kind of Georgian yogurt. But this gesture with the jacket was a gesture of a king. He was also very friendly with people he didn't know, like taxi drivers, shop sellers, children.</div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span>Maybe one of the rare feature of Parajanov was a unique ability to combine a hell and a heaven. That’s why he was so contradictive, sometimes being so kind, and sometimes being unbearable. I want to recall one story which I heard from Serge Avedikyan, one of the film directors and actors in the feature film, <i>Parajanov</i> (2013). When Parajanov was in Paris in September 1988 he asked Serge Avedikyan to bring pencils, paints, color papers, miscellaneous things for collages. He managed to create one good composition and Avedikyan decided to buy it despite its high cost. So Serge found somewhere the amount needed. They agreed to meet at the cemetery at Tarkovski’s grave. It was fantastic scene, recalls Avedikyan: Parajanov was crying, "Oh, my Andrey! You left me forever. I am alone now." And during this nonstop lamentation, Parajanov managed to ask Avedikyan several times, whether he brought him the money.<div><span><br /></span>Another story happened with me personally. In 1985 I with my friends who organized a photography exhibition. There were exhibited mainly portraits performed in neo-realistic manner. And we were so proud of our works. Parajanov quickly looked through pictures, became extremely angry and shouted, "Mechitov thinks that he is Parajanov at a time when I am Parajanov!" What was that? Jealousy? Intolerance?Last creative trick – The Funeral of Parajanov, being himself a witness! <span style="color: black; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An amazing, frankly mystical story occurred in connection with this photograph. Only 20 years later did I notice, in the upper right corner of the photo, Sergei Iosifovich himself, keeping an eye on his own funeral. I was so struck with this discovery that I began to successively enlarge the photo. My actions, despite their absurdity from a scientific point of view, repeated step by step the movements of the protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film <i>Blow Up</i> (1966). There is possibly a materialistic explanation of this fact – some old man who resembled Parajanov climbed up on the tree and was observing the funeral of the Maestro from there. But in this case I am not a materialist.</span></div><div><span style="color: black; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>(Illustrations: Sergei Parajanov in Tbilisi, Georgia 1984 by Yuri Mechitov; still from <i>Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors</i>; Parajanov mug-shot; Yuri Mechitov at Parajanov exhibit in Vilnius 2013 photograph by Maya Deisadze)<div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">***</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p>Addenda one...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTl9FE4yZhStqKX4RbbGAVF0SWGNi3glAtGtIQeKBtlM9cQp_DqSXg8B8aylVaXASmAJgym4Iq3ThKHfIw9A1-_RjqJIF5o600kQ0VD8imWt3rA_HUKkrqHLo42TJ5vSEzC85HHLO4z-bz3FoWBaK-oRMJW-r3IN7iuly7bfDn591SiKB-yLCFpZDN-g=s3000" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2007" data-original-width="3000" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTl9FE4yZhStqKX4RbbGAVF0SWGNi3glAtGtIQeKBtlM9cQp_DqSXg8B8aylVaXASmAJgym4Iq3ThKHfIw9A1-_RjqJIF5o600kQ0VD8imWt3rA_HUKkrqHLo42TJ5vSEzC85HHLO4z-bz3FoWBaK-oRMJW-r3IN7iuly7bfDn591SiKB-yLCFpZDN-g=w374-h258" width="374" /></a><div><br /></div>Joe Carducci: In the chapter of my film book that deals with Soviet cinema - Happy Endings and The Party - I knew I wanted photographs of the key directors of its end-game. I had a good one of Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky but needed Parajanov. The best image I could find on-line took awhile to find with a photographer's credit to one Yuri Mechitov. I looked and saw his facebook page so I sent a message to the page and waited. Nothing. So I decided to just use it and credit it. A couple years later I heard from Mr. Mechitov and fortunately he was happy I had used the photograph. I emailed him a picture of the photo on the page of my book and then I mailed him payment and a copy of the book. The book went to Tbilisi and came back marked "unclaimed" and the money order was lost. I re-sent the book, this time to his niece who happened to be traveling in America and then I wired the payment. Also, we arranged to reprint Yuri's great memoir-essay on Parajanov which he delivered to a Parajanov exhibit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Once his neice got back to Tbilisi Yuri sent me this nice proof of delivery! Nice to know there is one copy in the hands of someone who knew Sergei Parajanov. Thanks Yuri!<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span><b id="docs-internal-guid-34dd06fc-7fff-2a47-d4f5-c7a4cccf67d4" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></span></span><br /><div style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></span></span></span></div><div style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">***</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></span></span></span></div><div style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Stone Male</i> named the official bible of</span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <a href="http://www.midnightmoviecowboys.com" target="new">MIdnight Movie podcast!</a></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Transcript from the Burt Reynolds <i>Stick</i> episode:</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"The Western is a 20th century thing. It was cinema's greatest subject."</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"Yeah, its like jazz and comic books and old-time radio..."</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"And if you want to see why Westerns were great read Joe Carducci's <i>Stone Male</i>."</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"Yes, the official bible of the podcast." </span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; white-space: pre-wrap;">"It really covers what was special about that early time in cinema that created the Western, tough-guy movies..."</span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"Joe Carducci really defines it in a way that no other film scholar has."</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">"The thing about Joe Carducci's books, just like <i>Rock and the Pop Narcotic</i>, its like its the last book you need to read about rock music, and <i>Stone Male</i> is the last book you need to read about action films."</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><br /></p>
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<b><span style="font-family: arial;">Lisle, Illinois </span></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDkX_IXyXrHQ1MuL7XXIdwUUEJzPFu3CIfgUuJeo2eNhYR8bw2vgLkP9HTAQNUlUouq7V5HU8SQXiuMLDFAget_VV5ky4u4kj5wFxNLwwaIq64ccqao4WSDyCQUIrM6ovNWziq-5RPoj4cpATyVrYFucMReJZDj_0RX2aFD0Q7Yn1voNJ_hw5ztz6E9A=s1672" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1254" data-original-width="1672" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDkX_IXyXrHQ1MuL7XXIdwUUEJzPFu3CIfgUuJeo2eNhYR8bw2vgLkP9HTAQNUlUouq7V5HU8SQXiuMLDFAget_VV5ky4u4kj5wFxNLwwaIq64ccqao4WSDyCQUIrM6ovNWziq-5RPoj4cpATyVrYFucMReJZDj_0RX2aFD0Q7Yn1voNJ_hw5ztz6E9A=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci<br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHkPTRZQCZK0V30LPb5UTfcPF4oZ9r2MJ6y3wJslCOYnFq5Ihs2DcXupgUEvJ6uCZl3OJ3Vp-EjVvB6Yz97SuqiscHlEYIMupxZW8JhS9BHL_5cAq1xBOCDBipfONC6gcObihUwaqWYksrcQet5UICS1CgE0gv_KJcbN2dj1DRHodYiZuMKhe3njtslA=s861" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="861" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHkPTRZQCZK0V30LPb5UTfcPF4oZ9r2MJ6y3wJslCOYnFq5Ihs2DcXupgUEvJ6uCZl3OJ3Vp-EjVvB6Yz97SuqiscHlEYIMupxZW8JhS9BHL_5cAq1xBOCDBipfONC6gcObihUwaqWYksrcQet5UICS1CgE0gv_KJcbN2dj1DRHodYiZuMKhe3njtslA=w640-h322" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b style="font-family: arial; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Oil Tasters, Systematic, and Thermidor</b></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-5a671eea-7fff-fe53-2dd2-bf42d4be9158"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Joe Carducci</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;">We started distributing independent releases in Spring 1978 when I was still working part-time at Peter Handel's Renaissance Records on Morrisson in Portland Oregon. I got paid in records, something like three 45s or one album for doing the 3-6pm close. The shop was an import-only shop started by three guys who had worked at Music Millennium across town. It was not doing well as customers seemed limited to weirdo audiophiles who would pay a premium for a European or Japanese pressing of a record, or wandering straights who needed a copy of a Nana Mouskouri album or Pachelbel's <i>Canon in D</i>; the shop also had a nice display of punk picture sleeves of US and UK 7" records but there weren't many punks in Portland then and those didn't have the money to buy anything anyway. every human (One good customer was the late Tim Kerr who started the label of the same name in the 1990s.) Renaissance had a connection to Rough Trade London going back to when RT was primarily a reggae shop. Peter's partners were leaving the business but he went over to London in late 1977 or early '78 to see for himself what was going at Rough Trade. By then it was the best UK shop for independently released records and RT was distributing as well as beginning to release their own records. We began to import these British independent releases. Renaissance became the exclusive importer of Rough Trade's releases and those labels they distributed (Industrial, Factory, Mute, Fast, Object...) for the US that Spring.</span></span></div></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhQxdSFZ93wEuZEInsPKjrXoBaNupgq81uuVZOafIBIcRfBhlrdAKEclXblAlzPge83CvOiWEKhYhVDQp4zc0c5OpV4esyRocjuywvLOhBHRIgG5vROzTOFISP5AwIgLE6bQqrbHr50alIuJqBVjrGdSwR8cqfQ0Mt_M0HUrvvoOuknbCYo7Cq7zqQkqQ=s2045" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1025" data-original-width="2045" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhQxdSFZ93wEuZEInsPKjrXoBaNupgq81uuVZOafIBIcRfBhlrdAKEclXblAlzPge83CvOiWEKhYhVDQp4zc0c5OpV4esyRocjuywvLOhBHRIgG5vROzTOFISP5AwIgLE6bQqrbHr50alIuJqBVjrGdSwR8cqfQ0Mt_M0HUrvvoOuknbCYo7Cq7zqQkqQ=w400-h200" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">One of the first American independent labels we distributed was the Dangerhouse label. We also added small American labels like Hearthan, Slash, Poshboy, and interesting self-released records by Monitor, Radio Free Europe, Twinkeyz, Flesheaters, Dead Kennedys as well as local Portland bands' releases by The Wipers, Smegma, Ice-9, and Parasites of the Western World. We almost started a label but the Neo-boys didn't like the studio we put them in; Jennifer LoBianco who played guitar in the band worked at Renaissance for a while and the band practiced in the shop. But the shop wasn't as interesting as what we were doing or planning for the distribution, mail-order and record label sides of the business. So we closed the shop, leaving all the Nana Mouskouri fans high and dry and then moved the company to Berkeley after Christmas 1979. I left my KBOO radio show in Jennifer's hands and I heard she all but burned the place down!</span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p>In Berkeley, California now and called Systematic Record Distribution we coordinated with a Rough Trade America branch, also in Berkeley, and pushed the British records more efficiently while I built up our catalog of American independent labels by writing for samples whenever I saw an advertisement for, or a review of, an American independent release in a fanzine. And bands sometimes found out about us by asking their local shop or other bands how to distribute a record. If I recall, the Oil Tasters, from Milwaukee, heard about Systematic from Jim Nash at the Wax Trax shop in Chicago.<span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgELa25R6iY0-yx1kcDp2yKBhHYpPXNKMMcT-a-fUaPThK7r69KVGOu7EMALRP79pum1G7sICraQzlcXsuBt-3MAF-8CQQZuzjfWSrhRwHWNVSiyE0-wMs5SOloKQoS2RQ8qOPdiuI9_1My1i_0-XjRY8RO8sYOUpksQMer9TzjXTBK7bq97C71Okc2LA=s2052" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1021" data-original-width="2052" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgELa25R6iY0-yx1kcDp2yKBhHYpPXNKMMcT-a-fUaPThK7r69KVGOu7EMALRP79pum1G7sICraQzlcXsuBt-3MAF-8CQQZuzjfWSrhRwHWNVSiyE0-wMs5SOloKQoS2RQ8qOPdiuI9_1My1i_0-XjRY8RO8sYOUpksQMer9TzjXTBK7bq97C71Okc2LA=w400-h199" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">I got a sample of the first Oil Tasters 45, "Get Out of the Bathroom/What's In Your Mouth?" and I knew right away we could push it on shop-buyers in good conscience. The two songs were unusually well-played and well-recorded and the band's name and their lyrics were absurd and funny, and their line-up of sax-bass-drums was distinctive. Still there wasn't much sales potential for anything back then before bands were touring. We probably ordered 75 copies and maybe reordered a few more as that would've been what our enthusiasm could deliver when we touted a record to the buyers of the shops we sold to plus our own retail mail-order catalog. (We could rarely get Rough Trade interested in any reverse exporting of American independents to London but their American branch did pick up American independents for distribution here.) The release of the second Oil Tasters 45, "That's When the Brick Goes Through the Window", would've allowed us to push their first single again and we tried to re-solicit sales periodically on the best records.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span>Mostly we did business through the mails and the phones were reserved for sales calls to shops and ordering from RT UK. But after the second single I remember talking to Caleb Alexander a few times - he played sax in the band - and he said he'd been a kind of roadie-understudy to James Siegfried before he'd moved to New York and changed his name to James Chance. He also told me about The Haskells e.p. which he wasn't on but his bandmates Richard LaValliere and Guy Hoffman were. It was another great record and we ordered and sold 50 or more of those too. Jon Boshard was getting an MFA at UC-Berkeley and did the "Industrial Complex" radio show on the college's station, <i>KALX</i>; Jon and I started the record label, Thermidor in 1980 and ran the label out of his studio in Richmond. Though Systematic did start a label as soon as we opened up in Berkeley [Optional Music] Peter was rarely interested in things I wanted to put out. I think Jon and I started thinking about putting out an Oil Tasters LP after I was back in Chicago on a trip and got to see the band play at the Cubby Bear in 1981 or '82.<div><span><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNmHWg3_h8Mtz_r7F7F0ZytflQCuabNkdGu1VoZb1rlFw1f4EweEl4t9lAfJKAAVaQQ1d6ukLfU0oYGphc683JiqB4vHuzEahIIrGSOxWcB1f3lfVAtzk--0HsciUp4x5ap8B8-uMfgfkWjdHPCvTcJ15NI5ctPhMxeeaB1SAT_ff-bGsGvDmXTbMuyQ=s435" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="435" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNmHWg3_h8Mtz_r7F7F0ZytflQCuabNkdGu1VoZb1rlFw1f4EweEl4t9lAfJKAAVaQQ1d6ukLfU0oYGphc683JiqB4vHuzEahIIrGSOxWcB1f3lfVAtzk--0HsciUp4x5ap8B8-uMfgfkWjdHPCvTcJ15NI5ctPhMxeeaB1SAT_ff-bGsGvDmXTbMuyQ=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Jon liked the Oil Tasters too but when he saw the album cover he really got interested as it is one of the best designed covers of that era. I don't think overall that it is as well-recorded as that first 45 however; that was some debut! I believe we pressed one thousand albums and we probably sent out a hundred promotional copies to college radio and reviewers and sent a box of fifty to the band. Systematic sold most of the copies, though we shipped quantities to other distributors such as Rough Trade America, Dutch East, and Wamid who exported to Europe. The album was well received in Milwaukee and the nearby towns that the band played, but otherwise reviews were mostly in small fanzines of the day. They got a good review in the <i>N.M.E.</i> in London but there was no way to get attention from American mainstream rock publications in those years. Same with radio; the Oil Tasters probably got airplay on some thirty or forty college radio stations.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span>I moved down to LA to run the SST Records office in September 1981. Black Flag was the band it took to forge a new touring circuit. I went down there for my own screenwriting reasons but also if I was going to stay in the record business I wanted to be with people determined to break things open so that great bands stopped dying on the vine. I continued to work new Thermidor releases for Jon thru mastering and pressing in LA; Peter was losing interest in Systematic and in 1983 gave it to Joseph Pope for the assumption of its liabilities. Joseph was also in the band, Angst; he kept some Optional Music titles in print but didn't release new records, though Systematic was doing some manufacturing-and-distribution deals helping bands get records into print, notably The Didjits.</div><div><span><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiUNqoEZ06X8fXFYeIahgHp29DvQ-pRoN-C14P7TupU-OyxDeboK-3hsUOyL2FdfKTXqTdw_kDhmXXpdBL8rnKZlF8rBOErGn5yKM5FAfASfQAs7XPph7VUwi2HHkpDUeF53_65qFUxpFmv5Lf6VdeAiP4prUGgXnadZo9cq1kS3VAtbpCFoLF2eCUWYw=s1877" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1877" data-original-width="1116" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiUNqoEZ06X8fXFYeIahgHp29DvQ-pRoN-C14P7TupU-OyxDeboK-3hsUOyL2FdfKTXqTdw_kDhmXXpdBL8rnKZlF8rBOErGn5yKM5FAfASfQAs7XPph7VUwi2HHkpDUeF53_65qFUxpFmv5Lf6VdeAiP4prUGgXnadZo9cq1kS3VAtbpCFoLF2eCUWYw=w238-h400" width="238" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Black Flag liked the Oil Tasters record and talked about covering "Brick" during their legal battle to get free from Unicorn - a real message song. Greg asked me to see if the Oil Tasters would do the midwest part of their 1982 tour for the "Damaged" album. I called Caleb and he told me they had just broken up! I encouraged him to talk to the others and see if they might postpone breaking up until after doing a first and last tour. I stressed how rare an opportunity it was. Caleb did and said Richard and Guy had moved on and it was no-go. What a shame to see so many great bands have to give up in those years; a band doesn't often survive more than five years anyway. I was glad I got to help move the needle a bit at Systematic and SST, but even then I also felt it was up to me to write all the fallen genius bands into the history of rock and roll where they belong with my book, <i>Rock and the Pop Narcotic</i>. All hail The Oil Tasters! They also served.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">(adapted from an essay written for the <a href="https://splungecomm.com" target="new">Splunge Communications</a> reissue of The Oil Tasters recorded output.)</span></span></p></div></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">***</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Addenda 2...</span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Oil Tasters -
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08pCqQzDp0Q" target="_blank">"My Girlfriend's Ghost"</a> live 1981 videoclip. </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">
<iframe width="320" height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/08pCqQzDp0Q" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>
The Haskels -
<a href="https://youtu.be/N53O2IYkk7E" target="_blank">"Liberace Is Coming"</a> live 1979 videoclip. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">
<iframe width="426" height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N53O2IYkk7E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The
<a href="http://wisconsinmusicblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/oil-tasters-self-titled-album-1982-get.html" target="_blank">Wisconsin Music Blog</a> on The Oil Tasters.</span></div><div><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
There was always a built in small group of people that came to love this band and support them wherever they played any shows. Unfortunately there wasn't enough local support, and clubs to play and make a living out of this, and each member grew and morphed into other projects. But in the early 1980s they were pretty much the "house band" at The Starship. The Starship was the best place to play, and get seen, and sell your music at that time. It was always The Oil Tasters supported by 1 or 2 or even 3 other bands who opened up for them. Lucky Milwaukeans were able to hear this self titled album and singles by The Oil Tasters on WSOE, soon to be WMSE 91.7 FM radio, which was the only college
ation and it the THEE PLACE to hear when and where the next Oil Tasters show was going to happen. The Oil Tasters bounced from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison for years, and quickly gained a serious fan following....</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Dan Volohov interviewed me for the London site <i>joyzine.org</i> this summer and when he found out I had a collection of Westerns coming out on Redoubt Press he offered to do pr for it. I tried to explain to him that people don't care about screenplays, care even less about Westerns and don't care all that much for books anymore either. Dan insisted and when I found he would be doing this work from Ingushetia I decided I had to let him try. Well, Gospodin Volohov has triggered a heretofore unsuspected latent Carduccimania that few review editors or mental health experts anticipated. These first interviews range over my six books plus my life'n times in the late record business: <div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> *** </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2021/10/joe-carducci-interview.html?fbclid=IwAR2tg5zliYXgF1arMrYtgM4ttGk8K7LMQe8kgCo6-DyScH1N0KjWeHnVEu4" target="_blank">Its Psychedelic Baby</a> interview with Klemen Breznikar:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
On Thermidor: "Jon and I sat down with Graeme Revell of SPK after their San Francisco gig and talked to him about doing an album; Graeme’s face was still covered with blood from the pig’s head he had been hitting with a machete while he sang."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="http://www.radionope.com/podcasts/protonicreversal/?name=2021-11-07_271_ep271__joe_carducci_sst_records__author__rock_and_the_pop_narcotic__western_stories__enter_naomi.mp3" target="_blank">Protonic Reversal</a> podcast interview with Conan Neutron:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">On Wennerphobia, arena rock, Negativland and Greg Ginn, SST buy-ins, Redoubt sell-outs, Xamerica, MinimumRocknRoll, good 'n bad controversials, Mike Sheppard shearing his flock, Naomi's Darkroom...</span></blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.thevinylguide.com/episodes/ep307-joe-carducci-rock-pop-punk-and-the-wild-west-pt-1" target="_blank">The Vinyl Guide</a> podcast interview with Nate Goyer, Pt I:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">On The Who, Minutemen, Black Flag, Cream, David Lightbourne, Husker Du, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Unicorn, MCA, Rolling Stone, Systematic, New Alliance, Greenworld, Enigma, Raymond Pettibon, Charley Patton, Saint Vitus, Misfits, Rough Trade, Weirdos (I meant Dangerhouse not Slash!), Ramones and look for Parts II & III too.</span></blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://louderthanwar.com/from-sst-records-to-the-wild-west-an-interview-with-joe-carducci/?fbclid=IwAR2SEoaYN3JJd7NquHnfhRKtFFkxWj7MOxFd-MV96F0fxu69VQFVvckpfls" target="_blank">Louder Than War</a> interview with Audrey J. Golden:
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On moving from music to film: "At the time I left the music business in 1986, there was still zero interest on the part of the film side of Hollywood or other media in the music underground. Although just today someone posted an image to an SST facebook group from a skateboarding movie called <i>Thrashin’</i> (1986) - theme song by Meat Loaf! - showing a young Josh Brolin wearing an SST T-shirt I drew for label promotion. I moved back to Chicago then to focus on writing, rather than networking Hollywood."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
***</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.impattosonoro.it/2021/10/21/interviste/ad-un-passo-dal-deserto-si-puo-sentire-il-vecchio-west-respirare-intervista-a-joe-carducci/" target="_blank">Impatto Sonoro</a>
interview with Fabio Marco Ferragatta:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
FMF: While I was studying cinema at university one of my teachers said that there are genres that have run their course and have exhausted their vein, and among them there was the western, but it is true that they have never stopped being produced films of this type. Do you think it can come back?
JC: I think Taylor Sheridan is doing the best work In contemporary settings of the west including the cultural inheritance of the old West in <i>Wind River</i>, <i>Sicario</i>, <i>Hell or High Water</i>, and on TV with <i>"Yellowstone"</i>. I wouldn’t think an actor could suddenly be doing the best writing out there, but there it is… But you’re right there are Westerns made every year though it can’t take back the standing it once had. Movies before the feature film came in (1908-1915) were first an entertainment for immigrants in the cities who did not speak English yet, so the spare title cards of silent films was better than dialogue would have been. They were living in cramped tenements so they were astonished seeing these expansive spaces of the west on big screens in ways no-one could be today. The feature film now, often two hours long, can still cast a spell but we are all too media-wise. And also the classical Hollywood filmmakers like John Ford, Henry King, Frank Borzage…, first made films in the silent era which was an advantage no current filmmaker possesses. Then there’s the question of women in the Western when so much of modern womanhood is dependent on all the modern conveniences which undercut biology and nature in the period drama generally. Maybe the horror film does a better job squaring that circle.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Also soon:
<a href="https://newnoisemagazine.com/" target="_blank">New Noise</a> conversation with Johnny Temple (Akashic, Girls Against Boys) podcast & hardcopy.
<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1BRBQOsbLB54SwGV12P9Hz" target="_blank">The Punk Rock Academy</a> podcast interview with Dave Springer & Jon Gerlis.
<a href="https://www.rocksbackpages.com/" target="_blank">Rock's Backpages</a> podcast.
<a href="https://joyzine.org/2021/04/13/interview-joe-carducci-on-sst-records-writing-rock-and-the-pop-narcotic-stone-male-and-more/" target="_blank"><i>Joyzine</i></a> interview with Dan Volohov:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Normally it’s fun to start with a few characters and a setting and find out what develops and how resonant the resolution can be whether it’s closer to Tragedy or Hollywood happy ending. But the script 'Naomi’s Darkroom' uses what diaries Naomi kept and which survived her hectic life so I was trapped in the plot she understood as her fate. The story follows her as she goes from quitting high school to working for SST to moving to the east coast and working for Ras Records and the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. It’s a long script about a short life.</span></blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> A related viral strain, SSTmania, is expected in spring; I talked to both authors' books (both are illustrated with Naomi Petersen shots):
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Abe Gibson
<i>Here to Blast Your Concept - An Oral History of SST Records</i>
(<a href="https://www.diwulf.com/" target="new">DiWulf Publishing</a>) Spring 2022.
</span></blockquote><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Jim Ruland
</span><i style="font-family: arial;">Corporate Rock Sucks - The Rise & Fall of SST Records</i><span style="font-family: arial;">
(Hachette) Spring 2022.</span></p><p> </p><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> And in othered photobook news:
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Glen E. Friedman
<i>What I See - The Black Flag Photographs</i>
(Akashic) Spring 2022.</span></blockquote><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Melanie Nissen
</span><i style="font-family: arial;">Hard + Fast</i><span style="font-family: arial;">
(Blank Industries) February 2022.</span></p><p> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/punklifenaomi/?hl=en" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">Naomi Petersen</a><span style="font-family: arial;">
Chris Petersen is prepping a book of his sister Naomi's music photography, details tba.</span></p><p> </p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Photograph by Joe Carducci</span><br /><br /></span></td></tr>
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<br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>From the London desk / editor: Steve Beeho </b></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Dennis Duncan in THE LITERARY REVIEW on Andrew Hussey's book,
<a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/man-of-lettrisme" target="_blank">Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou</a>.
</span><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhle2rjo3NYmooWrlp8QuvuKQDwskxulyDF8GUklgcPJcd05nday45pU86nnt4u50xbp_iud1IJlUFfjAQmBtUdOj3lx-kpxH6aAm-zpvTpUCcQpd3uJSeC1728Vy55fljA2mQbDIT_obDkVxaTFE6O0QidcMtcmJSn2cSa16hdmLQfPBJyK9sDBEytlw=s745" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="745" data-original-width="535" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhle2rjo3NYmooWrlp8QuvuKQDwskxulyDF8GUklgcPJcd05nday45pU86nnt4u50xbp_iud1IJlUFfjAQmBtUdOj3lx-kpxH6aAm-zpvTpUCcQpd3uJSeC1728Vy55fljA2mQbDIT_obDkVxaTFE6O0QidcMtcmJSn2cSa16hdmLQfPBJyK9sDBEytlw=w288-h400" width="288" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">
In one sense, Isidore Isou had been predicting the events of May 1968 for nearly two decades. The Romanian-French artist and poet, founder of the avant-garde <i>lettriste</i> movement, had been calling for an uprising of the youth since 1949, when he and his followers plastered the Left Bank with posters declaring, ‘12,000,000 YOUTHS WILL TAKE THE STREETS TO MAKE THE LETTRISTE REVOLUTION’. When the uprising came, however, the slogans on display were those not of Isou and his lettriste comrades but of the Situationists, a long-established splinter group led by Isou’s nemesis, Guy Debord. As the rioting intensified, Isou attempted to assert control, demanding that the students recognise him as their leader, even attempting to gatecrash a radio programme to declare himself head of the French nation. The revolution, <i>his</i> revolution, was really happening, and yet he was confined to the margins. In a cafe, surrounded by comrades, Isou began to rave. He wanted to cut himself to prove to his followers that he was immortal. A doctor was called. Within hours Isou was in an asylum under heavy sedation. By the time he woke up it was mid-June.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
^^^ </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Rachel Cunliffe in THE NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2021/09/why-new-age-puritans-are-the-enemies-of-progress" target="_blank">Why New Age Puritans Are the Enemies of Progress</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
We will always be bedevilled by puritans, and in moments of crisis or societal upheaval the sanctimonious spy an opportunity to push their own personal morality onto the rest of us. As we recover from Covid, it’s worth remembering that the most censorious among us do not hold the ethical high-ground they think they do. No one can claim virtue by making other people miserable.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
^^^ </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Park MacDougald at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/09/why-we-need-to-be-repressed/" target="_blank">Why We Need to Be Repressed</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
But it is hard not to notice certain resonances between Rieff’s doomsaying and some of the stranger political developments of our own time. On the Left, the rise of wokeness or “cancel culture” can be read as the expression of a longing, among the children of our therapeutic culture, to revive some idea of Good and Evil, to erect taboos and restrictions and impose a new moral order. On the Right, the cultural and intellectual energy is with those who, whether they speak in religious terms or not, denounce the “degeneracy” of the modern West and long for a restoration of traditional authority... Rieff predicted that the logical endpoint of therapeutic culture was an orgy of violence — “Immediately behind the hippies stand the thugs,” as he wrote in <i>Fellow Teachers</i>. Such an orgy is still nowhere on the horizon. But I suspect we should take seriously his suggestion that somewhere deep in our minds is a longing for, or at least a receptivity to, the demands of the sacred, which also happen to be the one thing that our culture seems genuinely comfortable repressing. And as good therapeutics, we can always count on the return of the repressed.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
^^^</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Peter Hitchens in THE CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2021/hard-labour/" target="_blank">Hard Labour</a>.
</span><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: arial;">
My boss on the industrial desk of the Daily Express, the kind, thoughtful and conscientious Barrie Devney, once returned from the [National Union of Mineworkers] conference so appallingly hungover that he could not even remember his own home telephone number, and had to ask me what it was, bless him. Barrie sensibly never let me near the miners’ union, rightly concluding that it would almost certainly have killed me, and that I would have been useless at it too. My Spartan years at various boarding schools may have prepared me for Moscow, Gaza and the Congo, which I would later endure. But not for the NUM.</span></blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-family: arial;">
^^^</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">John Gray at THE NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/11/dawn-everything-new-history-humanity-david-graeber-wengrow-review" target="_blank">How Fear Makes Us Human</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
[David Graeber and David Wengrow] tell us the primordial freedoms “tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been)”. Here they write with patronising disdain for those they propose to liberate – the downtrodden and wretched of the Earth – that is characteristic of radical theorists. The mass of humankind, however, are not whippets: they understand, better than ideological visionaries, the conflicting needs that shape freedom in the complex and often contradictory world in which they live.</span></blockquote><p> </p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">^^^ </span></p></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Douglas Murray in THE SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/farewell-to-cambridge-s-disastrous-vice-chancellor" target="_blank">Farewell to Cambridge's Disastrous Vice Chancellor</a>.
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I have occasionally been asked, over the last few years, why I have written about Toope so many times, both here and at the <i>Telegraph</i>. The reason is not just because Toope was clearly so magnificently ill-suited to the job he has now left early. Nor was it simply that I believe he is such a prime example of one of those undistinguished functionaries who falls ever-upwards by parroting and then pushing the latest on-brand dictates of the era. The reason is that – to steal a quote from Evelyn Waugh – watching Stephen Toope in charge of Cambridge University was like watching a Sèvres vase being balanced in the hands of a chimpanzee. He seemed to show no care as he teetered and careered around with it. He seemed, as he particularly showed in his ignominious last year, to have no care of whether or not he dropped and smashed the whole damn thing.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
^^^</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Miranda Sawyer in THE GUARDIAN on Paul Morley's book, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/25/from-manchester-with-love-by-paul-morley-review-an-epic-life-of-tony-wilson" target="_blank">From Manchester With Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson</a>.
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[Tony] Wilson, through his energy and ambition, his ability to effect change, altered many people’s lives, including mine. Also Morley’s, who writes honestly about a complicated man who was as intimidating and selfish as he was inspiring and fabulous. A respected music writer, producer and manager who began by creating his own fanzine in late 70s Manchester, Morley is some years younger than Wilson. They knew each other through the local music scene and some time in 1977, Wilson pops round to Morley’s family home to see if he is in. He isn’t, but Morley’s mum is beside herself. Telly celebrity Tony Wilson is in her home! He tries to help her fix a leaky tap, tells her his technique for making mashed potatoes. “My mum smiled about the day Tony visited for the rest of her life,” writes Morley.</blockquote>
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^^^</span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Jon Savage in INTERVIEW, <a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/scott-king-debrist-manifesto" target="_blank">Scott King Discusses His Manifesto on Embracing Inaction</a>.
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SAVAGE: Fear of success is very punk, isn’t it?
KING: It is. The idea that you can no longer be the outsider because too many people like you. It’s inherent in punk, or a certain strain of the punk ethos. I try to address this. There is a section in the manifesto called “Failure is Success,” but I don’t think what I say is punk. It’s about the pursuit of perfectionism. It’s also about the notion of not being able to let go, being trapped in a cul-de-sac in search of The Masterpiece, and consequently producing nothing. So, I think Debrism might be more negative than punk, unless you embrace the act of non-production or incompletion as an art form, or unless you try to find art and purpose solely in the pursuit of ideas, with no obligation to ever make these ideas concrete or public.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
^^^</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> L’histoire de Les Lou’s at </span><a href="http://www.45vinylvidivici.net/ajout/RAJOUT/CAMELEONRECORDS/CAMELEONLous.htm?fbclid=IwAR2P1a8XMfHLhN3tW9meIONgwbay99dLbsBytnpweKwQTGjDGDxKRngpH24" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank"><i>vinylvidivici.net</i></a><span style="font-family: arial;">. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> ^^^ </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Jah Wobble interview at </span><i style="font-family: arial;">vanguard-online.co.uk</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, </span><a href="http://www.vanguard-online.co.uk/jah-wobble-interview-all-about-metal-box-remixed-in-dub/http:/www.vanguard-online.co.uk/jah-wobble-interview-all-about-metal-box-remixed-in-dub/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">All About Metal Box Remixed in Dub</a><span style="font-family: arial;">.</span></div><div><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
And, you know, PIL only lasted two years. It was great we did Metal Box and then it was good I left. At the time I really had the hump with them but actually, I realise now that that was it for that side, which is great – it’s great you don’t repeat yourself. That was the peak for that kind of approach. Then after that I don’t think John and Keith have done anything that serious. I really don’t mean that to sound snobbish but the words he had then and the whole balance; it was just fantastic. We really caught something in a way you would struggle to do now because we had the benefit of a major record company, no management, nobody saying “you can’t do that – we won’t give you any money unless you agree to go in with a producer wearing a pair of Kickers, who will make you play music with a chordal basis”.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>
^^^</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Rob Carroll at <i>railholidaymaker.com</i>, <a href="https://www.railholidaymaker.com/post/we-are-the-fall-a-tour-of-the-fall-s-prestwich-in-the-footsteps-of-mark-e-smith" target="_blank">We Are The Fall - a tour of The Fall's Prestwich in the footsteps of Mark E. Smith</a>.
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'Mental hospitals!' I squealed in high pitch at the other Rob, pointing into the distance up Bury New Road at the area where Prestwich Hospital once stood. Now mostly bulldozed and replaced with commercial units, this was once the largest asylum in Europe. Rob is always polite, though must have been embarrassed by his tour guide’s Fall falsetto in broad daylight on a busy street. Around the Kingswood Road era merged two themes that would help define The Fall. The squeals were my attempt at a line from 1979’s 'Repetition'. What became ever clearer as the day progressed was how Mark E Smith wrote about the things on his doorstep. Literally right outside his door.</span></blockquote><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><b>
From the Wyoming & DuPage Desks / editor: Joe Carducci </b></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Neil Brown, President of The Poynter Institute, Oct. 21, 2021
<a href="https://www.poynter.org/" target="_blank">email</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Hi Joe, Let's celebrate journalism and its undeniable value to our democracy. Journalism is vital to our everyday lives. From vaccine rollouts to Delta variants, social media bans to outages, spa shootings to the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, and from the insurrection at the United States Capitol to the withdrawal from Afghanistan - journalists in newsrooms national and local have been there to cover the most important stories of our time and bring information, context and understanding to the complexities of the modern world.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Batya Ungar-Sargon at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/10/the-medias-betrayal-of-the-poor/" target="_blank">The Media's Betrayal of the Poor</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain. But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Brent Staples in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/opinion/sunday/white-newspapers-african-americans.html" target="_blank">How the White Press Wrote Off Black America</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Black news organizations started to wither as segregation eased and the white press became interested in the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, it would take decades for that interest to extend beyond stories about crime. The Kerner Commission underscored this problem when it admonished the news media to “publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of the Negro, both as a Negro and as part of the community.” News organizations that were not moved to address this problem when the business represented a license to print money have come to see things differently since the business model began its collapse. The apology movement represents a belated understanding that these organizations need every kind of reader to survive.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Charles Blow in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/opinion/latinos-colorism-anti-blackness.html" target="_blank">The Impact of the Browning of America on Anti-Blackness</a>.
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In too many societies across the globe, where a difference in skin tone exists, the darker people are often assigned a lower caste. And when people migrate to this country from those societies, they can bring those biases with them, underscoring that you don’t have to be white to contribute to anti-Blackness. A fascinating report issued this month by the Pew Research Center explored colorism in the Hispanic community and underscored how anti-Blackness, or anti-darkness, is no respecter of race or ethnicity. It is pervasive and portends a future in which the browning of America does not succeed in wiping away its racial prejudices.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Nykia Wright & Chris Fusco in CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/6/15/21292317/capitalzing-b-black-sun-times-african-american-latino-white-style-newsroom" target="_blank">To our readers: Why we're now capitalizing the 'B' in Black</a>.
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Our decision puts Black on the same level as Hispanic, Latino, Asian, African-<br />American and other descriptors. We also told our journalists to continue to lowercase the "w" in white.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Kellen Browning & Brian Chen in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/19/us/black-asian-activists-policing-disagreement.html" target="_blank">In Fight Against Violence, Asian and Black Activists Struggle to Agree</a>.
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The two groups were reacting to violence aimed at their communities. That included the police killing of George Floyd last year in Minneapolis, which led to a surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. In March, a gunman killed eight people at Atlanta spas, six of whom were Asian women, amid a spree of anti-Asian attacks.... But the tensions boiled down to one main disagreement: policing. While Black Lives Matter activists have called for reducing police budgets and decreasing cities’ reliance on law enforcement officers, Asian leaders say that police are crucial to preventing attacks.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Amy Harmon in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/us/terminology-language-politics.html" target="_blank">BIPOC or POC? Equity or Equality? The Debate Over Language on the Left</a>.
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For some people, though, the new lexicon has become a kind of inscrutable code, set at a frequency that only a narrow, highly educated slice of the country can understand, or even a political litmus test in which the answers continually change.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>smartertimes.com</i>: <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1637/harvard-mission" target="_blank">Harvard's Mission</a>.
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A New York Times article... reports: "some scholars say a fundamental tension remains between the school's explicit mission in the first centuries of its existence — to reproduce the white gentry by educating its sons — and its stated role now, as a beacon of diversity and democracy where a prestigious education is available to any and all who merit acceptance." The Times doesn't name any of these "scholars." Just for the record, though, it is not accurate that the school's "explicit mission in the first centuries of its existence" was "to reproduce the white gentry by educating its sons." Here is the Harvard Charter of 1650: "Whereas through the good hand of God many well devoted persons have been and daily are moved and stirred up to give and bestow sundry gifts legacies lands and revenues for the advancement of all good literature arts and sciences in Harvard College in Cambridge in the County of Middlesex and to the maintenance of the President and Fellows and for all accommodations of buildings and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Patrick Wyman in ATLANTIC, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/" target="_blank">American Gentry</a>.
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The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern daily life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group’s existence and its importance, acting, as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his “beautiful boaters,” lauding the flotillas of supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6 crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets, he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Geoff Shullenberger in CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/social-justice-austerity-and-the-humanities-death-spiral" target="_blank">Social Justice, Austerity, and the Humanities Death Spiral</a>.
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How are humanities disciplines pushing back against the existential threats they face? Obviously, one can find a variety of arguments against cutbacks and the devaluation of humanistic study. On the other hand, faculty members within these fields sometimes make what looks like a case against their own value. For example, the Chicago announcement states that "English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, and anti-Blackness." Those who make funding decisions might well ask why such a discipline deserves to continue existing.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
*** </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Bret Stephens in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-criticisms.html" target="_blank">The 1619 Chronicles</a>.
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Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not<br /> trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.
</span></blockquote><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">***</span></p><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, </span><a href="https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/a-deeper-look-into-the-controversy-of-the-new-york-times-1619-project/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">A deeper look into the controversy of The New York Times' '1619 Project'</a><span style="font-family: arial;">.</span></p><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” about slavery in the United States came out more than a year ago. But it’s now back in the news with a Times opinion columnist criticizing the piece and a call for its Pulitzer Prize to be removed. I’m still not sure why this is suddenly a topic again right now. But it is.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Richard Samuelson in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/cancel-the-new-york-times/" target="_blank">Cancel The New York Times</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Racism is, in the words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter the Times put in charge of the 1619 Project, “in the very DNA of this country.” But DNA, Kesler notes, is something that cannot be changed. Hence the rhetoric of the 1619 Project is rhetoric of futility. Like bringing democracy to Iraq or a sense of humor to Presbyterians, ending racism in the U.S., from this point of view, is impossible.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ashley Rindsberg at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/11/why-the-new-york-times-rewrites-history/" target="_blank">Why the New York Times rewrites history</a>.
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We might be tempted to think that a correspondent of a previous century would have little to do with the most celebrated journalist of the present day. Certainly, it is inconceivable that anything can compare with Duranty’s attempts to deny the Ukraine famine — and the deaths that followed. But the parallels between Duranty and Nikole Hannah-Jones seem hard to ignore. Like Duranty, Hannah-Jones has become the New York Times’s marquee reporter, her public profile taking on celebrity proportions. Hannah-Jones, like Duranty, is as often the subject of headlines as the creator of them. And, of course, there’s the Pulitzer Prize both she and Duranty won relatively early in their respective careers.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
William Broad in NEW YORK TIMES, The Truth Behind the News
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/science/william-laurence-new-york-times.html" target="_blank">William Laurence, Pt. 1</a>.
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Before the war, Mr. Laurence’s science reporting won him a Pulitzer. Working with and effectively for the War Department during the bomb project, he witnessed the test explosion of the world’s first nuclear device and flew on the Nagasaki bombing run. He won his second Pulitzer for his firsthand account of the atomic strike as well as subsequent articles on the bomb’s making and significance. Colleagues called him Atomic Bill. Now, a pair of books... tell how the superstar became not only an apologist for the American military but also a serial defier of journalism’s mores. He flourished during a freewheeling, rough-and-tumble era both as a Times newsman and, it turns out, a bold accumulator of outside pay from the government agencies he covered.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/science/charles-loeb-atomic-bomb.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article" target="_blank">William Laurence, Pt. 2</a>.
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Charles H. Loeb was a Black war correspondent whose articles in World War II were distributed to papers across the United States by the National Negro Publishers Association. In the article, Mr. Loeb told how bursts of deadly radiation had sickened and killed the city’s residents. His perspective, while coolly analytic, cast light on a major wartime cover up. The Page 1 article contradicted the War Department, the Manhattan Project, and The New York Times and its star reporter, William L. Laurence, on what had become a bitter dispute between the victor and the vanquished. Japan insisted that the bomb’s invisible rays at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to waves of sudden death and lingering illness. Emphatically, the United States denied that charge.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Aram Bakshian Jr in NATIONAL INTEREST on Donald Ritchie's book, <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/feature/scorpion-potomac-navigating-drew-pearson%E2%80%99s-washington-192562" target="_blank">The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson's Washington</a>.
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In a National Public Radio interview touting his book, Feldstein described how, after Nixon was elected vice president in 1952, Pearson and Anderson, his chief “leg man” and later co-writer, "...published a false story based on a forged document that claimed that Nixon was getting payoffs from Union Oil, one of the biggest oil companies, now Chevron, and it turned out to have been a fraudulent document, distributed by the Democratic National Committee." And Pearson and Anderson didn’t just base their story on this pre-Trumpian “phony dossier,” Feldstein continued. They also “worked behind the scenes, hand-in-glove with Democrats, to orchestrate congressional hearings to try to keep Nixon from being seated as vice president.” Feldstein concluded, "Nixon’s paranoia goes back to the very beginning, and the paranoia that would ultimately bring his destruction in Watergate had some basis in fact. And it goes back to, among other things, this forged memo that Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson publicized.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Daryl Michael Scott interviewed by Len Gutkin in CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/bad-history-and-worse-social-science-have-replaced-truth" target="_blank">'Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth'</a>.
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What about journalism? On Facebook recently you called <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>'s "1619 Project" and the Trump administration's 1776 Commission competing forms of history as propaganda.
A lot of people who were involved in "The 1619 Project" are experts who want to have influence. Now Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist, is using this expertise to advance a view. OK, fine. But the scholars are the junior partners in this enterprise. In all of my professional life, academics really want access to the pages of <i>The New York Times</i>. This is very important to people! Particularly the magazine. It has a kind of enduring quality. Sign me up! ...My critique is that Black people made 400 years of history in British North America, and all we hear about is racism and slavery. It's the most reductionist thing - it's almost like pre-Black studies.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1684/whitewashing-a-communist-camp" target="_blank">Whitewashing a Communist Camp</a>.
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The New York Times has a strange, repeated "odd tendency to euphemize or dance around communism." The latest example comes in a super-long and pretty boring profile of a 97-year-old World War II veteran. The Times claims the person is known as "the king of the artificial Christmas Tree." The Times writes, "in midsummer of 1949, he went to Camp Unity, a leftist camp in Wingdale, N.Y." "Leftist" haha. The Times itself reported on July 17, 1932, that it was a communist camp in which "the theoretical revolutionists live the life of the proletariat in Soviet Russia."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1653/op-ed-whitewashes-china" target="_blank">Op-Ed Whitewashes China</a>.
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"China is authoritarian and on the rise. But it is hardly Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. China is open for business, whether on fair terms or not; the world's largest trading nation makes a strange candidate for a totalitarian menace whose every activity closes off the earth." I don't find the second paragraph particularly convincing. Nazi Germany was "open for business," too. As Joseph Kahn reported in the Times news columns back in 2000: "At least 50 American companies operated factories in Germany during the years that the Nazis were in power, which began in 1933. American companies continued doing business in Germany after war broke out in 1939. Some remained there until late 1941, when the United States entered the war....Ford, General Motors, Exxon-Mobil and Kodak are among a growing number of American multinationals that say they have found evidence that their subsidiaries used forced labor during those years." ...The Soviet Union was also "open for business." The New York Times obituary of David Koch reported that his father, Fred, "made millions in the 1920s and '30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere." The New York Times obituary of the American businessman Armand Hammer reported that "he profited spectacularly from his dealings with the Soviet Union." ...The op-ed's claim that China is different from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union because China is open to international trade just isn't supported by the facts.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>, Times Advice: <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1683/times-advice-invest-in-china" target="_blank">Invest in China</a>.
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This pretty much says it all about the modern New York Times - it wants readers to divest from and boycott Israel, but to invest in China, where as recently as July 26, 2021 the U.S. State Department was describing an "ongoing genocide." ...Sommer passes along the Vanguard projections as if they are valid, without doing any checking to see if previous Vanguard predictions about returns of U.S. stocks are accurate. For example, in March 2012 Vanguard advised allocating between 20% to 40% to international equities. That would have been not great advice to take: the pre-tax average annual return return for the past ten years on a Vanguard International Stock Index Fund was in the 7 percent to 8 percent range, while the return for a U.S. Total Stock Market Index Fund has been more like 16 percent to 17 percent annually over the same period. If you invested $10,000 at the start of the decade in the U.S. fund, you'd have about $44,000, while if you invested in the international fund, you'd have about $20,000. Taking Vanguard's advice on that would have cost you $24,000.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Frances Martel at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/12/02/marco-rubio-nyt-covered-up-proof-xi-jinping-personally-ordered-uyghur-genocide/" target="_blank">Marco Rubio: NYT 'Covered Up Proof' Xi Jinping Personally Ordered Uyghur Genocide</a>.
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“For unknown reasons, the New York Times appears to have intentionally withheld documents that directly linked top Chinese Communist Party officials, including General Secretary Xi Jinping, to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,” Rubio wrote in a letter to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on Tuesday. “In those now-released ‘Top Secret’ transcripts – documents that the New York Times has allegedly had in its possession since at least 2019 – Xi explicitly authorized changing local counterterrorism laws, rounding up and sentencing Uyghurs, the use of forced sterilization, and the use of slave labor in Xinjiang.” Much of the information missing from the New York Times coverage came to light this week as a result of the work of the Uyghur Tribunal, an independent effort to document China’s genocidal campaign. Among that evidence are several speeches Xi personally issued complaining that East Turkistan’s population was too Uyghur and directly tying the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an global infrastructure colonialism project, to the eradication of Uyghurs and other Muslims from the region. One of the world’s top researchers documenting the Uyghur genocide, Adrian Zenz, confirmed that the information revealed at the Uyghur Tribunal came from the same source as the New York Times reporting from 2019, but that the contents of the newspaper’s reporting did not include much of what was revealed to be in the documents this week.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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James Harkin in HARPER'S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/sign-of-the-times-caliphate-the-perils-of-online-reporting/" target="_blank">Sign of The Times</a>.
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Callimachi was “a powerful reporter whom we imbued with a great deal of<br /> power and authority,” Baquet said in an NPR interview the same day. “She was regarded at that moment as, you know, as big a deal ISIS reporter as there was in the world. And there’s no question that that was one of the driving forces of the story.” Internally, the apology only intensified the disappointment many felt with the paper’s leadership. In the days before the public recantation, Kahn called a number of reporters who had previously raised concerns about Callimachi’s work. His tone was apologetic. He and Dolnick then convened a video call with a group of between fifteen and twenty reporters and editors to discuss the findings. The mood was funereal. The Times had worked hard to build up expertise in the region, someone pointed out, which editors then proceeded to ignore; the result had been to undermine the collegiality and openness that characterizes good editorial decision-making. According to Erik Wemple, a columnist at the Washington Post, Chivers read a statement he had prepared that excoriated top editors for ignoring and maligning those who had raised red flags. “Warnings were not just dead letters,” he said. “They became a basis to impugn people personally and professionally.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Ben Rhodes in NEW YORK TIMES on Elizabeth Samet's book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/books/review/looking-for-the-good-war-elizabeth-samet.html" target="_blank">Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness</a>.
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Of course, there is nobility in celebrating the U.S. victory in a just war and honoring those who served. Samet reaffirms that truth while forcing our attention on a more complicated reality. A sizable “America First” movement sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s ideology, which borrowed from our history of white supremacy. Americans were reluctantly drawn into war only after Pearl Harbor, and liberating the Jews was never a priority. Racism permeated our military forces — most obviously in mandated segregation, and in the restoration of Confederate war heroes in the naming of military facilities and the narrative of national greatness. In the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, the United States was indiscriminate in its use of violence. For U.S. troops who fought, the war was often something to be endured and not celebrated.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Ira Stoll at <i>nysun.com</i>, <a href="https://www.nysun.com/national/why-nytimes-is-kvelling-about-the-free-market/91414/" target="_blank">Why NYTimes Is Kvelling About The Free Market</a>.
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Someday, even without a government push, consumers in great numbers could decide that they’d rather drive electric cars than gas-powered ones, just as some consumers choose electric stoves or clothes-dryers or lawnmowers over gas-powered ones. Some of this is happening already as American buyers voluntarily opt to trade in their Mercedes and Audis for Teslas, with minimal tax subsidies. Yet when a Chinese cabinet decision sets the timeline for an American automaker’s decision to make it impossible to buy a Cadillac or a Buick with an engine that rumbles or roars, it’s hard to see it really as “a reminder of the power of free market forces.” Anyone wishing to mount a serious challenge to the State Council’s electric car plan might find themselves like Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai or democracy advocate Martin Lee - under arrest.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Ben Smith in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/business/media-misinformation-disinformation.html" target="_blank">Inside the 'Misinformation' Wars</a>.
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While some academics use the term carefully, “misinformation” in the case of the lost laptop was more or less synonymous with “material passed along by Trump aides.” And in that context, the phrase “media manipulation” refers to any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike. (Emily Dreyfuss, a fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at the Shorenstein Center, told me that “media manipulation,” despite its sinister ring, is “not necessarily nefarious.”) The focus on who’s saying something, and how they’re spreading their claims, can pretty quickly lead Silicon Valley engineers to slap the “misinformation” label on something that is, in plainer English, true.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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James Bowman in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/whore-you-gonna-believe-not-the-media_4148634.html" target="_blank">Who're You Gonna Believe? Not the Media</a>.
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The recent revelations arising from the Durham probe into the origins of the Russiagate scandal have made it clearer than ever that, when the media fought back against Donald Trump’s charge that they had become the purveyors of “fake news,” they did so at the cost of having proved him right. Not that you would know that, if, for some unfathomable reason, you continue to rely on the media themselves for your information. Though The Washington Post has gone back and corrected some details (and omitted some others) in the hundreds of Russiagate stories it ran between 2017 and 2020, it has apologized for or retracted none of them. Nor has any other mainstream media outlet known to me.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Matt Taibbi at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american" target="_blank">The Sovietization of the American Press</a>.
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“In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.” This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Gary Saul Morson in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Carl Any's book, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/howling-in-unison/" target="_blank">The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority Under Stalin</a>.
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Writers, like all cadres, were expected to be permeated by the spirit of “partiinost,” party-mindedness, which meant that, ideally, their will coincided entirely with that of the party. There was no room for the private or personal, and frivolous literary forms like love poetry or pessimistic ones like tragedy were frowned upon. Artistry was, at best, secondary to ideological correctness. Cultivating individual talent earned one reproof for “Mozartism” (ever more pejorative “-isms” were always being discovered). Literary critics, who wrote scathing attacks on works that deviated ever so slightly, lorded it over creative talents.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Eva Fu in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/covert-corrupt-and-coercive-report-details-beijings-bid-to-establish-new-global-media-order_4029626.html" target="_blank">'Covert, Corrupt, and Coercive': Report Details Beijing's Bid to Establish New Global Media Order</a>.
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These “spectacular scores” have been the outcome of a deliberate effort to artificially inflate subscriber numbers, the report authors said, pointing to the “exceptional growth rate” and the “extremely low interaction rate” these accounts receive. According to the report, eight major Chinese state media in English have an average growth rate of 37.8 percent from the period Jan. 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020, or about 5,000 times higher than that of U.S. mainstream media. But their level of engagement is 68 times lower than their U.S. counterparts.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Janan Ganesh in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a ref="https://www.ft.com/content/b47b2786-92be-4ad4-8ca8-e23a3a60bbc4" target="_blank">How TV news de-civilized us</a>.
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Nor does the chronology of real-world events implicate social media as the problem. If there was an identifiable rupture in public civility, it was the turn of the 1990s. That was when unanimous confirmations of Supreme Court justices (a proxy measure of bipartisanship) disappeared. Newt Gingrich broke through. The best guess is that unipolarity, the fall of communism, cost the US: the absence of an enemy freed Americans to fight themselves. But even if we turn from the geo-structural to mere media for a culprit, it cannot be Facebook or Twitter. Each was still a decade or more from inception. As Europe’s intra-Christian wars followed the printing press, and fascism trailed radio, perhaps the strife of our day is traceable to a new means of communication. The error is to cite the most modish one. Just as likely, we are still processing an expansion of TV news that is not that much older.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Brad Wilcox, Hal Boyd & Wendy Wang in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/opinion/liberals-happiness-thanksgiving.html" target="_blank">How Liberals Can Be Happier</a>.
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Human connection lends meaning, direction and a sense of solidarity to our lives. In short, it helps make us happier. Arthur Brooks of Harvard, for example, told us: “A lot of our happiness is out of our control, based on genetics and circumstances. But some of it we can control. It requires we invest in four things each day.” Those four things, he said, are “faith, family, friends and work in which we earn our success and serve others.” The liberal-conservative happiness gap, then, may not be primarily about political ideology but rather connections to our country’s three core institutions. Self-identified liberals are less likely than conservatives, on average, to be tied to family, faith and community.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Michael Vasquez in CHRONCLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-crossed-many-lines" target="_blank">Campus Extremism</a>.
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Melinda Hernandez wanted an apology. Sitting across from her, on a bench tucked in a corner of the picturesque Stanford University campus, was John David Rice-Cameron. Even at an elite university, Rice-Cameron stood out for his political pedigree: the son of Susan Rice, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser under President Barack Obama, and today head of President Biden’s Domestic Policy Council. Rice-Cameron, like his mother, has considerable power in his social sphere but at the other end of the ideological spectrum. A fervent Donald Trump supporter, Rice-Cameron took over as president of the Stanford College Republicans in 2018, and he remade the organization in Trump’s image. It became a more combative, and disruptive, presence on campus. In her 2019 memoir, <i>Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For</i>, Susan Rice acknowledged that her son's sharp rightward turn perplexed his parents.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Mark Jeftovic at <i>bombthrower.com</i>, <a href="https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-age-of-over-abundant-elites/" target="_blank">The Age of Over-Abundant Elites</a>.
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Democratic Socialism, BLM, whatever comes next all have in common extremely well off elites (millionaires and billionaires) talking up a populist game against some ostensibly amorphous “Establishment”, to which these crusaders are loathe to admit their own membership.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"> ***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Robert Merry in AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/covers/july-august-2020/" target="_blank">Why Elites Abadoned Nationalism</a>.
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Georgetown's Paul D. Miller, in an aggressive and piffling <i>Foreign Policy</i> piece, declared the matter closed by simply denying that there were any real nations in the world and that, anyway, American had never been a nation-state in the first place.... How did this once antiseptic term that for decades was considered a perfectly acceptable denotation of the regard a nation's citizens hold for their country turn into a no-no term denoting bad civic thoughts and motives? For an answer we must take a careful look at the rise of America's meritocratic elite, which beginning around the 1970s supplanted the old Anglo-Saxon establishment as the country's guiding force.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Jay Nordlinger in LAW & LIBERTY, <a href="https://lawliberty.org/forum/we-will-burn-and-loot-and-destroy-the-weather-underground-and-its-legacy/" target="_blank">"We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy": The Weather Underground and Its Legacy</a>.
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Many of the erstwhile Weathermen entered academia. Ayers, for instance, became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn became a law professor at Northwestern. Kathy Boudin, who was released from prison in 2003, became a scholar-in-residence at New York University - blocks from 18 West 11th Street. She also became a professor at Columbia - one of the targets of the bombmakers in the townhouse. Indeed, she co-founded an outfit at Columbia called “the Center for Justice.” According to its literature, the center “is committed to ending mass incarceration and criminalization, and advancing alternative approaches to justice and safety through education, research, and policy change.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Michael Anton in LAW & LIBERTY, <a href="https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-weather-undergrounds-lasting-victory/" target="_blank">The Weather Underground's Lasting Victory</a>.
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Millions have become so convinced of their own and/or the surrounding society’s inexpungable guilt that, to assuage their consciences, must vote against order and life as a way to expiate sin. Perhaps the supreme moment of 2020 was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s richest and most liberal suburb, of a mass of overclass winners bowing and begging forgiveness from a group of people none of them had ever harmed. The clear - and only - visible distinction between the penitent and the righteous was demographic. Both groups fervently believe in Manichean wokeness; the only difference is that the righteous feel not guilty but aggrieved. They want revenge. This, let’s call it, Dom-Sub coalition is the heart of the modern Democratic Party, and is a direct legacy of the Weather Underground and New Left insistence that America and Americans (or to be more precise, a certainly part thereof) are irredeemably evil.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Jeffrey Goldberg at <i>theatlantic.com</i> email, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/republican-party-america-democracy-in-crisis/620839/" target="_blank">A party, and nation in crisis</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The leaders of the Republican Party - the soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior - are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly. “There will be no recovery from this crisis until the Republican Party recommits itself to democracy,” says this magazine’s David Frum, who was one of the first writers to warn that America possessed no special immunities against demagoguery and authoritarianism.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ross Douthat in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opinion/trump-press-restoration.html" target="_blank">Can media prevent Trump's return?</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
There were ways in which the national news media helped Trump in his path through the Republican primaries in 2016, by giving him constant celebrity-level hype at every other candidate’s expense. But from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump - positioning itself as the guardian of democracy, a moral arbiter rather than a neutral referee, determined to make Trump’s abnormal qualities and authoritarian tendencies the central story of his presidency. The results of this mind-set, unfortunately, included a lot of not particularly great journalism. The emergency mentality conflated Trumpian sordidness with something world-historical and treasonous, as in the overwrought Russia coverage seeded by the Steele dossier. It turned figures peripheral to national politics, from Nick Sandmann to Kyle Rittenhouse, into temporary avatars of incipient fascism. It invented anti-Trump paladins, from Michael Avenatti to Andrew Cuomo, who turned out to embody their own sort of moral turpitude. And it instilled an industrywide fear, palpable throughout the 2020 election, of any kind of coverage that might give too much aid and comfort to Trumpism - whether it touched on the summertime riots or Hunter Biden’s business dealings.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ross Douthat in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/11/opinion/what-the-new-right-sees.html" target="_blank">What the New Right Sees</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Suppose you made a list of what each tendency in American politics considers our biggest challenges right now. For the new right, the list might look something like this. Abroad, the double failure of our post-9/11 nation-building efforts and our open door to China, which requires either a recalibration to contain the Chinese regime or else a general pullback from an overextended empire. At home, the threat to liberty from Silicon Valley monopolies enforcing progressive orthodoxy and the threat to human happiness from the addictive nature of social media, online pornography and online life in general. The collapse of birthrates, the dissolution of institutional religion and the decline of bourgeois normalcy, manifest in the younger generation’s failure to mate, to marry, raise families. The post-1960s “great stagnation” in both living standards and technological innovation. The costs of cultural libertarianism, the increase in unhappiness and high rates of depression and addiction in a more individualistic society. Then finally, the way in which the technocratic response to the pandemic, the retreat to a virtual life suited only to a “laptop class” (and maybe not even to them), may make these problems worse....</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Gary Saul Morson in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals" target="_blank">Suicide of the Liberals</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
An intelligent could not be a believer, which is another reason no one would have considered Tolstoy (let alone that conservative Dostoevsky) an intelligent. They accepted atheism on faith, were spiritually devoted to materialism, and proselytized determinism. They based these commitments on “science,” a word they used to mean not a disinterested process of discovery based on experiment and evidence, but - and here the reason became perfectly circular - a metaphysics of materialism and determinism. Still worse, intelligentsia “science” entailed an assertion that the world worked by blind, purposeless force and yet, as if guided by providence, was guaranteed to progress in human terms and reach moral perfection. (As people say today, the arc of history bends toward justice.) Berdyaev quoted theologian Vladimir Soloviev’s paraphrase of “the intelligentsia syllogism”: “Man is descended from the apes; therefore love one another.” In the same spirit, Bulgakov observed that “the intelligentsia asserts that the personality is wholly a product of the environment, and at the same time suggests to it that it improve its surroundings, like Baron Münchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Laura Kipnis in LIBERTIES, <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/transgression-an-elegy/" target="_blank">Transgression, An Elegy</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“Transgression” has become the signature style of the alt-right and “alt-light”. Now they are the rebellious, anti-establishment ones, gleefully offending everyone. Some even lay the blame for the stylistics of online troll culture - the alt-truth shitposting adopted so successfully by the current president and his basket of deplorables (to borrow Hillary Clinton’s supremely self-annihilating phrase) - at the doorstep of the avant-garde. In <i>Kill All Normies</i>, Angela Nagle traces their antecedents to Sade, the Romantics, Nietzsche, the Surrealists, the Situationists, the counterculture and punk - culminating with far-right culture hero Milo Yiannopoulos, who also extolled the virtues of disrupting the status quo and upsetting the liberals, whom he saw as hegemonic. All was going well for Milo, the self-proclaimed “dangerous faggot,” until he got a smidgen too dangerous by commending pedophilia, or so said his former patrons who quickly smote him into oblivion. Haha, their transgressive spirit is about an inch deep. Yet the longstanding association of transgression with the left was always superficial and historically accidental. In Nagle’s version, the alt-right crowd have simply veered toward nihilism in lieu of revolution. She even intimates that it was the virtue-signaling and trigger warnings of the touchy-feely left that gave us Donald Trump and the rest of the destructive right- wing ids; and this has made her persona non grata in certain leftish circles. However you draw your causality arrows, there’s no doubt that the more fun the right started having, the more earnestly humorless the social justice types became, and the more aesthetically conservative.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/03/an-event-perhaps-biography-jacques-derrida-review" target="_blank">Deconstructing Jackie</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Denounced as a hater of truth, Derrida's crime was to illuminate the true nature of modern humanism as a hodgepodge of forgotten religion and metaphysics. His misfortune was to beget an intellectual mass movement for which deconstruction was an assault on Western traditions.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Andrew Marzoni in NATION on Stuart Jeffries' book, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/postmodern-stuart-jeffries/" target="_blank">Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Nevertheless, Lyotard’s periodicity has proved especially enticing to contemporary thinkers on the left, often awkwardly so. The British filmmaker Adam Curtis and the American critic Greil Marcus are two examples cited by Jeffries who (though he does not say as much) have made similar attempts to totalize the untotalizable. By trying to reflect, with differing degrees of formal experimentation, the decentralized logic of the postmodern age through storytelling, Curtis and Marcus traverse periods, continents, discourses, and traditions to illuminate some method to our collective madness. But these comparative gymnastics cannot help but fall prey to the basic conventions of narrative - unity, continuity, meaning - that both men insist our era eludes and resists, even as they unveil virtuosic theories of everything that are overwhelming at first but soon leave their audiences a little undernourished, even slightly nauseated. This left-wing melancholia is Jeffries’s inheritance from Lyotard, Žižek, Harvey, Curtis, and Marcus as much as from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the rest of the Frankfurt School, the subject of Jeffries’s 2016 group biography <i>Grand Hotel Abyss</i>, where his anecdotal skill and easy wit resulted in a book both enjoyable and incisive, extracting from the lives of a handful of midcentury college professors a historical drama that, when projected onto the author’s own time, falls appropriately flat.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Christopher Caldwell in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opinion/french-intellectual-life-america.html" target="_blank">Is This the End of French Intellectual Life?</a>.
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“There is a mighty ideological wave coming from the United States,” the<br /> philosopher Yves Charles Zarka wrote last fall in an article about the death of <i>Le Débat</i>. “It brings rewriting history, censuring literature, toppling statues, and imposing a racialist vision of society.” Nor is it as iconoclastic as it looks, according to Luc Ferry, a philosopher and conservative columnist. “However anticapitalist and anti-American they may think themselves,” he wrote last year, “these activists are only aping whatever has been going on on campuses across the Atlantic over the last four decades.” The shoe used to be on the other foot. The United States used to learn a lot from France. Until a generation ago, into the age of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, one could say America deferred to France on matters intellectual. It doesn’t any longer. The demise of <i>Le Débat</i> was marked by not a single mention in any major American newspaper or magazine.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Aris Roussinos at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/12/what-the-tories-can-learn-from-the-american-right/" target="_blank">The Tories can learn from the American Right</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“Tonight the world’s eyes are on Washington,” declared <i>Newsnight</i>’s Emily Maitlis recently, referring to the abortion debate currently going through America’s Supreme Court. No doubt, in the dark forests of the Ituri, Twa hunters paused their age-old stalking of game to deliberate on Mississippi’s new legislation; in the glittering skyscrapers of Shanghai and Guangzhou, the Chinese economy ground to a halt as industrialists awaited Amy Coney Barrett’s contentious deliberation; high in the mountains of Bolivia, peasant farmers abandoned their timeless struggle with the frigid Andean soil, huddling in their villages to confer on what this could all mean for America’s women. Obviously this is a fantasy, like most British political commentary. It is Britain’s political comment class alone who are so destructively enamoured of the political theatre of a distant foreign country that American news crowds out our own in the battle for attention. Yet this colonised mindset is only true of a specific shade of American politics: an identitarian left-liberal strand tailor-made for our mid-Atlantic Twitter class. Londoners rioted in protest against policing in Minnesota, and our increasingly deranged discourse is directly cut-and-pasted from US models. But the twists and tangles of American conservative politics are more or less unknown territory in our own semi-digested imperial province.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ira Stoll in ALGEMEINER, <a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/09/07/new-york-times-marks-world-war-ii-anniversary-with-harsh-criticism-of-us/" target="_blank">New York Times Marks World War II Anniversary With Harsh Criticism of US</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Any one of these criticisms taken on its own may have some merit, but all together they amount to a slanted picture, lacking a proper sense of proportion or context. A reader might come away basically wishing America had lost the war, or at least not seeing much moral distinction between the Nazis and the Allies. If the Americans are racists, antisemites, and attackers of civilians, what makes them better than the Nazis? The Times is not much help on that front.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
<i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="https://www.smartertimes.com/1664/george-shultz" target="_blank">George Shultz</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The New York Times obituary of George Shultz is strange. The print headline is "Statesman Who Guided U.S. Toward the End of the Cold War." The jump headline over the end of the piece is "George Shultz, 100, Who Helped End The Cold War, Dies." I would have gone with "Statesman Who Guided U.S. Toward Victory in Cold War," or "George Shultz, 100, Who Helped Win The Cold War, Dies." For whatever reason, though, the Times headline writers seem loath to admit that the U.S. won the Cold War. This isn't just a headline problem with the obituary, either. The Times obituary says, "Mr. Shultz lived long enough to see his most lasting legacy from the Reagan years come largely undone." This is followed by a long dirge about the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. But Shultz's most lasting legacy was not the INF treaty but the defeat of the Soviet Union, the freeing of the captive nations, and the emigration of Soviet Jewry. None of those legacies have come undone.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Jonathan Turley at <i>jonathanturley.org</i>, <a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2020/07/27/willful-blindness-new-damaging-information-on-the-russian-investigation-is-promptly-unseen-by-the-media/" target="_blank">Willful Blindness: New Damaging Information On The Russian Investigation Is Promptly Unseen By The Media</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Willful blindness has its advantages. The media covered the original leak and the collusion narrative, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news shows and pages of print with a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the political opponents of an administration. But in Washington, success often depends not on what you see but what you can unsee.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
NEW YORK TIMES: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016-report.html" target="_blank">The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple. Who is Oleg Deripaska? What’s the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence - the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups - has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It’s no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Adam Goldman & Charlie Savage in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/politics/igor-danchenko-arrested-steele-dossier.html" target="_blank">Contributor to Steele Dossier Is Arrested</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko - who was born in Russia but lives in the United States - worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent. In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko - who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material - also denied being a Russian agent.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Robert Scheer at <i>kcrw.com</i>, <a href="https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/indicment-democrats-russia" target="_blank">New indictments expose Democrats' Russiagate obsession as a historic hoax</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The indictment documents that there were no such deep cover sources in Russia. Rather, it was all a politically convenient fantasy concocted by Danchenko, a former Brookings Institute hawk, and his Russian emigree drinking buddies telling the Democratic financiers of the Steele dossier what they wanted to hear. It was not only Maddow who uncritically hyped this fabrication. As Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple writes: “The Danchenko indictment doubles as a critique of several media outlets that covered Steele’s reports in 2016 and after its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017…CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the McClatchy newspaper chain and various pundits showered credibility upon the dossier without corroboration - and found other topics to cover when a forceful debunking arrived in December 2019 via a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Bret Stephens in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/opinion/steele-dossier-fbi-trump.html" target="_blank">The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.” If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Marc Ruskin in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/department-of-justice-has-different-standards-for-different-subjects_4148924.html" target="_blank">Department of Justice Has Different Standards for Different Subjects</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The order to fire McCabe didn’t arise from a political source, nor did it come from the Trump White House. Rather, it came from the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibly (OPR), the bureau’s version of Internal Affairs. Historically impervious to outside influence and virtually impossible to tamper with, OPR has always ruled severely in such cases. A finding of lack of candor results in dismissal. Many, many special agents have learned this harsh truth. McCabe had been treated in this instance as would any FBI special agent and received no special treatment for being in upper management. Rather, the lesson was that the system works. Democracy will prevail, and those who try to subvert the agency—be they the deputy director or director of the FBI—will ultimately be brought down. However, the lesson has now proved to be incorrect. Wait for a shift of the political winds, and the system will be perverted—he who tried to subvert the agency has ultimately been absolved. Concurrent with a no-doubt lucrative run as a CNN commentator, McCabe has been formally absolved of wrongdoing by a Garland Department of Justice (DOJ) settlement. McCabe’s pension has been fully restored, and all references to his having been fired for cause are to be removed from official FBI files.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"> Kimball in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-york-times-shows-need-for-reality-czar_3697773.html" target="_blank">New York Times Shows Need for 'Reality Czar'</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Virtually every substantive claim in the 1619 Project was refuted by historians. The NY Times silently altered some of the more egregious errors, but again the damage had been done. So, maybe, the NY Times is right and we do need a “reality czar” and a coordinated task force to police “misinformation.” But the focus of the efforts shouldn’t be on people expressing differing opinions about the integrity of the 2020 election or the best way to respond to the CCP virus. It should be on the machinations of that vast engine for the production of politicized misinformation, The New York Times.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Paul Mozur & John Liu in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/world/asia/china-hu-xijin-retires.html" target="_blank">Hu Xijin, Head of 'China's Fox News,' Says He'll Retire</a>.
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A standout in China’s growing chorus of nationalist voices, Mr. Hu led the<br /> paper, which some have called China’s version of Fox News, for more than a decade. Under his watch, it became one of the country’s best-known, and most truculent, media organizations. “Old Hu will turn 62 years old after the New Year, and it’s about time I retire,” Mr. Hu wrote on China’s Twitter-like Weibo social media platform, referring to himself by a popular nickname. “In the future, as a special commentator for Global Times, I will continue to contribute to the development of the Global Times and continue to do my best for the party’s news and public opinion work,” he added.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
John Nolte at <i>breitbart.com</i>, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/15/ny-times-waits-close-impeachment-trial-retract-fire-extinguisher-fable/" target="_blank">NY Times Waits Until Close of Impeachment Trial to Retract 'Fire Extinguisher' Fable</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
It turns out none of this was true, something we’ve known for weeks already. But the Times still waited until this weekend to disguise its retraction in an “update” that reads, “UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.” Oh, but it gets worse… Much worse… The most crucial part of the January 8 article has now been rewritten. Read the rewrite very carefully: "Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official." Now go back and read the “update” again… I’ll wait. You see the difference? You see the difference between the source for the “fire extinguisher” fable now being identified as “officials close to the Capitol Police” when we were originally told the source was “law enforcement officials”?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, <a href="https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/still-making-sense-of-what-happened-at-the-new-york-times-and-the-philadelphia-inquirer/" target="_blank">Still making sense of what happened at The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
New York Times reporters Edmund Lee and Ben Smith reported that Jim VandeHei, the chief executive and co-founder of Axios, sent an email that told employees, “First, let me say we proudly support and encourage you to exercise your rights to free speech, press, and protest. If you’re arrested or meet harm while exercising these rights, Axios will stand behind you and use the Family Fund to cover your bail or assist with medical bills.” VandeHei’s answer came after an employee asked about the company’s stance on protesting. Again, this is unusual for news outlets, which typically forbid marching in protests, donating to political candidates’ campaigns or supporting candidates with bumper stickers or yard signs. For example, Lee and Smith point out that The New York Times policy is that journalists “may not march or rally in support of public causes or movements” or publicly take positions on public issues. It adds, “doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or The Times’s ability to function as neutral observers in covering the news.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Glenn Greenwald at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship" target="_blank">The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Well-Deserved Blows</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Numerous <i>Clubhouse</i> participants, including Kmele Foster, immediately documented that Lorenz had lied. The moderator of the discussion, Nait Jones, said that “Marc never used that word.” What actually happened was that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the discussion, had “explained that the Redditors call themselves ‘retard revolution’” and that was the only mention of that word. Rather than apologizing and retracting, Lorenz thanked Jones for “clarifying,” and then emphasized how hurtful it is to use that word. She deleted the original tweet without comment, and then - with the smear fully realized - locked her account. Besides the fact that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy someone’s reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything. The participants in <i>Clubhouse</i> have tried to block these tattletale reporters from eavesdropping on their private conversations precisely because they see themselves as Stasi agents whose function is to report people for expressing prohibited ideas even in private conservations. As Jones pointedly noted, “this is why people block” journalists: “because of this horseshit dishonesty.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Oliver Wiseman in CRITIC, <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2021/the-new-york-times/" target="_blank">Bad times at the Grey Lady</a>.
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Cotton’s article is still on the Times website, though neutered by a lengthy editorial note which states that “the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published”. The note implies factual mistakes in the piece - and yet no corrections have been made. A few months later, the same section of the paper (under new management) published an egregious piece of Chinese Communist Party apologia. “Hong Kong is China, like it or not” ran the headline of an article by a pro-Beijing member of Hong Kong’s legislative council. Too busy play-acting a fight between fascism and democracy in America, the paper’s staff didn’t seem to mind much about it providing cover for a genuinely dictatorial regime.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Douglas Murray in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-trouble-with-the-new-york-times" target="_blank">What has the New York Times got against Ayaan Hirsi Ali?</a>.
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All of which leaves a number of questions to this reader. Not just why Filipovic seems to have read a different book from the one she was hired to review, but what exactly people like Filipovic think the answer to the problems described by Hirsi Ali actually are. Do they exist? If so what i one to do about them, other than shut down people who speak about them? The reviewer claims to dislike fundamentalist religious views, but she dislikes even more anybody who criticises such views. I wonder what the explanation could be? But here I will take a leaf out of the NYT’s book, and look for the simplest and most hostile explanation possible. In this fashion, one possibility does spring to mind. A possibility produced by the organ that Filipovic is writing for. In recent times, the NYT has had a terrible problem – more so than any other mainstream publication – of racism among its staff. The publication has hired writers who make overtly racist comments (Sarah Jeong) and fired other people for allegedly using racist terminology. I don’t know why the NYT can’t get through a month without an internal racism scandal, but I begin to desire to take it by its own lights and simply accept that the paper in question has a racism problem. And I suppose that a piece like Filipovic’s must be read in this light.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Bari Weiss at <a href="https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter" target="_blank"><i>bariweiss.com</i></a>:</span> </blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">Dear A.G.
I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming. I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor.... But the lessons that ought to have followed the election - lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society - have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Bret Stephens in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/tom-cotton-op-ed.html" target="_blank">What The Times Got Wrong</a>.
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The paper’s editors’ note said the senator’s Op-Ed didn’t meet The Times’s editorial standards. To which one might ask: Would the paper have stood by the article if Cotton had made a better case for sending in troops, with stronger legal arguments and a nicer tone? Or were the piece’s supposed flaws a pretext for achieving the politically desired result by a paper that lost its nerve in the face of a staff revolt?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, <a href="https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/breaking-down-the-controversial-resignation-of-new-york-times-opinion-writer-bari-weiss/" target="_blank">Breaking down the controversial resignation of New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss</a>.
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Weiss wasn’t the only high-profile writer to resign on Tuesday. Andrew Sullivan tweeted that this would be his last week at <i>New York Magazine</i>. His reasons sound similar to Weiss’.... Sullivan, who has been at <i>New York</i> since 2016, said he had “no beef” with his colleagues and didn’t give a specific reason for his resignation, but added, “The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.” ...In a memo to staff obtained by CNN’s Kerry Flynn, <i>New York</i> editor-in-chief David Haskell said the parting was “mutual.” ...Haskell did allude to differences with Sullivan, if not in political views then in approach. “I am trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest space for political debate,” Haskell said. “I believe there is a way to write from a conservative perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values. I also think that our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say not only championed but also interrogated.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Donald G. McNeil Jr at <i>medium.com</i>, <a href="https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-word-part-one-introduction-57eb6a3e0d95" target="_blank">NYTimes Peru N-Word, Part One: Introduction</a>.
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On February 5 this year, one week after an article about me appeared in the Daily Beast, The New York Times announced that I would be leaving. At my departure, I was the paper’s lead reporter on the Covid-19 pandemic. I had been at the Times since starting as a copy boy in 1976. Since the Daily Beast wrote to the Times on Jan. 28 saying it intended to publish a story, I have not spoken in detail to any reporter. On the advice of my lawyer, I waited until my departure date, March 1, 2021.... I’m publishing my thoughts here on <i>Medium</i> because I know journalists. We make America what it is - without a free press, democracy dies. But we’re still jackals. We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just as you’re offering us a treat. We can’t help it.... That’s the game. I’m somewhat relieved to be out of it. But after 50 years, if you count writing for my high school magazine, I’ll probably never be able to shake the habits. Since January 28, I’ve been a jackal circled by jackals.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, <a href="https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2021/an-uncomfortable-portrait-the-new-york-times-takes-a-hard-look-at-itself/" target="_blank">The New York Times takes a hard look at itself</a>.
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The investigation - led by Amber Guild, president of the company’s T Brand Studios, deputy managing editor Carolyn Ryan, and senior vice president Anand Venkatesan - found that Black and Latino staffers face “the largest and most pervasive challenges” and are underrepresented in leadership. As another example, it found that Asian American women on the staff feel “invisible and unseen.” Guild, Ryan and Venkatesan wrote, “We cannot accept this. We must change our culture and systems. And we must be bolder in making The Times more diverse, equitable and inclusive. Doing so will improve the experience not just for our colleagues of color, but for everyone at The Times.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Eric Dezenhall in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-stonewalls-steele-dossier-disinformation-trump-nyt-washington-post-trump-11638718026" target="_blank">Media Stonewalls on Steele Dossier</a>.
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Having had media companies as clients, I’ve found that when they’re under fire, they behave no differently from chemical or drug companies. Why? Because they don’t see coming clean as being in their self-interest. Among other things, the truth can tarnish the brand and jam them up in court. So they often deny, stonewall, close ranks, and attack their critics. Two things media companies have that other businesses don’t is the ability to deliver news instantly and the mantle of moral authority. The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the sources of disinformation leveled at our clients. The first factor in a successful disinformation campaign is an audience that desperately wants to believe something. Then you find a plausible allegation that fits the marketplace. Next, you implant an outrageous allegation within the plausible one. Finally, you find a trustworthy person, someone simpatico with media organizations, to let it rip.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
David Rutz at <i>foxnews.com</i>, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-podcast-steele-dossiers-downfall-neglects-democratic" target="_blank">NY Times podcast on Steele dossier's downfall neglects to mention Democratic spin doctor's key role</a>.
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Dolan was a state chairman for President Bill Clinton's 1992 and 1996 campaigns, advised Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and "actively campaigned and participated in calls and events as a volunteer on behalf of Hillary Clinton." In his career as a public relations professional, he had extensive Russian contacts and connections. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple, who has been harshly critical of outlets like CNN and MSNBC for their extensive promotion of the Steele dossier during the Trump years, wrote about Dolan's role as an example of the "circular logic" of its allegations. "Talk about circular logic: The dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee - via research group Fusion GPS - yet here was a career Democrat feeding information to its primary collector," Wemple wrote last month.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Batya Ungar-Sargon in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-new-york-times-broke-journalism" target="_blank">What broke the New York Times?</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, books like J.D. Vance's <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> soared to the top of the bestseller list as blindsided liberals sought to understand how people could have voted for Trump. For a brief period, it seemed like the American mainstream might truly grapple with the question of class. But this quickly disappeared in favour of an easier explanation: Trump voters were racists.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Karol Markowicz in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/florida-plague-is-the-medias-cold-new-york-surge-omicron-infection-variant-vaccines-11640268505" target="_blank">Florida's Plague Is the Media's Cold</a>.
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Covid could be stopped, they insisted, if only those rubes would behave correctly. Florida was a particular target because its governor had ended lockdowns and mandates early and was pushing for schools to stop requiring masks. A typical piece, by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, was titled “Ron DeSantis’ priorities on Covid-19 are all screwed up.” A chastened Mr. Cillizza tweeted last Friday that he had learned the vaccine “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected,” and that “I realize I am way behind lots of other people in doing that.” That’s for sure.... The reason it took so long for this reality to penetrate the media bubble is political. Journalists believed red states would get sick while blue ones would be spared. Some still do: A Dec. 17 Washington Post piece by columnist Paul Waldman was headlined “The red covid wave is here.” Covid has followed a seasonal pattern. States getting hit now had similar rises exactly a year ago, and Florida experienced summer surges in both 2020 and 2021. The New York spike could have been easily anticipated if members of the media hadn’t pretended there was virtue in not getting sick. But there’s no way for journalists to avoid the truth when it’s happening to them. Suddenly it’s fact that there’s no real way to stop a respiratory virus and maybe we should stop our heroic efforts that destroy so much about our lives in the pursuit of eradicating Covid.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ira Stoll at <i>nysun.com</i>, <a href="https://www.nysun.com/national/new-york-times-might-be-one-of-ford-foundations/91681/" target="_blank">New York Times Might Be One of Ford Foundation's Neediest Cases</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
A 2014 joint interview of Mr. Walker featured softball questions from the Times reporter like, “How did you cope when reality began to exceed your dreams?” and “Do you ever stop noticing that you’re the only person of color, the only gay person sitting in the powerful conference room?” In recent months, the Ford Foundation has opened that “$13 billion checkbook” - which has swelled in the meantime to nearly $16 billion - for the Times. In December 2020, the New York Times Company announced it had raised $1.5 million from the Ford Foundation “to launch Headway, a journalism initiative to investigate global and national challenges.” The Times press release announcing Headway declared that “Michael Kimmelman, founder of the Headway project, will serve as editor at large.” That’s the same Michael Kimmelman who wrote the Times article praising the Ford Foundation’s headquarters renovation.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Dan Barry, Alan Feuer & Matthew Rosenberg in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/16/us/capitol-riot.html" target="_blank">90 Seconds of Rage</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Nearly a quarter of the more than 600 people arrested in connection with the riot have been charged with assaulting or impeding police officers. But only a handful of that subset have any ties to extremist provocateurs like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. The most violent on Jan. 6, it seems, were the most ordinary - a slice of the Trump faithful. They largely represent a group certain to have powerful sway in the nation’s tortured politics to come: whiter, slightly older and less likely than the general voting population to live in a city or be college-educated. Recent studies indicate that they come from places where people tend to fear the replacement of their ethnic and cultural dominance by immigrants, and adhere to the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, <a href="https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2021/the-washington-post-shows-off-its-journalism-muscle-in-extraordinary-jan-6-investigation/" target="_blank">The Washington Post shows off its journalism muscle in extraordinary Jan. 6 investigation</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
On Sunday, The Washington Post published an exceptional three-part investigation about Jan. 6. It involved more than 75 journalists and included interviews with more than 230 people, thousands of pages of court documents and law enforcement reports, as well as hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings. The package - called “The Attack” - is divided into three parts: “Before,” “During” and “After.” All are painstakingly reported and detailed. In a statement, Matea Gold, national political enterprise and investigations editor, said, “An event of the magnitude of the Capitol attack demands deep and revelatory reporting. This newsroom-wide collaboration provides our readers with a definitive account of Jan. 6 and its lasting impact on American democracy.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ivan Pentchoukov in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/brookings-institution-under-scrutiny-as-more-links-emerge-to-author-of-infamous-steele-dossier_3449840.html" target="_blank">Brookings Institution Under Scrutiny as More Links Emerge to Author of Infamous Steele Dossier</a>.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) last week demanded all records regarding the communications between the State Department and Brookings Institution employees in 2016 and 2017 about Steele and the Trump campaign. House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said last week that he wants to know why Strobe Talbott, the president of the think tank in 2016, was in touch with Steele and received the spy’s dossier.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Sidney Blumenthal in GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/09/trump-maga-us-american-civil-war" target="_blank">Trump's Maga insurrectionists were perverse US civil war re-enactors</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Donald Trump tweeted on December 19, a week after his would-be Brown Shirt followers rioted in the streets of Washington to protest the “stolen” election. When Der Tag – the climactic day of battle arrived – Trump assembled his true believers on the South Ellipse at the White House for a “Save America” rally, waving them up Pennsylvania Avenue as his army to nullify the congressional certification of electoral college votes in the presidential election. Near the steps of the Capitol, as Trump’s shock troops prepared themselves for the assault on the citadel, they built a bare but dramatic monument to their revenge fantasy: wooden gallows with steps leading up to a swinging noose. Smashing their way through the windows and doors of the Capitol, they rampaged in a mad dash, breaking furniture, slashing paintings and looting offices. One of the invaders roamed through the corridors carrying a large Confederate flag, the first and only time that emblem of the Slave Power has ever appeared inside the Capitol.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Kevin Roose in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html" target="_blank">How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
By 2014, The Epoch Times was edging closer to Mr. Li’s vision of a respectable news outlet. Subscriptions were growing, the paper’s reporting was winning journalism awards, and its finances were stabilizing.... But at a staff meeting in 2015, leadership announced that the publication was in trouble again, Ms. Belmaker recalled. Facebook had changed its algorithm for determining which articles appeared in users’ newsfeeds, and The Epoch Times’s traffic and ad revenue were suffering.... This year, Facebook took down more than 500 pages and accounts linked to Truth Media, a network of anti-China pages that had been using fake accounts to amplify their messages. The Epoch Times denied any involvement, but Facebook’s investigators said Truth Media “showed some links to on-platform activity by Epoch Media Group and NTD.” “We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times,” said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the social network would punish the outlet if it violated more rules in the future. Since being barred from advertising on Facebook, The Epoch Times has moved much of its operation to YouTube, where it has spent more than $1.8 million on ads since May 2018, according to Google’s public database of political advertising.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
EPOCH TIMES: <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-york-times-8-month-long-investigation-of-the-epoch-times-light-on-facts-heavy-on-bias_3487144.html" target="_blank">New York Times' 8-Month-Long 'Investigation' of The Epoch Times: Light on Facts, Heavy on Bias</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
At the heart of the article is the NY Times’ apparent discontent with the fact that The Epoch Times has become - in the NY Times’ own words - “one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.” The article could easily have been written as a success story of a group of Chinese Americans who cherish their First Amendment rights and have succeeded in growing a large independent media outlet. Instead, Roose relies on words such as “secretive” and attempts to tie us to an unrelated outlet, in order to call into question the quality of our award-winning journalism. Roose takes particular issue with our critical position on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its ongoing human rights abuses. He downplays accounts of the abuses taking place, claiming they “veer into exaggeration.” This unusual defense and appeasement of the CCP is morally questionable.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Michael Grynbaum in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/oann-trump.html" target="_blank">One America News, the Network That Spreads Conspiracies to the West Wing</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
In the segment about Mr. Gugino, the One America News reporter, Mr. Rouz, claims that “newly released video appeared to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest.” The footage, as seen in the segment, offers no obvious evidence to back up that assertion. The allegation of a link between Mr. Gugino and a far-left antifascist group referred to as “antifa” appears to have originated on <i>Conservative Treehouse</i>, a fringe right-wing website that has spread baseless conspiracy theories. The site bills itself as a “Rag Tag Bunch of Conservative Misfits.” The unsubstantiated theory that antifa activists were responsible for riots and looting at the protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died last month after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer, was the biggest piece of protest misinformation tracked by Zignal Labs, a research firm that follows the spread of falsehoods in the media.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Tom Jones in POYNTER REPORT, <a href="https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/in-one-press-conference-president-trump-just-revealed-the-rest-of-his-campaign-strategy/" target="_blank">Question of the day</a>.
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When I say “Question of the day,” I don’t mean in a good way. If you had any lingering questions about the legitimacy of OANN as a news organization, this question should pretty much put an end to that. CNN’s Daniel Dale tweeted that this was the first question OANN’s Chanel Rion asked of President Trump in a recent interview: “When you’re hosting that briefing room, sitting across from you there are people there who, if in any other circumstance, you probably would get along with them fine, if you weren’t president and they weren’t journalists. Something happens, though. Somewhere along the way, the cameras turn on and all of a sudden the vitriol starts. Their questions, often devoid of rationality, reason, decency. So my question to you is, do you think these attacks against you in that briefing room … are they organic questions from individual, free-thinking people or do you think that these journalists are afraid they might lose their jobs if they don’t attack you the way they do every day?”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
OAN: <a href="https://www.oann.com/newly-organized-national-white-house-correspondents-association-launches-offers-counterpoint-to-117-year-old-white-house-correspondents-association/" target="_blank">Newly Organized National White House Correspondents Association Launches, Offers Counterpoint to 117-Year-Old White House Correspondents’ Association</a>.
</span><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKlJ8lrtt-yR8bP70_C6Ko8E-Ot3tBifkijz21bOyYP83iselL8h5HTgJPEI1YowcPnC-ggobqbBQtvYmji-lJdaWi2Z981LqD6qpK93Y-M-y5C6uS36MpK8lV99QsR5EUrDwTP6sErfcBX0oMjatwLlZpZF7CFCuMgV3yMFPeMA5f_qclJrJEiqKCOw=s350" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="350" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKlJ8lrtt-yR8bP70_C6Ko8E-Ot3tBifkijz21bOyYP83iselL8h5HTgJPEI1YowcPnC-ggobqbBQtvYmji-lJdaWi2Z981LqD6qpK93Y-M-y5C6uS36MpK8lV99QsR5EUrDwTP6sErfcBX0oMjatwLlZpZF7CFCuMgV3yMFPeMA5f_qclJrJEiqKCOw=s320" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">
The NWHCA seeks to restore balance and diversity of viewpoints in White House news coverage. The American public is served best when all voices are heard and the President’s message is unfiltered. According to Rion the WHCA has maneuvered almost all balance and diversity out of the White House correspondents’ pool and briefing room demonstrating daily that they consider America’s free press the exclusive property of the “progressive” reformers of Washington. This is not representative of a free and balanced press.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Dana Milbank in WASHINGTON POST, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/biden-media-coverage-worse-trump-favorable/?utm_source=Poynter+Institute&utm_campaign=3741c88687-12202021+-+The+Poynter+Report&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">The media treats Biden as badly as - or worse than Trump. Here's proof</a>.
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We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Ben Smith in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html" target="_blank">Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn't Buy It</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article. Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance - but containing some of the same emails - to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story - as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Lee Smith in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/washington-post-vies-to-become-official-state-media_3629811.html" target="_blank">Washington Post Vies to Become Official State Media</a>.
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The advent of the internet in the 1990s broke the media’s financial model, which led to the collapse of its ethical and professional standards. With hundreds of media outlets out of business, the prestige press was replaced by social media platforms whose political and economic interests intersected with a globalized tech industry and the government consumers of many of its most sophisticated products. For instance, Bezos also owns Amazon Web Services, which furnished and maintains the “cloud” technology on which the CIA stores its information. It was during the four-year-long coup targeting Donald Trump and the foundations of the republic that the new political anatomy began to materialize. Under the new regime, journalists and intelligence officers became courtiers servicing oligarchic interests. Thus, the purpose of the communications infrastructure they preside over is to protect the oligarchy’s leading members and destroy its enemies. The war began before Trump was inaugurated. With its Jan. 10, 2017, story leaking news that Obama’s intelligence chiefs had briefed the president-elect on a former British spy’s Democrat-funded memos, CNN ushered in the Age of the Dossier, legitimizing reports sourced to conspiracy theories as news. NBC/MSNBC openly modeled the new media condominium joining the press and spy services with former senior CIA officers such as John Brennan under contract to push establishment propaganda. But the print press was the coup’s operational center of gravity, and The Washington Post its most important instrument.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ben Smith in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/business/media/martin-baron-washington-post.html" target="_blank">Marty Baron Made The Post Great Again. Now, the News Is Changing</a>.
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The revival of The Post by Mr. Baron and its owner, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is perhaps the greatest news business success story of the past decade. But that journalistic revival has in some ways masked a messier story, one of many contradictions. The Post has published some of the best reporting in the 20th-century American newspaper tradition that’s ever been done, like the sprawling exposé of America’s war in Afghanistan — all wrapped in a digital marketing, advertising and publishing machine that The Post licenses lucratively to news organizations around the world. It’s a faceless institution in an era of influencers and personal brands.... Mr. Baron’s fearless focus on White House coverage and investigations has put it at the center of the American media’s response to President Trump. But it’s also a top-down institution whose constrained view of what journalism is today has frustrated some of the industry’s creative young stars.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Paul Farhi in WASHINGTON POST, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/media-washington-post-steele-dossier/2021/11/12/f7c9b770-43d5-11ec-a88e-2aa4632af69b_story.html" target="_blank">The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories regarding the Steele dossier</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The March 2017 Post story carried the headline, “Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim.” It said Millian had been identified in different portions of the dossier as Source D and Source E. The article included Millian’s repeated denials that he had helped Steele. The newspaper removed references to Millian as Steele’s source in online and archived versions of the original articles. The stories themselves won’t be retracted. A dozen other Post stories that made the same assertion were also corrected and amended.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Katie Robertson & Marc Tracy in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/business/media/marty-baron-retirement-washington-post.html" target="_blank">Martin Baron, Who Led Three Major Papers, Retires From Washington Post</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“At age 66, I feel ready to move on,” he said in a note to the newspaper’s staff. Mr. Baron said that he had joined the paper with “a reverence for The Post’s heritage of courage and independence and feeling an inviolable obligation to uphold its values,” and that the news staff had delivered “the finest journalism.” “You stood firm against cynical, never-ending assaults on objective fact,” he wrote.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Glenn Greenwald at <i>twitter.com</i>, <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1350075640444284928?lang=en" target="_blank">Signal & Telegram</a>.
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The 3 journalistic units most devoted to demanding online censorship are CNN's media reporters, NBC's "disinformation team," and NYT's tech reporters... Three events in the last 3 months have been major attacks on a free internet: FB & Twitter uniting to censor NY Post pre-election reporting on the Bidens (a shocking breach); the removal of POTUS from the internet; the monopolistic destruction of Parler. A huge escalation.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Adam Goldman in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-laptop.html" target="_blank">Hunter Biden Claims Still Nebulous</a>.
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What don’t we know? A lot. Mr. Isaac, who said he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, declined to answer many questions about the laptop and his contacts with the F.B.I. He also would not talk about his communications with the Trump loyalists who orchestrated the plan to make the computer’s contents public just before the election. It is also not clear what the F.B.I. did with the laptop or what Justice Department officials knew about the sensitive F.B.I. investigation at the time. F.B.I. officials have declined to discuss the inquiry.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Eric Lipton, Kenneth Vogel & Maggie Haberman in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/us/politics/bidens-china.html" target="_blank">Questions and Answers About the Bidens and a Deal in China - There is no evidence that the former vice president was involved in or profited from a joint venture pursued by his son and brother.</a> </span></blockquote><p> </p><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Adam Goldman & Mark Mazzetti in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/us/politics/project-veritas-journalism-political-spying.html" target="_blank">Project Veritas and the Line Between Journalism and Political Spying</a>.
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Project Veritas has long occupied a gray area between investigative journalism and political spying, and internal documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws. The documents, a series of memos written by the group’s lawyer, detail ways for Project Veritas sting operations - which typically diverge from standard journalistic practice by employing people who mask their real identities or create fake ones to infiltrate target organizations - to avoid breaking federal statutes such as the law against lying to government officials.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Adam Goldman & Michael Schmidt in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/us/politics/ashley-biden-project-veritas-diary.html" target="_blank">How Ashley Biden's Diary Made Its Way to Project Veritas</a>.
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Extensive interviews with people involved in or briefed on the investigation and a review of court filings, police records and other material help flesh out elements of a tale that is testing the line between investigative journalism and political dirty tricks. The investigation has focused new attention on how Mr. Trump or his allies sought to use the troubles of Mr. Biden’s two surviving children to undercut him. The inquiry has also intensified the scrutiny of Project Veritas. Its founder, James O’Keefe, was pulled from his apartment in his underwear and handcuffed during a dawn raid last month by the F.B.I., two days after a pair of his former employees had their homes raided. The group - which purchased the diary but ultimately did not publish it and denies any wrongdoing - has assailed the investigation.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
NEW YORK TIMES: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/opinion/project-veritas-new-york-times.html" target="_blank">A Dangerous Court Order Against The New York Times</a>.
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Journalism, like democracy, thrives in an environment of transparency and freedom. No court should be able to tell The New York Times or any other news organization — or, for that matter, Project Veritas — how to conduct its reporting. Otherwise, it would provide an incentive for any reporter’s subjects to file frivolous libel suits as a means of controlling news coverage about them. More to the point, it would subvert the values embodied by the First Amendment and hobble the functioning of the free press on which a self-governing republic depends.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Jack Phillips in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/glenn-greenwald-resigns-from-the-intercept-claims-suppression-of-joe-biden-story_3557811.html" target="_blank">Glenn Greenwald Resigns From The Intercept, Claims Biden Story 'Suppression'</a>.
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Greenwald posted a resignation letter on Twitter on Oct. 29, saying editors at the left-leaning publication refused to publish an article of his unless he deleted “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.” The journalist, who helped break news on classified NSA surveillance programs leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden about a decade ago, asserted that <i>The Intercept</i>’s decision and his choice to resign shows there is a trend of “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles." <i>The Intercept</i>, in response, claimed Greenwald is presenting a false narrative.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Alexander Burns in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/democrats-trump-election-plan.html" target="_blank">How Democrats Planned for Doomsday</a>.
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The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill. They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump. They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Molly Ball in TIME, <a href="https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=politics_2020-election&linkId=110717147" target="_blank">The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election</a>.
</span><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtkdRhKNIixshAmLTFxLChIwqdhIeNJgbFixZT0TMo5ljc3Tyfb9oINuaQ75iBgQtf2SEyOEzOTAI30S5B0cEwgoFceBbx07_nnNoH7mQxiE12V-6I25X77trUVuqWpZTIVIayUN8mW_JbVn3IsCUQqCP3QRAxz4hTdcfJ0gHHkxpBLHgYmi4Ymrh5AQ=s259" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtkdRhKNIixshAmLTFxLChIwqdhIeNJgbFixZT0TMo5ljc3Tyfb9oINuaQ75iBgQtf2SEyOEzOTAI30S5B0cEwgoFceBbx07_nnNoH7mQxiE12V-6I25X77trUVuqWpZTIVIayUN8mW_JbVn3IsCUQqCP3QRAxz4hTdcfJ0gHHkxpBLHgYmi4Ymrh5AQ" width="194" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">
To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.” In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
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Jeff Carlson in EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/time-magazine-article-points-to-a-controlled-election_3688393.html" target="_blank">Time Magazine Details the 'Shadow Campaign' Against Trump</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
As the article notes, the efforts of this cabal “touched every aspect of the election,” including our election laws. These groups engaged in a unified legal front to “change voting systems and laws” at the state level, often unconstitutionally bypassing state legislatures and shifting power to the states’ governors in the process. Conservative efforts to fight against this process were euphemistically termed as “voter-suppression lawsuits.” The terminology and framing of issues bring us to a peculiar characteristic of the article. It’s written as though 75 million Trump voters simply don’t exist - as though a nation was somehow wholly united against a self-imposed second term of a Trump presidency. There is no acknowledgment that President Donald Trump enjoyed support from a large segment of the population. When the term “voters” is used, it’s always in reference to those who were voting against Trump and for Biden. Other than a few short paragraphs, the reader could be forgiven for thinking the election was ever even in question. While an intense focus on the Trump campaign is present in the article, there’s an almost surprising lack of discussion regarding the Biden campaign.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Morgan Phillips in DAILY MAIL, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10288375/Hillary-Clinton-gets-tearful-reads-speech-given-won-election.html" target="_blank">Hillary Clinton gets tearful as she reads speech she would have given...</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
'I've never shared this with anybody. I've never read this out loud. But it helps to encapsulate who I am, what I believe in, and what my hopes were for the kind of country that I want for my grandchildren, and that I want for the world, that I believe in that is America at its best: My fellow Americans, today you sent a message to the whole world,' she begins, sharing what she would have read to the world. 'Our values endure. Our democracy stands strong. And our motto remains: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one.... We will not be defined only by our differences,' Clinton continues in the speech. 'We will not be an us versus them country. The American dream is big enough for everyone.'</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Amanda Hess in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/arts/hillary-clinton-masterclass.html" target="_blank">Victory Speech (Hillary's Version)</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Resilience suggests elasticity, and there is something morbidly fascinating about watching Clinton revert to her pre-Trump form. The victory speech itself reads like centrist Mad Libs - a meditation on “E Pluribus Unum,” nods to both Black Lives Matter and the bravery of police, an Abraham Lincoln quote - but at its end it veers into complex emotional territory. Clinton recalls her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, and as she describes a dream about her, her voice shakes and warps in pitch. Dorothy Rodham had a bleak upbringing, and Clinton wishes she could visit her mother’s childhood self and assure her that despite all the suffering she would endure, her daughter would go on to become the president of the United States. As Clinton plays her former self comforting her mother’s former self with the idea of a future Clinton who will never exist, we finally glimpse a loss that cannot be negotiated, optimized or monetized: She can never speak to her mother again. Soon, Clinton’s MasterClass has reverted back to its banal messaging - she instructs us to dust ourselves off, take a walk, make our beds - but for a few seconds, she could be seen not as a windup historical figure but as a person, like the rest of us, who cannot beat time.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Mehreen Khan in FINANCIAL TIMES on Rafia Zakaria's book, <a ref="https://www.ft.com/content/b33b71aa-0721-45ae-be86-cd8ced29d6ac" target="_blank">Against White Feminism</a>.
</span><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEOqQ7Gdck9cgpNyR_i-yANkFjov3fkxbTkC081U9VISYsbxwV3uCGrhKPJPDHoxz9-sO4UCQLU5IuBXEBfllA3CR6wq_ZmPl6PMiADmspg3gvcsSxLzK3anrIo9GsDO23k8RTWSQL4ImFtYFRI7ISl7pnPy71UEKxvioo0Q7gZHhIBbVMXJ-AqidhdQ=s483" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="483" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEOqQ7Gdck9cgpNyR_i-yANkFjov3fkxbTkC081U9VISYsbxwV3uCGrhKPJPDHoxz9-sO4UCQLU5IuBXEBfllA3CR6wq_ZmPl6PMiADmspg3gvcsSxLzK3anrIo9GsDO23k8RTWSQL4ImFtYFRI7ISl7pnPy71UEKxvioo0Q7gZHhIBbVMXJ-AqidhdQ=s320" width="199" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">
The figure of the veiled Afghan woman oppressed by the Taliban was held up by a coalition of leading US women’s organisations and female journalists to cheerlead for the invasion in the aftermath of 9/11. It was a quintessential neo-imperialist mission to save, as the author puts it, “brown women from brown men”. The small matter of devastating bombs... was a necessary means to that shining feminist end.... Zakaria’s relentless and unforgiving excoriation of white female intellectuals, activists and journalists will make for uncomfortable reading for many well-meaning women. The author admits that her clarion call for a more inclusive feminism will isolate fellow activists and lose her friends. Her solutions call for white women to cede space to women of colour, pay greater attention to the class and economic barriers that keep women of colour out of feminist discourse, and for older feminists to “let go of their paranoid belief that racial equality within the movement is some sort of surreptitious strategy to displace them”.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Jemima Kelly in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3e565df2-0cb2-4126-a879-eb2710eef03a" target="_blank">Substack's success reveals reader fatigue with polarised media</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“There are a lot of people who want options that aren’t either some 27-year-old white woman yelling at you about being racist or ableist all day long, or Fox News,” says Freddie deBoer, a freelance journalist turned <i>Substack</i> writer who has amassed more than 1,400 subscribers since joining the platform a month ago. What could stop <i>Substack</i>? Some argue it is not scalable and will only provide a sustainable income for those who got in early. This seems like a fair concern, though there is no sign of this group having reached capacity. Others point out that the company lacks any kind of “moat”, or sustainable competitive advantage, and will not survive competition from companies such as Twitter, which recently acquired newsletter company Revue, and promised to take just a 5 per cent cut from subscription income. But <i>Substack</i>’s user-friendliness and its commitment to free speech, which it was forced to make clear in a statement last week after calls to deplatform some of its contributors for hate speech and transphobia, is turning the platform into a brand in its own right. I would argue this constitutes the first droplets of a moat.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
David Klion at <i>jewishcurrents.org</i>, <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/jeffrey-goldberg-doesnt-speak-for-the-jews" target="_blank">Jeffrey Goldberg Doesn't Speak for the Jews</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
As his many famous friends and stewardship of The Atlantic attest, Goldberg really is an informal leader of a highly influential cohort, and he really does speak for its values. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed following his firing, Williamson recounted pointing out to Goldberg that the late Christopher Hitchens, a frequent Atlantic contributor, “routinely and gleefully gave occasion for offense - and he was one of the invaluable essayists of our time.” “Yes,” Goldberg replied, “But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.” Goldberg knows and frankly admits that there’s a family. What he has a harder time admitting is that he has more power than almost anyone to determine who belongs to it. He gets to decide, for instance, that Peter Beinart (J Street-aligned liberal Zionists) and David Frum (respectable #NeverTrump neoconservatives) should represent the poles of acceptable Jewish discourse. Meanwhile, the emerging generation of American Jews who supported Sanders, and who in many cases feel totally alienated from Zionism, are shut out.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>revolver.news</i>: <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2021/11/are-you-ready-to-be-an-american-kulak/" target="_blank">Are You Ready To Be An American Kulak?</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The modern American regime is built on explicit, institutionalized hostility to the people who most resemble the great Americans of the past. It is anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-rural, and anti-middle class. The more of these traits a person has, the more worthy of hate they become. The more the Globalist American Empire decays and squanders the inheritance it was given, the more bile and hatred it directs against those who symbolize what came before. But those on the receiving end of this new discriminatory regime may not appreciate its full scope or the ultimate fate that the Globalist American Empire has planned for them. They may see recent anti-white animus as a temporary spell, or a limited affair that can be waited out. They are wrong. America’s shrinking white middle class are the target of an ever-intensifying cycle, whose mechanics are ripped straight from another oppressive regime, the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 30s.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Bronwen Maddox in FINANCIAL TIMES, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0c5c8d5e-811b-40aa-8cdb-f7e54bb6dea6" target="_blank">The pandemic has shown we need clarity on the role of experts</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Sir Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and author of <i>Unelected Power</i>, a book discussing these questions, pointed out in a 2018 talk in parliament that “the principles of the structure of government in the western world - stemming from Montesquieu, Madison and John Locke among others - make no place for the administrative state, regulators and central banks at all”. This is a problem, he argued, “because the wonder of... representative democracy is that it separates... how we feel about the government of the day and how we feel about the system of government”. The more of government that is in the hands of unelected people, the less that can be remedied by a general election.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
William Voegeli in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/criminal-negligence/" target="_blank">Criminal Negligence</a>.
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In the progressive framework, then, it is not enough for the government to<br /> provide safety in order that individuals may pursue happiness. Indeed, the attempt to do so is futile and reckless. The enlightened understanding of crime views unhappiness - poverty, despair, injustice - as the key reason for the absence of safety. The streets will not, cannot, and perhaps even should not be safe until such root causes have been addressed. Decency and pragmatism, then, both demand policies that comfort those afflicted by societal failures through humane social programs, rather than efforts to discipline lawbreakers through coercion. Progressivism began, according to political scientist Harvey Mansfield, as “an alliance of experts and victims.” In this alliance, however, victims are more numerous but less powerful. The experts’ prerogatives include the right to make authoritative claims that, while all victims are victims, some victims are victimier than others.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ross Barkan in NEW YORK, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/what-happened-to-matt-taibbi.html" target="_blank">What Happend to Matt Taibbi? The former darling of the liberal media is now one of its loudest critics. He says he hasn't changed</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Taibbi’s critics view him as a reporter turned red-pilled culture warrior chasing subscriptions - or worse, a middle-aged male no longer at the vanguard, aggrieved that younger journalists are now leading the fight for justice. “One of a crew of a dozen white guy contrarians in media,” said the journalist Wesley Lowery. The liberal-left especially loathes the way Taibbi equates the right- and left-wing media. His second-most recent book, <i>Hate Inc.</i>, features Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity on the cover together, and argues that both sides have played a role in polarizing the country and stoking hate. Taibbi has gone as far as to argue that Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party that is still the ratings king, “no longer represents real institutional political influence in this country anymore. The financial/educational/political elite with all the power is on the other side and I think they’re the people to be worrying about.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="https://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2020/11/the-new-york-times-and-voter-fraud" target="_blank">The New York Times and Voter Fraud</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The article goes on: "top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success." Imagine if the Times took this approach to reporting on potential fraud in other sectors. "The Times called CEOs of 500 big companies. All of them said their businesses are a remarkable success." Or "the Times called the chief executives of the state's top 50 hospitals. All of them said there were no systematic billing errors or medical mistakes." Or "the Times called 20 hedge fund managers. All of them said there was no insider trading." Or, "The Times called 20 major league umpires. All of them said they'd never missed a call that affected the outcome of a game." What does the Times expect, that the top election officials in charge of making sure the elections run smoothly and fraud-free are just going to confess - yeah, you know what, we totally screwed up!</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Margot Cleveland at <i>thefederalist.com</i>, <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/19/whistleblower-videos-capture-pennsylvania-election-officials-destroying-evidence/" target="_blank">Whistleblower Videos Capture Pennsylvania Election Officials Destroying Evidence</a>.
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A May 21, 2021 request for 2020 election data and information submitted to Delaware County under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law served as an impetus for the alleged conspiracy and cover-up, as the complaint told the story. A week later after the Right to Know request, a conversation is captured between two individuals, identified by those with knowledge of the lawsuit, as James Allen, the Director of Election Operations for Delaware County, and Jim Savage, identified by Delaware County’s directory as the Chief Custodian/Voting Machine Warehouse Supervisor. In that video provided to The Federalist, Allen is heard telling Savage, “Then get rid of the pads and the second scanners.” “We can’t talk about it anymore,” Savage replies, with Allen questioning, “Why?” “It’s a felony,” Allen countered. The complaint added more texture to this video, alleging that Savage then “encouraged a private conversation to continue the conversation of the removal of the pads and scanners due to other Delaware County employees and [contract employee] Regina Miller,” being present.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Helene Cooper in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/us/politics/pentagon-military-extremism-rules.html" target="_blank">Pentagon Updates Its Rules on Extremism in the Military</a>.
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“The overwhelming majority of the men and women of the Department of Defense serve this country with honor and integrity,” Mr. Austin said in the memo. “They respect the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He added, “We believe only a very few violate this oath by participating in extremist activities, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness, and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Holman Jenkins in WALL STREET JOURNAL, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-win-2024-threat-democracy-kagan-mueller-report-russia-collusion-2020-election-11633727345" target="_blank">If Trump Wins in 2024, Then Who Threatens Democracy?</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ask yourself these questions: What was the voting-rights Kabuki of the past eight months all about, concerning a House bill with no chance of becoming law, if not to create talking points to delegitimize future election outcomes? Joe Biden, with premeditation, falsely hid behind the claim that his son’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Would he somehow transcend Hillary Clinton and not resort to the same dodge if he lost to Mr. Trump? Why did MSNBC just give Rachel Maddow a new $30-million-a-year contract through the 2024 election? As punishment for her relentless and uncritical flogging of the collusion story?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Linda Greenhouse in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opinion/supreme-court-trump.html" target="_blank">The Supreme Court, Weaponized</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
With the accuracy of a drone strike, the three justices appointed by President Donald Trump and strong-armed through to confirmation by Senator Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, are doing exactly what they were sent to the court to do. The resulting path of destruction of settled precedent and long-established norms is breathtaking.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
<i>revolver.news</i>: Meet Ray Epps: <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/" target="_blank">The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
After months of research, <i>Revolver</i>’s investigative reporting team can now reveal that Ray Epps appears to be among the primary orchestrators of the very first breach of the Capitol’s police barricades at 12:50pm on January 6. Epps appears to have led the “breach team” that committed the very first illegal acts on that fateful day. What’s more, Epps and his “breach team” did all their dirty work with 20 minutes still remaining in President Trump’s National Mall speech, and with the vast majority of Trump supporters still 30 minutes away from the Capitol. Secondly, <i>Revolver</i> also determined, and will prove below, that the the FBI stealthily removed Ray Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, just one day after <i>Revolver</i> exposed the inexplicable and puzzlesome FBI protection of known Epps associate and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. July 1 was also just one day after separate New York Times report amplified a glaring, falsifiable lie about Epps’s role in the events of January 6. Lastly, Ray Epps appears to have worked alongside several individuals - many of them suspiciously unindicted - to carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
- Meet Ray Epps, Pt. 2: <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2021/12/damning-new-details-massive-web-unindicted-operators-january-6/" target="_blank">Damning New Details Emerge Exposing Massive Web Of Unindicted Operators At The Heart Of January 6</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
It is noteworthy that this Ray Epps breach occurs just one minute after Capitol Police began responding to reports of two “pipe bombs” located at DNC and GOP headquarters, respectively. Rather conveniently, the already-handicapped Capitol Police thus had still-fewer resources with which to respond to the barricade breach in question. While the “pipe bombs” turned out to be a dud, the Ray Epps breach proved fateful. Today, the official stories told by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the US Justice Department all depict the apparent Ray Epps-orchestrated 12:50 p.m. initial breach of metal barricades as the “Big Bang” event of January 6.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Mike Baker, Sergio Olmos, Adam Goldman in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/us/portland-protests-fbi-surveillance.html" target="_blank">The F.B.I. Deployed Surveillance Teams Inside Portland Protests</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
The breadth of F.B.I. involvement in Portland and other cities where federal teams were deployed at street protests became a point of concern for some within the bureau and the Justice Department who worried that it could undermine the First Amendment right to protest against the government, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.
Protesters marched through Portland during President Biden’s inauguration in January. Some within the departments worried that the teams could be compared to F.B.I. surveillance transgressions of decades past, such as the COINTELPRO projects that sought to spy on and disrupt various activist groups in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the officials, one current and one former, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the debate. There has been no evidence so far that the bureau used similar surveillance teams on right-wing demonstrators during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, despite potential threats of violence against the heart of federal government - though the F.B.I. did have an informant in the crowd that day.</span> </blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Alan Feuer in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/us/politics/first-amendment-praetorian-trump-jan-6.html" target="_blank">Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump</a>.
<blockquote>
1AP’s first “mission” - protecting conservative V.I.P.s - came in October 2020, when the group provided security at a march in Washington led by the Walk Away Foundation, an organization that seeks to persuade Democratic voters to leave the party, Mr. Lewis said in a YouTube video posted that December. The foundation’s leader, Brandon Straka, a former hairstylist in New York, was among those arrested in the Capitol attack. Court papers suggest that he recently began to cooperate with the government.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Alan Feuer in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-riot-investigation.html" target="_blank">Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but Questions Remain</a>.
<blockquote>
For an entire year, federal agents in almost every state have been poring over mounting stacks of tipster reports, interviews with witnesses, public social media posts and private messages obtained by warrants. They have also collected nearly 14,000 hours of video - from media outlets, surveillance cameras and police-worn body cameras - enough raw footage that it would take a year and a half of around-the-clock viewing to get through it. While the Justice Department has called the inquiry one of the largest in its history, traditional law enforcement officials have not been acting alone. Working with information from online sleuths who style themselves as “Sedition Hunters,” the authorities have made more than 700 arrests - with little sign of slowing down. The government estimates that as many as 2,500 people who took part in the events of Jan. 6 could be charged with federal crimes.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
David Gilbert at <i>vice.com</i>, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3n3m8/guy-reffitt-capitol-rioter-family-torn-apart" target="_blank">My Dad Attacked Cops at the Capitol Rio. I Turned Him In</a>.
<blockquote>
Reffitt has been in custody for almost a full year, and is facing five charges relating to his activity on Jan. 6 and the days after. Soon after his father was arrested, Jackson moved out of the family home, because he “knew at some point I would be either kicked out or pushed out in some sort of way.” He told VICE News he didn’t want to “burn any bridges,” and he wants to give his family a chance to come back together once all of this is over. Peyton and Sarah see his decision to move out differently. “He hasn't tried to protect us in any way, even emotionally,” Sarah told VICE News, adding that her brother told the FBI agents he was going to step up and take care of his family, but that never happened. Jackson rejected Sarah’s assertion, saying that he has “offered plenty [of help] but my mother refuses, as she seems to feel as if it’s blood money.”</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Zack Beauchamp at <i>vox.com</i>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22814025/democracy-trump-january-6-capitol-riot-election-violence" target="_blank">A year after the January insurrection, how does America's crisis end?</a>
<blockquote>
Americans have long believed our country to be exceptional. That is true today in perhaps the worst possible sense: No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Laurence Tribe, Donald Ayer, Dennis Aftergut in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opinion/trump-capitol-riot-january-6th.html" target="_blank">Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection?</a>
<blockquote>
In his nine months in office, Attorney General Merrick Garland has done a great deal to restore integrity and evenhanded enforcement of the law to an agency that was badly misused for political reasons under his predecessor. But his place in history will be assessed based on the challenges that confronted him. And the overriding test that he and the rest of the government face is the threat to our democracy from people bent on destroying it.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Thomas Friedman in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/opinion/trump-jan-6-democracy.html" target="_blank">How to Stop Trump and Prevent Another Jan. 6</a>.
<blockquote>
Many people, particularly in the American business community, are vastly underestimating the danger to our constitutional order if this struggle ends badly. If the majority of G.O.P. lawmakers continue to bow to the most politically pernicious “alternative fact” - that the 2020 election was a fraud that justifies empowering Republican legislatures to override the will of voters and remove Republican and Democratic election supervisors who helped save our democracy last time by calling the election fairly - then America isn’t just in trouble. It is headed for what scientists call “an extinction-level event.”</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Jedediah Britton-Purdy in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/us-democracy-constitution.html" target="_blank">The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy</a>.
<blockquote>
An antidemocratic system has bred an antidemocratic party. The remedy is to democratize our so-called democracy. James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule that Madison voiced when he wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Madison’s condescension has never gone away.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
NEW YORK TIMES: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/opinion/january-6-attack-committee.html" target="_blank">Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now</a>.
<blockquote>
Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations. Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
David Klepper in AP, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/television-donald-trump-washington-conspiracy-theories-congress-0ddc173391135ac2cdaa335e3c9b4881" target="_blank">Conspiracy theories paint fraudulent reality of Jan. 6 riot</a>.
<blockquote>
Dozens of police officers were severely injured. One Capitol Police officer who was attacked and assaulted with bear spray suffered a stroke and died a day later of natural causes. Former Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who rushed to the scene, said he was “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country.” The assault stopped only when he said he had children.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Stuart Thompson in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/technology/apple-google-spotify-podcast-election-misinformation.html" target="_blank">Election Falsehoods Surged on Podcasts Before Capitol Riots, Researchers Find</a>.
<blockquote>
Researchers at the Brookings Institution reviewed transcripts of nearly 1,500 episodes from 20 of the most popular political podcasts. Among episodes released between the election and the Jan. 6 riot, about half contained election misinformation, according to the analysis. In some weeks, 60 percent of episodes mentioned the election fraud conspiracy theories tracked by Brookings.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
AP: <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ashli-babbitt-capitol-siege-a15c7e52a04d932972b7a284c7a8f7df" target="_blank">Ashli Babbitt A Martyr? Her Past Tells A More Complex Story</a>.
<blockquote>
The first time Celeste Norris laid eyes on Ashli Babbitt, the future insurrectionist had just rammed her vehicle three times with an SUV and was pounding on the window, challenging her to a fight. Norris says the bad blood between them began in 2015, when Babbitt engaged in a monthslong extramarital affair with Norris’ longtime live-in boyfriend. When she learned of the relationship, Norris called Babbitt’s husband and told him she was cheating. “She pulls up yelling and screaming,” Norris said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, recounting the July 29, 2016, road-rage incident in Prince Frederick, Maryland. “It took me a good 30 seconds to figure out who she was.”</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Michael Anton at <i>americanmind.org</i>, <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/blue-americas-messaging-problem/" target="_blank">Blue America's Messaging Problem</a>.
<blockquote>
It’s important to understand... that these policy positions favored by millions of Reds are not “conservative” as that term has been understood for at least a generation. The “conservatives” have consistently supported open, or at least lax, borders, rigid free trade, and ground troops wherever a single Islamic extremist might wistfully contemplate striking the West. As for the slander that these positions are somehow “far right,” one need only be over 40 to remember a time when Democrats were the party of protectionism and peace, when even Bill Clinton and the New York Times professed support for limiting immigration. Suddenly all that is not merely unacceptable; it’s fascism. Blue America makes very clear to Red: you deserve and will get none of this. There will be no compromise. You are evil merely for wanting it, much less voting for it. Should you manage, against our every effort and precaution, to elect people who threaten to enact these things, we will be justified in “resisting” - i.e., blocking implementation by any means necessary - to protect “our democracy.”</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Amanda Hess in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/arts/hillary-clinton-masterclass.html" target="_blank">Victory Speech (Hillary's Version)</a>.
<blockquote>
Clinton’s 16 video lessons in resilience are largely tedious (one is about binder organization), but the whole exercise builds to a rattling unease. The course culminates with Clinton reciting her unused presidential victory speech from 2016. Holding the text in her lap like a storybook, she seems to be impersonating a lost version of herself. She is accessing a faintly smug, terribly naïve Hillary Clinton, as if practicing in front of a mirror for a moment that would never arrive. It’s the kind of humiliating growth exercise you might spy through the keyhole of a therapist’s office. Even as Clinton has styled herself as an influencer on the subject of carrying on, it feels as if she is being held hostage by the past, compelled to relive her defeat again and again.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Barton Gellman in <i>theatlantic.com</i> email, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/barton-gellman/" target="_blank">How you can support our most consequential journalism</a>.
<blockquote>
My 14,000-word cover piece in the January/February issue of <i>The Atlantic</i> has two through lines. The first is that January 6 was the initial milestone, not the last, in the growth of the first violent mass movement in American politics since the 1920s. The second is that Republicans have made up their minds to steal the 2024 presidential election and are well on their way to manufacturing the means. There is a clear and present danger, I wrote, that the loser of the next election will be certified president-elect, with all the chaos and bloodshed that portends.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
<i>e.newyorktimes.com</i> email: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/tressie-mcmillan-cottom" target="_blank">A new newsletter</a> - a sociologist's view:
<blockquote>
Personal stories. Universal truths. Cultural assumptions re-examined. A new subscriber-only newsletter: Tressie McMillan Cottom. Introducing a new Opinion newsletter from a sociologist's perspective, with thoughtful reflections on our institutions and their issues. McMillan Cottom is an essayist and author, MacArthur fellow and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Cynthia Miller-Idriss in NEW YORK TIMES, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/jan-6-domestic-extremism.html" target="_blank">America's Most Urgent Threat Now Comes From Within</a>.
<blockquote>
No one wants the federal government to police people’s beliefs. But the U.S. government’s focus on using conventional counterterrorism tools fails to account for the generally unchecked spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, propaganda targeting racial and religious minorities and the increasing dehumanization of those with whom one disagrees. These are important precursors to violence.... A public health approach to preventing violent extremism would shift prevention work away from security and intelligence experts - away from wiretaps and cultivated informants - and toward social workers, school counselors and teachers, mental health experts and religious leaders to focus on social support and democratic resilience.
- <i>Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at American University, where she leads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. She is the author, most recently, of "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right."</i></blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Quoth the Raven at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-mainstream-media-is-losing-the" target="_blank">The Mainstream Media Is Losing The Fight Of Its Life... All Thanks To Joe Rogan</a>.
<blockquote>
In the same way that bitcoin unintentionally became a global phenomenon as a result of the negative consequences of central banking, Joe Rogan has become a global phenomenon at the hands of the negative consequences of how the mainstream media and "big tech" does business.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Clare Malone interviews Ben Smith at <i>newyorker.com</i>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/ben-smith-cant-say-what-his-new-media-venture-is" target="_blank">Ben Smith Can't Say What His New Media Venture Is</a>.
<blockquote>
<b>Why are you doing this?</b>
There’s an opportunity to reach a new audience to deliver stories in new ways, and to also align ourselves with great journalists in a way that can be hard for legacy institutions. And I think the other thing - sorry, I’m just going to kind of riff a little - I just think the other is that we’re coming out in this moment in which the news business wrapped itself around social media for better or for worse. There’s lots of interesting stuff that happened, obviously, but also, I think sometimes that a lot of news is sort of stuck in a feedback loop. But that there’s a big audience, and I feel like this is something I’ve to some degree learned at the <i>Times</i>, that the stories that hit hardest are the ones that actually get the truth of a complex, real story.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Steve Kirsch at <i>substack.com</i>, <a href="https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/how-google-manipulated-mass-formation" target="_blank">How Google manipulated "Mass formation psychosis" search results after the Malone interview</a>.
<blockquote>
Google has hand manipulated the “mass formation psychosis” search results so that a YouTube video from a gamer who knows nothing at all about the topic is ranked #3 in the search results.... Highly relevant pages like the following are nowhere to be found in Google’s search results. We are being manipulated. You can see this for yourself.... Perhaps it is time to switch to DuckDuckGo or Bing which provide more honest results? One of my readers pointed this out in Bing’s search results: they had already indexed my article just a few hours after I published it. Note that Google has already indexed my substack page as well, yet they claim they indexed it 5 days ago (which is 5 days before I wrote it) while Bing is accurate (Jan 2 if you are in EST).</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Ed Kilgore in NEW YORK, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/no-red-state-rebels-there-will-be-no-secession.html" target="_blank">No, Red State Rebels, There Will Be No Secession</a>.
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<i>I won’t let you go.</i> I have no illusions of compromises yet untried or “third ways” left unexplored. So let’s have it out right here in America as peacefully as we can manage. Perhaps if we continue to battle for control of our common country, one side or the other might win a popular mandate to exercise real power and change the facts on the ground, breaking the perpetual stalemate. If not, then let’s consider the wisdom of those who crushed the Confederacy in the belief that the misery of political conflict is better than the literal civic death of national disunion.</blockquote>
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Angie Drobnic Holan in POLITIFACT <a ref="https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/dec/15/2021-lie-year-lies-about-jan-6-capitol-attack-and-/" target="_blank">Lie of the Year</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
By the night’s end, democracy was still standing. But the manipulation of the narrative was already underway.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Park MacDougald at <i>unherd.com</i>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/09/why-we-need-to-be-repressed/" target="_blank">The importance of repression - Philip Rieff predicted that therapy culture would end in barbarism</a>.
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
Indeed, this is how Rieff came to understand our culture war. He believed that the Western elite had abdicated its responsibility to continue transmitting moral commandments, instead embracing an ethic of liberation and transgression designed to free themselves from the too-strict demands of the interdicts. But because this cultural shift had penetrated deeply only among elites, the result was a constant war between the “officer class” and the population at large, who still clung to a basically traditional conception of the moral order. Elite cultural output - both the modernist high art that Rieff analysed and the pop culture of our own day - had become a series of “deconversion therapies” attempting to train the lower classes out of their supposedly primitive superstitions, which in his telling were actually the vestiges of a sacred impulse toward transcendence.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
***</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>
Obituaries of the issue</b></span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-melloan-wall-street-journal-commentator-dies-at-age-92-11601603188" target="_blank">George Melloan</a> (1927-2021)
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
After growing up in an Indiana farm town, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Butler University in 1950. He was a reporter, editor and bureau chief for the Journal with stops in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland and New York. As a London-based foreign correspondent in the late 1960s, he covered the Six-Day War in Israel in 1967 and the Biafran War in Nigeria in 1968. He joined the editorial page in 1970 and three years later was named deputy to that section’s chief editor, Robert L. Bartley. In the early 1990s, Mr. Melloan was based in Brussels and oversaw editorial pages for the overseas editions.... Growing up during the Depression in a rural area helped shape his economic views. “We Journal editors were a rather proletarian lot to be promoting capitalism,” he wrote.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/arts/music/don-maddox-dead.html" target="_blank">Don Maddox</a> (1922-2021)
</span><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
“We didn’t call it ‘rockabilly,’” Mr. Maddox went on. “We called it ‘Okie boogie.’” Mr. Maddox played fiddle, in a sawing down-home mode, and provided backing vocals; his sister, Rose, was the lead vocalist. The other members were his older brothers Cliff and Cal on guitars and his younger brother, Henry, on mandolin. Rose Maddox died in 1998, Cliff in 1949, Cal in 1968, Henry in 1974 and Fred in 1992. The account of how the Maddoxes made it to California rivaled the story of their rise within the ranks of West Coast country music - a Depression-era narrative as emblematic as <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>.</span></blockquote><br /></blockquote></div></div>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-41150227841413016162020-04-19T20:58:00.000-07:002020-04-20T15:28:06.555-07:00Issue #157 (April 20, 2020)<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Carillon along the DuPage River, Naperville, Ill.</span></b><br />
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<b>Bon Scott - Prophet of Damnation</b><br />
A Facebook Mobile Disquisition<br />
B.C. Miller<br />
<br />
<b>I.</b> (January 23)
I'm gonna attempt to make sense of Bon Scott by looking at his lyrics. This is an ongoing project that I'll deal with on a song by song basis, but as a whole his lyrics deploy a dazzling array of techniques that make his badass self convincing and cathartic for his audience. We've gotten used to AC/DC so we overlook what provoked mass manias in concert, a moral panic, and bewilderment that their music could work so powerfully. They threw out the book and discovered volume and voodoo intensity could make them sound really exciting. At the time it left the old school in the dust and caused a lot of confusion over what the hell they were doing.<br />
Bon Scott was a small-time rock singer best known for a pot bust. He had a long rap sheet for thefts, assaults, vandalism, "unlawful carnal knowledge", and was an alcoholic and in certain ways a sociopath. He looked scary, right off the bat. He stood on stage with a confidence that seemed threatening. Then he started singing, and the idea of Noddy Holder possessed by Satan crossed your mind. He got in front of this loud riotous band and punched notes in a blues cadence with a throat full of grit. His sneering tone, his bitter joking tone, and his lusty tone all built the songs into little stories. You've got to think back to realize how far from rock subject matter these songs were. Nobody since has posed as evil so convincingly. I'll outline his worldview below:<br />
(1) Bon used to be poor but now he's a rock star with millions of dollars. Rock music is closest thing to holy because it shows Bon is superior to his fans, who are like S&W gimps.<br />
(2) Bon has no interest in males unless he wants to beat somebody up. He doesn't want to hang out with his mates. Never does Bon celebrate hanging out with the guys, a rock staple. Love doesn't figure in his worldview. There's no trace of empathy or interest in humanity beyond:<br />
(3) Girls. By rock standards, he is pro-female. "Touch Too Much" hints at some capacity for human connection. "Girls Got Rhythm" praises them for reasons like: he's seen a million and still wants them, they move like sin, they make him lose sleep, and they possess rhythm which is a high compliment. "Backseat rhythm" is erotic but tasteful. "Whole Lotta Rosie" recognizes women as individuals especially if you're chubby with huge boobs. "Shot Down In Flames" shows he appreciates something beyond sex appeal in women, as he is clearly amused after a woman turns him down at the bar. "Get It Hot" might be the closest he came to a love song. It's almost romantic. Bon doesn't want to drink and drive at high speed alone! He wants "A sweet young thing with nothing to lose". "Bend you like a G-string/Conduct you like a choir" is kinda hot.<br />
(4) Hell. Bon doesn't care he's going there and figures it will be fine. Good doesn't really exist for Bon, beyond his own pleasure. He doesn't care about Satan but enjoys reminding fans that rock and roll leads to damnation. He doesn't put any theater into this stuff. Hell may be entirely secular to Bon. He enjoys the hard time his fans will have. Bon expects some status down there: he hopes to drive into it down the highway.<br />
(5) Murder. Not many people admit to enjoying crimes on the world stage. He committed them on whims and felt no guilt over them. He usually dodged the cops, though he'd been kicked out of the army. Maybe he killed people for real? Maybe if his life wasn't cut short. This brings us to the closest he comes to a "justice" song, "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap". It's "aspirational" and shows a willingness to work. It's written as an advertisement he figures will have massive appeal, the only evidence he cared what people thought. Funnily enough this song is on the radio all the time and nobody thinks it's unusual. It's got one of the most menacing riffs in rock which makes the "hire me!" jingle format even stranger. Bon believes humans want a hit man who is always awake and provides a phone number. More important is price: we want our hit men to work cheap. He gives us a scenario he figures we'll support, as Bon kills a school principal to save a girl "who wants to graduate but not in his bed". In a twist, she rewards him with sex. So he'll kill for sex? Nice to have that option. Another murder he's hired for is caused by "double dealing with your best friend". If you still aren't sold, he says he'll kill women the same as men. "Nagging at you night and day" is one reason.<br />
(6) Bon Scott. Bon's internal life is rarely hinted at. He was shallow and had no intellectual side beyond rock and planning crimes. He liked drinking and having sex for hours. It's not clear how he regarded AC/DC beyond being worthy of backing him. They were a generation younger but Bon was open to new musical ideas. Perhaps empathy was possible with Angus's guitar sound, giving Angus value? There is plenty of evidence Bon would talk about music like a normal person. He appreciated bands he wasn't in. He loved singing and put a lot of work into it.<br />
Bon didn't bother with a "mask of sanity" persona and wanted to be "bad". He was aware some considered "bad" something else and his lyrics try to tell them "bad" is "bad". Trying to impress Bon by matching his chaotic, thrill-seeking lifestyle let him know you were a sucker. "Walk All Over You" isn't about overcoming an obstacle, it's a reminder: he will turn on you for the joy of dominating you. Your motorcycle means nothing. Women have sexy qualities he likes but love means nothing to him and dominating women sexually is "paradise".<br />
"T.N.T." is the closest Bon comes to self-mythologizing. He begins saying: my life is so far from yours I'm like a cowboy on TV. He's not the good guy but he's the winner. His enormous greed justifies every crime he commits. He's public enemy #1, and public means the world. He's something beyond humanity that could explode anytime. It's fate.<br />
(7) ROCK N ROLL. Bon Scott seems to have despised his audiences but considered it worthwhile to remind them he was superior. He might've hoped his songs wouldn't give millions the vicarious thrill of being badass. He considered humanity too weak to live by his code which includes "Bon always wins". Two especially striking things about Bon is his utter confidence on stage and his lack of restraint lyrically in front of the world. It takes some effort to make sense of his message and recognize the sociopathic nature of it all. "Rock N Roll Singer" SEEMS like a "society made me" account of his youth. This isn't a "lets be rebels buddy" tune like usual. It's about how Bon was born with the devil in his blood and earned his place doing the only respectable job. He hated anything boring and that was all of humanity. He doesn't hope we'll improve and wouldn't notice if we did. He'll do us the favor of separating himself from other singers. His hatred of us is like a law of physics. Enduring us before he willed himself to Rock N Roll Singerhood proves we need songs from what he hopes we understand are different than other songs. Bon liked to see himself as divine wrath in human form.<br />
"Let There Be Rock" is interesting as Bon explains Rock as an unfathomable entity born and imitated and worshipped. Bon considered it a sign of our damnation and paired with his "truth" was the source of his power. He relates this in parody of a religious sermon which doubles the point: humanity are fools.<br />
Bon's sense of humor is difficult to fathom. There are hints he's amused by songs he wrote but this is never clear. Sharing a joke? Not a priority. "The Jack" and "Big Balls" show what he figured his fans found funny.<br />
___
<br />
<b>II.</b> (February 20)<br />
I used to fantasize about running away to Australia. Not sure what I'd do there. I don't drink beer and I'm not very beachy. I don't like long drives through the desert. I guess the accent is cute, and if Bon Scott is to be believed the girls are dirty. What I really like about Australia is the culture, the rock music, and the crazy movies. They have a knack for rock'n'roll and craziness. I'm pretty well schooled on Aussie rock from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. HUSH were a glam band with 10 top 10 hits. Their management wanted them to do bubblegum and covers, but they wanted to play harder rock. "Get Rocked" is a killer early anthem that caused disturbances as kids sang along, "Get Fucked". Their 1975 album "Rough Tough 'n' Ready" has a whole side of cranked numbers.<br />
___
<br />
<b>III.</b> (March 17 at 7:08 pm)<br />
BON SCOTT: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDFR-dn4sXo&fbclid=IwAR0aA6f3szNLx5BGhBjbHMClOa5__ZHFwSsjV6GyM-hQ8PGSZPQuIXz9JjM" target="_blank">"LIVESTOCK"</a><br />
After the '70 pot bust that broke up The Valentines, Bon started getting hassled, especially by Aussie cops who hoped to trace him to Robert Trimbole, the Godfather of drugs down under. Bon moved to Adelaide and worked as a navvy while testing his potential in Fraternity. They played some hard boogies and some stately Procal Harum numbers, sometimes with flutes. Bon was happiest when they trekked the pre-glam, progressive/pub circuit popular with Australian longhairs at the time. That's when he met his legendary wife, the only woman to put a ring on Bon's finger. Fraternity made two albums which are damn hard to find and I hadn't heard them till recently. One highlight for them was playing with Geordie (Brian Johnson's band) and Status Quo. Bon joined a jam band with the future bassist for The Angels in '73, and soon would set eyes on AC/DC.<br />
___
<br />
<b>IV.</b> (January 21)<br />
JOHN PAUL YOUNG: A SCOTTISH MAN'S STORY DOWN UNDER<br />
Henry Vanda + George Young might be the greatest team of rock'n'roll songwriters in history, and the coolest people who ever existed, and being Australian gives them so much cred it's unreal, because that place is the closest we have to an off-world prison colony. Hang out with me, Australians, I'll hook you up proper. Your fights are my fights, cuz I'm a castaway too. Vanda + Young might've got slagged by the system in another country but Australians knew this pair could make a mongoloid truckee a star with their songs.<br />
Listen to their first band, The Easybeats, and notice their guitars work magic together, and their songs are leagues above the usual beat band patter. English people have some gripe with Australia so instead of stars the Easybeats got in debt to their record company and Vanda + Young starting writing and producing over there. It took three years to get back to Australia and make their big move and their hard rocking vision took over the charts. (Usually 20-30 percent of the Aussie charts were their songs).<br />
Even if you don't know Australian bands you know AC/DC. Angus and Malcolm Young are George's little brothers, and Angus was in a band called Marcus Hook Roll Band that sketched out where AC/DC would go. They'd written a song for Bon Scott in the '60s. They put Easybeats' singer Stevie Wright on the charts and produced Rose Tattoo and The Angels. They brought a Scottish singer from a band called Elm Tree they'd produced down under, because this guy really had something. John Paul Young they called him, and Vanda + Young put together a band called The All Stars of ex-La De Da's, Aztecs, and Daddy Cool players, and wrote a slew of songs. Platinum albums and sold out tours followed, and while not everything is my style, they did some awesome songs. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVSEiveFY7g&fbclid=IwAR38F4Izg3lbXFAxJjU-fFSdXvRhlmk7lhI2K82teduNyHtHHL4Cok9LL9k" target="_blank">"Yesterday's Hero"</a> is one of the best glam numbers ever and back in Scotland The Bay City Rollers had a hit with it. John Paul Young's whisky voice is the true voice for this working class anthem and I'm happy to bring it to America. <br />
___
<br />
<b>V.</b> (January 21)<br />
STEVIE WRIGHT<br />
This skinny little guy had a big smile and sang his heart out with The Easybeats. He wasn't faking it. He was feeling those songs and he wanted to make you happy. He could do backflips and invented dances and fans called him Little Stevie. They had a top 20 hit in America you probably know, and toured with The Stones and Small Faces, but their label considered them crude because they were Australian, and then as now labels are crime outfits who'll underpay and underpromote a band while letting them rack up debts. They'll even surround a band with drug pushers. These things killed The Easybeats and kept them in debt slavery for three years. Broke, Stevie took a part in Jesus Christ Superstar back home. Depressed, he started using heroin. Vanda + Young hadn't forgotten him, though. They put him in front of a crack hard rock band and gave him some of their best songs: "Hard Road", "Guitar Man", and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuY-EnoKfBg&fbclid=IwAR0NHZcy44jChESe9ruJLQaH7AwR1Vz2rdc0ubrEaNJDSnM-yIHCkCesZOY" target="_blank">"Black Eyed Bruiser"</a>. A long elaborate ballad called "Evie" hit the charts and kept Stevie from starving in the harrowing years to come. By '76 he was on methadone but while in hospital was given a combination of drug-induced coma and shock treatment by a quack doctor. Stevie suffered brain damage along as did many others and the doctor killed himself to avoid prison.<br />
For decades he'd alternate between projects with Vanda + Young which would fail when his addiction and depression took over. For some years he worked as a janitor, other years he was homeless and in 1984 he went to prison after attempting to break into a house. Humiliated after two years locked up, his mates Vanda + Young reunited The Easybeats in '86 and Stevie was amazed by the young people who loved his band. Stevie suffered chronic heroin addiction and crippling depression for the rest of his life but never gave up his music. He died of pneumonia in 2015 at 68 and Rose Tattoo covered this song in his memory.<br />
___
<br />
<b>VI.</b> (March 18 at 11:06 am)<br />
BON SCOTT: "DOG EAT DOG" <br />
Black Sabbath debuted in February 1970, on Friday the 13th. Despite sneering reviews and resembling nothing in rock history, deploying occultism and fear of divine judgement at a time when plastic paganism and ego cults had replaced LSD and Marxism as the hipster's hula hoop, this "counter-revolutionary" work of revolutionary art went top ten in the UK. It went to #23 in America and sold a million copies. October 1970 saw "Paranoid" top the UK charts. It went to #12 in America and sold four million. This was in spite of no radio play, corrupt management, and a panic over Satanism. They first toured here after "Master Of Reality" went top 10 internationally and became the anti-hippie weapon of choice.<br />
A few years later and it might not have happened. A few years before The Velvet Underground had been buried by hippie vitriol and the entire mid-60s "Nuggets" scene was denied. The "Revolution" even pressed Greg Shaw (founder of <i>Bomp!</i>) to call for a boycott of Paul Revere And The Raiders for representing the suddenly "reactionary" American Revolution. Kowtowing to the plastic panther zeitgeist could be deadly too: The MC5 and many others to lesser degrees.<br />
The clampdown began in 1974 but the American market was already guarded by several political and criminal cliques. Once even the poorest could succeed with a library card and some practicality. Sam Phillips grew up picking cotton with no "professional revolutionaries" to turn him against his country or our music. As a D.J. he played black and white artists together and he did likewise at Sun Records. He was a visionary, today we only have idealists.<br />
AC/DC had seen their vision stranded in Australia with an unstable fan base -- the toughs didn't want to be seen at a kiddie glam show. Radio didn't want to play them but Vanda-Young got them on "Countdown". In '76 the sampler of their first two albums was panned and sold so little the American leg of their first tour was cancelled. "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" was rejected and would only be released after Bon's death.<br />
1977 saw them broke and vengeful. They'd pushed their sound hard. Now they'd shake the bones of the Earth. "Let There Be Rock" was written and recorded in two weeks. Heavier than Stonehenge and just as eternal. "Dog Eat Dog" takes a common metaphor for human depravity and says it doesn't begin to cover the truth. "Well it's dog eat dog/Eat cat too/The French eat frog/And I eat you." He doesn't pander to us, this is an admission of universal depravity, and he is proud to admit he's a part of it. He's not bragging, because his band has just been a chew-toy, and this song is his only set of fangs. "Businessman, when you make a deal/Do you know who you can trust/Do you sign your life away/Do you write your name in dust." The Biblical phrases and acceptance of fate begin appearing on this album. It went to 154 on the U.S. charts, but Top 20 in Europe, and their tour is captured on video.<br />
___
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<b>VII.</b> (March 6 at 4:44 pm)<br />
BON SCOTT: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgPgNzQYQQ4&fbclid=IwAR3Zheg9QdEgwLLtO4A2gI25ySA6DkBXggwuJr_rXGBS-stosYDjfUk89uQ" target="_blank">"SOUL STRIPPER"</a><br />
The jump in power between the Australian "High Voltage" and "TNT" albums is due to Bon's ability to re-focus them from a dinky glam band to an outlaw force. The rough version of "Soul Stripper" I've posted is an early show of his vision shaping a "jam song" into a potent killer. It's not as good as the hit version, but was sort of an audition for Bon, who was merely their limo driver before being accepted into the band. The misandry present in a minority of male sociopaths is something I've noted in my reviews of Bon's lyrics: other men are derided, but women have names, agency, and power. Due to their oppression women have sometimes benefited from such romantics though with Bon the misandry is so strong it works the opposite way: a song about falling in love is described with such imagery ("she pulled out a knife and flashed it before me") one can imagine it as a masochistic sex fantasy, unless one is familiar with Bon and his lyrics as a whole. <br />
___
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<b>VIII.</b> (March 18 at 6:44 am)<br />
BON SCOTT: "HIGH VOLTAGE" (1975) <br />
"Those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first U.S. album by these Australian gross-out champions, the genre has hit its all-time low. Lead singer Bon Scott spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me." - BILLY ALTMAN, <i>ROLLING STONE</i><br />
Today we know AC/DC like we know our dicks and pussies. Sadly that wasn't the case while Bon was alive. Their first three albums only came out in Australia, and when a sampler of the first two appeared the reviews seemed done by a very cranky nursing home patient. Whether "stupidity" is a valid category in music criticism (the ancients thought balance of meter and harmony the mind's highest goal and AC/DC achieve that) or "calculated stupidity" a description of Bon's lyrics which possess an idiom, concern reality, and equal the ferocity of the music (Billy's first two sentences are grammatical disasters, fuzzy in logic, and like most <i>RS</i> criticism takes personal offense beyond whatever criticisms can be fished out: is "truly annoying aggression" worth supposing is "the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night".<br />
Surely "truly romantic crooning" would work as well. I think someone like Sam Phillips would see the potential in this "all-time low". Musicians certainly did. Critics who claim "it's the same 3 chord hog hump" are thinking conceptually, like a museum patron mistaking boredom for sophistication. Critics who dismiss Bon's songwriting genius might consider the ancient literary virtues they display which journalists ought to be familiar with.<br />
Billy perhaps believes as the Bolsheviks did: folk art is a feudal artifact that hinders collectivization. It is stupidity, and when put on record asserts individuality: "calculated stupidity". A natural tyrant, to think "offends me" is enough warrant for damnation.<br />
I'll point out the themes of the songs Billy found stupid:<br />
"High Voltage" opens with an awesome 1-2 punch deglamorizing the notion of stardom, putting it eternally in the future, then giving such a personal motivation for seeking it that the quest is noble and spiritual. VANITY is no part of it, and sex isn't mentioned. Sex is a theme used very differently: "The Jack" uses a card game as a metaphor for VD. "Live Wire" is a romantic fantasy about burning down the town. "T.N.T." makes female company a possible weapon or reward for a violent man.<br />
"Can I Sit Next To You Girl?" shows the value of Bon's lyrics because the Young brothers wrote some dumb ones here. I wouldn't sing this is I was twelve.<br />
"Little Lover" has some vivid erotic imagery that doesn't rely on the usual blues metaphors and leavens it with some self-parody.<br />
"She's Got Balls" is about a woman with balls. I don't know where she got them but overall Bon's lyrics show a man at ease with women and unashamed of sexy lyrics.<br />
As for "High Voltage": it was recorded during their first album sessions. Bon had just joined and they were using Vanda-Young's in-house rhythm section. The song is a fat T. Rex riff with some Angus soloing but not quite the full "T.N.T." assault. The lyrics are pretty stock glam style paying tribute to rock n roll. Bon likely had to write them fast, though maybe they were Dave Evans leftovers. He sings it in a cleaner anthem voice than usual and while not a favorite it was their third A-side. "Soul Stripper", their best early jam, was the B.<br />
Billy likely considers AC/DC a spectacle designed by rich stars for a richer industry. Bon was a star in talent but -- in part thanks to enemies of the working class like Billy -- he was living hand to mouth. "High Voltage" was ignored and their management was afraid of losing money so cancelled their first American tour. Then "Dirty Deeds" was rejected. Another European tour got them angry and their loudest epic "Let There Be Rock" was written and recorded in 2 weeks. It didn't break the top 100 in America but their world tour was successful. Another tour and "Powerage" hit 133. Ditto and "If You Want Blood" hit 113. A new US manager and producer helped "Highway To Hell" get to 17.<br />
Bon died during that tour, having never made much money. The women and the music meant more to him, since he'd never had money. His sudden death encouraged their label to reissue their earlier albums and that's when they started going platinum over and over. "Back In Black" peaked at 4 here but became the best selling hard rock album of all time. <br />
___
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<b>IX.</b> (January 25)<br />
"CUTS": DEDICATED TO BON SCOTT <br />
I'll explain what I mean so it seems real tidy. Then I'll let you know we're deep in the postmodern era.<br />
"Cuts" (also known as "cues", "edits", "juxtapositions", "contradictions") is theater talk for stage directions. Bon Scott's "Riding down the highway, going to a show..." begins "It's A Long Way To The Top" with a "setting" and for two more lines it holds until "time" and "bitterness" mark a drastic change in subject... one might call the absence of "setting" in most of Bon's lyrics an "alienating effect" suggesting "The Top" really is a long way away.
Bon's notes would have his own lingo for these things because he didn't live in Shakespeare's day. Still I could say "Blitzkrieg Bop" is a juxtaposition.
As for Bon Scott's authorship of "Back In Black" I'd call "American thighs" unlike him cuz he never mentions a country. "Have A Drink On Me" is the one that's so unlike Bon it might be from his ghost down the highway.<br />
___
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<b>X.</b> (January 25)<br />
BON SCOTT: "JAILBREAK"<br />
This is a tight example of Bon's literary talents including one of the basics, tension and release. There are also dead stops and blood-curdling freezes. The visceral power is overwhelming as Bon stretches his words like a snake, calm, cosmically bemused.<br />
Having invested us in our heroic murderer's freedom to the effect we are hypnotized with anxiety, Bon hits the rafters: "ALL IN THE NAME OF LIB-ER-TY!" This is crazy exciting and an almost singular line in Bon's sprawling epic. It uses a crowd-pleasing word, "liberty", and in reference to a non-Bon character. (Also unusual is him being "A friend of mine" but worth it to add "on murder".) Bon deploys a panoply of ALIENATING techniques and one reason is: he hated pandering "all you need is love" type lyrics.<br />
Compare the music of 1976 with AC/DC and the Ramones and you'll feel ALIENATED already so you can appreciate them for writing such good lyrics. I won't hint how the song ends but I'll point out Bon puts some homoerotic swagger to hint at what you weren't allowed to say!<br />
___
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<b>XI.</b> (March 10 at 8:30 pm)<br />
BON SCOTT: "SHOT DOWN IN FLAMES"<br />
This is a great one to warm up with. After a flight check the eagles wings start beating and the runway appears. The song is in full flight when Bon presents his challenge: can you keep up with him? He's looking for ladies, so if you're afraid to ask one out, get ready to be left behind. Now, I'm a guy like Bon. I was a girl's guy long before I was a ladies' man and I know ladies get asked out all the time. You don't expect a yes or no, you expect that if you're polite. You want a reputation as a cool guy who's fun to talk to, who isn't a creep. What better way to show that then take "no" for an answer. Bon gives you some setups here: "I said baby what's the going price, she told me to go to hell." WRONG WAY, guys. What if another guy butts in? He's got a "chip on his shoulder", no secure man would have to guard his lady like she's Fort Knox.<br />
___
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<b>XII.</b> (January 23)<br />
BON SCOTT: "ROCK N ROLL DAMNATION"<br />
Here's a favorite one might guess is about rock n roll excess chock full of swagger. I had the impression it was about runaway kids from the line "living on the street you've got to practice what you preach". The awesome chorus has the line "ma's own whipping boy" so I thought the kids ran away because of that.<br />
Clearly I was wrong as Bon Scott is probably the one songwriter whose take on child abuse would that there should be more, and when he found them on the street he would eat them.<br />
So what's it really about? Well, it's a response to a rock critic. A lady rock critic. It starts by sassing her like she's a hooker, then it details how Bon knows the lady is a hooker who started as a runaway, and still is, and he knows because she's the dirtiest hooker he knows and she's always after him! Instead she's getting a "Rock N Roll Damnation", in other words a vile act of slander for a WOMAN who thinks she can cross BON SCOTT. Had he included her name is would mean he could commit a crime with his songwriting, a dream come true for the man.<br />
I don't know what happened to the woman besides having this beloved party singalong in which her "secret" is revealed by the same rock star with the song advertising that he'll commit murder in exchange for sex.<br />
Lest you imagine she'd written some outrageous hit piece on the band and deserved this, it seems Bon thought so, because he quotes her. They say that you play too loud (they were maybe the loudest band of their time), they say that you got too much (about the millions of dollars or millions of women Bon bragged he had on their first album?), they tell you that you look a fool (safe to assume he was wearing the one flannel shirt with his beer gut hanging out), and they say that your mind's diseased (probably the best known fact about Bon Scott, something not to suspect on sight, whose defining trait was his sociopathy, as one might guess from this number).<br />
___
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<b>XIII.</b> (January 23)<br />
BON SCOTT: "DOWN PAYMENT BLUES"<br />
One of the things you'd expect a sociopath to sing about would be his life history, or rather the bizarre lies he wanted to tell about it. Bon Scott indeed lived a life full of unusual incidents, which likely hardened his outlook, but he doesn't draw upon them or his criminal escapades which he knew to keep secret.<br />
I suppose Bon considered songs about his bad times something a sucker would write. Don't shed a tear for me, or think we've got something in common, because I'm a Rock N Roll Singer! I too would consider fronting AC/DC worth the scars it took to get there.<br />
Bon does want us to know (1) he's got the blood of the devil and as a problem child realized schools taught shit, moral standards are a lie, and jobs are for suckers. His parents were suckers with jobs too. You're fools and I'm no fool. (2) he spent a long time getting to the top and touring was rough and we got ripped off, and also he plays bagpipes, check it out.<br />
Sometimes Bon would try a genre he despised to make points not typically found in such songs, and these had elements of parody, audience-baiting, and one of his favorite tricks, pairing a setup with an emotionally dissonant payoff. A sad scene resulting in a joke, say.<br />
"Down Payment Blues" begins as only he could: "I know that it's evil, I know that it's got to be!", before introducing his predicament: he's unemployed and while "doing nothing means a lot to me" he is unjustly short on cash. Asking for charity donations and going on welfare show his working-class credibility. As we'd expect from a blues, things get darker: he buys a Cadillac hoping a certain Suzy will get in with him, but she doesn't. "I'm living in a nightmare!" he concludes. "She's looking like a wet dream!" hammers home the injustice of it all.<br />
His subsequent slide into poverty hurts those closest to him: "I can't even feed my cat!" so misery is his social security check. The darkest point comes when Bon ponders getting a job which warps reality so much that he's poor, then rich on a boat having sex with Suzy, then poor again. THE GODS ARE LAUGHING.<br />
It was a brave choice to document such a blues and the emotional honesty is why people love Bon Scott. Clearly poverty is an issue he cares deeply about and the reason he bares his own pain urges us to donate to Ethiopia or something. The lesson here is universal: when Suzy doesn't have sex in your Cadillac, get a boat because that's the place Suzy likes to fuck.<br />
___
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<b>XIV.</b> (January 26)<br />
BON SCOTT: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGftIcp2SC0&fbclid=IwAR2VtHdcAs4D-MP3V79MSGmaFThbLy6YXutSNaDBloi26Dx0Qqbd3WQ9a78" target="_blank">"TOUCH TOO MUCH"</a><br />
The question of whether it is indeed possible to touch too much is answered by Bon. Seems like it. LOVE is a word Bon never uses cheaply and the word makes an earlier striking appearance in the chorus of "What's Next To The Moon?" which I'll talk about also. It's about Bon's ex-wife of many years who he loved very much indeed, in the way way long ago. COULD HE EVER LOVE AGAIN? One always hopes. He dreamed about HER, sensed she was out there: "It was one of those nights when you turn out the lights, and everything comes into view, she was taking her time, I was losing my mind, there was nothing that she wouldn't do!" A subtle cut put us further into his vision: "It wasn't the first, it wasn't the last, SHE KNEW WE WERE MAKIN' LOVE!" Listen to the soul he puts into the word "love". "I was so satisfied, deep down inside, like a hand in a velvet glove!" So are we, but in truth falling in love is a REALITY SHOCK so intense it feels a bit crazy: "Seems like a touch, a touch too much, too much for my body, too much for my mind, she's got a touch, a touch too much." He is awed by her divinity but finds courage and abandons himself to her storm: "She had the face of an angel, smiling with sin, the body of Venus with arms/Dealing with danger, stroking my skin, let the thunder and lighting begin."<br />
___
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<b>XV.</b> (January 25)<br />
SAD. <br />
Back's broke. Thought I'd hang out with Bon Scott and learned a lot from him. "Black man's blues, white man's schmaltz" was how he said it. He had times like mine and lord they were bad. I don't like them coming back. Now I'm down. Lonely. Just cry at my cat. Started to rain. Room looks hellish and there won't be one around for a long time.
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pond along DuPage River, Naperville, Ill.</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci</span></td></tr>
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Ten years ago on April 29 a friend and mentor of mine David Lightbourne died. He was born in 1942 so had a superior perspective on and experience with American culture and media. Aside from the shock it was also like losing my own personal google-wikipedia-Britannica device. Michael Hurley called David "The Informaton" and when Steve Weber heard that Dave had died he said, "Alot of people talk alot, but David always had something to say." Weber himself has recently died. All three of them made music in many places around the country but something special happened back in old Portland in the years before that city had a national audience. Many good burghers today tout the motto "Keep Portland Weird"; I suspect they have no idea. So I thought I'd re-post this piece on David's lives of crime and music there. His death prompted me to pitch to Goldenvoice that they put on a kind of Last Waltz Jr. in NYC with the Rounders, Michael Hurley, and the Freak Mountain Ramblers. I thought that might place them well for what remains of the national media and even offer Bob Dylan hisself an opportunity to reconcile with those psychedelic folkies who briefly showed him up back when he was still playing footsie with commies. Too late now I suppose. Thanks to Wade you can now listen to David's album at the link while reading. We finally got David recorded twenty years ago at the Blasting Room in Fort Collins.<br />
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David Lightbourne's Stop & Listen Boys -
<a href="https://youtu.be/bOzO6nZYRRk?t=1615" target="_blank">"Come Back, Corrinna"</a> and the "Monkey Junk" album.<br />
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<b>David Lightbourne - On the 10th Anniversary of His Demise</b>
(a re-edited repost of David Lightbourne and Outlaw Folk in Seventies’ Oregon from NV56 and the anthology, Life Against Dementia)<br />
Joe Carducci
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Portland was once a nice, unpretentious, not to say sleepy, port town on the Columbia River that had had its great big rock and roll moment when The Wailers, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Sonics and others jumped from the Northwest’s vibrant dancehall circuit to the national charts beginning in 1959 and lasting most of the sixties. That circuit started with Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver but for some bands included Spokane, Boise, and Reno. Important college towns included Eugene and Olympia. But as a whole the scene was isolated and often left off of national tours, which turned out an aesthetic advantage if a business handicap. The book that covers the fifties/sixties era in the Northwest in all its richness unknown to the Billboard charts or official oldies radio/Rolling Stone posterity is <i>Dance Halls, Armories and Teen Fairs</i>, by Don Rogers.<br />
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But whereas Portland and the Northwest helped lead the way post-Elvis/pre-Beatles, it began following the rest of the country, primarily San Francisco, by the end of the sixties, “In 1968... rumors spread that between 8,000 and 50,000 hippies were headed to the city” from suddenly drug-desiccated San Francisco, according to Valerie Brown (<i>Oregon Historical Quarterly</i>, Summer 2007). These thousands didn’t show but the city did generate and collect a music scene that featured all the influences of the period -- blues, folk, and psychedelia. Touring bands that had special impact in the late 1960s included The Grateful Dead, and Dan Hicks. It wouldn’t have been too unusual for these influences to be politely discrete in local bands such as The PH Phactor Jug Band, Melodious Funk, The Nazzare Blues Band, Portland Zoo, The Sodgimoli Jug Band and others. If so, that surely changed when a small invasion of musicians a couple years older than the hippies began to show up from points east.<br />
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David Lightbourne had performed with friends and classmates in Iowa while he attended Grinnell; these included Tom Newman, Clark Dimond, Ellis Simberloff, and Peter Cohon (later Coyote). An April 21, 1962 Grinnell Folk Club concert saw a double-album private release and features David performing two songs before an auditorium full of enthusiastic and knowledgeable music fans. That generation of student had followed rock and roll in junior high, and then found in 1958 that the record industry had tamed it and as David would say, “Dick Clark took it over.” The music obsessives in high school then discovered a truer folk music underneath the bogus pop-folk, or folkum as <i>The Little Sandy Review</i> might call The Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, Harry Belafonte, etc. David at 19 sounds influenced by Dave Van Ronk, and The New Lost City Ramblers; he was discovering the blues but hadn’t worked much of that into his sound yet, though he is already playing finger-pick style and doing a Memphis Minnie tune. And it’s clear by the audience reaction as David is introduced as “a performer of social import” that he is cutting a figure on campus where he also wrote a column in the paper. Clark Dimond, also on the album, wrote,<br />
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“We shared our knowledge and our repertoire at Uno’s coffeehouse, which was run by Zal Lefkowicz, later to become actor and producer Zalman King. Mescaline was available by mail from Texas. I remember the police doing an ashtray sweep looking for evidence of marijuana. David was playing onstage at the time they came in. Next to his foot was an open quart bottle of mescaline, and David just kept on playing and the cops left.” (CD, July 16, 2010)<br />
David grew up in several places as a young child when his father was killed in WWII when David was one. David didn't think his father, Kermit Loe, had ever even seen him until he recieved some photographs from his mother later in life and it included one image of his father holding David as a baby. I figured Dave did have a memory of a brief idyll with his mother and her family before she remarried when he was about four. His sister Priscilla writes:<br />
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“My maternal grandparents, Isaac and Emma, were from southern Indiana and Kentucky. My mother <br />
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used to tell many stories of how much music there was in the house. They were tenant farmers, so incredibly poor, but each evening they would either sit on the porch or in the living room and sing, one harmonizing, one on lead. This was the house that David grew up in, at least until he was four, and then visited often after that. In someone else I might say they were too young to soak up the atmosphere, but I wouldn’t say that about David.” (PL, July 20, 2010)<br />
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David's new step-father, Kirk Lightbourne, had played trumpet for the Dorseys and Paul Whiteman on the east coast, primarily recording with them rather than as part of touring bands. Kirk left the east coast to sell instruments to kids and schools in Chicago. The new family moved near Elmhurst outside Chicago and David was preternaturally media-wise when it came to radio drama, comics, movies, and early television. The Lightbourne family’s daily radio program featured the parents Kirk and Jean, and the kids, David and his younger half-brother Michael -- his half-sister Priscilla was too young. David said they had radio equipment under their kitchen table and a big old ribbon microphone in the middle of the table with a special phone line to send the show live to the station (WTAQ AM); he was eight and playing accordion. The show ran in 1950-51. David saw Elvis Presley in 1957 at the International Amphitheater, a date on the first Presley tour of the North. David switched to guitar; he saw Mike Seeger in 1958, Rev. Gary Davis, Mike Bloomfield, and Elizabeth Cotton in 1961, Ramblin’ Jack in 1962, and in 1963 he worked for Bob Koester at Jazz Record Mart and roamed southside blues clubs with him to see J.B. Hutto, Junior Wells and others; he got to know Bloomfield and saw Skip James, Son House and Howlin’ Wolf, and was a charter subscriber to Minneapolis’ <i>The Little Sandy Review</i>. Here’s something David wrote for himself, setting the early scene for his high school cohort in 1958 with Elvis in the Army and rock and roll on the ropes:<br />
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“We had spent four full years up to ’61 largely listening to music, frequently driving distances to see it live, when no one our age did that. By 10th grade… I had started my lifelong ransacking of American roots music record catalogs and made no apologies for any lack of savvy. I knew that older hipsters knew more about political folk music, and bluegrass, and blues. But I prided myself in also keeping AM Top 40 in my cross-hairs as well, and older music freaks despised that stuff on principle to their loss. I’m trying to remember 10th grade now: Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger, Brownie & Sonny, Bob Gibson, Odetta, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Josh White….” (DL circa 2000s)<br />
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David was to record a folk album for Koester’s Delmark label but the British invaded, Dylan plugged in, and the folkies surrendered. He enjoyed Grinnell and talked about his music-minded classmates and friends often. He took over the column in the school newspaper from Walter Jacobson who graduated and became a long time WBBM TV journalist-anchor in Chicago and David occasionally mentioned the possibility of picking back up his alternate possible career arc in journalism under Van Gordon Sauter. Instead David took his third year off and spent it in Cedar Falls/Waterloo where he made some friends he’d revisit in 1967 when he had enough of his first job in the straight world at R.R. Donnelly in Chicago. He was on a white-collar career ladder and somewhere between his older uptight co-workers sniggering about co-eds or the blacks, he balked, returned to his Waterloo friends and drifted into their drug-smuggling enterprise, dubbed The Company. He writes,<br />
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“I was only twenty-four in 1967, but already like a lot of other people in America, somewhat desperate to cling to the visions of unfulfilled action that had been promised earlier in my life. Action, drama and incident… Accident and movement… In some weird way possible, yet in the civilization of depressed content -- the sublimation of sexuality sideways -- the opportunity to be aggressive, still something to snatch and grab…. The deal was to pay the expenses of the trip, a quickie, from a small town in the hinterlands of the remote Midwest, quickly to Chicago and thence to Mexico City. We were going to bring back as much as $500 would bring in the best available Acapulco Gold, which used to be available on the farm for prices around $6.00 a kilo…. The last time friends of mine had done it, their interpreter had taken along a pistol. This was sheer madness in the hallucinatory glitter of our truly psychedelic childhoods.” (DL, circa 1990s)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2Zi2qkw1q3pul6br_2Y2bPWEkzIVOTFmVpUciT4hoptsg5TaeOncAvoFpm5Pi4vS_M47FcwWb83T6jU8D0IsHDETqhf69tAzLENWqAvBML0zE7I_LQ_Eoh-cIWVH2aMm281X9VQBpPl3/s1600/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="383" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2Zi2qkw1q3pul6br_2Y2bPWEkzIVOTFmVpUciT4hoptsg5TaeOncAvoFpm5Pi4vS_M47FcwWb83T6jU8D0IsHDETqhf69tAzLENWqAvBML0zE7I_LQ_Eoh-cIWVH2aMm281X9VQBpPl3/s320/4.jpg" width="239" /></a>In this peripatetic pre-Portland period Lightbourne was trying to figure out how his interest in writing and music could be applied without winding up a hollow careerist who might as well be pulling down a salary at Donnelly for all the good it would do the culture. If he wrote he’d want to write as Miller or Genet wrote; if he played music he’d want it to be as true as Koerner Ray & Glover, or Mike Seeger. Dave spent a long week on the Strip in Los Angeles catching Albert King, Steppenwolf, Canned Heat, and others before settling into Cambridge, Mass. for a year. He doesn’t appear to have performed while in Boston though he followed the vital music there -- The Remains, Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band, Taj Mahal…. In Fall 1969 he moved to Eugene, Oregon. David lived with his Iowa friend Warren and their girlfriends while Warren ran what Tom Newman calls “a hippie hangout” called Alice’s Restaurant. Tom writes, “Wherever Warren lived was always the center of activity for everyone he knew.” In a fictionalized version of these days Dave describes a certain character as “being Pisces, active, restless, impatient with the stasis in things, with perpetual momentum for stirring up, shaking down, bilking the town in the only really effective way possible, the corruption of its youth however such may be accomplished.” Did I mention Dave said these instant “youth-culture food parlors” Warren set up wherever he went in Iowa and Oregon were inevitably crawling with runaway girls?<br />
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In Eugene they also found Al Malam, another former Iowan, who David thought had the best singing voice in a white boy. Still does, though he’s gone by the name Al Rivers for decades now. In early 1971 David and Warren moved to Portland. They and Tom Wood, also from Iowa and who’d been in Cambridge as well, now set up to run their Mexican loads up to the rather dry environs of rain city. In a cassette tape dated November 1972 that David made in a Cuernavaca hotel room, he, Colleen, Tom and Warren mostly swat cockroaches and laugh about David’s attempts at emergency Spanish when they were evicted the day before at gunpoint from another hotel.<br />
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Portland liberalized its restrictive licensing of bars for live music presentation in 1973 and Portland stages quickly filled up with acoustic country-blues specialists as scenes in Boston, Manhattan, Bucks County, Nevada, and Vermont emptied out of people like Steve Weber, Robin Remaily, Dave Reisch, Jeffrey Frederick, Jill Gross, Peter Langston, Fritz Richmond, Gary Sisco and others. They were liking what they were hearing and seeing in Portland. Bars like The Inferno, The Euphoria, The Earth Tavern, The White Eagle, The Leaky Roof, Key Largo, The Grog House, The Dandelion, and Sweet Revenge were soon showcasing The Holy Modal Rounders, The Clamtones, Michael Hurley, The Metropolitan Jug Band, The Fly By Night Jass Band, Puddle City Bluegrass Band, Al Rivers and others. Lightbourne was quoted in the Oregon Journal, “Portland is sort of a refuge for ’60s folk musicians” (2.4.1980), and he looked forward to luring Dave Van Ronk next.<br />
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These guys were just hitting their stride too. They’d been perhaps a bit too green in their first attempts to sound blue or old-timey. Now they were ten-plus years into their music-making. They had all manner of criminal sidelines (drug-use of course, but also smuggling, shoplifting, drug-store raiding, arson, and maybe even a crime or two against nature), they had hip young women to inspire them now whose own estate-sale obsessions guaranteed the apartments and houses where they lived or passed-out in were furnished with the finest in old-growth wood craftsmanship and twenties accoutrements. They really were off-the-rails and out-of-hand in formerly tidy, rain-scrubbed backwater Portland.<br />
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The Holy Modal Rounders came through Portland in 1971 and except for Peter Stampfel, they decided to stay. The were instantly a big attraction in their new town and though the lineup always did go through its changes the band was stabilized when Jeffrey Frederick’s Clamtones moved to town from Vermont in 1975. Lightbourne dashed off this bit about local color on a large pharmaceutical post-it pad:<br />
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“In those days, not quite the mid-70’s, high times came with seemingly no effort, a serendipity of sex, drugs, and rock and roll spurred by hip capitalism and an explosion in entertainment options. When the magnum rock quintet (version of the) Holy Modal Rounders hit Portland in 1973, we all rolled over onto our opposite hip, blinked groggily, and whispered, ‘No shit?’ excitedly. PDX already had a rich local rock band culture going back before ‘Louie Louie’ to the 50’s. Folk rock had seen a great new generation emerge, while Melodious Funk, (and the) PH Phactor Jug Band, had opened for the Dead in the early years in a nod to their own jug-nik origins. The Rounders conquered (like a Roman company).” (DL, circa 2000s)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV30EOwiLLeWqf71GXD36umj0OL2nnPTk6VQLOPgtIPY5gn4xQSzZAwbXu_bd2A5ZfBo84EqaKf5jtPc7BCDakotfvfWTDXR0ykilkq6n4-pVWEWxWWaXWtyENB8e3exNPJwtxUEGthoNX/s1600/NV-DL-MJB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="400" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV30EOwiLLeWqf71GXD36umj0OL2nnPTk6VQLOPgtIPY5gn4xQSzZAwbXu_bd2A5ZfBo84EqaKf5jtPc7BCDakotfvfWTDXR0ykilkq6n4-pVWEWxWWaXWtyENB8e3exNPJwtxUEGthoNX/s400/NV-DL-MJB.jpg" width="400" /></a>The Seventies serendipity happened differently around the country. The common ingredients led usually to an egalitarian suburbanized arena rock FM youth culture which didn’t last too long, but which pushed its boomer elders into a politicized adulthood of singer-songwriters or bluegrass. It was different in Portland: smarter, more sophisticated, almost as if the promise of that most vital thread of the folk-roots movement had somehow survived there alone to incubate into its own rock and roll culmination -- one knowing but natural, deduced from music recorded in the twenties, re-discovered in the fifties, and here delivered in the seventies. The music took off locally on its own power. Nick Hill calls the Rounders of this period “the hottest touring dance band in the Northwest”. They regularly packed the Rainbow and the Central in Seattle as well. But the drugs came with the musicians. Warren stopped going to Mexico; David made one more trip. Tom Wood had left Portland when the high times spooked him, but he did not leave drug-smuggling; alone now Tom was killed outside Acapulco in fall 1977. The business of maintaining the high got big and got violent.<br />
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I was part of a punk recalibration which in its early years was often puritanical in its determination not to be drunk or stoned or wired like the rockers, the hippies, or the disco crowd. And as the punks were going to have to reinvent their own radio and record industries it was going to require a modicum of sobriety. And further, given that punk would be music with “whiter”, more forced rhythm, pot’s vaunted musicological aid was initially dispensable.<br />
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What is striking to me about Portland's jug-band psychedelic blues scene was how dance-oriented their rock and roll was, even when acoustic. In the sixties I was too young to do anything but listen to the radio, and later too disaffected to go to high school dances in the early seventies, and by then hard rock and punk rock weren’t for dancing, thanks largely to the influence of the British Invasion. The laid-back singer-songwriter bunk made sure that one of punk’s initial demands would be that you at least stand up in the presence of live music. But David always talked about dancing, its presence or its absence, and how in his ideal music, a band performance was responsive in the live moment to the best dancers on the floor. This certainty of David’s and Jeffrey Frederick’s especially, brought women into the Portland audience, whereas they were drifting away from commercial rock audiences elsewhere for disco.<br />
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Colorado writer Elliott Johnston interviewed Lightbourne in 2008 and asked him about his role in the mid-seventies Holy Modal Rounders:<br />
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“All I did was occasionally get onstage and sing the Stampfel parts when Weber would do a song and it desperately called for a higher voice. Then they’d just tell me to play lead electric guitar. The real relationship was, everybody in Portland could rent a Victorian mansion for $125 a month… The one I rented, I lived with Marcus and Weber. So in other words there were like seven people dividing $125 a month rent… But what Weber finally told me to do was, ‘Why don’t you start your own band?’ And I think he was tired of me getting onstage with him. ‘Why don’t you start your own fucking band?’ So I did.” (DL, Oct. 12, 2008)<br />
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I imagine The Metropolitan Jug Band would have come together anyway, despite the impression David leaves. In fact, unlike his friends, he managed to get out of a scrape with time-served in early 1978 so I’m guessing that forming The Stumptown Slickers, which evolved into the MJB, as well as his KBOO radio program which also began that year were part of his attempt to move himself past the harder, heavier drugging that had begun four years earlier. He was back in jail in fall 1979 while I was staying at his apt to save money for a November trip to London to meet the Rough Trade folks (we were moving Renaissance/Systematic Record Distribution down to Berkeley to help them set up in America). Christine, another Company turista was also staying in the place - her claim-to-fame included an appearance in an early 1970s issue of <i>Playboy</i>. David wrote from jail, “In this situation depression is too dangerous to cultivate, and discipline works quite well. Little things mean a lot: I’m doing exercises, taking showers, brushing after every meal -- it’s literally amazing!” It took the slammer to get Dave to brush his teeth. He also writes that his bandmates were a blessing and thanks me for doing his Fifties show for him. I remember KBOO’s blues host Tom Wendt being down there in case Dave hadn’t made any arrangements. Tom was another music-first Portland fixture; Dave told me Tom sold blood as often as allowed so he could buy blues records. Those were the days…<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6SeIu4xxFV5iOIoG0MfExn2yGM_JdGU-E_gaX2cyZmICRyLUb5wczq9bpudBPioGXAOl8oaYvqDbQfE6Wn3dOGD06ALMfzKn-J4XDWz3G0ul102yaQAP4e1c7Q-NSaPKA0wzekSVEI2V/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="292" data-original-width="350" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6SeIu4xxFV5iOIoG0MfExn2yGM_JdGU-E_gaX2cyZmICRyLUb5wczq9bpudBPioGXAOl8oaYvqDbQfE6Wn3dOGD06ALMfzKn-J4XDWz3G0ul102yaQAP4e1c7Q-NSaPKA0wzekSVEI2V/s400/5.jpg" width="400" /></a>But as regards the Metropolitan Jug Band, you don’t get a Fritz Richmond joining your band unless it's his best option. Fritz was a star in the early 1960s Boston folk scene with Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band and a noted recording engineer as well as a friend of John Sebastian -- Fritz named The Lovin’ Spoonful. In the 1990s and thereafter he played in Sebastian’s The J Band, and was also in ex-Kweskin band-mate Geoff Muldaur’s Jug Band (as well as a last Portland outfit called Barbecue Orchestra). Fritz was the foremost jug and washtub bass player of the revival years. He’d been on the Vanguard and Reprise labels, and Fritz had engineered albums for Elektra’s Paul Rothchild and others in Los Angeles (The Doors, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Lonnie Mack, The Everly Brothers…). Tom Fitting describes the beginnings of the MJB as he and Kevin Robinson playing guitars together and Kevin bringing in Hugh Frederick on harp and Dan Lissy joining quickly, singing and blowing jug. “Hugh or Lissy introduced David Lightbourne to the trio in late 1978, and the foursome started playing as The Stumptown Slickers. It was clear that David was a powerful presence in the musical direction….” (TF, July 15, 2010)<br />
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Dan Lissy told the <i>Blues Notes</i> paper in 2004 that The Stumptown Slickers included Billy Hults as well and lasted a year with a regular gig at The Long Goodbye and opening slots for John Mayall and John Lee Hooker. Lissy left and David sang and they played as a trio for a bit in early 1979 as The New Stop & Listen Boys. Hugh brought in David Dearborn on washboard and they became The Metropolitan Jug Band by spring, playing Fridays at the Leaky Roof Tavern. Tom Fitting writes:<br />
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“From my tapes, it looks like Fritz Richmond approached the band on 7/13/79 and sat in then for the first time, and I recall he was there every time we played thereafter… [W]hen Fritz asked if he could sit in… Hugh was coy but let Fritz come on stage, although he told me later that he recognized Fritz… and was fully aware of Fritz's pedigree.” (TF)<br />
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The MJB represented David’s musical vision, but that’s not to say he lead the band otherwise. The Kweskin band often tilted away from blues and jug band styles toward vaudeville-style jazz and kitsch. There was zero kitsch in David’s bands. He knew the best songs, the best players, the best playing so he never shrank from hating or just ignoring lesser stuff. And he knew that rock and roll was acoustic music first, as it was as late as Elvis on Sun. And he further knew that if rock and roll was radical it was also of a tradition. It was not progressive, but rather regressive. Lightbourne wrote recently: “We regress to do battle, we regress to make love, we regress to dream.”<br />
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But none of this got the band recorded. Tom writes, “Fritz was very clear about recording. He insisted on professional recording using the record label’s support, nothing less, and we did not have a label. We had several different discussions about it, and he would not budge.” Dave never regretted that to my knowledge -- there’s loads of tapes and he could always pull out his guitar and go to work on anything he wanted to hear -- but once I thought about it after he joined me in Chicago in 1995 it annoyed me. I wasn’t having a good enough time at SST once we were solvent to have thought of recording the MJB for SST. I should’ve done it anyway. Fritz didn’t realize that the record business he had known was ending; the easy money and access was over. And maybe, with what he enjoyed about Portland life, he was lulled out of awareness that he was no longer in the record industry loop. What I think Fritz feared happening was the band recording itself with local resources and having some substandard product marketed on his reputation. Big mistake.
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One of the great things about the early rock and roll era was that musicians were all coming from an organic folk culture that, though it took advantage of the electronic media, was not yet altered by that media. Musicians could sit in with players they did not know and find their way to sync up. So lineups were more fluid. Still it could take an hour to sync up; David often mentioned seeing Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago and being surprised at the shambling versions they were putting out until about forty minute in when it all came into a riveting focus. David often talked about the rhythmic sense of his generation of players versus some player who might be deep into the same blues canon but being younger couldn’t quite settle into the same wavelength; he even marveled that he and Steve Weber didn’t really have it together either. When I saw the Metropolitan Jug Band at the Leaky Roof in 1979 Billy Hults was subbing for Dearborn. Billy played with everyone sooner or later in the Portland scene. His bands (The Fly By Night Jass Band, and Billy Foodstamp & the Welfare Ranch Rodeo) had more fluid lineups than most but he got good results. This clip of Fly By Night doing The Memphis Jug Band’s “She Done Sold It Out” is the single best video representation of the Portland scene that I’m aware of. Let us pause now and watch…
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"She Done Sold It Out"<br />
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This taping features:
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John Ward - vocals, harp<br />
Billy Hults - washboard<br />
Kenneth Turtle Vandemar - guitar, kazoo<br />
Stu Dodge - fiddle<br />
John Dominegoni - bass<br />
Robin Remaily - fiddle<br />
Richard Tyler - piano<br />
Peter Langston - mandolin
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Nick Hill guesses this video is an outtake from sessions that yielded a six song EP around 1974, and he thinks he recognizes Mike Lastra and David Lightbourne on the floor towards the end; I can’t tell but I didn’t know David that early. Peter Langston who had been in Portland Zoo, writes, “I believe that was filmed at Rex Recording where we had just finished mixing some recordings of our bluegrass band, Puddle City. As we were leaving we ran into our Fly By Nite Jass Band friends rehearsing and they invited me to join in.” (PL, July 14, 2010)<br />
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Remaily and Tyler were then in The Holy Modal Rounders, though when the now Portland-based Rounders-Clamtones toured to the east coast to record the “Have Moicy!” album with Peter Stampfel and Michael Hurley, Weber dropped off the tour long enough to miss the recording session. Lightbourne thought “Have Moicy!”, credited to Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones, was <i>the</i> masterpiece of their scene, though it was recorded on the east coast and Stampfel rather than Weber held down the Rounders franchise. It was recorded in two days in July 1975, mixed in three. Hurley told PopWatch, “You probably just don't have the software to know how good I feel about the ‘Have Moicy!’ release. So many people have told me that they love it, it changed their life, it turned them on to old-time asskickin' hillbilly, it lead them to a superior love life, it brought them much wealth and still remains a favorite after 20 years or 10. Everytime I listen to it, it sounds more together; it sounds like a bunch of loonies too.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHKc95wiTQ5EpsASZKDwZFBMkCHJX-46h_NbzEE2-2FqE0v37cri5dZKdfPTG-2fG21zwFJ5LPOSS8MGDDriPRYQ3z3I7_pWussmqKhDJtg9Tg-n9iydjulJNd8Etgxuz5IhleUwRE8mFR/s1600/5+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHKc95wiTQ5EpsASZKDwZFBMkCHJX-46h_NbzEE2-2FqE0v37cri5dZKdfPTG-2fG21zwFJ5LPOSS8MGDDriPRYQ3z3I7_pWussmqKhDJtg9Tg-n9iydjulJNd8Etgxuz5IhleUwRE8mFR/s400/5+%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a>Thereafter, some of Hurley’s mob, David Reisch and Gary Sisco, threw in with the Portland crew and Michael himself was pulled inevitably to Oregon. One could find different combinations of all these players in any of a number of bands. Lightbourne and Richmond also played 1984 gigs as The Justin Other Jug Band with Mark Goldfarb on guitar and vocals and Randy Griffin on harp. And Earth Tavern fixture and music-writer Dan Lissy who’d been in The Stumptown Slickers continued to play with David and others.<br />
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Another one-page essay I found in David’s effects, tells of yet one more wayward folk musician on the scene in 1973 playing his own depressive low-key ballads:<br />
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“At the time we all lived, four or five of us, in a little one-bedroom house down by the freeway at the very edge of the black and hippie enclave in Portland called Dogpatch. Colleen, Weber’s girlfriend at the time, came calling at ten o’clock one morning, way too early, and I woke up in my loft in the utility room cursing the daylight. Somebody in the front room had taken down the little 1868 Martin parlor guitar, D-8 or something, with a great-looking dark spruce top, and the music sounded like jazzed folk, or folk swing or folk soul.<br />
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By the time I got up and down and out this geeky little guy with a Jimmy Durante hat and Ray Charles sunglasses had played a real sweet set and Colleen introduced me to Tansy Ragwort. (We got to the west coast in the late sixties, and one of the first topics they got your attention with in the regional media had to do with cattle dying all over eastern Oregon from eating Tansy Ragwort. At the time it sounded like this was the deep down hard-core uniquely Oregonesque local exotic lore.)<br />
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The real Tansy Ragwort wrote really pretty love songs with simple folkish tunes using jazz-substitution chords on acoustic guitar with classic 1930s changes. He’d been opening for the Holy Modal Rounders that week in Seattle at several venues and grabbed the ride south as a great chance to check Portland, Modal Rounder World Headquarters.” (DL)<br />
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Tansy’s actual name was Steven Bernstein as he was known later for his poetry; he died by his own hand in 1991.
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There’s been revolutions in American music all along of course, but in Portland this backwater mix by postwar pop culture radicals seemed to start with fifties rock and roll and then retreat into the past. Often acoustic or half-acoustic, it was metaphysically, if not always musically, a blues-style revolution. It was not dreamy and righteous as in the former folk-style, or self-absorbed and mercenary as in the singer-songwriter mode then current. As Jane Stokes writes (NV 56) about her time with David in Cambridge, “From the different sixties’ themes -- political, music, black, drugs -- we were black and drugs.”<br />
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David printed out a post to the “Have Moicy group” by Nick, maybe the only member who insists on the importance of the west coast Rounders against the general indifference to all Weber was doing in his Portland years. Nick's post was about a Portland classmate, also a musician, just then deceased in 2005:<br />
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“I am reminded of a day I spent at Weber’s house in Portland when he was living with Colleen on SW 1st St. I was all of 15 at the time, and Craig would have been about 18. I had just stopped by to visit and was surprised to see Craig Mayther there, tripping out of his mind. Obviously he had taken heroic doses of acid, and maybe something more ferocious. He was large, and out of control, foaming at the mouth. Doctor Steven Weber was in. Attending to this LSD overdose with all the bedside manner of a saint. Administering B-12, and generous doses of gentle old guitar ballads to cool the huge man‘s disturbed sense of being.” (NH, June 6, 2005)<br />
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David may have performed similar ministrations but I remember most his story of his first heroin customer who received rather more cursory treatment when David found him turning blue on the floor of his bathroom. He managed to save the guy’s life and send him on his way, but that was how he learned that you never let a customer use your bathroom on the way out.<br />
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I found this short note, which by the looks of it was written by David in the five years or so before his 2010 death:<br />
<br />
“I’m inclined to a totally apologetic attitude about the Great Portland Oregon Heroin Plague, roughly 1974-1994. Fucked up the very best and brightest, the talented and everyone else. Weber played his central flashpoint position to get the ball rolling. Ricardo, Dolores, Fat Freddy, Shade Tree, at one point Rube & Pam the Gorgeous. The listed would fill a damn data-base, and Oregon bureaucrats probably have a good one, hard to access. Start at the easy end with the clockwork thud of obituaries, Here an O.D., there an O.D., everywhere a-, not to mention a few suicides.<br />
<br />
"One of my road buddies from Iowa, running to dodge the draft as well as to escape an FBI dragnet for a failed Florida Panama Red load, set up shop with a mixture tested at 80% opiates coming down from Vancouver. He cleared a hundred grand a month for a spell. We played our part, and probably a dozen younger kids did too much. Not a good way to begin, self-indulgent, spoiled and bored. Things were way better when Steve just hit me from his cotton for driving him to cop. I could take it or leave it.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjevr12rFZfgDRsq3OdRmn5uyu8EsesIsydY3ZVdLP5Pp2YLdi1sLHo_H8GKaDHhaMNRCDpvyEe7HJPfn1P0ULUEDAEe9DNM5e_ZhybY33M-yn0I6WJG_jqsZ_O6kjr7P-w1a6kKzbd7h_x/s1600/NV-Clamtones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="406" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjevr12rFZfgDRsq3OdRmn5uyu8EsesIsydY3ZVdLP5Pp2YLdi1sLHo_H8GKaDHhaMNRCDpvyEe7HJPfn1P0ULUEDAEe9DNM5e_ZhybY33M-yn0I6WJG_jqsZ_O6kjr7P-w1a6kKzbd7h_x/s400/NV-Clamtones.jpg" width="316" /></a>"I personally don’t care for the shit. I quickly learned how a whole other kind of normal fellow, the ambulatory depressed, could and would soon commit any and every imaginable desperate act to assure the sustenance of life itself. I’m sure it beats all the anti-depressants by a mile, with the only downside lifelong constipation. Not at all like these pills that make you go postal. But I only liked it because I needed it. Getting it often proved an unbelievable adventure, and man did it feel wonderful suddenly getting well. I way prefer pot.<br />
<br />
"The Greeks said everything in moderation and about the best time I ever had took place the afternoon Jeffrey and I went over to Danielle’s to do some good white. We had two guitars. That’s really all I remember. As soon as we realized how amazingly well we clicked we never looked back. The one day in my life I could never begrudge a tip of the top hat to King Dope, shit, smack, dog, do, H, beige, boy, etc.” (DL, circa 2000s)
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*<br />
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I got to Portland from Hollywood in fall 1977 and got to know Dave because we both worked at the Cinema 21. I was the janitor and would clean the theater after the last show cleared out around midnight. Sometimes he’d hang around the theater but usually I’d do the job alone with a small radio turned on that filled the big empty theater space nicely. (One amazing night of mopping I was mesmerized by a piece of contemporary classical music and got a pencil to write down what the announcer said; it was the 1978 debut recording Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 and I never found a copy until a lesser British version came out twenty years later and went platinum.) I might get done at the theater about 3am and I’d check to see if the light was still on at Dave’s nearby apartment. It usually was and we’d talk in his place, or go to the QP diner a few blocks away. I didn’t know anything about drugs I didn’t hear from him. In his place he’d be dabbing the tracks on his arms with some skin restorative while we talked. He was off heroin then and had never liked cocaine, LSD, or alcohol. I met Weber once at Dave’s apartment but had no idea who he was. I left Portland when we moved Systematic to Berkeley at the end of 1979 and soon enough it was clear by his letters that he was back on it, plus he was starting to mention some of the Portland punks I’d known who were now crossing paths with the older scene.
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*
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<br />
I found a cassette in David’s collection that records a quiet late-night fifty minutes or so of Steve Weber in 1977 moving through one tune after another, singing and playing guitar for Dan Lissy, Pamela Boswell Marcus, and Christine Van Kamen. It begins with David reading discographical information about Frank Stokes and adding to that what he knows about how the metal masters were found near Grafton, Wisconsin nailed to chicken coops as roofing shingles. Then David is either unusually quiet or has left. Lissy is still recording and to prompt a version of “Cocaine Blues” out of Steve, he asks him what he knows about cocaine. Steve answers, “Well you take some cocaine you feel like a new man, and next thing you know the new man wants some too.” Steve plays it and another dozen songs, four of which he reprised the next year in New York with Peter Stampfel as part of the “Going Nowhere Fast” album. Weber sounds far less comfortable in the New York recordings and so the tunes are as a consequence not as delicate and beautiful, or in the case of “Junker’s Blues”, not as perverse as the Portland home recordings. And yet the album’s liner-notes by John Swenson are at pains to dismiss rumored Portland recordings of Peter and Steve and cheer on the abuse his co-producer lays on Steve, “working at a breakneck pace by haranguing him constantly during breaks until Weber retreated behind the microphone for solace.” New York for ya…<br />
<br />
The women of the Portland scene shopped resale, wearing what twenties dresses could bear up under the crush in these bars and the wear-and-tear of the strange new sexual customs still then unfolding. The protest flyer nearby concerns Jeffrey Frederick’s apparently routine exclusive use of the women’s johns at bars. The flyer’s protest features already routine feminist attitudes with descriptions of behavior somewhat more in the true spirit of the times. Here’s David again, writing decades later about this flyer and that night. (A Warning: David wrote this for himself with perhaps no editor or reader in mind…)<br />
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“The flyer makes the big dustup unnecessarily complicated and confusing. It vanished overnight so this might be the only surviving copy. No one took it seriously just like no one took the cat fight seriously from the get go. Needless to say, anywhere Fat Freddy had a gig, he only pissed in the women’s shitter. Supposedly men’s cans turned his stomach. In truth, many women swear it’s the opposite -- Hey, gals, come on in!<br />
<br />
"Either Jeffrey walked in on Hannah or she walked in on him. Probably told him to get the fuck out of there. But then she made the fatal, suicidal mistake of flinging his hat into a toilet bowl.<br />
<br />
"The poor dumb cunt had no possible way of knowing that a bindle of heroin lay tucked inside the hat’s sweatband. She thought in all honesty she was just being a righteous bitch. No damn harm, No damn foul. Fuck the hat you fat fucking fuck! Dear sweet Jesus.<br />
<br />
"A cross-cultural misunderstanding of tectonic proportions: Put a twenty dollar match-head of Persian beige inside a hundred dollar hat. The hat would maybe be the real deal in price for vanity stage drag. But Jeffrey would happily pawn a pair of Stetsons, even trade ’em, for one good hit.
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<br />
"How in holy hell could poor Hannah possibly comprehend this alien universe she had stumbled into -- where the men all shit in the women’s, which sees no room, no rest.” (DL, circa 2000s)
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<br />
I should explain here several of David’s unique circumlocutionary habits. He often paired the euphemism “freakin’” with the very word it was meant to take the edge off of, namely the F-word; hence, a likely sentence: “If he wants to go out of business I’d be glad to burn the freakin’ fuckin’ place to the ground for him.” Another strange tic of his involved how someone, anyone, might edit themselves in conversation by ending a sentence with “blah, blah, blah…”; but Dave was moving much to quickly to make do with just three “blahs” so he’d use freakin’ fuckin’ five of ’em! Dave was a great editor and proof reader, but I’d say his verbal editing needed editing.
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<br />
David’s girlfriends were often buyers and sellers of vintage threads re-released on post-Carnaby Street, post-earth-mother fashion via former timber-baron estate-sales and auctions so these mogul’s dissolute scions could buy heroin from David. He was in the used records stores and his girlfriend was in the resale clothing shops. It was a division of postwar post-labor, an archeology of one postwar golden age so as to prolong the last bit of a second postwar golden age. One thing that bears mentioning is that the earliest of our postwar bohemia spun from homosexual men born between the wars. Bohemia after the Beats was generally hetero but at first shaped by the pre-birth-control Pill years when women, pairing up, children and/or marriage were the threat to their plans to avoid the straight work-a-day world. So those born during WWII were often misogynists going into the sixties sexual revolution, and they could be, lets guess, a handful during it. Their girlfriends were of necessity quite their match.
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*
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<br />
In Boston and Chicago and elsewhere acoustic/delta/Piedmont/blues/etc. was already being<br />
presented as if behind glass in a museum for the progressive delectation of that element of the sixties generation which wished to retire into an epicurean lifestyle. But in Portland Oregon, these musician-criminals couldn’t help but make that music live again as twenties-style rock and roll in something like the manner of the great jug bands of Memphis. I mostly missed it as I wasn’t looking for that. Lightbourne’s fifties’ rock and roll knowledge seemed more relevant to me and the punk rock I was beginning to deal in. Thank God I did go and see his band a couple times, once at the Leaky Roof and once at a practice at either Hugh Frederick’s or David Dearborn’s house.
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The hip tavern culture of Portland peaked in the eighties, probably with the election of bar-owner Bud Clark as mayor in 1984. He claimed his bar, the Goose Hollow Inn, was regularly crowded “butt-to-belly” and served 200 kegs of beer a month. The movie <i>Drugstore Cowboy</i> (1989) may be the nadir; it is based on events committed by friends of these musicians but subtracting all of their style and wit and taste. Lightbourne’s friends were co-stars in the actual nonfiction newspaper coverage; I found a set of clippings in his things of the arrests and the sentencings, and also a newspaper photo of a pharmacist with a framed photo of Matt Damon on the wall behind him. Dave would tell some insane Portland-era story and I’d again remind him that we needed to re-write that truth-never-told and make Danielle in that small house in the shade of the sheer back wall of Fred Meyer's the star of the show. Her front room was a Marx Brothers' state-room scene waiting to happen with all the human traffic, the antique bric-a-brac and David's complete run of Rolling Stones lining the walls floor-to-ceiling. The pitch would’ve been: Maisie in the crack-den, call it Superheroine.
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In one of David’s many semi-filled journals-diaries-notebooks there is this, immediately following a short note dated Feb. 16, 1983 on basketball dynasties:
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“It was all quite predictably freaky. I burst into Warren’s without knocking last Sunday, the 7th, and got three sawed-off shotguns pointed at me. Narcs as thugs; at first I thought ‘bikers’ before things slowed enough to notice the down vests and hiking shoes. They almost blew my ass out of the universe nose-first, perhaps to a parallel realm where mu-mesons reverse/implode in time. After holding me face down on the floor and kicking me a lot I talked my head off and they found a hundred dollar paper in a wallet next to where I’d been on the floor, pocketed the heroin, wallet and all, and said why don’t you split. So I did….” (DL, circa 1983)
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David was then the star of the top tavern attraction in town, playing four nights a week.
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It couldn’t last. They each on their own schedule stopped their drinking or drugging, or they died.<br />
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Some spent time in jail, Dave among them. He almost never drank anything other than Coca Cola but he gave up heroin a second time in the mid-eighties, though he continued to recommend it for depression; he considered all of Big Pharma’s search for the perfect anti-depressant utterly redundant and hypocritical. Until I read Sisco’s blog I didn’t appreciate what an a-hole I was drinking a beer in front of Michael Hurley, who does a manful job pretending to love his cup of tea while his Boone & Jocko cartoons tell you what’s really on his mind. David had a number of friends who disappeared late in life into relationships with women that seemed combination rehab-matrimonies. He referred to these lost souls in the past tense, and described them as having married dominatrices. Dave’s girlfriends over the years were all good-looking, hip and smart but his own troubled childhood meant that he was pitched mightily against fatherhood and so these women left him to pair off with more user-friendly men, though many stayed in touch with him and counted on him for occasional blasts of information from out beyond their new normal.<br />
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Dave left Portland gradually, spending the late eighties in Phoenix with his mother and stepfather, actually taking law classes to assure her that he’d be able to provide for himself. He then went on the road as the audio-video tech for his brother Michael who was conducting sales seminars in the Rentrak video rental system. During these tours Dave hit every used record store in the country and re-connected with everyone he ever knew and respected as he went, and he would tell you all kinds of stuff, like what he found when he went looking for the Augusta house where Blind Willie McTell was born.
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David’s brother Michael, while here to move his brother's effects, told me two very interesting things about Michael and Priscilla’s father Kirk Lightbourne -- David’s step-father. Kirk played trumpet in big bands until he got his front teeth knocked out in a drunken brawl at a club. (Paul Whiteman Violence Must Stop!) Just before David went off to college in Iowa he had a big argument with Kirk who perhaps resented paying for it. Michael who was thirteen didn’t understand the argument except that it was scaring him because David was getting the better of his father until as Michael tells it Kirk picked David up and set him in the trash saying, “You are garbage.” David never went back home after that. In retirement in Phoenix, Kirk was an in-demand piano-tuner and he got to know Alice Cooper, Glen Campbell and other notable musicians in the area. Michael believes that his father began to soften on David as he recognized that what I’ll call the rockstar traits of Alice and Glen were the same things he’d been seeing in David since he barged in on young David’s idyll. But as a former big-band musician he had no respect for folk music per se, whether it was stepson David’s or his own son Michael’s, who on the face of it was quite successful himself in the pop end of early sixties folk music. As Michael puts it, his father though quite rowdy in his big band days, played ballrooms in tuxedos and “never saw the musical merit of this genre of music.”
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In January 2007 Dave was at Jane’s in New York and The Holy Modal Rounders and Michael Hurley were in Portland doing gigs around the release of a documentary film called <i>Bound to Lose</i>. The film’s makers knew it was important to present in Portland, though the film does not cover the band’s Portland years. Dave wrote an email on the details of his impending return to Wyoming, and filled me in on what he heard about how things went back in his own stomping grounds:
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“They took some good photos at the PDX bash, one in particular of Hurley & Reisch. Hurley looks like he's on a roll. Reisch had the sound-guy do digital 32 tracks off the board but noted that, often, one side of the stage had no idea what the other side was playing. His admonition: ‘Tapes don't lie’. Four fiddles, three washboards, two saxophones.... equals Tennessee Klezmer. Still being billed as Weber's one last chance to resurrect, apotheosize, or take petulance to the mountaintop. Nobody even remembers that he was virtually run out of town as corpses fell on every side. Nor do any of these morons remember Martin & Lewis, Laurel & Hardy.... or even Dan & Connie. Stampfel, meanwhile, has made a bigtime outback comeback.” (DL, Jan. 10, 2007)
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David could be impatient with writers or filmmakers when they didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. He smiled when he told me the filmmakers had said they hoped to portray “the love between Peter and Steve”. Dave didn’t exactly mean to imply they hated each other, but he meant that the self-esteem generation might never figure out that once the focus had been on music first, and then drugs, girls, and life in America, and only after that maybe camaraderie, perhaps touched with something resembling love. The literature on bands like The Minutemen or Dinosaur Jr hinge on the ability of Music itself to bring together the nerds with the jocks -- nerds do not make good drummers and only genius-grade music can lure some happening high school dude to associate with his weirdest classmates -- it may be touching, but it isn’t love. How much more likely necessary was it in 1963 that music brought the two pathfinders of The Holy Modal Rounders together? (Peter began hearing horror-stories about Steve from Antonia as early as 1962; Steve was in Bucks County down the street from Hurley.)
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To be fair Dave himself should have written these books and films on the blues, or Dylan, or The Rounders, or Mike Seeger, Mike Bloomfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marshall McLuhan, Elvis Presley…. It’s hardly their authors’ fault he didn’t. What is their fault is that they somehow didn’t locate him during their inadequate research phase. Dave was nothing if not the world’s premiere expert talking head. When Weber heard of David’s death I’m told he said, “There’s a lot of people who talk a lot, but David always had something to say.” Only a rank amateur filmmaker by the name of Elwood Snock ever knew enough to point a video-camera at David. (Take a look at Michael's film tribute.)
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There aren’t too many gaps in my book <i>Rock and the Pop Narcotic</i> of a size sufficient to embarrass me but my missing that Oregon scene is surely the principle one. And I was so close to it! Dave might have recorded for Delmark in the early sixties when he worked for Bob Koester; he almost recorded for Adelphi in 1970. When I convinced David to move to Wyoming he actually first joined me in Chicago for a few months as I prepared to sell that building and pack up. While in Chicago he got a temp job and began to meet people around town. He played nights at Smokedaddy's on Division and got to know folks in Devil in the Woodpile and at the Specimen Guitar shop, and reintroduced himself to Koester at Jazz Record Mart. I recall that Bob was at first busy doing inventory but then he stopped and looked around and said, "Now where's that guy I was talking to?" Then they really commenced reminiscing. But no recordings of David's music panned out until Wyoming when we got The Stop & Listen Boys album together in 2000 for a label I put together with Bill Stevenson of The Descendents and Black Flag -- bands that were among the reasons I left Portland and Berkeley for Los Angeles.
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Fortunately there is a ton of additional recordings of David and his bands from both the Wyoming era and the Portland era, and perhaps we’ll find material from the sixties as well in this crate of ancient reel-to-reel tapes he’d been toting around for years. Somehow I expect we will whittle the takes down to an album release spanning his decades; Byron Coley saw David perform at one of the Upland Breakdowns in Wyoming and I'm working with him over what a new record might include for his label, Feeding Tube.
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I had a vague idea that aside from what Coca-Cola did to his teeth, that drinking it all day long might presage some kind of nightmare diabetic finger-failure that you hear about in the pages of blues history. But Dave got stronger on the guitar in his sixties. Laramie of all places offered him both weekly solo venues (at Provisional Café, Cowboy Coffee, The Fireside, Muddy Waters Coffeehouse, The Buckhorn Bar) and places to play with his band The Stop & Listen Boys (The Old Centennial Café-Beartree Tavern, The Trading Post, KUWR, KRFC, and many one-offs). We talked through each Upland Breakdown since 2000, trying to bring out the best players he and I had known around a loose idea of acoustic blues. He was most engaged and even a touch nervous when he could bring out to our centrally-located middle-of-nowhere another of his old music compatriots: Michael Hurley, Gary Sisco, Al Rivers, Jane Cohen-Pellouchoud…. Every few years I’d ask him if he thought there’d be any chance of bringing out Peter Stampfel & Steve Weber, or at least Weber. He was sure it couldn’t be done and I figured he must know. But that would’ve been something. Something for Wyoming to fear. Gary came out the once and looked around at the Beartree crowd in Centennial, Wyoming and said, "I'm glad there's still a scene somewhere!"
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David’s theory on health issues was to avoid doctors and hospitals because they’d insure that you’d have a lengthy twilight of failing abilities and mobility. He didn’t want that and didn’t let on when he was in pain due to a childhood bout with rheumatic fever which meant that he had often had what he referred to in notes I found after his death as "phantom chest pains"; he apparently learned to just ignore it. I found stray references to insomnia due to such pain in diary entries as early as 1972 while he was on a run to Mexico. So I suspect he didn’t have any expectation that death was approaching though he'd lived as if expecting an early death. He was on the phone until about 11pm Mountain time to his old Portland pal Kevin Robinson the night of Thursday April 29th talking about a song lyric he was working on, and the coroner had his death come between 10pm and midnight. I found him at 9:30 the next morning sitting on the floor wrapped in his blanket, as if during the heart attack he tried to get up off the sofa. But this time it was more than just pain.
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I don't often remember my dreams but I did have one fairly lucid one where I was back in my Laramie building where Dave and I lived on either side of a large warren of rooms above two shopfronts from 1996 to 2005. Much later, after I'd sold the building and he stayed in Laramie while I moved a bit west to Centennial, I dreamt I was back in the building doing something on his side some time after he'd died when he walked in from the back door like usual. I was surprised that he had somehow managed to slip out of the town morgue. I asked him in surprise, "How'd you get out of there?" He smiled and then I don't remember anything further because I woke up.
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(illustrations: D. Lightbourne, J. Carducci at Upland Breakdown by Jane Schuman; Jean & Kermit Loe with David circa 1942; WTAQ AM's "Breakfast with a Music Teacher" circa 1951; Metropolitan Jug Band, Portland Oct. 31 1981, photo by Liz Fitting; D. Lightbourne & S. Weber circa 1977; Jeffrey Frederick; Clamtones & Earth Tavern protest flyer; D. Lightbourne, Portland circa 1977)<br />
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<br />
<a href="https://www.bitlanders.com/movie/the-shortwave-stall/25896" target="_blank">“The Shortwave Stall”</a>, Michael Hurley’s short film features David in his Wyoming non-dotage.
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David Lightbourne's Stop & Listen Boys performing live on the Meredith Ochs show <a href="http://www.wfmu.org/special.php/MO" target="_blank">WFMU</a> on June 6, 2001 -- their 2nd of 3 appearances; scroll down, click, and move to the one hour mark.
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<br />
There are additional remembrances of David by others who knew him at <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/07/issue-56-july-28-2010.html" target="_blank">The New Vulgate No. 56</a> and issues through <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/05/issue-44-may-3-2010.html" target="_blank">The New Vulgate No. 44</a>. There are also links to David's writing for the NV including his piece on seeing Elvis in 1957. Worth looking into if still homebound.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">DuPage River, Naperville, Ill.</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci</span></td></tr>
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From the London Desk: Steve Beeho:
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John Gray in <i>The New Statesman</i>,<a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history" target="_blank">Why This Crisis Is a Turning Point in History</a>.
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<blockquote>
It is only by recognising the frailties of liberal societies that their most essential values can be preserved. Along with fairness they include individual liberty, which as well as being worthwhile in itself is a necessary check on government. But those who believe personal autonomy is the innermost human need betray an ignorance of psychology, not least their own. For practically everyone, security and belonging are as important, often more so. Liberalism was, in effect, a systematic denial of this fact.</blockquote>
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^^^</b><br />
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Peter Hitchens in <i>First Things</i> on Wolfram Siemann's book, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/05/prince-of-diplomats" target="_blank">Metternich - Strategist and Visionary</a>.
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<blockquote>
Metternich had become too repressive for his own countrymen, and so had to seek refuge in the least repressive country in Europe. The man who had once negotiated with Bonaparte and quarreled with the Emperor of All Russia found himself tottering along the Brighton seafront in the briny wind, pondering his vast journey through the decades of revolution and war. If he had loved constitutional monarchy, and the hurly-burly of a free press, he had shown little sign of it when he had the power to influence such things in his own country.</blockquote>
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<b>^^^</b><br />
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Tanya Gold at <i>unherd.com</i> on Woody Allen's book, <a href="https://unherd.com/2020/04/woody-allens-brilliant-betrayal/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3" target="_blank">Apropos of Nothing</a>.
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His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing. Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.</blockquote>
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Mathew Lyons at <i>The Quietus</i> on Mike Barnes' book, <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/28043-a-new-day-yesterday-uk-prog-book-mike-barnes-henry-cow-keith-emerson-king-crimson-review" target="_blank">
A New Day Yesterday - U.K. Progressive Rock and the 1970s</a>.
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<blockquote>
<i>A New Day Yesterday</i> isn’t just about the music, it is about a moment in time, a brief <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9C2UTKCR0rtz51iQfJUNMthQb6GxRL5zM4P-gvGjp9oAaBiktZ8xE4yNLW3rM8rbwzmRWsxPfgPfQpRiXkIecPBrEbk4sHtbzRqveDq4B0FYhdLqbZ_HkSjJuaUFI1x7pmQcYCtt_JzSt/s1600/ANewDayYesterday+%25283%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="239" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9C2UTKCR0rtz51iQfJUNMthQb6GxRL5zM4P-gvGjp9oAaBiktZ8xE4yNLW3rM8rbwzmRWsxPfgPfQpRiXkIecPBrEbk4sHtbzRqveDq4B0FYhdLqbZ_HkSjJuaUFI1x7pmQcYCtt_JzSt/s320/ANewDayYesterday+%25283%2529.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
period when musicians were giddy with the possibilities of their music and accepted no limits on their ambitions – and when record labels were happy to invest in experimentation and fans in vast numbers willing to indulge it. On this reading, prog was swept away not just because it had run its course, but because what replaced it was more corporate-friendly: more marketable, more easily branded and more readily commoditised. Just another consumer good.</blockquote>
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Richard Hell on Ork Records at <a href="https://pleasekillme.com/ork-records/" target="_blank"><i>Please Kill Me</i></a>.
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<blockquote>
Ork did have an inspired idea for the few small ads he bought for the “Blank Generation” EP. We printed “Call Hell” along with a headshot of me from the cover of the record and my actual phone number. Some people have written that when you called the number, you got a recording of the song, but that’s incorrect. It was my home phone number and I answered the phone. I didn’t get very many calls, but Mike Watt (formerly of the Minutemen, latterly the Stooges revival tours, along with a stream of great projects) tells the story of calling the number but being afraid to talk when I answered. I actually remember that call. He’s a shy guy.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ4dE0hSI1B5AXqxX-cGrnNjtOzYvfFOAKNmS9YAQ2_wka95b6OOj2LapFhiFSYPhu289winr8F54M5FlCQCUNRiqGXEEg85Xo8hR-0nP_urseiCLtsG1kKRbDtWJWRoWOKgnHcG79vPvG/s1600/TheLifeandTimesofMalcolmMcLaren.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="242" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ4dE0hSI1B5AXqxX-cGrnNjtOzYvfFOAKNmS9YAQ2_wka95b6OOj2LapFhiFSYPhu289winr8F54M5FlCQCUNRiqGXEEg85Xo8hR-0nP_urseiCLtsG1kKRbDtWJWRoWOKgnHcG79vPvG/s320/TheLifeandTimesofMalcolmMcLaren.jpg" width="209" /></a>^
Paul Gorman treats <i>The Word</i> to <a href="http://www.paulgormanis.com/?p=22729" target="_blank">Around Malcolm McLaren in 10 objects</a>.
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<b>^^^</b><br />
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<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/apr/08/sheila-rock-punk-the-clash-siouxsie-sioux-pictures-gallery" target="_blank">Sheila Rock's punk photos</a> in <i>The Guardian</i>.
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<b>^^^</b><br />
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Sean O'Hagan in <i>The Guardian</i> on Paul Gorman's book, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/06/the-life-and-times-of-malcolm-mclaren-by-paul-gorman-review-punks-king-of-chaos" target="_blank">The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren</a>.
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<blockquote>
It is unsurprising that McLaren struggled to find his niche after punk. Though punctuated<br />
with moments of inspiration, his later career as, by turns, a film-maker, scriptwriter, curator, and pop-cultural zeitgeist surfer, was a protracted coda to the main event. In the end, Malcolm McLaren may have been his own worst enemy, the contradictions he embraced ultimately subverting his own credibility to a terminal degree.</blockquote>
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<b>From the DuPage Desk: Joe Carducci</b>:
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Nayan Chanda in TIMES OF INDIA, <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/george-orwell-lives-in-the-heroic-recounting-of-chinas-fight-against-devil-coronavirus-facts-are-obliterated/" target="_blank">George Orwell Lives in The Heroic Recounting of China's Fight vs. "Devil" Coronavirus</a>.
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<blockquote>
Chinese television is showing an endless loop of Chinese doctors and medical supplies being rushed to virus ravaged Italy and Iran, and receiving warm thanks from countries around the world. Welcome to the latest edition of Chinese propaganda blitz to claim the leadership role abandoned by “America First” president Donald Trump. A believer in the strategy ‘offence is the best defence’, China has employed its formidable propaganda machinery to rewrite history as it happens. Well established facts like the emergence of the coronavirus in Wuhan’s wet market or its claiming the first known casualty on November 17 last year – full 44 days before China informed WHO about an unidentified virus – have been erased. In the heroic recounting of China’s fight against the “devil” (that’s how Chinese leader Xi Jinping described the virus) it all began on January 23 when the leader took the draconian action of quarantining the entire Wuhan city of 11 million. No mention is made of the lost precious weeks when the government silenced whistleblowers, hid news of the outbreak allowing tens of thousands of Wuhan residents, many of them infected, to stream out to other parts of the country and to foreign destinations. The result of that lethal deception came days later in the explosion of the pandemic across the globe.</blockquote>
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Anna Gross & Madhumita Murgia in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ac14d5fe-5da0-4f18-a415-f6dcbd8ceb39" target="_blank">Chinese Push to Rewire the Internet Triggers Concern Over Human Rights</a>.
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<blockquote>
China claims this will enable cutting-edge technologies such as holograms and self-driving cars, but critics say it will also bake authoritarianism into the architecture underpinning the web.Huawei, together with state-run companies China Unicom and China Telecom, and the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), have jointly proposed a new standard for core network technology, called “New IP”, at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Western countries believe the system would splinter the global internet and give state-run internet service providers granular control over citizens’ internet use. It has gained the support of Russia, and potentially Saudi Arabia, according to western representatives at the ITU. “Below the surface, there is a huge battle going on over what the internet will look like,” said a UK delegate. “You’ve got these two competing visions: one which is very free and open and?.?.?.?government hands-off?.?.?.?and one which is much more controlled and regulated by governments.” Huawei and other co-developers are planning to push through the standardisation of New IP at a major ITU conference in India in November.</blockquote>
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Sue-Lin Wong in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/192f8d60-ac18-415d-b700-78ce5735a5b6" target="_blank">The UN's Partnership with China's Tencent Is at Odds With Its Push for Global Unity</a>.
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In recent weeks, the growing privacy woes surrounding the US videoconferencing platform Zoom have illustrated heightened concerns western countries have over the exposure of their data to China. In the same week that researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab reavealed that Zoom was transmitting keys for encrypting and decrypting global meetings to servers in Beijing, groups including NASA, SpaceX, the Taiwanese government and the New York City public school system all banned the use of the service. The UN says that partnering with western platforms such as Google Hangouts or Facebook is not a viable option for its 75th anniversary, since the Communist Party blocks these services in China and the UN wants to reach as many people as possible.</blockquote>
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Josh Rogin in WASHINGTON POST, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/" target="_blank">State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab Studying Bat Coronaviruses</a>.
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In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.</blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-coronavirus-disinformation-11586122093" target="_blank">World Health Disinformation</a>.
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<blockquote>
This record is tragic but not surprising. Much of the blame for WHO’s failures lies with Dr. Tedros, who is a politician, not a medical doctor. As a member of the left-wing Tigray People’s Liberation Front, he rose through Ethiopia’s autocratic government as health and foreign minister. After taking the director-general job in 2017, he tried to install Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador. China inevitably gains more international clout as its economy grows. But why does WHO seem so much more afraid of Beijing’s ire than Washington’s? Only 12% of WHO’s assessed member-state contributions come from China. The U.S. contributes 22%. Americans at WHO generally are loyal to the institution, while Chinese appointees put Chinese interests first or they will suffer Beijing’s wrath. China’s influence over WHO has been organized and consistent, whereas the U.S. response has been haphazard. Washington needs a quarterback to lead the fight against Chinese dominance at WHO and other international organizations. Yet the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs lacks a political appointee.</blockquote>
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Lanhee Chen in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/lost-in-beijing-the-story-of-the-who-11586365090" target="_blank">Lost in Beijing: The Story of the WHO</a>.
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<blockquote>
Under Mr. Tedros’s leadership, the WHO has accepted China’s falsehoods about the coronavirus and helped launder them into respectable-looking public-health assessments. On Jan. 14, before an official WHO delegation had even visited China, the group parroted Beijing’s claim that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Two weeks later, after China had reported more than 4,500 cases of the virus and over 70 people in other countries were sick with it, Mr. Tedros visited China and heaped praise on its leaders for their “transparency.” Recall that China waited six weeks after patients first saw symptoms in Wuhan to institute a lockdown there. During this time Chinese authorities censored and punished physicians who tried to sound the alarm, repeatedly denied that the virus could be transmitted between humans, and held a public banquet in Wuhan for tens of thousands of families. In the meantime, more than five million people left or fled Wuhan, according to the city’s mayor. This included the patient with the first confirmed case of the virus in America. The WHO finally declared a public-health emergency on Jan. 30, after nearly 10,000 cases of the virus had been confirmed. China’s reported figures rose in early February to more than 17,000 infections and 361 deaths, yet Mr. Tedros rebuked Mr. Trump for restricting travel from China and urged other countries not to follow suit. He called the virus’s spread outside China “minimal and slow.” It took until March 11 for the WHO to declare a pandemic. By that point the official world-wide case count was 118,000 people in 114 countries. China’s influence is also apparent in the WHO’s exclusion of Taiwan. The WHO didn’t even bother replying to Taiwanese inquiries in December about whether the coronavirus could, contrary to Beijing’s claims, be transmitted between humans.</blockquote>
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<i>zerohedge.com</i>: <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/who-issues-statement-taiwan-after-rude-official-shills-china" target="_blank">WHO Issues Statement on Taiwan After Rude Official Shills for China</a>.
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A journalist with Hong Kong broadcaster <i>RTHK</i> was rudely hung up on after asking WHO official Bruce Aylward -who led a mission to Wuhan - if the organization might give Taiwan a membership. First, Aylward said he couldn't hear the question - asking the reporter to move on. Then, he disconnected the line after she said she wanted to hear more about Taiwan. When they were reconnected, Aylward dodged another direct question about Taiwan - taking China's stance with his answer while complimenting Beijing and wishing Hong Kong good luck.</blockquote>
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Mary Anastasia O'Grady in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/audit-the-whos-pan-american-arm-11586717189" target="_blank">Audit the WHO's Pan American Arm</a>.
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Havana boasts about sending medical personnel abroad as if it runs a charity. But governments pay Havana for Cuban health-care workers, who then receive a miserly stipend from the regime, which leaves them in poverty. The dictatorship profits by keeping the lion’s share of the income. This is human trafficking and it violates international law and the laws by which the WHO is governed. As I reported in January, Cuban medics who escaped the program are suing PAHO in U.S. federal court. They allege that when Brazilian law and congressional opposition got in the way of launching the scheme, PAHO stepped in as a financial intermediary to launder the illegal payments of a secret Cuba-Brazil agreement. On April 3 the venue for that suit was moved to Washington. The deal was exposed when Brazilian journalists won the release of Brazilian documents connected with the Cuban medical missions.</blockquote>
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Hannah Beech & Muktita Suhartono in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/asia/Indonesia-south-china-sea-fishing.html" target="_blank">China Chases Indonesia's Fishing Fleets</a>.
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Backed by armed Chinese Coast Guard ships, Chinese fishing fleets have been raiding the rich waters of the South China Sea that are internationally recognized as exclusively Indonesia’s to fish. While Mr. Dedi catches the traditional way, with nets and lines, the steel Chinese trawlers scrape the bottom of the sea, destroying other marine life. So not only does the Chinese trawling breach maritime borders, it also leaves a lifeless seascape in its wake. “They come into our waters and kill everything,” said Mr. Dedi, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name. “I don’t understand why our government doesn’t protect us.” ...Chinese impunity was on full display in January when President Joko Widodo of Indonesia visited the Natunas. “There is no bargaining when it comes to our sovereignty,” Mr. Joko said. Earlier, Indonesian fighter jets buzzed the sky, while warships patrolled the seas. But the day after Mr. Joko left the Natunas, the Chinese showed up again. Its fishing fleet, backed by the Chinese Coast Guard, took days to leave the area, local officials and fishers said. The fisheries ministry denied that any such incident had taken place.</blockquote>
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Hannah Beech in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/world/asia/china-mekong-drought.html" target="_blank">China Limited the Mekong's Flow. Other Countries Suffered a Drought</a>.
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But during last year’s wet season, the fortunes of the river’s two parts diverged in dramatic fashion. As China’s section of the Mekong welcomed an above average volume of water, downstream countries were stricken by a drought so crushing that parts of the river dried up entirely, leaving cracked riverbed exposed in a season when fishing should have been plentiful. At one gauge in Chiang Saen, in northern Thailand, such low water levels had never been recorded before. Overall, during the 28-year period they studied this gauge, Mr. Basist and his colleague calculated that dams in China had held back more than 410 feet of river height. While addressing regional foreign ministers in February, Mr. Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, contended that China, too, was suffering. He suggested that the Chinese leadership was being magnanimous by sending water downstream, especially at a time when Beijing was contending with a severe coronavirus outbreak. “Though China itself has also been afflicted by the drought and a serious shortage of precipitation in the upper reaches, it has overcome various difficulties to increase the water discharge,” he said. Mr. Basist disputed this take. “You look at our mapping, and it’s bright blue with plenty of water in China and bright red from an extreme lack of water in Thailand and Cambodia,” he said. “China can regulate this river’s flow through dams, and that appears to be exactly what it’s doing.”</blockquote>
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David Pilling & Sue-Lin Wong in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/48f199b0-9054-4ab6-aaad-a326163c9285" target="_blank">China-Africa Ties Fray Over 'Racism' Towards Foreigners in Guangzhou</a>.
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African ambassadors in Beijing wrote a letter to China's foreign affairs ministry, seen by the Financial Times, condemning what they said was "the persistent harassment and humiliation of African nationals". Families with young children had been forced to sleep on the strets and passports had been confiscated, they said. "The singling out of Africans for compulsory testing and quarantine, in our view, has no scientific or logical basis and amounts to racism towards Africans in China," the letter said, flagging the possibility of a backlash against the Chinese diaspora on the African continent.</blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-africa-groans-under-debt-it-casts-wary-eye-at-china-11587115804" target="_blank">As Africa Groans Under Debt, It's Wary of Beijing</a>.
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With Africa's most poverty-stricken economies pushing for debt relief as hey struggle with the fallout from the global coronovirus pandemic, a tussle is brewing between developed nations, private investors and the continent's largest creditor: China. Wealthy countries from the U.S. to Japan -- watching their own economies lurch toward recession -- are loath to forgive African debt if they think the money will indirectly support Chinese creditors, including the government, banks and contractors. At the same time, Beijing is worried about setting a precedent for widespread forgiveness.</blockquote>
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Brian Spegele & Anna Isaac in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/hidden-chinese-lending-puts-emerging-market-economies-at-risk-11585560600" target="_blank">China's Secrecy Hides Risk to Nations in Its Debt</a>.
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China's rise as a trading and manufacturing power has been extensively sutdies over the past four decades, but its impact as a financial power is less understood. Exactly how much China has lent is kept under wraps by state-run banks such as China Development Bank and the countries receiving the loans. China's opaque lending can lead investors and organizations to underestimate the risk they are taking when they make loans to these countries or buy their bonds, leading them to lend at rates that might be too low given the potential losses. These include global investors and multilateral lenders such as the World Bank.</blockquote>
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Mark Magnier at SCMP, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3079918/coronavirus-runs-roughshod-over-debt-laden-belt-and-road" target="_blank">Coronavirus Runs Roughshod Over Debt-Laden Belt and Road Projects</a>.
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“The Bar-Boljare motorway is not just a roadway, it is a path to the Western value system,” Prime Minister Dusko Markovi said last month in the capital of Podgorica, defending his pet project. A government statement added: “Markovi underlined that there was no talk of bankruptcy or ‘debt bondage’, as it has often been speculated.” BRI countries such as Montenegro, already deeply indebted to Beijing, face mounting difficulties related to the pandemic as commodity prices plunge, trade falters and exchange rates shift. “A debt crisis with Chinese characteristics?” warned Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy in a report last year citing growing default risks. Adding to the challenge of managing mounting global indebtedness is Beijing’s characteristic lack of transparency. “The Chinese government considers the details of its overseas lending programme a state secret. No one really knows the numbers,” said Brad Parks, executive director of AidData, part of the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and co-author of a study on Chinese lending practices released last month by the Centre for Global Development (CGD).</blockquote>
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Steven Myers in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/world/asia/coronavirus-china-xi-jinping.html" target="_blank">China's Aggressive Diplomacy Weakens Xi Jinping's Global Standing</a>.
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The lasting effect on Mr. Xi’s global ambitions could be profound. China’s relationship with the United States has already cratered, despite a rhetorical truce reached between Mr. Xi and President Trump. Now there is evidence the pandemic is forcing other countries to rethink relations. Japan has pledged $2 billion to help companies move their production out of China because of concerns about the country’s reliability. President Emmanuel Macron of France questioned whether China’s response was a model for democracies to follow, disputing the narrative Mr. Xi’s acolytes have tried to spin. “Let’s not be so naïve as to say it’s been much better at handling this,” he said in an interview with The Financial Times. China’s state media portray Mr. Xi as a steady, forceful and yet benevolent leader who has guided the country through a “people’s war” against the pandemic. The increasingly combative, nationalist tone of his diplomats, though, has stirred hostility. China’s embassy in France posted a statement on its website accusing Western governments of failing to protect their most vulnerable, letting the residents of nursing homes die abandoned. "How they operate domestically spills over into how they operate internationally," said Susan L. Shirk, the chairwoman of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego.</blockquote>
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Qiao Long on RADIO FREE ASIA: <a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wuhan-cremations-04062020143043.html" target="_blank">China Mourns Dead as Wuhan Families Deal with Mass Cremations</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT66Thyphenhyphen_IeTbBqbg_Z1WHxwwXmt0TlAaIRO7E8n2lOl5rZBqj-jV8ERqH-B1IvzM1sMoM1dxsKEBL1YUIyK_kVYD2KX1bBr03BKKBvWb-pbOY_iOFgZ_SVZfYNTzddgf-71cXdXzm_IXS/s1600/NV-157-RFA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="325" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT66Thyphenhyphen_IeTbBqbg_Z1WHxwwXmt0TlAaIRO7E8n2lOl5rZBqj-jV8ERqH-B1IvzM1sMoM1dxsKEBL1YUIyK_kVYD2KX1bBr03BKKBvWb-pbOY_iOFgZ_SVZfYNTzddgf-71cXdXzm_IXS/s320/NV-157-RFA.jpg" width="320" /></a>A source close to the funeral industry surnamed Ma said some incinerators have stopped working after being run night and day, and that funeral homes are now cremating several bodies together to meet demand. "In the past, only one body would be cremated at a time, but now they are working 24/7," Ma said, adding that six out of the city's 30 furnaces were now no longer working. "This is certainly because they have been burning too many bodies at the same time," he said. "This blocked up the machine and it burned out." Ma said reports have emerged of people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving, citing videos circulating online. These included a video that went viral on social media in February in which a woman speaking in a Wuhan dialect of Chinese described seeing a male patient next to her in a city hospital forced into a body bag while his feet and hands were still moving. "One old lady was saying that they put one guy into ... a body bag when he wasn't even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him," he said, citing the particular video.
Ma also cited information from other video clips, including "screaming sounds" emerging from crematorium furnaces, "which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive." RFA was unable to confirm these reports independently.</blockquote>
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Catherine Yang in THE EPOCH TIMES, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/who-created-the-ccp-virus-documentary-exposes-pandemic-origins_3305798.html" target="_blank">Documentary Explores the Origins of the CCP Virus</a>.
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Philipp’s investigation of the CCP virus in this documentary goes back to the outbreak of SARS nearly two decades ago. The CCP tried to cover up the SARS outbreak as well, and The Epoch Times was one of the few media outlets to expose this. There is precedent of the regime being untrustworthy in the event of an epidemic. Philipp has been researching the CCP since 2008, and gave an example of its military approach to shed light on how the CCP can profit off this pandemic that most consider a tragedy. “One important thing to understand is they talk about war without morals. They talk about ‘unrestricted warfare’: war that does not take into account any concept of human rights, human dignity, human life. It is victory by any means. There is nothing they will not do, and we see the same thing in many parts of their system, including the medical system where altering the human genome is not a big deal to them,” Philipp said. The documentary’s experts remind us: This is a nation that currently holds at least 1 million of its own people in concentration camps. “They don’t care about human life when it comes to this regime—we’ve seen that in their human rights abuses,” Philipp said.</blockquote>
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Mark Leonard in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2019/10/britain-s-lonely-future-age-clashing-empires" target="_blank">Britain's Lonely Future in the Age of Clashing Empires</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsQX6A1olqHl14IA7fWW7xKLWADpqSmAirg_2UxjMr8QUcGMa-1FUuO-UVt5DgDadUz0IUNBisOr2UlUUQ8LmjFUaXNumxrdVez3E2LaA7_nRpAz4hqmpIUDHVhdZXHmOHqrBpbQQicXnE/s1600/NV-NewStatesman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="285" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsQX6A1olqHl14IA7fWW7xKLWADpqSmAirg_2UxjMr8QUcGMa-1FUuO-UVt5DgDadUz0IUNBisOr2UlUUQ8LmjFUaXNumxrdVez3E2LaA7_nRpAz4hqmpIUDHVhdZXHmOHqrBpbQQicXnE/s320/NV-NewStatesman.jpg" width="243" /></a>Many in the West dismiss Trump as a self-defeating buffoon, but in Beijing he is considered a master strategist and tactician. “The trade wars are just the tip of the iceberg,” I was told by He Yafei, a former Chinese deputy foreign minister, who came to international prominence when he wagged his finger at Obama at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. He is much less dismissive of Trump, whom he claims is challenging China economically, militarily and ideologically. The Chinese do not consider the policy of America First to be a retreat from the world but rather a recalibration of the US’s engagement. After the Iraq and Libya debacles, the US is trying to lessen its footprint on the ground and disentangle itself from the high cost of occupations that have sapped the relative advantages of American power and diminished public support for its foreign policy. Just as important is the rethink on globalisation. Trump’s goal, the Chinese believe, is to make use of American economic power and its unbalanced position in the international trade system to renegotiate the nature of its relationships with other players. It is, they claim, “a retreat to advance”.</blockquote>
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Andrew Higgins in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/world/europe/russia-china-border.html" target="_blank">Quiet Border Embraces Selective Memories of a 1900 Massacre</a>.
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A museum of local history and culture in Blagoveshchensk, the capital of Russia’s Amur Region, makes no mention of the thousands of Chinese killed on the river, referring only gingerly to the “military events on the Amur, June-July 1900.” A big part of the museum’s display space is instead being turned over to exhibits recalling the suffering of Russians in the Great Patriotic War, otherwise known as World War II. It is part of a nationwide preparation for celebrations on May 9, marking the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism in 1945. A Chinese museum on the other side of the river displays a huge painting that shows Russians driving Chinese into the river. But China takes pains not to rub Russians’ face in the episode: The museum is closed to foreigners. Victor Zatsepine, a historian of modern Chinese history at the University of Connecticut who has studied the incident, said “the massacre definitely happened.” But, he said, “there is a big difference in how things appear inside China and how they are presented to foreigners.”</blockquote>
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William Broad in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html" target="_blank">Putin's Long War Against American Science</a>.
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Within Russia, Mr. Putin has been a staunch proponent of vaccines. “I make sure I get my vaccinations in time, before the flu season starts,” he told listeners to a 2016 call-in show. At a televised meeting with doctors in St. Petersburg, in 2018, he scolded Russian parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids: “They endanger the lives of their own children.” Calling the issue “very important,” he warned of possible administrative steps to speed the pace of childhood immunizations. Last fall, Russia’s health authorities laid out expanded rules that require strict new adherence to protocols for childhood vaccination. At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti-vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media. Moreover, the disinformation has sought to implicate the C.D.C. in a cover-up. For years, tweets originating in St. Petersburg have claimed that the health agency muzzled a whistle-blower to hide evidence that vaccines cause autism, especially in male African-American infants. Medical experts have dismissed the allegation, but it reverberated.</blockquote>
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Mark Glennon in CT, <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-coronavirus-pensions-bailouts-20200330-72mzxrkerrfgfmsbuars6vkbga-story.html" target="_blank">Pension Bailouts Are Not the Answer for Chicago and Illinois</a>.
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That idea is for state and local government to issue bonds to borrow money for pensions. They are called pension obligation bonds, or POBs, which we have criticized repeatedly at Wirepoints. And the proposal is to make those bonds tax-exempt, meaning federal taxpayers would subsidize them. First, POBs are inherently foolish. They represent nothing more than borrowing to cover debt — one credit card to another — replacing unfunded pension debt with unfunded bond debt. They are a can-kicking at its purest. Worse, they gamble that interest paid on the bond will be less than earnings made on the stocks a pension would buy with the borrowed money. Farmer says “a boost in assets now would likely produce a welcome return on investment over the next few years and ultimately help stabilize government pension bills.” That’s pure speculation, and nothing more than market timing, an investment strategy widely shunned as a suckers’ game by pension managers and all but a few experts who specialize in it. Basic market economics say that the likely return on stocks and bonds, if properly risk adjusted, should be equal. Who would buy those bonds from Illinois, Chicago and others that were in death spirals even before the current downturn? Therein lies the second wrong in Farmer’s proposal. She says the deal could be sweetened by making interest on the bonds exempt from federal income taxes. That would be a backdoor way to force all Americans to pay for a bailout, including those in responsible states that have managed their pensions sanely.</blockquote>
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CST: <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/4/19/21226709/don-harmon-illinois-senate-democrats-pension-bailout-10-billion-cares-act-stimululs" target="_blank">State Senate President's Foolish Pitch to Washington Can Only Hurt Illinois</a>.
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Illinois' $138 billion unfunded pension liability has been years -- make that decades -- in the making. Springfield lawmakers since before the Beatles have been expanding employee retirement benefits without putting aside enough money to pay for them. At best Harmon's pension ask is politically clueless. At worst, it will serve to explode efforts at bipartisanship in Washington as our nation struggles to recover from the pandemic.</blockquote>
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CT: <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-illinois-seeks-federal-bailout-pensions-coronavirus-20200419-ymvxr3m2lzd3zcoyytbahkyqki-story.html" target="_blank">Illinois' Shameless, Dishonest Ask for a Federal Bailout</a>.
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At the same time Illinois lawmakers were ignoring the growing crisis, they were adding benefits and beneficiaries, including union officials and teacher union lobbyists who substitute-taught for one day in order to "qualify" for the Teachers Retirement System. Those abuses, shockingly, were ruled constitutional by the Illinois Supreme Court. That's how un-seriously this state's leaders have dealt with state resources.</blockquote>
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Cezary Podkul in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/calpers-unwound-hedges-just-before-marchs-epic-stock-selloff-11587211200?mod=newsviewer_click" target="_blank">Calpers Exited Hedges Before Market Turmoil</a>.
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After suffering bit losses during the financial crisis, the $371 billion pension fund hedged against another dramatic downturn by investing in three funds designed to produce big payoffs when markets fall steeply. But the pension, also known Calpers, decided to sell out of these hedges last year, giving up what could have been a payday of more than $1 billion. Some members of Calpers board were caught by surprise. At a March 18 teleconference, board member Margaret Brown asked the pension fund's chief investment officer, Ben Meng, how these funds were doing. "They should perform well in this kind of a down market, as they were exactly designed to do," Mr. Meng answered, according to a call transcript. "And from what we know... most of these strategies are performing as anticipated." Mr. Meng didn't say that Calpers had mostly exited the three funds.</blockquote>
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M.N. Gordon at <i>economicprism.com</i>, <a href="https://economicprism.com/boeings-bean-counter-culture-and-mass-financialization/" target="_blank">Boeing's Bean-Counter Culture and the Bailout of Mass Financialization</a>.
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William Boeing, the man responsible for the rise of Boeing during the first half of the 20th century, died in 1956. We don’t know much about the man. We’ve never read his biography. But we suspect the culture that William Boeing instilled in his company faded from its corporate principles by the turn of the new millennium. You see, William Boeing’s cohorts likely continued the company in the William Boeing way after his death. These associates likely passed on the culture of exacting engineering to the next generation of Boeing management. However, once management was three generations removed, they had little connection to what had made the company great. No current Boeing employee – management, engineer, or mailroom clerk – has ever met William Boeing. What’s more, it’s highly unlikely that any current Boeing employee has ever met someone who has met William Boeing. By all practical matters, the culture of William Boeing no longer exists at the Boeing Company. David Calhoun, the current CEO, the guy that doesn’t have a need for an equity stake, isn’t even an aviation engineer. He’s an accountant. He has no clue how airplanes fly or how jet engines work. But he does possess a special skill that’s inherent with his technical discipline… One of the chief skills of accountants who are granted the controls of corporate management is the unmatched aptitude for eroding industrial capital in favor of shareholders. When all business decisions are guided by bean counters a company’s reason to exist ceases.</blockquote>
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Karen Ward in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/814e0185-ae0b-408a-8fa3-1e8a62fc3cce" target="_blank">Crisis Will Awaken Inflationary Forces Within a Year</a>.
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When stay-at-home restrictions are removed, demand will roar back. Families will flock to restaurants, shops, shows and mini-breaks. Households will, in many cases have built up savings to fund such a binge. In Europe, this is thanks in large part to the generosity of governments' employment subsidies, which should mean that the rise in unemployment is modest. In the US the fiscal stimulus is less about making sure people keep their job and more about boosting the social safety net. Average weekly unemployment benefits have been increased from roughly $385 per week on average to $985. Our judgment is that a lot of people who receive this benefit will actually be better off while out of work. The recovery in demand will be much swifter than the recovery in supply.</blockquote>
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Brandon Specktor at <i>livescience.com</i>, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/oldest-human-ancestor-dna-homo-antecessor.html" target="_blank">World's Oldest Human DNA Found in 800,000-year-old Tooth of a Cannibal</a>.
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"I am happy that the protein study provides evidence that the Homo antecessor species may be closely related to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans," study co-author José María Bermúdez de Castro, scientific co-director of the excavations in Atapuerca, said in a statement. "The features shared by Homo antecessor with these hominins clearly appeared much earlier than previously thought." To reach these results, the researchers used a method called paleoproteomics — literally, the study of ancient proteins. Using mass spectrometry, which displays the masses of all the molecules in a sample, scientists can identify the specific proteins in a given fossil. Our cells build proteins according to instructions contained in our DNA, with three nucleotides, or letters, in a string of DNA coding for a specific amino acid. Strings of amino acids form a protein. So, the amino acid chains that form each person's unique protein sequence reveal the patterns of nucleotides that form that person's genetic code, lead study author Frido Welker, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, told Haaretz.com. Studying ancient proteins therefore opens a window into our genetic past in a way that DNA analysis cannot. DNA degrades relatively quickly, becoming unreadable within several hundred thousand years. To date, the oldest human DNA ever sequenced was about 430,000 years old (also discovered in Spain), according to a 2016 Nature study. Proteins, meanwhile, can survive in fossils for millions of years. Scientists have previously used similar protein sequencing methods to study the genetic code of a 1.77-million-year-old rhino found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and a 1.9-million-year-old extinct ape in China.</blockquote>
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Jonathan Derbyshire in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/fbe59e72-f4b9-11e9-b018-3ef8794b17c6" target="_blank">Writers and Their Ringmasters</a>.
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It was with two of his colleagues from that journal [<i>The Listener</i>], Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp, that Miller would eventually launch the <i>London Review of Books</i> in 1979. The paper was the accidental child of an industrial dispute which meant that the <i>TLS</i> disappeared from newsstands for nearly a year. Writing in a handsome anniversary volume, which gathers "artifacts and ephemera" culled from the paper's archive, Wilmers, who put her own money into the venture and would take over as editor in 1992, recalls that the critic Frank Kermode wrote a beseeching newspaper article "on behalf of all the new books that [were not getting] reviewed, in the absence of the <i>TLS</i>. The <i>LRB</i> eventually emerged to fill the gap, first as an insert carried in UK copies of the <i>New York Review of Books</i> and then, from May 1980, sailing under its own steam.</blockquote>
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Janan Ganesh in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/4a8b7f78-7fc1-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84" target="_blank">The End of the 'Two Cultures'</a>.
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It is not just medicine and epidemiology that have become central to our thoughts in recent weeks, but quantitative science, too. Last month, the health academic Hugh Montgomery told a broadcaster that a flu victim, with an infection rate of 1.3, would cause 14 cases of flu after 10 "layers" of interaction. Someone with an infection rate of 3 would infect 59,000. Neither the interviewer nor I , nor probably you, had clocked how a seemingly small difference in contagiousness could ramify. And it is no longer cute or raffish to be so innumerate. The problem is playing out on our screens. Lots of Americans dread their president's press conferences, which, with his CEO-flattery, his unscientific itch to reopen businesses, could be situationist pranks on capitalism. But a subtler problem afflicts the equivalent briefings in Britain and elsewhere. Reporters trained in the humanities must hold governments to account on the specificities of science and mathematics. The ministers themselves are no less generalist. The misalignment of skills and duties makes for queasy viewing.</blockquote>
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George Gilder in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-politicians-in-a-pandemic-11586710824" target="_blank">We Need Politicians in a Pandemic</a>.
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Political leaders, elected to exercise judgment on our behalf must defer to doctors, because the viral threat is addressable only through medical expertise. Yet since many liken fighting the coronavirus to war, we should remember that in war admirals and generals defer to civilian authority -- to the president, as commander in chief, on matters of strategy and to Congress on matters of budget. This is not a design flaw but how a free people governs itself, even in a perilous crisis. It is how we bring the largest possible perspective to decision-making.</blockquote>
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Steve Krakow in READER, <a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/legendary-chicago-experimentalists-ono-confront-centuries-of-race-based-violence-on-the-transformative-red-summer/Content?oid=79145257" target="_blank">Legendary Chicago Experimentalists ONO Confront Centuries of Race-Based Violence on the Transformative <i>Red Summer</i>.</a>.
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<blockquote>
I could write a novel about Ono. This Chicago avant-garde group are one of the great bands, and their story is endlessly fascinating. Few groups that had their heyday in the 80s have come back in the late aughts sounding completely rejuvenated and vital. Most important, they’ve continued to progress, honing their wild experimentation into incendiary, out-of-this-world performances and recordings. Like all great sonic art, their work isn’t just entertainment meant for toe-tapping. In fact, 74-year-old lead singer/whirlwind Travis will tell you he’s not much of a fan of mere “music” at all. Starting with the very first, 1983’s <i>Machines That Kill People</i>, Ono’s records have always been journeys with the power to transform the listener in real time. Such is the case with their latest album, the hyperdetailed <i>Red Summer</i> (American Dreams), which includes several pieces they’ve been performing live in recent years.</blockquote>
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Richard Roeper in CST, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/bulls/2020/4/18/21222522/recalling-many-jock-and-bull-stories" target="_blank">Recalling Many Jock and Bull Stories</a>.
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My own amateur scouting report for the Sun-Times: “He’d be the best guy on your softball team. And the worst guy on the White Sox.” Of course, Jordan never made it to the big club. But on April 7, 1994, the 31-year-old wannabe rookie did play right field for the White Sox in an exhibition against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, with a crowd of nearly 38,000 buzzing like it was a playoff game. He was the one player to garner thunderous applause from fans of BOTH teams. In the sixth inning, Jordan drove in a run with a high hopper just out of the third baseman’s reach. Later, he tied the score with an RBI double and stood at second base beaming like a little kid as he tipped his helmet to the crowd. For all of Jordan’s electric moments in the old Stadium and the United Center, the largest Chicago crowd to see him play ball was actually at Wrigley Field.</blockquote>
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue...</b>
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<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/2020/4/12/21218312/glenn-beckert-key-member-of-1969-chicago-cubs-dies-at-79-san-diego-padres-florida" target="_blank">Glenn Beckert</a> (1940-2020)
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfWMxmQEGKQ7Y9Ze-9hu_DeB8AK6ynW_NKOKJau6X_NjUpzWcE14GFSZ5FpRGQy-s4wTJVoECiIbwCcgtysL0if361noBJ9soERVS2X4MQ_5kFvIkNlvh_uWyBeiQlr-PGS2PgY3qlm_L9/s1600/NV-157-Beckert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="271" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfWMxmQEGKQ7Y9Ze-9hu_DeB8AK6ynW_NKOKJau6X_NjUpzWcE14GFSZ5FpRGQy-s4wTJVoECiIbwCcgtysL0if361noBJ9soERVS2X4MQ_5kFvIkNlvh_uWyBeiQlr-PGS2PgY3qlm_L9/s320/NV-157-Beckert.jpg" width="231" /></a>He graduated from Allegheny College in 1962 and became the Cubs’ every-day second baseman in 1965, a role that needed filling after 22-year-old Ken Hubbs, the 1962 National League Rookie of the Year, died in a plane crash before the 1964 season. Joey Amalfitano was the Cubs’ primary second baseman in 1964 and remained with the team in a reserve role after Beckert arrived on the scene. Beckert, who also played for the Padres in 1974 and 1975, was a career .283 hitter. In 1968, he led the majors with 98 runs and won a Gold Glove. He was selected as an All-Star four consecutive seasons beginning in 1969. He led the NL five times in best strikeout-to-at-bat ratio and finished third in the league with a career-best .342 batting average in 1971. He was extraordinarily tough to strike out, being retired that way only 235 times in 5,020 at-bats with the Cubs. Usually batting second in the order ahead of Williams, he had multiple long hitting streaks, broke up a handful of no-hit bids and was known for his clutch hits to right field.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/ira-einhorn-dead.html" target="_blank">Ira Einhorn</a> (1940-2020)
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A big burly man with a full beard and electric blue eyes, he was an early avatar of the counterculture steeped in consciousness-raising, ecological awareness and illicit psychedelic drugs. He dropped acid as early as 1958 and later started a rescue service for people in the throes of bad trips. He also taught a series of free courses, including “Analogues to the LSD Experience.” The <i>Village Voice</i> called him “indisputably Philadelphia’s head hippie” and the city’s “number one freak.” He attracted a wide range of friends, from the Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to corporate executives and civic do-gooders. “Ira waxed eloquent about what was happening in the world,” Sam Katz, a former mayoral candidate and Philadelphia entrepreneur, said in a phone interview. “It was the age of Aquarius and the Vietnam War and the generation gap, and he was articulate and dynamic and very approachable,” Mr. Katz said. Mr. Einhorn became a bridge between the anti-establishment and the establishment, he said, often speaking at civic events. But his darker side and a monumental ego were emerging, most noticeably during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, when 20 million people across the country gathered to draw attention to environmental problems. As two environmental activists later wrote in an op-ed in The Inquirer, Mr. Einhorn had made himself unwelcome at organizational meetings in advance of Earth Day, and then, at the actual event, he “grabbed the microphone and refused to give up the podium for 30 minutes, thinking he would get some free television publicity.”</blockquote>
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Thanks to Joseph Pope, Michael Carducci, Mark Carducci, Steve Beeho, <i>aldaily.com</i>, random friends on facebook...
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<br />JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-88695225414375848482020-03-25T20:22:00.000-07:002020-04-23T20:02:34.473-07:00Issue #156 (March 26, 2020)<table><tbody>
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<b>STREAMING NOW FOR THE FUTURE!</b><br />
Generic Cinema High and Low Then and Now<br />
Joe Carducci
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You can't watch everything. Back when everyone was obsessing over <i>"Sex in the City"</i> and <i>"The Wire"</i> I was finishing up research for my book on stuntmen and acting by watching nothing but silent films, Soviet cinema and half-hour tv westerns from the 1950s. I found you can't even watch all pre-1920 American cinema even though little survives and running times are short. Still I watched what I could until I felt I understood how the motion picture came to be, from 1890s Edison productions through the one- and two-reelers produced in New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Golden, San Antonio, San Diego, Niles, Santa Barbara and finally Hollywood.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsBu4t0NA3-RYKwYahDFMvrGcD_xfu3l4hv17MAGc3kiubizwmWV5S8XZavUeUBUXVh990229aPTvZsDoqMY0cCok5qSjTJLYuFs7lfe4vjt9GhflZTyxh2Ls5l3lxiMiQkeRhXe3imdM/s1600/The-Broken-Coin-1915-Courtesy-ROBERT-S.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="524" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsBu4t0NA3-RYKwYahDFMvrGcD_xfu3l4hv17MAGc3kiubizwmWV5S8XZavUeUBUXVh990229aPTvZsDoqMY0cCok5qSjTJLYuFs7lfe4vjt9GhflZTyxh2Ls5l3lxiMiQkeRhXe3imdM/s400/The-Broken-Coin-1915-Courtesy-ROBERT-S.jpg" width="341" /></a>The earliest projected films were travelogue-like "actualities." These gave way to story-films after the turn of that century. American film genres high and low formed quickly; the starter pistol for the western genre was fired by the success of the Edison Co.'s <i>The Great Train Robbery</i> (1903) which was shot in New Jersey. The nickelodeon boom began in 1905 and allowed the motion picture to escape game rooms and vaudeville houses for pride of place in its own venue. Francis Ford was a pioneer of the action film as early as 1908 with the first independent producer, Centaur Film Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey. In his unpublished memoir Ford described what he called a "chase picture" of the one-reel [12-14 minutes] era: "The reason for the chase amounting to about one quarter of the reel and the chase took up the remainder." (<i>Up and Down the Ladder</i>)
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Centaur productions stressed "action, action, action" as one trade magazine put it, and the company developed the western out of the more sentimental and pastoral "Indian subject" of the day. By 1910 a full production slate for any studio delivered a minimum of one drama, one western, and one comedy each week. This first production boom allowed nickelodeons to change programs daily. The movies had no start-times or credits and there were no movie reviews, people simply watched the program until it came back 'round to the point at which they'd entered, generally just over an hour. The twenty thousand or more shorts of that era laid the foundations for film language, film genres and the movie industry we know.<br />
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The Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, and Kalem companies in New York were part of the Edison Trust establishment and they produced "uplift" fare: sentimental melodramas and short adaptations of famous novels and plays. Trust producers hoped to attract the middle class to what was initially an entertainment for the urban immigrant working class. No English was needed to understand chase pictures or slapstick comedies. D.W. Griffith at Biograph improved film grammar with his one- and then two-reeler women's pictures, melodramas, and occasional forays into the action genre. Before Griffith demonstrated what a film director was, pictures were made by technicians such as cameramen or lighting engineers and the performers were said to "pose" for these pictures. Also at Biograph Mack Sennett pioneered silent comedy. Sennett went west and ran Keystone for the New York Motion Picture Company. NYMPCo. was another important independent producer and they made their westerns under the brands "101"-Bison and Kay-Bee, where Francis Ford made his greatest films. In Chicago, the Trust producers dropped their "uplift" burden quickly. Essanay Film and The Selig Polyscope Co. made westerns and comedies; the independent producer American Film (a.k.a., The Flying "A" Film Co.) made westerns and comedies too. Lubin Manufacturing in Philadelphia was another early Trust producer of westerns and melodramas.
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The rise of the western genre soon made the ability to produce realistic westerns an existential concern and this drove producers westward. Ford wrote that the western quickly evolved beyond the "Jersey westerns" with their "bob-tailed horses with English saddles." And once the Chicago companies began sending crews out to Colorado and the west Ford joined Melies-Star Films in New York -- Georges Melies France's best-known filmmaker sent his brother Gaston to represent his interests and produce films in New Jersey in 1910. Star Films was a Trust member and they soon moved to San Antonio to improve their westerns and then onto Santa Paula, Calif. If you couldn't make westerns in New Jersey any longer then you couldn't make them in the French countryside either and French producers like Pathe and Eclair followed, sending their western units to Oklahoma and points west.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihwKakIg1v8pw8gfhRY2l85uRU3S-FtSFZJ6salOIqcpJ9DifCjN79XiVR9hccAGt-DJz5CMxmudaL2S7_WOGcty0_eLPIMPaKVe8mNp4NbLE3YkUv3EWxNJwj1XL_8tWuHRPFjiPLWqjz/s1600/FrancisFord-TheInvaders-DavidLeeGuss-NVsmall.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihwKakIg1v8pw8gfhRY2l85uRU3S-FtSFZJ6salOIqcpJ9DifCjN79XiVR9hccAGt-DJz5CMxmudaL2S7_WOGcty0_eLPIMPaKVe8mNp4NbLE3YkUv3EWxNJwj1XL_8tWuHRPFjiPLWqjz/s1600/FrancisFord-TheInvaders-DavidLeeGuss-NVsmall.png" /></a>By 1912 Francis Ford was directing and starring in occasional three-reel "specials" such as <i>The Invaders</i> which survives and at three-reels (40+ minutes) Ford was knocking on the door to the feature-length film. The weekly serial was another half-step toward feature productions and by 1913 Ford was producing and starring in those too; film scholar Robert Birchard credits him with inventing the cliffhanger ending. It is believed that John Ford joined his older brother in Hollywood in 1914 so its likely John's first work in Hollywood was on Francis' serial, <i>Lucille Love - Girl of Mystery</i> (1914). The breakthrough years-long success of Griffith's <i>The Birth of a Nation</i> (1915) set the feature film as the new production standard (John Ford claimed he was an extra in it). John was famously prickly when interviewed later in life but he was unusually effusive about his older brother's talents and influence on his own filmmaking when talking to Peter Bogdanovich in 1966. Jack credited Frank with coming up with most of the tricks considered novel in '60s films but explained: "[H]e just couldn't concentrate on one thing too long." This was Jack's explanation for how Frank could be such a powerhouse actor-director-writer-producer of the early period and then be lost in the feature era, forgotten and busted to bit parts until his death in 1953.
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Feature-length film production after 1915 winnowed the many movie producers to just the sturdiest of studios. The scale necessary to absorb the heightened costs and logistics of feature production was daunting and soon the additional burden of sound recording for "talkies" reduced the number of major studios to just MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Columbia. Each produced many kinds of shorts and features but primarily they produced slates of low-budget or B-films within defined genres for the routine profit such films could generate. Bs were often filmed on sets built for the rare large-budget pictures studios felt called upon to make; later they were shot on-location for economy and realism. A-films and epics gambled with talent, quality, weather, health emergencies, etc., any of which might lead to throwing good money after bad on a runaway production. For an A-film to be profitable it had to last months in first-run theaters and then run another year or two in neighborhood theaters. So at MGM, Wallace Beery Bs and Laurel & Hardy shorts plus Andy Hardy or Maisie B-series built up profits that the studio gambled on <i>Mutiny on the Bounty</i> (1935) or <i>Marie Antoinette</i> (1938).<br />
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After WWII the aesthetic polarity of Hollywood began to reverse. Working women and men back from the war put a premium on realism and new independent producers fed this appetite better than the studios. That new realism is today usually termed <i>noir</i>. David Selznick in 1953 reportedly worried that MGM was making films "for which there was 'no longer a market.'" (<i>The Genius of the System</i>) It was a rare movie reviewer in the 1930s and '40s who displayed positive interest in the action genres -- Harry Potamkin and Manny Farber come to mind. Their advanced taste was soon reinforced by postwar critics' interest in European films such as the neo-realist films from Italy and French 1950s <i>film noir</i> and 1960s New Wave. These European films had tighter budgets and simpler logistical visual and sound designs and so their low-key realism helped recast the value of "lesser" American productions and turned Hollywood's aesthetic heirarchy upside-down. MGM's family-friendly musicals, costume dramas, and adult melodramas lost standing to RKO's crime dramas and independent producers' westerns.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuH1vn6yXmSw3zJtJfiqpxMwQTf84xVib57xq6t1TmMc02L7Ny8v_e6w4byspJyo4N29RkHJhyYPqZ2MdXyhI6mhyphenhyphenRNSbARjpWIR64rAXkX6dgxyE0g-PzfirOz_PRZOMNNmuJCRF1KHWG/s1600/DraggedAcrossConcrete-NV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="350" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuH1vn6yXmSw3zJtJfiqpxMwQTf84xVib57xq6t1TmMc02L7Ny8v_e6w4byspJyo4N29RkHJhyYPqZ2MdXyhI6mhyphenhyphenRNSbARjpWIR64rAXkX6dgxyE0g-PzfirOz_PRZOMNNmuJCRF1KHWG/s320/DraggedAcrossConcrete-NV.jpg" width="268" /></a>We have since seen highbrow neo-genre filmmaking in the 1970s (films like <i>The Godfather</i>, <i>The Hired Hand</i>, <i>The Long Goodbye</i>, <i>The Last American Hero</i>, <i>Chinatown</i>, <i>The Exorcist</i>, <i>Hard Times</i>, <i>Jaws</i>...) blend with the action genre continnum best illustrated by Clint Eastwood's filmography. But contemporary iterations of the action genre today seem threatened by the rise of the cheapest, lowest-brow generic film. It grew from the weekly serials of the 1930s (<i>Flash Gordon</i>, <i>Buck Rogers</i>, <i>Secret Agent X-9</i>...) though now they play more like series B-films only with top-heavy MGMish production values (all that CGI "realism"). Superheroes, robots, dinosaurs... the junk movies of 1930s and '40s childhoods now absurdly rule a Hollywood focused on a global audience that is less sophisticated than the American audience, immigrants included.
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The modest generic action film at its best displays a low-key knowing realism about American life and in Greek terms is descended from comedy as well as tragedy. It does not pretend to world-saving all-importance as does the comics- or toy-derived A-film and so travels less well overseas. Action films now look a budget-step up from the past international co-production style of B-films by a Golden Harvest or Golan-Globus even as few now approach their high/low peaks: <i>Death Hunt</i> (1981) and <i>Runaway Train</i> (1985). Distribution to suburban drive-ins and ghetto grind-houses gave way to straight-to-video or -cable channel for the B-film. The horror genre has worked best in the pitiless economics of theatrical distribution where a $5million film might cost $30million to release and market. I've not caught up on contemporary B-films since finishing my book but recent generic contenders of varying budgets might be <i>Drive</i> (2011), <i>The Grey</i> (2011), <i>A Walk Among the Tombstones</i> (2014), <i>Bone Tomahawk</i> (2015), <i>Sicario</i> (2015), <i>Hell or High Water</i> (2016), <i>Blood Father</i> (2016), <i>Get Out</i> (2017), <i>Wind River</i> (2017), <i>Hostiles</i> (2017), <i>Dragged Across Concrete</i> (2018), <i>The Mule</i> (2018), <i>The Invisible Man</i> (2020)...<br />
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When serials began in 1912 they were an acclaimed motion picture breakthrough but the format itself quickly deteriorated to a marker of the poorest type of production. But the serial aspect of today's comic book A-film evidently enjoys aesthetic validation from that boom in highbrow television. The tv-beat writers lord it over film critics who find they must write seriously about men in tights. But the sequeling model for these no-longer-just-summer movies was built from "first episodes" that were actually quite spare B-film productions: <i>Rocky</i> (1976), <i>Star Wars</i> (1977), <i>Alien</i> (1979), <i>First Blood</i> (1982), and <i>The Terminator</i> (1984). Budgets for the sequels were tripled or more and those opened much bigger to greater anticipation. Now budgets for series films start high; they are based on comic book properties instead of novels or plays or built out from existing hit series. The old idea was that the sequels would in turn yield diminishing returns and so by numbers 3 or 4 the budgets would shrink to take profit on the opening weekend for a hollowed-out franchise. The new idea seeks to maintain the value of the underlying intellectual property by continuing to spend the time and money necessary to deliver A-film series excitement. Rooting through the studio-conglomerate IP vaults and rebooting worn-out franchises is now a corporate mandate. And its potentially too expensive to kill off any character whether superhero or archvillain. This is a problem imported to cinema from episodic television -- once established, no member of the regular cast can die without the corporation foregoing possible revenue from some spin-off. On any <i>"Mannix"</i> episode at least the fate of the villain was at stake.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOa2RF67eYraaQjmImOWVT9lyXpFXPXBczRLgFB_tJYMKi4_EyYC8-qRFLwybvss5CkHpdwzmoogZS_tGzSbTRgdyRHHthEnCM48ac3mSDQPZoyz-ZFBMEyM7UVF72GHOV0sGp-7phU4dp/s1600/NV-boxoffice-Nov6-1948small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOa2RF67eYraaQjmImOWVT9lyXpFXPXBczRLgFB_tJYMKi4_EyYC8-qRFLwybvss5CkHpdwzmoogZS_tGzSbTRgdyRHHthEnCM48ac3mSDQPZoyz-ZFBMEyM7UVF72GHOV0sGp-7phU4dp/s320/NV-boxoffice-Nov6-1948small.jpg" width="238" /></a>The Paramount decision of 1948 forced studios to sell their theaters and outlawed exclusive block-booking distribution deals just as television was arriving to challenge the monopoly that concerned the Supreme Court. By 1954 half the homes in America had television sets and this quickly ended saturday matinee B-western series as well as radio drama and moved Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, <i>"Gunsmoke"</i>, <i>et al.</i> to television. And it began the shrinking of the theatrical audience in earnest. The Motion Picture Association just recently reported that in 2018 global digital revenue surpassed theatrical box-office and also that last year more Americans watched streaming content on their devices than watched television. (<i>WSJ</i>) Early streaming options began at Youtube and Netflix with old B-westerns and crime dramas. These also provided initial low-cost programming for early broadcast television seventy years ago, and forty years ago they got the call to provide depth to the stock of wide-buying mom-and-pop independent videoshops in the years before the consolidation into large chains led to the narrow buying of mass-market titles.
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Now the streaming juggernaut can be seen as reconstituting the old in-house distribution of the major studios' theater chains or block-booking arrangements. Late last year the Justice Department rescinded the Paramount decision as an ironic rimshot to these developments. Of the remaining studios only Disney, which began self-distribution with Buena Vista in 1953, might want to own theaters since their Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel productions have been most efficient at drawing large theatrical box-office returns. Disney produced six features that reached $1billion in revenue last year. (<i>WSJ</i>) Other studios' A-films are all the riskier for their lack of dependable B-film revenue which only streaming might deliver. But even the successful November launch of streamer Disney+ (28.6million subscribers, <i>"The Mandalorian"</i> series premiere) is expected to stall according to <i>The Hollywood Reporter</i> which last week detailed a dearth of prospective B-product and the move of some programming to Hulu to allow for "edgier" themes.
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As streaming increasingly <i>is</i> distribution the B-film may regain its standing in Hollywood. When Netflix, and now Apple, Amazon, AT&T-Warner, NBCUniversal-Comcast and the rest become producing studios in order to fill their streaming distribution pipes we see the real world extinguishing of the Paramount decision whether Disney buys a theater chain or not. Significantly Netflix, though tempted, finally passed on wide national theatrical distribution for its prestige A-production of the auteurist B-styled gangster film, <i>The Irishman</i>. Two large theater chains offered to shrink their standard theatrical window from 90 days to 60 days but Netflix balked and released the film to a small number of independent theaters with just a 26-day window before making the film available to its streaming subscribers. That was a close call for generic cinema! It is an unalloyed good for action cinema high and low to be thrown directly into streaming pipelines, at least for now.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigM3XUMSAyxew1Ys5HEtE7Rbcu00jnHoT-V5Uqrvm0x77BaDh7awi6SzYOKajjRASrwArk44Jp2LmHYrjt0lne28wXzM2EPsJ-IH9LthXCAbCIvS8BWIa2VdAMWXfe5_Sr6fbBROJv7Bka/s1600/NEW3_SM-FFordStudio-Hollywoodphotos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigM3XUMSAyxew1Ys5HEtE7Rbcu00jnHoT-V5Uqrvm0x77BaDh7awi6SzYOKajjRASrwArk44Jp2LmHYrjt0lne28wXzM2EPsJ-IH9LthXCAbCIvS8BWIa2VdAMWXfe5_Sr6fbBROJv7Bka/s1600/NEW3_SM-FFordStudio-Hollywoodphotos.jpg" /></a>Some day it may not cost $30 million to market a small picture to movie theaters. As streaming organizes audiences it will allow a more efficient and direct form of marketing than the old big multi-media ad campaigns do today. Those costs were already derailing the last coherent version of the traditional A-film/B-film relationship when the wheels fell off at Miramax. Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films' action and horror Bs long paid for Harvey's costly and riskier Miramax A-films. Quentin Tarantino might have made more and better films for Bob; instead he warped his genre interests into long, more expensive "specials" that he only infrequently could deliver to Harvey. Netflix prefers to keep its distribution numbers untouted as they perfect data-mining for increased efficiency in marketing. Not very Hollywood of them but no doubt they are nearing a modern solution to the A/B crux -- they might dispense with the A-film gamble and produce only Bs and once made simply judge which merit a theatrical roll-out.<br />
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Sometimes I fear it would be dumb luck if not all production for the streamers is episodic television or serial cinema. The streamer Quibi is even relaunching short material in a format equivalent to the one-reeler! But as long as genre features can get made cheaply and are allowed a chance to pay for the A-budget features, high and low, the market for the great American genre film can grow again despite current global market conditions. And in the long term such films might actually have a shot at again remaking that global market for the better as Jack Ford's older brother Frank's "chase pictures" once did.
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(An earlier version of this <i>Streaming...</i> essay was published by the good folks at <a href="https://thelosangelesbeat.com/2020/03/streaming-now-for-the-future-generic-cinema-high-and-low-then-and-now/#more-156374" target="_blank">L.A. Beat</a>).
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(illustrations: Moving Picture World trade mag logo; Francis Ford's <i>The Broken Coin</i> (1915) - Frank left directing, Jack Ford in costume right of camera [photo: Robert S. Birchard collection]; Moore's Garden Theatre, Jan. 1913, Francis Ford's <i>The Invaders</i> (1912) [photo: David Lee Guss collection]; video-on-demand ad for <i>Dragged Across Concrete</i> (2018); Nov. 6, 1948 <i>Box Office Magazine</i> (<i>yumpu.com</i>); Francis Ford Studio circa 1920 (<i>hollywoodphotographs.com</i>).
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">DuPage River Quarry Pond</span></b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci</span></td></tr>
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<b>From the DuPage desk of Joe Carducci...</b>
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Adam Shatz in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n08/adam-shatz/writing-absurdity" target="_blank">Chester B. Himes - A Biography by Lawrence Jackson</a>.
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In his novels, Himes depicted the whole of American life as a prison inferno, a blaze of race, sex and power, where freedom could be achieved only in death, or murder. One of the most prolific American writers of his generation, as well as one of its most versatile, Himes published proletarian and prison fiction, Bildungsromans, sex romps, blistering tales of interracial manners and flamboyant detective stories set in Harlem. The odd man out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, <i>The Indignant Generation</i>, was a formidable history of black American writers from the Depression years to the civil rights era, writes brilliantly about Himes’s fraught relations with his black peers as they competed for what little attention the white literary world was willing to grant them, a game Himes described as a ‘mean and undermining competition with your black brothers for the favours of white folks’. It was a game he could never win. Wright, Ellison and Baldwin were all determined to write the Great American Novel, and took Dostoevsky, Malraux and James as their models. Himes was a reader of European modernism, and of Hemingway and Faulkner (‘my secret mentor’), but he mostly wrote genre fiction....</blockquote>
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Scott Eyman in WSJ on <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sun-and-her-stars-review-weimar-in-hollywood-11579882843" target="_blank">The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind and The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel</a>.
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She was born Salomea Sara Steuermann, which she thankfully shortened to Salka Viertel. She and Berthold, a writer and director, arrived in America early in 1928 at the bidding of the great director F.W. Murnau. Berthold had written Murnau's now-lost "Four Devils," and Murnau wanted him to write his next film, "City Girl." Berthold worked in America but never truly settled down. Salka worked but also made a home for herself.... Her own career moved into high gear after she met Greta Garbo in Lubitsch's living room. They formed abond - a friendship complicated by a deep need on Garbo's part.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2020/02/26/were-gonna-do-economic-activity-without-money-inside-the-criminal-glamour-of-the-san-francisco-diggers-with-kent-minault/" target="_blank">We're gonna do economic activity—without money!”: Inside the criminal glamour of the San Francisco Diggers with Kent Minault</a>.
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I remember one event on Haight Street, and this involved the Grateful Dead, I think. We had set up a street fair. Maybe it was a year after we had cleared all that traffic off the street. There was a street fair. And again Arthur Lisch had his colored chalk. We were setting up things. I was walking up and down the street. There was a string quartet playing music, and then there was somebody else playing one of those bamboo flutes, and here was a person selling these extremely imaginative color candles. So there’s all these hippie artists. People were selling clothing, artifacts, sandals, wall hangings, art and posters and things like that. And everybody was wandering around and it was this wonderful environment, where you could smell the pot and the incense, and it was filled with love, and it was the best kind of Haight-Ashbury event that you could imagine. And then I looked up and right by the Straight Theater, this big U-Haul truck backed across the street. It was filled with these enormous amplifiers. And the Grateful Dead were on the truck. And as soon as the truck were into place… CHONG! This giant chord resounded down the street. And everybody stopped what they were doing and sat down and they watched. And so all of that interaction just stopped, and they were watching one hugely amped activity. And the music was very nice, the Grateful Dead were terrific musicians, but really the life of the place just stopped with that. And I thought, Eh I think I’ll go home. Cuz it was suddenly an event for people who were fans. And what had been going on before was an event for participants.</blockquote>
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David Trotter in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n15/david-trotter/a-cine-fist-to-the-solar-plexus" target="_blank">A Cine-Fist to the Solar Plexus</a>.
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Declaring that Strike (1925) was the first Soviet film to handle its 'revolutionary-historical' subject from the 'correct point of view' (his italics), Eisenstein laid into rival claimants to a 'materialist approach to form' such as the Cine-Eye group led by Dziga Vertov. He complained that Vertov's documentaries took from their surroundings 'the things that impress him rather than the things with which, by impressing the audience, he will plough its psyche'. Documentary just wasn't agressive enough: 'It is not a "Cine-Eye" that we need, but a "Cine-Fist".' Eisenstein's nuclear option was what he had called in seminal essays of 1923 and 1924 the 'montage of attractions'.</blockquote>
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Martha Bayles in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/dream-factory-or-propaganda-machine/" target="_blank">Dream Factory or Propaganda Machine?</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_biuJg2ogIvRhgdsGoK59hQVIH_N6cKSIicQgsCxfHyu9syq8LalB-MD5S3ow9trsJvbPhsEmANsDUKRK2IEVF_6hi5cDtl2KR_vyDjaGQpfjQdOljQdsGEQNz5iY70rueGEBEVcxmQV9/s1600/NV-156-ClaremontReview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_biuJg2ogIvRhgdsGoK59hQVIH_N6cKSIicQgsCxfHyu9syq8LalB-MD5S3ow9trsJvbPhsEmANsDUKRK2IEVF_6hi5cDtl2KR_vyDjaGQpfjQdOljQdsGEQNz5iY70rueGEBEVcxmQV9/s1600/NV-156-ClaremontReview.jpg" /></a>According to a recent report from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), over the past year China has turned decisively away from “soft power,” which works through “attraction and persuasion,” and toward “sharp power,” which “pierces, penetrates, or perforates the political and information environments in the targeted countries,” for the purpose of “masking [China’s] policies and suppressing, to the extent possible, any voices beyond China’s borders that are critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” Will this turn toward sharp power break up the Hollywood-China romance? The tea leaves are tricky to read. But there is a definite backstory here, which I will now chronicle through a series of dramatic episodes.</blockquote>
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Human Rights Watch at zerohedge.com, <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-02/chinas-mass-surveillance-app-hacked-code-reveals-specific-criterea-illegal" target="_blank">China's Mass Surveillance App Hacked, Code Reveals Specific Criteria for Illegal Oppression</a>.
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The platform targets 36 types of people for data collection, from those who have "collected money or materials for mosques with enthusiasm," to people who stop using smartphones.... HRW notes that "Many—perhaps all—of the mass surveillance practices described in this report appear to be contrary to Chinese law, and also violate internationally guaranteed rights to privacy, the presumption of innocence, and freedom of association and movement. "Their impact on other rights, such as freedom of expression and religion, is profound," according to the report.</blockquote>
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CBC News: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/china-tibet-student-election-1.5019648" target="_blank">'China is your Daddy'</a>.
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What might otherwise be the usual mudslinging around a student election has turned into a political firestorm on a Toronto university campus, where a newly-elected student president is raising questions about the source of pro-China attacks against her. On Saturday morning, Chemi Lhamo, 22, learned she'd been elected student president at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus (UTSC). By noon, her phone was buzzing incessantly with notifications. But instead of messages of congratulations, Lhamo — a Canadian citizen of Tibetan origin — realized a photo she'd posted on Instagram for the Lunar New Year was attracting thousands of hateful comments, most rife with anti-Tibet sentiment, some threatening. "China is your daddy — you better know this," read one comment. "Ur not gonna be the president of UTSC," read another. "Even if you do, we will make sure things get done so u won't survive a day. Peace RIP." That wasn't all. A petition calling on Lhamo to step down had amassed nearly 10,000 signatures.
And there was a message on the Chinese mobile service We Chat making the rounds, calling on Chinese international students to stop Lhamo from becoming president.</blockquote>
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Mads Frese at euobserver.com, <a href="https://euobserver.com/eu-china/144483" target="_blank">Italy Takes China's New Silk Road to the Heart of Europe</a>.
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<blockquote>
Italy has Europe's biggest Chinese community. Around 300,000 Chinese live in the country, many of whom are concentrated in industrial cities such as Prato near Florence or in metropolitan 'Chinatowns'. A remarkably high number of Chinese emigrants have opened their own businesses in Italy, and Chinese investments have bought power on the boards of big Italian companies. Since 2000 Italy has attracted 15bn Euro in Chinese investments - far behind the level of Chinese investment in the UK and Germany, but ahead of France and the rest of Europe.</blockquote>
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Ben Hall in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/62e42274-19af-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21" target="_blank">German Industry Unveils Plan to Halt the Chinese Steamroller</a>.
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<blockquote>
German companies seem as preoccupied with state-subsidised overcapacity, forced technology transfers, closed market access, intellectual property theft and the creation of national champions as with making a mint from China’s vast middle class and dynamic businesses.“It is the result of a pretty dramatic rethink of how we see China economically,” said Thorsten Benner, of the Global Public Policy Institute think-tank in Berlin. “Until three years ago, we thought these were complementary economies. This has totally changed. With Made in China 2025 we could see that state capitalism was out to eat our lunch.”</blockquote>
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Kathrin Hille in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/08edd97e-3410-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5" target="_blank">How Hauwei Helped Undermine Its Image</a>.
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From the 1990s, Huawei enlisted some of the most illustrious western consultants: IBM to help modernise management; Bain Capital as a partner for US acquisitions; and the Cohen Group, an advisory founded by former secretary of defence William Cohen, to help deal with US government security concerns. It also employed a vast array of global PR companies from Ogilvy to Edelman to BCW.But at crucial moments, the company did not heed their advice and even outmanoeuvred the consultants it had hired, according to former executives and external consultants. “There was always a fundamental lack of trust in non-Chinese. You offer guidance, and are regularly second-guessed,” Mr Plummer said. Two external consultants who worked for Huawei in the US and one American government official said a move by management to set up a lobbying outfit in the US in 2009 without consulting its experts on the ground did immense damage. The company, which was vying for contracts to upgrade US telecom operator Sprint’s mobile network, offered to deliver its products through an independent third party which would probe its software and hardware for security flaws and hold Huawei’s source code, the key software component, in an attempt to offer more transparency. At the same time, however, Cohen Group was discussing with the Director of National Intelligence to use such mechanisms for trusted delivery of Huawei gear that would assuage US security concerns. When Huawei announced its own structure instead — a company called Amerilink, which would be led by William Owens, a former vice-chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff — that potential deal fell apart over concerns that the new entity was not sufficiently independent.</blockquote>
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Henny Sender in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/stream/9fc236c0-fa86-4945-a464-d0da7f048b03" target="_blank">Entrepreneurs Stifled by the Dead Hand of the Chinese State</a>.
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"Everyone has to listen to the call of the party," says Chen Zhiwu of the Asia Global Institute at the Uinversity of Hong Kong, who has been warning about the ascendancy of the party and the diminution of the private sector for several years. "Today the party controls everyting. The unintended consequence is that it has given the US and others a good excuse to label all Chinese copanies as state-controlled and muddied the waters for everyone. The tortured debate over Huawei and who controls it misses the point. The national intelligence law adopted in 2017 - which underlines the obligation of Chinese citizens and organisations alike to "support, co-operate with and collaborate on national intelligence work" - makes it clear that companies must acquiesce to state demands.</blockquote>
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Jairaj Devadiga in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dearth-of-data-helped-hong-kong-succeed-11559944078" target="_blank">A Dearth of Data Helped Hong Kong Succeed</a>.
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Sir John Cowperthwaite was Hong Kong’s financial secretary from 1961-71 and is widely credited for the prosperity Hong Kong enjoys today. An ardent free-marketeer, Cowperthwaite believed that government should not try to manage the economy. One salient feature of Cowperthwaite’s policies: His administration didn’t collect any economic data during his tenure. Not even gross domestic product was calculated. When the American economist Milton Friedman asked why, Cowperthwaite replied that once the data were made available, officials would invariably use them to make the case for government intervention in the economy.</blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-takes-on-chinas-huawei-in-undersea-battle-over-the-global-internet-grid-11552407466" target="_blank">U.S. Fights Huawei on Undersea Data Grid</a>.
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Huawei Marine Networks Co., majority owned by the Chinese telecom giant, completed a 3,750-mile cable between Brazil and Cameroon in September. It recently started work on a 7,500-mile cable connecting Europe, Asia and Africa and is finishing up links across the Gulf of California in Mexico. Altogether, the company has worked on some 90 projects to build or upgrade seabed fiber-optic links, gaining fast on the three U.S., European and Japanese firms that dominate the industry. These officials say the company’s knowledge of and access to undersea cables could allow China to attach devices that divert or monitor data traffic—or, in a conflict, to sever links to entire nations. Such interference could be done remotely, via Huawei network management software and other equipment at coastal landing stations, where submarine cables join land-based networks, these officials say.</blockquote>
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Sunil Amrith in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opinion/himalayas-mountains-dams.html" target="_blank">The Race to Dam the Himalayas</a>.
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More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decades, in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan; at least 100 more have been proposed across the Chinese border in Tibet. If the plans come to fruition, this will be one of the world’s most heavily dammed regions. But these projects will aggravate international tensions. They carry grave ecological risks. To understand why their backers cast caution aside, it helps to look to history. When India became independent in 1947, large dams promised to even out the vagaries of a monsoon climate that provides more than two-thirds of the country’s annual rainfall. These projects held out the prospect of increasing food production in a part of the world where the memory of famine still stung and where the partition of India from Pakistan left both countries feeling they had lost valuable agricultural land. For new Asian nations, these bold engineering projects symbolized their attainment of political freedom and embrace of modernity. When he surveyed the Bhakra Nangal Dam in 1956, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that “these are the new temples of India, where I worship.”</blockquote>
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Chun Han Wong in WSJ <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-hard-edge-the-leader-of-beijings-muslim-crackdown-gains-influence-11554655886" target="_blank">From Falun Gong to Xinjiang: China's Repression Maestro</a>.
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After the government outlawed the Falun Gong spiritual group in 1999, Mr. Chen participated in the crackdown as a senior Henan official, with responsibilities over the destruction of the group's pamphlets, books and CDs.... In 2009, Mr. Chen became deputy party chief of Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing, where he encountered a ndw grid-style policing method the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, was testing. It segmented communities into defined areas and set up comprehensive police service stations to help organize surveillance and security. Mr. Chen took that to Tibet when he became its party chief in 2011, three years after anti-Chinese riots there. He installed roughly 700 "convenience police stations." Open round the clock, they doubled as mini-community centers, with household tools and cold medications. State TV produced a 20-episode drama series to glamorize them.... Tibet had "become the world's largest prison," blanked with checkpoints and security cameras, said Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan filmmaker, after he complete a six-year prison term on a subversion charge. He is exiled in the U.S. Mr. Chen's strategies appeared to bring down violence and public dissent. They also won him favor in Beijing, which was looking for a harder-edged approach in Xinjiang as ethnic tensions there rose.</blockquote>
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Jun Mai in SCMP, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3041810/tibet-xinjiang-beijings-man-restive-regions-chen-quanguo-prime" target="_blank">
From Tibet to Xinjiang, Beijing's Man for Restive Regions Chen Quanguo is the Prime Target of US Sanctions</a>.
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Chen was also quick to hitch his wagon to the president. In February 2016 when he was the party chief of Tibet, he was among the first to speak of Xi as the “core” of the party leadership, a term that elevated Xi’s status among party leaders. A month later, Tibetan delegates attending the National People’s Congress in Beijing showed up sporting lapel badges with Xi’s picture, a clear echo of the Mao Zedong era. One now retired official said the badges raised eyebrows among senior leaders including Yu Zhengsheng, then chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Yu took Chen aside and told him the gesture was inappropriate. “Chen only replied it was a spontaneous act by the delegates … but the fact is he was rewarded [for it],” said the official, who didn’t wish to be named.</blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/world/asia/china-muslim-detainment-xinjang-camps.html" target="_blank">The Leaders Who Unleashed China's Mass Detention of Muslims</a>.
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<blockquote>
By taking a harder line in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi effectively endorsed a group of Chinese scholars and officials advocating an overhaul of the party’s longstanding policies toward ethnic minorities. For decades, the party kept Uighurs, Tibetans and other groups under tight political control while allowing some room for preserving each nationality’s language, culture and religion. The mosaic approach was copied from the Soviet Union and made Xinjiang an “autonomous region,” where, in theory, Uighurs enjoyed greater rights and representation. But in the 1990s, Chinese academics advising the government began arguing that these policies had contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union by encouraging ethnic separatism. To avoid similar troubles, they argued, China should adopt measures aimed unapologetically at merging ethnic minorities into a broader national identity.</blockquote>
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Austin Ramzy in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/world/asia/china-muslim-detention-uighur-kazakh.html" target="_blank">He Needed a Job. China Gave Him One: Locking Up His Fellow Muslims</a>.
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The businesses he started had failed, and he had a wife and two children to support. So when the authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region offered him a job with the auxiliary police, Baimurat welcomed the good pay and benefits. For months, he stood at roadside checkpoints, looking for people on the government’s blacklist, usually from Muslim ethnic minorities. As a Kazakh Muslim himself, he sometimes felt uncomfortable about his work, but he needed the money. Then he was asked to help bring 600 handcuffed people to a new facility — and was stunned by what he saw. Officials called it a job training center, but it was basically a prison, with toilets and beds behind bars. One detainee was an acquaintance he barely recognized because he had lost so much weight. Mr. Baimurat, 39, suppressed his emotions. “There are cameras everywhere,” he recalled, “and if they see you look unhappy, you will be in trouble.”</blockquote>
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Olivia Utley in PROSPECT, <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/prisoners-were-always-interrogated-at-night-how-a-former-detainee-wants-to-use-ofcom-to-end-chinas-forced-tv-confessions" target="_blank">"Prisoners Were Always Interrogated at Night"</a>.
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In the next couple of months, CCTV—Chinese State TV—is set to open the world’s biggest foreign news bureau in Chiswick Park, London. The London hub will be the jewel in the crown of CCTV’s Europe expansion, occupying a 3,000 sq foot building and employing over 300 London-based writers. For demoralised and underpaid UK journalists, the jobs—which offer the opportunity to “tell China’s story well” for a hefty salary—look like glittering opportunities. One department has already had 6,000 applicants for 90 positions, and the deadline isn’t until February. So, what’s the catch? Well, it’s a big one. CCTV stands accused of assisting the Chinese police in extracting forced and falsified “confessions” in front of its TV cameras. According to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia, there have been 45 confirmed forced televised confessions in China between 2013 and 2018—but the true figure is thought to be much, much higher. Almost all are aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.</blockquote>
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Sayragul Sauytbay in HARPERS, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/at-the-minds-limits/" target="_blank">At the Mind's Limits</a>.
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During the day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, inmates had to learn Chinese, sing party songs, confess their crimes and moral offenses, and recite Communist Party propaganda slogans like "Thank you to the Communist Party," "I am Chinese," and "I love Xi Jinging." We received three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soupl and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant. Refusal brought punishment. There was no medical treatment, and they gave us pills that they told us prevented diseases, but the nurses secretly told me that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them. Some prisoners who took the pills were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and there were rumors that men became sterile. The only room that didn't have cameras was the Black Room, which was used to torture the prisoners.... The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh. On an everday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and the girls didn't come back to the rooms all night.... They took two hundred inmates outside - men and women - and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese, she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and raped her, one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her, they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their heads or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away, and we never saw them again. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.</blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/09/27/lin-zhao-breaking-eggs-against-rock/" target="_blank">Blood Letters - The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China</a>.<br />
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A year later, despite the release in July of Liu Xia to Germany, one can argue that Liu is a nonperson in China—of interest only to a few thousand dissidents. One might imagine that when they die, he too will die in the public memory, commemorated only by foreign human rights groups and studied by academics interested in turn-of-the-century Chinese thought and politics. And yet memory can be miraculously persistent. This is a major theme in Blood Letters, an important new biography of Lin Zhao, the journalist who was executed fifty years ago this spring for criticizing the Communist Party’s misrule in the 1950s and 1960s. After years of imprisonment, torture, and mental deterioration, she was hauled out of the prison hospital where she had shriveled to seventy pounds, taken to a thousand-seat prison auditorium in her hospital gown, gagged with a rubber ball, sentenced to death, and shot. Her mother learned the news from a messenger; a few days later, law enforcement demanded from her five cents to cover the cost of the bullet. Sustained by her Christian faith, Lin wrote hundreds of thousands of words in prison, but all were confiscated and locked away. Yet her writings somehow survived and slowly spread, despite censorship.</blockquote>
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Minnie Chan in SCMP, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3012956/how-tiananmen-crackdown-left-deep-scar-chinas-military-psyche" target="_blank">How Tiananmen Crackdown Left a Deep Scar on China's Military Psyche</a>.
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After the bloodshed, it was the military that suggested the pro-democracy student movement be referred to not as a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” but as a time of “political turmoil”, two former PLA officers told the South China Morning Post. They said the move to tone down the language around the crackdown reflected the anxiety and shame felt by many rank-and-file officers over a fateful decision that has tainted the military’s reputation and legacy. Up to that point, the PLA had been widely respected by the Chinese public. Even during the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution from 1966, the military was largely uninvolved. Rather, it was instrumental in bringing an end to the chaos and setting China on the path of reform and opening up. The crackdown in 1989 was unprecedented for the PLA and dealt a crippling blow to its reputation and morale – and the question over the legitimacy of the decision to send in the tanks and open fire on the protesters remains.</blockquote>
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Aruna Viswanatha & Kate O'Keefe in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-tycoon-holed-up-in-manhattan-hotel-is-accused-of-spying-for-beijing-11563810726" target="_blank">China Critic Called a Spy in Fight</a>.
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Strategic Vision enlisted investigators to perform the research, according to Friday's filing. The filing said investiagors determined the first 15 names proveded by Mr. Guo had been designated by the U.S. as "Records Protected" individuals, for whom certain information wasn't subject to disclosure. Such a designation is used in highly classified and access-restricted government databases, former intelligence officials said. The immigration status about such disgnees is often blocked in restricted government databases, and can suggest the person may be a foreigner who is assisting the U.S. government, experts said. Strategic Vision sia dit concluded Mr. Guo was seeking information on Chinese nationals who may have been helping the U.S. government in national-security investigations or who were involved in other sensitive matters, according to the filing. "Guo never intended to use the fruits of Strategic Vision's research against the Chinese Communist Party," the court filing said. "That is because Guo was not the dissident he claimed to be. Instead, Guo Wengui was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People's Republic of China." Mr. Guo's lawyer, Mr. Podhaskie, denied the allegations. "Mr. Guo is the most-wanted dissident worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party and has been their most outspoken and vitriolic ciritic since his arrival in the United States," he said in his statement. The Chinese Embassy didn't respond to arequest to comment.</blockquote>
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Yuan Yang & Nian Liu in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a06f414c-0e6e-11e9-a3aa-118c761d2745" target="_blank">China Hushes Up Scheme to Recruit Scientists from Overseas</a>.
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Last September, Texas Tech University warned faculty in a letter that the US Congress saw the Thousand Talents programme as “part of a broader strategy to build technological superiority” and that the State Department and Congress believed elements of the plan to be “closely allied to the Chinese military”. The letter contained a warning: that recipients of Thousand Talents awards could be barred from Department of Defense grants, and in future possibly federal research grants, a significant disincentive for researchers.Han Lifeng, the chief executive of a talent agency that has worked with about 30 “Thousand Talents” experts, has noticed the mood shift. “Technology competition between the US and China is fierce now. The US sets obstacles for scientists who want to come back, so China doesn’t mention the name ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ in documents or meetings any more.”</blockquote>
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Timothy Puko & Kate O'Keefe in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-department-to-ban-foreign-talent-recruitment-programs-11549052674" target="_blank">Agency Wants Scientists Off Foreign Payrolls</a>.
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The Energy Department's initiative takes aim at programs such as China's "Thousand Talents Plan," which pays scientists working abroad and says its mission is to gather "global wisdom." Dating to 2008, the program has brought thousands of experts from outside China to its laboratories, companies and research centers, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional panel. Short-term contracts provide program participants with the equivalent of roughly $74,000 in initial funding. Longer-term contracts may award more than $700,000 and other benefits such as housing and health care, according to the Thousand Talents website. Thousand Talents is just one of nearly 200 other programs like it run by the Chinese government, said James Mulvenon, who co-wrote a 2013 book called "Chinese Industrial Espionage."</blockquote>
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Kathrin Hille in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/4eb88028-263f-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632" target="_blank">China Sets Up 'Discussions' on Taiwan's Future</a>.
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“The problem is the 20th Communist party congress in 2022. If he doesn’t show progress in his second term, some of the people he purged could use this against him.”Indeed the tone on the Chinese domestic scene on Taiwan is turning increasingly belligerent, with a senior military official threatening what he called “supporters of Taiwanese separatism” last month. “If we are forced to use force to settle the Taiwanese issue, they will be held responsible. In other words, they will inevitably be considered war criminals,” said Lieutenant General He Lei, a former regional military commander and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences.</blockquote>
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Amy Qin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/world/asia/singapore-china.html" target="_blank">Worries Grow in Singapore Over China's Calls to Help 'Motherland'</a>.
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China has become increasingly assertive in its efforts to appeal to the vast Chinese diaspora to serve the country’s national interests and gain influence abroad. Already, there has been evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to manipulate political activity among Chinese populations in countries like Canada, the United States and Australia. And with ethnic Chinese constituting nearly 75 percent of Singapore’s population of 5.6 million, some scholars and former diplomats worry that this island nation could be an especially tantalizing target for the Chinese government’s influence efforts.</blockquote>
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Mark Magnier in SCMP, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3048799/horse-trading-and-arm-twisting-us-battles-china-over" target="_blank">Horse Trading and Arm Twisting as US Battles China Over Leadership of UN Intellectual Property Agency</a>.
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<blockquote>
Speaking on Chinese state media last year, former head of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Wu Hongbo said he prioritised China’s interests over the UN’s. His tenure saw the president of the World Uygur Congress expelled from an indigenous rights forum. Taiwan has not been allowed to attend the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s annual assembly since a Chinese national took over the agency. And Washington worries that Zhao Houlin could nudge global 5G standards in Huawei’s favour as current head of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union. Unlike most UN agencies, almost all of Wipo’s US$800 million budget and US$99 million surplus is funded by industry, giving the agency and its director greater independence from UN member nations. The funding comes from companies that pay around US$1,000 per claim to safeguard their corporate and quasi-military secrets. Patent and trademark filings are stored on a secure Wipo server while companies decide which national jurisdictions to target. “If it had control over all the levers, China would have nominal access to all patent applications before they got published,” said James Pooley, a trade secrets lawyer and former deputy director general at Wipo who testified before Congress on malfeasance at the agency.</blockquote>
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<br />
Tom Hancock & Nicolle Liu in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2eb02fa4-3429-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5" target="_blank">Senior China Officials in Plagiarism Outcry</a>.
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<blockquote>
China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed of the 25 most senior Communist party officials, boasts seven doctoral graduates including Xi Jinping, the president, who obtained a law doctorate from Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2002.But the doctoral dissertation by Chen Quanguo, a politburo member and head of the Communist party in the northwestern Xinjiang region, features dozens of paragraphs identical to earlier works that are not cited. Theses by other politburo members are not accessible on public academic databases. But an FT review of 10 doctoral theses by other Chinese officials that were available online found three cases in which extended passages were copied without citation. The revelation comes amid a public debate in China about the academic qualifications of well-connected people. Last week, Beijing Film Academy revoked a doctorate awarded to Zhai Tianlin, one of the country’s best-known actors, after finding that sections of a paper published while he was a graduate student were copied from other texts without references.</blockquote>
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Lucy Hornby in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/lucy-hornby" target="_blank">Beijing Casts Wary Eye Over Past US Rivals Who Flattered to Deceive</a>.
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<blockquote>
The Chinese leadership is aware of the historical warnings. For 12 years (and two stock market crashes), reformers have fretted about Japan's "lost decade" and drooping international influence. Party stalwarts including Xi Jinping are equally obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union. In September, the Chinese party surpassed the length of time the Soviets held power. "In different ways, the USSR and Japan both stumbled when they faced the need to generate growth from more bottom-up, entrepreneurial, service- and netowrk-oriented activities," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. "Despite a strong record of bottom-up dynamism, China is now moving in a much more statist direction."</blockquote>
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Keith Bradsher in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/business/china-trade-negotiations.html" target="_blank">China Faces Expertise Gap in Trade Talks with U.S.</a>.
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<blockquote>
China is struggling to find people in Washington who can provide insight into the Trump administration’s aggressive moves on trade. One senior American trade insider tried to help — and wound up in Beijing with little to do but check out the pottery. That insider, Alan Wolff, a veteran senior adviser to the top United States trade representative and a frequent visitor to Beijing, came to China two weeks ago to speak at a conference on agricultural trade and sought to make contact with top Chinese policymakers. But they did not respond to his requests for meetings, and they said days later that they had not known who he was. Mr. Wolff, an admirer of ancient pottery, instead spent a quiet Saturday in a Beijing museum browsing 2,200-year-old bowls. As members of the Trump administration delegation arrived in Beijing on Thursday for two days of high-level talks, they sat across from Chinese officials with limited experience in trade matters.</blockquote>
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Kathrin Hille in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f4538db4-5f6b-11ea-b0ab-339c2307bcd4" target="_blank">Taiwan's KMT Poised to End Pro-China Policy to Woo Voters</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
Xi Jinping, China’s president and Communist party general secretary, has grown increasingly strident in his rhetoric on Taiwan. Senior KMT politicians said Mr Xi destroyed the 1992 consensus when he equated it last year with “One Country, Two Systems”, the model of government by which Beijing rules Hong Kong and which it wants to impose on Taiwan. Taiwanese voters have emphatically rejected this formula, under which Hong Kong enjoys some legal and political autonomy but Beijing hand picks its leader. Johnny Chiang, a KMT lawmaker and one of the candidates in Saturday’s vote, said the Communist party’s “distortion” of the “One China” formula and the Taiwanese people’s ever more sceptical view of Beijing meant his party could no longer win elections.</blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-warnings.html" target="_blank">Chinese Leader Is on Edge in a Year Rife with Risk</a>.
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<blockquote>
Mr. Xi identified dangers that extended far beyond the economy, especially political risks like the party’s ability to keep young Chinese from slipping from its ideological orbit. He demanded stricter controls on the Chinese internet — which is already thoroughly censored — and more indoctrination to “ensure that the youth generation become builders and inheritors of socialism.” “Younger officials must go in guns blazing to take on these major struggles,” Mr. Xi told the officials, seated in rows like students taking notes. Yet Mr. Xi’s demands for unyielding stability could backfire, experts say, as warnings of danger around every turn could smother the initiative and flexibility that Chinese officials need to defuse long-term economic and social dangers. The demands for rigid order on so many fronts put local cadres in near impossible binds, they said: trying to prevent job losses while cutting debt and shutting inefficient “zombie” businesses; trying to buoy private investment while cracking down on pollution and bank credit; and proclaiming public confidence in the government while stifling complaints from the public.
“If everything is a risk, you can end up mitigating nothing,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese policymaking at Crumpton Group in Virginia, which advises companies on investments.</blockquote>
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Gordon Chang in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-changed-my-mind-about-trump-11564008053" target="_blank">Xi Changed My Mind About Trump</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
The world is full of “experts” who will tell you China and the U.S. are locked in a contest for dominance. Technically, that’s true. The idea that the two nations are struggling for control, however, falsely implies that America is jealously guarding its position atop the international system. That’s Beijing’s narrative. Chinese leaders disparage the U.S. by implying it is in terminal decline and accusing it of attempting to prevent China’s legitimate rise. In reality, America is preserving more than its role in the international system. It is trying to preserve the system itself—which Mr. Xi is working to overthrow by promoting imperial-era Chinese concepts.
The idea that underpinned the imperial tributary system was that states near and far were obligated to acknowledge Chinese rule. Chinese emperors claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven over tianxia, or “All Under Heaven.” China repudiated tianxia in the first half of the 20th century and played it down in the second half. But in the 21st century it is making a comeback. “Tianxia is a long Chinese political tradition of practice and ideal that is being revitalized and re-energized in today’s People’s Republic,” Fei-Ling Wang, author of “The China Order: Centralia, World Empire and the Nature of Chinese Power,” told me last week. “The Chinese dream of tianxia, or the China Order, assumes a hierarchical world empire system.”</blockquote>
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<br />
Brian Boeck at longreads.com, <a href="https://longreads.com/2019/02/06/stalins-scheherazade/" target="_blank">Stalin's Scheherazade</a>.
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR5esu4ZmdvlwzoUxiKb9h4GM4fAC6vv2GYjHvpMuMunlxiY_mbofyzuq8Lr0vVObd2tgG2xpGEJFYVAAasIkHtaHvsRwgdg4Lp8-ilv3PsmytJajPxtb40d_ZWYbQOuRj-z0B774V4unY/s1600/NV-156-QuietDon-Sholokov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR5esu4ZmdvlwzoUxiKb9h4GM4fAC6vv2GYjHvpMuMunlxiY_mbofyzuq8Lr0vVObd2tgG2xpGEJFYVAAasIkHtaHvsRwgdg4Lp8-ilv3PsmytJajPxtb40d_ZWYbQOuRj-z0B774V4unY/s1600/NV-156-QuietDon-Sholokov.jpg" /></a>Sholokhov was compelled to immediately find a way to justify his non-negative <br />
portrayal. “Kornilov distinguished himself on the Austrian front with acts of bravery, he was captured by the enemy and managed to escape from captivity and return to Russia. He could even be described in some sense as honorable.” “Honorable?” Stalin smiled. “A man who went against the people? Such a man could never be considered honorable.” “Subjectively speaking he was honorable. From the point of view of his class he behaved honorably. He was motivated by a strong sense of duty. He possessed an officer’s sense of honor. He risked his life to return to Russia. He loved his motherland.” These pronouncements must have intrigued Stalin. He was pondering whether ideology alone could bring cohesion to the Soviet Union. He was starting to have doubts about the mobilizational potential of proletarian internationalism for inspiring the masses to defend the country. The emotionally resonant concept of “motherland,” which had gone out of fashion with the October revolution, now intrigued him.... Sholokhov had comported himself well under Stalin’s first barrage of questions. He had passed a literary litmus test that the dictator developed during an earlier foray into the field of literary censorship. A year earlier Stalin was asked to decide whether or not to ban a play by Mikhail Bulgakov. Censors complained that it heroicized White generals who had been vanquished by the Soviet side. Although Gorky did not find it objectionable and interpreted it through a satirical lens, several major Soviet theater figures were appalled by its contents. They appealed to Stalin to suppress it. By this action they invited him to assume the role of censor of last resort. He took on the role with relish and would never relinquish it.</blockquote>
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Graham Farmelo in WSJ on <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/lost-in-math-review-the-beauty-myth-1529703982" target="_blank">Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder</a>.
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<blockquote>
As she explains, the use of beauty as a proxy for truth has an impressive pedigree.... As a result of this misguided focus on beauty, Ms. Hossenfelder says, her generation of theoretical physicists has been "stunningly unsuccessful." The multiverse - the idea that our universe is only one of a vast number - is one of the fasionalbe concepts that she believes is a dud. Theoreticians found it difficult to use it to make predictions that astronomers can test. Even more disappointing for her is string theory, the most popular candidate for a unified theory of all the basic forces of nature. According to this theory, each fundamental subatomic particle corresponds to an excitation of a string, analogous to a musical note played on a guitar. The theory is mathematically gorgeous, astonishingly self-consistent and even explains why the existence of gravity is inevitable. The problem is that the theory has not yet made a single verified prediction.</blockquote>
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Toril Moi at thepointmag.com, <a href="https://thepointmag.com/criticism/real-characters-literary-criticism-existential-turn-toril-moi/" target="_blank">Real Characters</a>.
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<blockquote>
As a highbrow modernist, L.C. Knights heaps scorn on the popular and the middlebrow, blaming the rot of character criticism on the “growth of the popular novel, from Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë to our own Best Sellers, [which] encouraged an emotional identification of the reader with hero or heroine.” The “Best Sellers” are particularly despicable, for they appeal directly to “human sympathy and emotion,” which are utterly destructive of professional criticism, since they eradicate the critic’s “necessary aloofness from a work of art.” I read this as a reference to T.?S. Eliot’s theory of poetic impersonality: if poetry is a flight from emotion and personality, criticism must be too. Knights’s critical agenda is now clear. Against traditionalist, feminized, middlebrow sentimentality, he sets cool, modernist impersonality. Identification, emotional responses, sympathy and moralism must go, for they can only cloud the critic’s gaze. Since thinking of texts as creating an “illusion of reality” encourages these vices, it’s not just character criticism but realism itself that must go. Knights’s manifesto reads like an expression of the avant-garde aesthetic agenda of his generation. In the 1920s and 1930s, traditionalist critics attacked modernist artists and writers precisely by arguing that they were immoral, incapable of inventing emotionally satisfying plots, and failed to provide characters with which one could sympathize. (In the 1880s and 1890s similar accusations were levied against Ibsen.) No wonder Knights attacks precisely moralism, sentimentalism and empathy.</blockquote>
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Jon Baskin at thepointmag.com, <a href="https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-the-hatred-of-literature/" target="_blank">On the Hatred of Literature</a>.
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<blockquote>
Going back to Plato—perhaps the first hater of literature on record—philosophers and religious authorities have attacked art for the same reasons our professors taught us to deconstruct and distrust it: because it is unpredictable, unreasonable and often inconsistent with their preferred politics or morality. It was also a lesson that was destined, in the years that followed, to seep off campus. Even as New Historicism fell out of fashion in literary studies—along with the broader postmodern notion of “critique” that had produced it—the students it had trained were taking up positions in the public intellectual magazines and book reviews, where they now preside over the gradual disappearance of a distinctively literary mode of criticism: a criticism, that is, that attends to matters of form, style and character, that takes aesthetic experience seriously, and that appreciates the emotions inspired by an artwork as fully as, and as constitutive of, its politics. To the extent that this disappearance has gone unremarked, it is because the hatred of literature, though it remains almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture. As was the case in my college survey course, the highest honors go to the most eloquent haters.</blockquote>
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Julian Baggini in PROSPECT, <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/the-enduring-brilliance-of-ludwig-wittgenstein" target="_blank">The Enduring Brilliance of Ludwig Wittgenstein</a>.
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<blockquote>
Wittgenstein‘s most famous and abused idea is that of the “language game.” Reacting against both dominant philosophies of language and his own earlier work, Wittgenstein came to reject the idea that words are kinds of labels for things in the world or ideas in our head, and that the meaning of sentences are therefore entirely determinable. The meaning of a word is rather “its use in the language” which is governed by rules that are neither explicit nor clear. The same word can be used to refer to two things because they have a “family resemblance,” but it might not be possible to precisely define what that resemblance is. This view of how language works anticipated the more empirical prototype theory developed in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch. Rosch argued that we learn the meanings of words by noticing how they are used, first learning their most typical usages and later their extended or metaphorical ones. Learning meanings by definitions is atypical. The family resemblance to family resemblance theory is too strong to miss. Once again, Wittgenstein cleared the path that others only later followed. Wittgenstein has also become extremely popular in theology. His ideas provide the perfect response to those who would dismiss religion as bad proto-science, a set of beliefs about the things that exist in the universe. Many theologians respond to this with Wittgenstein’s line “For a mistake, that’s too big.” Religion is rather a “form of life” to use another Wittgensteinian concept, in which the rules of the language game are different from the scientific or the historical. Statements like “God is love” or “we need saving from sin” are not like “tomato is a fruit” or “the drowning woman needs saving from the flood.” They are attempts to capture spiritual and existential realities, not describe the empirical world.</blockquote>
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Andrew Hussey in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/04/making-messiah" target="_blank">The Making of a Messiah</a>.
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<blockquote>
Only the Zionists offered any real resistance, in his view, and he asked them to help him get to Israel. The plan was “fucked-up”, as he put it, when he got to the coast and there were no boats. Back in Bucharest, Isou hung out with his friends, visited brothels and got into fights, all the time hating the “Christians” who wanted to kill him. In a darkened cinema, he is about to make love to a “Christian” girl he has just picked up when he sees the first horrible images broadcast of the death camps in the east. He feels that he recognises himself in the piles of young corpses being swept into mass graves. “Don’t look at the Yids,” she says, pulling him back for another kiss. “They deserve it. They brought it on themselves.” It was in this time and place, that Isou had the series of revelations that would become lettrisme. The first illumination came to him on a Bucharest street on 19 March 1942 when he was 17 years old. It was clear to him that the “old civilisation” he had grown up in was now crumbling away before his eyes. He admired the surrealists because they’d had the courage to announce the “end of the Christian era”, a civilisation that he had come to believe was defined by mass murder and rape. He declared that he hated Christians, and unlike the weak-minded Zionists fleeing to Israel, he wanted revenge. He called for a “Judaism on the attack!” The question in Isou’s mind was the same question being asked then in the newly-born Israel: how to build the new world, how to found a new civilisation? In 1945, Isou escaped from Bucharest, and after a hazardous and illegal journey across the wreckage of post-war Europe, he made it to Paris. Then, for a brief moment – he was only 20 years old – he was suddenly famous, courted by Jean Cocteau and André Gide, profiled in the New York Times and interviewed on film by Orson Welles.</blockquote>
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<br />
Elisabeth Zerofsky in NY TIMES MAGAZINE, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/eric-zemmour-france-far-right.html" target="_blank">The Right-Wing Pundit 'Hashtag Triggering' France</a>.
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<blockquote>
In a radio interview the week before his appearance at the Salle Gaveau, Zemmour nodded in vigorous agreement when he was asked if he was nostalgic and reactionary. These tendencies appeal to a wide-ranging, well-heeled conservative crowd but haven’t cost him the loyalty of a younger audience, who delight in the way he combines the cable-news pugnacity of Tucker Carlson with the studied contemptuousness of Christopher Hitchens. At the Salle Gaveau, I spoke with one such fan, a 27-year-old named Jacques, the founder of a successful start-up. As he saw it, 90 percent of the French media were on the left, and they hid the truth about the failure to integrate immigrants; this was readily apparent in the drug dealing and crime in the banlieues and, of course, the terror attacks of the last three years. Zemmour’s words were merely good sense. In fact, there was an adjective for the few willing to say aloud what everyone was thinking: “Zemmourrian.” “I’m not nostalgic,” Jacques said. “I think there’s a lot that’s not working in modernity. But we have to say that when you come to a country you have to integrate and assimilate.” A lawyer friend of his had recently defended an immigrant against domestic-violence charges, and his friend advised the client not to say that he thought what he did was right. But during the trial, the wife testified that her husband was angry that she went to see her friends, and so he was right to beat her. “That’s what happens when you accept all cultures and you refuse to force people to accept certain norms,” Jacques said. “We’ve really gone somewhere irrational, out of fear of shocking or provoking. But we’re creating a horrible world.”</blockquote>
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<br />
Philip Broughton in WSJ on <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/twilight-of-the-elites-review-on-the-outskirts-of-higher-france-11548722743" target="_blank">Twilight of the Elites by Christophe Guilluy</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY2s7jnZ2jhKSyAwud9EC-Lx24Hi2cP-tZgUg_sPjftkiQx5wIUqir7-bsV6sfExYNRRHihBItJzFfQCRnz96xhSZEmlcEqjK8n7X4AZi4kfhQsiFzs7gpNRYas-upQiyVDFvmqbl__uZj/s1600/NV-156-TwilightoftheElites.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY2s7jnZ2jhKSyAwud9EC-Lx24Hi2cP-tZgUg_sPjftkiQx5wIUqir7-bsV6sfExYNRRHihBItJzFfQCRnz96xhSZEmlcEqjK8n7X4AZi4kfhQsiFzs7gpNRYas-upQiyVDFvmqbl__uZj/s1600/NV-156-TwilightoftheElites.jpg" /></a>"The higher France," says Mr. Guilluy, "now lives undisturbed in the safety of its new<br />
citadels." This class reaps all the economic benefits while, for form's sake, spouting criticism of finance, bankers and technology giants. They have it every which way, ruthless capitalists by day, yogis and locavores by night. "Cleverly disguised as hipsters, untroubled by the least moral qualm in the safety of their townhouses, today's bourgeoisie forms the bulwark of the hardest and most unpitying form of capitalism imaginable." They embrace a "declasse lifestyle, stylishly slumming it in formerly working-class neighborhoods and hanging out in bars and restaurants that still retain something of their old proletarian atmosphere."</blockquote>
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Victor Mallet in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/victor-mallet" target="_blank">Populism Wave Threatens to Wash Away Elite Colleges</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
"There is no other country that so purposefully creates an elite and gives them a title for life... It is a very incestuous system," he said. "It is the most powerful lobby in France... It is a monopoly and no one likes to give up a monopoly." Ena was founded after the second world war in 1945 precisely to promote "social mixing" and give less privileged students the chance to win senior government posts based on their merits. But over the decades the successful applicants have increasingly been drawn from the upper classes - 70 per cent at the lates count, compared with about 45 per cent in the 1950s.</blockquote>
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Thierry Baudet in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/houellebecqs-unfinished-critique-of-liberal-modernity/" target="_blank">Houellebecq's Unfinished Critique of Liberal Modernity</a>.
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_TCRWG0aaAQoKJsmjiF30lRGkcIG2V62Il77ZnxEWhhcOzaBI6SPpZ6xD54cnDEnntkV1FAYOLOcstHqDc1315pkfudRQJ8TvRjpa1T7R5q-Qm_IaA8Pw2-7jAG5hd_Pj6BHkGI7Bwkg/s1600/NV-156-AmericanAffairs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp_TCRWG0aaAQoKJsmjiF30lRGkcIG2V62Il77ZnxEWhhcOzaBI6SPpZ6xD54cnDEnntkV1FAYOLOcstHqDc1315pkfudRQJ8TvRjpa1T7R5q-Qm_IaA8Pw2-7jAG5hd_Pj6BHkGI7Bwkg/s1600/NV-156-AmericanAffairs.jpg" /></a>Now this fundamental point which Houellebecq makes time and again deserves further <br />
reflection, because it challenges the very fun damentals of both the contemporary “Left” and the “Right.” It challenges modern anthropology as such. Both the social-dem ocratic and the liberal wing of the modern political spectrum (re spectively advocating the welfare state and the free market) wish to maximize individual autonomy. Liberalism and socialism differ when it comes to the most effective way to achieve that objective, but they do not differ in the objective itself. They are both liberation movements; they both want the complete emancipation of the indi vidual. And both base their vision of society on the (unfounded but supposedly “self-evident”) principle that every individual enjoys certain “inalienable rights,” which by definition eclipse all other claims, and to which all other ties, loyalties, and connections must ultimately be subordinated. Over time, all such institutions that the individual requires to fully actualize a meaningful existence—such as a family and a connection to generations past and future, a nation, a tradition, perhaps a church—will weaken and eventually disappear. Today, even new life (in the womb) may be extinguished to avoid disturbing the individual’s freedom. In the Netherlands (where I live), suicide is facilitated to ensure that here, too, no constraints—such as the duty to care for your parents—are placed on the indi vidual.</blockquote>
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<br />
Christopher Caldwell in COMMENTARY, <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/christopher-caldwell/houellebecq-on-the-modern-age/" target="_blank">A Bellow from France</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
Houellebecq, educated at the elite National Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There is a fussy statisticality about his writing: "The year 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, despite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression.... Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of Southern France. In the space of a few months, the number of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45." This is the texture of all Houellebecq's books. They ventriloquize or parody other genres - journalism (as in this quote), science writing, encyclopedias, travel guides, marketing pitches, and history. In an age of political correctness, this distancing in time and tone allowed Houellebecq to restore to the French novel its didactic or widom-imparting function. He (or his narrator) could say such things as: "That's one of the worst things about extreme beauty in young women: Only an experienced pickup artist, cynical and without scruples, thinks himself up to the task; so it is in general the rottenest men who win the treasure of their virginity, and this marks for such girls the first stage of a permanent debasement." This is the tone of the hardboiled French fiction associated with the sensualist aristocrat Henry de Montherlant and the detective writer Georges Simenon. Until Houellebecq came along, it had been decades since anyone used it.</blockquote>
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Thomas Howard in WSJ on David Kertzer's <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pope-who-would-be-king-and-vatican-i-review-rome-infallible-11549410374" target="_blank">The Pope Who Would Be King and John O'Malley's Vatican I</a>.
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<blockquote>
Although hailed as a reformer at first, Pius became a firm reactionary due to his experience of the revolutions of 1848. "The Pope Who Would Be King" focuses on just three critical years of Pius's papacy: 1848-50. After revolution engulfed Rome and led to the short-lived Republic of Rome, Pius was forced to flee the city in disguise and took refuge in the Neapolitan kingdom of Ferdinand II. He returned to Rome in 1850 with the help of the French, and in the wake of these events defined the controversial teaching of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854) and issued an encyclical accompanied by the "Syllabus of Errors" (1864), a sledgehammer of anti-modern invective that insisted that the papal office stood under no compulsion to "reconcile [itself]... to progress, liberalism and modern civilization."</blockquote>
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<br />
Isaac Reed in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, <a href="https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/eating-and-being/articles/the-kings-two-bodies-and-the-crisis-of-liberal-modernity" target="_blank">The King's Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity</a>.
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<blockquote>
For Durkheim, in the good society, every individual has two bodies. Modernity as we actually know it fails at this ambition. Modern individualism had as its accompaniment a violent series of exclusions of entire categories of persons from the dignitas of having a second body, precisely because they were denied the equality with which all people, under the republican dispensation, were supposed to be endowed—by a divine creator or, later, by dint of “human nature.” And one is thus compelled to ask, at another crisis point in the arc of modernity, whether the ethereal quality to which Durkheim referred is not itself “equality,” and thus to ask further what cultural reconfigurations will be required such that this quality of individuals is indeed given power by “society”? Certainly, we need to investigate more closely the redistribution of the sacred in the era after the King’s Two Bodies. Doing so entails an understanding of established religion as a regulator of the distribution of the sacred—after all, who can deny the importance of Christianity to the mother of all American social movements, abolitionism?—but also entails a grappling with the way in which such dispensations, repeatedly occur outside of, and exceed in their resonance, churches and congregations, even to the point of opposition to religion itself.</blockquote>
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James Penrose in NEW CRITERION on <a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/3/a-wild-dangerous-effervescence" target="_blank">A New World Begins - The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy Popkin</a>.
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<blockquote>
What started as a debate about artistic freedom, however, quickly changed direction when Georges Clemenceau rose to defend the Terror by calling it inseparable from the Revolution. “Gentlemen,” he said, “whether we want or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc . . . from which we can separate nothing.” L’affaire Thermidor, as it was called, illuminated the issue that had divided historians since the start of Revolution: were the events, as Clemenceau seemed to be saying, simply a case of “on ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs”? Or was it, as Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Hippolyte Taine argued, a disaster for France? Three new books make their own contributions to this perpetual debate.
In grappling with the Revolution’s central paradox, how hundreds of thousands of French citizens were slaughtered in the name of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” Jeremy D. Popkin’s A New World Begins takes a warts-and-all approach, if only to emerge, marginally, on the side of the omelet. He describes France’s appalling difficulties prior to the Revolution before moving to the idealistic, often chaotic but increasingly repressive, efforts of a series of legislative bodies that led eventually to the Convention, Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and its lethal agent, the Revolutionary Tribunal. Although Popkin understates matters by describing atrocities like the September Massacres, the Nantes mass drownings (“vertical deportations” to use its repulsive euphemism), the Lyon cannonades, and mob killings as merely “troubling,” his account of the Terror and the rise of Napoleon is compelling reading.</blockquote>
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Daniel Greenfield at frontpagemag.com, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/08/i-was-stooge-communist-terror-group-murdered-daniel-greenfield/" target="_blank">I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group that Murdered Americans</a>.
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<blockquote>
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Bernardine Dohrn gloated at a Weathermen war council. Dohrn and other members of the leftist group understood the horrifying murders as a radical act that normalized violence. And Dohrn, a Weatherman terrorist, saw violence as an inspirational tool for shattering the norms of society. That was why the Weathermen adopted the ‘fork salute’. The horrifying reality of the sorts of people that would do that is at odds with the media’s normalization of leftist radicals as principled activists reacting to racism and the Vietnam War. The radicals are routinely humanized and their victims are forgotten. History is entombed with the dead. And so The Tablet decided to give Jonah Raskin, who had participated in the Weathermen, and later promoted the hateful works of the violent Communist terror group, a forum for his fond memories. "I could wallow in nostalgia about my days with the Weather Underground in the early 1970s: at Coney Island with Bernardine Dohrn, eating Bill Ayers’ soufflés and Jeff Jones’ homemade breads," he begins. Dohrn’s fork celebration of the murder of a pregnant woman had taken place in 1969. But surely old Nazis also have fond memories of eating soufflés and homemade breads. Himmler’s wife probably made a mean ham sandwich. And the Manson family no doubt had some great chili. But outside of Neo-Nazi publications, they don’t get the space to share fond food and murder memories. Old Communist killers and their cohort however get ample space for their horrifying nostalgia.</blockquote>
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Roger Kimball in NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/multiculturalism-anti-american-revolution" target="_blank">Multiculturalism and the Anti-American Revolution</a>.
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<blockquote>
As Samuel Huntington pointed out years ago, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization…. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” Quite right. The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”</blockquote>
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Glen Loury in CHRONICLE REVIEW, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2019-06-17-loury" target="_blank">'Affirmative Action Is Not About Equality. It's About Covering Ass</a>.
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<blockquote>
Q: What do you see as being at stake in the Harvard case filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants?
A: The story of Asian-American achievement in this country is extremely powerful, and a reflection of the openness of American institutions. Many of them are second-generation immigrants. You're going to pooh-pooh that? You're not going to recognize what that says about the country? If the Harvard case gets to the Supreme Court, and I assume it will, the legal ramifications will be significant. I should say that Peter Arcidiacono, a friend at Duke, was hired by the plaintiffs to do a brief. Eight or ten economists were asked to endorse the brief, and I was one of them. What it lays out is If you're African-American and you're in the top 20 percent of the applicant pool, you have a more than 50-percent chance of getting admitted to Harvard. If you're Asian-American and in the top 20 percent, you have a 5-percent chance of getting admitted. The disparity is huge. Harvard says the disparity can be accounted for by other measures, like student personality. To which I respond: If I can see African-American applicants with relatively high test scores but poor performance on these personality measures not be admitted, and I can see Asian-American applicants with relatively low test scores but high performance on these personality measures be admitted, I'll believe Harvard.</blockquote>
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Samuel Abrams in WSJ, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-administrators.html" target="_blank">Even More Liberal Than Professors</a>.
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<blockquote>
The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.</blockquote>
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Shelby Steele in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-left-is-consumed-with-hate-1537723198" target="_blank">Why the Left Is Consumed with Hate</a>.
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<blockquote>
How did the American left - concieved to bring more compassion and justice to the world - become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when American finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed American forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy. The genius of the left in the '60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itslef with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of American's moral legitimacy. The left, not the right - not conservatism - would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.</blockquote>
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Peter Wood & David Randall in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-bad-is-the-governments-science-1523915765" target="_blank">How Bad Is the Government's Science?</a>.
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<blockquote>
For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them. Further from the spotlight is a lot of equally flawed research that is often more consequential. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 "landmark" studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medican treatment on the rest?</blockquote>
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Frank Pasquale in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/05/tech-platforms-and-the-knowledge-problem/" target="_blank">Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem</a>.
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<blockquote>
Friedrich von Hayek, the preeminent theorist of laissez-faire, called the "knowledge problem" an insuperable barrier to central planning. Knowledge about the price of supplies and labor, and consumers' ability and willingness to pay, is so scattered and protean that even the wisest authorities cannot access all of it. No person knows everything about how goods and services in an economy should be priced. No central decision-maker can grasp the idiosyncratic preferences, values, and purchasing power of millions of individuals. That kind of knowledge, Hayek said, is <i>distributed</i>. In an era of artificial intelligence and mass surveillance, however, the possibility of central planning has reemerged - this time in the form of massive firms.</blockquote>
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Alberto Mingardi in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-feeds-big-government-isnt-only-ideology-11549324944" target="_blank">What Feeds Big Government Isn't Only Ideology</a>.
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<blockquote>
Redistribution, Jasay maintained, is "addictive." The moment government starts giving out goodies, the mechanisms undergirding society and the economy change. Corporations and interest groups have a new incentive to work to win the state's favor. So businesses tend to shift resources and attention from engineers to lawyers, from serving customers to capturing decision makers. "The greater the reach of the state, the greater is the scope for profiting from its commands," Jasay wrote.</blockquote>
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Benjamin Schwarz at spiked-online.com, <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/marxists-against-wokeness/" target="_blank">Marxists Against Wokeness</a>.
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<blockquote>
In their discussions of cultural life and of societal trends, the organs of American educated opinion (the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, et al.); the faculty and students at our elite prep schools, colleges, and universities; and the members of the metropolitan class who read those publications and emerge from those institutions, frequently and increasingly assert, rather than argue, a set of vaguely interlocking propositions and slogans concerning (I’ll spare the scare quotes) white privilege, social justice, systemic racism, diversity, inclusivity, microaggressions, and the intellectual and cultural heritage — irrelevant at best, baneful at worst — of dead white males. Although both the champions and critics of these propositions characterise them (and the attendant attitudinising) as ‘political’, they are nothing of the sort. They are merely gestural. Lacking subtlety and depth, they amount to the intoning of shibboleths unsupported by reasoned, detailed, systematic analysis and argument. An orthodoxy has taken hold of intellectual, cultural and academic life, an orthodoxy nurtured and protected by an overweening and aggressive sense of virtue and righteous aggrievement that permits it to go unchallenged by the scepticism and bracing scrutiny that used to characterise — in fact to define — intellectual, cultural and academic life.</blockquote>
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Michael Lind in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-democracy-from-the-managerial-elite-11578672945" target="_blank">Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite</a>.
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<blockquote>
The class divide is most visible in politics. Between 2010 and 2018, whites with a college degree fell from 40% to 29% of Republican voters; Democrats now win an overwhelming share of the country's most highly educated counties. Similarly, in predicting a vote for Brexit in the U.K. in 2016, lower educational attainment was more important than race or ethnicity. Unwilling to admit that the center-left has been largely captured by the managerial elite, many pundits and academics on the left insist that mindless bigotry, rather than class interests, explains the attraction of many working-class voters to populist parties that promise to restrict trade and immigration. But it is just a rational for workers to prefer a seller's market in labor as it is for employers to prefer a buyer's market in labor.</blockquote>
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Matthew Crawford in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, <a href="https://hedgehogreview.com/blog/thr/posts/privilege" target="_blank">Privilege</a>.
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<blockquote>
Under the ancien régime, ennobled families were granted privilege in the literal sense; that is, they answered to a different set of laws (privy: private, leges: laws). In particular, they were exempt from taxation. Making matters worse, one could buy into this arrangement through the purchase of “venal offices,” which granted one the same immunities. One might become an inspector of cheeses, for example. It really was that ridiculous. Such positions proliferated as the fiscal crisis of the 1780s deepened; the sale of offices was a way for the crown to finance its present needs through the sacrifice of future tax revenue. Those who purchased offices were entered, along with their descendants, into the lists of noble families, permanently exempt from the tax burden. Meanwhile, one of many forms of taxation that peasants were subject to was the corvée (literally, “drudgery”): The men of a village would be rounded up to perform some public works project such as the building of a road, and for whatever reason this tended to happen during the harvest, just when their labor was most needed at home. It was a bitter injustice. Obviously, the whole system of privilege was parasitical. It was also quite different from what we mean today when we speak of privilege. According to current usage, it means something like good fortune.</blockquote>
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Alex Perez in Tablet, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/300925/philip-roth-and-american-manhood" target="_blank">Philip Roth and American Manhood</a>.
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<blockquote>
I read Roth and Carver and the rest of the problematic male crew because, above all other contemporary classifications, I identify as a man. The fact that I was born to Cuban parents and live in a predominately Hispanic community has always been secondary to my maleness, which is why I so strongly connected and continue to connect with unabashedly masculine writers who tackle classically heterosexual male concerns. Questions of creed or color were never at the forefront for me, because to be a young man, for better or worse, is to be ruled by your manhood, which is why my main concerns as a reader and a writer have always been boyhood and manhood and all the permutations in between. It is this unabashed masculinity, and not whiteness, that my woke-reader friends find repellent, which explains their disgust at the mere mention of any of the great masculine writers. In their eyes, it is a great sin, no doubt, to be white, but to be a traditionally masculine man has seemingly trumped even whiteness as America’s greater cultural sickness. A white person afflicted by their terrible, repellent whiteness might possibly even be rehabilitated, but a masculine young man, irrespective of race, is inherently toxic.</blockquote>
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Christopher DeMuth in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-revolt-of-the-somewheres-11551483212" target="_blank">Trump and the Revolt of the 'Somewheres'</a>.
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<blockquote>
The most educated, articulate, mobile and networked are well-positioned to influence the administrative state and the judiciary. They focus not on their own congressmen but on the agencies, and legislators from wherever, that specialize in the issues they follow. They think that policy should be determined by reason, science and expertise rdather than legislative horse-trading and nose-counting. They themselves work in meritocracies - business, finance, the professions, universities, media and think tanks. Meritocracy, not democracy, justifies their power and the means by which they exercise it.</blockquote>
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Kevin Roose in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/automation-davos-world-economic-forum.html" target="_blank">The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite</a>.
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<blockquote>
In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology — and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation. But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.</blockquote>
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Steve Sailer at takimag.com, <a href="https://www.takimag.com/article/civil-rights-gone-wrong/" target="_blank">Civil Rights Gone Wrong</a>.
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<blockquote>
This is not to imply that Caldwell wants to go back to Jim Crow, just that, much as Burke did a better job in 1790 of forecasting the course of the French Revolution, he finds that the old Southern critics of the new order foresaw the implications of the civil rights revolution more clearly than did its advocates: Those who opposed the legislation proved wiser about its consequences than those who sponsored it…. A measure that had been intended to normalize American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination has instead wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence. Thus, by 2020: In the prevailing culture, whiteness was a lower spiritual state, associated with moral unfitness and shame, and it was hereditary. Whiteness was a “bloody heirloom,” as [Ta-Nehisi] Coates wrote….
Caldwell summarizes his thesis: …what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more. The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible…. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail.... The author notes that the two parties now consisted of the winners (Democrats) and losers (Republicans) from the new quasi-constitution imposed in the 1960s: The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers—and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary…. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities.
In contrast: Republicans were the party…of yesterday’s entire political spectrum, of New Deal supporters and New Deal foes….</blockquote>
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Sadanand Dhume in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-ethnic-quotas-are-a-cautionary-tale-11548375194" target="_blank">India's Ethnic Quotas Are a Cautionary Tale</a>.
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<blockquote>
Supporters of reservation point to the progress India has made in fighting caste discrimination. Parliament long ago outlawed discrimination against Dalits. Two of them have served as president, including the incumbent, Ram Nath Kovind. Dalit leader Mayawati has served four times as chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. So-called upper castes have largely surrendered their grip on political power. In social terms, urbanization has dissolved much day-to-day discrimination. In a city, nobody knows the caste of the person sitting beside him on a bus or serving him at a restaurant. And Hindu temples no longer bar Dalits from entering. Yet if the goal was to erase caste divisions in public life, India has failed spectacularly. Flip open a newspaper and you’ll see analysts judging the coming elections less in terms of policies than of caste combinations. In places such as Bihar’s Patna University even dormitories are organized along caste lines—not by the administration, but by students themselves. As the joke goes, Indians don’t cast their votes. They vote their caste.</blockquote>
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Robert Tombs in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6ee0d1a6-42a0-11ea-9a2a-98980971c1ff" target="_blank">The 'Damn Fools' Got It Right on Brexit</a>.
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<blockquote>
Project fear talked up disaster so flamboyantly that almost anything will be an anticlimax. There may be some short-term disturbance. But Brexit is economically rational. The share of Britain’s exports accounted for by the EU fell by 11 percentage points between 2006 and 2016. The EU single market gives us limited help — especially in services — and may be harming our external trade by imposing high levels of regulation and cost. A rational aim would be “frictionless trade” with as much of the world as possible, not only with the EU. Remainer predominance in business lobbies clearly did not represent either the interests or the opinions of business as a whole. As Lord Melbourne once observed, on some questions the clever fellows get it wrong and the damn fools get it right. This is one of them.</blockquote>
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Mary O'Grady in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-n-and-human-trafficking-11580071750" target="_blank">The U.N. and Human Trafficking</a>.
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<blockquote>
In a 2018 class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Miami, Dr. Matos Rodriguez and three other Cuban doctors claim that 85% of the money went to Havana via the Pan American Health Organization, or PAHO, which acted as the go-between. By gaining PAHO’s cooperation, Brazil’s then-President Dilma Rousseff was able to conceal the illegal arrangement from the Brazilian Congress, other federal institutions and the international community, the suit alleges. PAHO is a United Nations outfit, and member countries pay its annual budget, with the U.S. providing more than half. But the lawsuit claims that in its secret agreement with Cuba, the organization was also taking a 5% cut of the doctors’ salaries as they passed through Washington.</blockquote>
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Jose de Cordoba & Juan Montes in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-of-civilization-in-mexico-250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374" target="_blank">Mexico's 'Crisis of Civilization': 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing</a>.
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<blockquote>
Her son, who sold CDs by a gas station, was kidnapped in 2014. Three years later to the day, she and the other mothers of the search group dug up his remains. “I felt his presence,” she said, remembering the day and breaking out in tears. “I wanted to find him alive, but at least I found him.” Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure. Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher. The killing and the number of missing grow each year. Last year, 5,500 people disappeared, up from 3,400 in 2015. Mexico’s murders are up another 18% through September this year.</blockquote>
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Robin Harding in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/78c9d0f4-08d7-11e9-9fe8-acdb36967cfc" target="_blank">Abe Attacked over Japan's 'Stealth Immigration' Policy</a>.
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<blockquote>
Mr Tamaki’s comments add to growing controversy over immigration in Japan as policymakers have been under pressure to open up to migrants in a country that has long been homogenous and closed. The population of foreign workers in Japan has soared in recent years — up 18 per cent in 2017 to 1.28m — but the majority are students or “trainees” whose visas make it impossible to stay in the country for the long term.Mr Tamaki called for measures to provide Japanese language training, limit migration if it threatens employment for native workers and to guarantee that migrants receive the same pay and conditions as natives.“It’d be better to admit up front this is immigration, follow a sensible immigration policy, and avoid the kind of problems we’ve seen in Europe and the US,” he said.</blockquote>
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Filipe Fernandez-Armesto in WSJ on <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-fistful-of-shells-review-buyers-sellers-and-rulers-11582071693" target="_blank">A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green</a>.
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyNkkln_eFPQDPqXTS0Fblq5WfJY4BvTLiVGh5Yi-Z1DeMsWY3rfOpmx0lG-1eHu0Q8NRhK7C330CgXH01fCmvsihzM1PWW1sc_wrar_s14Vv1pqQJ2EFsTcfYX2hn0bblZKeerjm06Cgm/s1600/NV-156-AFistfulofShells.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyNkkln_eFPQDPqXTS0Fblq5WfJY4BvTLiVGh5Yi-Z1DeMsWY3rfOpmx0lG-1eHu0Q8NRhK7C330CgXH01fCmvsihzM1PWW1sc_wrar_s14Vv1pqQJ2EFsTcfYX2hn0bblZKeerjm06Cgm/s1600/NV-156-AFistfulofShells.jpg" /></a>Mr. Green helps us understand how the value of indigenous capital dwindled. West <br />
Africa "lost out in the accrual of surplus value," he writes, glutted with Luandan shell-currency and Brazilian gold, while "enslaved persons became money." Instead of enriching African economies, monetization and trade favored "inequality" on local and global scales. The same processes help explain, as Mr. Green argues, the eclipse of native polities, facilitating European colonialism and even prefiguring Africans' "suspicion" of centralized states today.</blockquote>
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Alex Colville in SPECTATOR on <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/lost-cities-in-the-sands" target="_blank">The Golden Rhinoceros - Histories of the African Middle Ages by Francois-Xavier Faiuvelle</a>.
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<blockquote>
He places the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the story, as a rude interruption of what was in fact a golden age of African civilization. But even if Fort Jesus and other imperial relics linger on, little remains today to show what had made the Portuguese covet Mombasa so much in the first place. Long vanished are the palaces and mosques built entirely of coral which attracted merchants from across the Indian Ocean, swapping Persian spices, Venetian glass and Chinese porcelain for the gold and slaves which mysteriously arrived from the continent's interior.</blockquote>
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Gunther Orth at qantara.de on <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/burkhard-hofmanns-and-god-created-fear-a-psychogram-of-the-arab-soul" target="_blank">And God Created Fear - A Psychogram of the Arab Soul by Burkhard Hofmann</a>.
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<blockquote>
A phenomenon that is widespread in the Gulf countries is, for example, what the author refers to as "Nanny syndrome": parents delegate the care of their small children to nannies, who themselves are suffering as a result of the separation from the children they have left behind in their native countries. This prevents them from being able to offer any emotional closeness. As a result, economic dependency generates "life-conditioning feelings of isolation in both mothers and their children on both sides of the Indian Ocean". The resulting "weak self fails when confronted with reality" in adult years. However, even in those cases where the mother is available, children often lack a close relationship with their father, either because he is rarely at home or because he has entered into a second marriage – another trauma that Hofmann frequently encounters in his patients. According to Hofmann, in many cases, the Arab father feels that his only duty as a parent is to introduce his son to the Muslim faith, thereby referring him to "the image of a distance God", only to then turn away emotionally from the child once again. In this way, a close relationship with the father remains an unfulfilled desire. In addition, the religious taboo of children rebelling against their parents ensures that those individuals who do tend to blame themselves, or to hate those who have been lucky enough to experience such affection.</blockquote>
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James Robins in SPECTATOR on <a href="https://spectator.us/author/james-robins/" target="_blank">The Thirty-Year Genocide - Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924</a>.
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<blockquote>
An impenetrable cultish mythos envelops him. Even for Istanbul’s young cosmopolitans, any word against Kemal spurs a visceral reaction. Recep Erdogan, the current president, whose politics are anathema to Kemalist ideology, still has to invoke him for the purposes of propaganda. To an American intelligence officer who met the man in the fraught summer of 1921, however, Kemal was a ‘clever, ugly customer,’ with the look of ‘a very superior waiter’.
It’s little wonder that an American would view Kemal in such a way. His nationalist movement was waging a quasi-guerrilla insurgency against the victors of the first world war, who sought to carve up the moribund, defeated Ottoman empire. In the process, Kemal completed what his predecessors had already begun: the definitive slaughter and removal of the empire’s remaining Christian population: Pontic and Ionian Greeks, Assyrians and, of course, Armenians. In their expansive and detailed new volume The Thirty-Year Genocide the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi depart from well-established accounts of the Armenian genocide which often consign earlier and later frenzies of slaying to introductions and conclusions. They roll three crimes into one. First, the Hamidian Terror (1894–96) under the sclerotic rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Secondly, the obliteration carried out by the formerly liberal Committee of Union and Progress (1914–18). And finally, the Kemalist ‘cleansing’ campaigns during and after the war of independence (1919–24).</blockquote>
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Adam Phillips in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n20/adam-phillips/in-a-garden-in-milan" target="_blank">Confessions - A New Translations by Augustine</a>.
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The perplexities of male adolscence, its urgencies and its ecstasies, are what makes Augustine's transformation into a man of God at once so confounding and so inevitable. He knew what he was giving up, and could acknowledge how little he could know about what he was giving it up for; and it is clearly this drama of faith, its improbable necessity, that gets to him. In the secular language of appetite and gratification that... <i>Confessions</i> plays on, and that can make <i>Confessions</i> sound so contemporary, the true struggle is to find a satisfactrory object of desire: to find the right thing to want and the right way of wanting it.</blockquote>
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Christopher Kelly in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n04/christopher-kelly/a-shocking-story" target="_blank">The Last Pagan Emperor - Julian the Apostate and the War Against Christianity</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnfclO4JocRe5BI9ruPw81-fyKN_rhCjMfIJusxaMeg5P8AswRXlvAiGgekNjmBHt1LE7_t_nLfay7UloATVOkRq_5FQ5JKhvhOUQQkRB13fW1I_KWdCxwNM0unjh-wwgqoLOe4dwhV9M_/s1600/NV-156-The+LastPaganEmperor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnfclO4JocRe5BI9ruPw81-fyKN_rhCjMfIJusxaMeg5P8AswRXlvAiGgekNjmBHt1LE7_t_nLfay7UloATVOkRq_5FQ5JKhvhOUQQkRB13fW1I_KWdCxwNM0unjh-wwgqoLOe4dwhV9M_/s1600/NV-156-The+LastPaganEmperor.jpg" /></a>Above all, Julian set out to theologise paganism. He offered (to take one example) the <br />
following explanation of the relationship between Helios and the Supreme Deity: the One who 'reveals to all existence, beauty, perfection, wholeness and irresistible power, because of the primal substance that abides in it, produced... Helios the most mighty god, proceeding from itself and in all things like unto itself.' This exegesis runs parallel to the formulations developed by three hundred Christian bishops convened, at the prompting of the emperor Constantine, in 325 at Nicea (modern Iznik, just south of Istanbul). Their propositions were crystallized in the Nicene Creed, which remains the cornerstone of Christian belief....</blockquote>
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue</b>
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<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/1/13/21063510/maceo-woods-dead-chicago-minister-gospel-music-organist-choir-leader-composer-obituary" target="_blank">Maceo Woods</a> (1932-2020)
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His breakthrough came in the mid-1950s with his recording of “Amazing Grace” on Vee-Jay Records, where he became a house organist. “‘Amazing Grace’ went on to become the best-selling gospel instrumental of all time, reportedly selling 200,000 copies in its first year of release,” according to Robert M. Marovich, founder of the Journal of Gospel Music, host of the WLUW radio show “Gospel Memories” and author of “A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9YeqQ8NGyk" target="_blank"> “Amazing Grace”</a> continues to sell, as do other classics by his choir, such as “Jesus Can Work it Out,” and “Hello Sunshine.” “His music has no expiration date,” said WVON radio host Pam Morris-Walton. Pastor Woods, whose church is at 47th and Prairie, shared friendships and concert stages with legends who made Chicago a center of gospel, including the Barrett Sisters, the Caravans, the Rev. James Cleveland, the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson. He appeared at the Apollo Theater and Madison Square Garden.</blockquote>
<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/11/27/20986170/rev-clay-evans-civil-rights-leader-evangelical-broadcaster-gospel-icon-dies-obituary" target="_blank">Clay Evans</a> (1925-2019)
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“When Dr. King decided to use Chicago as a northern expansion of the civil rights movement, Rev. Clay Evans had to endure some political fallout” for his support, said funeral director Spencer Leak Sr. “The word had gone out [from City Hall] that ministers should not invite Dr. King to their churches.” Rev. Evans embraced him and worked with him, and as a result, it became difficult for him to get construction work done on his church, Leak said. Code violations were alleged, and “Building permits were very difficult to obtain because of his support for Dr. King,” he said. In 1964, the pastor and Leak’s father, A.R. Leak, helped lead a march of thousands to desegregate racially divided Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side. Over the years, countless politicians visited his church to speak to the congregation and cultivate voters. In 1995, Daley’s son, Richard M. Daley, received key support when Rev. Evans backed his mayoral reelection bid over an African American candidate, Joseph E. Gardner. “He migrated to Chicago in June 1945, at age 20, with plans to be an undertaker, but he could not afford the tuition fee to attend mortuary school,” said Marovich, author of “A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.” “Instead, he worked at a pickle factory, as a window-washer, as a pie truck driver, then found work at the Brass Rail, a local lounge, and dreamed of a future as a big band singer.” He sang with various church choirs and wrote gospel songs, including “By and By,” a 1950s hit for the Davis Sisters, according to Marovich, host of the Gospel Memories radio show on WLUW 88.7 FM. After founding his church, Rev. Evans performed on many of his choir’s records.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/music/steve-weber-dead.html?fbclid=IwAR08n5BsiQm7MhTr7cDxlBv9_kNYMpUL8VORPt4oL1hQ0g5EiaW-iMGnwTs" target="_blank">Steve Weber</a> (1942-2020)
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Steven P. Weber was born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1943, and grew up with his mother in Buckingham, Pa. There he met Robin Remaily, who would become a longtime member of the Holy Modal Rounders, and Michael Hurley, a singer-songwriter and illustrator who would also have a long association with the group. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
“The Holy Modal Rounders … Bound to Lose,” a 2006 documentary by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace, portrays Mr. Weber’s time on the West Coast, starting in the early 1970s, as being plagued by drug and alcohol abuse. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Weber said in the film, he had decided to return home to Pennsylvania after waking up to find himself cradling a half-gallon bottle of vodka. Mr. Weber and Mr. Stampfel performed in 1996 at the Bottom Line in New York, which kicked off a series of reunion appearances and led to a new album, “Too Much Fun,” in 1999. But the film captures the two men still bickering onstage and in strained rehearsals, and it ends with Mr. Weber failing to appear at a 40th-anniversary show in 2003. Mr. Stampfel said he had not spoken to him since. In “Always in Trouble,” the book about the ESP label, Mr. Weber said he had failed to appear because he had felt deceived by the filmmakers and disappointed that the film paid so little attention to the Portland incarnation of the Holy Modal Rounders that he led starting in the early 1970s. He was asked what made the Holy Modal Rounders different from other folk groups. He noted that other musicians were interested in singing about social reform. “We took more of a raucous and zany detour,” he said.</blockquote>
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Thanks to Joseph Pope, Steve Beeho, Mark Carducci, Mike Carducci, Andy Schwartz, Roger Trilling, Jane Schuman...
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<br />JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-78049374470358927782018-04-18T07:23:00.000-07:002018-04-18T19:27:42.324-07:00Issue #155 (April 17, 2018)<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bald Mountain</span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<b>SSTs – Electronics & Records</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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SST Electronics was Greg Ginn’s original business, though it may have grown out of his publishing a ham radio fanzine, <i>The Novice</i>, that he must’ve been doing in junior high! Greg built and sold antenna tuners based on his own patents to ham radio operators world-wide. Sales increased through advertising and a distributor in Ohio (if I recall). Greg’s electronics mentor retired and turned over his mailing address, P.O. Box 1, Lawndale to him. And Greg began to rent a number of early offices around Hermosa Beach. The beginnings of Black Flag included a songwriting period which included Greg’s brother Raymond on bass and probably took place at their parents’ house on the 1200 block of 21st St. SST Electronics required assemblers of the merchandise – soldering tuners’ circuitry and putting them into stock housings. In the period after I arrived (Sept. 1981) Greg told me he’d learned that if his crew had pot to smoke they seemed to focus better on getting the units soldered and ordered filled. But I was glad the band was then in something of a pot-smoking hiatus. Mugger told me Greg figured I smoked and had prepared them for my expected arrival trailing clouds of contact high.<br />
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Over all these early addresses the Ginn family’s house was central to the enterprises. I’m told the Mrs., Oie Ginn, died last October; her husband Regis died in 2005. They met in London during the war; he was U.S. 8th Army Air Corps and she a refugee from Soviet-occupied Estonia. They both hated Russians! You can read more about them in Henry Rollins’ <i>Get In the Van</i>, my <i>Enter Naomi</i>, and other literature on their sons Gregory and Raymond; the Ginns weren’t people you forget. It was no bed of roses for them but I think they liked most of us even as we traipsed through their living room or crashed there more often than ideal. They served in <i>My War</i> too.<br />
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Gigs and tours and recording aside, here’s where it mostly happened:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">1215 Manhattan Ave., Hermosa Beach</span></td></tr>
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<b>SST Records</b> addresses, plus satellite offices – years approximate:<br />
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<b>1603 Aviation Blvd, Hermosa Beach – 1977-78</b><br />
One space in this building was the practice pad for the band, then called Panic, in 1977. They played their first sets here for friends. It was not far from Keith Morris’ dad’s fishing supplies store, Jerry’s Tackle Box, south on the other side of Aviation. Panic recorded the “Nervous Breakdown” ep in Dec. 1977-Jan. 1978 at Media Art in Hermosa Beach.<br />
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<b>1215 Manhattan Ave, Hermosa Beach – 1978-79</b><br />
This was the Creative Craft Center, aka The Church. Now the Abigaile Restaurant stands on the lot. Black Flag with Raymond, Spot, and Medea were filmed here for “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981). More Black Flag’s practice and crash-pad, then SST Records office, still some SST Electronics soldering may have gone on here. Mostly practicing, songwriting, gigging and finding/founding a scene that now included The Last, Red Cross and The Descendents. The Last had released their first 45 and sent Black Flag to Virco in Alhambra to press “Nervous Breakdown”. Having a record meant they had an easier time playing around LA and beyond; they played San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego and then touring their way up to Vancouver and back at the end of 1979.<br />
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<b>157 Pier Ave, Hermosa Beach – 1978-79</b><br />
In what is now Java Man coffeehouse, Greg & Medea lived and SST tuners were assembled by Mugger and others around the band. It is south of where The Church stood, across a parking lot.
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<i>I had given up on Hollywood in 1977 and moved to Portland where I was soon helping turn an import record shop into an independent record distributor. In 1979 I saw SST’s ad in Slash magazine for the Black Flag record and I wrote for a sample. We moved Systematic Record Distribution down to Berkeley, California at the end of 1979 and by the time the “Nervous Breakdown” copy was forwarded to us and I wrote to order copies they had sold out the first pressing, as well as a follow-up run. Today one sees municipal touting of Hermosa Beach’s punk heritage but back as the scene coalesced around The Church, Hermosa’s city fathers set its finest against its worst and the punks were kicked out of The Church and warned to stay out of town. The first Black Flag touring van wound up with one of the Ginn girls and whenever her husband used it to haul anything he told me he’d be pulled over by any Hermosa policeman who caught sight of it.</i></blockquote>
<b>1409 Sartori Ave, Torrance – 1980-81</b><br />
This business address in downtown Torrance was the SST office (and Black Flag practice pad) that was more Record company than Electronics office. Soldering tuners was still going on but now the band was played by Rodney Bingenheimer on KROQ, they recorded and released “Jealous Again”, and Minutemen’s debut ep “Paranoid Time”. They were getting known and cutting figures in Torrance, where I’m guessing the muff began to flow more seriously. In Hermosa it was the looks of the scene so close to the beach and tourism that alarmed. Here in Torrance it was the stream of high school girls hanging out at SST that inspired the cops to pose as winos in the alley behind SST looking for a pretext. The distributor Jem up in Reseda told Greg that the Torrance PD had come in right after he’d delivered records and went through the boxes expecting to find drugs. The last real manufacturing of SST Electronics occurred here with Minutemen joining that work crew. I was ordering records regularly from SST by late 1980 and I happened to call down one day in spring 1981 while the Torrance Police Dept. was raiding this office. The band had just left for their second tour east. Spot answered the phone laughing strangely, but wouldn’t say anything to me except, “I don’t know…”, finally he handed the phone to Mike Watt who told me the cops were ransacking the place looking for drugs.
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<i>Kicked out of Torrance while on the east coast, there was suddenly no SST office all through Summer 1981. I was in Chicago and saw Black Flag play Tut’s on July 15. It was one of the last gigs with Dez on vocals; Henry was travelling back to LA with them to become the new singer. I offered to come down to LA and run their office at this gig; Greg laughed and said they didn’t really have an office to run but he was interested in the idea. The band stayed at what was called the Oxford house in Koreatown and Chuck did phone business outside at a bank of three payphones. In these years Spot was often moving a growing vault-full of multi-track and two-track master tapes from one place to another; I think he finally stowed them at his parents' house in Crenshaw until he moved to Austin.</i></blockquote>
<b>8611 Santa Monica Blvd -rear, West Hollywood – Aug. 1981-Mar. 1982</b><br />
Spot’s job in addition to recording bands at Media Art and doing live sound at gigs and on tour, was to figure out mastering and pressing issues. When Media Art closed in May 1981 (The Stains was the last thing done there) Spot canvassed other studios in LA and found Unicorn. It was a studio and a label with some empty offices to rent as well. The convenience overruled a certain weirdness factor. I came down to SST here in September 1981; we all slept on the floors and could walk up to the Sunset Strip clubs and Tower Records. “Damaged”, “Meat Puppets”, “TV Party” 45, the instrument tracks for Overkill’s “Triumph of the Will”, and the Frazier Smith-Black Flag interview promotional album were recorded at Unicorn in late 1981 thru March 1982. Unicorn moved to Santa Monica in March and although Black Flag and Saccharine Trust practiced in that building briefly and a party or two occurred there, SST never did business out of there.<br />
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<b>1900 Phelan Ave, Redondo Beach – Mar. 1982-84</b><br />
This space was one room with a bathroom/shower. It had been rented by Greg or his brother-in-law or parents to store Greg’s electronics supplies. SST Electronics was still nominally in business but there was no energy put into it. Mugger had moved me down to LA from Berkeley and we loaded my few possessions, mostly a record collection, into this space. So when we left Unicorn due to the gathering weirdness we organized this small room into the new SST. I was glad to get out of West Hollywood and down to the south bay and see Black Flag’s old stomping grounds. For awhile it was crowded but the band toured all year and into 1983 on “Damaged”. Spot left the tour and moved in. That was good since he found that one of the Media Art guys had opened Total Access Studio in Redondo Beach. Naomi Petersen became our label photographer here and Mugger left the tour crew, started taking night courses in business and changed the checking account from SST Electronics to SST Records. Once with just Davo and myself at the place Greg’s old girlfriend Medea crashlanded with her boyfriend for about a week; that sure broke up the monotony of putting out great records. Greg and his parents figured out a way to move them to Cleveland which almost worked – they got back up to Hollywood anyway, and before the Redondo PD identified her on the street and traced her to us. Greg decided to sell the SST Electronics materials and rights to his distributor but he couldn’t spend the time to organize it so the manufacturing could be transferred and the sale fell through. The only soldering I ever saw was Greg soldering his live guitar’s electronics after a stage-diver tripped and pulled the chord-jack out mid-set; the band improvised while Greg’s soldering made noise as he repaired it.
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2612 Artesia Blvd -rear, Redondo Beach – 1983-1986
Global 1, I’d forgotten that Raymond had found a small office in this building first for use as a studio and as it was just a block away from SST-Phelan a nice two-story rear space became a satellite office up top for Chuck’s booking as well as a practice space below. Black Flag’s road crew, Davo Claassen and Tom Troccoli were based here, and Jordan Schwartz did booking with Chuck. Black Flag played a lot, but Gone, Dog, Slovenly, and others practiced here too. Dave Rat built a PA system for touring and so he was around here too methinks. SST Publications and the Global scene crowded Raymond out of his own studio. I think the booking and tour pr and maybe Nixon Management was moved into this “annex” and Naomi Petersen became a full-time employee here in early 1986.</blockquote>
<b>2414 Ralston Ln -rear, Redondo Beach – 1984</b><br />
This was a small garage apartment behind Greg’s sister Linda Flynn's house. We stored records in the garage itself; the SST catalog was expanding and forcing us to move often. Mugger was in charge of finding what we needed and SST’s cash-flow independent of Black Flag’s gig revenue was just beginning to amount to something. SST was here for just a few months during which I stayed at the Ginns’ house on 21st St., but then I moved into this garage apartment when SST was off to Lawndale. (There's nothing to see here so please don't bother whoever is now living in this house!)<br />
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<b>14147 Hawthorne Blvd, Lawndale – 1984</b><br />
This office in a small plaza was where we added merchandise and employees – Jeannine Garfias took over the expanded mail order and Mike Watt worked retail promo on the phone as “Spaceman.” When he had big promotional mailings to go out you could find D. Boon, Tom Troccoli and Dave Claassen come by for a day. The video for Minutemen’s cover of The Urinals’ “Ack Ack Ack” was shot here by John Talley-Jones when we vacated to move on to the next place.<br />
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<b>13209 S. Inglewood Ave, Hawthorne – 1985-86</b><br />
When Mugger found this place I didn’t think SST would ever have to move again. It had a loading dock or maybe it was a drive in warehouse plus a big open office space and even a foyer. Staff adds were Ray Farrell, Linda Trudnich, and the new Spaceman, Mike Whittaker (Minutemen could now tour so Mike and D. weren’t around the office as much). Mugger picked up day-laborers as needed and I think he settled on a couple dependable guys who were our warehousemen – they didn’t speak a word of English. The label was running smoothly although our distributors all started labels that were looking for imitation SST bands when they weren’t snooping around the real things. I left SST here in March 1986. Rich Ford took over the manufacturing end of things when I was last assigning catalog numbers in the SST 080s I think, and Kara Nicks took over the mail order on Jeannine’s recommendation after the accident that killed D. Boon. Kara describes Raymond coming over one day and removing artwork intended for use on Black Flag’s “Who’s Got the 10½?” and the “Annihilate the Week” ep covers. I’m glad I missed that.
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2401 Torrance Blvd, Torrance – 1986-87
The Global crew moved to this office probably in late 86. We’d been doing printing, typesetting, photo lab work in the south bay again for a few years so the various police departments mellowed out a bit on Black Flag activities, plus the band was done as of August 1986.</blockquote>
<b>21176 Alameda St, Carson – 1987-1992</b><br />
Mugger found this even bigger complex and moved both SST and Global offices together. We probably shouldn’t have separated them but it was hard to give up the Phelan office with its shower and $150/month rent. There were some additional staff added but everyone was here but me now. I visited once when I came back to produce the final SST release by Saint Vitus, “Mournful Cries”. Later on people began to leave or be weeded out in the parlance.<br />
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<b>10500 Humbolt St, Los Alamitos – 1993-96</b><br />
Never saw this place but on Google-satellite it looks huge; SST was probably releasing catalog numbers in the SST 300s. I think Mugger was gone so was no longer piloting the logistics of SST’s needs.<br />
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<b>441 E. 4th St, Long Beach – 1996-2007</b><br />
Greg bought this enormous building w/ parking lot across street at the real estate bottom. When he sold it ten years later he probably made more than SST cumulative had in total through its history. For a short period he and Chuck ran the Idea Room club in addition to the label and the Casa Destroy recording studio. I know very little about this place but I did go by there twice, once with filmmaker Jim Sikora who had made music videos for Greg Ginn solo tunes which don’t appear to be up on youtube. Chuck let us in and we were talking but when Greg came by he didn’t acknowledge my presence except to shake his head as he walked past. The other time with Mugger out of curiosity but it was all locked up. I think that Greg recorded some with Jack Brewer and Keith Morris here. The label was in the building but understaffed and just tending to catalog unless Greg had something to release.<br />
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<b>406 Talbot St, Taylor TX – 2008-present</b><br />
Another huge building, part warehouse, part studio, part practice-pad, part crash-pad. I gather Greg had custody of his daughters for awhile here. Records have been released from here, CDs anyway, and the mail order and distribution functions somehow.<br />
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Ancillary addresses of note, years approximate:<br />
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1201 The Strand, Hermosa Beach – 1976-78
The Würm-hole. At the Hermosa Pier, west of the Strand were some derelict buildings since replaced by the county’s Southern Section Lifeguard station which gives 1201 The Strand as an address. Chuck’s pre-Black Flag band, Würm, lived and practiced in the old Bathhouse section rent-free; now there’s the definition of a Golden Age, sleazing by at the beach.<br />
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8847 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood – 1992-1994
The SST Superstore. This was on the Sunset Strip. The Germs’ Pat Smear and The Leaving Trains’ Falling James were clerks here. I went in there once but neither one was there to talk to. For the hell of it I bought the earliest SST 7” records on 3” CD format.<br />
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2485 Long Beach Blvd, Long Beach – 1988-89
Cruz Records had this separate office run by Greg with Craig Ibarra and Ron Coleman. This side-label (All, Skinyard, Big Drill Car, Chemical People…) then joined SST at the Carson address.<br />
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There’s some Hermosa Beach color in Keith Morris’ book, <i>My Damage</i>, and its the focus of this Keith feature, <a href="https://www.easyreadernews.com/wild-in-the-streets/" target="_blank"><i>Wild In the Streets</i></a>, put together in 2010 by Don Waller for the <i>Easy Reader.</i><br />
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<i>(Thanks for help in assembling this go to Chuck Dukowski, Spot, Jordan Schwartz, Keith Morris, Craig Ibarra and Mike Watt, and to Knocko Nolan for asking – he’s LAPD and swears Black Flag had fans in the department.)</i>
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<b>American Myths Violated & Realities Revealed: Photographs by SPOT</b><br />
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“Cornelius Projects is pleased to present American Myths Violated & Realities Revealed: Photographs by SPOT. The exhibition is from April 21–May 26, 2018 with an opening reception on Saturday, April 21 from 6–8:45 PM.<br />
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“Continue to celebrate the exhibition at Harold’s Place, 1908 S Pacific Ave, San Pedro, CA from 9 PM–12 AM, $5 at the door with live music by 2-Bit Whore (Steve Reed); The Farmers (featuring George Hurley); Los Olvidados Nig? Heist? (SPOT and Mugger); The Real Oh My (Mike Watt/Nick Reinhart/Bob Lee).
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“The son of a Tuskegee Airman from Monrovia, California and a Creole and Choctaw mother from New Orleans, SPOT (born Glen Lockett in 1951) came of age in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s when America was experiencing a cultural awakening and breakdown of societal, cultural and political legacies from Civil Rights to Watergate. Crossing cultural divides and armed with a camera, SPOT navigated disparate Southern California communities including West Adams, Hollywood and the South Bay. He focused his lens primarily on non-conformists from longhaired hippies, rock musicians, and roller skaters to the early 1980s punk music scene. SPOT’s images capture and expose in black and white the energy and social climates of Southern California’s offbeat subcultures with clarity and sense of belonging.</blockquote>
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“An accomplished musician and multi-instrumentalist, SPOT is best known for being the house producer and engineer for the punk record label SST Records. He recorded and produced most of SST’s pivotal acts between 1979 and 1985. He is credited on albums by such notable bands as Black Flag, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, St. Vitus, Descendents, Misfits, Big Boys and Dicks. In 2014 his book <i>Sounds of Two Eyes Opening: Southern Cali Punk/Surf/Skate Culture 69-82, Photographs by Spot</i> was published by Sinecure Books.</blockquote>
“A conversation with SPOT and fellow Punk Rock instigators including Joe Carducci, Mugger and Steve Reed is planned for Saturday, April 28 from 7–9 PM.<br />
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“Following the opening reception on Saturday, April 21 from 6–8:45 PM, Cornelius Projects will be open Friday through Sunday from noon to 5 PM. A red flag flies outside our door when we are open. Appointments can also be made to view the exhibition by calling (310) 266-9216.”<br />
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Laurie Steelink
<a href="http://corneliusprojects.com/post/172628482188/american-myths-violated-realities-revealed" target="_blank">Cornelius Projects</a>
1417 South Pacific Avenue
San Pedro, California 90731
(310) 266-9216
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<block><i>I’ve written six screenplays since finishing my film book,</i> Stone Male<i>; three are Westerns. This second one I tried to simplify after the first became a historical epic. This one got mid-sized so I scaled down the third Western script to early Burt Kennedy/late Budd Boetticher territory. We’ll try to make that one but the other two remain available in this surely soon-to-be Western-crazy environment we live in. I’ve re-formatted this here so as to conserve cyberspace which I hear is rapidly filling up just as the frontier did.</i></block>
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<b>THE MOJAVE DOLLARCOAT</b><br />
Joe Carducci
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Close up: The eastern horizon brightens and the sun appears.
Dissolve to:
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EXTERIOR / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
Wide shot: The desert floor.
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Title: Mojave Desert, 1866
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EXT. / RUFE’S CAMPSITE 1 / DAY<br />
An old miner, RUFE, walks with his canteen in one hand and a smoke-stained coffee pot in the other. He sets the coffee pot down next to the fire. Then he sets the canteen by his pack and leads his donkey around the rock formation to the water hole. The donkey drinks and Rufe scans the horizon until he notices something around the rocks.
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Rufe looks over some bones that have been scattered around. He picks up one end of some denim pants and brushes off some dirt before hearing the clink of coins in a pocket. He shakes some silver coins out of the pocket and then drops the denim to study them before slipping the coins into his pocket. Rufe looks around in the dirt for other bones until he finds a discolored skull. He picks it up.
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<i>RUFE: There you are.</i><br />
Rufe blows some dirt off of it and inspects a cracked indent on the back and sets it on a nearby rock facing him.<br />
<i>RUFE: You’ll get more sun here, friend.</i><br />
Rufe walks back to his campsite. He sips coffee from a tin cup as he kicks dirt on the fire and stamps it out. His donkey eats at scrub grass. He pours more coffee into his cup and then makes his way up the nearby rock formation. Rufe sets his cup down and scans around the horizon as he catches his breath. He starts at seeing something in the distance.<br />
<i>RUFE: More company, damn it.</i><br />
Rufe squints into the distance.
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Close up, Telephoto: The approaching dust from several horsemen.
Rufe grabs his cup and carefully picks his way back down to his camp. Rufe has packed up his donkey and waits as the riders, including the SHERIFF, JACK the livery man, and three more TOWNSMEN lead their horses to the water hole. The SHERIFF nods and steps over to Rufe, glancing around as he speaks.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: I’m Sheriff Cobb Dunsing from Belleville...</i><br />
Rufe nods expectantly.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: You seen anybody out here? </i><br />
<i>RUFE: No, I seen one Mojave boy out on his spirit hunt. He was sucking on locoweed so he didn’t bother me. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: They’re not staying on the reservation, are they? But we’re looking for white men.</i><br />
Jack and some other Riders step over to listen.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: The Tuesday stage was robbed. </i><br />
<i>RUFE: I didn’t know I was close to Belleville. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well, you aren’t. We’re two days out and were heading back when we saw your smoke.<br />
RUFE: How many white men you looking for? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Three.</i><br />
Rufe nods at the other men.<br />
<i>JACK: Who are them bones over there, old-timer?</i><br />
The Sheriff looks surprised.<br />
<i>RUFE: Looks like a white man hit on the head, years ago, wouldn’t ya say? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: That sound right, Jack? </i><br />
<i>JACK: Yeah... </i><br />
<i>RUFE: I may not be that old. I just now set his skull out on that rock so... well it seemed right to do.<br />
SHERIFF: Can I ask you your name? </i><br />
<i>RUFE: I’m Rufe Maddon, Sheriff. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well, good luck to ya, Rufe.</i><br />
The Sheriff nods to Rufe, then turns back to his horse and the Riders all mount and leave. Rufe watches and then leads his donkey in the other direction.
Dissolve to:
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Pan: The wide desert valley.<br />
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EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Three white men, COLE the leader and two brothers DOUG and BOBBY, are on foot leading their horses down the far side of a mountain ridge. Loose stones clatter down ahead of them. They pull up and stop at a level patch to catch their breath.
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<i>COLE: Hold up...</i><br />
They stop and steady their horses on the flat.<br />
<i>COLE: Damn, I want to live to spend it! </i><br />
<i>DOUG: We made it. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: We’re safe, right Cole? </i><br />
<i>COLE: I don’t think they’ll follow us over that, Bobby.</i><br />
Cole takes an arrow in the chest and his eyes open wide before he falls over. The other two freeze momentarily and then bolt downhill leaving their horses. They knock loose more stones and rocks as they run and slide downhill toward the valley floor.
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Cut to:
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EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
Doug and Bobby are exhausted and fall to all fours. As the last stones roll down around them, five MOJAVE Indians step up around them. The Mojave wear long loinclothes over earth-colored clothes. The brothers look up but are too tired to run or resist. Anya’eely Hulla, BLACK MOON, leads this small band; he wears only the loincloth and his tattooed lines over his body show. He is only a few years older than the others but his authority requires them to regularly glance at him to confirm what they are doing. Black Moon leads the three horses down to the others. The dead body of Cole is laid across the saddle of the lead horse.
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<i>BLACK MOON: (Mojave: Take their clothes and send them away.) </i><br />
<i>MOJAVE 1: (Alive?) </i><br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (They will draw the white man.)</i><br />
The Mojave pull off the clothes of Doug and Bobby, punching them as they do. Black Moon pulls Cole’s body from the horse and lets it fall before his Men; they undress the corpse too. Black Moon inspects the pistols, ammunition belts, saddles and rolls while the others shout at now naked Doug and Bobby. Their faces and arms are tanned against the whiteness of the rest of their bodies. Doug and Bobby are reluctant at first but then run off around the edge of the rocks. The Mojave look through the saddle bags of the horses. Mojave 2 finds a small bible, some jewelry, a watch fob, and coins and shows these to Black Moon who nods to save them. The others inspect the pistols excitedly. Mojave 3 pulls out loose bundles of large new greenbacks, frowns at them and dumps them on the ground. Another Mojave fires off a gun into the air and then laughs to the others.
Cut to:
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Medium shot: Not far away Doug and Bobby react to the gunshot by dodging and running faster.
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EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Close up: Rufe has heard the distant gunshot and he cranes his neck as he steps out for a look, and listens for more.
Cut to:
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EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
The Mojave now wear the Thieves’ hats, gun-belts and other bits of clothing. The rest of their clothes are bundled over one horse and the horses are led away. Black Moon stays behind a moment and looks at the pile of newly printed currency on the ground and decides to pick up a handful of the bills. He stuffs those into a saddlebag and leaves the rest of the currency behind with Cole’s body.
Dissolve to:
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Wide pan: The desert at sunset.
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EXT. / BELLEVILLE / NIGHT<br />
The small frontier town is quiet and mostly dark but for one bar still lit by lanterns inside and out. The Sheriff’s Posse ride slowly into town exhausted. The Posse dismount, leaving their horses loose to find the water trough on their own. The men drag themselves into the saloon.
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Cut to:
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INT. / SALOON / NIGHT<br />
The BARTEND washing glasses and the BOY mopping the floor stop and come to the bar to hear what the Men have to say after days on the hunt.
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<i>BARTEND: Sheriff! </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Beer and more beer, Arch.</i><br />
The Men line up and lean heavily against the bar. The Boy helps the Bartender pour multiple beers for each of the men. The men at the bar are silent and down their first beers directly. As they catch their breath...<br />
<i>SHERIFF: They hit the rocks and we lost the trail one day out.</i><br />
They start on the second round and Bartend and Boy refill the first mugs. Then the Bartend waits for the Sheriff to lower his mug.<br />
<i>BARTEND: You gonna ask the Fort for help? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: No, they scrounged that company up from the gold-mine bust up north. Captain wouldn’t be able to keep his soldiers from stealing what they found. </i><br />
<i>BARTEND: (dryly) What about that oath they swear to?</i><br />
The Sheriff smiles.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Put these beers on paper for the city, Arch.</i><br />
The Bartend nods and pulls up a pad of paper to tote it up. Sheriff hoists another beer.
Fade to black.
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EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
Wide shot: At dawn reveille sounds in the distance, the Colorado River in the foreground, the fort to the east against brightening sky.
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The fort, set on a short wide mesa east of the river, includes barracks, officers’ quarters, livery barn, batterie and sutler’s store; it is open to the desert and looks over the nearby Colorado River. The makeshift PLATOON of about forty are in rough formation and dressed in a catchall of uniforms and work clothes at dawn for the raising of the flag; reveille ends. The Sutler, PERRIN, and the Indian Agent, Superintendant OLSON, stand on the store’s porch watching and sipping coffee. Perrin wears neat simple work clothes while Olson wears a suit. The Troop salutes almost as one and are dismissed by the SERGEANT. CAPTAIN Cooledge and LIEUTENANT Hayes walk to the office. The Indian scout, TUHUDDA, lingers behind the officers. Tuhudda is in his forties with deeply lined face and is dressed even less formally with his long black hair and bandana.
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Cut to:
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INT. / FORT'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Captain motions the Lieutenant to the easy chairs near the fireplace as a middle-aged Indian woman, AMALIA Gomez, brings a tray with a coffee pot and two cups to the table between them. Amalia pours each cup and then silently leaves the room for the back.
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<i>LIEUTENANT: Thank you, Captain.</i><br />
They sip their coffee a moment.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: So Lieutenant, how is the Sergeant doing pulling a construction detail together?<br />
LIEUTENANT: He expects he will have ten men with the skills to speed construction on the reservation.</i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Ten! We can hope. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: It’s a good bet those men who skipped out on the contractor robbed that stage. Do we assist and advise the Sheriff on that, Captain? </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: No just send a notice to the Sheriff about the missing men; he’ll understand. I don’t want to get involved at the reservation either, but we can’t move the Mojave onto it til its built.</i><br />
Captain pauses to sip coffee.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: (motions) And we have that Indian agent hanging around here! </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: His sutler’s more comfortable than his office, I guess. I’ll take him back with me today and we’ll see what the contractor will need. </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Good. And uh... pack up tents and a cook’s wagon so the men know they won’t be coming back til the job’s done. I want them desperate to get back here. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes sir. I’ll start on that requisition and have them ready to go tomorrow.</i><br />
The Lieutenant stands and Captain follows.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: And Lieutenant Hayes, they are watching us back in Washington. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes sir, I understand.</i><br />
They salute and the Lieutenant leaves. The Captain with his cup steps over to the large map of the U.S. and its Territories near his desk.
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Dissolve to:
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EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
On a mountain ridge top an old hunting camp of about ten brush-walled wikiups around a fire-pit has been revived by the WOMEN of Black Moon’s band plus an older SHAMAN. The Women are wearing canvas dresses from the reservation store but these are decorated with shells, quills and feathers. Some have face tattoos. The Women are busy with cooking, working a loom, a couple babies, some children and feeding horses in a corral when Black Moon’s Men ride up slowly on their ponies with the Thieves’ horses on a string behind them. The Women stop their work and greet their Men. Only Black Moon has no woman here. At the sounds of their greetings the Shaman ducks out of his wikiup and stands up; he is a dark Shaman who wears animal skins over his full body and face tattoos, and an elaborate headdress of skins, claws and shells; the SHAMAN’S WIFE looks out of the doorway after him but stays inside. The other Women fear him.
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Two of the Mojave men take the saddles off the thieves’ horses and leave them outside the Shaman’s wikiup so he can inspect everything for use in magic. Black Moon picks his horse from the rest being taken to the corral.
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<i>BLACK MOON: (Mojave: I will go and return with Neolge.)</i><br />
The Shaman turns to place his hand on Black Moon’s shoulder and nods.<br />
<i>SHAMAN: (I will follow and you will return safely, Black Moon.)</i><br />
Mojave 1 hands Black Moon a bowl of water and he drinks it. Then Black Moon mounts his horse and rides off.
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Dissolve to:
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Montage: Black Moon rides slowly down from elevation and then begins to cross the desert valley.
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EXT. / RESERVATION / DAY<br />
The reservation is north of the mesa that the fort sits on. The Agent’s office is the only finished modern building. There are piles of milled wood and foundation stone, and many hogans and wikiups surround the center fire-pit. There is also a corral for plow horses out by the planted fields near the river. The Lieutenant and Indian Agent Olson ride onto the reservation. Olson waves the CONTRACTOR over to his office from his work overseeing a small number of white and Mojave WORKERS. The Lieutenant talks with Olson and the Contractor, pointing out an empty area for the troopers work camp.
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Dissolve to:
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Close up: The sun sets against the providence mountains.<br />
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EXT. / RESERVATION / NIGHT<br />
Black Moon rides past the fields, then past a load of lumber and the half-built structure the Contractor’s crew had been working on.
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Cut to:
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Close up: The Shaman’s face inside his smoky, fire-lit wikiup. He is in a moon flower trance and out following Black Moon.<br />
Cut to:
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Shaman POV, aerial: Black Moon moving slowly on horseback is seen from above by the light of the reservation’s fires.
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Cut to:
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Black Moon comes to some permanent Mojave hogan structures made of mud-packed logs and branches. Light comes from a fire-pit nearby and some torches that illuminate the Indian Agent’s office. Black Moon ties his horse beside one of the hogans and then walks up to two MOJAVE men sitting at the fire. They talk quietly for a moment and then Black Moon returns to the hogan. Black Moon quietly announces himself before entering.
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Cut to:
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INT. / HOGAN / NIGHT<br />
Black Moon and his wife, Neolge THONATHON (Sun’s heat), embrace and then she lights a lantern with a match. Black Moon picks up the box of matches and studies it, then sets it down.
<br />
<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (The white man changes everything, even fire.) </i><br />
<i>THONATHON: (The white man looks for you every day; we must go, husband.) </i><br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (You are ready?)</i><br />
She nods.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (You have told my Whalia and your Neolge people?)</i><br />
She nods.<br />
<i>THONATHON: (They will bring the children.)</i><br />
He nods.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Shaman POV, aerial: Black Moon walks his horse and a pack-horse silently back through the reservation, followed by Thonathon leading her horse.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: The waning moon.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / DESERT / NIGHT<br />
Black Moon pauses in the moonlight and he and Thonathon dismount. He holds the reins of all three horses while she combs the nearby gully. Thonathon picks several of the night blooming Moon flowers. She sets the flowers into the saddle pocket. They remount and move along.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: The eastern horizon brightens.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RUFE’S CAMPSITE 2 / DAY<br />
Rufe’s camp is further up the ridge now. He is looking around in the early morning light, sipping coffee from his tin cup as his donkey lies nearby. Rufe spots Doug and Bobby making their way up to him.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: Comp’ny again... And Hay-zoos, Rocky, they naked as robins!</i><br />
Rufe shakes his head at the sight of them approaching. He returns to his campfire and throws more wood on the fire and sets his tin cup next to the coffee pot. Then he leads his donkey away.<br />
<i>RUFE: Come along now, you don’t want to see this.</i><br />
Rufe leads the donkey above rocks further up, overlooking the campsite. He waits with his small single-shot rifle. Doug and Bobby step out into his clearing, looking at the fire and then looking around. They are exhausted from the climb and sunburnt from yesterday; they sit down by the fire to warm themselves from the cold night and drink the coffee, sharing the one cup. They groan in relief.<br />
<i>RUFE: (O.C.) Like my coffee, boys?</i><br />
They look around and at each other before answering.<br />
<i>DOUG: Oh, you don’t know Mister! Thank you! </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Injuns attacked us; took our clothes and everything. </i><br />
<i>RUFE: (O.C.) You boys those stage-robbers they looking for, ain’t you?</i><br />
They look at each other.<br />
<i>DOUG: No, we were heading for the Providents... heard there was gold up there. </i><br />
<i>RUFE: (O.C.) Where’s the third one of ya? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Injuns killed him.</i><br />
Doug waves him to keep quiet.Rufe steps around holding some clothes and also his rifle by the barrel. They look around at him but stay warming themselves by the fire. Doug raises his cup to him smiling.<br />
<i>RUFE: Well I got one extra pair a pants and some long johns...</i><br />
Rufe moves over to a rock and sets the clothing there at a safe distance. Doug and Bobby leave the campfire and struggle over the pants. Rufe moves to the fire and picks up his coffee-pot and cup. Bobby puts on the long johns and Doug puts on the pants.<br />
<i>RUFE: You best head for Belleville. That’s the closest town. They’ll sell you some clothes, long as you ain’t those thieves. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: We’re miners like you. </i><br />
<i>RUFE: You won’t find no gold in the Providence. Silver maybe. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Maybe we can throw in with you.</i><br />
Rufe shakes his head no and half-raises his rifle.<br />
<i>BOBBY: We’re handy with a pick and shovel. </i><br />
<i>RUFE: No, no... I been on my own since ‘49, well ‘50 anyways. You might find more clothes over down that south edge. Animals scattered a dead man’s bones but I seen his pants. Sheriff and his posse did too. Look around over there; maybe you’ll find a shirt... Well boys, good luck to ya.</i><br />
Rufe steps back up and away. Doug and Bobby look at each other.<br />
<i>BOBBY: (whispers) Sheriff’s posse!</i>
Doug motions him to be quiet.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Doug and Bobby stand on a rock promontory and look down at Rufe and his donkey disappear across the valley. Doug wears the too-short pants and Bobby the faded full-body long johns.
<br />
<br />
<i>BOBBY: We shoulda took him! </i><br />
<i>DOUG: He would’ve shot one of us, little brother, and I didn’t hear you volunteer... Let’s go look for that shirt.</i><br />
They start down carefully on bare feet.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: Mojave desert in heat of the day.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RESERVATION / DAY<br />
<br />
Wide: The construction squad of ten soldiers arrives on horseback with cook’s wagon and supply wagon in tow. Mojave KIDS run up from different points to watch or jump onto the sides and backs of the wagons.
<br />
<br />
Montage: The soldiers occupy the marked area for their camp and begin to pitch tents, dig latrine, and prep a lunch.
<br />
<br />
The COOK drives the kids from his wagon by raising a butcher knife at them, mugging and waving them nearer. They run screaming.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
The camp is quiet during the heat of the day as Black Moon and Thonathon ride up slowly to their wikiup. They dismount and she unloads the pack horse, then he leads the horses to the corral.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / DAY<br />
The brush walls are shaved flat for the inside and let in a dim light on the north side; the south wall is lined by blankets. Thonathon is unpacking the bundle.Black Moon enters and hands her the Moon flowers and she sets them aside carefully. She hands him a bowl of water and he drinks and gives it back to her. He lies down to sleep. She leaves the wikiup.
Fade to black.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / BELLEVILLE HOTEL / DAY<br />
The stagecoach enters town and pulls to a stop at the hotel where a BELLHOP helps the PASSENGERS out. The stage driver, RED, locks the break and then climbs down.
<br />
<br />
<i>RED: Twenty minutes folks.</i><br />
Jack the livery man nods to Red as he goes to tend to the horse team. The Passengers step into the hotel and Red walks down the street.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SHERIFF’S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Sheriff is watching Red as he pages through the wanted posters. Red stands to stretch before he has to sit on the stage box again.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Thanks for coming in Red. </i><br />
<i>RED: Sure. Bank in Tucson wants to know what happened so I wanted to check in. No luck?</i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I have to go back out. Hate to with no deputy. They don’t ever stay for a second payday.</i><br />
<i>RED: Yeah, I hate to roll without a second riding shotgun but they didn’t find me another yet.</i><br />
Red flips through the last of the posters and hands them to the Sheriff.<br />
<i>RED: There sure ain’t no shortage of thievin’ bastards... </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Not one of ‘em looks right? </i><br />
<i>RED: Might be any mother’s son of ‘em done it, except the fat one. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: You buried Jeff right? I’ve been gone. </i><br />
<i>RED: Yeah, stones and all. Just needs a marker. You got your report for the mail? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I’ll have it to you a minute. </i><br />
<i>RED: I have passengers waiting so make it quick. (sighs) Your deputies and my shotguns...</i><br />
Red leaves and the Sheriff sets the posters back in their file before sitting down to write up a report.<br />
Dissolve to:<br />
<br />
EXT. / RUFE’S CAMPSITE 3 / DAY<br />
Near familiar large rocks at the foot of a ridge we hear the clinking of a hammer on rock. The shadows are late day. The donkey is wandering towards some of the scattered greenbacks and begins eating them. The hammer stops clinking. Rufe has set down the hammer and is pulling open a cracked stone and studying it in the sunlight. He tosses it aside. Rufe wipes his brow and checks the low sun as he walks back to his campsite. He notices a dust cloud rising and climbs a rock to get a better look.<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Close up, telephoto: The stagecoach runs quickly across the desert.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Rufe looks around the small clearing in the rocks where his cold fire-pit and supplies are spread out for the night. He’s looking for the donkey.<br />
<i>RUFE: Rocky.</i><br />
He walks around and through some of the rocks along the foot of the ridge until he sees the donkey.<br />
<i>RUFE: What do you got there, Rocky?</i><br />
Rufe steps up and pats the donkey and then sees the scattered greenbacks and the pile of them up ahead. He picks one up and reads haltingly.<br />
<i>RUFE: Payable at the U.S. Treasury at New York... (laughs and tosses it) You’ll eat anything, Rocky. Last time it was Richmond paper.</i><br />
Rufe walks over to the pile of greenbacks and moves them around with his foot to see if anything is underneath them.<br />
<i>RUFE: Not a plugged nickel...</i><br />
Rufe picks up a few of the bills and stuffs them into the bag on his donkey. He leads the donkey back to his campsite.<br />
<i>RUFE: Time for my dinner, Rocky.</i><br />
Rufe turns and then notices something and abruptly runs out around some rocks causing a half dozen large birds to take flight.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ2rqCDwrwkQK6LUZuNW3ajwF7Q1S0KuSbHYY-bZbKYlXhYBa8DdHiuKZNZh4wytsD1uepICdkrEvo87YtDZfxk2wOd5YaFSmm7IroLb8jjZp7oGuG0O_QRp0xfKYMqjk262qVVfnnX_XT/s1600/NV-155-OakCreekTrail-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ2rqCDwrwkQK6LUZuNW3ajwF7Q1S0KuSbHYY-bZbKYlXhYBa8DdHiuKZNZh4wytsD1uepICdkrEvo87YtDZfxk2wOd5YaFSmm7IroLb8jjZp7oGuG0O_QRp0xfKYMqjk262qVVfnnX_XT/s400/NV-155-OakCreekTrail-small.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Rufe stands over Cole’s body which is gouged up a little by the birds.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: There’s the other one....</i><br />
Rufe rolls the body over onto its back and sees the arrow wound in the chest.<br />
<i>RUFE: Injuns... (sighs) Be right back with my shovel, son.</i><br />
He grimly glances around before returning to his campsite.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / BELLEVILLE / DAY<br />
Doug and Bobby in their ill-fitting clothes see the town up ahead. Doug now also wears a ripped up flannel shirt and Bobby wears the torn jeans over the long john bottoms. They have torn off their shirt sleeves and wrapped the cloth around their feet.
<br />
<br />
<i>BOBBY: We gonna just walk into town, Dougie? </i><br />
<i>DOUG: No! We gotta find a house we can get into, find some real clothes and shoes. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: And horses? </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Yeah. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: It’s a small town though. Not even like Bakers Field. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: We gotta hit it late tonight and then head back to get our money. Those Injuns don’t know about paper money. It’s still sitting out there. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: I hope we can get some food. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Lets sleep here, until night. Take turns and then pick a house.</i><br />
They find some cover overlooking one end of the town and set themselves down to rest.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: The sun sinks below the horizon.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
EXT. / BELLEVILLE STABLE / NIGHT<br />
The Sheriff walks into the Livery barn.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / BELLEVILLE STABLE / NIGHT<br />
The stable boy, FRANKIE, looks up from his shoveling out a stable.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Frankie, where’s your boss? </i><br />
<i>FRANKIE: Hi Sheriff; he’s having dinner. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I’ll be in early, about four. Have my horse ready? </i><br />
<i>FRANKIE: Sure will, sir. You going after those robbers? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Yep.</i><br />
The Sheriff tosses him a coin. He catches it and inspects it before shoving it into his pocket.<br />
<i>FRANKIE: Thanks Sheriff. You want Mr. Roberts to go with you again? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: No, not this time.</i>
Sheriff leaves.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: Belleville at night with lights in most windows.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: Doug and Bobby look over the lights of the town.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / NIGHT<br />
The small band huddles around the fire. They include Thonathon and Black Moon, his men and their women and the Shaman who has added some greenbacks to his headdress.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHAMAN: (Black Moon, what did Neolge see from the white agent?)</i><br />
Black Moon nods to Thonathon.<br />
<i>THONATHON: (I was told to see the white man chief. I went inside his place. He was with another white man who never speak, who only draw little pictures. The white man chief ask my Neolge names, my husband’s Whalia names... They do not understand these and are angry.)</i><br />
Thonathon looks around at them worried, unused to speaking to the group. They look at her in the firelight. Black Moon nods at her again and she continues.<br />
<i>THONATHON: (...The Shivawach man who became white...) </i><br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (Tuhudda.)</i><br />
They nod.<br />
<i>THONATHON: (He tell the white man chief’s words to me, and take my words to the angry white man chief. And the other white man draws little pictures.)</i><br />
The Shaman stands and walks to his wikiup.<br />
<i>MOJAVE 1: (Does this white man draw any large picture?) </i><br />
<i>THONATHON: (No, only small pictures.)</i><br />
They are quiet and puzzle over this information. The Shaman returns as the band is breaking up for the night. He carries the greenback bills over to Black Moon and Thonathon at their wikiup.<br />
<i>SHAMAN: (What does Tuhudda wear?) </i><br />
<i>THONATHON: (He wears the white man’s warrior coat.)</i><br />
The Shaman frowns and then hands the greenbacks to Black Moon.<br />
<i>SHAMAN: (These have power over the white man. They can be worn against the soldier coat.)</i><br />
Black Moon takes the greenbacks from the Shaman.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (There were many.) </i><br />
<i>SHAMAN: (It would be good to have more of them.)</i><br />
Black Moon hands the bills to Thonathon. The Shaman nods and leaves and Black Moon follows Thonathon into their wikiup.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / NIGHT<br />
Black Moon is sleeping. Thonathon works by the light of a small fire; she is folding and sewing greenbacks with a large thorn-needle and reed stalks.<br />
Fade to black.<br />
<br />
Close up: The waning crescent moon rising into the frame.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / BELLEVILLE / NIGHT<br />
The town is closed up for the night except for a clean-up lamp at the saloon and at the stable.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / BELLEVILLE STABLE / NIGHT<br />
Jack is saddling up the Sheriff’s horse by lantern light. Up in the loft Frankie wakes and looks down and watches. Doug and Bobby step into the barn wielding kitchen knives. They are dressed in stolen clothing now, Bobby is wearing a black suit without a tie, and Doug is wearing denim overalls and red flannel shirt. Their shoes don’t quite fit right either.
<br />
<br />
<i>FRANKIE: Mr. Roberts!</i><br />
They look up to the loft before Jack sees them and then they turn their attention back to Jack. Doug points at the Sheriff’s horse.<br />
<i>DOUG: We’ll take that one and another one, Mr. Roberts! </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: You get down here kid! </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Forget about him; pick out a horse.</i><br />
Frankie tosses a half-barrel down and it knocks out Doug which confuses Bobby. Jack steps back toward the wall-ladder up to the loft. Bobby sets his knife down and tries to lift Doug to his feet. The Sheriff walks in carrying two canteens.<br />
<i>JACK: Sheriff, careful, these men were gonna steal your horse!</i><br />
Frankie starts clambering down after he sees the Sheriff.<br />
<i>FRANKIE: And another one too! </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: We was gonna pay just as soon as we go get our money!</i><br />
The Sheriff picks up the two knives.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: What happened to him? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: That little bastard dropped a barrel on him!</i><br />
Frankie jumps off the ladder and steps up.<br />
<i>FRANKIE: I’m not a bastard!</i><br />
Jack pulls Frankie back.<br />
<i>JACK: Frankie saw ‘em first. They had knives and this one demanded your horse and told him to get one for himself.</i><br />
Bobby sets unconscious Doug back down and tries to wake him up with light slapping to his face.<br />
<i>BOBBY: Dougie! </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: (to Bobby) There were three of you... </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Injuns killed Cole.</i><br />
The Sheriff now draws his gun.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Pick up Dougie and come with me.</i><br />
Bobby picks up Doug and struggles to carry him out ahead of the Sheriff. He keep whispering his brother’s name urgently.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / NIGHT<br />
Doug and Bobby are locked into the cell and the Sheriff steps back into the front office where Frankie and Jack wait; he closes the door to the jail behind him.
<br />
<br />
<i>JACK: You think the third man’s dead? Cole, did he say? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Yeah. These two are probably brothers. The money could be anywhere. </i><br />
<i>JACK: There alot missing?</i><br />
Sheriff raises his eyebrows and nods.<br />
<i>FRANKIE: The one I conked looks like wearing Mr. Charlie’s church clothes. </i><br />
<i>JACK: That’s right... </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I’ll go check on Charlie and stop by, let you know.</i><br />
They leave the office.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / CHARLIE’S HOUSE / NIGHT<br />
The Sheriff rides his horse up to the small, darkened house quietly and dismounts. He pulls his pistol and walks around the house where he finds a window open.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Charlie?</i><br />
There’s some knocking noise. He moves quickly back to the door and enters.<br />
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / CHARLIE'S HOUSE / NIGHT<br />
The dark room is lit as the Sheriff strikes a match. CHARLIE is an older man and he’s tied up and lying on the floor. The Sheriff lights a nearby lantern and then kneels to untie him.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Don’t worry, Charlie, we got ‘em.</i><br />
He pulls the bandana from his mouth.<br />
<i>CHARLIE: Thank you Sheriff. I thought I might have to wait til noon when my daughter comes by!</i>
Sheriff helps him to his feet and he wobbles a bit.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: You alright? </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: They’re wearing my clothes! </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Yeah, Frankie recognized your Sunday suit. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: Oh there’s a sharp kid. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: We’ll get the clothes back for you but might take til the merc’s open to get them some clothes of their own. Why don’t you come down to the jail at about ten. You can identify them then and we’ll have your suit. They had two knives. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: Yeah they took those too. Wanted cash but I didn’t let on about that. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Alright then, ten a.m. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: Thanks again, Cobb.</i><br />
Sheriff leaves the house. Charlie looks around, see the clock reads 4:15 and sighs.<br />
<i>CHARLIE: (mutters) Charlie, go to sleep.</i>
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / BELLEVILLE STABLE / NIGHT<br />
Jack looks up at Frankie in the loft.
<br />
<br />
<i>JACK: Get some sleep now; you done good.</i><br />
Jack kicks the barrel pieces to one side and the Sheriff leads his horse inside. Jack looks at him expectantly.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Charlie’s okay. They had him tied up is all. I told him Frankie recognized his suit.</i>
<br />
<br />
Close up: Frankie is admiring his coins. He smiles at hearing his name.
<br />
<br />
<i>JACK: You still going out early? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: No, I’ll give those boys a few hours in jail and see what they’ll tell me. </i><br />
<i>JACK: Alright then, Cobb; let me know if you need me. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Thanks Jack, ’night Frankie. </i><br />
<i>FRANKIE: Goodnight Sheriff.</i>
Sheriff leaves the barn on foot.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF’S OFFICE / NIGHT<br />
The Sheriff walks down the street to his still dimly lit office. He enters and in a moment the light goes out.<br />
Fade to black.
<br />
<br />
Wide: East horizon is brightening pre-dawn.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / NIGHT<br />
Rufe has just got up and is rubbing his sore back, waiting for the sun. He turns around and is surprised to see Black Moon watching him. Rufe smiles and bows slightly, raising his hand.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: Kwitch-kama-dum...</i><br />
Black Moon seems to be testing the effect of his dollarcoat on Rufe. Black Moon doesn’t respond to his greeting, but neither does Rufe respond at first to the dollarcoat itself. Then Rufe catches on and contrives to look awestruck and points at the coat and seems to half-avert his eyes.<br />
<i>RUFE: Wh-where’d you get that coat, Injun? </i><br />
<i>BLACK MOON: You... white man, go!</i><br />
Rufe bows and motions for his patience and turns around and slips down the side of the ridge to his camp. Black Moon watches him go, satisfied the coat has power over white men.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / CAMPSITE 3 / DAY<br />
Rufe keeps glancing around in case Black Moon returns. Rufe sets up his firewood in the early light. He’s using crumpled up greenbacks for kindling. Rufe half-fills his coffee-pot from the canteen and sets it by the fire. He looks from the fire to his donkey.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: Well, Rocky, I just saved your life; Mojave just love donkey meat...</i><br />
Rufe uses his hat to pick up the hot coffeepot and pour a cup. There’s some half burned bills near the fire.<br />
<i>RUFE: I don’t cotton to this here paper, Rocky. You gonna find us some gold now? We’re feeling lucky today, ain’t we?</i><br />
Rufe steps over to look out at the valley with his tin cup of coffee.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
As the morning reveille ends and the Troop, now smaller, breaks up, the Indian Agent Olson enters the Sutler’s store.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SUTLER’S MERCANTILE / DAY<br />
Inside the store are general merchandise, clothing, and on one side is a makeshift bar. Perrin walks behind the bar and grabs a bottle and two glasses as if he does it every time Olson comes in. Olson walks up opposite him at the bar.
<br />
<br />
<i>OLSON: You got coffee on? </i><br />
<i>PERRIN: I think she does.</i><br />
Olson throws back a shot glass while Perrin goes back to his quarters and returns with a coffee pot.<br />
<i>OLSON: Well Perrin, I guess construction really will get along now. Captain’s making them stay til the work’s done. </i><br />
<i>PERRIN: Are they going to build up for when they all come in off the desert? </i><br />
<i>OLSON: No, we’ll build as needed.</i><br />
Perrin has poured a cup of coffee and Olson sips it.<br />
<i>PERRIN: Drawing off a full-paid contract...</i><br />
Perrin is nodding admiringly.<br />
<i>OLSON: Who knows how many Mojave are out there in their camps... They don’t need water like us.<br />
SUTLER: Well for this business here, we want them all on the reservation, so more settlers move in.<br />
OLSON: Settlers will want land by the river. So we’ll move the Mojave in and then soon enough have to move them back out. They’ll get it done.</i><br />
Perrin shakes his head smiling in disbelief.<br />
<i>OLSON: I’m going over to town, check out our competition. See you later.</i><br />
Olson finishes the coffee and leaves.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / BELLEVILLE / DAY<br />
Olson rides into town; his coat is off and across his saddlehorn. The Bartender opening his saloon nods unwelcomingly to him as he sweeps the front.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
Olson ties his horse to the most distant end of the rail before shaking out his suitcoat and putting it on. He walks over quietly to the door and enters.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
Olson leans in and looks around at the empty-seeming office. Instead of calling out for the Sheriff he enters and doesn’t quite shut the door behind him. He makes a move towards the jail door when the Sheriff in a reflex grabs his pistol from a nightstand by his cot in the corner behind the wood-stove before recognizing the intruder and pausing. Olson opens the doorway to the jail and sticks his head inside. We hear the prisoners sit up.
<br />
<br />
<i>DOUG: (O.C.) (whispers) Olly, get us out of here. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: (whispers) Where’s Cole?! </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: That’s a good way to get shot, Mister.</i><br />
Olson starts and quickly shuts the door, then smiles. The Sheriff is squinting against the morning light; it’s not clear if he heard the whispering.<br />
<i>OLSON: Oh, pardon me, Sheriff.</i><br />
The Sheriff sits up still dressed but in his stocking feet.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: It’s you... What are you doing here, Superintendant? </i><br />
<i>OLSON: I thought you might be in back. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: How are my guests? </i><br />
<i>OLSON: They’re awake. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Go fill that bowl for me, would ya? From the pump, not the trough. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: Certainly, Sheriff. I’ll be right back with it. Sorry I disturbed your sleep. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I had to get up anyway...</i><br />
Sheriff looks up at the clock. Olson picks up the bowl and leaves the door open as he goes for water. The Sheriff gets up and empties the old coffee grounds. Olson returns and the Sheriff takes the bowl and pours half the water into the coffeepot and sets the bowl by his mirror and the coffeepot on the stove.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Start a fire, will ya? Then I can offer you coffee? </i><br />
<i>OLSON: Certainly, Sheriff.</i><br />
Olson starts a fire in the stove while the Sheriff washes his face at the mirror on the wall. The Sheriff crosses to the jail door and opens it and calls in to Doug and Bobby.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Alright boys. I got no deputy so I’ll go get us some breakfast at the hotel. Coffee’s on.</i><br />
They don’t say anything which surprises him. The Sheriff shrugs and closes the door, then he sits to pull his boots on.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: They claim they’re innocent, all the while wearing another man’s pants... Come along?<br />
OLSON: Sure, Sheriff.</i>
They leave the office.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / JAIL CELL / DAY<br />
Doug and Bobby leaning forward and listening for sound in the front office.
<br />
<br />
<i>BOBBY: (whispers) You see Olson? </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Yeah, this was all his fault. Cole and him. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Right before the Injuns killed him, Cole called me Bobby, first time. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Shut up. If we don’t get out of here, Sheriff’ll hang us and bury us naked. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Would he?! </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Olson’s got to help us; he don’t want us to talk. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Let’s eat first, I mean, before we escape.</i><br />
Doug rattles the bars testing them.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / HOTEL KITCHEN / DAY<br />
While the COOK fries up breakfasts the Sheriff sips coffee and talks to Olson.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: I got the two of ‘em that came into town. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: They came back? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I don’t know that they been here before... </i><br />
<i>OLSON: I just mean you’d think they’d be on their way to Mexico. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: They had none of the money so it’s likely the third man double-crossed ‘em. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: If they had none of the money, how do you know? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Just talking it out of ’em...</i><br />
The Sheriff is quiet and staring at Olson who gets nervous. The Sheriff smiles at Olson.<br />
<i>OLSON: Well, I better get to the mercantile. I want to get back before the heat. Any message you need run back with me? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: To the reservation? No. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: I meant the fort; I’m there often. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: No, thanks, Mr. Olson.</i><br />
The Sheriff watches him go. Then he picks up a pen and signs off on the hotel’s credit.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Stack three plates and pile it all on the top one, okay Manny? I signed for it.</i><br />
The Cook nods to the Sheriff.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
Medium: Black Moon wearing the dollarcoat steps slowly along some rocks where hawks, vultures and ravens perch waiting.
<br />
<br />
Two coyotes reluctantly leave Rufe’s burial mound for Cole as Black Moon approaches. Black Moon raises his arms and barks a threat and the birds launch themselves into the air and the coyotes run to a safe distance. Black Moon stands over the grave from which the coyotes have managed to pull an arm. Black Moon pushes away some of the larger stones and then grabs the chewed up arm and pulls hard to drag Cole’s gray body up out of the earth. Black Moon, breathing hard, straightens up to display his dollarcoat against the angry spirit of the dead white man. After a moment Black Moon steps around the body to the loose cash and kneels down and stuffs the bulk of the greenbacks into his leather pouch. The coyotes watch and some of the birds return to perch or the rocks, waiting. Black Moon stands and looks around, circling the body, challenging the spirits and the animals. Then he walks off and the birds and then the coyotes return to the body.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
Captain Cooledge steps over to Lieutenant Hayes at the batterie. The four TROOPS snap to attention and salute. He returns their salute.<br />
<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Carry on, men. Lieutenant, if I may...</i><br />
The Lieutenant follows him out into the yard.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes Captain. </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I’d like you to march the rest of our men around the desert so as to remind those bands of trespassers that we are impatient with them. No engagements, just a show - some target practice where the sound will carry. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes sir... (pauses) Shall we depart immediately and conduct a readiness field test as well? </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Excellent idea, Lieutenant. Proceed as you wish.</i><br />
They notice Olson return to the fort on horseback.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Do you want Superintendant Olson in formation? </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: (laughs) No! Jesus, they’ll never come in if we go parading him around.</i><br />
Captain salutes and Lieutenant returns it and goes back to his CORPORAL.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Corporal, prepare the men to march two days out, two days back. We’ll need Cooks wagon, and freight wagon with tents for every man available. </i><br />
<i>CORPORAL: Yes sir.</i><br />
The Corporal salutes and he and the batterie Men run off to prepare. The Lieutenant follows.Captain glances over at Tuhudda and waves him to his office.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / FORT’S OFFICE / DAY<br />
Captain removes his hat and coat and sits down behind his desk. Tuhudda closes the door behind him and the Captain motions him to be seated. He offers him a cigar and they each light up.
<br />
<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Well, Tuhudda... (sighs) My standing order is move the Mojave nation onto their reservation. That is their land now. The provisions they might find there have yet to attract them. In fact, they appear to be trickling back out hither and yon to hell and back as they damn well please! We’ll show ourselves out there one more time. You know them; what is your recommendation if that does not work? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: I know Mojave, but I am not Mojave. I am Shivawach.</i><br />
The Captain nods; he knows this.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Mojave war-chiefs long ago lose the talk to the peace-chief Irataba. The Mojave War is over. If the Mojave return to war, then fight. If there is peace... leave them be American too, on the reservation or on the desert. Does the white man need all the desert too?</i><br />
The Captain is nodding as he listens, then stops.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: The peaceful nations will sometimes have to endure treatment that is designed for the worst, most bloody-minded tribes.... These orders come from Washington, Tuhudda. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: In Washington are the Injuns led by peace or war chief? </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I don’t believe the white men in Washington can even remember their Injuns.</i>
<br />
<br />
Close up: Tuhudda thinks about forgotten tribes.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: The Captain looks at Tuhudda and frowns.
<br />
<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I thought the Mojave being farmers might take to the modern ways more easily than the Apache.</i><br />
Tuhudda pauses.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: No, no Apache...</i><br />
The Captain smokes and waits for him. Tuhudda motions with either hand, moving his cigar back and forth as he talks.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: The Mojave plant his land. The white man plant his land. This is not the same. The land Mojave see is not the same. His plant is not the same. Mojave animal is not the same as the white man animal. Mojave is not the same.</i><br />
The Captain cocks his head with faint smile.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Yes, but in time... </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Tuhudda know. In time the white man will forget. The secretary write everything so white man can forget.<br />
CAPTAIN: I think you misunderstood me, Tuhudda. The reports are made and they are read by my generals and by the president. They are not forgotten.</i><br />
Tuhudda pauses again and the Captain smokes.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Tuhudda know that forever before there was time Pokoh created each people from the ground where they live. But the white man Jesus and his followers, they wander away. They forget.</i><br />
The Captain stares at him and then blinks.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Smoke your cigar, Tuhudda.</i><br />
They smoke.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / DAY<br />
Thonathon is working in the smoky, dimly lit space on the moon flowers, cutting their leaves from the stem, opening the pods and separating out the seeds. She lays out the pieces on a flat rock beside the small fire.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RESERVATION / DAY<br />
The Troop squad’s six tents are up alongside the cook’s wagon, freight wagon, corral and the new outhouse. The Soldiers are hammering and sawing the milled lumber into row-houses.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF’S OFFICE / DAY<br />
A soldier’s horse is tied at the post.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The fort’s MESSENGER stands at the wanted poster board idly while Sheriff reads the official communique at his desk. His empty breakfast dish sits on the desk.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Yes, soldier, take this back to your commanding officer...</i><br />
The Sheriff writes a note quickly, then seals it in an envelope and addresses it. He stands to hand it to the Messenger.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Thank you, soldier. </i><br />
<i>MESSENGER: Thank you, Sheriff.</i><br />
The soldier takes the envelope and pockets it; then leaves. The Sheriff sighs and looks up thinking.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / JAIL / DAY<br />
The Sheriff has pulled a chair into the doorway to the back jail and sits down to question Doug and Bobby who sit on one bunk. Their breakfast dishes sit on a stool.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Sorry for the delay, boys. The Indian Agent was by - maybe you saw him. Then I got a message from the Fort’s commander. Sounds angry; he had to send some soldiers to the reservation to replace civilian workers who ran out on their construction contract...</i><br />
Bobby looks at Doug nervously while Doug holds his expression looking at the Sheriff.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well we all have our burdens to carry, don’t we? Now, where you boys from, Tennessee?<br />
BOBBY: (brightens) How’d you know?!</i><br />
Doug looks at Bobby sternly to shut him up and Bobby frowns and ducks his head down.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: I knew some Tennessee boys during the Mexican War. Good boys.</i><br />
Doug is staring at the Sheriff, doubting him. In a moment the Sheriff continues.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Last name?</i><br />
There’s a long pause.<br />
<i>DOUG: Grady. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: So, Bobby, tell me about your friend Cole.</i><br />
Doug answers quickly to keep Bobby quiet.<br />
<i>DOUG: He wasn’t a friend. We only met Cole last Monday, in Bakers town. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I asked your brother. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: (nodding) That’s right Sheriff, it was Monday. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: You know I can hang you boys right now for attempted horse theft. Not to mention lying about Cole and Baker’s field and what-not.... (pauses) People around here, we like Charlie, Jack and Frankie. We’re all glad they’re still alive. But I knew Jeff too, from the war in fact. And I’m telling you, you’re not going to win over a jury with this story you’re telling me. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Who’s Jeff? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Jeff Strohman is buried under a pile of rocks down at the end of town. He was the man riding shotgun on that stage.</i><br />
Bobby looks down again. Doug stares at the Sheriff for a long moment while the Sheriff waits.<br />
<i>DOUG: What’s that mean, Sheriff? About the jury... </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well, I’m a realistic man. Probably all that’s provable is... your dead man killed our dead man...</i><br />
The Sheriff pauses and lights a cigarette; Doug stares at him and Bobby glances between the two of them.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: So, if we were able to recover the money I might manage to postpone hanging you both until the day you set foot in this town again.</i><br />
Doug looks away at Bobby. Sheriff stands up and looks out at his office wall clock.
<br />
<br />
Close up: The clock face reads a few minutes after 9am.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Think it over boys. Maybe you can do with never setting foot in Belleville again. I’ll be back with some clothes for you.</i><br />
He picks up the chair and leaves the jail section, closing the door behind him.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Sheriff leaves his office for the Mercantile down the street.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / MERCANTILE / DAY<br />
A woman customer, MRS. GIBBS, about forty and wearing a plain calico work-dress, and the Sheriff are inside. The shopkeep, MR. GOMES, is older and speaks with a faint Mexican accent. She pronounces his name in an Anglo fashion. Sheriff waits but checks the wall clock.
<br />
<br />
<i>MRS. GIBBS: I know you can’t bring in the fruits and vegetables, Mr. Gomes. All I’m asking of you is to supply the seeds! </i><br />
<i>MR. GOMES: Yes, yes, Mrs. Gibbs, I understand. But they come to me not only from San Francisco, but around the Cape, around the Cape! Cabo de Hornos, the sailors’ tumba!</i><br />
She turns to the Sheriff.<br />
<i>MRS. GIBBS: Can you understand this man, Sheriff?! All I want is the smallest seeds for our garden! They could be mailed to him. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: I’m sure Carlos wants to sell you anything he can get for you, Mrs. Gibbs.</i><br />
She scoffs and storms out.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Now you got her mad at me, Gomez. </i><br />
<i>MR. GOMES: Aye, aye, aye! I tell her wait til the Indios bring in their corn and beans, you can see the look she give me. This town, he have no future.</i><br />
The Sheriff puts his hand up to stop him complaining.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Senor, I need two pair of pants, two shirts, and four shoes. The cheapest you got, for my prisoners. </i><br />
<i>MR. GOMES: Oh, more billing to the town with no future!</i><br />
The Sheriff smiles as Mr. Gomez storms around picking up the stuff.<br />
<i>MR. GOMES: The cheapest I have... Are these malvados big or small, eh? Small brain, big feet?<br />
SHERIFF: They don’t need hats as far as I’m concerned...</i><br />
Gomes holds up some shoes and the Sheriff nods.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Wrap ‘em up.</i><br />
Gomes returns to his counter and tears out a length of paper and folds the clothes and shoes up in it and ties it with string.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (looks at clock) I gotta meet Charlie at the jail; they stole his church suit. Send me the paper. </i><br />
<i>MR. GOMES: Sure I send you the paper. (points at his sign) I accept gold and silver. None of those war-time shin-plasters here.</i><br />
Gomes throws the package to the Sheriff who catches it.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Thanks Carlos. Hey, did you see the Indian agent in here today? </i><br />
<i>MR. GOMES: No, I see him on the street. He ride in and then he ride out. He’s a nosy man usually.</i>
Sheriff frowns and then leaves.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
Charlie is standing outside the office when the Sheriff walks over with the package.
<br />
<br />
<i>CHARLIE: I didn’t want to wait inside with those desperados in back. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: That’s fine, Charlie; come on in.</i><br />
The Sheriff opens the door for him and follows him inside.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Sheriff goes right to the back room.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Have a seat, Charlie; be right with you.</i><br />
Sheriff disappears into the back and opens the package.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Here’s your duds boys; get those off and hand ‘em back through.</i><br />
We can hear them stand up and undress and take the new clothes. Sheriff returns to the front room with Charlie’s clothes and closes the back room’s door. He rolls up the clothes before handing them to Charlie.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (whispers) You probably want to wash these. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: You bet I will. Thank you Sheriff. (whispers) I hope you’re going to hang those fellows.<br />
SHERIFF: I’m not sure, Charlie. They claim the Injuns delivered a mean justice to the man who killed Jeff. I don’t think they’d claim that if he got away with the money. They don’t have any of it. Anyway there could be a body and alot of cash out on the desert. I may take the young one out to look around. Maybe go easy on ‘em if that works out. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: (frowns) Well, I suppose you know your job Sheriff.... Thanks again for coming by last night. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Thank Frankie, I might not have thought of it. </i><br />
<i>CHARLIE: Already did.</i><br />
Charlie leaves.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / WIKIUP / DAY<br />
Smoke is leaking out through the scrub walls. Thonathon leaves the wikiup trailing smoke, closing the flap behind her. She stands up blinking against the sunlight; she stretches and breathes deeply the fresh air. Black Moon steps over and she hands him a folded up vest she has sewn out of the greenbacks. He carefully unfolds it and hangs it on a T-pole and then sets the pole between a rock and the wikiup wall so that it hangs above the wikiup vent’s. He reaches up and opens the vent so the smoke rises and envelopes the dollarcoat.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
The Soldier returns on horseback to the Captain’s office. He knocks and enters the office. In a moment he returns to his horse and leads him away on foot.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / FORT'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Captain at his desk is reading the Sheriff’s letter.
<br />
<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I’ll wring that Swede’s neck. </i><br />
<i>AMALIA: What’s Mr. Olly do now?</i><br />
She’s just come in from the living quarters with her broom and dustpan. The Captain folds the letter back up.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: He’s stealing cookies again, Amalia, can you believe it?</i><br />
<i> AMALIA: Oh that’s my fault, Captain; I make them so very good.</i><br />
She smiles as she opens the door and walks outside past the window to empty the pan off the porch-side. She returns inside and closes the door.<br />
<i>AMALIA: (nods) Your Mr. Olson is back.</i><br />
He rolls his eyes and she passes through to the back room.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
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The sun is setting below the surrounding rocks now.
<br />
<br />
Pan: Upward slowly, following smoke from the wikiup’s vent as it curls up around the dollarcoat which is still hit by the last rays of the sun.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: Waning moon rising against the horizon.
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / NIGHT<br />
Thonathon is naked and her tattooed skin is gleaming as she drips water onto rocks set in the fire’s coals. The vent above them is open and the steam rises illuminated by the glowing coals.Black Moon is wearing the dollarcoat and his skin is gleaming wet underneath it. He sits across the fire from Thonathon and is shivering, his eyes open but in a moonflower trance. A droning, whistling chord sounds and continues...
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: Black Moon’s POV is airborne but the moonlit desert beneath him is very dark at first. The droning music continues on the soundtrack. The moon’s reflection in a small lake is the first flash of real illumination below until the large trail campfire comes into view. The night guards and the two wagons and tents become visible in the firelight as Black Moon approaches the fort’s troop from above. Drone ends.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL CAMPFIRE / NIGHT<br />
A couple of GUARDS traverse the makeshift camp which is circled by the Army’s wagons, tents and horses. The fire illuminates the scene. Tahudda walks from the periphery into the light and then stops and looks around. He sees nothing but the camp. He can’t see that Black Moon is standing in the dollarcoat and staring at him.
<br />
<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (whispers) (Tahudda, you must run the maze to clean yourself.)</i><br />
Tahudda turns around quickly but still cannot see Black Moon who stares at him, his skin gleaming in the light of the fire.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (whispers) (Lead these brutes to the dead land and clean yourself, Tahudda.)</i>
<br />
<br />
Close up: Tahudda understands now what is happening but he is still unnerved.
<br />
<br />
Close up: Black Moon’s face in a trance back in the smoky wikiup.
<br />
<br />
Wide: Two-shot with Thonathon dripping more water on the hot rocks between her and Black Moon; the burst of steam obscures them further.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: Eastern sky lightens on the horizon.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL CAMPFIRE / DAWN<br />
The Troop is up and in motion for breakfast and resumption of the trek through the desert. Tuhudda is with the Lieutenant outside the officer’s tent; Lietuenant eats as they talk.
<br />
<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Will the renegades be camped high or on the flats, Tuhudda? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: They have moved to Coyote Lake. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: (surprised) When did this happen? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: They heard you will come. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: There’s no surprising an Injun. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Many families are split in reservation and in camps, Lieutenant. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: There’s more than one camp?</i><br />
Tuhudda nods.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Well why don’t we show ourselves first to the nearest camp? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: We have.</i><br />
The Lieutenant looks at Tuhudda and then almost smiles.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Get some food, Tuhudda. You must need water like any man.</i><br />
Tuhudda nods and leaves.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
The shadows of the Troop on the move are early morning long as they head out to what looks like the heart of the wasteland.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Rufe stands near his new camp with coffeepot in hand watching the Troop line depart down below.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: Where you suppose the soldier boys is off to now, Rocky?</i><br />
He shrugs and packs the pot.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
The fort is nearly empty. Indian Agent Olson walks from the store across the yard to the Captain’s office.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / FORT'S OFFICE / DAY<br />
The Captain and the Agent bring their coffee cups over to sit in easy chairs near the fire place.
<br />
<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: So how’s business, Superintendant? </i><br />
<i>OLSON: Which business, Captain? </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I meant your sutler’s. I’m afraid I know the state of the tribe. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: Well, Captain, we could all do with either more Indians or more settlers. </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: It was the silver rush that put us both here, but that’s over. I don’t like having my troops filling in for these criminal runaways of yours, but the Mojave won’t come in to the reservation in its present condition. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: I beg your pardon! </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I want you to know that I’ve sent a preliminary estimate to the War Department for forwarding to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As I understand it your contractor lost three men, and since they were known to spend most of their time at your sutler’s pub I’ve sent nine men and a cook so we can make up some time. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: (exasperated) I wish you hadn’t done that, Captain. God knows how much of whose contract they’ll try to attach now! </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: I had to assume you don’t want the reservation to look like a lumberyard any more than I do. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: A dry winter will bring them in and we’ll build as needed. </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: They need the river-bottom all year round, what are you talking about?! These are Mojave, not Sioux! Now there is housing for them to move into. I am done fretting I’m not doing all I can, Superintendant. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: What more can I do, Captain?</i><br />
They are interrupted by an urgent knocking on the door, followed by the entrance of a road weary MESSENGER. The Captain stands and salutes him.<br />
<i>MESSENGER: Sir, I have an urgent message.</i><br />
The Captain nods and then looks at Olson who stands.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: We’ll have to finish this later, Superintendant. </i><br />
<i>OLSON: Yes, we will.</i><br />
Olson leaves and the Army Messenger closes the door after him, then returns to attention to pull the order from his jacket and hands it to the Captain. The Captain sits down behind his desk and opens it and reads. He reads it as if frozen, then slumps and sighs.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: When will the replacement force arrive, Corporal? </i><br />
<i>MESSENGER: They are a day behind me.... I’m sorry sir.</i><br />
The Captain stands up and paces.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Will you return to them or wait here? </i><br />
<i>MESSENGER: The General ordered me to return if you had a message that couldn’t wait for his arrival. </i><br />
<i>CAPTAIN: Then make yourself at home, Corporal. It can all wait now. The men are on patrol.</i>
Captain salutes.<br />
<i>MESSENGER: Thank you, sir.</i><br />
He returns salute and leaves. The Captain follows him out the door and stands on the porch looking at the nearly deserted grounds.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Black Moon steps out onto a promontory and looks off into the hazy desert distance.
<br />
<br />
Telephoto close: Through the haze and the early heat waves off the desert floor we see the Troop leaving across the valley raising dust that hangs in the air behind them.
Fade to black.
<br />
<br />
Close up: The last crescent of the waning moon rises from the Providence mountains to the east.
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / NIGHT<br />
Close up: Black Moon in his wide-eyed trance the sound of water hitting the heated rocks and steaming.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Black Moon POV, aerial: Through the air at night approaching the 2nd night trail campfire of the troop.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL CAMPFIRE 2 / NIGHT<br />
The Lieutenant and the few Soldiers still up and patrolling the camp perimeter are notably more ragged looking after a second day on the desert. Tuhudda is staring out into the dark beyond the camp. The Lieutenant walks over to him.
<br />
<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: I don’t like this, Scout.</i><br />
Tuhudda is still absorbed and doesn’t hear him.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: (annoyed) Attention!</i><br />
Tuhudda breaks his stare and turns to look at him.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Sir. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Something out there, Tuhudda? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Yes. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Well, we’re out here to show ourselves. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: I tell Captain leave Mojave, unless they take war. These men... (motions to tents) This is danger. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: You don’t mean the Indians... </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: No. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Will we see anything at Coyote? Or just be seen again?</i><br />
Unseen, Black Moon glares at Tuhudda, who swallows hard and doesn’t answer the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant, alarmed, looks closer at him.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: The crescent moon against the milky way.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close: The face of the clock on the Sheriff’s office wall reads 3:45 by lantern light. We hear the light blown out and the door open.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (O.C.) Let’s go...</i><br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF'S OFFICE / NIGHT<br />
Bobby walks ahead of the Sheriff. He’s wearing better fitting clothing and an old hat. He looks behind at the Sheriff who closes the door behind them. The Sheriff motions him to move down the street.
<br />
<br />
INT. / BELLEVILLE STABLE / NIGHT<br />
Jack and Frankie have readied two horses for the Sheriff and Bobby. Each horse carries four canteens. Jack steps back at the sight of Bobby. Frankie stares at him.
<br />
<br />
<i>FRANKIE: Shouldn’t you handcuff him Sheriff? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well, the man’s got to ride. And I got his brother locked up. </i><br />
<i>JACK: You’re okay then, Cobb? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Yeah. Just don’t go near the jail. He’s got food there and a bucket... (to Bobby) Mount up, Grady.</i><br />
Bobby mounts his horse and the Sheriff his.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: You know the way better’n I do.</i><br />
Bobby rides out of the barn and Sheriff follows after nodding to Jack.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: The eastern horizon brightens.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL CAMPFIRE 2 / DAWN<br />
The Men are in two lines for roll call but the responses stop and a name repeated. SERGEANT reports to the Lieutenant.
<br />
<br />
<i>SERGEANT: Sir, two men missing. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: They take horses, Sergeant? </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: I don’t know, sir. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Sergeant, will the men hold for another full day of this?</i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: Yes sir.</i><br />
A PRIVATE runs up and salutes and then points back.<br />
<i>PRIVATE: Sirs, the water! Most of it’s leaked out.</i><br />
They run to one of the wagons. Two SOLDIERS are pouring what’s left of one barrel’s water into the remaining good barrel. The dirt around the wagon is wet. The Lieutenant walks back slowly, and stops when he catches sight of Tuhudda.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Scout!</i><br />
Tuhudda nods and walks over.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Tuhudda, we’ve lost half the water.</i><br />
The Sergeant runs up and salutes.<br />
<i>SERGEANT: Two horses are missing, sir. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes Sergeant...</i><br />
The Lieutenant doesn’t break his glare at Tuhudda.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: We have just enough water to make it to Lake Coyote where we can refill the barrels.</i><br />
The Lieutenant waits for Tuhudda to respond but he does not. The Lieutenant waits longer, confusing the Sergeant who looks between them trying to comprehend. The Lieutenant sighs slightly and finally turns to the Sergeant.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Alright Sergeant, we return to the fort as soon as the men are fed. </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: Sir? </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Fort Mojave. </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: Yes sir.</i><br />
The Sergeant salutes and leaves him. The Lieutenant looks at Tuhudda disappointed.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: (curtly) Track the deserters and report to me when you find out what direction they’re headed. We’ll be on the trail back to the fort.</i><br />
Lieutenant dismisses him with a salute, which is returned by Tuhudda. The Lieutenant lights up a cigarette and then turns to watch Tuhudda head to the corral for his horse.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
Bobby and the Sheriff ride slowly along the stagecoach trail through the cactus and scrub out toward the desert valley.
<br />
<br />
Pan: Up from behind Bobby and the Sheriff’s horses, fixing on the Mojave desert ahead.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
Tuhudda on horseback moves slowly looking down at the tracks of two horses. In a moment he spurs his horse to a gallop. He pulls away from the tracks to reach nearby high ground.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Tuhudda on foot climbs to a point to look down the valley.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Telephoto: Tuhudda POV shot of the two Deserters on horseback. They are riding their horses too hard in the desert.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: Tuhudda’s face as he hesitates and looks at his horse below on the ridge.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
The Troop moves in a double line back through the valley. The Sergeant rides back along the line to the Lieutenant.
<br />
<br />
<i>SERGEANT: Sir. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Yes, Sergeant. </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: Sir, I can’t picture Troopers Clayton or Dodge sabotaging our water. </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: If Tuhudda returns... and then if he tells us they’ve fled west toward Coyote Lake or Bakers field... then they did it to prevent us from following them. </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: Sir, it’s not my place but I don’t trust that Scout.</i><br />
Lieutenant nods and salutes.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Well, Sergeant, he’s got one problem. I know there ain’t a barrel of drinking water in all of Coyote Lake.</i><br />
Sergeant frowns, then salutes and rides back to the head of the troop.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
Steam rises from Black Moon’s wikiup. Two Mojave men, a SINGER and a DANCER, perform a bird song dance in a circle around the wikiup. One shakes a rattle, the other sings.
<br />
<br />
<i>SINGER: (My fingers become feathers, my hands wings. My fingers become feathers, my hands wings. My tailfeather guides my path, I don’t fall. My tailfeather guides my path, I don’t fall.I rest on the moon, on my way to the sun. I rest on the moon, on my way to the sun...)</i>
<br />
<br />
INT. / WIKIUP / DAY<br />
In the dim interior Black Moon is passed out in his dollarcoat. The music is heard through the walls. Thonathon wipes her finger over some moon flower paste and touches it inside Black Moon’s lower lip. Then she pours more water on the hot rocks and steam fills the wikiup.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
Wide: Black Moon aerial POV moving above the desert. He comes up on Tuhudda on horseback.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
Tuhudda looks up after a bird’s shadow crosses ahead of him. He can’t see the bird against the sun so he turns away. Black Moon walks alongside Tuhudda’s horse.
<br />
<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (Shivawach! You are wandering between peoples...)</i><br />
Tuhudda raises himself in his stirrups to look around, but he sees nothing. Tuhudda sits down in his saddle and Black Moon is now behind him on the horse.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (You will wander forever after death if you do not quit the white man!)</i><br />
Tuhudda stops the horse, spooked by the nearness of Black Moon’s projection. Tuhudda pleads tearfully, turning this way and that in the desert.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (Black Moon, when you were a child I fought the white man with Chief Sickahote and Niaveh Espaniole until we are so many dead that Chief Irataba said we must have peace with the white man or lose our lands to the Maricopa! I remember this and I remember my birth! You are young and know nothing you do not see! It is you have forgotten, Black Moon!)</i>
<br />
<br />
Close up, aerial: From directly above Tuhudda alone on his horse, quiet now, looking this way and that until he suddenly spurs his horse to a run across the desert.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Medium, aerial: From the side following Tuhudda, his horse at full gallup, while Black Moon running alongside at a Mojave runner’s pace but quicker by moon flower magic.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
Rufe is breaking rocks with a small hammer in a shaded gully half way up the mountain. His donkey is chewing on some scrub down lower.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
Rufe’s hammer continues on the soundtrack as we see the desert floor from his mountain perch. Across the floor a dust cloud is raised by Tuhudda’s horse. Rufe’s clinking ends and he steps over to look at the dust.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Telephoto, close up: Now Tuhudda and his horse are visible as they race across the desert as if chased by a ghost.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Rufe steps out for a look at where the horse may be heading. He sees something.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Telephoto: The Troop formation at the far edge of the desert floor raising its own cloud of dust.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
Rufe scratches the back of his neck.<br />
<i>RUFE: Can’t be a one-Injun attack on the cavalry... Must be a messenger.</i><br />
Rufe walks back to his work while the camera stays on the desert floor.<br />
<i>RUFE: (O.C.) He’s sure killing that horse.</i><br />
In a moment the hammer clinking sounds begin again.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL / DAY<br />
The Sheriff follows Bobby riding slowly down the stagecoach route. They follow the road from the valley to the dry flat ahead. The Sheriff has seen this place already but waits for Bobby’s response. It takes awhile.<br />
<i>BOBBY: (points) Seems like we must’ve hit the stage up here and then run up over that ridge to the other side. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Why’d you do that? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: We were looking to camp on the other side, as far as we could get. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: (shakes head) Seems like a lotta work to try to avoid working for a living. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: We Gradys never been afraid of hard work, Sheriff. Of course being I’m younger I get most of the spade-work.</i><br />
Ahead on the trail they stop the horses and look over the area where the robbery happened.<br />
<i>BOBBY: (points) There’s the wheel marks turnin’. And that’s where... Cole did the shootin’.</i><br />
They find the three horses’ marks and follow them off the trail across the desert toward the ridge.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE BOTTOM / DAY<br />
The horses leave the desert bottom and their hooves clatter on the rock flats at the foot of the ridge.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: We lost your trail here.</i><br />
Bobby smiles and then points up the ridge.<br />
<i>BOBBY: We go right up there Sheriff.</i><br />
Sheriff frowns at the prospect of the climb.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: You came down somewhere, didn’t you? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: I want to show you where the Injuns attacked us... (drops smile) Cole must still be there. We wanted to bury him and say words, but the Injuns don’t care about decency and they chased us away.<br />
SHERIFF: Alright then, lead the way.</i><br />
Sheriff and Bobby begin to ride their horses higher.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
The Troop is dusty and ragged late in the afternoon but still moving forward when the REAR GUARD rides up to the Lieutenant.
<br />
<br />
<i>REAR GUARD: Lieutenant! Scout approaching! </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Report to Sergeant Greene ahead; have him order halt. </i><br />
<i>REAR GUARD: Yes sir.</i><br />
The Rear Guard rides to the head of the troop while the Lieutenant turns around to locate Tuhudda. He seems not to be approaching as his horse begins to collapse. The Lieutenant rides back to meet him. Tuhudda is on foot beside his dying horse. He is still spooked enough to be relieved at the approach of the Lieutenant.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Scout! Report!</i><br />
Tuhudda salutes distractedly.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Sir... </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Tuhudda, what’s happened to your horse? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Sir, I had to run when they...</i><br />
Lieutenant looks out over Tuhudda.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: I don’t see anyone, you mean Dodge and Clayton?</i><br />
Tuhudda nods.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Where’d they head?</i><br />
Tuhudda looks confused.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: I have to see my family...</i><br />
Lieutenant looks Tuhudda over carefully.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Looks like you pushed your horse is all... Strip him, shoot him and get on a wagon.</i>
Lieutenant rides back to meet the Sergeant at the halted troop.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: I don’t know what happened to him; something did. I swear, they come at you with no fear, then they see a ghost and curl up in a ball. </i><br />
<i>SERGEANT: When do want to set camp, sir?</i><br />
The Lieutenant checks his pocket watch, then looks at the sun’s position.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: An hour. But wait for Tuhudda.</i><br />
They salute and the Sergeant returns to lead the troop.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: The sun sinks towards the western horizon.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnUmV0hyKnkF1JzVcS0ddKVXi8X-UqNF0jfSDUDkm8fK9eeuj2DiD8SBx_9afZ30VvKSq-rl8KYyXNeBUPjiTpe1UKZHnPI-fPse-wtJycxrRskV3kFHrK5JnfkofZciCsoZgv0Sj1fNx/s1600/NV-155desert3nunzio.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="712" data-original-width="1068" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnUmV0hyKnkF1JzVcS0ddKVXi8X-UqNF0jfSDUDkm8fK9eeuj2DiD8SBx_9afZ30VvKSq-rl8KYyXNeBUPjiTpe1UKZHnPI-fPse-wtJycxrRskV3kFHrK5JnfkofZciCsoZgv0Sj1fNx/s400/NV-155desert3nunzio.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
The Sheriff and Bobby are now on foot leading their horses higher up the ridge. The Sheriff pauses at a small clearing and glances at his pocket watch then at the sun.
<br />
<br />
<i>SHERIFF: We better make camp.</i><br />
They leave the horses to forage the scrub, while they look back down the ridge.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Pick up any wood you can find; we’ll fire here.</i><br />
Bobby wanders around pulling up dead scrub.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / CAMPSITE 3 / DAY<br />
Rufe glances to the west and then hurries to gather scraps of wood and brush for his night campfire.Rufe crumples up some of the greenbacks to help build the fire. He pours water from his canteen into his coffeepot and adds the last of the coffee grounds from a small canvas bag to the used grounds still in the pot.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: That’s that, Rocky.</i><br />
He sets the pot down next to the fire.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Close up: Western horizon at the last of the light.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / CAMPSITE 3 / NIGHT<br />
Rufe and his donkey lie on either side of the small fire.
<br />
<br />
<i>RUFE: We better wash up on our way into town, eh Rocky?</i><br />
The donkey looks at Rufe.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / TRAIL CAMPFIRE 3 / NIGHT<br />
The Troopers are in their tents except for those on guard duty. Tuhudda is sitting on the ground by the fire with his head down. The Lieutenant comes out of the darkness and sits down next to Tuhudda; he isn’t as comfortable sitting this way. Tuhudda looks over at him.
<br />
<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: You are different, Tuhudda. What happened out there?</i><br />
Tuhudda shakes his head.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Our deserters didn’t chase you, but something did. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Nuumet! </i><br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: You’re not afraid of cougars. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (angrily) Mahwat!</i><br />
Lieutenant sits up to stretch, frustrated.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: You have another year in your hitch. I say this to you as a friend, Tuhudda. Prison is bad for white men but it kills the Indian. You know this. </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Two soldiers run to Mexico. I break the barrel to make you return. Not go to die as... Mahwat want.</i><br />
Lieutenant looks at him and then sighs and looks at the fire.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: You fought the white man once.</i><br />
Tuhudda nods.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Mahwat or Nuumet or some young bucks want to fight the white man again.</i><br />
Tuhudda nods.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: How can we stop this? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Let me see my people and then see... Mahwat.</i><br />
Lieutenant nods.<br />
<i>LIEUTENANT: Do you want to go in with us or take a horse and go? </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: I take horse and meet you at the fort; then I will go on to...(motions out)...the camps.<br />
LIEUTENANT: Fine, Tuhudda. I wish you good luck. The Captain will want to hear our reports.</i><br />
The Lieutenant stands and stretches and sees the Sergeant watching them. Lieutenant nods to him and walks over, leaving Tuhudda staring into the fire.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Montage: Abstract womb memory to droning over drumming.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / NIGHT<br />
Black Moon startles those around the fire as he staggers from his wikiup trailing smoke and steam and stands up straight. He wears his loin cloth and the dollarcoat. The others gather around him and lay hands on his coat carefully. The Shaman walks over and the others part and he puts his hand on Black Moon’s forehead. The small band watches Black Moon walk away from the light of the fire-pit and away from the camp.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / SHERIFF’S CAMP / NIGHT<br />
The Sheriff and Bobby sit on either side of the fire talking.
<br />
<br />
<i>BOBBY: There was no place for us in the gold fields. Everybody got theirs and don’t need anybody more. So we come to try silver and that’s when Dougie started talking to Cole... about other things.<br />
SHERIFF: How’d you meet Olly? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: He was Cole’s friend. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Your brother looks to me like he’s going to end up somewhere you don’t want to be. But you look to me like you’re going to follow along anyway. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: That’s right, Sheriff. I think you’re right about that.</i><br />
The Sheriff smiles despite himself but then is distracted suddenly, and slowly stands up to face Black Moon who is standing at the edge of the fire’s light. Sheriff motions him forward as Bobby turns to look.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Coffee, friend?</i><br />
Black Moon walks in slowly but aggressively, slapping their possessions, knocking things over, startling the horses, and finally roughly poking Bobby who stands up cowering and sidling over to the Sheriff who is simply staring at Black Moon, confused by his actions and his dollarcoat made of the missing greenbacks.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (points) Where’d you get those?</i><br />
Black Moon is now satisfied the coat has power and he points out to the darkness.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: White man leave the land of Ah’ Mahavi!</i><br />
He turns to Bobby to get a better, more fearful response.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: All white man!</i><br />
Black Moon kicks dirt onto their fire. The Sheriff only now pulls his gun from his holster. Black Moon stands for a few moments expecting to be shot but protected by the coat. Then he turns and bounds away quickly into the night. Unsure if other Mojave may be near. He waves Bobby away from the remaining light of the fire and motions him to be silent. They crouch against a rock waiting and listening.<br />
Fade to black.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / COLORADO RIVER / NIGHT<br />
Tuhudda leads his horse into the river to cross.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / RESERVATION / NIGHT<br />
Tuhudda rides onto the dark, quiet reservation. There is no fire and no-one sees him. He ties his horse outside one of the hogans, and enters it.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
INT. / HOGAN 2 / NIGHT<br />
Tuhudda lights a match and his wife, CHACH’HODA, sits up from her sleep quietly. Three young children are still sleeping. He lights one twig at a time as they talk in whispers.
<br />
<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (Chach’hoda, where are the people?) </i><br />
<i>CHACH’HODA: (All have left for the Mountain, to fight. The soldiers make the white man’s houses.)</i><br />
Tuhudda is thinking.<br />
<i>CHACH’HODA: (You need rest, Tuhudda; let me fix you something to eat.) </i><br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (All Neolge and Wahlia are gone?)</i><br />
She nods. The BOY who is about seven wakes and looks up at his parents worried at their grave expressions. Tuhudda smiles at him and reaches over and pulls the Boy onto his lap.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (Quahote, my son.)</i><br />
Chach’hoda smiles momentarily at her son in his father’s arms.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (I will report, then follow to the mountains.)</i><br />
His wife is worried to hear this. Tuhudda sets his son back down in his bedding.
<br />
<br />
Close up: The flame consumes the last of a twig and goes out.
<br />
Cut to:
<br />
<br />
EXT. / HOGAN 2 / NIGHT<br />
Tuhudda silently leads his horse from the hogan and out of the reservation.
<br />
Dissolve to:
<br />
<br />
Wide: The eastern horizon is brightening.
<br />
<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
Tuhudda rides onto the fort grounds as reveille is sounded for the few men still here. He stops his horse and watches the raising of the flag by the remaining Troop plus the Army Messenger. The flag raised, the men salute the Captain who then pauses on his return to his office at the sight of Tuhudda alone. Tuhudda dismounts and leads his horse to the office post where he meets the Captain. They salute but the Captain says nothing which strikes Tuhudda as odd.
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<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: The Lieutenant is returning, Captain.</i><br />
The Captain nods.<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: Captain, I must go out to the Mojave camps.</i><br />
The Captain steps up onto his porch and then turns back to Tuhudda.<br />
<i>CAPTAIN: (nods) Don’t go yet, Tuhudda. It would be good for you to see the arrival of the U.S. Army. The 7th California volunteers will be relieved in a matter of hours.</i><br />
The Captain dismisses the confused Tuhudda with a salute and enters his office and closes the door. Tuhudda looks at the door close and then turns to walk his horse to the livery.
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<br />
EXT. / FORT MOJAVE / DAY<br />
Later, the Lieutenant leads his Troop back to a different looking fort. The grounds are now full of the U.S. ARMY TROOP, a full garrison of a hundred men with wagons and artillery.
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<br />
Close up: The Lieutenant looks at the new troop with confusion. The sergeant rides up beside him looking the same.
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<br />
Tuhudda rides grimly past the returning Troop and salutes the officers who barely notice him.
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<br />
EXT. / COLORADO RIVER / DAY<br />
Tuhudda rides out of the river; he and his horse are dripping water as they ride slowly toward the mountains.
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<br />
EXT. / VALLEY FLAT / DAY<br />
The Sheriff looks down grimly at the rough exhumation of what’s left of Cole’s body. Bobby jerks away from the sight as he comes up on it and steps away slightly.
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<br />
<i>BOBBY: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Sheriff! Why’d they go and do that to him?! </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: No. This was done by animals.</i><br />
Sheriff stops staring at the remains and steps around the area looking. Bobby follows him looking nauseous.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: You say they took everything from you here? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Yeah, only they left all the money. Dougie saw it too because we was gonna come back and get it. </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Well our friend was wearing some of it. So maybe they came back.</i><br />
Sheriff picks up a greenback from the brush and studies it.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: I better pick these few up. Bobby, get the horses and follow me. These footprints move along here. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Alright.</i><br />
Bobby goes back for the horses and the Sheriff follows the few stray greenbacks that he sees spread around.
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<br />
EXT. / CAMPSITE 3 / DAY<br />
Rufe is drinking coffee and looking up at circling hawks and vultures down along the ridge.
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<br />
<i>RUFE: What are those devils back for?</i><br />
Rufe is puzzled as he knows he buried the body.
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Dissolve to:
<br />
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EXT. / DESERT MAZE / DAY<br />
Tahudda’s horse is tied at the edge of the Mojave maze. The maze is made of lines made of piles of small stones and designed to run through and lose bad spirits by taking its complicated turns and back tracks quickly.
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Cut to:
<br />
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Wide aerial pan: From the horse and Tuhudda’s things, then across the maze lines until Tuhudda himself comes into view. He is stripped to his loincloth and running through the lines, making sharp turns and directional changes.
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<br />
Back outside of the maze Tuhudda breathes hard and looks around as if he expects to catch sight of the spirit he hopes to elude.
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EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
The old hunting camp is filling up with new Mojave arrivals. They set up makeshift lean-tos and wikiups and fill the area.
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EXT. / TRAIL / DAY<br />
Olson is now wearing work clothes and spurring a horse with two more horses in tow.
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INT. / JAIL CELL / DAY<br />
Doug is sleeping in his bunk. Olson’s voice comes through the bars on the small window.
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<br />
<i>OLSON: (O.C.) Grady! ...Doug! ...Bobby!</i><br />
Doug stirs and then quickly stands and jumps up on the bunk to grab the bars and lift himself up.<br />
<i>DOUG: Yeah!<br />
OLSON: (O.C.) I’ve got horses for you. Use this. We gotta find that money!</i><br />
A small sack is pushed through the bars. Doug grabs it and opens it. Inside he finds a stick of dynamite and box of matches. Doug pushes the bars out and jams the stick between the bunk steel and the bars and lights it. Now in a panic Doug steps over to the far side of the cell and then curls up on the floor. The dynamite blows and one side of the bars clatters out against the wall.
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EXT. / SOUTHWEST DESERT / DAY<br />
Olson and Doug ride quickly into the desert.
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EXT. / RIDGE / DAY<br />
The Sheriff walks carefully up the side of the rock-strewn ridge, watching the trail for tracks and dollars. Behind him a ways Bobby is following on foot with the horses. Drumming is heard faintly now. Sheriff turns and holds up his hand to stop Bobby who pauses and watches the Sheriff move up to the edge of a rim to take a look.
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Close up: The Sheriff raises from behind a rock and sees the now large Indian camp.
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EXT. / INDIAN CAMP / DAY<br />
Wide: Sheriff’s POV, the ridge top is filled with Mojave, drummers on one side of the large fire and dancers on the other. Ten warriors including Black Moon wear dollarcoats and the Shaman is giving each of them a sip of moon flower tea in turn.
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Cut to:
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<br />
The Sheriff scrambles back down to Bobby.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Quite the pow wow up there. And they’re wearing our money. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Wearing it?!</i><br />
Sheriff nods and looks around at the ridge.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: They’re going to war. Maybe that’s why we haven’t been seen. But we better not move until night.</i><br />
The Sheriff sits down and Bobby looks around.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: Tie them there and sit down.</i><br />
Bobby ties the horses to some scrub and sits down.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: They’ll probably burn the reservation and then attack the fort. And if they manage all that, Belleville next. </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: Think they can do all that? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: They can try.</i>
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<br />
The Sheriff lies back and takes a look at his watch. Then he tips his hat down over his eyes. Bobby looks at him and then does the same.
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Dissolve to:
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Close up: The Sun sets against the horizon; the drumming continues on the soundtrack.
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EXT. / RIDGE / NIGHT<br />
Elsewhere on the ridge Rufe can hear the drums and he peers over and spots the war dance by firelight. He immediately ducks and starts back down the ridge to his donkey and leads it away.
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Dissolve to:
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Close up: The new moon; drumming on the soundtrack.
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EXT. / RIDGE / NIGHT<br />
Bobby and the Sheriff stir; they hear war chants with the drumming now.
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<br />
<i>BOBBY: Think we should get out of here, Sheriff? </i><br />
<i>SHERIFF: Let me take a look first.</i><br />
The Sheriff climbs back up to the rim and peers over it.
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Cut to:
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Wide: Sheriff’s POV, the ridge top is all in motion with Mojave reaching the trance state together.
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Close up: Tuhudda arrives at the gathering and he breaks his way into the dancing circle.
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Cut to:
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<br />
Down below the Sheriff, Doug and Olson reach Bobby.<br />
<i>BOBBY: Dougie! </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Hey little brother; where’s that Sheriff?</i><br />
Bobby points up the ridge.<br />
<i>OLSON: Where’s the money? </i><br />
<i>BOBBY: He said the Injuns are wearing the money. </i><br />
<i>DOUG: Wearing the money! Goddamn it Olson, we’re all going to wind up like Cole!</i><br />
Olson motions for them to be quiet as they move up the ridge to the rim. The Sheriff hears something and turns around to face Olson’s gun.<br />
<i>OLSON: Hold still, Sheriff.</i><br />
The Sheriff can’t help smiling and shaking his head.<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (points) Look at your money, Ollie.</i><br />
Olson is leery of taking the gun off the Sheriff. Doug climbs to the rim next to the Sheriff and looks. He is stunned by what he sees and slowly motions Olson up. The Sheriff turns back to the sight unconcerned with Olson’s gun so Olson too moves to the rim followed by Bobby.
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Close up: In a row left-to-right, Bobby, Olson, Doug, and the Sheriff stare at the sight, their faces lit by the fire.
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Cut to:
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<br />
Their POV: Black Moon and nine more Warriors are wearing dollarcoats and are dancing as if in trances. Black Moon is the leader and this is denoted by the open watch fob that hangs around his neck. The Shaman has a roll of burning greenbacks in one hand and he waves the smoke to each Warriors face in turn. Another hundred or so Mojave circle them to touch the smoke themselves.
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<br />
Medium: Tuhudda has pushed his way through the crowd and reaches Black Moon and interrupts the Shaman who steps aside and the dancing and drumming begin to fall apart to silence. Tuhudda stares at Black Moon until everyone is quiet and then talks loudly for all to hear.
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<br />
<i>TUHUDDA: (Black Moon! You must not war against the white man! Chief Irataba’s word must rule! There is a new army at the fort! One hundred soldiers with horses, rifles and cannons! The Mojave will die and the land will be lost! To your children! To your spirits!)</i><br />
Black Moon steps forward and raises his arms to show his dollarcoat.<br />
<i>BLACK MOON: (We do not fear the white man! No more! Now we pick up Chief Sickahote’s spear and bow and strike from behind the magic of the white man’s dollar and time face!)</i><br />
The Shaman shakes the burning roll of greenbacks to Black Moon’s words and a cheer goes up from the Mojave. Tuhudda looks around at the war crazy Mojave and despairs. He raises his pistol and holds it until Black Moon focuses on it and waits confidently for the shot. The entire camp builds to a loud chanting until Tuhudda fires a shot at Black Moon. Black Moon staggers back with arms still raised. Black Moon can’t believe he is shot and now staggers forward and falls into the fire sending sparks into the sky. The chanting ends. The Shaman and a Warrior pulls Black Moon from the fire. Other Warriors unsheath knives and attack Tuhudda together. Tuhudda doesn’t seem to resist and goes down under their blows.
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<br />
The Mojave now are quiet as what’s happened sinks in. The Warriors remove their dollarcoats and drop them into the fire. All drift away into the darkness leaving the Shaman dancing over the body of Black Moon.
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Cut to:
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<br />
EXT. / RIDGE / NIGHT<br />
The Sheriff turns away from the Mojave fire and joins the brothers and Olson who are staring into the dark night. Olson is slack-jawed. Doug is sullen. Bobby is still scared. The Sheriff is somehow tickled by what he’s seen.
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<br />
<i>SHERIFF: (sighs) Well... give them some time boys and they’ll print up another batch of money for ya... But right now you’re under arrest.</i><br />
He casually pulls his pistol but otherwise none bats an eye.
<br />
Dissolve to:
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<br />
Close: The new moon against the milky way.
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Dissolve to:
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<br />
Wide pan: The sun rises against the eastern horizon. On the soundtrack we hear the clinking of Rufe’s hammer.
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Cut to:
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<br />
Close: The sun on the dark stained skull setting on the rock.
Fade to black.
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<br />
<i>(illustrations: header collage by Mike Vann Gray; sunset by Nunzio Carducci; other photographs by Joe Carducci)</i>
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Copyright 2018 D. Joseph Carducci | reg. WGAw
P.O. Box 276, Centennial Wyoming 82055<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">"Desert Poem" by Rafael Carducci
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pines</span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<b>
From the Wyoming Desk…</b>
<br />
<br />
Richard Rodriguez in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/padre-mestizo" target="_blank">Padre Mestizo</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
The Jesuits in Baja California plastered the walls of their missions with the brightest, most supernatural white they were capable of fabricating in order to enchant the Indians down from the hills. My father would have come. I would have come down to see what the missions were about. To hear about Jesus-God. As a mestizo, like most Mexicans alive today, like my ancestors, I was made by the missions. St. Junípero is not our role model; not the first. He was part of a procession. We are called to his grave because of the strength of his resolve—a resolve he shared with thousands of missionaries. His great ambition, his deep desire, was to join his soul to the souls of Indians, many of whom fled his presence. You may find yourself unwilling to praise the old priest. But I will. </blockquote>
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<br />
<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Simon Romero in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/us/indian-slaves-genizaros.html" target="_blank">Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
New Mexico, which had the largest number of sedentary Indians north of central Mexico, emerged as a coveted domain for slavers almost as soon as the Spanish began settling here in the 16th century, according to Andrés Reséndez, a historian who details the trade in his 2016 book, “The Other Slavery.” Colonists initially took local Pueblo Indians as slaves, leading to an uprising in 1680 that temporarily pushed the Spanish out of New Mexico. The trade then evolved to include not just Hispanic traffickers but horse-mounted Comanche and Ute warriors, who raided the settlements of Apache, Kiowa, Jumano, Pawnee and other peoples. They took captives, many of them children plucked from their homes, and sold them at auctions in village plazas. The Spanish crown tried to prohibit slavery in its colonies, but traffickers often circumvented the ban by labeling their captives in parish records as criados, or servants. The trade endured even decades after the Mexican-American War, when the United States took control of much of the Southwest in the 1840s. Seeking to strengthen the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, Congress passed the Peonage Act of 1867 after learning of propertied New Mexicans owning hundreds and perhaps thousands of Indian slaves, mainly Navajo women and children. </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Allen Guelzo in WSJ on Brooks Simpson’s anthology, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-reconstruction-eras-open-wound-1517610265" target="_blank">Reconstruction</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
The first document in the anthology is from no less than Frederick Douglass, whose optimistic speech in January 1865 was titled “What the Black Man Wants.” Douglass’s answer was, simply: to be left alone. “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us…. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength… let them fall!” The balance of the anthology can be seen as one long, exasperated illustration of how that advice was ignored. Former Confederates had no intention of leaving the freedpeople alone, because Southern wealth and white supremacy depended on keeping African-Americans in an economic condition as close to slavery as possible. At the same time, infuriated anti-slavery Northerners… made it clear that they had not fought the Civil War merely to obtain some minor readjustments of Southern society, and the freedpeople became their proxies in a war to bury forever an anti-republican and anti-capitalist slave-holding elite. </blockquote>
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<br />
<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Michael Barone in WSJ on James Simon’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/eisenhower-vs-warren-review-on-the-docket-social-change-1523315425" target="_blank">Eisenhower vs. Warren</a>.
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<blockquote>
The fact is that Eisenhower and Warren were both acting under political constraints – something that Mr. Simon, in his gripping account, describes generously in Warren’s case but somewhat more grudgingly in Eisenhower’s. Eisenhower was a politician who in 1952 had won 49% in the South and wanted to do even better in 1956 (he got 50.2%). A plunge in his job approval would weaken his ability to govern. As it was, as Mr. Simon notes, the Southern federal judges he appointed did yeoman work insisting on desegregation. Warren was constrained by his statesmanlike desire for unanimity. The price was delay. It required the work of a brilliantly led civil-rights movement, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act over a dramatic filibuster and the hammer of the Voting Rights Act a year later to dismantle the segregation system. And it was the administration of Richard Nixon, whom Eisenhower disdained and Warren loathed, that finally ended segregation in the schools. </blockquote>
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<br />
<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
H.W. Brands in WSJ on John Sedgwick’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cherokee-vs-the-cherokee-1522959876" target="_blank">Blood Moon</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAYwEVGvq98rszhfjldHcFe5-4JNKRYbRYjom_bBoxoxl0crHwQeRYZ4g0eYuOk2HQIR_cu-2eDMiYEFcCJm0gHs_2a0X3jxdxLpT359ZH43c5k7jWyRcr2wJyIAmfhHbVJ06cL3WUKL-y/s1600/NV-155-blood+moon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="235" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAYwEVGvq98rszhfjldHcFe5-4JNKRYbRYjom_bBoxoxl0crHwQeRYZ4g0eYuOk2HQIR_cu-2eDMiYEFcCJm0gHs_2a0X3jxdxLpT359ZH43c5k7jWyRcr2wJyIAmfhHbVJ06cL3WUKL-y/s200/NV-155-blood+moon.png" width="133" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
In the case of the Cherokee, it was often difficult to tell who was white and who Indian.<br />
Mr. Sedgwick deftly hangs his tale on two remarkable individuals: The Ridge (He Who Walks on Mountaintops) and John Ross. Each was of mixed ancestry, with The Ridge looking more like his Cherokee father than his Scots grandfather, and Ross resembling the seven of his eight great-grandparents who were white. The Ridge never learned to speak fluent English; Ross never mastered Cherokee. For decades the two battled whites, collaborated with whites and eventually fought against each other for the future of the Cherokee nation. The question that finally drove them apart was the one that confronted every Indian tribe sooner or later: retreat in the face of white pressure or fight to the bitter end?</blockquote>
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<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Andrew Higgins in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/world/asia/kazakhstan-cowboys.html" target="_blank">Kazakhstan Prizes Its Cowboys</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
As the world’s largest landlocked country, Kazakhstan covers an area nearly four times the size of Texas but has only 18 million people, a ratio that leaves plenty of open spaces for cattle and cowboys. In the first two decades after independence, Kazakhstan focused mostly on developing its oil fields and mostly ignored its cows, whose number declined steeply. Also neglected were cowboys. In 2012, the government decided, for both economic and cultural reasons, to start pouring money into the cattle industry. It sent groups of cowboys to train in North Dakota and brought in American cowboys to help out on the steppe. The number of cattle has since risen sharply. Nearly all of the money, however, went to big ranches linked to or owned by the government, not to small-time cowboys like Mr. Kozhakov. Instead of delighting in Kazakhstan’s progress, both he and his wife say they miss the Soviet Union. His wife said she and her family were living in a remote camp without television or telephone when the Soviet Union fell apart and did not even know anything had happened until the state farm they were herding cattle for stopped sending supplies. “We knew nothing,” she recalled. “All the leaders of the state farm were too busy dividing up the property among themselves to tell us anything.” </blockquote>
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<br />
<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Jim Carlton in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-battle-for-the-american-west-the-cowboys-are-losing-1522425557" target="_blank">In Battle for American West, Cowboys Are Losing</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
Since 1979, when the environmental movement kicked into gear, the number of ranchers permitted on Bureau of Land Management-owned lands fell from about 22,000 with 12 million permitted livestock, mostly cows, to 18,000 ranchers with about seven million livestock, according to the most recent government estimates, from 2016. The number of ranchers and cows on public lands continued to drop even as cattle prices stabilized and rose. </blockquote>
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<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Chad Nelson in POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, <a href="http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19724" target="_blank">Why the Great Powers Permitted the Creation of an American Hegemon</a>.
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<blockquote>
There were, in fact, benefits to American hegemony for Britain and France, at least in the short and medium term, which was more explicitly acknowledged when the future of that hegemony seemed in doubt during the Civil War. One of the motives Americans had for obtaining hegemony in North America was to keep the state weak. In the unusual conditions of North America, expansionism was a substitute for state building. American statesmen wanted to prevent a competitive security environment from developing, as in Europe, as this would require a stronger state and a standing army, thus endangering liberty. Europeans benefited from this weak state, which, for the most part, did not engage in European diplomacy and did not embroil them in conflicts in the Western Hemisphere, confining the bulk of their interactions to trade. When that arrangement seemed to be breaking down, British and French observers did not see it as a necessarily positive development. The breakup of American hegemony would (and did) create powerful states that threatened to suck the British and French in to a dangerous cauldron. Perhaps American hegemony gave Britain a balancer of last resort in Europe, but there is no evidence that Britain appreciated this longer-term benefit. It was rather the more immediate benefit of a peaceful North America that the British prized. </blockquote>
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<b>
***
</b><br />
<br />
Christopher Hawthorne in LAT, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-building-type-new-york-times-20180211-story.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles, Houston and the Rise of the Unreadable City</a>.
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<blockquote>
Houston is casually written off even more often than Los Angeles, which is saying something. Now the fourth largest city in the country in population — and gaining on third-place Chicago — it's an unruly place in terms of its urbanism, a place that (as Los Angeles once did) has room, or makes room, for a wide spectrum of architectural production, from the innovative to the ugly. Like Los Angeles, it's a city that invested heavily in freeways and other car-centric infrastructure last century and remains, in many neighborhoods, a terrible place to walk. It's long been a place people go to reinvent themselves, to get rich or to disappear. The flip side of its great tolerance is a certain lack of cohesion, a difficulty in articulating a set of common civic goals. (Here's where I concede that the instinct behind the New York Times piece on L.A., if little about its execution, was perfectly reasonable.) As is the case in Los Angeles, the greatest thing and the worst thing about Houston are one and the same: Nobody cares what anybody else is doing. Freedom in both places sometimes trumps community. It also tends to trump stale donor-class taste. Roughly one in four residents of Houston's Harris County is foreign-born, a rate nearly as high as those in New York and Los Angeles. Houston's relationship with Dallas, the third biggest city in Texas, is something like L.A.'s with San Francisco; the southern city in each pair is less decorous, less fixed in its civic identity and (at the moment, at least) entirely more vital. </blockquote>
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Adam Liptak in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/us/politics/trump-california-lawsuits.html" target="_blank">Trump v. California: The Biggest Legal Clashes</a>.
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In the Obama years, red states tried to strike down the heart of the Affordable Care Act and succeeded in blocking a major immigration program. “Now we see the blue states battling Trump over sanctuary cities, the census and other issues,” Professor Somin said. Greg Abbott, now the governor of Texas, used to say that his job description as the state’s attorney general was simple: “I go to the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, has said that his attitude is slightly different. “We don’t wake up in the morning looking to pick a fight with the Trump administration,” he said. “But we will do what is necessary to defend our values.” Texas sued the Obama administration at least 48 times, according to a survey conducted by The Texas Tribune. The Trump administration is a little more than a year old, and California is already within striking distance of those numbers. </blockquote>
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Max Fisher, et. al., in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/world/americas/mexico-state-corruption.html" target="_blank">Losing Faith in the State, Some Mexican Towns Quietly Break Away</a>.
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<blockquote>
Local orchard owners, who export over $1 million in avocados per day, mostly to the United States, underwrite what has effectively become an independent city-state. Self-policing and self-governing, it is a sanctuary from drug cartels as well as from the Mexican state. But beneath the calm is a town under tightfisted control, enforced by militias accountable only to their paymasters. Drug addiction and suicide are soaring, locals say, as the social contract strains. Tancítaro represents a quiet but telling trend in Mexico, where a handful of towns and cities are effectively seceding, partly or in whole. These are acts of desperation, revealing the degree to which Mexico’s police and politicians are seen as part of the threat. Visit three such enclaves — Tancítaro; Monterrey, a rich commercial city; and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, just outside the capital — and you will find a pattern. Each is a haven of relative safety amid violence, suggesting that their diagnosis of the problem was correct. But their gains are fragile and have come at significant cost. </blockquote>
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Azam Ahmed in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/world/americas/mexico-press-government-advertising.html" target="_blank">Using Billions in Government Cash, Mexico Controls News Media</a>.
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Despite vowing to regulate government publicity, Mr. Peña Nieto has spent more money on media advertising than any other president in Mexico’s history — nearly $2 billion in the past five years, according to government data compiled by Fundar, a transparency group. It found that his administration spent more than twice the generous media budget Mexican lawmakers allotted it for 2016 alone. And that is just the federal money…. According to the executives and editors involved in the negotiations, some government press secretaries openly demand positive coverage from news organizations before signing an advertising contract. The result is a media landscape across Mexico in which federal and state officials routinely dictate the news, telling outlets what they should — and should not — report, according to dozens of interviews with executives, editors and reporters. Hard-hitting stories are often softened, squashed or put off indefinitely, if they get reported at all…. Mr. Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, also known as the PRI, pioneered this system during its 70 years in power. Former President José López Portillo explicitly laid out the government’s expectations decades ago — he was even quoted as saying that he did not pay the media to attack him — and the practice continued when the opposition claimed the presidency in 2000, then again in 2006. </blockquote>
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Raymond Zhong in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/technology/china-censor-teen-moms.html" target="_blank">China Isn’t Happy About Its Newest Internet Stars: Teenage Moms</a>.
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The slapdown — which comes as China’s government extends its internet controls to encompass not only what it finds politically subversive, but also what it deems unwholesome or pornographic — prompted quick declarations of remorse from the video apps’ creators. “Content appeared on the platform that shouldn’t have been there, and it has had an extremely bad influence on society,” Su Hua, the chief executive of the company that operates Kuaishou, one of the apps, wrote in a statement. “I am very grateful to CCTV and other media for criticizing Kuaishou, so that I could clearly see my own deficiencies.” The company behind the other app, Huoshan, wrote: “Thanks to CCTV’s supervision, Huoshan feels a deep sense of responsibility.” The creators of both apps said that they would strengthen their systems for screening videos. </blockquote>
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Javier Hernandez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html" target="_blank">Chinese Sperm Bank Seeks Donors. Only Good Communists Need Apply</a>.
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No bald men. No hereditary diseases like color blindness. And in case there were any doubts, the sperm bank at Peking University Third Hospital clarified: Only men with an abiding love for the “socialist motherland” need apply. President Xi Jinping’s drive to restore the Communist Party’s place at the center of everyday life in China has brought socialist banners to city streets, nationalistic rap music to the airwaves and patriotic heroes to movie theaters. Now Mr. Xi has inspired a new test of party loyalty — reproduction. The ad placed by the hospital sperm bank, which has circulated widely on social media in recent days, listed support for the Communist Party and Mr. Xi as its top requirements for potential donors. “He must have good ideological thoughts,” the ad said by way of describing ideal donors, “love the socialist motherland and support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.” </blockquote>
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James Millward in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html" target="_blank">What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State</a>.
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According to Radio Free Asia, a county official and a police officer in southern Xinjiang were instructed by superiors to lock up 40 percent of the local Uighur population. Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, estimates that 5 percent of the Uighur population across Xinjiang has been or is currently detained — more than 500,000 people in all. Local orphanages overflow with the children of detainees; some children reportedly are sent to facilities in the eastern parts of China. Why are so many Uighurs subjected to these harsh policies? A Chinese official in Kashgar explained: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” The C.C.P., once quite liberal in its approach to diversity, seems to be redefining Chinese identity in the image of the majority Han — its version, perhaps, of the nativism that appears to be sweeping other parts of the world. With ethnic difference itself now defined as a threat to the Chinese state, local leaders like Mr. Chen feel empowered to target Uighurs and their culture wholesale. </blockquote>
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Walter Mead in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/left-and-right-agree-get-tough-on-china-1515458432" target="_blank">Left and Right Agree: Get Tough on China</a>.
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Within the Republican Party, China is what unites the Steve Bannon wing with the H.R. McMasters and the Rex Tillersons. Where the populists see a threat to American jobs and wages from unfair Chinese competition, the national-security types worry about protecting important sea lanes and American allies in the region from an aggressive, rapidly arming power. As many traditional pro-China voices in corporate America fall silent in the face of Beijing’s mercantilism, the Richard Nixon-George H.W. Bush legacy of Republican friendship with China is on the wane. Democrats also are increasingly focused on perceived threats from Beijing. Organized labor has long argued that Chinese competition undermines American wages and jobs. But now China, not content with suppressing human rights in its own territory, is seeking to advance the cause of nondemocratic governance in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe. That brings it into conflict with the powerful human-rights constituency in Democratic politics. Beyond that, the often left-leaning tech lords of Silicon Valley have been hit by some of China’s most aggressively mercantilist abuses. </blockquote>
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Keith Bradsher & Jane Perlez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/asia/china-trade-war-trump.html" target="_blank">Is Trump Series About Trade War? China’s Leaders Hunt for Answers</a>.
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In these meetings, the Americans have warned that Mr. Trump’s complaints should be taken seriously because of widespread frustration in Washington with Chinese policies, especially a $300 billion program to dominate critical high-tech industries, known as Made in China 2025, that has alarmed the United States national security establishment. It is unclear whether that message is making it through to Mr. Xi — or whether he has chosen to ignore it after concluding that Mr. Trump is bluffing and that the United States will back off, as it has in the past. Governing with a new mandate since engineering the removal of presidential term limits last month, Mr. Xi has personally taken control of decision-making in the trade standoff, according to analysts and political insiders with ties to the leadership. His unquestioned authority, some say, has made it more difficult for the party apparatus to deliver news that contradicts him. “When you have this kind of regime, you want to report the good story,” said Tao Jingzhou, a managing partner at the global law firm Dechert who deals with senior Chinese officials. “I have the impression the leadership is not fully briefed about the seriousness of the atmosphere against China in the U.S. establishment.” </blockquote>
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Jamil Anderlini in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/comment/columnists/jamil-anderlini" target="_blank">Enduring Suspicion Weighs on Capitalists in China</a>.
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In ancient times, merchants were at the very bottom of the four official social classes, below warrior-scholars, farmers and artisans. Although some became very rich they were considered parasites in Chinese society. Ever since the Han emperors established the state salt monopoly in the second century BCE (remnants of which remain to this day), large-scale business enterprises have been controlled by the state to completely reliant on the favour of the emperor and the bureaucrat class. In the 20th century, the Communist emperor Mao Zedong effectively managed to stamp out all private enterprise for a while. Until the party finally allowed “capitalists” to join its ranks in 2002, many of the business activities carried out by the resurgent merchant class were technically illegal. </blockquote>
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Zephyr Teachout in NYT on Adam Winkler’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/books/review/adam-winkler-we-the-corporations.html" target="_blank">We the Corporations – How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights</a>.
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Corporations have rarely won rights by trumpeting their own importance, or openly arguing for civil rights. Instead, over generations, they have succeeded by claiming that corporate rights are necessary and useful tools for vindicating the rights of others — of people. In the first major corporate-rights case, in 1809, the issue was whether a bank had the right to sue in federal court. Given the politics of the time, the bank was likely to lose in state court. The problem was that the Constitution gave access to federal court only to “citizens.” Instead of trying to argue that a corporation is a person qua person, the bank’s lawyer insisted that the rights of the owners — an association of people — would be trampled on if the bank couldn’t be heard in federal court. The Supreme Court acquiesced…. In 1946, the Supreme Court justice Hugo Black proposed an alternative way to think about big corporations, as quasi governments. Black wrote the majority opinion in Marsh v. Alabama, arguing that when corporations take on the role of governments, they must be subject to the limitations we put on governmental power. Had Black’s logic been taken more seriously, it would have reshaped American rules regarding corporate power. Winkler spends several pages on the case but doesn’t persuasively explain why Black’s argument never took hold. </blockquote>
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Andrew Sullivan in NEW YORK, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html" target="_blank">We All Live on Campus Now</a>.
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And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit – as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” – is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment – untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights – are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself. </blockquote>
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Patrick Buchanan in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-nixon-in-68-the-year-america-came-apart-1522937732" target="_blank">With Nixon in ’68 </a>.
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The stage was set for an explosive Democratic convention in Chicago. I asked Nixon to send me. He agreed. Our listening post was on the 19th floor of the “Comrade Hilton.” I was alone in the suite one night when Norman Mailer walked in with the light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres. As we talked, a commotion erupted outside. A phalanx of cops had marched up Balbo Drive to Michigan Avenue and halted. Suddenly, the cops took off into Grant Park, clubbing the radicals and dragging them to patrol wagons. Mailer and I saw it all from our 19th-floor window. On and on it went, as Torres cursed the cops and I stayed mute. I had been down there at night among the protestors, who were as ugly a crowd as I had seen in the Vietnam era. When Humphrey left Chicago, the Democratic coalition that had give LBJ a historic landslide in 1964 was shattered. Wallace seemed certain to shear off the electoral votes of the Deep South. The McCarthy-Kennedy wing was enraged over how Mayor Richard Daley’s cops had beaten the protestors. The nation had seen a convention where Democratic delegates cursed one another on the floor as their partisans brawled with police in the streets. I came back from Chicago and told Nixon that we should side with Daley and the cops. Nixon’s first campaign stop that fall was a motorcade through downtown Chicago, where huge crowds cheered him. </blockquote>
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Patrick Deneen in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/04/the-ignoble-lie" target="_blank">The Ignoble Lie – How the New Aristocracy Masks Its Privilege</a>.
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<blockquote>
Socrates is reluctant even to speak the myth aloud, recognizing how repulsive it is likely to sound to his hearers. More, he admits that it will require great acts of persuasion—likely over generations—before it is accepted by denizens of the city, and even then, it is likely not to be persuasive to the ruling class. If anyone is likely to accept the myth, he suggests, it is the uneducated working class…. When pressed on the question of why it will prove more difficult to persuade the ruling class of the truth of the noble lie, most students believe that the ruling class’s superior education and intelligence make them more resistant to propaganda, while the simple working people are likely to succumb to deception because they don’t adequately understand their own interests. My students implicitly side with Marx in believing that the less educated are likely to adopt “false consciousness.” Plato intends us to understand the myth differently. Unlike Marx, he did not believe that the members of the lower class would be unlikely to know their own interests. The underclass is likely to accept the myth because they realize it works to their advantage. Its members are keenly aware of the fact of inequality. That part of the “lie” hardly seems false to them. What is novel, and what works to their advantage, is the idea that inequalities exist for the benefit of the underclass as well as the rulers. That is, members with noble metals in their souls are to undertake their work for the benefit of everyone, including those whose souls are marked by base metals. By contrast, members of the ruling class are likely to <i>disbelieve</i> the myth out of self-interest. They balk at the claim that every person, regardless of rank, belongs to the same family. They do not want the advantages that might solely benefit their class to be employed for the benefit of the whole. </blockquote>
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John Gray in TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/john-gray-hyper-liberalism-liberty/" target="_blank">The Problem of Hyper-Liberalism</a>.
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It would be easy to say that liberalism has now been abandoned. Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world. If a regime of censorship prevails in universities, it is because they have become vehicles for this project. When students from China study in Western countries one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government. In institutions that proclaim their commitment to critical inquiry, censorship is most effective when it is self-imposed. A defining feature of tyranny, the policing of opinion is now established practice in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been. </blockquote>
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Shelby Steele in HOOVER DIGEST, <a href="https://www.hoover.org/research/sick-hunger-racism" target="_blank">A Sick Hunger for Racism</a>.
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Today Americans know that active racism is no longer the greatest barrier to black and minority advancement. Since the 1960s other pathologies, even if originally generated by racism, have supplanted it. White racism did not shoot more than four thousand people last year in Chicago. To the contrary, America for decades now—with much genuine remorse—has been recoiling from the practice of racism and has gained a firm intolerance for what it once indulged. But Americans don’t really trust the truth of this. It sounds too self-exonerating. Talk of “structural” and “systemic” racism conditions people to think of it as inexorable, predestined. So even if bigotry and discrimination have lost much of their menace, Americans nevertheless yearn to know whether or not we are a racist people. A staple on cable news these days is the “racial incident,” which stands as a referendum on this question. One day there is Charlottesville. In previous days there were the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and others. Don’t they reveal an irrepressible racism in American life? At the news conferences surrounding these events there are always the Al Sharpton clones, if not the man himself, ready to spin the tale of black tragedy and white bigotry. Such people—and the American left generally—have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the “sweetness at the horrid core of bad news.” It’s hard to witness the media’s oddly exhila-rated reaction to, say, the death of Trayvon Martin without applying Percy’s insight. A black boy is dead. But not all is lost. It looks like racism. What makes racism so sweet? </blockquote>
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Martin Jay at <i>aeon.co</i>, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-1950s-everybody-cool-was-a-little-alienated-what-changed" target="_blank">A History of Alienation</a>.
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By undermining the realist illusion and preventing emotional identification with characters, Brecht de-familiarised the familiar, and forced the audience to reflect critically on unjust conditions beyond the world of art. What was needed, he argued, was more discomfort with the world and less feeling at home in it – more reflective estrangement and less aesthetic comfort food. At the very least, that’s what was required until the spell of false consciousness was broken, phoney gratifications revealed for what they were, and our true state of alienation exposed so as to open the path to true healing. Such arguments were still rooted in the idea that alienation was a pathological condition, one that ultimately needed to be redressed. But what if the alleged healing was <i>itself</i> ideological? This more radical riposte to the notion of alienation emerged in the theories that came to be called ‘post-structuralism’. Despite all their complexities and diversity, the thinkers within this rubric shared a common distrust of a key assumption: that a unified, holistic self or community was inherently superior to their opposites. A rejection of unity can be seen in the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities. This began to loom in the 1970s and took inspiration from many different theories of language: ordinary language philosophy, hermeneutics, universal pragmatics, speech-act theory and the ‘deconstruction’ of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. This last movement was viewed as the vanguard of post-structuralism, and underpinned by a suspicion of the universal, knowing human subject which sat at the heart of traditional humanism. </blockquote>
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Richard Reinsch in MODERN AGE, <a href="https://home.isi.org/autonomy-road-tyranny" target="_blank">Autonomy on the Road to Tyranny</a>.
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On an existential note, love for the living tradition of one’s culture and the ballast it establishes lead the members of that culture to reproduce. To reject the past, doubt everything, and affirm nothing save for a constructed future, or to forbid forbidding in the manner of a postmodern theorist, negates the very idea of an inheritance. It ends in sterility, a fact understood by the vast majority of Western nations struggling with below-replacement birth rates. Administrative theory dissolves this culture, notes Eliot. The previous class of custodians are purged by what amounts to a new class of managers. But this elite must form its own standards to maintain its rule. What will be their standards, and what will this group share in common with the country it rules? Eliot argues that they will have no culture and will only share with one another the technique of management, i.e., the committee meetings whereby they dominate a society. They feel no sense of duty or gratitude to the larger body they rule. This is not limited to politics, Eliot observes, but operates in all manner of pursuits and undertakings. The elite assumes the essential malleability of society, which can be shaped by theory without concern for history or culture or actual existing people. We can accept standardization and a certain amount of machinery ruling us, Eliot thought, for a limited time and a definite purpose: wars, catastrophes, etc. But elites will try to keep the levers of power in their hands. How? Having achieved their status on the basis of examinations, educational attainment, and ideology, it stands to reason that these experts, united only by their functions, will find ways to make their position permanent. So they will come to govern inscrutably, striking down challengers as enemies of Progress, the people, and change. </blockquote>
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Timothy Snyder in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/16/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism/" target="_blank">Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism</a>.
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Ilyin’s proclamation of a fascist future for Russia in the 1920s was the absolute negation of his hopes in the 1910s that Russia might become a rule-of-law state. “The fact of the matter,” wrote Ilyin, “is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” Arbitrariness <i>(proizvol)</i>, a central concept in all modern Russian political discussions, was the bugbear of all Russian reformers seeking improvement through law. Now <i>proizvol</i> was patriotic. The word for “redemptive” <i>(spasytelnii)</i>, is another central Russian concept. It is the adjective Russian Orthodox Christians might apply to the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, the death of the One for the salvation of the many. Ilyin uses it to mean the murder of outsiders so that the nation could undertake a project of total politics that might later redeem a lost God. In one sentence, two universal concepts, law and Christianity, are undone. A spirit of lawlessness replaces the spirit of the law; a spirit of murder replaces a spirit of mercy. </blockquote>
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Stefan Buchen at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/hedwig-klein-and-mein-kampf-the-unknown-arabist?nopaging=1" target="_blank">Hedwig Klein and Mein Kampf</a>.
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"Allah will help me." Hedwig Klein, a 27-year-old native of Hamburg, is feeling confident. She is an Islamic studies scholar who had been planning to make a career for herself at Hamburg University. But there is an insurmountable obstacle in her way: Hedwig Klein is Jewish. On board the steamer Rauenfels, she writes a postcard to the man in Hamburg who helped her escape, Carl August Rathjens. "I feel very comfortable on board in this good weather and at the moment am not worrying about the future." The postcard is dated 21 August 1939. The ship had left Hamburg two days previously, heading for Bombay in India. Rathjens, an economic geographer with contacts in many different countries, had managed to get the persecuted Jewish woman a visa for the British colony. Salvation seemed so close, but it was to remain elusive. Hedwig Klein’s attempt to emigrate failed. The last hope of the Hamburg Jew would ultimately hinge on helping spread anti-Semitism in the Arab world. She ended up working on a dictionary that was intended to serve as the basis for the translation of "Mein Kampf" into Arabic. </blockquote>
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Bernd Schmitz at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/the-history-of-jazz-in-iran-creating-a-confluence" target="_blank">The History of Jazz in Iran</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yhcMK93v498/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yhcMK93v498?feature=player_embedded" style="clear: right; float: right;" width="320"></iframe>The word jazz – or "jaaz" as Iranians tend to pronounce it – was however initially subject to some misunderstanding. "Because the drum kit was seen as the main instrument in what for most Iranians was a novel style of music, there was a tendency initially to refer to any music that featured it as jazz," says Tehran music producer Ramin Sadighi. "One of the biggest Iranian pop stars of that time, Vigen, for example was dubbed the 'Sultan of Jazz', simply because his band featured a drummer." According to Sadighi, the story of jazz in Iran begins in the early 1960s: "The country's oil industry was booming at the time, especially in Khuzestan province in the south-west. Most of the oil extraction back then was done by British and American companies and the employees had their own clubs – in Ahwaz, Khorramshahr and Abadan, for example – where jazz music was played." In an article published in the book "Jazz World/World Jazz" in 2017, the London-based musicologist and teacher Laudan Nooshin describes jazz as a minority interest in Iran in comparison to pop music, but also points out that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi made use of its growing popularity to further his aim of turning Iran into a secular state along Western capitalist lines. </blockquote>
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Marcia Qualey at <i>qantara.de</i> on Dunya Mikhail’s book, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/content/non-fiction-dunya-mikhails-the-beekeeper-rescuing-the-stolen-women" target="_blank">The Beekeeper – Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq</a>.
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<blockquote>
But, even when the word sabaya is removed from the title, it remains central to the book. One of the women who talks to Mikhail, an Iraqi sewing instructor named Hiam, says that "what happened to us was completely unprecedented. We had lived through continuous war but we had never heard certain words like <i>sabaya</i>, <i>caliphate</i>, <i>fucking</i>." For Daesh forces, "sabaya" was a word applied to non-Sunni-Muslim women who were considered less-than-human war booty. Hussein Koro, director of the Office of Kidnapped Affairs, explained to Mikhail that, "Daesh calls our men prisoners of war and our women sabaya." And while a heroic Abdullah Shrem rescues stolen women, it was women who first rescued him. Escaping his home town, he journeyed with about 350 others to Syria "on a road that was being protected by the Peopleʹs Defence Brigades." He added: "To tell you the truth, it was an unusual protection force, as it was mostly made up of women." Throughout the book, women continue to rescue each other. Itʹs their large and small heroisms that make the book bearable, full as it is of Daeshʹs fairy-tale grotesqueries: mass murder, enslavement, starvation, beatings and children sold for parts. </blockquote>
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Dan Bilefsky in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/canada/canada-herouxville-immigration.html" target="_blank">Don’t Burn Women</a>.
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<blockquote>
With its gray identikit houses seemingly frozen in a 1950s time warp, Hérouxville would seem like just another Quebec village. Except that this quiet hamlet attracted global opprobrium about a decade ago when the local council introduced a code of conduct for immigrants that, among other things, warned against stoning women in public and burning them alive. There was also a section explaining Christmas trees. “We listen to music, we drink alcoholic beverages in public or private places, we dance and at the end of every year, we decorate a tree with balls and tinsel and some lights,” the code explained. “The only time you may mask or cover your face is during Halloween.” There was just one thing: The town had no immigrants. The code of conduct, which also affirmed the rights of same-sex parents, was the brainchild of a local official, André Drouin, who died last year, and had come up with the idea after traveling in the Middle East. </blockquote>
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Marilynne Robinson in TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/poetry-of-puritanism-marilynne-robinson/" target="_blank">Poetry of Puritanism</a>.
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<blockquote>
I’ve read a good deal of Fascist literature over the years, and I know it was believed and taught and spun into philosophy and philology all over the Continent that mingled and rootless people who spoke an adopted language could never even know how utterly they fell short – of profundity, of authenticity, both important terms of the time. By these lights such people were a corruption, a threat to the organic integrity of any true culture. A splinter in the flesh, Hitler said. In our deference to European thought we applied this thinking to our hapless selves and kind, never reflecting on the uses that had been made of it in Europe or the biases it legitimized here. I have never admired deference. I was dosed with Sartre and Artaud, as any college girl then would have been. I felt their nausea. It made an Americanist of me. But for those whose tolerances were different from mine, figures like these defined the future. It was not a very interesting or habitable future, but in the short term it opened the way to study abroad. Juniors returned knowing better how to hold a fork or a cigarette. They had heightened social confidence – they had checked an important box. None of this ends with adolescence. Or this adolescence never ends. It seems to be true now that there is no Europe of the kind to potentially unleash new literary trends or to make us line up around the block for a new French or Italian movie. Without any particular object of emulation to measure our deficiencies by, the sense of deficiency is at least as strong as ever. It is absurd that the products of a civilization as old and solid as this one should forever be such colonials, feeling sophisticated in the fact that they have and confess such deeply internalized prejudices against themselves. </blockquote>
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Martin Peretz in WSJ on Michael Walzer’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-foreign-policy-for-the-left-review-can-there-be-a-decent-left-1521068399" target="_blank">A Foreign Policy for the Left</a>.
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<blockquote>
According to Mr. Walzer, the left’s vanguardism has put it in bed with dictators, fanatics and activists who reject reasoned debate as a means to democratic change. This is most obvious to Mr. Walzer in foreign policy because its so extreme. He gives many examples: leftists’ unwillingness to engage with unionist and feminist allies in Afghanistan and Iraq because American intervention as a force for good didn’t fit their theory of America as a force for evil; their mischaracterization of America’s world reach as totalistic, which allows blame always to ricochet back to us…. Mr. Walzer also sees the vanguard impulse at work domestically. He finds, in the aftermath of 9/11, American leftists opposed to America. They equate American soldiers’ accidental killing of civilians in Afghanistan with terrorist actions, which “denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killings.” From these observations, Mr. Walzer poses a searing question: “Can there be a decent left in a superpower?” The alternative is that “the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power.” </blockquote>
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Robert Kaplan in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-russia-and-china-could-come-unhinged-1521844349" target="_blank">How Russia and China Could Become Unhinged</a>.
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<blockquote>
Technology is unhinging all sorts of societies. Look at the U.S. A world without instant polling and internet-fed polarization would yield a calmer political climate. A world of smoke-filled rooms rather than primaries would have produced a more conventional Republican presidential candidate in 2016. But America’s newfound political instability – with all of its dangers – is of a self-correcting sort. The U.S. holds elections at the local, state and national levels that allow citizens and their elites to respond and adapt to ever-changing circumstances. Russia and China are different situations. Russia is a rickety house that at some point may crumble. China is sturdier; nevertheless, it could slowly become a compressed pack of social dynamite with less of an outlet for its internal frustrations. It is theoretically possible for Mr. Xi, as president for life, to institute a program of dramatic economic reforms. But doing so would unleash the need and yearning for more personal freedoms, the kind that the regime is moving with its technological thought control to try to eliminate. </blockquote>
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Sheila Fitzpatrick in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Elizabeth McGuire’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/19/chinese-communists-from-moscow-with-love/" target="_blank">Red at Heart – How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
The Comintern in China sent new student-revolutionaries to Moscow, but they were a dispirited bunch. Their schooling in the 1930s included a new emphasis on conspiracy and secrecy and lessons on withstanding interrogation. This training may not have been much use to students whose next encounter with political police was likely with the NKVD in the Great Purges a few years later. One school for Manchurian operatives in Moscow was so secret tdhat it was never officially acknowledged by the Soviet Communist Party, but its students continued the tradition of pairing off and having babies. Kang Sheng, who would become notorious as a brutal chief of the secret police under Mao, arrived from China to lecture at the University of the Toilers of the East (the main destination for Chinese students in Moscow after the demise of Sun Yat-sen University in 1930). He was trained for his harsh police work by the NKVD. Unlike some other Western commentators, who concentrate primarily on the exposure of Chinese students to the Soviet apparatus of political repression, McGuire emphasizes other ways in which they learned to think and live like Soviets. But repression was certainly an aspect of Soviet life that could not have escaped their attention. While they were not particularly targeted in the Great Purges, it is estimated that at least 1,700 Chinese citizens (not counting Soviet citizens who were ethnic Chinese) had been sent to the Gulag by 1939, and Chinese “enemies of the people” were executed as well. </blockquote>
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Yoram Hazony in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dark-side-of-the-enlightenment-1523050206" target="_blank">The Dark Side of the Enlightenment</a>.
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<blockquote>
For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori – meaning independent of experience. As far as reason is concerned, there is one eternally valid, unassailably correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics. Man is rational only to the extent that he recognizes this and spends his time trying to arrive at that one correct answer. This astonishing arrogance is based on a powerful idea: that <i>mathematics</i> can produce universal truths by beginning with self-evident premises – or, as Rene Descartes had put it, “clear and distinct ideas” – and then proceeding to what Kant called “apodictic certainty.” Snce this method worked in mathematics, Descartes had insisted, it could be applied to all other disciplines. The idea was subsequently taken up and refined by Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as Kant. This view of “reason” – and of its power, freed from the shackles of history, tradition and experience – is what Kant called “Enlightenment.” It is completely wrong. Human reason is incapable of reaching universally valid, unassailably correct answers to the problems of science, morality and politics by applying the methods of mathematics. </blockquote>
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Ed Finn & David Guston in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/frankenstein-has-become-a-true-monster-1514563511" target="_blank">The 200-Year-Old Novel That Became a Monster</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
This durability derives not just from the fact that Frankenstein is a great work of literature, but from the way it encompasses our anxieties about scientific creativity and responsibility. Victor Frankenstein, the novel’s protagonist, predates the first usage of the word “scientist” by at least a decade. Before we even had the calling of the modern scientist, we had this depiction of a deeply flawed initiate pursuing knowledge at any cost. Before we had scientific ethics, we had Frankenstein’s characters anticipating the success of their technical endeavors and agonizing over unexpected consequences. And yet, 200 years into the new editions, adaptations, rip-offs, and remixes, we might only now be ready to learn what Frankenstein has to teach us. The story’s central, science fictional premise – that a human can create life with scientific tools and knowledge – is no longer speculative. </blockquote>
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John Hawks in WSJ on David Reich’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-we-are-and-how-we-got-here-review-ghosts-in-the-genome-1523399111" target="_blank">Who We Are and How We Got Here</a>.
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The stories are varied: People who brought Indo-European languages into Europe seem to have originated in the Yamnaya, or Pit Grave, culture of the Ukrainian steppe. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil carry a faint trace of DNA not found in other Native Americans – DNA traces that resemble the populations of Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Up to half of the ancestry of West African people may represent an ancient “ghost” population long diverged from other modern humans. One of the most interesting chapters concerns India. There, Mr. Reich and his co-workers have documented a series of migrations, starting 4,000 years ago, that brought Indo-European languages and peoples into the subcontinent from the northwest. The science paints a scenario that seemingly parallels events described in the “Big Veda,” the 3,500-year-old collection of Sanskrit hymns. The concordance of near-mythological history with genetic fact was scientifically exciting but to the surprise of Mr. Reich and his mathematician colleague Nick Patterson, it was also a potential political bombshell. </blockquote>
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Carl Zimmer in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html" target="_blank">Be Fruitful and Multiply. So A Mutant Crayfish Did</a>.
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The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995. The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time. Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce. In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America. </blockquote>
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Fenton Johnson in HARPER’S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2018/01/the-future-of-queer/" target="_blank">The Future of Queer</a>.
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The assimilationists have won, with state-sanctioned marriage as the very mortar cementing the bricks of the wall of convention that separates us from ourselves, from one another, from all that is unfamiliar, strange, challenging, and thus from learning and growth. The assimilationists have won, with the neocons building their Wonder Bread philosophies upon the ashes of queers who laid their lives on the line in the fight for AIDS visibility and treatment. The assimilationists have won, those men and women whose highest aspiration was to be like everybody else, whose greatest act of imagination was picturing matching Barcaloungers in front of a flatscreen television and matching, custom-designed wedding rings. The evolution from ACT UP and Zen Hospice to state-sanctioned marriage is precisely analogous to gentrification—the creative outliers do the heavy lifting, and when a certainlevel of safety has been achieved, the assimilationists move in, raise prices, and force out the agents of change. </blockquote>
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Richard Rodriguez in HARPER’S, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2018/01/the-castro/" target="_blank">The Castro</a>.
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<blockquote>
It was the glamour of gay life, as much as it was the feminist call to career, that encouraged heterosexuals in the Seventies to excuse themselves from nature, to swallow the birth control pill. Who needs children? The gay bar became the paradigm for the singles bar. The gay couple became the paradigm for the selfish couple—all dressed up and everywhere to go. And there was the example of the gay house in illustrated lifestyle magazines. At the same time that suburban housewives were looking outside the home for fulfillment, gay men were reintroducing a new generation in the city—heterosexual men and women—to the complacencies of the barren house.
Puritanical America dismissed gay camp followers as yuppies; the term means to suggest infantility. Yuppies were obsessive and awkward in their materialism. Whereas gays arranged a decorative life against a barren state, yuppies sought early returns—lives that were not to be all toil and spin. Yuppies, trained to careerism from the cradle, wavered in their pursuit of the Northern European ethic—indeed, we might now call it the pan-Pacific ethic—in favor of the Mediterranean, the Latin, the Catholic, the Castro, the Gay. </blockquote>
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Obituary of the Issue…
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0552b1b8-1d2d-11e8-aaca-4574d7dabfb6" target="_blank">Chen Xiaolu</a> (1946-2018)
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<blockquote>
As the 50th anniversary of the cultural revolution approached, Chen formally and publicly proposed to apologise on behalf of his high-school classmates to the teachers they victimised during the tumultuous period. Actions by Chen and other princelings served as a proxy for the ruling Communist party and helped spur a low-key movement among the public to recognise teachers’ suffering during the period…. During the cultural revolution, Chen attended Beijing’s No 8 Middle School, an early hotbed of violence as the children of the revolutionary elite attacked their parents’ former colleagues, their teachers and each other. He helped organise violent public denunciation sessions, he later wrote. He subsequently organised a “Beijing Xicheng District Red Guard Picket Corps” to rush to the defence of conservative party members whose homes were under attack by more radical Red Guard groups, Mr Bao said. Thousands of people, many of them teachers, were beaten to death in Beijing in August and September 1967, when the movement erupted into violence. Between 1.5m and 3m Chinese were murdered in the following decade as factions struggled to succeed an ageing Mao Zedong. His father Chen Yi, a commander of Communist troops in southern China during the Japanese occupation and Chinese civil war, served as mayor of Shanghai and foreign minister before being sidelined for criticising the cultural revolution.</blockquote>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-64626105773371072622018-01-14T19:28:00.001-08:002018-01-15T20:39:50.272-08:00Issue #154 (January 14, 2018)<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Libby Flats, Snowy Range</span></b></div>
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<b>Selling Postcards of the Hanging</b>
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Bart Bull
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<i>“They’re selling post cards of the hanging…”</i>
- Opening line of Bob Dylan’s <i>“Desolation Row”</i> (<i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, 1965)
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<blockquote>
<i>"If you never been in jail, without a single friend to your name, and stood around there like a lost dog in a hard rain, why then you won’t get the full meaning out of any jailhouse song. I know.
I’ve been where I could hear all them things. If all the jails I been in was all put together, it would make a hard rock hotel as big as the Capitol building.”</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Woody Guthrie, recorded by Alan Lomax,
as quoted in “The Folk Songs of North America” by Alan Lomax (1960), illuminating the song <i>“Hard Times”</i> which was preceded by Guthrie’s <i>“Hard Travelin’”</i> and followed by Guthrie’s <i>“Hard, Ain’t It Hard”</i>.
These songs, oddly enough, do not bear a Lomax name on the copyright; thus, they could hardly be “folk music” were they not "Copyright TRO/The Richmond Organization."</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<i>“It looks like Im a doing everything I can to make a hobo out of me.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- written by Woody Guthrie on the back of the manuscript of his song, <i>"Jailhouse Blues”</i>.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
He’s in the jailhouse now
He’s in the jailhouse now
I told him over again
To quit drinkin’ whiskey, lay off of that gin
He’s in the jailhouse now
Ah-d’leedle-odelayee-yodel-ee-hee
Yodel-leedle-dodel-ayee-yodel-ee-hee
Yodel-ay-ee-hee, lay-ee-hee, d’yodel-ay-ee...</blockquote>
<blockquote>
- first chorus of <i>“In The Jailhouse Now (Number Two)”</i> by Jimmie Rodgers, 1930, Hollywood, California; a Victor recording, published by Peer Music: Ralph Peer, owner and operator, sole proprietor. Jimmie Rodgers, now known as the “Father of Country Music,” was, with Will Rogers, the model for much of what the early public Woody Guthrie claimed to be until after he arrived in New York City,
where Jimmie Rodgers was almost unknown (despite dying of tuberculosis, just north of Times Square, immediately after a recording session.)</blockquote>
<br />
As a kid, little Woody Guthrie played spoons and harmonica and tap-danced a Tambo shuffle — “jig-dancing,” he called it — on the sidewalks of Okemah, Oklahoma, a comic little raggedy white picaninny in an all-white town, an all-white town his two-fisted courthouse sport of a father had been instrumental in keeping safe and segregated.
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It was a time of blackface minstrelsy, of coon songs and cakewalks becoming fiddle tunes and folk culture as ragtime faded and a mysterious black art called jazz invaded the biggest cities. Okemah, a brief bit of a boom town, was nothing like a big city, or even a city. A picaninny was the minstrel show’s cute unthreatening surprise, sometimes brought onstage in a sack slung over a shoulder and then ceremoniously dumped loose and free, unleashed, a blur of dance and delight and condescension. Sammy Davis Jr. started out as a pic in his father and uncle’s act; think of the startling energy explosion of the Jackson 5 as centered around the tiny time-bomb of little Michael Jackson, side-slide gliding across a stage somewhere within shouting distance of 1920s Okemah, Oklahoma, shouting back even farther, and so much deeper than Woody’s own hick-town version. Woody Guthrie’s earliest memory, he would sometimes claim, was a “Negro minstrel jazzy band blowing and tooting and pounding drums up and down our street.” The minstrel show had come to town, in many more ways than one. The circus was in town.
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Down the road a piece, still in the Okemah’s own Okfuskee County, just over ten miles away, the entirely Negro town of Boley had been entirely hornswaggled out of their entirely Republican vote during Oklahoma’s very first election in 1907, and thus the Democratic candidate, Charlie Guthrie, was duly sworn in as District Court Clerk. A prominent citizen and a noted practical joker, later to be elected justice of the peace and then, very briefly, state legislator (until a recount found ballot box stuffing at the courthouse), Charley was almost certainly a central participant of the 1911 mob that lynched a 13-year old black boy and his mother and, lacking the nerve to complete their task, were understood to have left the mother’s baby ditched in the river reeds behind and beneath where the bodies swung. <i>The Okemah Ledger</i> stated: “It is generally thought the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law.”
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A photograph of the lynchings was printed up and sold as a popular local postcard. It shows more than fifty white citizens posing together on the brand new bridge over the North Canadian River. Some of the men are in suits and ties, others are in their shirtsleeves; nearly all have hats. The women wear sunbonnets and aprons, the children are in overalls and straw hats, ala Huckleberry Finn. One little boy is yanking on the rope that holds the corpse of young L.D. (or possibly L.W.) Nelson. The photographer made other exposures so we can see more detail. The dead boy’s torn pants dangle from his bare ankles. His left arm, bound at the wrist, hangs at an unnatural angle. In the darkroom, the photographer has dodged in a white blot for the sake of modesty, to cover the unsightly view of castration. His mother, Laura Nelson, who was raped, is covered in a long sundress. Drawers or a petticoat droop below her bare feet.
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<blockquote>
<i>”For a year or so my dad was undersheriff of Okemah, Oklahoma, and he used to tell me many a sad tale about that old black jailhouse... This Negro lady had a right new baby, and a son that was doomed to hang by her dead body with the rise of the morning wind, and my dad told me the whole story.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- handwritten introduction to the song <i>“Don’t Kill My Baby and My Son”</i> by Woody Guthrie - <i>“You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge/But don’t kill my baby and my son…”</i>;
Charlie Guthrie was never “undersheriff”; he was instead likely a prominent member of the lynch mob; the Okemah jail was not an “old black jailhouse”; the Nelsons were removed from cells at the
Okemah County Courthouse, Woody’s father’s workplace; the Nelsons were taken six miles away to a bridge pointedly near a Negro settlement; the mob had arrived around midnight and the hanging
had taken place long before “the rise of the morning wind.” </blockquote>
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, is home-field for the tall tale of Woody Guthrie, but his official story never amounts to much more than a Rodgers & Hammerstein roadshow version done-up for a one-man band. The Sooner State had only just achieved statehood when Woody was born in 1912. Its name before Oklahoma was chosen had been, as if on the much-disputed-over map of Neverland, “Indian Territory.”
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The Sooner story is a core image of Americana, far too colorful ever to be neglected by brightly-illustrated middle school American History textbooks, too darn graphic not to end up as a looming Social Realist
post office lobby mural. It’s the perfect American frontier moment at the very border of modern times. Land in Indian Territory was declared free, free for the taking — Free Lunch! Free Beer! — by President Benjamin
Harrison (he who pulled Northern troops out of the Reconstruction South, unleashing a tide of lynchings) as of, somehow, the precise stroke of the absolute pocket-watch stroke of the courthouse clock-tower stroke of
noon on April 22, 1889, when wild-eyed settlers assembled all along the Arkansas and Texas borders, lining up with toes touching the dusty borderline, waiting for the whistle to blow, the cannon to fire, the race to commence.
The typical lively tableau, lacking only Mark Twain to report it from high aloft in a hot air balloon, shows a pistol fired into the air, bugles being blatted bravely but badly, and a mad dash of buggies and buckboards and ponies and fringed surreys and wild-eyed folks clinging to the steam engine’s cow-catcher with derby-hatted dudes pedaling big-wheeled velocipedes in what is obviously the Le Mans start to end all Figure-Eight dirt track racing for at least the next decade or so. (Being Oklahoma, sooner or later, they're pretty much bound to invent those World Of Outlaws sprint cars with the aerodynamic aluminum wings bolted on top, and the fluorescing sprint-car t-shirts that go with 'em — just be patient, hold your horses, keep your shirt on.) The Great Land Rush was on, and Indian Territory is on its way to becoming O-O-O-O-O-Oklahoma, where the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and even cornier.
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Ah, but an alert assemblage of federal marshals, bureaucrats, and — beware! be warned! watch out! — railroad men were already there, had already laid out their own personal plots, had already claimed the prime spots, had scammed the simple-minded settlers. The scammers were soon enough known as “Sooners.” The town of (ahem) Guthrie rose from near-zilch to 10,000 over the course of that one afternoon, but the fix, let’s face it, was in. The great redeeming laugh of it all was that the town’s precious land was nigh unto worthless, free of wells and water and worth, ready to turn into loose blowing red dust at the hint of a strong sneeze much less a wind come sweepin’ down the plain. The whole mess was Manifest Destiny at its most manifestly messy.
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And yet. And yet it’s ever so odd how much that Great Land Rush image is the comic mask that jauntily slaps over top of the tragedy of the Trail of Tears. Much less a part of any Americana tableau, less comical, less laughable, less likely to loom over a postal lobby, but visually stunning all the same, the so-called “Trail of Tears” — <i>"Nunna daul Tsuny"</i> was how the Cherokee described it in their own language, in their own newspapers and books: The Trail Where They Cried — was as well-organized as any act in our savage centuries-long American ethnic cleansing campaign against all the Indian nations. Some honor accrues to General John Wool, who resigned his commission rather than execute President Andrew Jackson’s land-grab fiat; General Winfield Scott efficiently replaced him in the chain of command and in 1838, the Cherokee Nation was forcibly removed from its fertile traditional lands in Georgia to the absurd barren badlands of Oklahoma: Neverland.
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Their chief, John Scott, had once written directly to Congress: “In truth, our cause is your own. It is the cause of liberty and of justice. It is based upon your own principles, which we have learned from yourselves; for we have gloried to count Washington and Jefferson our great teachers... We have practised their precepts with success. And the result is manifest.” Now Chief Scott was manifestly reduced to begging General Scott to allow his people to break into smaller, less concentrated groups in order that they might more successfully forage for food and survive the thousand-mile forced march. More than 4,000 died all the same. The others of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, the Creek, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole, were forced out of Georgia and Florida and Alabama and Mississippi, and driven off to the worthless new Neverland under military guard.
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No one has ever gotten around to declaring them “The Laters,” probably since they got there long before the celebrated Sooners. Besides, “The Later State” would have made a lousy license plate slogan. Thus is history written, or at least stamped out.
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Oklahoma’s own Will Rogers, that great American cowboy star, Number One Hollywood Box Office Star in 1934, in the top ten for years before and dead a year later — oh, and the obvious model for most of Woody Guthrie’s showbiz persona when it wasn’t aimed at aping Jimmie Rodgers — was different than Woody Guthrie just the same. Will Rogers had traveled, bummed around, which Woody mostly just claimed to have done, and he’d done it adventurously all over the world. He notched up a long series of show business successes, which Woody envied enormously but never achieved. Guthrie copied Rogers’ newspaper column, “Will Says,” with his own “Woody Sez,” but way-overplayed his auto-Aw-Shucks hokum-tone, invariably coming down on the correct side of the Stalinist line, while Will Rogers was eternally the iconoclast, challenging any and all the powers that be on principle. Rogers’ newspaper column was widely syndicated — 800 newspapers, distributed by the <i>New York Times</i> from 1922 until his death in 1935 — and hugely popular; Woody wrote for the West Coast Communist newspaper <i>People’s World</i> for a brief while but never managed to break into the big leagues.
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<br />
<i>(“Woody Sez” began May 12, 1939; by August 25,</i> Pravda <i>proudly announced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact allying Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia; “Woody Sez” appeared sporadically until November 1940; during that time, under the Non-Aggression Pact’s benign accord, Hitler invaded Poland, then Stalin invaded Poland too; Stalin invaded Finland (causing the Soviet Union to be expelled from the League of Nations), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Baltic States, while Hitler invaded Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, and blockaded Britain, sinking non-combatant ships throughout the Atlantic and launching rocket and bombing attacks against England’s civilian population; Woody Guthrie maintained his faux-folksy Party line throughout, following the Communist Party insistence on “neutrality” perfectly until Hitler attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, at which time the line changed overnight and Guthrie enthusiastically joined in demanding that the United States attack the fascists, that America must “Open Up The Eastern Front” and defend the Soviet Union.)</i>
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Once a top-billed vaudeville headliner known as “The Cherokee Kid,” Will Rogers never in life went quiet about being part Indian, never quit nimbly waltzing his massive syndicated newspaper column’s all-American audience over to that other end of reservation so as to have a good quick glance at how things looked from the fucked-up smoky-ass side of the campfire. By the time Woody Guthrie was born, all Oklahoma was a patchwork of Indian reservations, and of former Indian reservations, and of land that just might prove fertile enough yet to become a former Indian reservation. Or, sooner than later, oil-bearing enough. What was left of the Five Civilized Nations were now concentrated there — though many Seminoles succeeded in hiding behind in the swamps of Florida — and the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Kiowa, the Kaw, the Shawnee, the Sauk and the Fox, the Ponca, the Caddo, and a dozen other smaller tribes struggling on smaller reservations. By the time Woody Guthrie died, the only reservation still existing in Oklahoma was occupied by the Osage. Out of nowhere, in the age of the automobile, oil had become of worth, of glorious value, of greasy golden goodness, and it was discovered often enough and ever so inconveniently, on Indian land. The result, as the Cherokee John Scott had said, was manifest.
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<blockquote>
<i>“They tell me down in Oklahoma that the Indian language ain’t got no cuss words in it. Well, wait till they get a little hungrier and raggedier. They’ll work up some.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Woody Guthrie, quoted in John Greenway’s essay, “Woody Guthrie: The Man, The Land, The Understanding”; Greenway, an Australian folklorist who is recorded playing Guthrie songs at an early Newport Folk Festival, had bumped into Guthrie on an otherwise undocumented cross-country flight from California to New York and interviewed him at length.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<i>“This was not all that melted into the songs that I heard around me, because my Father, Charlie, was always out talking, dancing, drinking and trading with the Indians. He could speak several Creek words, taught me how to count in Chicasaw or Choctaw, Cherokee, Sioux, Osage, or Seminole dialect.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Woody Guthrie, from “My Life,” one of his unceasing “autobiographical” sketches, this one intended for Alan and John Lomax’s 1947 book, <i>“Folk Song U.S.A.”</i>: Collected, adapted, and arranged by John A. Lomax
and Alan Lomax; Alan Lomax, Editor; Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Music Editors; Woody’s extravagant self-aggrandizement was of course not used; the songbook would become a cornerstone in the Lomax’s
astonishingly broad and eternally lucrative claim to the copyrights and publishing royalty payments of hundreds upon hundreds of so-called “folk songs,” as registered with both BMI and ASCAP primarily through
TRO/The Richmond Organization, which would also represent the publishing claims of Folkways Records Moe Asch, Pete Seeger, The Weavers (under the lucrative pseudonym “Paul Campbell”) and thus much of what we now
call folk music, American and international as well. </blockquote>
Buried away beneath all of this is the long-forgotten fact that at the very moment of statehood, Oklahoma was the uplifting Promised Land of Negro Americans, a land-bound Black Star Liner a decade in advance of Marcus Garvey. In a time when the vast majority of Negro Americans continued to be forcibly confined to rural life, post-slavery, post-Reconstruction, Oklahoma was The Rural Harlem, The New Jerusalem, The Great Black Hope. It was The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma, but not Kafka’s long-distance invert-o-vision as free of Negroes, imagined or real, as Prague. Organized and planned as a grand coordinated endeavor of self-determination, the hope — The Hope — was that by settling in the new upcoming state-to-be, and banding together in significant numbers, Negro Americans might achieve first a semblance of safety, and then prosperity, and afterward, maybe, miraculously, a majority vote. The most prominent sign of this great outburst of hope was the town of Boley, just a little more than ten miles distant from Okemah.
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<blockquote>
<i>“Boley, Indian Territory, is the youngest, the most enterprising, and in many ways the most interesting of the negro towns in the United States... This was the town of Boley, where, it is said, no white man ever let the sun go down upon him.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Booker T. Washington, from his article “Boley, A Negro Town in the West,” <i>Outlook</i> magazine, January, 1909</blockquote>
Booker T. Washington, rarely remembered, barely discussed, little considered, and never honored these days, was the most prominent Negro American of his extraordinarily dangerous day, and he took on that notoriety as a grave, terrible, deadly serious responsibility to the entirety of his race. He was as formal and more as any white man in an era of great Edwardian formality; he was determined to lead by example of education and enterprise. He was not, in other words, a giant madcap joker, nor even a courthouse sport, but his article on Boley has at least a couple of very pointedly polite knee-slappers. One of them is contained in the quote above, and is underscored by his impeccable diction: “…where, it is said, no white man ever let the sun go down upon him.” So says the eminent Dr. Washington in 1908, at a time when the number of lynchings had been rising annually for decades and showed no sign of slowing down, at a time when everybody black and most whites would have known immediately that he was improving the English of each of the many Southern and Southwestern towns, “sundown towns,” that often literally had the slogan “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you here” painted at either end of the city limits.
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His article had at least one other jolly, jaunty, jovial jest. During his visit to the Negro towns of Oklahoma, he enquired repeatedly as to the location of the “natives,” upon which occasions he would be introduced to one: Not an Indian, but a Negro. “The negroes who are known in that locality as ‘natives’ are the descendants of slaves that the Indians brought with them from Alabama and Mississippi when they migrated to this Territory [‘The Trail of Tears’] about the middle of the last century. I was introduced later to one or two other ‘natives’ who were not negroes, but neither were they, as far as my observation went, Indians. They were, on the contrary, white men.” On the contrary; and even yet, his contrariness-stuffed joke isn’t finished: “‘But where’ I asked at length, ‘are the Indians?’
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“’Oh, the Indians,’ was the reply, “they have gone,’ with a wave in the hand of the direction of the horizon, ‘they have gone back!’
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“I repeated this question in a number of places, and invariably received the same reply, ‘Oh, they have gone back!’ I remembered the expression because into a phrase went a great deal of local history.”
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“A great deal of local history” — What a card, what a crack-up that Booker T. Washington was! Later in the same article, just ever so lightly soft-shoeing, heel-and-toeing, buck-and-winging past what had gone before, he mentions that Boley locals — not natives, but locals — have told him that on summer nights you can still hear “...the wild notes of the Indian drums and the shrill cries of the Indian dancers among the hills beyond the settlement.”
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Booker T. Washington, America’s favorite Negro, most famous Negro, most beloved of either those in power or of those he attempted to speak for, depending, depending… locates within the most prominent and exclusively Negro settlement of his time, at the height of the Coon Song Era, three different races: white, negro, “native.” (Coon songs, the prominent pop music of their day, will be briefly followed by a fad for “Indian” songs, just as rock’n’roll in the Little Richard/Chuck Berry moment will be actively attacked from the music publishing business by, among other approaches, calypso songs... and by folk music.) Then Washington follows suit by turning natives into whites, whites into residents of Boley, and Indians into ghosts. Talk about your original Kings of Comedy! Louis Jordan’s <i>“Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens”</i> is still three decades away, and the theme from <i>Ghostbusters</i> — <i>“I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts!”</i> — lurks on the whole other side of the century. Ahh…just imagine what Booker T. could have done with the Blues Brothers!
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<blockquote>
<i>"Boley, like the other negro towns that have sprung up in other parts of the country, represents a dawning race consciousness, a wholesome desire to do something to make the race respected; something which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating. In short, Boley is another chapter in the long struggle of the negro for moral, industrial, and political freedom.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Booker T. Washington, concluding his article “Boley, A Negro Town in the West,” <i>Outlook</i> magazine, January, 1909</blockquote>
Woody Guthrie never met a mirror that didn’t fascinate him. A frantic, constant, incessant scribbler — and a fine, accurate typist — who could never manage to write more than a page or paragraph or so about anyone else before compulsively discussing himself, an obsessive self-portraitist, a serial autobiographer stuck on automatic as much as he was stuck on himself, he would eventually rewrite Okemah’s favorite lynching in song, spinning the scene around until he, Woody, was a member of the family being lynched. His father, back in reality not a sheriff at all, ever, but a prominent member of the lynch mob, became an actual victim now, and Woody — strange, strange fruit — was the survivor.
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<blockquote>
<i>
Did you ever lose a brother on that hang knot?<br />
Did you ever lose a brother on that hang knot?<br />
My brother was a slave and he tried to escape<br />
They drug him to his grave on a hang knot<br />
<br />
Did you ever lose your father on a hang knot?<br />
Did you ever lose your father on a hang knot?<br />
They hung him on a pole and they shot him full of holes<br />
Left him there to rot on that hang knot...</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
- from <i>“Hang Knot”</i> (also called “Slipknot”) by Woody Guthrie; illustrated by Woody Guthrie in his characteristic rudimentary fashion; the X-shaped crossbars in his illustration make it clear that Guthrie knew the postcard; in his illustration’s background are a pair of tiny gallows with numerous stick-figures of the type commonly seen in the child’s game “Hangman”; in the major foreground illustration, signed, and as detailed as Guthrie is capable, vague fuzzily indistinct figures hang loosely; the X-shaped crossbars, as seen in the “1911 Copyrighted G M Farnum Okemah” postcard photograph, were in fact where the citizens of Okemah gathered to celebrate the lynching in the photographic daylight; the bodies of Mrs. Nelson and her son dangle far below, spinning separated from one another by many yards, not far above the placid water of the North Canadian River; directly beneath the X-angled supports, several local citizens wave at the camera, and reach up to hang on the X-shaped supports.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<i>“That’s how I lived to write a book instead of being hanged for murder.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Woody Guthrie to <i>New York Post</i> syndicated entertainment columnist Leonard Lyons, April 1943, during the promotion for Guthrie’s “autobiography,” <i>Bound For Glory</i>. Guthrie’s press agent was the notable socialite heiress Amy Vanderbilt, cousin of John Hammond, and later America’s most prominent expert on etiquette. </blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<i>“It is inevitable, if people are prominent, that such news concerning them will reach the press eventually. It is preferable to have it brief and controlled. Certainly no one of taste discusses intimate difficulties with the press.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- from Amy Vanderbilt’s <i>Complete Book of Etiquette — A Guide to Gracious Living</i>, 1952.</blockquote>
This is artistic license, certainly, and blackface minstrelsy, of course — transparently, and greasily, smearing everywhere — but it is also Woody Guthrie’s artistic method for all the rest of life as well. He never succeeds in being popular, he never influences anybody who has any real relation to country music, but he becomes legendary among those who place their politics far in front of their music. He will always work a highly specific audience who make even more highly specified demands on their art. It must bleed; profusely, prominently, and from the correct holes. Just like Woody, they wish to be deeply hidden away in plain view at the center of every story, their needs and their sympathies driving each action, all of it, every bit, and every outcome determined long before a word can be sung, or even written. No matter how compulsive it may have been, Woody Guthrie’s unswerving devotion to writing in first person serves his audience every bit as shrewdly as it does him, and the more he blends and blurs the details of his own life into that of the songs, the more his listeners are justified in believing themselves in the presence of Authenticity, justified in feeling authentically moved, justified in their own justification. Justified.
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Later in life, as he told and retold and and told and told over again his story of his life, consistent only in his constant, steady, unwavering need to lie, he would tell the tale of how he first learned to play music. It is a central story in the history of blackface minstrelsy. Not Woody Guthrie’s version especially, just the same old story itself, which is one told and told again by white men who practice minstrelsy, as we do, as we will, as we so often seem to do, as we apparently must, over and over again and again. It is a magic story, a fairy tale, with a blue fairy and everything.
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<br />
The way Woody told it, he learned to play music from a black man, a black man who shall forever remain nameless — though occasionally Woody named him “George,” the generic name that white folks gave to railroad porters and the like — a black man who was a boy, a shoeshine boy, because he was a black man. They are nearly always nameless in this story, these stories, these black men called boys, unless they are George or unless they are crippled old stable hands named Jim Crow who jump jes’ so. This one played the harmonica, this boogie-woogie shoeshine boy, and of course he played it so well, so lonely, so blue, that you could hear a train whistle blow way off in the distance. And hanging around the barbershop, young Woody was entranced, enthralled, and decided he must make such magic, such music. The kindly black man not only taught the little white boy how to make the magical sounds... why, he even gave him the magic lamp that would light his path through the world. He hands the boy his very own harmonica. <i>Shhhh!</i> Let’s watch from behind as the happy little white boy jiggedy-dances his new harmonica home, and as the kindly black man turns back toward the barber shop, gathers up his broom, and then jumps jes’ so.
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<blockquote>
<i>“Woody believed that no man should be anonymous.... Racism achieves its hideous ends only when it is able to render human beings so totally anonymous that they seem not even to be human any longer. In this sense, just about every great song Woody Guthrie ever wrote stands in opposition to racism.”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Dave Marsh, “Deportees: Woody Guthrie’s Unfinished Business,” an address delivered to the “Hard Travelin: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie” conference held at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, September, 1996.</blockquote>
In 1911, Boley, Oklahoma had two banks; it had three cotton gins, two tiny colleges, an electrical generating plant, a water system, a newspaper, an ice plant, and a Masonic temple that was the tallest building in the state until you got to Oklahoma City. There were five grocery stores, five hotels, three drug stores, two insurance agencies, one undertaker, and two photographers. Perhaps it had a shoeshine stand, or maybe more than one, depending on how many barbershops were in business and which hotel had the bigger lobby. In a brand new state whose white majority legislature’s first official act had been to declare segregation (Booker T. Washington, ever a pragmatist, ever patient in public and ever cautious in private, was doubtless not taken by surprise) maybe, just maybe, there was a harmonica-playing Negro shoeshine boy from Boley who was just foolish and entrepreneurial and foolish enough to eventually start working at the white barbershop all the way down the road in Okemah, leaving his prosperous entirely Negro town to walk eleven miles to another town where white men gladly lynched black women as handily as they did black men, and then sold postcards to prove it. Maybe so. <i>“I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts!”</i> If so, we can guess he didn’t let the sun go down on his black ass.
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<blockquote>
<i>“After Joe Louise done won de crown fo bein the wuhlds most bestas boxuh, all de Niggahs evahwha automatickly got de idee dey wuz tuff too, so dey went out to celibrate how tough dey wuz. Santa Monica beach wuz de place and de white folks say dem coons got plum wile...”</i></blockquote>
<blockquote>
- Woody Guthrie in Los Angeles writing as “Rastus Brown” in his newspaper parody, the “Santa Monica Examin ‘Er,” in June 1937, after Joe Louis defeated James J. Braddock for the Heavyweight Championship of the World.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>I wouldn’t even pay my house rent<br /> I wouldn’t buy me nothin’ to eat<br /> Joe Louis said come and take a chance with me<br /> I’ll bet ya I’ll put you on yo’ feet<br /> In the ring now — he’s still fightin’! — doin’ that same ol’ thing...</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
- from <i>“He’s In The Ring”</i> by Memphis Minnie, b/w <i>“Joe Louis Strut”</i> (<i>“Tell ‘em what it’s all about — they don’t know!”</i>); one of a flood of records by black musicians in the storm of celebration that followed Joe Louis’ far more than symbolic victory. </blockquote>
One way we can reckon out what this New Frontier would become, this Indian Territory/Sooner State/Black Ark/Neverland that never came to be, is by looking at music — let’s not bother to listen, shall we? That will become the traditional Woody Guthrie way! — and at Negro musicians from Oklahoma, and at their influence. (As ever, black music was allowed an economic existence that at least left scant traces, while other black endeavors vanish like vapors on the breeze.) The author of <i>Invisible Man</i>, novelist Ralph Ellison, Negro, went to school in Oklahoma City with Charlie Christian, the genius, the giant who in his very brief life entirely transformed the playing of guitar, who changed the very nature of the instrument to a degree that we can probably best comprehend if we consider the part-Cherokee Jimi Hendrix. The great tenor sax player Don Byas was born in Muskogee the same year as Woody Guthrie, master swing fiddler Claude Williams was born there four years earlier and the irreplaceable piano player/bandleader Jay McShann four years later. (As for Muskogee’s per capita pot-smoking, well, let it be said that Merle Haggard and the Strangers were only just merely passing through on the tour bus when the idea for the song came inspired, and Merle was usually a wee bit sketchy — not to say cloudy, as to what inspired his inspiration.) Blues shouter Jimmy Rushing was from Oklahoma, and bluesman Lowell Fulsom and band leader Benny Moten, while protean bop bassist Oscar Pettiford, another complete game-changer, who although black was born on an Indian reservation there. (He was black, in American terms, because his mother was full Cherokee, and his father was half Cherokee and half black.)
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All manner of non-Negro musicians from throughout the South and the Southwest, musicians like Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers and Jack Teagarden and Hank Williams, musicians known for playing either jazz or country, but who typically mixed the both together, and then tried to come up with something sexier for all the Mexican gals on the dance floor, were raised in close proximity to Negro Americans. Bob Wills picked cotton row by row with them, we are told by historians who mostly miss the Mexicans who were the backbone of stoop labor in Texas and all points West of the Mississippi state border; Jimmie Rodgers toted water to Negro railway workers in Mississippi rail yards; Jack Teagarden snuck into the Negro tent revivals on the vacant lot next to his family’s home just the other side of the Red River from Indian Territory. Hank Williams sold peanuts as a Dickensian child on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and paid a real live Negro musician named Rufe Payne — it was probably short and familiar for “Rufus,” though everybody called him “Tee-Tot” — to teach him what he could learn. It was an exchange of goods and services, which is how it was always meant to be.
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Meanwhile, Woody Guthrie grew up just a few miles from one of the most prominent Negro towns in all of America but he absorbed none of its music firsthand. By the time he was growing up, his father and his father’s courthouse cronies had enforced the purest form of segregation, fencing the town as effectively as if they’d sunk postholes in cement and strung barbwire. Woody would tell his puffed-up tale of the magic Negro shoeshine boy later, but that was a stock character from a minstrel show, not a human being, not based on any experience more real than a darkened afternoon watching Stepin Fetchit slouch through a Will Rogers movie directed by John Ford. Later in life, crapping out yet again in his own game of liar’s dice, he will let his blackface mask slip: this time he wrote that he had learned harmonica from another kid in Okemah, from his childhood friend, John “Smokey” Woods. There had been, of course, no nameless black “George,” but “Smokey” was another race-bait code-word too.
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In his late thirties, at the end of the 1940s, Woody Guthrie will proudly begin learning Open G tuning, “Spanish” tuning, as black musicians called it from <i>“Spanish Flang-dang”</i> after the 1850s parlor guitar piece <i>“Spanish Fandango”</i> written by Henry Worrell, the same composer who created <i>“Sebastopol”</i>, after which “Vastapol” tuning, Open D, was named. You could hardly have missed learning Spanish tuning if you’d ever been around blues musicians — black guitar players — for more than a few minutes in life. It’s omnipresent in gospel as well, and so common in country music that these days it’s just as often called Dobro tuning. Woody Guthrie could have been exposed to some pretty astonishing music if he had been born somewhere like Boley, but he wasn’t, and he was not. He was born not quite eleven miles away, in a town that sold picture postcards of a lynching in order to send a short but plainly stamped message.
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Woody always intended for his alleged “autobiography” <i>Bound For Glory</i> to be called “The Boomchasers"<i>. </i>(And he would forever resent that his editor insisted on titling it after a line from Sister Rosetta Tharpe's very first hit, the pre-war crossover smash, <i>“This Train”</i>, the rocking gospel song that defined R&B almost a decade before the term was invented.) The way Woody Guthrie cared to remember his childhood was boyhood in a boomtown, or boyhood as boomtown and then bust, and when you think of how many booms Oklahoma had been through in its brief history, oil booms and land booms and wave after wave of immigration, forced and voluntary and inadvertent and Sooners and Nevers and such, well, that may have been just right. The American artist Thomas Hart Benton visited Borger, Texas, another boomtown of just the Okemah/Pampa type, in February 1927, less than a year after there’d been a big oil gusher — 5,000 gallons a day — and real estate developer Ace Borger had proceeded to promote himself a town of 30,000 people from nothing out of nowheres. If Benton had stuck around Borger another month, he could have caught Jimmie Rodgers headlining a tent show called “Swain’s Hollywood Follies” on Sunday, May 4, and as a big a country music fan as Benton was — and a fine harmonica player — it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have gone, sketchpad in hand. That was what he’d come to Borger for, to look and sketch and gather, and one result was a painting he finished in 1928 entitled “Boomtown.” "All the mighty anarchic carelessness of our country was revealed in Borger," he reported, "but it was revealed with a breadth, with an expansive grandeur..." And that was without even sticking around to see Jimmie Rodgers breeze into town with the Hollywood Follies.<br />
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<i>This train don’t carry no liars<br />
No false pretenders<br />
No back-biters...</i>
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- from <i>“This Train”</i>, by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Decca Records, 1939); possibly written by Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, often called “The Father of Black Gospel Music,” and formerly known as Georgia Tom, who, with Tampa Red, sold millions of records with the licentious hokum-blues hit, <i>“It’s Tight Like That”</i>; Sister Rosetta is rarely called “The Father of Rock ’n’ Roll,” but bad-ass electric guitar-picking black women wearing blonde wigs are most likely exempt from that questionable honorific.</blockquote>
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There’s another good ol’ Okemah tale that Woody Guthrie never got around to mentioning in song or story or sketch, in any of his stretched-out strings of childish fables, all featuring Woody in the starring role boldly leading fierce rock fights in a local vacant lot, or him a-fightin’ the doggone fascists wheresoever Woody found ‘em, or in any of his incessant highflown heroic hyped-up and typed-down two-fisted tales of street-fightin’ triumph. Because it’s difficult to imagine how he might have become the centerpiece of this one, and that may be why he never worked up a Woody-esque version. This one was gathered up instead in 1945 by Hazel Ruby McMahan, then Oklahoma State Historian for the Daughters of the American Revolution, as delivered verbatim from a written account by a gentleman named W.L. Payne, an Okemah resident, and a first-hand witness of sorts, sort of.
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It was an essential Okemah story, directly connected to the celebrated double-lynching on that shining new bridge at the Yarborough Crossing over the North Canadian River. Mr. Payne’s collected account mentioned, in blithe passing, the interesting fact that there had once been a Negro hotel in Okemah established, he said, so that Negroes attending court might have a place to sleep. But some local wags had stuffed the stone building full of dynamite — farmers eight miles away heard the blast, he claimed, and Mr. Payne remembered dishes rattling in his own home a mile away. It left a blank empty spot on Broadway, Okemah’s main street, an empty lot amidst the store fronts. “An old southern method had been employed to purify this negro hotel sector... [it] blew furniture and fixtures to fragments.” Mr. Payne didn’t seem to remember if any of the hotel guests he’d mentioned, the ones he described comically blown from their beds, had been killed or injured, nor what might have happened to any clerks, maids, staff, or bystanders. Mr. Payne did add, in his winking Southwestern way, “This brought about a quick reduction in the Negro population of Okemah.”
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But that bombing, after all, wasn’t the main thrust of his story, his history, and neither was the castration, the rape, or the lynching of mother and son. Once he’d told his own interesting version of the lynching (“The jailer released himself after gnawing at a tightly-drawn knot for an hour… however several minutes passed before he could relate what had happened as the rope had been drawn tightly in his mouth, which rendered him speechless.” “Searching partiers were sent out by Sheriff J. A. Dunnegan, but no traces of the prisoners [the lynching victims, kidnapped by a mob of over forty white locals] could be found.” “After conducting an exhaustive inquiry the grand jury failed to ascertain who was responsible for the deaths of Laura and her son, L.D. Nelson.”), he re-commenced his narrative. “The lawless Negroes of Okfuskee and adjoining counties made revengeful threats against residents of Okemah.” In fact, what he called “a white ‘stool pigeon’” revealed to the sheriff that “the negroes were planning to sack and burn Okemah that night [June 1911; date unspecified]. No mercy was to be shown women and children.” What followed was yet another rush on the sheriff’s office, with 200 men and boys demanding guns, and a complete sell-out of all ammunition in local stores. Much of the town would later remember spending the night out in the fields on the outskirts of town, waiting for a mass attack that never came. At 2am, allegedly, a Negro man riding bareback on a mule happened by, and while many were convinced that he was an outriding scout, a spy, he managed not to be lynched. “The scare terminated with the loss of a good night’s sleep however, this memorable occasion will linger in our minds forever.” Thus, the anti-climactic end of what he considered, from his end of the rope, to be “Okemah’s Night of Terror.”
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<i>“Many armed Negroes were observed in all sections of Okfuskee County, who threatened revenge for the lynching of the Nelsons... Secret meetings were known to have been held by the infuriated lawless Negroes in formulating plans to wreak vengeance on Okemah. After the Negro colonization plans at Okemah had been shattered, by the demolition of the Negro hotel, white residents living near negro settlements watched movements of the lawless negro element and made reports to the law enforcement officers at Okemah. Serious trouble was expected on the basis of these reports.”</i></blockquote>
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- from “Okemah’s Night of Terror” by Mrs. James W. McMahan, directly quoting W.L. Payne’s detailed but undated written record, in <i>Stories of Early Oklahoma — A collection of interesting facts, biographical sketches, and stories relating to the history of Oklahoma</i>, as assembled by Hazel Ruby McMahan, State Historian for the Oklahoma Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, 1945; Payne declared, “An old southern method had been employed to purify…” ; he was incorrect, as dynamite was in fact a modern local method, common to Okemah, as the oil-drilling boomtown of Woody Guthrie’s boyhood. The nearby town of Paden’s newspaper had reported on an incident in March of 1905, stating “…the darkey was not allowed to have his habitat in the town [Okemah] and he was discouraged by high explosives. In 1907, the home of John Hogan, the only Negro living in Okemah, was dynamited. On April 18, 1908, Saturday night around midnight, a boarding house on Broadway was dynamited, but according to the Okemah <i>Daily Leader</i>, “There was no clue to the perpetrator of the deed.”</blockquote>
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Me, I’ve passed through Boley. I’ve gone first to Okemah, of course, where nowadays there’s a little memorial park where there’d long been a vacant lot, a gap tooth amongst all the once-and-former-storefronts. Now it’s a park dedicated to tourist-attractive Woody Guthrie, a place where people who aren’t from anywhere near here can pull off the highway and gather once a year to celebrate so great an American hero. Last time I was there, the print shop a bit further down Broadway still had a pretty fierce denunciation of Woody prominently displayed in the front window. There’s the typical small-town retrospective mural on one of the brick walls overlooking the park, in this case mainly dedicated to Okemah’s wayward black sheep semi-favorite son looking a lot like the movie star he once so desperately wished to be, and a van-art Indian warrior astride a charging pinto with a couple of mini oil derricks thrown in, and some squatting cowpokes drinking coffee and chewing on hay-stalks, as cowpokes supposedly do. The park’s centerpiece is a bronze guitar-wielding Woody Guthrie sculpture by sculptor Dan Brook, a Creek-Muscogee, himself born and raised, it turns out, in Okemah. Woody is accurately and appropriately leprechaun-scale, dwarfed by a bronze dreadnaught guitar, just the tiny little guy he truly was, ever bragging about his two-fisted triumphs, always wishing he could be like his Okemah saloon-brawling daddy, and always pretending out loud and into his typewriter that he really was. (In fact, Brook told me, he made the sculpture just ever so slightly larger than life. because it would have seemed too absurdly diminutive otherwise; he boosted Woody up to about five-foot-eight.) The statue is set higher than the tourist — memorial statues are not meant to be looked down upon, other than by pigeons — with a pedestal of commemorative bricks, song titles and slogans emblazoned on them, donated by the well-meaning. There is no mention whatever of how that vacant lot in the middle of Broadway Street came to exist, of why there’s so prominent a gap on that side of the storefront street, that there was once a hotel on the site, and that once upon a time, Negro Americans were, however briefly, allowed to stay in that hotel, if only to attend court. There is certainly no discussion of whether anybody was killed or injured in the explosion that created this empty lot, this commemorative park, this site of what these days we would call an act of terrorism.
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No billboard on the highway urges you to <i>Visit Boley — Once Known As “The Largest and Wealthiest Exclusive Negro City In The World”</i>. There wouldn’t be much left to see, after all. There is a commemorative state plaque right where you could turn off the two-lane State Route 62 to come into town, if you were inclined to turn off at yet another brass plaque, and there’s another sign that asks you to Keep Boley Clean. You bet. Boley isn’t even much of a ghost town now, just a wreck wherever it isn’t a struggle; not much of a place to visit, and a hard place to try to live and buy groceries. There’s a two-pump gas station, diesel and unleaded, that might or might not be open, and a fresh new gray-painted funeral home. The inevitable looming small-town water tower isn’t working, and neither is the empty swimming pool out behind the prefab fire department building. I couldn’t tell you where the fire department gets its water these days. A tiny American Legion post, generations deep in heritage, butts up against yet another boarded-over building. This is the poorest county in Oklahoma, and most buildings in Boley older than a single-wide trailer are boarded up, caving in, falling down, shot to hell. Not all of them, but most of them.
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Some people still live there, but no so many. Quite a few of them have come back from the diasporas, all the various great migrations, from the Depression, from World War II, from all those other wars and all the economic tides that have dragged black Americans away from their homes, from hope to hope, from pillar to post on their own trail of tears. Pumpsie Green was born right here in Boley; he was the first black ballplayer the Boston Red Sox allowed on the green grass of Fenway Park wearing their sacred white uniform, finally, at last, in 1959, twelve years, twelve long sunny baseball seasons after Jackie Robinson “broke baseball’s color line.” They mostly let him pinch-hit. Boley’s high school football team won state championships a number of times in the 1970s but now the high school is closed down too. There’s a prison a mile down the road that provides jobs for much of the county. As far as employment goes, it’s what you’d call the local industry.
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<i>“Ever since I was a kid growin’ up, I’ve always… I’ve always found time to [stage chuckle] stop and talk to these colored people because I found them to be full of jokes... what I mean... and wisdom. I learned to play a french harp off a boy that shined shoes down there. I was passin’ the barber shop one day, I was about fifteen, sixteen years old, and there was a big barefooted boy up layin’ in there, had his feet layin’ up toward me, and he was playin’ the harmonica… And I says, uh, Boy, I said, that’s undoubtedly the lonesomest piece of music that [stage chuckle] I ever run onto in my life — where in the world did you learn it?”</i></blockquote>
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- Woody Guthrie, interviewed by Alan Lomax in the Coolidge Auditorium for what are now titled “The Library of Congress Recordings.” Guthrie goes into pseudo-dialect version of the Negro “boy’s” dialog, and soon loses control of his stage chuckle. At the time he is describing, Woody was working as a shoeshine boy. He would claim the name of the barber shop was “Jigg’s”; an outdated racial slur for African-Americans is “jig,” a shortening of the longer slur “jigaboo.” A photo of the barber shop from 1925, when Woody Guthrie was 13, proudly displays a five-chair establishment whose shoeshine boy is, of course, white.</blockquote>
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<i>“The bodies were cut down and brought to Okemah, however relatives of the Nelsons refused to claim the bodies and they were buried by Okfuskee County in the Jeff Williams family cemetery on Greenleaf, near Okemah.”</i>
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- from “Okemah’s Night of Terror”; based on the undated written testimony of W.L. Payne, in <i>Stories of Early Oklahoma — A collection of interesting facts, biographical sketches, and stories relating to the history of Oklahoma</i>, assembled by Hazel Ruby McMahan, State Historian for the Oklahoma Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, 1945; W.L. (Lawrence). Payne had in fact been the jailer on duty on the night of May 27, 1911 (not the 25th, as has sometimes been stated, which was the date of the Nelson’s arrest) when Laura Nelson and her son were taken from Okemah’s courthouse jail by a mob around midnight. According to Payne’s statement, he had been tied up, and after two hours managed to hobble over to Moon’s cafe across the street, but was unable to speak for a considerable while later, due, he said, to the tightness of the rope that had gagged him. Payne’s statements at the time of the incident differ significantly from his undated later written narrative; Payne was responsible for actively leaving the door to the jailhouse unlocked, contrary to typical procedure. No nearby Okemah residents heard anything or were able to identify any of the horseback-mounted mob; Payne could not identify any mob members, even so far as to their race; Payne’s boss, Sheriff J.A. Dunnegan, searched Okemah for the Negroes he claimed to believe had freed the Nelsons but was unable to find any trace of the mob’s tracks in town. The Nelson’s hanging bodies were said to be discovered in the morning by a Negro boy leading his cow to water at the river. Hundreds of white citizens visited the site of the lynchings; the photographer, G.H. “Bill” Farnum hired a boat in order to be able to make a photo that would include all the many local residents gathered above the dangling corpses of the Nelsons.</blockquote>
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<i> I’m a stranger at this place, and I’m lookin’ for my mother’ grave<br /> I’m a stranger at this place, and I’m lookin’ for my mother’ grave<br /> Well, it seems like to me, oooh hooo... well, someone stole it away...</i></blockquote>
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- Opening lines of <i>“Strange Place Blues”</i> (1940), by Booker T. Washington White (aka “Bukka White”), likely played in open tuning; his earliest record label, Vocalion, failed to understand White’s proper name and spelled it phonetically, as permanent evidence of their own ignorance; his folk-era re-discoverers insisted on maintaining the authentic mistake, as permanent evidence of their own arrogance; entirely aside from the demeaning nature of the misnaming, which irked him, it also made it difficult for him to verify and cash the rare royalty check that shook its way down to him.</blockquote>
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Woody Guthrie’s childhood was sweet and tough, unique and ordinary, and it had tragedy in it too, true genuine tragedy. It was not so very far from typical in most ways, not merely just typical for his time and place, but typical in ways that simply speak of childhood. But typical wasn’t going to get the job done. No matter how outrageously he acted on the outside, somewhere not far inside Woody knew that he wasn’t going to make the grade with his music, mainly because he really wasn’t ever much good. He was from Oklahoma, where musical genius bloomed as a principal crop, where the Territory bands like Walter Page’s Blue Devils (later to be the Count Basie Orchestra) were playing as many dances as Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys and Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies, bad-asses one and all, black and white, and with Indians passing either way and both. It was as rich as any musical bottom-land in American history, and Woody Guthrie brought nothing to the dance — he couldn’t even play straight time, no matter how many square dances he would claim to have played once he hit Greenwich Village, where they thought country music was <i>supposed</i> to sound awful. He needed more, desperately. He needed something bigger, grander, flashier, something that would distract but add as well. A true story, his own true story, wouldn’t have been big enough — and being truly tragic, might have cut much too deep — and the more Woody didn’t grow, the taller he seemed to need his tales to be, and the more two-fisted, the more heroic.
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He writes his unbelievable autobiographical sketches obsessively, again and again, over and over, as though he can’t help himself. He can’t. Driven on by a curious pathology of lying, he keeps sneaking back around and digging up the same old dry bones, sniffing at them and gnawing them, meatless though they are now, and then kicking dirt back over them to hide them away. In the late 1940s, he begins yet another autobiography, his second book-length effort, this one intended somehow as a follow-up to <i>Bound For Glory</i>, even though he’s back telling the same stories about the gang he’d been in, and the fierce fistfights he’d won, and so on and so on, but somehow he starts losing steam. It’s the first time he’s ever lost interest in himself, really, and he’s gone over this ground too many times to remember which details are allowed.
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These dramatically flattering self-portraits of his never include the fact that in 1923 his family moved to Oklahoma City, the biggest metropolis in the state then and now, where Ralph Ellison and Charlie Christian were boys as well but on the other side of town, of the color line, of the world. Woody worked on a milk truck, running up to the door of houses and removing any empties from the wooden box on the porch, then replacing them with fresh cold bottles of milk and cream, waxed cardboard containers of cottage cheese and butter. It didn’t make for much of a thrilling tale, so it always got left out, never mentioned in his reams of retellings of his own tale. (In his early high school days, he learned to strum a typewriter, and it would be the instrument he was most proficient at forever after, always a fast and accurate and obsessive typist, page after page after page, and always wearing out the capitalized letter “I.”) After a year, the family drifted back to Okemah. They were actually poor now, genuinely so, but the kind of poor that doesn’t raise much sympathy in a song unless it strips away artifice and falsehood: they had been rich and now they were poor. Kids who live in poverty notoriously don’t notice much poetry in it, then or later.
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It wasn’t a poverty that lined up with big obvious socio-economic moments. The Twenties were a boom time nationwide, and nowhere knew it as much as Oklahoma and Texas when oil was being discovered. <i>“My mama and papa were both injured in a fire. This family asked me to come and live with them. I had been working out at the golf grounds with Claude, the oldest boy...”</i>
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The golf grounds... This is not the Oklahoma imagined back East, or that would feature in all of Guthrie’s rough ’n’ rowdy tales later on — no telling how many lives were ruined when the mighty dust storms blew all the sand out of the sand traps and muddied up the water hazards to the point where your tiny young caddy couldn’t see to fish your ball out. This isn’t the hardscrabble Farm Security Administration black-and-white photo Oklahoma, or even the Rodgers and Hammerstein Oklahoma. This is the Oklahoma where a little boy named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie lost his own parents to their troubles and was taken in by the parents of a pal from school — his name wasn’t really Claude — and together they both made a little pocket change caddying out at the golf course.
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There’s a photo, pointedly never displayed in any connection with Woody but only ever seen in relation to his cousin, cowboy singer/recording artist Jack Guthrie, a picture of two happy wet teenagers in swimming trunks, the photo shot through the chain-link fence of the public pool. Jack, already on his way to being a long tall galoot, towers over his cousin despite being three years younger — though in those days Jack was still known as Leon, or sometimes Jerry. Jack is sticking out his tongue and making a face at the camera, and Woody has reached his hand up and rested it happily on Jack’s shoulder. It’s nothing much, really, just a chlorine-scented snapshot of a couple of kids in swim trunks standing on the wet concrete on a blazing hot Oklahoma summer day. It’s just that it declares so plainly that the world Woody grew up in, the Oklahoma of the Twenties and early Thirties, while thoroughly segregated, was not so incredibly distant from our own. It was a place where white kids swam in public pools and got caddy jobs at the golf course and maybe, just maybe, if they were feeling wild or lonely or curious, hitch-hiked out of town one day and then tried to scurry home before it got dark and they got themselves in trouble.
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The name of Laura Nelson’s baby, according to census records, was Carrie.
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<i>Billy James: “How far did you get when you were seven and left Gallup?”
Bob Dylan: “Oh ...Well, I was with an uncle and, uh, I was in Texas, then Kansas. But this stuff you see, I can't really remember so hot. All I remember is basic... base things. Where I could, uh, just base things, sort of like...”</i></blockquote>
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- from an audio interview with Bob Dylan, October or November 1961, conducted by Billy James of the Columbia Public Relations and Information Services department to prepare liner notes for what would be Dylan’s first album; Dylan, a largely untraveled 20-year-old college drop-out, born and raised in northern Minnesota, had come to New York for the first time earlier that year in order to perform and to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, whose uncle had first taught him in his late teens to play guitar in Pampa, Texas.</blockquote>
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<i>They’re selling postcards of the hanging<br /> They’re painting the passports brown<br /> The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors<br /> The circus is in town...</i></blockquote>
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- Opening lines of Bob Dylan’s <i>“Desolation Row”</i> (<i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, 1965)</blockquote>
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<i>(Illustrations: Lynching postcard 1911; Indian Territory 1857; Guthrie’s autobiography; Swains Hollywood Follies poster; Guthrie statue and park, photos by Bart Bull)</i>
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(from <i>Dustiest of the Dust Bowlers: The Tall Tale of Woody Guthrie</i>, a work in progress first written in 2003; revised January 2009; revised April 2017)
<!--- >>>>> END BART - GUTHRIE ESSAY <<<<<< --->
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Laramie footbridge</span></b></div>
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<b>Welcome Yankee – Curtis Jones in Paris, 1967</b>
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Jane Stokes
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Curtis never gave up on America even when he said he was never coming back:
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“…I’m from Texas… Where is this country, Negro? …The black man of the USA he has no home to return to… his forefathers were from Africa – they're not going to accept them… our home is like a rabbit …where ever we make it…. I don't want this curse on my country – the people who do these things to America they don't love it neither do they love themselves….
But yet I have no desire to get even with him for nothing – I love the USA and I want the people of the USA to be loved instead of the reply from the many other countries, repeating go home Yankee with your propaganda – I want them to say welcome Yankee to whom it may concern.” </blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji41KE8KxH4vJZ3fSquQMibDHCQIDfFvUoJ12cRD76_JCyUWcHzDY-KXcpOt6egSboD2OK76fkCiONJ2xGVEgb-h9H4ba6h6i9OfwiXp0sKWFnamm4NgHSvdPYTZitwcnU8jpkV0XqBhOu/s1600/NV-154-CurtisJones-Bluebird-Jan02-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="392" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji41KE8KxH4vJZ3fSquQMibDHCQIDfFvUoJ12cRD76_JCyUWcHzDY-KXcpOt6egSboD2OK76fkCiONJ2xGVEgb-h9H4ba6h6i9OfwiXp0sKWFnamm4NgHSvdPYTZitwcnU8jpkV0XqBhOu/s200/NV-154-CurtisJones-Bluebird-Jan02-1.jpg" width="195" /></a>My improbable friendship with Curtis Jones began in Paris in 1967, but it wasn’t until a recent Google search that I quite realized that same Curtis Jones was a blues legend, a pianist and vocalist, credited with songs such as <i>“Highway 51”</i>, <i>“Tin Pan Alley”</i>, and <i>“Decoration Day Blues”</i>. And also noted in the Herb Museum for the song, <i>“Reefer Hound Blues”</i>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1zM-F0kjOQ&list=PLMZCTyu5qmjUXOeXPefsbDIu-5zB1iqSu" target="_blank">These and many more</a> are credited to him. Curtis Jones died at the piano in 1971 I was told and buried in an unmarked grave….
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The Curtis Jones I knew in 1967 was the man between the gigs – not the noted blues pianist, but a guitarist, an instrument he taught himself as a child and carried around with him even while playing piano at Texas bars and dance halls in the twenties and thirties. He and guitar great T-bone Walker knew each other when they were both young men in Dallas, if not earlier in their small neighboring hometowns between Dallas and Shreveport. Curtis came along as ragtime and barrelhouse piano styles were evolving into the dance-oriented boogie-woogie and the slower, more cerebral blues style after the war.
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But to me in Paris and after, Curtis was always a guitarist, and also protector, and a real friend. He was the man living in a hotel room – the same provisional “rabbit” home I imagined he inhabited during all of his musician’s travels since the 1930s when he recorded <i>“Lonesome Bedroom Blues”</i>. He was also the man who often told his visitors that he had no time for them. It was the year before the student revolution, before Martin Luther King was killed and before race-riots swept the US in a long hot summer. And a few years before NOW defined the “woman problem.”
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Curtis and I had little in common except our birthdays – not age, religion, or race. I was already a refugee from The Sixties sitting in a cafe on St. Germain du Pres, 20 years old, just abandoned by what might have been called my boyfriend. All this was back when suddenly nobody knew what to call anything.
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Curtis was a refugee from America. He referred often to <i>black power</i>, a phrase he would weave into everything. He called himself, “One of the soul brothers who love all power… all kind.” In Europe in the sixties American blues was being discovered and appreciated. Curtis had arrived with the American Folk Festival five years earlier. He told me, “I must be black power if I’ve come to Europe – I am treated like a king – they call me Mr. Curtis Jones USA… but in the USA they call me Negro….”
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The day we met, I was sitting in Café Buci, a left bank dive patronized by an assortment of expats – some American hippies gone mad on drugs, some French Algerians still talking about the war five years past, and some Lebanese with their bricks of hash and dark rumors soothed by espresso. Someone there invited me to visit this guy Curtis Jones in the Hotel La Louisiane across the street. Through an indistinct entrance, up and around three flights of spiral stairs, lay a small, neat, lonesome room <i>sans toilette</i> where Curtis stood, his face shining and smiling, welcoming us in….
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Curtis gratefully receives a bit of sweet-smelling Lebanese hash from one of my party and rolls it with Chesterfield tobacco. He then takes a moment to show off his prized
WWII-era Zippo, and to praise the owners of “La Louisiane” as if they, not he, were somehow our real hosts. After lighting the joint and clunking his Zippo closed, he waved his hand around him, repeating “La Louisiane.” He loved to say it and considered them part of his great fortune coming to Europe. (The hotel, I would later learn, was easy on artists and writers in arrears.)
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Curtis was known for his recordings and performances on the piano but in his hotel room he had only a guitar. Someone requests Curtis play <i>”Morocco”</i> a place many seemed to be going to, or coming from. He picked up the guitar and obliged:
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<i>Plan your vacation
Please toll down Morocco way…
God knows I copped a scene
One year, one month, one day….
Tangiers on a mountain
Sahara desert far below…</i></blockquote>
After the song, Curtis describes how he came to Paris with another of what I’d soon recognize as one of his refrains: “no bank account, no booking agent, couldn’t speak the language….” He couldn’t speak the language? He loved language. And the words he loved to say were the words he sang – words like <i>chérie</i> or <i>s'il vous plaît</i>…
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A few days later I was knocking on his door with my own request: “Could you give me guitar lessons?” Curtis laughed. Curtis always laughed-giggled… And so, with brief interruptions of him trying to teach me a few chords, began my friendship with Curtis Jones. I would play, and he would say, “Oooh eeee”, a long “ohoooeeeeee…. I don’t never want to scold you…!” I would pass the guitar back to him and watch his toughened fingers slide effortlessly on the metal strings. And listen. Eventually, I stopped taking the guitar back… And then our project changed – he would talk and I would write… He wanted to tell the story of his life and the story of <i>black power</i>.
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“Mama give birth but she ain’t give breath,” he began, “and the baby goes <i>wha wha wah</i>… And who made the air we breathe… and the ore and the coal that he gather out of the earth?” “God,” he went on to prove. “The power of God that operates the moon, sun, and the stars as same as he operates the brains of all of his creative work…” I had never heard the Old Testament told the way he told it, but he was only leading to his subject...
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“So blame the one who did it… To hate a person because of the color of the flesh as the person responsible for his color… If not, then blame the one who did it….
“His power caused man to dream because Moses mentioned in his write up, that it was a dream that told him where to go to find the first commandment. Also he mentioned it was a dream that told him to take the walking cane and take the slaves from Pharaoh…”
“So the people of the tower was dancing and singing unpleasant songs and doing many different evil things until it was God who saw fit to destroy this unholy tower – not man – but He who created man. Before this tower there was only one language. He never can forget this tower… and the many different languages that we gather upon the face of today come from that one address, the Babbling Tower…”</blockquote>
Through Café Buci, through the darkness with untrustworthy people, I was led to Curtis Jones, King of the Blues, and the story continued…
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuupnYzNgimjEqjrGSLoRpXxG0_qAmRjlxSmln_nCkqjhBN9AbS0yae-K3cSRRn9lJFgDE7dOkbOEKMvPusfbkx_GslF0AUaVL9TSWxAYIEz5M3_CV5PXO35oYVuLHMCONchiNyUAYPf-g/s1600/NV-154-curtisjones-bluesandtrouble-Jan02-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="298" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuupnYzNgimjEqjrGSLoRpXxG0_qAmRjlxSmln_nCkqjhBN9AbS0yae-K3cSRRn9lJFgDE7dOkbOEKMvPusfbkx_GslF0AUaVL9TSWxAYIEz5M3_CV5PXO35oYVuLHMCONchiNyUAYPf-g/s200/NV-154-curtisjones-bluesandtrouble-Jan02-1.jpg" width="197" /></a>I didn’t at first realize what it meant to meet a religious man…
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“God put it there, not man – Man’s power can’t stop the earthquakes, neither the storms or tornadoes, neither can he stand before God’s cold, sleet, and snow…. Then from what I can see now, I very much agree with the bible, there will be no peace on earth until men love each other as brothers…”</blockquote>
I hadn’t even heard of Freemasonry until his biblical poetics:
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“Even little David killed Goliath with a slingshot… everybody shouted for joy – took a live sword and cut his head off his body, then he became king as same as LB Johnson is today. So little David… married this dead man's wife then went home and got the bible – and said he was going to build the Masonic Temple… That's when the Spirit of God appeared to him in a dream and told him he didn't kill the man's wife but… he had blood stain hands and the dream told him that the temple had to be built with clean hands.
“So little David was so frightened when he awakens from the dream he composed all the Psalms in the Bible asking God to forgive him for what he had did which was wrong taking something he can't give which is life so then he gave the blessings and the understandings what he knew about the dream to his son King Solomon which was a black man which is black power…” </blockquote>
He would go on and on until he “would shame me out of disbelief.” I didn’t know too much about black magic either, but he did.
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<i>I call it black magic – some people call it plain hoodoo,
I call it black magic – some people call it plain hoodoo…
But this evil curse leave me no place with you.</i></blockquote>
Those were his lyrics, but his recipes to potions he wouldn’t let me write down.
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He knew things. He knew about trafficking, about getting off the street with drugs. He knew about “the Arab lock up their women,” and he warned me. He knew things about violent takeover being talked about back home and he explained how its better to cut all the (telephone) wires….
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Then maybe Vietnamese food down the corner… His tunes in my head following me down the Paris streets, the metro – <i>standin’ at the station</i> – his tune in key, past Pigalle and up the winding steps… and back, the reverse route next day back to La Louisiane… And that’s how the days passed in Paris in 1967.
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Everything was strange here – the art, the parties in the middle of the night, the characters, the international intrigue… Switzerland, strange… The mountains by size alone were strange, but then the people and myself… “No,” Curtis would say, “those are sad magic thoughts.” Then he would play the guitar… And then the book resumed:
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“We must find a foundation to talk about black power because it exists, plus the history… So we’ll take the history and see what the history said about black power – the history is the history of the first religions, Christianity – from that to Dixieland jazz, then American jazz, blues and boogies from the foundation of WC Handy, <i>“St. Louis Blues”</i>, then Louis Armstrong, his Dixieland Jazz, Madam Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Hot Lips Page, Jack Johnson World Champion, Two Brothers, Jimmy Yancey, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Art Blakey, Ray Charles, Joe Lewis, Mahalia Jackson soul sister, Rosetta Tharpe, and Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, Bennie Moten, Count Basie, James P. Johnson, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell, Joe Turner, Big Bill Broonzy, Curtis Jones, black power, Joe Walcott, Adam Clayton Powell soul brother, Martin Luther King… that’s the popularity part and the society part of black power .”</blockquote>
Curtis learned to stay out of trouble, watching his friends go down with alcoholism. He’d mention some one of them, then take a drag and pause… and then go on to name them all in a list, another refrain… “Your body is your temple,” he’d remind me and then inhale the sweet smoke from his hash.
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“…They was very happy smoking their peace pipes, hashish, marijuana, until the white power put a law against it and put whiskey on the shelf and today we acknowledge many, many whiskey cancer and many other alcoholic illness but no patient for hashish smokers neither reefer smokers nor marijuana…”</blockquote>
About history and economics Curtis said and I wrote down: “The history is clear, from slave labor to poor pay to black market, black power made America rich.” But first he explained the emerging from slavery with illiteracy but also the strong oral tradition of which music of course was central. “Many, many black power of the USA don't have education but some of the greatest talent that you want to meet, many of them can't read and write music, neither can Curtis Jones…” And then in summation, his tone now lawyerly:
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“I want to ask you and you and you, my composing, my playing and my singing and my talent and my name and my photo is all my own material. Then if they take my material and record it on their wax and sell for all countries and all parts of the world, then I have a fully right to speak about my own civil right. If the musicians are artists that can read and write music, receive royalties from their product then no matter whether I can't read music or write music I deserve my royalties the same as they do. Why don't the law give me the same protection as he gives to all other artists, why am I discriminated? What reason have I given to be Black market in this way? If there is a reason please let it be known so the whole world can know what it is all about because they are the one that's buying my records in their home in the night clubs and restaurants and many other places and I don't have a copy of the paper to show to nobody that's the music companies of the USA has paid me no royalties from 1940 until this present moment January 8, 1968” </blockquote>
Then Vietnamese food…, the Buci…, sometimes going to hear him perform on the piano – I can’t say I remember his ever playing the guitar in those venues. The gigs were few and far between and no dancing. They were at restaurant-bars and I remember Curtis playing <i>“Gee, Pretty Baby”</i>, <i>“I Want to Be Your Slave”</i>, <i>“Soul Brother Blues”</i>…. I can still hear him singing, <i>“Goin’ to Paris to sing my blues all night, Cause I love a little baby but she don’t treat me right…”</i>, then banging out <i>“Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee…”</i> and still see everyone look up from their meals at him before he’d finish the chorus, <i>“Gee, pretty baby what you do to me.”</i> Later they’d smoke their Gauloises and listen seriously. (Curtis smoked non-filter American because they were “healthier.”) But then came time for me to leave – really leave – back to the States.
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Curtis’ question returned with me: Where is the money? “I’ve got some of the best selling blues on the market, and who got the money? I’m black power and I didn’t get it.” I hired a lawyer to find out about “these business matters” and Curtis and I continued to write. His letters from Paris came on preprinted stationery with header <i>en Francais</i> “Curtis Jones, Chanteuse et Pianiste.” I also received the song with a note: “I hope you have obtained my latest issue ‘Now Resident in Europe’ [Blue Horizon, 1968] so you can listen to ‘Jane Blues,’ you beautiful lovely you.”
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Yes, it was sad to leave Paris. Then about a month after I left, in May, the student revolution erupted. His notes from the front: “Please believe me Paris is a blaze of fire and it is real dangerous…. Little snow for two or three days but the police keep the streets so hot until this snow got shame and melted.” In the USA, MLK had just been shot: “…ain't nothing happening in Paris only just like the situation of the USA.”
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Curtis’ letters were always signed “King of the Blues”, but things weren’t going well in Paris or with his record producers. His letters with the preprinted stationery also had the preprinted footer with the names of all those labels displayed proudly (”Vedette des disques: Decca, Paramount, Vocalion, Colombia, Bluebird, Okeh, Prestige, Delmar, etc…”), but understood now by me to be the very culprits I had heard about.
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But at least the law process had started:
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“well baby I am really glad that you found out that I told you the truth… I received here at my hotel $3…. No they don’t ask me nothing – the only time I hear from them is through you.” </blockquote>
In the meantime, Parisian students and 11 million workers went on strike:
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“Yes of course anybody can come to Paris and spend lots of money and work like hell and make no money… The Paris police is checking passports hustling all of the peddlers off to jail both young and old… Paris is burnt up. The hippie and the young cats set up flame and the police are trying real well… from what I understand the police are hustling on tourists and artists with all of their know-how… If the people see you on the street and you not spending your money then they tell the police that you selling dope – this place is a drag…. I don't take it anymore, only you can live in France longer than you can any other country in Europe… Of course Bill got caught and German Arthur and many, many others was in jail…. October 20, 1968 I stayed at the hotel one night and paid $300 hotel bill and we came to London October 21, 1968 and I'm still here in London to engage my last concert – December 30, 1968 – as for myself I'm cooling for a while and I'm not in no hurry.”</blockquote>
I was back home after MLK’s death and riots spread across USA. Curtis wrote from Europe: “I have many white friend in the USA were being beat up like the black man.” Women’s groups and anti-war protest groups and other loosely formed organizations were allying with each other in the name of freedom. And while riots were breaking out, ideologies were being formulated and radicalized – self-defense, militancy, anti-Americanism – The Black Panthers were debating among themselves the meaning of their own new term, Black Power – the same term Curtis had been using when referring to Discrimination as a “discovery… the most poisonous material that is existeth… man can reverse hate to love since he discovered this…”
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Curtis felt the USA had driven him out with its discrimination. And from Europe he warned that “when you drive out black power you drive out the popularity from your country.” And popular music was changing in the new political climate. Music was louder, more message-oriented. People… <i>Peoples>/i> had been listening in on each other through radio and records since the twenties. Now they… <i>we</i> all seemed in direct contact… “Say it louder.” “Goddamn Mississippi.” Bobby Seale’s book refers to Bob Dylan’s <i>“The Ballad of a Thin Man”</i> as inspiring the Panthers.
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Now in Cambridge, Mass., I found that Curtis Jones was known to one David Lightbourne, expert in Delta Blues, unofficial Harvard Coop musicologist for the local Medford boys. Many nights were spent getting David’s records out, passing the joint, playing first some Motown, then BB King, then finally the old ones, the ones with the scratchy acoustics even on the newest compilation albums. And they all listened as if to the grand uncles who’d taught Curtis and were somehow even more distant, across the bigger ocean of time – those slave times pulling the Old Testament up close to our own day. Of the Medford boys, Vernie would have been another Otis Redding if he wasn’t always getting drunk and going to jail. Ponce, Taj Mahal’s first manager, and Johnny, the thinker…. We all stopped and listened. It was a time when the experts were exhuming the old acoustic masters while the popular electric sounds were drowning out but also exhuming those very surviving masters.
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The recent documentary, <i>Two Trains Runnin’</i> (2016), follows blues collectors in 1964 as they follow the vaguest clues suggesting that Skip James and Son House might still be alive in Mississippi – these collectors entirely oblivious to another group of outsiders, the civil rights activists also gathering in Mississippi that year to break Jim Crow segregation by registering black voters for Freedom Summer. James and House were both found and returned to stages while Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were murdered by Klansmen and laid in graves. The next year the Voting Rights Act passed and Bob Dylan plugged-in and recorded <i>“Highway 61 Revisited”</i>. Trains and highways… We were all going somewhere new and ancient.
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Lightbourne had been following the ongoing excavation of the earliest blues recordings and no sooner did I mention to him that I knew Curtis Jones than he was able to find Curtis’ name in his magazines and west-side blues programs from 1963, back when Europeans were discovering these blues artists in person via the American Folk Blues Festival tours. As Curtis said his music was out there in the market for the Chicago sound, but it was jumping its own music distribution segregation more and more.
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The law case over royalties due Curtis went slowly, but at least with a lawyer he knew he had a case and it was in motion:
</i><br />
<blockquote>
<i>“There was a letter from the Delmar record company, and the details and understanding that I gathered so you know that I print my writing in block letters and by the time that I finish giving them, the lawyer, my statement that I had to hurry to the post so my letter could reach them at the earliest possible before the post close…. Trying to work and advertise my type of work as a whole, but to tell the truth a real good lawyer working secretly not letting the people know that he is protecting my rights within one years time he would be rich from the money he would obtain including his other business matters.” </i></blockquote>
<i>
Curtis then writes:
</i><br />
<blockquote>
<i>“I enjoyed four months vacation [July 1 to Oct. 30, 1969] in the beautiful and sunshine city of Roma, Italy including the film that I recorded not by music, only in person October 29, 1969 to October 30, 1969. I took a first-class train ticket arriving in Zurich, Switzerland, October 31 beginning my one-month tour of Switzerland except 10 Days in Poland completed December 1, 1969 …so you have plenty of time to return an answer to me.” </i></blockquote>
<i>
While he was enjoying a European resurgence with many new recordings and re-recordings a legal dispute involving London producers was simmering and he was as broke as ever: “Yes of course I am poor as far as money. But for music I am rich and will remain this way until I die or obtain a stroke which I hope not.” Whatever amount agreed upon in the settlement he never got it:
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<i>“I posted to the address location there in New York… that I received from you a check that I received in London last December 68 because the England banks would not cash the Delmar record company, USA check. Also I posted this check in particular to let them know that the Delmar record company do owe me money until this very moment that I have not received…. Leads Music Company there in New York, copyright Curtis Jones 51 Highway Blues, please look in the book of the blues American folk book on the blues on page 51 and you can see where they got it in sheet music, and having mention nothing to me whatsoever no they did not mention no mail to me, no money unless it was a three dollar… Of course London is also the same but it still exists for accommodation.” </i></blockquote>
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Over the next years, I received his tour schedules, especially the steady places like Haim House in München, where he could pick up and return mail. His letters and notes were not on his custom stationery anymore but they still featured his customary <i>patois</i>: “I'm the King that's in the know and I know which away to go for the happenings all around the globe.”
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The case over unpaid royalties continued slowly and his bookings began to lag so he was obviously frustrated:
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<i>“Why should someone the age of myself let them square monkeys get away with all of my beautiful talent voices and they sit and laugh at me – would not even invite me to a cup of coffee. I often wonder to myself how much more longer do I have to continue knowing all the while that's remembering the strength behind me…”</i></blockquote>
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Back home radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Weatherman, and other anti-war groups continued re-aligning. Curtis only read about America now and his advice was cautionary:
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<i>“I read the Herald Tribune paper every day and this is so much danger. I gather the revolution, the demonstration, the bombs, plus all of the evil things that happening in the USA…. You can be full of mistake – as good as you can be – full of mistake…. Stop and think what is best for yourself… to not get involved with the wrong type of peoples…”</i></blockquote>
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In the new decade, The Seventies now, the word “mistake” no longer existed for women and this came to dominate my thoughts. Everything could change and yet not improve. Curtis knew well, as the grandson of slaves (b. 1906), and from his own young sharecropping days, all about the Jim Crow regime of the south:
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<i>“…the black people who has no weapon, only their own bare hand with the Bible in their right hand and a prayer in their mouth to go to the location where the dishonesty is located to kneel and pray and return back to their home only asking that the prayer of civil rights be answered.” </i></blockquote>
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But he also knew from his years in Dallas, Kansas City, and especially in Chicago that the battles were now in the streets of the urban ghettos where they didn’t have this background from the south:
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<i>“USA has more scandal discrimination segregation, racketeer, President murder, then any place in the whole world… the many, many murders… The history is clear… slave labor… poor pay… they even black market the black powers money… The white power took black power – the white power didn't want the black power to buy a building in their neighborhood and many other different ways the USA black-market the black powers money – black power made this country rich with their labor and their talent…. Would you prefer black power with its rich clean moral refine society or would you prefer the racketeer, the gangster, the swindler and people who hate another one because of the color of their skin? …As far as white is concerned I have seen white cotton, white snow, white clouds but never in my life have I ever seen a white man or a white woman.” </i></blockquote>
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The black power of the Panthers started in the city ghettos and reached more people with its body-based clenched-fist message, and soon overshadowed the faith-based MLK movement. Music was more electric and the messages more in tune with revolution. The new mix included <i>“Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud”</i> by James Brown, <i>“Why Am I Treated So Bad”</i> by The Staple Singers, <i>“The End of the Silence”</i> by Elaine Brown, <i>“Seize the Time”</i> by Bob Dylan, <i>“Revolution”</i> by The Beatles, and <i>“Revolution”</i> by Nina Simone. The great migration to northern cities made an urban music directly from ex-rural hands but younger city-born blacks and suburban whites were changing the blues.
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<i>“It is almost hell anyway you point your finger but the USA's tops for… such matters until it is not safe for innocents who don't even approve of these situations that is performed.” </i></blockquote>
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Curtis was right about the innocents. The innocence of people not knowing the matter, the muting of MLK’s dream, and the new separatism that set in subtly. Even with our own friends, the Medford boys… We all began to go toward different places. They disappeared into a different mode of segregation, their musical roots not deep enough. Taj Mahal winding up in Hawaii. Hanging out changed, even for the boys, or men.
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The American Folk Festival that had brought Curtis to Europe in 1963 was discontinued by 1970. Nevertheless in Europe Curtis felt he had the freedom without history:
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<i>“No I don't want to return to the USA because it is too much hatred. Yes of course we have hatred in Europe but much different from this of the USA. No I don't hate no one only I want to be far away from these that hate me because my skin is black and my age is 63. …This new manager did not like me because I talk too straight and plane to please him, also he was an evil crook charging the peoples too much money for everything…”</i></blockquote>
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European producers finally couldn’t recognize him as a national treasure either. They didn’t
promote him and most importantly, didn’t pay him. In liner-notes to one release is a biography written after he died where Curtis is described as the grandson of a slave and as “impoverished.” The notes go on to describe Curtis as not as successful as contemporaries such as Jack Dupree, and as an embittered man.
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I know they were wrong and even self- incriminating. He used to praise his fellow singers, the soul brothers on the list, Dupree especially – Curtis was godfather to his child. Curtis was surely a self-promoter (“no bank account, no booking agent”) but he was not envious, and not fighting over slavery, but fighting in the marketplace of that day for agreed upon rights. In the end he used his poverty contra his contract specifying the royalties owed him as collateral for a place to sleep or eat.
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In 1971 I unexpectedly received a letter:
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<i>“This is very important news that I now hear forward to you post…. The same doctor that was treating my illness… in München… and I was his patient so I have the same kind of illness which he explained that it is call Blatter illness so when I entered my hotel to collect my key to rest a while… this new manager that the hotel owner employed told me that he didn't have any vacant room for Curtis Jones and I was so weak and I ask him if I could sit a little while and take a breath he said yes so me and my suitcase guitar and pillow….” (note: a piano stool pillow – underlined in his letter because in the midst of everything, he is still teasing me for that time I forgot to bring it!)</i></blockquote>
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Curtis knew he didn’t want to return to America:
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<i>“…So I am glad they won't let the Negro haters guinea pig me… because we all are going to die someway someday. I can't explain or name the date or the reason. No I don't hate nobody, I only want to be as far away as I can from people approve of such matters. That is the reason that I rather to remain in Europe because the USA has the worst history in any country that exist.” </i></blockquote>
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An expat to the end.
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<i>“The doctors and nurses was so nice to me and I didn't have no one and they knew that I did not have money… so I have to give the credit to the German people and Jane… So thanks for your attention to my sad news” </i></blockquote>
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That was the last letter I got from Curtis. His sister wrote me soon after: “my bro he gone – heart stopped... at piano.” (Sept. 11, 1971, during the Attica prison riots) Curtis Jones’ musical legacy dwindled over the next decade. And worse, eight years later they removed his pauper’s grave for non-payment – removing even his name. All unbeknownst to me because my son was born at that time. I gave him the middle name Curtis – Cur, I still call him when I’m in my bluesy loving mood – so his name is preserved in my life.
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Then, now, after the internet seemed to brush away everything – shady independent labels, corporate major labels, giant record superstores, dingy used record shops… – I google “Bob Dylan Columbia Records 1962, Highway 51 Sheet Music” and find Curtis Jones’ name and an addendum:
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<i>“NOTICE Purchasers of this musical file are entitled to use it for their personal enjoyment and musical fulfillment. However, any duplication, adaptation, arranging and/or transmission of this copyrighted music… requires the written consent of the copyright owner(s)… infringements of the copyright law… may subject the user to civil and/or criminal penalties.”
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Thank you credit card $3 download. But who got the money? I know Curtis Jones didn’t…
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<i>“I repeat regardless to richer poor, he come in the world naked not one but all – there's only one world and one life to live for all mankind no matter city country town or village he or she may come from we all are traveling the same road and that's extended from birth till we return to death as the sun travels from east to west so does mankind travel from generation to generation.” </i></blockquote>
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Curtis Jones' guitar songs "Jane" and "Morocco" can be found <a href="https://evilfighter.ru/curtis-jones/" target="new">HERE</a>
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<i><i>“Jane”</i> (take 2) </i><br />
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<i><i>“Morocco Blues”</i> (take 2)
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Curtis Jones live at café in Montmartre 1967 –
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlhCfF0Om9o&list=PLsY6VJc9zDqn-XdG-QaoHzE7OUFeDnvKU&index=103" target="_blank"><i>“Lowdown Worried Blues”</i></a>.
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<i>Mel Wright talks about being a sideman for Curtis Jones on a 1968 UK <a href="http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/brit-author-and-musician-mel-wright-talks-about-british-blues" target="_blank">tour date</a> at Nag’s Head, near London.
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<i>I positioned myself with a good view of the piano and Curtis. Ron Skinner on bass guitar hovered over my shoulder with the same idea. All you can hope for at this stage is a look, a gesture or some signal what the number was. No set list or idea of what he was about to play – just feel it. Unprofessional? I don’t think so. It keeps you on your toes and can give the music an edge – a lot of trust is needed between you. Curtis rolled the piano keys, Unlike Jack Dupree he didn’t hammer his foot down to give you the beat – his was more lilting style. Some lovely slow blues <i>Lonesome Bedroom Blues</i>. The student crowd loved it. Cheap beer, a legendary blues player from Texas and Dynaflow just making it by the skin of their teeth. It seemed a short set but maybe it was because of the relief of getting to the gig and the long journey – it was suddenly all over.</i></blockquote>
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<i>(Illustrations: Hotel La Louisiane – out a window, Tripadvisor.com; Bluebird Records 1937; Hotel La Louisiane side entrance;</i></i><i> Vocalion Records 1938;</i><i><i> Curtis Jones LP back cover; German poster circa 1968; Curtis w/ IHT; page of letter to author, 1968; Nag’s Head poster, 1968)</i>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Libby Flats, Snowy Range </span></b></div>
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<b>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…</b>
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John Gray in NEW STATESMAN on Francis O’Gorman’s book, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/10/forgetfulness-dangers-modern-culture-wages-war-its-own-past" target="_blank">Forgetfulness: The Dangers of a Modern Culture that Wages War on its Own Past</a>.
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Demolishing national and cultural identities makes moral and political sense if – and only if – the result will be better than the liberal societies that have actually existed. Yet these societies are highly fragile settlements, regularly disrupted by war and economic crisis. Today they are also threatened by an ideology that wages war on their past. Societies that repudiate their historic inheritance in this way leave themselves defenceless against the dark forces that are now re-emerging. As George Santayana might have put it were he alive today, those who deconstruct the past are condemned to repeat it. </blockquote>
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Craig Brown in GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/23/princess-margaret-misadventures-in-bohemia-craig-brown" target="_blank">Princess Margaret's Misadventures in Bohemia</a>.
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Where did it come from, her tendency towards the artistic? Margaret’s elder sister, their parents and grandparents regarded the arts as less to be enjoyed than endured. “Come over here, May, this’ll make you laugh,” George V called to his wife, Queen Mary, when he first set eyes on a Cézanne. Listening with her children to TS Eliot reading from The Waste Land at a wartime recital, the Queen Mother had to stifle her giggles. “Such a gloomy man ... we didn’t understand a word!” she explained some years later. </blockquote>
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Rod Liddle in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/12/raising-awareness-for-enraged-victims-always-ends-in-lunacy/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=021211_Weekly_Highlights_48_SUBS" target="_blank">Raising Awareness for Enraged ‘Victims’ Always Ends in Lunacy</a>.
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What begins as an admirable and necessary attempt to raise our awareness of iniquity in society almost always ends, somewhere down the line, in a form of lunacy. This is true of feminism, anti-racism, transgenderism, gay rights and especially, perhaps, the disability lobby. It always begins with advocacy groups insisting, almost certainly rightly, that their particular tranche of victims are wrongly discriminated against. But it is in the nature of advocacy groups — and human beings in general — that they cannot simply clap their hands, cheer and close down their organisations when legislative battles establishing equal rights have been nobly won. They carry on and on and on. Whereas once they insisted that iniquities occurred because the victim groups they supported were a small minority, they now expand their remit and argue almost the opposite, almost always to the disservice of the people they were representing in the first place. </blockquote>
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Mark Lilla in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/09/how-modern-addiction-identity-politics-has-fractured-left" target="_blank">How the modern addiction to identity politics has fractured the left</a>.
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What matters about these academic trends is that they give an intellectual patina to the narcissism that almost everything else in our society encourages. If our young student accepts the mystical idea that anonymous forces of power shape everything in life, she will be perfectly justified in withdrawing from democratic politics and casting an ironic eye on it. If, as is more likely, she accepts the all-American idea that her unique identity is something she gets to construct and change as the fancy strikes her, she can hardly be expected to have an enduring political attachment to others, and certainly cannot be expected to hear the call of duty towards them. Instead, she will find herself in the hold of what might be called the Facebook model of identity: the self as a home page I construct like a personal brand, linked to others through associations I can “like” and “unlike” at will. Intersectionality is too ephemeral to serve as a lasting foundation for solidarity and commitment. </blockquote>
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TJ Clark at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/tj-clark/reinstall-the-footlights?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3922&utm_content=ukrw_nonsubs" target="_blank">Reinstall the Footlights</a>.
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Inevitably, the reassembled Malevich installation had too much the appearance of a theme park, clean and well lit – the publicity photos don’t get that wrong. For those of us who had fed for years on the grainy black and whites of the exhibit taken in 1932, the weird warm glow of reality came as a shock. But the room was nonetheless a triumph, a reopened tomb, a definitive counterfactual – in which all the absurd and horrifying improbability of Bolshevik culture came back to outflank the mind. It reminded one, for a start, of the utter unlikelihood of the exhibit’s having happened in the first place, in the last grisly year of the first Five Year Plan. This is not what Stalinist art was (or is) supposed to have looked like. </blockquote>
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Simon Reynolds at <i>redbullmusicacademy.com</i>, <a href="http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/10/simon-draper-virgin-records" target="_blank">Simon Draper and the Story of Virgin Records</a>.
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Like most denizens of the progressive realm represented by labels such as Island, Harvest, Charisma and others, Draper had assumed music would continue on its ever-upward path of sophistication. Fusion was the prevailing ethos at the mid-decade mark: rock’s destiny was to keep on hybridizing and hyphenating itself with classical, jazz, folk and world influences. “Music Week was doing a series of interviews with A&R people in 1976, asking what they were listening to,” Draper recalls. “I said ‘Keith Jarrett’s Arbour Zena and Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns.’” Punk erupted in the midst of all that maturity and musicianship, a teenage rampage of crude energy stomping on the prevailing ideals of subtlety and sensitivity. Skinning up and drifting off to album-side-long dreamscapes suddenly seemed decadent and disengaged, a retreat from the political urgencies of the present. The crisis time demanded not discounted admission to a Hatfield and the North concert, but proper crisis music. </blockquote>
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Kirsty Allison at <i>3ammagazine.com</i> on the anthology, <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/make-day-night-review-punk-dead/" target="_blank">Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night</a>.
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In this masterfully edited collection, which flows in a style that at times reaches post-Burroughs glory in Neil Brown’s outstanding cut-up diary, or Richard Cabut’s fanzine love for Richard Hell, writing on the spiky-haired singer-cum-writer as: a peddle-to-metal hopped-up dropout crossing the States with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction anti-hero. Vagabond poet rogue of the open highway’ – you get to the end of this, and feel Punk can now die happy. Covered. Analysed. Of course, this alignment to the poets of yore is one referenced repeatedly by Paris-based co-editor, Andrew Gallix, who founded this publication, and home to all of us poets, philosophers, and punks, under the strap-line, ‘whatever it is, we’re against it’. He considers the literary tradition of punk, from his French perspective, exploring Arthur Cravan, and Comte de Lautréamont as forerunners to Situationism, surrealism and DADA. Collectively, the edition explores what killed punk, and why it wanted to kill everything that had been before. </blockquote>
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Luc Sante at <i>Noisey</i>, <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/a37dvz/maybe-the-people-would-be-the-times-v24n8" target="_blank">Maybe the People Would Be the Times</a>.
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We all paid heed to that English tatterdemalion's cry of "no future" in different ways, and if the word "future" didn't portend a lifetime's career opportunity in the mills gone south, or a cracked vision of needle-nosed high-rises connected by space taxis against a bloodred sky with three moons, what mostly remained in our heads was no. Our fill-in-the-blank generation has had its blank filled by no. There is a No Wave, and it is coming to your town but not really. Your town could not take it. You want your big guitars and hummable melodies and never-ending teenage idyll. Those things look delusional from where we stand. They were washed away by wars and assassinations and riots long ago, and if you don't understand this, you are huffing stronger drugs than we possess. Our aesthetic is <i>destroy</i>, as the French say, who have converted the English verb into an adjective. Not for nothing are the faces of this instant those of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, lately deceased. </blockquote>
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Frank Parlato in NIAGARA FALLS REPORTER, <a href="http://niagarafallsreporter.com/mike-hudson-founder-niagara-falls-reporter-died-2/" target="_blank">Mike Hudson, Founder of Niagara Falls Reporter, Has Died</a>.
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Mike Hudson co-founded and was lead singer of the American punk rock band, the Pagans. His brother Brian co founded the group and was its drummer…. Mike worked as editor for the <i>Cleveland Sun</i>, crime reporter at the <i>Corry Evening Journal</i>, literary critic at the <i>Irish Echo</i>. His work appeared in <i>Radar</i>, <i>Field & Stream</i>, <i>Rolling Stone</i>, <i>Hustler</i>, the <i>Associated Press</i>, <i>Master Detective</i> and the <i>New York Post</i>. By 1998, he moved to Niagara Falls with his wife, Rebecca Hudson. He worked as a staff reporter for the <i>Niagara Gazette</i>. In 2000, he was fired for repeatedly coming in drunk. He disputed his firing, since he continued to produce the same output drunk or sober. His publisher disagreed and would not let him return. With a few thousand dollars, he started the <i>Niagara Falls Reporter</i>. Its first edition was June 28, 2000. With his hard hitting and muckraking style of reporting, the newspaper grew and attracted advertisers. Mike remained editor in chief, until he sold his share and moved to Los Angeles in 2012. During the interim, he wrote groundbreaking stories on politics in the <i>Falls</i>. A series of articles critical of a local labor union resulted in Hudson getting beat up by three of its members. His stories led to numerous convictions and the bust up of the mob-controlled union. </blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">near Libby Circle</span></b></div>
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci</b>
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James Damore in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-by-google-1502481290" target="_blank">Why I Was Fired by Google</a>.
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In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment. When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored. Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed – that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same – could not let this public offense go unpunished. </blockquote>
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John McKinnon & Brody Mullins in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-dominance-in-washington-faces-a-reckoning-1509379625" target="_blank">Google’s Washington Clout Faces a Reckoning</a>.
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Within days of the election, Google posted a help wanted notice for an employee in Washington who could manage outreach to conservative organizations, and ultimately hired someone from the staff of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican. Overall, Alphabet has spend $13.6 million on lobbying this year as of the end of September, compared with 2016’s full year total of $15.4 million, according to lobbying – disclosure records compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Cumulatively over the past five years, only Boeing Co. has spent more on lobbying in Washington than Google. </blockquote>
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Julie Bykowicz in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-steps-up-efforts-to-sway-lawmakers-1509044190" target="_blank">Facebook Seeks More Sway in Washington</a>.
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<blockquote>
The Menlo Park, Calif., company has invested more than $8.4 million this year on its 36-member federal lobbying team – putting it on track to spend more on federal lobbying than in any previous year. The company recently added Republican-led Hamilton Place Strategies and other communications strategists to its team and posted an ad seeking a crisis communications specialist. The tech giant also held several focus-group session last week hosted by Quadrant Strategies, a Democratic-led research firm. People familiar with the sessions said public relations professionals and other Washington insiders were among the attendees. Facebook was soliciting advice as to how best to respond to the Russia ad controversy – and how to communicate with Republicans in particular, the people said. </blockquote>
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Rana Foroohar in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a06bedd2-e1ae-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce" target="_blank">Why Big Tech Wants to Keep the Net Neutral</a>.
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Liberals in the US have supported the idea for reasons of social equity. But some conservatives, as well as some members of the business community, have argued that it is a distorting regulation that prevents the ISPs from properly monetising their investment in broadband. It’s a fair point. After all, the telecoms companies building the 21st-century digital highway have single-digit profit margins, while the likes of Google and Facebook — which simply has to wait for someone to upload a cat video and then sell hyper-targeted advertising against it — have high double-digit profit margins. Big tech platform companies, which have been the largest corporate beneficiaries of net neutrality, have until now worked both the social and economic arguments to their own advantage. They and many other supporters of net neutrality — including start-ups that are worried about being winnowed out by larger players with deeper pockets that can pay to have their data delivered faster — have argued that more power for the ISPs would squash innovation on the internet and unfairly penalise small businesses. </blockquote>
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Andy Kessler in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerbergs-opiate-for-the-masses-1497821885" target="_blank">Zuckerberg’s Opiate for the Masses</a>.
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Many Americans really do need help, and no one should be dying in the streets. But why create an entire class of freeloaders out of people who otherwise wouldn’t have sought handouts? The bigger question is why all these Silicon Valley bigwigs are intent on giving away other people’s money. Perhaps it’s a misplaced sense of shame for their riches. Worse, some believe they are chosen to carry society on their packs while the teeming masses can be paid to idle along. Well, as long as they download the latest apps and are given enough to pay for wireless internet and an iPhone upgrade every few years. Facebook and videogames are already huge mind sinks. Add Mr. Musk’s Neuralink direct brain interface and no one will ever get off the couch. </blockquote>
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Mark Epstein in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-google-facebook-duopoly-threatens-diversity-of-thought-1513642519" target="_blank">The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought</a>.
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Google, Facebook and Twitter place stricter content policies on advertisers than general users. There are legitimate reasons for this. The tech companies are sensitive to accusations that they not only profit from controversial content but also fund it by giving its creator a slice of the ad revenue. When virtually all online advertising goes through two companies, howeer, they have the power to harm websites arbitrarily. One political blog that posted an article trying to distinguish the “alt-right” from white nationalism received a warning email from Google’s Ad-Sense team. An editor took the article down, explaining to readers that the blog “needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive.” </blockquote>
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Cecilia Kang in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/technology/amazon-lobbying.html" target="_blank">Amazon Lobbyists Are Upping Their Charm Offensive in D.C. </a>.
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<blockquote>
Amazon is sweeping the nation’s capitol with a branding campaign of jobs creation and support for small businesses, promoting the upsides of its major expansion in media, groceries and transportation. This year, Amazon has increased its lobbying staff to 83 members from 60, making it one of the biggest corporate lobbying shops in town. The company is also on its way to surpassing its previous high for lobbying spending: $11.3 million last year. The $6.2 million Amazon spent in the first two quarters of this year was the 11th most among companies, above Exxon and far above Walmart, which spent $3.6 million in the same period. The company’s more aggressive approach, focused on building relationships with leading politicians and improving the company’s overall reputation, is a break from its past. Before last year, the company relied on a no-frills operation for more than a decade, prodding officials in Washington on narrow laws and regulations and arguing about the nuances of issues like sales taxes and copyright. </blockquote>
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<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2017/09/amazon-second-headquarters" target="_blank">Amazon Second Headquarters</a>.
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I'd be happy to see Amazon come here so long as the tax breaks aren't a total giveaway. But if I had to predict or bet, I'd suspect that the company winds up choosing Washington, D.C., Virginia, or Maryland. Jeff Bezos just spent $23 million on a 27,000-square-foot building in Washington, D.C., that he intends to convert into a single-family home, according to a report in the Washington Post newspaper, which Bezos owns. But there are reasons to choose the Washington, D.C. area beyond the convenience of, or proximity to, the CEO, or friendly local press. Sure, there's a faint case that the D.C. area has the universities — Georgetown, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, George Mason, George Washington University, American University — to generate the workforce Amazon needs. And, though D.C. is hardly Silicon Valley or even Kendall Square, there's some web startup tech culture there dating back at least to the era of AOL, which was based in suburban Virginia. The main reason, though, is the opportunity and threat that comes from the federal government. Opportunity, because the huge federal government, with its taxing power, offers Amazon the chance to sell products and services to the government, including web services — server hosting for websites, computing power — and more run-of-the-mill purchasing that would allow government employees to order things from Amazon the same way that consumers do. And threat, because the federal government is just about the only institution in American life at this point that is powerful enough to challenge Amazon, either by forcing it to break up as an antitrust matter (hence the need for two headquarters rather than one), or by forcing it to collect sales tax on all sales (including those of "marketplace" vendors), or even by some sort of retroactive play on those past sales taxes that went uncollected….</blockquote>
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Nicholas Carr in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-smartphones-hijack-our-minds-1507307811" target="_blank">How Smart-Phones Hijack Our Minds</a>.
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The results were striking. In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction – that they hadn’t even thought about the device during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking. </blockquote>
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Steven Russolillo in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/biting-back-on-bitcoin-central-banks-chew-over-introducing-cryptocurrencies-1505729052" target="_blank">Countries Urged to Weigh Issuing Digital Currencies</a>.
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Overall, the debate about how central banks should best consider embracing cryptocurrencies is more important in countries such as Sweden, where cash use id dwindling rapidly, according to the BIS report. “In making this decision, central banks will have to consider not only consumer preferences for privacy and possible efficiency gains – in terms of payments, clearing and settlement – but also the risks it may entail for the financial system and the wider economy, as well as any implications for monetary policy,” the BIS said. </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-leads-china-into-big-data-dictatorship-1508237820" target="_blank">President Uses Big Data to Tighten Big Brother’s Grip</a>.
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In public at least, the chief executives of China’s data oligopolies, including Alibaba and Tencent, are evangelists for the project that requires them to sluice gushers of consumer data to state superhubs. Alibaba founder Jack Ma in a seminar last year likened the role of big data in economic management to an X-ray or CT-scan in medical diagnosis. In the next 30 years, he declared, “the planned economy will get bigger and bigger.” </blockquote>
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Yang Jie & Liza Lin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-sell-its-china-cloud-computing-business-1510628802" target="_blank">Amazon Bends to Beijing’s Call</a>.
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Peter Fuhrman, chairman of technology investment bank China First Capital, said Amazon’s decision illustrates China’s tightened grip on those companies that provide internet services. “The key policy brickwork is now done,” Mr. Fuhrman said. “The Chinese internet, in the borad entirety, will become even more comprehensively managed by the Chinese state.” Mr. Fuhrman added that such protectionist moves will ultimately limit China’s access to the latest technology and could hurt its competitiveness over the long term. </blockquote>
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Li Yuan in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-take-note-in-chinas-new-era-the-communist-party-comes-first-1509615006" target="_blank">U.S. Tech Giants Need to Rethink China Ties</a>.
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A five-minute report shown on national television’s prime-time newscast featured 10 seconds of applause for Mr. Xi from the executives. That was after he told them that the goal of education is to “train the builders and successors of socialism with Chinese characteristics, not bystanders and opponents.” Social-media users cackled about the event. Some referred to Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Cook as “comrades.” Others said the executives looked like representatives of the toothless government advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, reporting to Mr. Xi. Some publication closed off their social-media posts’ comment function. </blockquote>
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Carlos Tejada in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/business/google-ai-china.html" target="_blank">Google Announces Plan for A.I. Center in China</a>.
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Google closed its search business in China in 2010, saying it would no longer tolerate Beijing’s censorship requirements and government-linked efforts to hack the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and others. Google’s services were subsequently blocked in the country, and China’s internet developed its own answers to the company’s products, from email and search to video-sharing and chat. Still, Google never left China entirely. It has an active business distributing online ads for desktop computers and mobile applications, and Chinese makers of smartphones use its Android mobile device software. The two sides have shown signs of warming. Last week, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, spoke at China’s annual internet conference in the city of Wuzhen, saying the company did robust business helping Chinese firms seeking customers abroad. And this year, Google began offering its translation software in China. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCvwFyN6lZ1zIa2cFFGGykF1ui2zlPhhDZGAFs1WxyRMn0MG_5Rlb2KBXcQkvc7GOZrF0a4cd_4Ld0g-BGZ7ahNJW31O-Sis0BughjYik9VgGXtCk6SG_nuIkxyJ4eGukI3GO7OqrxkeoB/s1600/NV-154-carduccilinks-scmp.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="337" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCvwFyN6lZ1zIa2cFFGGykF1ui2zlPhhDZGAFs1WxyRMn0MG_5Rlb2KBXcQkvc7GOZrF0a4cd_4Ld0g-BGZ7ahNJW31O-Sis0BughjYik9VgGXtCk6SG_nuIkxyJ4eGukI3GO7OqrxkeoB/s320/NV-154-carduccilinks-scmp.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Jun Mai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2122719/chinas-shadowy-ideology-chief-steps-out-behind-curtains" target="_blank">China’s Shadowy Ideology Chief Steps Out from Behind the Curtains to Address Internet Conference</a>.
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Wang’s speech to the World Internet Conference on Sunday came just weeks after he secured a seat on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee. As the most senior political figure at the event, which Apple chief executive Tim Cook and Google boss Sundar Pichai also attended, Wang’s presence appeared to be further confirmation that the new number five in the party’s hierarchy will take care of ideological control. Wang addressed state journalists and political advisers last month, but these two speeches were not open to non-official media. At Sunday’s event in Wuzhen, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, Wang did not wave to his audience as he led the dozen officials into the main arena. Speaking in a low voice and fluently repeating the tongue-twisting jargon of the party’s political slogans, Wang argued for China to have a greater say over how the internet operates around the world, with a call for more “balanced internet rules”. “China is happy to work with the international community to make international rules that are more balanced and better reflect the interests of all parties,” he said. </blockquote>
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Emily Feng in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b86f6b82-dfd5-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c" target="_blank">Chinese Collection of DNA Data Sparks Uighur Concerns</a>.
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Government notices mandate police officers and cadres to collect and record pictures, fingerprints, blood type, DNA and iris scans in six counties and prefectures through specially-designed mobile apps and a health check-up programme offered to all Xinjiang residents. Officials from each of the six areas, which together hold about one-third of Xinjiang’s 22m residents, confirmed the authenticity of the notices but all declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Xinjiang’s Aksu prefectural government said she had been instructed not to discuss such issues over the phone. The collection is fuelling concerns among Uighur residents that the DNA data will be used to match the organs of suspected criminals who may face execution with potential recipients, said Darren Byler, a researcher at the University of Washington who specialises in Xinjiang. </blockquote>
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Josh Chin & Clement Burge in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-chinas-surveillance-state-overwhelms-daily-life-1513700355" target="_blank">Where China Is Always Watching</a>.
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<blockquote>
At a security exposition in October, an executive of Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology Co., which has sold facial-recognition algorithms to police and identity-verification systems to gas stations in Xinjiang, called the region the world’s most heavily guarded place. According to the executive, Jiang Jun, for every 100,000 people the police in Xinjiang want to monitor, they use the same amount of surveillance equipment that police in other parts of China would use to monitor millions. Authorities in Xinjiang declined to respond to questions about surveillance. Top party officials from Xinjiang said at a Communist Party gathering in Beijing in October that “social stability and long-term security” were the local government’s bottom-line goals.
Chinese and foreign civil-liberty activists say the surveillance in this northwestern corner of China offers a preview of what is to come nationwide. “They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east,” says Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases. “What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people.” </blockquote>
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Charles Clover in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2ba4366c-e08c-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c" target="_blank">Spying Fears Lead China to Curb Self-Driving Foreign Cars</a>.
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<blockquote>
So far, only foreign companies have been given this message. “We have some obstacles related to testing of automated functionalities, but this is a delicate thing,” said a representative of one global carmaker. “We have obstacles driving around China making photos and recording GPS co-ordinates,” he said, adding this was “connected with [China’s] national defence policies”. Already Beijing has made clear that accurate GPS mapping of China can only be done by Chinese companies, but the objections being presented appear to signal the entire suite of driverless technology may eventually be subject to national security restrictions. Automated and self-driving cars rely on cameras, advanced sensors such as Lidar, and hyper accurate GPS maps to find their locations and avoid obstacles. But China’s security agencies are also concerned they can also be used to spy, said analysts. Local Chinese companies working on autonomous driving technology, however, say they have not faced the same objections. “I’ve never heard of this,” said a senior executive at the autonomous driving unit of Baidu, China’s largest search engine. </blockquote>
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Maya Wang in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-chilling-social-credit-blacklist-1513036054" target="_blank">China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist</a>.
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<blockquote>
The experience of lawyer Li Xiaolin may give a taste of what that future looks like. During a 2016 work trip inside China, he tried to use his national identity card to purchase a plane ticket. To his surprise, the online system rejected it, saying he had been blacklisted by China’s top court. Mr. Li checked the court’s website: His name was on a list of “untrustworthy” people for having failed to carry out a court order in 2015. He thought he had resolved the issue, but now he was stranded more than 1,200 miles from home. Mr. Li’s dilemma was due to the Chinese government’s ambitious “social credit system.” Launched by the government in 2012. It vows to “make trustworthy people benefit everywhere and untrustworthy people restricted everywhere” by the time it is fully implemented in 2020. </blockquote>
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Amy Qin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/world/asia/china-science-fraud-scandals.html" target="_blank">Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower</a>.
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It now has more laboratory scientists than any other country, outspends the entire European Union on research and development, and produces more scientific articles than any other nation except the United States. But in its rush to dominance, China has stood out in another, less boastful way. Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks and seeks to publicize retractions of research papers. Now, a recent string of high-profile scandals over questionable or discredited research has driven home the point in China that to become a scientific superpower, it must first overcome a festering problem of systemic fraud. </blockquote>
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Ai Jun in GLOBAL TIMES, <a href="http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1081325.shtml" target="_blank">Is China Ready to Face Direct Competition with US? </a>.
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<blockquote>
China never thought that the era of Beijing-Washington competition would come so soon. Frankly speaking, China is not ready, since all it has been doing is focusing on its own development and its own growth. Chinese people believe that although the country has become the world's second-largest economy, a great gap still exists in regard to technology, military, education etc. Yet Americans do not see it that way. They see no progress, or even a recession in their national strength over the past few years, while China is rising sharply. Especially since the Made in China 2025 strategy was announced by China, the US has been sensing Beijing may take over the global value chain in no time. </blockquote>
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Fan Feifei in CHINA DAILY, <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/05/WS5a27740aa3107865316d4a2e.html" target="_blank">China Can Play Key Role in Setting 5G Standards</a>.
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Wang Jianya, president of Nokia Shanghai Bell, is confident that China will pioneer 5G research and development before it is rolled out in the next few years. This in turn will help develop a standard blueprint across the sector. "The key issue for 5G is producing a unified global standard," Wang said. A joint venture of Nokia Corp and State-owned investment firm China Huaxin, Nokia Shanghai Bell has been promoting the commercialization of 5G with domestic telecom carriers. China Mobile Communications Corp, the world's largest telecom carrier by subscribers, has stepped up efforts to develop 5G technology. It plans to launch a pre-commercial service in 2019 before launching a fully commercialized 5G network in 2020. "With the rapid development of 5G, internet of things (IoT) and big data, we are entering the digital era," said Sha Yuejia, vice-president of China Mobile. "As intelligent manufacturing, smart transportation and healthcare become more popular, this will promote the economic momentum to achieve a new leap forward in our society," Sha said. So far, the company has established more than 2.23 million base stations with more than 900 million mobile users and 200 million IoT connections. </blockquote>
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Jamil Anderlini in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/39860d76-d9b3-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482" target="_blank">Xi’s Anti-Corruption Drive Mimics a Ming Obsession</a>.
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Today, the party’s official version of history claims the Mongolian Khans and Manchu princes as part of a continuum of unbroken Chinese civilization stretching back millennia. But for much of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the majority ethnically Han Chinese were subjugated and treated as lower-class citizens. Throughout these and other periods, the central state was often weak or predatory, without the ability or incentive to protect Chinese subjects in far-flung reaches of the empire. So citizens formed strong clan networks based around blood, geographical and professional ties reinforced by Confucian concepts of filial piety. </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/china-when-law-meets-party/" target="_blank">When the Law Meets the Party</a>.
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<blockquote>
At the time of Mao’s death in 1976, China effectively had no laws. His successors created a legal code for two reasons. First, they wanted it to pursue economic reforms – capitalism needs contracts. But often overlooked was their genuine desire for the civilizing effect on politics that a functioning legal system can bring. Many senior party members had suffered badly because of Mao’s whims. Unsure of their own system and willing to look outward for solutions, leaders such as Peng Zhen, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang realized that laws, especially as a way to regulate disputes, would make society fairer while also helping to restore the Party’s badly damaged legitimacy. </blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-anticorruption.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fchris-buckley&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection&_r=0" target="_blank">Risky Defense of Rule of Law in China</a>.
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The nation’s current anticorruption watchdog is an arm of the Communist Party, with broad powers but jurisdiction only over the party’s 89 million members. Mr. Xi’s new commission would be a state agency with oversight over China’s entire public sector, which employs as many as 62 million people, many of whom do not belong to the party. Opponents say the legislation would violate China’s Constitution and give the new commission carte blanche to operate beyond the scope of Chinese laws, especially those meant to prevent arbitrary arrest. </blockquote>
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Viola Zhou in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2126039/reason-why-chinas-armed-police-will-now-only-take" target="_blank">Why China’s Armed Police Will Now Only Take Orders from Xi and His Generals</a>.
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The People’s Armed Police (PAP) has been under the dual command of the CMC, which oversees the armed forces, and the State Council, China’s cabinet. The structure gave lower-level authorities the power to deploy the PAP to tackle natural disasters, protests and hostage crises.
But from January 1, the PAP will be under the sole command of the CMC, chaired by President Xi Jinping, a move that will strip local officials of that power. Analysts said the change – applauded by party media outlets as strengthening centralised control – was prompted by fears among top leaders that the PAP could be used to challenge their rule. One incident that might have sparked those concerns was in February 2012 when armed police were sent to Chengdu after former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun sought refuge in the US consulate in the Sichuan capital. The PAP officers had reportedly been sent on the orders of Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai after Bo and Wang argued over the involvement of Bo’s wife in the murder of a British businessman. Observers said the use of armed police in the political crisis might have spooked Beijing. </blockquote>
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Jennifer Hughes in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a4b28218-80db-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd" target="_blank">Communist Party Control Written into Law at China’s Big Companies</a>.
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China’s Communist party is writing itself into the articles of association of many of the country’s biggest companies in a blow to investor hopes that Beijing would relax its grip on the market. More than 30 Hong Kong-listed state-owned enterprises, representing more than $1tn in market capitalisation, have this year added lines to their central documents that place the party, rather than the Chinese state, at the heart of each group. New phrases injected into the articles of association in recent months include describing the party as playing a core role in “an organised, institutionalised and concrete way” and “providing direction [and] managing the overall situation”. The changes are being billed by the companies as part of Beijing’s efforts to improve efficiency and productivity at SOEs, which account for about a fifth of the country’s economic output. </blockquote>
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Tom Mitchell in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/31407684-8101-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff" target="_blank">China’s Communist Party Seeks Company Control Before Reform</a>.
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To most western executives and analysts, the party’s higher profile at SOEs undermines the authority of their company boards and is more bad news for state-sector reform, which they feel has been neglected by Mr Xi’s administration…. To Mr Xi and Mr Wang, the party’s more prominent profile in SOEs is actually a prerequisite for state-sector reform. In their view, the party had given SOEs too long a leash, leading to mismanagement at best and unchecked corruption at worst. For Mr Xi, who last year described SOEs as “the major force to boost the comprehensive strength of the country and to protect the common interests of the people”, state companies are too important not to play a more active role in supervising and, if necessary, managing. Whether stricter party oversight will ultimately help or hinder SOEs is no mere academic debate. It could well determine the fate of Mr Xi’s larger project to end the Chinese economy’s dependence on debt-fuelled investment and establish himself as a “transformative” economic reformer in the mould of Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s post-Mao “reform and opening” strategy. In Communist party-speak, the proliferation of party committees at SOEs is in keeping with a larger strategy of quan fu gai, or “full coverage”. For better or worse, people who do business with or invest in SOEs are going to be seeing a lot more of the party. </blockquote>
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Javier Hernandez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/world/asia/china-schools-propaganda-education.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Reading Writing and Revolution</a>.
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Jiang Xueqin, an education consultant in Beijing, said fanning national pride could quickly “mutate into a fierce and militant nationalism” that is difficult to control. Mr. Xi’s vision of patriotic education is already in full bloom at the Workers and Peasants Red Army Elementary School, which was founded in 1788 but only became a Red Army school in 2012. Classes begin with Red Army songs, and students take turns reciting revolutionary stories featuring Japanese spies as villains. “The blood in the past gave us the life we have today,” said Kuang Yanli, 11, a sixth-grade student. “A lot of other countries want to invade our country again, so we have to study hard and make sure that doesn’t happen.” Local officials are sensitive to the idea that the school is indoctrinating students, and the police blocked journalists from <i>The New York Times</i> from reporting after being alerted to their presence. </blockquote>
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Glenn Thrush & Alan Rappeport in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/us/trump-cautious-on-china-inquiry-over-intellectual-property-theft.html" target="_blank">Intellectual Property Theft by China Will Get Scrutiny</a>.
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The request for an investigation will focus on Beijing’s practices of coercing American companies doing business in China to partner with local firms, which require them to turn over proprietary technological secrets as part of what American officials described as a coordinated effort to steal intellectual property. Mr. Trump’s trade advisers, speaking to reporters on a conference call early Saturday, did not say why the administration decided to add the intermediate step of requesting an investigation, rather than starting one immediately. This month, people familiar with Mr. Trump’s deliberations suggested that the administration was prepared to immediately begin an inquiry into Chinese theft under the 1974 Trade Act. Chinese officials have repeatedly denied that they have engaged in such theft. The pause might give both sides a chance to negotiate some kind of a deal before the investigation begins, one American official involved in the policy said. If Mr. Trump moves ahead with an investigation, China could litigate it with the World Trade Organization. </blockquote>
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Kate O’Keefe, Arund Viswanatha & Cezary Podkul in NYT, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-hunt-for-guo-wengui-a-fugitive-businessman-kicks-off-manhattan-caper-worthy-of-spy-thriller-1508717977" target="_blank">China’s Hunt for Critic Roils U.S. </a>.
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At first, the Chinese officials said they were cultural affairs diplomats. Then they admitted to being security agents. The FBI agents instructed them to leave the country, saying they were in violation of their visas and weren’t to speak to Mr. Guo again. The Chinese got on the train to Washington. The FBI assumed they would be gone in 24 hours. Two days later, on May 26, Mr. Liu and the other Chinese officials returned to Mr. Guo’s apartment ahead of a planned flight back to China in the late afternoon. U.S. law-enforcement authorities, whom Mr. Guo had told about the impending visit, decided it was time to act. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn prepared charges alleging visa fraud and extortion, according to people familiar with the matter. FBI agents raced to John F. Kennedy International airport ahead of the official’s scheduled 4:50 p.m. Air China flight. </blockquote>
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Austin Ramzy in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/china-beijing-migrants-eviction.html" target="_blank">Artist Flees After Filming Evictions in Beijing</a>.
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Mr. Hua, 48, said that were it not for the money he earned from painting, he too would be a member of the “low-end population.” In his conversations with workers, some said they felt painfully unwelcome in Beijing. Last week, Mr. Hua, like many of the people he has filmed, was forced to leave Beijing. He fled the city after the police came to arrest him for publicizing the evictions. He has relied on friends to move him “from city A to city B,” he said in a video posted Sunday. “Now they want to move me on to an even safer city C,” he added. It was not his first run-in with the authorities. In 2012, Mr. Hua was sentenced to a labor camp for a performance in memory of the protesters killed during a 1989 pro-democracy demonstration. In Tiananmen Square he punched himself in the face until his nose started bleeding, then used his blood to write “64,” the way the June 4 crackdown is usually rendered in Chinese. He has made his living as a painter, but now questions the value of such work. “In an environment where you can’t speak the truth, creating art is utterly worthless,” he said in an interview before he left Beijing. </blockquote>
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Jane Perlez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-global-power.html" target="_blank">Xi Jinping Pushes China’s Rise Despite Friction and Fear</a>.
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Analysts say Australia has been a tempting target because China is its biggest trading partner, and it is home to large populations of Chinese immigrants and students, who provide critical financial support to its universities. But the government is now considering new limits on campaign contributions, restrictions on foreign investments and tougher counterintelligence laws. Australia is also seeking to strengthen security ties with India and Japan. “The Chinese party-state has overplayed its hand in trying to influence Australia’s choices,” said Rory Medcalf, head of the national security college at the Australian National University. Concern about political interference by China is also growing in New Zealand, where a Chinese official recently advised Chinese-language journalists to coordinate coverage with China’s official press. “I never imagined the level of instruction was that direct,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, who recently published a research paper on Beijing’s efforts in New Zealand. </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/sunday-review/xi-jinping-china.html" target="_blank">Xi Jinping and China’s New Era of Glory</a>.
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For five years, Mr. Xi has led a fierce campaign against corruption, which arguably was the biggest threat to the party’s long-term ability to rule. But he’s also leveraged this crackdown to sideline political rivals, admitting as much last year when he said that high-ranking officials arrested for corruption had been engaging in “political conspiracies.” A sophisticated program of domestic surveillance is part of this strategy. The government has encouraged provinces to experiment with a system of “social credit” that rates people on how they behave — from financial delinquency to being too critical online — and then limiting the freedom of offenders, for example by restricting their ability to get promoted or travel on trains or planes, something the German political scientist Sebastian Heilmann calls “digital Leninism.” Nationally, this new policy of refined coercion has eradicated public dissent. Previous leaders disliked alternative viewpoints, but small bookstores, regional newspapers, think tanks and, for a while, social media allowed some space for differing views. Now these channels are all but closed. </blockquote>
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Markos Koulanakis at <i>mcclatchydc.com</i>, <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article182139386.html" target="_blank">China Is Using Fentanyl in a Chemical War Against America</a>.
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China has a deep, visceral understanding of how an Opium War can convulse a nation and collapse an empire. After all, it happened to them in the 19th century. Chinese call it their “Century of Humiliation.” Now the tables have turned. China has absorbed the Century of Humiliation’s lessons of stealth attack and economic power and applied them globally. President Xi sits atop the world’s power pinnacle; a recent Economist cover story called him “the world’s most powerful man,” and POTUS acknowledges Xi’s king-like authority. But either this omnipotent man can control his population or not. Given China’s authoritarian tech and police state tools, Xi’s monopoly power gives him extraordinary abilities to monitor and manage domestic criminal activity. Trump should not call to crack down further on the general population, but appeal for a more targeted application of Beijing’s honed control practices. Since China already easily and regularly arrests bloggers, VPN users, artists, protesters, and other innocents, it can certainly find and disrupt criminal cartels cooking up deadly street drugs for sale in America. </blockquote>
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Stephen Chen in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2124925/china-set-move-united-states-backyard-national" target="_blank">China Set to Move into US’ Backyard with National Development Plan for Grenada</a>.
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The Chinese foreign ministry told the <i>South China Morning Post</i> this month that “China Development Bank, at the request of the Grenadian government, is helping them draft a national development strategy”. It said the Grenadian government “assumed the primary responsibility for the development of their own country” and that China was “willing to provide necessary assistance to their economic and social development upon request”. Wang Yingjie, a lead researcher involved in the drafting of the Grenada national development strategic plan, told the <i>Post</i> this month the plan had been finished recently and “should be in the hands of the Grenadian government already”. The Grenadian government announced its national strategic plan 2030 in November 2014. Beijing’s blueprint envisions the construction of massive infrastructure projects in the small tropical nation, which has a population of about 100,000. They include the construction of a highway connecting the major towns on its main island, which is about four times the size of Hong Kong Island, and a railway line encircling it. The plan also calls for the building of deepwater ports that could accommodate a large number of cruise and cargo ships, a large wind farm to replace diesel-fuelled generators and a modernised airport with more, longer runways. </blockquote>
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Tom Hancock in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7106ab42-80d1-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff" target="_blank">Chinese Migrants Lose Faith in Southern Africa</a>.
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Known for its entrepreneurial culture and history of emigration, hundreds of thousands have moved from China’s Fujian province to southern Africa since the early 2000s, and are thought to make up most of South Africa’s Chinese population of more than 350,000. As a result, visitors to remote coastal villages in Fujian can find their request for directions answered in English, tinged with a South African accent. Migration has transformed the villages with tall houses built with remittances from overseas workers, many with crosses painted above their doors, a reflection of the province’s large Christian population. </blockquote>
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Gabriel Wildau in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3bc4da08-8171-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff" target="_blank">China Debt Analyst Warns of $6.8tn in Hidden Losses</a>.
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In her latest report, Ms Chu estimates that credit losses in China’s financial system will reach as much as Rmb51tn ($7.6tn) by the end of this year, more than five times the value of bank loans officially classified as either non-performing or one notch above. That estimate implies a bad debt ratio of 25 per cent, well above the official 5.3 per cent ratio for those two categories at the end of June. Charlene Chu was one the first analysts to warn of risks from China’s rising debt. China’s problem with borrowing came under the spotlight this week when the International Monetary Fund issued a warning about Beijing’s reluctance to rein in “dangerous” levels of debt. The fund blamed Beijing’s tolerance of high debt levels on its goal of doubling the size of the economy between 2010 and 2020. “The [Chinese] authorities will do what it takes to attain the 2020 GDP target,” the IMF said. </blockquote>
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Sidney Leng in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2099845/audit-report-reveals-chinas-economic-fault-lines" target="_blank">Audit Report Reveals China’s Economic Fault Lines</a>.
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Beijing’s push for structural reforms in the economy appears to have sparked a backlash in the form of companies inflating their profitability, according to an analyst. An official audit report published on Friday said that 18 of the 20 state-owned firms that were audited have in recent years inflated their revenues by more than 200 billion yuan (US$29 billion) and boosted their profits by 20 billion yuan with faked business and manipulated books. </blockquote>
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Jane Cai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2113869/past-its-use-date-warps-chinas-antiquated-policy-picking-industry" target="_blank">
Foreign Players Feeling Squeezed Out by Beijing’s Support for State Companies</a>.
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In the cement sector, China plans to expand the combined market share of the 10 biggest producers from the nearly 42 per cent last year to 60 per cent by 2020 through mergers and acquisitions, according to an action plan drafted by the China Cement Association, a semi-official industry federation. The biggest cement producer by assets, the state-owned China National Building Material Group, was formed last year by merging with China National Materials Corp (Sinoma), an SOE. But Wu said picking winners was an outdated approach. What China needed were policies that could ensure information was shared and various players competed fairly, leaving business decisions to entrepreneurs, he said. “Since China introduced industry policies in 1987, the government has been inclined to blame ‘market dysfunction’ too often,” he said. “They like to see market dysfunction as an inherent defect of the market system, thus opening the door to boundless government intervention.” </blockquote>
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Trefor Moss in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-with-methodical-discipline-takes-global-lead-in-electric-cars-1506954248" target="_blank">China Pushes Domestic Electric-Car Batteries</a>.
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Foreign batteries aren’t banned in China, but auto makers must use ones from a government-approved list to qulify for generous EV subsidies. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s list includes 57 manufacturers, all of them Chinese. Foreign battery companies declined to discuss their absence from the list. But analyst Mark Newman of Sanford C. Bernstein said the government has cited reasons such as paperwork errors to exclude foreign suppliers. “They want to give their companies two to three years” without foreign competition to secure customers, achieve scale, and improve their technology, Mr. Newman said. The Ministry didn’t respond to questions. </blockquote>
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Jane Cai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2109943/how-china-making-its-state-firm-dinosaurs-bigger-and-richer" target="_blank">Forget Privatisation, Xi Has Other Big Plans for Bloated State Firms</a>.
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China’s government is speeding up a massive ownership change among its largest state-owned enterprises designed to make them richer, bigger and stronger, a process that may reshape the future landscape of the Chinese economy by cultivating a group of influential “national champions”. The government is encouraging state financing institutions and the country’s private technology giants to invest in weak state enterprises grappling with debt and inefficiency under its “mixed ownership reform”. The state parent of China Unicom, the weakest of the country’s three telecom operators in profitability, sold a combined 35.2 per cent equity stake to more than a dozen investors as part of a 78 billion yuan (US$11.9 billion) deal. Among the new investors are Tencent Holdings, JD.com, Baidu and Alibaba Group, which owns the <i>South China Morning Post</i>. China Railway Corp, with outstanding debt of more than US$700 billion, says it wants to undergo similar mixed ownership reform and it has sent “invitations” to a number of potential investors, including FAW Group, the country’s state-owned car maker. </blockquote>
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Sui-Lee Wee in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/world/asia/china-xi-business-entrepreneurs.html?_r=0" target="_blank">China’s Entrepreneurs Squirm Under Xi Jinping’s Tightening Grip</a>.
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The country now has 647 billionaires in American dollar terms, according to The Hurun Report, which tracks wealth in China. But the political environment remains perilous for many. Two prominent Chinese businessmen — Xiao Jianhua and Wu Xiaohui — have not been seen in months since they were taken away for questioning. Guo Wengui, a billionaire developer who has accused Chinese officials of corruption, is seeking political asylum in the United States. Last year, party officials put Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken property tycoon, on probation as a party member for one year after he criticized Mr. Xi’s propaganda policies. “Clearly, there’s been a willingness to let these guys flourish but, at the same time, a desire to neutralize them as an independent political force,” said Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner of the Beijing-based research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. Analysts say the state intervention has resulted in entrepreneurs’ losing confidence in China’s future. Private-sector investment has been weak, and many tycoons have parked their money abroad should they run afoul of the government. </blockquote>
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He Huifeng in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2122401/runaway-borrowers-new-face-chinas-personal-credit-boom" target="_blank">Runaway Borrowers the New Face of China’s Personal Credit Boom</a>.
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China’s online lending boom has sent a steady stream of new clients to Guangzhou lawyer Luo Aiping in recent months: the parents and siblings of young men trapped or ruined by usurious debts. “These young men, the son or the brother in a family, are actually subprime borrowers with little in the way of savings and no assets,” Luo said. “They’ve recently been encouraged to access a dizzying array of online microcredit platforms to fund their own consumption and have cared little about the exorbitant interest rates. “Now they’ve run away from their creditors and left behind big troubles for their parents, who are not wealthy.” </blockquote>
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Alexandra Stevenson & Cao Li in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/business/china-online-lending-debt.html" target="_blank">China’s New Lenders Collect Invasive Data and Offer Billions. Beijing Is Worried</a>.
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One of those was a company named Smart Finance. Its app — Yongqianbao, or “use wallet” in Chinese — helps it build a credit rating system based on 1,200 data points related to user behavior. Yongqianbao then connects potential borrowers with lenders. Backed by the venture capital vehicle of Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google China and a prominent start-up investor in China, it has approved 1.5 million loans a month. Its algorithms look for correlations between behavior and repayment history — and some of those are unusual. Yongqianbao considers how quickly people type on their phones, how often they eat takeout or how much power is left on their smartphone batteries when they apply for the loan. It also evaluates whether the borrower took the time to read the Yongqianbao user agreement. Approval can come in eight seconds or less. “It is hard to determine how the machine knows,” said Jiao Ke, a former Baidu product manager who created Smart Finance, “but it is much more accurate” than a traditional loan officer. </blockquote>
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Nectar Gan in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2116107/chinas-communist-party-boosts-presence-foreign-funded" target="_blank">China’s Communist Party Makes Big Inroads into Foreign-Funded Firms</a>.
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Party branches had been set up in 67.9 per cent of the country’s 2.73 million private enterprises by the end of last year. That equates to a 30 percentage point rise, according to the government. Xi has tried to increase the role of the party in all aspects of life in China since taking office and he pledged to continue this process during his speech on Wednesday at the opening of its five-yearly congress in Beijing. Xi has also tried to expand the party’s presence in areas where it has previously had a limited role, such as in private and foreign joint-venture companies and the boards of listed firms. Qi dismissed some foreign businesses’ concerns that the party’s growing presence in their companies could affect their operations. He said party branches could aid foreign companies’ business and development by helping them better understand government policies and by guiding them in obeying the country’s laws and regulations. “Setting up grass-roots party organisations in companies in China has always been a common practice and is in accordance with China’s laws and regulations,” Qi said. </blockquote>
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Chun Han Wong & Eva Dou in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-companies-in-china-get-a-new-partner-the-communist-party-1509297523" target="_blank">Chinese Communist Party Encroaches on Foreign Workplaces</a>.
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The 300 or so Communist Party members who work at Walt Disney Co.’s theme park in China don’t keep their politics to themselves. Many attend party lectures during business hours and display hammer and sickle insignia at their desks. Company newsletters and state media praise them as exemplary workers…. State media described the park’s party organization – established in 2011 with 14 members – as a “bridge of enchantment” between the American and Chinese management. “At the time, the American management didn’t quite understand this,” Shendi Chairman Fan Xiping told <i>Jiefang Daily</i>, Shanghai’s flagship party newspaper, in a June report marking the resort’s first anniversary. It quoted Mr. King, the resort’s vice president for public affairs, as saying that the party organization has created value for shareholders. </blockquote>
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Liza Lin & Josh Chin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-tech-giants-have-a-second-job-helping-the-government-see-everything-1512056284" target="_blank">China’s Tech Giants Have a Side Job: Helping Beijing Spy</a>.
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Unlike American companies, which often resist U.S. government requests for information, Chinese ones talk openly about working with authorities. Ten-cent Chief Executive Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma, and Alibaba founder Jack Ma both have voiced support for private companies working with the government on law enforcement and security issues. “The political and legal system of the fture is inseparable from the internet, inseparable from big data,” Alibaba’s Mr. Ma told a Communist Party commission overseeing law enforcement last year. He said technology will soon make it possible to predict security threats. “Bad guys won’t even be able to walk into the square,” he said. </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/world/chinas-disgraced-internet-czar-still-wins/ar-BBFRkKf" target="_blank">China’s Disgraced Web Czar Still Wins</a>.
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At home and abroad, the swaggering Lu Wei, China’s now disgraced chief censor, won all his battles. Humiliation was his trademark, whether publicly cowing the country’s “Big V” bloggers—wits and satirists who once commanded tens of millions of followers with mild critiques of the regime—or extracting homage from Western media and technology executives. On a visit to Silicon Valley three years ago, he famously took a spin in the office chair of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. That moment, his face lit up in delight, seemed to cap his triumph. An old-style Communist apparatchik with digital-era savvy, he had practically written the autocrat’s guide to internet management, demonstrating how the web could be turned into an effective tool of authoritarian control while still acting as an engine of economic growth and innovation—a goal many in the West thought impossible. Now, a U.S. media mogul who’d made his fortune on free expression in an open society was playing along. </blockquote>
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Greg Rushford in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-believe-chinas-trade-hype-1512938685" target="_blank">Don’t Believe China’s Trade Hype</a>.
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Global economic leadership is a key part of Mr. Xi’s “Chinese Dream.” But going by China’s actual record in the WTO, Mr. Xi will have to dream on. Despite the glowing free-trade rhetoric from Beijing, inside WTO negotiating rooms China is hardly a champion of free trade. Instead the Chinese run with the G-33, a group of poorer, protectionist-minded WTO laggards – the likes of South Africa, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and India. </blockquote>
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Ben McLannahan & Shawn Donnan in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/386c3fbc-dc67-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482" target="_blank">US Rebuffs Chinese Deals with Red-Tape Delays</a>.
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Rod Hunter, who oversaw Cfius cases while on President George W Bush’s National Security Council and is now a partner at law firm Baker McKenzie, said the US moves were part of a broader international crackdown on record levels of Chinese investment. The EU is considering new constraints on inbound investment and Australia and Canada are among other countries implementing similar scrutiny. But by extending Cfius’ scrutiny to outbound investment and overseas joint ventures, the proposed US legislation would vastly expand the number of transactions facing review to thousands from the 250 or so expected this year. “It basically would turn the investment regime into a technology control regime,” Mr Hunter said. </blockquote>
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Demetri Sevastopulo & Shawn Donnan in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1801d4f4-e201-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce" target="_blank">US Steps Up Tough Talk on Trade with China</a>.
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Mr Trump castigated China repeatedly on the campaign trail. But in office, and particularly since the Mar-a-Lago summit with Mr Xi, he has taken a less combative stance, partly because the US believes Chinese pressure on North Korea is crucial to tackling the nuclear crisis. Over the past few months, however, Mr Trump has grown more irritated at the lack of progress in tackling the US trade deficit with China. He hinted at a return to a harder position at the Apec summit in Vietnam when he said he would no longer tolerate “chronic trade abuses” by Asian nations. HR McMaster, US national security adviser, who oversaw the strategy, this week said China — along with Russia — was a “revisionist power” that was “undermining the international order”. The inclusion of the tough language on China heralds a rockier period for Sino-US relations next year. It also marks a departure from previous national security strategies, which did not incorporate trade and economic issues so prominently. The White House National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington also did not respond. </blockquote>
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Florent Detroy in LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, <a href="https://mondediplo.com/2017/10/12silk-road" target="_blank">Rail Caravan from China</a>.
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China’s President Xi Jinping must have been pleased with the success of the first international forum on its new Silk Roads plan – One Best, One Road – in Beijing in May…. Though Russia and China both criticize US dominance, it would have been hard to predict that Russia would have such a prominent role in this forum. Russia has long been suspicious of the plan, which encroaches on its traditional zone of influence in Central Asia. China sees the policy mostly as a way to protect trade with Europe, 95% of which currently goes by sea. China fears a trade blockade in the event of conflict with the US – whose allies in the region include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thiland and Australia – and is keen to develop an alternative land route through Central Asia. </blockquote>
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Charles Clover in FT on Elisabeth McGuire’s book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/66816942-de68-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce" target="_blank">Red at Heart – How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution</a>.
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The Chinese began to arrive in Moscow with Qu Qiubai, a flighty, slightly neurotic translator and writer, one of only a handful of Chinese people who spoke any Russian at the time. Qu wrote History of the Heart in the Red Capital, which so successfully conjured the charms of Moscow in the 1920s that it propelled a generation of Chinese spiritual adventurers to seek it out.In truth, Moscow at the time could hardly have been more inhospitable. Food was scarce, the climate was unforgiving, and the language was a nearly insurmountable barrier. Stalinist purges were unpredictable and many Chinese students fell afoul of opaque factional rivalries. But for many Chinese visitors, Moscow remained a paradise, where they found inspiration, ideological affinity, friendship and love — not to mention a lot of sex. Escaping the stifling conformity of China was a common theme. The author and radical Chen Bilan, for example, was propelled to Moscow in 1924 to escape an arranged marriage. Soviet archives, reports McGuire, contain collections of letters and reports “that show how wracked by love and overcome with desire the Chinese in the Red Capital were”. Stalin, meanwhile, made sure to pay special attention to China. In 1949, shortly after the communist victory in China, he hosted Mao for three months in Moscow — an unheard-of length of time for a new leader to be absent from his capital, and an indicator of just how close the two revolutions had become. </blockquote>
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Javier Henandez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/world/asia/mao-mountain-china-religion-environment.html" target="_blank">In China a Religious Revival Fuels Environmental Activism</a>.
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Shen Zhanqing, a pastor who works for the Amity Foundation, a Christian charity, said many church members felt inspired by religion to help protect the environment. The foundation has held study groups on issues like reducing carbon emissions and climate change, and it encourages members to take buses to church. “The decadence of human beings has destroyed the environment in China,” Pastor Shen said. “Our purpose is to protect God’s creation.” At Mao Mountain, the monks gather each morning to read ancient texts and to write calligraphy next to the trees and stones. Hundreds of visitors climb the stairs each day to pay respect to Lao-tzu. To limit pollution, they are prohibited from burning more than three sticks of incense each. Abbot Yang devotes much of his time to persuading local officials across China to set aside areas for natural protection, an unpopular idea in many parts. He has also worked to attract young, wealthy urbanites to Taoism. </blockquote>
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Nectar Gan in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2119699/praise-xi-jinping-not-jesus-escape-poverty-christian" target="_blank">Replace Pictures of Jesus with Xi Jingping, Christian Villagers Urged</a>.
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In Yugan, the officially atheist party is competing for influence with Christianity, which has spread rapidly in both poor rural villages and prosperous cities since the end of the Cultural Revolution more than 40 years ago. By some estimates, Christians in China now outnumber the 90 million members of the party. A local social media account reported over the weekend that in Yugan’s Huangjinbu township, cadres visited poor Christian families to promote the party’s poverty-relief policies and helped them solve their material problems. The officials successfully “melted the hard ice in their hearts” and “transformed them from believing in religion to believing in the party”, the report said. As a result, more than 600 villagers “voluntarily” got rid of the religious texts and paintings they had in their homes, and replaced them with 453 portraits of Xi. The report had disappeared on Monday afternoon, but the campaign was confirmed by villagers and local officials contacted by the <i>South China Morning Post</i>. </blockquote>
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Ben Bland in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8e3b8576-cb80-11e7-ab18-7a9fb7d6163e" target="_blank">Chinese Buy Back History in Patriotic Surge</a>.
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The wave is driven by a patriotic urge to bring back great objects as well as hopes for financial gains. “It’s an expression of the soft power of China,” says Mr Stone. Christie’s sold £430.9m of Asian art in the first half of 2017, double the figure for the same period a year ago. Pieces on offer at the fair include a book of astronomical instruments written by Jesuits in the 17th century to prove the supremacy of western science to the Chinese emperor. </blockquote>
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Steven Lee Myers in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/asia/china-tibet-unesco.html" target="_blank">Tibet Group Challenges China on Bid for Unesco Heritage Site</a>.
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In a report released late last week, the group argued that recognizing the region as a World Heritage site would bolster China’s efforts to resettle tens of thousands of pastoralists from the plateaus into villages, while threatening the habitat of the antelope and the environment in general. “This controversial nomination would signify Unesco endorsement of China’s forced relocation of Tibetan nomads, who have protected the grasslands and wildlife for centuries,” said Matteo Mecacci, president of the Tibet organization. The annual meeting of Unesco has become unusually contentious, underscoring how debates on cultural patrimony can assume political significance. </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/asia/china-buddhism-fo-guang-shan.html" target="_blank">Is a Buddhist Group Changing China? Or Is China Changing It? </a>.
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After fleeing the Communist Revolution, Master Hsing Yun took that message to Taiwan and founded Fo Guang Shan in the southern port of Kaohsiung in 1967. He sought to make Buddhism more accessible to ordinary people by updating its fusty image and embracing mass-market tactics. In sports stadiums, he held lectures that owed more to Billy Graham than the sound of one hand clapping. He built a theme park with multimedia shows and slot machines that displayed dioramas of Buddhist saints. The approach had a profound impact in Taiwan, which then resembled mainland China today: an industrializing society that worried it had cast off traditional values in its rush to modernize. Fo Guang Shan became part of a popular embrace of religious life. Many scholars say it also helped lay the foundation for the self-governing island’s evolution into a vibrant democracy by fostering a political culture committed to equality, civility and social progress…. While Mr. Xi’s government has tightened restrictions on Christianity and Islam, it has allowed Fo Guang Shan to open cultural centers in four cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. The organization’s students include government officials, who don gray tunics and trousers and live like monks or nuns for several days, reciting the sutras and learning about Master Hsing Yun’s philosophy. But unlike in Taiwan, where it held special services during national crises and encouraged members to participate in public affairs, Fo Guang Shan avoids politics in China. </blockquote>
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Nectar Gan in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2111239/chinas-new-campaign-instil-official-historical" target="_blank">China’s New Campaign to Instill Official Historical Narrative in Xinjiang</a>.
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“In the lead-up to the 19th National Congress next month, [the meeting] aims at establishing some clear lines for the party’s approach to Xinjiang,” said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at the National Security College, Australian National University. Xinjiang, home to some 10 million mostly Muslim Uygurs, has been subject to beefed up security measures and a crackdown on religious activities after ethnic violence that has killed hundreds of people in recent years. But the government seems to have opened up a new front in the fight against what it calls “the rise in extremism and separatism” – an ideological campaign around history. The <i>Xinhua</i> report did not specify exactly what “historical issues” were discussed at the symposium, but it did list what “stances” had been clarified: that Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of Chinese territory since the ancient dynasties; that various ethnic groups in the region are members of the Chinese nation; that the culture of Xinjiang’s ethnic groups is deeply rooted in, and an indivisible part of, Chinese civilisation; and that Xinjiang is a region where a number of religions exist side by side. The rhetoric is consistent with the party’s official line that was first summarised in a white paper released in 2003 on the history and development of Xinjiang…. The white paper states that “since the Han dynasty established the Western Regions Frontier Command in Xinjiang in 60BC, the Chinese central governments of all historical periods exercised military and administrative jurisdiction over Xinjiang”. </blockquote>
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Jacob Dreyer in TLS, <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/belt-and-road/" target="_blank">Belt and Road</a>.
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Historically, Chinese emigrants have long settled in Southeast Asia (called “Nanyang”, or the south sea, in Chinese), bringing language and folkways with them. However, in times past, this emigration was largely responsive to China’s own domestic turmoil – villagers from Fujian and Guangzhou fleeing poverty or local tyrants. Effectively, Chinese are what the historian Yuri Slezkine calls “service nomads” in much of Southeast Asia – they form a loose but coherent network, avoiding politics in favour of business, which they deem safer and more reliable. In countries such as Thailand and Indonesia, most of the biggest fortunes are those of ethnically Chinese – and backlash has been frequent (one example being the 1960s Indonesian pogroms depicted in <i>The Act of Killing</i>). But the Chinese state is strong now, and it superimposes its logic onto the more diffuse networks of commerce. Chineseness itself is as vague as any category enclosing billions of humans must necessarily be; indeed, the Chinese language differentiates between China as a polity (??) and as a culture (??); many of Asia’s tensions and conflicts, from Hong Kong’s umbrella movement to the island-building movement in the South China Sea, hinge on the fact that many who are culturally Chinese nonetheless oppose the state that calls itself China; in many cases, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are there because they fled from that same state. The sheer weight of the Chinese state and the population it represents can flatten these distinctions, in the process displacing older social structures. </blockquote>
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Joe Cochrane in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/world/asia/indonesia-south-china-sea-military-buildup.html" target="_blank">Indonesia, Long on Sidelines, Starts to Confront China’s Territorial Claims</a>.
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Before naming part of the contested waterway the North Natuna Sea “to make it sound more Indonesian,” Mr. Storey said, Indonesia last year began beefing up its military presence in the Natunas. That included expanding its naval port on the main island to handle bigger ships and lengthening the runway at its air force base there to accommodate larger aircraft. For decades, Indonesia’s official policy has been that it is not a party to any territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, unlike its regional neighbors Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Last year, however, Indonesia and China had the three maritime skirmishes within Indonesia’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone off its Natuna Islands, which lie northwest of Borneo. After the third skirmish, in June 2016, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement in which it claimed for the first time that its controversial nine-dash line included “traditional fishing grounds” within Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone. The administration of the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, whose top administrative priorities since taking office in October 2014 include transforming his country into a maritime power, has ordered the authorities to blow up hundreds of foreign fishing vessels seized while illegally fishing in Indonesian waters. Mr. Joko, during a visit to Japan in 2015, said in a newspaper interview that China’s nine-dash line had no basis in international law. </blockquote>
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Philip Bowring in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/13/indonesia-and-china-the-sea-between/" target="_blank">Indonesia & China: The Sea Between</a>.
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Do not imagine that the term “South China Sea” ever implied Chinese ownership. It is a Western construction that dates to about 1900. Previously, European maps referred to it as the China Sea, and before that as part of the Indian Sea. When the Portuguese arrived there in the early sixteenth century they called it the Cham Sea, after the maritime kingdom of coastal Vietnam. Other names at various times include Luzon Sea and (by early Arab traders) the Clove Sea. To China it has long been the South Sea and to Vietnamese the East Sea. The Philippines now refers to it as the West Philippine Sea. “Malay seas” is another term that has been applied to it and its immediate neighbors, the Java, Sulu, and Banda seas. The South China Sea itself is predominantly a Malay sea, as defined by the culture and language group of the majority of people living along its shores. Until European imperialism from the sixteenth century onward gradually snuffed out these trade-based kingdoms and sultanates, they were the region’s principal traders. Earlier, the Sumatra-based Srivijaya kingdom held similar sway through its control of the Melaka straits and hence all seaborne trade between China and the Spice Islands with India, Arabia, and beyond. It was during this era that ships from the archipelago brought the first colonists to Madagascar, leaving a language and genetic imprint that remains to this day. They also traded across the Indian ocean to Africa and Yemen. The first Romans known to have visited China did so by sea via India and the Malay peninsula. Trade spread Buddhism to Sumatra and Java, where by the fifth century it was flourishing to such an extent that Srivijaya attracted Chinese monks, who then traveled on to Sri Lanka and India. Chinese traders occasionally visited countries to the south, but did so on “barbarian” ships based out of Champa, Funan (in the Mekong delta), Java, Borneo, or Sumatra. </blockquote>
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Charles Clover in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/302fc14a-66ef-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614" target="_blank">Factories Ready for Military Role</a>.
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High technology undergoes a dramatic transformation when it hits China — everything from smartphones to laptops to telecommunications networks go from being expensive and proprietary to being cheap and easy to produce in a few short years. Thousands of factories in southern China churn out components for iPhone or iPad imitations, sometimes in the same factories that produce the Apple gadgets themselves. Could the commodification of technology happen to defence industries as well? This is an important question for The Pentagon. The prospect of robot wars in the future raises the question of whether quantity will finally trump quality when it comes to military hardware. This trend clearly favours China as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. </blockquote>
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Alastair Gale in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/print/WSJ_-A006-20171221.pdf" target="_blank">Japan Fortifies Islands Near China</a>.
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Ishigaki and neighboring islands are part of what China’s military calls the “first island chain,” a series of archipelagoes around China’s perimeter stretching from Russia’s Kurils to the South China Sea, where Beijing seeks naval dominance. Authorities on Ishigaki have jurisdiction over a nearby group of tiny, uninhabited islands that Japan calls the Senkakus. They are also claimed by China and Taiwan. Their Chinese name is Diaoyu. In recent years China has sent larger coast guard ships, some armed, to circle the islands. A fleet of 10 Japanese coast guard ships based in Ishigaki regularly plays cat and mouse with the Chinese vessels. </blockquote>
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Mike Ives in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/world/asia/vietnam-south-china-sea.html" target="_blank">A Defiant Map-Hunter Stakes Vietnam’s Claims in the South China Sea</a>.
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“The Chinese know very clearly they never mentioned the Hoang Sa or the Truong Sa in their history books or historical maps,” Dr. Son said, using the Vietnamese terms for the Paracels and Spratlys. By contrast, he said, he found evidence in more than 50 books — in English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese — that a Nguyen-era Vietnamese explorer planted the royal flag in the Paracels in the 1850s. International arbitration over territorial sovereignty can only proceed if both parties agree, analysts say, and China has shown no interest in that. Still, the frenzy of interest in Vietnam’s maritime history since about 2012 has produced a buzz in the state-run news media — and a few unexpected heroes. One is Tran Thang, a Vietnamese-American mechanical engineer who lives in Connecticut. He said by telephone that he had donated 153 maps and atlases to the Danang government in 2012 after ordering them on eBay for about $30,000. Among Vietnamese academics who study the government’s territorial claims in what it calls the East Vietnam Sea, Dr. Son is among the most prominent. He was born in 1967 in Hue, about 50 miles northwest of Danang, and his father was killed in 1970 while fighting for South Vietnam. “I only remember the funeral,” he said. </blockquote>
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Steven Lee Myers in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/world/asia/squeezed-by-an-india-china-standoff-bhutan-holds-its-breath.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Squeezed by an India-China Standoff, Bhutan Holds Its Breath</a>.
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“In the case of war between India and China, we would be the meat in the sandwich,” said Pema Gyamtsho, a leader of the opposition party in Bhutan’s National Assembly. “It shouldn’t have to be a choice,” he added, referring to his nation’s ties with India and China, “but it is at the moment.” For decades, Bhutan has chosen India. More than a half century ago, Bhutan watched warily as China’s Communists took power and eventually occupied neighboring Tibet, with which it has close ethnic, cultural and religious ties. India offered to defend the kingdom, and Bhutan accepted. But the latest standoff has inflamed festering resentments over India’s influence in the country. In particular, many suspect that India has sought to block Bhutan’s efforts to establish diplomatic relations and expand trade with Beijing, fearing that a rapprochement could remove the strategic buffer that Bhutan provides. </blockquote>
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NYT: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/world/asia/nepal-election-winners.html" target="_blank">Nepal Communists’ Victories May Signal Closer China Ties</a>.
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The defeat of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s governing Nepali Congress party is likely to have significant foreign policy implications for Nepal, a landlocked country squeezed between India and China. Mr. Deuba’s government recently oversaw the cancellation of an award granted by a Chinese company to develop a large hydropower project in Nepal. Politicians say that decisions like that could be reversed under the leadership of politicians like Mr. Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal, who took a harder line against India when he served as prime minister. Nepal has been through turmoil in recent years. A decade-long insurgency led by Maoist rebels left more than 17,000 people dead before a 2006 peace deal ushered in democracy. In April 2015, a series of earthquakes dealt another devastating blow, killing nearly 9,000 people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes. When Nepal’s Constitution was finally adopted in September 2015 after long, contentious delays, ethnic groups living along the country’s southern border with India mobilized in deadly protests against provisions that they saw as discriminatory against women, indigenous communities and those from lower castes. India also perked up. </blockquote>
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Kai Schultz in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-china-port.html" target="_blank">Deep in Debt, Sri Lanka Leases Big Port to China</a>.
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Sri Lanka owes more than $8 billion to state-controlled Chinese firms, officials say. Sri Lankan politicians said the Hambantota deal, valued at $1.1 billion, was necessary to chip away at the debt, but analysts warned of the consequences of signing away too much control to China. “The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,” said N. Sathiya Moorthy, a senior fellow specializing in Sri Lanka at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. Sri Lanka has long been in India’s orbit, but its relationship with China has strengthened in recent years. As Western nations accused Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country’s former president, of grievous human rights abuses during the final stages of Sri Lanka’s nearly 26-year civil war, China extended billions of dollars of loans to Mr. Rajapaksa’s government for new infrastructure projects. </blockquote>
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Charlotte Graham in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/world/asia/new-zealand-china-spy.html" target="_blank">A New Zealand Lawmaker’s Spy-Linked Past Raises Alarms on China’s Reach</a>.
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Several China experts said in interviews that it was not possible for people to willingly “leave” China’s Communist Party, as Mr. Yang said he did, unless they had been expelled from it. Mr. Yang has not denounced the party. Rodney Jones, a New Zealand economist who lives in Beijing and who has worked in Asia for 30 years, said that an “unrepentant” former member of the Communist Party should not be eligible to be a New Zealand lawmaker. He said that Mr. Yang should resign from Parliament. Mr. Jones said that New Zealand needed better representation of its Chinese population in Parliament, but that Mr. Yang’s ascension showed that New Zealand had become a “tributary state” of China. </blockquote>
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Laura Zhou in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2123122/china-angrily-denies-buying-political-influence" target="_blank">China Angrily Denies Buying Political Influence in Australia</a>.
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A statement from the Chinese embassy in Australia said allegations first aired in the media of China attempting to increase political influence through donations were “made up out of thin air and filled with a cold war mentality and ideological bias”. The statement also criticised media reports about China’s increasing influence on university campuses, adding that the allegations might harm political trust with Australia. “The relevant reports not only made unjustifiable accusations against the Chinese government, but also unscrupulously vilified Chinese students as well as the Chinese community in Australia with racial prejudice, which in turn has tarnished Australia’s reputation as a multicultural society,” the statement said. “[This] reflected a typical anti-China hysteria and paranoia,” it added. “China has no intention of interfering in Australia’s internal affairs or exerting influence on its political process through political donations.” </blockquote>
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Nikolaj Nielsen at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/justice/140221" target="_blank">Germany Says China Using LinkedIn to Recruit Informants</a>.
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The German domestic intelligence agency (BfV) says China is using fake profiles on social media to target German officials and politicians. "This is a broad-based attempt to infiltrate, in particular, parliaments, ministries and government agencies," said BfV head Hans-Georg Maassen on Sunday (10 December). Maassen said more than 10,000 Germans have been approached by the alleged ruse from Chinese profiles posing as reputable professionals on social networking site LinkedIn. The BfV released around half dozen fake LinkedIn profiles of young attractive Chinese professionals. Among them is Laeticia Chen who supposedly works at the China Center for International Politics and Economy. Another, Eva Han, is from the China University of Political Science and Law. </blockquote>
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Salman Rafi Sheikh in Asia Sentinel, <a href="https://www.asiasentinel.com/econ-business/pakistan-plunge-china-debt/" target="_blank">Pakistan’s Costly Plunge into China Debt</a>.
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Wherever China’s One Belt, One Road initiative goes, it appears that the Chinese lenders including the Bank of China – the government’s flagship bank – aren’t far behind, and that Beijing is using the financial power of the government-owned banks to its advantage, along with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Asian International Investment Bank. Chinese banks including the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China and others by the end of 2014 loaned almost as much money to developing countries as the next six lenders had together, including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Initiative. While obviously development loans are crucial for modernization and investment in developing countries, in some cases the terms are onerous and interest rates are steep. Nowhere is that clearer than in Pakistan, where the Bank of China began operations in the country just in the past week and where soaring developmental debt to China threatens the macro economy. </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES: <a href="https://www.newdelhitimes.com/beijing-wants-chinese-currency-yuan-in-pakistans-gwadar/" target="_blank">Beijing Wants Chinese Currency ‘Yuan’ in Pakistan’s Gwadar</a>.
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Thus far, only two countries have officially allowed the Yuan to be legal tender: Angola and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s decision was aided by collapse of its own currency in 2009, when they shifted to the US dollar and the South African rand as legal tender, and added Yuan in 2015. Pak government has so far hidden information from the public and signing agreements with foreign countries and entities obligating the people without public disclosure and consent in violation of public trust and democratic norms. Important issues are neither discussed in parliament nor details shared with the public. The lands along the Road have been bought by political people making the Chinese buy back those lands at high rates for projects. Any information withheld causes worry to people. China first showed interest in 2006 to have energy pipelines run from Gwadar to China via the Himalayas which years later turned into CPEC under President Xi’s grand OBOR vision. Chinese soon built a small harbour at Gwadar to bring machinery, equipment and materials for constructing a proper port while the management and development of other facilities was given to a Singaporean Company. CPEC added rail and road connections to the energy lines projecting it as a grand plan for overall economic and industrial development of Pakistan. China is thinking long term – laying the seeds in both Sri Lanka and Pakistan, for eroding the absolute sovereignty over strategic geographical locations like Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka and Gwadar in Pakistan which will become like Hong Kong and Falklands – colonies that are defended by force or demographic changes if necessary to defend the Chinese world order. </blockquote>
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Nathaniel Taplin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bid-to-dominate-oil-pricing-will-fail-1514284200" target="_blank">China’s Problematic Oil-Yuan Plan</a>.
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Oil markets are already among the world’s most volatile—prices can leap 3% overnight on news from Middle Eastern nations many investors couldn’t pinpoint on a map. Oil guzzlers like China and India suffer the additional indignity of having to pay for this fickle resource in dollars, magnifying price swings. China would love to pay in yuan instead: and after years of preparation, it is finally launching yuan-denominated oil futures to let it do just that. Actual oil market investors, however, are likely to be unimpressed. It makes sense for China to have its own benchmark: China’s oil bill shouldn’t remain forever pegged to the price of barrels from aging Brent fields off the coast of Britain, half a world away. The problem is that China doesn’t trust its own markets, and routinely intervenes when they move in ways it doesn’t like—particularly the yuan. As long as that is true, foreign oil producers and traders will be leery of committing capital to a market that adds quixotic regulatory and currency risk to an already volatile game. </blockquote>
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Tom Hancock in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/69a41f7e-6b96-11e7-bfeb-33fe0c5b7eaa" target="_blank">China’s Christian Missionaries Seek Converts Along the Belt and Road</a>.
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Some Chinese churches are inspired by an evangelical movement from the 1940s called “Back to Jerusalem”, named after a Chinese pastor’s vision of converting populations from east China to the ancient city. “The idea is that once Christianity spreads back to Jerusalem, it will hasten the second coming [of Christ],” says Carsten Vala, a professor at Loyola University Maryland who has studied underground churches. The movement was revived in 2000, when 36 Chinese Christians travelled to a neighbouring Buddhist country, according to its website. It reports a total of 274 missionaries working as of June in what it calls the “darkest regions of the world”, including 56 in Egypt, 30 in Myanmar and 20 in Pakistan. Chinese churches’ most ambitious plan is “Mission China 2030”, which aims to send 20,000 faithful overseas by the end of next decade. The number, calculated in part on an estimate of the number of foreign missionaries who died in China, was affirmed at a meeting of 1,000 Chinese church representatives in South Korea last summer. </blockquote>
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Mimi Lau in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2099968/secret-lives-chinese-missionaries-northern-iraq" target="_blank">The Secret Lives of Chinese Missionaries in Northern Iraq</a>.
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Michael, 25, and Christy, 23, left China just over a year ago, right after their wedding, for one of the world’s most war-torn areas. Security concerns, in Iraq and in China, mean details of their identities cannot be revealed. “It is not as torn up by warfare here as much as outsiders would read in the news, I actually feel safer here,” said Michael, comparing his experience in Iraq with life in China as a full-time worker in an underground Christian church. “Life could be described as normal here.” There are no official statistics about the number of Chinese missionaries working overseas, and they often pose as businessmen or teachers for travel purposes. But estimates by some academics and mainland house churches say there could be hundreds, or even a couple of thousand. Pastors working on the mainland say it has the largest number of born-again Christians in the world, and that despite having a communist government that is officially atheist is on track to be the world’s largest exporter of Christian faith. Emulating the Western missionaries who proselytised in China centuries ago, most Chinese missionaries serve in developing countries, especially Muslim ones, where such activities are dangerous. The dream honeymoon destination for most Chinese couples would be somewhere like the Maldives, but Michael and Christy, a former make-up artist, spent their honeymoon and first wedding anniversary in an Iraqi village, saying they were simply called by faith. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZzanMSLEzL_SOUunWTGmRFzkvBk6EnJikzlI31Rth1KJ2kMZkpuufRZxRTqlVj7EWySjQBTRSt1csvKTU8dR4N8Mus7N2U9JnnJaMJ1axd9Yxao8FiZi3FGqpQyXkHJExqWhIr7fZwsA1/s1600/NV-154-carduccilinks-khakicapital.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="226" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZzanMSLEzL_SOUunWTGmRFzkvBk6EnJikzlI31Rth1KJ2kMZkpuufRZxRTqlVj7EWySjQBTRSt1csvKTU8dR4N8Mus7N2U9JnnJaMJ1axd9Yxao8FiZi3FGqpQyXkHJExqWhIr7fZwsA1/s320/NV-154-carduccilinks-khakicapital.png" width="212" /></a></div>
Michael Peel in FT on the anthology, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a73318f4-7c21-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928" target="_blank">Khaki Capital – The Political Economy of the Military in Southeast Asia</a>.
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Militaries have asserted themselves in business from contrasting starting points. Modern-day armed forces are the products of national liberation wars in Vietnam and Indonesia, post-imperial turbulence in the Philippines, and non-colonial evolution in Thailand. Generals have held power directly for years in Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, whereas Cambodia has become a tightly controlled quasi-democracy, and Vietnam and Laos remain one-party Communist states. Southeast Asian khaki capitalism has also been fuelled from abroad. The US, Soviet Union and China all sent large amounts of military and economic aid to the region during the cold war. Armed forces were tasked in many cases not only with security but also rural development, giving them new avenues to win business contracts and amass wealth. </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES: <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/syria-sees-increase-in-uighur-militant/" target="_blank">Syria Sees Increase in Uighur Militants</a>.
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There are parallels that can be drawn between the East Turkistan Islamic Movement/Party (ETIM/ETIP) and the the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The East Turkistan Islamic Movement/Party (ETIM/ETIP) started its activities against the Chinese government in the late 1990s, when its presence in Afghanistan was first reported. It was probably influenced by another Central Asian militant Islamist group, which was also in its early stages in Afghanistan in those years, after having been forced out of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Since then, ETIM has maintained very close relations with the IMU. The two groups have been closely cooperation have often followed each other’s political and military trajectories very closely. The two groups, for example, have been operating together in Afghanistan since 2001, co-operating with groups of Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants. Typically, ETIM fighters would be mixed with IMU fighters in the same tactical units. After some years, ETIM also made attempts at infiltration in the Central Asian countries, but relatively on a smaller scale, in close co-operation with the IMU. The surge for supremacy between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for projecting themselves as the custodians of global Islamist militancy has had a deep impact on the IMU, which as of spring 2017 had disintegrated into five different groups, without counting older splits. Debates have started within the IMU over ideological alliances; primarily on the issue of affiliating with the Islamic State as opposed to Al-Qaeda, and the degree of cooperation with the Central Asian Islamist with Al Qaeda. </blockquote>
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Simon Tisdall at GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/17/zimbabwe-was-mugabes-fall-a-result-of-china-flexing-its-muscle" target="_blank">Was Mugabe’s Fall a Result of China’s Flexing Its Muscle? </a>.
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A visit to Beijing last Friday by Zimbabwe’s military chief, General Constantino Chiwenga, has fuelled suspicions that China may have given the green light to this week’s army takeover in Harare. If so, the world may just have witnessed the first example of a covert coup d’etat of the kind once favoured by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, but conceived and executed with the tacit support of the 21st century’s new global superpower. Military vehicles take control of the streets of Harare in the early hours. South Africa says Mugabe has told its president, Jacob Zuma, by telephone that he is under house arrest but is "fine". China, Africa’s biggest foreign investor, has more at stake in Zimbabwe, and more political influence, than any other state. This is largely due to its extensive investments in the mining, agriculture, energy and construction sectors. China was Zimbabwe’s top trade partner in 2015, buying 28% of its exports. But the Chinese connection is about more than money. The pre-independence guerrilla force led to victory by Robert Mugabe, the 93-year-old Zimbabwean president detained by the military on Tuesday night, was financed and armed by the Chinese in the 1970s. </blockquote>
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Amy Qin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/world/asia/china-india-dangal-bollywood.html" target="_blank">A Bollywood Smash With a Twist, in China’s Cultural Battle with India</a>.
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Featuring the Bollywood star Aamir Khan, <i>Dangal</i> was India’s first big hit at the Chinese box office. It took in more than $194 million in two months, making it one of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time in China. In cinemas across the country, moviegoers cheered and grew misty-eyed in one particularly moving scene as the Indian flag was raised to the tune of the Indian national anthem. While China’s film industry has long sought both to emulate and compete with Hollywood, the runaway success of <i>Dangal</i> has prompted Chinese production companies to turn their gaze from West to East. Suddenly, Chinese companies are racing to snap up all things Bollywood — partnerships and distribution rights, but also Indian directors and screenwriters. And that has led to some unease. </blockquote>
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Erich Schwartzel in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-recreates-the-silk-road-to-challenge-hollywood-1514390400" target="_blank">China’s Hollywood Challenge</a>.
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Beijing-based Shinework Media has an entire Belt & Road slate of productions planned with producers from countries along the route. It includes a comedy with Iran, a sports drama with Brazil, and a disaster epic with Indonesia. The film projects come as China makes other One Belt, One Road investments, including high-speed rail and oil pipelines, in those and neighboring countries. </blockquote>
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Patrick Brzeski in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/no-chinas-not-hollywood-why-just-a-new-beginning-1062199" target="_blank">No China’s Not Over</a>.
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"In the past, many tried to co-produce a film that can work in all markets, but it is very difficult to bridge Chinese and Western cultures," says Song Ge, chairman of Beijing Culture Media, currently one of the hottest studios in Beijing. "Now we are taking a more targeted approach and thinking more strategically about how we collaborate." Action star Wu Jing's smash hit <i>Wolf Warrior 2</i>, which Song's Beijing Culture co-produced, could be the box-office phenomenon that launches the new model. The film blends a story of emphatically Chinese patriotic appeal — the tagline: "Whoever attacks China will be killed no matter how far the target is" — with a level of action-flick proficiency previously unseen. The Hollywood dazzle came courtesy of Marvel mainstays Joe and Anthony Russo (the duo is at work on the next <i>Avengers</i> film), who consulted on the project via a deal with Beijing Culture. "The American team helped Wu Jing make a stronger film," says Song. This proved to be a winning formula: Although it did limited business overseas, <i>Wolf Warrior 2</i> grossed $854 million in China alone, the second-biggest single-market gross ever behind only J.J. Abrams' <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> ($936.7 million in North America). Song says this type of project-specific, piecemeal collaboration will be a feature of the Chinese film industry going forward — the company recently hired Oscar-winning producer Barrie M. Osborne (<i>The Lord of the Rings</i>) and a U.S. stunt team to consult on its forthcoming fantasy epic <i>The Creation of Gods</i>. </blockquote>
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Erich Schwartzel in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-wants-to-make-better-movies-so-it-turned-to-the-guy-who-made-die-hard-2-1514477181" target="_blank">Helping China Make Movies: Director of ‘Die Hard 2’</a>.
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Colleagues on set told Mr. Harlin that Chinese viewers wouldn’t understand “attention shoppers,” forcing his translators to search for a replacement. Sarcasm is often lost on Chinese viewers, too. Mr. Harlin debated dropping the line altogether. Mr. Cheung, though, opted to keep it – thinking younger Chinese audiences familiar with Hollywood-style heroes will find his character cool. “It’s like an additive flavor in this movie, that mix of East and West,” said Mr. Cheung. Antiheroes or villains who get away with their crime are also a no-go, turning nearly every Chinese movie into a morality play. Mr. Cheung’s doctor cannot directly kill the main villain, as he inevitably would in most Western narratives. Having a vigilante act as a law enforcer would be morally suspect for Chinese audiences – and censors – so the bad guy dies at his own hand, giving Mr. Harlin’s hero the distance he needs to remain pure. </blockquote>
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Tom Hancock in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c90c0f2c-d8c8-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482" target="_blank">Beijing Woos Highly Paid A-list Actors</a>.
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This year, the Communist Party has attempted to channel celebrities’ charisma into its own propaganda. It has ordered Chinese cinemas to play short films celebrating themes such as “core socialist values” and featuring movie stars such as [Jackie] Chan before every movie screening. It also gathered 100 of China’s top filmmakers, actors and pop stars in the city of Hangzhou for a day last month to study the “spirit” of October’s party congress, which bolstered the status of President Xi Jinping. But the party has registered little success to date in reining in A-listers’ rampant fees, despite surveys showing their unpopularity with the public. </blockquote>
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Daniel Stacey & Alastair Gale in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/countering-china-in-indian-ocean-proves-tall-order-for-japan-and-india-1500807600" target="_blank">Japan, India Slowed in Bid to Curb China</a>.
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Experts say India has long believed its vast land and sea borders were best left undeveloped to avoid providing useful infrastructure for potential invaders. Now, with China building highways along India’s Himalayan border and constructing ports in neighboring countries, India is facing the reality that it needs to spend heavily to keep up. Key strategic sites in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian archipelago at the eastern gateway to the Indian Ocean, haven’t been developed, even as China has forged ahead with new ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The U.S. has been largely hamstrung in its offers to help. Indian authorities have rejected six requests by the U.S. Navy to dock ships at the Andamans in recent years, an official said, linking those rejections to China’s expressions of displeasure about the role of the U.S. in the Indian Ocean. In the place of U.S. support, Japan has offered to step in. </blockquote>
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Shawn Donnan in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5f0aad90-deae-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c" target="_blank">US, EU and Japan to Link Up on China Trade</a>.
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The EU, Japan and the US are set to announce a new alliance to take on China more aggressively over trade issues such as overcapacity in steel and forced technology transfers, in a rare effort at international economic co-operation by the Trump administration. In a statement due to be issued on Tuesday on the sidelines of a World Trade Organization meeting, the three economies will target the “severe excess capacity” in important sectors like steel and the role of illegal subsidies, state financing and state-owned enterprises in fuelling it, according to a draft read to the <i>Financial Times</i>. Also targeted are the rules in countries such as China that require foreign investors to hand over important proprietary technologies or house content and data on local servers. </blockquote>
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Ankit Srivastava in NEW DELHI TIMES, <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/shanghai-cooperation-organisation-admits-india-and-pakistan-quarrelling-country-cousins-worry-china/" target="_blank">Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Admits India and Pakistan: Quarrelling Country Cousins Worry China</a>.
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The Shanghai Five began on April 26, 1996 comprising of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. That became Shanghai Cooperation Organisation when Uzbekistan joined the group in June 2001 as sixth member. With focus on military cooperation, intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism operations in Central Asia. SCO is the only organisation in the world to combine military with economic cooperation. India and Pakistan availed observer status along with Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Belarus. During Ufa summit, the SCO formally adopted a resolution to begin the process of admission of India and Pakistan as full members. The Memorandum of Obligations was signed on June 26, 2016 at the Tashkent summit that has now led to their admission as full time members during Astana summit in Kazakhstan in May 2017. India and Pakistan also became the first nations to be inducted as members since the formation of SCO to expand the scope of the group from China, Russia and Central Asian countries to South Asia, covering over 60 per cent of Eurasia. Once the euphoria dies down, the teething problems of expanded membership will come to focus. The hostility between the two states is too ingrained to be settled in the short time. Add to that their complicated relations with China and Russia, the admission could be a Trojan horse to drag more internal conflicts into SCO than it can handle. The SCO has seen how the estrangement between India and Pakistan rendered an established organisation like SAARC dysfunctional overnight. </blockquote>
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Maxwell Carter in WSJ on Audrey Truschke’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/last-of-the-great-mughal-emperors-1501269181" target="_blank">Aurangzeb</a>.
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The first Mughal emperor, Babur, wrested power from the Lodi dynasty in 1526 and wrote one of the world’s outstanding memoirs; the second, Humayun, rallied from defeat and exile to restore Mughal sovereignty in 1555; the third, Akbar, promoted an exemplary religious syncretism, abolishing the poll tax for non-Muslims in 1564; the fourth, Jahangir, was Mughal portraiture’s keenest patron and connoisseur; and the fifth, Shah Jahan, built Delhi’s Red Fort and the Taj Mahal. His son, Aurangzeb, the last of the so-called great Mughal emperors, whose reign spanned nearly 50 years (1658-1707), enlarged the empire’s borders to their furthest extent. </blockquote>
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Russell Goldman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/world/asia/indonesia-chinese-statue-islam-muslims-protest-guan-yu.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Muslims’ Protest in Indonesia Puts Deity Under Wraps</a>.
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The Islamist campaign against the statue, a depiction of the third-century general Guan Yu, who is worshiped as a god in several Chinese religions, began online and soon spread to the gates of a Chinese Confucian temple in Tuban, near the Java Sea coast, where the figure was erected last month. On social media, Muslims assailed the statue as an “uncivilized” affront to Islam and the island’s “home people,” and a mob gathered this week outside the East Java legislature in the city of Surabaya to demand its destruction. Statues deemed un-Islamic have been destroyed or vandalized around Indonesia in recent years, and several Chinese temples have been set on fire. Covering the statue with a large white tarp was a stopgap measure proposed by the temple’s officials after a governmental religious body pushed them to find a solution. </blockquote>
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Mark Ives in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/myanmar-buddhist-yangon.html" target="_blank">Ultranationalist Monks in Myanmar, Facing Crackdown, Say They’re Unrepentant</a>.
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Ma Ba Tha has long denied promoting violence, but critics say that its statements — which often go viral on social media — have clearly fueled it. “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” Ma Ba Tha’s best-known ultranationalist monk, Ashin Wirathu, said in a 2013 sermon, referring to Muslims. Analysts say the Buddhist authority’s directive, and Ma Ba Tha’s headstrong reply, illustrate a central challenge facing the governing National League for Democracy, the political party led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The government’s crackdown on Ma Ba Tha, they say, could ease pressure on Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi from rights advocates overseas who have criticized her inability — or perhaps unwillingness — to curb state-sanctioned violence against Rohingya who live in western Myanmar. However, the analysts said, it could also drive Ma Ba Tha’s supporters toward political parties that increasingly embrace hard-line Buddhist rhetoric, including one party that is linked to the military junta that ruled Myanmar for decades until 2011. </blockquote>
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Richard Paddock in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-min-aung-hlaing.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Ethnic Purge Elevates Myanmar’s Other Leader</a>.
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Min Aung Hlaing graduated in 1977 and became an infantry officer in a military whose existence had largely been defined by its wars against ethnic minorities. It waged a ruthless counterinsurgency strategy known as the “Four Cuts,” isolating rebels from civilian support by violently severing their access to food, money, intelligence and recruits. “Burning villages is what they have done for years,” Mr. Mathieson said. “He would have risen in the ranks in the ’80s when this was happening all the time.” …One of his commanding officers, Mr. Hla Oo said, was a colonel named Than Shwe, who later became senior general and head of the ruling clique. In early 2009, Min Aung Hlaing was named chief of the Bureau of Special Operations-2, overseeing northeastern Myanmar. In July and August that year, his troops targeted rebels in Shan State campaigns that drove nearly 50,000 people from their homes. “This campaign has been carried out coldbloodedly and systematically,” Kham Harn Fah, director of the Shan Human Rights Foundation, said at the time. “The troops commandeered petrol to burn down the houses, and radioed repeatedly to their headquarters as the buildings went up in flames.” The assault in the Kokang region of northern Shan State began after the military, known as the Tatmadaw, tried to arrest a popular Kokang leader, Pheung Kya-shin. Fighting erupted, dozens were killed and 37,000 refugees fled into China. Mr. Pheung accused soldiers of robbing, raping and killing civilians. In March 2011, Senior Gen. Than Shwe bypassed older and more experienced generals and picked Min Aung Hlaing, then a young lieutenant general, as commander-in-chief. His selection was part of the junta leader’s plan to restructure the government under the new Constitution. Then in his mid-70s, Than Shwe needed a trusted successor who would not hold him accountable in retirement for his brutal reign or his accumulation of personal wealth. Than Shwe put two other top generals into civilian positions, including Thein Sein as president, and dissolved the junta in 2011. In 2013, Min Aung Hlaing took on the title of senior general previously held by his mentor. It is unclear who promoted him. </blockquote>
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Robert Kaplan in WSJ on Richard McGregor’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-eastern-time-bomb-1504288948" target="_blank">Asia’s Reckoning</a>.
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It was only the security guarantee provided by the U.S. Navy that allowed Asian countries not to fear one another and thus to concentrate on building their economies instead of their militaries. The result has been the Asian economic miracle, which began to gagther force in the late 1970s and has continued to the present day. Of course, Asians themselves have ascribed their success to “Asian values” – the emphasis on order and hierarchy embodied in the Confucian ethos. But “the region’s peaceful postwar coexistence, far from being somehow organic to local political cultures,” notes Richard McGregor in <i>Asia’s Reckoning</i>, “had been underwritten by the U.S. military.” Now the situation is changing. The rise of the Chinese navy and the arms race that it has set off across Asia have made the region’s stability tenuous. </blockquote>
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Yaroslav Trofimov in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-feuding-central-asia-nations-move-to-reconcile-1507195800" target="_blank">Central Asians Bridge Divisions</a>.
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The most progress so far as been made between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, which have had frosty relations since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, with festering disputes over frontiers, water allocation and minority rights. The Soviet-drawn border has left two fully isolated Uzbek enclaves in Kyrgyzstan and a small Kyrgyz enclave in Uzbekistan. Travel between the nations was restricted by Uzbekistan following the 2005 Islamist-inspired uprising in the Uzbek section of the Fergana Valley, near the Kyrgyz frontier. Such travel became virtually impossible after 2010. Last month, jubilant crowds gathered as Uzbek-Kyrgyz border checkpoints in the valley fully reopened, allowing people on both sides to visit relatives and friends they hadn’t seen in years. </blockquote>
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Thomas Erdbrink in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/world/middleeast/iran-tehran-attack.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article" target="_blank">As Toll Rises Iran Says ISIS Recruited Attackers from Within Country</a>.
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Official Iranian news accounts said the men were killed and the woman blew herself up. It was Iran’s worst episode of terrorism in years, exposing security lapses and undermining government assertions that the country is a beacon of calm in the volatile Middle East. The attacks also appeared to be the first time that Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation, had been successfully targeted by the Islamic State, which considers Shiites to be religious traitors. A government statement issued Thursday about the attacks said the male assailants had left Iran at an unspecified time to fight for the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and in Raqqa, Syria, the group’s de facto capital. They returned to Iran last July or August under the leadership of a commander with the nom de guerre Abu Aisha, the statement said, and had “intended to carry out terrorist operations in religious cities.” The statement did not specify whether they were Iranian citizens or provide further information about the female assailant. But Reza Seifollahi, deputy chief of the Supreme National Security Council, was quoted by the independent newspaper Shargh as saying the men were Iranian. If true, that would be an unusual acknowledgment, given the antipathy between the Islamic State and Iran. </blockquote>
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Shabnam Madadzadeh in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-remembers-the-murderous-summer-of-1988-1505861938" target="_blank">Iran Remembers the Murderous Summer of 1988</a>.
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Although the regime has tried to force Iranians to foregt 1988, the crimes committed were so vast that this was impossible. An estimated 20,000 people, mainly MIK activists, were executed. Their “trials” usually lasted minutes…. The mass burial sites of 1988 remain largely unknown, and the public is banned from visiting any that have been uncovered, like those in Tehran’s Khavaran area. Nevertheless, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers have been doing so for the past 29 years. </blockquote>
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Thomas Erdbrink in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/world/middleeast/iran-revolutionary-guards.html" target="_blank">Iran Saps Strength of Revolutionary Guards with Arrests and Cutbacks</a>.
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For years, the construction giant and numerous other companies and conglomerates run by the Revolutionary Guards have operated with impunity, well beyond the reach of civilian authorities, driving Iran’s sanctions-crippled economy, financing its military adventures in the region and — not coincidentally — enriching the hard-line commanders and clerics at their helms. But now, with many sanctions lifted after the nuclear deal, and as the government tries to open the country to competition and foreign investment, the group’s economic dominance is increasingly seen as a liability. The Revolutionary Guards’ international reputation for regional meddling, its potential designation as a terrorist group by the Trump administration and the sanctions that remain in place combine to make it a toxic business partner for the Western and Asian companies Tehran needs to reinvigorate its economy and rebuild its crumbling infrastructure. As a result, it has had its budget cut and seen large government projects that were once its private preserve steered to outsiders. </blockquote>
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Christopher Carroll in WSJ on G.W. Bowersock’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crescent-rising-1507158059" target="_blank">The Crucible of Islam</a>.
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Islam, he stresses, emerged from an environment that was already rich in religion – Judaism, Christianity and polytheism – and rife with religious conflict. There were even other monotheist prophets contemporary with Muhammad, including Musaylima, who is “alleged to have had his own unique god called Rahman, his own revelations, and his own Qur’an.” Later chapters cover the Arab invasions of the 630s and 640s. Here Mr. Bowersock challenges the commonly held idea that the lands conquered by the Muslim armies were shattered and exhausted from conflicts between the Persians and the Eastern Roman Empire, easy pickings for the Muslim armies. “In pacifying and administering the regions they had conquered, [the Persians] created a world that was not much different from what it had been before, with its rich traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Hellenism.” Many of the conquered territories – like Jerusalem – capitulated not out of hopeless exasperation but out of a belief that surrender would be the best way to preserve their way of life. </blockquote>
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Yaroslav Trofimov in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-saudi-purge-echoes-of-putin-and-xi-1509989119" target="_blank">Echoes of Putin and Xi in Kingdom’s Purge of Power Brokers</a>.
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This weekend’s purge, which follows an earlier wave of arrests and the dismissal of Prince Muhammed’s predecessor as crown prince, former interior minister Mohammed bin Nayef, is unprecedented in modern Saudi history. Those detained include leading business and media tycoons, senior princes and the main policy makers of previous Saudi administrations. While corruption is widespread at the top rungs of the Saudi royal family and business elite, the reasons for targeting these individuals – just as was the case in Russia’s and China’s anti-graft campaigns – have more to do with Prince Mohammed’s consolidation of power than administering justice, according to analysts and diplomats. </blockquote>
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Dan Bilefsky in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/turkey-curriculum-darwin-jihad.html" target="_blank">In Turkish Schools Darwin Is Out and Jihad In</a>.
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“The reason Turkey is not Pakistan is that generations have been exposed to a secular public education,” Mr. Cagaptay said. “But for Erdogan, who comes from the other side of the tracks and feels religion was marginalized for decades, this is his revenge.” Politicians across the political spectrum criticized the changes. When they were first highlighted this summer, a leading teachers union called them an effort to stymie the raising of “generations who ask questions.” Turkey’s education system, which has long provided a secular education to religious and secular students alike, has come under scrutiny by the government following the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, culminating in the firing of more than 33,000 teachers and the closing of scores of schools. At the same time, the ruling Islamic-inspired Justice and Development Party has significantly increased the number of religious schools, known as imam hatip schools, and promoted Mr. Erdogan’s professed goal of raising a “pious generation” of Turks. Following the new changes, evolutionary concepts like natural selection will be removed from the high school curriculum, along with any mention of Darwin, the English naturalist whose theory has become a mainstay of biology classes around the world. </blockquote>
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Patrick Kingsley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/world/europe/turkey-greece-asylum-pushbacks.html" target="_blank">Greek Government Is Accused of Deporting Asylum Seekers to Placate Turkey</a>.
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The Greek government denies that account, by the Hellenic League for Human Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights, which say that twice in the last few weeks, on May 24 and June 2, Turks fleeing persecution have been shipped back to their country. The Hellenic League documented a total of 17 forcible deportations, or pushbacks, including those of seven children. The pushbacks followed a pattern, according to the league. The Greek police drove the asylum seekers in a van to a meeting point where they were handed over to masked armed men. These men then forced the refugees onto a boat that was sent across the Evros River to Turkey. </blockquote>
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Nikolaj Nielsen at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/foreign/138290" target="_blank">Turkey Received €1bn in EU Money to Develop Democracy</a>.
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A European Commission spokesperson told <i>Euobserver</i> earlier this month some €979.6 million was paid out between 2007 and April this year with more likely to come given Turkey's continued candidacy for EU membership. Thank you for reading EUobserver!
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The commission also said it was closely reviewing ongoing and future financial assistance for Turkey "to make sure it is fully in line with our interests and values." But Turkey's backsliding into an autocracy led by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has, since last July, led to over 50,000 arrests, some 100,000 detentions, 138,000 job sackings, and close to 2,100 schools being shut down. Of those, 234 journalists have been arrested, over 4,400 judges and prosecutors dismissed, and around 8,270 academics fired. Earlier this month, Taner Kilic, the chair of Amnesty International Turkey, had also been detained by the police along with 22 other lawyers. He was then charged of belonging to a terrorist organisation. </blockquote>
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Yaakov Katz in JERUSALEM POST, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/In-possible-nod-to-Israel-top-Saudi-officials-visit-Paris-synagogue-515001" target="_blank">In Possible Nod to Israel, Two Top Saudi Officials Visit Paris Synagogue</a>.
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The officials were Secretary General of the Muslim World League Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Kareem al-Issa, a former Saudi justice minister, and Khalid bin Mohammed Al Angari, a former Saudi education minister who currently serves as Riyadh’s ambassador to France. The Muslim World League is an international Islamic NGO based in Mecca that works to spread Islam. Alongside al-Issa’s work in the league, he also serves as an official adviser to the royal court in Riyadh and to the Saudi minister of defense. The pair, who visited the Grand Synagogue in Paris on Monday, were hosted by France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia and the synagogue’s rabbi, Moshe Sebbag. Sebbag and Korsia removed a Torah scroll from the Ark during the visit and showed it to the Saudi officials, explaining the significance of the text and showing them various ornaments in the sanctuary.</blockquote>
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Jason Horowitz in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/europe/for-right-wing-italian-youth-a-mission-to-disrupt-migration.html" target="_blank">Italian Youths Find Mission in Disrupting Migration</a>.
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It began in May, when Mr. Fiato, a leader of the Italian branch of a European right-wing movement that calls itself identitarian, joined his allies in using an inflatable raft to momentarily delay a ship carrying Doctors Without Borders personnel that was chartered to rescue migrants at sea. The tactic appalled human rights organizations, which argued that the activists, mostly in their 20s, threatened the lives of desperate migrants making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. But it also attracted publicity, new members and, identitarians say, at least $100,000 in private donations. That money went to Defend Europe, a project that included as its centerpiece the chartering of a 130-foot ship previously used off the Horn of Africa. Mr. Fiato and his allies around Europe suspect aid ships of colluding with human traffickers and believe migration amounts to a Muslim invasion. They wanted to disrupt and monitor the operations of rescue vessels and make sure they did not cross into Libyan waters, cooperate with human traffickers or bring more migrants to Europe’s shores. </blockquote>
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Alexander Stille in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/last-slaves-in-mauritania/" target="_blank">Preaching in the Desert – Political Islam and Social Change in Mauritania</a>.
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On April 27, 2012, the prominent political figure Biram Dah Abeid held a demonstration near his local mosque and, before a stunned crowd of followers, burned a set of Islamic religious-legal texts that had been used for centuries to justify slavery in Mauritania. Abeid fully intended to challenge and provoke Mauritania’s religious and political authorities. Quite predictably, he was arrested the next day and crowds of demonstrators demanded that he be put to death for blasphemy, a serious crime under Islamic religious law. The book burning produced an intense debate among religious scholars about the status of slavery in Islam and inspired counterdemonstrations by former slaves who supported Abeid. After a few months in prison, he was released. This auto-da-fe, in Salem’s view, reflects not only the bold self-confidence of a new generation of abolitionist leaders but also the degree to which social conflicts in Mauritania tend to invoke the language of religion. “It is extremely significant,” Salem told me at his house in Nouakchott, “that Biram carried out his book burning after Friday prayers and with the blessing of an imam.” </blockquote>
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Dionne Searcey & Jaime Yaya Barry in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/africa/migrants-africa-libya.html" target="_blank">An Old Enemy for Sub-Saharan Migrants: Bigotry</a>.
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Libyan smugglers call them “burned,” a racial epithet sometimes used in the country for people whose skin color is black. And while many of the migrants who pass through Libya hoping to set sail for Italy are beaten and otherwise abused by smugglers, Mr. Drammeh believes his treatment was especially harsh because of his skin color. Fellow Muslims — even children — refused to let him pray alongside them. “They think they’re better than us,” Mr. Drammeh, who is 18, said by phone from a refugee camp in Italy. “They say we’re created different from them.” </blockquote>
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Caroline Elkins in WSJ on Lawrence James’ book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-scramble-for-africa-1502320150" target="_blank">Empires in the Sun</a>.
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From the get-go, Mr. James gazes into his historical crystal ball and declares how, without European colonization of Africa – formalized in Berlin in 1884-85 – the continent would have descended into horror. Africa’s partition was an act of European mercy. Had it not occurred, “Africa’s subsequent history might have followed the pattern of Europe’s in the Dark and Early Middle Ages, with intermittent regional wars for political supremacy and consolidation.” Mr. James’s subtitle, “The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa,” tips his historical hand. “War had always been endemic in Africa,” the author avers, as had an Islamism “untroubled by slavery.” In contrast, “Britain was the friend of the weak and the oppressed and a nation deeply aware of its collective Christian duty.” </blockquote>
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Norimitsu Onishi in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/angola-portugal-money-laundering.html" target="_blank">As Colonizer Flounders, Angola Flaunts Riches</a>.
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Angola had been at war — fighting for independence from Portugal, which came in 1975, and then locked in a civil war — for four decades by the time peace finally arrived in 2002. Peace coincided with an extended oil boom that eventually propelled Angola, with only 25 million people, to become one of the top 20 oil producers in the world. It was an extraordinary turnaround for a country that had been dominated for centuries by Portugal, which exploited Angola for the slave trade and its natural resources, before falling into a long and costly civil war fueled by the Cold War. But the oil boom disproportionately benefited Angola’s governing elite, who moved enormous sums abroad. Between 2002 and 2015, Angolan companies and individuals poured $189 billion outside the country into often opaque investments, according to the Catholic University of Angola’s Center for Studies and Scientific Research in Luanda. Inside Angola, one of the world’s most unequal societies, half of the working population lives on less than $3.10 a day. Meanwhile, its former colonial ruler, Portugal, suffered from a financial crisis that forced it to obtain a $111 billion bailout from international creditors and downgraded its national debt, rated junk to this day. Portugal was desperate for investment. </blockquote>
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Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/africa/ethiopia-government-surveillance.html?_r=0" target="_blank">‘We Are Everywhere’: How Ethiopia Became a Land of Prying Eyes</a>.
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Mr. Alene’s loyalty to the governing party has earned him handsome rewards. He was given the title of “model farmer” and has been granted plots of land and other benefits like farm animals, a cellphone, the gun he turned on his neighbor and a radio, which he keeps under lock and key. “I am No. 1,” he exclaimed recently in the village pub, sitting against a wall stacked with sacks of fertilizer and drinking home-brewed beer poured into what used to be a can of chickpeas. “I feel great happiness,” he added. Ethiopia is unlike many countries in Africa, where the power of the state often reaches beyond the capital in name only. More organized, more ambitious and more centrally controlled than a lot of governments on the continent, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (a coalition of four regional parties), which controls this mountainous, semiarid but spectacularly beautiful land of just over 100 million people, intends to transform it into a middle-income country by 2025. Achieving that goal, in a country that 30 years ago was a byword for famine, means realizing a plan of rapid industrial and agricultural growth modeled on the success stories of Asia. Ethiopia is relying on state-driven development rather than the Western-style liberalization that in the 1980s and 1990s hurt many economies across Africa, like Ghana and the Ivory Coast. </blockquote>
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Amanda DeMarco in WSJ on Christa Wolf’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/christa-wolf-looks-back-in-anger-1506463791" target="_blank">One Day a Year</a>.
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To the end, she saw things in terms of “us” and “them,” and she doesn’t hesitate to speak on behalf of “us” – a concept that could telescope from former citizens of the GDR to what we now call the 99%. Her oppositional thinking is understandable in a cloistered, struggling society but maladapted to a global, interconnected modernity. In her own eyes she remained an easterner, a child of war, and a mourner of a great civilizational project whose failure whispered things about the nature of humanity that she didn’t want to hear. </blockquote>
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John O’Sullivan in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on James Kirchick’s book, The End of Europe, and Douglas Murray’s book, <a href="http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-dream-and-the-nightmare/" target="_blank">The Strange Death of Europe</a>.
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Legal attempts to regulate immigration were made by governments, but the rules were quite liberal since politicians felt guilty about keeping out poor people from former colonies, and besides, the immigrants learned to game the system. So a modest but relentless rise in immigration continued, not much hindered by official controls, until Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997 and adopted a policy positively encouraging migration—to boost economic growth, official documents argued; to swamp the Tories electorally, said a Blair policymaker. The new policy accelerated the transformation of Britain into a multicultural society with racial and religious tensions; terrorist murders, bombings, and beheadings; physical attacks on gays in East London; the extraordinary epidemic of the rape and sexual grooming of underage girls by Pakistani Muslim gangs in Rotherham and in two dozen other provincial cities; hostile demonstrations against British soldiers returning from Afghanistan; an estimated (by the British Medical Association) 74,000 cases of female genital mutilation by 2006; the occasional honor killing; and excellent restaurants. </blockquote>
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Christopher Caldwell in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-less-and-less-grand-coalition/article/2010673" target="_blank">A Less and Less Grand Coalition</a>.
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Even with merely moderate immigration, there are two countries that would see their Muslim population rise by more than 10 percent: Sweden and Britain. You begin to understand the electrifying effect that immigration had on the Brexit referendum: All these nations, even if no one dares to say it, are fighting for their demographic lives. And you begin to see how, under the surface of German politeness and historic repentance, people might be angered by the return of the Christian Democrat-Social Democrat grand coalition that got Germany into its immigration predicament. Normally a leader in Merkel’s position will pay a high price in policy and personnel for the support of a reluctant coalition partner like the SPD. But Merkel’s governing strategy has always been to upstage and demoralize the Social Democrats by preempting the issues they care about. She committed Germany to phasing out nuclear power, instituted quotas for women on corporate boards, and secured gay marriage (while professing to be personally opposed). Germany’s taboo against right-wing parties allowed Merkel to pull this off, protecting her from her own conservative voters. But the vote for the AfD and the FDP this fall is a sign that the taboo is losing its power. </blockquote>
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Ryszard Legutko in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-eurocrats-cant-stand-polands-law-and-justice-party-1508280886" target="_blank">
Why the Eurocrats Can’t Stand Poland’s Law and Justice Party</a>.
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<blockquote>
Western European governments and the leadership of EUY institutions have long rerated the countries of Eastern Europe as adolescents under their tutelage. European commissioner Gunther Oettinger asked the Polish government to bring legislative proposals to Brussels before submitting them to the Polish parliament. During an informal meeting with Polish politicians last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel couldn’t disuise her irritation at Poland’s new economic relationship with China, arguing that such an opening should have had the blessing of “friends.” Most irritating to the Eurocrats has been the growing cooperation among the Visegrad Four – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – and the Trimarium, composed of the V4, the three Baltic states, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania. Poland has played a major role in bringing these Central and Eastern European perspectives together. The EU functionaries seek to enlarge their power by centralizing it. Watching Eastern European countries regain their political agency drives them crazy. </blockquote>
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Thomas Grove in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/beneath-helsinki-finns-prepare-for-russian-threat-1500024602" target="_blank">Underground, Finns Gird for Russia</a>.
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Much of Finland’s defensive planning has been shaped by its three-month war against the Soviet Union in the winter of 1939-40. In record cold temperatures, small groups of Finnish ski soldiers in winter camouflage picked off approaching Red Army soldiers in the forests. The Finns lost 10% of their territory to the Soviets, but maintained their sovereignty. Planning is still shaped by that experience – with an emphasis on survival and forcing the enemy into unfamiliar terrain – though it shifted, after the Cold War, to the tunnels. In March, Finland carried out a military exercise based on a recent, real-world scenario: The takeover of government buildings by foreign specialforces, like the Russians who seized installations in Crimea ahead of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula. </blockquote>
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Walter Russell Mead in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/secessionisms-dangerous-return-1508194609" target="_blank">Secessionism’s Dangerous Return</a>.
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<blockquote>
There are approximately 34 million Igbo compared with seven million Bulgarians, six million Danes, and two million Slovenes. Nevertheless, a wave of secession movements in the developing world would be a geopolitical and humanitarian nightmare. South Sudan, Rwanda, Syria and Myanmar show what can result when ethnic and religious identity politics erupt in full force. As a result, with some rare exceptions (Eritrea, East Timor, South Sudan and Bangladesh) the world has looked askance at independence and secession movements in postcolonial countries. Western elites have fondly hoped that modernization – understood as economic development and the spread of democracy – would cause identity politics and ethno-nationalist grievances to fade. Yet the history of Europe from the Napoleonic Wars through the aftermath of World War I is the story of movements for national liberation that grew more powerful as economic and social development spread. </blockquote>
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Ioan Grillo in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/opinion/mexico-mass-grave-drug-cartel.html" target="_blank">The Paradox of Mexico’s Mass Graves</a>.
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<blockquote>
I’ve covered Mexico’s violence since 2001, but I am still dumbstruck by the extent to which normal life seems to carry on next door to such terrors. A study released last month found that at least 1,400 bodies were dug up from mass graves across the country between 2009 and 2014. And those are just a fraction of the 176,000 murders that police have counted here over the last decade. At the same time, Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and is the eighth-most-visited tourist destination on the planet. The government denies there is an armed conflict going on. How can we understand this paradox and classify this bloodshed? Is it simply a horrendous crime problem, or is it an actual war? The question is not merely academic — it affects real-life decisions, like those of judges who decide whether people fleeing the violence can be classified as refugees. </blockquote>
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James Marson & Julian Barnes in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-multiple-invasions-the-u-s-army-is-getting-tired-of-liberating-atropia-1505144872" target="_blank">After Multiple Invasions, the U.S. Army Is Tired of Liberating Atropia</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Candidly,” says Lt. Col. Joe Buccino of the 82nd Airborne Division, a veteran of multiple Atropia actions, “having liberated that place four times in 15 months, it is about time we let the Atropians provide security for themselves.” Atropia’s problem, it seems, is reality. It keeps interfering with an elaborately constructed military-training scenario. The U.S. Army’s training command in 2012 developed a rich back story for various ersatz countries in its war games. The fictional country of Atropia, according to the playbook, is a pro-western dictatorship. The Army ordered its training centers adopt the scenario. </blockquote>
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Ross Douthat in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-west-and-what-comes-after.html" target="_blank">The West and What Comes After</a>.
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<blockquote>
Wilder follows two black intellectuals and politicians, Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, who shared a striking combination of anti-imperialist zeal and desire for continued political union with the French Republic. Césaire’s tiny Martinique did indeed become a French département. But in Senegal and Africa and the once-colonized world writ large, their project never had a chance. Once the age of empire ended, political separation became inevitable. Yet against critics who deemed both men sellouts and self-haters for desiring to remain in some sense French, Wilder argues that their vision was complex and potentially prophetic. They were Western-educated Francophones who read deeply in the European canon, who believed in the “miracle of Greek civilization,” who drew on Plato and Virgil and Pascal and Goethe. At the same time, they argued for their own race’s civilizational genius, for a <i>negritude</i> that turned a derogatory label into a celebration of African cultural distinctiveness. </blockquote>
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Musab Younis in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Gary Wilder’s book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n13/musab-younis/against-independence" target="_blank">Freedom Time – Negritude, Decolonisation and the Future of the World</a>.
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<blockquote>
Eminent politicians in French-controlled West Africa were campaigning, like Césaire, for their countries to remain legally tied to France. In a referendum across the French Empire in September 1958 – two years before decolonization in French sub-Saharan Africa – only one country, Guinea, opted for outright independence. Senghor, the future president of independent Senegal and a close friend of Césaire (they had met in Paris as students), called for a federal structure that would bind France and its West African possessions in a new arrangement. Even as events seemed to tip the balance decisively in favour of national self-determination and a clean break – the Algerian war (from 1954), French withdrawal from Vietnam (1954), the independence of Morocco and Tunisia (1956), and Ghanaian independence (1957) – Senghor insisted that federation with France was essential for French-speaking West Africa. In 1955, by which time he had been an overseas deputy in the French National Assembly for ten years, he disparaged independence as an ‘iron collar’ and argued that federalism would herald a new area in which both Africans and Europeans would become full human beings, dispensing with the hierarchies that had divided them. </blockquote>
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David Reynolds in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Matthew Karp’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/22/slave-owners-foreign-policy/" target="_blank">This Vast Southern Empire – Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy</a>.
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<blockquote>
Karp argues that, in fact, the South saw itself as ultra-modern and forward-looking. Slave countries like Brazil and Cuba, pro-slavery leaders held, were prospering while places where slavery had been abolished, such as Mexico and the West Indies, were faring poorly. Slavery, therefore, appeared to southerners to make excellent economic sense for the modern world. American champions of human bondage noted that even England, despite its official policy of abolition, exploited indigenous peoples in India, China, South Africa, and elsewhere…. The southern view, Karp reminds us, was bolstered by contemporary scientific ethnology, which identified “inferior” races destined to die off unless they had the protection and security offered by American-style slavery. </blockquote>
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Eric Foner in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Sydney Nathans’ book, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n13/eric-foner/hallelujah-times" target="_blank">A Mind to Stay – White Plantation, Black Homeland</a>.
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<blockquote>
The Great Migration, as it came to be called, produced the modern urban ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities, which epitomized African-American life in the 20th century as surely as the Southern farm and plantation had in the 19th…. The fact is, however, that more blacks preferred to stay in the South than embark on the Great Migration, and far less attention has been paid to them. </blockquote>
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Clifford Thompson in WSJ on Lawrence Jackson’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/hollering-at-the-system-1503683564" target="_blank">Chester B. Himes</a>.
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<blockquote>
As Mr. Jackson notes, Himes was “the rare black writer to earn official condemnation from the NAACP.” Another irony of Himes’s career is that the very source of his later fame and financial success likely excluded him, at least initially, from the loftier reaches of literary repute. With <i>Cotton Comes to Harlem</i> and the other slim, biting, funny, wonderful novels featuring the super-tough black Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Himes forayed, as Wright, Ellison and Baldwin never did, into the supposedly less serious world of genre fiction. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are neither stooges of their white-run police department nor revolutionaries with badges. They are cops – unsentimental, devoted to their jobs and to each other, given to occasional, laconic musing about the way things are but hardly kept awake at night by having shot criminals during the day. </blockquote>
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Darryl Pinckney in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Claude McKay’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/22/claude-mckay-harlem-he-knew/" target="_blank">Amiable with Big Teeth – A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem</a>.
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<blockquote>
Then, too, it's as though McKay had got to that particular theme of anticommunism too early, or too rhetorically, too topically. He was writing his novel after the Hitler-Stalin pact had been made and broken. Yet his handling of politics differs so much in tone from that of the generation of black writers who found advancement with the Party when other doors to publication were closed to them because of racism. He remembered the tragic factional disputes in the early days of the Russian Revolution. Wright's brilliant autobiography, <i>Black Boy</i>, had its original ending of his fallout with the Communist Party cut when it was first published in 1945. The edited chapters were published on their own as <i>American Hunger</i> (1977). Among Chester Himes's early work is <i>Lonely Crusade</i> (1947), about Communist attempts to control a black union organizer at an airplane factory in California during the war. One of Wright's failures, <i>The Outsider</i> (1953), is also about Party efforts to manipulate a black frontman. And in <i>Invisible Man</i>, Ralph Ellison transforms his experience with the Communist Party into allegory. Perhaps the real difference is that McKay had never been one of the faithful, unlike [Langston] Hughes and Paul Robeson. </blockquote>
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Benjamin Nathans in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Yuri Slezkine’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/bolshevisms-new-believers/" target="_blank">The House of Government – A Saga of the Russian Revolution</a>.
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<blockquote>
Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, <i>The House of Government</i>, also situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology. </blockquote>
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Thomas Loy in NEW EASTERN EUROPE, <a href="http://neweasterneurope.eu/2017/10/04/connecting-histories-geographies-jews-central-asia/" target="_blank">The Jews of Central Asia</a>.
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<blockquote>
In the 1920s and early 30s, thousands of Jews fled from Soviet Central Asia – not merely because of religion or ideology this time, but in order to escape state persecution and the rapid deterioration of living and working conditions under Bolshevik rule. Bukharan Jewish religious dignitaries and entrepreneurs – the so-called NEP-men – were the first ones who fled. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin disposed of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and set up the first Five-Year Plan. Forced collectivization and sedentarisation brought about a drastic deterioration of living conditions in Soviet Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands opted to flee to northern Afghanistan – among them about 4,000 Bukharan Jews (about one-tenth of the community) trying to make their way to Palestine. Almost every Jewish family had relatives or friends among the refugees. Others left the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and moved to towns in the recently established Tajik SSR, where there were job prospects for the educated Tajik speakers. </blockquote>
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Gavin Jacobson in FT on Martin Goodman’s book, A History of Judaism, and Rebecca Abrams’ book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b4f5daf4-e007-11e7-a0d4-0944c5f49e46" target="_blank">The Jewish Journey</a>.
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<blockquote>
Writing to Martin Buber, the existentialist philosopher, in May 1917, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig set out his most passionate views on what he called “the Jewish question”. Seized by an irrepressible wanderlust, Zweig had spent the previous 10 years travelling throughout Europe, reveling in his being “homeless in the highest sense of the word”, where all places felt like home. “This supranational feeling of freedom from the madness of a fanatical world,” he wrote, “has saved me psychologically during these trying times, and I feel with gratitude that it is Judaism that has made this supranational feeling possible for me.” </blockquote>
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John Buntin in WSJ on Steven Ross’ book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-hitlers-plot-against-hollywood-1513373181" target="_blank">Hitler in Los Angeles, and Laura Rosensweig’s book, Hollywood’s Spies</a>.
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Schwinn and his Nazi-friendly colleagues dreamed of “der Tag,” the day when fascist storm troopers would defeat communist insurgents and take control of the U.S. government. But was this ever more than a delusional dream? “Perhaps,” is Mr. Ross’s answer. A professor at the University of Southern California, Mr. Ross is a distinguished historian of prewar Los Angeles. For someone of his stature, “perhaps” is disappointing answer. Fortunately, Laura Rosensweig’s <i>Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles</i> supplies the context that is often missing from Mr. Ross’s book. She starts with Leon Lewis’s spy operation itself. Los Angeles, Ms. Rosenzweig explains, was a city in which “political espionage was standard operating procedure.” The business community funded (and provided office space to) the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious “Red Squad,” which spied on communists and busted up labor unions. Citizen groups hired corrupt cops to rat out police misconduct. Communists angled for control of unions and ports. Business groups paid fascists to infiltrate the Communist Party. The Ku Klux Klan spied on both the fascists and the communists. In short, everyone was spying on everyone else. </blockquote>
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Andrew Ferguson in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/to-be-sure-nazis-are-evil/article/2010676" target="_blank">To Be Sure Nazis Are Evil</a>.
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There’s a trick in journalism called the “to-be-sure paragraph.” It is meant to get the readers off the reporter’s back, letting them know that the reporter is already familiar with the objections that may be forming in their minds. Say you’re writing a story for <i>Times</i> readers about the loveliness of rainbows. “To be sure,” the reporter will write, “the beauty we associate with rainbows often follows violent storms that tend to devastate poor areas while leaving wealthier enclaves relatively untouched.” Fausset’s real fault is that he didn’t salt his story with to-be-sure paragraphs. “He eats at Applebee’s,” he could have written, then reassured his readers by starting a new paragraph: “To be sure, eating at Applebee’s will do little to alter the fact that this Nazi is a creep.” “His pasta is delicious.” Then: “To be sure, delicious pasta doesn’t weigh much in the scales of this country’s history of racial injustice .??.??. ” <i>Times</i> readers are a needy bunch, craving reassurance at every turn. The reassurance they require is that their beliefs—even those that are shared by pretty much everybody, like anti-fascism—are true and righteous altogether. And they need to be reassured that the writers and editors of their favorite newspaper know this. They want to see it in print. </blockquote>
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Scott Stossel in WSJ on Nancy Schoenberger’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-wayne-and-ford-co-creating-masculinity-1513368844" target="_blank">Wayne and Ford</a>.
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<blockquote>
In retrospect, 1962 – the year of <i>The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</i> – was probably the year that “John Wayne” as a plausible ideal of manhood expired. Ford’s heroic vision curdled into the gothic sensibility of the Spaghetti westerns and their offshoots. By 1970 the western as valorizer o the white-hatted masculine hero was effectively dead. Yet at this moment of reckoning for men, maybe there remains some benefit to resuscitating the ideal that John Wayne, at his most mythical, represented. Ms. Schoenberger’s affection for him, and for her own war-hero father, is palpable. And no less gimlet-eyed an observer than Joan Didion, writing in 1965, offered up Wayne as her romantic beau ideal. So OK, then: Print the legend. </blockquote>
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Andrew Ferguson in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-more-times-are-a-changin-the-more-they-stay-the-same/article/2008493" target="_blank">The More Times Are A-Changin’, the More They Stay the Same</a>.
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<blockquote>
The classic formulation of the pro-Dylan argument was produced more than 15 years ago, during another Dylan plagiarism scandal, by a music critic for the <i>New York Times</i>: "The hoopla over [Dylan's plagiarism] is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next." Though wrong about everything else, this <i>Times</i> writer was right on the money when he mentioned the subject of "ownership." It is the nub of the matter. When Dylan takes other people's stuff for his own work, he doesn't just pass it along so that others in the "folk tradition" can then take it and claim it for their own, as part of the long glorious evolution of culture. No, he copyrights it. He makes people who want to use it pay for it. And he's got a nice big house in Malibu to prove it. </blockquote>
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Jim Farber in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/style/the-gay-architects-of-classic-rock.html?_r=0" target="_blank">The Gay Architects of Classic Rock</a>.
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The gay managers of that era were forthright about their sexuality, if only among friends and colleagues. Besides Mr. Epstein and Mr. Lambert, those men included Robert Stigwood (manager of Cream and the Bee Gees), Simon Napier-Bell (the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan), Billy Gaff (Rod Stewart), Ken Pitt (David Bowie), Barry Krost (Cat Stevens) and Larry Parnes (who molded pre-Beatles British rockers, including Tommy Steele and Billy Fury). Their sexual orientation was mirrored by Americans including Nat Weiss (who oversaw the Beatles’ business interests and later managed James Taylor), Danny Fields (who managed Iggy Pop and the Stooges and, later, the Ramones), as well as music moguls including David Geffen and Clive Davis (who identifies as bisexual). According to Mr. Napier-Bell, part of the reason British gay men of his era gravitated to the music business was because it was one of the few areas “where you could be out amongst yourselves. It was like a private club,” he said. “It was such a good life. You’d go to Robert Stigwood’s house and it was like a gay pub.” Jim Fouratt, who has worked in the music industry since the 1960s, believes the men in Mr. Napier-Bell’s circle brought to the emerging rock scene a special understanding of image. “As gay men, we have to remake ourselves in order to survive,” he said. “That matches perfectly with the masquerade of rock ’n’ roll, with the fantasy.” </blockquote>
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Heather Murphy in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/science/stanford-sexual-orientation-study.html" target="_blank">The ‘Gaydar’ Machine Causes an Uproar</a>.
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The software extracts information from thousands of facial data points, including nose width, mustache shape, eyebrows, corners of the mouth, hairline and even aspects of the face we don’t have words for. It then turns the faces into numbers. “We showed that this model produces slightly different numbers for gay and straight faces,” Dr. Kosinski said. The authors were then ready to pit their prediction model against humans in what would become a notorious gaydar competition. Both humans and machine were given pairings of two faces — one straight, one gay — and asked to pick who was more likely heterosexual. The participants, who were procured through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a supplier for digital tasks, were advised to “use the best of your intuition.” They made the correct selection 54 percent of the time for women and 61 percent of the time for men — slightly better than flipping a coin. Dr. Kosinski’s algorithm, by comparison, picked correctly 71 percent for of the time for women and 81 percent for men. When the computer was given five photos for each person instead of just one, accuracy rose to 83 percent for women and 91 percent for the men. </blockquote>
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Steven Poole in WSJ on Abigail Marsh’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-cruel-and-the-kind-1508280915" target="_blank">The Fear Factory</a>.
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It turns out the amygdales of altruists are the opposite to those of psychopaths: They are bigger and more active than ordinary people’s when shown frightened faces. In other words, they have an unusually high empathetic response to others’ fear. Together with that, altruists tend to be more frightened themselves by things, and there seems to be a strong link between this fear and a more vivid understanding of the fear of the others they feel driven to save, whether by donating an organ or running into a burning house. </blockquote>
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Maudlyne Ihejirika in CST, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/out-of-the-ashes-burned-pilgrim-baptist-to-finally-get-gospel-museum/" target="_blank">Chicago Chronicles – Church Revival</a>.
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On Jan, 6, 2006, workers hired for a $500,000 restoration of Chicago’s historic Pilgrim Baptist Church accidentally set its roof on fire. As many watched — drawn physically to the block or glued to televisions — scorching orange flames swallowed the interior of the renowned landmark designed in 1890 by engineer Dankmar Adler and architect Louis Sullivan; with it, priceless history. Since then, the limestone shell at 3301 S. Indiana has stood a vacant sentinel over the national birthplace of gospel music. But no more. “When I got the call in 2015 to come out to the church, seeing the ruins and the braces holding up its walls almost made me cry,” says Don Jackson, CEO of Chicago-based Central City Productions and founder of the 32-year-old Stellar Gospel Music Awards…. At the announcement Friday at nearby Illinois Institute of Technology, gospel greats like Marvin Sapp, Smokie Norful, Donald Lawrence and Charles Jenkins will be in attendance to celebrate a project culminating the decade-long effort to pay tribute to Pilgrim’s long-time music director, the “Father of Gospel Music,” Thomas A. Dorsey. Pilgrim’s music director from 1932 until the late ’70s, the former blues pianist created the music genre by blending Christian praise with the rhythms of jazz and blues, and drew top singers who would become gospel greats to perform at the church, e.g. Mahalia Jackson, Albertina Walker, Aretha Franklin, Sallie Martin, James Cleveland and the Staples Singers. </blockquote>
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Janan Ganesh in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/95c3c73c-8e3a-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d" target="_blank">How Sport Beat the Anti-Globalists</a>.
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There is no mystery to the gold rush when sport commands so many paying spectators. The mystery is why sport holds out against the world’s general turn away from globalisation. To judge by the data, international trade volumes, foreign direct investment and cross-border stocks of financial assets peaked before or just after the crash. More ineffably, the moral momentum behind the idea of openness has passed, too. Even Britain and America, nations that shaped those 30 liberal years from Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door speech to the fall of Lehman Brothers, are having a nativist moment. And there, steadfastly, is sport, colour-blind, passport-blind and near-nihilist in its pursuit of competitive excellence above all claims of blood and soil. The easy reply is that sport can do this because it does not matter. It is what Hugh McIlvanney, the best writer on the subject that Britain has produced, called “our magnificent triviality”. Expose people to the same pitiless competition in the factory or the office, where normal wages are earned, and things like Brexit happen. </blockquote>
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Bill Pennington in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/sports/football/nfl-huddle-offense.html" target="_blank">Ready, Set, Gone! The N.F.L.’s Disappearing Huddle</a>.
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The origin of the huddle appears to date to the 1890s, when it was first used by players at a school for the deaf, Gallaudet University, where quarterbacks had been communicating to teammates using sign language. Because both teams in games were often from schools for the hearing-impaired, the opposition could discern the play call by watching the quarterback’s hands. Gallaudet quarterback Paul Hubbard’s solution was to summon teammates into a huddle that shielded his team’s intentions. The practice spread throughout football, especially as teams left behind primitive, run-only schemes for more sophisticated formations that included forward passes. Various other universities have staked a claim to inventing the huddle, including Illinois, Georgia and Oregon, although a majority of early-20th-century football historians point to Hubbard and Gallaudet, in Washington, D.C. What is certain is that a huddle soon followed every play as football spiked in popularity. Stories from and about the huddle, a unique convention in a major American sport, began to color the historical narrative of the game, whether it was the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, Nile Kinnick, exhorting teammates in the huddle during an upset of Notre Dame or Baltimore Colts quarterback Unitas reconfiguring his team’s pass routes on the fly in the huddle. </blockquote>
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CT: <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-chicago-lost-sports-venues-htmlstory.html" target="_blank">Lost Sports Venues</a>.
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Eric Zweig in NYT,
<a href=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/sports/hockey/nhl-centennial-goalie-rules.html" target="new">When the N.H.L. Began Play, the Goalies Stood Tall. They Had to.</a>
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Small rosters and few substitutions meant the game was slower. Equipment was limited and rather primitive, providing only minimal protection. Players did not hit nearly as hard as they do today. The rules were different too. Forward passing was not yet permitted in the N.H.L.; it would begin to be phased in during the 1918-19 season. When play began with two games on Dec. 19, 1917, goalies were not even allowed to drop to the ice to make a save.... While perhaps not the game changer that forward passing became, it is hard to imagine modern hockey without goalies being allowed to leave their feet. Credit for the rule change has often been given to Clint Benedict, a Hall of Fame goalie with the Senators. Benedict’s habit of dropping to his knees to stop the puck had led Toronto fans to mockingly call him Praying Benny. “It was against the rules then,” Benedict told The Ottawa Journal in 1962, “but if you made it look like an accident, you could get away without a penalty. I got pretty good at it.”
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue…</b><br />
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/sports/hockey/johnny-bower-dead-hockey-goalie.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Johnny Bower</a> (1924-2017)
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Bower was one of hockey’s most talented and durable goalies. Facing flying pucks without donning a mask until his final full season, he lost almost all his teeth and needed at least 200 stitches in his face. He came out of his net to dive at opposing players on breakaways, exposing his face to their sharpened skates as he wielded his stick to poke-check the puck away….. “Glenn Hall, Terry Sawchuk, Jacques Plante, Johnny Bower — they were the heroes of my childhood,” Ken Dryden, the Montreal Canadiens’ Hall of Fame goalie, wrote in his book “The Game” (1983). “Performing before my adolescent eyes, they did unimaginable things in magical places. Everything they did was braver and better than I had ever seen before.” </blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/obituaries/iulian-vlad-ex-chief-of-romanias-feared-secret-police-dies-at-86.html" target="_blank">Iulian Vlad</a> (1931-2017)
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Ceausescu sought to quell the uprising by ordering his security forces to shoot to kill instead of firing blanks — an order that General Vlad apparently disobeyed. Either because he was genuinely fed up with the failing regime or because he detected the shifting political winds, General Vlad declared on state radio — one day after Ceausescu fled the capital — that he was joining the revolutionaries. He later claimed credit, along with another general, Stefan Gusa, for averting a civil war and preventing Russia from seizing Moldova and Hungary from grabbing Transylvania. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were captured by soldiers, tried and executed on Christmas Day 1989. Adrian Nastase, a former prime minister of Romania, wrote on his blog this week that he respected General Vlad’s “efforts to temper the situation in the country before 1989 and to ensure the defense of the country’s interests at the end of the Cold War.” </blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/asia/ur-rao-dead-india-space-program.html" target="_blank">U.R. Rao</a> (1932-2017)
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The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India’s space program was being born. And helping to steer it was U. R. Rao, who believed that science — particularly aerospace science — could help his country solve its food shortages and eradicate its poverty. He would begin toiling there, pursuing his vision with other scientists, from offices in a converted bishop’s house. Eighteen years later, on Nov. 21, 1980, their efforts bore fruit when the former churchyard became the scene of India’s first rocket launch, giving the country a foothold in an exclusive club of spacefaring nations. </blockquote>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-33921757924815332732017-06-20T08:40:00.000-07:002018-01-08T21:50:18.519-08:00Issue #153 (June 20, 2017)<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Line Shed along WY130</span></b><br />
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<!--- ORIGINAL CHINA MAP STILL NOT GOOD THOGUH --->
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One Road; map by South China Morning Post
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<b>One Belt – One Road, But Many Chinas</b><br />
Joe Carducci
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<blockquote>
<i>“There is only one China, not two, in this world. On this we agree. All Chinese people, including you and compatriots abroad, absolutely will not allow the American plot forcibly to create two Chinas to come true. The present age is an age full of hope. All patriots have a future and should not be afraid of the imperialists…. These words of ours are well-intentioned and bear no ill-will. You come to understand them by and by.”</i>
Peng Teh-huai, PRC Minister of Defense,
Message to Compatriots in Taiwan, Oct. 25 1958;
Chinese Mainland and Taiwan (<i>Third World</i>)
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The touchiness of Chinese Communists over what is China and what Chinese or anyone else says about it indicates how brittle the now powerful state remains. The brittleness of the Party, the last organization still standing and claiming to divine the Science of History as Marx revealed it, is now mirrored society-wide as the Politburo has burrowed into the carcass of Imperial China, the Middle Kingdom, for what temporary warmth can be got as the trail of History goes cold. Philip Roth may have predicted President Trump but Karl Marx did not. Social media may be keeping embassy windows and western or non-Chinese eastern businesses from being smashed all across China, but the racing fever-dreams of the young and wireless as they mob-up on-line to become a numbers-drunk critical-mass threatens far worse. The <i>South China Morning Post</i> reports on these mainland and overseas Chinese youth and differentiates them from what it calls the “50 cent gang” who are actually paid to fill cyberspace with cheers for the Party line. The Hong Kong paper recently explained <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2095458/rise-little-pink-chinas-young-angry-digital-warriors" target="_blank">The Rise of Little Pink</a>, a naturally-occurring mob of connected college-age Chinese women who can be counted on to mass against Western outrages against a perpetually wounded Chinese pride seeking perverse confirmations such as the recent graduation day comments of a Chinese co-ed grateful for her experience at the Univ. of Maryland. The poor girl is now an infamous race-traitor to her own generation. <br />
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This is worrisome because the Communist Party of China demands to rule over the lands it claims: the historical high-water mark of an empire – the Party’s historical enemy no less. And further this is how today’s Han elite seeks to use other, namely the Manchu, Song, and Mongol empires who once ruled over them to profit centuries later on their own conquest. Racially, it’s as if the Han take the provincial Westerner’s view that sees “Asian eyes” everywhere from Jakarta to Vladivostok and Osaka to Warsaw and calls it “Chinese” and demand it be China. It was charming when Peruvian peasants in cute bowlers cheered their past President, Alberto Fujimori, as “El Chino” or “The Chinaman” when he was actually the son of Japanese immigrants to Peru, but it means something different if Han Chinese claim Manchu, Mongol and other peoples to build a demographic rule.<br />
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What is China? And who are the Chinese? Communists without Communism lean heavily on nationalism, but which nation? Surrounding the Han are many national minorities who routinely find themselves on the wrong end of a Han demands. They must identify as Chinese while not receiving any true option to partake in the nation’s economic boom. Even when major infrastructure projects are paving over their own provincial capitals the jobs go to imported Chinese – which is to say Han – labor. In old American parlance these provincials might offer that they do not have a Chinaman’s chance. Han labor is already resented as a kind of double-scab scam from Kashgar to Kenya and the ambitious One Belt One Road plan to re-track distribution roads, railroads, and shipping routes of the Eurasian supercontinent hasn’t even begun.<br />
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When considering the linguistic groups of China and their many dialects clustered around a common script one can see the Peoples Republic of China as more equivalent to the polyglot Roman Empire circa 1000-1600 A.D. than a single nation. That empire evolved into about ten more-or-less organic countries. The husk of Imperial China as administered by a Han-dominated Communist Party may not evolve into ten states but that might only be because Tibet (plus at least Qinhua province), and Xinjiang (or East Turkestan as the native Hui and Uighur might call it) won’t be sticking around. Demographic engineering by emperors was done before literacy never mind cellphone cameras could record the destruction and keep it front and center as a roadmap for revanchism if not revenge. The China-building the CPC is doing today in western and southern provinces will survive about as long as the Soviet Union held together once the threat of state violence receded. (One wonders how Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman Imperium will express itself eastward toward its own origins in Central Asia and Mongolia and it meets the Han national project.)<br />
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Anthropologist Dru Gladney has written about the deceptive demographics of China for years. He writes that “the supposedly homogenous Han speak eight mutually unintelligible tongues” and even “these linguistic subgroups show marked internal diversity.” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/22/opinion/22iht-eddru.html" target="_blank">NYT</a>) Philip Ball, long-time editor of <i>Nature</i> magazine, writes in his recent book, <i>The Water Kingdom</i>, that the Yangtze River is referred locally to by many different names along its upriver stretches and that:
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“China is cloven in two by the Long River, and the two halves could seem like separate nations: the north cold and dry, the south hot and wet. In the north you eat wheat noodles; in the south, rice. Northerners, it is said, are tall and haughty, whether eastern Manchurian stock or Islamic Uyghurs to the west. The southerners, in contrast, are earthy, pragmatic, always on the make, a patchwork of minority races and mutually incomprehensible dialects. That division – decreed by nature, patrolled by the Yangtze – establishes the defining tension within the nation, in which the question is how unity can persist in the face of such a disparity of the most fundamental resource, water.” (<a href="http://laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/water-margin" target="_blank">Lapham’s Quarterly</a>)</span></blockquote>
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Gladney also noted in 1995 that “Comedians used to make fun of southern ways and accents, but southerners now scorn northerners for their lack of sophistication and business acumen.” Gradually there’s been internal tourism developing in China and one presumes the old prejudices might be weakening. But it’s not so likely that urban or coastal Chinese will be swept by manias for their own minority cultures the way Americans were since the Indian subject silent pictures, jazz, Hawai’iana, et. al., from the early 20th century on.<br />
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It seemed likely to me at the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China that the uniquely free-est economic entity of Hong Kong, sheltered even from politics under the British Crown for a century, was more likely to have its way with the mainland than that it would be tamed by the Politburo. Indeed Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoism today might be seen as a belated attempt to rein in what Hong Kong’s Cantonese culture has wrought. The CPC attacks “foreign” or “western” influences but these may now be code for the Hong Kong culture now inside the tent. I remember seeing the dramatic high-security testimony of one of the Colombian cartel’s former accountants before the Congress; he warned that the drug kingpins were naïve and that with their merger with the FARC Communists the cocaine trade would come to serve the Revolution and spread it with the drug. But he was wrong. The Left had lost its true belief in the doctrines of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao…, and its revolutionary “piety” had ripened for the temptations of capital. And the firmest historical materialist finds that Adam Smith’s invisible hand gives a hell of a handjob.<br />
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Race-nations, whether they possess actual nation-state borders or not, protect their people’s creation story and their “just innocence,” let’s call it. Many an aboriginal group self-identified with their term for “human beings,” thus bracketing their neighbors with animals. The Republic of Turkey has long insisted on referring to Kurds as “Mountain Turks” and banned their language and still fights a decades-long war against their resistance to the Turks embrace. Europe’s wars in the first half of the 20th century were so destructive that the behavior of the major combatants (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain, Russia…) was finally altered. Still the two World Wars delivered a late high-water mark to a Russian Empire now administered by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Russians fomented third world “wars of national liberation” but they themselves fought only actions to suppress the national aspirations of the U.S.S.R.’s constituent peoples, especially its recent acquisitions in Eastern Europe. But Germany’s national penance was something new as demanded by the Allies, in particular FDR. Douglas MacArthur oversaw Japan’s penance and she was allowed to retain some measure of “just innocence” regarding her Emperor’s and his people’s culpability. Today only Tayyip Erdogan at his most intemperate refers to Nazi crimes when critiquing present day German national behavior. This is not the case with Japan and its imperial past’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Japan’s successive apologies are judged insufficient and new ones demanded all-around by both the PRC and Taiwan and by both North and South Korea.<br />
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Residual Marxism and Confucianism makes China’s modernizing path particularly hard to guess because the Party and the country are conflicted as they seek to pick up where the Imperial Middle Kingdom left off. And the Party is now orphaned with the death of its big brother Russian Party. Has China’s insularity withstood its capitalist revolution? The original movement for <i>International</i> Socialism ended during and after WWI when Bolshevik-assisted revolts failed in Hungary, Germany, Estonia, Mongolia and China. Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin sidelined Trotsky and determined to build “socialism in one country”. Thereafter the Comintern, the organization for International Socialism, was corrupted and fraternal Parties became fifth columns conspiring with the U.S.S.R. against their own nation-states whether they were kingdoms, bourgeois democracies, military regimes or, indeed, people’s democracies. That was all National Socialism, strictly speaking, only with strange fealties to the Kremlin as if Russian National Socialism’s late secular imperialist phase could rationalize the destruction of other national histories, cutting cultural anchors and vaulting them into modernity.<br />
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In retrospect, it’s that Mao’s Peoples Republic of China deferred to the Kremlin for so long that tells us that Mao initially did believe he was a modernizing follower of his Russian big brother’s revolution. But ex-peasant Communists whether in Russia or China couldn’t imagine much beyond some futurist’s fantasy of smokestacks, tractors and armaments grinding up the feudal past. An interlocked system of satellites, radars and hardened silos of nuclear ICBMs was the outer limit of their Industrial Age imaginations. Within those limits the Russians proved excellent strategic chess-masters. (Hitler used his National Socialist modernizing project to overturn the chessboard on a single wager on armageddon.) The Chinese Party rejected the Russian Party’s denunciation of Stalin, as limited as it was. And when China got the Bomb in 1964 Mao had already tipped back into pure social destruction: The Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-57), The Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-59), The Great Leap Forward (1958-62), and The Cultural Revolution (1966-76). These internal convulsions may have killed more people than WWII. The world is fortunate Mao did not use his nukes.<br />
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Portraits of all that Maoist chaos within the PRC keep coming and these books ought to revise conventional wisdom’s long ago dismissals of Douglas MacArthur’s, Chaing Kai-Shek’s, and others’ confidence that the Communists could have been routed, the “lost” China regained, and millions saved. Not that it was America’s job to keep fighting but in fact the PRC was vulnerable as the Party was myopically destroying its cultural inheritance and exterminating so-called class enemies and minority elites and inventing or creating internal enemies when these ran out. Still, the People’s Liberation Army was able to invade North Korea (1950) and Tibet (1959), as well as militarily assert its border claims against India (1962) and Russia (1969) and be effective via sheer numbers or superior organization. But in terms of the internal killings of their own peoples Mao may get a perverse pass that Hitler and Stalin do not since the West does not recognize the many non-Han Chinese and cannot tell if there might be a race-war or clan-war going on rather than the class-war advertised.<br />
<br />
There are interesting “wrong” notes in the music of the current East-West diplomatic dance which are probably melodious within the Chinese musical scale but sound discordant from outside. For example, North Korea. Why would modern China continue to keep the DPRK on a leash when its behavior has set off the rewriting of Japan’s “peace constitution” and kept South Korea in America’s military embrace? Japan was resisting any reconfiguring of its defense posture but North Korea’s behavior itself has made the argument that Japan must become a “normal” country with an autonomous military power commensurate with its economic clout. Maps of the historical dynastic rulers of China are inconsistent but interesting. Several dynasties including the Han dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.) which is considered China’s “golden age” are routinely shown in maps as covering the area of North Korea. Not something the PRC is pressed on at the U.N., say, but an answer to our question suggests itself.<br />
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President Trump’s dispatching of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the Paris Climate Accord has pushed China forward just as it was beginning to market its own One Belt – One Road initiative making global use of its Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. These moves on the world’s stage put Beijing forward as another Rome, the fourth one if one concedes Moscow was the third. But the unusually un-Chinese ballyhoo surrounding these moves was conceived against the Obama administrations busy internationalizing and the enduring <i>Pax Americana</i>. Trump’s threats to move America back to a paleo-conservative foreign policy that the Chinese do not remember scares Xi and so that meeting at Mar-a-Lago happened pronto. Pulling the United States back from the world stage might leave China and Xi Jinping onstage solo as Obama’s old key light swings over onto Xi, the world looking on. Xi may be the new “core” leader of the Peoples Republic of China but this is not what he had in mind.<br />
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<i>(illustrations: “Dynasties in China 1000 BCE to Present – Wikipedia; “Warring States era 453 BC to 221 BC – Wikipedia; “The Mongol Empires of Eurasia”)</i>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mirror Lake</span></b></div>
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<b>Jack Brewer / Saccharine Trust</b>
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facebook thread (abridged) May 3-4, 2017:
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<br />
David McClure<br />
<i>¡Que vive El Patch Crew!</i>
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Joey Slab<br />
<i>Si se puede, cue Joe Baiza's "piercing" guitar riff/slide</i>
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Mark Dziga<br />
<i>Jack Brewer is my name , Concrete is the game.</i>
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Joey Slab<br />
<i>I'm glad you came to that Saccharine gig in the desert Mark Dziga</i>
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Mark Dziga<br />
<i>I had a great time ... thank you.</i>
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Chris Stein<br />
<i>You look good, Jack.</i>
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Tim Hogan<br />
<i>Looking lean and mean brother</i>
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Ralph Gorodetsky<br />
<i>Weren't you in the pillage people?</i>
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Joe Dean<br />
<i>Good band.</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>5 months of back breaking construction wears you out and stretches you. But takes away the pounds. Not a diet plan I would wish on anyone. Yet an effective one.</i>
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Edward Huerta<br />
<i>seriously, you do look good Jack….</i>
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Andy Shelton<br />
<i>Jack M Brewer, keep up the great work! This is a great photo of you!</i>
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Joey Slab<br />
<i>If you are driving on an LA freeway chances are Jack Brewer had something to do with the construction or maintenance of it</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>Well, most likely after this job is over I'll go back to firewatch- 12 hours a night, 7 nights a week, of standing watching other people work and weld. I'll have no time again for exercise. So the weight may come back. And this could just be my short stint of dabbling in vanity. Or maybe I'll get another construction job? We'll see...</i>
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Curt Crosby<br />
<i>Firewatch is so boring. Same with Holewatch</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>Yes, you have been there. Who did you work for?</i>
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Curt Crosby<br />
<i>I worked in refineries, with a contractor company called Ramcon. Did about 10 years mostly in Exxon. Almost miss it now</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>Yeah, I know how you feel. With all of the screaming, yelling, the physical demands, the sledge hammer, the heat, the pressure to work unsafely and quickly, I almost miss the sanity of the refineries. Irwin and Transfield.</i>
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Curt Crosby<br />
<i>Irwin! They practically ran Exxon when I started.</i>
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Curt Crosby<br />
<i>Refinery work is rough, but if you can handle the physical aspect, it ain't bad pay. I feel like I'm too old now</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>They did. Then they lost the contract because their civil crew made a mistake. I remember Irwin's civil crew at Chevron- few of them had any construction experience. Hardly any grading, paving, concrete or structural experience. All most of them knew how to do was distribute 5 gallon water jugs.</i>
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Curt Crosby<br />
<i>I remember that at Exxon. They were poised to get the contract for the ESP. Then they got booted for safety violations. I ended up running that job. Nightmare! Were you at Exxon for that?</i>
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Jack M Brewer<br />
<i>No I came in just after that. Though I did work at the Exxon that was close to Goleta or Camarillo - somewhere in that area. Around 2013.</i>
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<i>(reprinted by permission)</i>
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Saccharine Trust –
<a href="http://waterunderthebridgerecords.bigcartel.com/product/saccharine-trust-the-great-one-is-dead-2xlp-mp3" target="_blank">“The Great One Is Dead” </a> (Water Under the Bridge)
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Snowy Range from Libby Circle</span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<b>Byron Coley <a href="http://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/coley-byron-defense-against-squares-book/LOIE.BC2.html" target="_blank">“Defense Against Squares” </a> / Poems</b>
<i>(L’Oie de Cravan)</i>
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KINNELON HIGH
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<br />
when i travel around now<br />
it seems to me there are<br />
a lot less women smoking<br />
than there used to be
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<br />
surely some of this<br />
is a function of our age<br />
in which smoking is banned<br />
almost everywhere you go
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<br />
but it also appears the gender ratio has changed<br />
women have, perhaps, smartened up<br />
more successfully than their male companions<br />
who are now in the preponderance
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<br />
of smokers huddled around the entrances<br />
of the clubs and bars of our land<br />
grabbing an all but illicit lungfull of tobacco smoke<br />
with the haunted scent of guilt heavy on their bodies
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<br />
it makes me remember the pleasure<br />
of hanging out with the tough hippie girls<br />
i went to high school with<br />
girls who loved their cigs as much as anyone
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<br />
tara brinker smoked marlboros<br />
lainie crawford smoked kools<br />
sharon baust smoked kents<br />
maria gowan smoked whatever she could bum<br />
and we would loiter around the kolt korral<br />
the outdoor pavilion near kinnelon high<br />
where upper classmen were allowed<br />
to linger during free periods, smoking lazily
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i would read them funny stories i’d written<br />
and they’d laugh and snort appreciatively<br />
smoke bursting from their mouths and nostrils<br />
when a line caught them in an unexpected way
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<br />
they all looked incredible to me then<br />
sexy and knowing and wise for their 17 years<br />
and the fact that i, at 15, was able to make them<br />
erupt with smoke-filled laughter
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<br />
gave me a sense of self-worth so palpable<br />
so new to me, that i will never forget it<br />
and i am sorry things have changed so much<br />
that few teenagers today will be give this same gift
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<br />
because there is something truly powerful<br />
about the process<br />
and it is a combination i will never fail to marvel at<br />
girls and laughter and smoke
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<i>(reprinted by permission)</i>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Snowy Range</span></b></div>
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<b>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…</b>
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<br />
Stephen Bayley in the <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/my-part-in-the-expensive-calamity-that-was-the-millennium-dome/" target="_blank">SPECTATOR</a> on <i>My part in the expensive calamity that was the Millennium Dome</i>:
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<blockquote>
People forget now that the Millennium Dome was a Heseltine project that Blair inherited. Whether or not to take it on was considered a test of New Labour’s resolve and Peter Mandelson was the Chosen One to demonstrate such resolution. One day he came in to address a nervous staff team, his pager pinging like a Geiger counter. ‘I believe in art, design and excellence,’ he cooed assuringly and left a long dramatic pause before adding: ‘However, I am a politician.’
I piped up: ‘So there are times you don’t believe in art, design and excellence then?’ They say it took minutes for the chill to leave the room.</blockquote>
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<br />
^^^
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<br />
John Gray in <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/05/fellow-travellers-and-useful-idiots" target="_blank">NEW STATESMAN</a>, Fellow-travellers and useful idiots
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<blockquote>
Fellow-travellers may sometimes look like opportunists, but it is opportunism of a particular kind – the belief that the regime with which they identify is being propelled by irresistible historical forces. Yet history mocks all such certainties. Those who embraced the Soviet cause in the 1930s did so in the conviction that capitalism was doomed, along with nationalism and religion. In the introduction to his 1968 account of his years as a Soviet agent, <i>My Silent War</i>, Kim Philby wrote complacently: “As I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.” Philby died in May 1988. Just a few years later, the solid foundations he admired from his study window had collapsed. Blending authentically Bolshevik methods of government-by-fear with crony capitalism, ethnic nationalism and resurgent religious Orthodoxy, the regime that emerged from the ruins would have been inconceivable to him.</blockquote>
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<br />
^^^
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<br />
James Wolcott in the <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n10/james-wolcott/enemies-for-ever?utm_source=LRB+icymi&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170520+icymi&utm_content=ukrw_nonsubs" target="_blank">LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS</a> on the re-publication of <i>Making It</i> by Norman Podhoretz:
<br />
<blockquote>
With <i>Making It</i>, Podhoretz was stepping up into Mailer’s heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on <i>Making It</i>, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the spring 1968 issue of <i>Partisan Review</i> (grisly particulars to follow), it was an ‘Et tu, Brute?’ moment – ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ (Carry on Cleo) – that eventually severed their friendship and sent Podhoretz into a year-long depression to lick his wounds. He would keep licking them for decades, nursing his grievances into a fine kettle of vendettas. Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts.</blockquote>
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^^^
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Simon Reynolds in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/19/doctors-of-madness-punk" target="_blank">GUARDIAN</a>, <i>Doctors of Madness, the band that prophesied punk – and then disappeared</i>
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In [Richard] Strange’s telling, the turning point in the tale comes when the Sex Pistols supported Doctors of Madness at Middlesborough Town Hall, on 21 May 1976. “Watching them from the side of the stage, I realised it was all over for us – the goalposts were suddenly moved. We were probably three years older than them, no more, but the generational difference was seismic.” Compounding the injury and insult of being consigned to the old wave in one fell swoop, Doctors of Madness’s clothes were rifled for cash during their headlining performance, with the guttersnipe Pistols doubtless scarpering from the dressing room and cackling all the way to the nearest pub.</blockquote>
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Byron Coley interviewed by Tony Rettman at <a href="http://clrvynt.com/byron-coley-interview/" target="_blank">CLRYNT</a> on his new volume of poetry and why he has no time for squares:
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The state of rock journalism is something that causes me to lose very little sleep. There are always some good writers who have original ideas and insights, and then there's a vast landscape crammed with careerist sheep. Why anyone thinks there's a living to be made in the field is something I can't quite figure out, but there are so many mimetic dogfish out there, I think the rumor must be floating somewhere that it's a solid job choice. It is always galling to me to see one-sheets I write for records get paraphrased as "reviews," but it's nothing new. Might be more prevalent now, since there's an idiotic rush to be the first one to write some lousy words about a new record, with little consideration of whether the writing is any good. People seem very afraid to express any actual opinion about material that hasn't already been written about by someone else. They can react to opinions, but not to the music itself.</blockquote>
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Robert Christgau interviewed at <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/robert-christgaus-theory-of-pop/19768?utm_content=buffer7aebc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.WS8Dc9y1vIW" target="_blank"><i>spiked-online.com</i></a> on <i>The art of pop</i>:
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And yet, he still makes room in what he calls his ‘theory of pop’ for the underground and the avant-garde. He calls it ‘semi-popular music’, ‘music that is appreciated… for having all the earmarks of popular music except one: popularity’. ‘The novel started out as a diversion for ladies of leisure, and it evolved into something else’, he tells me. ‘That is what happens to [artforms]. They have formal characteristics, and if you like the art you enjoy the formal characteristics. And some people are going to do stuff with those formal characteristics that are not going to serve the social function that they were originally designed to serve. It’s just built into the form, into the whole activity of making art. And if you like the art, and if it gives you pleasure – another important concept for me – well then you’re going to enjoy those things, because you are in fact an aesthete. I have no problem with being an aesthete. I am an aesthete. But not, I hope, too rarefied an aesthete.’</blockquote>
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John/Jonh Ingham interviewed at <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/rare-photos-of-the-1970s-british-punk-scene" target="_blank">VICE</a> about his new photo book <i>Spirit of 76: London Punk Eyewitness</i>:
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What fascinated me about that [Sex Pistols show] was, it was an invite-only because they were shooting it for a TV show—like, a current-affairs show. And yet half the people there you'd never seen for a current-affairs show, like ever. There's a guy with a long hair and an overcoat, and the guy that's on the cover of the book—never saw them before. The two girls who are handcuffed together in the black leather and plastic—never seen them before, never saw them again. All these people had kind of come out of somewhere, and that's what prompted how the book ends. Because a lot of the original people were going, "Oh, look at these guys! I mean, who are these people? It's terrible now!" I was kind of shocked that people who were 20, 21, were so kind of pessimistic and cynical. It's a very young age to kind of think the world is finished.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiOkM25zZRadePY8cdhV9cRqNOycXxfCX-ykuVJBTWS0G09oL0hWzfnIl1T5-tlHHxuwoOi9_WKAZe2mPQWbVQlbpThJ1YaL5QAP-NlU9hv54fNCfc_cOq8oLRMhPcFv8767x0u0NzJhmA/s1600/NV-153-beeho-uncommonpeople.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="227" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiOkM25zZRadePY8cdhV9cRqNOycXxfCX-ykuVJBTWS0G09oL0hWzfnIl1T5-tlHHxuwoOi9_WKAZe2mPQWbVQlbpThJ1YaL5QAP-NlU9hv54fNCfc_cOq8oLRMhPcFv8767x0u0NzJhmA/s320/NV-153-beeho-uncommonpeople.png" width="209" /></a></div>
Julie Burchill in the <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/when-real-rock-stars-roamed-the-world/" target="_blank">SPECTATOR</a> on David Hepworth's book <i>Uncommon People</i>.
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But of course the fall of the rock star is not all gloom and doom: it’s not awfully good for human beings to worship other human beings, either as love objects or love slaves. In such situations, it’s not even clear whether we were actually adoring another person or conducting a scenic-route romance with an idealised version of ourselves. My husband, with admirable masculine brusqueness, has noted a phenomenon he calls ‘tearleading’ — that of ululating groups of people getting together to competitively mourn dead celebs on social media — which may well have as much to do with their own sorrow that their lives have not matched up to their teenage dreams as with the deceased.</blockquote>
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Doug Sheppard in <a href="http://ugly-things.com/reuniting-with-reunions-how-reunion-albums-hold-up-plus-thoughts-on-the-new-stones-album/" target="_blank">UGLY THINGS</a>, <i>How Reunion Albums Hold Up</i>.
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Iggy’s reunion with the Asheton brothers and replacement Mike Watt on bass was absolutely transcendent live—at last giving the Stooges a chance to bask in overdue glory. They had fun in the studio, too, but unfortunately no songs.</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sheep Mountain from Centennial Ridge</span></b></div>
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<b>From the Wyoming desk of Joe Carducci…</b>
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David Vines in CAIXIN, <a href="http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-05-17/101091483.html" target="_blank">One Belt, One Road: China’s 21st Century Marshall Plan? </a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span arial="" font-size:="" small="">Will the Belt and Road initiative come to look like the Marshall Plan? It is clear that there will eventually be a huge amount of money on the table for the Belt and Road initiative — current estimates suggest $1 trillion. China has also begun to create its own instruments of economic cooperation, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). But will those who are creating the Belt and Road initiative and the AIIB be able to work with RCEP parties to create a framework of international cooperation that benefits all? There are two main risks. The first risk concerns China’s own policy in developing the Belt and Road initiative. Although China has described the initiative as inclusive and designed to create mutual benefit, this may not turn out to be the case. The AIIB may actually encourage those countries with which it carries out investment to look inward or back toward China. The Belt and Road initiative might conceivably become no more than a gigantic instrument of supply-chain management for China, creating the kind of jobs that drive an enormous Chinese production machine. These firms might pay low wages in the Belt and Road countries, and might confine the resulting value added to coastal China…. The second risk concerns the policies that other countries have toward China. Many in Europe fear that China will use Belt and Road in the way outlined above, or fear that the initiative has long-term political and strategic implications for Europe itself. </span></span></blockquote>
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Tushar Ranjan Mohanty at <i>satp.org</i>, <a href="http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/latest/index.html" target="_blank">Balochistan: The Chinese Chequered</a>.
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The killing of the Chinese couple has underscored questions about the security of Chinese workers in Pakistan, and the country's centrality to China's ambitious One Belt One Road initiative. The centrepiece of the 'new Silk Route' plan, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), passes through insurgency-hit Balochistan.... On June 14, 2017, however, South Korea rejected Pakistan's contention that the slain Chinese nationals were preaching Christianity under the guise of studying Urdu at a school run by a South Korean. An unnamed South Korean official asserted that there was no evidence to show the couple was involved in proselytizing under Seo's guidance. Meanwhile, China's official media <i>Global Times</i> has criticized South Korean Christian groups for converting young Chinese and sending them to proselytize in Muslim countries. The kidnapping was a rare crime against Chinese nationals in Pakistan, but has alarmed the growing Chinese community in the country.... Pakistan currently hosts a sizeable Chinese population and the numbers are slated to grow as the project progresses. Concern about the demographic transformation of Balochistan was reiterated in a report by the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) on December 28, 2016, which noted that, at the current rate of influx of Chinese national into Balochistan and after completion of the CPEC, the native population of the area would be outnumbered by 2048.</blockquote>
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Edward Wong in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/18/world/asia/mongolian-warriors-and-communist-soldiers-a-frontier-town-in-china.html" target="_blank">Mongolian Warriors and Communist Soldiers: A Frontier Town in China</a>.
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Though the party’s ethnic policies are contentious, there has been a revived interest in some parts of China in the languages and traditions of smaller ethnic groups. Sometimes this has strong support by the national government, as in the case of the Manchus. In other instances, ordinary people or community officials drive the revival. “There is this new sub-ethnic consciousness,” said Peter C. Perdue, a historian at Yale University who has studied the Qing conquest of Xinjiang. “The Chahar want to say they are a separate ethnic group, not mixed in with the other Mongolians there.” “You hear about the Uighurs all the time there,” he added, referring to a Turkic-speaking group in Xinjiang. “The other minority people are also trying to regenerate a sense of their identity, in a somewhat different sense than the way the People’s Republic of China assigns ethnic labels to people.”
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South Asia Democratic Forum: <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/obor-discussion-takes-place-in-the-european-parliament-hosted-by-sadf-621447053.html" target="_blank">Chinese OBOR Discuss in the European Parliament</a>.
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In his address, Ryszard Czarnecki, MEP, cautioned European countries not to take at face value Chinese claims that OBOR would result in a win-win situation for all partners. He drew specific attention to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship OBOR project being implemented on the ground, which had run into deep opposition from locals who saw it as a means of further exploiting their resources, in keeping with the Chinese track record in Africa. In his remarks, Fulvio Martusciello, MEP, referred to the currently stalled Belgrade-Budapest railway project, and stated that the unscrupulous methods adopted by China only further confirmed suspicions about the long-term objectives of OBOR. He opined that through OBOR, China would not only acquire companies in Europe, it would also try and impose Chinese regulations, standards and gradually increase its influence over countries in the region, making their economic growth dependent on China. </blockquote>
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Catherine Wong in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2096860/chinas-long-reach-europe-test-eu-resolve" target="_blank">How a History of Divisive Tactics Has Made the European Union Suspicious of China</a>.
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European diplomats said suspicions ran deep over China’s geopolitical intentions in Europe, particularly with its massive trade and infrastructure plan, the “Belt and Road Initiative”. Some European diplomats said the plan would benefit the continent by boosting economic development among the bloc’s less developed member states. Others said China’s aid and investment in Africa and the Middle East also helped to ease pressure of mass migration into Europe. Nevertheless, doubts were mounting over just how sincere China was in promoting free trade, they said. “The initiative is about promoting globalisation, which is positive,” one European diplomat said. “But it comes with Chinese characteristics. So it’s not really the liberal, market-oriented, rules-based globalisation that we would like to see. It seems to be more about hierarchy.” That scepticism was also evident last month when representatives from several European countries refused to sign a trade statement at the belt and road summit in Beijing. European diplomats said the main reasons for not getting behind the document drafted by China were a lack of discussions among the participating nations. “The way the trade declaration was drafted, without really consulting anybody, suggests a Sinocentric mindset,” the diplomat said. </blockquote>
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Minnie Chan in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2096749/beijing-cancels-its-shangri-la-dialogue-rival-soothe" target="_blank">Beijing Cancels its Sharngri-La Dialogue rival, the Xiangshan Forum, to Soothe Neighbors</a>.
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As a high-level platform to discuss Asian security and defence issues, the Xiangshan Forum was initially held every two years but was upgraded to an annual event in 2014. It is widely believed the forum was designed to rival the Asia Security Forum in Singapore. A Beijing-based retired senior colonel said Beijing wanted to downplay its miliary role this year to pacify its neighbours in the hope of attracting more support for “One Belt, One Road” initiatives of President Xi Jinping. “China realised that it should not frighten its Asian neighbours but create a stable security situation in Asia-Pacific that will help Beijing convince other small countries to join the Belt and Road initiatives,” the veteran, who also requested anonymity, told the <i>Post</i>. The Xiangshan Forum has sparked controversy due to its role as a rival to the Shangri-la Dialogue. </blockquote>
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Catherine Wong in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2096913/india-pakistan-set-join-china-led-security-group" target="_blank">Security Trumps Rivalry as India, Pakistan to Join China-led Regional Bloc</a>.
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The accession of India and Pakistan as full members of the body will be formally announced during its annual summit on June 8 and 9 in Astana, Kazakhstan, which will be attended by President Xi Jinping. The inclusion of the two countries, who previously held observer status, will “add to the potential and the global influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation”, China’s assistant foreign minister, Li Huilai, said on Monday. The SCO, seen by some as a counterweight to the US- and European-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), is a political and security organisation that facilitates counter-terrorism cooperation. Its members are China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. </blockquote>
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Salman Masood in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/world/asia/pakistan-chinese-couple-killed.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Chinese Couple Abducted in Pakistan Have Been Killed, Officials Say</a>.
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The killing of the Chinese couple comes at a time when China is expanding its outreach in Pakistan under a multibillion-dollar economic cooperation initiative known as One Belt, One Road, which includes joint infrastructure and industrial projects. A number of Chinese have been traveling to Pakistan for this initiative, also known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. There are growing concerns over the security of foreigners working on the venture. Mr. Khan, the interior minister, said in his statement on Monday that the two Chinese who were killed had been acting as missionaries, even though they were in the country on business visas, ostensibly to learn Urdu at a technology institute owned by a Korean businessman in Quetta. </blockquote>
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Brook Larmer in NYTMag, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/magazine/is-china-the-worlds-new-colonial-power.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Is China the World’s New Colonial Power? </a>.
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China’s leaders insist that its influence is entirely benign, a global exercise in what they call “win-win cooperation.” And indeed, many of the projects Chinese companies are pursuing — roads and railways, ports and pipelines, mines and telecom networks — might never be built without them. China’s investment in the Husab uranium mine, in which C.G.N. subsidiaries hold a 90 percent stake and the Namibian government owns 10 percent, is doing its part to stave off a recession. “We helped Namibia gain its political liberation,” Xia Lili, a former Chinese diplomat who now works as an executive at a Chinese company in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, says. “Now we’re helping it fight for economic emancipation.” For some Namibians, however, the flood of Chinese loans and investments doesn’t look so much like freedom as it does a new form of colonialism. The infrastructure is welcome, but as projects made possible by loans — financed by the Chinese — they have saddled the economy with debt and done little to alleviate the nearly 30 percent unemployment rate. Over the last few months, moreover, a series of scandals involving Chinese nationals — including tax evasion, money-laundering and poaching endangered wildlife — has soured locals on a foreign presence that can seem largely extractive: pulling uranium, timber, rhino horns and profits out the country without benefiting a population that, because of apartheid’s legacy, ranks among the most unequal economically in the world. In January, a Windhoek newspaper captured the rising sentiment with an illustration on its front page of a golden dragon devouring the Namibian flag. The headline: “Feeding Namibia to the Chinese.” </blockquote>
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Noam Scheiber & Keith Bradsher in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/business/economy/ohio-factory-jobs-china.html" target="_blank">Culture Clash at a Chinese-Owned Plant in Ohio</a>.
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From 2000 to the first quarter of this year, the Chinese have invested almost $120 billion in the United States, according to the Rhodium Group, which tracks these flows. Nearly half of that amount has come since early 2016, making China one of this country’s largest sources of foreign direct investment during that time. But with the explosion of investment has come unexpected trouble. At Fuyao, a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms. Fuyao faces an acrimonious union campaign by the United Automobile Workers and a lawsuit by a former manager who says he was let go in part because he is not Chinese. The investment has even prompted hand-wringing in China, where comments by the company’s chairman, a self-made billionaire named Cao Dewang, stirred a debate over the country’s competitiveness. “Cao Dewang behaved like a traitor,” wrote one person on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site. “You set up a factory in the U.S. to solve employment there.” Solving employment is, of course, the promise that Mr. Trump rode to office. Since his victory, foreign companies like Bayer, SoftBank and Infosys have moved to align themselves with that goal — and avoid an America-first backlash — by promoting plans for thousands of United States-based jobs. </blockquote>
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Kristin Huang in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2095078/will-arctic-be-next-stop-chinas-new-silk-road" target="_blank">Will the Artic Be the Next Stop on China’s New Silk Road? </a>.
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“Beijing’s strategy does not stop at belt and road,” Li Xiguang, a professor at Tsinghua University told a forum in Hong Kong on Saturday. Li is leading a field study on the economic corridor China and Pakistan are building as part of the trade route. “The full name of the strategy will be ‘One Belt, One Road, One Circle’, and the circle refers to the Arctic Circle,” Li paraphrased another Tsinghua professor, Hu Angang, as saying in a speech last month that was not reported in mainland media. Hu is a leading economist in China and is the director of the Centre for China Studies at the university. “The Arctic region is rich in gold and many other mineral resources, which are yet to be exploited. So this region is probably included in China’s strategy,” Li said, although he acknowledged the term “one circle” was not included in any official documents. </blockquote>
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Jun Mai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2093026/why-communist-party-has-created-new-bureau-xinjiang" target="_blank">Why the Communist Party Has Created a New Bureau for Xinjiang</a>.
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While Beijing blames separatists and Islamists extremist for the violence, critics argue that China’s repressive rule in Xinjiang is the main trigger for the violenc. The government banned men growing long beards and women wearing face veils in many places in Xinjiang. In the latest development, China earlier this year banned dozens of Muslim baby names with religious overtones, including Jihad, Imam, Medina and Mohammed. The new bureau’s creation comes at a time when the party is tightening its control in Xinjiang after hardliner Chen Quanguo, the former party secretary of Tibet, was transferred to the region in August last year. A sprawling web of “convenience police stations” has sprung up in cities and rural areas across the region since Chen came to office, covering the region with war-zone style security checks. The stations are equipped with surveillance cameras and guards on 24-hour seamless patrols and can be quickly turned into checkpoints when needed. In the city of Urumqi alone, which covers 340 sq km, is expected to have 949 such stations, according to a website affiliated with the city government. </blockquote>
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Bassem Mroue & Gerry Shih in AP, <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-04-22/chinese-jihadis-rise-in-syria-raises-concerns-at-home" target="_blank">Chinese ‘Lions’ Raise Fears Back Home</a>.
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Thousands of Chinese jihadis have come to Syria since the country's civil war began in March 2011 to fight against government forces and their allies. Some have joined the al-Qaida's branch in the country previously known as Nusra Front. Others paid allegiance to the Islamic State group and a smaller number joined factions such as the ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham. But the majority of Chinese jihadis are with the Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria, whose vast majority are Chinese Muslims, particularly those from the Turkic-speaking Uighur majority native to Xinjiang in China. Their growing role in Syria has resulted in increased cooperation between Syrian and Chinese intelligence agencies who fear those same jihadis could one day return home and cause trouble there. The Turkistan Islamic Party is the other name for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement that considers China's Xinjiang to be East Turkistan. </blockquote>
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Andrew Nathan in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, on Cheng Li’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/02/09/china-struggle-at-the-top/" target="_blank">Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era</a>, and Minxin Pei’s book, China’s Crony Capitalism.
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Under Mao, in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and in similar systems elsewhere, leaders clung to power for decades while their regimes stagnated or fell into disorder. Li shows how formal rules and informal norms put in place by Deng Xiao-ping and his successor, Jiang Zemin, have promoted the turnover of elites in post-Mao China. With rare exceptions, officials have to move up or out after a maximum of fifteen years at a given rank. </blockquote>
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Chun Han Wong in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-propaganda-machine-elevates-xi-to-socialist-thinker-in-chief-1496308921" target="_blank">China’s Propaganda Machine Elevates President</a>.
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<blockquote>
Since Chairman Mao’s days, China’s most powerful leaders have been exalted as its greatest thinkers. Today, President Xi Jinping appears primed to join those elite ranks, a sign of his rising clout ahead of a pivotal Communist Party leadership shuffle this fall. A crescendo of state-backed publicity and research on Mr. Xi’s policies this year bears the hallmarks of a campaign to proclaim him a great socialist thinker, whose ideas are driving China’s renaissance as a global power. The aim, China watchers say, is to enshrine a set of Mr. Xi’s theories in the Communist Party charter, cementing his unrivaled authority and casting him as worthy successor to Mao Zedong, the revolutionary, and Deng Xiaoping, the reformer. “Mao saved China from bullies, Deng saved China from hunger,” said Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of the <i>Study Times</i>, a newspaper published by the elite Central Party School. “Now Xi wants to restore China’s greatness and self-confidence, and make it a leader of the world.” </blockquote>
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He Huifeng in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2080545/pr-chiefs-spearhead-communist-party-push-chinas-top" target="_blank">Why PR Chiefs Are Running Communist Party Branches at China Tech Firms</a>.
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<blockquote>
Wen Gao, deputy head of the party committee at NetEase, said the total number of the internet company’s party members reached 223 last year, 6.4 times more than the previous year. In contrast, tech giants that were expanding their business overseas, such as Huawei and ZTE, were keeping their party committees low profile, Liu said. “It’s not good for building up their international image if they have strong state involvement,” he said. </blockquote>
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Zhuang Pinghui in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2093162/chinas-independent-think-tanks-told-toe-communist-party" target="_blank">China’s Independent Think Tanks Told to Toe the Communist Party Line</a>.
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<blockquote>
Chinese authorities are bringing the burgeoning industry of private think tanks into line with new rules ordering them to serve the Communist Party and register “big events” and overseas donations. The new “guidelines” were issued on Thursday by nine ministerial agencies and are designed to promote “healthy development” of the sector, according to the document. The organisations could be shut down if they failed to comply. Jia Xijin, associate professor with Tsinghua University’s public policy school, said the tightened controls were in line with stricter regulation of private players in social management. Non-government research institutions have mushroomed since Chinese President Xi Jinping called two years ago for the creation of “new types of think tanks with Chinese characteristics”. By the end of last year, China had 435 think tanks, second only to the United States with 1,835, according to a list compiled by the University of Pennsylvania. </blockquote>
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Stephanie Saul in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-western-campuses-china-influence.html" target="_blank">On Campuses Far From China, Still Under Beijing’s Watchful Eye</a>.
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<blockquote>
At the center of the opposition was the U.C. San Diego chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which threatened “tough measures to resolutely resist the school’s unreasonable behavior.” The Chinese government accuses the Dalai Lama of promoting Tibetan independence from China, and if the student group’s message sounded a bit like the Beijing party line, that may have been no coincidence: The group said it had consulted with the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles on the matter. China’s booming economy has increasingly allowed more of its young men and women to seek a college education in the West; 329,000 now study in the United States, more than five times the number recorded a decade ago. By far the largest contingent of foreign students, they can be an economic lifeline for colleges, since they usually pay full tuition, and they can provide a healthy dose of international diversity. But those students often bring to campus something else from home: the watchful eyes and occasionally heavy hand of the Chinese government, manifested through its ties to many of the 150-odd chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations. </blockquote>
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Lawrence Chung in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2096843/handle-taiwanese-rights-activists-case-care-tsai-urges" target="_blank">Handle Taiwanese Rights Activist’s Case with Care, Tsai Urges Beijing</a>.
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<blockquote>
Leaders in Taiwan used the 28th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown to call on Beijing to handle the case of a detained Taiwanese human rights activist with care. They also urged Beijing to promote democratic reforms to match its place as one of the world’s powers. “It is true that China is rising, but it would be a great regret if democracy was absent during this process,” President Tsai Ing-wen said on Sunday, adding that the world’s respect came with democracy. Tsai said Taiwan was willing to share its democratic experience with the mainland, including how it transformed from an authoritarian regime. </blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/world/asia/xie-yang-china-lawyer-trial.html" target="_blank">In Reversal, Chinese Lawyer Confesses, and Rights Groups Denounce His Trial</a>.
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Before the Chinese human rights lawyer stood trial for subversion, he wrote a letter saying he would confess to such charges only if he was tortured. But on Monday, the lawyer, Xie Yang, appeared at court a drastically altered man. He had become a seemingly contrite actor in a trial intended to discredit China’s struggling dissident lawyers who take up contentious cases and want courts freed of Communist Party control. “I feel ashamed and deeply remorseful for my past actions,” Mr. Xie said at his trial in Changsha, a city in southern China, according to transcripts issued online by the court. “Everyone should take me as a warning to certainly stay within the framework of the law, and avoid being exploited by Western anti-China forces.” At the trial, Mr. Xie withdrew his claims of torture, which were laid out in piercing detail in transcripts of meetings shared earlier by his former defense lawyers. He pleaded guilty to the subversion charge and a charge of disrupting court proceedings. And he placed blame for his years as a combative lawyer on seductive but toxic ideas about constitutional government learned from study sessions abroad. </blockquote>
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Choi Chi-yuk & Eva Li in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2094794/lawyers-groups-chinese-megacity-spearhead-new-communist" target="_blank">Lawyers in Chinese Megacity the New Front in Communist Party’s Push for Greater Control</a>.
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The northern Chinese city of Tianjin is set to become a new front in the Communist Party’s war for ideological control, with political commissars to be installed in lawyers associations in the megacity this week. Tianjin will be the first city in China to have commissars in professional groups not directly under the government’s authority, reflecting a tighter grip by the party on the public sphere. While it is still unclear whether other cities will follow suit, Tianjin has been playing a pilot role in political developments for rest of the country since Li Hongzhong became its party boss in September 2016. Li has been one of the most vocal advocates of “absolute loyalty” to President Xi Jinping. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWadO8b5Tepk027psbzRRLawmP1vLpDY406RC3lXOvgfFGRFrBGZK9I_EnL_BCw8kEglAfRtEtBisjLGiQ92ba6tfBpPdOwkZLCFLG4G40E0jQREeaLs5bPSVU2zXObvCrZ83J76hzbEO5/s1600/NV-153-spectatorbook-beingbornagirl.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="227" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWadO8b5Tepk027psbzRRLawmP1vLpDY406RC3lXOvgfFGRFrBGZK9I_EnL_BCw8kEglAfRtEtBisjLGiQ92ba6tfBpPdOwkZLCFLG4G40E0jQREeaLs5bPSVU2zXObvCrZ83J76hzbEO5/s320/NV-153-spectatorbook-beingbornagirl.png" width="208" /></a></div>
Rose George in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/being-born-a-girl-in-modern-china-is-the-worst-thing-in-the-world/" target="_blank">Being Born a Girl in Modern China Is the Worst Thing in the World</a>.
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<blockquote>
Guo’s mother is harsh on all fronts — a woman from peasant stock who married far beneath her (according to the topsy-turvy class system of the Cultural Revolution), to an intellectual whom even she referred to as a Stinking Number Nine, after his class ranking. This was a courageous thing to do, but not enough for the reader to warm to her. Guo’s father gets a more tender portrayal. He was an artist, and seems to have loved his daughter, and she was set on becoming one too. And goodness, she was determined, with an ambition fuelled by fury, to which she has a right. Don’t be deceived by the calmness of her prose, because you should feel for her, this child who was sexually abused for two years by her father’s colleague, described in the chapter entitled ‘Stop Crying! Every girl has to go through this.’ Guo has never named her abuser before. ‘But here on these pages I want to say it out loud, exactly as it is spelled, for the simple reason that he was never punished for what he did to me.’ So I will too: Hu Wenren. </blockquote>
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Anjani Trivedi in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-chinese-men-are-dying-1487933230" target="_blank">Why Chinese Men Are Dying Despite Rising Income</a>.
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<blockquote>
It could be that financial success breeds bad health habits. Disposable income per captia has risen 90% in the past six years and probably more than that over the past decade, though official government data are limited. Chinese liquor consumption – men consume 60% more than women – has risen 5% compounded annually over the past 15 years, considered fast by global standards, according to Bernstein analysts. </blockquote>
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Karoline Kan in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/world/asia/china-tfboys-boy-band.html" target="_blank">In China It’s the Party That Keeps the Boy Band Going</a>.
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<blockquote>
That wholesome schoolboy image has won TFBoys love not only from Chinese fans, but also from the government. They have twice been featured on the Chinese Lunar New Year television gala staged by <i>CCTV</i>, the state broadcaster. The Communist Youth League’s official Weibo account often promotes the group’s activities. In April, it posted an item about Wang Yuan’s receiving a special award from United Nations officials in China for his proposals on education. On International Children’s Day in 2015, the Communist Youth League released a video featuring TFBoys singing “We Are the Heirs of Communism,” the song of the Young Pioneers, the Communist children’s organization. In the video, they wear the Young Pioneers’ signature red scarves and sing: “Love the country and the people. Fear neither hardship nor the enemy.” </blockquote>
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Preetika Rana in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-emerges-as-powerhouse-for-biotech-drugs-1491816607" target="_blank">China Climbs Drugmaking Ladder</a>.
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<blockquote>
In the past two years, Lilly, Merck, Tesaro Inc. and Incyte Co. have signed multimillion-dollar deals to sell China-discovered biotech drugs overseas. The tie-ups are a boost for China’s ambition to shake off a history of scandals, such as a 2008 incident when a blood thinner called heparin – made with Chinese ingredients – killed dozens of people in the U.S. alone. China is working to overcome a reputation for poor quality to become an innovator and global producer of complex products. </blockquote>
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Maneka Sanjay Gandhi at NEW DELHI TIMES, <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/food-habits-in-china-threatens-to-extinct-many-species123/" target="_blank">Food Habits in China Threatens to Extinct Many Species</a>.
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<blockquote>
The trouble with China’s new found wealth and middle class is that they are not only eating every animal and fish in their own country, but they are sucking in and killing almost all species from all over the world to satisfy their insatiable lust. Donkeys in Africa have suddenly been turned into meat for the Chinese. We, of course, are losing everything – from seahorses, porcupines, dogs, sharks, tigers, rhinos, bears, every species of fish and wild cat and even insects. The Chinese kill rare species simply for social prestige. Their local medicine is rubbish, but they continue to kill every animal for it. They use our rhino horns – which are just made of keratin, the same as our toenails – for everything, from headaches to cancer. Does that make sense? Likewise, shark fins are just lumps of flesh with no food value. But they have become a symbol of riches and so India loses millions of its sharks for this valueless soup. But, because their government has no laws and no intention of controlling the trade, the illegal market thrives. Like shark fin, fish swim bladders are an ingrained part of traditional Chinese culture, used to signal wealth and opulence. </blockquote>
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Nathaniel Taplin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-oil-refiners-are-coming-for-your-market-share-1492659302" target="_blank">China’s Oil Refiners Set Sights on World</a>.
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China’s rising refining overcapacity has followed a pattern that previously helped sink global margins in steel, aluminum and solar-panel manufacturing. State-backed firms, which face little problem getting access to credit, pile into what initially look like profitable sectors. As long as the economy is humming along, this strategy works fine, but when growth slows, all that new diesel or steel needs to find a new home. As the Chinese economy slowed sharply in late 2014, China moved from being a net importer or fuel products to one of the world’s largest exporters – a position it still holds. </blockquote>
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Ben Bland in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/71d7fed8-2bf2-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7" target="_blank">China Spreads Wings with Challenge to Boeing and Airbus</a>.
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More than 30 years after China’s previous attempt to build a large airliner ended in failure – when it abandoned efforts to reverse engineer a crashed Boeing 707 – Mr. Xi’s plan to turn China into an aviation powerhouse is one step closer to fruition…. With China forecast to overtake the US as the world’s biggest aviation market in 2024, there will be a large domestic customer base for the C919, if all goes to plan and the first aircraft roll off the production line in 2019. </blockquote>
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Josh Chin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-make-leap-toward-quantum-network-1497549676" target="_blank">In China, a Quantum Leap</a>.
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Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build a “unhackable” global communications network. The result is a breakthrough that establishes China as a pioneer in efforts to harness the enigmatic properties of matter and energy at the subatomic level, the experts said. </blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridges-infrastructure.html" target="_blank">China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt</a>.
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<blockquote>
A primary motive is economic growth: Infrastructure spending surged as part of a huge stimulus program after the 2008 global financial crisis. Each bridge can cost billions and employ hundreds of workers for several years. But the endless construction has also created a self-perpetuating gravy train, feeding corruption and distorting priorities. While experts often advocate infrastructure building as a path to economic development, local governments in China “went overboard” because of corruption and other financial lures, said Huang Shaoqing, an economist at Shanghai Jiaotong University. And as gleaming expressways and majestic bridges spread into less populated areas, the cost-benefit ratio of each new mile of asphalt drops sharply…. In the past six years, anticorruption inquiries have toppled more than 27 Hunan transportation officials. “In their jurisdiction, they were the emperors,” a party report said in 2014. </blockquote>
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James Areddy in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/swipe-by-swipe-chinese-smartphone-users-flock-to-risky-investments-1490714334" target="_blank">Chinese Pile on Risk, One Swipe at a Time</a>.
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A million companies in China have turned to the internet to raise money, hawking loosely regulated, often risky investments, according to one of the country’s largest online leaders. Swipe by swipe, the online money supply is helping to democratize investing and loosen capital markets. It also is propping up indebted Chinese companies and inflating bubbles in asset types from bonds to plastic pellets. And it is shifting more of the risks from China’s corporate debt load onto consumers. </blockquote>
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Paul Mozur & Jane Perlez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/technology/china-defense-start-ups.html" target="_blank">China Bets on Sensitive US Start-Ups, Worrying the Pentagon</a>.
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<blockquote>
When the United States Air Force wanted help making military robots more perceptive, it turned to a Boston-based artificial intelligence start-up called Neurala. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military. So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from an investment firm backed by a state-run Chinese company. Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington. </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-u-s-china-headed-for-hot-war-on-trade-1488883291" target="_blank">Are US and China Headed for ‘Hot War’ Over Trade? </a>.
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Yet China has brought on this fight. Its wholesale theft of intellectual property, requirements forcing foreign investors to disgorge their technology, and a digital “Great Firewall” that blocks most of the world’s top internet sites, have provided ample ammunition to White House trade warriors. Meanwhile, armed with a half-trillion-dollar war chest, China is shopping for U.S. and European tech companies to build advanced manufacturing capabilities that it will foster to its own protected markets – and then unleash on open economies in the West. </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-brother-comes-for-foreign-firms-in-china-1495531800" target="_blank">Big Brother Tightens Control by Mining Foreign Firms’ Data</a>.
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China is already rolling out an IT-enabled ratings system to govern the behavior of individuals. Less attention is being paid to its other application: Big Brother is also harnessing big data to create the world’s most extensive system of corporate surveillance and control. Think of it as the ultimate tool of Chinese state capitalism. The Mercator Institute for China Studies, a German think tank, calls it “IT-backed authoritarianism.” …The backbone of the system will be up and running by 2020. As it becomes more sophisticated, it will generate corporate scorecards from masses of data extracted from cameras, sensors and e-commerce trading platforms. Low scorers might expect higher taxes, or more expensive loans; high scorers lucrative investment opportunities. </blockquote>
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Gabriel Wildau in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0361c1a4-bcfe-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080" target="_blank">China Data Chief Admits ‘Fraud and Deception’ on Statistics</a>.
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Critics of Chinese statistics have consistently argued that political interference in statistical compilation is the problem, not the solution. Communist party officials, especially at the local level, are still evaluated largely on their ability to meet or exceed economic growth targets. For many years, the sum of provincial GDP figures has far exceeded the national total. The party has taken tentative steps in recent years to reduce the role of economic growth targets in evaluating cadres’ performance, but strong incentives remain. </blockquote>
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Shen Hong in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-aim-at-moodys-after-rating-downgrade-1495713109" target="_blank">China Chides Moody’s After Its Downgrade</a>.
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China’s Finance Ministry immediately criticized the Moody’s downgrade – its first such move in nearly three decades – accusing it of using an “inappropriate” methodology and betraying “a lack of necessary knowledge of Chinese law.” The U.S.-based rating firm had cited concerns about rising debt as China’s economy slows as the main reason for its downgrade. In an article published on Wednesday evening, China’s official Xinhua News Agency criticized Western rating firms as discriminating against developing countries. “Their methodologies are flawed and their reputation has already been questioned,” Xinhua said. </blockquote>
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Nathaniel Taplin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-the-china-credit-crunch-could-really-bite-1495705560" target="_blank">Where the China Credit Crunch Could Really Take a Bite</a>.
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The downgrade of China by credit-rating firm Moody’s has highlighted the rising risks the government faces from contingent liabilities: poisonous loans to deadbeat state-owned companies that Beijing might eventually need to absorb, potentially by recapitalizing the country’s major banks. What Moody’s didn’t explain is that this absorption of hidden liabilities is already under way. Central to the story is what has happened to local-government finances in China in the past two years. In early 2015, investment levels in China –still so crucial to the country’s growth – were in a tailspin. One main reason was a double whammy for city governments, normally big drivers of capital spending. Falling land sales, which represent around one-third of local revenue, were pummeling budgets just as Beijing had rammed through tough restrictions on cities’ off-balance-sheet fundraising. By March 2015, it was obvious that the clampdown had gone too far. In a policy U-turn, Beijing greenlighted a massive refinancing program for troubled local governments, and the struggling industrial companies they owned, allowing them to directly issue bonds in large amounts for the first time. By doing so, though, Beijing was also implicitly recognizing its ultimate responsibility for these debts. The result was a stunning expansion of formal government debt in China as corporate liabilities were refinanced wholesale through provincial bonds: Government-bond debt, which had been running around 15% of gross domestic product since the 2008 global financial crisis, nearly doubled to 28% in just two years. </blockquote>
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Gregor Hunter & Kosaku Narioka in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-big-new-investor-in-stock-markets-the-state-1480933807" target="_blank">In Asia, the State Becomes a Major Company Stakeholder</a>.
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About 30% of all the companies in Japan’s three main equity indexes now count the country’s central bank as one of their top 10 shareholders, according to a <i>Wall Street Journal</i> analysis of data as of the end of September. Six years ago, the Bank of Japan’s presence in the market was trivial. In China, two major state-owned investment funds that are part of the national team have become top-10 shareholders in 30% of listed companies over the past year, according to UBS Group AG, which analyzed shareholdings as of the end of September. The data are a stunning benchmark for the role governments now play in markets after nearly a decade of heavy intervention. Public pension funds and sovereign-wealth funds have long been big holders of stocks. But the new wave of state buying is unique in that it is aimed primarily at propping up markets and economies. </blockquote>
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Chuin-Wei Yap in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-shifts-stance-letting-dying-firms-go-bankrupt-1488586442" target="_blank">China Shifts Stance, Letting Firms Go Bust</a>.
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According to official figures from China’s Supreme People’s Court, from 2012-14 there were about 2,000 bankruptcy cases each year – just 0.25% of the roughly 800,000 companies that left the market each year. That jumped to a record 3,683 in 2015, and higher again to 5,665 cases last year, as corporate debt sharply surged and the court began to urge wider use of the law – including parts attorneys say draw on U.S. chapter 11 provisions to let companies restructure under court protection. </blockquote>
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Robin Augustin at <i>freemalaysiatoday.com</i>, <a href="http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2017/01/12/what-happens-when-you-owe-china-too-much/" target="_blank">What Happens When You Owe China Too Much</a>.
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There would be a heavy price to pay if China-linked mega projects were to fail, said Azlan Awang, who is deputy chairman of Bantah-TPPA and a founder of Blindspot, a socio-economic interest group. Azlan told FMT there were similarities between Sri Lanka’s and Malaysia’s indebtedness to China. He pointed to a recent violent riot near the port city of Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka. The rioters were protesting against a deal they said would result in the port becoming a Chinese colony. The deal would see the port being leased for 99 years to a company in which China will have 80% ownership. It would also result in the establishment of an industrial zone where Chinese companies would be invited to set up base. Azlan said the deal was a consequence of Sri Lanka’s failure to pay for the China-financed Mattala airport project. It should give a glimpse of how Beijing would deal with those failing to pay their dues, he added. “Beijing may not be sending the Red Army, but the ownership of the Hambantota deep sea port as well as 15,000 acres of land for the new industrial zone ceded to China as its colony for the next 99 years will do. For Malaysia, what will be our pound of flesh if we default on our humongous debts?” </blockquote>
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Andrew Jacobs & Jane Perlez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/world/africa/us-djibouti-chinese-naval-base.html?_r=0" target="_blank">US Wary of Its New Neighbor in Djibouti: A Chinese Naval Base</a>.
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With no shared border, China and the United States mostly circle each other from afar, relying on satellites and cybersnooping to peek inside the workings of each other’s war machines. But the two strategic rivals are about to become neighbors in this sun-scorched patch of East African desert. China is constructing its first overseas military base here — just a few miles from Camp Lemonnier, one of the Pentagon’s largest and most important foreign installations. With increasing tensions over China’s island-building efforts in the South China Sea, American strategists worry that a naval port so close to Camp Lemonnier could provide a front-row seat to the staging ground for American counterterror operations in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. </blockquote>
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Peter Hoskin in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-new-battleground-between-china-and-america-hollywood/" target="_blank">The New Battleground between China and America: Hollywood</a>.
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In 1994, to support ailing theatres, the state agreed a revenue-sharing deal to import <i>The Fugitive</i> — the first time Hollywood had been let into the Chinese market for 45 years. The film made what, at that time and in that place, was an impressive $3 million, but it also set a precedent. Nowadays, after a landmark 2012 deal signed by vice-president Joe Biden and premier Xi Jinping, and urged on by the dictates of the World Trade Organisation, China imports 34 foreign films a year through similar deals. With the quota set to double, American filmmakers are sensing an opportunity…. What wouldn’t a Hollywood producer do for that sort of box office? Very little, it turns out. A special cut of <i>Iron Man 3</i> (2013) was prepared for China, featuring extra scenes with popular Chinese actors, along with a super-villainous amount of product placement for the milk brand Yili. Then the makers of <i>Transformers: Age of Extinction</i> (2014) went even further by setting and shooting a large part of their movie in China, with appearances from several Chinese stars and several hundred Chinese products. The idea was, in part, to blur the line between what counts as an American film and what counts as a Chinese one — so that the quota needn’t matter. </blockquote>
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Erich Schwartzel in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/hollywoods-new-script-you-cant-make-movies-without-china-1492525636" target="_blank">Hollywood Doesn’t Work Without China</a>.
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Chinese investors bring the support of a Communist Party that under China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, has made cultural influence an important piece of its long-term growth plans. “We must make patriotism into the main melody of literature and art creation, guide the people to establish and uphold correct views of history, views of the nation, views of the country and views of culture, and strengthen their fortitude and resolve to be Chinese,” said Mr. Xi at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art in October 2014. </blockquote>
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Chun Han Wong in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-tycoon-lobs-graft-claims-into-beijing-politics-1493803804" target="_blank">Exiled Tycoon Roils Beijing Politics</a>.
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<blockquote>
Guo Wengui, an up-by-the-bootstraps tycoon who says he has lived in the U.S. since 2015, has said in rambling video interviews and a deluge of Twitter posts that he has detailed knowledge of wrongdoing by senior Communist Party officials, their relatives and their associates. Mr. Guo has provided scant evidence to substantiate his allegations. Still, they are the talk among many politically minded Chinese, and China’s government has launched a multipronged campaign to discredit him…. Mr. Guo’s allegations, flowing freely through a broad online megaphone, have the potential to exacerbate behind-the-scenes jostling among senior leaders seeking positions in the Communist Party leadership that a congress is set to appoint this year. </blockquote>
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Sasha Gong in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-managed-to-muffle-the-voice-of-america-1495580183" target="_blank">How China Managed to Muffle the Voice of America</a>.
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Like its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, Guo An has a fearsome reputation. Chinese citizens say it suppresses protests, harasses dissidents and monitors intellectuals. Using its vast fortune, Guo An has allegedly infiltrated overseas corporations, universities, civil groups and even foreign governments…. The money spent by Guo An is astronomical. Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer and human-rights activist who escaped to the U.S. a few years ago, estimates that the Chinese government spent $10.5 million spying on him alone. Mr. Guo says that a great deal of what the spy agency spends is bankrolled by private Chinese businessmen. In the preinteview, Mr. Guo explained that he paid for office rentals, private jets, surveillance systems, personnel and many other expenses. In exchange, Guo An officials would assist him in dealing with his business rivals. </blockquote>
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Sherry Fei Ju & Charles Clover in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a6a8d40c-2bc0-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7" target="_blank">Reality Check, Chinese TV Cashes in on Corruption with Hit Drama</a>.
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<blockquote>
The drama is set in present-day China under the rule of a president very much like Xi Jinping, who launched a crackdown on corruption in 2012 that has ensnared hundreds of thousands of officials from powerful “tigers” to lowly “flies”. The series, episodes of which have garnered 1.7bn online views since its debut a month ago, according to research company Ent Group, marks the first time a Chinese state TV drama has ventured into the fraught subject of high-level sleaze. In 2004 China’s broadcast regulator explicitly banned discussion of corruption on TV for “potentially misleading audiences”. With central government officials almost uniformly portrayed as benevolent and fatherly on TV, depicting them as villains is unprecedented. </blockquote>
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Howard French in WSJ on Julian Gewirtz’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dengs-great-leap-1484869466" target="_blank">Unlikely Partners</a>.
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<blockquote>
Beyond standard Marxism, modern economics was almost entirely unknown in China under Mao. In a near blink of the eye in historical terms, Mr. Gewirtz shows, reformist leaders eagerly embraced the ideas of thinkers like the Polish-born Wlodzimierz Brus and the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai and then select Westerners, such as American Nobel laureate James Tobin and the British economist Alexander Cairncross. This culminated in a famous 1985 cruise down the Yangtze River that brought Chinese economists eager to absorb the best of what the world could offer together with their leading thinkers…. In different hands this material might have sped on toward some pat “and the rest was history” conclusion. Rewardingly, Mr. Gewirtz resists this, showing, for example, that many of the reforms credited to Deng actually owe their provenance to Hua Guofeng, the all-but-forgotten figure who preceded Deng during a brief interregnum after Mao died in September 1976. </blockquote>
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Jun Mai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2091985/big-message-behind-making-xi-jinpings-political" target="_blank">Reading Between the Lines of Xi Jinping’s Political Philosophy</a>.
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<blockquote>
According to Li, Xi’s political theory is made up of a series of public remarks given by the president. While Li stopped short of officially naming the theory, he referred to it as “Xi Jinping’s series of important speeches”, providing the latest confirmation that the system of political ideas conveyed in the leader’s speeches would be named after him. As Li is a trusted ally of Xi and his office is the nerve hub of the top leadership’s daily operations, the chief of staff can be seen as speaking on behalf of the party’s top leaders. His words carry greater authority than <i>People’s Daily</i> editorials or remarks from senior policy advisers, for example. A “complete theory system”, as Li put it, carries tremendous weight in the world of Chinese politics, as each top leader can have only one such system. </blockquote>
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Jun Mai in SCMP, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2087653/why-china-blurring-line-between-party-and-state" target="_blank">Why Is China Blurring the Line Between Party and State? </a>.
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The concept of the separation of party and state, later written into the top-level political report at the party’s 13th national congress in 1987, urged the party to only take part in major decisions and retreat from daily government operations. It was part of an effort to tackle excessive concentration of power, seen by the party as the root of the political mayhem during the Mao Zedong era, but Deng also repeatedly warned against Western notions of the separation of powers. The purpose of such reforms is to “strengthen the leadership of the party”, not to weaken it, according to Deng. Still, Deng’s “separation of party and state” remarks remain perceived by many on face value. Attempts at further political reform have stalled for decades following the leadership shake-up that accompanied the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Party committees were reinstated in government institutions, but it is rare for officials to openly advocate the fusion of party and state apparatus. </blockquote>
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Bruce Dickson in WASHINGTON QUARTERLY, <a href="https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/TWQ_Winter2017_Dickson.pdf" target="_blank">The Survival Strategy of the Chinese Communist Party</a>.
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The main dilemma posed by co-opting urban elites into the Party is that they may try to change the Party from within. The Party hopes to obtain their loyalty by bringing them into the organization, but since most people nowadays join the Party out of self-interest, there is no guarantee that they will be committed to the Party’s goals or support the regime at a time of crisis. Instead, they may try to push the Party to become more open to contending voices and less intrusive into economic and social affairs. This was one of the objections raised in the 1990s against admitting capitalists into the Party, although those fears seem to have been unwarranted – the “red capitalists” did not push the Party further than it was willing to go. </blockquote>
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Graham Allison in NATIONAL INTEREST, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-china-could-stumble-war-20150" target="_blank">Destined for War? </a>.
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“History,” Henry Kissinger observed in his first book, “is the memory of states.” China’s memory is longer than most, with the century of humiliation forming a core part of the country’s identity. Recent military engagements are also part of each state’s living memory. The Korean War and Sino-Soviet border conflict taught Chinese strategists not to back down from more powerful adversaries. Moreover, both the American and Chinese militaries acknowledge that the United States has lost, or at least failed to win, four of the five major wars it has entered since World War II. The most pertinent background conditions, however, are Thucydides’s Trap and the syndromes of rising and ruling powers that China and the United States display in full. Thucydides’s Trap is the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one. Most contests that fit this pattern have ended badly. Over the past five hundred years, a major rising power has threatened to displace a ruling power sixteen times. In twelve of those, the result was war. </blockquote>
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James Stavridis in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-threats-to-the-u-s-at-sea-1496408086" target="_blank">The Naval Battles Ahead</a>.
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I spent the formative years of my naval career in cruisers and destroyers during the long twilight of the Cold War. We chased Soviet submarines through the North Atlantic and dodged their intelligence ships in the South China Sea, forever playing a kind of “Hunt for Red October.” The fleet of the U.S.S.R. was massive, dangerously armed and globally deployed – a worthy foe. Those of us in the U.S. Navy felt a twinge of regret (but only a twinge) as we watched much of that fleet broken apart, mothballed or sold to other nations after the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s. China was still just starting its astonishing economic rise, and its navy was little more than a coastal force. The oceans looked to be a vast American lake for decades to come. That era has now come to an end. </blockquote>
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Richard Bernstein in WSJ on Johan Lagerkvist’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/exporting-authoritarianism-1483488210" target="_blank">Tiananmen Redux</a>.
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What is most important in Mr. Lagerkvist’s scheme is that Tiananmen allowed the 84-year-old Deng to press on his reluctant co-elders in the party a neoliberal economic agenda, by which he means a kind of savage capitalism, with low wages, reduced social welfare benefits and yawning gaps between the rich and the poor. All the well-publicized ills of globalization thus originate in China’s decision to go for rapid economic growth no matter the costs. This produced another irony. For decades, the widespread hope and expectation outside of China was that capitalism would make the country more like us. As Mr. Lagerkvist gloomily points out, something like the reverse has actually happened. Rather than China being Westernized, the West is being Sinicized. “It would be imprudent,” he writes, “to ignore the fact that the world may indeed become more authoritarian and parochially nationalistic despite, or precisely because of the effects of neoliberal globalisation.” </blockquote>
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Gao Zhisheng in FIRST THINGS, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/04/struggle-against-the-gods" target="_blank">Struggle Against the Gods</a>.
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He has no desire to introduce due process of law; his main goal is to maintain the CCP’s dictatorial status and eliminate rivals; and a sincere anti-corruption campaign would subvert the regime. Xi must know that the most corrupt officials in China are members of the CCP Politburo and its Standing Committee. What family of past or current Politburo Standing Committee members is not as rich as a small nation? In the end, whether it’s Mao, Deng, or Xi, in terms of political logic, motives, and modus operandi, they are birds of a feather. I have participated in the defense of some of those accused of corruption, and those cases let me perceive some common patterns. First, not a single corruption case has been uncovered as a result of the normal operation of anti-corruption procedures. Second, such cases have been exposed due to accidental factors or power struggles between groups of corrupt officials. When the power struggles remain in equilibrium, everyone remains a “leading comrade.” Once the equilibrium breaks, the losing party becomes the corrupt official and the winning one becomes the anti-corruption hero. In fact, these are cases of the heinously corrupt arresting the merely corrupt. If Xi really fought corruption through to the end, he and the rest of his regime would be thrown into prison. </blockquote>
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Hugo Restall in WSJ on Ian Johnson’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/article/SB10915937718571523342804583076722180658716.html" target="_blank">The Souls of China</a>.
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As Chinese become more prosperous and move to cities, their spiritual life is also evolving. Instead of rituals and fortune-telling, they want a coherent worldview and direction on how to live a good life. Simple rules are giving way to theological debates. Protestantism is most representative of this trend, which helps explain why it continues to grow so fast. The one religion that thrived under Mao’s oppression, it has gone from just one million followers in 1949 to more than 60 million today…. Protestantism adapts quickly. Wang Yi, the pastor of Early Rain, was once a human rights lawyer. Now he and his colleagues see Christianity as the path to redeeming a corrupt society. </blockquote>
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Simon Winchester in NYTBR on John Pomfret’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/books/review/beautiful-country-middle-kingdom-john-pomfret.html" target="_blank">The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom</a>.
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Whenever a volume like Pomfret’s thuds onto my study table, I flip to the bibliography to look for a citation of one Western book that I have long thought properly explores this deeply contextual aspect of Chinese thinking: Alain Peyrefitte’s “The Immobile Empire,” first published in Paris in 1989…. Peyrefitte, a writer who was then researching much the same East-West relationship as Pomfret (though focused on the end of the 18th century and in connection with Britain alone), was granted unprecedented access to the imperial archives in Beijing. There he found a trove of private papers from the Emperor Qianlong, and within these files discovered notations in vermilion ink that had been written by no less than the Son of Heaven himself. With remarkable candor, the emperor showed just what he thought of the noblemen George III had sent out to China in hopes of spawning a friendship between what were then, at least in Britain’s eyes, the world’s two greatest nations. And it is clear the emperor thought precious little of them. His notes displayed a brutal condescension toward the visitors and an absolute, unwavering certainty of the superiority of Chinese civilization. What policy makers in America now need to grasp — and what isn’t fully illustrated in this new book — is that little has changed today. </blockquote>
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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-was-bill-clintons-russia-1488585526" target="_blank">China Was Bill Clinton’s Russia</a>.
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This isn’t even ancient history. Last week a 17-year-old video surfaced from convicted Clinton fundraiser Johnny Chung in which he confessed to fronting for Chinese intelligence and worried about being bumped off. Mr. Trump wasn’t president during the 2016 campaign, unlike Bill Clinton in 1996. He didn’t dispatch his Russian-born deputy assistant commerce secretary to panhandle among Russia-connected sources. He didn’t send his vice president to an illegal fundraiser at a Russian Orthodox church. </blockquote>
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Gordon Chang in NYT, on Michael Green’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/books/review/by-more-than-providence-michael-j-green.html" target="_blank">By More Than Providence – Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783</a>.
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<blockquote>
As Walter Lippmann noted, the United States was never isolationist in the Pacific. The American effort over time is all the more remarkable because democracies are, by their nature, ill-suited to maintaining consistent foreign policies, something noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America.” As Green writes: “The founders created a system that was designed to prevent precisely the kind of centralization of decision-making imagined by Thucydides, Clausewitz and other classical strategic thinkers.” Yet America has been able to maintain consistency because its policy, he perceptively notes, “always flowed organically from the Republic’s values and geographic circumstances.” Those geographic circumstances — two oceans — did not insulate America. The United States fought two great wars in Europe in the last century, both to prevent one power, Germany, from seizing the continent. That same strategic imperative forced Washington to engage in two epic struggles in the Asia-Pacific, first a war with Japan and then a multidecade effort to contain Soviet power. Now, the United States finds itself involved in a third campaign to prevent a state from asserting hegemonic control in Asia. Green points out that Asia is defined in large part “by the waxing and waning of the Sinocentric order.” </blockquote>
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Jeevan Vasagar & Leo Lewis in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c8e634fa-2a31-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7" target="_blank">Chinese Hackers Focus on Asia after US Pact</a>.
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Analysts warned of a potential upsurge in Chinese cyber espionage aimed at European or Asian targets following the agreement between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in 2015, when China and the US agreed not to support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property. China and Australia agreed [to] a similar pact this week. </blockquote>
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Chris Buckley & Adam Wu in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/world/asia/china-tanka-river-people-datang.html?_r=0" target="_blank">In China, an Ancient People Watch Their Floating Life Dissolve</a>.
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The residents of this floating village are members of the Tanka group, an ancient people scattered across southern China who have survived on coastal waterways, and on the margins of society. But Guangdong is a caldron of manufacturing and urban growth. Cities have engulfed once-quiet towns, and the Tanka way of life is disappearing. A cement plant on the shore opposite the village in Datang discharged fumes into the air. Apartment blocks have risen along the riverfront. The briny, tidal water of the Bei River, the residents’ lifeblood, has been dredged and is polluted, overfished and crowded with ships. “Many Tanka people who have settled onshore haven’t told their children about their Tanka background,” said Wu Shuitian, a professor at Guangzhou University who studies the Tanka people. “The Tanka life on the water is disappearing, and it’s also disappearing as a culture.” Yet Tanka people rarely voiced regret for the passing of their old ways. Their dislocated lives left little room for nostalgia or even for remembering their folk songs, called saltwater songs. Fishing and living on boats, many said, were a means of survival, not cultural preservation. </blockquote>
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Javier Hernandez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/world/asia/china-japan-textbooks-war.html" target="_blank">China, Fanning Patriotism, Adds 6 Years to War with Japan in History Books</a>.
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The Chinese Ministry of Education said the decision to add six years to the war sought to promote patriotic education and to highlight the Communist Party’s “core role” in resisting Japanese fascism in the prelude to World War II. It also seemed intended to rally support for the party among young people as Mr. Xi vigorously promotes Communist history and thought in schools. Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing, said the decision to revise the length of the war was justified from a historical perspective. But he said it would also have political benefits for the party and would encourage anti-Japanese sentiment. “Chinese leaders still have a Cold War mentality,” he said. “They’ve tried to conjure up imaginary enemies in the world.” Mr. Xi has worked in recent years to enhance the image of the Communists and their achievements in World War II, even though many historians believe it was the Chinese Nationalists, not the Communists, who did most of the fighting. </blockquote>
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Suisheng Zhao at yaleglobal, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/reconstruction-chinese-history-peaceful-rise" target="_blank">Reconstruction of Chinese History for a Peaceful Rise</a>.
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In comparison with Western countries that used coercive power to build colonies, the Chinese world order was more civil, attracting admiration from tributary states without use of force. Emphasizing benevolent governance, etiquette, peace and denying the imperialistic nature, imperial China and its relations with surrounding regions were far more advanced than the colonialism of western countries. Some Chinese scholars have gone so far as to argue that the root of all troubles in Chinese diplomacy today is China’s lost opportunities for expansion by being pedantic and caring too much about morality and principles. “The surrounding countries should be grateful for China’s benevolent governance, and that the imperial order should be re-established, yet they don’t like moderation and self-restraint as part of the imperial tradition,” maintains Haiyang Yu…. Recent scholarship in the West, suggests that imperial China, like its counterparts, was not uniquely benevolent or uniquely violent. Odd Arne Westad’s study reveals, “The dramatic Qing penetration of Central Asia is a story of intense conflict and, eventually, of genocide.” After defeating Zungharia in battle, the Qianlong emperor ordered his army to kill Zunghar elite. “Then he incorporated most of eastern Zungharia and the minor Khanates to its south into China, creating one region that Qianlong, triumphantly, referred to as China’s new frontier (Xinjiang).” Warfare was constant in imperial China, with regions often in disunion or under foreign invasion. </blockquote>
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Chris Horton in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/asia/taiwan-1947-kuomintang.html" target="_blank">Taiwan Commemorates a Violent Nationalist Episode, 70 Years Later</a>.
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<blockquote>
The “2/28 Incident,” as it has come to be known, was an uprising that flared on Feb. 28, 1947. It soon spread to other parts of the island and was crushed in the massacre of up to 28,000 Taiwanese by the troops of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader of China. The revolt was followed by four decades of martial law and divisions between Taiwanese whose roots on the island predated the Nationalists’ arrival in 1945 and the Chinese mainlanders who came after. Yet it was the eventual willingness to confront these events that enabled Taiwan’s people to begin to heal those divisions and achieve the voice in their government that the protesters demanded seven decades ago. “In recent years, the quest to redress Feb. 28 has been a very important development,” said Su Ching-hsuan, the executive secretary of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation. “It’s had a major influence on Taiwan’s democracy movement.” </blockquote>
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Craig Smith in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/world/canada/a-doomed-battle-for-hong-kong-with-only-medals-left-75-years-later.html" target="_blank">A Doomed Battle for Hong Kong, With Only Medals Left 75 Years Later</a>.
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Brigadier Lawson planned to move his headquarters back the next morning, but by 7 a.m. he was surrounded. Around 10 a.m., according to an account General Maltby wrote after the war, Brigadier Lawson reported that the Japanese were firing into his bunker “at point-blank range and that he was going outside to fight it out.” Sgt. Bob Manchester of the Winnipeg Grenadiers was in a ditch opposite and saw Brigadier Lawson and three of his men hit by machine-gun fire as they scrambled up the hillside behind the bunker. Fighting around the headquarters continued until Dec. 22, when the remaining soldiers in the area were captured. Capt. Uriah Laite, a chaplain, was taken to the bunkers by the Japanese to call for any men still alive to come out. “During the rounds,” he wrote in his diary, “I found the body of our Brigadier Lawson and was given permission to take his identification disc off his wrist.” The Japanese commander buried Brigadier Lawson the next day and erected a white marker on the grave with the brigadier’s name and rank written on it in Japanese, a rare honor. In 1946, the Canadian authorities reburied his remains in Sai Wan War Cemetery on Hong Kong Island, where they are today. </blockquote>
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Damien Cave & Jacqueline Williams in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/australia/china-political-influence-campaign-finance.html" target="_blank">Australian Politics Is Open to Foreign Donations, and China Has Much to Gain</a>.
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One of the donors is said to have withdrawn a large contribution last year because of a political party’s position on the disputed South China Sea, suggesting a back-room effort to shift public discussion of a delicate policy issue in Beijing’s favor. The question of Chinese interference is a sensitive one for Australia, an American ally that has embraced Beijing as its largest trade partner and welcomed Chinese investors and immigrants in large numbers. The political establishment here has generally been reluctant to tackle the issue. But the nation is now asking how a multicultural society should police a Communist power that has a record of mobilizing, and sometimes bullying, ethnic Chinese overseas to support its goals — and how it can do so without succumbing to racist xenophobia that treats everyone of Chinese descent as suspects. </blockquote>
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Raja Menon in OUTLOOK, <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/the-reborn-armada-of-cheng-ho/298333" target="_blank">The Reborn Armada of Cheng Ho</a>.
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In the year 1000, ship construction was an equal science in India, Arabia, Turkey, Venice and England. By 1600, the art of ship-building had grown exponentially in the West, firstly by the introduction of model-making and the use of those models to achieve curved hulls that were so precise that architects could venture beyond the limited length-to-breadth ratio of the conventional hull. Hundreds of oak trees were felled to build a single hull capable of withstanding a round shot fired by cannon at close range. In western shipyards, the making of a ship’s drawings became a complex art. This enterprise depended on the joint effort of a traditional carpenter, a mathematician, a naval architect and a draughtsman, whereas in India the ship was built without any drawings and remained limited in size to what the carpenter could memorise. In India particularly, a carpenter building a ship remained illiterate because his caste was too low for him to claim the right to education. Marine archaeologists used to sing the praises of the illiterate Indian ship carpenters turning out sailing ship hulls from memory without fully realising that the limitations of this very carpenter caused the maritime defeats at sea suffered by the ships he built. </blockquote>
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John Man in LITERARY REVIEW on Christoph Baumer’s book, <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/obscure-empires-brought-to-light" target="_blank">The History of Central Asia – The Age of Islam and the Mongols</a>.
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Since Genghis’s grandson Kublai made himself Chinese emperor (and, by extension, made Genghis Chinese, at least in Chinese eyes), how can Central Asian history be separated from Far Eastern history? It’s impossible: they overlap. Baumer omits the Jin empire of north China – Genghis’s first major target –but covers Kublai’s Yuan dynasty, which not only ruled over the north and south of the country after displacing the Jin and Song dynasties, but also in effect gave China its modern borders (incorporating Yunnan, Tibet and Xinjiang within them, though not Mongolia). It is not small irony, he notes, that the extension of a unified China was ‘brought about not by a Chinese but a “barbarian”. </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Tan Hecheng’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/tan-hecheng-chinese-unspeakable/" target="_blank">The Killing Wind – A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution</a>.
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<blockquote>
On August 26, 1967, Mrs. Zhou and her three children were dragged out of bed by leaders of the village of Tuditang. She had been working there for several years as a primary school teacher but had always lived under a cloud. Her father had been a traffic policeman during the time the Nationalist government had ruled China, which was enough to make her a “counterrevolutionary offspring.” That meant her family had been categorized as a “black element”—along with landlords, wealthy farmers, rightists (anyone who had voiced complaints in the late 1950s), and capitalists (usually small shopkeepers), as well as the catch-all “bad elements” (former prostitutes, opium smokers, homosexuals, and others seen as guilty of deviant behavior). For the previous eighteen years of Communist rule, black elements like Mrs. Zhou and her family had lived a marginal existence…. And it had inundated China with a barrage of propaganda intended to convince many that black elements were dangerous, violent criminals who were barely human. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao whipped up the propaganda another notch, declaring that enemies were readying a counterrevolution. In Dao County, stories began to fly that the black elements had seized weapons. The county government decided to strike preemptively and kill them. When village-level officials objected—many were related to the victims—more powerful leaders sent out “battle-hardened” squads of killers (often former criminals and hoodlums) to put pressure on locals to execute the undesirables. After the first deaths, locals were freed from moral constraints and usually acted spontaneously, even against family members. </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES: <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/india-gets-sucked-into-mongolia-china-relations-as-china-sanctions-mongolia-over-dalai-lamas-visit123/" target="_blank">India Gets Sucked into Mongolia-China Relations</a>.
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China has slapped economic sanctions on Mongolia as retaliation over Dalai Lama’s ninth visit to the country. Ulan Bator had allowed Lama’s visit in November in the teeth of official Chinese opposition. China reacted immediately by punitively charging all trucks crossing into China’s autonomous province of Inner Mongolia and cancelling all official interactions. To ward off sanctions by China, Mongolia sought India’s help who is ‘ready to work with Mongolian people in this time of their difficulty’. India had promised a credit line of US $1 billion financial assistance during Modi’s last visit but is careful to steer clear of Mongolia-China spat. India views the current crisis as a debt-serving problem. India considers Mongolia ‘a partner in democracy’. Mongolia boasts of ‘a long spiritual relationship with India’ and expects India to ‘raise its voice against the unilateral measures China is taking’ in the midst of severe winter. Silence is implied consent but India is apprehensive that a public statement would anger the Chinese. China’s actions could psyche out neighbours and do not augur well for One-Belt-One Road (OBOR) policy as countries will fear Chinese diktat for arbitrary economic sanctions. Russia is silent lest it upsets Chinese investment of US $ 400 billion. Mongolia has defied China throughout history, braving troubled and complicated relations despite heavy dependence on China for transit. Premiers of both countries had literally come to fisticuffs over support to India during Sino Indian war. </blockquote>
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Niharika Mandhana in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-moves-mountains-to-build-military-road-to-china-border-1491384609" target="_blank">India Moves Mountains to Build a Road to China</a>.
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India is accelerating work on strategic roads to be able to move troops and supplies to the border faster and deploy sophisticated weapons if armed conflict breaks out. China already has extensive infrastructure on its side. “It’s not business as usual,” a senior official overseeing the project said. “We have shifted gear.” Beijing claims 35,000 square miles of territory here, almost the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and calls it South Tibet. The arrival this week of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader – who China calls a separatist – has stirred the rivalry. </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES: <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/india-welcomes-bangladesh-its-true-friend123/" target="_blank">India Welcomes Bangladesh – Its True Friend</a>.
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Without understanding the long term ramifications, Rajiv Gandhi had recklessly promised Bangladesh military dictator H M Ershad way back in 1985 to include Nepal in future riparian talks. In years that followed, India had to work very hard to get out of it; the reason being that once Nepal is included, it would be impossible to exclude China, and that will render the talks quadrilateral in which eventuality there were real time danger of the other three– Bangladesh, Nepal and China- ganging up against India any time. As things stand at present, if Sheikh Hasina wants China included in talks on the Teesta and Brahmaputra rivers, it could renew India’s apprehensions. Recently high placed Bangladesh official said that in view of ‘China building barrages in Tibet and diverting the waters of these two rivers, it ‘should also be brought into the picture’. Thankfully, the same has not so far been the official line but nonetheless denotes the broadband of thinking. The fact of the matter is that after Hasina’s father Mujibur Rahman signed a water treaty with Indira Gandhi, Dhaka has always desired a third party. </blockquote>
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Ellen Barry in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/asia/anthropologist-india-andaman-island-tribes.html" target="_blank">A Season of Regret for an Aging Tribal Expert in India</a>.
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It took Mr. Pandit and his colleagues more than two decades to persuade the tribes known as the Jarawa and Sentinelese to lay down their bows and arrows and mingle peacefully with the Indian settlers who surrounded them. The process was grindingly slow, involving trips into remote jungle areas to leave gifts for people who would not show themselves. In each case, though, there was an exhilarating breakthrough. In India’s Andaman Islands, these encounters occurred two centuries after indigenous populations in the United States and Australia had been devastated by disease and addiction, leaving no doubt of the dangers of unregulated contact. Mr. Pandit found himself entrusted with the future of tiny groups believed to have migrated from Africa around 50,000 years ago, described by a team of geneticists as “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet.” India would do it better, he promised himself. So it is notable that now, when he looks back on his life’s great achievement, he does so with an unmistakable sadness. </blockquote>
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Hari Kumar & Ellen Barry in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/world/asia/kashmir-jammu-india-pakistan-beheadings.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Beheadings Escalate a Bitter Standoff Between Nuclear-Armed Nations</a>.
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Last year, <i>The Hindu</i>, a daily newspaper, printed internal government documents about a 2011 Indian Army raid called Operation Ginger, which was prompted by a Pakistani attack that had killed six Indian soldiers. Two of the dead were beheaded. The response came a month later: an ambush that left at least eight Pakistanis dead, three of them beheaded, according to documents cited by the newspaper. The newspaper characterized the soldiers’ heads as “trophies.” Beheading carries extraordinary emotional power for troops and has for many centuries, said Gen. Ved Prakash Malik, who was chief of the Indian Army during the Kargil conflict, a monthslong war the two countries fought along the Line of Control in 1999. </blockquote>
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Tushar Mohanty at SAIC, <a href="http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/sair15/15_46.htm" target="_blank">Balochistan: Unabated Bloodshed</a>.
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The suicide attack of May 12 and ethnic killings of May 13 in Balochistan occurred while Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif was in Beijing to ink agreements between Pakistan and China aimed at boosting cooperation in various sectors, on the sidelines of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Forum. Sharif arrived in Beijing on May 12, 2017, to participate in the OBOR Forum. CPEC is the flagship programme of OBOR, and is viewed by Baloch as a conspiracy by the Punjabi elite to plunder their land and resources. While Balochistan is the starting point of CPEC, the lion's share of projects under the programme has been assigned to Punjab, which has been assigned 53 per cent of the projects currently envisaged, according to Federal Ministry of Interior statistics shared with the Parliament on September 2, 2016. Out of the total of 330 projects, 176 are in Punjab while only eight have been allocated to Balochistan. This has compounded the sense of neglect and marginalization among the Baloch people. On September 3, 2016, the Balochistan Republican Party alleged that the Province’s abundant resources were being diverted for the benefit of Pakistan's dominant province, Punjab. Similarly, on March 13, 2017, Munir Mengal, the President of Baloch Voice Foundation, asserted, that CPEC was a 'strategic design' by Pakistan and China to loot Balochistan's resources and eliminate their culture and identity. Dubbing China as a 'great threat' to the Baloch people, UNHRC Balochistan representative Mehran Marri argued, on August 13, 2016, that "China really-really is spreading its tentacles in Balochistan very rapidly, and therefore, we are appealing to the international community. The Gwadar project is for the Chinese military….”</blockquote>
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Lucy Hornby & Aliya Ram in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e5d141b0-2584-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16" target="_blank">Beijing and New Delhi Restart Border Dispute Over Tibet Region</a>.
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Beijing’s claims over Arunachal Pradesh – which it calls South Tibet – rest on its control over the rest of Tibet, the vast mountain territory it invaded and seized in 1950. The decision to release new names follows a dispute over a visit to a Buddhist monastery in Arunachal this month by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who lives in exile in India. </blockquote>
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Edward Wong in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/world/asia/china-tibet-buddhists-larung-gar.html" target="_blank">UN Human Rights Experts Unite to Condemn China Over Expulsions in Tibetan Region</a>.
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Over the summer, Chinese officials began deporting monks and nuns living at Larung Gar who were not registered residents of Garze, the prefecture where the institution is. Since then, hundreds of clergy members have been forced out, and workers have demolished small homes clustered along the valley walls. One day last fall, I watched workers tearing and cutting apart wooden homes, sometimes using a chain saw. Official reports have said the demolition is part of a project to improve safety in the area because people live in such tight quarters there. In 2014, a fire destroyed about 100 homes. Residents said the government planned to bring the population down to 5,000 from 20,000 by next year. </blockquote>
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Edward Wong in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/asia/china-mongolia-dalai-lama.html" target="_blank">After Dalai Lama’s Visit, Mongolia Breaks Ties</a>.
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The Dalai Lamas arose from the actions of Altan Khan, a 16th-century Mongolian leader who controlled a region next to northern China, which was ruled by the ethnic Han emperors of the Ming dynasty. Three centuries earlier, Kublai Khan, the founding emperor of the Yuan dynasty, an era when Mongolians ruled China, had become interested in Tibetan Buddhism and had taken on a Tibetan teacher. But it was Altan Khan who made Tibetan Buddhism an official religion among Mongols. He did this when the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, also known as the Yellow Hat school, visited him in 1577. On that occasion, Altan Khan gave the spiritual leader the title of Dalai Lama. With Dalai meaning “ocean” in Mongolian and Lama being a Tibetan spiritual teacher, the title translates as “ocean of wisdom.” This bound the Mongols and Tibetans and established a relationship between Mongolian rulers and the Gelug school. Since then, the position of the Dalai Lama has been tied to complex politics in Asia. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBuEZf7s_dT3pLWwyj7KdD9WfoNdXf8EpMUOtrLFHLRwjbhZPKu1pvZxWG1B-LRyGVdiMaywdlsvpO1mcG4Nc35cvI-ITNGu9ZGLNuwGlAYOfjWppesQw_NNhRo5vBCGcKnirmOqVoUmOJ/s1600/NV-153-tseringwoeser-tibetonfire.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="230" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBuEZf7s_dT3pLWwyj7KdD9WfoNdXf8EpMUOtrLFHLRwjbhZPKu1pvZxWG1B-LRyGVdiMaywdlsvpO1mcG4Nc35cvI-ITNGu9ZGLNuwGlAYOfjWppesQw_NNhRo5vBCGcKnirmOqVoUmOJ/s320/NV-153-tseringwoeser-tibetonfire.png" width="212" /></a></div>
Jonathan Mirsky in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Tsering Woeser’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/how-tibet-is-being-crushed-while-the-dalai-lama-survives/" target="_blank">Tibet on Fire</a>, and Tsering Topgyal’s book, China and Tibet.
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The resentment of the Tibetans against the Chinese, according to Woeser, was based on the sense that their traditional identity had been violated, a conviction that reaches back to 1934 and 1935, during the Long March, when Mao’s forces, fleeing the pursuing forces of Chiang Kai-shek, passed through a predominantly Tibetan region inside China. This retreat has always been hailed as heroic, beginning with <i>Red Star Over China</i> (1937) by Edgar Snow, who heard Mao’s version of what happened at his guerrilla refuge. But, Woeser contends, the Reds looted food from the monasteries and massacred monks and lay people. (This account is new to me.) Since 1950, when the Communists invaded Tibet, Woeser writes, they have attempted to destroy the central elements of Tibetan culture…. During my visits between 1981 and 1989, some temples and monasteries were barely functioning and they were closely observed, including by policemen dressed as monks. I saw Chinese tourists and soldiers walking the wrong way around religious sites, a deliberate affront. </blockquote>
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Gordon Fairclough & Niharika Mandhana in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-stakes-as-the-dalai-lama-hints-at-being-reborn-outside-china-1491585210" target="_blank">High Stakes in the Dalai Lama’s Rebirth</a>.
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The Dalai Lama – the 14th in his lineage – has indicated that he won’t be reborn in any place under Chinese control. He has also hinted that he might opt not to be reincarnated at all…. In recent months, the Dalai Lama has traveled to the two spots on China’s periphery where the only previous non-Tibetan incarnations of the Dalai Lama originated. In November, he visited Mongolia, where the fourth Dalai Lama – the grandson of a Mongol ruler – was born in 1589. The trip drew a sharp response from the Chinese. Under pressure, Mongolian officials apologized and pledged not to invite the Tibetan leader back. This week, the Dalai Lama made the arduous journey to Tawang, less than 25 miles from India’s disputed frontier with China, where the sixth Dalai Lama – a child of a local nobleman – was discovered in the late 1600s. </blockquote>
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Reuters-SCMP: <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2083736/terrorism-threat-transforms-chinas-uygur-heartland" target="_blank">Terrorism Threat Transforms China’s Uygur Heartland into Security State</a>.
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China’s worst fears are that a large-scale attack would blight this year’s diplomatic set piece, a “One Belt, One Road” summit attended by world leaders planned for Beijing in May. State media says the drills, and other measures such as a network of thousands of new street-corner police posts, are aimed making everyone feel safer. But many residents say the drills are just part of an oppressive secutiry operation that has been ramped up in Kashgar and other cities in Xinjiang’s Uygur heartland in recent months. As well as taking part in drills, shopkeepers must, at their own expense, install password-activated security doors, “panic buttons” and cameras that film not just the street outside but also inside their stores, sending a direct video feed to police. </blockquote>
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Te-Ping Chen in WSJ-<i>newsofasia.net</i>, <a href="http://newsofasia.net/islamic-state-video-threatens-china-with-homegrown-fighters-video-appears-to-show-recruits-from-chinas-mostly-muslim-uighur-minority-threatening-to-avenge-oppression/" target="_blank">Uighurs Threaten Attacks in ISIS Video</a>.
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An Islamic State video appears to show recruits from China’s Uighur minority threatening to “avenge oppression,” feeding into Beijing’s assertion of a growing jihadist-terror threat. The half-hour video was released Monday by an Islamic State division in western Iraq, said the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online jihadist activity. Subtitled in both Arabic and Uighur, it shows what SITE says are Uighur fighters on the battlefield, as well as several grisly executions of accused informants. “Oh you Chinese who [do] not understand what people say!” one of the fighters declares before an execution, according to SITE’s translation. “We are the soldiers of the Caliphate, and we will come to you to clarify to you with the tongues of our weapons, to shed blood like rivers and avenging the oppressed, Allah permitting.” Recruitment by Middle East jihadist groups has Beijing on increasingly high alert, particularly in its northwest Xinjiang region, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan and is home to the mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority. Leaked Islamic State records show that more than 100 Chinese nationals have joined the group in Syria, according to two recent studies, and Chinese officials say about 300 Uighurs are fighting with the jihadist movement in Syria and Iraq. </blockquote>
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Carol Giocomo in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/opinion/sunday/villagers-in-myanmar-describe-the-destructive-power-of-chinas-building-frenzy.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Villagers in Myanmar Describe the Destructive Power of China’s Building Frenzy</a>.
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Called One Belt, One Road, the multibillion-dollar initiative seeks to generate business for China’s state-owned enterprises while promising development and jobs to other countries along the route that are desperate for both. Other foreign investors and nations, however, would be wise to consider what happened in the area around Kyaukphyu — a poor town of dilapidated wooden houses and deeply rutted roads in desperately poor Rakhine State, on Myanmar’s western coast — before participating in the huge venture…. I heard this story firsthand from five farmers who traveled hours by boat, foot and motorbike from their even smaller and poorer village, Kapaing Chaung, to talk with me about their experiences when the China National Petroleum Corporation and the government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, jointly built an oil and gas pipeline from China across Myanmar to Kyaukphyu, on the Bay of Bengal. The villagers are members of a local “watch committee” backed by two rights activist groups, the Natural Resource Governance Institute and Paung Ku, to monitor the operation. The committee is a weak but admirable attempt at community action in a country where people are reluctant to complain and nobody cared much about the farmers whose land was vital to the project but who were powerless to defend their interests. The Chinese destroyed a dam in the village and the mangrove trees that supported it, flooding farmlands with salty water and interfering with a river that provided irrigation. </blockquote>
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Mike Ives in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/myanmar-buddhist-yangon.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Ultranationalist Monks in Myanmar, Facing Crackdown, Say They’re Unrepetant</a>.
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The state-run Buddhist authority’s directive on Tuesday came two weeks after a raid on a Muslim neighborhood in Yangon by Buddhist vigilantes who were searching for Rohingya they believed were hiding there illegally. There is a widespread view in Myanmar that Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, regardless of whether their families have lived in Myanmar for generations. The raid led to street clashes between Buddhists and Muslims, a rarity in Yangon, and left at least one person injured. A Buddhist nationalist group, the Patriotic Monks Union, later claimed responsibility for the raid, and several people were charged with incitement to commit violence. Sectarian tensions have been especially high in Myanmar since the fall, when Rohingya militants killed nine police officers at a border post in Rakhine, inciting a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that sent tens of thousands of Rohingya fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh. In March, widespread reports of state-sanctioned rape and killing in Rakhine led the United Nations to call for a fact-finding mission to investigate accusations of rights violations by Myanmar’s Army and security forces. In another potential blow to religious harmony, U Ko Ni, a Muslim lawyer and a top adviser to the National League for Democracy, was shot and killed outside Yangon’s international airport in January, in what appeared to be a political assassination. </blockquote>
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Paul Millar at SOUTHEAST ASIA GLOBE, <a href="http://sea-globe.com/wealthy-middle-eastern-donors-bring-uncertainty-to-cambodias-cham-muslims/" target="_blank">Faith in Flux: Wealthy Middle Eastern Donors Bring Uncertainty to Cambodia’s Cham Muslims</a>.
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Rebuilt after the Khmer Rouge period in 1987 with Kuwaiti funds and private donations from Muslim communities spread across Southeast Asia, Nourussalaam Mosque is one of dozens of shining houses of worship lining Cambodia’s National Highway 5. The road stretches north from Phnom Penh to Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Cham, major hubs of the nation’s ethnic Cham community. Tracing their descent from the ancient kingdom of Champa in modern-day Vietnam, the more than 400,000 Chams who live in Cambodia have become the most visible face of Islam in the country. But as private and government funding from Muslim countries across the world continues to facilitate the spread of fundamentalist forms of Islam in this community, it is a face that is looking increasingly unfamiliar to the Buddhist majority. </blockquote>
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Julia Wallace & Neou Vannarin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-kem-ley-killing-life-sentence.html?_r=0" target="_blank">A Life Sentence in Cambodia, But a Political Murder Is Far from Solved</a>.
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In the days before his killing, Mr. Kem Ley gave radio interviews about a new Global Witness report, “Hostile Takeover,” that detailed the vast wealth amassed by the family of Mr. Hun Sen over his 30 years in power. Mr. Kem Ley was adept at communicating with rural Cambodians over the radio, deftly deploying the puns, double entendres and allegories that are staples of effective political communication in what is still overwhelmingly an oral culture. “Kem Ley mastered the art of communication to perfection,” Astrid Noren-Nilsson, a lecturer at Lund University’s Center for East and South-East Asian Studies, wrote in an email. He had also been campaigning against Vietnam’s supposed theft of borderlands — a highly delicate topic here — and writing a collection of mordant political fables. They were set in a surreal version of Cambodia populated by talking animals and characters like Uncle Strong, Aunty the Farm’s Gone and Mr. Microfinance, a world in which an assassin named Meet Kill would fit right in. Mr. Kem Ley called them “political jokes,” but usually the joke was on the common people, who were continually being duped by tigers, lions and rapacious rulers. In one, a man called Hostile Takeover accrues endless resources for himself and his family. Another, published the day before his killing, is set in a garden where “good and gentle animals are constantly killed” by a small cadre of thieving predators. </blockquote>
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Julia Wallace in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-im-chaem.html" target="_blank">The Bucolic Life of a Cambodian Grandmother Accused of Mass Killings</a>.
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Prosecutors estimated that 40,000 people had died at the largest prison in the district that Ms. Im Chaem ran, Phnom Trayoung, which was allegedly under her direct control. Some were executed by night, while others died doing heavy labor at the prison’s quarry while eating meager rations of rice porridge. An entire village of 400 people, Chakrey, was virtually eliminated; fewer than 10 men were alive by the end of 1978. At a nearby jail, around 6,000 people were killed, 20 or 30 every night. “In Chakrey village we could hear the screams from the forest nearby,” said one survivor cited in “The Pol Pot Regime,” a book by the historian Ben Kiernan. “The victims’ clothes were distributed to us the next day.” Ms. Im Chaem also supervised construction of huge waterworks to increase rice production, including two dams. According to prosecutors, one was built entirely by hand in three months by 1,300 slave laborers subsisting on tiny portions of rice porridge. She tells the story differently. In a 2012 interview with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent research group, she said she had been called upon to “solve problems” because she had a knack for organizing workers and supervising rice cultivation. </blockquote>
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Seth Mydans in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html" target="_blank">Khmer Rouge Tribunal’s Record: 11 Years, $300 Million and 3 convictions</a>.
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After spending more than a decade and nearly $300 million, the United Nations-backed tribunal prosecuting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge has convicted just three men. It appears now that they could be the only people to answer in court for the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 in one of the worst episodes of mass killing in the last century. Three more potential defendants have been investigated by the tribunal, an ungainly mix of Cambodian and international prosecutors and judges. But because of resistance on the Cambodian side, there are serious doubts that their indictments will proceed. </blockquote>
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Julia Wallace in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-capitalism.html" target="_blank">They Smashed Banks for Pol Pot. Now They’re Founding Them</a>.
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<blockquote>
Malai was still a malaria-infested jungle stronghold when Mr. Tep Khunnal moved here in 1998, bringing with him Pol Pot’s widow, whom he married shortly after his boss’s death. Along with a barely educated but savvy ex-soldier, Soom Yin, he took out a bank loan to test some of his ideas. Their company bought the area’s first corn-drying machine, imported a new breed of sun-resistant corn from Thailand and set up a quality-control system for the corn and cassava that moved through their warehouse. Today, Mr. Soom Yin owns the largest export firm in the area and can talk for hours about the minutiae of the cassava trade, from moisture levels to price fluctuations. In his spare time, he said, he reads books on management. The Khmer Rouge ways are “very old now,” he said. “Even me, I don’t even dream about that anymore. We just do business.” </blockquote>
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Harsh Pant at YALEGLOBAL, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/resurgent-russia-joins-great-game-south-asia" target="_blank">Resurgent Russia Joins Great Game in South Asia</a>.
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<blockquote>
Russia has revamped its South Asia policy in recent months with a major outreach to Pakistan and stepping forward as a power broker in Afghanistan, its former stomping ground. With the help of its newfound strategic partner China, Russia intends to checkmate the United States’ regional pre-eminence. But the maneuvering has also brought Moscow in opposition to New Delhi with which it has traditionally shared robust ties. Any new power equation in the region will have long-term implications. Since the 1960s Russia has been a close partner of India in South Asia. This relationship has stood the test of time even as global power equation changed after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the high point of the relationship was the signing of the 1971 Indo–Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, which signaled a decisive shift away from the West in response to an emerging US-Pakistan-China axis in South Asia. Though not an explicit military alliance, this treaty was sharp departure from India’s professed policy of non-alignment, and New Delhi emerged a close partner of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The treaty in effect created deterrence against any form of US-Pakistan-China detente and rendered India increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for defense capabilities. </blockquote>
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Neil Buckley in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/422a8252-2443-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16" target="_blank">Russia’s Agriculture Sector Flourishes Amid the Sanctions</a>.
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<blockquote>
Many western analysts and investors were cynical. But in at least one area of the economy – agriculture and associated sectors – the optimism has been vindicated. Russia last year became the world’s biggest exporter of grains, at more than 34m tones. Total Russian grain production hit a record 119m tones. The turnround is striking, since as recently as 15 years ago – and for a couple of decades before during the Soviet era – Russia was a net importer. The success goes beyond grain. Russia has fully substituted imports with domestic production of pork and chicken. It has become a top producer of sugar beet; greenhouse vegetable production last year was up 30 per cent on the year before. While agriculture remains far below oil and gas, the sector has overtaken arms sales to become Russia’s second-biggest exporter. </blockquote>
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Andrew Rettman at euobserver.com, <a href="https://euobserver.com/foreign/137865" target="_blank">Orthodox Believers Form Pro-Russia Bloc in Europe</a>.
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<blockquote>
Most people in the majority-Orthodox bloc, which includes EU and Nato states Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece, as well as EU-aspirant states such as Georgia, Moldova, and Serbia believe Russia should act as a “buffer” against the West and should “protect” them if need be. Orthodox societies also voiced more nationalist, homophobic, and sexist views, the survey, which was published by US pollster Pew on Wednesday (10 May) said. By contrast, people in majority Roman Catholic countries, such as Croatia, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, looked to the West for leadership. Orthodox affiliation was also rising sharply in central and eastern Europe, while Catholicism was on the wane, with the Czech Republic emerging as the most godless state of all, the pollster said. </blockquote>
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Igor Torbakov at <i>eurasianet.org</i>, <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/83671" target="_blank">Why Does Moscow’s Perennial Quest for Recognition Go Nowhere? </a>.
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<blockquote>
From a European perspective, the key problem that Russia is facing in its quest for recognition as an equal is a social one. Briefly, it boils down to the incompatibility between the Russian and European regime types, and, specifically, between the ways they structure the relationship between state and society. From the viewpoint of many in Washington, meanwhile, a significant barrier to parity is connected with economic achievement. Given that Russia’s GDP roughly equals that of the state of New York, Moscow’s pretence to cast itself as America’s peer is perceived as ridiculous by many American policy players. These days, some leading Russian foreign policy analysts assert that a major paradigm shift is occurring in which the “renationalization of international relations” is trending. The “historic” West has been eclipsed by the non-West, these experts argue. In addition, they maintain, the aspects of Russian conduct that seemed outdated and belonging to the 19th century diplomatic toolkit – policies such as the reliance on hard power, realist geopolitics, privileging national over international, and prioritizing an enhanced role for the state – actually constitute the “post-modern” reality of the 21stcentury. </blockquote>
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Wojciech Siegen in NEW EASTERN EUROPE, <a href="http://www.neweasterneurope.eu/component/content/article/1014-issue/2229-issue-1-2017" target="_blank">Making the Unreal Real</a>.
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During the first years of Putin’s rule as president there was willingness to de-ideologise the history curriculum. In 2003 the British historian Catherine Merridale presented the results of her research in Russia where she conducted interviews with academic staff and students who spoke about their willingness to teach and be taught history deprived of ideology. This educational programme was equated with western models, which at that time was positively assessed. Interestingly, Merridale concluded that Russia n youths were not interested in ideological content. The year 2005 can be regarded as a turning point in the ideologisation of education in Russia. A strong shift in the Kremlin’s policy towards the youth was undoubtedly illustrated in the idea of Vladislav Surkov (a close Putin associate and key Kremlin ideologist – editor’s note) to set up the “Youth Democratic Antifascist Movement”, or Nashi. The name and the stature of the organization refers to the myth of the Second World War. That year was also the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. </blockquote>
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Joshua Rubenstein in NYTBR on Catherine Merridale’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/lenin-on-the-train-catherine-merridale.html" target="_blank">Lenin on the Train</a>.
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<blockquote>
The cover of “Lenin on the Train” portends the trouble to follow. In a notorious Soviet-era painting, Lenin is shown descending from the train to greet an exuberant crowd of admirers at Petrograd’s Finland Station. Behind him looms the image of a smiling Stalin, as if that future tyrant had been aboard as well — “a visual fairy tale,” in Merridale’s words, to reinforce Stalin’s claim that he had always been Lenin’s principal lieutenant. In fact, Stalin had faced internal exile in Siberia before reaching Petrograd in March. Lenin was greeted by hundreds of followers, among them prominent Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Fedor Raskolnikov, while others, most notably Grigory Zinoviev and Grigory Sokolnikov, accompanied him on the train. Stalin later had them killed. But it was Lenin himself who made it clear that the Bolsheviks would reject democratic values. He “had not traveled back to join a coalition,” Merridale writes, but to undermine the provisional government and establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat. It was Lenin who instituted severe censorship, established one-party rule and resorted to terror against his political enemies. Stalin took these measures to further extremes for his own sinister purposes. Merridale is right to recall Winston Churchill’s famous observation about Lenin’s return. The Germans, Churchill wrote, “turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.” </blockquote>
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Gregory Feifer in NYTBR on Sean McMeekin’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/books/review/russian-revolution-sean-mcmeekin.html" target="_blank">The Russian Revolution – A New History</a>.
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<blockquote>
Four months had passed since the so-called February Revolution forced Czar Nicholas II from the throne, and the democratic socialists and liberals who had taken control were locked in a mounting power struggle marked by shifting alliances, palace intrigues and occasional street fighting. Denouncing them as bourgeois “minister-capitalists,” the mobs now demanded that the Soviet take full command of the country. The protesters were acting on the orders of the small but militant Bolshevik wing of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party, which had been busy propagandizing military units and factory workers. Although the Bolsheviks had called for a peaceful demonstration, their real plan was to seize power in a coup d’état. With gangs in armored cars and trucks roaming the city, they were already in de facto control. Vladimir Lenin was inside the palace waiting to proclaim a new government. When a leading minister stepped outside to calm the crowd, a worker raised a fist to his face, shouting, “Take power, you S.O.B., when they give it to you!” Others seized him and dragged him into a car. But the Bolshevik plan soon fizzled. Whether due more to a loss of nerve than bad planning, the mobs dissipated and the Bolshevik leaders were arrested. With evidence that they were being lavishly financed by Russia’s wartime enemy Germany, the provisional government prepared to dispatch the traitorous radicals. “Now they are going to shoot us,” Lenin warned his co-conspirator Leon Trotsky before shaving his beard and fleeing to Finland. </blockquote>
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Danusha Goska at <i>frontpage.com</i>. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266917/bernie-sanders-supporters-should-watch-afterimage-danusha-v-goska" target="_blank">In Andrzej Wajda’s Final Film, Communism Destroys an Artist</a>.
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A young man took the stage. He was earnest, pale, and underfed. "We are about to show you a film." We students were excited. Kids love it when class is canceled and the teacher shows a film. The young man continued in that weird English that could be heard only in the old Soviet Empire. The Iron Curtain guaranteed that its detainees didn't have much of a chance to converse with outsiders. Those very few people who could speak any English at all sounded as if they had memorized a purloined dictionary, reverse-engineered the grammar, and practiced only on Mars. "Since you are Americans, you will not understand this movie," the young man promised, with a familiar resignation. The waiters in the restaurants with no food; the train station clerks who couldn't sell you a ticket and couldn't explain why; the librarians whose shelves were off limits: resignation flowed more reliably than water through the noisy pipes in the student dorm. "Our history is peculiar," the young man informed us. We knew. We could exchange one dollar for fistfuls of Polish money. My Australian roommate, Kirstin, was about to visit West Germany. My Polish friend, Beata, gave Kirstin her entire month's salary, so Kirstin could bring back to Beata one spool of turquoise thread. The movie began. Understand it? It swept me away. </blockquote>
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Daniel Wanczyk in NEW EASTERN EUROPE, <a href="http://www.neweasterneurope.eu/component/content/article/1014-issue/2229-issue-1-2017" target="_blank">The Black Island of the Arctic</a>.
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The first searching and mining expedition – half of which was made up of hired workers and the other half was made up of prisoners – reached the area in 1931. The team had to transport everything on their backs, from boats, tools and construction materials to food. The Vorkuta River area was rich in coal but nothing else. There were no trees and conditions were too harsh for agriculture. With the exception of a few nomads, there were no permanent inhabitants. The first mine with two drifts opened in 1932. The local landscape was diversified by the ever growing piles of black coal, as it was still unclear how to most effectively transport it. Intense extraction required manpower, especially since people’s hands were almost the only available tool. By the winter of 1932 there were already 1,500 prisoners working in Vorkuta. By spring 1933 only 54 survived. The high mortality rate meant there was a need for more prisoners. </blockquote>
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Jere Longman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/sports/soccer/human-rights-stadiums-fifa-2018-world-cup-russia.html" target="_blank">Report Finds 17 Deaths and Labor Abuses at World Cup Stadiums in Russia</a>.
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<blockquote>
The 34-page report, set to be made public Wednesday, appears to be the most comprehensive analysis so far of the labor situation ahead of the World Cup, which will be contested at 12 stadiums in 11 cities across Russia from June 14, 2018, to July 15. The 17 deaths at World Cup construction sites were documented by Building and Wood Workers’ International, a global trade union based in Switzerland. At least 70 workers died during construction for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia; 13 before the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro; six before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; and zero during the building of the Olympic Park at the 2012 Olympics in London, according to trade union officials and news accounts. </blockquote>
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Anthony D’Agostino in NATIONAL INTEREST, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-the-soviet-union-thought-itself-death-20177" target="_blank">Glasnost Reconsidered</a>.
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In his student days, Gromyko had written a doctoral thesis on Aleksandr Gorchakov, foreign minister in the government of Czar Alexander II, the “Czar liberator” who freed the serfs in 1861. Recueillement comes from a phase Gorchakov once uttered in answer to a query about his quiet and almost passive foreign policy after defeat in the Crimean War. “la Russie ne boude pas,” he said, “La Russie se recueille” (Russia is not sulking; she is gathering her strength). Gorchakov explained that it would be wise for Russia to remove herself from the list of enemies of the other great powers, to erase the “Russian threat” from the minds of British and French leaders and to allow them to focus instead on their differences with each other. At the end of the Brezhnev years Gromyko, like Gorchakov, thought it was time to tone down Soviet foreign policy, which was then sponsoring revolutionary regimes on three continents, and make another attempt to return to the Nixon-Kissinger détente. In the Gorchakov tradition, which still moves Russian policy today, détente is the beau ideal of realistic relations among the two greatest powers. Bismarck and Salisbury could be imagined to be reaching for it in the 1880s, FDR and Stalin similarly at Tehran and Yalta. Gorbachev followed Gromyko’s lead in 1985–86 and then tried to supersede him by going even further to remove the Soviet threat by perestroika. It was recueillement, perestroika, glasnost. The unstated premise was that the Soviet threat was related to its totalitarianism. To prove that the Soviets were really changing and not tricking the West, as most of Ronald Reagan’s advisers were claiming, the change must be real. </blockquote>
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James Marson & Alan Cullison in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-says-botched-killing-has-moscows-fingerprints-1497037202" target="_blank">Ukraine: Botched Killing Has Russia’s Fingerprints</a>.
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Ukrainian authorities have arrested a Russian citizen who they believe traveled on a phony passport to Ukraine and was posing as a French journalist when he allegedly pulled a gun out of a gift-wrapped box and shot a Kremlin opponent he had invited to an interview last week. The assassination attempt went awry when the victim’s wife pulled a gun of her own and opened fire on the would-be killer. Both men were hospitalized and survived. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlGpsBTiKEFytfXoM-G27BHiY-2A9zgsvdPDMbhxzpWGYVawIQQrNd-X5flqQUavr0aRy0SS8RgaE8Mwr6_8AB3hzKGPx9mmgOIepE7Nglzx57dVxML0xiir5bWesf5cfJlN3-BiQHhYr/s1600/NV-153-michaelbreen-newkoreans.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="231" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlGpsBTiKEFytfXoM-G27BHiY-2A9zgsvdPDMbhxzpWGYVawIQQrNd-X5flqQUavr0aRy0SS8RgaE8Mwr6_8AB3hzKGPx9mmgOIepE7Nglzx57dVxML0xiir5bWesf5cfJlN3-BiQHhYr/s320/NV-153-michaelbreen-newkoreans.png" width="212" /></a></div>
John Tamny in WSJ on Michael Breen’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-go-from-the-third-world-to-the-first-1493330802" target="_blank">The New Koreans</a>.
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What the divide between North and South highlights is that past national trauma does not guarantee perpetual poverty and dysfunction. More than foreign-aid proponents would like to admit, economies are just people, and, like people, they gain strength from periods of weakness. In the 1950s, according to Mr. Breen, the Koreans were “angry, dislocated, and desperate.” That condition has driven the South to excel. These days its success may be reflected most clearly in South Korea’s growing cultural relevance. Pop star PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was a global sensation in 2012, and last year Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize. “Wealth and freedom brings artists to the fore,” Mr. Breen concludes. </blockquote>
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Demetri Sevastopoulo in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/fdfdecd6-2b18-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7" target="_blank">Trump Administration Warns Carter to Avoid Mediation Role in North Korea</a>.
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<blockquote>
Brian Hook, a top state department official, personally made the request to Mr. Carter last weekend at the former president’s home in Georgia. The meeting came after Mr. Carter requested a briefing on the White House’s hardening stance towards North Korea’s nuclear programme, according to one person familiar with the nature of the talks…. The plea to Mr. Carter signaled concern that the former president could complicate US policy towards Pyongyang, as has occurred before, including in 1994 when Bill Clinton had been considering launching a military strike against North Korea. </blockquote>
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Jeremy Page & Jay Solomon in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-north-korean-venture-shows-how-much-sanctions-can-miss-1494191212" target="_blank">Chinese, North Korean Companies Teamed Up</a>.
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For most of the past decade, a Chinese state-owned company had a joint venture with a North Korean company under sanctions for involvement in Pyongyang’s atomic-weapons program. Chinese corporate and government records show. China’s Limar Corp. and North Korea’s Ryongbong General Corp. set up a joint venture in 2008 to mine tantalum, niobium and zirconium, minerals that are useful in making phones and computers but also nuclear reactors and missiles. </blockquote>
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Mike Ives in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/asia/vietnam-hostages-protest-land-dispute-eviction.html" target="_blank">Vietnamese Villagers Hold Officials Hostage, Highlighting a Land Dispute</a>.
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Videos of confrontations between villagers and the riot police in rural Vietnam are widely shared on YouTube and Facebook, which are not blocked in the country. Some villagers are supported by networks of urban activists as they campaign against the officials or the state-affiliated companies behind the evictions. The disputes occasionally turn violent, forcing provincial or even national officials to intervene. In 2012, for example, after a farmer shot at police officers who were trying to evict him from his land in the northern port city of Haiphong, the prime minister at the time, Nguyen Tan Dung, stepped in to say that the eviction had been illegal. In 2013, Vietnam tweaked its land law in ways meant to introduce more transparency into eminent domain cases. A United Nations-financed survey of public administration in Vietnam later found that the percentage of citizens who reported land seizures in Vietnam had declined slightly, to 6.8 percent of respondents in 2016 from over 9 percent in 2013, suggesting that the law may have helped reduce land seizures by local officials. </blockquote>
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Javier Hernandez in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/world/asia/trump-duterte-xi-south-china-sea.html" target="_blank">After Trump’s Phone Call to Philippines Leader, China’s President Calls Him</a>.
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In Mr. Xi’s follow-up to Mr. Trump’s overture, he pledged to deepen ties with the Philippines and called the country a “friendly neighbor,” according to Chinese news media reports. Mr. Xi also said Manila would be an “important partner” in his plan to invest in infrastructure overseas. The remarks were in line with China’s recent attempts to capitalize on tensions between the United States and the Philippines and draw Mr. Duterte’s government closer with promises of economic aid. But they also appeared to be a way of thanking the Philippines for not provoking China over disputed South China Sea islands claimed by both countries. “There is a scramble to win over the heart and mind of President Duterte,” said Patrick M. Cronin, a senior adviser at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based policy research group. </blockquote>
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Gary Dexter in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/japan-thinks-english-is-the-future-whatever-jean-claude-juncker-says/" target="_blank">Japan Thinks English Is the Future – Whatever Jean-Claude Juncker Says</a>.
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In fact, Japanese contains so many English loan words that Japan feels closer to the UK, linguistically, than it would to, say, China (Mandarin Chinese is unrelated to Japanese), or indeed to any other Asian country. Common words such as cup, knife, fork, spoon, table, keyboard, pen, light, glass, speaker, tape, pill, backpack, jacket, skirt and sweater — just a few of the nouns I can see by looking around me at this moment — are all borrowed from English, and are commonly known as koppu, naifu, fōku, supūn, tēburu, kībōdo, pen, raito, gurasu, supīka, tēpu, piru, bakkupakku, jaketto, sukāto and sētā. There are many thousands of others. That Japan and Britain are similar in many ways is no real news to anyone. Both are island nations living off the coast of a very big and powerful continental entity. Both are jealous of their independence. Both like tea. Both have an exaggerated system of polite interactions — if you doubt this is still the case in Britain, count how many times the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are uttered when you buy a stamp. Both are relatively peaceful societies where guns are very difficult to get hold of. Both are self-consciously literary societies with traditions that stretch back at least 1,000 years. And it is in this last respect that the Japanese love of Britain comes into its own. </blockquote>
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Zack Baddorf in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/world/africa/joseph-kony-lords-resistance-army-uganda.html" target="_blank">Ordered to Catch a Warlord, Ugandan Troops Are Accused of Hunting Girls</a>.
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This region of the Central African Republic is one of the most remote and lawless parts of the country. Surrounded by dense forests, the town of Obo is right at the triple border with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the territory of Mr. Kony’s L.R.A. Inside the Ugandan camp here, the headquarters for the military’s regional mission against the Lord’s Resistance Army, soldiers cluster around a fire pit and hang their laundry on strings. Broken, rusted and half-disassembled military trucks litter the area. The women and girls entered the Ugandan headquarters “like it was the most normal thing in the world,” said Lewis Mudge, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has investigated allegations of sexual violence. “It was a complete culture of impunity where this was completely tolerated and accepted.” The United Nations defines sexual exploitation as “any actual or attempted abuse of position of vulnerability, differential power or trust, for sexual purposes.” The African Union prohibits any “sexual activities” with children as well as any “sexual favor in exchange for assistance.” </blockquote>
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Tonny Onyulo in USAT, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/05/01/uganda-human-children-sacrifice/100741148/" target="_blank">In Uganda, Child Sacrifices Frighteningly Too Common</a>.
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“I was shocked when I saw the mutilated body of my daughter,” Misanya, 30, wept as she recalled the horror. “I really couldn’t believe if she was really my daughter. She was missing almost every part of her body. She died a very painful death.” Police later arrested a wealthy neighbor, businessman Gilbert Odima, who authorities alleged used Jane as a human sacrifice in a witchcraft ritual designed to bring him good fortune. “He confessed to me that he carried out the ritual to boost his dwindling business,” Misanya recounted about Odima, who is now in prison awaiting trial. “He said he knew the act would bring him good luck and success in life.” Misanya’s gruesome experience is only too common in Uganda, where human sacrifice — especially of children — occurs despite the government's efforts to stop it. Ugandan figures show seven child and six adult sacrifices in 2015, the most recent numbers available. In 2014, police recorded nine child and four adult sacrifices. Five years before, they counted 29 cases in total, the most in recent years. </blockquote>
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Maria Abi-Habib in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/christians-in-an-epochal-shift-are-leaving-the-middle-east-1494597848" target="_blank">Christians Are Leaving the Middle East</a>.
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Today, more Arab Christians live outside the Middle East than in the region. Some 20 million live abroad, compared with 15 million Arab Christians who remain in the Mideast, according to a report last year by a trio of Christian charities and the University of East London. In 1971, Egyptian Coptic Christians had two churches in the U.S. Today there are 252 Coptic churches according to Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. </blockquote>
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Sohrab Ahmari in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-nationalism-can-solve-the-crisis-of-islam-1495830440" target="_blank">Weekend Interview: Pierre Manent</a>.
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“I cannot prove that the nation-state is the only viable form,” he says. “But what I’m sure about is that to live a fully human life, you need a common life and a community. This is a Greek idea, a Roman idea, a Christian idea.” It’s why 19th-century liberals such a Tocqueville were so enthralled by the modern democratic nation-state. It was committed to universal human rights, but it housed them within a pre-exiting “sacred community” that had its own inherited traditions – and boundaries. It’s also why in the 21st century, Mr. Manent says, the “small, damaged” nations of Central Europe react most viscerally against transnational liberalism. Hungary fears “it couldn’t have endured and would have disappeared,” he continues, if it faced the same multicultural pressures as, say, France. The European Union’s efforts to punish voters in such countries for electing the wrong kind of government will therefore intensify the backlash. </blockquote>
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Roger Scruton in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-need-for-nations-1496421583" target="_blank">The Case for Nations</a>.
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Urban elites build trust through career moves, joint projects and cooperation across borders. Like the aristocrats of old, they often form networks without reference to national boundaries. They do not, on the whole, depend upon a particular place, a particular faith or a particular routine for their sense of membership, and in the immediate circumstances of modern life, they can adapt to globalization without too much difficulty. They will identify with transnational networks since they see those things as assets, which amplify their power. However, even in modern conditions, this urban elite depends upon others who do not belong to it: the farmers, manufacturers, factory workers, builders, clothiers, mechanics, nurses, cleaners, cooks, police officers and soldiers for whom attachment to a place and its customs is implicit in all that they do. </blockquote>
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Sebnem Arsu at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/enlargement/137801" target="_blank">Turkey’s Accelerated Drift from Europe</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Both sides need each other but never at the expense of Turkey’s independence or rightful opposition,” said Yasin Aktay, the deputy chairman of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, as he underlined the dramatic decline in the EU's popularity at home because of the bloc’s unfair treatment of the country. “Whatever comes to the table, we’ll look out for Turkey’s interests, calculate our gains and losses. We have no an intention to remain in the EU at all costs or sacrifice ourselves for the bloc,” he added. Turkey refuses to tighten its comprehensive anti-terrorism law, which the EU set as a precondition for visa-free travel for Turks. The country also demands €6 billion to be delivered, as promised in the 2016 migrant deal, and expects new chapters to be opened in the EU accession talks. Whatever came out of Erdogan’s meetings with EU officials, his regime ultimately aimed to “de-Westernise Turkey,” and, along with that, loosening ties with the EU was one of the many phases, Aktar claimed. “In a deeper stream, Turkey is being de-Westernised by the Erdogan regime, as it tries to revert a 200-year long process,” Aktar said, in reference to Ottoman attempts to align with the West, long before the Turkish Republic was founded. He added that: “The effort is visible in education, civil law or on the street, in human relations, as well as in rifts with Europe and its institutions." For the Erdogan regime, being part of the bloc is irrelevant when it comes to democratic and economic advancement. And as for strategic alliances, Ankara, especially in meetings with Russia and China, signals that Europe is not the only option. </blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-reckons-with-its-depleted-armies-1496444305" target="_blank">Europe Reckons with Its Depleted Armies</a>.
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<blockquote>
During exercises, they told a parliamentary ombudsman, their unit didn’t have the munitions to simulate battle. Instead, they were told to imagine the bangs. Across Europe, similar shortfalls riddle land, sea, air and cyber forces following years of defense cutbacks. U.S. President Donald Trump last month irked European leaders when he berated them at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s new headquarters for insufficient defense spending and what he called unpaid military bills. Current and former European officials were quick to point that NATO members don’t owe dues to the U.S., but they acknowledged Mr. Trump wasn’t wrong: Europe lacks the capabilities to defend itself…. The real wake-up call, allied officials say, was Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, followed by Moscow’s intervention in Syria. Both displayed new Russian weaponry. Suddenly long ignored weapons of the Cold War became relevant again. </blockquote>
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Mehul Srivastava in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/62bcef70-2d9c-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a" target="_blank">Turkey Targets Dating Shows and Wikipedia</a>.
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<blockquote>
The move against dating shows was announced on Saturday in the official gazette, where decrees from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan become law upon publication under a state of emergency he imposed after last year’s coup attempt. The use of a decree to target the TV shows indicates that Mr. Erdogan will use emergency rules to clamp down on areas unrelated to the failed July putsch, which he blames on Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric in the US. </blockquote>
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Anton Troianovski in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/far-right-vies-with-center-left-for-german-workers-1493803805" target="_blank">Left, Far-Right Vie for German Workers</a>.
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<blockquote>
Guido Reil, a foreman in a coal mine and longtime union member, has been marching on May Day for better pay and working conditions for three decades. But as soon as he arrived at this week’s parade, dozens of fellow marchers surrounded him to try to separate him from the column, chanting “Shut up!” and “Get out!” The reason: Mr. Reil, for years a member of the labor-aligned Social Democrats, quit the party last year to join the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany. As elections approach here, he and others like him are the focal point of an intensifying battle between left and right for the votes of the German working class. </blockquote>
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Christopher Caldwell in NEW STATESMAN, <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2017/05/french-fracture" target="_blank">A Social Thinker Illuminates His Country’s Populist Divides</a>.
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<blockquote>
A process that Guilluy calls <i>metropolisation</i> has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s leading educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals – the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts”, as Robert Reich once called them – who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions and renew its prestige. Cheap labour, tariff-free consumer goods and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years – Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Beziers – are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified”, haunted by the empty shopfronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well. </blockquote>
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Philip Broughton in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-has-all-the-french-talent-gone-1494533526" target="_blank">Where Has All the French Talent Gone? </a>.
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<blockquote>
They have earned millions as hedge-fund traders and investment bankers, or by setting up businesses free of the mind-bending constraints of French employment laws. London has prospered from their presence. They have bought townhouses in South Kensington and filled the private schools with hordes of little Xaviers and Sylvies. If some enterprising PR company were to set up a cross-Channel croissant-making contest, the winner would be as likely to come from Mayfair as from the Marais. So if you wonder how a mysterious 39-year-old with only a brief record of public service can find his way to the French presidency, one answer is that his generation’s talent pool has been drained by emigration. Emmanuel Macron achieved his ascent while the best of his class were off elsewhere. He won the support of 93% of French voters iving outside the country. In that number were many who in an earlier era might have proved stiff opposition on the campaign trail. </blockquote>
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Charlotte Allen in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-spanish-left-yearns-for-deconquista-1496960885" target="_blank">The Spanish Left Yearns for <i>Deconquista</i></a>.
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<blockquote>
“The Great Mosque of Cordoba.” That’s what Unesco – the cultural arm of the United Nations – calls the 24,000-square-foot 10th century structure visited by 1.5 million tourists a year. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1984, and rightfully so: The building’s interior is a stunning example of Moorish architecture. Yet this “mosque” is actually the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cordoba. In 1236, King Ferdinand III of Castile captured Cordoba from the Almohad Caliphate. He then had the building consecrated for Christian use. Or reconsecrated, rather, since underneath the mosque lay the demolished remains of a sixth-century church built by Spains’s Visigothic rulers before the Muslim invasion in 711. </blockquote>
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Max Fisher & Amanda Taub in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/world/americas/venezuela-collapse-analysis-interpreter.html?_r=0" target="_blank">How Venezuela Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse</a>.
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<blockquote>
At democracy’s founding, in 1958, the country’s three leading parties, later narrowed to two, agreed to share power among themselves and oil revenue among their constituents. Their pact, meant to preserve democracy, came to dominate it. Party elites picked candidates and blocked outsiders, making politics less responsive. The agreement to share wealth fostered corruption. Economic shocks in the 1980s led many Venezuelans to conclude the system was rigged against them. In 1992, leftist military officers, led by Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez, attempted a coup. They failed and were imprisoned, but their anti-establishment message resonated, catapulting Mr. Chávez to stardom. The government instituted a series of reforms that were intended to save the two-party system, but that may have doomed it. A loosening of election rules allowed outside parties to break in. The president freed Mr. Chávez, hoping to demonstrate tolerance. But the economy worsened. Mr. Chávez ran for president in 1998. His populist message of returning power to the people won him victory. </blockquote>
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Rana Foroohar in FT, <a href="http://www.afr.com/news/world/north-america/democrats-its-time-to-meet-the-new-american-working-class-20170501-gvw4qv" target="_blank">Democrats, Meet the New Working Class</a>.
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<blockquote>
Accountants, consultants, lawyers and physicians are all starting to feel the effects of corporate monopoly power and tech-driven job disruption. For the first time this year, more doctors in the US worked for large hospital conglomerates than in private practice. Any number of middle-income sales professionals have been replaced by software. Indeed, if you start to think about "working class" as something defined not strictly by per-capita income, but by job insecurity and the decreasing power of labour relative to corporations, you suddenly find a lot more people in the same political boat. "The coming conflict is between a very small managerial class and the proletariat," says Michael Lind, an economic historian and fellow at the New America think-tank. Charged language, to be sure, but he has a point. All the meta-trends in the economy - from the rise of platform technologies to Trump-era deregulation and tax cuts - point to more corporate power in fewer hands, and a winner-takes-all labour market. In this landscape, shared economic issues are more urgent than social ones. Exploiting the potentially huge new multi-ethnic, multi-class voter base with shared economic worries will require Democrats to come to terms with some of the Faustian bargains that they have struck over the past few decades. </blockquote>
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Joe Klein in NYTBR on Pat Buchanan’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/books/review/nixons-white-house-wars-patrick-j-buchanan.html" target="_blank">Nixon’s White House Wars</a>.
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<blockquote>
Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., in 1938, although his family’s roots are in Mississippi. He celebrates ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but his most enduring loyalty is to the conservative Catholic Church of the 1950s — the church schools he attended, the Knights of Columbus, the Legion of Decency, Sodality and the Holy Name Society. His people are the white ethnic “unfashionable minorities,” as opposed to the “media minorities.” He was kicked out of Georgetown University for a year after a drunken fight with the Washington police: “I was ahead on points, until they brought out the sticks.” But he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism — one of his few Eastern elitist credentials, which he used to become an editorial polemicist for the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He was astonished by the 1960s. Well-off draft dodgers offended him; the New York construction workers who beat up the protesters were his team. Teddy Kennedy’s ability to “survive” Chappaquiddick was a confirmation of Buchanan’s worldview. Nixon, he believed (correctly), would have been crucified if he’d done something similar. He and Nixon “were like working-class kids in an elite university who, caught smoking pot in the dorm, would be expelled and disgraced for life, while the legacy students would be confined to campus for the weekend.” It was the “legacy” students in the C.I.A. and on John F. Kennedy’s staff who had started the war in Vietnam — and “legacy” students who opposed it; the children of Irish pipe fitters had to fight it. </blockquote>
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Michael O’Donnell in WSJ on John Bohrer’s book, <a href="http://www.michael-odonnell.com/how-the-thug-became-a-dove/" target="_blank">The Revolution of Robert Kennedy</a>.
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<blockquote>
Never the most urgent voice on civil rights, Kennedy had taken his lumps from James Baldwin and other black radicals in a Manhattan apartment in May 1963. Kennedy had requested the meeting in order to better understand growing racial tensions. What he got was a three-hour scolding on the daily insults of black life in America. Mr. Bohrer writes that Kennedy “didn’t let his pride overtake the lesson he learned that day” and that the word “insult” began appearing in his public remarks about race. Another mistake was Vietnam, a war Kennedy had helped engineer in his brother’s administration. Uneasy with Johnson’s escalation of the war, he nevertheless felt a certain ownership of the quagmire and was reluctant to criticize the new president. At first. Devastated or not, Kennedy was canny and opportunistic. He flirted with seeking the vice presidency in a de facto challenge to Johnson, only to run for Senate in 1964 instead, in New York and not Massachusetts (“Teddy’s there,” he explained). “Is this the East River?” he asked his driver during a ride in New York City. His campaign was heavier on machine politics and screaming fans than substance. Emerging from crowds, he found himself covered in scratches, his pockets stuffed with notes. </blockquote>
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Noah Millman in NYT on Daniel Drezner’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/books/review/ideas-industry-daniel-w-drezner.html" target="_blank">The Ideas Industry</a>.
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<blockquote>
As he tells it, three large-scale forces have remade the marketplace of ideas. The erosion of trust in prestigious institutions has weakened the position of both academia and the traditional journalistic perches of public intellectuals. The polarization of American politics has segmented that marketplace into distinct and separate niches. Most important, the dramatic growth in economic inequality has made wealthy individuals and corporations into the primary buyers, dominating the market. It’s this last trend, Drezner says, that accounts for the transformation of a marketplace into an industry. In a marketplace, wares are traded among participants with diverse needs, but an industry produces to meet the specific demands of its customers. </blockquote>
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Jason Guriel in THE WALRUS, <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/what-happens-when-authors-are-afraid-to-stand-alone/" target="_blank">What Happens When Authors Are Afraid to Stand Alone</a>.
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<blockquote>
Writing is such grueling, lonely work, that it’s not hard to see the appeal of any thinking that encourages you to engage with other carbon-based lifeforms. Plus, didn’t graduate school insist that writers are socially constructed anyway, the products of power and privilege? You might as well accept that you’re a node in a network. But you don’t have to buy into the myth of the Byronic bard to worry about the way our novelists and poets—valued for their independence of vision and language—now pine to be part of the crowd. What do we lose when writers are afraid to stand alone? Let’s be clear: writers always occupy some sort of social context…. But while no one is truly isolated, writers have become more entangled than ever. Workshops, readings, book launches, conferences, artists’ colonies, and other glorified mixers increasingly press literary types upon one another. Creative writing instructors urge their charges to get out there and network. Social media ensures we’re always connected. The contemporary acknowledgements page is a goblet that runneth over. </blockquote>
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Adam Kirsch in NEW YORKER, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/czeslaw-miloszs-battle-for-truth" target="_blank">Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth</a>.
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<blockquote>
Recounting this episode, Franaszek emphasizes Milosz’s desire to return to Janka, who had remained in Warsaw. But Milosz, in “Native Realm,” dwells less on love and more on his political and intellectual motives. “I had run from Stalin’s state to be able to think things over for myself instead of succumbing to a world view imposed from without,” he explains. “There was complete freedom here, precisely because National Socialism was an intellectual zero.” Communism, by contrast, exerted a terrible moral pressure, because it claimed to embody historical truth and justice, so that dissenting from it turned one into a sinner or a heretic. Nazism threatened the body, whereas Communism demanded the surrender of the soul. For a poet like Milosz, the latter seemed like the greater sacrifice. </blockquote>
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Simon Goldhill in TLS, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/look-back-with-danger/" target="_blank">Look Back with Danger</a>.
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<blockquote>
Writers, artists and philosophers across the world proclaimed that Greece was their “second homeland”; in an age of fierce and aspirational nationalism, this was highly charged language indeed. The desire to return to the past of antiquity was not just part of a philosophical or artistic movement, but became fully institutionalized in the school and university system; the study of the ancient world of Greece and Rome so dominated the curriculum, in fact, that by the end of the century, Kaiser Wilhelm II felt moved to argue that “we should raise young Germans, not young Greeks and Romans”. For Wilhelm, nostalgia entailed a worrying distortion of national values. What does it mean when a culture expresses its aspirations and ideals through a longing for a lost past, the past even of another country? ...Homer portrays a heroic world in which men were stronger, more beautiful and in closer contact with the gods than they were in his own society. Homer’s heroes went on to provide a model for the heroes of a later age: Alexander the Great in his search for glory, we are told, never travelled without a copy of the Iliad beneath his pillow. But the heroic age provided examples to live up to, not a lost world to hanker after. No Greek ever said: I could only be really at home in Homer. When the Parthenon was decorated with scenes of mythic battles, the temple was not designed to create a longing to return to a world where men and centaurs mixed, but to project a lesson of moral order for contemporary society. </blockquote>
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Michael Ledeen in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Paul Gottfried’s book, <a href="http://www.claremont.org/download_pdf.php?file_name=2663Ledeen.pdf" target="_blank">Fascism – The Career of a Concept</a>.
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<blockquote>
So while there is a “generic fascism,” with important Catholic social and political themes, we should limit it both temporally (it was important between the wars, and certainly during World War II) and geographically (Europe, not the whole world). Gottfried is especially valuable when he discusses leftist interpretations. For the most part, Marxist historians and political scientists missed one of fascism’s most significant strengths: its claim to be a revolutionary doctrine. Gottfried understands that a movement, and later a regime, could be reactionary and still appeal to workers, anarchosyndicalists, and even leftist Hegelian philosophers like Giovanni Gentile. </blockquote>
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Anthony Kenny in LITERARY REVIEW on Carlos Eire’s book, <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/across-the-great-divide" target="_blank">Reformations – The Early Modern World, 1450-1650</a>.
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<blockquote>
Two events in the 1450s initiated a new era in European history. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent rise of the Ottoman Empire forced Europeans to seek new sea routes to Asia and to embark on an age of exploration. At the same time, exiled Greek scholars gave an impetus to the humanistic study of the ancient classics. The invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1455 prompted a new information age in which both classical and religious texts were disseminated as never before. </blockquote>
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Yuval Harari at bloomberg.com, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-03/the-mozart-in-the-machine" target="_blank">The Mozart in the Machine</a>.
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<blockquote>
It is often said that people connect with art because they find themselves in it. This may lead to surprising and somewhat sinister results if and when, say, Facebook begins creating personalized art based on everything it knows about you. If your boyfriend dumps you, Facebook might treat you to a hit song about that all-too-familiar bastard rather than about the unknown person who broke the heart of Adele or Alanis Morissette. Talk about art as a narcissistic extravaganza. Alternatively, by using massive biometric databases garnered from millions of people, the algorithm could produce a global hit, which would set everybody swinging like crazy on the dance floors. If art is really about inspiring (or manipulating) human emotions, few if any human musicians will have a chance of competing with such an algorithm, because they cannot match it in understanding the chief instrument they are playing on: the human biochemical system. </blockquote>
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Gardiner Harris in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/rex-tillerson-state-department.html" target="_blank">Tillerson: It’s Time to Restore ‘Balance’ with Other Countries</a>.
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<blockquote>
In his first address laying out his vision as secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson said Wednesday that the United States had been far too accommodating to emerging nations and longtime allies and that “things have gotten out of balance.” Righting those imbalances, he said, will be the mission of the State Department as it fulfills President Trump’s promise to put “America first.” “We were promoting relations. We were promoting economic activity. We were promoting trade with a lot of these emerging economies, and we just kind of lost track of how we were doing,” Mr. Tillerson said. “And as a result, things got a little bit out of balance.” </blockquote>
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Walter Russell Mead in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-on-americas-role25-years-late-1495493024" target="_blank">A Debate on America’s Role – 25 Years Late</a>.
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<blockquote>
American voters have never shared the establishment’s enthusiasm for a foreign policy aimed at transforming the post Cold War world. When given the choice at the ballot box, they consistently dismiss experienced foreign-policy hands who call for deep global engagement. Instead they install untried outsiders who want increased focus on issues at home. Thus Clinton over Bush in 1992, Bush over Gore in 2000, Obama over McCain in 2008, and Trump over Clinton in 2016. </blockquote>
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Angelo Codevilla in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-cold-civil-war/" target="_blank">The Cold Civil War</a>.
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<blockquote>
The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves. Ever since Woodrow Wilson nearly a century and a half ago at Princeton, colleges have taught that ordinary Americans are rightly ruled by experts because they are incapable of governing themselves. Millions of graduates have identified themselves as the personifiers of expertise and believe themselves entitled to rule. Their practical definition of discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, etc., is neither more nor less than anyone’s reluctance to bow to them. It’s personal. On the other side, some two thirds of regular Americans chafe at insults from on high and believe that “the system” is rigged against them and, hence, illegitimate—that elected and appointed officials, plus the courts, business leaders, and educators are leading the country in the wrong direction. The non-elites blame the elites for corruptly ruling us against our will, for impoverishing us, for getting us into wars and losing them. Many demand payback—with interest. </blockquote>
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John Tierney in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-administrative-state-1497037492" target="_blank">Weekend Interview with Philip Hamburger</a>.
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<blockquote>
Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct. Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger….</blockquote>
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Andrew Sorkin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-ballmer-serves-up-a-fascinating-data-trove.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Next Project for Ballmer: Follow Money in Government</a>.
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<blockquote>
That conversation led Mr. Ballmer to pursue what may be one of the most ambitious private projects undertaken to answer a question that has long vexed the public and politicians alike. He sought to “figure out what the government really does with the money,” Mr. Ballmer said. “What really happens?” On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts.org. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments. Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways. </blockquote>
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>:
<a _blank="" href="http://www.smartertimes.com/1535/son-of-communists-burns-money%E2%80%9D%20target=">
Son of Communists Burns Money</a>
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The next time a Times journalist calls up a business or politician with pesky or hostile questions, maybe the subject of the story should just say, "sorry, I want the Oskar Eustis treatment — that is, the ability to tell my side of the story in my own words, unchallenged by probing questions or indeed any questions from Times journalists." As a business tactic, I suppose this is cheaper for the Times than hiring reporters. And there may be some instances where the first-person is appropriate. It's not clear to me that this particular case was one of them. Incidentally, the Times has a long-running quasi-obsession with children of communists. There weren't really ever that many American communists (at least so we are reassured by those who thought concern about them was paranoid), and yet it's almost to the point where one wonders whether are any of them remaining who haven't yet been recipients of warmly nostalgic coverage in the Times' columns. It's as if children of communists are a New York Times demographic niche target.
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<i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="http://www.smartertimes.com/1526/three-hypocrisies-one-day" target="_blank">Three Hypocrisies, One Day</a>.
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Not only are they all male, there doesn't appear to be a person of color among them. Donald Trump's cabinet is more diverse than the <i>New York Times</i> front-page bylines today, at least to judge by the race and gender categories that the <i>Times</i> is so fond of applying to everyone else. Then there is the <i>Times</i> business section. One article inside the section is about the Canadian airplane and train manufacturer Bombadier. <i>The Times</i> reports:
“Professor Moore, of McGill University, said he anticipated that major investors would push the Bombardier family to reduce its board membership. It holds six of the 15 positions. He said it was less likely that the family would voluntarily abandon the company's structure, which gives its members 53 percent of voting control though they own only 13 percent of its equity. Many analysts have said that an end to the family's control would immediately lift Bombardier's share price, which has fallen about 75 percent in the past nine years.”
Another <i>Times</i> article, also inside the business section, discusses an annual meeting of Ford, the American auto and truck company:
“’Look, we are as frustrated as you are by the stock price,’ said Mr. Ford, whose family effectively controls the company through a class of shares that carry outsize voting rights. ‘A couple of people have said, does the Ford family care about the stock price? The short answer is yes — a lot.’...The format also allowed some shareholders to call in. One of them, John Chevedden, commented on shareholder proposals that included eliminating the 16-votes-per-share rights attached to the Ford family's special class of stock. (The proposal failed on a vote of about 2 to 1.)”
Ordinarily, you might think that underperforming businesses in which family heirs maintain control through shares that give them more rights than other, non-family owners might be a topic that would merit a column, an editorial, even a front-page or section-front trend story in the <i>Times</i>. That, however, might raise some potentially uncomfortable questions about the <i>New York Times</i> itself, which operates under the same structure, privileging managers born into the business over ordinary shareholders with more humble origins. </blockquote>
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Park MacDougald & Jason Willick in NEW YORK, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/steve-sailer-invented-identity-politics-for-the-alt-right.html" target="_blank">The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right</a>.
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Sailer’s brief career at National Review ended in 1997, when William F. Buckley, Jr. eased out the magazine’s then-editor, the immigration hawk John O’Sullivan, in favor of Rich Lowry — part of a larger shift in the conservative world away from paleoconservatives and immigration skeptics near the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has largely been confined to smaller and less mainstream conservative outlets. But after Trump won last November by getting blue-collar, Midwestern whites to vote like a minority bloc, as Sailer had so memorably recommended in 2000, a number of Sailer’s establishment critics, such as Michael Barone, were forced to acknowledge that Sailer had been vindicated. On foreign policy, too, Sailer has been a pervasive if subtle presence on the right. During the mid-2000s, he popularized the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” to parody the apparent bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the last two decades around large-scale military intervention abroad and large-scale immigration at home. It took some time, but by the summer of 2016, the mood of the country had caught up with Sailer. Breitbart began using “Invade the World, Invite the World” to describe the ideology of John McCain and Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump’s stated hostility to elites’ perceived “globalist” overreach proved to be a major asset in his campaign. </blockquote>
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Richard Bourke in LITERARY REVIEW on Anthony Gottlieb’s book, <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/rational-selections" target="_blank">The Dream of Enlightenment</a>.
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What caused this extraordinary explosion of fresh thinking over the course of a mere hundred and fifty years? Gottlieb does not pause to pose the question. He does observe that most of his philosophers were ‘amateurs’. What he means is that they operated outside official university structures. There is some truth in this, although Descartes taught for a period at the University of Utrecht, Locke held a position at Oxford and Hume applied for various academic posts. However, it is certainly right that they opposed much that prevailed in the universities of the day, a lot of which was intended to serve the sensibilities of the clergy. </blockquote>
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Stuart Walton at <i>aeon.co</i>, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-frankfurt-school-diagnosed-the-ills-of-western-civilisation" target="_blank">Theory from the Ruins</a>.
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A key point of disputation for this generation of thinkers arose from the notion that society, in its progress from barbarism to civilisation according to the narrative of the European Enlightenment, had been increasingly founded on the principle of reason. Where mythology once held sway, the rationalistic sciences now reigned supreme. Among the Frankfurt School’s most provocative contentions was that Western civilisation had unwittingly executed a reversal of this narrative. The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? The Frankfurt School theorists argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart of this was what they called ‘instrumental reason’, the mechanism by which everything in human affairs was ground up. </blockquote>
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Edward Rothstein in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-world-is-here-harvards-peabody-museum-and-the-invention-of-american-anthropology-review-1494068400" target="_blank">At the Birth of Anthropology</a>.
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Anthropology was a joint creation of museum and fair. Typically both offer spectacular displays, though one is meant to be enduring and disciplined, the other evanescent and enticing. Both also left their mark on the nascent field. That is one theme of “All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology,” which the Peabody is mounting for its 150th anniversary. The exhibition is a nuanced tribute to the museum, to the 1893 fair, and to a discipline whose origins are still riven by political debate…. There’s the rub. The birth of anthropology was accompanied by condescension toward the cultures studied… But had any non-Western culture ever attempted a comparable survey? Had any examined human variation, doing it as much justice as knowledge then allowed? This was a great achievement too often dismissed by politically charged contemporary judgments. Finding a balance is not easy; condescension always is. </blockquote>
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Jillian Melchior in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-philosopher-gets-pilloried-1494283355" target="_blank">A Philosopher Gets Pilloried</a>.
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As with gender, Ms. Tuvel writes, “we need an account of race that does not collapse into a position according to which all forms of self-identification are socially recognized, such as one’s self-identification as a wolf.” Instead of taking on Ms. Tuvel’s arguments, the professoriate attacked her for asking questions to begin with. More than 500 academics signed a letter denouncing the paper. One of their main complaints was that Ms. Tuvel didn’t lace it with references to scholars “who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color).” Absent such citation, they said, her paper “painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege.” </blockquote>
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Beth Singler at <i>aeon.co</i>, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar" target="_blank">fAIth</a>.
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The odd thing about the anti-clericalism in the AI community is that religious language runs wild in its ranks, and in how the media reports on it. There are AI ‘oracles’ and technology ‘evangelists’ of a future that’s yet to come, plus plenty of loose talk about angels, gods and the apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil, an executive at Google, is regularly anointed a ‘prophet’ by the media – sometimes as a prophet of a coming wave of ‘superintelligence’ (a sapience surpassing any human’s capability); sometimes as a ‘prophet of doom’ (thanks to his pronouncements about the dire prospects for humanity); and often as a soothsayer of the ‘singularity’ (when humans will merge with machines, and as a consequence live forever). The tech folk who also invoke these metaphors and tropes operate in overtly and almost exclusively secular spaces, where rationality is routinely pitched against religion. But believers in a ‘transhuman’ future – in which AI will allow us to transcend the human condition once and for all – draw constantly on prophetic and end-of-days narratives to understand what they’re striving for. </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror/article/2008464" target="_blank">Camille Paglia interviewed by Jonathan Last at <i>weeklystandard.com</i></a>.
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There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of “compassion” (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. </blockquote>
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Serge Schmemann in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/vietnam-war-public-service-message-from-the-class-of-67.html" target="_blank">A Public Service Message from the Class of ‘67</a>.
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Twenty-five years earlier, a session on Vietnam had become intensely emotional and confessional as classmates recalled their war or their antiwar struggles; this time, we were more retrospective, reflective and ruminative. What was surprising was that many who rose to speak in the two-and-a-half hour session declared it was a shame that the draft, and more broadly the notion of a couple of years of national service before plunging into careers and families, had been abandoned. How could guys who expended so much passion and energy eluding the draft regret its demise? </blockquote>
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Julie Burchill in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/alt-hate-who-knew-the-left-had-so-much-venom/" target="_blank">Alt-Hate: Who Knew the Left Had So Much Venom? </a>.
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Growing up in a communist household, I thought ‘Tory’ was a curse word till I was a teenager. My father was the kindest and, yes, most noble of men — maybe the fact that his socialism was a product of being genuinely working class, rather than a pose struck to impress/shame others, had something to do with it — but I had no idea until Brexit of the bigotry that lurks within the Brotherhood of Man. We are often reminded of the ‘hatred’ the referendum and recent election ‘stirred up’ in our society — warned off democracy by those who would control us for our own good, as if we were wayward children eyeing the biscuit tin. What these sorrowing sad-sacks fail to add is the hate comes largely from their side. Too much democracy has merely flushed the poison out. Brexit did indeed unleash hate — but the hate it unleashed was not that of the British for foreigners but rather of the liberals for the masses. It sounds strange coming from someone who has made a lovely life out of peddling vitriol for pleasure and profit, but I’ve been amazed — and not a little amused, comparing their swivel-eyed social media savagery with their mollycoddling manifestos — at the level of nastiness that the Great and the Good (or, as I think of them, our Betters and Wetters) have displayed over the past year. During my entire career of evil, from 17-year-old enfant terrible to 57-year-old grande dame, I only recall wishing death on one person — well, two: the Eurythmics. But my dad, when he shouted ‘Tory!’ at the TV, was content to leave it at that. </blockquote>
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Tamar Lewin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/health/ivg-reproductive-technology.html" target="_blank">Making Skin Cells Into Babies? </a>.
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The process, in vitro gametogenesis, or I.V.G., so far has been used only in mice. But stem cell biologists say it is only a matter of time before it could be used in human reproduction — opening up mind-boggling possibilities. With I.V.G., two men could have a baby that was biologically related to both of them, by using skin cells from one to make an egg that would be fertilized by sperm from the other. Women with fertility problems could have eggs made from their skin cells, rather than go through the lengthy and expensive process of stimulating their ovaries to retrieve their eggs. “It gives me an unsettled feeling because we don’t know what this could lead to,” said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, Davis. “You can imagine one man providing both the eggs and the sperm, almost like cloning himself. You can imagine that eggs becoming so easily available would lead to designer babies.” Some scientists even talk about what they call the “Brad Pitt scenario” when someone retrieves a celebrity’s skin cells from a hotel bed or bathtub. Or a baby might have what one law professor called “multiplex” parents. </blockquote>
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John Leland in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/nyregion/larry-kramer-and-the-birth-of-aids-activism.html" target="_blank">Twilight of a Difficult Man: Larry Kramer and the Birth of AIDS Activism</a>.
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He fell in love with a man named David Webster, who did not want to settle monogamously with him. In response, Mr. Kramer wrote a devastating 1978 satirical novel called “Faggots,” which depicted a demimonde of men destroying themselves in wanton pleasure. The book sold well but made Mr. Kramer a pariah. “People were so angry and offended,” Dr. Mass said. “I don’t think there is a positive image of a gay person, not one, in the entire novel. Larry seemed to have this ridiculously outdated romantic notion of sexuality and its relationship to love, monogamy. He was this total misfit in this expanding world of gay promiscuity and the sexual revolution.” Three years later, the emergence of a new disease made the book seem prescient, and provided a purpose for Mr. Kramer’s wrath. “AIDS changed everything,” Mr. Kramer said. </blockquote>
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Russell Shorto in NYT on Mike Rapport’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/books/review/the-unruly-city-mike-rapport-paris-london-new-york-revolution.html" target="_blank">The Unruly City – Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution</a>.
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What was it about New York that made revolution play out there the way it did? The fact that Manhattan is an island gave the city a special dynamic. Beyond that, the American colonies’ inheritance of a set of rights and freedoms from Britain, which stemmed from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of an English Bill of Rights, meant that New York had a built-in basis for principled resistance. As Britain suffered under the financial burdens stemming from the Seven Years’ War (or, as the North American theater became known, the French and Indian War), it taxed its colonies without giving them a say, and New York’s longstanding elected assembly became a focal point of resistance. Coffeehouses and taverns, which had long been venues for discussing the events of the day, now became political hubs. Since the colonies had inherited England’s tradition of open-air political gatherings, it was only natural that Gen. George Washington would order the Declaration of Independence to be read out to his troops on “the Common,” at what is now City Hall Park. When the British Army stormed Long Island and then Manhattan, the whole city — from the Gowanus Pass to Kips Bay — became a landscape of revolution. Rapport anchors his prose with compact sense-of-place notes as he follows the action: “The Americans managed to drive the British back to a buckwheat field, now the site of Columbia University.” </blockquote>
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Michael Dirda in WP on Jon Lauck’s book, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/how-the-midwest-went-from-the-idealized-to-derided/2017/05/24/f9f29ab4-3cbc-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html" target="_blank">From Warm Center to Ragged Edge</a>.
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From an early date, the proponents of regionalism recognized two powerful enemies: mass media and federalism. The first led to a bland homogenization of culture and what Josiah Royce called a “monotonously uniform triviality of mind.” The latter, starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, lessened the ability of localities to govern themselves. After World War II, international fears of communism and atomic war further strengthened the power of Washington, as federal institutions assumed more and more control over American civic life. Lauck’s last chapter looks at how historians have studied the heartland. Initially, many academics at regional universities were born in the Midwest and viewed themselves as legatees of its values, but over time an increased professionalization led younger teachers to emphasize scholarly success among their peers rather than commitment to the intellectual well-being of their communities. In this section, Lauck looks hard at the opposing ideas of Richard Hofstadter, author of “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and Michigan State’s Russell Kirk, author of “The Conservative Mind.” He also implicitly endorses the view — of historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Christopher Lasch — that smaller communities and neighborhoods, not large cities, encourage a vigorous engagement in politics. As Lasch noted, conversation lies at the foundation of civic life. </blockquote>
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Rick Kogan in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ae-0528-hoekstra-music-scene-kogan-sidewalks-20170525-column.html" target="_blank">A Former Newspaperman’s Scoop: Springfield, Mo., Has a Music Scene Too</a>.
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What people will see is part of an ambitious project called <i>Songs of an Unsung America</i> (www.songsofanunsungamerica.com, where you can also see a short clip and meet the other members of the coumentary team), which intends to explore other hidden musical hotbeds, says Hoekstra, “such as the rich rhythm and blues of the beach music legacy in the Carolinas or the Gulf music of Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.” Hoekstra, a likable and self-effacing man of palpable passions, seems eternally upbeat, even when talking about how his more than 30-year-long newspaper career came to a close in March 2014. As he wrote on his ever-intriguing and lively website at the time, “Working at the <i>Sun-Times</i> was a dream come true. If I had the skills of a good basball player, filing stories from 401N. Wabash (long home to the paper and now the site of Trump Tower) would have been the same thing as playing at Wrigley Field.” </blockquote>
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Whet Moser in CHICAGO, <a href="http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2017/Why-Is-Chicago-So-Segregated/" target="_blank">Chicago Isn’t Just Segregated, It Basically Invented Modern Segregation</a>.
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It’s impossible to answer definitively, but the most satisfying answer I’ve encountered comes from Carl Nightingale, author of the book Segregation: A Global History—it has a lot to do with timing. When I interviewed Nightingale about the book, this is what he told me:
“Perhaps it was the chance of historical timing. The city’s population exploded in a still-developing city as the flourishing of racial and eugenic ‘science’ overlapped into the nascent fields of sociology and real-estate economics.”
“There is a regional Midwestern thing where all the cities with the highest segregation indexes until this day are all in the Midwest,” says Nightingale. “I’m not sure exactly why that is true. But it is true that Chicago had this enormous and booming land industry that the Chicago real estate board—which is founded in the 1890s—could claim, plausibly, that it was the most powerful real estate organization in any city, and in the world, and was then strong enough to then create a national organization located on Michigan Avenue. And in so doing really fell into the position, after the demise of <i>Buchanan vs. Worley</i>, as the center of power that people who wanted to divide cities had to rely upon.”
A substantial part of Nightingale’s book is about how Chicago was a laboratory for segregation. Tools of analyzing real estate and racial data were being created in Chicago in the early 20th century. Tools to segregate the city based on race were created here, such as restrictive covenants. </blockquote>
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CT – Clout Street: <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-michael-madigan-interview-20170510-story.html" target="_blank">Madigan Accuses Rauner of Trying to ‘Change History’ of Government</a>.
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Madigan, speaking in a rare interview with WGN Radio’s Patti Vasquez, said that’s the fundamental difference in his efforts to block Rauner’s agenda, which the governor has said is a prerequisite to reaching an end to the state’s historic budget impasse. The veteran House speaker offered a history lesson. “The Rauner proposal would say, let’s change history. ... Prior to (Franklin D.) Roosevelt’s election, the federal government wasn’t greatly involved in the management of the economy. But when Roosevelt became the president in 1933, the federal government became very active using the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the Congress in managing the economy,” Madigan said. “From 1933 until today, both Democratic and Republican presidents and members of the Congress have always worked to raise wages, raise the standard of living,” he said. “Here in Illinois, the Rauner proposal is: Let’s change that history. Let’s not have the government working to raise wages and the standard of living. Let’s have the government to work and lower wages and the standard of living by bringing down the benefit level in workers’ compensation, taking away the right to bargain collectively if you work for a government and if you work in the construction industry, taking away a prevailing wage. That’s the proposal. And it would be a proposed change in history. I don’t support it,” he said. </blockquote>
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William Hamilton in WSJ on Richard Ocejo’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-barber-will-see-you-now-1495578599" target="_blank">Masters of Craft – Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy</a>.
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After observing, interviewing and interning for 10 years, Mr. Ocejo – the grandson of a barber – tries to determine how these occupations have transmuted alchemically from coarse work into well-considered careers. “Masters of Craft” argues that this trend – a curious kind of self-selected downward mobility by the young and college-educated – is in fact a collaboration between a new typed of tradesman and a new type of client. The two now enjoy a personal affinity: Both value esoteric knowledge, skill and transparency in the sourcing of products. The socioeconomic gap between server and served has narrowed, producing a comfortable kind of peer-ship, like that between a craftsman and a connoisseur. </blockquote>
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Ben Shpigel in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/sports/hockey/from-hockey-101-in-nashville-to-a-phd-with-predators.html" target="_blank">From Hockey 101 to a Ph.D. in Nashville</a>.
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The first few years, the public-address announcer drew quizzical looks from visiting players by explaining basic infractions, like a two-line pass. Now, when the Predators sustain offensive-zone time or begin a power-play rush, the crowd roars. “We had to groom them,” said Terry Crisp, a longtime broadcaster for the Predators. Crisp understood the task ahead, perhaps better than anyone. He had played on two expansion teams (the 1967-68 Blues and 1972-73 Islanders) and coached another (the 1992-93 Lightning). “I guess I’m an original guy,” Crisp said. He recalled Tampa Bay’s inaugural game, when Chris Kontos scored his third of four goals. Only one fan commemorated the hat trick by tossing a cap onto the ice. He was then tossed out of the arena by an uninitiated security crew. (The team’s general manager, Phil Esposito, found the fan outside, took him back in and bought him a beer, Crisp said.) </blockquote>
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue…</b>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/world/europe/mauno-koivisto-president-who-led-finland-into-eu-dies-at-93.html" target="_blank">Mauno Koivisto</a> (1923-2017)
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He succeeded Urho Kekkonen, who had ruled Finland for 25 years until his resignation in 1981. Mr. Koivisto was seen as ushering in a new, freer era, changing the face of the country by reducing the powers of the head of state and strengthening the role of Parliament. Above all, he was recognized for his foreign policy skills with a fine balancing act of maintaining the country’s good relations with the West, particularly with the United States, and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War years. His second term, from 1988 to 1994, was crucial in cementing Finland’s neutral status until the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which shares an 800-mile border with Finland. Mr. Koivisto, fluent in Russian, developed a particular bond with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but also stayed in close contact with President George Bush. In 1990, the Finnish leader hosted a summit meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev in Helsinki. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Koivisto had started to lead Finland out of international isolation. He unilaterally declared two treaties as void: the 1947 Paris Treaty, which placed restrictions on the Finnish military, and the 1948 Finnish-Soviet pact on mutual assistance, which hindered Finland’s integration with European security structures. </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/ct-jimmy-piersall-one-of-a-kind-sullivan-spt-0605-20170604-column.html" target="_blank">Jimmy Piersall</a> (1929-2017)
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Piersall and his TV partner, Harry Caray, helped revive interest in the White Sox in the late 1970s. Their act was so unusual it was almost Vaudevillian, never to be replicated. Caray would often ask "Did you take your pills today?" — poking fun at Piersall's crazy reputation and taking the focus off the bad baseball we were forced to watch. Sox fans ate it up. The more famous Piersall became, the more outrageous his remarks. It'd be difficult to describe Piersall to a generation of fans who've grown accustomed to baseball announcers accentuating the positive and downplaying the negatives. When the Sox began to struggle after the uplifting South Side Hitmen team of 1977, the harsh commentary of Piersall and Caray upset players and a young manager named Tony La Russa, while endearing them even more to fans. White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf eventually separated the two, replacing Piersall with the bland Lou Brock, greasing the skids for Caray's departure to the Cubs. "Fans liked Harry and I, so we never changed," Piersall said in a 2014 Tribune interview. "We were entertainers for a last-place ballclub. And let me tell you, that wasn't easy. You'd hear Harry with bases loaded, cry: 'He paaaaaapped it up.'" After Reindorf's group bought the Sox from Bill Veeck, the La Russa feud intensified. "Reinsdorf said to us in a meeting 'You guys are always second-guessing LaRussa,'" Piersall recalled. "Harry said, 'We don't second guess. We first guess.'"</blockquote>
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Thanks to Joseph Pope, Jeff Williams, Mark Carducci, Archie Patterson, Andy Schwartz…
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<br />JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-58793063017839078632017-05-22T19:00:00.000-07:002017-05-23T18:10:22.075-07:00Issue #152 (May 22 2017)<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From Centennial Ridge</span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Let’s Edit the First Amendment!</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joe Carducci
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The first rule to remember when reading newspapers or otherwise consuming reportage is don’t forget what you know firsthand, that whenever a reporter has happened upon your own neighborhood or area of expertise you smiled or laughed out loud over that reporter’s inadequate understanding of what was before him. One might have been angered if that incomprehension seemed rather a tactical use of reality as raw material to achieve some pre-existing storyline the reporter brought to town with him. Such disregard intensifies the more reporters are hot on the trail of any single story – their mob uni-brain constructs a better disguise more quickly for the imposed narrative – an asserted teaching moment for those underfoot. The bald truth is never enough, as Laramie, Wyoming witnessed when Manhattan’s satellite trucks landed on it for the 1999 Matt Shepard murder trial. Somewhere I have the <i>Village Voice</i> with the painting of a buck fence on the Hudson overlooking New York. Raising the wrong particulars became threats to the reverence demanded by the campaigners for hate crime legislation, and so nothing less than a justification for the brutal murder. Local officials in the college town necessarily submitted, though hardly fast enough for the conductors of that teaching moment. One could barely discern the shape of the far more interesting and tragic actual story underneath the fable of a saint’s martyrdom, but politicos don’t miss truth or poetry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In my record business years I didn’t see this in my four years at Systematic (1978-81) where we were buying and distributing small label and self-released records. The rock media weren’t involved at all, even as we regularly sent them promotional copies from our own labels and from the Rough Trade labels. I imagine those rock critics rarely took their award-winning Dylan albums off the turntable to listen to the 45s and LPs we sent them. But fanzines did review them and gradually the college radio stations played them and so that music was not edited out of rock and roll history entirely even though it was made to wear its outside-ness in ways that the music of the 1950s and 1960s was not, even before rock print media existed. With the rock-press came a mediated self-serving defensive narrative, an identity politik most earnestly worked out at <i>Rolling Stone</i> magazine, somewhat subverted and critiqued at the sharper, downscale, sadly less influential <i>Creem</i> magazine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Black Flag started touring beyond California in 1979. This made them suddenly the only band (and label) that Systematic could work with in a kind of amateur business-art version of major label touring band behavior. Black Flag on the road would first hit the best record shop in town according to the promoter. Systematic wasn’t primarily an importer of UK major label releases like most small distributors; we’d solicit regularly whether shops needed restocks of the bands and labels we carried. The importers were generally interested only in new releases, not catalog sales. And the record shop dudes were typically more into spending their budgets on the newest UK major label imports that they got from those companies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But now Black Flag was at their counter asking where they got “Jealous Again” or why they didn’t have it in stock. The shop-dude invariably answered “Systematic” or “The distributor was out of stock.” But the band knew that wasn’t the case because they had shipped their own records to us and we had known of the tour and which shop accounts were along its route. Black Flag was unusually interested in trying to understand and develop this latent underground independent system’s potential. We bonded over such esoteric knowledge of shop-dude behavior. But truth required a third perspective on the situation – Black Flag had to get into the shop the way a major label’s regional distribution sales agent might for the reality on the ground in the bins to be clear. Otherwise the shop-dude’s weasel nature worked against solid information moving efficiently to where it was needed. Eventually bands had to sell their own records at gigs and shop-dudes lost their choke-hold on music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The news media and its reporters on the scene should provide that perspective. In earlier decades reporters apprenticed their way into the job during or after high school. Today they get a professional degree in journalism at a University. Whatever they are learning now is less useful than the old system, for they arrive on the scene of the crime like a know-it-all intern.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I experienced <i>Rolling Stone</i> magazine interest in SST matters only after I was long gone from the label. The magazine was fumbling to make up for lost time in the period after Nirvana’s multiplatinum success. Michael Goldberg was writing something on SST’s 1993 lawsuit against the Meat Puppets and the lingering Negativland-U2 hubbub. I knew nothing of the contracts at issue, but given how short the resulting news feature, I was impressed by how thorough Michael was in trying to understand the pre-contract years of SST which I did know about but which he seemed never to have encountered before. I remember asking him at some point if he was going to write a book, it was taking so long. It was all foreign to him, thanks to his editor-publisher Jan Wenner’s longtime disinterest in punk, but he was scrupulous about getting the flavor of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In the early days at SST we didn’t even shake hands on our deals, we just proceeded from the phone, the mail, the gig. There could be no hope of money advances when radio play was zero and sales microscopic so none of us at the label or in the bands paid attention to paperwork. That foreclosure of commercial prospects was itself largely due to Jan Wenner and other media criminals (Lee Abrams in radio, Lorne Michaels in television…), but our philosophy was to keep sending out pr and free records and let people get hip at their own pace so I was happy to talk to <i>Rolling Stone</i> in 1993. And Michael had written the one <i>RS</i> feature on the touring underground bands in 1985 which meant it was about SST bands plus Flipper (the Travolta-Curtis “Perfect” movie cover!). I wasn’t name-checked in that article though I’d talked to Goldberg then, but I took his quoting of the eminently quotable Jordan Schwartz (who worked at our booking office) as <i>Rolling Stone</i> magazine’s concession that SST might not be a menace, and perhaps was just a typical record label since there was a Jew in the office.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Four years earlier Greg and Chuck of Black Flag had heard that MCA label-head Al Bergamo dropped the “Damaged” album after calling up <i>Rolling Stone</i> to ask about the band and getting an earful of dirt. We covered up the MCA logo of the first run of covers with a sticker quoting Al from his explanation to <i>Billboard</i>, “As a parent… I found it an anti-parent record…”). I figured that Michael was playing his famously punkophobic editor, Jan Wenner, for the benefit of his story and SST and goddamn rock and roll history. To little effect in the end, though, as that 1993 story imparted little of just how rich and sad the implosion of SST Records was. The label was the culmination of independent label work since at least the first Ork and Hearthan releases, and aesthetically the deliverance of failed underground rock since The Stooges debuted on Elektra. Michael told me great bits that others had told him but those didn’t make it into his piece. Jan is an idiot and <i>Rolling Stone</i> is now half-owned by a Singaporean agribusiness billionaire’s son named Kuok Meng Ru; great for Jan maybe but not so good for rock and roll.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> So I began to think about how an editor, who doesn’t run to the story or make the calls himself, but monkeys around with his underling’s report after the fact, might easily upend and debase that reporter’s work, yet it still goes out under the reporter’s name alone. I’ve read newspapers since I was a little kid and had no idea. Publishers have an interest in hiding these aspects of their product – non-fiction requires a necessary fiction apparently. Recently in obits or memoirs of aged book editors we learn that these faceless men assembled the cornerstones of AmLit reading lists from the drunken scribblings sent with pleadings for cash advances from hotels in France or Spain. Last week <i>The New York Review of Books</i> announced that Ian Buruma would succeed Robert Silvers as editor; Buruma had hailed Silvers on his death for having possessed “no ambition to be a writer himself” and so didn’t treat his writers’ submissions as “raw material to get his teeth in and start to rewrite himself…. The way that so many editors do.” (<i>NYT</i>) But, as one, publishers, editors, reporters, and comedians jumped on the very idea of “alternative facts” when each story they work on has fact after fact trimmed out in an editing process. At the end there is the story as told <i>and</i> there is a pile of orphaned bits, details and facts that might reasonably be suspected of having been cut because they ran interference against the editor’s chosen through-line. An alternative story might easily be assembled from the same raw material though they pretend not to know that, assuming their readership are still children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I had never done much writing for any publication that went in for heavy editing as my dozens of readers know. But when I did run into it, that editing became a laundering of my voice as if I was a wayward toddler. And this was not even done by the editor himself who did a fine job helping me with clarity, which I try not to make a thankless task. He knew why he’d asked me to write about the subject, but the executive editor did not and ran the piece through his own conventional politicultural filter. I was on to other stuff and knew I’d have the true version available in my anthology, plus I’d hoped that new site would develop into something. Around that same time I saw how one young writer’s music biography of his favorite band was rushed out by its independent publisher to the point of sabotage, while another established music writer on a major publisher was chumped out of illustrations that he’d paid for personally, leaving an orphaned page of Naomi Petersen photo credits <i>but no photographs!</i> This in a Cannongate-Viking research-heavy hardcover doorstop! And again in both cases the writer’s name was on the resulting book, not the dude who messed it up, and I imagined the writers were both sick over what had happened to “their” books – I didn’t have the heart to press them for details. I wasn’t raring to write for any kind of publisher when Blogger came along and made it unnecessary as well as ameliorating somewhat the sudden absence of Tower Records, Books, Magazines & Video. In any case, I’m a screenwriter first so I never felt as vulnerable as the journeyman writer who is easily run in circles by editor-sadists. (I’ll re-write just once on a script; I’m sorry that’s our policy.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Now that the web has shattered three networks, four major labels, five movie studios, and six publishing houses into an ambient buzzing smart landscape, and its crowned with President Trump, the newsmedia’s subject number one whose metabolism magnifies their own dyslexic battle against context, it may be that Marinetti’s Future has finally dawned, shoveling the dirt onto old media for its richly deserved eternal buzzing quietus. The evening news programs can’t hit Trump on more than two different stories per night because they require one geriatric health feature for advertisers (“Do not take ViberziTM if you have no gall bladder.”) and must finish with a heartwarming postscript from out near an affiliate. But by then Trump has already committed two additional impeachable offenses! Cable news, even with its endless clock, is stuck with its uni-brain pile-on to one, maybe two stories for weeks or months at a time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The <i>Vanity Fair</i> monthly shows up showed-up on day-one. When did Graydon Carter sign off on the current issue? He all but admits he’s throwing in the towel:
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“In the B.T. (Before Trump) era, most people I know went about their daily lives reasonably confident in the knowledge that the papers or news sites they read that morning were all they needed to stay informed for the rest of the day. But now, A.T., all that has changed. Those same people check their phones with the regularity of lovelorn teenagers… wincing as they look to see what fresh horrors the great man in the White House has unleashed. Trump may thrive on conflict and disorder, but most of us do not.” (<i>VF</i>, “Trump Family Values”) </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Carter then illustrates this by switching off onto the First Lady – If only she were as respectable as Nancy Reagan, Betty Ford, or Barbara Bush. (<i>VF</i> still specializes in the old <i>Life</i> magazine-style Camelot-ing look-backs at our ur-royal families.) A monthly publication must step back from the headlines but Camelot-ing is part of our modern mediated problem. Graydon can suddenly read like a slow, kicked-in-the-head David Remnick as he tries to bag the Trump mid-Honeymoon, or was it pre-Hundred Days?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In the last <i>Vanity Fair</i> Carter sent Maureen Dowd after the truth about artificial intelligence. (Maybe the <i>NYT</i> is getting ready to offload more op-ed dead wood, always a difficult, sensitive matter akin to disarming a bomb.) I wonder if that <i>VF</i> issue’s Alec Baldwin’s memoir excerpt (the cover story) is as unfact-checked as he complained his book itself is. Editors love to stick it to beautiful people too. If I were sitting awkwardly at Graydon Carter’s desk I’d stick to Met Museum Turmoil and Gay and Nan Talese. Expect Camelot-style photo-essays looking back on the Obama wonder years well ahead of schedule for genuine nostalgic graphic impact.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i> The New Yorker</i> is a weekly but thinks long term, not that it helps much. Evan Osnos was just on Terry Gross for the whole hour talking about his endless primer, “End Games – How Could Trump Be Removed from Office?,” and this was before the firing of James Comey. Osnos and his editor are trying to own the expected impeachment as <i>The American Spectator</i> once owned Bill’s and <i>The Washington Post</i> owned Dick’s. But those weren’t drawn up beforehand. And Nixon and Clinton made pretty piñatas for discrete opposition parties and then handed them the knives themselves. Trump has scrambled his own party but he may not be standing still long enough for the geriatric Senate Democrats to gather with their walkers and beat him with their canes even if he succeeds in making that their one and only desire.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson while at the <i>WSJ</i> back in 1991 almost took Clarence Thomas’ scalp back before Bill Clinton forced the sexual harassment bar lower (it’s back up again). Abramson made it to the top of the <i>NYT</i> masthead but then got fired. Mayer has been at <i>The New Yorker</i>. She belled the Koch brothers back in August 2010. Thereafter every progressive tossed their names around knowingly. Mayer stayed on the Kochs beat with other <i>New Yorker</i> staff writers, wailing on them with occasional curveballs that contrasted them positively with ruder right-wingers. Suddenly their libertarian views could be taken as something other than a masque for plunder. These puff-ish pieces didn’t make sense until Mayer’s book, <i>Dark Money</i>, came out early in the election year. The magazine was attempting to coax the Kochs with something like sugar into talking to her for the book. But even in a weekly magazine with constant Kochs coverage (crowned with the book released just before the Iowa caucuses), in the end the Kochs’ scary <i>noir</i>ish darker-than-black money <i>sat out the election!</i> Mayer was forced by events to shovel dirt on her own book in a piece called, “Koch for Clinton? Not a Chance,” – actually it seems there was a chance. The Kochs’ scariness somehow, unaccountably, would not harmonize with Trump’s scariness no matter how skilled <i>New Yorker</i> editing is. And Donald Trump and David Koch are both New Yorkers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> As with the <i>NYT</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i> is most trustworthy when it reports from distant lands well outside its paradigming narrative-mongering, say, its excellent explication of the bloody implosion that ended the Nepali royal line in the July 30, 2001 issue. You expect <i>The Washington Post</i>, the company-town crier of our nation’s capital, to identify with the public sector to the exclusion of all else. They’re good at it too, and have us still in Cold War mode on top of our World’s policeman duties while we’re supposed to continue making the world safe for democracy, when the current challenge of an Islam-in-crisis is doing its best to unite America and other democracies with the interests of Communists and sundry dictatorships. <i>The Post</i>, whether under its old ink-stained crusading clichés straight out of <i>Superman</i> comics (blue-haired Katharine Graham, white-winged man’s man Ben Bradlee…) or the new post-humanoid cyborg cliché right out of <i>Batman</i> comics (Jeff Bezos), is just tending its readers’ provincial interests the way small-town newspapers do. But given the scale of Manhattan pretensions there really is no excuse for similar self-absorption there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And yet look at ‘em… The strange newsmedia coda of the Great Koch Bros. Non-Story of 2016 begins back on Aug. 22, 2016 when Tyler Durden, following up on <i>WSJ</i> reports about changes inside the Trump campaign, wrote at <i>zerohedge.com</i>, <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-22/meet-puppetmaster-hedge-fund-behind-us-presidential-election" target="_blank">Meet the Hedge Fund Puppetmaster Behind This Presidential Election</a>:
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“And while the emergence of the true puppetmaster behind Trump's campaign is fascinating, we were more curious to dig deeper into the potential influence of Renaissance not on just one, but both candidates.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, Jim Simons, it turned out was one of Hillary’s biggest donors! But never mind that, she lost the selection, and Donald Trump, a president right out of Gotham City is now the story. So in March of this year another heretofore unmentioned billionaire with eccentric behavioral ticks and ideas, one who was long ago in the Ted Cruz camp with the Kochs but unlike them made the jump to Trump, enters stage right – namely Robert Mercer. He is yet another owner of Renaissance Technologies as well as part-owner of <i>Breitbart News</i> and he made his sudden overdue debut in three contending would-be scoops. Mercer with the weirdest of his three daughters, Rebekah, was instrumental in bringing Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon to Trump’s campaign and White House no less.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The early <i>WSJ</i> and <i>zerohedge</i> pieces hadn’t done the trick apparently. But on Feb. 23, 2017 one of Mercer’s hedge fund partners, David Magerman, talked to the <i>WSJ</i>’s Greg Zuckerman and in the resulting story demanded that his boss stop backing Trump whom he, as another RT Clinton supporter considered a white nationalist bent on world destruction. Mercer apparently had told Magerman not to worry, that he’d be less involved henceforth, but Magerman, like most disappointed Democrats, was not assuaged. He wrote his own somewhat mixed-up mea culpa op-ed for the <i>Philadelphia Inquirer</i> on March 1 where he fears donors’ sense of “investing” in campaigns for returns:
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“I know this because up until recently I <i>was</i> one of those donors. I tried to buy influence in the schools in my community, in my synagogue, and in other communal institutions. These investments all failed for one key reason: communal institutions are not for sale, and you should not be able to buy stock in them…. I have learned this lesson, and it is time for Robert Mercer and the rest of the 0.001 percenters to learn it too.” (<i>Philadelphia Inquirer</i>)</span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq5VG7lEHkXZi7vPCfQg3vrtn7a8gNjMObVB1jxpOvEHWYlzIgu5hl3GMRHBGv2-lObj8o5_JbmOgAFZjaguZk0SElFDqnkK2xYiMa-ULq-oQ0cqqg55JKPa8EnaRT2x6AaDfEry26ChOB/s1600/NV-152essayillus3.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq5VG7lEHkXZi7vPCfQg3vrtn7a8gNjMObVB1jxpOvEHWYlzIgu5hl3GMRHBGv2-lObj8o5_JbmOgAFZjaguZk0SElFDqnkK2xYiMa-ULq-oQ0cqqg55JKPa8EnaRT2x6AaDfEry26ChOB/s200/NV-152essayillus3.png" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Magerman considered it was money that he had made for Mercer at Renaissance Technologies that had beaten the other RT monies that he himself, as well as Jim Simons, had donated to the Clinton campaign and got Trump elected. The stories about Robert and Rebekah Mercer finally hit in March of this year as if the slow metabolisms of <i>Vanity Fair</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, and even <i>The Washington Post</i> had rushed them out half-baked. The wonder is that the Mercers and Renaissance Technologies as massive contributors to both campaigns came visible only three months after Election Day. It seems some major part of the light-absorbing darkness of “dark money” is provided by the news media itself. Light of some intensity came on March 17 at <i>huffingtonpost.com</i> with Vicky Ward’s long essay, <a href="http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/" target="_blank">“The Blow-It-All-Up Billionaires”</a>. It’s quite funny with its emphasis on the Mercers’ eccentricities, especially Robert’s asocial manners that seem to come with his code-writing genius. And the piece also explores the relationships that brought Conway and Bannon to the insanity of the Trump campaign and then to our attention. On the same day Matea Gold wrote a short <i>Washington Post</i> article called, “The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a Populist Power Base Was Funded and Built.” Not as much poesy to be found in <i>WaPo</i> prose but I suppose it fed the most salient facts to a company town.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The same day those two pieces were posted and/or printed the <i>Huffington</i> piece’s author Vicky Ward appeared on <i>“Charlie Rose”</i> interviewed by a substitute host William Cohan from <i>Vanity Fair</i> which made me wonder if Ward’s piece might have been intended for <i>VF</i>, especially when ten days later a long and lumbering Jane Mayer piece on Robert Mercer showed up in <i>The New Yorker</i> titled, “Trump’s Money Man.” Mayer’s piece reads like an emptying out of a notebook for a piece not yet ready, which makes one wonder at what point it was begun – if the initial <i>WSJ</i> piece triggered both Ward’s and Mayer’s essays than the weekly <i>New Yorker</i> must require as much lead time as the monthly <i>Vanity Fair</i>. Mayer’s essay is mostly interesting as a awkwardly disguised come-down from her investment in inflating the Kochs as public enemies Numbers 1 & 2. Cue Emily Litella, “Never mind.” Mayer had to settle for a Wednesday appearance on <i>NPR</i>’s <i>“Fresh Air”</i>.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7i7TY5SI_SQcFUpSqGQVkmwpI4ZVowBldIEsR-VhDqZXM2y8ZGvmBDRSXSlM_T5858PrIw84nkeoxcDYXFd9m_3n1QvKWMI2kCPPYs5TKHXuI3GjaaIxNtS_fvcY0ZO0qxqatJ25d3T9u/s1600/NV-152essayillus2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7i7TY5SI_SQcFUpSqGQVkmwpI4ZVowBldIEsR-VhDqZXM2y8ZGvmBDRSXSlM_T5858PrIw84nkeoxcDYXFd9m_3n1QvKWMI2kCPPYs5TKHXuI3GjaaIxNtS_fvcY0ZO0qxqatJ25d3T9u/s200/NV-152essayillus2.png" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Vicky Ward was not so good on television; the enthusiastic Cohan was left insisting how good and funny and groundbreaking the piece was and he was right. Ward doesn’t mention the Clintons, Mayer emphasizes them and Mercer’s hatred of them. Like many Manhattan professional women Mayer’s identification with Hillary is almost total, though it ought to clash with her obsession with the Citizen United scenario given the Clinton money operation. But maybe that’s her editor’s imposition. I’m sure both are miserable over being scooped so skillfully and on a story that can only stand as a correction to a long series of <i>New Yorker</i> essays going back before that initial 2010 Koch Bros. hit piece; they’ve virtually been a beat of their own in the magazine. Further, the British-born Ward’s good humor shows up Mayer’s melodrama even though it too may have been hurriedly moved to the web from a monthly to beat a weekly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Now into the Trump administration it will be interesting to see whether the newsmedia can retain a focus on anything else – Donald Trump, this rather typical New Yorker is surely the least conservative Republican president since Richard Nixon. He may be triggering a similar territorial response – even an identity crisis disguised somewhat by class and regional stylistic differences. What frightens them may be that Trump doesn’t so much solve continuing Republican Party factional contradictions so much as he threatens to solve those of the Democratic Party.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In all the talk and reportage over why Hillary lost the election one big non-fake real reason “forgotten” by the newsers for the same reason Hillary doesn’t mention it, is that somehow the Obama administration or the deep state or just blind bureaucratic obliviousness decreed that healthcare premiums would go up in 2017 – this dropped on Hillary’s skull two weeks before the election by the Dept. of Health & Human Services. Given Hillary’s long identification with healthcare this hurt her most with those just above the point of having to pay unsubsidized prices so that they pay for the subsidized non-payers as well. The <i>NYT</i> “Upshot” numbers guy, Nate Cohn just produced, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/upshot/a-2016-review-theres-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-a-comey-effect.html?_r=0" target="_blank">“A 2016 Review: There’s Reason to Be Skeptical of a Comey Effect” </a>, and his graph is clear, Hillary’s polling dive begins at the healthcare premium rise announcement; she’s already bottomed-out at the Comey announcement. But Cohn and his editors don’t bring up the premiums as possible cause. Don’t even look for another dot to connect. Probably Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are crawling with such folks. Someone could look into that.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(Illustrations: Jan Wenner, Anne De Salvo, John Travolta “Perfect” film still; Jane Mayer on <i>“Rachel Maddow”</i>; Koch Bros newsflash on <i>CNN</i>; The Mercers – Rebekah, Robert, Diana; Vicky Ward and William Cohan on <i>“Charlie Rose”</i>)
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci,,, </b><br />
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Jim O’Neal & Guido van Rijn in LIVING BLUES, <a href="https://livingblues.com/product/living-blues-247-februarymarch-2017/" target="_blank">Paramount Records, A Centennial Celebration</a>.
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Local talent scouts became more and more important for Paramount to bring new artists to studios in Chicago or to the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana. In 1929, Paramount opened its own studio in Grafton. As interest in vaudeville blues faded, the recordings featured more hokum or double entendre music, and male solo guitarists became Paramount’s “Exclusive Artists.” </blockquote>
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David Mikics in TABLET, <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/227396/was-nazi-germany-made-in-america" target="_blank">Was Nazi Germany Made in America? </a>.
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The Nazi regime saw itself at the cutting edge of racial legislation, and America was their inspiration. “Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law,” Whitman remarks. In the 1930s, the American South and Nazi Germany were the world’s most straightforwardly racist regimes, proud of the way they had deprived blacks and Jews, respectively, of their civil rights. Scholars have long known that the American eugenics movement inspired the Nazis; now Whitman adds the influence of America’s immigration policy and its laws about race. Today, Whitman’s idea that Nazism looked to America for inspiration is liable to throw us into a moral panic. But there’s another side to the story, and in the Trump era, especially, we can benefit from taking a hard look at it. Our president was elected in part because he capitalized on an America-first nationalism that hunts ruthlessly for external and internal enemies. In this view, rootless cosmopolitans, immigrants, and the lawless inner cities constantly threaten the real America. </blockquote>
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Vivian Gornick in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html?_r=0" target="_blank">They Were True Believers</a>.
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It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive. I was 20 years old in February 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule. Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. “Lies!” I screamed at them. “Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!” Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was. </blockquote>
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Dominic Green in SPECTATOR on Peter Cozzens’ book, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-sins-of-the-founding-fathers/" target="_blank">The Earth Is Weeping</a>.
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Every Indian victory was pyrrhic, in provoking terrible retribution. Every defiant leader — Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse — surrendered in the end. The federal government failed to help the Indians starving on reservations, but always found the means to punish every Indian revolt. In December 1890, the massacre of Bigfoot and the Lakota Sioux in the snow at Wounded Knee marked the closure of the frontier, and the death of an ancient civilisation. This murder by ‘grand encirclement and slow strangulation’ was not, Cozzens argues, genocide. The federal governments that reneged on treaties and defrauded the Indians of their land and rights also launched five sets of ‘peace’ talks in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1866, when General Sherman, the head of the US army, advised ‘vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children’ the Grant administration instead pursued peace talks. Yet when Sherman advanced his solution for the ‘Indian problem’, he was the legal subordinate of the secretary of war. Cozzens writes that ‘the federal government never contemplated genocide’, but this is to acquit on a technicality. </blockquote>
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David Beito in REASON, <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2017/04/05/roosevelts-war-against-the-pre" target="_blank">Roosevelt’s War Against the Press</a>.
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Roosevelt warned in 1938 that "our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public, from the counting room. And I wish we could have a national symposium on that question, particularly in relation to the freedom of the press. How many bogies are conjured up by invoking that greatly overworked phrase?" Roosevelt's relationship with radio was warmer. The key distinction was that broadcasters operated in an entirely different political context: Thanks to federal rules and administrators, they had to tread much more lightly than newspapers did. At its inception in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reduced the license renewal period for stations from three years to only six months. Meanwhile, Roosevelt tapped Herbert L. Pettey as secretary of the FCC (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission). Pettey had overseen radio for Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign. After his appointment, he worked in tandem with the Democratic National Committee to handle "radio matters" with both the networks and local stations. It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts "contrary to the policies of the United States government." CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that "no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration." He elaborated "that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval." </blockquote>
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James Bowman in NEW CRITERION, <a href="http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2415" target="_blank">Who Governs America? </a>.
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Their triumph during the Obama presidency, about which they were as unanimously pro- as they are unanimously anti-Trump, must have emboldened them. Now they do not hesitate to present themselves to the public as the rightful government of the country and in news stories and editorials and opinion pieces alike to cast all the doubt they can on the legitimacy of Mr Trump and all who serve him. "News", "fact", "truth" have all become their property, to be decided by them alone, the inhabitants of "the realm of the true" as Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times described it on the day when even some Times readers must still celebrate the birth of the man who described himself as "the way, the truth and the life." His bosses at the Times must have been taken with the idea as, with the new year, they proceeded to discharge a blizzard of e-mails seeking new subscribers, all with tag-lines like: "Discover the truth with us" or "Searching out truth is what we do" or "The truth is what we do better" or "We’re passionate about truth. Are you?" </blockquote>
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Jennifer Senior in NYT on James Forman Jr’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html" target="_blank">Locking Up Our Own</a>.
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When he discusses policy decisions first made in the 1970s, the audience knows what’s eventually coming — that a grossly disproportionate number of African-American men will become ensnared in the criminal justice system — but none of the players do. Not the clergy or the activists; not the police chiefs or the elected officials; not the newspaper columnists or the grieving parents. The legions of African-Americans who lobbied for more punitive measures to fight gun violence and drug dealing in their own neighborhoods didn’t know that their real-time responses to crises would result in the inhuman outcome of mass incarceration. The effect, for the reader, is devastating. It is also politically consequential. Conservatives could look at this book and complain, for example, that Michelle Alexander underemphasized black enthusiasm for stricter law enforcement in her influential best seller, “The New Jim Crow.” But it’s also possible, reading Forman’s work, to stand that argument on its head. One of the most cherished shibboleths of the right is that African-Americans complain about police brutality while conveniently overlooking the violence in their own neighborhoods. </blockquote>
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Paul Beston in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-muhammad-ali-and-the-draft-1493330969" target="_blank">The Truth About Muhammad Ali and the Draft</a>.
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Ali told his boxing idol, Sugar Ray Robinson, he couldn’t join the army…. “If you ask me,“ Robinson said later, “he wasn’t afraid of jail. He was afraid of being killed by the Muslims.” Nearly a decade later, Ali told reporter Dave Kindred, “I would have gotten out of[the Nation of Islam] a long time ago, but you saw what they did to Malcolm X…. I can’t leave the Muslims. They’d shoot me, too.” It speaks volumes that Ali was more willing to face jail time than the Messenger’s wrath, especially since, by his own admission, the government had offered him “all kinds of deals.” Military brass neither wanted him in combat nor wished to see him become a draft resister. He would have served in a ceremonial capacity, as Joe Louis had in World War II, visiting and entertaining troops. The federal prosecutor who handled the case sensed that Ali was ready to sign up for a noncombat role, but that “some of his advisers wanted to make a martyr out of him.” They succeeded. It is not the only irony of Ali’s life that his submission to Elijah Muhammad’s authority somehow transformed him into a hero of freethinking and moral conscience. Yet he deserves credit for handling himself with magnanimity and elan. </blockquote>
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Peggy Noonan in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/steve-bannon-may-have-something-to-offer-1492126592" target="_blank">Does Steve Bannon Have Something to Offer? </a>.
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He speaks of two “disturbing” strands. “One is state-sponsored capitalism,” as in China and Russia. We also, to a degree, see it in America. This is “a brutal form of capitalism” in which wealth and value are distributed to “a very small subset of people.” It is connected to crony capitalism. He criticizes the Republican Party as “really a collection of crony capitalists that feel they have a different set of rules of how they’re going to comport themselves.” The other disturbing strand is “libertarian capitalism” which “really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost.” He saw this stand up close when he was on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs. There he saw “the securitization of everything” and an attitude in which “people” are looked at as commodities.” Capitalists, he said, now must ask: “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us… to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?” </blockquote>
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Michael Barone in CST, <a href="http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/the-new-world-politics-is-capital-city-vs-countryside/" target="_blank">The New World Politics is Capital City Vs. Countryside</a>.
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The countryside party, Trevor-Roper writes, vied to “pare down the parasitic fringe” of central government and sought to “protect industry” “rationalize finance” and “reduce the hatcheries which turned out the superfluous bureaucrats.” Similar impulses are apparent in Britain, France and America today. In different ways, Brexit, Le Pen and Trump seek to counter the university-trained bureaucratic, financial and cultural elite in London, Paris and NY/DC/LA/SF. They resent overlarge bureaucracies and public employee unions, the paymasters of the Labour and Democratic parties. With blunt, often ill-advised rhetoric, they challenge the pieties of the universities just as 17th-century countryside parliamentarians challenged the established church and universities. </blockquote>
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Tim Alberta in POLITICO, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/22/pat-buchanan-trump-president-history-profile-215042" target="_blank">Pat Buchanan “The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t” </a>.
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<blockquote>
Buchanan says he has “always been a pessimist,” and despite Trump’s conquest, two things continue to color his dark forecast for the nation. First, Buchanan harbors deep concerns over whether Trump, with his off-topic tweeting and pointless fight-picking, has the requisite focus and discipline to execute his nationalist agenda—especially over the opposition of a media-establishment complex bent on his destruction. Second, even if Trump delivers on the loftiest of his promises, Buchanan fears it will be too little, too late. Sweeping change was needed 25 years ago, he says, before thousands of factories vanished due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, before millions of illegal immigrants entered the country, before trillions of dollars were squandered on regime change and nation-building. He’s not unlike the countless Trump voters I met across the country in 2016, many of them older folks yearning for a return to the country of their youth, a place they remember as safer, whiter, more wholesome, more Christian, more confident and less polarized. The difference is that Buchanan refuses to indulge in the illusion that a return to this utopia of yesteryear is even possible. Economically and demographically and culturally, he believes, the damage is done. “We rolled the dice with the future of this country,” he tells me. “And I think it’s going to come up snake eyes.” </blockquote>
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James Rosen in NATIONAL INTEREST on Pat Buchanan’s book, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/pat-buchanans-white-house-battles-20224" target="_blank">Nixon’s White House Wars</a>.
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Time and again, as Nixon and his men deliberated the conduct of the Vietnam War and the threats posed by the radical Left, school desegregation and affirmative-action programs, Supreme Court nominations and Great Society funding, Buchanan struggled to understand why the Nixon he knew intimately from 1965 onward, the wily politician whose worldview aligned so squarely with the “Silent Majority” of Americans—a phrase Buchanan himself had coined—had embraced the policy prescriptions of his political opponents. “Why did the conservatives, who had so influenced the policy positions that Nixon had adopted during his comeback, fail to play a comparable role in the transition and the administration?” Buchanan asks. At one point, he even plaintively wonders whether the president and his key aides—principally, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman—entertained an “inherent suicidal tendency or death wish.” This lamentation, exposing the inner workings of the “troubled marriage” between Richard Nixon and conservatism and drawing on a thousand memoranda Buchanan exchanged with the president, many previously unpublished, provides the chief value of Buchanan’s book. </blockquote>
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Samuel Freeman in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Stuart Jeffries’ book, Grand Hotel Abyss, Stefan Muller-Doohm’s book, Habermas, and Peter Gordon’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/frankfurt-school-headquarters-neo-marxism/" target="_blank">Adorno and Existence</a>.
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The Frankfurt School’s leading theorists were neither skeptics about truth nor relativists about value. The phrase “false consciousness” suggests that people have a misconception of reality and hold false beliefs and values. But the Frankfurt School never articulated an explicit statement of true human values or a theory of society wherein such values could be realized. This was not because they were relativists but rather because they were pessimists about the validity of philosophical and ethical knowledge under capitalism. </blockquote>
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Marjorie Perloff in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-codebreaker/article/2007454" target="_blank">The Codebreaker</a>.
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Michael Wood's elegant and concise study of the great British literary critic William Empson (1906-1984) is especially welcome. Empson was all of 22 when he produced, at the suggestion of his Cambridge supervisor I.?A. Richards, a bulky manuscript called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Published in 1930, the book quickly became a classic, read and hotly debated in classrooms across Britain and the United States. Not until the 1970s, with the rise of Deconstruction, did Empson's star go down, the irony being (as Wood notes) that he anticipated so many of the theorems of what he called, in a letter to a friend, "those horrible Frenchmen"—he referred to the chef d'école of Deconstruction as "Nerrida"—who were "so very disgusting, in a social and moral way." Wood explains:
What Empson found disgusting was the seeking out, as he saw it, of complexity for complexity's sake, a project that was "always pretending to be plumbing the depths" but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it—this was in 1971—as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were let loose in the playground, no agents or intentions were to be seen. </blockquote>
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Helen Pluckrose at AREO, <a href="https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/" target="_blank">How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained</a>.
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Religions and other totalizing ideologies are metanarratives in their attempts to explain the meaning of life or all of society’s ills. Lyotard advocated replacing these with “mininarratives” to get at smaller and more personal “truths.” He addressed Christianity and Marxism in this way but also science. In his view, “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (p8). By tying science and the knowledge it produces to government and power he rejects its claim to objectivity. Lyotard describes this incredulous postmodern condition as a general one, and argues that from the end of the 19th century, “an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge” began to cause a change in the status of knowledge (p39). By the 1960s, the resulting “doubt” and “demoralization” of scientists had made “an impact on the central problem of legitimization” (p8). No number of scientists telling him they are not demoralized nor any more doubtful than befits the practitioners of a method whose results are always provisional and whose hypotheses are never “proven” could sway him from this. We see in Lyotard an explicit epistemic relativity (belief in personal or culturally specific truths or facts) and the advocacy of privileging “lived experience” over empirical evidence. We see too the promotion of a version of pluralism which privileges the views of minority groups over the general consensus of scientists or liberal democratic ethics which are presented as authoritarian and dogmatic. This is consistent in postmodern thought. </blockquote>
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Robert Boyers in CHRONICLE REVIEW, <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-s-Assault-on/239496" target="_blank">The Academy’s Assault on Intellectual Diversity</a>.
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In the early 1950s, Isaiah Berlin identified what he called “a common assumption” informing the work of Enlightenment thinkers: “that the answers to all of the great questions must of necessity agree with one another.” This “doctrine,” Berlin argued, “stems from older theological roots,” and refuses to accept any suggestion that we must learn to live with irresolvable conflicts. </blockquote>
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Douglas Belkin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberal-arts-colleges-in-fight-for-survival-focus-on-job-skills-1493051024" target="_blank">Liberal Arts Lose Luster</a>.
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“The big shift is cost,” said David Breneman, an economist and former college president, who has written about the pressures on liberal arts colleges, “People just can’t afford to be educated; they almost have to be trained.” The number of humanities degrees declined by almost 9% between 2012 and 2014, according to a 2016 analysis from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That led to a drop in humanities’ share of all bachelor’s degrees to 6.1% in 2014, the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1948. Undergraduate students are opting instead for programs leading to jobs in homeland security, parks and recreation and health care. </blockquote>
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James Stewart in NYTBR on Duff McDonald’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/review/golden-passport-duff-mcdonald.html?_r=0" target="_blank">The Golden Passport</a>.
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<blockquote>
In virtually every instance, McDonald contends, Harvard has obsessively pursued money, sending a disproportionate number of its graduates to consulting firms beginning in the 1950s (it was all but synonymous with McKinsey), to Wall Street in the 1980s and to entrepreneurial start-ups once initial public offerings became the rage in the 1990s — and provided intellectual justifications for its actions. Much of that wealth found its way back to the school itself. Its professors earn enormous sums as consultants to businesses populated by their former students, who also give generously to their alma mater: Its endowment stood at $3.3 billion by 2015, a dedicated portion of the university’s enormous $32.7 billion. McDonald’s criticism of Michael Jensen, now an emeritus professor, is especially withering. As he sees it, Jensen bears major responsibility for the rapacious hostile takeovers and the obsession with stock prices and short-term results that led to the Enron and WorldCom scandals, as well as for the emergence of outlandishly high chief executive pay. Jensen came to the business school in 1984, just as the junk-bond-fueled takeover boom was gaining steam, and he became a full-time faculty member in 1989. Undeniably one of the most influential business theorists of modern times, he advocated an “agency” theory of management in which management’s sole duty was to maximize shareholder value. This upended the long-held “stakeholder” model, in which management was seen as having broader obligations to a corporation’s workers, customers and communities. </blockquote>
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Charlotte Shane in BOOKFORUM on Laura Kipnis’ book, <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_01/17547" target="_blank">Unwanted Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus</a>.
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Marshaling this enthusiasm, she handily identifies a number of interconnected problems. The first is that the so-called feminist framing of the issue of campus assault is "blatantly paternalistic," wrong from the start, because relying on a classic woman-in-peril narrative is far more likely to harm women than to help them.The second is that this framing also employs a "rhetoric of emergency" designed to quash any seed of criticism of measures adopted to combat sexual assault.And third, that there's been an unwarranted expansion of Title IX, which has been almost gleefully misapplied in recent years. </blockquote>
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Andrew Sullivan in NEW YORK, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/is-intersectionality-a-religion.html" target="_blank">Is “Intersectionality” a Religion? </a>.
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Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.
Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation. </blockquote>
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Harvey Silverglate in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-congress-can-help-restore-campus-free-speech-1493583718" target="_blank">Trump and Congress Can Help Restore Campus Free Speech</a>.
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The law currently conditions federal funding on compliance with federal antidiscrimination laws such as Title IX, but it does not require schools – even public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment – to refrain from violating free-speech rights as a condition of funding. As a result, while universities spend millions on antidiscrimination efforts, speech codes are ubiquitous. According to a survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 93% of colleges and universities prohibit constitutionally protected speech. </blockquote>
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Amy Marcus in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/researchers-seek-guidelines-for-embryo-like-entities-created-in-labs-1490097605?tesla=y" target="_blank">Lab Creations Raise Ethics Issues</a>.
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As tissue-engineering techniques enable the creation of different types of synthetic entitles, some scientists – who are studying these organisms for clues to human development and the origins of diseases – are starting to consider whether the ethical guidelines should be expanded. In a paper published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers in the lab of George Church at Harvard University seek broader guidelines to encompass characteristics of engineered embryo- and organ-like structures, which they refer to as “synthetic human entities with embryo-like features,” or SHEEFs. The paper’s four authors recount how, in 2015, a scientist in the lab was working with adult reprogrammed cells, trying to grow them into brain “organoids.” </blockquote>
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David Chen in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/nyregion/nyc-cornell-columbia-nyu-campuses.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Where Halls of Ivy Meet Silicon Dreams, a New City Rises</a>.
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New York has plenty of company, of course, as universities worldwide, in hopes of imitating the success of Stanford, which has collected well over $1 billion in royalties as innovations linked to its campus made their way into the market, build or repurpose their own facilities. The University of Oregon announced in December a $1 billion initiative for a new science campus, financed in part by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. “I think what you’re seeing is a culture change,” said Michael H. Schill, Oregon’s president, who founded N.Y.U.’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy more than a decade ago. “A lot of universities for which previously the words ‘applied sciences’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ were dirty words now are jostling with each other to get a piece of the game.” </blockquote>
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William Galston in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-clinton-economy-the-lefts-ingratitude-1493766327" target="_blank">The Clinton Economy, the Left’s Ingratitude</a>.
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The Democratic Party is in the early stages of a much-needed debate about its economic agenda. But reshaping the future is no reason to rewrite the past. That’s what many self-styled progressives are now doing with their no-holds-barred rejection of Bill Clinton’s economic legacy. The latest participant in this self-defeating historical amnesia is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who said in a recent interview that the Clinton administration was “the beginning of the schizophrenic days, when they needed workers’ votes but wanted Wall Street money, so they tried to serve two masters but were successful at neither.” This gets it exactly backward. In fact, both “masters” – indeed, all segments of the economy – prospered during Mr. Clinton’s eight years in office. </blockquote>
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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-most-anti-reform-institution-the-media-1493417511" target="_blank">America’s Most Anti-Reform Institution? The Media</a>.
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There may be much to regret in President Trump’s temperament, his nonmastery of detail, his estrangement from the facts. Not without utility, though, is his generalized disdain for the major media, the most reflexively anti-reform institution in American life. Both major parties look like hotbeds of free-thinking in comparison. The media are a major factor in the outcomes we get. Large spending commitments are willed into being without willing the tax revenues or economic growth to pay for them. Social Security and Medicare are in a $70 trillion hole. Unfunded pension and health-care liabilities of the states and localities are at least $2 trillion. Federal debt has doubled to $20 trillion in less than 10 years. GDP growth has fallen by half. In our next recession, annual deficits could quickly surge to $1 trillion. Our comeuppance lies in a less and less distant future. But today we get only the horror of any proposed budget cut. We get the intolerability of any entitlement reform – and will continue to get such reporting right up to the day when it all unravels. </blockquote>
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Bret Stephens in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/climate-of-complete-certainty.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Climate of Complete Certainty</a>.
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As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.” Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts. None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power. </blockquote>
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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-editors-have-a-meltdown-1493766186" target="_blank">Climate Editors Have a Meltdown</a>.
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But not even the EPA’s Mr. Pruitt or the New York Times’s newest recruit exhibits the ill grace to phrase the “so what” question. “So what” is the most important question of all. So what if human activity is causing some measure of climate change if voters and politicians are unwilling to assume the costs (possibly hugely disproportionate to any benefit) of altering the outcome of the normal evolution of energy markets and energy technology. Even liberals have noticed that climate advocacy has morphed into a religion, unwilling to deal honestly with uncertainty or questions of coast and benefit. Climate apoplexy, like many single-issue obsessions, is now a form of entertainment for exercised minorities, allowing them to vent personal qualities that in most contexts they would be required to suppress. </blockquote>
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Tarek Fatah in TORONTO SUN, <a href="http://www.torontosun.com/2017/03/14/its-ok-to-say-western-civilization-is-superior" target="_blank">It’s OK to Say Western Civilization Is Superior</a>.
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Should we who have our ancestors in Africa or Asia feel guilty when we are inspired by the Hobbesian covenant, the Lockean contract or the Rousseauian pact? Some in the Islamic world believe so, and condemn any learning that originates from the words of the “Kufaar” (Christians, Jews, Hindus, Atheists). But now it seems some in the West also feel it is racist for non-White people to look up to Europe’s past for inspiration. Across the world, non-European leaders in the 20th century aspired to lift their societies to match the rights and responsibilities that had become part and parcel of the psyche of Europe and North America. Whether it was followers of Marx or Milton Friedman, they aspired for the right to be free as equal citizens, free of tribalism and caste, and not to be rated by some hierarchy of race and religion. </blockquote>
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Bret Stephens in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/other-peoples-babies-1490050955" target="_blank">‘Other People’s Babies’</a>.
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Without immigration, our demographic destiny would become Japanese. But our culture wouldn’t, leaving us with the worst of both worlds: economic stagnation without social stability. Multi-ethnic America would tear itself to pieces fighting over redistribution rights to the shrinking national pie. </blockquote>
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Aaron Carroll in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/upshot/birth-control-causes-depression-not-so-fast.html" target="_blank">Birth Control Causes Depression? Not So Fast</a>.
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The study found that those who used hormonal contraception had significantly higher risks of also taking an antidepressant. The study broke down the increased relative risk for each hormonal method this way: combined oral contraceptives (23 percent), progestogen-only pills (34 percent), the patch (100 percent), vaginal ring (60 percent) and levonorgestrel intrauterine system (40 percent). The risks were highest in adolescents and decreased as women aged. The risks also peaked six months after the start of contraception. Needless to say, many news outlets covered this finding widely. Some portrayed it as shocking new information that should change the way we think about hormonal birth control. Others saw it as a vindication of many women who said for years that birth control had triggered their depression while scientists and doctors ignored them. But we have to acknowledge the limitations of this type of research. It’s not a controlled trial, and it’s impossible to establish causality. Women who choose to have sex could also be more likely to consider antidepressant use. </blockquote>
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Mark Smith in WSJ on Carolyn Purnell’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stench-of-progress-1489171109" target="_blank">The Sensational Past</a>.
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Natural light governed the lives of working people, principally because candles were expensive. Night workers – such as baker boys known as “bats,” who worked in cheerless basements – learned to rely on their other senses, most notably touch. Patrons frequenting the markets also found sight less than reliable when it came to buying food. Smell and touch were the more trusty sentinels here; the murk of the markets meant that the color and health of fruits and vegetables simply could not be assessed visually. Hearing also augmented squinting eyes in the markets. Sounds, calls, shouts and noises helped map the spaces and also ascertain prices. The senses were also intimately tied to inner worth and character. “For Enlightenment consumers, a delicious food or beverage had more than just the power of giving a person pleasure,” writes Ms. Purnell; taste, it was held, could influence personality, emotions and intelligence. Take coffee, “the triumphant beverage of the Age of Enlightenment.” Considered a “sober liquor,” it stimulated creativity without courting the prospect of drunkenness…. Taste was also gendered: Coffee was deemed too strong for women; drinking chocolate was thought more suitable. </blockquote>
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Richard Paddock in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/world/asia/rodrigo-duterte-philippines-president-strongman.html" target="_blank">Becoming Duterte: The Making of a Philippine Strongman</a>.
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<blockquote>
His father told him that since he was always in trouble, he could save legal fees by becoming a lawyer, his brother recalled, so Rodrigo went to law school. In his final year, he shot and woun His father told him that since he was always in trouble, he could save legal fees by becoming a lawyer, his brother recalled, so Rodrigo went to law school. In his final year, he shot and wounded a fellow student whom he accused of bullying him. Mr. Duterte graduated anyway and became a prosecutor. “One thing about my brother is he is hardheaded,” Emmanuel Duterte said. “The more you tell him not to do it, the more he will do it. He needs to tone down on his anger. He needs anger management.” In the 1980s, his mother led frequent marches against President Marcos’s dictatorial rule. After his ouster, President Corazon Aquino offered her the post of Davao’s vice mayor. She asked that Rodrigo be appointed instead, friends and family said.
Two years later, in 1988, he ran for mayor and won, starting a lifelong streak in which he has never lost an election. When he took office, much of Davao was a war zone. The iron rule of the Marcos era had ended, and Communist rebels held a large part of the city. Armed groups operated with impunity and assassinations of police officers were common. Making the city safe was Mr. Duterte’s biggest challenge, and one he accepted personally. Jesus G. Dureza, a high school friend who is now a cabinet-level adviser, recalls seeing him late one night in the taxi he often drove to patrol the city. Mr. Duterte said he was hunting for a man who had been robbing cabdrivers. Mr. Dureza noticed that his pistol was cocked. “He had a death wish,” Mr. Dureza said. </blockquote>
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Adrian Chen in NEW YORKER, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/when-a-populist-demagogue-takes-power" target="_blank">The Tough Guy</a>.
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<blockquote>
The day after insulting Obama, Duterte released a statement expressing regret that his comment “came across as a personal attack on the U.S. President.” In his outburst, Duterte had used the Tagalog phrase putang ina, which means, literally, “your mother is a whore.” But it is also used to communicate frustration, as in “son of a bitch.” “It’s just an expression,” Salvador Panelo, Duterte’s chief legal counsel, explained to the press. “I don’t think it was directed to President Obama.” A columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer provided foreign journalists with a satirical guide to “Dutertespeak”: “Putang ina really means ‘I firmly believe you are mistaken.’ ”
Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues, laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino journalists. Ernie Abella, Duterte’s spokesman, recently pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its “creative imagination” when interpreting Duterte’s comments. </blockquote>
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Alexander Clapp in NATIONAL INTEREST, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/prisoner-the-caucasus-19473" target="_blank">Prisoner of the Caucusus</a>.
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On April 2, 2016, Azerbaijan launched its most severe attack on Nagorno-Karabakh in more than two decades. From the south and north, a nighttime missile barrage preceded a large ground assault on frontline villages. “There were six explosions,” Kegham Aghajanyan, the principal of the Madagis village elementary school, told me, gesturing to a crater the length of a pickup truck several meters from the school’s doorway. “Most children were evacuated by truck.” The Armenians pushed back. In Yerevan, I met Marat Petrosyan, a nineteen-year-old sergeant who successfully knocked out three Azerbaijani tanks before passing out midfire; by the time he came fully to, he’d been declared a national hero in Armenian neighborhoods around the world. Heavy fighting ceased after four days and some four hundred casualties. Both governments took to state TV with pronouncements of victory, but only the Armenians had any genuine case for it. An Azerbaijani invasion twenty-two years and $30 billion in the making had the capture of three brambly hillsides near the Iranian border to show for itself. In antiquity, Nagorno-Karabakh marked the easternmost frontier of the mountainous Armenian watershed. The arrival of medieval Turkic nomads from Central Asia turned it into an ethnic borderland: Muslim shepherds from around the Caspian Sea brought their flocks to the Nagorno-Karabakh highlands during summer months. From 1920 on, the Bolsheviks “solved” the ethnic dispute through top-down divide-and-rule, making an autonomous republic of Nagorno-Karabakh situated entirely within the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan. </blockquote>
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Marian Brehmer at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/content/sufis-targeted-in-pakistan-the-dance-goes-on" target="_blank">Sufis Targeted in Pakistan</a>.
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In Pakistan's unabating series of terror attacks, Sufi shrines are a recurrent target. The attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in the heart of Lahore, which killed more than 40 people in 2010, was especially traumatic for Pakistani Sufis. In the years that followed, attacks were carried out against Sufis in all parts of the country, most recently last November at the shrine of Shah Nurani in the western province of Baluchistan. Like no other shrine in Pakistan, the shrine in Sehwan is a symbol of the religious pluralism that is firmly rooted in this nation. Religious minorities are not only welcome at the tomb of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar – to this day, one of the guards continuing the family tradition of looking after the shrine is a Hindu. Not only that: women dance alongside men in the dhamal ritual. In the forecourt of the shrine, the otherwise ubiquitous separation of the sexes is repealed. This is why on 16 February, a large number of victims were women and children. </blockquote>
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INDIAN EXPRESS: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/converted-hindus-engineers-among-52-isis-terrorists-held-by-nia/" target="_blank">Converted Hindus, Engineers Among 52 ISIS Terrorists Held by NIA</a>.
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Those arrested for allegedly being ISIS operatives were of different age group. A total of 28 were in 18-25 year group, 20 between 25 to 40 years and four were above 40 years, it said. A highest of 20 accused were graduates or engineers, 13 were matric passed, 12 were diploma holders, four were senior secondary passed while three were post-graduates with Master of Arts or Master of Computer Application degrees, the NIA said when releasing data on the arrests. Giving details of the religious affiliations of the accused, the agency said 50 per cent belong to ‘Ahle Hadith’, 30 per cent to ‘Tahligi/Jammat’ and 20 per cent followed Deobandi. Of these 52 Islamic State-influenced persons held by NIA, 85 per cent of them are Sunni Muslims and rest are converted from Hinduism and Christianity, a senior NIA official said. </blockquote>
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Hassan Moosa & Geeta Anand in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/world/asia/maldives-atoll-saudi-money.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Inhabitants of Maldives Atoll Fear a Flood of Saudi Money</a>.
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<blockquote>
King Salman of Saudi Arabia was expected to visit the Maldives last week, but canceled at the last minute, citing a flu epidemic on the islands. It was widely assumed here that he wanted to avoid inflaming the dispute or facing protests. The Saudi interest in Faafu Atoll began with a 2014 visit by King Salman, then the crown prince, and his son Mohammed bin Salman, now the deputy crown prince. A year later, Prince Mohammed returned to host a week of parties. He and his entourage took over two resorts, said a person familiar with the plans. That person said guests had flown in night after night on private jets to attend the parties, which featured famous entertainers including the rapper Pitbull and the South Korean singer Psy. Mohamed Maleeh Jamal, formerly a member of Mr. Yameen’s economic and youth council, said that he had attended the signing of a memorandum of understanding between representatives of the Saudi royal family and the Maldives two years ago. He said he had been told that it involved selling the atoll, although he was not privy to the details. </blockquote>
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Hassan Moosa & Kai Schultz in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/asia/yameen-rasheed-dead-maldives-blogger-dead.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Maldives Blogger Who Challenged Radical Islamists Is Killed</a>.
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The police said that Mr. Rasheed was found with multiple stab wounds in his apartment building in the capital, Malé, shortly before 3 a.m. He was rushed to Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital and died soon after. The Republic of Maldives, a nation of nearly 1,200 islands southwest of India, is best known as a spectacular vacation destination. But the country, with fewer than 400,000 people, has also become a source of recruits for the Islamic State. The government said at least 49 Maldivians had traveled to Syria to fight with the group, also known as ISIS; a 2015 study by an international security firm said the number was about 200. The population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim, has traditionally been liberal in its interpretation of Islam, with women rarely covering their heads. But a more conservative strain of Islam has spread in recent years under the increasing influence of Saudi Arabia, which sends religious leaders to the Maldives and offers scholarships to Maldivian students to study at Saudi universities. </blockquote>
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Joseph Croitoru at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/saudi-arabias-entertainment-offensive-not-to-be-taken-lightly" target="_blank">Saudi Arabia’s Entertainment Offensive</a>.
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The entertainment offensive is being pursued vigorously, despite this resistance. The head of the authority, Ahmad al Khatib – a former health minister and most recently advisor to the defence ministry and the king – has now announced no less than 3000 events in 22 Saudi cities for the present year. An ?entertainment calendar? shared via several websites and Twitter profiles provides details on festivals, concerts, plays, comedy shows, exhibitions and mass spectacles such as the Monster Jam motorsport event. One of the highlights of the coming months is the American actor Al Pacino's first appearance in Saudi Arabia. Pacino will talk about his life and acting career and answer audience questions in Riyadh on 11 May. The event is listed in the ?For Families? category, meaning it is theoretically open to both men and women. It would be up to the religious police to check whether the ?family members? really are relatives, but the force has recently shown noticeable reserve about enforcing the gender segregation required in all sectors. Entertainment authority head al Khatib, at least, feels the huge visitor numbers confirm his strategy. The first 77 events offered in the last quarter of 2016 were attended by more than 150,000 people, he recently told the Saudi press. Al Khatib sees the ?Saudi entertainment industry? as already on its own two feet, although he admits there is much to be done. Over time, increasing numbers of local businesses are to become part of the sector. </blockquote>
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Nasser Rabbat at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/the-decline-of-humanism-in-the-arab-world-with-an-iron-fist" target="_blank">The Decline of Humanism in the Arab World</a>.
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The union between Syria and Egypt only lasted from 1958 to 1961. At the time, I was still a little boy in Damascus. One of the few things I can remember from that era is the sight of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on the balcony of the official guest house addressing an enthusiastic, frenetically cheering crowd in the square below. At the tender age of four, I imagined the crowd was cheering me as it chanted 'Nasser, Nasser'! I also recall my parents' furtive, whispered conversations about the increasingly tight control exercised by the secret services and the intimidation, torture and sometimes even murder of opposition activists. Despotism in itself was certainly nothing new in Syria; nor was torture. What was new was the organised structure applied to this oppression by the secret services run by Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, Syria's strong man at the time…. Before al-Sarraj and Abdel-Nasser, state oppression was a matter of moods and circumstances; it was often driven by very personal, tribal, or clientage considerations, as well as by values of macho masculinity – namely magnanimity and forgiveness – that were deeply rooted in the pre-Modern structures of most of the very young Arab nation sates. After al-Sarraj and Abdel-Nasser, however, state persecution became an integral, structural part of the state apparatus and one of its primary instruments of control. Models were imported and adapted from both West and East, from the CIA and the French Deuxieme Bureau to the KGB and the East German Stasi. </blockquote>
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Patrick Kingsley in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/world/middleeast/the-jihadi-who-turned-to-jesus.html" target="_blank">The Jihadi Who Turned to Jesus</a>.
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Exactly why he sought solace in Christianity, rather than a more mainstream version of Islam, no one can quite explain. Reading the Bible, Mr. Mohammad claimed, made him calmer than reading the Quran. The churches he attended, Mr. Mohammad said, made him feel more welcome than the neighborhood mosques. In his personal view, Christian prayers were more generous than Muslim ones. But these are subjective claims, and many would reject the characterization of Islam as a less benign religion, much as they would reject Nusra’s extremist interpretation of it. </blockquote>
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Harriet Sherwood & Philip Oltermann in GUARDIAN, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/05/european-churches-growing-flock-muslim-refugees-converting-christianity" target="_blank">European Churches Say Growing Flock of Muslim Refugees Are Converting</a>.
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Reliable data on conversions is not available but anecdotal evidence suggests a pattern of rising church attendance by Muslims who have fled conflict, repression and economic hardship in countries across the Middle East and central Asia. Complex factors behind the trend include heartfelt faith in a new religion, gratitude to Christian groups offering support during perilous and frightening journeys, and an expectation that conversion may aid asylum applications. At Trinity church in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz, the congregation has grown from 150 two years ago to almost 700, swollen by Muslim converts, according to Pastor Gottfried Martens. Earlier this year, churches in Berlin and Hamburg reportedly held mass conversions for asylum seekers at municipal swimming pools. The Austrian Catholic church logged 300 applications for adult baptism in the first three months of 2016, with the Austrian pastoral institute estimating 70% of those converting are refugees. At Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral in the UK, a weekly Persian service attracts between 100 and 140 people. Nearly all are migrants from Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere in central Asia. </blockquote>
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Mey Dudin at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/islam-in-greece-a-mosque-for-athens" target="_blank">A Mosque for Athens</a>.
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Athens is one of the few European capitals – if not the only one – not to boast a large mosque for use by its Muslim population. Believers pray in dozens of private spaces in basements and rear courtyards. And this despite the fact that it is almost 40 years since the government promised to erect a mosque – something it has repeatedly put off due to vociferous resistance. Greek media reports say the mosque is now due to be completed in May. No official opening date has so far been announced. The decades-old conflict exposes the persistently difficult relationship between the Orthodox Christian nation, which was ruled by the Ottomans for several centuries, and Islam. </blockquote>
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Declan Walsh in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/world/middleeast/cairo-pope-churches.html" target="_blank">Priest Prays in Cairo For a Church Made Legal</a>.
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To move the project along, Father Saad hired a Muslim contractor, which caused the price to rise sharply. He visited the construction site quietly, not wishing to attract attention. Then in August, Mr. Sisi’s government appeared to throw him a lifeline: a new law that contained a provision for the legalization of illegal churches. But the law, which has been criticized by international human rights groups as not going far enough, still allows the authorities to refuse permission for a slew of reasons, including the threat of violence from Muslim neighbors. So far the congregation has had no problems. On Sundays, worshipers file out in small groups to avoid scrutiny. Yet even the rickshaw drivers know it is a church, Father Saad said, so he and his congregation are bracing for possible trouble. Already the neighbors have made their displeasure known. The nearest mosque, Father Saad said, which is about 300 feet away, moved its loudspeakers closer and cranked up the volume during daily prayers. But he cannot complain because his church is illegal. It is also dangerous. Because the church lacks government permission, it has not received state protection since the recent Islamic State attacks. So while armed security officers guard a nearby Orthodox church, the door of Father Saad’s is monitored by scouts, including his daughters. </blockquote>
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Nour Malas in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/among-arabs-diverging-views-on-turkeys-erdogan-1492710003" target="_blank">Among Many Arabs, Erdogan Remains Model Reformer for Region</a>.
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The Results of the referendum, in which Turks voted by a slim margin to concentrate more power in the presidency, were met with supportive nods in corners of the Arab world, though the vote was marred by allegations of irregularities. Some of the nods came from citizens of countries led by monarchs or repressive regimes – a sign of how deeply split the Middle East is over ideas of reform and Islamist rule, and how relative and fluid those notions can be. </blockquote>
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Ulrich von Schwerin at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/turkey-post-referendum-reconciliation-not-a-chance" target="_blank">Turkey Post-Referendum</a>.
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With the transition to the presidential system, Erdogan promised, the era of a "new Turkey" would begin. His visit to the graves of Menderes, Ozal and Erbakan can be understood as a nod to three heads of state who had themselves promoted a reform of the secular state order that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk bestowed on Turkey. As a result, his mentor Erbakan was forced by the military to stand down in 1997, Menderes was executed in 1961, while Ozal died 24 years ago in suspicious circumstances. Erdogan on the other hand has not only managed to survive a coup attempt by the military, but also to enforce a tailor-made presidential system against the resistance of the old elite. </blockquote>
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Bartle Bull in WSJ on Christopher de Bellaigue’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/islams-blighted-enlightenment-1492795195" target="_blank">The Islamic Enlightenment</a>.
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For the Middle East in the 19th century, to “modernize” meant to Europeanize. For the Ottomans, it was not Napoleon but weakness against the Russians that prompted the urge. In the 1820s and 1830s, Sultan Mahmud II set up a medical school, hired a Prussian officer to reform the army, and rode in a European saddle. At his medical school, Mahmud overturned an ancient Islamic proscription against human dissection and fought the fatalism that God’s untrammeled caprice puts at the heart of Sunni Islam. </blockquote>
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WSJ Weekend Interview, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ayaan-hirsi-ali-islams-most-eloquent-apostate-1491590469" target="_blank">Ayaan Hirsi Ali</a>.
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She chuckles here: “That’s a horrible phrase… ‘institutions of socialization’… but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains. And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.” America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution” – with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations. “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage. We mean that they want gays put to death.” </blockquote>
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Paul du Quenoy in NEW CRITERION on Pieter Judson’s book, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Habsburg-slip-8631" target="_blank">The Habsburg Empire</a>.
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In a provocative thesis covering the last 150 years of the Empire’s existence, he argues instead that nationalism—the modern concept of an ethnic community defined by common linguistic and cultural traditions—complemented rather than challenged imperial governance. The “nations” that boldly asserted independence in late 1918 arose not from magically reawakened Herderian spirits of collective defiance but from deliberate measures taken by the imperial government itself to improve efficiency, undermine non-national sources of opposition, and—in its last decades—promote a supra-ethnic Habsburg patriotism based upon multiethnic inclusiveness and legally guaranteed civic equality. Rather than feebly reacting to angry waves of unstoppable national liberation, the Habsburg state proved remarkably adept at the reform, compromise, and balance it needed not merely to survive but to flourish. If its rulers held their thrones for more than six hundred years, something obviously had gone right. At the same time, the “nationalists” among the Empire’s dozen or so minorities made abundant use of imperial institutions not to destroy the empire but to reshape its structures to maximum local advantage. </blockquote>
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Adam Tooze in FT on Perry Anderson’s book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2367a896-29b5-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c" target="_blank">The H-Word – The Peripeteia of Hegemony</a>.
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What first Athens and then Sparta exercised, Aristotle tells us, was <i>hegemonia</i>. The term went out of use with the Romans – for them Republic and Empire sufficed. But as Perry Anderson shows in his fascinating history <i>The H-Word</i>, talk of hegemony was revived in the mid 19th century by those who fancied that in fractured, post-Napoleonic Germany, Prussia might play the role that Athens once had in Greece. Since then, talk of hegemony has never gone away. The term was put to use by revolutionary Marxists, International relations theorists, political scientists and economists. Today, hegemony is the bread and butter of highbrow op-eds. </blockquote>
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Stephen Mihm in NYTBR on Charles Morris’ book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/books/review/rabble-of-dead-money-charles-r-morris-great-depression-wall-street.html" target="_blank">A Rabble of Dead Money – The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929-1939</a>.
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“It is hard to conceive of the Great Depression absent World War I,” he says, and he begins his book with the colossal military miscalculations that sent Europe into the abyss. Most of the remainder of the book dwells at great length on the “disordered aftermath” of this conflict overseas, which he believes set the stage for the collapse. This is refreshing, and Morris traces in considerable detail the economic effects of the war, beginning with Europe’s abandonment of the gold standard and, even worse, the attempts to return to it at all costs (France gets particular blame for its “semi-messianic drive … to force a gold-based deflation on the rest of Europe”)…. Still, the average reader may not delight in being subjected to discussions of the nuts and bolts of war reparations and the endless negotiations in Europe over the gold standard. Morris does cover simultaneous developments in the United States, but these tend to showcase the underlying strength and resilience of the American economy. Though Morris acknowledges that the agricultural sector was a “laggard,” and grants that the stock market was getting a little frothy by 1929, he insists it was “international developments that pushed the United States over the brink” and into the Great Depression. Indeed, if there’s a culprit here, it’s Europe, especially Germany with France a close second. At times, Morris goes out of his way to pillory Germany. “The Germans paid the reparations by borrowing from the war’s victors, and rubbed it in by defaulting on the loans,” he notes in a typical comment. In this account, Weimar Germany comes across as a nation of hypocritical deadbeats. </blockquote>
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Henry Kissinger in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-who-saved-europe-the-last-time-1493417446" target="_blank">The Man Who Saved Europe the Last Time</a>.
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From this posture, Adenauer heralded a historic turning point. The new Federal Republic would seek, in his words, “full freedom” by earning a place in the community of nations, not by pressure or by seizing it. Calling for an entirely new conception of foreign policy, Adenauer proclaimed the goal of “a positive and viable European federation” to overcome “the narrow nationalistic conception of the states as it prevailed in the 19th and 20th century… in order to restore the unity of European life in all fields of endeavor.” Adenauer’s conduct reinforced his rejection of European history. Tall, erect, imperturbable, his face immobile from an automobile accident in his youth, he exuded the serenity of the pre-World War I world that had formed him. Equally distinctive was his sparse speaking style. It conveyed that unobtrusiveness and performance, not exhortation or imposition, were to be the operating style for the new Germany. </blockquote>
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Martin Breum at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/nordic/137671" target="_blank">
Power Struggle in Greenland</a>.
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Firstly, Greenland holds vast deposits of minerals of strategic importance to industry. These include some of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals outside China, which controls some 90 percent of the world’s rare earth mineral production. Already in 2012, Antonio Tajani, the then vice-president of the European Commission, travelled to Nuuk to strike a deal that would keep Greenland’s rare earth minerals out of the hands of the Chinese. In exchange, Greenland got EU support to develop a mining sector. The mining industry, however, has been hesitant to invest in Greenland with its harsh climate and limited infrastructure. Political instability in Greenland could push mining in Greenland further into the future. Secondly, Greenland has been sympathetic to the EU’s wish to increase its role in the Arctic. Greenland withdrew from the EU in 1985, the first nation ever to do so, long before Brexit, but today it enjoys cooperation with the EU over fisheries, which provides substantial revenues and support. Other Arctic players – Russia and Canada, in particular – have proven far less friendly to the EU’s Arctic plans. Brussels needs to remain a close friend to whomever wins the top job in Nuuk. </blockquote>
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Alissa Rubin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/world/europe/france-joinville-heritage.html" target="_blank">Stripped Village Homes Expose a Hollowing Out of France’s Heritage</a>.
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Throughout the French countryside, especially in less visited rural areas of eastern and central France, some homes have fallen victim to speculators who strip their architectural treasures and sell them, often abroad, leaving once graceful historic structures little more than empty shells behind gaily painted facades. In other cases, the owners themselves sell the architectural elements to raise some cash. Joinville’s losses are anything but an exception. The sales are for the most part legal, but the phenomenon is an element in the gradual depopulation of many of France’s villages, and what some fear is an ebbing away of French traditions and culture. </blockquote>
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Anne Sulvaine Chassany in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/793b78b8-1ee5-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229c" target="_blank">The Shadow of de Gualle Stalks the French Election</a>.
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Do we French have no politicians greater than Charles de Gaulle to celebrate? Perhaps not. The founder of the Fifth Republic exited French politics nearly half a century ago despised and humiliated, but it seems everybody still wants a piece of his legacy. As the meltdown of the mainstream parties that have governed for four decades heralds a new, potentially messy political era, French presidential candidates from right to left are conjuring up the general’s reassuring, fatherly figure to lure confused voters. </blockquote>
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Diana Johnstone at <i>counterpunch.org</i>, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/21/the-main-issue-in-the-french-presidential-election-national-sovereignty/" target="_blank">The Main Issue in the French Presidential Election: National Sovereignty</a>.
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Fifty years ago, it was “the left” whose most ardent cause was passionate support for Third World national liberation struggles. The left’s heroes were Ahmed Ben Bella, Sukarno, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and above all Ho Chi Minh. What were these leaders fighting for? …They were fighting for independence, for the right to determine their own way of life, preserve their own customs, decide their own future. They were fighting for national sovereignty, and the left supported that struggle. Today, it is all turned around. “Sovereignty” has become a bad word in the mainstream left. National sovereignty is an essentially defensive concept. It is about staying home and minding one’s own business. It is the opposite of the aggressive nationalism that inspired fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to conquer other countries, depriving them of their national sovereignty. The confusion is due to the fact that most of what calls itself “the left” in the West has been totally won over to the current form of imperialism – aka “globalization”. It is an imperialism of a new type, centered on the use of military force and “soft” power to enable transnational finance to penetrate every corner of the earth and thus to reshape all societies in the endless quest for profitable return on capital investment. The left has been won over to this new imperialism because it advances under the banner of “human rights” and “antiracism” – abstractions which a whole generation has been indoctrinated to consider the central, if not the only, political issues of our times. The fact that “sovereignism” is growing in Europe is interpreted by mainstream globalist media as proof that “Europe is moving to the right”– no doubt because Europeans are “racist”. This interpretation is biased and dangerous. People in more and more European nations are calling for national sovereignty precisely because they have lost it. </blockquote>
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Michael Barone in WSJ on Amy Goldstein’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hollowed-out-heartland-1493161273" target="_blank">Janesville – An American Story</a>.
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<blockquote>
Some readers may assume that “Janesville” is a guide to economically ravaged Trump voters. It is true that Rock County’s 62%-38% margin for Barack Obama in 2012 fell to 52%-41% for Hillary Clinton. But the focus is not on partisan politics: “Janesville” is more the story of a strong union town come to grief. Ms. Goldstein deftly sketches the city’s industrial history: how George Parker founded Parker Pen there in the 1880s; how Joseph Craig, a manager at a local tractor factory, enticed GM to open the auto plant in 1923; how both men generously endorsed civic institutions. She notes Janesville’s unusually nonviolent resolution of the illegal sitdown strikes against GM in 1936-37. But she mentions one pivotal event only briefly, noting how a GM-er’s grandfather participated in the United Auto Workers’ 67-day GM strike in 1970. Out of that strike came “30 and out” – retirement after 30 years, a provision demanded by workers who hated their jobs – and, later, generous retiree health benefits. After all, a 48-year-old retiree won’t get Medicare for 17 years. Business writers began characterizing GM as a health insurer with a side-line producing cars, and retiree pensions and benefits did much to send the company on the road to bankruptcy. </blockquote>
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Gina Kolata in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/science/ancient-human-dna-cave-dirt.html" target="_blank">Scientists Recover Ancient Human DNA from Cave Dirt</a>.
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Although DNA sticks to minerals and decayed plants in soil, scientists did not know whether it would ever be possible to fish out gene fragments that were tens of thousands of years old and buried deep among other genetic debris. Bits of genes from ancient humans make up just a minute fraction of the DNA floating around in the natural world. But the German scientists, led by Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, have spent years developing methods to find DNA even where it seemed impossibly scarce and degraded. “There’s been a real revolution in technology invented by this lab,” Dr. Reich said. “Matthias is kind of a wizard in pushing the envelope.” Scientists began by retrieving DNA from ancient bones: first Neanderthals, then Denisovans. To identify the Denisovans, Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Planck Institute and a co-author of the new paper, had only a child’s pinkie bone to work with. </blockquote>
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Kenneth Chang in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/science/horses-genetics-domestication-scythians.html" target="_blank">Ancient DNA Hints at How Horses Were Tamed</a>.
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Among the farm animals whose lives have become entwined with people, horses were a late addition. Dogs were the first animal friends of humans — wolves that scavenged for food among garbage piles and turned docile about 15,000 years ago, or possibly much earlier. Cattle, chickens and pigs were domesticated by people in different parts of the world between 8,000 and 11,000 years ago. It was only about 5,500 years ago that people in Central Asia started catching and keeping wild horses for meat and milk. Riding horses came later. In the new research, the scientists used a bit of bone from the horse skeletons — less than half a gram in most cases — to extract DNA. They were able to decipher the genomes for 11 of the 13 horses from the Scythian mound. They also analyzed the DNA of two stallions from a royal Scythian tomb 400 years earlier, and one mare, dating to 4,100 years ago, that belonged to a nearby, earlier people, the Sintashta, who had already figured out how to use horses to pull two-wheeled chariots. </blockquote>
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Terry Anderson in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/utah-faces-down-the-rock-climbing-industrial-complex-1489187009" target="_blank">Utah Faces Down the Rock-Climbing Industrial Complex</a>.
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In fact, profits from recreation are what drive the politics of federal land management. More wilderness for backpackers means that wealthy, healthy Gen Xers and millennials will buy more backpacks, tents, boots, mountain bikes and high-tech clothing for trekking into the backcountry. To take one example, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which is calling on the Trump administration to budget more for “intact, working landscapes,” has argued that outdoor recreation generates $646 billion in direct spending while supporting six million jobs. But the foundation of these profits is an enormous subsidy from the American taxpayer. Every year the federal government spends millions to support recreation, without earning much revenue from those campers, bikers and hikers. For every dollar that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management spent on recreation from 2009-13, they took in less than 30 cents….</blockquote>
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Andrew Marantz in NEW YORKER, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/an-awkward-right-wing-dance-party" target="_blank">Alt Dance-off</a>.
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Recently, she took a Saturday-night gig, at a downtown cigar bar. “I was told that it would be a group of journalists having an eighties-themed party,” she said. She was not told that the party would be called the Real News Correspondents’ dinner—not the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and not Samantha Bee’s “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” but a smaller event, held as a form of right-wing counterprogramming…. The first speaker was Lucian Wintrich, from the Gateway Pundit. He introduced Gavin McInnes, a talk-show host and a self-proclaimed “Western chauvinist,” who took the microphone from Wintrich and kissed him on the mouth. “You can’t get AIDS from kissing, right?” McInnes said. He wore a studded denim vest, and his face was smeared with dirt. “This is how I dressed in the eighties,” he said. “I was an anarchist punk, and I think in many ways I still am.” He argued that the G.O.P. was the party of freedom. “You became the Nazis, Democrats,” he said. “You became the Fascists.” He concluded with what he called “a poem that I just came up with right now.” The poem was a chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” </blockquote>
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Neil Steinberg in CST, <a href="http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/steinberg-this-is-as-actual-a-part-of-living-as-being-born/" target="_blank">My Final Calls with ‘Concrete’</a>.
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Concrete had been phoning me at the newspaper for 15 years. Once a week, once a month – it’s not like I kept track. He’d comment on columns, talk about stuff in a blunt, rounded Chicago voice, massaging his “t’s” into “d’s.” “Hi, it’s Concrede,” he’d say. He was informed, often complimentary. But still, for years I viewed him as something of a nuisance. I had work to do. I’d surf the web while we talked. It’s not something I thought much about. I had no idea, for instance, why I called him “Concrete.” Over the past few months, he got sick – heart failure – and started to die. I began paying closer attention. </blockquote>
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Obituary of the Issue
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/arts/music/obituary-dick-contino-accordion-heartthrob.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Dick Contino</a> (1930-2017)
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With muscled arms built up with barbells and Charles Atlas’s dynamic tension exercises, Mr. Contino played the accordion like a rock star. His fingers flew over the keys. Elvis-like, he wiggled, shook and swaggered. He played polkas, jazz, romantic songs, show tunes and folk music. And, of course, “Lady of Spain.” But his onstage physicality belied his early shyness. “Playing the accordion was like he was talking to you,” his brother Victor said in an interview. Mr. Contino started playing his father’s accordion and learned so well, and so quickly, that at 18 he won $5,000 in a contest staged by the popular bandleader and radio star Horace Heidt. Mr. Contino’s popularity soared when he played with Mr. Heidt’s band. Restless, Mr. Contino sued to break away from Mr. Heidt’s contractual control, but settled and stayed for a while before leaving. </blockquote>
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Thanks to Archie Patterson…
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<br />JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-55913433838770888372017-04-23T19:25:00.001-07:002017-04-23T19:25:38.466-07:00Issue #151 (April 23, 2017)<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sheep Mountain from Centennial Ridge</span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsnxivIQv4hE_hgRS_JFhg5QA0gZTssvv9-vWnTcRjr1xJFh-DGSEPGKDDYNaAGAHXJzdQIN_UQONdpaL3HWCMZEZtkQMzotLFcxjXAfI5DCQNVDvD-pQ1NQn2T3UupJX8fUI7qq8mkidC/s1600/sheepmtnfromcentridge-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsnxivIQv4hE_hgRS_JFhg5QA0gZTssvv9-vWnTcRjr1xJFh-DGSEPGKDDYNaAGAHXJzdQIN_UQONdpaL3HWCMZEZtkQMzotLFcxjXAfI5DCQNVDvD-pQ1NQn2T3UupJX8fUI7qq8mkidC/s640/sheepmtnfromcentridge-sm.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Money For Food</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Michael Essington</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> At the end of my walk one night, I snuck into my local 7-11 for a diet Mountain Dew (because as a diabetic everything that is “good” for you tastes like shit).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> When I walked in the door, the front of the place was empty except for two or three girls in the corner giggling while making their selection on the Redbox machine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I ran in, grabbed the soda, pay and walked out. As I walked out the door I heard, “Hey man, you got some change?” I think what startled me was the voice. It was the voice that I and every kid I have ever known has used to fool our parents into thinking we were sick when we wanted to get out of going to school. That gravelly Barry White thing, minus the sex-appeal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I looked down and I saw a guy, late teens-early twenties, sitting next to the phone booth, backpack against the wall, a blanket laid out, and the palm of his hand towards me. I wanted to tell him he was full of shit. I had been in 7-11 three minutes. In that time he had arranged his belongings, laid out his blanket, did his best Barry White and started begging. Once he ran the change thing past me, I shook my head and said, “Sorry, no change.” And walked away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Over twenty years earlier, I was on a date with some girl and she wanted to stroll along Melrose. So, we started on one end and headed towards Fairfax. Midway down, we passed a homeless guy, about the same age as the guy out in front of the 7-11 last night. This guy was a little dirty, hair messy, he gave me that strained smile and said, “Sorry to bother you, but I’m in a bit of a bad situation. I haven’t eaten in a while and no place to sleep.” I told him I was sorry he was in that situation. The girl I was with was tugging on my arm, trying to move on down Melrose. I told her to hold on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I fished through my pockets, the only cash I had was a five dollar bill. I handed it to him and said sorry it wasn’t more. He thanked me three or four times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> We start back down Melrose. The girl I was with started in with the whole “Why did you give him that money? He’s only going to use it for drugs or alcohol.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I looked at her for a bit and said, “How do you know?” She gave me a snooty look and said, “They all do.” I shook my head and mumbled, “Oh, they do, do they?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I didn’t talk to her for the rest of the walk. Kind of juggling this information around in my head. Do people say this to justify not giving money to those in need or were they previously generous and got burnt and are now callous?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> About twenty minutes later we were heading to where we had parked, we pass the guy I had just given money to. I smile and nod to him. Now there is a blonde guy sitting with him. He stands up, a little more aggressively than his friend. He does a whole, “I need some money, man.” I nod at him at point to his friend, kind of a cue for his friend to say, “Hey, he gave us a few bucks.” Instead, the blonde guy takes my actions as a slight and yells “Don’t ignore me, man! Trying to brush me off?!” He jumps in my face.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The girl I was with is now a half a block away. I put the palm of my hand on this guy’s chest I say to him very softly, “Make another move, say another word I’m knocking your ass out.” The guy pushes against my hand, I cock back – his friend jumps off the sidewalk and yells, “Dude, stop! That’s the guy that gave us the cash!” The blonde does a double-take and says, kind of humble-like, “Oh, sorry dude.” I nod and say, “You two have a good night.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Once I catch up to the girl, she starts, “See, that’s why you shouldn’t give them money. They were high. They probably had weapons.” By this point, I had had it. I said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Most of us are a check or two away from this. If I lived out here I’d want to be loaded too. I’d have a shit-load of weapons. So what? Not all of us were raised in Thousand Oaks with the luxury to look down on the world.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> She looked floored. “What?! Take me home.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">----
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In the summer of 2014, I stopped into Headline Records to visit my friend Jean-Luc. In the twenty to twenty-five minutes I was in there two guys popped in asking for money.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Jean-Luc explained to me what he tells them. He tells each and every one of them the same thing. “Sweep out the shop, wash my front window and I’ll take you to the pizza place across the street and get you lunch.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> He said out of the hundred plus people that have come through his shop asking for money for “food,” only one person has taken him up on his offer. One.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(from the forthcoming book, Broken; information <a href="http://bit.do/michaelessington" target="_blank">here</a>.)
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Sheep Mountain from Green Rock</b></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBkj2jScIq2uOeRtcAcGIMwKwk8j-GMeb6M-B55fsWvF_zSl8ybC-72VSb5c7WAd-aAC47QldTxiEFOi_R8-FBDYWAPZ0TB0P154RLTC6Er_22zY_iUma0cR5vOERncth_OyMgwUO15NgH/s1600/SheepMtn-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBkj2jScIq2uOeRtcAcGIMwKwk8j-GMeb6M-B55fsWvF_zSl8ybC-72VSb5c7WAd-aAC47QldTxiEFOi_R8-FBDYWAPZ0TB0P154RLTC6Er_22zY_iUma0cR5vOERncth_OyMgwUO15NgH/s640/SheepMtn-sm.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>From the London desk of Steve Beeho…</b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Larry Elliott on why populism is the result of global economic failure in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/26/populism-is-the-result-of-global-economic-failure" target="_blank">GUARDIAN</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross. The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism. Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Matthew Goodhart, Shocked by populism? You shouldn’t be,
in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c691edd4-13cf-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76" target="_blank">FT</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While most serious analysts share a consensus that populism is set to remain as a durable force, this narrow economics-based interpretation is unconvincing, not least because it ignores the fact that populists experienced much of their growth before the onset of the financial crisis and that the most successful, such as those in the Netherlands or Austria, arose amid some of the lowest unemployment rates in the western world. The second camp, whose bible will now be David Goodhart’s important new book, <i>The Road to Somewhere</i>, instead contends that these revolts are symptomatic of a deeper conflict over values and identity — a conflict that is beginning to eclipse the traditional divide over economic redistribution that used to organise our parties neatly into left and right.Goodhart, a former <i>Financial Times</i> journalist who edited <i>Prospect</i> magazine and now works for the Policy Exchange think-tank, sees two different groups increasingly pitted against each other. On one side are the liberal, socially mobile and university-educated “people from Anywhere”, who subscribe to an “achieved” and cosmopolitan identity. On the other side are conservative, marginalised “people from Somewhere”, who subscribe to a roots-based conception of national identity and cherish ways of life that have been lost or are under threat. It is the latter who, via the populist rebellions of 2016, are forcing themselves back on to the agenda of western politics. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frank Furedi, A Revolt Against Deference, at <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/a-revolt-against-deference/19611#.WN6ZpcvbLIV" target="_blank"><i>spiked-online.com</i></a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In recent years the decline of deference towards the Western establishment’s truths has prompted it to wage a crusade against populism. This has led to a new stage in the decades-long Culture War. What stands in the way of the elite crusade to regain deference is the wisdom of the people. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">John Gray on Fictions of Fascism in the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about" target="_blank">NEW STATESMAN</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Viewing the current turmoil in politics through the lens of a received account of fascism may stave off a paralysing sense of bafflement. At bottom, however, it is a way of failing to understand the present. Fascism was more alluring to intellectuals, and more modern, than many who fear its return have realised. Yet what we are witnessing is more a meltdown in the political traditions that prevailed since the end of the Cold War than a reversion to interwar fascism. All of our political ideologies are in disarray – not least left-liberalism, now not much more than a collection of smelly new orthodoxies and an uncomprehending wail of self-righteous indignation. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rod Liddle, What shocks me about the <i>BBC</i>: occasionally it isn’t biased
in <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/what-shocks-me-about-the-bbc-occasionally-it-isnt-biased/" target="_blank">the SPECTATOR</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I may have told you before about the comment made to me when I was editor of the <i>Today</i> programme about complaints from Eurosceptics which claimed our coverage was guilty of bias. I had been inclined to take the complaints very seriously. But a senior <i>BBC</i> apparatchik said to me: ‘What you have to understand, Rod, is that these people are all mad.’ That was the <i>BBC</i>’s controller of editorial policy, since you asked. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paul Berman on Russian Manipulations, Past and Present in the <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/228239/russian-manipulations-past-and-present" target="_blank">TABLET</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How should the [Soviet-era] Russians have felt about the Republican Party, then? It depends. The Russians had every reason to look with horror upon the Cold War hard-liners. But, in the degree to which they were willing to confine their ambitions to their own oversized chunk of the world, they also had reason to look with respectful appreciation upon the Kissingerians. And so the question arises: Did the Russians, back in Soviet times, ever go so far as actually to intervene in an American election on behalf of the Republican Party in its Kissingerian mode? This is Devin Nunes’s question, except that I have rendered it more precise. I can answer. They did. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tanya Gold, Losing Momentum: how Jeremy Corbyn’s support group ran out of steam,
in the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/03/losing-momentum-how-jeremy-corbyn-s-support-group-ran-out-steam" target="_blank">NEW STATESMAN</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The man beside me has been ill. He talks sweetly about the potential renewal of society under Corbyn’s Labour as a metaphor for his own recovery, and this moves him; he has not been involved in politics until now. I like this man very much, until I mention the Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger and the anti-Semitism she has suffered from Corbyn supporters and others; and he says, simply, that she has been employed by the state of Israel. He says nothing else about her, as if there were nothing else to say. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mary Wakefield, The mad, bad crusade against ‘cultural appropriation’, in the <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-mad-bad-crusade-against-cultural-appropriation/" target="_blank">SPECTATOR</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Who do these righteous muppets think should decide on culturally appropriate subjects for writers and artists? Do they imagine a licensing body, an arm of government going from studio to studio checking for privilege? The truth is, they don’t imagine anything. They just don’t do sustained thought. For them, it’s enough to harangue, and to signal lofty indifference to criticism on Twitter: “Wow. Just wow.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Jordan N. Mamone, How Mark Cunningham Blitzed the Bowery With No Wave Icons Mars,
at <a href="http://observer.com/2017/01/mark-cunningham-blitzed-bowery-with-no-wave-icons-mars/" target="_blank"><i>observer.com</i></a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We had our public, absolutely. Especially at CBGB. Sometimes it depended on who we played with; if it was someone that had their own crowd, maybe they didn’t get us at all. This particularly happened while playing with punk or hard rock bands. When we played in a series at Folk City with the Heartbreakers, [the audience was] throwing things at us. But on those nights captured on the record, you can really hear the complicity that we provoked in our immediate circles. For them, the weirder and more intense, the better. In this sense, we were very much a product of our time and place, not ahead of it as is generally thought. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Cz9D0TBZARx_Ht2_ql3EE_j704KT63LmhjOu682fecepRhCcPF5b69A3wOYLCZSqCXykGb8wj0tgKMQuoFtrfgkGxW1p-DUpAyy_DKaZCfJrL4YNpR_idVXTUwDJhVsGwZPggY7Vm0D3/s1600/NV151-brianMcMahonmemoir.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Cz9D0TBZARx_Ht2_ql3EE_j704KT63LmhjOu682fecepRhCcPF5b69A3wOYLCZSqCXykGb8wj0tgKMQuoFtrfgkGxW1p-DUpAyy_DKaZCfJrL4YNpR_idVXTUwDJhVsGwZPggY7Vm0D3/s320/NV151-brianMcMahonmemoir.png" width="225" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">electric eel Brian McMahon interviewed about his memoir, <i>Jaguar Ride</i>, at <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_au/article/jaguar-ride-is-a-memoir-from-one-of-americas-finest-overlooked-musical-miscreants" target="_blank"><i>noisey.vice.com</i></a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The electric eels started as a myth that became a band, let us swirl forever in mystery and conjecture. I expect inclined readers will decide for themselves whether my book breaks the myth down or builds it up. My intentions were broader than a band book. Less a story about selling the who and more about telling the why. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">David Keenan interviewed about his novel, <i>This Is Memorial Device, An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986</i> in the <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/books_and_poetry/15055526.I_dream_of_Airdrie__David_Keenan_on_his_new_novel__This_Is_Memorial_Device/" target="_blank">SUNDAY HERALD</a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I think the most interesting stuff about post-punk was what happened outside the urban centres, in the small villages. What happens in <i>This Is Memorial Device</i> happened in a lot of small towns I think. It’s an international scene in microcosm. So you have your local Iggy Pop, you have your local Lou Reed. And as one of the characters says, in a way the people in Airdrie were living it harder than their role models. It’s not easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie…. I think the surreal aspect of it is closer to the truth in a way… The strange, unlikely, supernatural, hallucinated part was somehow closer to the real experience. And something tells me that’s closer to how people experience reality. Things do seem hallucinated and weird. You’re invaded mentally by all these weird ideas at the same time and memory itself twists and turns it. Memory itself is creative. Rather than some weird fidelity to some social realist notion of Airdrie in 1978 I wanted to get the psychic reality of Airdrie, '78. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9R0MIQLAW4CAJHsNSqPOJaA3gv6sJY6dmcLMMrQ6rNeRi8Lh9q0y5medjgYENXcZvL96HqVCB-OqfSFjyCL-WvtqHbKwkTjpcPUWBYZ80BgS6O-_4kv7w0ykizar6f47sZy4OJnK-WE7E/s1600/NV151-spiralscratch.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9R0MIQLAW4CAJHsNSqPOJaA3gv6sJY6dmcLMMrQ6rNeRi8Lh9q0y5medjgYENXcZvL96HqVCB-OqfSFjyCL-WvtqHbKwkTjpcPUWBYZ80BgS6O-_4kv7w0ykizar6f47sZy4OJnK-WE7E/s320/NV151-spiralscratch.png" width="318" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's The Buzz, Cock! <i>Spiral Scratch</i> 40 Years On at <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/21653-buzzcocks-interview-spiral-scratch-anniversary-review" target="_blank"><i>thequietus.com</i></a>.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hannett's production, even at his most inexperienced, was somewhat groundbreaking too, remembers Diggle. “Any time the engineer was doing something that sounded right, Martin Hannett would undo it and started messing with everything. The engineer was furious but he ended up getting that unique sound, the 'terrible beauty' as I call it. On the one hand it sounds terrible and on the other it sounds beautiful.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">^^^
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As surreal postscripts go, <a href="http://www.officialcharts.com/charts/physical-singles-chart/20170203/1/" target="_blank">this</a> one isn't bad...
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Middle Mountain</span></b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIScTZXuTNwSoZiAsvfS840MUv8xC7WTwI1W4y2Kc1kTanx68MdXyNRwi8pmRsTrcqytwvDBc8x6b3LRlEtB_HVmruR56a2Ub4XuNZPhcuHMf9HfKYcZYsMQ-5Oo-v-cKfMiFe9GN-pK2T/s1600/MiddleMtn-sm+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIScTZXuTNwSoZiAsvfS840MUv8xC7WTwI1W4y2Kc1kTanx68MdXyNRwi8pmRsTrcqytwvDBc8x6b3LRlEtB_HVmruR56a2Ub4XuNZPhcuHMf9HfKYcZYsMQ-5Oo-v-cKfMiFe9GN-pK2T/s640/MiddleMtn-sm+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Photograph by Joe Carducci</span>
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<img border="0" height="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReEmecffpEsWUVSiqeuxRTV8j1RgLPU7l-lgVMjKlSw4Bpaj1gj7sKmfDtdsyjpZlTJ_Fucjdb-xRH7MeK298dJXSOM6-rWCQTop15QsO-qVyND-riGHqHH5qGg3kFLV-UF6fyRuI8yrw/s640/NV151-putinyeltsin.png" width="640" />
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Red States</b><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joe Carducci</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>“I want to ask for your forgiveness, that many of our dreams didn't come true. That what seemed to us to be simple turned out painfully difficult. I ask forgiveness for the fact that I didn't justify some of the hopes of those people who believed that with one stroke, one burst, one sign we could jump from the grey, stagnant, totalitarian past to a bright, rich, civilized future…. but I want you to know – I've never said this, today it's important for me to tell you: the pain of every one of you, I feel in myself, in my heart... in saying farewell, I want to say to every one of you: be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness, and peace.”</i>
- Boris Yeltsin final address, Dec. 31, 1999</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Russia is in poor shape economically but it sure seems politically stable. Since the collapse of Soviet Union it’s been conventional Eastern wisdom that Gorbachev was wrong to put political reform ahead of economic reform. China did it right the sages say; when Chinese people made political demands the People’s Liberation Army was set upon them and the survivors turned to their work-lives and entrepreneurship for some freer space. Today China has many homegrown millionaires and billionaires and politically connected and protected provincial power centers. And now it is China’s center that may not hold. They look at Putin as someone who countered the centrifugal forces spinning from political freedom as they look to counter those spinning from economic freedom. Communism had criminalized all political and economic activity outside of the Party until its societies and cultures were up on blocks and stripped. The Party had to retract some unknown amount from totalitarian control to allow human nature the creative space to regenerate resources it had pillaged. Lenin had done this himself with the New Economic Policy of 1921, but Stalin closed that opening in 1928 with the First Five-Year Plan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Any Putinizing of Chinese leadership this year (Xi Jinping becoming a “core” leader like Deng or Mao at his reappointment, and perhaps taking a third term in 2022) tells us the East is in a new era. Trump’s election and Xi’s elevation should both contribute to making Putin himself easier to deal with. But we may not see Putin-Trump deal-making on some grand stage in <i>Mitteleuropa</i> or in twin summits in New York and St. Petersburg with trumpets blaring for quite a while. In the wake of Xi’s recent meeting with Trump we hear that our Metternich, Henry Kissinger, is schooling Jared Kushner on playing China and Russia off against each other. It would appear there’s a thin line between an Isolationist or a Neo-con.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Vladimir Putin passed up the chance to serve two terms and continue the Yeltsin precedent of stepping away from power. Instead he made a deal with Dmitri Medvedev who became President for one term while Putin glided over to the position of Prime Minister. He then returned to the Presidency. He will presumably win a 4th presidential term next year which will secure his leadership until 2024 when he will be 72. Putin has said that he does not intend to be President-for-life, remarking that he doesn’t believe that would be good for the nation or for himself. If he steps down in 2024 he will have only technically observed the two-term limit, as if the Russian constitution really meant to only bar two <i>consecutive</i> terms. The George Washington-like ritual of Public Servant No. 1 returning to a private life merely interrupted by service, not consumed by rule, seemed inconvenient. Putin considered himself an indispensible man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRHYCPnDw_dj7rV7GjTASc4IjsMoKzNst1eoaK_eAgpXbYkNvzP7Cbr95cGmowRqqEoggcdnt5I6q8ETMS8tX4GHQ7Ijxx0W7KtavgVKa_qa48kZ-VSJN3jGMM5DGQUDuxh6JvZ3nKSqJZ/s1600/NV151-putinkirill.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRHYCPnDw_dj7rV7GjTASc4IjsMoKzNst1eoaK_eAgpXbYkNvzP7Cbr95cGmowRqqEoggcdnt5I6q8ETMS8tX4GHQ7Ijxx0W7KtavgVKa_qa48kZ-VSJN3jGMM5DGQUDuxh6JvZ3nKSqJZ/s400/NV151-putinkirill.png" width="400" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Given Russia’s poor economic prospects (barring oil and gas prices doubling back to their 2014 high) Putin will be thinking about turning his current geo-political high-water mark into a new deal with the West that can outlive him. He put himself forward as a new model for the battered, neutered Russian male. The West found this amusing but it needed doing after seven decades of communist cuckolding put the Russian male’s life expectancy at five decades. Putin had risen from his various positions in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the waning days of Boris Yeltin’s presidency and made the deal to immunize the Yeltsin family from prosecution so as to prevent further national drift under his decline. Putin himself, if he’s being truthful and does not die in office, will be even more cautious about negotiating such immunity for himself and his family. After so many terms in office, rumors of Tsar-like wealth, and so much rough governing there is much appetite to get at him and many potential charges. But those who shout that no-one is above the law must be careful they don’t insure tyranny by making stepping down the greater risk.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But who is there today in Russia who might step forward, and from which organ of state power, to succeed Putin and protect him in retirement? I won’t guess about that, other than to say that it is no longer true as it was in the Soviet period that the secret police have unique awareness in a nation blinded by <i>Pravda</i>. Putin had to emerge from the FSB-KGB; his successor perhaps not. But it does seem likely that Putin would now plan for this event, and that right now is trying to guess at whether Donald Trump will last one term or two. Should Trump be re-elected his second term would end in 2025, a year after Putin’s putative final term. It’s quite likely then that they would conclude the fabled post-Soviet Russo-American reset by 2022, over thirty years past the end of the U.S.S.R.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The reset that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton floated was out-of-sync with the life-cycle of Putin’s regime. As part of President Obama’s stated goal of “a pivot to Asia” the reset seemed designed to leave a reduced Russia to the EU so as to work at containing a rising China. Why wouldn’t Putin work to tie down American defense and diplomatic dollars in Europe and the Middle East and bank that favor with China? Such amateurish face-up poker is what we’ve seen from our DC realists-idealists since George H.W. Bush let the U.S.S.R. collapse; his challenger Michael Dukakis seemed to advocate saving Gorbachev and the Soviet Union with foreign aid, the very programs designed to bolster others against the Soviet Union! A perfectly Keynesian foreign policy: pay ’em to dig the ditch and then pay ’em to fill it in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech (Aug. 1, 1991) was delivered in Ukraine before its referendum on leaving the USSR. It was written by then aide Condoleeza Rice to warn Ukraine against “suicidal nationalism” but the polling seemed to indicate that it drove a blowout vote <i>for</i> independence even in Crimea though there the vote was closer. Bush’s seeming-timidity (the speech was tagged “chicken” by William Safire) was not however what inspired Pat Buchanan to challenge him for the nomination in 1991. I don’t remember Buchanan having a position on Ukrainian independence per se; what he wanted was for the U.S. to get off the war footing and let a now post-communist non-expansionary, indeed shrinking Russia in out of the cold. The Cold War was over and Buchanan wanted a peace dividend and a return to as much of our classical American Republic as could be salvaged. He campaigned against the Washington establishment’s search for new challenges for our superpowers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> There’s evidence that early on Putin was inclined to come in out of the cold. George W. Bush intended to reset our geopolitics with more “humility.” Even after the Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon both Russia and China were enthusiastically folding their own respective battles against Muslims-if-not-Islamists in Chechnya and in Xinjiang into the West’s new battle. Soon more attacks followed in Madrid, London, etc., and the West, which had been objecting to Russian and Chinese behavior, went along with a kind of pro forma simpatico. For awhile Islam united East and West, Christendom and Communism, the Hindutva and Buddhism; too bad for Burma the comity was over before their new democracy’s current battle with Muslims-if-not-Islamists began.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Russia has always been a bad neighbor to have. In their defense it was a bad neighborhood that formed them. And now that Russia is back, back to meddling everywhere, creating rump statelets out of minority grievances wherever they can. They even rumped the rump state of Moldova which itself was pealed from Romania. Russia seems fated to seek to force what they assert is a naturally occurring sphere of influence. And this can clash with Putin’s determination to be the standard bearer for stability above all – evolution rather than revolution, the historical position of America in the world. In this light Putin and Russia are loathe to observe the centenary of the Russian Revolution this year, whether the February authentic democratic revolution or the October Bolshevik coup which launched the totalitarian approach to tyranny and perfected it in the sense that simple authoritarian regimes expire with their author. The Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq are and were mixed versions and like North Korea destined to function like de-sanctified kingdoms with biological princes assuming the secular thrones of Assad, Saddam, and Kim. Further confusing matters was the reverse-truth of the world’s fleeting concern over America’s status as sole “hyperpower” after the passing of the USSR. It wasn’t concern over any American appetite for imperial control but more fear over her rather blithe unleashing of social chaos in states without the cultural sophistication to withstand democratic freedoms. In Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent meeting at the Kremlin in the shadow of the American attack on the Syrian airbase over chemical weapon use, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov read Tillerson the riot act: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan….</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Personally, I stopped worrying about <i>being</i> an anarchist when I realized that each society gets as much freedom or anarchy as it can handle. So it can be naïve in terms of the old world to insist that, say, Iraqis (even just her component societies – the Sunnis, Shi’a, Kurds, etc.) elect their leaders. The fact that each country must adapt from the US what they dare so as to participate in modernity does not mean that any of them can approach its level of dynamism without breaking apart or retreating into dictatorship.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> America has been struggling to keep its global responsibilities from destroying its own house. But an Americanism seeking a mission beyond <i>realpolitik</i> stability is something of a conundrum. But even free trade stability when with a tyranny that serves only some ruling clique who starves its subject people can be hard to take for either American party. Pat Buchanan’s reprised and revised America First doctrine is still in part based on his suspicion that a post-Cold War NATO is actually only pretending that it will go to war to keep its new members independent, or perhaps he fears that only America is <i>not</i> pretending. The wars that concern the EU, NATO, and the US were Russia’s semi-invasions of parts of Georgia and Ukraine. Neither was conducted like the Chechnya war. And both Ukraine and Georgia during accession talks with the EU behaved as if they could force the hand of NATO to all but excavate them away from their Russian borders. The still uncooled conflict between the now independent nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan hasn’t concerned Putin so much because neither has made moves to join the EU or NATO; they remain members of the Russia-centered CIS and its military alliance the CSTO. But in this unique backwater the ongoing but lukewarm war helps keep the combatants’ respective peaces with Russia, reinforced by Russia’s interest in “defending” Armenia from Turkey, and Azerbaijan from Iran.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Trump, if he is as advertised, must believe that the West’s objection to Putin’s seizing of Crimea in 2014 was just another fake red line and in a word, “SAD!” Khrushchev’s seemingly meaningless ceding of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 only mattered when Ukraine’s incompetent Russia-sponsored president lost a rigged election due to people power in the “Orange Revolution.” The EU still acts like the Crimea, where the Russian naval base on the Black Sea allows access through the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf, must and will be returned to Ukraine, despite the inability of subsequent “legitimate” non-Russian sponsored Ukrainian Presidents, Victor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko, to inspire any Western confidence in the nation’s leadership (Currently Poroshenko seems an improvement). This is unlike the Baltic states where governance and spending on defense and training seems coherent and determined.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Trump has certainly scattered the newsmedia’s leading Russian experts: David Remnick, Stephen F. Cohen, Strobe Talbott, Hedrick Smith, Gary Hart…. They all surely winced when Mitt Romney was laughed at by their fellow liberals for claiming during the 2012 presidential debate that Russia remained our number one geopolitical foe. These experts each retain that warped investment in the Russian mythos once so common, though only Cohen is so old left about it that Trump is actually collaterally repaired as Cohen defends Putin and Russia against the Democrats’ cross-dressing “McCarthyism.” Remnick is the most visible to his detriment methinks on <i>“Charlie Rose”</i> and as one of three authors of an endless essay in a recent <i>New Yorker</i> titled, “Active Measures” – the length of which was required to rescue the beloved Obama administration from culpability for anything but innocent bystanding – Remnick had special access to President Obama and exhibits withdrawal symptoms.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Trump speaks and tweets scattershot to soften his opponents’ defenses like the wholesale barely-aimed fire from Katyusha rocket launchers. But he shows a simple contempt for the preening moral objection to the seizure of Crimea and other offenses against Ukraine that the EU and Obama administration offered. Any serious protest would have to aim toward a deal, where even a <i>fait accompli</i> might garner a geopolitical cost equal to or greater than the gain. Glancing at a map, the obvious swap to threaten would have been Kaliningrad, but apparently not one neuron in any of the legions of double-domes sheltering behind the desks of the EU, UN or White House was exercised in gaming out such real world penalty. Any motion toward placing Kaliningrad on the table would have been the minimum required of an actual strategy beyond mere protest. It might have been obvious as well to reinforce that with simultaneous motion toward the southern Kuriles, two Japanese islands seized by Stalin at the end of WWII. Military maneuvers and diplomatic demands are the minimum cards to play if one was seriously offended over Crimea. Anything less is the posturing of peacocks and that offends real world dealmaker Trump.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Putin is still playing a weak hand, well or not. The populist right gained in the Netherlands election but did not win as expected, and Putin’s more direct choice lost in the recent election in Bulgaria, historically the most slavish satellite. The Russian-sponsored America-less Syrian peace process may not survive the recent cruise missile strikes in retaliation for the use of Sarin gas. That may depend on whether Assad was chumping Putin on the use and even the presence of such missiles. So far Trump’s moves regarding Syria and North Korea are working and even reinforcing each other, but he is edge-walking. If Steve Bannon is fired it’s probably a sign that the Pottery Barn doctrine has returned; we will stay the world’s cop because the world is broken.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Will France vote for Le Pen? Hard to picture but that’d be a hell of a loss for EU pretensions and another effective win for Putin. A German election is due as well after which the playing field for Putin’s last term is set. Crimea might be judged by the Trump administration as not worth the crisis. Then a comprehensive re-tracking of relations would be possible along the lines Pat Buchanan or even George W. Bush initially seemed to favor. When Bush was ridiculed for having seen Putin’s soul he had been impressed by the scale of Putin’s job to right a shellshocked nation with declining lifespans to go with a declining population. The price of oil hadn’t yet risen and the Russian oil industry was leaking more oil than it pumped anyway. Bush saw that Putin took this task seriously which explained everything from his athletic displays to his religious observances. If that soul was real then Buchanan was right to warn that NATO expansion would retrigger Russian imperialism to secure its sphere of influence. All we can be sure of is that it happened.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In any case Russia and Putin were not reminded that the West includes the East, and Japan’s still open demand for the return of the Kuriles was not used to underscore that Russia’s detached canton on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Latvia might also be plopped back on the table. That Russia quietly reinforced Kaliningrad all through the second half of 2016 tells us that Putin understood his vulnerability if the West did not. Does President Trump understand? We may not know until 2022.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(Illustrations: Putin and Yeltsin, Dec. 31 1999 – Reuters; Patriarch Kirill and Putin, July 2015 – AFP; Xi and Putin, June 2016)
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<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sheep Mountain from Green Rock #2</span></b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkzHAL10RVLewjDZnjYAv1omcNfL5t8jz2N2ici-7aIuwKsUI0KWVR_udl-98cL0TGncL1UPjjFk9dMdKrvVn_PPPJYx9jgnrrcpbs8YPP7Oxte0kJ5rsx6npCcElIHPZ-WqhMf0KZvSmm/s1600/SheepMtn-2-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkzHAL10RVLewjDZnjYAv1omcNfL5t8jz2N2ici-7aIuwKsUI0KWVR_udl-98cL0TGncL1UPjjFk9dMdKrvVn_PPPJYx9jgnrrcpbs8YPP7Oxte0kJ5rsx6npCcElIHPZ-WqhMf0KZvSmm/s640/SheepMtn-2-sm.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
Photograph by Joe Carducci
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci,,, </b><br />
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Mikhail Khodorkovsky in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ultimate-trump-putin-deal-1489016627" target="_blank">The Ultimate Trump-Putin Deal</a>.
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Mr. Putin would like to use international agreements to preserve and formalize the “gains” he has achieved in Europe: his conquest of Crimea and neutral status for Ukraine and other states Mr. Putin considers to be inside Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence. The desire for such concessions may motivate Mr. Putin to discuss the matter of his stepping down while Mr. Trump is in office. That in turn, could create an opportunity to remove other problems from the table. But it could also tempt the West to appease and buckle under, or to throw up barriers. In any other scenario, if Mr. Putin is going to be thinking about how to remain in power, he needs the U.S. for only one thing – to play the role of a “safe enemy.” That allows him to rally the Russian people around him, while knowing America presents no actual danger. To expect any other approach from Mr. Putin is a self-delusion that will carry a high cost in the end…. The window for handling Mr. Putin is very narrow. Mr. Trump’s brashness has stopped at attacking Mr. Putin personally. That atypical restraint horrified many Russia hawks in the West. But it may turn out that Mr. Trump took a better approach. Whether accidentally or by design, he has left the door open for Mr. Putin to make a graceful exit. That would be good for everyone. </blockquote>
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Mark Helprin in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deal-trump-shouldnt-make-with-russia-1490828823" target="_blank">The Deal Trump Shouldn’t Make With Russia</a>.
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The new administration may be sorely tempted to close a showy, diplomatic “deal,” the origins of which are President Obama’s extraordinary policy failure in the Middle East. With American financing rather than resistance, Iran has thrown a military bridge from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, a feat the U.S. could not equal at the height of its powers when it unsuccessfully tried to construct the Central Treaty Organization in the 1950s. </blockquote>
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Roger Scruton in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/russian-way-lying/" target="_blank">The Russian Way of Lying</a>.
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All this has come to mind in reflecting on the role of truth in Russian diplomacy. Communist ideology dismissed the idea of truth as a bourgeois construct. What mattered was power; and you baptised as truth those doctrines which provided it. This invincible way of marginalising reality was exposed for all honest people by Orwell, Koestler, Solzhenitsyn and, more recently, Havel. Only education in a modern university, with repeated doses of Foucault, Deleuze and Vattimo, could blind one to the dangers of a philosophy that sees power as a real goal of discourse. Unfortunately, that education exists, and we have to live with the result of it. </blockquote>
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Alison Smale & Andrew Higgins in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/world/europe/vladimir-putin-angela-merkel-russia-germany.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Putin and Merkel: A Rivalry of History, Distrust and Power</a>.
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Never a friend nor an open foe, Ms. Merkel has always sought to nudge Mr. Putin and Russia toward a relationship rooted in rules rather than emotion, a comity built on clearly defined common interests, not personal chemistry. Mr. Putin, in turn, has longed for a transactional leader in Europe, someone who would strike a grand bargain and guarantee Russia a fixed, even privileged, place at the decision-making table. Before Ms. Merkel took power, Mr. Putin had that rapport with her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. Now it is one of Mr. Schröder’s heirs, Martin Schulz, leading the center-left Social Democrats, who poses the biggest challenge to Ms. Merkel. Having the Social Democrats back in power, with their warmer embrace of Russia, would be a boon to Mr. Putin — just as he is hoping for friendlier leadership in France, and with Mr. Trump in the United States. </blockquote>
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James Marson in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-exploits-europes-divisions-in-bid-to-dominate-gas-supply-1490866203" target="_blank">Russia Taps Political Splits</a>.
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Sweden is a prime example of Mr. Putin’s divide and conquer strategy as he attempts to maintain Russia’s status as an energy powerhouse and a geopolitical force in Europe. The Nordic country has reinstituted a military draft and moved troops to a strategic Baltic Sea island in response to Russian military moves, but it can’t stop Karlshamn from helping Gazprom because local governments in Sweden have strong authority over local affairs. </blockquote>
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Yoichi Funabashi in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/fe57a068-b30a-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0" target="_blank">Japan Seizes the Rare Chance of a Reset with Russia</a>.
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The advent of Mr Trump may create the strategic breathing space that Tokyo was not afforded during the Obama administration. Mr Abe is keenly aware of the potentially favourable environment for fostering Japan-Russia relations and is therefore moving with a sense of urgency. A rare opportunity is opening for Japan and Russia to normalise bilateral relations and finally leave behind the legacy of the second world war. But as Tokyo enjoys leeway to pursue a more autonomous foreign policy, it must be careful not to revert to the kind of opportunism that led to a neutrality pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1941 and then to Japan’s fate being linked to that of the Axis powers in Europe. Japan must choose the path of principled and hard-headed engagement that it followed when it normalised relations with an authoritarian South Korea in 1965 — and again in 1972, when it established diplomatic relations with totalitarian Communist China. Certainly, a peace treaty between Japan and Russia, two great powers, will be of significant benefit to regional stability, as well to both countries’ economies. Mr Abe, though, must not forget the overarching goal of shoring up the liberal international order. </blockquote>
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Evan Gershkovich in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/world/europe/alaska-russia-sale-150.html?_r=0" target="_blank">150 Years On, Russians Have Sellers Remorse</a>.
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Russians started to settle Alaska in 1784, setting up trading posts and Eastern Orthodox churches, mostly along the coast. By the 1860s, having lost the Crimean War to Britain, and fearful that Britain would seize Alaska in any future conflict, the czar decided to strike a deal. The sea otters who were the heart of then-thriving fur trade had almost been wiped out, and the Russians also feared that if gold were discovered — as it would be, in the Klondike Gold Rush that started in 1896 — the Americans might overrun the territory, said Susan Smith-Peter, a historian at the College of Staten Island in New York. “From the Russian point of view, the deal made a lot of sense,” she said. “They could irritate Britain, and they could have a closer relationship with the United States.” The United States also thought the purchase would position it closer to trade with China, and fend off any British thoughts of encroachment on the West Coast, said Gwenn A. Miller, a historian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. </blockquote>
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Neil MacFarquhar in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/world/europe/russian-revolution-100-years-putin.html" target="_blank">‘Revolution? What Revolution?’ Russia Asks 100 Years Later</a>.
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The official reason proffered for ignoring the event is that Russia remains too divided over the consequences of that fateful year. The more likely explanation, some Kremlin officials, historians and other analysts say, is that President Vladimir V. Putin loathes the very idea of revolution, not to mention the thought of Russians dancing in the streets to celebrate the overthrow of any ruler. Moreover, 1917 smudges the Kremlin’s version of Russian history as a long, unified march to greatness, meant to instill a sense of national pride and purpose. For the record, the Kremlin is sticking to the official line of avoiding domestic discord. </blockquote>
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Brendan Simms in WSJ on Robert Gerwarth’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-war-that-never-ended-1480549528" target="_blank">The Vanquished</a>.
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Regional wars broke out in the Baltics and between Poland and the young Soviet Union. The same fracturing happened in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, whose corpses were being dismembered even before the victim was dead. In many cases, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East, postwar rivalries picked up hwere they had left off before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Troops from Britain, Italy and France sporadically entered these post-Armistice conflicts, usually attempting to support their local clients or shore up the non-Bolshevik elements in Russia…. In Germany and Finland right-wing paramilitaries battled left-wing revolutionaries seeking to imitate the Bolsheviks. In Germany, Hungary and Turkey, demagogues denounced the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the St. Germain and Sevres peace settlements and called for the return of lost lands or the lifting of financial punishments. </blockquote>
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Loren Graham in WSJ on Simon Ings’ book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-under-stalin-1487635509" target="_blank">Stalin and the Scientists</a>.
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Russian achievements in science and technology occurred in an environment of political terror. The father of the Russian hydrogen bonds, Andrei Sakharov, wrote in his memoirs that the research facility in which he worked was built by political prisoners, and each morning he looked out the window of his office to see them marching under armed guard to their construction sites. The “chief designer” of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, was long a prisoner who worked in a special prison laboratory, or <i>sharashka</i>. The dean of Soviet airplane designers, A.N. Tupolev, also labored for years as a prisoner to a special laboratory. Three of the Soviet Union’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists were arrested for alleged political disloyalty. Probably half of the engineers in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s were eventually arrested. In 1928 alone 648 members of the staff of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were purged. </blockquote>
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Owen Matthews in SPECTATOR on Ivan Chistyakov’s book, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/a-year-in-the-life-of-ivan-chistyakov-gulag-guard/" target="_blank">The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard</a>.
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Clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths, as we can see from Chistyakov’s descriptions of ‘the bunch of misfits’ who are his drunken subordinates. But Chistyakov is an unwilling cog in the apparatus. He has been assigned to the BAM involuntarily, spends much of his time scheming to get away at the earliest opportunity, and shares at least some of the material deprivations of the prisoners. He plans, frequently, to denounce the ‘madhouse shambles’ he finds among his fellow BAM officers and expose their ‘illiteracy’ and ‘misdeeds’. Perhaps the most chilling psychological insight offered by the diary is the portrait of a humane man conforming to an inhuman system. ‘I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expression,’ he writes. ‘My heart is desolate, it alarms me.’ </blockquote>
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Bartle Bull in WSJ on Daniel Beer’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-prison-bigger-than-all-of-western-europe-1483742598" target="_blank">The House of the Dead</a>.
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Romanov Russia sent her criminals and political criminals east for two reasons: colonization and punishment. In decent hands, as Australia showed on a much smaller scale, the combination could be enormously successful. In the 19th-century Russian context, it was calamitously flawed. A small portion of those sent east through most of the 19th century were political exiles like Dostoevsky and the Decembrists. The majority were ordinary criminals – thieves, rapists, pimps, murderers, recalcitrant serfs. For these, the theory of czarist Siberia was that Russian society’s worst elements would emerge improved by the bracing atmosphere of the eastern mines…. Instead the opposite happened. </blockquote>
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Andrew Rettman at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/foreign/137017" target="_blank">Armenia-Azerbaijan War: Line of Contact</a>.
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“Frontline coffee is the best coffee in the world”, Marat Babayan, an Armenian lieutenant, told EUobserver on a visit to his post, a short drive from the town of Askeran, on Tuesday. When asked if he had all the equipment that he needed, he said: “Yes. Everything”. Asked if he would like to see international peacekeepers sent to the area, he said: “What for? We’ve got all we need to defend ourselves.” Asked how often his men shot at the Azerbaijanis, he said they only fired if Azerbaijan fired first and only if they got an order from central command. The conflict dates back to 1988 when people in the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the then Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, tried to join Armenia. Three decades later it risks sudden escalation, destabilising the South Caucasus and aggravating the EU refugee crisis. In the worst case scenario, it could also drag in Russia, Nato member Turkey, and Iran into a regional war. </blockquote>
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Michael O’Hanlon in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-alternative-to-nato-expansion-that-wont-antagonize-russia-1488144087" target="_blank">An Alternative to NATO Expansion That Won’t Antagonize Russia</a>.
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<blockquote>
Today we arguably have the worst of all worlds. At its 2008 summit, NATO promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia. But it did so without offering any specificity as to when they would get it. For now these two countries, as well as other Eastern European neutral states, get no protection from NATO. Knowing of our eventual interest in bringing these nations into the alliance, Mr. Putin has every incentive to keep them weak and unstable so they won’t become eligible for membership…. It is time that Western nations seek to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in Eastern Europe today. The core concept would be permanent neutrality, at least in terms of formal membership in treaty-based mutual-defense organizations. </blockquote>
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Matthew Brunwasser in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/europe/as-albania-reckons-with-its-communist-past-critics-say-its-too-late.html" target="_blank">As Albania Reckons with Its Communist Past, Critics Say It’s Too Late</a>.
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When the Rev. Shtjefen Kurti, a 73-year-old Catholic priest, was executed in 1971 for performing a baptism, the Communist authorities didn’t bother to inform his family. Only when his brother tried to take food to him in prison did he learn the priest’s fate. “Don’t come back,” a guard told the brother. “He won’t be needing it anymore.” Some 6,000 Albanians were taken away by government agents during the Communist era and never heard from again. Their bodies were never recovered, and they are assumed to have been executed, classified as “enforced disappearances” in the language of international human rights law. Of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Albania had the harshest and most isolated regime. Enver Hoxha, a hard-line Stalinist, created a repressive apparatus that outlasted his death in 1985 and continued right up until the regime’s fall in 1991. </blockquote>
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Somini Sengupta in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/political-strategy-for-europes-far-right-female-leaders-wooing-female-voters.html" target="_blank">Europe’s Far Right: Female Leaders Wooing Female Voters</a>.
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<blockquote>
Gender issues don’t much get the attention of far-right parties, whether led by men or women. The parties don’t support gender quotas in politics, as many centrist and left parties do, nor do they campaign on issues like equal pay. Abortion and gay rights are not lightning rod political issues for conservatives as they are in the United States, so they tend not to be ideological tinder in Europe. Gender is a useful wedge, though, when it comes to highlighting what has become one of their main planks: a critique of immigration, particularly from the Muslim world. The European far right has long seized on the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy; more recently it has said that attacks on gays and women in Muslim enclaves are evidence of the Islamic threat to European values. </blockquote>
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Ronald Rosbottom in WSJ on Jonathan Fenby’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-roots-of-the-paris-terrorist-attacks-1483054000" target="_blank">France</a>.
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For Mr. Fenby, the French political class has been relentlessly myopic, if not completely blind, about the concerns of those who work and mine and farm. The rewriting of history – in textbooks, in popular literature and later in film – was one of the most prominent, though ultimately unsuccessful, strategies of the conservative governments of the Third and Fourth Republics. The avoidable mistakes of reluctant decolonialization in the 1950s and 1960s – especially in Indochina and Algeria – left France the policeman of West Africa (a role it maintains) and yet caused a massive increase in African immigration. Unplanned and unaddressed by the politicians, this demographic change has proved to be rich soil for the forces that seek to destabilize a still influential nation. </blockquote>
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Greg Ip in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-worlds-new-ideological-fault-line-runs-through-france-1490806802" target="_blank">Globalism’s Fault Line Now Shifts to France</a>.
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The National Front yearns for a return to the state-directed capitalism, or dirigisme, of the 1960s. It would require life insurers to devote 2% of their assets to French venture capital, let the French central bank print money to finance government deficits, favor French firms in government purchasing, require “Made in France” labels and impose “smart protectionism” against cheap imports. All of that is illegal within the EU. </blockquote>
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Adam Nossiter in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/europe/france-albi-french-towns-fading.html" target="_blank">As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’</a>.
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Before arriving, I picked up a government report, an autopsy of many French provincial capitals: Agen, Limoges, Bourges, Arras, Beziers, Auxerre, Vichy, Calais and others. In these old towns, many harder hit than Albi, the interplay of the human-scale architecture, weathered stone and brick, and public life had been one of the crucibles of French history and culture for centuries. Now they were endangered, as even the dry language of the report conveyed that an essential part of French life is disappearing. “This phenomenon of the devitalization of the urban centers is worrisome,” the government report declared, “as the stores contribute so much to city life and largely fashion it.” My first appointment was with the town whistle-blower, who had agreed to give me a tour. Florian Jourdain wasn’t exposing local corruption but the decline of the town that was hidden in plain sight. His meticulous blog, picked up by the French press, caused such resentment among Albi’s commercial establishment that last year the merchants’ association staged a demonstration against him in the main square. </blockquote>
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Tove Lifvendahl in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/how-sweden-became-an-example-of-how-not-to-handle-immigration/" target="_blank">How Sweden Became an Example of How Not to Handle Immigration</a>.
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<blockquote>
The children are every age and arrive from all kinds of countries. Afghans and Somalis are currently the two biggest groups. Then come Syrians, Ethiopians, Iraqis, Moroccans and Eritreans. Some are fleeing war; many are fleeing poverty and misery. Strikingly, boys outnumber girls by about five to one. And it’s far from clear how many may in fact be adults — unlike other countries, Sweden doesn’t test for age. Whatever age the applicant gives is accepted, unless it’s ‘obviously’ untrue. The definition of ‘obvious’ is unclear. During one recent interview on Swedish radio, several asylum-seekers confessed to lying about their age to improve their chances of settlement. One, called Dawood, put it bluntly: ‘If I say I’m grown-up, they’ll deport me.’ The cost of accommodating our child refugees is enormous: £160 per child per day. That could be money well spent, if it worked. There are serious concerns, though, about children falling victim to predatory adults who have lied about their age. Earlier this year, a boy of 12 was raped in refugee accommodation by another refugee who claimed to be 15. A dental X-ray suggested the attacker was closer to 19. Later that month, a 22-year-old Swede (herself the daughter of immigrants) was stabbed to death by one of the refugees she was caring for — another adult claiming to be 15. Such horrific stories raise the fear that the authorities have lost control. This is reflected in the extraordinary rise of the Sweden Democrats. </blockquote>
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Tom Fairless in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-departure-ecb-officials-stump-for-the-european-union-1486662663?tesla=y" target="_blank">Europe Central Bank Gets Political</a>.
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The ECB, which won sweeping new powers after helping to beat back Europe’s successive crises in recent years, has become a last line of defense for the bloc and its single currency. “For the most part, EU leaders are weak and have limited mandates, while Draghi is strong,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director at Eurasia Group. “What’s new is the fact that the ECB is now wading into the EU’s international relations.” </blockquote>
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Mariana Mazzucato in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/11e0d4b2-c056-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a" target="_blank">Italy’s Future Growth Hinges on New Ways of Doing Business</a>.
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To understand why companies in Italy are so small and not growing, it is crucial to look at Germany. While the latter has a strong public bank, KfW, providing long-term capital for corporate innovation, Italy’s public bank, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, is still too much oriented towards small infrastructure investments for local government, and too little on financing innovative enterprises. Second, Germany has links between science and industry, through the Fraunhofer institutes, which Italy completely lacks. Italy’s average research and development expenditure during the past 20 years has been 1.1 per cent of GDP, whereas Germany has invested 2.49 per cent of GDP in the same period. The subsidy mentality, rather than a proactive investment one, has created a parasitic public-private ecosystem that breeds inertia on both sides. The current banking problem in Italy is partly an outcome of this clientelism. </blockquote>
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Amanda Taub in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/world/europe/germany-far-right-politics-afd.html?_r=0" target="_blank">In Germany, the Taboo of Patriotism Is Fueling Far Right’s Rise</a>.
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“Germany has negotiated the European part very well, but the casualty has been Germanness,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who specializes in the legacy of European fascism. That smoothed the country’s path back into the community of nations after World War II. But Germans are increasingly concerned about the costs. A July 2016 Pew poll found that half of Germans had an unfavorable view of the European Union. As Euroskepticism rises, a growing minority of Germans are chafing at what they see as pressure to place European identity before national identity. The influx of refugees into the country in recent years has caused particular stress, Professor Ben-Ghiat said. “In Germany, you’re not even allowed to say you’re proud to be German. You have to say you’re European,” she said. “So when these people come in, what are they left with?” </blockquote>
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Anton Troianovski in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-german-right-believes-its-time-to-discard-their-countrys-historical-guilt-1488467995" target="_blank">German Right Takes Aim at Wartime Guilt</a>.
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AfD [Alternative for Germany] politicians accept that the Holocaust happened and describe the Nazis as a criminal regime. Most party leaders avoid rhetoric about racial superiority or ethnic purity. They also say the postwar establishment’s focus on atonement has robbed Germans of a positive identity and pushed the country to act against its own interests. The party wants to reduce the time schools spend teaching children about the Nazis to focus more on German achievements in science and the arts. Some prominent members go further, arguing that the European consensus on World War II history is too anti-German. “History is a whore of politics,” Bjorn Hocke, one of the party’s most radical politicians, said in an interview. “A great people like the German people, which lost two world wars in one century, no longer has a historical narrative of its own.” </blockquote>
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Yaroslav Trofimov in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkeys-autocratic-turn-1481288401" target="_blank">Turkey’s Autocratic Turn</a>.
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“Erdogan’s real aim is to take Turkey out of the Western bloc, out of the civilized world, and to turn Turkey into a Middle Eastern country where he can continue to rule without any obstacles,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. “He wants to turn Turkey into a country where there is no secularism and where people are divided along their ethnic identity and their beliefs. It is becoming a nation that faces internal conflict, just as we have seen in Iraq, Syria or Libya.” Turkish officials retort that the West is abandoning their country, not the other way around. Mr. Erdogan recently blasted the European Union for its “meaningless hostility” as decadeslong talks on Turkish membership in the bloc neared collapse. “Neither the European Union nor the European countries that are on the brink of falling into the clutches of racism can exclude Turkey from Europe,” said Mr. Erdogan. “We are not a guest but a host in Europe.” </blockquote>
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Dion Nissenbaum in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/detained-in-turkey-a-journal-reporters-story-1483721224" target="_blank">Detained in Turkey – A Reporter’s Story</a>.
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We still don’t know why I was detained or released. The Turkish government has yet to officially explain. (Turkish officials didn’t reply to requests for comment for this article.) I may have been rounded up by overzealous investigators; the Interior Ministry says that more than 1,600 people have been arrested for social–media posts in the past six months and that 10,000 more are being investigated. Or the decision may have been made higher up. In any event, I was very lucky. I experienced a small dose of what scores of Turkish journalists face behind bars, where they endure much harsher conditions and far greater risks. </blockquote>
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Ulrich von Schwerin in <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/erdogan-and-turkish-foreign-policy-neo-ottoman-rumblings" target="_blank">Neo-Ottoman Rumblings</a>.
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The Treaty of Lausanne is generally considered a great success for Turkey, as it revised the 1919 Treaty of Sevres, which had envisaged parcelling out much of Anatolia among Greece, France, Italy and Armenia after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. After the Turkish nationalists' successful war of independence under the leadership of Ataturk, the major European powers meeting in Lausanne were then forced to acknowledge the existence of the modern Turkish Republic. Erdogan's references to the previous size of the Ottoman Empire are not new. Ever since his AKP Party took power in 2002, he has endeavoured to cast the memory of the empire in a more positive light. His long-time foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who, until being deposed as prime minister last May, had a considerable influence on the ideology of the AKP, made former Ottoman countries such as Iraq and Syria a focus of Turkish foreign policy and tried to position Turkey as a regional leader. </blockquote>
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Sohrab Ahmari in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-christian-pastor-in-turkeys-prisons-1483398559" target="_blank">A Christian Pastor in Turkey’s Prisons</a>.
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Fethullah Gulen is a Pennsylvania-based imam whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of masterminding July’s failed coup. For years Mr. Gulen’s followers worked hand-in-hand with Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party to purge the country’s secular establishment. The relationship soured in 2013, however, and a power struggle ensued between the rival Islamist camps. Most observers in Turkey, including members of the opposition, believe Gulenists were behind the attempted putsch this summer. But “Gulen” plays the role of Goldstein in Mr. Erdogan’s personal “1984” – the devious traitor who lurks behind every doner-kebob stand and behind every tragedy. Under the pretext of rooting out Gulenists, the government has jailed or fired tens of thousands of police officers, prosecutors, judges, journalists, educators and members of the armed forces. Now even evangelical pastors are secret Gulenists. </blockquote>
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Rod Nordland in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/world/middleeast/turkey-kurds-womens-rights.html" target="_blank">Gender Equality in Kurdish Society Erodes in Turkey</a>.
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In local government, boards and committees have male and female co-executives, with one exception: the Women’s Affairs Department. Any decision-making process regarding women can be made only by women. Even Kurdish guerrilla units are fully integrated by gender: Women occupy the same combat roles as men, and when the military goes to war, it sends a woman to command one of its major units. There is one big problem with this aspect of Kurdish life, in Turkey at least: It has, in effect, been outlawed as part of the Turkish government’s crackdown after a failed coup attempt last summer. Along with arresting Kurdish political leaders, the government is taking aim at measures meant to promote gender equality. This was the world as envisioned by the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. The P.K.K. may be a terrorist organization in the view of the Turkish government, Europe and the United States, but it has also long made women’s rights a centerpiece of its political platform. </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES: <a href="https://www.newdelhitimes.com/orienting-islam-to-modern-times-society-has-lost-its-patience-with-blood-letting-religion123/" target="_blank">Orienting Islam to Modern Times; Society Has Lost Its Patience with Blood-letting Religion</a>.
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The universal laws of karma have ensured that Islam has also killed its own adherents-Sunnis, Shias, and Ahmedias. Different religions, at crucial periods of their evolution, have undergone reform process to rid themselves of the unrefined remnants of outdated practices. Hinduism was fortunate to have Ram Mohan Roys, Keshab Chandra Sens to offload the unwanted baggage while other religions have not been that fortunate. Islamophobia may be a bogey which the liberals, pseudo intellectuals beat, but the fact remains that people fear Islam, they hate Islam. If a person in burkha is dreaded, and the adherents of a particular religion are warded off from countries, what type of dignity it can claim? Threat to Islam is not from other religions but from within. A religion cannot be held back from obsolescence merely by a bunch of hard core adherents holding guns and bombs to protect the tenets of the desert that developed around fourteen centuries back. Islam must evolve. </blockquote>
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Tawfik Hamid at THE COUNTER JIHAD REPORT, <a href="https://counterjihadreport.com/2017/01/22/liberal-support-for-the-american-flag-hijab-is-an-endorsement-of-slavery/" target="_blank">Liberal Support for the American Flag Hijab Is an Endorsement of Slavery</a>.
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Many ideologues (be they of the liberal left or Islamophiles or whomever) are apparently blind to, or unaware of, or simply choose to ignore the fact that traditional and unopposed Islamic teaching (which is to say, mainstream modern Islamic teaching) unambiguously states: The Hijab is a dress code in Islam that was designed to distinguish “free” from “slave” women. According to Ibn Kathir (one of the most reputable interpretations of the Quran), and according to almost all authentic and approved Islamic theology and Sharia legal texts, the hijab exists to differentiate between free women and concubines so that free Muslim women will not be accidentally molested. Slaves and concubines (actual modern classes of human beings in Islam) enjoy no such protections. Only “free” women are allowed to wear the hijab and cover their bodies. </blockquote>
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<i>qantara.de</i>: <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/egypts-coptic-church-the-cost-of-a-cornerstone" target="_blank">Egypt’s Coptic Church – The Cost of a Cornerstone</a>.
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The Copts regard themselves as quasi the "indigenous people" of Egypt. They were present before the Islamisation of most of the population in the 7th century, the name "Copts" is derived from the Greek word for "Egyptians". But since they have been in the minority, they feel like second class citizens, held back by the state and repeatedly used as a political football. In the 1970s, President Anwar Al Sadat entered into a pact with the Islamists, even forcing the Coptic Pope Shenouda III into exile. After the death of Al Sadat, relations between Copts and Muslims recovered slightly during the era of Hosni Mubarak. But the building of new churches was always a bone of contention. "There are 90 churches in my province, although only half of them are real church buildings. The other half are just places in which we are allowed to hold our religious rituals. 150 villages have no place for worship at all," says Bishop Makarios of Minya. Sometimes the rooms are so small, that masses have to be held out in the open or in tents. The Bishop is convinced that the new law won't change that. </blockquote>
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Kareem Chehayeb at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/young-people-and-protests-in-the-arab-world-so-shall-you-reap" target="_blank">Young People and Protests in the Arab World</a>.
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Youth participation in protests across the Arab region was over 18% in 2013 – almost double that of middle income countries. However, Arab youth have the lowest voting rate worldwide at 68.4%, whereas youth from middle income countries make up a hefty 87.4%. Despite their eagerness to be part of the political process and the lack of formal barriers to at least some participation (in all except eight countries), young people remain excluded. For instance, the average age of ministerial councils in the region is 58 years old. </blockquote>
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Christopher de Belloigue in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/the-islamic-world-did-liberalise-but-then-came-the-first-world-war/" target="_blank">The Islamic World Did Liberalise – But Then Came the First World War</a>.
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That Islam’s liberal moment came juddering to a halt in 1914 is a little-known tragedy. In the first decade of the 20th century, Iranian and Turkish democrats had launched revolutions establishing parliamentary systems that limited the powers of the ruler — a similar movement in favour of popular sovereignty in Egypt had been thwarted by the British occupation two decades earlier. But war laid waste to the region and the British and French chopped up much of the former Ottoman Empire into mandate-sized chunks. Egypt stayed under British supervision, while in Iran and Turkey the powers were only kept at bay by new regimes that westernised furiously along Roman lines (Mussolini was the model), not Jeffersonian ones. </blockquote>
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Margherita Stancati & Nicolas Parasie in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/gulf-arab-states-push-to-develop-their-own-defense-industries-1490785201" target="_blank">Arab States Push to Develop Own Arms Makers</a>.
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Wealthy Gulf Arab states have a warning for Western suppliers of military equipment: If they want business, they have to transfer technical knowledge to local companies that are part of a rising, home-grown defense sector…. The rulers want to become less dependent on the U.S. and other Western countries, and they see defense as a sector that can help diversify their oil-based economies. The Saudi government, the world’s No. 3 defense spender after the U.S. and China, last year said it wants half the money it allots for military equipment to go to local firms by 2030, up from 2% today. Even if the kingdom only partly achieves its goal, the impact will reverberate through the global defense industry. </blockquote>
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Mujib Mashal in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/world/what-in-the-world/being-an-afghan-general-is-nice-work-if-you-can-get-it-and-many-do.html" target="_blank">Being an Afghan General Is Nice Work if You Can Get It. And Many Do</a>.
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The country has close to 1,000 officers of general rank on its books — more than the United States, whose military is three times as large. And off the books? No one knows. New names are added to the roster at a rate far out of proportion to battlefield realities, where the Afghan armed forces — the army, national police and intelligence forces, numbering 350,000 in all — have been steadily losing soldiers and territory to the Taliban. Meanwhile, retirements are rare. The United States government, which picks up much of the tab for the Afghan military, can’t pin down the number of generals. “We still don’t know how many police and how many soldiers we’re paying salaries for,” said John F. Sopko, the United States special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. “We don’t even know how many generals. It is pretty pathetic, and here we are, 15 years into this.” </blockquote>
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Preetika Rana in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/fast-food-chains-in-india-cultivate-untapped-workforce-women-1482674401" target="_blank">Fast-Food Jobs Attract Women in India</a>.
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American fast-food chains have become an unlikely source of female employment and empowerment in India, a country where traditionally most women are kept from working outside the home. The increasingly female face of a new Indian workforce shines at suburban Delhi’s Mall of India. Nearly half of the employees in its five floors of newly opened food and fashion outlets are women. Just across the street in the old shopping district, females are few and far between. Even the women’s clothing stores are almost entirely manned my men. </blockquote>
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Norimitsu Onishi in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/africa/immigrant-protests-south-africa.html" target="_blank">South Africa Anti-Immigrant Protests Turn Violent</a>.
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South Africans accuse migrants of stealing jobs or exploiting locals by running small businesses in poor, black townships. Others blame foreigners for the country’s high crime rates. The accusations, which are not backed up by official statistics, resonate in a country with a jobless rate of 27-percent and yawning income inequalities. The latest anti-immigrant sentiments were set off in a neighborhood south of Johannesburg called Rosettenville, where residents burned down a dozen houses that they said were being used by Nigerians as drug dens and brothels. </blockquote>
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Douglas Murray in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/who-will-protect-nigerias-northern-christians/" target="_blank">Who Will Protect Nigeria’s Northern Christians? </a>
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<blockquote>
Another day in northern Nigeria, another Christian village reeling from an attack by the Muslim Fulani herdsmen who used to be their neighbours — and who are now cleansing them from the area. The locals daren’t collect the freshest bodies. Some who tried earlier have already been killed, spotted by the waiting militia and hacked down or shot. The Fulani are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues. Every week, more massacres — another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. A young woman, whose husband and two children have just been killed in front of her, tells me blankly, ‘Our parents told us about these people. But we lived in relative peace and we forgot what they said.’
For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest. These tribal-led villages, each with their own ‘paramount ruler’, were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians — from the bishop down — sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. </blockquote>
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Jeffrey Gettleman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/world/africa/quandary-in-south-sudan-should-it-lose-its-hard-won-independence.html" target="_blank">Quandary in South Sudan: Should It Lose Its Hard-Won Independence? </a>
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<blockquote>
The South Sudanese had absorbed bombings and massacres. The Arabs stole their children and turned tother slahem into slaves. As a result, many South Sudanese were scattered across the four corners of the earth — the famous Lost Boys, but also many Lost Girls, ripped from their families and forced to flee to cold foreign places that they had never envisioned. On independence day, South Sudan’s capital, Juba, partied until dawn. Lost Boys swigged White Bull (the local beer) next to hardened guerrillas bobbing their heads to reggae rap. All around us, there seemed to be a real appreciation of what had been achieved and what lay ahead. Most important, there was unity. That crumbled quickly, undermined by old political rivalries, ethnic tension and a greed for South Sudan’s one main export: oil. The fault line was the most predictable one, the Dinka versus the Nuer. </blockquote>
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Frances Robles in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/world/americas/trying-to-stanch-trinidads-flow-of-young-recruits-to-isis.html" target="_blank">Trying to Stanch Trinidad’s Flow of Young Recruits to ISIS</a>.
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<blockquote>
Trinidad has a history of Islamist extremism — a radical Muslim group was responsible for a failed coup in 1990 that lasted six days, and in 2012 a Trinidadian man was sentenced to life in prison for his role in a plot to blow up Kennedy International Airport. Muslims make up only about 6 percent of the population, and the combatants often come from the margins of society, some of them on the run from criminal charges. They saw few opportunities in an oil-rich nation whose economy has declined with the price of petroleum, experts say. Some were gang members who either converted or were radicalized in prison, while others have been swayed by local imams who studied in the Middle East, according to Muslim leaders and American officials. </blockquote>
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Simon Romero in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/americas/voice-of-brazilian-rodeo-rides-a-national-movement-to-the-right.html" target="_blank">Voice of Brazilian Rodeo Rides a National Movement to the Right</a>.
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<blockquote>
While unknown to many residents of coastal cities in Brazil, he has won fame in the hinterland as a rodeo announcer with an ostentatious style that might shock some counterparts in the United States, and for his vocal embrace of socially conservative positions in a country shifting to the right. In a meandering interview over a lunch of draft beer and copious amounts of beef, Mr. Lima expressed his views on a wide variety of issues, including religion (he calls himself as a staunch Roman Catholic who also frequents an evangelical church), the role of women in society (his views appear to be reflected in a country music video he made in which he boasts about paying for a homemaker’s plastic surgery) and the environment. “Don’t get me started on the Amazon,” Mr. Lima said, referring to the vast river basin where, the authorities say, the expansion of Brazil’s ranching frontier has illegally destroyed large tracts of the rain forest. “I’ve flown over the Amazon in a small plane, and all I saw for hours was trees. Trust me, we can deforest a lot more if we have to.” </blockquote>
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Mary Walsh in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/business/dealbook/puerto-rico-teacher-pensions.html" target="_blank">In Puerto Rico, Teachers’ Pension Fund Works Like a Ponzi Scheme</a>.
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<blockquote>
Pension funds are supposed to be giant, largely self-sustaining pools of money, contributed by taxpayers and often workers, that earn investment income. Over time, the money is supposed to grow enough to pay retirees. Knowing this, teachers might reasonably expect to get a pension worth more than what they invested. But that is not always the case. In Puerto Rico, for instance, the pension funds are so short of cash that money contributed by working teachers basically flows straight out to retirees. None of Puerto Rico’s current teachers can expect to get their money back, because the fund is due to run out of money in 2018, long before they retire.
That is, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. But this structure is legal in Puerto Rico because of a complicated series of changes in the law brought about in recent years by the island’s financial crisis. Puerto Rico, a United States territory, ran off the rails by using debt to spend beyond its means. </blockquote>
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Ira Stoll at <i>smartertimes.com</i>, <a href="http://www.smartertimes.com/1510/david-brooks-smears-ronald-reagan" target="_blank">David Brooks Smears Ronald Reagan</a>.
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<blockquote>
Anyone without ideological blinders on should be able to look at these columns of numbers and realize that federal revenue grew during the Reagan administration even as tax rates were cut. The economic growth effects of the tax cuts helped the government revenues increase, on both a nominal and an inflation-adjusted basis, even though the rates were reduced. To dismiss this as "utopian" or an instance of Reagan having "erred" is itself an error; if anyone is in error here it is Mr. Brooks, not President Reagan. As for the accusation that the elimination of nuclear weapons is a utopian error, the evidence on that isn't in as decisively as the evidence on the Reagan tax cuts is, but even there Mr. Brooks seems off-base. Reagan's alleged "utopianism" on the point is shared by such legendarily realistic strategic thinkers as George P. Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn. Back during the Reagan administration, the Times editorialists were criticizing missile defense (a now well-proven technology with bipartisan support) as utopian, and faulting Reagan for abandoning the zero option on nuclear missiles to pursue what the <i>Times</i> considered a missile defense fantasy. These days, the <i>Times</i> editorialists have been slightly critical of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry for failing to move fast enough toward Obama's stated goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. What's important for our point is that even in a column devoted to praising Reagan in comparison to President Trump, even in a column by what passes for a token conservative or at least center-right columnist at the <i>New York Times</i>, David Brooks manages to sneak in a totally unjustified cheap shot or two at the Gipper. Would it be a utopian error on my part to hope the <i>Times</i> can ever stop this sort of nonsense? </blockquote>
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FISCAL TIMES: <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2017/01/09/EXCLUSIVE-Chicago-New-York-Worst-Financial-Shape-Among-Large-US-Cities" target="_blank">Chicago, New York in Worst Financial Shape Among Large US Cities</a>.
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<blockquote>
Last summer, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel announced a plan to resolve MEABF underfunding by raising water and sewer rates and increasing employee contributions to the system. Because these changes don’t take effect until this year, it will take some time for them to impact Chicago’s audited financial statements and their fiscal health scores. While Chicago’s place at the bottom of the list is unsurprising, New York City’s position — just one step above — was unexpected. An extended bull market and soaring real estate prices have pumped money into the Big Apple’s coffers. Total municipal revenues rose from $60 billion in 2009 to $81 billion in 2015. But the city has been spending the money almost as quickly as it has been coming in. At the end of its 2015 fiscal year, the city’s general fund reserves amounted to just 0.67 percent of expenditures — well below the Government Finance Officers Association recommendation of 16.67 percent (equivalent to two months of spending). A city’s general fund is roughly analogous to an individual’s checking account. </blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/illinois-tax-heist-1487808724" target="_blank">Illinois Tax Heist</a>.
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<blockquote>
In 2011 Senate President John Cullerton said the point of the temporary hike was to pay pensions, “pay off our debt [and] to have enough money to pay the interest on that debt.” But the roughly $31 billion it generated made hardly a dent. Since 2011 the unfunded pension liability in Illinois has grown by $47 billion, even as the tax hike was mostly spent on pensions. Meanwhile, Democrats won’t change the state constitution to allow for pension reform that won’t be overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court. Democrats are still peddling that they can tax their way out of Illinois’s economic decline, while taxpayers are picking up and heading to neighboring states. </blockquote>
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John Kass in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-bill-hanhardt-kass-0105-20170104-column.html" target="_blank">The Chicago Outfit, Chicago Police and the Silence of Consent</a>.
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<blockquote>
Chicago is loud about its sports and its politics. But noise doesn't tell you the whole story.
Sometimes, it's silence that can tell you the truth of things. And Chicago was never so silent than on the day the feds indicted former Chief of Detectives William Hanhardt. In Italy, they have a phrase for this silence. "Chi tace acconsente," said my excellent barber, Raffaele Raia, born near Salerno. "He who is silent says yes," Raia translated. "The silence is the consent." For decades, Hanhardt, who died the other day at 88, was a hero cop lionized in Chicago media as a great crime fighter. But according to the feds, he was Joey "The Clown" Lombardo's guy. As chief of detectives he was the de facto boss of the Chicago police. An officer needed his blessing to make detective, or get a transfer, or a promotion. When he'd show up at a police district, cops would crowd around him, around that Sinatra vibe. He was a rock star. He had Hollywood connections, serving as technical adviser on the movie "Thief" with James Caan, and once appearing as a hit man in the TV show "Crime Story," where his buddy, the late cop turned actor Dennis Farina played a Hanhardt-like crime-buster. </blockquote>
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Bret Stephens in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/doomed-to-stagnate-1482192461" target="_blank">Doomed to Stagnate? </a>
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<blockquote>
Want to better understand the mess Greece is in? In 2006 it took an average of 151 days to enforce a contract in the Hellenic Republic. Today it takes 1,580. Want to measure Israel’s progress? A decade ago, starting a business in the startup nation took about 34 days. Now it takes 12. What about the United States? When President Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. ranked third in the overall index, just behind Singapore and New Zealand. It has since fallen to eighth place. Eight years ago, 40 days were needed to get a construction permit. Now it’s 81. </blockquote>
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Peter Pitts in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-other-countries-freeload-on-u-s-drug-research-1487722580" target="_blank">How Other Countries Freeload on U.S. Drug Research</a>.
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The U.S. is the world leader in producing new medicines. The country’s strong intellectual property laws, coupled with a comparatively free-market pricing system, encourage firms to research new treatments. Companies wouldn’t take on the enormous cost of developing a new drug without a solid chance of recouping their investment. On average, a new medicine takes 10 years and costs $2.6 billion to develop, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The problem is that either than promote innovation, may other countries impose price controls on prescription drugs – including new medicines invented in the United States – to make them artificially cheaper for consumers. If American companies refuse to sell their medicines at these steeply discounted dictated prices, foreign countries threaten to break their patents and produce knockoff versions of the medicines…. Foreign price controls succeed because they are carried on the back of the American consumer. </blockquote>
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Shelby Steele in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-exhaustion-of-american-liberalism-1488751826" target="_blank">The Exhaustion of American Liberalism</a>.
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White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries – racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret. It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its <i>raison d’etre</i>; moral authority is. </blockquote>
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Rod Liddle in SPECTATOR, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/field-guide-doomed-liberal-elite/" target="_blank">A Field Guide to Our Doomed Liberal Elite</a>.
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<blockquote>
The liberal elite we talk about today is beholden to a leftish cultural and political paradigm which predominates in all the non-elected institutions which run our lives. In the judiciary, for example. Within the BBC. In the running of our universities and in the courses they put before students. In the teaching profession. In the social services departments of every council in the land. At the top of the medical profession. On the boards of all the quangos — the lot of them, from those which hand out money in the arts to those which regulate our media and our utilities. It is a left-liberal paradigm, informed by affluence, which has been swallowed whole by all of these institutions and which is utterly intolerant of dissent. Try being a social worker who thinks gay adoptions are problematic. Or a doctor who disapproves of abortion or transitioning…. Try being a judge who thinks an awful lot of hate crimes are imaginary or vexatious. In all cases you’d be drummed out. No job. You’d be finished. There would be tribunals — where you would be judged by other upholders of the liberal elite — and you’d be out. </blockquote>
Crispin Sartwell in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-postmodern-intellectual-roots-of-todays-campus-mobs-1490394294" target="_blank">The ‘Postmodern’ Intellectual Roots of Today’s Campus Mobs</a>.
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<blockquote>
For Rorty, truth is nothing but a story we will all come to accept together – a progressive story in which inequalities of race, sex and sexuality are being steadily ameliorated. The positions articulated by opponents of this narrative are false by definition, false from the outset, known to be false before they are even examined. It is then well within the values of academia – devoted to the truth – to silence those views. </blockquote>
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Lee Smith in TABLET, <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/225587/trump-american-press" target="_blank">Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press</a>.
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<blockquote>
Barrett had Trump on a whole variety of issues, but check the records yourself—up until the day of his death, the day before Trump’s inauguration, there’s nothing on Trump and Putin. Does this mean Trump is totally clean? Who knows? But the journalists now clamoring like maniacs about Trump’s ties sure aren’t going to find it. They’re thin-skinned hacks outraged that Trump dared violate the inherent dignity of that most important of American political institutions, the presidential press conference. And as we all know, this is the apex of real journalism, where esteemed members of the press sit side by side with other masters of the craft to see who gets their question televised. Does Trump really believe the media are “an enemy of the people”? Please. Let’s remember how he rode his wave to fame on the back of the <i>New York Post</i>’s Page Six (and Graydon Carter’s <i>Spy</i> magazine). He still speaks regularly to the head of CNN (aka “Fake News”), Jeff Zucker, who put him on <i>The Apprentice</i> and <i>Celebrity Apprentice</i> at NBC, where Trump sat atop the Nielsens for 13 years. </blockquote>
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Ira Stoll at <i>reason.com</i>, <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/19/trump-versus-the-we-bes" target="_blank">Trump Versus the Bureaucracy</a>.
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<blockquote>
A lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Robert Behn, writes about this as "the law of diminishing control: the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top." He says bureaucrats speak of "residents" and "tourists"— the residents are the bureaucrats; the tourists are political appointees, just passing through. Or, Behn writes, a member of the permanent government refers to himself or herself as a "We Be" — as in, "<i>We be</i> here before you're here. <i>We be</i> here after you're here." The civilian bureaucracy, after all, voted overwhelmingly against Trump. The District of Columbia voted 91 percent for Hillary Clinton. Washington's Virginia suburbs, where federal workers live, voted for her, too: she won 77 percent of the vote in Arlington County and 65 percentof the vote in Fairfax County. In Montgomery County, Maryland, another Washington suburb full of federal employees, 76 percent of the vote went to Clinton. In Prince George's County, Maryland, another Washington suburb full of federal employees, the presidential vote was 89 percent for Clinton. </blockquote>
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Reuven Brenner in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-longshoreman-philosopher-saw-trump-coming-in-1970-1488144135" target="_blank">The ‘Longshoreman Philosopher’ Saw Trump Coming in 1970</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.” Those words might have been written last year, as an explanation for Donald Trump’s rise or a rejoinder to Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of “deplorables.” In fact they were published in November 1970 and written by Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who was best known for his slender 1951 classic, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements.” </blockquote>
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Christopher Caldwell in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/what-does-steve-bannon-want.html?_r=0" target="_blank">What Does Steve Bannon Want? </a>
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<blockquote>
He warned against “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” by which he meant “a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people.” Capitalism, he said, ought to rest on a “Judeo-Christian” foundation. If so, this was bad news for the Republican Party. By the time Mr. Bannon spoke, Ayn Rand-style capitalism was all that remained of its Reagan-era agenda. Free-market thinking had swallowed the party whole, and its Judeo-Christian preoccupations — “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being” — along with it. A business orientation was what donors wanted. But voters never more than tolerated it. It was Pat Buchanan who in his 1992 run for president first called on Republicans to value jobs and communities over profits. An argument consumed the party over whether this was a better-rounded vision of society or just the grousing of a reactionary. After a generation, Mr. Buchanan has won that argument. By 2016 his views on trade and migration, once dismissed as crackpot, were spreading so fast that everyone in the party had embraced them — except its elected officials and its establishment presidential candidates. </blockquote>
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Jason Horowitz in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html" target="_blank">Fascists Too Lax For a Philosopher Cited by Bannon</a>.
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<blockquote>
[Julius] Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.” Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values. It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth. Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.” </blockquote>
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Sohrab Ahmari in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-liberals-killed-the-freedom-of-movement-1485464612" target="_blank">The Left Helped Build the Wall</a>.
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The irony is that freedom of movement is unraveling because liberals won central debates – about Islamism, social cohesion, and nationalism. Rather than give any ground, they accused opponents of being phobic and reactionary. Now liberals are reaping the rewards of those underhanded victories. </blockquote>
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Pat Buchanan at <i>worldnetdaily.com</i>, <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2017/01/trump-america-for-the-americans/" target="_blank">Trump: America for the Americans! </a>
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<blockquote>
Indeed, it carries echoes of FDR’s second inaugural: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. … The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Some of the recoil to Trump’s speech is surely traceable to an awareness by those covering and commenting upon it – that this was a searing indictment of them and their own ruling class. With America’s political elite sitting behind him, Trump accused them of enriching “foreign industry,” not ours, of subsidizing other countries’ armies but neglecting our own, of defending other nation’s borders while leaving America’s borders unprotected. Then, in the line that will give his address its name in history, he declared: “From this day forward it’s going to be only America First.” </blockquote>
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Micah Meadowcroft in WSJ on Patrick Deneen’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-didnt-kill-conservatism-1484265394" target="_blank">Conserving America? </a>
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<blockquote>
We have ceased to live in light of the past or in anticipation of the future. Fixation on the present has left us – a loose, contractual collection of individuals – unmoored, adrift in the now. Instead of living lives of memory and hope, we have severed the ties that bind us to our ancestors and to our posterity…. The two dominant alternatives to this fixation on the present are progressivism’s focus on the future and what Mr. Deneen refers to as “nostalgism,” which “dons rose-tinted glasses in its high regard for a perfect past.” </blockquote>
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Jon Baskin in THE CHRONICLE REVIEW, <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academic-Home-of-Trumpism/239495" target="_blank">The Academic Home of Trumpism</a>.
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<blockquote>
Not incidentally, the progressives whom Wilson brought with him into government were taken largely from the first generation of American Ph.D.s. The result was the rise and rule of the "administrative state," a term of art that plays, for the Claremonsters, approximately the same role that the "culture industry" plays in the literature of the Frankfurt School. To Kesler and company, the growth of this "fourth branch of government" has accounted not only for a series of costly and ineffective social programs but also for the gradual erosion of democratic norms and the substitution of the founders’ philosophical wisdom with the shallow certainties of university-trained "scientists" (think Robert McNamara or, better, Cass Sunstein). In other words, one of the things that is most disturbing about Trump for liberal and conservative elites (including some East Coast Straussians) — his utter disdain for expertise and convention — is what is most promising about him from the point of view of the Claremonsters. "There’s a fundamental clash between the self-evident truths of the Declaration and the worldview of the progressives," said Voegeli. "Our view is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas progressives are inclined to think that government derives just powers from the expertise of the experts." </blockquote>
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David Ernst in THE FEDERALIST, <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/donald-trump-first-president-turn-postmodernism/" target="_blank">Donald Trump Is the First President to Turn Postmodernism Against Itself</a>.
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<blockquote>
All this raises an uncomfortable question for people who have no use for PC’s agenda, and who value the freedom to think for themselves. How do you respond to someone who is determined to smear you for your alleged bigotry regardless of what you think and why? How do you win an argument against someone who willfully changes the meaning of words, maintains that the truth is completely relative, and feels perfectly justified in accusing virtually anyone of the gravest moral failure? If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Enter the right-wing postmodern antihero. Unlike just about every other presidential candidate who ran on the Republican ticket, Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect. If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse than phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable. </blockquote>
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Michael Lind in NYTBR on Stephen Kinzer’s book, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/books/review/true-flag-stephen-kinzer.html" target="_blank">The True Flag</a>.
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America’s turn from isolationism to foreign interventionism, often attributed to World War II, was the result of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent American conquest of the Philippines. That is the thesis of the journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer in “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.” All foreign policy debates since 1898 have echoed the themes of that era, Kinzer asserts. “Only once before — in the period when the United States was founded — have so many brilliant Americans so eloquently debated a question so fraught with meaning for all humanity.” On May 1, 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Adm. George Dewey’s warships crippled the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines, a Spanish colony soon to become an American protectorate until after World War II. On Sept. 30, 1899, in a triumphal parade in New York City, the admiral passed under the Dewey Arch, which stretched across Fifth Avenue at 24th Street. According to Kinzer, “It was modeled after the first-century Arch of Titus in Rome but was more ornate.” </blockquote>
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John Stauffer in WSJ on Steven Hahn’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-americas-aim-was-empire-1481924308" target="_blank">A Nation Without Borders</a>.
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In 1850, slaveholders made up only about 1% of the U.S. population. Yet they wielded enormous power, aligning themselves with non-slaveholding expansionists, “chiefly in the Democratic Party,” as Mr. Hahn notes. As a group, they were the wealthiest Americans, the 1% of their day. Yet slaveholders felt besieged. In 1770, human bondage was legal everywhere in the New World, but by 1850, owing to the growing moral outrage over slavery, it persisted only in the U.S., along with Brazil, Cuba and Dutch Guiana. Slaveholders sought to protect an institution that had been almost unquestioned for centuries but that was now facing vast resistance. </blockquote>
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Scott Spillman in THE POINT, <a href="https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/conflict-and-consensus" target="_blank">Conflict and Consensus</a>.
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The living embodiment of Boorstin’s vision of American consensus was the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Eisenhower had led the victory over fascism in World War II. As the first Supreme Commander of NATO, he had represented European and American cooperation against Soviet Communism in the early years of the Cold War. His political positions were sufficiently anodyne and indistinct that in 1948 he was courted as a presidential contender by both Democrats and Republicans. “Except for moral issues and exact sciences,” he once said, “extreme positions are always wrong.” Eisenhower preferred the “dynamic center.” Elected in 1952 as the first Republican president since the New Deal, he nevertheless helped ensure the survival of Roosevelt’s programs and reforms by expanding Social Security, extending the minimum wage and allowing social-welfare spending to grow despite his party’s emphasis on cutting the federal budget. Other consensus historians, who had also come out of thirties-era dalliances with communism, found it harder to celebrate the conciliatory politics of the Eisenhower era. They agreed with Boorstin that a consensus about the virtues of individual liberty and economic freedom governed American life, but they approached that consensus with ambivalence or even resignation. If for Boorstin these shared commitments gave American politics its unique genius, for critics they were evidence of the American political spectrum’s lamentably narrow and parochial constraints. In other words, the consensus school had its roots not only in Tocqueville but also in Marx. </blockquote>
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Roger Kimball in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/yales-inconsistent-name-dropping-1486941233" target="_blank">Yale’s Inconsistent Name-Dropping</a>.
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Readers who savor tortuous verbal legerdemain will want to acquaint themselves with the “Letter of the Advisory Group on the Renaming of Calhoun College,” which is available online. It is a masterpiece of the genre. Is it also convincing? I think the best way to answer that is to fill out the historical picture a bit…. Calhoun owned slaves. But so did Timothy Dwight, Calhoun’s mentor at Yale, who has a college named in his honor. So did Benjamin Silliman, who also gives his name to a residential college, and whose mother was the largest slave owner in Fairfield County, Conn. So did Ezra Stiles, John Davenport and even Jonathan Edwards, all of whom have colleges named in their honor at Yale. Writing in these pages last summer, I suggested that Yale table the question of John Calhoun and tackle some figures even more obnoxious to contemporary sensitivities. One example was Elihu Yale, the American-born British merchant who, as an administrator in India, was an active participant in the slave trade. </blockquote>
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Peter Nabokov in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Andres Resendez’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/24/indians-slaves-and-mass-murder-the-hidden-history/" target="_blank">The Other Slavery, and Benjamin Madley’s book, An American Genocide</a>.
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Among the eleventh-century mound-building Indian cultures of the Mississippi Bottoms, such war prisoners made up a serf-like underclass. This civilization collapsed in the thirteenth century and the succeeding tribes we know as Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and others perpetuated the practice of serfdom; Cherokee war parties added to each town’s stock of <i>atsi nahsa’i</i>, or “one who is owned.” The custom continued across indigenous America, with child-bearing women and prepubescent males generally preferred. Their husbands and fathers were more commonly killed. Reséndez hardly mentions the subsequent participation of those same tribes in the white man’s race-based “peculiar institution.” They bought and sold African-American slaves to work their Indian-owned plantations. Once the Civil War broke out there was a painfully divisive splitting of southern Indian nations into Confederate and Union allies. </blockquote>
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Chuka Umunna in PROSPECT, <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/left-power-patriotism-immigration-integration-brexit" target="_blank">Harnessing the Power of Patriotism</a>.
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We on the left must get over our queasiness at displays of national pride and stop giving the impression that we believe transnational entities such as the European Union to be somehow morally superior to nation states. We must harness the power of patriotism to accentuate our essential sameness and build bonds of trust between Britons of all backgrounds in every corner of our country. Englishness, much like Scottishness, is deeply felt—there’s no denying it’s a more emotional connection than Britishness. </blockquote>
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Ian Buruma in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Andrew Lownie’s book, Stalin’s Englishman, and Stewart Purvis & Jeff Hulbert’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/the-weird-success-of-guy-burgess/" target="_blank">Guy Burgess</a>.
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Marxism, then, was in the air, especially at Cambridge. To be on the far left was also a way for high-minded young people to distinguish themselves from the conventional mainstream and feel morally righteous about it, a superior form of <i>epater les bourgeois</i>. The previous generation of aesthetes and “bright young things” had reacted to the horrors of World War I by affecting a deliberate air of decadence and frivolousness. </blockquote>
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G.M. Tamas in LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-never-ending-lukacs-debate/" target="_blank">The Never-Ending Lukacs Debate</a>.
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Yet Lukács was indeed a communist, and in 1956 an authentic socialist revolution took place, in which he participated. But the most important revolution of his life occurred long before, in 1917. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács was a pessimistic conservative. Like so many German and Austrian writers of the time, he hated the bourgeoisie <i>from the right</i>. In 1917, however, he lost all his reserve and reticence, and all his respect for convention. For him, as for many of his generation, the revolution brought salvation: it saved their souls by proclaiming the end of exploitation, of class divisions, of the distinction between intellectual and manual labor, of punitive law, property, family, churches, prisons. In other words, it promised the end of the state. The revolution also meant the end of utopia. </blockquote>
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Nicholas Wade in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/science/woolly-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html" target="_blank">The Woolly Mammoth’s Last Stand</a>.
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Woolly mammoths once flourished from northern Europe to Siberia. As the last ice age drew to a close some 10,000 years ago, the mainland population perished, victims of climate change and human hunters. But some populations lived on for thousands of years, notably on two remote islands that had once been part of Beringia, the now foundered land bridge that joined Alaska to Siberia. One of these refuges was Wrangel Island, a mountainous island set in polar seas and so inaccessible that Baron von Wrangel, the explorer after whom it is named, never managed to reach it. The other is St. Paul Island, which lies some 280 miles from Alaska and the Aleutians.
The mammoths on St. Paul survived until 5,600 years ago, but the reasons for their extinction have long been a matter of speculation. Last August, a team led by Russell W. Graham of Pennsylvania State University ruled out all the leading candidates, including human predation, polar bears, increased winter snowpack, volcanic activity and changing vegetation. </blockquote>
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Robert Hotz in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-stored-in-dna-an-old-french-movie-and-a-50-gift-card-1488481266" target="_blank">What Lurks in DNA? $50 Gift Cards</a>.
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In fact, analysts at IBM Corp. estimate that 90% of all the electronic data in the world has been created in the past two years. In a bid to contain this deluge, researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center have crossed a significant new milestone. They have figured out how to store and retrieve a 122-year-old French movie, an entire computer operating system, and even a $50 Amazon gift card – all in a single drop of DNA. </blockquote>
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BEC Crew at <i>sciencealert.com</i>, <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/harvard-physicists-just-proposed-that-mysterious-cosmic-radio-bursts-are-powering-alien-spaceships" target="_blank">Harvard Physicists Just Proposed That Mystery Radio Bursts Are Powering Alien Spaceships</a>.
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Of all the unexplained things in our Universe, fast radio bursts are arguably the weirdest. They're some of the most elusive and explosive signals ever detected in space, and while they last for mere milliseconds, they generate as much energy as 500 million Suns. Last year, researchers found 16 Fast Radio Bursts all coming from the same source beyond our Milky Way, and now Harvard physicists have proposed that signals like these could be evidence of advanced alien technology.... The leading hypotheses right now are that these signals result from the most volatile and explosive events in the Universe - supermassive black holes coughing up cosmic material; explosions of superluminous supernovae; or rotating magnetars - a type of neutron star that pummels everything around it with intense magnetic fields. But this is all just speculation, based on the assumption that such powerful signals would originate from the most powerful events we've ever detected. Now Loeb and his team say that in the absence of an explanation everyone can agree on, we should be looking at some slightly less... <i>natural</i> sources. "[W]e have posited that Fast Radio Bursts are beams set up by extragalactic civilisations to potentially power lightsails," they describe in a new paper. </blockquote>
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Ross Douthat in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/resist-the-internet.html" target="_blank">Resist the Internet</a>.
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I suspect that versions of these ideas will be embraced within my lifetime by a segment of the upper class and a certain kind of religious family. But the masses will still be addicted, and the technology itself will have evolved to hook and immerse — and alienate and sedate — more completely and efficiently. But what if we decided that what’s good for the Silicon Valley overlords who send their kids to a low-tech Waldorf school is also good for everyone else? Our devices we shall always have with us, but we can choose the terms. We just have to choose together, to embrace temperance and paternalism both. Only a movement can save you from the tyrant in your pocket. </blockquote>
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Claudia Dreifus in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/science/technology-addiction-irresistible-by-adam-alter.html" target="_blank">Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens</a>.
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Smartphones give everything you need to enjoy the moment you’re in, but they don’t require much initiative. You never have to remember anything because everything is right in front of you. You don’t have to develop the ability to memorize or to come up with new ideas. I find it interesting that the late Steve Jobs said in a 2010 interview that his own children didn’t use iPads. In fact, there are a surprising number of Silicon Valley titans who refuse to let their kids near certain devices. There’s a private school in the Bay Area and it doesn’t allow any tech — no iPhones or iPads. The really interesting thing about this school is that 75 percent of the parents are tech executives. </blockquote>
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<b>Obituaries of the Issue.</b>
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<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/ct-robert-sengstacke-obituary-20170312-story.html" target="_blank">Robert Sengstacke</a> (1943-2017)
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"His father got him his first camera when he was 14," his daughter said. At 16, he accompanied his father on a trip to Cuba, where he took a picture of Fidel Castro with boxing champion Joe Louis. "That was the start of his professional career." His great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the paper in 1905. His father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. He began his career as a freelance photographer for the paper. He later served as president of Sengstacke Newspapers and was a former editor of what was then the <i>Chicago Daily Defender</i>. A 2002 <i>Chicago Tribune</i> story recounted some of the paper's storied past, including the information that the <i>Defender</i>'s sustained editorial campaign during the 1910s and 1920s, urging Southern black people to relocate to Chicago, is widely credited with spurring the Great Migration of Southern black people to Northern cities. </blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/sports/basketball/jerry-krause-dead-bulls-general-manager.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Jerry Krause</a> (1939-2017)
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<blockquote>
He was a second-string catcher at Taft High School, then attended Bradley University hoping to become a journalist. He was a student assistant to the basketball coach, charting plays, then quit school to pursue a career in sports and was hired as a “flunky,” as he told it, with the Chicago Cubs. He began to scout baseball and basketball teams, and while working for the Bullets, he drafted Earl Monroe out of little-known Winston-Salem State in 1967. He became a Bulls scout in the 1960s and had a brief stint as their director of player personnel in 1976. Krause was hired as a scout in 1978 by Bill Veeck, the White Sox owner, and three years later began working for Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn when they took over the team. He persuaded management to obtain Ozzie Guillen, their future All-Star shortstop and manager, from the San Diego Padres’ organization. After leaving pro basketball, he returned to baseball, scouting for the Yankees, the Mets and the Arizona Diamondbacks. </blockquote>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/europe/yevgeny-yevtushenko-dead-dissident-soviet-poet.html?_r=0" target="_blank">
Yevgeny Yevtushenko </a>(1933-2017)
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Mr. Yevtushenko kept homes in Russia and in the United States and, besides the University of Tulsa, taught at the City University of New York and New York University (where one student remembered him dressed in silver suits “stalking back and forth across the front of the lecture hall” as he read his poems in “booming Russian”). He traveled widely, reading his poetry, lecturing, teaching and giving speeches to overflow crowds at universities.
Through it all, Mr. Yevtushenko regarded himself as a patriot. In “Don’t Die Before You’re Dead,” he summed up his ambivalent feelings of triumph, nostalgia and remorse as a survivor of the defunct Soviet system. In a poem on the final page, “Goodbye, Our Red Flag,” he wrote: I didn’t take the czars’ Winter Palace. / I didn’t storm Hitler’s Reichstag. / I am not what you call a “Commie.” / But I caress the Red Flag and cry.... He preferred Oklahoma to New York. “In some provincial cities you can find the real soul of a country,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “I like the craziness of New York, but New York is really not America. It’s all humanity in one drop. Tulsa is very American.” He called Tulsa “the bellybutton of world culture.”</blockquote>
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Thanks to Steve Beeho, Mark Carducci…
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<br />JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-58189433428007260252017-03-08T20:07:00.001-08:002017-03-08T20:41:14.546-08:00Issue #150 (March 8, 2017)<div class="post-header-line-1">
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Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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The Ramones 1976 - <a href="https://www.firstthirdbooks.com/product/ramones/" target="new">Photo by Danny Fields</a>
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<b>Lobotomy!</b><br />
Joe Carducci
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My facebook friends are a thousand-strong – the number alone proof they’ve likely never met me. Someone I actually do know from my years at SST, Kara Nicks (who wrote about the label for us <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2015/05/issue-147-may-10-2015.html" target="_blank">here</a>), convinced me years ago that I had to do a myspace page and she put one together for Redoubt Press and my books. When it seemed I needed a facebook page I just used my name and a passive approach that collects readers of my books, fans of SST Records, and unwary fb pickups from the sharing of good tunes via youtube clips, which is how a lot of us use the site.
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As someone who got involved in the music business during the punk era maybe it isn’t surprising that I’ve found music doesn’t bring people together. Rather it is used by small groups of young people to define themselves socially <i>against</i> other groups in their environments of school hallways and city streets. They prefer narratives of heroic minorities beleaguered by greater straighter majorities of Van Halen or Bruce Springsteen fans. This helps explain the sociological imperative behind what’s called pop criticism and the consequent ignoring of great music qua music for the hunt for pop artists who seem might reprise high-low mass phenomena: The Beatles or Elvis, primarily. But for veterans of the independent record label <i>business</i> in the punk era (say, 1976-1986) and the younger obsessives who followed us playing, collecting, studying, releasing, promoting music, the filling out of our sense of what happened over the course of our lives and before (music often left outside of radio-playlists, distribution patterns, and histories) explains our now more ecumenical interest in sharing and listening to song-files and video-clips that date back to the beginnings of most styles of American vernacular music and the feedback loop completed by the British Invasion and other slap-back responses.
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But last year the politics of the election pushed against our music-determined posts and sharing; there were manias for Warren and Sanders, occasional Green Party or Libertarian Party jousts, resigned Clinton rationales, and even a few conservative, anarchist, or Trump parries. I do very little on fb but share individual song-clips – usually just the best songs my friends post. But I gather that with all the relentlessly earnest politicking there was much un-friending all around. Some began prefacing their political posts with warnings that dissenters would be purged; this to amplify their seriousness as if the election hung on the balance of this or that unequivocal comment thread. Others tried to push back at politics by calling for more intensive music sharing.
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Several things struck me about the social media crossfire as I saw it:<br />
<blockquote>
1, Aging punks aren’t so distinguishable from old hippies.<br />
2, Sharing obituaries of musicians has become a religious observance.<br />
3, People expect a punk rock revival under President Trump.
</blockquote>
The first is largely explained by the old punks’ health concerns and their poverty, though it does slight the true hippies actual politics which were more properly considered metaphysical or philosophical. In this sense I would say there were more student radicals and fellow travelers than there were actual hippies in that era (1967-1974). But regarding the punks who followed, a depressingly common feature of facebook lately has been fundraising pleas for musicians in need of expensive medical care. The independent record label economy yielded very little monetary prospects and of course the worst of those fake hippies kept punk music off the media and major labels where some coin might’ve been made.
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The second is a testament to how each decade of the 20th century can be considered its own golden age as the obits in the news media can still range back to 1930s performers and though punk rockers like others began by drawing a line against most music then contemporary, they have widened their respect for all sorts of music. In addition, many notable musicians of the past only debut in the national media, whether <i>Rolling Stone</i> or <i>New York Times</i>, as obituaries. Personally I never share or post anything from <i>Rolling Stone</i> on principle, including all these listicles of great guitarists or albums no matter how many SST artists now get included.
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But the third seems based on a conventional misunderstanding of history because punk rock coalesced in the mid-1970s during the Ford and Carter administrations, not under Ronald Reagan. Punk may have been a new cool but it was an anxious response to the pretensions of the hippie-style youth culture triumphant, both culturally (the mellow ideal, white blues, blue-eyed soul…) and politically (ending the draft, the Nixon resignation, losing South Vietnam…). Musically, punk used earlier stripped-down working class rock and roll styles (garage, frat, rockabilly) to attack hippie and progressive pretensions. The Carter administration here, and the Labour government of James Callaghan in the U.K. illustrated the sudden haplessness of the postwar center-left consensus and perverse kids who hung around record stores and the rare, often gay live music dives had a field day deflating “hippie” pretense. The new documentary-and-book, <i>Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead</i>, about <i>National Lampoon</i> magazine, underlines that punk as working class cultural phenomenon pre-dates middle class hippie. The <i>National Lampoon</i>’s counter-cultural incorrectness knew no bounds and demonstrates how much punk could survive hippie as comedy, a typically reactionary culture. The doc, though not the book, includes coverage of the magazine’s gleeful ripping into Woodstock with its musical theater-piece, <i>Lemmings</i>, where John Belushi had debuted his Joe Cocker parody.
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The anxiety brewing underneath a bohemia rising, aging and selling-out was quite productive, especially in rock and roll. However, the now hippie-determined media businesses resolutely denied airplay to a couple generations of worthy, now classic punk-era bands. That fifteen-year blockade of punk in America (1976-1991) by sixties-era moguls like Bill Graham, Jan Wenner, Lee Abrams, and Lorne Michaels is the actual cause of our current cultural malaise. No-airplay oxygen-deprivation lead to cultural brain-damage and the slowing of the great American musical train to a stop. And the media of course now fully dominates the message today. These social media behemoths, though they are dissolving the old mass media, make of the smart-phone the true end-point delivery of Marshall McLuhan’s foresight that the medium is the message – the phone presumably just a clumsy way-station on the way to a jack-chip installed in the brain at age seven, probably, the old age of discretion. Radio stations no longer rush the stuff local kids are crazy about into the air, and television no longer beats the bushes for some hick genius and flies him to their coastal soundstages. And I and my thousand-plus fb friends are just so many archeologists using the web to study ancient rock and roll runes, and to find out which few aged mastodons might yet trod the earth’s tour circuit.
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But now, what? Its “Donald Trump-ass motherfucker” memes and links all day long from those predicting new punk rock glories. What they forget is what I wish I could forget. How the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan allowed that productive bohemian anxiety to relax suddenly into a thick certainty of a cool gone cold. The British culturati after 1979 considered Thatcher a contemptible throwback, and the American culturati believed Reagan a dangerous simpleton. Thatcher reminded me of how women of a certain age used to carry themselves before feminism, and Reagan reminded me of my grandmother’s generation in his manner of speaking and habits of etiquette. I wasn’t into either of them; I considered myself an anarchist though day-to-day I was in business. But I couldn’t quite see either of them blowing up the world as was the common claimed bohemian belief around me.
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Being from Hollywood, Reagan understood media far better than his fellow Republicans, the Democrats, or the news media itself. In this sense Donald Trump is like Reagan; he too understands media better than the media itself or his political foes. That he is underestimated just compounds his advantage. Trump seems to be treated as Reagan reprised as farce or Nixon as recurring nightmare or even Hitler before the Reichstag fire. And yet its Trump’s moves away from free-trade/small-government Republicanism and toward once time-honored Democratic Party positions on trade, employment, infrastructure, immigration… that has set off the left and made liberals look like they’ve learned to love the military-industrial complex! Democrats and their reporter allies are seemingly trapped in their rehearsed reaction-shot long faces as they defend the national security state status quo. Just try to stop them from finally enlisting in the Cold War! I recall that on early 1970s talk shows all the dashing and perverse intellectuals were touted as controversial. It tells who the Man is today when the word no longer has positive connotations. Now it is Donald Trump, a typical New Yorker says this ex-Chicagoan, who is controversial.
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In any case, the best early 1980s punk rock (usually called “postpunk” in the U.K. and “hardcore” in the U.S.) had to avoid politics as best it could, because otherwise one risked performing a lobotomy on one’s own artistic sensibility. Before Reagan’s election the Dead Kennedys (one of the many bands I had the honor of working with) famously ripped on the original and enduring hippie politician Jerry Brown in their now classic song – even <i>Rolling Stone</i> touts it – “California Über Alles.” The first album by X, “Los Angeles,” had a cover that featured a stark, mediated, burning “X” which old-line hippie record shop clerks duly took to be racist. They didn’t even need to hear the great, raw language of the title track to come to their misconclusion. They hated it on sight because they knew its attack was in large part aimed at them. (Not that The Ramones’ more genial, comic approach did them any better with such clerks.)
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The Adverts, one of the smarter, less pretentious of the early London punk bands didn’t last to 1980 but did comment sharply in the moment. Unlike here, in London the first flush of punk swamped that city’s hot-house media; bands were on major labels, media and the charts. The Adverts third 45, “Safety In Numbers,” released in October 1977 included lines by T.V. Smith such as:
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Here we all are in the latest craze. / Stick with the crowd,<br />
Hope it’s not a passing phase. / It’s the latest thing to be nowhere.<br />
You can turn into the wallpaper / But you know you were always there anyway<br />
Without the new wave. / What about the new wave?<br />
Did you think it would change things? / It’s just safety in numbers.
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When it's tricky, when it gets tough,<br />
When you need to feel that you’re good enough,<br />
All you pretty people who’ve been taken over,<br />
Had better start looking for your own answers,<br />
’cause there’s no safety in numbers anyway,<br />
Or in a new wave….<br />
(c) 1977 Anchor / Adverse Noise
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The band/commune Crass were quintessential politicos using art as a hammer. Pseudo-hippies but they seemed to conceive their band and label around the outrage that followed The Clash’s signing to CBS Records thereby contradicting that band’s own revolutionary cant. I haven’t listened to any of the Crass records since working on my rock book in the late 1980s, but I can still hear the various vocalists screaming out their Prime Minister’s name <i>“That-chahhh!”</i> in lyric after lyric as if they might accomplish something well outside the purview of musical art. They counted themselves anarchist but I still have an Aunt Polly-ish postcard they sent to Black Flag seeking to shame them out of regressive tendencies. The Crass label (they were in business too) sold plenty of records including those by Chumbawamba who finally signed to EMI and had a worldwide Top-10 novelty hit in 1997.
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That sort of pseudo-anarchist control-freak politick was most apparent in the U.S. at <i>Maximum RocknRoll</i>, a Pacifica Radio program that became a fanzine whose taste and judgments were soon narrowed to a pure form of artless political hardcore. The editor, the late Tim Yohannan, was a nice guy when I knew him; he laughed at my impolitic jokes and he had had great taste in 1960s garage rock (he was a bit older – born 1945). But once he smelled a youth-based hardcore world revolution he sold all those records and filled the mag with revolution and scene reports from Andorra to Zambia. Judgments all around, but none for art. I remember how Hüsker Dü was first adopted by the San Francisco scene around <i>Maximum RocknRoll</i> which they were grateful for, but soon got the heebie-jeebies over. The boys were skilled songwriters just coming into their own and weren’t going to put some artless yoke on their music for anybody. The band’s first planned SST album, “Metal Circus,” was cut down to an EP as they found that voice. They dropped a few hardcore-ish tunes and they made Bob Mould’s “Real World” the lead tune-as-explication:<br />
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People talk about anarchy / And taking up a fight<br />
Well I'm afraid of things like that / I lock my doors at night<br />
I don't rape, and I don't pillage / Other peoples' lives<br />
I don't practice what you preach / And I won't see through your eyes.<br />
(c) 1983 Reflex Music
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Don’t remember if they too got a postcard from Crass but I remember thinking when Spot played us the tunes that they would fit right into SST so I talked to Greg, Chuck, and Mugger and made sure the band knew we’d like to release it. SST bands pretty much reflexively battled against the many politico-aesthetic paradigms that had been pushed on art by industry and audience since those pseudo-hippie moguls took control of things in the years after Jimi Hendrix died. A later SST band, the San Francisco band Angst, appeared on the 1982 MRR compilation album, “Not So Quiet on the Western Front”. But as Joseph Pope the band’s bassist-singer (also co-editor of this blog) describes it in an email:<br />
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“Tim had seen us live, loved us and we got the ok to be on the comp – whatever song we wanted to use. When I gave him
the tape (produced by Klaus Flouride of the DKs), he freaked: ‘It sounds like the Go-Gos!’ For maximum irritation factor I replied, ‘They have lots of money, don't they?’ – That nearly killed the deal right there! I got my hearing in which I was asked to justify why the song was punk. I convinced him it was by telling him I go back to the original days of punk and what it's about is individual expression, pushing against conventions, no constraints on creativity, etc.”
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Joseph explains that Tim bought it but he doesn’t think “his stridency” ever waned. I think the magazine did begin to improve by the late 1980s – it had to as political hardcore disappeared after new trends like metal-crossover, emo, gearhead, rockabilly….
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We, by which I mean any SST band from Black Flag to Saint Vitus from Saccharine Trust to Meat Puppets, were making music and trying to reach listeners <i>despite</i> the hardcore scene that was in the music’s way! As Curt Kirkwood told <i>Melody Maker</i> in 1985, “We’re playing music and if you take it any further than that, you’re guessing wrong about us.” There were other great bands out there fighting their own battles against a purely political understanding of punk but SST itself helped our bands be mutually reinforcing even as they each went their own way artistically.
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That misremembered anti-Reagan fuzz-polka muzak from back then could only be comfort food because even rock critics – also pushers of social relevance – could understand that. But punk’s signal anxiety was thereby routed away from time-honored fertile songwriting themes such as girls, bragging, and self-loathing, and channeled into the inert dead-end of topical political relevance – a criteria that any four leather-jacketed burr-heads from Finland could replicate. American bands and American culture should never kowtow to the Eurocentric political comfort zone; that’s not what anyone important from Edgar Poe to Elvis Presley, from Mark Twain to Ernest Tubb, ever did. Even the Minutemen, the most political band I worked with at SST used a beatnik, absurdist word-jazz approach ruthlessly edited to keep that politick subordinate to the art.
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Drudge recently linked to another bogus proposition, namely “Is Trumpism the new punk rock?” Though it proved essentially click-bait it does link to a better 1996 essay, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/was-punk-rock-right-wing/article/8474" target="_blank">Was Punk Rock Right-wing?</a> from the <i>Weekly Standard</i> magazine and asked that author, Daniel Wattenberg, whether he thinks today’s Alt-Right is the new punk rock – he says no.
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This expected anti-Trump punk rock bonanza could only be less inspired than what might have been: another Clinton presidency, one that could have sent anxious millennials into more aesthetically fertile directions. However, the dog that didn’t bark reminds us that no such anxious reflux occurred under Obama, a far less problematic dream-president for the left. An actual parallel today of that strange mid-1970s victorious counter-culture/second-thoughts hangover would have to start with the forcing out of the vice president and his replacement by a Gerald Ford analog (the Democratic majority’s choice of a Republican) and only then the president impeached. Howard Baker had said that the Senate back in 1974 would not have voted to convict Richard Nixon so he had to resign out of some combination of shame, health concerns, family concerns, and concern for the country itself for that counter-culture scalp-taking “silent coup” to occur. Had Nixon been as shameless as the Clintons he would have just served out his term. Donald Trump as a president is safe-to-say further evolved on the scale of political shamelessness. In any case Obama and Clinton have left the Democratic Party in steep Washington minorities. Perhaps this confirms that there is no possible present day analog to what was punk. Kids are not going to free themselves from their phone-leashes long enough to build a drop-out bohemia of their own. The culture is lucky if they buy an occasional record or fanzine. They are too busy buying into something rather indistinct up ahead of us all, but that something surely promises to be one hell of a noxious fruit of the tree of knowledge.
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<i>(Illustrations: National Lampoon Lemmings album cover art 1973; Joe Strummer in Crass shirt - photographer unknown; Maximum Rock n Roll flyer 1981; LA's Wasted Youth flyer 1981 - art by Pushead Lamort)</i>
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Elvis Presley Up North</b>
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David Lightbourne
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<blockquote>
<i>(The late <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/07/issue-56-july-28-2010.html" target="_blank"> David Lightbourne</a> attended show number one on Elvis’ first tour of the North sixty years ago this March 28. I first met Dave in Portland in 1977. <i>The New Vulgate</i> was in part my attempt to force Dave to write. He had shelved his journalistic ambitions to master country blues fingerpicking which he did – see his album, “Monkey Junk” (Upland). One correction and a minor clarification: 1) Elvis used the twin-mic stand David describes in an appearance for <i>“The Milton Berle Show”</i> not at this show, and 2) Presley’s performing career began in mid-1954 in Memphis and Louisiana, then adding Arkansas, Texas, the Southwest and Southeast; in 1955 he played up through Ohio and by 1956 up to Detroit and through St. Louis to Wisconsin and Minnesota, but he’d avoided Chicago and the big east coast cities. Indeed, other than the television tapings Elvis didn’t play New York City until 1972. This essay was originally posted in No. 10, Sept. 9, 2009)</i></blockquote>
Elvis made his Chicago debut on Thursday March 28 1957, kicking off a 10-date North American tour -- his first outside short runs down south.
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The whole previous year I had witnessed a string of his national television triumphs, first curious, then with real interest, finally pure excitement. The exotic figure with the indelible name began appearing in mainstream print beyond monthly music pulps. Explosive 1956 – the one true “Year of Elvis” – saw him move like a cat from the <i>Dorsey Stage Show</i> to <i>Milton Berle</i> to <i>Steve Allen</i> to powerful <i>Ed Sullivan</i>, the mere threat of an incendiary performance delivering ratings skyrockets.
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“Hound Dog” confirmed everything. Elvis Presley ruled America.
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Between trips from Memphis to New York and L.A. for the very lucrative television gigs, Elvis sandwiched short, regional southern tours, plus a bad week in stone-age Vegas. Press appearances found him declaring, assuring, pledging, that fame, celebrity, and northern acceptance would never compromise, corrupt, or turn him into anything but the modest, religious, good old boy his first audiences identified with, adored, and emulated. Meanwhile, his singles and albums would not stop selling.
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To accommodate this astonishing arc of success, Chicago chose the huge, old, International Amphitheatre, the city’s largest indoor venue, its strategic location the entrance to mammoth Union Stockyards, meat-slaughterer for the nation. Stone, steel, concrete, and brick, the cavernous innards usually saw all its action on its vast floor. Boat shows, fall model auto previews, similar trade conclaves, took dates with no cattle-congress scheduled. The Amphitheatre also hosted both parties’ presidential nominating conventions regularly, right up to the 1968 Chicago “Police Riots.”
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The cops came out for Elvis in force, as did twelve thousand shrieking girls of all ages. From our folding metal seats, six rows back stage left, all the hall looked like a sea of young women. A high, box-like, unpainted temporary stage projected out from the wall at our end, maybe seven feet above the floor and fifteen-feet squared. A cordon of police, arms locked, ringed the three exposed sides, hats well below stage level, with very little to worry about, on generous overtime.
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As our family entourage of six waited for the hall to totally fill and house lights go down, I scanned the stage and had a true shock of recognition. The microphone stand at center stage, a pro Atlas with the large, heavy base, rose only chest-high, where a horizontal extension rod held, side by side, a pair of large microphones, one at each end on stubs, about four feet apart.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikJD-ANorI6Huwsk-0cRh1Kz5OQoJ2dYPFCigUrAs-GaD0KVuFqQxJLygSrIc8NTxcHiZ7QcP5inL8BqGasQ2hPp_iHcumqXuHLbxPVX0nxuGhZAFTPfe_oLnnNkxQSjlw8ra9T_rItD0X/s1600/NV-Elvis57-DavesRadioshow51.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikJD-ANorI6Huwsk-0cRh1Kz5OQoJ2dYPFCigUrAs-GaD0KVuFqQxJLygSrIc8NTxcHiZ7QcP5inL8BqGasQ2hPp_iHcumqXuHLbxPVX0nxuGhZAFTPfe_oLnnNkxQSjlw8ra9T_rItD0X/s320/NV-Elvis57-DavesRadioshow51.jpg" width="239" /></a> I knew those mikes well. Five years earlier an identical one had occupied the center of the table during our family’s daily breakfast radio show. A prized possession actually resting in my socks drawer, those big Altec omni-directional ribbon mikes, the size of a small melon, weighed a ton and had unbelievable sensitivity at any gain at all. Elvis not only had the best, but with unbelievable style and total class, a freaking pair of Altecs where only one had ever gone before.<br />
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This unprecedented, downright radical arrangement made nothing but simply brilliant sense. During the entire second half of 1956, television camera had famously, notoriously, avoided any shots showing Elvis the Pelvis below the waist. The hyper-efficient Altecs guaranteed that Elvis would not move off-mike no matter what manner of extreme sports his performance explored. Wild hair on the tiny tube only went so far. Tonight the main man came on a mission to move, shake, rock, roll, wiggle, gyrate, cavort, and do the funky monkey, with every lateral lurch in perfect technical proximity.
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Dimming house lights brought the loud, expectant crowd to a hush, followed by a tide of excited screaming as the show’s master of ceremonies took the stage. Waiting for his disproportionate welcome to subside -- it did quickly -- he welcomed the throng, then introduced an unexpected surprise opening act, emphasizing that the unknown comic was a close personal friend of the King and Elvis wanted us to welcome him with open arms. The poor fellow needed more help than anyone’s endorsement could possibly offer: semi-professional, if that, dressed for amateur night in a small Ozark bar, corny beyond all expectations, with even the lame slapstick failing him, he had enough sense to bail before the voluble crowd actually lost patience with this surreal blend of courage and suicide.
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Elvis and the three Blue Moon Boys took the stage within the first minutes of a ten minute-long mass tonsillectomy, with bits of young tissue flying like projectiles. The collective power of that many young, healthy adolescent American lungs gained sufficient synergy to dislodge trachea and inflict permanent internal damage on every fourth female esophagus, merely temporary pathologies otherwise. My younger brother and I, now standing in his royal presence, tried our best to mount complimentary obligatory screams, but with instantly pathetic results, utterly insufficient in volume, hopelessly low-pitched.
Later accounts would record that this Chicago show saw the first appearance of the spectacular completely singular, all-gold suit, a tuxedo-length coat and matching trousers, yards of shining gold-lamé from über-tailor-to-showbiz, Nudie of Hollywood. The gold material, glittering brightly under the stage spots, gained almost blinding brilliance as every available flashbulb in Chicago detonated as one. A money shot for the ages, his Highness in the flesh, this stunning fashion-statement overdue acknowledgement – also the penultimate touch for an immediately iconic, definitive portrait – of dazzling superstardom.
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The suit signaled unparalleled apotheosis; a private reminder of his childhood Hollywood dreams; and a butterfly-like transformation from his former attire and very appearance. Until Nudie concocted this statuesque, gold God, Elvis had improvised an inspired, idiosyncratic mix of country music, biker, and ghetto street threads, eclectic parts juxtaposed in a fertile, marvelously resonant personal style. All traces of this Elvis had vanished.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPrWJ0S_TUoYuM4TGMLF1efZiqSFPYKRgmibs9vo44CrKYDH_ek3y-I8xGg80uPGOTEw9YZMbiGx_IdioiUsMDWLp6Vbh5YBnQG1kjiITj2BxKBtmHTtLDd5BG5EFz6IKMzm_0yo_q-DDL/s1600/NV-ElvisChi2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPrWJ0S_TUoYuM4TGMLF1efZiqSFPYKRgmibs9vo44CrKYDH_ek3y-I8xGg80uPGOTEw9YZMbiGx_IdioiUsMDWLp6Vbh5YBnQG1kjiITj2BxKBtmHTtLDd5BG5EFz6IKMzm_0yo_q-DDL/s320/NV-ElvisChi2.jpg" width="218" /></a> He looked cleaner. Hollywood had given him a makeup makeover, echoes of Little Richard mascara and androgynous eye-treatments banished. A California super-barber had sculpted a sleeker cut, streamlined by expert thinning, especially along the sides. The hair lay near the core of the E.P. mystique. Big magazine spreads found him in a local Memphis barber’s chair, his hair so thick that, combed back in a ducktail, it formed rich, curving fenders above the ears. Formerly, when the pompadour flipped forward across his face, only both hands could collect it back up into place. No longer, and it made him look younger, fresher, and kind of perfect.<br />
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Indeed, Elvis looked great, in a clear line-of-sight just yards away: healthy, athletic – maybe into touch football – brimming with energy, eager to rock. Moving with easy confidence, with the surfeit of ego-magic crucial to managing and proceeding along this existential cusp, he started acknowledging widely scattered sections of the vast seating, causing full thirds of the place to go either nuclear, postal, or plain apeshit. Small females now began the sporadic business of hurling themselves at officers and stage, one girl managing to cling by her fingers seven feet up. The cops now got busy as this mandatory ritual accelerated. Emotional little girls, burning pure adrenaline, in a variety of delusional states, kept needing sorting out.
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With Scotty, Bill, and D.J. wearing white shirts and blazers, well-settled behind their instruments, Elvis began his familiar initial, disingenuous gestures, shaking his head in wonder, appealing for a reduction of the bedlam to ordinary mass hysteria. He flashed his shy grin, a broad smile, hands up briefly now and then for quiet, his body language conveying only half-hearted impatience. His overall demeanor spoke a silent, genuinely deferential, expression of pure gratitude.
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When, finally, Elvis spoke – probably something like “Thank you very much,” – still further eruptions. Inevitably, the need to cling to every word gained a marginal edge over the cacophony of countless one-on-one intense personal conversations, oblivious in the urgency of opportunity. Sporadic meltdowns still sounded from far regions, according to some school of chaos theory – suddenly joined by every throat when the gist of a brief remark sank in for everyone.
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With his smallest gesture a pretext for whole cohorts to go bananas, Elvis began indulging along an irresistible detour, teasing these reactions, milking them, both with apparent good humor and an oddly amoral, gratuitous self-satisfaction. Nobody minded and nobody could get enough.
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Elvis had enough first. Smoothly steering this stage business around a broad curve, he began the pitcher’s windup and abrupt, bellow-like first links of “Heartbreak Hotel.” The song, his first national hit, had given him real cred as a singer before most of America knew who he was, what he looked like – or cared. A widespread belief that rock vocalists could never realize the professional skills of crooning ballad-singers took time to discredit. Naysayers, older music buffs confronted with this early Presley performance, grudgingly accepted the quality in his voice, usually weaseling-out with, “But I still don’t like his movements.”
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Until its reprise in the lead-off slot, “Heartbreak Hotel” was all but ancient history, Plymouth Rock on the way to the Gold Rush. Only a year after its release, I remember feeling startled that night by its familiar quality. Elvis sang the lyric with real strength, power when required, with a richness in his voice a listener could not ignore. Probably the musical high-point of the night, I still wondered why he chose it to open with under these wild, Dionysian circumstances.
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A recording of the 45-minute set – sixteen songs according to the <i>Tribune</i>’s next edition – would reveal other moments when the music rose to the truly inspired. D.J. Fontana no doubt rocked out on drums; Bill Black’s upright-bass playing had to have served Elvis well, and Scotty’s Gibson electric – the only amplified instrument on stage – must have reflected confidence and license-to-play that record sales alone now granted him/them. Proud parents – Scotty and Bill had invented this experimental sound for Elvis in 1953.<br />
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I only remember the medley-like blur of hits flying by – each one forgettable as quickly as the next release took its place – the set-list distinguished only by the introduction (in release Monday) of his next gold single (a million already pre-sold). An Otis Blackwell composition with a feeling back to the R&B lexicon, “All Shook Up” noticeably rocked to a superior beat and Elvis danced his way through it. On first hearing, “I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree,” the second line sounded odd and gross. It sounded better later without the bright lights and the all-gold victim of distress.
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The descending pattern of fluff over the previous six months – owing largely to Col. Parker’s resentment of Elvis jamming with Leiber and Stoller – almost defined the creative vacuum forever plaguing disposable music. “(Won’t You Be My) Teddy Bear”, “Wear My Ring (Around Your Neck)” and the like would soon portend even bleaker prospects for a man of such huge talent and unknown potential. I don’t remember “Hound Dog” or “Don’t Be Cruel” in any detail, but they were the ones I wanted to hear. Both could have gone far past the three-minute-plus template in a less stopwatch-driven situation. Songs like “Love Me Tender” gave Elvis a chance to catch his breath if, indeed, he ever needed to.
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As for Scotty, Bill, and D.J., a decade later they'd stage a jam session with Elvis on his big 1968 <i>NBC</i> Come-Back Special trying to recapture the sound (already past) when Scotty and Bill taught Elvis his first guitar chords in Scotty's house. No sound since truly recaptured the low-rent grace and slap-back echo of the old Sun Studio, or their cobbled scrabble of country & western, country blues, rhythm & blues, and forties jazz. Already out of their Memphis depth here in Chicago, riding a rocket moving too fast to hold onto, the trio played with the Hillbilly Cat outside the studio for their final year. With Elvis Army-bound, by mid-1958 the three would all be on their own. For the moment, though, a key part in the sound of elemental rock and roll still held the stage.
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They actually said it. A disembodied voice in a tone of authority and knowledge heard through ranks of stranded fans suddenly left in the lurch, their eyes blinking under the now somehow brighter house lights, announced “Elvis has left the building.”
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They believed it.
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No need to storm the dressing room. No use setting fires to smoke him out. No hope he’ll wander out the wrong door or get in a limo and have the engine stall. Elvis had left the building. We believed it if we believed he’d ever been in the building in the first place. Anticipation had consumed 95% of the experience, the 45 minutes of rock and roll all a blur. We alone seemed to avoid the stampede out of the building to the car lot. As I stood under the big work-lights surveying a now-empty battlefield, I understood in my still innocent but expanding grasp of affairs that Elvis was over. He was Elvis 2.0 now.
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The next day my classmates barely shrugged when I confessed where I had been the night before. Mid-1950s 8th graders lived in a pre-adolescent space far younger than epicenters of serious – older – Elvis freaks. But the Colonel, RCA, Hal Wallis, and the best industry hustlers with expense accounts would see to it that my classmates got their Elvis soon enough.
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<i>[images: Presley with two Altec mics at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre - Tribune photo; WTAQ advertisement for the Lightbourne family radio program, 1951-52; Poster for the March 28 1957 gig; Chicago Tribune coverage.]</i>
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<img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPTXei54bDe6b8CB1i-pFp07BKN-zJkAwf-eu7507KwHpoOHeMWHr2ovMS5YS7EoOxB-4ky_zSmNWkrDUpQwrGABNenCaestAcMHHCLzbdX_3K0KOLhLj1b4mtn0vmXJH8kGSaKj-BNYjX/s640/jumpoff+joe+offramp+on+I-5+in+oregon+mar+3+2017+photo+by+mike+watt.jpg" width="640" />
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<a href="http://hootpage.com/hoot_thetourtourtwo2017.html" target="new">Photo by Mike Watt</a>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtyn_IM8WQbkdFQZVEZNBAn_PP30eFk10pZQkJ4jlw1ZNmxErrSBNWakxowD1yM4Zv2TJlBtgFcKOkP_Z8D97yIxup6C990ziNVv_iFEAQjUfWf1pVpgz8823fWd3K95_JM24Yk14QZjur/s1600/NV-DeclineandFallaltcivilization.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtyn_IM8WQbkdFQZVEZNBAn_PP30eFk10pZQkJ4jlw1ZNmxErrSBNWakxowD1yM4Zv2TJlBtgFcKOkP_Z8D97yIxup6C990ziNVv_iFEAQjUfWf1pVpgz8823fWd3K95_JM24Yk14QZjur/s320/NV-DeclineandFallaltcivilization.png" width="257" height="320" /></a></div><b>Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization</b>
(<a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/626423" target="_blank">novel</a> excerpt)<br />
G.S. Oldman
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At one of his band rehearsals, she picked up an idle electric bass and examined it. Heavy and huge, through the big amplifier it sounded so formidable and when her fingers remembered a small, clumsy Juneism, this time in tune, the fat strings barked like a fatigued piano and… omigod. It sounded like music. Real music. The air pushing out of the speakers besieged her and made her heart jump (Music) and something made a flash of sense (Real Music) that settled down to an indrawn horizon of breath.
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“Oooh, Magnolia Blossom, maybe you can play dat ding,” he said.<br />
<br /> June sat with her hand on the neck, her other hand fidgeting at the strings, the windings against the skin of her thumb. She fumbled a two-note riff on the smallest string; tried the same on one of the bigger, deeper ones; then she felt silly. “I…I…I don’t know.”
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That night at the restaurant was a preoccupied haze of botched orders and pitiful tips. She gabbed endlessly about the instrument in bed that night. “Shuddup, willya,” he groaned from under the pillow. “A million girls in this city and I have to find one who thinks she wants to be a musician? Gross!”
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She strutted in the door one day holding a $50 “junkie fix” bass. A cheap Korean job that thought it was a Fender, it basically played in tune. When she was late on the rent, George scolded and wrestled her into a spanking, declaring, “There will be consequences, y’know.” Two weeks later she was forced to get on stage with him to accompany the stupidest song he ever concocted. Never had sucking sounded so deep.
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He gathered up his drums and his old Gibson after six months and moved to New York on an opportunity to play serious jazz. A quiet breakup, she took over his efficiency and promised to send money for his well-worn Toyota hatchback. That first night alone she laid in a darkness that reached from the apartment and touched a sky that passengers on nodding night flights gazed back upon. Imagining their destinations, many thoughts about men and women made having a bass to sleep with very satisfying. “Improper” thumb-plucking technique gave her an odd credibility among the grungies and, especially, the garagies.
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Some day she’d have a doggone amplifier!
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In the mean optimism of time, guys (and grrrls) were all too eager to “…get together and jam!” Stumblings that left much to be desired. And the one guy: the ooky tattoo-and-flannel specimen who somehow moved in for a week that never ended…ick. An eviction notice got him out of her life, and the Toyota moved her meagerness to a nervous, speed freak household, a tenancy that only lasted one double-ooky month.
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But nothing could match the ooky-ness of Wendell.
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Wendell joined the girls’ current attempt at a band some months ago. June met him at the coffeehouse and they’d run into each other at shows, and when the band needed to fill the guit-position he was enthusiastic. Another flannel-funker-red-hot-frusciante reject, there was a chemistry that moved them in a reasonably forward direction until the chemistry got him into June’s pants. Most of the blame being on the moon or on hormonal imbalances, her knickers fell down and she rubbed flesh against an assortment of garden-variety tattoos that yearned for some kind of metal to puncture them.
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There was no need to blame her vulnerability on the spoon.
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In the modern world it’s hard to take stock when clever heroin participants and utilitarian drug dealers tend to rule the roost. For the sake of the band, she gave him the benefit of a stupid doubt and rehearsals got strange, stranger, were becoming nonexistent, and were worse than the flaky, ineffective events they had become. This was how bands ended—not with anger and shouting, but with indifference and forgotten syringes.
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Lying on the kitchen floor, beneath the dinge on the ceiling, the chill breeze that blew through the front door kept her from sticking her head back into the bean pot. There was too much water under too many bridges and too much rain flowing rivers like swollen arteries. Too much blood already mixed with the water, and she was the cosmic babysitter standing over cauldrons abubble with lethal formulas. Babies would cry and complain if babies didn’t get their bottles. For this life would stop, the rivers cease to flow, and she would have to test the formula, shaking drops onto the exposed veins of her inner forearm?
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No. Hell no.
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She’d been exposed to needle culture at an early enough age, having never indulged in any of it thanks to dear Uncle Kevin. He saw her through the big lies about ROCK & ROLL! and DRUGS! and also the lies of parents and politicians whose dialectics dissuaded their youth from partaking of either, whilst failing to acknowledge that:<br />
<br /> 1) in a world of civilized uncertainty, drugs worked. And
<br /> 2) it was one of the few things that guaranteed a result you could count on.
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Blasphemy.
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Churches always railed against SEX! and the realities of EXPERIENCE! They, along with parents and politicians, had only been concerned with IDEALS! It was the great failing of the Anti-Sex/Drugs/Rock&Roll War and this holy choir persisted in a sweaty tent show revival in their condemnation of it all, forever preaching uninformed gospels of saying anything but YES!—and not noticing how, since the beginning of civilization, righteous fundamentalists of all persuasions have been busy wiping the ooze from their hands after the last botched attempt to wrestle Pandora back into her box.
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Ms. McClunaghan was fifteen—1978, a full year since hearing the song on The Velvet Underground’s first album—when her initial encounter with heroin was at a hoodlum party where several drugs were sampled and washed down with liberal dosages of beer and hard liquor. Stumbling into the back bedroom and the needle being offered her, she slurred, “No.
I’ll jus’ wadch you,” and rebellious brain cells leaned her against the wall and slid down its surface to inspect the fine blur from a stuporous heap on the floor. A movie in which she was the only collection of focused grains in the emulsion, anchoring the frames between sprocket
holes that were being mis-threaded by a stoned projectionist.
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If she had put her mind to it she could have followed in the alcoholic footsteps of her mother, but experience made her set her own rules and not have vain ditherings about it. Life goes on. She had tolerated enough loud, simple, stupidly literate tunes and enough earaches, headaches, and heartaches to know the values of Music and Rock & Roll. And Sex. They all worked. More and more, they worked best when not trying to be articulate about it. It could be the singer or the sideman or it could be the song—and in the early evening, after two beers, she didn’t worry about epistemology, justice or depression.<br />
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<a href="http://www.gsoldman.com/the-book/" target="_blank">Author’s page</a>.
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<img border="0" height="481" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGs8702ZIaoyTueSeIgSSkM8EeA5kfnOHtjcBaQfI-twLiMMBBvZ-_2ApzvB1FmortbyNDRbO9zqRKRYhzvUQNh6uKak6mSrBJtlUnbZAFgWM9fcS3dPYSGZNzv-UVgirB6FD43ILTRFfc/s640/Middlemtn-sm.jpg" width="640" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci
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<b>From the Wyoming desk of Joe Carducci…<BR><BR>
</b>Liz Spayd of NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/public-editor/a-hard-look-at-times-editing-in-the-digital-era.html?_r=0" target="_blank">A Hard Look at Times Editing in the Digital Era</a>.
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<blockquote>
Its editing architecture, originally constructed in the bountiful days of print, allows for multiple layers of editing that help keep copy clean and errors to a minimum. Except for breaking news, most stories are reviewed by three editors, with up to six or more if the article is headed for home page prominence or A1. Soon this conveyor will be replaced by a bespoke editing system built primarily around digital. The specifics of how it will work are not final, but it is aimed at answering questions like: What is the maximum speed at which a story should travel from a reporter to the website? What is the minimum number of editors who should see it? What role should reporters play in taking ownership of their story and its presentation to readers, including photos, video and embedded tweets? And how can these changes be made to maximize the power and presence of visuals throughout <i>The Times</i>’s report? This shift will be among the most significant the newsroom undergoes this year. Not only is the leadership overhauling the critical infrastructure that welds together the journalism, it is also likely to make sizable cuts in the editing ranks. </blockquote>
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Jonathan Taplin in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/opinion/forget-att-the-real-monopolies-are-google-and-facebook.html" target="_blank">Who Runs The Media? Not Us</a>.
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Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. Instead, they both have built their advertising businesses as “free riders” on content made by others, some of it from Time Warner. The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country. Every pirated music video or song posted on YouTube or Facebook robs the creators of income, and YouTube in particular is dominated by unlicensed content. Google’s YouTube has an over 55 percent market share in the streaming audio business and yet provides less than 11 percent of the streaming audio revenues to the content owners and creators. But Facebook, which refuses to enter into any licensing agreement on music or video, is challenging YouTube in the free online video and music world. </blockquote>
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Sydney Ember in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/business/media/wall-street-journal-wsj2020.html" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal Editor Defends Coverage of Trump</a>.
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Mr. Baker offered a different interpretation, according to two participants in the session: The administration wants to engage the news media in a battle, he said, and <i>The Journal</i> should not become part of it. “We can’t allow ourselves to be dragged into the political process, to be a protagonist in the political fight,” he said, according to one of the people. He said that Americans already distrusted the news media, and that if <i>The Journal</i> covered Mr. Trump in an overly confrontational way, that distrust might increase. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgICHH31oMZ4qtwkaiVgH4V4qNxwjCwLmUDDv_Hey6K8x1XddTQuVwAuuVc_eTSLmgcdZBJ96PT224_tEFKyBgjt9LENVoQLJ75H9Etmj74x6Zr0A-XlWbykehz_hMvq2S7tjYE1GuDcGu9/s1600/NV-Tribunefront.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgICHH31oMZ4qtwkaiVgH4V4qNxwjCwLmUDDv_Hey6K8x1XddTQuVwAuuVc_eTSLmgcdZBJ96PT224_tEFKyBgjt9LENVoQLJ75H9Etmj74x6Zr0A-XlWbykehz_hMvq2S7tjYE1GuDcGu9/s320/NV-Tribunefront.png" width="265" /></a></div>
William Lee in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-bad-week-in-crime-column-20170206-story.html" target="_blank">Even for Reporters, Sad Tales Too Much to Bear</a>.
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Recently, I could both see and feel a neighbor’s happy energy leave her body as I gave her the particulars of a quadruple homicide I covered on the Far South Side in December. It’s quite easy to forget that most people aren’t prepared for the very real details of carnage that comes with reporting on crime, no matter how many <i>“Law & Order”</i> marathons they watch…. Even for those of us covering the madness, it can be difficult to avoid being pulled into the same bubbling tar of despair that traps many city dwellers. As a result, my home is a news-free zone on my off days; I’ll only scan a newspaper, allow for short visits to <i>chicagotribune.com</i> and avoid TV news broadcasts altogether. I’m not alone, knowing plenty of other journalists who cover crime and some cops who avoid news on their own time. This is an abrupt about-face from my days as a young reporter, when I delved into crime statistics, keeping track of new crime trends and noting heated gang rivalries. Back then, my zest for work was as much about a kid who grew up on cop shows and action movies wanting a front seat to the violence my family had kept me sheltered from. </blockquote>
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WSJ Weekend Interview: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-nfl-legend-trump-and-americas-gangs-1484956591" target="_blank">Jim Brown</a>.
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The responsibility of self-determination is a very important phrase because most people who are poor and don’t have an education are looking to be delivered. When we sit down with gang members and they want to talk about what somebody else did to them, what somebody owes them, they lost a father, somebody killed their friend a year ago. All of that’s fine, but don’t blame all of these issues [for] where you are now, because if you apply yourself, you can come out of that, especially as an American. </blockquote>
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Jelani Cobb in NEW YORKER, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/06/inside-the-trial-of-dylann-roof" target="_blank">Prodigy of Hate</a>.
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She speaks with a pronounced Charleston accent, and when Richardson asked her if she was married she looked at her husband, sitting in the front row, and answered “Yes” so wearily that the courtroom erupted into laughter. Then Richardson asked her about Roof’s behavior in the church. “Most of the time, he hung his head down just the way he’s doing right now,” she said. Tywanza was an avid social-media user, and he uploaded a video of himself at the church to Snapchat. Roof can be seen in the background, sitting in the Bible circle. “He was there for forty-five minutes to an hour,” Sanders continued. “We stood up and shut our eyes to say a prayer.” When she heard the first shots, she assumed that the noise stemmed from a problem with a new elevator that was being installed, but then she looked at the defendant. “I screamed, ‘He has a gun!’” she said. “By then, he had already shot Reverend Pinckney.” Roof began firing randomly. At one point, he paused to ask Polly Sheppard, a seventy-two-year-old retired nurse, if he had shot her yet. “My son rised up to get the attention off Miss Polly, even though he had already got shot,” Sanders told the jury. “He stood up and said, ‘Why are you doing this?’” She continued, “The defendant, over there with his head hanging down, refusing to look at me right now, told my son, ‘I have to do this, because you’re raping our women and y’all taking over the world.’” She added, “That’s when he put about five bullets in my son.” Sanders lay on the floor, shielding her eleven-year-old granddaughter, holding the girl so tightly that she worried that she might smother her. She went on, “I said, ‘Tywanza, please lay down.’ He said, ‘I gotta get to Aunt Susie.’ ” Susie Jackson, who was eighty-seven, was the family matriarch, Tywanza’s great-aunt on his father’s side. She had been shot, but Tywanza managed to crawl over to her, and reached out to touch her hair, before he died. Sanders began to sob as she recalled her son’s final moments. She’d had a difficult pregnancy with him—the doctors warned that she might miscarry—and she had always thought of his birth as a testament to faith. She had come to think of his death in similar terms. Sanders told the court, “I watched my son come into this world and I watched my son leave this world.” The family members sat quietly throughout most of the trial, but Sanders’s words left several of them weeping. The sign-language interpreters who relayed the proceedings to Gary Washington, whose mother, Ethel Lance, was among the dead, were crying. The courtroom sketch artist and many of the journalists present paused to wipe away tears. Judge Gergel called a short recess. When the court reconvened, Bruck, during his cross-examination of Sanders, asked if Roof had said anything as he left the church. “Yes,” she re-plied. “He said he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that. He’s evil. There’s no place on earth for him except the pit of Hell.” </blockquote>
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Fergus Bordewich in WSJ on Matthew Karp’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dixies-foreign-policy-1481491167" target="_blank">This Vast Southern Empire</a>.
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Men from the future Confederate states dominated the State Department for decades, as well as the War and Navy departments. Southern-born diplomats and policy makers furthered the interests of slavery, Mr. Karp writes, “not simply to guard their property rights or to solidify their social order, but because they understood slavery as a vital element of global progress.” </blockquote>
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Nicholas Gallagher in WSJ on Susan Carruthers’ book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-birth-of-pax-americana-1482882200" target="_blank">The Good Occupation</a>.
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“Peace is hell,” Harry Truman told the Gridiron Club in December 1945, riffing off William Tecumseh Sherman. Only three months after V-J Day, Truman was under fire from all sides. Progressives thought the U.S. was needlessly antagonizing the Soviet Union by keeping vast standing armies in Europe and Asia – perhaps, they suspected, with an eye towards empire. Remnants of the old isolationist right also felt the country had no business maintaining a mighty presence abroad. Liberal internationalists embraced a transformative vision for a post-war order under the aegis of the United Nations, but there weren’t enough of them to govern. The president’s biggest headache came from average Americans who had fought their way across France and the Pacific but were severely divided over whether to stay and wage peace. Today the occupations of Germany and Japan are remembered as triumphs. But as Susan L. Carruthers argues in her well-researched new book… the reality was much more complicated – and darker – than the legend. </blockquote>
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Rosa Brooks in WSJ on John Ferejohn & Frances Rosenbluth’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on-war-1483741787" target="_blank">Forged Through Fire</a>.
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The authors walk the reader through 2,500 bloody years of Western history, from the Peloponnesian wars to the war in Vietnam, highlighting, again and again, a brutal trade-off: The emergence and consolidation of democracy depends on warfare, and a particular kind of warfare, at that. Here’s the logic: The rich and powerful prefer to remain that way, and are, as a general rule, disinclined to share either wealth or political power with the poor. Only when elites are faced with external military threats do the poor become valuable to the rich. This is so because armies have traditionally required bodies – and plenty of them. </blockquote>
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David Barash in WSJ on Robin Dunbar’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-only-humans-know-how-to-party-1483054115" target="_blank">Human Evolution</a>.
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As group size increases, Mr. Dunbar argues, primates increasingly have a hard time finding both the time and the opportunity to establish and nourish the requisite social relationships. So they developed social approaches, he suggests: pro-social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, singing and dancing, eating together, and – to a lesser extent – religious observances. He notes that these activities correlate closely with endorphin release in the brain, thus they make sense in terms of what evolutionary biologists label “proximate mechanisms” (immediate causative factors) as well as “ultimate mechanisms” (the traits or behaviors that enhance fitness and adaptability). An intriguing observation made by Mr. Dunbar – one of those things that seem obvious only after they are pointed out – is that music in general and dancing in particular are far more likely to take place in the evening than in the daytime. The author connects this fact with the hypothesis that fire served not only to facilitate cooking but also to extend our daily activity cycle so as to accommodate increased, socializing – with music especially prominent in this regard. </blockquote>
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Rupert Shortt in TLS, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/at-the-prow-of-history/" target="_blank">How Christianity Invented Modernity</a>.
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First, is secularism really robust enough to carry the freight once shouldered by the Church in Europe? Ask politicians or NGOs about the functional aspect of human rights, say, and you’re likely to get an assured answer. Ask about the <i>source</i> of those rights, or about deeper questions of truth and purpose, and the replies are coy. Second and more significantly, is Moran’s apparent assumption that we are simply dancing a minuet around the void actually true? Armchair philosophers – many of them far less acute than James or Moran – regularly announce that the centre cannot hold. As Terry Eagleton among others has emphasized, such people can purchase their unbelief on the cheap, usually by setting up a straw man version of religion no thoughtful believer could accept, before felling it with a single puff. To counter that things do <i>not</i> fall apart may take courage, or insight of another sort – or maybe just the innocence of a child. </blockquote>
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Stuart Jeffries in GUARDIAN on Stefan Muller-Doohm’s book, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/15/habermas-biography-stefan-muller-doohm-review" target="_blank">Habermas</a>.
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In 2005, this one-time Marxist rebel met a fellow Hitler Youth, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. It was a meeting, incredibly, of the like-minded, as both struggled to work out how multicultural societies could be held together without an overarching conception of the good (a thought that preoccupied not just Habermas but his US counterpart, the philosopher John Rawls). In this binding, Habermas wrote, religion was necessary: “Among the modern societies only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.” </blockquote>
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Daniel Oppenheimer in WASHINGTON MONTHLY on Mark Lilla’s book, <a href="http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/02/02/not-yet-falling-apart/" target="_blank">The Shipwrecked Mind – On Political Reaction</a>.
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“We want comfort,” Lilla writes. “So from time immemorial we have fabricated myths to convince ourselves that we understand the underlying processes by which the world took on its present shape. Such myths begin with some remote historical Big Bang, after which life unfolds in a meaningful, if not precisely predictable, direction. It is a revealing psychological fact that the most common historical myths with which early civilizations comforted themselves were stories of fated decline, which give temporal reasons for why life is so hard. We suffer because we live in the Age of Iron, far removed from our origins in the Age of Gold. If we are good perhaps one day the gods will smile down and return us to the world we have lost.” Lilla thinks these are false myths, and often dangerous ones. Make America Great Again, to give just most the recent example, is a pernicious myth on many levels. But Lilla also believes they speak to something true in the human experience of modernity, and we ignore them at our peril. More than that, Modern secular liberal society, of the sort Lilla prefers, will survive and flourish only if it’s able to reckon with the insights of those who critique and reject its premises. In fact it’s one of the necessary virtues of liberal society, for Lilla, that it’s capable of reckoning and sometimes even reconciling with its critics and haters. It’s also one of the responsibilities of liberal intellectuals to act as facilitators of this process. </blockquote>
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Patrick Wood in RANGE, <a href="http://www.rangemagazine.com/features/spring-17/range-sp17-technocracy.pdf" target="_blank">Technocracy</a>.
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All physical resources would be carefully and efficiently managed by the technocrat rules, for the good of all the people. Your suitable education and employment would be determined by the scientific analysis of your capabilities and potential. Not unsurprisingly, early technocrats hated politicians, whom they blamed for the inept mismanagement of society. In 1933, one prominent technocrat even urged President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt to simply declare himself dictator in order to dump Congress and summarily set up technocracy in North America. The definition of technocracy appeared in <i>The Technocrat</i> in 1938: “Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.” </blockquote>
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Gregory Clark in WSJ on Walter Scheidel’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-surest-cure-for-inequality-1484948199" target="_blank">The Great Leveler – Violence and the History of Inequality</a>.
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The tale Mr. Scheidel tells is of a 2,000-year process of disequalization that was halted, in his account, only by the violence, misery and disruption unleashed upon the world in the 20th century – by two world wars and the great Communist revolutions in Russia and China. For him, 1914 appears to have been the peak of all inequality in world history, with the top 1% wealth share in the U.S. and Europe averaging 50% of all wealth, compared with ony 35% in 1800. </blockquote>
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Judith Matloff in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-altitudes-violent-lands-1487868078" target="_blank">High Altitudes, Violent Lands</a>.
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To get a sense of their discontent, listen to the World Mountain People Association. This network of highlanders from some 70 countries convenes on scenic ascents every year to pursue “the continuity of mountain identity.” The group was born out of a global forum organized by Unesco in 2000. Its gatherings call to mind the pointed multiculturalism of a Benetton ad – turbaned Tuaregs communing with Sherpas – except that the diversity here is genuine. The group’s leader is Jean Lassalle, a 6-foot-7-inch French parliamentarian from a family of sheep farmers in the Pyrenees. That isn’t exactly life in, say, Chechnya or Kashmir, but his tussles with Paris over grazing lands have, he says, taught him that the challenges highlanders face are all too often invisible to their countries’ leadership. Mr. Lassalle affirms what behavioral geographers and anthropologists have long said: Mountain topography not only yields similar concerns, it breeds similar characteristics. “Mountain people instantly understand each other,” he told me near his high-altitude hamlet. “We don’t view things like those from the plains.” An Ecuadorian indigenous leader in a long braid sitting next to him nodded in vigorous assent. </blockquote>
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James Bartholomew in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/what-explains-the-idiocy-of-the-liberal-elite-its-their-education/" target="_blank">What Explains the Idiocy of the Liberal Elite? It’s Their Education</a>.
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That word ‘educated’. What does ‘educated’ mean today? It doesn’t mean they know a lot about the world. It means they have been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers. They have been taught by people who themselves have little experience of the real world. They have been indoctrinated with certain ideas. Here are some key ones. They have been taught that capitalism is inherently bad. It is something to be controlled at every turn by an altruistic government or else reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile the pursuit of equality is good. These are truly astonishing things for educated people to believe when the past 100 years have been a brutal lesson instructing us that the opposite is the case. The pursuit of equality brought the world terror and tens of millions of deaths along with terrible economic failure. In the past 30 years, by contrast, since China and India adopted more pro-capitalist policies, capitalism has caused the biggest reduction in poverty the world has ever known. You may know that, but it is not taught in schools. Schools actually teach that Stalin’s five-year plans were a qualified success! The academic world is overwhelmingly left-wing and the textbooks spin to the left. They distort the facts or omit them. What the elite have been led to believe is that governments make things better. ‘Market failure’ is taught; ‘public-sector failure’ is not. In my own area, they are taught that everything was awful in 19th-century Britain until governments came along to save the day with an ever-bigger welfare state. The importance of friendly societies, voluntary hospitals and so on is omitted. It is rubbish — left-wing propaganda. But misleading education of this and other kinds rubs off even on those who are not studying history or politics. It comes through in the <i>Times</i>, the <i>Guardian</i> or, in America, the <i>Washington Post</i> or <i>New York Times</i>. In Britain, <i>BBC Radio 4</i> is the continuation of university propaganda by other means. </blockquote>
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Elizabeth Kolbert in NEW YORKER, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds" target="_blank">That’s What You Think</a>.
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Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own. A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two. In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with. </blockquote>
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Matthew Rees in WSJ on Tyler Cowen’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-american-workers-got-lazy-1488240716" target="_blank">The Complacent Class</a>.
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That’s the fear of Tyler Cowen… that America is increasingly defined by an aversion to risk as well as to anything that is unfamiliar or different. He sees a broad swath of the American population losing “the capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people.” This mind-set, he says, has “sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made American the world’s most productive and innovative economy.” Many data points underscore the diminished dynamism of the U.S. economy. Mr. Cowen notes that the entrepreneurship rate has plunged, with start-ups accounting for only 7%-8% of all U.S. companies today, down from 12%-13% in the 1980s. The percentage of workers who switch jobs each year – suggesting the enticement of better prospects more than the forced shifts triggered by layoffs – has declined by nearly 50% in the past 15 years. And innovation is slowing, reflected in everything from falling productivity (for the past eight years, about half the postwar average) to a 25% decline, since 1999, in U.S. patents that are also filed in Europe and Japan (signaling the rigor of such patents). </blockquote>
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Richard Fausset in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/us/atlanta-food-rolling-stores.html?_r=0" target="_blank">One of Atlanta’s Last Stores on Wheels Navigates a World of Change</a>.
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They look like penitents at confession. Mr. Palmer, half obscured in the truck’s interior, calls each of them sir or ma’am. He teaches respect by respecting them first. A teenage boy asks for blunts. “No, sir,” the proprietor said. Mr. Palmer’s truck is among the last of a small and dying tradition in this section of black Atlanta, just west and northwest of downtown. In the 1970s and ’80s, there were rolling stores all over neighborhoods like English Avenue and Vine City, stocked with all of the fixings for a real supper, recalled Greg Morgan, the owner of a brick-and-mortar convenience store in a notoriously rough area called the Bluff. “Fatback, hog maw, pig knuckles,” he said. “It was a thriving thing, and it was a moneymaking thing.” Mr. Morgan has a number of theories as to why the rolling stores are disappearing, including stepped-up regulation from city officials and a hunch that home cooking is yet another dying tradition around here. More broadly, the disappearance of the rolling stores may simply be a result of the relentless and multifarious pace of change in Atlanta, one of those American cities that move and morph at the pace of the nation itself. </blockquote>
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Jason Zinoman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/theater/the-last-act-for-the-ringling-circus.html" target="_blank">The Last Act for the Ringling Circus</a>.
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In response to the criticism, Ringling stopped using elephants last year, sidelining perhaps their most famous stars. (The word “jumbo” derives from the African elephant P. T. Barnum brought to America and showcased in his circus.) Perhaps it’s for the best. The world moves on, even when a link to the past is broken. When I took my young daughter to see Ringling a few years ago, just as my parents had done with me, it was the elephant that captivated her the most. On the way out, I bought a doll of one for her, with the red sign promoting “Greatest Show on Earth” over its trunk. That stuffed toy sat near her bed for years, long after she had lost interest in dolls. When I threw it out to make room for less childish things, I didn’t expect how furious she would get with me. She says she still misses it. </blockquote>
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Jessica Nutik Zitter in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opinion/sunday/first-sex-ed-then-death-ed.html?_r=0" target="_blank">First, Sex Ed. Then Death Ed</a>.
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I am a passionate advocate for educating teenagers to be responsible about their sexuality. And I believe it is past time for us to educate them also about death, an equally important stage of life, and one for which the consequences of poor preparedness are as bad, arguably worse. Ideally this education would come early, well before it’s likely to be needed. I propose that we teach death ed in all of our high schools. I see this curriculum as a civic responsibility. I understand that might sound radical, but bear with me. Why should death be considered more taboo than sex? Both are a natural part of life. We may think death is too scary for kids to talk about, but I believe the consequences of a bad death are far scarier. A death ed program would aim to normalize this passage of life and encourage students to prepare for it, whenever it might come — for them, or for their families. </blockquote>
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Anemona Hartocollis in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/us/college-campuses-title-ix-sexual-assault.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Universities Face Pressure To Hold the Line on Title IX</a>.
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Colleges and universities are in a delicate position, reluctant to dismantle the current system for addressing sexual assault, while viewing the new administration as potentially making it less fraught for them. “Schools must and will continue to support survivors and to be fair to both parties, we are required to do that, but federal guidance can be a straitjacket that forces schools to act in a way that may not further those goals,” said Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group. Mr. Hartle acknowledged that colleges and universities chafe at the public scrutiny that comes with being put on a list of institutions under investigation, even before findings have been made. That list now numbers 309 cases at 227 colleges and universities, including Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., and Stanford. He said the criteria for such federal investigations were “vague” and “ambiguous,” and that colleges would like clarification. “How do we avoid getting sued by the government?” he said. </blockquote>
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Leonore Tiefer in WSJ on Nancy Malkiel’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-quad-went-coed-1479680187" target="_blank">Keep the Damned Women Out</a>.
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The author was a Princeton history professor for more than forty years. She is steeped in Ivy League culture and conducted scores of interviews with movers and shakers she doubtless knew personally. She also seems to have footnoted every scrap of paper she found in the archives. She walks us through committee reports, administrative minutes, campus news coverage and contentious correspondence from all the stakeholders. She describes how various alternative arrangements were considered (such as moving Vassar to New Haven and Sarah Lawrence to Princeton!) and discarded. At each school, the administration worked to develop plans to satisfy the interests of students, faculty and alumni. But getting the buy-in of the last group was difficult because the deep-pocketed alumni were, as Ms. Malkiel gently puts it, “grounded in sentiment and history.” By and large they were outraged – and weren’t hesitant to say so in the bluntest terms. “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient and much, much cheaper,” wrote one anonymous alumnus to the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1968. </blockquote>
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Jennifer Braceras in WSJ on KC Johnson & Stuart Taylor Jr’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/witch-hunt-on-the-quad-1485477033" target="_blank">The Campus Rape Frenzy</a>.
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Messrs. Johnson and Taylor trace the intellectual roots of today’s “crisis” to feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who fundamentally redefined the meaning of the word rape. “Politically,” Ms. MacKinnon wrote in 1981, “I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated,” regardless of whether she consented beforehand. Ms. MacKinnon’s view – that regretted sex constitutes rape – was radical in its time. Today it is enshrined in campus disciplinary codes that define “sexual assault” in an almost limitless fashion. </blockquote>
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Alex Beam in NYT on Laurel Ulrich’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/mormonisms-gender-gap-1484345864" target="_blank">A House Full of Females - Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870</a>.
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How do we know that Smith offered women the coveted priesthood status? Because the church revised its own history about a dozen years later, when Brigham Young censored the official records of Joseph’s Nauvoo pronouncements…. The swashbuckling Young, dubbed “the Lion of the Lord” by his followers, cared less for women’s right than Smith, who was killed by a mob in 1844. Just a year after Smith’s death, Young disbanded the Relief Society as he battled Emma for influence within the leaderless church. “I don’t [want] the advice or counsel of any woman – they would lead us down to hell,” he declared. </blockquote>
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Nancy Segal & Satoshi Kanazawa in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/does-breast-milk-have-a-sex-bias.html" target="_blank">Does Breast Milk Have a Sex Bias? </a>
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There is also some evidence of sex-biased milk production among human mothers. A group of women studied in Massachusetts, for example, produced higher-quality milk, with greater energy, lipids and other constituents, for their sons than for their daughters. Economically sufficient Kenyan mothers, according to another study, produced milk with higher fat concentration for their sons than for their daughters, whereas the reverse was true for poorer mothers. </blockquote>
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Pam Belluck in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/health/pregnancy-brain-change.html" target="_blank">Pregnancy Changes the Brain in Ways That May Help Mothering</a>.
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In the study, researchers scanned the brains of women who had never conceived before, and again after they gave birth for the first time. The results were remarkable: loss of gray matter in several brain areas involved in a process called social cognition or “theory of mind,” the ability to register and consider how other people perceive things. What might the loss mean? There are three possibilities, said Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the study. “The most intuitive is that losing gray matter is not beneficial, that later on there may be negative consequences.” Or, he said, it could be just a “neutral” reflection of pregnancy-related “stress, diet, lack of sleep.” A third possibility is that the loss is “part of the brain’s program for dealing with the future,” he said. Hormone surges in pregnancy might cause “pruning or cellular adaptation that is helpful,” he said, streamlining certain brain areas to be more efficient at mothering skills “from nurturing to extra vigilance to teaching.” The study strongly leans toward the third possibility. </blockquote>
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Pam Belluck in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/health/abortion-mental-health.html" target="_blank">Abortion Is Found to Have Little Effect on Women’s Mental Health</a>.
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The study, published on Wednesday in <i>JAMA Psychiatry</i>, found psychological symptoms increased only in women who sought abortions but were not allowed to have the procedure because their pregnancies were further along than the cutoff time at the clinic they visited. But their distress was short-lived, whether they went elsewhere for an abortion or delivered the baby. About six months after being turned away from the first abortion clinic, their mental health resembled that of women who were not turned away and had abortions. “What I think is incredibly interesting is how everyone kind of evens out together at six months to a year,” said Katie Watson, a bioethicist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “What this study tells us about is resilience and people making the best of their circumstances and moving on,” she said. “What’s sort of a revelation is the ordinariness of it.” </blockquote>
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Thomas Fuller in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/san-francisco-children.html" target="_blank">San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone? </a>
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As an urban renaissance has swept through major American cities in recent decades, San Francisco’s population has risen to historical highs and a forest of skyscraping condominiums has replaced tumbledown warehouses and abandoned wharves. At the same time, the share of children in San Francisco fell to 13 percent, low even compared with another expensive city, New York, with 21 percent. In Chicago, 23 percent of the population is under 18 years old, which is also the overall average across the United States. California, which has one of the world’s 10 largest economies, recently released data showing the lowest birthrate since the Great Depression. As San Francisco moves toward a one-industry town with soaring costs, the dearth of children is one more change that raises questions about its character. Are fewer children making San Francisco more one-dimensional and less vibrant? The answer is subjective and part of an impassioned debate over whether a new, wealthier San Francisco can retain the allure of the city it is replacing. </blockquote>
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Bryant Rousseau in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/asia/bali-indonesia-babies-nyambutin.html" target="_blank">In Bali, Babies Are Believed Too Holy to Touch the Earth</a>.
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Babies on the Indonesian island of Bali don’t start off life on the right foot — or on the left. That is because a prevalent and ancient custom there says an infant’s feet should not touch the ground for the first 105 days after birth. The practice derives from a belief that newborns are still close to the sacred realm from which they came and therefore deserve to be treated with veneration. Belief in reincarnation is widespread in Bali, where most people practice a local form of Hinduism. A child’s birth is seen as the rebirth of a deceased relative, with ancestors returning as their own descendants. </blockquote>
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John Kaag & Clancy Martin at aeon.co, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-childless-fathers-of-existentialism-teach-real-dads" target="_blank">Dreadful Dads</a>.
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Parenting authentically also involves coming to terms with what children are really like. They are not angels or hellions, sweethearts or monsters: they are little people who, as Kierkegaard suggests, are <i>both</i> angelic and beastly. This banal platitude expresses a deep truth about the human condition, namely that we are the sorts of creatures, perhaps the only ones, who possess radical freedom. Most of adult life is geared to ignoring this aspect of human nature, and modernity sets artificial constraints on behaviour, pretending that these constraints are God-given. Of course, for an existentialist, as for a child, all of this is nonsense – nothing is God-given. The boundaries that define civilised life are, more often than not, self-imposed, which is to say radically contingent. A child knows, in a way that most parents intentionally forget, that the range of life’s possibilities is always profoundly open. And the difficulty of life is to choose for oneself which possibilities should become actual. </blockquote>
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Amy Harmon in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/health/human-gene-editing-panel.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Human Gene Editing Receives Science Panel’s Support</a>.
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A more pragmatic concern driving the committee was the likelihood that the new technology would be adopted in countries like China, where some pioneering research on editing human embryos — without the intent to gestate them — has already occurred. “If we have an absolute prohibition in the United States with this technology advancing, it’s not like it won’t happen,” Ms. Charo said. But opponents of human germ line editing say that is not a reason to take a big step toward what they fear will be an inevitable push to engineer traits like strength, beauty and intelligence, perhaps eventually creating a dystopian social divide between those who can afford enhancements and those who cannot. </blockquote>
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NEW CRITERION, <a href="https://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/-i-Cultural-backwash-i--8591" target="_blank">Cultural Backwash</a>.
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On January 19, Mary Katherine Ham reported in <i>The Federalist</i> on a cultural hall of mirrors. Back in 2014, Ivanka Trump, now the new First Daughter, had posted on Instagram a picture of herself getting ready for an event. She sits in a white robe, iPhone in hand, in front of a mirror while a stylist does her hair. Enter Richard Prince, an Artist™ whose medium is “appropriation art,” i.e., other people make the stuff, he “appropriates” it, exhibits it, and gets paid for it. An exhibition of work (it would not be quite accurate to say “his work”) in 2014 consisted mostly of enlarged versions of other people’s Instagram pictures. If you are wondering how appropriation—Communist regimes call it “expropriation”—differs from simple theft, you are not alone. As Ms. Ham notes, Prince, a certified “Controversial Artist,” has been sued by artists whose work he has stolen, er, appropriated. But if Prince displays an imperfect appreciation for the distinction between meum and tuum, he seems to have a lively appetite for lucrum. For a fee of $36,000, Ivanka Trump commissioned Prince to make an enlarged version of her own Instagram selfie. She then posed in front of the picture and posted it on Instagram. “There’s post-modern and poster-modern,” Ms. Ham observes, “and then there’s postest-modern.” </blockquote>
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Jack Nicas in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-tops-1-billion-hours-of-video-a-day-on-pace-to-eclipse-tv-1488220851" target="_blank">YouTube Notches Global Video Milestone</a>.
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YouTube viewers world-wide are now watching more than 1 billion hours of videos a day, threatening to eclipse U.S. television viewership, a milestone fueled by the Google unit’s aggressive embrace of artificial intelligence to recommend videos…. It represents a 10-fold increase since 2012, YouTube said, when it started building algorithms that tap user data to give each user personalized video lineups designed to keep them watching longer. Feeding those recommendations is an unmatched collection of content: 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, or 65 years of video a day. </blockquote>
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Ryan Adams in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/arts/music/ryan-adams-the-first-time-i-was-rattled-by-a-heckler.html" target="_blank">The First Time I Was Rattled by a Heckler</a>.
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By the time I got there, I was so angry. I felt humiliated, but what else could be done? Either way I had lost something. Unlike a more seasoned comic or musician, I didn’t have the experience to ignore a situation like this, or to use wit to turn it around. I felt a kind of disappointment and disillusionment that I had never known — and it was in front of a thousand-plus people. As I approached the heckler’s wooden pew, I was shocked. He was only a few years older than me. Unshaven, bleary-eyed. He had on a baseball hat and seemed so drunk that his limbs hung from his sides like a broken doll. His eyes were like two poached eggs waiting to break. The anger left me, and I instantly felt bad. No one was there for this man. No one stopped him. I said, “Hey man, if you were trying to ruin the show you succeeded, but I need to try and finish this — it’s my job.” I pulled out two $20 bills and said: “Here is your money, please take a taxi and leave here. Go home and take an aspirin. Please. Leave.” I walked back to the stage. People applauded. The fourth wall was destroyed in the worst possible way. </blockquote>
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Dominic Green in WSJ on Martin Torgoff’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ruins-beneath-the-shrine-of-the-1960s-1485549280" target="_blank">Bop Apocalypse</a>.
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In Young, Kerouac saw a modern American counterpart to Baudelaire’s poet maudit, the “cursed poet,” doomed by bad luck and a lack of recognition. “You can hear Lester blow and he is the greatness of America in a single Negro musician,” he wrote in the first draft of <i>On the Road</i>. …But Kerouac was a white writer, trying to create a “New Vision” that adapted a European art tradition to modern America. Young was a black musician trying to make a living in night clubs. A few months after Kerouac met Young, the U.S. Army conscripted Young. Diagnosed with epilepsy, syphilis and “chronic alcoholism and nomadism,” he was imprisoned at Fort Gordon, Ga., then dishonorably discharged. He never recovered. Kerouac did not write about Young’s persecution and decline. Instead, he idealized the pre-Army Young. </blockquote>
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Sarah Boxer in WSJ on Michael Tisserand’s book, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-comic-strip-of-the-20th-century-1480717473" target="_blank">Krazy</a>.
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Starting at age 10, George Herriman became a white guy born in California. He never looked back. His parents enrolled him in an all-white school, where he studied “grammar, elocution, ancient and modern history, natural philosophy, mathematics… astronomy, metaphysics, Latin, and Greek” – subjects that he would draw on liberally for “Krazy Kat.” …Mr. Tisserand relays this story largely by documenting Herriman’s dozens of failed comics and recalling the picaresque tales of his newspaper friends, who “celebrated a hard-brawling immigrant America” and were known as the “Sports.” Herriman, a self-effacing cut-up, never revealed his roots to anyone. His friends called him “George the Greek,” and he took to wearing a hat to conceal his kinky hair. </blockquote>
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Jonny Whiteside in LA WEEKLY, <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/music/50-years-ago-the-wah-wah-pedal-was-born-in-a-hollywood-hills-garage-7767475" target="_blank">50 Years Ago, the Wah-Wah Pedal Was Born in a Hollywood Hills Garage</a>.
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“I had a nice garage studio at my place in the Hollywood Hills,” Casher recalls. “One day, Frank Zappa knocks on my door and says, ‘I hear you have a good studio.’ I’m looking at him, with the beard and the hair, wondering who he was.” Zappa was on assignment to do a song for Roger Corman’s 1966 sci-fi flick <i>Queen of Blood</i>, and he needed an out-of-this-world sound. “Frank brought [actor] Florence Marly in, she’s singing these really wild lyrics, ‘Space Boy, Space Boy, sex without soul,’ and I thought it’d go nowhere fast. “I started overdubbing my parts, and Frank says, ‘Make it as spacey and weird as you can.’ So I got my oscillator out, and soon the sounds were whizzing by, really weird and wild. And then Zappa says, ‘Can I overdub the drums now?’ And I thought this wacko is going to screw up everything I just did. In one take, he did it, it was perfect. We hit it off, and he invited me to join his band.” Soon Casher was leading a double life, doing morning sessions for the squares who watched Autry’s <i>Melody Ranch</i> and at night sitting in with Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Whisky a Go-Go. “So I was doing the Hollywood music business from A to Z,” Casher quips. </blockquote>
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Maria Bakkalapulo interviewed at Qantara.de, <a href="https://en.qantara.de/content/street-punk-banda-aceh-a-film-documentary-stage-diving-from-meccas-verandah" target="_blank">Stage-diving from Mecca’s Verandah</a>.
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It all began in Jakarta, where I would go to insane punk gigs where people from all economic levels would thrash and stage dive to their heart′s content. What really inspired me about punks in Indonesia was how it allowed the marginalised to find a community, a purpose and identity. On the rough streets of Jakarta, it gave them protection and friendship. At the end of 2004, I went to Banda Aceh to cover the devastating effects of the tsunami. I followed events there for years after, travelling back from time to time to work on stories. Then the 65 punks were arrested in December 2011, had their mohawks shaved and were forced to bathe in a lake because they were seen as unclean. Our film ″Street Punk! Banda Aceh″ talks about the evolution of this community and where they are now. </blockquote>
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Karen Crouse & Seth Berkman in NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/sports/olympics/south-korea-winter-games-2018-hockey.html?_r=0" target="_blank">South Korea, Next Olympics Host, Went Shopping in North America to Build Its Hockey Teams</a>.
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Tyler Brickler, a Chicago native whose mother is from South Korea, is in the process of acquiring his citizenship. Brickler, 26, was invited to a national training camp in South Korea during his senior year at SUNY Geneseo and signed out of college with the Asia League, his interest whetted by the possibility of an Olympic berth. “It is a very weird situation for me, for sure,” Brickler said before a home game in February in the northern Seoul suburb of Goyang. “Playing in North America, I was sometimes considered the Asian player on the team, but when I came out here I’m considered the American.” He added, “I might not look it fully or speak it, but no one can take away the fact that I have Korean blood from my mother.” Marissa Brandt, who played at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., will be a defenseman on the women’s team, whose roster is about 20 percent North American. She was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family. “When I was in the States, I didn’t want to be Korean, I wanted to be like everyone else,” she said. In the summer of 2015, she traveled to Korea for the first time since her adoption to attend a hockey camp and was transformed. “It was definitely an eye-opener,” said Brandt, who now wears her Korean name, Yoon Jung Park, on her jersey. “Coming back, I am Korean.” ...The sport still operates largely in a vacuum in a country that is crazy for speed skating and figure skating. At a coffee house two blocks from Anyang Halla’s rink, a longtime resident, huddled at a table with two friends, looked up from his hot drink with a confused expression when asked about the local hockey team. What hockey team? he asked. </blockquote>
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Ira Stoll in LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL, <a href="http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/commentary-major-league-baseball-s-extra-inning-experiment-ridiculous" target="_blank">Major League Baseball’s Extra-Inning Experiment is Ridiculous</a>.
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Is there anything that better symbolizes everything that is wrong with America today than the proposal by Major League Baseball to change the rules so that extra innings start with a runner on second base? The idea undercuts just about every virtue extolled by parents, teachers, philosophers, religious leaders — patience, industry, hard work, earned success, delayed gratification, respect for tradition. It is, instead, a monument to character flaws such as impatience and laziness. It’s a kind of welfare giveaway for baseball players. They can now wind up on second base not by earning it — by, say, hitting a double, or getting a walk and then stealing second — but simply by being placed there by a baseball commissioner inexplicably eager for games to end as soon as possible after the ninth inning. </blockquote>
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Jason Gay in WSJ, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-sports-column-is-too-long-1487626129" target="_blank">This Column Is Too Long</a>.
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We’ve all read about the NFL’s scramble to cut down on unnecessary delays, and using advertising split-screens and other tricks to try to maintain its position as TV’s top-rated entertainment. The NBA’s looking at similar measures, especially for the final few minutes of its contests, which can drag on like a bad office party speech. Even fuddy-duddy baseball is in. Just the other day, a Major League Baseball general manager, Ross Atkins of Toronto, told MLB.com he’d be interested in exploring 7-inning games. Seven-inning games! Holy Honus Wagner. Don’t tell those baseball traditionalists, or they’ll come chase you in their potato-sack wool uniforms…. Time is a luxury which should be well-spent. Maybe a sport could be that luxury. But you already knew that. You stopped reading this stupid column long, long ago. </blockquote>
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Raymond Pettibon <a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/raymond-pettibon-talks-about-his-journey-from-l-a-s-punk-periphery-to-art-stardom-020717" target="_blank">interview</a> by Paul Laster at <i>timeout.com</i>.
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Q: You depict America as a pretty grim place. Do you think of yourself as a political artist?
A: That’s not for me to say, but I aspire to show that side. I started as a political cartoonist when I was 12 years old, but I grew out of it.</blockquote>
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Joe Carducci <a href="http://sadwave.com/2016/12/joe-carducci/" target="_blank">interview</a> by Ian Henderson at <i>sadwave.com</i>.
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Q: «Stone Male» есть глава, посвященная советскому кино. Насколько органично этот раздел вписался в повествование о ярких мужчинах в кино?
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A: Советское кино сильно отличалось от Голливуда тем, что кинематографисты в СССР снимали фильмы для рабочих, а не в угоду рынку. Образ таких персонажей должен был укладываться в рамки соцреализма, но получившиеся герои часто оказывались «дефектными», более сложными. Процесс превращения российского кино в советское настолько увлекателен, что я думал, мне удастся проследить всю его историю (благо надо мной не довлел ни агент, ни редактор). В итоге я смог сконцентрироваться только на самых известных фильмах, чего, на мой взгляд, недостаточно, потратив на это еще 5 лет и 130 страниц текста!</blockquote>
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Obituary of the Issue
<a href="http://louisebrookssociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/david-shepard-1940-2017.html" target="_blank">David Shepard</a> (1940-2017)
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David's involvement with silent film extends to Louise Brooks, who's now lost 1927 film, <i>The City Gone Wild</i>, he almost saved. In his 1990 book, <i>Behind the Mask of Innocence</i>, Kevin Brownlow wrote about an incident in the 1970s. “David Shepard, then with the American Film Institute’s archive program, had a list of 35mm nitrate prints held in a vault Paramount had forgotten it had. He asked me which title I would select, out of all of them, to look at right away. I said <i>The City Gone Wild</i>. He called Paramount to bring it out of the vaults for our collection that afternoon. The projectionist went to pick it up. ‘O, there was some powder on that,’ said the vault keeper ‘We threw it away.’ … He tried to rescue it, even from its watery grave, but a salvage company had carted it off by the time he got there.” A few years ago, I spoke with David about this incident, and he confirmed its details and expressed his frustration…. Born in 1940, David had a lifelong love of film, having devoted most of his life to film preservation. Through teaching and scholarship, through his company, Film Preservation Associates, through his ownership of the Blackhawk Films library, and through his film and video restoration efforts, David had long worked behind the scenes helping save early films. Just as importantly, David made these films available to the home video market, first through laserdisc and VHS formats, and more recently through high-quality DVD releases "where the clarity and beauty of these early motion pictures can really be fully appreciated." </blockquote>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-6078730018223724262016-11-27T14:05:00.000-08:002016-11-30T09:50:32.870-08:00Issue #149 (December 1, 2016)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<BR><BR><B>East Mid-town</B><BR>
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<br> Photo by Joe Carducci
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<B>Know It Alls vs. Know Nothings</B><BR>
Joe Carducci
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I was going to call this, “What We’ve Learned,” listing what ought to have been learned, if not in Iraq then certainly in Egypt once the military recouped power after two years of the Muslim Brotherhood’s democratically elected pogromchik – Coptic citizens standing in for the long expelled Jews of Egypt. The West’s official protest for the vanquishing of democracy in Egypt barely rated a half-hearted whimper. The evidence of learning was clear if unspoken: Muslim societies are best governed by dictators. This is unspoken because the West continues attacking the Syrian regime though now its unsure it wants Bashar Assad to actually fall! But the geopolitical machinery once set in motion grinds on, the pride of the Know-It-Alls of the U.S. and E.U. deeply invested in the idea of his fall, or in denying Putin his broken clock’s credit in being correct in this instance.<P>
Likewise now in Turkey: Which western states, or eastern ones for that matter, are really pleased that the military coup against freely elected President Erdogan failed? And further I was going to go back and tick off what-all therefore need be reconsidered: Bush I’s Gulf War where he organized a UN-full of allstar coat-holders (including Assad’s father), and even Jimmy Carter’s shove to the Shah of Iran in light of the Shiite furies thereby unleashed which triggered the battle of Mecca and the Iran-Iraq War and the usual Lebanon crises. But when the Democrats in full conviction that the Iraq War was the worst catastrophe of all time can proceed nonetheless as they have in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen… one wonders whether the only issue for the centrists of each party is who directs the catastrophes.<P>
The point to underline might be how our political discourse, run between two necessarily compromised political parties, and overseen by a willfully compromised news media directed by the leading cement-heads of institutions which believe themselves political players (New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and assorted Academia nuts), enables us to avoid learning much of anything. The reading-writing-talking class’ obsessive concern with the maintenance of a linguistic etiquette that handily bakes in their own proposed solutions, succeeds mostly in chasing more and more of the electorate outside of shrinking polite society. Their reflexive inflation of their opinions to profound objections is just the collegiate set seeking to enforce working class silence. To the sophomore what needs to be true is true; its a simple matter of lingo mastery to make it so. In fact, polite society can’t account for America’s improved race relations so its burns much energy pretending things have gotten worse.<P>
Real existing racial accommodation occurred here on the factory floors, in the military, in sports and popular culture and had nothing to do with politesse. I have a 96-year old aunt who grew up on the northwest side of Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s, had ten kids whose youngest daughter divorced a jerk and then married a black guy they liked and had three grandkids they love. Talking about life in Chicago, certainly the capital of working class America not to mention capital of black America, she put it succinctly: “Nigger, kike, polack, dago, kraut… that’s just how we talked.” My cousins were older than me so we learned things over at her house like how to ride bikes or how to have a firecracker war. It was where I first heard the word “nigger” and having no idea what it meant I went with my onomatopoetic sense that it must be something like a booger. My uncle like any Chicagoan threw the aspersions around because he was seeing and dealing with all kinds of people in the city; in fact he had played professional basketball with black guys in the pre-NBA leagues. The point is all of this tribal roughhousing within a dynamic economic culture changed Americans. And Europe is currently failing to accomplish racial or ethnic accommodation with merely more rules, regulations and etiquette – more lying etiquette! Sweden could once lecture us about race relations because they had zero racial incidents, now Swedes may come to accept Polish plumbers only because Muslim immigrants are such unmitigated trouble. And within Swedish society it is the working class who must deal with these immigrants while an elite ushers more and more into the country to the huzzahs of Davos, the E.U., and the U.N.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVxoQwWiZxsr8k-ffsw0eYxO7x1k7kz7Hh0d4NQinVm5N9h-YlAuqQFFSyyz6lYcpiEfwa_r_jmbOBJDE7Iy8chhCN7dOL2ZghM7TSCUFOiaSgAlBMsSDVT_CmUW3VXSyMPdDgthqf3NO/s1600/NV-daviddegnar-Nov27-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: .5em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVxoQwWiZxsr8k-ffsw0eYxO7x1k7kz7Hh0d4NQinVm5N9h-YlAuqQFFSyyz6lYcpiEfwa_r_jmbOBJDE7Iy8chhCN7dOL2ZghM7TSCUFOiaSgAlBMsSDVT_CmUW3VXSyMPdDgthqf3NO/s320/NV-daviddegnar-Nov27-1.png" width="320" height="213" /></a></div> We forget that the case for the Iraq War was pretty convincing: chronic middle east bloodshed would become nuclear at some point; before that why not collar those nations with democracy where the citizens might restrain future strongmen with delusions of anything but constituency service. In this regard I remember either Vice President Cheney or Bill Kristol saying at one point that Iraq was about Egypt, Cairo being the capital of Arab culture. So finally Egypt does democratize – the perfect called bankshot. The western newsmedia finds images of the uprising which <i>pop</i>, say the young Egyptian woman shot by David Degner, call her Marianne-of-the-sunroof, holding the Egyptian flag high, which “translate” the inscrutable hieroglyphic Egyptian action into mediated terms. More recently European news reports of thousands of young male refugees setting out to cross the Mediterranean Sea are sweetened with images of the anomalous children or young women somehow found amongst the testosterone-fueled horde. Newsmedia photo editors are highly skilled, but at what?<P>
Linguists and lawyers labor to enable our new administrative class. They are lead by an Ivy League cabal of the credentialed, to rule for the people in our name but unencumbered by tallies of the votes of the great unwashed. The smartest of them clamber up into niches from which they merely criticize the productive sector or the people and their wayward political and cultural choices – good gig! Our political season is administered and interpreted by some permanent interests and they smell like the insiders who bullied the British but also fell short in the Brexit referendum. It’s important to remember that our constitutional democratic republic is not designed to guarantee that children live better than their parents, or that everyone goes to college, or even that the government work hard for world peace. The founding fathers designed the mechanisms of the state to keep it busy against itself so that short-term manias are slowed and cooled and freedom is safeguarded from the state itself. What any individual does with that freedom – smoking, drinking, gambling, reading, working, shirking, spending, investing, saving… – is beside the constitution’s point. If the Federalists and anti-Federalists alike were naïve it wasn’t about the eternal dangers from the state but perhaps about the durability of the common Christian folk culture of that day that might be the necessary precondition for any freedom to work best. Their Christianity was Protestant, and they were very suspicious of Catholicism. The Irish, Polish, Italians, and Bavarian Germans who came over in waves after the 1830s were a big test of the American premise. Certainly at first the Catholic immigrants retarded race relations in 19th century America. In an established Eastern city such as Boston such immigrants were allowed to replicate more of their old world patterns than they were in the roiling new industrial towns from Pittsburgh to Chicago. These became the cities which forged a Catholic variant of American citizenry, but the jury was out until WWII or so.<P>
Catholics joined unions and were part of the New Deal coalition but they remained otherwise conservative, trusting moral and cultural precedent. Black Americans were mostly Baptists, Methodists, or Pentecostals, and had been Republicans until the New Deal made them Democrats, but they too remained conservative and religious. Catholics as a group track pretty well with the swing-voter or Reagan Democrats. Unions typically become parochial interest groups rather than vanguards of social change. Apartheid in South Africa evolved from trade union socialism in order to protect white workers and pay scale from black, largely migrant labor. Capital was tempted to employ black non-union labor so the unions closed up shop to them. Similar forces yielded less draconian outcomes here in part due to our decentralized, federal structure. Capital was free to employ anyone here and growth and American geography made it work. Capital and economic growth pulled blacks north and immigrants over here until the multicultural imperatives of the new class debuted with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Factories no longer forged American citizens out of foreigners; now its up to the popular culture to do it, and in opposition to a counseling bureacracy who sell the immigrants on their right to be wards of the state and advise them, “Never change,” since America is now a mosaic, not a melting pot.<P>
The administrative class took shape here with each war-time centralization of power, from the Civil War, through the Spanish-American War and WWI. The New Deal put it in the driver’s seat and the WWII mobilization and the Cold War locked it in place. WWII had leveled the production capacity of the industrial world except for the United States. It should be no surprise that the Obama administration found many new wars to its liking – the center-left has profited from every war’s further eroding of the constitutional check on our state. America could usually outbid Russia for overseas Cold War allegiances. Ultimately the currency paid to our allies was easier access to the American market. Even nominally free trade must be administered after all, and fees and tariffs charged, regulations enforced. Those who made these trade agreements for America consigned whole regional industries to the scrapheap of American history: textiles, garments, steel…, to fend off Communism in Central and South America, Northeast and Southeast Asia, Western Europe, the Middle East…. Americans got cheaper products but had to pay for them from a store of inherited wealth as the job base withered. In the Soviet Union the lives of Russians were cheered by sudden access to Cuban sugar, Nicaraguan bananas and Ethiopian coffee but their empire was being fully impoverished as they spent first the Tsar’s money, then the Church’s money, then their war booty, whereas our alliances were enriching this nation, but also hollowing out the working class. Aside from the elite, only the public sector seemed to thrive; perhaps embarrassed they began to make even more extravagant claims their work, as if should the Republicans eliminate the Departments of Education, Energy, and Commerce, we would no longer have education, gasoline, or business of any sort.<P>
American decadence probably began with Ralph Nader’s campaign against GM’s Corvair. Detroit made plenty of small gas-efficient vehicles before the lawyer-driven liability revolution made it unwise to continue. Then just as the baby boom’s daughters began to go to college or work they found only Japanese imports fit their needs. As a salve to geopolitical free-riding the manufacturing of foreign cars began to be relocated here from Japan and West Germany in the 1980s but mostly in southern states to avoid the union costs and restrictions of the industrial midwest. The American manufacturers had to right-size or die under this pressure. Michael Moore made fun of GM in his “Roger and Me” doc but CEO Roger Smith was actually his kind of guy, running GM for its administrators, its workforce and salesforce, at least in the short term as the unwieldy behemoth tipped into a death spiral that Ross Perot made his name by calling out. Smith’s successor was hardly the Chainsaw Al required but the U.S. government stepped in and prevented the marketplace punishment that would have right-sized the American auto industry naturally. Chrysler was also bailed out, and so the one healthy American manufacturer, Ford, was effectively punished via the propping up its incompetent competitors. The WWII bubble burst.<P>
This crux, where an increasingly pretentious state meets and directs private corporations, is essentially fascism. The state no longer nationalizes production outright but seeks to steer corporations, while leaving any liability in place for old time’s sake. Further we can see the state’s drive to tax, regulate, and direct a corporation’s existence to the point at which it begins to require state subsidy to survive. The state does recognize a single salutary societal role for an enterprise, as employer. This is perfect socialist stasis from the new class’ perspective – a vampire feeding on a zombie. Only competition from beyond the borders monkey-wrenches a perfect closed system. Globalization seems to the center-left the true test of seriousness and an excuse to cash in, but it means something different to the E.U. project than it does to us. And now if the Clintons are out of the way the Democratic Party looks set to re-McGovernize. It seemed odd to me that the party with 17 candidates for the nomination was considered broken and the party that allowed the Clintons to wire up a coronation was healthy. At least until the day after.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3uRAKcq0cVVzQIpoTbLMfUMoHtTNw_xPD4VrR4lcM3wU4gujixP_LEFvv-iG25jBHp4qbSsW6Cmn10xfB9myxX5wd3bN4lrBd9Xk9yz4jmUOsFzzwHELNhAR71a_cVoNTYCNi1yZ6VwbM/s1600/NV-Trump-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3uRAKcq0cVVzQIpoTbLMfUMoHtTNw_xPD4VrR4lcM3wU4gujixP_LEFvv-iG25jBHp4qbSsW6Cmn10xfB9myxX5wd3bN4lrBd9Xk9yz4jmUOsFzzwHELNhAR71a_cVoNTYCNi1yZ6VwbM/s400/NV-Trump-small.jpg" width="400" height="263" /></a></div> We don’t let police departments determine how they will police us, but cops are the only public sector employees who aren’t granted a dispensation for self-aggrandizement. Most government agencies now write laws which aren’t passed by any legislature of representatives of the people, and the Supreme Court sleeps. But the new class mistrusts and disrespects the police as members of the working class; with this affectation the new class defines itself. They see themselves well above the working class in sensibility though they do not consider themselves middle class. Marx at his most rigorous allowed that classes could only pursue their own interests; the industrial proletariat was the new class then. Marxism leaves the intelligentsia, no less the active revolutionaries as pursuing what, for whom? Hannah Arendt conflated them in retrospect as a new leisure-class! Lenin, being impatient, had decided that this perverse, pretentious leisure-class of busybodies had to assert a vanguard position to lead the dim-bulb working class to its fated socialist paradise. This vanguardism is the malady our Know It Alls still suffer. But Marx’s economics was socialism’s Gordian knot preventing a real world application. Remember, Marx’s Economics had Capitalism doing all the heavy lifting dirty work mulching ancient feudal patterns, leaving Socialism to show up after the fact in a white hat. Lenin and Stalin sniffed out that all that mulching was the fun part of historical materialism. Marx tried to ground an earlier naïve back-to-nature Socialism in economics, a science rather than wishful thinking.<P>
Today race and occasionally gender are the Left’s skeleton key to open and recode America’s black box, its constitution. All recent permutations of post-Marxism, call it Late Socialism, were hard to trace and keep in mind until pre-modern, tribal, biological man showed up again in the form of Islam in the west. There is nothing like Know Nothings-of-color to really knock Know It Alls-of-pallor for a loop. The 9-11 attacks made me think three things: one, that the government would have to get out of some of its oversight responsibilities so as to do a much better job at minute-by-minute security around airports and borders; two, conservatives would be reminded how okay they were with much of the liberalized sexual and cultural patterns in the west as they contemplated the demands of Islam, and three better to build along the ground like the Pentagon than to build straight up. But for Know It Alls multiculturalism would easily trump feminism or liberalism in their world of politics. It seems long ago indeed when the Muslim nations joined with the Vatican and assorted fundamentalist Protestant faiths to stop a U.N. abortion rights push at a 1994 world population conference in Cairo.<P>
In the 19th and early 20th centuries Industry needed workers and the American state wanted settlers. The high, even double-digit growth rates required large-scale immigration and internal migration from farms to cities. But at each correction the government increasingly made the mistake of trying to do something about economics. Today “centrist” economists ready us for low growth yet they and their party seek more immigration, even that which eludes their administrative law. <i>Cui bono</i>, Native Americans? Blacks? Hispanic Americans? Mexicans themselves are a special case and they look a pretty good deal for America next to the Muslims where even the first generation American-born come with a culture that provides an auto-destruct button that is the accepted way for wayward young men and women sinning in the west to get right with Allah in a flash. Know It Alls point to such Muslims’ very American births so as to count these bloody acts of terrorism as good old American violence rather than Islamic terrorism. The Know It Alls posit that returning illegals or “dreamers” to Mexico might be some kind of fate worse than death. If that is so and the border must be open than they are one half-step from arguing for the annexation of Mexico, rather than any kind of Reconquista, as La Raza comprendoes it anyway. Nafta my ass, Washington D.C. could hit the real staffing-up bonanza to administer the Estados Unidos Mexicanos, I dare say.<P>
The Know Nothings accept tradition and American reality as their families have known it. They do not understand the Know It Alls but they do know bullshit when they smell it. The race-mongering of the Know It Alls has in mind a numbers game that tells them they will subdue the Know Nothings once and for all when they can deliver the future to a majority of color. If this occurs under a Republican his regime will be referred to as a white minority government, an illegitimate occupation, even if Mexican-Americans end up joining their fellow Catholics as swing voters. The Know It Alls deny American exceptionalism or the country’s special providence or unique history. They behave as vicarious ex-pats in their identification with European elites who seek to offload the historical crimes of the white race onto America. The same America whose revolution succeeded where European revolutions failed. The U.S. remains in the dock for slavery, rather than the European powers, the Arab world, or the African tribes. European Know-it-alls are far dumber on the educated-beyond-their-intelligence scale than are American elites who do have, despite themselves, a practical American ingenuity. And European Know-Nothings are far more insular and dangerous than their American counterparts. In this country with these choices you have to go with the Know-Nothings because you just cannot grade a Know It All on a curve.<P>
Certainly the United States owes some negotiable amount of consideration to those black Americans whose ancestors were slaves, and to Native Americans. The Know It Alls actually steal this due consideration from its rightful recipients when they act as if America owes the same programs or payouts to others of color or to genders 2 thru 5. Academia, the media, and the Democratic Party are particular offenders in this regard. Every immigrant allowed in or who steals in is a new competitor for jobs and drives wages downward. Black voting behavior suggests they have given up on the private sector and are resigned to government employment or assistance. Immigration into a low growth economy probably requires a selectivity beyond the state’s competence; the civil service can’t be fired so they don’t feel this issue themselves. As far as refugee settlement goes, one wonders why there was no talk of airlifting Christians out of Egypt or ISIS-threatened territory. The black box of the state’s immigration algorithm was surely set by Know It Alls.<P>
The new class’ eyes are simply too big for its stomach. That’s obvious enough. But this actually profits them in the upside-down world of public sector particle physics. Our sprawling bureaucracies are rewarded with greater funding and staffing the worse job they do. Mass higher education, tilting toward scarcely useful Liberal Arts hot-house specialties as opposed to engineering and sciences, yields this Know It All pretention rather than anything remotely connected to cultural or historical wisdom. The wisdom of the elders is left for the Know Nothings to share and pass along as popular tradition. (The Kit Wilson link below, “Sentimental Nihilism and Popular Culture,” digs into this phenomenon.) College is less vocational now and the campus center of gravity is no longer found in the old noblesse oblige class or in the working class meritocrats determined to better themselves and the country. Now the center of weightlessness is found in a pretentious yet quite middle class expectation of consumer demands being serviced on a whole ’nother level.
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Amity Shlaes in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/60f98120-ac1a-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24"target="_blank">"The Long History and Uncertain Future of Trump’s Forgotten Man"</a>.
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The Forgotten Man first popped up in the 1880s, in the lectures of an egregiously popular Yale sociologist named William Graham Sumner. Sumner worried that progressive spending programmes would darken the American entrepreneurial spirit and slow economic growth. He formulated a little algebra to capture his Forgotten Man and pounded it into the brains of several generations of undergraduates: “A”, the man at the top, said Sumner, wants to help “X”, the man at the bottom, the poor man. That is fine as far as it goes. “A” may join a wealthy colleague, “B”, so they can work together. But there comes a problem, Sumner posited, when “A” and “B” coerce “C,” an innocent and anonymous third party, into co-funding their perhaps dubious project for “X”. “C”, wrote Sumner, was the Forgotten Man, the anonymous silhouette who does not happen to fall into a specific social class or interest group: “the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of”. When the progressive Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, he put another spin on the Forgotten Man term. Then New York governor, he promised the national government would help “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. That was the poor man, Sumner’s “X”. The key distinction between Sumner’s Forgotten Man and Roosevelt’s was that Sumner spoke generally and Roosevelt targeted a specific constituent for aid. </blockquote>
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Peggy Noonan in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-global-elites-forsake-their-countrymen-1470959258"target="_blank">"How Elites Forsake Their Countrymen"</a>.
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It was as good an explanation as I’d heard. But there was a fundamental problem with the decision that you can see rippling now throughout the West. Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be. Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it. The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.” </blockquote>
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James Payne in THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, <a href="http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=1155"target="_blank">"Government Fails, Long Live Government!"</a>.
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The findings of this vast policy-evaluation industry have been rather consistently unflattering to government. Report after report has found that government programs don’t work the way they should and are riddled with inefficiencies and harmful side effects. For example, economists’ closer look at the 1930s now reveals that Roosevelt’s policies, far from fixing the economic slump, actually made it worse (Roose 1954; Anderson 1980; Best 1991; Hall and Ferguson 1998; Smiley 2003; Higgs 2006; Shlaes 2008). </blockquote>
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Helen Andrews in THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW, <a href="http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_Andrews.php"target="_blank">"The New Ruling Class"</a>.
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Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter. Statistics on the decline of social mobility are not lacking. In 1985, less than half of students at selective colleges came from families in the top income quartile; in 2010, 67 percent did. For those authors brave enough to cite Charles Murray (as Robert Putnam, for one, was not), Coming Apart documents quantitatively the growing tendency of the members of America’s cognitive elite to marry each other, live near each other in “Super Zips,” and launch their children into the same schools, and thence onto the same path to worldly success. Deresiewicz puts this betrayal of the democratic impulse neatly: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.” </blockquote>
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Robert Kagan in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/782381b6-ad91-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24"target="_blank">"An End to the Indispensable Nation"</a>.
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He aims to put America First, which means we are closer to the end of the 70-year-old US world order. Mr Trump, in this respect, is no anomaly. Pat Buchanan rode “America First” a long way against George HW Bush of New World Order fame in 1992; and after the Iraq and Afghan wars and the financial crisis, it became a national phenomenon. Internationalists such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio went nowhere this year; Bernie Sanders joined Mr Trump in attacking global involvement; and Hillary Clinton was hit from all sides for being too internationalist and too wedded to the idea of the US as the “indispensable nation”, the Bill Clinton phrase that encapsulated the thinking of every president from Harry Truman to George W Bush. President Barack Obama was the transitional figure away from that tradition, and Mr Trump’s election is the decisive break. The US is, for now, out of the world order business. This does not mean a “return” to a mythical American isolationism. This powerful, commercially minded nation has never cut itself off from the rest of the world, not even in the 1930s. What it does mean is a return to national solipsism, with a much narrower definition of American interests and a reluctance to act in the world except to protect those narrow interests. To put it another way, America may once again start behaving like a normal nation. A hypercritical Europe, with its own solipsism, has often taken for granted just how abnormally unselfish American behaviour has been since the second world war. </blockquote>
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Nikole Hannah-Jones in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/magazine/trumps-inconvenient-racial-truth.html?_r=1"target="_blank">"On Black America, Trump Isn’t Entirely Wrong"</a>.
<blockquote>
Trump, in turning the usual rhetoric on its head — claiming that black people are living in inner-city hells and should therefore spurn the Democratic Party — has forced progressives, both black and white, into the uncomfortable position of arguing that things aren’t nearly as bad for black America as Trump would have us believe. In the weeks before Trump’s alleged sexual improprieties overtook everything else, writers dashed off thousands of words arguing that the “inner cities” are improving (gentrification!) and that poverty is not just in the inner city but in suburban America too, and that there are lots of middle-class black folks doing just fine, thank you. Writers pointed out that Trump was wrong when he said nearly half of inner-city black children are poor when it’s actually just one-third. If Trump had raised these statistics and said black people needed to simply work harder, these same people would be arguing that candidates needed to be talking about what they were going to do address the systemic causes of devastatingly high poverty and unemployment rates that black Americans experience. And they would have been right. </blockquote>
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Mackenzie Eaglen in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/cutting-troops-but-letting-the-civilian-army-swell-1437692640"target="_blank">"Cutting Troops But Letting the Civilian Army Swell"</a>.
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Another round of pink slips for U.S. troops: On July 9 the Army announced that 40,000 soldiers will be cut from active duty—some involuntarily. This comes on top of the 80,000 soldiers already let go since the Iraq and Afghanistan buildup. At a time of increasing global tension, the American military is smaller than it was before 9/11 at the nadir of the Clinton “peace dividend” drawdown. Yet even as the military shrinks and readiness wanes, the Pentagon’s two civilian workforces—government employees and federal contractors—remain disproportionately large. Since defense budgets peaked in 2010, the number of civilian employees at the Pentagon has grown nearly 6% to 744,000. Similarly, the figure for civilian contractors has ballooned 20% to an estimated 730,000. Active duty military personnel, who number 1.36 million, are now outnumbered by the civilians supporting them—a historic shift. </blockquote>
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Gabriel Schoenfeld in WSJ on Rosa Brooks’ book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fog-of-forever-war-1470698455"target="_blank">"How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything"</a>.
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In a world where our enemies do not belong to armies or wear uniforms—where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus—confusion reigns. Do the laws of war apply, allowing for the liberal use of force? Or must we adhere to the laws of peacetime, which constrict the application of force within a web of legal procedures? “We don’t know,” Ms. Brooks writes, “if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.” We don’t know “when it is acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial.” We don’t know “if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.” Thanks to the haziness of our present situation, Ms. Brooks concludes, we are losing “our collective ability to place meaningful restraints on power and violence.” Decisions taken first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, she writes, “have allowed the rules and habits of wartime to pervade ordinary life.” She cites “the militarization of U.S. police forces,” evident in the proliferation of SWAT teams armed with equipment intended for war zones; the blanket of secrecy thrown over court proceedings; and intensified surveillance that can have “chilling effects” on the exercise of constitutional rights. </blockquote>
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Kimberley Strassel in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/justices-liberal-slush-fund-1449188273"target="_blank">"Justice’s Liberal Slush Fund"</a>.
<blockquote>
It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods. The Justice Department maintains a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries. And surprise, surprise: Many of them are liberal activist groups. The National Council of La Raza. The National Urban League. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition. NeighborWorks America (which awards grants to left-leaning community organization groups, and has been compared with Acorn).</blockquote>
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WSJ: <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-obama-clinton-coal-bailout-1475190767"target="_blank">"The Obama-Clinton Coal Bailout"</a>.
<blockquote>
Democrats have a three-stage strategy when they want to destroy an industry: Pick a politically vulnerable target, then pile on new regulatory costs, and finally demand that taxpayers bail out the victims of the destruction. We’re now in phase three in President Obama’s war on coal, with Democrats demanding that Congress save the United Mine Workers pension fund. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) runs a multi-employer pension plan that has struggled as coal has shrunk under Mr. Obama’s political assault and competition from natural gas. For every worker there are now 10 retirees. Liabilities have exploded as bankrupt companies have stopped paying for their workers and retirees. Benefits are underfunded by $5.6 billion, or about $600,000 per worker, and the pension plan is projected to go broke by 2025. </blockquote>
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<B>Arboretum</B> <BR>
<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXdKTEBNxKy2n-TTPZlEHJsJKxf0OqG1d9zoUmJVO9_JpR5rTN3n7u8YhvbtZ92ebLyo3NElN5EqTy2c-9r7Ih2GS17XUDcR709UUQgwE_trgNtXvqK63PNAgMMp4UykPBqJ5aLrYS1pom/s1600/Oct23-2016arboretum+039-sm-Nov27-1.jpg" width=650 height=488 />
<BR> Photo by Joe Carducci
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<B>The Passing of a Chicago Sports Gestalt</B><BR>
Joe Carducci
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“Chicago is a great sports town; if you could only win here.”
Ben Bentley, <i>“The Sportswriters” WFLD</i>, 1985<P><P>
The pre-war working class style of Chicago sports yielded to television-age baby boomer fans very slowly. That makes our experience with the old venues at that late date (Comiskey Park, Wrigley Field, Chicago Stadium…) particularly rich in retrospect. The old style of sports culture as it existed back in the town’s golden age of baseball, football, boxing, and horse racing in the roaring teens and twenties hung in the air like the tobacco smoke at the Stadium come the third period or fourth quarter. Bentley himself had been a great Stadium announcer of the old laconic style in the years before the big money melodramatic presentation took hold.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9KNRNxfIxB8LH6S6ZbPQIuAA5baZdyk9ec-UHzwSDpA2-_MQzgwuuVh7cJkUfUy6U03yfx13-GbI2aV5BdqWo_-kPzRFvcBEujWKfbwTgLsQAWum0tutTc0tWXGe629oLsUqkRmgBY65e/s1600/carduccis-1964-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9KNRNxfIxB8LH6S6ZbPQIuAA5baZdyk9ec-UHzwSDpA2-_MQzgwuuVh7cJkUfUy6U03yfx13-GbI2aV5BdqWo_-kPzRFvcBEujWKfbwTgLsQAWum0tutTc0tWXGe629oLsUqkRmgBY65e/s320/carduccis-1964-small.jpg" width="320" height="284" /></a></div> The city itself settled into a one mob, one party machine after its last Republican mayor, Big Bill Thompson, left office early in the Depression. The Black Sox who threw the series in 1919 didn’t win another pennant until 1959. Baby boom fans generally were too young to have memories of the Go Go Sox, or even the 1961 Blackhawks Stanley Cup and the Bears 1963 Championship. But those championships often triggered the interest of parents to take their kids to games thereafter, but as pre-videotape live events they barely exist in contemporary memory. It’s the notorious Cubs’ collapse in 1969 that really haunted the baby boom Cubs culture.<P>
The 1969 Cubs were the most perfect reflection of the team’s biggest star, Ernie Banks, through his sunny “let’s play two!” twenty year career. Banks moved from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues to the Cubs in 1953. By 1969 he was a player-coach and two years from retirement was still a kind of pied piper for the baby boom generation of fans. My dad knew an ex-Cub player named Bob Will (1957-63) and we got tickets to a Bulls game in 1969 and before the game Will and my dad were taking me and my brother Matt to the concessions when we could hear someone up ahead. It was Ernie Banks and he was strolling down the concourse announcing to one and all, “The Bulls’re gonna beat the Bullets!” The Bulls were an expansion team and not very good so the Stadium was not crowded. Will had played with Banks and they greeted each other like old friends and we got to meet Ernie Banks. Me and my brothers were allowed to take the train down to Union Station and walk the Loop blocks to catch the elevated to Wrigley Field and we got to see a great double-header against the Mets on June 11, 1967 (we won 5-3 and 18-10: http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN196706112.shtml). My favorite Cub was Billy Williams, Matt’s was Ron Santo and Mark, just ten years old and new to going to games, unfortunately saw the young Panamanian centerfielder Adolfo Phillips hit four home-runs, three in consecutive at-bats in game 2, six total hits, 8 rbis, a stolen base and two diving catches. So naturally Mark picked Adolfo as his favorite player. He was soon traded to Montreal for Paul Popovich.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvK5Qycsw2Rh6sR68YjEmnqRR_0vZk_h33vmk7OfZK4_2WZbI6cHGJx6B3Zycsh21BtVnvRsLbkClcYr5ZZkhK8SmEqNZnCU_ll-eajNcORoKZ6QKOjoem5oKcrJas4Eg6tsDEJ8ftG_Z6/s1600/blackhawks-62logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: .5em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvK5Qycsw2Rh6sR68YjEmnqRR_0vZk_h33vmk7OfZK4_2WZbI6cHGJx6B3Zycsh21BtVnvRsLbkClcYr5ZZkhK8SmEqNZnCU_ll-eajNcORoKZ6QKOjoem5oKcrJas4Eg6tsDEJ8ftG_Z6/s200/blackhawks-62logo.png" width="200" height="162" /></a></div> The Blackhawks’ Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita were young when they won the 1961 Cup. The following year and in 1965 they lost in the finals, though these years are still before the memory of my contemporaries. Hull and Mikita never won another, although they had a run of great contending teams soon after being moved to the new Western Conference in 1970. They feasted on expansion teams but then couldn’t quite get it done the two times they got into the finals in 1971 and 1973, both times against the Montreal Canadiens. (Bobby Hull moved to the expansion league WHA’s Winnipeg Jets in 1972). These two Cup finals losses built on the Cubs’ futility in this period. We watched those finals home games via closed-circuit television at the Berwyn Theater. Lloyd Pettit came into his own as the voice of the Blackhawks on radio and tv but he had begun as just another <i>WGN</i> utility broadcaster doing baseball poorly as Jack Brickhouse’s second.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjHGfZpVBJg0H4nLyEFP_btBBIL71TZYgdLiL9PSx4vTptWWcbdGahjV091UGtXpDYeCtTB1-RsrjLF8VA1ZzGfNUl4evcAQd47C_NAaJuh9UC15acLDtcz757XjPNp9l692QfDVlwRdaV/s1600/Vulgate-Bulls69-small.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: .1em; margin-left: .1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjHGfZpVBJg0H4nLyEFP_btBBIL71TZYgdLiL9PSx4vTptWWcbdGahjV091UGtXpDYeCtTB1-RsrjLF8VA1ZzGfNUl4evcAQd47C_NAaJuh9UC15acLDtcz757XjPNp9l692QfDVlwRdaV/s320/Vulgate-Bulls69-small.png" width="320" height="256" /></a></div> Also in the early seventies the Bulls were suddenly a great team. They were coached by Dick Motta and featured Bob Love and Chet Walker plus guys who went on to be NBA coaches themselves: Jerry Sloan, Bob Weiss, Norm Van Lier, and Matt Goukas. But in this era the big man was dominant and team ball could not quite overcome Wilt Chamberlain or Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul Jabbar). The Bulls lost valiant playoff series against Alcindor when he was with the Milwaukee Bucks or Chamberlain and later Jabbar when they centered the Los Angeles Lakers. Jack Fleming was the voice of the Bulls on radio and tv in this period. Ultimately just more gut-check Chicago sportsfan steeling. But for what?<P>
The White Sox had some great players I remember from the mid-sixties on: Moose Skowron, Luis Aparicio, Carlos May, Bill Melton, Walter “No Neck” Williams, Hoyt Wilhelm, Tommy John, Wilbur Wood…. I remember when knuckleballer Wood was put on a half-rotation where he pitched every second game, and I remember Dick Allen hitting home-runs off of American League pitching like it was batting practice. Bill Veeck controlled the team after the last of the Comiskey heirs yielded majority share in 1958 but he lost control in 1961 before returning in 1975. Comiskey Park was a great old relic, built in 1910 and certainly salvageable but the owners never even replaced the non-box seating areas some of which didn’t even face the infield. And the team often seemed a retirement home for Yankees wash-outs in a day of less trading of players. My brothers and I went to Comiskey Park for the first time with dad and a fellow doctor and his three sons (Wayne, Dean and Keith) in 1967; they’d bought neighboring lots to build new houses in Naperville so we were soon neighbors and could get up a game of street hockey or football or baseball or basketball in an instant. We drove through the southside to get to Comiskey and I studied the black kids sitting on their stoops. It was our first night ballgame and Veeck’s exploding scoreboard was a great tacky hood ornament for the otherwise dark stately steel structure.<P>
Perhaps the White Sox almost moved in 1970; I don’t remember that but I can believe it. Bob Elson was their radio voice from 1929 until 1970, but the Sox wanted their own television deal where they didn’t come second to the Cubs so they left <i>WGN</i> for <i>WFLD</i> and then <i>WSNS</i>, both UHF channels and hard to receive clearly outside the city. As a kid, though, you could tell that the crowd at Comiskey were men by the sound. The Cubs crowd was more kids and women and the day games with Jack Brickhouse on the mic just reinforced their sunny presentation. You wouldn’t know that Leo Durocher wanted to be rid of Banks. He wrote in his memoir: “He couldn’t run, he couldn't field; toward the end, he couldn’t even hit…. But I had to play him. Had to play the man or there would have been a revolution in the street.” (<i>Nice Guys Finish Last</i>) On the southside, after Veeck returned to Comiskey he hired Harry Caray after he was fired by the St. Louis Cardinals; with Jimmy Piersall as his color man they began the revival of the Sox.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaVSxxiQykcph7jf3A3j3qD8_qdR_1tRk796YANNbEpnI_NRz_qcuMN72GtR-WjOKuNDX-cFP3vViQfCQreLiQ8SFYkDqbLrKxgKk0gC8PqZTeDcJpU7f2lEbhyphenhyphenTFCm5mR6qLavLEL_qij/s1600/NV-Butkus.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: .5em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaVSxxiQykcph7jf3A3j3qD8_qdR_1tRk796YANNbEpnI_NRz_qcuMN72GtR-WjOKuNDX-cFP3vViQfCQreLiQ8SFYkDqbLrKxgKk0gC8PqZTeDcJpU7f2lEbhyphenhyphenTFCm5mR6qLavLEL_qij/s200/NV-Butkus.png" width="148" height="200" /></a></div> Regarding the Bears post-1963 Chicagoans often took comfort in the performances of singular athletes like Gale Sayers, Dick Gordon, Dick Butkus or the defense generally. I remember one stat that contributed to Chicago’s loser compensations: Circa early 1970s the Butkus defense would keep the team in almost any game, sometimes even outscoring their own offense. And the following week their opponents invariably lost their next game – a measure of how they’d been beaten up by Chicago. We didn’t go to football games generally but you always tried to watch them on television. They played at Wrigley up until they moved to Soldier Field in 1970. We did go to see two of the College Allstars games which the Bears played annually at Soldier Field for charity. Old Soldier Field had very shallow plank seating that really put you a mile away from the game; they eventually rescinded its Landmark status and built a modern stadium within the old structure which was built for track and field style competitions.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaE-rgo0PfkdB2O2WU-DoDSw7G1potPwSyf0oO5RO6ERMNw4KO15NpcreVOfigUwgkFTRx-_9Nfm4Lb2Giqilyeop06JixdeFsZH7HvW8rpLYYlUU4XuwVYMXBqGpvKTN2DItWxGX04TS4/s1600/1-NV-blackhawksStadiumwreck-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaE-rgo0PfkdB2O2WU-DoDSw7G1potPwSyf0oO5RO6ERMNw4KO15NpcreVOfigUwgkFTRx-_9Nfm4Lb2Giqilyeop06JixdeFsZH7HvW8rpLYYlUU4XuwVYMXBqGpvKTN2DItWxGX04TS4/s1600/1-NV-blackhawksStadiumwreck-small.jpg" /></a></div> Chicago had once been the business-culture action capital of the country and its growth in the late 19th century had been the prompt for New York’s merging with its other boroughs to maintain its pride of place as the country’s most populous city. Chicago stopped growing in the 1960s, peaking in 1970 and thereafter losing over a million people down to its current 2 million. This too colored the flavor of a disappointment on the far side of bitterness. I got back to the city from the west coast in late 1986 and went to the old derelict parks as often as I could before the Stadium and Comiskey were torn down. Wrigley survived but the Tribune Co. bought the Cubs and installed lights over much resistance. <i>WGN AM</i> had always been a regional clear channel station, “the farmer’s friend”, and now the World’s Greatest Newspaper made its television channel an early cable television superstation. Both of these built on the old team’s greater Chicagoland midwestern fan-base.<P>
The city’s number one White Sox fan, Richard J. Daley, died in late 1976 and the old Chicago stasis began to shift and break apart – both its good aspects and its bad. In sports, however, this could only mean good news! The White Sox in their “Southside Lumber Company” phase hit their way into the playoffs in 1983, the Cubs did the same the next year, before the Bears, suddenly possessed by their “Monsters of the Midway” ghosts, destroyed the NFL in 1985 and won Superbowl XX. The Bulls had drafted Michael Jordan in 1984, and watching the team constructed around him come together for their 8 year run of 6 NBA Championships (1991-93, 1996-98) was a joy unknown in the city since before the 1919 Black Sox.<P>
The Bulls’ run was Chicago’s first taste of winning expectations for one of its teams, something like exists for the Boston Celtics, New York Yankees, Montreal Canadiens, and a few others. The pressure that built from success and the perceived NBA interest in having the New York Knicks play the Los Angeles Lakers in the finals was suddenly released when Jordan decided to go play baseball for the White Sox, whose co-owner Jerry Reinsdorf also owned the Bulls. The sports press was generally derisive about this but it sounded like Jordan loved it in the minor leagues and though he probably had the largest strike zone in baseball he did finally hit well over .300 during his last month before he decided to return to the NBA. Jim Durham was the voice of the first three championships, and Neil Funk from the second run on. The refs did steal one finals from the Jordan-less Bulls but the whatif is, Could they have won eight straight with Jordan with that pressure increasing each year?<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfkm6sOo5syZDAPzM9sEkt0Kq_Y3GOh10-n3pIhHVvyfY7M_cTODiUQwUPbOqq88hCJd2-3hDGQABT7dAmjV1At-8Wxiyu3P8MVELkqVbJsuGjNan9Djhj47YOuDtX136d-t0f9nq0Z_HJ/s1600/NV-Cubs2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: .5em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfkm6sOo5syZDAPzM9sEkt0Kq_Y3GOh10-n3pIhHVvyfY7M_cTODiUQwUPbOqq88hCJd2-3hDGQABT7dAmjV1At-8Wxiyu3P8MVELkqVbJsuGjNan9Djhj47YOuDtX136d-t0f9nq0Z_HJ/s320/NV-Cubs2.png" width="280" height="224" /></a></div> The Cubs got back to the pennant chase but came up short in 1984 against the San Diego Padres. Me and Matt got tickets to game two and sat across the aisle from Bill Veeck in the center field bleachers; he was shirtless and with his peg-leg and eye patch he looked like a pirate and he sat with his brother Ed who looked like a healthier, complete version of Bill. (Veeck had lost control of the Sox to Eddie Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf in early 1981 and so wouldn’t attend Comiskey.) The Cubs won those two home games and then were stoned in San Diego three straight and Veeck had a tumor removed from his lung on the day of that last loss. In 1989 Wrigley got lights; Matt got tickets to Wrigley’s Opening Night and I got tickets to the next night’s game so when the first game got called for rain we still got to see the actual first full game. But they lost that year to the San Francisco Giants in five. They came up short again in 2003 against the Florida Marlins and reinforced talk of being cursed. We were no longer kids but Matt staying in Naperville to practice medicine so he follows the team every year and has developed anti-White Sox and anti-Cardinal prejudices which follow from that.<P>
Some kind of corner had been turned by the city though. The White Sox finally came through in 2005 beating the Angels and then the Houston Astros in the World Series. The way they took every advantage including notably conscience-less capitalizing on bad calls made in their favor really made Chicagoans take notice. But like the Superbowl Bears they didn’t threaten to repeat. The Bulls looked like they might return to the finals with the Derrick Rose-led teams but they plateaued without ever reaching the finals. It was the Blackhawks who built the next dynasty. They’d surprised us and made the finals in 1992 but were swept by the Pittsburgh Penguins; Matt got to use our tickets but the rest of us were in Italy visiting dad’s birthplace. The current Jonathan Toews-led team has won the Stanley Cup every other year since 2010 and may not be done; Mark has been especially excited about this and his kids are all Blackhawks fans – only one of Matt’s four kids is into sports but she has gone right past the Blackhawks-mania to know everything about the NHL. The games are called by Pat Foley who grew up listening to Lloyd Pettit with the rest of us. Matt, Mark and I managed to get into the United Center for a finals game for the first two Cups but it’s not like it would have been in the old building, torn down in 1995. But yeah, Blackhawks Nation is now as full of girls as Cubs Nation is, filling arenas with visiting team cheers to piss off the home fans.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2kFyRY1OCs8T1h8klrC2O41vT3O1sgi8IoBY-15zUpIIG8MZtPfnHyRAaTUHLWOxs0mu91UdSlVAB6zOKFc_OD_lXvyO2q_nr3_KWge6778ZlcUxx-bfE4XEc4KdtMnpCjLZLOeBultCK/s1600/3-NV-MattComiskey1990-2-fix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2kFyRY1OCs8T1h8klrC2O41vT3O1sgi8IoBY-15zUpIIG8MZtPfnHyRAaTUHLWOxs0mu91UdSlVAB6zOKFc_OD_lXvyO2q_nr3_KWge6778ZlcUxx-bfE4XEc4KdtMnpCjLZLOeBultCK/s1600/3-NV-MattComiskey1990-2-fix.jpg" /></a></div> And now the Cubs have won the World Series. Matt and I got to game two in Cleveland and then he got into Wrigley for game 5 and back to Cleveland for game seven. I’m as interested in the parks as the teams but I’m glad I went to Cleveland and saw the Cubs in a World Series. You never know but it could happen again soon, this Cubs team is so deep. The fans around us at the game did not hang on every pitch; in fact many were gone for innings at a time at the concession stands and Matt’s crazy game seven story begs for <i>“After Hours”</i>-like treatment. All the creature comforts and facilities are great in these new stadiums. But if the team wasn’t winning the new owner of the Cubs, Ameritrade scion Tom Ricketts, might’ve been attacked for what’s been done to the bleachers in Wrigley Field. But maybe the younger fans have no taste for derelict early 20th century working class semi-comfort. What we do know is that Chicago isn’t the same city. Every neighborhood is gentrified and the factories are mostly gone with that third million what filled up Denver, Phoenix and points west. The voice of today’s Cubs is Len Kasper, appropriately yuppieish you’d have to say, but not bad all the same. The old <i>Tribune</i> hand Bernie Lincicome writes of the “special rot of winning” that must be contended with now. Kids growing up Chicagoan will now come to their sports teams with utterly different expectations and pretentions. Chicago might even be ready for reform now.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnkv9OGDwbfrG2LrWxH3Enx1vBh9BwyD3qQ-2K-Ac5ypZD45nIQe5_hdx9yXC2Ax3QoX_Cb79qTMnmWi-f502bY2-NBdXImpGu9FJbwMsYvCHlNmXsyiTRWw41mHT69omfDaAyeOJQBwBR/s1600/WS-Mattgame2-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnkv9OGDwbfrG2LrWxH3Enx1vBh9BwyD3qQ-2K-Ac5ypZD45nIQe5_hdx9yXC2Ax3QoX_Cb79qTMnmWi-f502bY2-NBdXImpGu9FJbwMsYvCHlNmXsyiTRWw41mHT69omfDaAyeOJQBwBR/s320/WS-Mattgame2-sm.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div> My youngest brother, Mike, grew up stranded with five sisters separating him and his three older brothers. Our dad was from Bradford, Pa. and was a lifelong Pirates, Steelers and Pitt fan. Mike grew up with cable TV following dad’s teams plus the Penguins. How could you argue for picking Chicago teams to root for when you could follow the teams from Pittsburgh, city of champions? Well now Chicago might warrant that claim. When the 2010 Stanley Cup parade was clocked at two million, I wondered at what a Cubs championship parade might draw and figured I’d never know. Did it really draw five million? Was it really the seventh largest gathering of humanity in history? Just the claim tells you something. Ben Bentley didn’t live to see it, but his statement back in 1985 tells us he had an inkling.
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(photos - Wrigley Field vidcap; Carducci kids by Filomena Carducci, left to right: Joe, Mark, Geri, Matt; 1962 Blackhawks logo; Bulls 1969 roster; Bears middle linebacker Dick Butkus; Chicago Stadium coming down 1995 by Joe Carducci; World Series game 5 scoreboard; Matt at Comiskey Park 1990 by Joe Carducci; Matt at Progressive Field, Cleveland game two)
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Thomas Boswell in WASHINGTON POST, <a href="You knew it couldn’t come easy, but the Cubs are World Series champions"target="_blank">"You Knew It Couldn’t Come Easy, But the Cubs Are World Series Champions"</a>.
<blockquote>
Because this game went beyond the baseball surreal, because it provided forgetfulness and forgiveness for several Cubs who might have been enormous goats, including reliever Aroldis Chapman and Manager Joe Maddon, it seemed to encapsulate the team’s long history of staring into the abyss. Only this time, at long last — it only took a century or so — the abyss blinked. </blockquote>
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Christopher Borrelli in CT, <a href="Ghost of Baseball’s Future Message to Cubs Fans"target="_blank">"http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/ct-cubs-fans-red-sox-borrelli-spt-1024-20161023-story.html"</a>.
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Should the postseason continue to pay off, however, late at night, you will be visited by the Ghost of Baseball Past: You will soar above the Wrigley Field of yesteryear. You will see, the picture is warmer and friendlier. Having not won a World Series since 1908, Wrigley Field has avoided, as Chicago writer Bill Savage noted in <i>ESPN.com</i> recently, a likely move to a colder, contemporary suburban field. You have not traded the charm of your cozy confines for slabs of concrete and a U.S. Cellular Field-like shopping-mall anonymity. There's soul and quirks in these Cubs, a unity forged from endurance. Your failures are still mediocre (not grandiose, like the Red Sox), your hopes are still modest, even Midwestern. </blockquote>
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Phil Rosenthal in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-cubs-jack-brickhouse-spt-1109-20161107-story.html"target="_blank">"Jack Brickhouse, The Overlooked Voice of Cubs Optimism"</a>.
<blockquote>
“I’ve telecast more than 4,800 Cub games,” Brickhouse told the Tribune’s David Condon when it was announced in the summer of 1981 he was passing the mic to Hamilton. “I don’t see how anyone else can ever come close. Yet after all the years, I’m more enthusiastic about baseball than as a teenager broadcasting Peoria’s Three-I League games. And I’ve never regretted the reputation of being a superfan. Occasionally, I criticize, yet basically I’m the good guy. It’s not my nature to nail people. Sure, lots of broadcasters are rough critics. They create controversy more to line their pockets than to safeguard the fans’ interests.” </blockquote>
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Joseph Epstein in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/joy-in-mudville/article/2005223"target="_blank">"Joy in Mudville"</a>.
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Although the decades of defeat are a bit of a blur, for me they will always be characterized by a television commercial in the 1950s that invited fans to venture out to Wrigley Field as to a forest preserve, there to enjoy the sunshine, green field, and ivy-clad walls, have a hot dog and beer, and, while at it – an afterthought – see a ballgame. This was under the uninspiring ownership and management of the Cubs by the Wrigleys, the chewing-gum dynasty. A Churchillian writing a multivolume history of Cubs teams of this period might title the volume The Dismal Years. Not the least dismal thing about them was the team’s television announcer Jack Brickhouse. Brickhouse announced games from 1948 to 1981, providing 33 years of cheerful nullity…. The comedian Bill Murray, who grew up in north suburban Chicago, has recounted as a boy returning home from school, turning on the Cubs game, and listening to Brickhouse put an optimistic gloss on yet another Cubs defeaet to the accompaniment in the background of the echo of straggling fans stomping on empty paper beer cups. Sheer depression. </blockquote>
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Andy Grimm in CST, <a href="http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/family-go-cubs-go-success-a-fitting-memorial-to-steve-goodman/"target="_blank">"A Sweet Chicago Serenade"</a>.
<blockquote>
As the poet laureate of long-frustrated Cubs fans, the late Steve Goodman surely would have been doubly thrilled that his beloved team won the World Series and that his sing-along anthem “Go Cubs Go” finally charted for the first time 32 years after he recorded it, family members say…. They sold the publishing rights this year for Goodman’s entire song catalogue, according to his daughter Rosanna Goodman. “I called it,” Goodman said by phone from her home in Austin, Texas. “We sold it, and I said, “This is the year the Cubs are going to win the World Series.” The singer himself probably never would have made such a bold prediction, according to his widow, Nancy Goodman Tenney…. She said that, although Goodman elaborately outlined his ideal burial in the lyrics for “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request,” he never told his family what to do if the Cubs actually ever won the World Series….</blockquote>
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Canadian television doc, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfeArcOP2Yw"target="_blank">"King of the Hill"</a> follows Ferguson Jenkins and the Cubs through 1972-73 seasons.
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<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/ct-obituary-georgeff-1113-20161111-story.html"target="_blank">"Phil Georgeff"</a> (1931-2016)
<blockquote>
At the outset of his career, Georgeff coined the phrase "And here they come spinning out of the turn …" to enable TV sports announcers to segue into race footage and it became his trademark.
After sending the horses "spinning out of the turn" for the last time, Georgeff and his wife, Bobbi, moved from Villa Park to Fairhope, a small community on the east coast of Mobile Bay.
"My father was excited about watching all the Cubs' games in the playoffs and World Series (on TV)," said Scot, who lives in Oswego with his wife, Cari. "He and my mother stayed up late to watch the seventh game." Indicative of the esteem in which he was held was the furor that followed his firing by one-time Arlington President John Mooney on a Saturday afternoon in August 1982, eight days before the Arlington Million. Mooney, who was in his first year at the track then owned by Gulf & Western, wanted Georgeff to tone down his calls — "save the excitement for the feature race" — and quit using "spinning out of the turn." </blockquote>
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<B>Snowy Range</B> <BR>
<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlXvXoYwrdCYv9HmfBR0z5KDUQrdSuMkQc0m-tGyxA0Lkk032WAZoJzVItuIwBTJVdAsoM8NW_uC7utUjTsp2oMbmwZZEcohSGe0qGto99OISD2RGK6wqxhKblMoagLIOqosVsk-_pXVEa/s1600/oct-3-16-eastofpeaks-3-sm.jpg" width=650 height=488 /></a>
<BR> Photo by Joe Carducci
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<B>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho...</B>
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John Gray in the NEW STATESMAN on <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/11/closing-liberal-mind"target="_blank">"The Closing of the Liberal Mind"</a>.
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Any suggestion that liberal values are not humanly universal will provoke spasms of righteous indignation. Liberals cannot help believing that all human beings secretly yearn to become as they imagine themselves to be. But this is faith, not fact. The belief that liberal values are universally revered is not founded in empirical observation. They are far from secure even in parts of continental Europe where they were seen as unshakeable only a few years ago. In much of the world they are barely recognised. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFyuoGgFTk-7m6v_lV0ViXdsEL5hLpq580bDOIlmhJcyJxGKMEmMYU4paWZA4tg5S6Njw_3rBFlDTKUM8LDx6WdezTnqRbmOuLo6NTe0rZlfgsaguaSBPPijj0nAphoMNQR-K21vikF_P/s1600/NV-grandhotelabyss.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFyuoGgFTk-7m6v_lV0ViXdsEL5hLpq580bDOIlmhJcyJxGKMEmMYU4paWZA4tg5S6Njw_3rBFlDTKUM8LDx6WdezTnqRbmOuLo6NTe0rZlfgsaguaSBPPijj0nAphoMNQR-K21vikF_P/s320/NV-grandhotelabyss.png" width="211" height="320" /></a></div>Christopher Bray in the SPECTATOR on <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/the-frankfurt-school-was-a-place-of-fearsome-seriousness/"target="_blank">"Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School"</a>.
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The Frankfurters could find fascism everywhere. Adorno, a gifted pianist and music critic, saw in his one-time hero Stravinsky’s abandonment of modernist experiment for neo-classicist tonalism what Jeffries calls ‘the arbitrary control of a Führer’. Later in life, says Jeffries, Adorno would claim that an orchestra conductor was ‘the musical equivalent of [an] authoritarian dictator’. As for American mass culture — movies, TV, jazz — that was pure aesthetic tyranny, a put-up job foisted on the masses to prevent them from listening to the late Beethoven that would foment revolution. </blockquote>
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"Grey, grim and glorious" - Alexis Petridis in the GUARDIAN on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/21/im-a-freak-baby-a-journey-through-the-british-heavy-psych-and-hard-rock-underground-scene-1968-1972-review-grey-grim-and-glorious"target="_blank">"I’m a Freak Baby: A Journey Through the British Heavy Psych and Hard Rock Underground Scene 1968-1972"</a>.
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The sleeve notes are packed with horrified reviews from the contemporary music press: “essentially joyless”, “sordid, squalid … the bottom of the bin”, “from the first note, you know you don’t want to hear any more”. [...] A few years later, the predominant style found on I’m a Freak Baby would be streamlined, warped and codified into heavy metal. Others would find their influence erupting elsewhere. In north London, a Pink Fairies fan called John Lydon was clearly paying close attention to the band’s anthem Do It. But these bands’ real spiritual successors would emerge much later, on the other side of the Atlantic. If someone told you that Jerusalem’s Primitive Man or Little Free Rock’s Dream had actually been released not in 1972 or 1969 but on Sub Pop, around the time of Nirvana’s debut album, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. </blockquote>
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Julie Burchill in the NEW STATESMAN on how <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/11/marina-abramovi-turned-attention-seeking-modern-art-form"target="_blank">Marina Abramovic</a> has turned attention-seeking into a modern art form.
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Abramovic, however, was the child of Party elite whose abode was “like an apartment building in Paris . . . a whole floor, eight rooms for four people”, about which she was rightly upset when she discovered that it had been seized from a Jewish family by Nazi occupiers during the war. In the same breath, she criticises her mum’s taste in art: “Later I also realised the paintings my mother put in our apartment were not very good.” It’s hard to say which offends her the most. </blockquote>
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Josh Gray at <i>thequietus.com</i> hails Brant Bjork's indelible contribution to <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/20999-brant-bjork-kyuss-wretch-review"target="_blank">Kyuss' “Wretch”</a>.
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The best thing about listening back to Wretch is hearing Brant invent his signature sound between takes, glancing only occasionally in his wing mirror to watch the band’s early Black Flag pretensions recede into the distance. [...] The premise for Brant’s soon-to-be perfected technique is simple: build a wash of cymbal sound, vary it up enough dynamically to cast the illusion of a never-ending crescendo, but keep it stable enough to function as a sonic highway that the accompanying tussling bass/guitar juggernaut can safely helter down the middle of. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7lJYwhIILwD-RPWlX-bwKHj5h5GFZILBM8CnKAYMhNANXRFah4Q37sdVZigdCIj2jq-Y3JXU8835HznvDDqewsgf_nFiyxtF7rSZ82OHEJ5buRpumzcI1pT_ZjIK3mkteZsNEMR2o1pcq/s1600/NV-KleenexLiliput1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7lJYwhIILwD-RPWlX-bwKHj5h5GFZILBM8CnKAYMhNANXRFah4Q37sdVZigdCIj2jq-Y3JXU8835HznvDDqewsgf_nFiyxtF7rSZ82OHEJ5buRpumzcI1pT_ZjIK3mkteZsNEMR2o1pcq/s1600/NV-KleenexLiliput1.jpg" /></a></div>Loring Kemp at <i>coverourtracks.com</i> on Peter Fischli's sleeve designs for <a href="http://www.coverourtracks.com/single-post/2016/08/16/Nice-Peter-Fischli-and-LiliPUT"target="_blank">LiliPUT</a>.
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For 1979's "You", Fischli opted to design a simple proto Pac-Man graphic, which would become an unofficial logo for the band - appearing on buttons, promo photos and later in another form on the Mississippi Records 4-LP vinyl release. If you look closely at some of the creatures Fischli fashioned for the floral collage on 1983's "You Did It", you can see the open-mouthed motif again. Although the designs for each Fischli single were unique in approach, all reflect the exuberant spirit of LiliPUT's clamorous brand of punk. </blockquote>
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Pete Stennett interviewed at <i>musiclikedirt.com</i> about the history of the Small Wonder Records shop and label:
<a href="http://www.musiclikedirt.com/2013/07/22/pete-stennett-of-small-wonder-records-interview-part-1/"target="_blank">Part I</a>.
<a href="http://www.musiclikedirt.com/2016/04/30/small-wonder-records-pete-stennett-interview-part-2/"target="_blank">Part II</a>.
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Simon Reynolds at PITCHFORK on <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22374-metal-box/"target="_blank">"Metal Box"</a>.
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If you do doggedly listen to Metal Box in accordance with its given running order, what comes across strongly now is its sheer accumulative power as an album. That in turn accentuates the feeling that this is a record that can be understood fairly easily by a fan of, say, Led Zeppelin. It works on the same terms as Zoso: a thematically coherent suite of physically imposing rhythm, virtuoso guitar violence, and impassioned singing. Lydon would soon enough ‘fess up to his latent rockism on 1986’s hard-riffing Album (also reissued as a deluxe box set at this time) on which he collaborated with Old Wave musos like ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker. That incarnation of PiL even performed Zep’s “Kashmir” in concert. </blockquote>
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Tony Rettman interviews <a href="http://greenroom-radio.com/2016/05/09/alan-jones/"target="_blank">Alan Jones</a> at <i>greenroom-radio.com</i> about witnessing the birth of the Sex Pistols and later contributing to Stefan Jaworzyn's immortal Shock Xpress.
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One day, there were a group of guys hanging around in the shop and the next day they were on stage at a pub called The Nashville doing one of their very first gigs and we’re looking at them going “Oh, this is now something that’s happened!” I can remember that first Sex Pistols gig like it was yesterday. It was so unlike anything anyone had ever seen. They were talking to the audience from the stage and waving at us. It was just great. They might have been musically undeveloped, but you could see it was going to go somewhere. </blockquote>
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"Partying with the Germs and drinking with X" - Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen on <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-slash-magazine-book-exhibition-20160719-snap-story.html"target="_blank">Slash</a> magazine in LAT.
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The concept for the loud-mouthed, photo-driven newsprint magazine — whose name was inspired by British slang for urination — was put together over just a few weeks in spring 1977. Its layouts were improvised and its drippy logo was sketched out on a paper bag in 30 minutes. Yet, almost instantly, it became the bible of L.A.’s early punk scene, documenting now-legendary musical acts while they were still in their infancy. (The Screamers, in fact, held their debut performance at Samiof’s Pico Boulevard studio.) </blockquote>
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Dave Hyde interviews Grace Ambrose and Shivaun Watchorn at <i>terminal-boredom.com</i> about the <a href="http://terminal-boredom.com/interviews/MRR/"target="_blank">MRR archive project</a>.
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Tim Yohannan was a record collector. Records were the most important thing in the world to him. That’s why we have 48,000 punk records instead of 48,000 tapes. Manic Hispanic put out a record that he loved, but only on CD. He wanted to own a vinyl copy of it so he paid for a short run of records. Undoubtedly, part of the reason Tim did the magazine was to get free records. He would say that himself! </blockquote>
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Charlie Gates in the PRESS on <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/83057642/when-the-mighty-fall-came-to-new-Zealand"target="_blank">The Fall</a>'s memorable 1982 tour of New Zealand.
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When Marc Riley arrived in New Zealand at Christchurch Airport on August 17, 1982, The Press was there to capture the moment.The photograph of the 21-year-old guitarist from The Fall came to represent the cult British band's brief, but influential tour of New Zealand. The photograph appeared on the front page of The Press newspaper the next day under the headline "Happy Fall Guitarist" and also featured on the cover of Fall in a Hole, the live album that captured the band performing in Auckland. But, the chirpy looking photograph and headline masked tensions within the band. Riley had been in a punch up with the band's singer, Mark E Smith, just weeks earlier and was exhausted after a nearly-month long tour of Australia. The front page photograph only made tensions worse and its appearance over a year later on the live album cover made Smith angry all over again, even though by then Riley had been booted from the band. </blockquote>
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Brad Cohan at <i>observer.com</i>, <a href="http://observer.com/2016/11/the-time-mike-watt-dave-grohl-and-eddie-vedder-jammed-econo/" target="new">The Time Mike Watt, Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder Jammed Econo </a>
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How did you feel about going solo after all those years of being in a band with Minutemen and fIREHOSE?</b>
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Scared. Pretty pants-shitter. No Ed fROMOHIO to hide behind, no D. Boon, no Georgie. Georgie, 14 years! But especially D. Boon and Edward. Both Edward and D. Boon played like, “This might be the last gig.” Those guys, total hard chargers. You could not be afraid playin’ a gig with Ed fROMOHIO or D. Boon or Ig. They are just such strong cats. And now…I’d never even stood in the middle before! The whole thing was a total pants-shitter! But I had to man up and grow a pair, as they say. In some ways, it doesn’t look like nostalgia but a chapter in my music thing.
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<a href="http://metrograph.com/series/series/54/joe-carducci-requiem-for-the-living-picture"target="_blank"><B>"The Ford Brothers – Together Again"</B></a>
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Joe Carducci is at The Metrograph on the lower east side of Manhattan on Saturday Dec. 10 introducing two Francis Ford silent films and two John Ford feature films, followed by a Q&A with noted film writer Nick Pinkerton about Carducci’s new film book, <i>Stone Male-Requiem for The Living Picture</i>.
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Saturday, Dec. 10
2:00 pm <i>The Invaders</i> (1912) / <i>The Quiet Man</i> (1952) 4:45 pm <i>The Bandit’s Wager</i> (1916) / <i>The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</i> (1962)
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<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiH8Tqvp_VKcIiIwOolhxfnpsUmOSFEAB74cHtsHxLgvvM4Dwaog446_11UdB_lBAMqjGZnNdIjdrad7zNOIELRClQviBswqF1L2dG45L22BuEHtb7oRGxcl_ZlPB7Q2lDfePXTJTR08kM/s640/NV-FFordJWVMcBFitzgeraldJF-Quiet-Man-small.jpg" width="550" height="387" />
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(<i>The Quiet Man</i>, left-to-right: Francis Ford, John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, John Ford, front: Barry Fitzgerald.)
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Francis Ford began making movies in 1908 in New York and New Jersey, moved to San Antonio to make better Westerns in 1910 and finally to Southern California in 1911 where he came into his own as an early motion picture director-star. This link to The Metrograph’s in-house publication, issue No. 5, is to an excerpt from Francis Ford’s unpublished memoir about the early years of filmmaking, <a href="http://metrograph.com/edition/article/39/up-and-down-the-ladder-excerpt-from-an-unpublished-manuscript-c-1933"target="_blank">"
Up and Down the Ladder"</a> (1933) a copy of which can be found at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library.
<blockquote>
I can not help but recall an incident that happened in my home town when my dad took his brother to see me on the screen. It was a serial and one of the first pictures my uncle had ever been induced to witness. They sat through the picture and when I was being beaten up by a gang of rough necks it was as much as my dad could do to keep Uncle John from rising from his seat and doing damage to the manager for allowing what he called in an Irish brogue a dammed unfair brawl. He was finally restrained from doing harm, but when the performance was over and my dad started to go, he still remained seated. When my dad asked him what he was waiting for he indignantly said: “Well, you’re a hell of a father. Ain’t you going to stay and see your boy after the wonderful fight he put up?” It was almost impossible to convince him that I was miles away in California working, and what he saw was just a moving picture. It was hard for him to believe that I was not there. </blockquote>
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<B>From the Desk of Joe Carducci…</B>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq7-pJsxKBvAugBv-lAzf4K0fyYIiz8UoHzR9-jF8sQW-rs49UnnuxAZlPzNKt7W3d4ASQAoxM3cpyLxuaUeuV-NzzKRR1n32nGcGkCKHiAPddnhHI0wztWezUHJHWBLHXTLTwIKz6VYZT/s1600/NV-Range.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq7-pJsxKBvAugBv-lAzf4K0fyYIiz8UoHzR9-jF8sQW-rs49UnnuxAZlPzNKt7W3d4ASQAoxM3cpyLxuaUeuV-NzzKRR1n32nGcGkCKHiAPddnhHI0wztWezUHJHWBLHXTLTwIKz6VYZT/s1600/NV-Range.png" /></a></div>Barry Perryman in RANGE, <a href="http://www.rangemagazine.com/features/fall-16/range-fa16-time_travel.pdf"target="_blank">"Time Travel"</a>.
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Range and livestock-grazing research have been hit particularly hard. I believe that this trend needs to be reversed. Applied, mission-oriented research in agriculture and natural resources that solves local and regional problems is critically important to citizens in both rural and urban areas of the West. We need to move back to a system that works toward the original charter of land-grant universities and agriculture experiment stations. And it doesn’t help when land-grant university presidents make statements like, “This is not a land-grant university, ; it is a liberal arts university with land-grant responsibilities.” </blockquote>
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Neil Steinberg in CST, <a href="http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/steinberg-new-farmall-calendar-it-wasnt-just-about-tractors/"target="_blank">"12 Months of Farming, How It Used to Look"</a>.
<blockquote>
The Chicago region has been a center for farm machinery since 1847, when Cyrus McCormick moved his famed Reaper Works from New York to be closer to his farmer customers, settling on a spot just east of where the Michigan Avenue Bridge is today. As Chicago grew, farm machinery manufacturing moved even closer to the fields, and the Quad Cities — Rock Island, Moline, East Moline and Davenport, Iowa — became “to tractors and combines what Pittsburgh was for steel and Detroit to the automobile,” according to the New York Times…. They drove 1,500 miles photographing tractors and talking to their owners, which turned into the best part of the trip, stopping at places like Van Petten, Illinois, population 2. “That’s something we noticed,” said Blomquist. “It wasn’t just about tractors. We really liked the old farmers. Really nice people, despite the fact that all of them are Trump fans. They are so much more relaxed than we are. Very laid back and soothing talking about the tractors they’re passionate about.” </blockquote>
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Andrew Higgins in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/world/asia/russia-china-farmers.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Russia’s Acres, if Not Its Locals, Beckon Chinese Farmers"</a>.
<blockquote>
Locals, she said, “have much to learn from Chinese peasants.” She said there were no real figures for the number of Chinese working in the area as full-time hired hands for Russian landowners, seasonal laborers or as farmers on land they lease for themselves. But, Ms. Voron added, one thing was abundantly clear in a region that was originally set up by Stalin in the 1930s as a would-be Jewish homeland: “There are definitely many more Chinese here than Jews.” With a Russian population of just 1,716 people, Ms. Voron’s district has only two Jewish families left — all the others moved to Israel or elsewhere — but it has hundreds of Chinese. Her daughter, Maria, who is the district administration chief, complained that many Chinese worked without registering and “sleep in the fields.” But she, too, cheered their work ethic. “They all work like mad,” she said, praising them for turning previously unused land into productive farms. Local men, many of them alcoholics, are less enthusiastic and curse the Chinese for getting up too early, using too much chemical fertilizer and overworking the land. </blockquote>
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Andrew Higgins in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/world/asia/vladivostok-china-haishenwai-tourists.html"target="_blank">"Vladivostok Lures Chinese (Many Think Its Theirs)"</a>.
<blockquote>
The name Chinese use for the city, Haishenwai, roughly translates as “sea cucumber bay,” though some historians believe the name is not Chinese at all but Manchu, the language of the court during the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1911. Whatever the language, Chinese tour guides and guidebooks nearly all give Haishenwai as Vladivostok’s original and true name. Even under Russian rule, Vladivostok has at times had nearly as many Chinese residents as Russians. In 1912, for example, nearly 30 percent of the population was Chinese, with the rest divided between Russians and a large number of Europeans, Japanese, Americans and other foreigners. That all changed with Russia’s 1917 revolution, after which the Soviet authorities declared the city a sensitive military zone and sealed it off. </blockquote>
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Amie Ferris-Rotman in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-welcomes-growing-wave-of-red-tourists-from-china-1477825201"target="_blank">"Chinese ‘Red Tourists’ Are Flocking to Russia"</a>.
<blockquote>
Next year’s centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution is expected to bring a deluge of Chinese visitors to Russia, he said. The German birthplaces of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are also preparing for more tourists. According to adventure tour company Russian Discovery, around 200,000 Chinese visited Russia last year on communist-inspired travel. This includes expeditions in Lenin’s footsteps, beginning with his birthplace of Ulyanovsk in central Russia, followed by the city of Kazan where he studied, St. Petersburg for the October revolution and Moscow, where his embalmed body lies in a pool of red light in a mausoleum. Russia and China, former Communist rivals that share a 2,500-mile border, have been steadily drawing closer as East-West ties strain. </blockquote>
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Tom Mitchell in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8309863e-ab39-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122"target="_blank">"The Means of Corruption"</a>.
<blockquote>
One of the central pillars of China’s economic transformation over the past 35 years has been decentralisation. Whether the yardstick is government spending, industrial production or control of the country’s most valuable resource — land — it’s clear that local governments rule most roosts. As the Chinese adage has it, “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away”. The fundamental problem, as Pei sees it, is that control of state assets was dispersed without any corresponding clarification of property rights. The richer China became in the decades after the party crushed pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the richer the pickings for corrupt cadres. “A predatory state always defines [property] rights to maximise its income and privileges,” Pei writes. </blockquote>
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Tom Mitchell in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ba17282c-ab14-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122"target="_blank">"Sony ‘Patent Troll’ Case Shows China’s New Clout in Corporate Litigation"</a>.
<blockquote>
Wilan is what critics call a “patent troll”, a company that collects payments from other companies on its intellectual property but produces little if anything itself. If Wilan wins, Sony could be barred from selling and exporting its LTE handsets as early as next summer. The potential ban on exports is the real threat, given China’s pivotal role in almost all global manufacturing chains. Imagine a similar suit with the same potential consequences, only with an Apple or a Samsung cast as the defendant. The impact on consumers would be enormous. A new corporate era beckons in which a Chinese judge could conceivably cut off the lifeblood of some of the world’s most valuable companies. </blockquote>
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Robert McDowell & Gordon Goldstein in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-authoritarian-internet-power-grab-1477436573"target="_blank">"The Authoritarian Internet Power Grab"</a>.
<blockquote>
Today’s global fight over internet freedom started more than a decade ago. In 2003, China, Russia and other countries initiated a persistent and patient campaign to bring Icann under the control of the United Nations. In 2012 the U.S. led a coalition of 55 countries that refused to sign a global treaty negotiated in Dubai that would have expanded the U.N.’s reach and power to shape how key aspects of the internet operate. While the U.S. and some of its internet allies rejected the Dubai power grab, 89 other countries voted for more U.N. influence, including an enlarged role in “international Internet governance and for ensuring the stability, security and continuity of the existing Internet and its future development.” That particular resolution was rammed through at 1:30 a.m. on the penultimate night of the conference—forcing the U.S. delegation, of which we were both members—to contest the conference’s legitimacy and boycott its result. In 2015 a coalition comprised of China and 134 other countries submitted a manifesto to another U.N. meeting insisting that national governments—rather than NGOs, civil society, consumers or business innovators—should dictate the digital future. The bloc declared that “overall authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States.” </blockquote>
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(AP) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/asia/interpol-president-meng-hongwei-china.html"target="_blank">"Interpol Names Chinese Police Official as President"</a>.
<blockquote>
His appointment is effective immediately as he replaces Mireille Ballestrazzi of France, the organization said in a statement. While the job of Interpol’s president is limited in scope, the announcement was met with disdain by human rights groups. Authoritarian governments like Russia and China have been known to abuse Interpol’s “red notices,” tantamount to international arrest warrants, to hunt down political enemies. China’s law enforcement agencies have shown little regard for international borders in recent years, spiriting away political opponents from places like Thailand and Myanmar. “The appointment of Meng Hongwei is alarming given China’s longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad,” Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director at Amnesty International, said in a statement. </blockquote>
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John Gapper in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/57060372-9aaf-11e6-8f9b-70e3cabccfae"target="_blank">"If China Cannot Beat Europe, It Will Acquire It"</a>.
<blockquote>
There is no mystery as to why it is happening. The Made in China 2025 plan unveiled last year calls for China to move into advanced manufacturing in 10 industries, including machine tools and robotics, aerospace, medicine and information technology. If it cannot beat advanced companies in Germany or the US, it will acquire them. This is not inherently sinister. It has advantages over China’s former tactic, which was to spark “indigenous innovation” by making European and US companies that wanted access to its home market form joint ventures with Chinese companies and transfer their technology as the price of entry. </blockquote>
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Chandran Nair in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8d65f6c4-acb7-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24"target="_blank">"Duterte’s Embrace of China Is a Rational Challenge to the Old Order"</a>.
<blockquote>
China and the Philippines have a relationship far older than the Phillipines’ relationship with the US, and one free of histories of colonialism. China is also re-emerging as the economic and cultural centre of East Asia. We can even understand Mr Duterte’s attitude to China using the Asian concept of “face”. By heralding Beijing as the focal point for a different economic, political and cultural order, Mr Duterte according it a lot of prestige. And, in return, China is willing to support the new Filipino president, perhaps by rdeceding from the issues that divide them. Many in the west – with their focus on credibility, “rational” interests and power as a zero-sum game – will always miss relationships based on prestige and mutual benefit. </blockquote>
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Lucy Hornby in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9d18ee2a-a1a7-11e6-86d5-4e36b35c3550"target="_blank">"Beijing Reform Paves Way for Large-Scale Corporate Agriculture"</a>.
<blockquote>
The move to corporate farming is designed to solve two pressing problems of the Chinese countryside – a rapid increase in elderly farmers and poor yields from hundreds of millions of small plots – while accommodating the ruling Communist party’s opposition to individual private land ownership. </blockquote>
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Chris Buckley in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-economic-policy.html"target="_blank">"Sluggish China Takes a Lesson from Reagan"</a>.
<blockquote>
Skeptics attribute the problem partly to the repeated clash of Mr. Xi’s economic goals with his political objectives. While he has shown great enterprise in centralizing power, they say, he has been reluctant to restrain the reach of the state, especially to curtail state companies’ privileged, often monopolistic, access to loans, resources and customers. Several economists said Mr. Xi’s supply-side initiative may turn out to be cosmetic — promising market liberalization yet magnifying state control. “To get the government more onto the market track, it would have to abstain,” said Ning Zhu, a professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. “But that’s exactly what they haven’t been doing.” </blockquote>
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Didi Tatlow in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/world/asia/china-fertility-birth.html"target="_blank">"With Fertility Rate in China Law, Some Press to Legalize Births Outside Marriage"</a>.
<blockquote>
Findings from a 2015 government census show that the average Chinese woman has 1.05 children — a legacy of the one-child policy that changed on Jan. 1 to a two-child policy. It is the lowest fertility rate in the world, according to People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The fines, known as social maintenance fees, can run up to tens of thousands of dollars and close an avenue to increase birthrates, critics say. “Especially with these falling birthrates, the right thing to do would be to allow single women to have children,” Wu Youshui, a lawyer in Hangzhou who specializes in reproductive issues, said in an interview. “But in fact, they’re still fining people,” he said. “A lot. People see it and don’t understand why.” </blockquote>
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NEW DELHI TIMES, <a href="http://www.newdelhitimes.com/chinas-looming-debt-crisis123/"target="_blank">"China’s Looming Debt Crisis"</a>.
<blockquote>
An examination by the National Audit Office of China discovered that in 2013 debt was outstanding of 18 trillion yuan. In 2016, Chinese debt rose to a whopping 237 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). China’s ratio of debt to GDP has been rising extremely fast, that it has been a cause of concern within the Chinese political establishment. During 2007, the ratio was at around 150 per cent and the speed it picked up till 2016 has had alarm bells ringing in China. The harrowing question is that how will the debt crisis affect China’s vibrant economy. What is the reason behind China’s rising tower of debts and its fast economic slowdown? Is an impending collapse of the Chinese economy on the cards? The rising debt to GDP ratio suggests that China is likely to face a crisis yet one thing to consider is that China is in a strong balance of payment position. Countries like Greece saw an economic collapse not only because of the high debt levels but also because it was not able to compensate its balance of payments. Considering this China is most likely to recover. </blockquote>
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Edward Wong in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/world/asia/china-yugurs-gansu.html"target="_blank">"The Clash of Modern Life for Nomads of China’s Highlands"</a>.
<blockquote>
Chinese scholars say both the Uighurs and the Yugurs (sometimes called the Yellow Uighurs) are descendants of an ethnic group called the Huihu, a Turkic-speaking nomadic people who had an empire in the eighth to ninth centuries on the steppes of present-day Mongolia. Western scholars use the term Uighur or Uyghur to describe that earlier group. One branch migrated west into what is now the Xinjiang region. They converted to Islam over several centuries. Another major branch moved east down the Hexi Corridor, a broad plain between mountain ranges that was the passage to Central Asia for empires and dynasties in eastern China. The Qilian Mountains form the southern boundary of the corridor. Yugurs who settled toward the western end of Sunan County were mostly Turkic speakers, while those to the east spoke the language that now resembles old Mongolian. They had lived under a Mongolian khanate. The influence worked both ways: Mongolians at one point adapted the old Uighur script, now vanished, to create a written language, which in turn was adapted by the Manchus; the original Uighur script has roots in Aramaic, Syriac and Sogdian scripts. </blockquote>
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Andrew Jacobs in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/world/asia/china-xinjiang-manchu-xibe-language.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Manchu, Once a Language of Empire, Nears Extinction"</a>.
<blockquote>
Loyal to the core and prized for their horsemanship, several thousand Manchu soldiers heeded the emperor’s call and, with families and livestock in tow, embarked in 1764 on a trek that took them from northeastern China to the most distant fringes of the Qing dynasty empire, the Central Asian lands now known as Xinjiang.... Two and a half centuries later, the roughly 30,000 people in this rural county who consider themselves Xibe have proved to be an ethnographic curiosity and a linguistic bonanza. As the last handful of Manchu speakers in northeast China have died, the Xibe have become the sole inheritors of what was once the official tongue of one of the world’s most powerful empires, a domain that stretched from India to Russia and formed the geographic foundation for modern China. In the decades after the revolution in 1911 that drove the Qing from power after nearly 300 years, Mandarin Chinese vanquished the Manchu language, even in its former stronghold in the forested northeast. But the isolation of the Xibe in this parched, far-flung region near the Kazakh border helped keep the language alive, even if its existence was largely forgotten until the 1940s. For scholars of Manchu, especially those eager to translate the mounds of Qing dynasty documents that fill archives across China, the discovery of so many living Manchu speakers has been a godsend. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQYzSrxrV86wTeulD1AHUv5QK2e7Yt0aaxnPA1L5VY68ZgZMW85aDsasJ90GCL7YxKNlvaeOnBzOnKYVastdcb18JDNAVbmBy5bykPqEqrb7SETGzFG-ttJp14qxF65TeApo9p3xsDHPIt/s1600/NV-billion+voices.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQYzSrxrV86wTeulD1AHUv5QK2e7Yt0aaxnPA1L5VY68ZgZMW85aDsasJ90GCL7YxKNlvaeOnBzOnKYVastdcb18JDNAVbmBy5bykPqEqrb7SETGzFG-ttJp14qxF65TeApo9p3xsDHPIt/s1600/NV-billion+voices.png" /></a></div>Yuan Yang in FT on David Moser’s book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e4013444-95fb-11e6-a1dc-bdf38d484582"target="_blank">"A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language"</a>.
<blockquote>
Hong Kongers and Tibetans have protested the encroachment of Mandarin in schools. In Muslim Xinjiang, compulsory Mandarin education is arguably part of a racial politics designed to erode local culture. The tension between the unifying goals of China’s leaders and the reality of a diverse, often disunited citizenry runs through the book. Moser, a linguist based at Beijing Capital Normal University, introduces the linguistic struggles of early 20th century China through the lives of intellectuals of the time. His colourful portraits include the initial convener of the committee to create a standard Chinese, a foul-mouthed firebrand who called for the country to “flush all classical literature down the toilet.” </blockquote>
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Richard McGregor in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/bd8d37be-acbb-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24"target="_blank">"China’s Linguistic Shift to Socialism with Gay Characteristics"</a>.
<blockquote>
On this occasion, unfortunately, the language of China, like the country itself, has moved on since the days when a comrade was a fraternal colleague in the noble pursuit of socialism. Although it may have passed the politburo inner circle (average age about 65) by, for a few decades the word has been expropriated by the gay community. Both playful and cleverly politically correct, gay people use “comrade” to show solidarity in a society that has by and large been hostile to homosexuality. It was not until 2001 that homosexuality was removed from the ministry of health’s list of mental illnesses. Out-and-out hostility has mostly gone, at least in metropolitan areas, but the stigma is still widespread.... It was no surprise, then, that the directive for party members to use “comrade” elicited much sniggering from young people on social media and from the foreign press. This will not worry the leadership too much as the message was directed at party members, not the public at large. Even so, the language diktats of the theorists should not be dismissed too lightly. The directive that instituted the linguistic change, “Norms of political life within the party under current conditions”, was issued by the Central Committee, which acts as a kind of enlarged board of directors for the Communist party. In other words, it was released only after serious consideration at the highest of levels. </blockquote>
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Francis Rocca & Chun Han Wong in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/vatican-china-mull-deal-on-selection-of-bishops-after-decades-of-division-1477844997"target="_blank">"Beijing, Vatican Weigh Pact on Bishops"</a>.
<blockquote>
If Pope Francis and Chinese leaders sign off on the proposed deal, the pope would accept eight bishops ordained by the Chinese government without the Vatican’s permission. But the deal would leave many other issues unresolved, including the role of China’s state-run Catholic institutions. Negotiators are waiting for the pope’s decision; if he agrees, the final decision will be up to Beijing. It would be a diplomatic breakthrough for the pope, who has eagerly pursued an opening to China that eluded his predecessors, though re-establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the Vatican—which Beijing severed in 1951—would remain a distant goal. Vatican officials, however, are bracing for strong protests from Chinese Catholics in the so-called underground church, some of whose members have suffered imprisonment or other punishment for defying government control of the church, and who could regard the agreement as a lopsided win for Beijing and hence a betrayal of their fidelity. The deal would defer many thorny issues, including the legal status of underground Chinese bishops loyal to Rome, who currently operate without government approval. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFRHOmVnqnV0myDJ-Pk0SRxf-M9Yr4AhVsLgl3pVAS4C51UutZbI9uyAITDrgcjcAQeUxxKaOJ3hfwxGAtujoDqFBd1ayB8M3jcLwTdSdZEtJ4NhHhPWYxotXNebeosQRhvlHZVqlEsK_y/s1600/NV-first+things.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFRHOmVnqnV0myDJ-Pk0SRxf-M9Yr4AhVsLgl3pVAS4C51UutZbI9uyAITDrgcjcAQeUxxKaOJ3hfwxGAtujoDqFBd1ayB8M3jcLwTdSdZEtJ4NhHhPWYxotXNebeosQRhvlHZVqlEsK_y/s1600/NV-first+things.png" /></a></div>Yu Jie in FIRST THINGS, China’s Christian Future.
<a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/08/chinas-christian-future"target="_blank">""</a>.
<blockquote>
Christianity has transformed how I see myself as a dissident. Over decades of involvement with the Chinese democracy movement, I have seen so-called dissidents think the same, talk the same, act the same as those from whom they are supposedly dissenting. Too often the Communists and dissidents are kindred spirits. I have also seen personal ambitions and power struggles drive friends apart and turn those who should be working with one another against one another. My fellow dissidents attach great hopes to democracy, but it is simply a better method of public management and division of powers—the least worst, as Churchill said. It is not the horizon of all human hope and longing. If one does not believe in something other than democracy, one is no better off than the Communists, making a god of a political system. </blockquote>
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Jeremy Page in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-terror-claims-bolstered-by-new-evidence-1469435872"target="_blank">"Many Chinese Join Extremists in Syria"</a>.
<blockquote>
The studies by two U.S. think tanks found that almost all Chinese fighters in the records said they came from China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where some members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic group have been resisting Beijing’s rule for decades. Some Chinese recruits didn’t specify their origin, but gave names, noms de guerre or other details suggesting they were Uighur. The research from the New America think tank and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point was based on Islamic State registration forms, leaked by a defector, for recruits entering Syria from Turkey from mid-2013 to mid-2014. It corroborates Chinese officials’ assertions that there are about 300 Uighurs fighting with Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. It’s unclear if more Chinese fighters joined the group outside the period covered by the leaked documents. </blockquote>
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Barbara Demick in LAT, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/great-reads/la-fg-c1-tibet-princess-20150911-story.html"target="_blank">"Tibet’s Last Princess Gives a Rare Interview"</a>.
<blockquote>
Gonpo is the heir to a now-defunct kingdom known as the Mei that until the mid-20th century was centered in Aba, a predominantly Tibetan city in China's Sichuan province…. Until the 1950s, the area was ruled by Gonpo's family. Although the Chinese referred to her father as a tribal chieftain, Tibetans used the word gyalpo, or king, and referred to his holdings as the Mei kingdom. By whatever name, the king reported neither to the Tibetan government in Lhasa nor to Chinese authorities. His constituents maintained a fierce independence, often fighting with other Tibetan rulers who coveted their land and the yak and sheep that were their livelihood…. Her father, Rapten Tinley, a tall, slim man with high cheekbones and furrowed brows, appears in photos seeming to carry the weight of the world. A few years ago, neighbors erected a small shrine to the king over a stream next door. "The people were very loyal to the king," says Amdo Gelek, an amateur historian from Aba who now lives in exile in Dharamsala. He says his own father was a general in the king's militia. "He tried to protect his people from the Chinese until the very end." </blockquote>
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Andrew Duff in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/the-story-of-sikkims-last-king-and-queen-reads-like-a-fairy-tale-gone-wrong/"target="_blank">"The Story of Sikkim’s Last King and Queen Reads Like a Fairy Tale Gone Wrong"</a>.
<blockquote>
As is often the case with nationalist causes, Sikkim wanted to be free of India but was heavily reliant on the aid flowing from Delhi. Inevitably, Mrs Gandhi got her way and annexed the kingdom in 1975. Duff is sympathetic to Thondup and instinctively on his side, but he makes it clear that the man was not an adept politician. Emotion ruled the day — when his minders in Calcutta refused to let him fly the Sikkim flag on his car, he let the vehicle proceed without him and walked with an assistant holding the flag. In short, he was not up to his job. One wonders who would have been, with almost every superpower on the case. ‘Everyone agrees,’ writes Duff, ‘that Sikkim’s sensitive geopolitical position dealt Thondup an almost unplayable hand.’ At least the state enjoys relative peace now, living off hydroelectricity and tourism — unlike Tibet. But one has ample evidence that Beijing will not rest until cultural annihilation on the plateau is complete. As a result of a referendum, the monarchy was abolished in 1975, and the marriage crumbled under the strain of events. Cooke left the modest palace in Sikkim’s capital, Gangtok, and returned to America with her two children. Thondup died in 1982, and Cooke lives on in New York, though she refused to meet Duff. </blockquote>
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Robin Harding & Simon Mundy in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a0d56d1e-9a63-11e5-bdda-9f13f99fa654"target="_blank">"North Korean ‘Ghost Ships’ with Dead Crews Wash Up in Japan"</a>.
<blockquote>
Japanese coastguard patrols have spent the past few months engaged in a macabre annual ritual — recovering a steady stream of dilapidated wooden vessels, apparently from North Korea, unmanned save for skeletal corpses. The “ghost ships” show the dangerous lengths to which North Korean fishermen have gone in search of their catch, often far beyond their own territorial waters. The numbers peak every autumn — the main squid-catching season for North Korea’s fisheries — when cold winds blow from the north and drive the vessels towards Japan. According to the Japanese coastguard, 80 ships drifted ashore in 2013, 65 in 2014 and 34 as of November 27 this year — although it counts every piece of wreckage as a separate incident so the figures likely overstate the total. The vessels often carry the bodies of the crew, victims of exposure or starvation — whose advanced state of decomposition suggests they have been dead for as long as three months, according to the Japanese broadcaster NHK, which reported this week that 25 bodies have been found in the past two months. </blockquote>
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Will Nicoll in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/enver-hoxha-stalins-devilish-disciple/"target="_blank">"Enver Hoxha: Stalin’s Devilish Disciple"</a>.
<blockquote>
Born in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër in 1908, Hoxha studied at the French lycée in Korçë before winning a government scholarship to the University of Montpellier. Outwardly, this bright start suggests diligence and intelligence. In reality, Hoxha won both these early benedictions, and practically every advantage there-after, through networking. When he flunked Montpellier, nepotism got him board and lodgings with a wealthy friend of a friend called Hasan Jero (whom he later sentenced to 35 years in prison). The same sort of inflence won him a job at the Albanian embassy in Brussels, when the foreign minister to the Kingdom of Albania, Eqrem Libohova, put Hoxha forward for the position. Libohova also found Hoxha a teaching assistant position in Korçë when he returned home in 1936. It’s even arguable that networking got Hoxha the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Albania in 1943 — and national leadership after the German defeat in 1944. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCT62XBd64d8xFv0Af5qKmn9KLZMkspKs7HmBO3-MG9LikUgFdMKW3mDAuP-LRbP4-1zxJzBmOR1qQQKXnIHKPpx1h1sKqO_Mt0WalX10cALKajP71D_fk5Zmlxgo4_fV2_hiIVG5b6MTB/s1600/NV-culture+of+growth.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCT62XBd64d8xFv0Af5qKmn9KLZMkspKs7HmBO3-MG9LikUgFdMKW3mDAuP-LRbP4-1zxJzBmOR1qQQKXnIHKPpx1h1sKqO_Mt0WalX10cALKajP71D_fk5Zmlxgo4_fV2_hiIVG5b6MTB/s1600/NV-culture+of+growth.png" /></a></div>Richard Vedder in WSJ on Joel Mokyr’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-genesis-of-prosperity-1478823543"target="_blank">"A Culture of Growth"</a>.
<blockquote>
The author further observes that while a lively intellectual environment was present elsewhere, notably China, it lacked the favorable conditions prevailing in Europe. Confucian philosophy still dominated Chinese thinking and the content of the all-important civil service examination, so modern scientific scholars seldom became members of that civil service. Moreover, there were no alternative political parties or jurisdictions for innovative thinkers to flee to. In short, the country’s monopolistic government bureaucracy stifled innovation. </blockquote>
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Darrin McMahon in WSJ on Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morality-of-prosperity-1465769881"target="_blank">"Bourgeois Equality"</a>.
<blockquote>
Ms. McCloskey convincingly dismisses each one of these explanations. The Chinese, after all, long had a thriving mercantile culture and good “institutions.” But the Great Enrichment didn’t begin there. Italian bankers accumulated vast sums of capital in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But by the 18th century, their leading cities languished in faded grandeur. And the “economic effect of imperialism on ordinary Europeans” was, for all its horrors, “nil or negative.” One can’t explain the Great Enrichment by theft. No, this monumental achievement was caused by a change in values, Ms. McCloskey says—the rise of what she calls, in a mocking nod to Marx, a “bourgeois ideology.” It was far from an apology for greed, however. Anglo-Dutch in origin, the new ideology presented a deeply moral vision of the world that vaunted the value of work and innovation, earthly happiness and prosperity, and the liberty, dignity and equality of ordinary people. Preaching tolerance of difference and respect for the individual, it applauded those who sought to improve their lives (and the lives of others) through material betterment, scientific and technological inquiry, self-improvement, and honest work. Suspicious of hierarchy and stasis, proponents of bourgeois values attacked monopoly and privilege and extolled free trade and free lives while setting great store by prudence, enterprise, decency and hope. </blockquote>
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Alan Kors in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462"target="_blank">"The Victims of Socialism"</a>.
<blockquote>
To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”
It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life. This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind. </blockquote>
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Robin Harding in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ab383f88-a274-11e6-82c3-4351ce86813f"target="_blank">"Japan Hopes Talks with Russia Will Calm Islands Row"</a>.
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The two countries never signed a peace treaty after World War Two because of Moscow’s seizure of the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain. Covering about 5,000 square kilometres, the islands offer rich fishing and have a Russian population of thousands. The previous Japanese population was expelled after the war. The starting point for any settlement would most likely be a 1956 joint declaration by Japan and the Soviet Union agreeing that the smallest of the four disputed islands — Habomai and Shikotan — should go back to Japan. But there is little sign Mr Putin is minded to return any territory at all. </blockquote>
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Julio Teehankee & Mark Thompson in JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY, <a href="http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/article/vote-philippines-electing-strongman"target="_blank">"Electing a Strongman"</a>.
<blockquote>
Known as “the Punisher” for condoning the summary execution of alleged criminals, Duterte used as his campaign calling card his record as mayor of Davao City (population 1.4 million) on the southern island of Mindanao. He ran on the tough-guy (<i>siga</i>) image that he originally crafted as the self-proclaimed savior of communist-infiltrated and crime-infested Davao. Duterte was first elected mayor of Davao in 1988, and for the past 28 years the people of Davao have “allowed him to rule with an iron-fist in exchange for social peace and personal security.” Duterte has shrugged off accusations of human-rights abuses, promising to implement his Davao model nationwide. According to Philippine sociologist Randy David, “Duterte promises just one thing: the will and leadership to do what needs to be done – to the point of killing and putting one’s own life on the line.”</blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK1p6Ku6ILNzjZcx4PAoy4MlCjI3Fb9_xUba5BiztADDSbRazLrD3ZyFwU_JSBz4KPRfluqytfiRDLgq6UshLMv05ZTDPYCCWhj_Ms97H5-H50c84lqhKiK0p3oBb29bt2KkFM7iZY6Bo9/s1600/NV-fall+of+heaven.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK1p6Ku6ILNzjZcx4PAoy4MlCjI3Fb9_xUba5BiztADDSbRazLrD3ZyFwU_JSBz4KPRfluqytfiRDLgq6UshLMv05ZTDPYCCWhj_Ms97H5-H50c84lqhKiK0p3oBb29bt2KkFM7iZY6Bo9/s1600/NV-fall+of+heaven.png" /></a></div>Abbas Milani in WSJ on Andrew Cooper’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-view-from-the-toppled-1470428603"target="_blank">"The Fall of Heaven"</a>.
<blockquote>
According to this view, the Shah was rapidly modernizing Iran and increasingly challenging the West, particularly when it came to the price of oil. But communists, oil companies, disgruntled clergy and Western powers with bad intentions—especially the U.S. and Britain—manipulated the Iranian people and global public opinion to turn against the Shah. These interests all came together to orchestrate his overthrow and stop Iran from becoming one of the greatest powers in the Middle East. Mr. Cooper’s book stands out for his access and his willingness to repeat what many of his partisan contacts—including officials from the Carter White House, Iran’s last queen and several of her intimate friends—say to him. In a telling passage, the author reveals the reason he was afforded such trust. He was, he says, “struck by how many of my Iranian interviewees confided that they felt more comfortable talking to a New Zealand-born historian than an ethnic Iranian scholar, whom they feared would cast judgment on them or misinterpret or even manipulate their words.” By way of disclosure, I must say that in writing my books on the Pahlavi era, I was one of those Iranian scholars denied such access. </blockquote>
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Rod Nordland in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/world/europe/turkey-press-erdogan-coup.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Turkey’s Free Press Withers as Erdogan Jails 120 Journalists"</a>.
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A prominent columnist wrote recently about how President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey hates cigarettes so much that he confiscates packs from his followers, lecturing them on the evils of smoking. The columnist, Kadri Gursel, then urged his readers to protest the president’s anti-democratic ways by lighting a cigarette and not putting it out. For that, Mr. Gursel was arrested on terrorism charges and is being held in pretrial detention, one of 120 journalists who have been jailed in Turkey’s crackdown on the news media since a failed coup attempt in July. There, he has the company of 10 colleagues from his newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the country’s last major independent publication. Among them are its editor and the paper’s chief executive, arrested as he stepped off a flight to Istanbul last Friday. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRlM8PcjIe3oeOpldzYfP3PE8nWWnhQ_RPq9XCwAY-EIiZqU3rHO3TxkKdrezrph43UJO1CoG2frRazjhgWrB8BVEQQ0OJVN3jWdokucdTdFXs2J6oMLehQiM6t12s_a0mftDF-WgPxpio/s1600/NV-crusadeandjihad.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRlM8PcjIe3oeOpldzYfP3PE8nWWnhQ_RPq9XCwAY-EIiZqU3rHO3TxkKdrezrph43UJO1CoG2frRazjhgWrB8BVEQQ0OJVN3jWdokucdTdFXs2J6oMLehQiM6t12s_a0mftDF-WgPxpio/s1600/NV-crusadeandjihad.png" /></a></div>Justin Marozzi in SPECTATOR on Malcolm Lambert’s book, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/why-the-crusades-ended-and-jihad-goes-on/"target="_blank">"Crusade and Jihad"</a>.
<blockquote>
Lambert acknowledges the great difficulty as a 21st-century historian in trying to understand the minds of the men who exulted in this extraordinarily violent expedition, an 11th-century combination of piety and savagery. Perhaps they saw themselves as agents of the wrath of God. When David Hume described the crusading movement as the ‘most signal and most durable example of the folly of mankind in the history of any age or nation’, he was unwittingly demonstrating that he was as much a product of his time as the crusaders were of theirs. One man’s fanatic is another man’s Scottish Enlightenment empiricist and philosopher. Lambert is right to highlight as a lacuna in modern studies the lamentable absence of attention given to massacres by Muslims of Muslims in the 11th century. ‘Crusades had no monopoly of atrocities.’ Lambert does not mention it, but if further evidence of the abuse of jihad is required, the career of the 14th-century Turkic conqueror Tamerlane, whose countless holy wars killed infinitely more Muslims than infidels, provides it in abundance. ‘Readers deserve better of their Muslim historians,’ writes Lambert in a crusaderly swipe at his counterparts. One might add that Muslims deserve better of their leaders. </blockquote>
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Alan Jacobs in HARPER’S, <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2016/09/the-watchmen/"target="_blank">"What Became of the Christian Intellectuals? "</a>.
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As these institutions grew stronger and more confident, they provided ways for highly educated Christians, Christians who perhaps in an earlier era would have had a chance of becoming significant public intellectuals, to talk to one another more than to the culture at large. As they devoted themselves to these labors, all around them the Sixties were happening; by the time they realized just how dramatically the culture had changed, it was too late for them to learn its language — or for it to learn theirs. One career might serve to illustrate this general trend: that of Richard John Neuhaus. Neuhaus first made a name for himself in the late Sixties, when he was serving as the pastor of a black Lutheran congregation in Brooklyn. He participated vigorously in the civil-rights movement, and if he later exaggerated his relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., there was indeed something to exaggerate. The practice of social protest led him, quite naturally he believed, to vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. He appeared regularly on television, published widely, and was reported on and interviewed by every major periodical in America. Neuhaus was not a scholar, but he was certainly an intellectual, and was capable of reflecting learnedly on the ways in which Scripture and Christian tradition spoke to the crises of the time. (It is said that when they met, Reinhold Niebuhr remarked, “I’m told you’re the next Reinhold Niebuhr.”) But then things changed for Neuhaus. He did not cease to think that racism was a massive wound at the heart of American life, nor did he cease to believe that the Vietnam War was utterly misbegotten; but he did come to believe that the liberal establishment was neglecting an equally serious moral issue: abortion. </blockquote>
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Saeed Shah in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/modernity-and-muslims-encroach-on-unique-tribe-in-pakistan-1433370643"target="_blank">"Modernity, Muslims Squeeze Tribe in Pakistan"</a>.
<blockquote>
Many Kalash consider themselves descendants of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror who led his army into what is now Pakistan in 326 B.C. Anthropologists believe the Kalash are more likely the marroned remnants of an ancient migration from Central Asia to South Asia and Europe. The Kalash’s realm once straddled Pakistan’s far northwestern Chitral area and the adjacent Afghan province of Nuristan, a region dubbed Kafiristan, or “Land of the Infidels.” Muslims began to conquer Chitral in the 14th century, driving the Kalash into ever-smaller pockets. Afghanistan’s King Abdur Rahman forcibly converted Kalash in the 1890s to Islam. The tribespeople now inhabit three narrow valleys in Chitral, where they grow crops and raise long-haired goats in a region accessible only by a narrow track carved into the mountainside. The Kalash language and religion are distinct, as are their pacifist ways in a region known for violence and internecine feuding. </blockquote>
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Kamel Daoud in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/the-sexual-misery-of-the-arab-world.html?_r=1"target="_blank">"Sexual Misery and Islam"</a>.
<blockquote>
Sex is a complex taboo, arising, in places like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria or Yemen, out of the ambient conservatism’s patriarchal culture, the Islamists’ new, rigorist codes and the discreet puritanism of the region’s various socialisms. That makes a good combination for obstructing desire or guilt-tripping and marginalizing those who feel any. And it’s a far cry from the delicious licentiousness of the writings of the Muslim golden age, like Sheikh Nafzawi’s “The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight,” which tackled eroticism and the Kama Sutra without any hang-ups. Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment. Although women are veiled, they are at the center of our connections, exchanges and concerns. Women are a recurrent theme in daily discourse, because the stakes they personify — for manliness, honor, family values — are great. </blockquote>
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Noemie Bisserbe in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/european-prisons-fueling-spread-of-islamic-radicalism-1470001491"target="_blank">"Europe’s Prisons Fuel Spread of Radicalism"</a>.
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Within that system, Islamist radicals act as an “aristocracy,” the audit said, dictating prison etiquette to other inmates by forbidding them to take showers naked or listen to music. Televised matches of women’s tennis are also banned by inmates in some cells, the audit said. A 52-year-old inmate who has been in and out of prison for a decade said radicals who once kept to themselves have begun reaching out to thieves and drug dealers to expand their following. “They’re now willing to promote their cause by whatever means possible,” he said. The audit found that radicals have little trouble communicating beyond prison walls. French intelligence recovered contraband mobile phones from one jail showing that many inmates had contacted people in Syria and Yemen. A popular wallpaper for such phones, the audit noted, was the Islamic State’s flag. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrcutV7aZ07RASyFbMlcIJmpcAIUoixv2H5T37LBdentYYiQcaN7CYt58_g4yxfW6dbK5j4XSjeeLZbyW0H3-slr395iOR9NBmvdY8VkHyIZIXcSBPO5QdNqidcWIxsbnh7RCIEnXrclfV/s1600/NV-beyondradicalsecularism.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrcutV7aZ07RASyFbMlcIJmpcAIUoixv2H5T37LBdentYYiQcaN7CYt58_g4yxfW6dbK5j4XSjeeLZbyW0H3-slr395iOR9NBmvdY8VkHyIZIXcSBPO5QdNqidcWIxsbnh7RCIEnXrclfV/s1600/NV-beyondradicalsecularism.png" /></a></div>Barton Swaim in WSJ on Pierre Manent’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-paris-from-islamism-1470265502"target="_blank">"Beyond Radical Secularism"</a>.
<blockquote>
Not only, though, must the French begin again to understand themselves as citizens of the French Republic; they must also come to terms with what he calls the European continent’s “Christian mark.” Mr. Manent’s “perspective is not that of a pious person, nor that of a ‘believer,’ ” he writes. But he notes that liberal democratic nation-states developed in Europe rather than elsewhere for specific reasons. Europe formed nation-states of free citizens, he argues, as a consequence of a profound and double-sided “indeterminacy”: On the one hand, the Christian revelation offered the concept of a “covenant” between man and a loving God but did not dictate exactly how governments should reproduce that covenant; on the other, the Christian gospel demanded a response that could take different forms in different places. Over centuries, geographically cohesive groupings established similar but separate forms of religious adherence along with distinctive forms of covenantal government—that is, government in which rulers ruled for the good of the governed, not merely for self-aggrandizement or territorial gain. The only humane, enlightened way to deal with the Muslim presence in France, then, is to acknowledge France’s Catholic Christian character. France’s Catholic Church, he thinks, will need to assert itself as a “mediator” between Muslims and non-Muslims, with a view to admitting Muslims into a civic life defined by some common practices and a common good. </blockquote>
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Patrick Marnham in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/meet-the-intellectuals-leading-france-to-the-right/"target="_blank">"Meet the Intellectuals Leading France to the Right"</a>.
<blockquote>
The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence. They look back on a golden age that started with the French revolution and continued for nearly 200 years as France — driven by the republican principles of freedom, equality, brotherhood and the rights of man, plus anti-clericalism — pursued its worldwide ‘civilising mission’. Today the pressures of globalisation threaten France’s identity and a nation that once imposed its vision on the world is having to swallow ideas the very opposite of those it has always preached. The importance of ‘the French model’ is drilled into the nation’s schoolchildren daily. But in the view of these philosophers, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ political correctness (‘la bien-pensance’) has poisoned teacher-training courses, which have become ‘gulags of knowledge’. The new reactionaries are convinced that one of the cornerstones of French culture, ‘freedom of expression’, is dying. They reject ‘post-colonial guilt’ and are appalled by ‘cultural relativism’. To get down to the nitty-gritty, they take the view that France’s sovereignty is under threat from Arab immigration. Europe’s migration crisis has highlighted their fears, and the lip service that President Hollande pays to Angela Merkel’s refugee-quota system — widely unpopular in France — has further aided the reactionaries’ arguments. </blockquote>
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Ruth Bender in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/some-muslim-migrants-find-more-than-refuge-in-europes-churches-1442437388"target="_blank">"Some Muslim Arrivals Seek More Than Refuge in Churches"</a>.
<blockquote>
In many countries where classical Islamic law is a strong element of the legal system, such as Afghanistan and Iran, conversions by Muslims to another religion are prohibited and can be punished by death, said Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor of international law at the University of Copenhagen. “Out of fear of being sent back, many refugees feel that converting is the safest route to getting their papers,” the church official said. “In most cases, such asylum requests are granted.” German authorities can grant asylum if a conversion exposes the applicant to persecution at home, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. But a baptism certificate alone rarely suffices. </blockquote>
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Aleksandra Eriksson at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="https://euobserver.com/migration/135257"target="_blank">"Learn to Love Migrant Quotas, Juncker Tells Eastern EU"</a>.
<blockquote>
“It’s not the EU, but some member states that are failing on refugees,” Juncker said.
EU parliament's Schulz tuned in saying Orban was misleading voters and should stop dividing the EU. “The EU is based on compromise, not on confrontation,” he said. “Europe was always strong when there was a spirit of unity. Eastern countries are asking for solidarity on economic development, on Russia, but have none of it when it comes to refugees. Solidarity is a principle, not cherry picking.” </blockquote>
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Ralph Atkins in FT, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/12ce1506-95c7-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b"target="_blank">"Swiss Nationalists’ Fight with Brussels Offers Parallels for Brexit Negotiations"</a>.
<blockquote>
Swiss conservatives cheered in February 2014 when the country defied Brussels and voted narrowly for controls on immigration from neighbouring countries. But negotiations with the EU, with which the affluent Alpine state has close economic ties although it is not a member, started badly. Then the British voted for Brexit, enormously raising the stakes of any negotiations and scuppering any chance of the deal conservatives wanted. “Our government and parliament have decided not to implement this [Swiss] vote; they simply ignored the referendum,” Albert Rösti, president of the ultra-conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP) said. “I was very angry … It is really a historic situation.” </blockquote>
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Tove Lifvendahl in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/how-sweden-became-an-example-of-how-not-to-handle-immigration/"target="_blank">"How Sweden Became an Example of How Not to Handle Immigration"</a>.
<blockquote>
For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ — making its mark on the world not by fighting wars but by offering shelter to war’s victims. Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers. Over the past 15 years, some 650,000 asylum-seekers made their way to Sweden. Of the 163,000 who arrived last year, 32,000 were granted asylum. Sweden accepts more refugees in proportion to size of population than any other nation in the developed world — when it comes to offering shelter, no one does it better. But when it comes to integrating those we take in (or finding the extra housing, schools and healthcare needed for them), we don’t do so well…. The problems relating to immigration have been building up for years, but the country’s left and right were united in maintaining employment regulations and rent controls that kept immigrants unemployed in ghetto-like suburbs. As a result, we lost valuable time. Three years ago, there were riots in socially deprived areas of Stockholm, and it’s only got worse since then. A parallel society is emerging where the state’s monopoly on law and order is being challenged. ‘Today, the gang environment is — well, I don’t want to exactly call it the Wild West, but something in that direction,’ says Amir Rostami, an authority on Swedish organised crime who teaches at Stockholm University. </blockquote>
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James Black in DAILY MAIL, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html"target="_blank">"How Labour Threw Open Doors to Mass Migration in Secret Plot to Make a Multicultural UK"</a>.
<blockquote>
Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy to change the social make-up of the UK, secret papers suggest. A draft report from the Cabinet Office shows that ministers wanted to ‘maximise the contribution’ of migrants to their ‘social objectives’. The number of foreigners allowed in the UK increased by as much as 50 per cent in the wake of the report, written in 2000. Labour has always justified immigration on economic grounds and denied it was using it to foster multiculturalism. But suspicions of a secret agenda rose when Andrew Neather, a former government adviser and speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said the aim of Labour’s immigration strategy was to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCJ1onyPEYCJ9-xgDQfS_5rxSu2gJdgjAX3qgqDzr7SpFlYC3v2z8U3et2PMxg_dan-c5hLK1Pv_qeKV-Wl7fsbegzCYT3a8C7RtBmN9rYUDS4lC35CtysDrpKRbOFZGlJTXM6d0vjIHz_/s1600/NV-HarvardMag.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCJ1onyPEYCJ9-xgDQfS_5rxSu2gJdgjAX3qgqDzr7SpFlYC3v2z8U3et2PMxg_dan-c5hLK1Pv_qeKV-Wl7fsbegzCYT3a8C7RtBmN9rYUDS4lC35CtysDrpKRbOFZGlJTXM6d0vjIHz_/s1600/NV-HarvardMag.png" /></a></div>Adam Cohen in HARVARD MAGAZINE, <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-eugenics-era"target="_blank">"Harvard’s Eugenics Era"</a>.
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Harvard’s geneticists gave important support to Galton’s fledgling would-be science. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvard’s Bussey Institution, propounded a particularly racial version of eugenics. In his 1919 book Inbreeding and Outbreeding: Their Genetic and Sociological Significance, East warned that race mixing would diminish the white race, writing: “Races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits.” The simple fact, he said, was that “the negro is inferior to the white.” East also sounded a biological alarm about the Jews, Italians, Asians, and other foreigners who were arriving in large numbers. “The early settlers came from stock which had made notable contributions to civilization,” he asserted, whereas the new immigrants were coming “in increasing numbers from peoples who have impressed modern civilization but lightly.” There was a distinct possibility, he warned, that a “considerable part of these people are genetically undesirable.” In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, East’s pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. “And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families?” East wrote. “No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable….”</blockquote>
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Fraser Nelson in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/the-return-of-eugenics/"target="_blank">"The Return of Eugenics"</a>.
<blockquote>
When a Sterilisation Bill was brought before Parliament in 1931 it had the backing of social workers, dozens of local authorities and the medical and scientific establishment. It was defeated, but the agenda continued. The Nuremberg Trials established that the Nazis (latecomers to all this) carried out some 400,000 compulsory sterilisations — a figure so horrific it has eclipsed the 60,000 in Sweden and a similar number in the United States. The idea of a biological divide between the fit and the unfit was no Nazi invention. It was the conventional wisdom of the developed world. </blockquote>
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Barton Swaim in WSJ on Roger Scruton’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/groupthink-in-the-ivory-tower-1449793028"target="_blank">"Fools, Frauds and Firebrands"</a>.
<blockquote>
In a sense, the Frankfurt theorists did what leftist intellectuals have always done. First they collapsed European and American society’s bewildering variety of mediating institutions—churches, charitable organizations, debating societies, pubs, brass bands—into a single lifeless word, “capitalism.” Second, they set the present “capitalist” society against a future state of total equality, a state that by definition couldn’t be measured or even described. This latter maneuver is everywhere in New Left writing. Mr. Scruton relays a remarkable sentence from the historian Eric Hobsbawm: “If the left have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling.” Hobsbawm felt no obligation to prove or even argue that this “new society” would be better than the old; the fact that he could envision it was all he needed to condemn the society he lived in. That disposition of studied ingratitude is the defining characteristic of leftist theorizing, and it’s the temptation against which modern liberalism must constantly guard itself. </blockquote>
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Michael Lind in SMART SET, <a href="http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/"target="_blank">"Intellectuals Are Freaks"</a>.
<blockquote>
The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be: More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools. It is only natural for them to generalize from their own highly atypical life experiences and propose that society would be better off if everyone went to college — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Most of the jobs in advanced economies — a majority of them in the service sector — do not require higher education beyond a little vocational training. Notwithstanding automation, for the foreseeable future janitors will vastly outnumber professors, and if the wages of janitors are too low then other methods — unionization, the restriction of low-wage immigration, a higher minimum wage — make much more sense than enabling janitors to acquire BAs, much less MAs and Ph.Ds. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvX8IOjHt5OBjvHL57jO_zq0_WDFwd-wv_hNMbLBw__eGKM4a8dFpcpUb8nVkoNoc4LlUHT6morbWElzlnLV6i-m4UKp8Tcw7W_yq8QvRc7wxH9WQWP2dzWlgVZ9xi95cxetVFaOVwWsC/s1600/NV-shipwreckedmind.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: .5em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvX8IOjHt5OBjvHL57jO_zq0_WDFwd-wv_hNMbLBw__eGKM4a8dFpcpUb8nVkoNoc4LlUHT6morbWElzlnLV6i-m4UKp8Tcw7W_yq8QvRc7wxH9WQWP2dzWlgVZ9xi95cxetVFaOVwWsC/s1600/NV-shipwreckedmind.png" /></a></div>Jonathan Derby in FT on Mark Lilla’s book, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/88dd8940-8ae9-11e6-8cb7-e7ada1d123b1"target="_blank">"The Shipwrecked Mind"</a>.
<blockquote>
Lilla places this freshly minted declinism in a tradition that dates back to the French Revolution, and includes writers such as Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Maurice Barrès and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He also notes the affinities that contemporary writers such as Zemmour have with the thinkers from other national traditions whom he examines in this book — notably the German-Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig and the political theorists Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, both of whom were born in Germany and made their reputations in the US in the mid-20th century. What Rosenzweig, Voegelin and Strauss have in common, in Lilla’s reading, is a “World We Have Lost narrative”, an apocalyptic view of modernity as a kind of post-lapsarian state. For this cast of mind, he writes, “the present, not the past, is a foreign country”. This is the outlook of the reactionary, who differs, in the “militancy” of his nostalgia, from the conservative. Unlike the conservative, the reactionary is a distinctively modern figure, yearning for the past while also dreaming of a future in which the wounds caused by some originating catastrophe — whether it’s the fall of Jerusalem, the Reformation, the abolition of the caliphate or, in Zemmour’s case, the social reforms of the 1960s — will be healed. All the thinkers Lilla discusses here conjure the memory of a well-ordered state undone by alien ideas promulgated by a deracinated intellectual elite — the betrayal of elites, he notes, being the “linchpin of every reactionary story”. </blockquote>
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Sheri Berman in JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY, <a href="http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/article/specter-haunting-europe-lost-left"target="_blank">"The Lost Left"</a>.
<blockquote>
But perhaps more puzzlingly, many on the left failed to understand or wholeheartedly accept the new order. Some forgot that reforms, while important, were merely means to an end, an ongoing process of taming and domesticating capitalism. So they let themselves be content with pedestrian management of social and economic policy. Some similarly believed that capitalism had been rendered static and benign by the postwar order and stopped thinking critically and carefully about its evolution and dynamics. Others on the left never really accepted the loss of a postcapitalist future and viewed the postwar order as “second best.” Because such leftists believed that true justice could come on with capitalism’s elimination, they implicitly and sometimes explicitly denigrated efforts to tame it and felt there was little need to devote their energies to developing policies and reforms that could do this. </blockquote>
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Adam Tooze in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Gian Giacomo Migone’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/when-we-loved-mussolini/"target="_blank">"The United States and Fascist Italy"</a>.
<blockquote>
Already in 1972 John Patrick Diggins, in his Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, had revealed the widespread enthusiasm for Mussolini among progressive American intellectuals. What Migone’s book laid bare was that these affinities were founded on more than ideas and politics. Behind the scenes, financial interests had a part in orchestrating the connubio between America and Italian fascism. As he puts it in his preface, Migone may not have started out as a Marxist, but through “reading documents produced by central banks and investment bankers” he sometimes felt as though he might “become one.” One of the obstacles to acknowledging the amicable relationship between Wall Street and Italian fascism was the commonplace view of the interwar period as an era of economic nationalism. Mussolini was famous for his advocacy of autarchy and for triumphs such as draining the Pontine marshes and the “battle for grain” in agriculture. Italy, for its part, was severely affected by America’s nativist immigration quotas imposed early in the 1920s. </blockquote>
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Nicholas Wade in WSJ on Loren Graham’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scourge-of-soviet-science-1466192179"target="_blank">"Lysenko’s Ghost"</a>.
<blockquote>
Russian geneticists also flirted with eugenic ideas, Mr. Graham relates. Under socialism, the Russian geneticist A.S. Serebrovskii wrote, “love will be separated from childbirth” and women would have to obtain sperm not from their husbands but from “a specific approved source.” With “outstanding” men fathering up to 10,000 children, “human selection will make giant leaps forward,” Serebrovskii predicted. H.J. Muller, a Nobel-winning American geneticist and staunch Marxist, made the same proposal in a letter to Stalin. Russian women, he said, should be inseminated with sperm from “the most transcendently superior individuals,” of whome he gave Lenin as an example, so as to create a higher type of human being. </blockquote>
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William Wilson in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-scientific-regress-1461623898"target="_blank">"Meanwhile, About Bill Nye…"</a>.
<blockquote>
If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. </blockquote>
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Kit Wilson at standpointmag.co.uk, <a href="http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/critique-july-august-2015-kit-wilson-sentimental-nihilist-and-popular-culture"target="_blank">"Sentimental Nihilism and Popular Culture"</a>.
<blockquote>
Anchored by the conservatism of public taste, most popular forms — film and music in particular — stayed the course of the 20th century much more successfully than their “higher” cousins. Many can trace an unbroken line back to the very traditions the modernists tried to sever us from. If a contemporary classical composer writes in a tonal style, it sounds peculiar to us: too self-conscious, too kitsch. But in popular music, the continued use of a harmonic system developed centuries ago sounds perfectly natural — precisely because it never tried fully to break away. Indeed, far more of the West’s teleological code might have been smuggled in popular forms than their highbrow critics ever realised. Just as the eye seems to appear on whichever evolutionary branch one looks at, so the same trends that preoccupied Western musicians a hundred years ago are unfurling in pop music today. Melody strains against its rhythmic and harmonic leashes once again, threatening to snap free altogether. But while Schoenberg — motivated by political ideology — thrust this melodic “autonomy” onto his works, today it grows out of humanity’s simple desire to explore. The prognosis for today’s music is therefore, I believe, much better. Popular culture crystallised archetypically Western tropes that, if nurtured, may still blossom again. It is probably the closest thing we have today to a myth about ourselves — we do not question, perhaps cannot question, the pre-rational sway it has over us. So ingrained in the public’s mind are the perfect cadence and the love story that not even the Enlightenment’s cynical ticks can burrow deep enough to suck them out. Today, like the lounge suit, their ubiquity conceals a quintessentially Western inheritance. </blockquote>
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Steph Yin in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/science/fire-smoke-evolution-tuberculosis.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"The Lingering Embers of Discovering Fire"</a>.
<blockquote>
Now, two new studies have proposed theories on how negative consequences of fire might have shaped human evolution and development. In the first, published Tuesday, scientists identified a genetic mutation in modern humans that allows certain toxins, including those found in smoke, to be metabolized at a safe rate. The same genetic sequence was not found in other primates, including ancient hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. The researchers believe the mutation was selected for in response to breathing in smoke toxins, which can increase the risk of respiratory infections, suppress the immune system and disrupt the reproductive system. It’s possible that having this mutation gave modern humans an evolutionary edge over Neanderthals, though it’s speculation at this point, said Gary Perdew, a professor of toxicology at Pennsylvania State University and an author of the paper. But if the speculation is correct, the mutation may have been one way that modern humans were inured against some adverse effects from fire, while other species were not. </blockquote>
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Stephen Budiansky in WSJ on Steven Vogel’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-brilliant-history-of-technology-1478288337"target="_blank">"Why the Wheel Is Round"</a>.
<blockquote>
One seemingly small, and at first glimpse even obvious, difference between the design approaches of evolution and engineers forms the premise for Vogel’s final book, the newly (and posthumously) published “Why the Wheel Is Round.” Vogel begins by noting a “paradoxical problem.” Most useful things that people have built machines to do, from ancient times to the present—grinding grain, pumping water, spinning fibers, shaping pottery, drilling holes, propelling vehicles—require rotary motion. Yet, “through most of human history . . . muscle has been the main motor of our technology. . . . Muscle can only pull, and it must remain attached at both ends.” No organism bigger than a bacterium has a moving part that can turn through a complete, 360-degree circle. So how can a non-rotating engine drive truly rotating machinery? </blockquote>
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James Gorman in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/prehistoric-massacre-ancient-humans-lake-turkana-kenya.html"target="_blank">"Prehistoric Massacre Hints at War Among Hunter-Gatherers"</a>.
<blockquote>
The injuries, she said, showed that two different size clubs were used, as well as arrows. Deep cuts to foreheads, jaws and hands, she said, meant that a third type of weapon, with embedded stone blades, must have been used. The stone remnants were obsidian, which is rare in that area, and, she said, they “suggest the attackers were coming from somewhere else.” The authors of the Nature report say the attack could have been a raid for resources, or it could be an example of organized violence that was common among ancient hunter-gatherers, but rarely preserved. This was a highly fertile time in the Lake Turkana area. Pottery found in the region suggests that some groups of foragers at that time may have been storing food — resources worth stealing. Or the attackers may have been after captives. Bones from one young teenager were found at the site, and remains of adults and children under 6, but no remains of older children, who might have been taken by the attackers. </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcidz_ABnt4LfDwTFoJUtUZTGiuo99Ak3X-mXl0PyyCMLiU89bAJZZer2_hM-Sr0m5NQ976EsySzziXw9_hmM2do31rlSHWkdNyrc51KGw1WI2cdzyfs294ixYTe44alJRnRbJqV5CRPh/s1600/NV-Paradise+ofthePacific.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcidz_ABnt4LfDwTFoJUtUZTGiuo99Ak3X-mXl0PyyCMLiU89bAJZZer2_hM-Sr0m5NQ976EsySzziXw9_hmM2do31rlSHWkdNyrc51KGw1WI2cdzyfs294ixYTe44alJRnRbJqV5CRPh/s1600/NV-Paradise+ofthePacific.png" /></a></div>Glyn Williams in WSJ on Susanna Moore’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-in-paradise-1440790094"target="_blank">"Paradise of the Pacific"</a>.
<blockquote>
Among Hawaiians, strict observance of kapu began to decline, and again the presence of foreigners played its part, for islanders noticed that their blatant disregard of traditional rules and penalties went unpunished. The critical moment came five months after Kamehameha’s death and involved Kaahumanu, the king’s favorite among his 22 wives and a strong personality in her own right. She had appointed herself regent to Kamehameha’s successor, his son Liholiho (Kamehameha II). At a feast that Kaahumanu arranged in his honor, Ms. Moore writes, the young king ate with the women and ”was not struck dead” by the gods. It was the end, she notes, of a thousand years of kapu, and although some resisted the new order, the event was followed by widespread rejoicing and the burning of images of the gods. </blockquote>
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Carl Zimmer in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/science/scientists-puzzle-over-a-biological-mystery-the-female-orgasm.html"target="_blank">"In the Bedroom, an Evolutionary Mystery"</a>.
<blockquote>
While women release an egg each month, other female mammals, such as rabbits and camels, release an egg only after mating with a male. Ovulatory cycles evolved in only a few lineages of mammals, including our own, Dr. Pavlicev and Dr. Wagner found. Before then, our ancient mammal ancestors originally relied on ovulation triggered by sex with a male. Those early mammals developed a clitoris inside the vagina. Only in mammals that evolved ovulatory cycles did the clitoris move away. Based on these findings, Dr. Pavlicev and Dr. Wagner argue that the female orgasm first evolved as a reflex to help females become pregnant. When early mammals mated, the clitoris could send signals to the brain, triggering hormones that released an egg. Once the egg became fertilized, the hormones may have helped ensure it became implanted in the uterus. This arrangement has worked well for mammals that rarely encounter males. It helps females make the most of each mating. But eventually some mammals, including primates like us, started spending their lives in social groups. Females had access to regular sex with males, and orgasm as an ovulatory mechanism was no longer so useful. Our female forebears instead evolved a new system: releasing eggs in a regular cycle. As the original purpose of the orgasm was lost, the clitoris moved away from its original position. Dr. Wagner speculated that this shift was part of evolution’s dismantling of a sensor system: “You don’t want to have the old signal sending noise at the wrong time,” he said. </blockquote>
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Jessica Gavora in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-title-ix-became-a-political-weapon-1433715320"target="_blank">"How Title IX Became a Political Weapon"</a>.
<blockquote>
The road that took Title IX from a classically liberal antidiscrimination law to an illiberal gender-quota regime began in 1996 with an innocent-seeming “Dear Colleague” letter written by federal education officials in the Clinton administration. The letter targeted colleges and universities struggling to answer the difficult question of what constitutes (unlawful) discrimination under Title IX in sports programs that are already segregated on the basis of sex. It instructed schools that quotas—equalizing the participation of men and women in athletics, despite demonstrated disparities of interest—were the way to comply with the law. Activists who had been instrumental in creating the new standard took the federal guidance and ran with it. Aided by the trial bar, they initiated lawsuits that enshrined the new bureaucratic “guidance.” The case brought against Brown University in the early 1990s by a coalition of feminists and trial lawyers set the stage. It alleged that Brown—which offered more women’s sports teams than men’s at the time—had violated the law by downgrading two women’s teams. The university produced reams of data showing that women at Brown had more opportunities to play sports than men, but more men than women played intramural sports by 3 to 1 and club sports by a whopping 8 to 1. To the applause of the Clinton administration, the court ruled that such data didn’t matter. The responsibility of the school wasn’t to provide equal opportunity to participate in sports—it was to educate women to be interested in sports. </blockquote>
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Henry Allen in WSJ on Steven Watts’ book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-messiah-of-masculinity-1478280156"target="_blank">"JFK & the Masculine Mystique"</a>.
<blockquote>
In an epilogue, we’re told that Kennedy’s “crusade for invigorated masculinity helped unleash subversive social forces that . . . whirled out of control” to give us the ruckus of the later ’60s. In pop-psych vocabulary, Mr. Watts attempts to reconcile the masculinism of Kennedy and the feminism of Betty Friedan by saying they both defined “a new nirvana of emotional self-realization for affluent men and women.” On the other hand, the author concludes by saying that “mortally wounded along with JFK was an intensely male cultural style that would soon prove unsatisfying to just about everyone, from the politically correct Left to the family-values Right.” </blockquote>
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Vikki Ortiz Healy in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-transgender-estrogen-shortage-met-20161105-story.html"target="_blank">"Injectable Estrogen Shortage Worries Trans Community"</a>.
<blockquote>
To achieve female characteristics such as curvy hips, breasts, thinning face and hair growth, trans women may be prescribed estrogen — a hormone that stimulates development in those areas. But the injections, which are typically needed in high dosages of 40 mg for trans women, became scarce this fall. Par Pharmaceutical, one of the companies that manufactures estrogen injections under the name Delestrogen, ceased making its product after one of its suppliers stopped providing a material used in the injections. To begin producing Delestrogen again with material from a new supplier, that supplier must be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said Heather Zoumas-Lubeski, senior director of corporate affairs for Par Pharmaceutical. </blockquote>
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Guy Dammann in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/nobel-prize-literature-long-last-awarded-complete-idiot/"target="_blank">"The Nobel Prize for Literature, at Long Last, Has Been Awarded to a Complete Idiot"</a>.
<blockquote>
What, then, does Bob Dylan teach us to see? Dylan, perhaps better than anyone, raises a smudged and shaking mirror to the shallowness and lack of intellectual ambition which have come to stand as our age’s foremost images of excellence. In Dylan’s singer-songwriting we can apprehend with hideous clarity the easy self-satisfaction of the protestor who thinks constructive engagement is for losers and phonies. Above all, Dylan expresses our epoch’s celebration of the protraction of adolescence; a glorified refusal to be understood, because no one understands the real me. So much modern art exists to perpetuate and celebrate our facile self-regard, but Dylan’s music oozes it. Its whole texture is shot through with its insufferable smugness, from its inexplicable contentment with a handful of inanely doodled rhymes and empty riddles, to the performer’s blatant refusal even to sing it properly. His cracked vocal timbre, and habit of singing against the stress and flow of his own verses, so beloved of his millions of fans, articulates with breath-taking clarity the spirt of the adolescent’s stubborn refusal to realise his confused view of the world, and his place in it, is not a mark of genius but a waste of everybody else’s time. Hence the injured tone of much of Dylan’s songs, and his performances of them. His music is the sound of everything being everybody else’s fault, the music of the drop-out. </blockquote>
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Ben Sisario & Sydney Ember in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/business/media/rolling-stone-stays-focused-as-defamation-trial-is-set-to-begin.html"target="_blank">"Facing the Music"</a>.
<blockquote>
Wenner, which is privately owned, also shoulders more than $14 million in debt payments each year for a loan that dates to 2006, when the company borrowed $300 million to buy back the 50 percent share in US Weekly that it had sold to Disney for $40 million just five years before. Analysts say that Wenner has been disciplined in paying down the loan — its obligation is now $59 million — but described the terms as aggressive, since lenders want to make their money back before the magazine business falls apart. Last month, in a $40 million deal, Wenner Media sold a 49 percent stake in Rolling Stone to BandLab Technologies, a Singapore-based music tech company. Wenner used $25 million from that transaction for a special payment on its loan, according to credit reports, and the rest is intended as an investment to expand Rolling Stone’s reach internationally, and into new areas of branding and licensing like concerts and hotels.
The Singapore deal was a coming-out of sorts for Gus Wenner, who was appointed to his current position two years ago and has quickly become the company’s heir apparent. For years, Jann Wenner had seemingly never needed a succession plan. </blockquote>
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Andrew Goldman in WSJ MAG, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/l-a-vice-inside-media-mogul-shane-smiths-santa-monica-estate-1473165901"target="_blank">"L.A. Vice"</a>.
<blockquote>
“If a lot of the stuff that we’re doing seems politically correct now, it’s because Gen Y people make it,” Smith says. “We don’t hide our past. That said, we did have to look at what side of history we wanted to be on. A lot of my views on a lot of things were outdated. There’s a more positivist thing going on now. It’s like Bob Dylan going electric. We have to keep changing and challenging ourselves.” McInnes – who parted with Vice in early 2008, citing “creative differences,” and no longer speaks to Smith – howls when hearing this pronouncement. “It’s a great sales pitch,” he says. “I think the edginess to him was a hindrance for his job, which was selling ads. This is about what’s going to make the most money. If you want the young demo, you have to acquiesce to the predominant narrative, which is political correctness.” A couple of years after McInnes left, Freston, who had been fired from Viacom, helped Vice buy back its stake from Viacom and assumed an unofficial role as the company’s in-house grown-up. </blockquote>
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Gavin McInnis at <i>takimag.com</i>, <a href="http://takimag.com/article/lena_dunham_killed_phyllis_stewart_schlafly_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz4QyoQ2Cii"target="_blank">"Lena Dunham Killed Phyllis Stewart Schlafly"</a>.
<blockquote>
After discovering we are living in a world that venerates the likes of Lena Dunham, she decided life was no longer worth living and went gently into that good night. An old, amateur Wiki entry trivialized Phyllis’ work thusly:
Schlafly believed that if women were given equal rights they would be drafted into the military, that unisex bathrooms would be mandated and that same sex marriages would be legalized, none of which were correct. Schlafly also believed that with having the Equal Rights Amendment the atmosphere and the “traditional home life” would be disrupted. That last hyperlink, entitled “My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family,” features a woman with a beard “chest-feeding” her son because she thinks she’s a man and moms don’t have breasts when they’re dads, got it? The amount of injections, hormones, fake smiles, and suspensions of disbelief required to make his “brother’s pregnancy” appear normal is enough to make you wish Phyllis croaked about fifteen years ago. </blockquote>
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Adrien Bose in TABLET, <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/"target="_blank">"Double Exposure: Jean-Pierre Melville"</a>.
<blockquote>
Jean-Pierre’s attitude toward his brother’s murderer highlights the man’s deepest ambiguity. Unexpected, unclassifiable, quick to take a side step, he is forever turning on its head the commonplace and the simplistic. With his brother a committed Socialist, he became a right-wing anarchist and took pleasure, in the conformist setting of his cultural milieu, in expressing his devotion to the army and its representatives. And while the French New Wave filmmakers hailed him as a founding father, he opposed their moral transgression from his seat on the board of censors, where he categorically banned all pornography from film, defining it in the strictest terms. Melville always turned up with a series of sharp, shocking, and amoral pronouncements, which he dispensed in his affected voice, enunciating each word with gracious geniality. </blockquote>
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<B>Obituary of the Issue</B>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/world/middleeast/ashraf-pahlavi-sister-of-irans-last-shah-defender-and-diplomat-dies-at-96.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Ashraf Pahlavi"</a> (1919-2016)
<blockquote>
Princess Ashraf was a glamorous and divisive figure. As a teenager in 1934, she and her older sister, Shams, along with their mother, appeared at a public ceremony not wearing the veils that were a part of traditional dress in Iran. This public display, part of her father’s program to bring Iran into the 20th century, helped establish her public image: Western-oriented, modern, fashionably dressed, fluent in French and English, with a taste for the high life. She used her privileged position as a princess to plead the cause of women in a variety of ways, most visibly as the president of the Organization of Iranian Women, the chairwoman of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the Iranian delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and an adviser to the World Conference on Women in 1975. At the same time, Princess Ashraf gained a reputation as a steely political operator, an unashamed apologist for the despotic regime of her brother, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and a mink-draped sybarite, well known at the casinos of the French Riviera, who amassed a considerable fortune during her brother’s years in power and lived in luxurious exile after he was overthrown in 1979. </blockquote>
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Thanks to Mike Vann Gray, Chris Woods, Matt Carducci
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-51172555391268773892015-06-06T08:53:00.000-07:002016-11-27T10:49:17.943-08:00Issue #148 (June 6, 2015)
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<b>West of Big Hollow, Wyoming </b><br />
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE7j5nK_gp_SGVZy3mXEoe07AM444-I1pgvPEB48O8CSO6uCjwWy1HBWcGf_5H2f4a00gOnUWXFSRyf_549hK5x2FgD__8lWsV_V6SZX9iS29UYmJRIu6aTg8bv7UQYYWLk0as5Lqifd4a/s640/BigHollow2-small.jpg" /></div>
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>Father’s Night</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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In late 2010 I wrote <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/12/issue-78-december-29-2010.html" target="_blank">"here"</a> about my father’s early stages of Alzheimer’s and how his memory as a lifelong Pirates fan at 83 years of age stacked up watching the just discovered film of the entire game 7 of the 1960 World Series when they beat the Yankees in the 9th on Mazeroski’s home-run for the ages. Dad’s response to revisiting probably the most powerful sports memory of his young manhood was subdued but interested. <br />
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Dad got steadily worse from there, of course, with his sudden loss of interest in his teams the least of our concerns. The youngest of his siblings, Joseph, had died of cancer in 2009 and Mom said Dad stood at the casket a long time. Dad was the oldest of four and he had been born Delio in Italy, the rest (Filomena, Nick, Joe) in Pennsylvania coal country near Scranton. Their father, Secondo, had worked in the mines until his older brother Romeo was killed in a mine collapse. He helped his sister-in-law buy a small farm and then he moved his own family, Olivia and the kids, to Bradford, oil country and home of Zippo Manufacturing, where he landscaped for the rich families. Dad had to get up hours before school on snowy nights to help his father shovel out his employers’ driveways and sidewalks. Dad told me he’d envy his baby brother Joe sleeping soundly as he left in the dark to work.<P>
I moved back to Naperville for half a year to see if we could keep him at home and still allow Mom to get out of the house during the day. So Dad and I would walk a mile along the DuPage River to a coffeeshop each morning to buy the papers and have a cup, and then walk back, where we’d eat and he’d watch the stuff I was seeing for my next book: 1950s television Westerns and D.W. Griffith silent Biographs from before 1913. Dad would be glad to sit after the walk and watching <i>“Cheyenne”</i> he might interject, “It’s all about sex, you know?” Or with the silents he might laugh at them or even get confused about what could possibly be going on that he was watching these ancient moving pictures with this guy who might be his brother Joe, or his son Joe, or just any old Joe. He was forgetting the <i>why</i> of things. And for a guy who played as hard as he worked (golf, skiing, basketball…), sitting around the house was just plain odd. Early in his retirement he and Mom were always travelling, and in town he had his “we bad” pals for poker and the football pool, and the “old farts” who gathered at Dunkin Donuts as early as 5am, and grandkids, helping the older ones with homework and bringing bagels to the younger ones.<P>
Dad still remembered certain childhood watersheds as I wrote in that earlier piece:<br />
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“Secondo worked first in America for several years before returning to Sarnano to bring his wife and son to America. Dad still remembers his earliest memory – the porpoises following alongside the boat, he was not quite four. Secondo worked with his older brother in the mines until Romeo was killed in a mine collapse…. Dad can usually tell the story of getting into a fight out front of his new house with a neighbor kid who was Irish. He searches for words now but still tells it well. Basically the Irish kid was picking on the new Italian kid and both mothers came out on their porches. Dad remembers his Mother calling out, ‘Dalio, don’ta you fight,’ while the Irish kid’s Mom was yelling <i>‘Tommy, you whip that little dago!’</i>” (<i>NV78</i>) </blockquote>
Actually, Dad did tell an earlier story, the one thing he remembered about his life in the old country. He must’ve been three when he was given a piglet to raise. As he understood it he was given the pig as a pet and so how many months later when they took his pig and slaughtered it he was as he recalled “inconsolable” and you believed him.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgChTjMd6V00gwhaeUIrqW27ytJyWilEACFmIatmvdTNuCnNb06KyAa8lLj5bJ3Wh8qaY7slzxfhL3AlVeI4z-0TPKrUGuNPfG-GW320XW-LzI6c5X-lU3dGhhqECtJppb057Tujpemygau/s1600/carducciL-Rmattmarkjoe1959.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgChTjMd6V00gwhaeUIrqW27ytJyWilEACFmIatmvdTNuCnNb06KyAa8lLj5bJ3Wh8qaY7slzxfhL3AlVeI4z-0TPKrUGuNPfG-GW320XW-LzI6c5X-lU3dGhhqECtJppb057Tujpemygau/s400/carducciL-Rmattmarkjoe1959.png" /></a></div>Back in 2010, after a while watching tv, inevitably Dad would look around and ask, “Where’s Jacquie?” or “Where’s Mom?” He wasn’t sure about anything anymore except Mom by then so he was fine as long as she was around. He had his spells for a while, like being certain that he’d just gotten a call from the hospital and had to jump in the car to go check a patient. He’d been doing that for over 40 years when he finally retired completely. He’d failed a driving test and wasn’t happy about it but some memory-echo could play back as a real moment and it took all the trust he had in Mom for her to convince him that he was retired, there had been no call, and there was no-one to see. This happened a few times during the first half of 2010 and one time, finally convinced, he asked Mom, “Then what is my purpose here?” Another time I asked him some question and he just motioned to his head and said, “My brain is just a bag of water,” in explaining why he didn’t know the answer. His crossword puzzle answers were farther and farther off-base, Mom says. I was never interested in medicine and had an aversion to checking up on him; I tried to treat him like he was still Dad-in-full, man of the house. One day he sat at the kitchen table and poured over the <i>Sun-Times</i> for about two hours. I think he was testing himself on the crossword or on some article. Dad had energy and intelligence and for a time he tried to account for the disease and think his way around it.<P>
He left the house at night on foot once looking for Mom at her sister’s nearby condo when she had been beside him in bed asleep. He drove all around town in circles once trying to drive that short hop and couldn’t find his way home until he found the Hospital. Other misadventures required help by neighbors and policemen. My brother Matt put an alarm on the door; I kept worrying Dad would see what he was doing and get angry or hurt, but he didn’t notice. He got paranoid occasionally and Matt put him on something that mellowed him out, but you’d wonder if you were losing that much more of the real person. Soon he wasn’t mobile enough to get out of the house and be a concern that way. It was usually me who set off the alarm. I went back to Wyoming when he started going to an elder-care facility during the day. He’d fled an earlier one, but he now enjoyed this one, but Alzheimer’s gradually takes away the physical skills as well and soon he was at home all day tended by two care-takers, Cesar and Nancy, in turn, before he went to bed. They’d talk to him and have the television on while they went through a daily routine and Mom was around but able to visit friends and do errands around town, and we, the kids, the seven of us who could, would visit as often as possible, taking turns to keep the activity level high in the house.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjduFvuylp6_vekpSV8Gfm-rL1CF1RlaNXdAIo1A4Cyv45GgDsKOja7Ysr0KpXt83fk-_tqfoRvJATxw3RKpwQ5w0g8N0blMWyt-O4t1-SnoFWRUA4oVQtl_maWx1gae8OioBTy1ZYfhZIX/s1600/vulgate-DadsBirthday-40thmaybe-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjduFvuylp6_vekpSV8Gfm-rL1CF1RlaNXdAIo1A4Cyv45GgDsKOja7Ysr0KpXt83fk-_tqfoRvJATxw3RKpwQ5w0g8N0blMWyt-O4t1-SnoFWRUA4oVQtl_maWx1gae8OioBTy1ZYfhZIX/s320/vulgate-DadsBirthday-40thmaybe-small.jpg" /></a></div>We rented movies a couple Saturdays running in December 2012, and had some of the grandkids over and watched <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i>, and <i>The Grey</i> with the lights out and yet Dad stayed awake both times and seemed to follow the movies. He was barely talking by then so we only knew when he looked alert and when he was tired or asleep in his chair. He was able to walk with assistance up until about mid-2013, after which he needed a wheelchair and then even a lift to move him around. He seemed to have his alert days followed by sleeping days, especially in winter when it got dark so early. If you were lucky you got a “yeah” out of him in answer to a simple question. I caught his eye early one morning last December when Cesar wheeled him into the kitchen and said “Good morning, Dad,” and got a very carefully pronounced “Good morning” back. <P>
About a month later, though, he stopped having alert days, had trouble focusing his eyes, using his tongue, and swallowing. He last ate something Wednesday February 4th and on that Sunday Cesar felt he shouldn’t get him out of bed. Dad encouraged us all to consider medicine and so four of us are doctors. Matt’s practice is descended from Dad’s and is still in Naperville. He sent out emails about Dad’s condition and had his family visit Dad. We all made our plans to come back. Julie flew from Jakarta, Mark drove from Wyoming, and Geri and Michelle drove down from Wisconsin. Geri slept on the floor by his bed and noticed he was breathing roughly before sunrise on Monday Feb. 9th and woke up the others in the house and they were around him when he died. (Mike then flew in from Las Vegas and I left from Wyoming.) There are so many medical professionals in the family that the coroner didn’t shoo the family away from his work as he normally would, which Michelle said she regretted. I would have too.<P>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQJEpLyi39vjsgveztktRzBSp1qo2Je9O9uw21KAB44sIO2MkgsnC-xr9V0RsEDDDHHWD_OUKz1MCZQIXrv3zZ1tHD4oKhuy_SrQ1EaACFZNbn-7puFfMsvTUSqJSOrQ0KxF02LSGpUJZT/s1600/vulgate-CarducciPortrait-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQJEpLyi39vjsgveztktRzBSp1qo2Je9O9uw21KAB44sIO2MkgsnC-xr9V0RsEDDDHHWD_OUKz1MCZQIXrv3zZ1tHD4oKhuy_SrQ1EaACFZNbn-7puFfMsvTUSqJSOrQ0KxF02LSGpUJZT/s400/vulgate-CarducciPortrait-small.jpg" /></a></div>Dad’s end was so gradual over these last years that it was nothing like when my sister Lisa died in 1985. Now I can see there was an odd comfort in feeling cheated by fate out of a normal life-span. You couldn’t lean on that with Dad’s death; it was real capital-D Death, The End, all the way out to the frozen ground. The docs in the family had an additional way to process it; they did reading on Alzheimer’s research and toward the end Dad was getting nasal spray applications of insulin which seemed to make some difference even at his late stage. That and maybe infra-red treatments are around the corner. We’ll get a report on the condition of his brain at some point and we’ll know all that can be known.<P>
In a big family there’s one long rolling conversation full of crosscurrents and it never follows one train of thought for very long. You can also forget when one or two of us are missing in all the hubbub, at least for awhile. So we got together, less sisters Jackie (institutionalized with Down’s syndrome) and Lisa and now Dad. But we saw the warm return of Dad’s long practice of medicine in a once-small town come back at the front door, the telephone, the <i>Naper Sun</i>, and several long facebook threads of people delivered by Dad, or treated by him, and on and on. The wake went two days with populations of old Naperville, Hospital staff, and relatives coming in waves with the littlest grandkids dressed up and flitting about in the background. I’ve been out of town for decades and in Wyoming I go days without talking to anyone, but Mom in particular knows and remembers everyone. At the funeral mass in the main church, painters’ scaffolding towered over the sanctuary, and plastic was draped over the stained glass windows and back altar like some Christo project. When the priest asked Mom to help spread the pall over the coffin she stepped over to us pallbearers and whispered, “This is surreal.” That’s the reality of <i>’Til death do us part</i>, I guess. It reminded me of Dad saying once during our morning walks back when they were getting harder for him to do or even comprehend, “God, this is like a dream!”<br />
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Dad was very busy building his practice when we were little; Mom’s mother moved in with us and Grandma helped raise us. The marriage of Italian to German had been a shock to each family so this was more significant than we kids knew. The time Dad could spend with us on Wednesdays or the weekends seemed that much more valuable to us. He would take us kids to the Intermission diner which was across the street from the Naper Theater. We called it “The Coke Store” and we each got a Coke to drink and Dad would order a cup of Sanka and he’d let us play a song on the tableside jukebox. The fry-cooks were Lebanese and they seemed to relate to Dad as a fellow-Mediterranean. The small-town of 6,000 German-American tradesmen and five doctors grew to a mixed population of 150,000 white collar high-achievers. Dad didn’t stay in the Eastern, rather tribal, immigrant world of his father; he liked the open, earnest world of Mom’s Midwestern family. He trusted that his help offered to new doctors in town would not harm his interests and in fact one of those Docs was a big help to Mom and a great friend of Dad’s through the end. Dave Cox MD told us that when his petition to join the staff at the hospital Dad leaned out and gave him the malocchio (he had a good one!) and said, “I’m going to blackball your nomination because Villanova beat St. Bonaventure in the NCAA tournament.” The first half of the sentence shocked everyone; then they were all laughing. When European and Middle-eastern doctors came to Naperville Dad didn’t encourage their old world assertion of status or their attempts to rig referrals. Unlike them Dad knew the names of the hospital staffers down to the janitors. If someone was surprised he’d say, “Those are my people.”<P>
Birth order shapes families and our old-country Grandpa Secondo didn’t approve of Mom until she bore Dad three sons; then he told Dad, <i>“Questa donna è la tua fortuna,” – This woman is your good fortune</i>. Except that the three of us (Matt, Mark, and myself) were always unconscionably looking for something to destroy around the house, then around the neighborhood, and once we got bicycles no place in town was safe. For obvious reasons we weren’t allowed to watch The Three Stooges when we were little. Your best entertainment value is to have three boys in short order – together we probably had one-third the good sense of an only child. On Main St. we lived near the city graveyard so could play in the mausoleums and climb the headstones. We were too little to do much damage there. As the family got larger we moved into a big old house near Ss. Peter & Paul Church and School. One inspired summer morning we saw that our neighbor’s tomatoes were coming in so we each got a golf club from the garage and waded into the garden swinging. Dad believed in corporal punishment but we considered ourselves lucky since our cousins would get the belt. I remember one day Dad told us boys to go into the back room; we asked each other, “What did you do?!” Instead he came in and told us about the birds and the bees and pointed at some anatomical drawings in a medical textbook. You could say that the facts of life were completely wasted on us at that point.<br />
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After the three of us five girls were born (Geri, Lisa, Julie, Michelle, Jackie), after which we moved into a custom built house on Anne Rd., where another boy, Mike, was born. The girls constituted their own mini-family with their own activities and jokey slang. Again birth order was hard to argue with. Recently most of us siblings were together talking and it surprised me how traumatic my sisters’ memories were of the day Jackie was taken from the house to the home. I don’t remember that day. But I do remember Dad taking me with him to that home where he did weekly check-ups on about a dozen severely retarded or deformed babies including our sister. I followed Dad around from one to the next, not really assisting him but that’s what he had in mind. The hydrocephalic baby not only had a swollen head but a large protrusion from the middle of the spine as well. Driving back home he asked if I thought I might like to do work like that. I’m sure I didn’t say much besides, “No.” It’s hard to remember, especially as a child, just how lucky you are.<P>
In those years on Ellsworth St., Dad would blow in from work on a Wednesday or Saturday, between work and house-calls and take us down the street with a bat and ball or a football and we’d play near the North Central College field-house or Central Park. But he’d have to get back to the office or do rounds at the hospital or make house-calls, etc. and so before we knew it he’d leave us there to continue playing by ourselves. We’d be disappointed and watch him leave and then try to resume the game. But it was never as much fun without him.<P>
<i>(Illustrations: Dad and Joe along Route 66 in Kansas 1956; Dad and his sister Filomena in Bradford, Pa. circa 1934; Brothers circa 1959 l-r Matt, Mark, Joe; Dad’s 40th birthday 1967 l-r: Matt, Lisa, Geri, Dad, Mark, Julie, Joe; family portrait 1973, l-r: Lisa, Matt, Mark, Dad, Mike, Michelle, Julie, Mom, Jackie, Joe, Geri, Grandma Hartlaub; Sept. 15 1974, l-r: Mom, me, Dad; Thanksgiving 2011: Dad and grandkids Rafa and Nina)</i>
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<b>Oak Creek Trail, west of Las Vegas, Nevada </b><br />
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Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<a href="http://rockymountainlow.com/" target="new">
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<b>Dirty Dogs & Beyond</b><br />
Joseph Pope<br />
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Laramie, Wyoming is 150 miles north of Denver which itself sits several hundred miles from any population center of consequence. That is, if you consider Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Oklahoma or Kansas City as consequential. It’s the west and the space is vast and in the 1970s it felt much more so, as one could not import visual, auditory or written cultural artifacts in a millisecond. If something did arrive one still had to know where to look. That makes the coming together of the Dirty Dogs in Laramie in 1977 that much more of an intriguing venture.<P>
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Unlike most of their Hard Rock contemporaries, the Dirty Dogs’ original songs were stripped down, rough-and-tumble, Punk-influenced Rock, though most of the songs they performed were covers. They were Hard Rock fans inspired by Punk who never fully took up its mantle. The trio of Alex Killtree (bass), Mike “Stoney” Stone (drums), and guitarist Kevin (last name unknown) had been playing together for the better part of 1977 without a name or gigs, doing songs by the likes of Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top and Mott The Hoople (the same covers the Dirty Dogs would play). In late ’77 guitarist Eric Ambel made their acquaintance in the local music store and once he joined the group, more obscure 60s songs were added to the repertoire, and in time, covers by groups such as the Ramones and Dead Boys as well as a handful of originals. Eric had spent the summer in his hometown of Chicago, and while there he had won concert tickets on the radio for two bands that he had never heard of before: the Ramones and Dictators. This experience opened his eyes to the power of raw, simple, and aggressive Rock n Roll, and he returned to Laramie carrying some of that inspiration - this had a major influence on the direction of the band. <P>
The Dirty Dogs’ sound and attitude were far outside of the recognized and accepted, local Wyoming musical fare. They began playing Laramie fraternities and even played a high school prom. They had a theatrical side in that a friend would occasionally stage fake fights with them a la Andy Kaufman, and on at least one occasion they tied Kevin to a chair while he played. According to Eric, “to say that people really reacted negatively to the Dirty Dogs would be an understatement”. <P>
The band rehearsed in the living room of Alex’s house, where he had built a stage and a custom PA. They decided that they wanted to make a record and booked time with Rocky’s Recording Service, an outfit run by a local old-timer whose usual clients were more likely to be the local high school orchestra than a Rock band, and the cost of the recording included 200 45s. Kevin left the band just prior to the recording, but since they had already booked the session they decided to go ahead with their plans. They recruited Don Dimasi (a friend from local Rock group Stagger Wing) to play 2nd guitar on these recordings only. In Alex’s living room they recorded two songs live, straight to a stereo mix: “Sorority Girl” (a composition of Alex’s) and “Eric’s Move”. These were self-released as their lone 45 a few months later in mid-1978, and would be the only songs the band ever recorded as the Dirty Dogs.
A friend, and fan of the band (Richard Aeilts) was then added as a permanent member on second guitar, and it was around this time they discovered Wax Trax in Denver and made the acquaintance of Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, the store’s owners. Primarily because the band had a PA that they could provide, they were offered the opening slot on an upcoming Wax Trax sponsored show. On April 14th and 15th, 1978, the Dirty Dogs made their first appearances in Colorado, opening for the Suicide Commandos and the Jonny III at the Oxford hotel. <P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUsRw0lXnRmC4meoTQpTpaw4-kU3BSJkNcpg8jv1zD3oFP1PfLwyFhg-7R2u6y7gpoFsQvzDV9MKWimOGxXj7sRpqOou6q2l8IIoqrs_NBtJOUUuXymqdk_3CFJISfm4XSZeSq6Hf9m8bc/s1600/hallow1978-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUsRw0lXnRmC4meoTQpTpaw4-kU3BSJkNcpg8jv1zD3oFP1PfLwyFhg-7R2u6y7gpoFsQvzDV9MKWimOGxXj7sRpqOou6q2l8IIoqrs_NBtJOUUuXymqdk_3CFJISfm4XSZeSq6Hf9m8bc/s1600/hallow1978-3.jpg" /></a></div>The Dirty Dogs immediately became known and appreciated in the Colorado scene, not only because of the high visibility of these shows, but also because there were so few local, Punk/New Wave shows or bands at that time. They gigged throughout 1978 in both Colorado and Wyoming, including a show at the <a href="http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/8623" target="new"> Fox Theatre</a> in downtown Laramie, an old, abandoned theatre that the group had gained access to and where they had begun to stage concerts. Their self-propelling DIY aesthetic pretty much dictated that they’d need to leave the confines of the Colorado/Wyoming scene. It’d always been either New York or Los Angeles for them, and in October they headed west.<P>
They arrived in Los Angeles on Halloween and on that first night were invited to a gig (Germs/Mau-Maus/Go-Gos/Hal Negro & The Satin Tones) and met Brooke Shields – at the show! They procured a basement rehearsal space at the Masque and took on a new name (the Accelerators), more original songs and a more polished Pop Punk sound. They never played any advertised gig at the Masque (but many parties), instead playing clubs such as Club 88, Troubadour, Blind Pig, Madam Wongs and the Starwood, sharing the stage with the likes of Backstage Pass, Simpletones, Plugz and Levi & The Rockcats. After a few months they were ready to record and had somehow made the acquaintance of Danny Holloway, who had produced the Heptones, Shock, and Furys, among others. At his suggestion they went to Media Arts in Hermosa Beach, where some Dangerhouse 45s as well as Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" had been recorded (Spot would subsequently do the early SST recordings there as well). They recorded what became their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0by_C0Uyuo" target="new">“It’s Cool To Rock”</a> 7” EP in 1979 (again self-released), which included an updated version of “Sorority Girl”</a>. Though the record was well received and the gigging continued, the rigors and financial strain of trying to survive as band in Los Angeles were too much – before the end of ‘79 the Accelerators were done. <P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYbJa74iRmyLGUhPG7hhTBAD3TG-KQWvEdkySt-Ba85doAulbL_mVs2ZcCkbnz7mkomrMCdzn7VhH8JCR9oZ9HhVHjti4tm66PboXSpsavQuknokRSK1TpMNh8DYI-9p6HAsw0xm9gbMC/s1600/tj%2526roth2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfYbJa74iRmyLGUhPG7hhTBAD3TG-KQWvEdkySt-Ba85doAulbL_mVs2ZcCkbnz7mkomrMCdzn7VhH8JCR9oZ9HhVHjti4tm66PboXSpsavQuknokRSK1TpMNh8DYI-9p6HAsw0xm9gbMC/s1600/tj%2526roth2.jpg" /></a></div>While Mike and Alex returned to Wyoming, Richard & Eric stayed and played. Eric picked up first, forming a band with bassist Gary Ryan and ex-Avenger Danny Furious (né Danny O'Brian) on drums. He had also befriended Rik L Rik (F-Word & Negative Trend) and they began working together on songs. They performed a handful of shows in L.A. & San Diego and made some recordings, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8wxBgqu0S4" target="new">some of which can be heard</a> on Rik’s <i>The Lost Album</I>, released in 1991. Local blues rocker Top Jimmy had heard of Eric and requested that he play guitar in his new band (bringing along Gary and Danny). This was a much bigger deal for Eric as this was the first group Jimmy put together after having done gigs with members of X backing him. This outft lasted until sometime in 1980 when Eric responded to an ad that stated “Looking for 3 good men”. Auditions took place and when the dust settled Eric, Gary and Danny were in as Joan Jett’s new backing band, becoming the original Blackhearts.<P>
At this point Eric handed his Top Jimmy responsibilities to Richard, who, taking the name Dig The Pig, would become an original guitarist in the newly christened Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs. Jimmy and the band were much beloved in L.A., becoming a stalwart of and a phenomenon in the club circuit, helping drive the Roots Rock scene of the early 80s. They were known for their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmWPCpPPVsk" target="new">raucous live shows</a> and counted many musicians among their fans, both from the punk underground to big stars. Purportedly Tom Waits, David Lee Roth, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ray Manzarek, Albert Collins, Bonnie Bramlett, Percy Mayfield, and of course, members of the Blasters and X had all joined them on stage at some point. Their run lasted almost the entire decade and they managed one long player, <I>Pigus Drunkus Maximus</i> in 1987.<P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiODItrTDuQqP4gpMwF0XaGifSvkO8lnU3GNa6jXYI2hVgtyuYb-pG0E78mC52S5PYdvMIM9YaAii_VjOiVjOUAXnpGjcUZE-GRYurAd5GAt2ssOkL2oPAc9jeWgOVq1r13F_uKgFLlszXx/s1600/jjbh_at_SIR2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiODItrTDuQqP4gpMwF0XaGifSvkO8lnU3GNa6jXYI2hVgtyuYb-pG0E78mC52S5PYdvMIM9YaAii_VjOiVjOUAXnpGjcUZE-GRYurAd5GAt2ssOkL2oPAc9jeWgOVq1r13F_uKgFLlszXx/s1600/jjbh_at_SIR2.jpg" /></a></div>Eric worked with Joan Jett solidly for two years, touring extensively and playing on her <I>I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll</I> album before leaving to co-found the Del-Lords with ex-Dictator Scott Kempner. The group released several albums throughout the 80s and during this period he began to build his career as a producer and over the years has worked with the Bottle Rockets, the Blood Oranges, Nils Lofgren, Freedy Johnston, Blue Mountain and many others. In 1996 he opened a recording studio in New York, <a href="http://cowboytechnical.com/NewCowboyTechnical/Welcome_New_Cowboy.html" target="new">Cowboy Technical Services (which he still operates today)</a>, as well as opening the Lakeside Lounge in the East Village, a bar many considered to have had the best Blues/R&B jukebox in the city (closed in 2012). Between 2000 & 2005 he toured and recorded with Steve Earle, appearing on his <I>Jerusalem</I> and <I>The Revolution Starts… Now</I> LPs. Almost 40 years after the Dirty Dogs started, Eric continues to play, record and produce.<P>
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<P><i> (Illustrations: Dirty Dogs performing at Fox Theatre, Laramie,Wyoming 1978 (theatre demolished in 2009); Dirty Dogs 45 1978; Flier for 10/31/1978 gig at Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles; Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs at the Cathay De Grande, Los Angeles, November 1981 l-r: Steve Berlin (cut-off), Gil T., David Lee Roth, Dig The Pig, Top Jimmy, Carlos Guitarlos; Joan Jett & the Blackhearts at SIR rehearsal space, Hollywood 1980 l-r: Eric Ambel, Joan Jett, Danny Furious, Gary Ryan)</i>
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This excerpt is revised and extended from liner notes contained in the compilation album
<a href="http://www.rockymountainlow.com" target="new"><i> Rocky Mountain Low - The Colorado Musical Underground Of The Late 1970s</I></a>
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<b>Lost Lake, Wyoming </b><br />
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<B>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…</B>
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<a href="http://www.coldwarnightlife.com/features/shine-on-conny-plank/"target="_blank">"Cold War Nightlife"</a> navigate ten Conny Plank productions (and some that were tragically destined not to be):
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“Not all of his artists were as willing to recognise his contributions: having pushed Kraftwerk in the direction of synthesizers and added the vital delay to ‘Autobahn’ while the band were out of the studio, they in-sourced their production work and froze him out of future albums. Plank’s reputation was undiminished, and the story is told that Brian Eno suggested him as the producer of U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’ album – an idea that Plank himself rejected with characteristic directness, simply saying, ‘I cannot work with that singer.’” </blockquote>
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Steve Hansgen interviewed by Tony Rettman for <a href="http://noisey.vice.com/blog/an-interview-with-steve-hansgen"target="_blank">"Noisey"</a> about “Out of Step” and his year in Minor Threat:
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“I got scapegoated over a lot of problems the band had going long before I joined. Apparently by joining, I added to the problems instead of taking them away. I ended up becoming just as dysfunctional as they were just to survive. They asked me to leave after that tour and I was more than happy to go at that point because it became so volatile in that band. After they kicked me out, they lasted another two months before they finally tore themselves apart.” </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUuYwYpNqqkRFYGiYl1wIAy36Psf9RmyZy9kz6w0ZK0mmgRTxHet6hldNMpSCgCQ5An1qzc6Ksw9q-dLV7-xeczcaxEhWKM0rer3cEE2kL6ZO0g_0l-S7s85BqPXX5cB4iKBM9d16-fr_K/s1600/GG-YourBandSucks.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUuYwYpNqqkRFYGiYl1wIAy36Psf9RmyZy9kz6w0ZK0mmgRTxHet6hldNMpSCgCQ5An1qzc6Ksw9q-dLV7-xeczcaxEhWKM0rer3cEE2kL6ZO0g_0l-S7s85BqPXX5cB4iKBM9d16-fr_K/s320/GG-YourBandSucks.png" /></a></div>Jon Fine expounds at Belt Magazine on his memoir <a href="http://beltmag.com/your-band-sucks-an-interview-with-jon-fine/"target="_blank">"Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear)"</a>.
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“This music turned out to be incredibly durable. On a personal level, I placed insanely high hopes on it that were not realistic or sustainable. I believed that this would somehow replace the existing music industry, and I was heartbroken and quite upset when that didn’t happen. But what it did do was that it formalized, nurtured, and maintained an alternate circuit that bands still play on.” </blockquote>
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Lydia Lunch passes on her compliments to Brian Eno, Dan Graham and Courtney Love at <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/28/dont-blame-me-for-courtney-love-lydia-lunch-on-no-wave-brian-eno-rent-strikes-and-legacy/"target="_blank">"Art News"</a>.
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“Dan Graham, [...] wrote an essay, first published in English in 1982, called ‘New Wave Rock and the Feminine.’ In it, he interpreted Lunch through the philosopher Julia Kristeva, in particular conflating Lunch’s ‘hysterical pitch’ with Kristeva’s concept of ‘semiotic chora,’ a psychoanalytic term, which Graham defines as a ‘prelinguistic realm of primary drives and feelings [from] the period when the child identifies with the mother – before the fixed, social, 'stable ego' necessitated by symbolic language and produced by the castration complex forces conscious denial of these primary drives.’ (‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Lunch told me when I brought up the essay.)” </blockquote>
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Rod Liddle in <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/06/footballs-elite-deserve-the-foulness-of-fifa/"target="_blank">"SPECTATOR"</a> on why ‘football's elite deserves the foulness of FIFA’:
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“There is a very good case for saying that football gets the administration it richly deserves. At the top level the game is foul, corrupt, greedy and amoral — in Europe every bit as much as in Africa or Haiti. The players, in the main, show not a shred of loyalty or commitment to either their clubs or their national teams. They and their horrible, grasping agents are motivated by one thing alone — ever more obscene amounts of money.” </blockquote>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTZX4XwcSNv1LVin1nNTM18YBnBg5vES4XGHSy2LSHl6kd-uChEMkB9pa23l6UwtFRegALkWXwZcVP_de51gQr2wdAa9wup5i9dTwqaPiX_FNvW-YubhmmVgFIxnc6_LOrg9GSN_h_vki_/s1600/GG-PunkElegies.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTZX4XwcSNv1LVin1nNTM18YBnBg5vES4XGHSy2LSHl6kd-uChEMkB9pa23l6UwtFRegALkWXwZcVP_de51gQr2wdAa9wup5i9dTwqaPiX_FNvW-YubhmmVgFIxnc6_LOrg9GSN_h_vki_/s320/GG-PunkElegies.png" /></a></div>Allan Macdonnell at <a href="http://issuemagazine.com/allan-macdonellpunk-elegies/?blog=true#/"target="_blank">"issuemagazine.com"</a> interviewed by Buzz Osborne about his completely and utterly awesome memoir Punk Elegies:
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“Recreational inebriation is a progressive endeavor. By 1977, it leads our ‘Punk Elegies’ hero protagonist to a dank basement enclave under an alley off of a sleazy section of Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a place called the Masque. I meet about 100 or so like-minded ‘others.’ We all spontaneously realize that each and every one of us is pretty great, and the world will soon be ours. Somewhere in there, LA punk is born.” </blockquote>
Accompanying soundtrack dished up by the author at <a href="http://decibelmagazine.com/blog/2015/5/12/tales-from-the-metalnomicon-punk-elegies-playlist"target="_blank">"DECIBEL"</a> with comment by Lamb Cannon.
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Craig Ibarra in <a href="http://larecord.com/interviews/2015/06/04/a-wailing-of-a-town-an-oral-history-of-early-san-pedro-punk-interview"target="_blank">"LA RECORD"</a> on his oral history of the San Pedro punk scene, “A Wailing of a Town”:
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“The Minutemen were the anchor of the early Pedro punk community, and still are in a way. They set the tone for originality. They blazed a path of creativity that was influential on all the other Pedro bands that formed after them. The Minutemen embodied the DIY spirit to the fullest. Most of the early Pedro punk bands were inspired by the early Hollywood scene, where it was wide open and there was no template. I think the early Pedro punk bands — Minutemen, Saccharine Trust — were more inspired by the real early L.A. stuff and some of the more experimental music coming out of England, not so much by the hardcore scene that came a couple years later.” </blockquote>
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Peter Hitchens at <a href="http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/05/why-i-place-no-hope-in-a-referendum-on-britains-eu-membership.html"target="_blank">"mailonsunday.co.uk"</a> looks forward to the forthcoming EU referendum:
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“Plebiscites are a weapon of the state against the people in almost all cases. If elites think they will lose them, they either do not hold them, or (if they are only weak and incompetent elites) they arrange to have them re-run to come up with the desired result.” </blockquote>
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A fascinating <a href="http://www.rainbowhistory.x10.mx/index.htm"target="_blank">"history"</a> of The Rainbow where (among other things) Frank Zappa was pushed off stage into the orchestra pit, the Ramones recorded <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imf25Squ8ro"target="_blank">"It's Alive"</a> on New Year's Eve, 1977 and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5rkwxc6MHg"target="_blank">"auditions"</a> for “The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle” were filmed.
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“This case concerns a dispute as to the ownership of the copyright in a song ‘Touch Sensitive’ which was recorded in 1999 by the Band known as The Fall, featuring the vocalist Mark Smith, and released by Artful Records on an album entitled ‘The Marshall Suite’ in 1999.” </blockquote>
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<b>Snowy Range, Wyoming </b><br />
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…</b>
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Christopher Caldwell in WEEKLY STANDARD, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/awol-summer-love_876722.html" target="_blank">"AWOL from the Summer of Love"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Dylan’s fans not only had unmeetable expectations of his music, they had unmeetable expectations of him. He was supposed to share and even embody a whole set of burn-it-down, I-spit-on-your-bourgeois-institutions attitudes towards American society—and he simply didn’t. He was suspended like a cartoon character in midair over the chasm separating his own pre-1960s America from the post-1960s America he had done so much to create. His fans would have been appalled (perhaps he, too, would have been appalled) to recognize on which side of that chasm he thought virtue lay. So a touching moment on this collection comes when Dylan begins to strum and sing the syrupy ‘Mister Blue,’ a number-one hit for the Fleetwoods in 1959, a perfect embodiment of Eisenhower-era sentimentality, and someone in the background laughs. Across the years, you can’t tell whose laugh it is, or whether the laugh is a joyous one of recognition or a snotty one of expectation that Dylan would mock or parody this exquisite but dreadfully passé song. One might expect irony, but irony was for a later generation. Dylan delights in ‘Mister Blue,’ and Robertson, recognizing this, embroiders around it a quiet lead-guitar accompaniment that is reminiscent of Bruce Langhorne’s on the Dylan hit ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ three years before.” </blockquote>
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Robert Huddleston in BOSTON REVIEW, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/poetry/robert-huddleston-wh-auden-struggle-politics" target="_blank">"Poetry Makes Nothing Happen"</a>.
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“Auden’s case is revealing. In the 1930s his work developed a following among committed Marxists. Ideologically Auden was a fellow traveler: not a Party member but sympathetic to the egalitarianism of the left. What he perhaps failed to realize, at least initially, was that this audience had certain expectations that did not conform to his traditionally liberal sensibilities. What was expected was overt encouragement of true believers, a celebration of class struggle, and unwavering demonstrations of loyalty to approved causes. Having courted their favor, Auden found himself in the position of having to meet their demands.” </blockquote>
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Camille Paglia <a href="http://reason.com/reasontv/2015/03/19/everythings-amazing-and-camille-paglia-i" target="_blank">"interview"</a> at <i>reason.com</i>.
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“<i>reason</i>: What would be a way forward for colleges or other institutions to start making a defense of the humanities?
<i>Paglia</i>: Oh, that's hopeless. It's absolutely hopeless. The humanities destroyed themselves with veering toward postmodernism and post-structuralism. It's over. They've been completely marginalized by deconstruction, by questioning, undermining, and throwing out the whole idea of the genius, of the master of great works of art. I believe that there are great works of art. I do not believe that the canon is produced by critics sitting in a room testifying to their own power. I believe the canon is created by other artists. You identify the canon by who had the greatest influence on other artists over time. That is the story. The whole historical tradition, the linear line, which I absolutely believe in in terms of art history, has been discarded. The survey courses are being abandoned. Graduate students are not being trained even to think in large terms anymore. They have no sense of history. I find there's more sense of history in southern evangelicals who didn't even finish high school because their knowledge of the world is based on the Bible, so they're thinking in terms of, ‘What happened 2,000 years ago? What happened 2,500 years ago?’” </blockquote>
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Thomas Kohut in WEEKLY STANDARD on Rudiger Safranski’s book, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/peculiarly-german_831093.html" target="_blank">"Romanticism – A German Affair"</a>.
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“The author is sympathetic to Romanticism, when it remains in the aesthetic realm, as having the potential to enrich and fulfill a life and a world that would otherwise be sterile and superficial, a <i>literal</i> life and a <i>literal</i> world. The problem comes when Romanticism enters the political realm. Whereas the Romantic craves adventure, intense experiences, and extremes, successful politics depends on compromise, rational discourse, consensus, and achievement that is mostly partial and prosaic. ‘If we fail to realize that the reason of politics and the passions of Romanticism are two separate spheres, which we must know how to keep separate… we risk the danger of looking to politics for an adventure that we would better find in the sphere of culture—or, vice versa, of demanding from the sphere of culture the same social utility we expect from politics. Neither an adventurous politics nor a politically correct cultural sphere is desirable. [Only misfortune and suffering result when] we seek in politics what we can never find there: redemption, true Being, the answer to the ultimate questions, the realization of dreams, the utopia of the successful life, the God of history, apocalypse, and eschatology.’ The contamination of the political sphere with the Romantic impulse has had fateful – indeed, fatal – consequences, particularly in Germany, according to Saranski.” </blockquote>
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Jeffrey Collins in WSJ on Mark Greengrass’ book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-christendom-destroyed-by-mark-greengrass-1422053133" target="_blank">"Christendom Destroyed"</a>.
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“For medieval Christendom, religion informed internal stability and inspired external, crusading aggression. The Reformation inverted these effects. By splintering Christianity, it created the fault lines of wretched religious wars across Europe. The most harrowing of these were the French civil wars of the late 16th century and the Thirty Years’ War of the early 17th, both ‘carnivals of death’ punctuated by ghastly massacres and assassinations. Mr. Greengrass offers a chronicle of blood-chilling cruelty. We read of heretics, bound together, thrown into rivers; a besieged family of French Protestants reduced to cannibalism; a pitiless soldier’s diary recording the various ‘pretty girls’ he took as war prizes. The Reformation itself fractured Christian religious practice, but it was the human calamity of the religious wars that ended Europe’s shared sense of Christian culture. ‘An iron century,’ writes Mr. Greengrass, ‘bred iron in the soul.’ Internal division dissipated the external power of Christendom. The Islamic Ottoman Empire was the wonder of the age, stretching from distant Persia, across the defunct Byzantine Empire, into Hungary and across North Africa. The Ottomans terrified Europe, and the Habsburgs warred against them without end (and with a rare success at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571). But the common defense of Christendom increasingly became a pallid dream. European kingdoms scrambled to secure trading privileges with the Ottomans, and the French even allied with them against the Holy Roman Empire.” </blockquote>
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Stephen Kotkin in WSJ on Paul Preston’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-last-stalinist-by-paul-preston-1427238209" target="_blank">"The Last Stalinist – The Life of Santiago Carillo"</a>.
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“His father served as a prominent trade unionist in Spain’s moderate Socialist Party. The son, via connections and his own dynamism, vaulted in 1934 to the post of general secretary of the Socialist Party’s youth wing. The youth were further to the left: An oversized portrait of Stalin came to dominate the young Carrillo’s office. In the 1930s, Stalinism appealed to those in a hurry. After a failed worker uprising in October 1934 against a more rightist incarnation of the republican government that resulted in 17 months in prison, during which time he demanded revolutionary ‘Bolshevization’ of his father’s gradualist Socialists, the 21-year-old Carrillo betrayed his father, stealing his way to Moscow and folding the Spanish Socialist Youth into the Communist Youth International. Carrillo fought with the republic against General Franco’s Nationalist insurgency in the civil war, and as Mr. Preston conclusively shows, played a leading role in the decision to execute, instead of evacuate, some 2,000 imprisoned Nationalist sympathizers—a massacre that would eventually haunt his political career. Once Franco and his co-conspirators had risen up against the legal government, they pushed it and its defenders to the left—the very outcome the generals’ putsch claimed to be preventing. But Mr. Preston refuses to acknowledge the abject failure of Spain’s so-called Popular Front coalition of Socialists, anarchists and Communists, which was doomed by the irredeemable depravity of Communism, or how Franco held power by forging a de facto popular front on the right, in no small measure because of the now genuine threat posed by the revolutionary left…. Asserting his slavish loyalty, he wrote an open letter in 1939 denouncing his Socialist Party father: ‘When you ask to be in touch with me, you forget that I am a Communist and you are a man who has betrayed his class…. Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind.’ Carrillo’s father responded to the person he presumed to stand behind the heinous letter: ‘I, Señor Stalin, had always educated my son in the love of freedom, you have converted him to slavery. I still love him.’” </blockquote>
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Mikhail Shishkin in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/opinion/mikhail-shishkin-how-russians-lost-the-war.html?_r=0" target="_blank">"How Russians Lost the War"</a>.
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“After the war, my father drank. All his submariner friends did. What else could they do?
During the Gorbachev era, we had lean times, and my father, as a veteran, received a ration that included items from Germany. For him, this was a personal insult. He got drunk and hollered ‘But we won!’ Then he quieted down and began to weep. ‘Tell me,’ he kept asking no one I could see, ‘did we win the war or lose it?’ In his last years, he destroyed himself with vodka. He was the last man standing: All his submariner friends had drunk themselves into the grave long before. My father was cremated in his sailor’s uniform. He was probably eager to see his wartime buddies. The chief Russian question is: If the fatherland is a monster, should it be loved or hated? Here everything has run together, inseparably. Long ago, a Russian poet put it this way: ‘A heart weary of hate cannot learn to love.’ Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads. Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory.” </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-world-vietnams-impossible-bind-how-to-stand-up-to-beijing-1428397027" target="_blank">"Vietnam’s Bind"</a>.
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“Moreover, the stakes are rising. Nguyen Quang A, a prominent Vietnamese economist, says that anti-Chinese nationalist sentiment in Vietnam, while perhaps not strong enough to bring down the government, could ‘undermine the foundations of this system.’ China moved its first deep-water drilling rig, pictured in a file photo, to disputed waters off Vietnam in May last year. The economist was among those who signed an open letter last May to urge Vietnam’s leaders to join the Philippines’ legal challenge of China’s claims to almost the entire South China Sea. Reflecting the government’s ambivalence, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung suggested last year that Hanoi was considering such a move, but since then leaders have instead attempted to reset cordial ties with China.” </blockquote>
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Tom Mitchell & James Crabtree in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf82ad8e-ba5d-11e4-945d-00144feab7de.html" target="_blank">"Modi’s Himalayan Visit Sparks China Anger"</a>.
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“Liu Zhenmin, Chinese vice-foreign minister, said the Indian prime minister’s trip to Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing considers part of Tibet, ‘infringes on China’s territorial sovereignty and magnifies the border dispute’…. Security analysts said China’s unusual decision to rebuke India’s ambassador reflected bad feeling in the aftermath of US president Barack Obama’s trip to New Delhi last month. During the visit, the US and India signed a ‘vision statement’ covering the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions, which irked Beijing by including a pointed reference to security concerns in the South China Sea.” </blockquote>
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William Dalrymple in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/21/great-and-beautiful-lost-kingdoms/" target="_blank">"The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms"</a>.
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“Out of India came not just artists, sculptors, traders, scientists, astronomers, and the occasional fleets of warships, but also missionaries of three Indic forms of religion: Buddhism and two rival branches of Hinduism: Shaivism, in which Lord Shiva is revered as the Supreme Being; and Vaishnavism, which venerates Lord Vishnu. If the scale and breadth of this extraordinary cultural diffusion is not as well known as it should be, that is perhaps partly because of a tendency to perceive and study this process as two separate disciplines, each the preserve of a different group of scholars. The many Buddhist monuments scattered around Afghanistan and the Taklamakan desert in northwest China, through which Xuanzang passed, for example, are usually viewed today as the first step in the story of the spread of Buddhism from India through Asia, or else as an episode in the history of the ‘Silk Road,’ a term coined in the nineteenth century by the Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the trading routes linking China with the Mediterranean West. Conversely, the spread of Indian and especially Hindu culture, literature, and religion southeastward to Burma, Thailand, Sumatra, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Java, and the Malay Peninsula tends to be studied as part of the story of the adoption throughout Indo-China of the Sanskrit language and literary culture.” </blockquote>
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Pankaj Mishra in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-many-strands-of-indian-identity-1423850509" target="_blank">"The Literary Riches of India’s ‘Many Countries’"</a>.
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“In 19th century India, the humiliations of British colonialism forced many upper-caste Hindu nationalists to seek flattering self-definitions in the past. Ironically, they used European scholarship on India’s Sanskritic heritage to bolster their self-esteem. Though barely spoken in India, Sanskrit, the ‘language of the gods,’ seemed to sum up the range of virtues that exalted India above inferior, even barbaric, civilizations. The inconveniently substantial non-Sanskritic and folk traditions of India—those followed by a majority of Indians and described by Prof. Doniger in her ‘alternative history’—were a source of embarrassment to Western-educated upper-caste Hindus. This elite’s fossilized notions of India’s Sanskritic past came to obscure the vitality of the country’s many other old and still existing cultures. Created as a supposed antidote to soul-destroying Western influence, cultural nationalism in India ironically turned into an exercise in suppressing Indian traditions.” </blockquote>
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Amir Alexander in NYT on Amir Aczel’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/science/finding-zero-a-long-journey-for-naught.html" target="_blank">"Finding Zero – A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers"</a>.
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“Although this claim was prevalent among scholars in the early 20th century, Dr. Aczel considers this claim European bigotry. The zero, he has no doubt, is the creation of what he calls ‘the Eastern mind.’ Westerners, according to Dr. Aczel, have mainly used numbers for commerce and other utilitarian purposes. Zero, however, is not just a useful symbol, but a paradox — a sign that represents absence, or ‘something’ that is also ‘nothing.’ Little wonder, he believes, that the practical-minded Europeans never stumbled upon it. In Eastern thought, however, the rigid oppositions between existence and nonexistence are blurred, allowing for intermediate states such as ‘neither existing nor not existing.’ This fluidity, Dr. Aczel believes, allows for the startling juxtaposition of mathematics and sex at Khajuraho. More profoundly, it accounts for ‘shunyata,’ the positive emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist meditation. And zero, in Hindi, is ‘shunya.’ Dr. Aczel’s connections between early zeros and Eastern thought are powerful, but his opposition of East and West suggests that he might be guilty of some Western binarism himself. One need consider only that the Pythagoreans, founders of the Western mathematical tradition, were a religious cult to realize that the mystical use of numbers was far from unknown in the West.” </blockquote>
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Oriana Mastro in National Interest, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-military-about-go-global-11882" target="_blank">"China Can’t Stay Home"</a>.
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“The PLA has also been pushing for a greater role in protection of citizens overseas; for the first time, China’s 2013 Defense White Paper emphasized the need to ‘protect Chinese people overseas,’ stating specifically that ‘when there is a war, riot or political disturbance, the army should be able to evacuate Chinese people swiftly.’ An editorial in the <i>China Daily</i> by a former PLA colonel captures this sentiment: The PLA is also responsible for rescuing Chinese hostages in the event of such crises, and this is especially pertinent at a time when pirates, terrorists and armed kidnappers are operating on a greater scale in many parts of the world. The army should also act as a deterrent against those who attempt to harm Chinese people. We will not allow any repeat of such tragedies as the May 1998 riots in Indonesia, in which some 1,200 ethnic Chinese were killed.” </blockquote>
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David Shambaugh in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-chinese-crack-up-1425659198" target="_blank">"The Coming Chinese Crackup"</a>.
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“First, China’s economic elites have one foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble. In 2014, Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute, which studies China’s wealthy, found that 64% of the ‘high net worth individuals’ whom it polled—393 millionaires and billionaires—were either emigrating or planning to do so. Rich Chinese are sending their children to study abroad in record numbers (in itself, an indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher-education system). Just this week, the Journal reported, federal agents searched several Southern California locations that U.S. authorities allege are linked to ‘multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses that enabled thousands of Chinese women to travel here and return home with infants born as U.S. citizens.’ Wealthy Chinese are also buying property abroad at record levels and prices, and they are parking their financial assets overseas, often in well-shielded tax havens and shell companies. Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged financial fugitives living abroad. When a country’s elites—many of them party members—flee in such large numbers, it is a telling sign of lack of confidence in the regime and the country’s future.” </blockquote>
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Charles Clover in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6f2301b4-ac61-11e4-af0e-00144feab7de.html" target="_blank">"Beijing Enlists Private Sector to Slim Down Its Bloated Army"</a>.
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“‘Private companies can do things for one-third the cost of state companies,’ said Yang Xiaojie, general manager of the joint venture who originally hails from the lab. Ms Yang, who has spent most of her career working in the state-owned aero-space sectors, said the elite state factories had a tendency to look down their noses at the new entrants. ‘In terms of qualifications and experience, the private companies are clearly still inferior to the state companies. The state companies still attract better degrees from better universities, a better caliber.’ But the private companies learn quickly, and they make do with fewer people – ‘they develop people better’, she said.” </blockquote>
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Jeremy Page & Emre Peker in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-muslim-uighurs-flee-china-sees-jihad-risk-1422666280" target="_blank">"As Muslim Uighurs Flee, China Sees Jihad Peril"</a>.
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“Chinese and Turkish officials have clashed over roughly 300 suspected Uighurs detained in Thailand since March, whom Thai police said they found hiding on a rubber plantation.
Beijing has pressed Thailand to return the suspected Uighurs, who have no identification documents but claim Turkish descent and ask to go to Turkey, say people involved in those discussions. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in November said publicly that Turkey informed Thailand it wished to take them in. China’s foreign ministry, responding to a question about Mr. Cavusoglu’s statement, said: ‘We urge Turkey to immediately stop interfering in the handling of the relevant case’ and ‘not to send mistaken signals to the outside world that connive in, and even support, illegal immigration activities.’ Sek Wannamethee a Thai-foreign-ministry spokesman, said his government knew the Chinese and Turkish positions but needed time to identify the detainees—men, women and children.” </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCPp7CxX3ezTwyzksoOeZEtPnpkdc4zV7AQGOTVNA4EibsWkFSgGHjNyUt4gO4D4j5xOnql7GFUnXaB6ctL0fzmOO_-0gWNA4oXAMpjPX1G8YQ50Jpxz6g1JYqCGFcM6R56yvj3SoCoEmD/s1600/GG-AttaturkinNaziImagination.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCPp7CxX3ezTwyzksoOeZEtPnpkdc4zV7AQGOTVNA4EibsWkFSgGHjNyUt4gO4D4j5xOnql7GFUnXaB6ctL0fzmOO_-0gWNA4oXAMpjPX1G8YQ50Jpxz6g1JYqCGFcM6R56yvj3SoCoEmD/s1600/GG-AttaturkinNaziImagination.png" /></a></div>
Dominic Green in WSJ on Stefan Ihrig’s book <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-ataturk-in-the-nazi-imagination-by-stefan-ihrig-and-islam-and-nazi-germanys-war-by-david-motadel-1421441724" target="_blank">"Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, and David Motadel’s book, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War"</a>.
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“‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,’ Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. ‘Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?’ Islam was a <i>Männerreligion</i>—a ‘religion of men’—and hygienic too. The ‘soldiers of Islam’ received a warrior’s heaven, ‘a real earthly paradise’ with ‘houris’ and ‘wine flowing.’ This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the ‘Germanic temperament’ than the ‘Jewish filth and priestly twaddle’ of Christianity. For decades, historians have seen Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as emulating Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. Not so, says Stefan Ihrig in ‘Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination.’ Hitler also had Turkey in mind—and not just the 1908 march of the Young Turks on Constantinople, which brought down a government. After 1917, the bankrupt, defeated and cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire contracted into a vigorous ‘Turanic’ nation-state. In the early 1920s, the new Turkey was the first ‘revisionist’ power to opt out of the postwar system, retaking lost lands on the Syrian coast and control over the Strait of the Dardanelles. Hitler, Mr. Ihrig writes, saw Turkey as the model of a ‘prosperous and völkisch modern state.’” </blockquote>
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Christopher de Bellaigue in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Marwa Elshakry’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/dreams-islamic-liberalism/" target="_blank">"Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950"</a>.
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“Just as Darwinism had been involved in political controversies in Britain, drawn on by Malthusians, white supremacists, and abolitionists alike, so <i>darwiniya</i> had its own effect on Egypt’s situation. The country was colonized by Britain in 1882, prompting a ‘scramble for Africa’ in which some 80 percent of the continent came under European rule. In 1898 General Herbert Kitchener defeated the Sudanese Mahdists at Omdurman and annexed what the Egyptians regarded as their natural hinterland; it was a particularly bloody demonstration of European military might, with the British losing forty-seven dead and an estimated 10,000 Muslims killed. ‘The law of natural selection,’ observed a demoralized Egyptian nationalist, Qasim Amin, had impelled the Europeans, ‘powered by steam and electricity,’ to seized the wealth of any country weaker than them. ‘For Amin,’ Elshakry writes, ‘like so many other Arab thinkers at theat time, the encounter with the Western world was itself an example of the 'struggle for life' between nations.’” </blockquote>
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Edward Rothstein in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/iconoclasm-redefined-1428356275" target="_blank">"Iconoclasm Redefined"</a>.
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“What saved these images is that they long ago found a home at the British Museum. Carved in relief on 8-foot-high stone slabs, they once lined a room of the palace of the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, in Nineveh, recounting the siege of Lachish in 701 B.C. and victory over the Judean King Hezekiah—an event recounted both in accompanying inscription and in Kings II. The reliefs portray an exaggeratedly immense battle, in which the Assyrian king boasted of carrying off more than 200,000 prisoners. And if those who now boast of demolishing ancient Assyrian ruins had seen these images—in one panel two captives are stretched horizontally as they are apparently being flayed alive—would they have taken some pride in seeing ancient versions of themselves? Probably not: Islamic State worships other gods.” </blockquote>
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Tamer El-Ghobashy in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/iraq-basketball-is-a-far-cry-from-march-madness-but-its-not-all-bad-1426550854" target="_blank">"Traveling Call: Iraq League Draws American Hoops Players"</a>.
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“Last year’s Superleague champion, Dohuk, from the northern Kurdistan region, dropped out of competition this season because of the cash crunch and the difficulty of traveling for games across territory held by Islamic State. But the league fights on, as much of Iraq has done. Mr. Kearse and two other Americans play for the Police Club, a team that represents Iraq’s interior ministry and won the championship Thursday, beating a team once run by a now-deceased son of Saddam Hussein and now run by the ministry of education. ‘It’s amazing how basketball is still relevant, especially with everything going on,” said DeAndre Rice, a 29-year-old Police Club point guard from Flint, Mich., who arrived in January. American players began joining Iraqi team rosters in 2010, drawn by relatively high pay and few other options. The top American players earn as much as $20,000 a month here, making them among the highest paid public employees in Iraq. Most are being paid between $4,000 and $10,000 monthly. Apart from the Americans, there are five other players from outside Iraq in the league. The top Iraqi players are earning about $12,000 a month; most make much less.” </blockquote>
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/ayaan-hirsi-ali-americas-academies-for-jihad-1427843597" target="_blank">"America’s Academies for Jihad"</a>.
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“Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had ‘been identified as one who has defamed the faith.’ As he explained at the time: ‘If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.’ After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails. According to records on the federal site USASpending.gov and first reported by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, the Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded Mr. Bayly a $10,500 contract in February 2014 to provide ‘religious services, leadership and guidance’ to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. Ten months later he received another federal contract, worth $2,400, to provide ‘Muslim classes for inmates’ at the same prison.” </blockquote>
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Joseph Epstein in WSJ on Shelby Steele’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-shame-by-shelby-steele-1426885452" target="_blank">"Shame"</a>.
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“The author’s conclusion is that black America sold itself out, entered ‘a Faustian pact,’ as he puts it, by placing its destiny in the ‘hands of contrite white people.’ Doing so, he writes, ‘left us pleading with government, not for freedom, which we had already won, but for ‘programs’ and ‘preferences’ that would be a ladder to full equality. The chilling result is that now, fifty years later, we remain – by most important measures – in the position of inferiors and dependents.’ The liberalism that has come into prominence wince the 1960s, Mr. Steele believes, ‘has done little more than toy with blacks.’” </blockquote>
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Natalie Lampert in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121334/how-much-does-egg-freezing-technology-help-delay-reproduction" target="_blank">"A Modern Woman’s Burden"</a>.
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“When it comes to fertility, the United States is schizophrenic. The modern woman (ideally) uses some form of birth control as soon as she becomes sexually active; then, suddenly, she’s in her late twenties or early thirties and is encouraged to consider exchanging the pill for fertility hormones. What’s more: There isn’t any breathing room between this ‘prevent birth’ and ‘preserve fertility’ logic.” </blockquote>
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Nicholas Eberstadt in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/nicholas-eberstadt-the-global-flight-from-the-family-1424476179" target="_blank">"The Global Flight From the Family"</a>.
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“All around the world today, pre-existing family patterns are being upended by a revolutionary new force: the seemingly unstoppable quest for convenience by adults demanding ever-greater autonomy. We can think of this as another triumph of consumer sovereignty, which has at last brought rational choice and elective affinities into a bastion heretofore governed by traditions and duties—many of them onerous. Thanks to this revolution, it is perhaps easier than ever before to free oneself from the burdens that would otherwise be imposed by spouses, children, relatives or significant others with whom one shares a hearth. Yet in infancy and childhood and then again much later, in feebleness or senescence, people need more from others. Whatever else we may be, we are all manifestly inconvenient at the start and end of life. Thus the recasting of the family puts it on a collision course with the inescapable inconvenience of the human condition itself—portending outcomes and risks we have scarcely begun to consider.” </blockquote>
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Jason Clayworth & Rodney White in DES MOINES REGISTER, <a href="http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/lost-schools/2015/05/08/amish-photo-launched-revolution/27018725/" target="_blank">"Lost Schools: A Photo That Launched a Revolution"</a>.
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“Iowa's Amish school controversy was in the making more than a decade before the 1965 incident. In 1947 the Hazleton Township voted to consolidate with the Hazleton Independent School District. All rural one-room schools in the areas were closed with the exception of two that were purchased by the Amish community and run privately with no support from taxes. Questions arose in 1961 about the lack of state-certified teachers in at least some of the Amish schools. Following the 1962 merger of the Hazleton and Oelwein districts, local school officials contacted the state about the issue and believed from the state's response that the Amish schools failed to meet minimum state education standards. Officials from the Iowa Department of Public Instruction told Oelwein officials that the department insisted that seventh- and eighth-grade Amish be sent to the Hazleton attendance center immediately and that kindergarten through sixth grades transition to the public school system within two years. The instruction must include teaching science, as required by law, the state department insisted, according to newspaper and written accounts provided by Sensor, the Oelwein superintendent at the time. The Amish resisted. At least 10 Amish men were found guilty in 1962 for failure to send their children to schools with certified teachers. Eight were jailed for three days for failing to pay the fines…. In March 1965, the Oelwein school board asked the Iowa attorney general for assistance and by September the state publicly concluded the problem was local and should be resolved by the Oelwein board. On Nov. 18, school officials notified Amish parents that buses would pick their children up the following morning. Parents like Sarah Swartz refused, and the highly emotional cornfield chase ensued. Register file photos from that day show law enforcement and school officials trying to force students at Hickory Grove onto the bus.” </blockquote>
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Ross Douthat in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-our-police-union-problem.html?_r=0" target="_blank">"Our Police Union Problem"</a>.
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“In an irony typical of politics, then, the right’s intellectual critique of public-sector unions is illustrated by the ease with which police unions have bridled and ridden actual right-wing politicians. Which in turn has left those unions in a politically enviable position, insulated from any real pressure to reform. Yet reform is what they need. There are many similarities between police officers and teachers: Both belong to professions filled with heroic and dedicated public servants, and both enjoy deep reservoirs of public sympathy as a result. But in both professions, unions have consistently exploited that sympathy to protect failed policies and incompetent personnel. With this important difference, however: Even with the worst teacher, the effects are diffused across many years and many kids, and it’s hard for just one teacher to do that much damage to any given student. A bad cop, on the other hand, can leave his victim dead or permanently damaged, and under the right circumstances one cop’s bad call — or a group of cops’ habitual thuggishness — can be the spark that leaves a city like Baltimore in flames.” </blockquote>
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Zusha Elinson in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/aging-baby-boomers-bring-drug-habits-into-middle-age-1426469057" target="_blank">"Aging Baby Boomers Hold on to Drug Habits"</a>.
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“The rate of death by accidental drug overdose for people aged 45 through 64 increased 11-fold between 1990, when no baby boomers were in the age group, and 2010, when the age group was filled with baby boomers, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality data. That multiple of increase was greater than for any other age group in that time span. The surge has pushed the accidental overdose rate for these late middle age adults higher than that of 25- to 44-year-olds for the first time. More than 12,000 boomers died of accidental drug overdoses in 2013, the most recent data available. That is more than the number that died that year from either car accidents or influenza and pneumonia, according to the CDC.” </blockquote>
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Charles Murray in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulation-run-amokand-how-to-fight-back-1431099256" target="_blank">"Fifty Shades of Red"</a>.
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“We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put aside all the ways in which city and state governments require us to march to their drummers and consider just the federal government. The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are ‘malum in se’—bad in themselves. The rest are ‘malum prohibitum’—crimes because the government disapproves. The laws setting out these crimes are often so complicated that only lawyers, working in teams, know everything that the law requires. Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to ‘obey’ laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (30,470 words), the Affordable Care Act (400,038 words) or Dodd-Frank (377,491 words). We submit to them.” </blockquote>
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Kimberley Strassel in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greens-back-door-at-the-epa-1431645574" target="_blank">"The Greens’ Back Door at the EPA"</a>.
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“Mr. Collier also sought EPA documents related to the veto by submitting disclosure requests to related agencies. The National Park Service recently came through with a smoking gun: a nine-page ‘Options Paper’ for the Pebble Mine, already in circulation by early May 2010. It shows the agency intended even then to veto the mine—a full year before it began its (sham) watershed assessment. The only question was timing. One reason listed in support of nixing the mine pre-emptively was that this would allow Pebble to ‘avoid spending tens of millions of dollars on a project EPA program staff believe should be vetoed.’ Meanwhile, emails show that in drafting the options paper EPA staff collaborated with Jeff Parker, an environmental activist and attorney who works with mine opponents. In June 2010, as the paper’s draft was being revised, Mr. Parker emailed EPA biologist Phil North (driving the veto process internally) and EPA lawyer Cara Steiner-Riley. In a message with the subject line ‘options paper,’ he suggested how best to craft a veto. More suggestions followed, some of which made it into the final options paper.” </blockquote>
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Eric Lipton & Coral Davenport in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/us/critics-hear-epas-voice-in-public-comments.html" target="_blank">"Critics Hear E.P.A.’s Voice in ‘Public Comments’"</a>.
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“The Obama administration is the first to give the E.P.A. a mandate to create broad public outreach campaigns, using the tactics of elections, in support of federal environmental regulations before they are final. The E.P.A.’s campaign highlights the tension between exploiting emerging technologies while trying to abide by laws written for another age. Federal law permits the president and political appointees, like the E.P.A. administrator, to promote government policy, or to support or oppose pending legislation. But the Justice Department, in a series of legal opinions going back nearly three decades, has told federal agencies that they should not engage in substantial ‘grass-roots’ lobbying, defined as ‘communications by executive officials directed to members of the public at large, or particular segments of the general public, intended to persuade them in turn to communicate with their elected representatives on some issue of concern to the executive.’” </blockquote>
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Amity Shlaes in WSJ on Daniel DiSalvo’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-goverment-against-itself-by-daniel-disalvo-1421366405" target="_blank">"Government Against Itself – Public Union Power and Its Consequences"</a>.
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“The trend is a shame and a drag on the economy. For the costs of public-sector unions are great. ‘The byproduct of political management of the economy is waste,’ the author notes. Second, pension and benefit obligations weigh down our cities. Trash disposal in Chicago costs $231 per ton, versus $74 in non-union Dallas. Increasingly, such a burden is fatal. When Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, a full half of the city’s$18.2 billion long-term debt was owed for employee pensions and health benefits. Even before the next downturn, other cities and some states will find themselves faltering because of similarly massive obligations. There is something grotesque about public workers fighting for benefits whose provision will hurt the public. Citizens who vote Democratic may choose not to acknowledge the perversity out of party loyalty. But over the years a few well-known Democrats have sided against the public-sector unions. ‘The process of collective bargaining as usually understood cannot be transplanted into the public service,’ a Democratic politician once declared. His name? Franklin Roosevelt.” </blockquote>
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Diana Rickert in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-aaron-schock-robert-breuder-alex-clifford-kenneth-ender-perspec-0414-20150413-story.html" target="_blank">"The Outrageous Perks of the Public Sector"</a>.
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“At a time when government agencies at all levels are crying poor, the bureaucrats who work there have never been better off. In the Chicago area, many of the perks Breuder enjoys are commonplace in the public sector. Elgin Community College President David Sam banked $317,337 in 2014, public records show. Every year through 2020 that he stays on the job, Sam's pay increases by 10 percent. Like Breuder, Sam gets a housing allowance; Sam's is equal to 10 percent of his salary. Taxpayers cover the cost of Sam's cellphone, up to $500 each month for his car and also foot the bill for a $12,000 annual expense account. Sam's contract also includes generous paid time off: five weeks of paid vacation, a week off for winter break, another week off for spring break, paid holidays and Fridays off during the summer. Before Breuder worked in DuPage County, he was president at Harper College in Palatine. The school gave him the parting gift of a Lexus SUV.” </blockquote>
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David Graeber in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/73212b74-c1ba-11e4-8b74-00144feab7de.html" target="_blank">"Capitalism’s Secret Love Affair with Bureaucracy"</a>.
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“It seems significant that while both postal services and the internet emerge from the military, they could be seen as adopting military technologies to quintessential anti-military purposes. Here we have a way of taking stripped-down, minimalistic forms of action and communication typical of military systems and turning them into the invisible base on which everything they are not can be constructed: dreams, projects, declarations of love and passion, artistic effusions, subversive manifestos, or pretty much anything else. But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us — that it seems at its most liberating — precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted that we can go to sleep on a bed of numbers and wake up with all those numbers still snugly in place. In this sense, bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I like to call ‘poetic technology’ — when mechanical forms of organisation, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshalled to the realisation of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratisation of despotism.” </blockquote>
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Robert Pozen in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-c-pozen-the-other-debt-bomb-in-public-employee-benefits-1421367030" target="_blank">"The Other Debt Bomb in Public-Employee Benefits"</a>.
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“Unlike pension plans, governments are not required to contribute to separate trusts to support health-care promises. As a result, only 11 states have funded more than 10% of retiree health-care liabilities, according to a November 2013 report from the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s. For example, New Jersey has almost no assets backing one of the largest retiree health-care liabilities of any state—$63.8 billion. Only eight out of the 30 largest U.S. cities have funded more than 5% of their retiree health-care obligations, according to a study released last March by the Pew Charitable Trust. New York City tops the list with $22,857 of unfunded liabilities per household. What exactly are retiree health-care obligations? State and local governments typically pay most of the insurance premiums for employees who retire before they are eligible for Medicare at age 65. That can be a long commitment, as many workers retire as early as 50. Many governments also pay a percentage of Medicare premiums once retired workers turn 65.” </blockquote>
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James Grant in WSJ on Andrew Palmer’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/forging-ahead-1431116923" target="_blank">"Smart Money"</a>.
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“As an example of benign adaptation, Mr. Palmer notes that new kinds of lenders—lightly regulated and digitally empowered—have sprung up to fill the business vacuum that Washington’s suffocating rules have made. Lending Club, a so-called peer-to-peer lender, and OnDeck Capital, a non-bank lender to speculative-grade small business, are among the author’s favorite creations. What he seems most to admire about OnDeck, which was founded in 2007 and went public early this year, is the speed with which it tells its customers, “Yes!” No need to eyeball the applicant when all the facts you need are online. Speed, accuracy and flexibility are the advertised virtues of the digital method. At last report, OnDeck was borrowing at 5.1% and lending at 36.7%. Oddly enough, the company does not turn a profit even at that shocking interest differential. Credit losses and competitive pressures take a large and growing bite out of revenue even today, a time of ostensible prosperity. Stay tuned for the next recession. Money—smart or otherwise—is at the center of Mr. Palmer’s narrative, though the raw material itself gets short shrift. As finance becomes more innovative, money becomes less substantial. It would be nice if a few of Mr. Palmer’s intellectual pioneers could spare some time to improve the quality of the currency—and, while they’re at it, to beat back the depredations of the regulatory state.” </blockquote>
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Thanks to Mark Carducci, Andy Schwartz, and Joseph Pope.
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</div>JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-46514783767127691332015-05-10T08:27:00.000-07:002016-11-27T13:24:03.134-08:00Issue #147 (May 10, 2015)
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<b>Hwy 130 Shed </b><br />
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3eMfRs3XQdrquJZZBAhODaDEWpwvPiaxhoJMYbDxWYw1wPXq9JJOVOWCB9KM1J1cr84K5xim1qetAtmkwNS_G9ywZ3Zfizi1QeD1PGs30sjNT5JdyCfyZfTQieBLZ9V8OY8k4GOPWAqd_/s1600/130shed-small.jpg">
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<b>My Last Day at SST</b><BR>
Kara Nicks
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Sometime in 1990.<P>
It's insane when I think about all the music I have been exposed to in my life, and yet here I sit listening to Journey's "Faithfully" and feeling that song so deep as if it were written for me. For anyone who's ever been on the road, or in love with a road dog, the lyrics are point on.
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihMDrj8bJSpaXdbGGGObUrxGXu7FQrywYjuW8ftcDhtwgnv__GJdDL2x7-M03Mtr66dsn3XduUrT0DqrsTOjCSiZbFGeGSOWjdGfHHlq8_rgI2xP_PSWeoiSC3ckiv_Mel2k5JHYe-UxZ1/s1600/vulgate-kara3.jpg">I miss the business, I miss the insanity, I miss the excitement, I miss... I miss the whole fucking package, the good, the bad, the ugly. When I was sent to Cali in 78 to live with my real pops, who would have thought my life would go in all the directions that it has? From surfing the cliffs at Huntington Beach, smoking Thai stick dipped in honey (my personal favorite), listening to Journey, Zeppelin, BOC, Skynyrd, Hendrix, Joplin... hell, all those bands, to working at one of the greatest record labels of all time is just mind blowing.
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I had no idea at the time and still don't know just what exactly I was part of. People tell me all the time, but it's just so hard for me to wrap my mind around. It was just my life, nothing special. I had a job to do, it started out quite small, mail order, but Mugger saw something in me I didn't even see in myself. He made me start going by my real name Kara and then he put me in charge of distribution sales. I took it from 8 national distributors to 22 within 3 months, not because I was that good but because Mugger knew I was that good. He just let me run with it.
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Let's go international! Fuck the middleman let's go direct to retail! What a gamble that was because we very well could have been blacklisted/shutout by all our distributors but I can remember telling them (the distributors) if you were doing your fucking jobs I wouldn't have to do it for you, buy more records and we'll back off.
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I started out with a couple of mom-and-pops then I got the Tower account, Cats, Turtles, oh and Third Street Jazz and Rock, Wax Trax.... Before the end of the year I was dealing with over 800 direct-to-retail accounts and still the sales to distributors had not fallen off. Then I got the call that I needed to go home to Tennessee for a bit. Needed to tie up some loose ends. I was gone from SST for about a year and when I came back the whole fucking game had changed. The asshole college fuck I had trained to take my place and the jack-off pussy that had taken Mugger's place, those two idiots combined had allowed Jem East, West, and Jem Texas to go out of business owing hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's right, I couldn't believe it, these fucking distributors had ceilings. The Jems if memory serves me right were allowed to owe about ten to twenty grand per site. How the fuck had these two idiots allowed this shit to happen is still beyond me.
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One thing I can say about Mugger and I is that we were a team, he would come into my office and say "Kara call the Greek, tell him he owes us X-amount of dollars and if he wants the new Meat Puppets record he'll have a check on my desk by tomorrow, and if that doesn't work tell him no more blowjobs! It worked, we got paid and fast. Quite strange looking back on it, a lot of my contacts, "my guys," I sold like it was one step away from phone sex, and I loved every minute of it. There weren't many women in the business then. I can remember Sue at Important was one of the few women in the business and I loved talking with her. Even though we were women we were not afraid to play with the boys. Guess we had to be that way. No sexual harassment suits back then; what fucking fun would that be?
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Hell that's what's wrong with the work place today. Everybody all uptight, sometimes you just wanna look at someone and say "Suck my dick!" Thanks Anita Hill and what's his fucking name. SST could never have existed under strict guidelines and it didn't. It was the beginning of the end. Bringing in all those useless college grads that couldn't find their ass with both hands. What a fucking joke!
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Hey, but it was all about control, who he could and who he could not control. I was one of the last originals to be fired and that was only because I was needed, I was the collector, but even he had to finally admit I was not one he could control so out I went. And all I could say was "SUCK MY DICK you fucking idiot."
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdvFI4iw_z2m-cvMuSk3OkrtYRcenyo6NESG5Z3k2SsXywxwIaBb-C3j1ycwhNWvz3PC585OsVVlrAoba7Pzla4ACqbOObRMNOdMbVsU6IoDwuE35WhJF1xLfxtRT1TIDQESfxh3gPF2PP/s1600/vulgate-kara2.jpg">I then loaded up all my personal belongings as he had Chuck Dukowski stand over me to make sure I only took what belonged to me. My God, were they kidding?! I loaded everything into two boxes, the whole time I was crying but at the same time I truly wanted to beat the shit out of Greg Ginn for destroying what we had all worked so hard to build, but hey, after all it was his dream, his label to do with as he wished, and best I could tell he just wanted to destroy it.
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Perhaps that's why he had locked himself in his office, after all I was known for my fits of rage. Once I got everything packed up I can remember looking at Dukowski and the look on his face spoke, "I'm sorry." I had been through so much with and for these guys I couldn't believe how easy it was for Ginn to just throw me away.
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I walked across the street to wait for the bus with my two boxes. I looked up and saw a fucking LAPD car sitting there next to SST. I couldn't believe it, the mighty Greg Ginn had called the cops to make sure I didn't cause any trouble.
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The bus arrived about twenty minutes later and once I was on it the police car pulled out from the corner and followed us for a few blocks. I can remember a brother, a crip, saying to me, "Damn baby, what did you do?" This I must say made me laugh, and suddenly it was as if my second skin was back. My answer was, "I almost killed a mother-fucker." With this he passed me his quart of beer, the Cobra, and said looks like you could use a drink. My answer, "I love to be bit by the Cobra."
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By the time I made it back to my apartment in Pedro I had already stopped and picked up my own bottle, so when Melinda asked me what I was doing home, all I could say was "Got fired." She then started in on this whole job, rent, pulling my own, etc. I stopped dead in my tracks, sat my boxes down and said, "I haven't kicked anyone's ass over this yet so don't let it be yours."
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I went into my room where I pulled my stash of meth out of the wall socket and begin to lose myself in absolute insanity that would take me years to recover from.
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<i>(illustrations: Kara Nicks pre-SST and post-SST)</i>
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<b>Window Ice </b><br />
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<b>Music, Culture & Context from Prague to Portland</b><BR>
Archie Patterson
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGCK36t1EV0SahpYz6DBs4440-_E8ByeC2swhHtE1NHCJS9P-V_dxKyeHJZB4BSZ4584SDJKoaEZspaZYWTiqXGy99gtFLq7S_pGUixflWNLBTwOUIdndqnPCsj-Oh4xBgQ7PzkkZjoCg1/s1600/vulgate-eurock1.jpg">Recently, someone on the [<i>Up-tight</i>] music newsgroup commented that he loved the 1st Eurock book, <b>European Rock & the Second Culture</b>, but he found one of its articles to be a bit strange, perhaps written as a political attack on dissent (rock in opposition) in general, and in particular the legendary Czech band, Plastic People of the Universe. The writer of the article in question had written several in-depth pieces surveying the experimental music scene in Czechoslovakia generally and at the time supplied me with abundant albums of most all the artists he speaks of (except of course the PPU) who were officially banned and jailed at that time. Theres a long article in the book I did about all of that, and another I did on how it influenced the evolution of <a href="http://eurock.com/"target="_blank">"<i>Eurock</i>"</a>. The following is a thought piece I did for that newsgroup related to the persons comment, the article in question and the PPU. It deals with the role Music plays an in Culture, and how it can best be understood when viewed in terms of its historical Context, the time and place in which it was created. ?A.P. </blockquote>
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The author Milan was an early contact of mine in Czechoslovakia and sent me tons of albums and information + several articles. He was incredibly helpful!
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I had never met him personally, and never knew what his day job was, so he could have been in the Czech government, or more likely someone who simply did not relate to socio-cultural deviancy or unorthodox ideas. My guess now was that he simply was a mega-music fan. I was often surprised back then, by who liked this type of music when I found out their real jobs, or got to know them personally in some way. In regards to that PPU article, some things truly are an artifact of the time and place in which they were created and written. Therefore when seen thru' the lens of life many years or decades later, may seem odd or misinterpreted as one thing or another, and not really what they were at that former time and place at all.
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I have no idea how old you are, or anyone else on this list is, but I'm on the old end of the spectrum (66 y/o). I can tell you that before there was an internet life was not so filled with information as it is now, and not controlled as completely as it is now. In fact, back then there was a definitive us or them mentality that only a VERY few felt akin to or identified with.
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Back in the 1970s and 80s when I published <i>Eurock Magazine</i>, I literally had people from all around the world simply write to me and offer to send music, write articles and help in some way, as they loved that some American was doing such a far-out magazine, promoting such weird and esoteric music.
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The information I came by arrived purely by chance when someone overseas heard about <i>Eurock</i> from someone else. Word was passed along via a sort of underground grapevine that existed as a fragment of people's imaginations, which became linked due to hearing about the magazine and perhaps some band it had covered, or album it had reviewed. It was a miraculous sort of magical connection all done via snail mail.
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That's part of the reason <i>Eurock</i> lasted so long, it simply took years to get all the letters written, posted, and replies coming back in. So like a rolling stone a lot of moss was gathered along the way.
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcGWT6CQdnx9PdkNAo3b7sDXTkWyNEEu2IroxqJoDxrZh0675g1EnjIRAzzk_qXxnFBBNVXvlBiMN1jWbqlHAorq0ZGmUIC3RXJF-CfDHXj4gPv1SArngIAymsaq-BB-zKx4BavpXkc3dB/s1600/vulgate-Eurock2.jpg" imageanchor="1">As <i>Eurock</i> became more well known, somehow the covers of several issues of the magazine were featured prominently on the magazine rack right next to the cash register on music store set of <i>"Mork & Mindy"</i> (may Robin Williams RIP, bless his soul). So the flow of information became a small avalanche, it was literally incredible. I have 3 file cabinets still full of old letters, photos and notes from all over the world, from people who were musicians and fans. Some are well known or famous now; many are so esoteric that probably no one knows of them, some I had friendly correspondence with, others I hardly remember.
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One strange realization I've had recently is that all of this is truly priceless, yet literally worth nothing to almost everyone. It's has become worthless due to the jump forward that technology has made that now totally devalues books, magazines and relationships as well as real flesh and blood relationships. The Internet fosters information overload while disseminating loads of bad, conflicting/ incorrect information. All of us on this list in some way "know" each other, but in fact, we don't know each other at all in real terms.
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Hardly anyone back then saw Rock as being in Opposition to the mainstream culture. It was in fact however viewed as social deviancy in the USA in the 50s and 60s by the government as well as vast majority, until it became a commercial product sold by major corporations. The Jefferson Airplane was the first band signed to a major label (RCA for around $20,000)! From then on, it became mainstreamed. Now decades later drugs and any kind of marginal social behavior have become mainstreamed.
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To provide a current context to all this, there is a very popular bumper sticker in Portland today that says "Keep Portland Weird". It sells for $2 I think. That idea was "borrowed" from an Austin record store, by a Portland record store. You see that bumper sticker on cars a lot (even a Prius or Outback). A huge part of the population here actually thinks they are weird really? As someone who has a perspective of what constitutes weird that stretches over several decades. I often say to someone in real life discussions - "when everyone thinks they are weird, no one is weird".
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Now also due to <i>"Portlandia"</i>, thousands of "artists" and "musicians" have been drawn to the city. Therefore rents have become astronomical for crummy houses, or tiny Micro apts., yet everyone is living the artists lifestyle. In addition, the city council literally passed a new "Arts Tax" and everyone over 18 in the entire city has to pay $35 a year, in perpetuity, if they make more than $1,000 a year. If you dont they send out a collection agency notice tacking on another $50. So, I also often say when talking about music and art to people something similar - "when everyone is an artist, no one is an artist". In Portland however, everyone over 18, even the artists, do have to be able to pay their rent and the Arts Tax.
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If you know the history of music, rock and art, you will know that it was never done to make money, and many of the great original artists died poor while someone else became rich off their works later. The same goes for many of the early black and white singer, rockers, etc. A few managers and promoters made the money, the artists often died penniless.
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For some reason I was one of the few who saw music as perhaps one of the most powerful manifestations of culture - back then and still now. I think that's why you liked the book. Maybe this makes that article and the context of <i>Eurock</i> clearer.
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<i>(illustrations: Archie Patterson <a href="http://eurock.com/"target="_blank">books - Eurock: European Rock & the Second Culture, and Eurock: Music & Second Culture Post Millennium)</i></a>
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<b>Vedauwoo Dawn</b><br />
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by Joe Carducci<br /><br />
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<b>The Album Concept and 70s Rock Radio</b><BR>
Joe Carducci
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A short-notice trip to catch some films at MoMA for my next book allowed me another opportunity to play records on John Allen's <a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/JA"target="_blank">"<i>WFMU</i>"</a> program (Dec. 31, 2014). We taped it in November and its archived longer than it streamed, 4-plus hours.
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEighN6VFrt2tgRbDcCz-eMfpKP1cI9Sq88SwYRnDVtFU9DefvKBSV7GGaZP6L2Qn4GlLBCtcg26U0p3CrPhH_WwaJs457X-_HJfd-4jw19UFHeI8P4aqteTDlZzddk-mvrbQgiuPI8PBxAc/s1600/vulgate-wfmu.jpg">We didn't have the time to prepare something like our two-part "The History of L.A. Punk" (2008), or "The Sleepers / San Francisco Story" (2012), and this time I didn't drive so couldn't bring much with me. So we came up with a simpler idea, or at least it seemed simple: play music from the early 1970s and talk about what kind of radio play it may have gotten back in those years before FM rock stations were formatted. But it's difficult to summarize such a rich period of music and so a lot of bands and styles weren't gotten to. I mailed ahead about a dozen albums that I thought we might not find on the station's shelves. I actually wasn't sure at all that that era's music hadn't long been purged from the station's shelves just as it's been purged from the "Classic Rock" format. Not that <i>WFMU</i> is like any other station around. (Still, where'd their copies of the first two Trower albs go?) John led me through the main stacks and then through at least three other un-filed caches of LPs on other floors and in raw-space corners of that warren of Jersey real estate. We found most albums we were looking for.
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The term "album" comes from the pre-rock era multi-disc sets of 78rpms used to release long classical works or Broadway musicals; these looked like photo albums, hence the phono album. The single disc 33rpm was introduced by Columbia in 1948. This new format migrated from early sound systems for talkies and radio transcription discs; it was introduced for music when plastics, mastering, and pressing technologies improved after the war. Bachelors with big hi-fis stacked their Jackie Gleason and Martin Denny albums for their parties or Sinatra and west coast jazz albums for their dates, while by late 1950s college kids graduated from 45s and found that folk music on 10" and 12" albums allowed them to study album cover liner notes before the side finished and they had to cross the dorm-room to flip the record over.
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These folkies, had they ever deigned to listen to Memphis rock and roll or the instrumental dance and surf combos it inspired, now considered they'd well outgrown such greasy kid stuff. Until the British Invasion, anyway. American college students of the great suburban postwar baby boom thus came to prefer their regional and working class American culture diverted through a European filter that removed organic stuff that smelled of the other side of town and added a posh accent. The London industry's use of the album as a novel-substitute for this first generation through mass higher education cinched the deal.
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsoUc0jk99tNovEMFWEh9zgsRdJbh1has0P3-O6vplk11stu8bg_tREHVu3HXlx8VgadgpggsbBg_kZzTENKrPCM-EA2Iz6K63yOuX4dD-kT5pH1r69jtI1omqOVW9ulGSl8OsYlSyklj7/s1600/vulgate-triad1.jpg">That decade (1963-73) of Brit band explorations of American forms was incredibly productive. Even though these earnest students of the music couldn't become black or American no matter how fervently they attempted to disappear into blues or rock and roll traditions, they possessed despite themselves something directly informed of old English balladry and London music hall traditions. This something is what allowed a linking back up with American forms long detoured from same and rolling along under African, Latin, and other influences.
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Still, as with any invasion, things got destroyed. Today one hears mostly echoes of that derailment of the American music train in the sundry denatured pop forms of today. That engine had a good four hundred years head of steam up from the moment the first African slaves were unloaded, their drums taken from them and they were made to play the hymns, ballads and waltzes of somebody else's old country. Quite quickly as folk things go the whitest Southerners talked with a drawl and liked their own music blued. That was a world-historical cultural process whether new wavers and eclectic snobs like it or not. But that doesn't mean they can't stop it.
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All these postwar years later, I think of the album as a mistake in that it allowed bands, labels, and radio to relax their focus on the song at hand. It led to five-minute arrangements of the simplest tunes, seven-minute <i>musique concrete</i> audiophilia, and album-side riff-reverence with solos all around climaxing in live-style three-minute fanfare finales. By 1969, with the album eclipsing the single even the best American bands were slow to think in album terms, and American record labels and artist management were also slow to understand the album-as-novel come-on; this gave the Brit bands and London labels a language advantage in America. And their transatlantic melodic and rhythmic eccentricities stood out as useful hooks in the novelty-hungry pop market where rock and roll found itself during the course of its own two-decade boom. It was damn hard to keep the American bands of our early 1970s <i>WFMU</i> schema from being overwhelmed by all the British bands we wanted to play. (Not to mention the bands from even foreigner places.)
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The Beatles wood-shedded rock and roll in West Germany for American G.I.s who'd grown up on Elvis and Chuck Berry. Lennon-McCartney originals gradually replaced those covers in their live set. I suspect that although the band recognized Ringo Starr was the drummer they wanted, they also understood that he was even so <i>not</i> like the drummers on the American records they studied. It was audience response, in Germany and Britain, that allayed the doubts they had about their own singing, song-writing and playing when they compared the sound they produced with what they had intended. As it happened, they landed back in England like a buzzbomb and sent a charge of pop ambition through all the little purist networks of skiffle, trad-jazz, blues, r&b and rockabilly musicians, fans, and collectors across the UK. And together they made London once again a prime exporter of music.
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London bands, whatever micro-style they considered themselves to be the pre-eminent British version of, were often purists of such provincial narrowness that they had no idea they were barely in the ballpark with their cock-eyed interpretations of American folk forms. Only by watching their music collide with America itself could they appraise their musical product for what it was, a rhythmic novelty with varied melodic, harmonic and fashion aspects. British musical vitality was a serial pageant not unlike tin pan alley's rhythmic novelty dance procession (Charleston, jitterbug, foxtrot, calypso, bossa nova?.) which was itself a burlesque of black music-dance trends. The British version de-emphasized the dance aspect for a head trip. (Bop and free jazz did something like this in black music.) Pretension and pop success in America quickly overwhelmed the humility with which they had first approached American music styles and so the British Invasion resolved into candidly un-American, arch, twee and progressive styles.
<P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWrQzvn1J8bigTc9mx8WuLFWOn2gwu7uOOuDNh06fhQalOvoPChaS9zPDPnl8Gn9bue0RkrPB-FcS-S_T5e59LpmlUErFJNsTnfbXFLbnGhHEphmvbKgDc21TVqFgjS3z5NEcnCV_KMefz/s1600/vulgate-triad2.jpg">But for <i>WFMU</i> and John Allen this time we played early seventies rock from the album's golden age before being Album-oriented hurt individual songs and performances. And we talked about where and how old FM radio managed to contend with that rock boom too large and wide a music-media phenomenon to refer to simply as underground rock, or underground radio. It was over quickly and got the punk rock reaction that sell-out decadence called for. By the time I got into the air it was on public or college airwaves, neither of which was as hospitable as commercial FM had been just five years earlier. On the program John asked me about SST and its radio promotion to commercial stations; we did what we could but most station music directors were still prioritizing the latest London exports only they had no longer studied much of anything but David Bowie albums. And today it's to some opaque algorithm-driven service or goddamn <i>NPR</i> that the neo-folkies turn for their eclectic world music pseudo-roots post-rock needs.
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My post-AM radio listening then was in Naperville outside of Chicago. I listened to Saul Smaizys on Triad Radio-<i>WXFM</i>, Wayne Juhlin's overnight show on <i>WDAI</i>, <i>WXRT</i> especially its new release-Wednesdays, North Central College's <i>WONC</i>, Aurora's <i>WMRO-AM</i> and a few other spots on the dial, before I moved to Denver in September 1973 for a year and half of college where I listened to the old FM freeform begin to die on <i>KLZ</i> and <i>KBPI</i> and back in Chicago too after January 1975. Naperville never quite supported the small record shops that tried their luck during the album boom of the late sixties / early seventies so they weren't the medium for me then that they would become later after radio had failed. John and I couldn't cover what-all was happening in those years in this one show, of course. That would require 24-hrs a day for years just as it was, as it were.
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<i>(illustrations: WFMU, Triad Magazine, Saul Smaizys WXFM)</i>
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___
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<b>Addenda…</b>
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Triad Radio Chicago <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceebop/sets/72157594534811213/"target="_blank">"photobook"</a>.
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Triad Radio 3rd anniversary, <a href="http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/multimedia/audio/1027-wxfm-triad-radio-aircheck-033172"target="_blank">"aircheck"</a> March 31, 1972.
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“The Wayne Juhlin Show” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-NM0oAO7do"target="_blank">"theme-song"</a>.
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<b>"Celebration" </b><br />
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by <a href="http://mjsaf.com/mjsaf/HOME.html" target="_blank">Mike Safran</a><br />
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<b>From Steve Beeho at the London Desk…</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://it-it.facebook.com/notes/876076312420519/"target="_blank">"Phast Freddie's Hollywood (Circa 1973-1983) "</a>, written in 1996 but unpublished at the time.
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"During the late Seventies and early Eighties there were several places in and around Hollywood that catered to what may only be described as the Underground Rock Elite of Los Angeles. This Underground Rock Elite consisted of both Punk Rock and New Wave musicians alike, as well as neo-Rockabillies, white blues singers, Mods, Doo Wop enthusiasts, poets, photographers, artists, writers, record collectors, drug dealers, a handful of music industry insiders, groupies, leaches, and various other hangers-on." </blockquote>
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^^^<br /><br />
Hanson Meyer at the Old School Punk Rock Info website on the pressing history of
<a href="http://blackflagnervousbreakdown.blogspot.co.uk/2014_05_01_archive.html"target="_blank">"SST 001"</a>,
and his first
<a href="http://blackflagnervousbreakdown.blogspot.co.uk/2014_06_01_archive.html"target="_blank">"Black Flag"</a> show in 1981:
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"After the show was finished, the band started to slowly pack their gear on the stage and invited us to hang out with them. While Robo was loading up his drums outside, I remember asking Greg how Robo got his name… and he, probably sensing my young and gullible nature, told me that it was because they were so poor that Robo would drink Robitussin cough syrup to get drunk. The guys were really friendly and once we were done chatting, we helped them take their instruments out to their van. And then, just before we left (without saying who), a couple of the guys in our group, trying to live up to all the punk rock media hype, had scribbled “Big Bear Punks” all over the bathroom and broke a couple of fixtures. We learned later that as a result, the club took it out of Black Flag's pay and they only made $50 for the night… I don’t think they were too happy about that. And then to add insult to injury, someone stole Greg's guitar that night." </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
Falling James on the
<a href="http://www.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2014/11/11/classic-la-punk-bands-were-still-rude-and-relevant-at-dangerhouse-records-night"target="_blank">"
Dangerhouse reunion"</a> at the Echoplex.
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^^^<br /><br />
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimfyLvDUwXymBFZL5CgXWNOgdN_QubkCwD9Llr7aFBIstMOyx-uwwvL5XEOmXyOwVdhtVtUNMHRfC8l3xVLNJ2l023zW2qaHlO7of5SsqkRkEdRTHD8KbZdIFuUZBTLUQ4JHP5tQG6_Pt8/s1600/vulgate-NYHC.png">Three suitably visceral excerpts from Tony Rettman's:
<a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/nyhc_by_tony_rettman/"target="_blank">"New York Hardcore 1980-1990"</a>, (Did the Voice actually cover this stuff at the time?!)
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^^^<br /><br />
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Mike Rubin hails the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/arts/music/the-short-lived-cleveland-band-x__x-is-back.html"target="_blank">"X_X"</a> resurgence in the New York Times (!).
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^^^<br /><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDBcmNDyOc"target="_blank">""A Box Full of Rocks""</a>, Raul Sandelin's great documentary on the El Cajon years of Lester Bangs.
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^^^<br /><br />
Simon Reynolds at
<a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/tpr/reader/worth-their-wait/"target="_blank">"Pitchfork"</a> on the vanished heyday of the British music press:
<blockquote>
"Free from top-down interference, financially buoyant, loyally supported by a huge readership looking to be guided and enlightened, and covering a beat that was the indisputable center of contemporary culture, but also a prism through which one could examine politics or other art forms like film and fiction, the British rock press understandably developed a healthy collective ego—to put it mildly. This self-belief, which applied to each paper on the institutional level but also endowed certain individual writers with a messianic streak, was a self-fulfilling confidence trick. Act like you have the power to steer music in a righteous direction and you can make others believe; soon enough you are steering it." </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
Andrew Mueller, interviewed by David Stubbs at the Quietus, recalls his time at the
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/16762-andrew-mueller-interview-david-stubbs-too-late-to-die-young-now"target="_blank">"Melody Maker"</a>:
<blockquote>
"I loved that the paper was so full of forceful and diffuse personalities – this argument taking place across a magazine. That reflects confidence and that has deserted old school journalism of all kinds. It’s a failing in art, too – when you abandon any confidence in yourself and anxiously start chasing audiences, asking them, ‘What do you think? What do you think?’"</blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSVAZQnN5qahrZTo-cCenKvqsO6KL3RzsIar1fqvyE4vuRTSfeXySCo3NgvVII4hhfukZACc6f6Hb0yhu_14BMsorTsUYeUiGWU6gdM8pzdTM2la63-3uljU4cxIdEubuZde9y960WTfY8/s1600/vulgate-bigmidweek.png">
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/01/the-big-midweek-life-inside-the-fall-review-mark-e-smith-steve-hanley"target="_blank">"The Big Midweek"</a>, Steve Hanley's Fall memoir:
<blockquote>
"The Fall that Steve Hanley came into was the lineup that Smith – with his bulldog of a girlfriend/manager, Kay Carroll – pieced together after purging the original quintet. A control freak whose gift for subverting everyday language in surreal cut-up lyrics made him a genuinely radical post-punk voice, Smith was a man who'd rebelled against – but also internalised – the berserk discipline of a bullying father. He was fortunate, therefore, to find such a loyal and unquestioning aide de camp in Hanley, whose book overflows with tales of Smith addressing his band like a drill sergeant." </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
Jon Dale dissects 131 UK DIY experimental classics from 1977-82 in
<a href="http://www.factmag.com/2014/10/01/the-story-of-uk-diy-131-experimental-underground-classics-from-1977-1985/"target="_blank">"Fact Magazine"</a>:
<blockquote>
"Writing this article alphabetically has meant that, in many ways, everything’s been a long lead up to The Petticoats’ “Normal” 7”. A justly legendary record in a list that’s not exactly short of ‘em, ‘Normal’ was the only record released by The Petticoats, the concept of one Stef Petticoat
[...] Stef has one of the greatest punk voices, totally natural and exploding with joy, along the same lines as Lora Logic or Poly Styrene. There’s something insanely seductive about this record, a compulsive blurt that you can’t help but listen to over and over again; hard to really pinpoint, but maybe it’s all in the forced laugh and then the deadpan “probably not” at the end of the third chorus. Or the spine-chilling scream Stef lets rip, from somewhere close to nowhere,
near the end. Perfect." </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/16858-the-heads-interview"target="_blank">"The Heads"</a> enlighten Tristan Bath at the Quietus on the gestation of their ultimate monolithic statement:
<blockquote>
"Everybody Knows We Got Nowhere is one hell of a title: ripping off Neil Young, overstating that wry fuzzy stoner outlook, pessimistically broadcasting a dim future for The Heads, and somewhat summarising how those heavy acid jams work. These guys would just stand in dingy rehearsal rooms and play for hours and hours, recording endlessly on Simon Price's Walkman while the group careened through the cosmos, getting nowhere in the process. But as Maskell makes clear, "That's the point isn't it?" </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
Grayson Haver Currin on the murky history of
<a href="http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/les-rallizes-denudes-feature"target="_blank">"Les Rallizes Denudes"</a>:
<blockquote>
"Asking someone to verify a story about Les Rallizes Dénudés feels like hoping someone shared the dream you had last night. For all I have been told about Les Rallizes Dénudés, and it’s a lot, I feel like I have learned almost nothing. “There’s always someone who wants proof,” says [John] Whitson. “If there’s nothing, people are really good at filling in bad information. If you just go, ‘Well, the bass player hijacked a plane to North Korea and these guys really rock,’ your mind can fill in the blanks in really interesting ways. That’s what everyone has done.” </blockquote>
^^^<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-new-english-library-334"target="_blank">"Harry Sword"</a> recalls at Vice:
<blockquote>
"The New English Library was the maniacal king of pulp publishing in 1970s Britain. Thrashing out books relentlessly, they excelled in the more brutal end of youth-oriented fiction: rampant gang violence, skinheads marauding around in bovver boots, Satanic cult worship... basically anything that was causing a moral fuss in the decade of disco. [...] While the NEL books formed an indelible mark on the British urban landscape, very few emerge on the second hand market, a sign of how highly regarded they remain today. These books sold in the hundreds of thousands 40 years ago, but are incredibly – legendarily – rare. People held onto them at the time and still do now. For many readers in the 70s, NEL first editions remain as impossible to part with as a lovingly collected box of reggae 7-inches – and the lasting legacy is surely one of the most idiosyncratic stories in cult fiction".</blockquote>
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<b>De-icing</b><br />
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx6_aHaKAIEWTjERdbwU1CMvrztv5kClk621oOeloAwUtTFa1uDy__AI4BAZDxv-QRCmPqJBj3baD1AXQdgzXDhJxIbHH3ZfbeMKb6WCRDSj05Vm1PWx_ifd8JGvqkigH2eOCbsYVtBTRX/s1600/Nunzio-deicing-2.16.jpg"><br />
by Nunzio Carducci<br /><br />
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<B>From Joe Carducci’s Wyoming desk...</B><br /><br />
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQkyhbG1GigCQliqgzWSVNNNta9zB4Rk0IOYOyYoPU_3Wrnhk8jZW5D3Itpddoy7PNJ0LQQkFLXqXH_B_V4WE3Lke19X6G2ZOv5a5qTSGKQVN9jFPTCZzL7kkpa7r5qLN8a9YcAJ3hWslR/s1600/vulg-wailingofatown.png"> <a href="http://waterunderthebridgerecords.com/wutb.html"target="_blank">"A Wailing of a Town"</a> -
Craig Ibarra interview by Elise Thompson at
<a href="http://thelosangelesbeat.com/2015/04/la-beat-interview-craig-ibarra-author-of-a-wailing-of-a-town/"target="_blank">"LA Beat"</a>.
<blockquote>
<b>Does the inception of Pedro punk go back to the apartment Joe Baiza and D. Boon lived in?</b><BR>
Pretty close. The Reactionaries (precursor to the Minutemen) were the first Pedro punk band. They were around from 1978 to 1979. Not long after, in early 1980, the 19th Street duplex was the birthplace of the Minutemen and Saccharine Trust too, to some extent. Gary Jacobelly and Joe Baiza lived on the bottom floor and D. Boon lived above them — a chance meeting. There’s a good chapter on the 19th Street scenario in the book. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Spot in <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_us/read/the-sound-of-two-guys-talking-an-interview-with-legendary-punk-photographer-spot?utm_source=vicefbus"target="_blank">"Vice"</a>.
<blockquote>
<b>Do you hate LA? Did you hate LA? Is that an oversimplification? I get very sad when I look at these pictures. Everything looks so grimy, lonely, and hopeless.</b><BR>
LA has one of the most amazing and interesting histories of all US cities, and they excelled at erasing their own legacy just to prove they were not like any other place. It's really not up to me to weigh in on this anymore; I got the hell out almost 30 years ago. It's a whole different perspective but the webseries OnlyinHelLA.com sums up a part of the experience nicely. LA is the best and worst place in the world. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Spot in <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2014/12/05/spots-amazing-photos-document-the-early-south-bay-skate-punk-scene-video"target="_blank">"L.A. Weekly"</a>.
<blockquote>
<b>So have you paid any attention to what’s happening now with what’s left of punk and hardcore in L.A.?</b><BR>
What <i>is</i> happening now in L.A.? [Laughs] I think there is still stuff happening in L.A. I think in L.A. there’s a big geezer-rocker element that’s refusing to die. There are people from bands back then that still have bands and they’re still playing. Some of them are pretty good and some of them are pretty burnt out. I went to this what they called “The Punk Rock Barbecue.” I was playing it, so... Look, before anything else I’m a musician. That’s what I've been doing for the last 20 years and just driving around and playing. Nobody cares, but I just do it anyways. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
James Fotopoulos <a href="http://www.screenslate.com/interviews/james-fotopoulos-at-spectacle-filmmaker-interview"target="_blank">"interview"</a>
at <i>Screenslate.com</i>.
<blockquote>
FC: How did you begin as a filmmaker?<BR>
JF: My grandfather had a video camera that he used for shooting family events and my parents eventually got one because I was using his so much. It was always something I did in childhood. I had a pixel vision camera when they were on the market for kids.
FC: When did it transition into scripted material?
JF: I was so young when I began, so the first things I did were mainly exploring the medium. It wasn’t until I was 12 or 13 that I started shaping the filming into stories but they still weren’t quiet 'scripts'.</blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8jTXSuwhsSQ-Cl_zmCQfSqFCNNOfEnABNT-VSyVf5kR2BPOkVilnnQAgVB7aQlsWdJgCDBKaIrS1LKVt9E-qZthwTUSbczJXoKb32OvWJiUKlLCfo_nWIo9EVN8GBRv-19iaVw87Gsftz/s1600/vulgate-BullTongue2.png"><a href="http://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/BTR.002.html"target="_blank">"Bull Tongue Review"</a> #2.
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Ben Sandmel in WSJ on Barry Mazor’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-ralph-peer-and-the-making-of-popular-roots-music-by-barry-mazor-1416003709"target="_blank">"Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music"</a>.
<blockquote>
Traditional songs with archaic roots and no definitive author presented minimal risk of copyright-infringement litigation. That risk could be further reduced if songs were changed slightly and then presented as original compositions. Such prescient acumen made Peer a very wealthy man. But he and the record labels he worked for were not the only parties to benefit from this business model. It also enabled many musicians whom Peer recorded to earn additional and recurring income from the songwriting royalties that Peer let them retain—if they agreed to sign over ownership of the music publishing rights and also to write for him exclusively. To Peer’s everlasting credit, he never falsely claimed authorship of the songs that he published. This commonplace practice cheated many tunesmiths and their descendants out of generations of royalties. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Luke Mullins in WASHINGTONIAN, <a href="http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/how-david-gregory-lost-his-job/"target="_blank">"How David Gregory Lost His Job"</a>.
<blockquote>
What Comcast did have was a super-connected political fixer named David L. Cohen.
Cohen, whose legendary stint as chief of staff to Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell in the 1990s was chronicled in Buzz Bissinger’s book <i>A Prayer for the City</i>, is plugged in all over DC…. After taking over Comcast’s government-affairs office in 2002, he had steadily beefed up the company’s presence in the capital. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Cohen expanded its lobbying team from 31 bodies in 2002 to 103 in 2009, when the merger was announced, and increased its lobbying spending more than five-fold over the same period. To rally political support for the merger, Comcast’s political-action committee handed out campaign cash, and Cohen worked to head off the concerns over diversity. Between 2008 and 2010, Comcast’s corporate foundation donated more than $3 million to 39 minority groups that wrote letters to federal regulators in support of the NBC deal. Comcast and NBC Universal also worked out an agreement with advocacy groups guaranteeing increased “minority participation in news and public affairs programming”—so long as the deal went through. And in 2009 and 2010, Comcast gave $155,000 to an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who ended up endorsing the merger. The campaign paid off. In January 2011, Washington approved the deal. One week later, NBC signed Cohen’s old boss, Ed Rendell, to an on-air contract. At MSNBC, which Comcast also owns, Sharpton landed a talk show. </blockquote>
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGsqEp2g-3V9SuCSjzzV-MNR1CgAHgwNeyVRz2XtLJ2IDtpTThhW0xQPznimQvuU4FJ1RDKmvUvWdbx5nZbgf8bEDiFqQ62WeqdS0VkqooePBM6mhRfjpvPHLPI45cQ6DFaivaDme1linG/s1600/vulgate-howtheworldwaswon.png">Elbert Ventura in TNR on Peter Conrad’s book, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120629/how-world-was-won-peter-conrad-review?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TNR%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%20Template%20-%20Dec%2026"target="_blank">"How the World Was Won – The Americanization of Everything"</a>.
<blockquote>
But as a fellow outsider who fell in love with America long before I set foot in it, I can hardly blame Conrad for his sentimentality. Unironic expressions of love for American culture have long been unfashionable on the left, with Americanization seen as little more than the imperial spread of a stultifying commercialism. But while it has had its malign effects, Americanization has been on the whole a force for good: a dynamic, irresistible phenomenon that gave those of us on the outside a glimpse of unknown pleasures and possibilities. Moreover—and this is what many critics miss—Americanization was hardly forced upon the world. “We were captivated rather than conquered—consensually Americanized,” writes Conrad. Perhaps that accounts for the grumpiness of the Godards and the von Triers—they know they invited the colonizer in. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Genevieve Yue in TLS on Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson’s book, <a href="http://www.genevieveyue.com/documents/TIM351GL21.pdf"target="_blank">"Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings"</a>.
<blockquote>
The realist strain of Kracauer’s writing takes shape in view of his suspicion of ideology, including “Talk with Teddie”, a lively account of his disagreement with Theodor Adorno’s obstinate dialecticism. Kracauer’s formulation of reality was attacked as “naïve” by the likes of Dudley Andrew and Pauline Kael, perhaps because he long wrestled with the term’s meaning; in <i>Theory of Film</i>, for example, it is often invoked negatively, as something lost, an experience of the world to which we have become numb, or, in the wake of war, suffered effects akin to shell shock. As the editors of this anthology, and Martin Jay, the author of its afterword, are careful to explain, reality was an elusive but essential concept for Kracauer, being both something that bears a trace of the material world and a stylized form of representation. Cinema, of course, is rife with such contradictions, and Kracauer was well aware that it could be deceptive, even dangerous; in an article from 1950, presaging Guy Debord, he notes the deleterious effects of the “pictorial deluge” of mass culture. Ultimately, however, cinema offered the extraterritorial critic a way back into the world, to the terra firma of life as it is really lived: fleeting, unadorned and ordinary. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Jed Perl in NYRB on three Picasso books, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/you-cant-catch-picasso/"target="_blank">"Picasso’s Masterpiece"</a>.
<blockquote>
Whatever Picasso made provoked questions and revelations that pushed him to make something else, to go in a different direction. This artist, who almost invariably embraced the real rather than the ideal, had no interest in the Hegelian dialectic, with its strenuous search for spiritual essences. He had an essentially Mediterranean sensibility, his creative processes closer to the Socratic dialectic, with its open-ended attitude of questioning and questing—and its refusal to draw some fast distinction, or indeed any distinction at all, between the allure of the love object and the pursuit of the life of the mind. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9MLoxAArQO8nbTd-6rgB4TF2EwrDzkmgeaKa5SQsPPhxtVBlpxUYH7hj-TzFxVzMboNWflFpzWCGd9DrBLEktXDGWJQfbhzV2QFqpXrOF9SECjd0U_ET85UOoK4i0KP6PQDmcUClBGEzI/s1600/vulgate-inventingtheindividual.png">David Gress in WSJ on Larry Siedentop’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-inventing-the-individual-by-larry-siedentop-1419029537"target="_blank">"Inventing the Individual"</a>.
<blockquote>
In the ancient world, he says, the individual did not exist as such. Everyone had his place within a hierarchy, which in turn determined all aspects of existence. The core unit was the family, ruled by the “paterfamilias.” Similarly, the fundamental maxim of Roman law was to “give each his due,” which meant assigning to each a particular status within the all-encompassing web of social and legal norms: the father as ruler of the family, the emperor as ruler of the state and its people, and the slave as a “human tool” subject to the will of his owner. Roman law presumed indelible distinctions: slave-free, citizen-alien, master-follower. Christianity, as preached by St. Paul in the first century and by St. Augustine in the fourth, promised something quite different, and revolutionary. “In Paul’s writings,” Mr. Siedentop writes, “we see the emergence of a new sense of justice, founded on the assumption of moral equality rather than on natural inequality.” A Christian idea of individual dignity, Mr. Siedentop says, led to what we call the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This notion incorporated a new principle of justice and fatally undermined the idea of “giving each his due.” Only a century after Paul, a church father could write that “one mighty deed alone,” meaning the incarnation, “was sufficient for our God to bring freedom to the human person.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Michael Rosen in TLS on Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1471244.ece"target="_blank">"The Impact of Idealism – The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought"</a>.
<blockquote>
Take the conventional contrast between determinism and libertarianism. If some radical version of determinism were true, our every action would be the inevitable consequence of a set of laws and initial conditions almost inconceivably distant from ourselves – circumstances which, if they had only been the tiniest bit different, would have led to different outcomes. If, on the other hand, each action is an isolated, undetermined event, our choices become unintelligible. The surprising German idealist insight is that there is something very similar about these two otherwise opposed possibilities. Whether by placing the origin of determination in the remote past or by removing it altogether, each case evokes a sense of arbitrariness which conflicts with the idea that we have – or would like to have – of ourselves as agents who are, at the same time, properly responsible for our actions. It is this, the idealists believed, that is incompatible with freedom. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Roger Cohen in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/opinion/roger-cohen-the-virtue-of-redeeming-vice.html"target="_blank">"The Virtue of Redeeming Vice"</a>.
<blockquote>
I’ve resisted writing about Berlin’s Hotel Savoy because I don’t want to ruin it, but I figure that if it’s resisted modernizing conformity this long it can probably withstand anything. Let me just say how wonderful it is to walk into the fug of cigar smoke in the hotel lobby. Proust’s madeleine has nothing on that time-canceling waft of tobacco. Out of the mists of time, emerging through the inhaled smoke, looms another age of laissez-faire before anyone ever dreamed of saying “Stay safe” — most awful of salutations — and anyone discovered special dietary requirements; a time when kids roamed free and did not even know what a helmet was. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
James Ceaser in WSJ on Arthur Melzer’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB21654999735662454609104580202204018844416" target="_blank">"Philosophy Between the Lines"</a>.
<blockquote>
It comes as a mild surprise to learn that a number of Enlightenment thinkers, including such stalwarts of public reason as Diderot and Condorcet, either practiced or condoned a form of esoteric writing. After all, the premise of Enlightenment thought, in direct contrast to the classic position, is that there is no ultimate tension between reason and society. Political life can rest on a foundation of truth or science without need of myth or prejudice. What utility then is there in esotericism? The “political esotericism” of the Enlightenment, Mr. Melzer shows, is a creature of a very different species than the older variants. It is a temporary tactic in the fight against the closed society envisioned by the ancients. People can shed their old prejudices only in stages, and esoteric writing may be required to help keep the project of Enlightenment from undermining itself before it has accomplished its goal. The ultimate end of this use of esoteric writing is to rid the world of esotericism and make it safe for openness. Extreme attacks on esotericism by most Enlightenment thinkers, those who had already swallowed the party line, is what created the hostility and repugnance to esoteric writing that by the 19th century led to the outright denial of its very existence. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Sophie Pinkham in NYTBR on Alexandra Popoff’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/books/review/tolstoys-false-disciple-by-alexandra-popoff.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Tolstoy’s False Disciple – The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov"</a>.
<blockquote>
The wealthy, spoiled Chertkov met Tolstoy, 26 years his senior, because of their shared interest in a Christianity that rejected the Orthodox Church. Chertkov, who didn’t care for literature, convinced Tolstoy that they were soul mates by simply parroting his philosophy. By then, Tolstoy was lost in the thicket of his own ideals, torn between what he believed and what he desired. He seems to have felt there was something holy in submission to Chertkov’s will, but the bond wasn’t strictly spiritual. Chertkov liked to keep plenty of handsome peasant youths ¬nearby; as a young man, Tolstoy had written that he’d loved only men, and never women. He worried, pathetically, about Chertkov not loving him enough, even as friends and family wondered how such a great man could love such a cad. Soon Chertkov was reading Tolstoy’s diary — a privilege reserved, until then, for Sophia. He was allowed to edit Tolstoy’s work and his papers, sometimes making large cuts and even rewriting sections, including sections of his diaries. He urged Tolstoy to focus on religious writing, and to revise his fiction to make it more didactic. Where major works were concerned, Tolstoy’s literary instincts rebelled, and he rejected Chertkov’s meddling. But most of the time, he submitted meekly. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Eric Metaxas in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568"target="_blank">"Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God"</a>.
<blockquote>
As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting. Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for <i>Skeptical Inquirer</i> magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.” As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here. Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Dennis Overbye in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/world/new-images-refine-view-of-infant-universe.html"target="_blank">"New Images Refine View of Infant Universe"</a>.
<blockquote>
The new data largely confirms and refines the picture from a temperature map of the microwaves that Planck scientists, a multinational collaboration led by Jan Tauber of the European Space Agency, produced in 2013, showing the faint irregularities from which gargantuan features like galaxies would grow. Its microwave portrait reveals a universe 13.8 billion years old that is precisely mysterious, composed of 4.9 percent atomic matter, 26.6 percent mysterious dark matter that is not atomic, and 68.5 percent of even more mysterious dark energy, the glib name for whatever it is that seems to be blowing the universe apart. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Claudia Dreifus in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/science/avi-loeb-ponders-the-early-universe-nature-and-life.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Much-Discussed Views That Go Way Back"</a>.
<blockquote>
<b>LAST YEAR YOU PUBLISHED AN ASTONISHING PAPER SUGGESTING THAT SOME TYPE OF LIFE MIGHT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE, BILLIONS OF YEARS BEFORE IT APPEARED ON EARTH. WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?</b>
On Thanksgiving morning, I had this realization: that at the time the first stars and galaxies were formed, the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the earliest time — was roughly at room temperature. So the universe, at roughly 15 million years after the Big Bang, was at a comfortable enough temperature for the chemistry of life to have incubated. I realized this while in the shower — as often happens. We had guests coming in the afternoon. So I asked my wife if instead of helping her with the meal, I could take care of the dishes after dinner. That gave me a few free hours to think this out. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Joshua Krisch in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/science/study-offers-clues-to-arctic-mystery-paleo-eskimos-abrupt-extinction.html"target="_blank">"New Study Offers Clues to Swift Arctic Extinction"</a>.
<blockquote>
To learn more about the Paleo-Eskimos and their sudden disappearance from the historical record, researchers collected DNA fragments from ancient human remains across Greenland, Canada and Siberia. Their results suggest that the Paleo-Eskimos remained genetically isolated for thousands of years, and that the Dorset culture did not vanish through assimilation. Modern Inuits, then, are descendants of the Thule and not directly related to the Paleo-Eskimos. “This is surprising, because every time people meet each other we find evidence of sex between the people,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the study. “But here we have a unique situation, where even though we know they must have been in touch with their neighbors, they chose to live in isolation.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkDUz4gphpXc88zBQG2UYvLCykf4ysqoahZT_0eiF8Dx1DueKE-6_O4bG-1AEo29RWQUz_05PNJ_jhxIcvmRzRqtyk03mAzogzui07n1Dnbhg7RQtg_EkdSa1dceGGmleH2hGi2up0Qez8/s1600/vulgate-kennewickman.png">Eve Newman in LB on the book, <a href="http://www.laramieboomerang.com/articles/2014/12/29/news/doc549f65afd538c054619207.prt"target="_blank">"Kennewick Man"</a>, edited by Douglas Owsley and Richard Jantz.
<blockquote>
Kennewick Man was a hunter and a traveler. Isotope values from his bones suggest he hunted seals and lived most of his adult life on the Pacific Coast, but much farther north than Washington. “You’ve got to get up into at least coastal or mid-coastal Alaska before you start getting the type of oxygen isotope values that you’ll find in this man,” Owsley said. He lived 8,900-9,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon analysis, and was about 5 feet, 7 inches tall. He was stocky, weighing about 160 pounds, and died when he was about 40. According to their analysis, he often held an object above his head with his arm bent, such as a spear. He also raised and lowered an object repeatedly while holding it in front of him, such as a dip net. Based on the condition of his leg bones, he often waded in shallow water and sprinted short distances. At one time, he broke six ribs, five of which never healed properly. The stone point in his hip was probably thrown at him with force, causing an injury that took some time to heal. He had no cavities, but his teeth were extremely worn. “He was very banged up, and a very tough guy,” Owsley said. Scientists think he was deliberately buried by the river on his back, palms down, legs straight. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<i>chronicle.com</i>: What Book Changed Your Mind?, Justin Smith on James Scott’s book, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/What-Book-Changed-Your-Mind-/149839/"target="_blank">"The Art of Not Being Governed"</a>.
<blockquote>
Impoverished migrants flocking to urban centers are desperate for the advantages the state can provide. But not everyone is. Some people, often found hidden away in hard-to-reach mountainous zones, practicing subsistence agriculture, are largely indifferent to what the state has to offer. They do not understand why they should be bothered with keeping identity papers or that other sort of paper that can be exchanged, in accordance with strange magical beliefs, for commercial goods. Pushing your way into the system, via politics, is not the only way for groups of human beings to thrive. One can also stay off the radar, slip through the cracks, and still realize something like the human good. This is not to excuse the status quo: another accusation commonly leveled by statists, who seem to believe that it is a violation of human dignity to accept life in the cracks, that the only acceptable form of thriving is the one that gets official recognition. Scott shows why such a view is misguided, as it portrays the plight of peoples like the Zomians as if in a zero-sum competition with the political claims of oppressed groups in the face of state power. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Michael Shear in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/us/politics/little-noticed-in-immigration-overhaul-a-government-hiring-rush.html"target="_blank">"In Immigration Actions, The Government Grows"</a>.
<blockquote>
Only 10 days after President Obama announced in a prime-time address that millions of undocumented people would soon “be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation,” an electronic bulletin reached inboxes across Washington. In a crucial detail that Mr. Obama left out, the Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said it was immediately seeking 1,000 new employees to work in an office building to process “cases filed as a result of the executive actions on immigration.” The likely cost: nearly $8 million a year in lease payments and more than $40 million for annual salaries. The announcement of the new “operational center” among the chain restaurants and high-rises of Crystal City, a Northern Virginia neighborhood used for overflow from the federal agencies in Washington, offers a glimpse into how swiftly a president’s words can produce bigger government. It also demonstrates the bureaucracy’s ability to swing into action, even during an extended power struggle between the president and Congress. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
James Buckley in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/james-l-buckley-how-congress-bribes-states-to-give-up-power-1419541292"target="_blank">"How Congress Bribes States to Give Up Power"</a>.
<blockquote>
Those programs, which provide funding for Medicaid as well as everything from road and bridge construction to rural housing, job training and fighting childhood obesity—now touch virtually every activity in which state and local governments are engaged. Their direct cost has grown, according to the federal budget, to an estimated $640.8 billion in 2015 from $24.1 billion in 1970. Their indirect costs, however, go far beyond those numbers both in terms of dollars wasted and the profound distortions they have brought about in how we govern ourselves. Because the grants come with detailed federal directives, they deprive state and local officials of the flexibility to meet their own responsibilities in the most effective ways, and undermine their citizens’ ability to ensure that their taxes will be used to meet their priorities rather than those of distant federal regulators. The irony is that the money the states and local governments receive from Washington is derived either from federal taxes paid by residents of the states or from the sale of bonds that their children will have to redeem. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuE15pLyn4X5EnHgPHmn7MZ9QmQum1UMSr3C45ZZVWA9DAuzeefgI-UvsYDhvDtZ4si88glRVtcX8uIrOqRZtEDmppgxBJCsJMyWFL9UMCUxcdyYDoR51LU6Tg8QuMaZI4Nb2pGQwvzcI5/s1600/vulgate-thehiddenagendaofthepoliticalmind.png">John McDermott in FT on Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/58d427ee-7f93-11e4-b4f5-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind – How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It"</a>.
<blockquote>
The University of Pennsylvania evolutionary psychology researchers argue that politics, like life, involves “social animals competing over advantages”. It is one of the means through which humans battle it out in zero-sum games for status, money and even sex. This is not Marx and Engels. This is Hobbes lying on Freud’s couch. Weeden and Kurzban acknowledge that theirs is a “deeply cynical” view of politics. But they have a case. Studies show that humans tend to think of their own views as enlightened but others’ as motivated by mere self-interest. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
William Hay in WSJ on Brian Vick’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-congress-of-vienna-by-brian-e-vick-1418597851"target="_blank">"The Congress of Vienna – Power and Politics After Napoleon"</a>.
<blockquote>
Prudent monarchs, with the French Revolution in mind, had grasped the need to accommodate the demands of their subjects, even if their countries had not adopted the representative system that set Britain apart. Mr. Vick presents Vienna as a stage set for dramatizing this new bond between rulers and the ruled. A “people’s festival” with an open-air circus culminated in a feast for injured veterans during which various monarchs toasted the soldiers. The so-called Praterfest, held in the Prater neighborhood in the heart of Vienna, combined a military review with a public feast. Another event culminated in a banquet to celebrate the anniversary of the allied victory at Leipzig in 1813. Government officials hosted some of these events; private entrepreneurs presented others, catering to a paying audience that was also eager to buy commemorative cups and battlefield prints. A whirl of balls and parties heightened the atmosphere of gaiety. Press accounts extended the reach of the events in Vienna and broadened their implicit message. The message, according to Mr. Vick, was that the people of Europe had vanquished the Corsican ogre and liberated a continent: Victory was a shared achievement and did not belong solely to rulers or armies. In that spirit, diplomacy in Vienna did not operate apart from wider society. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Nguyen Cong Khe in INYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/opinion/a-free-press-for-vietnam.html"target="_blank">"A Free Press for Vietnam"</a>.
<blockquote>
The public, including the intelligentsia, has grown so distrustful of state media and the state itself that it is too quick to accept accounts criticizing the government as true, even when they are not well substantiated. A slew of books has been published in recent years claiming to reveal state secrets on virtually every major national issue: from the origins of the Communist Party to the epic battle against the French at Dien Bien Phu, from China’s real designs on Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s private life. The recent “Den Cu,” by Tran Dinh, questions Uncle Ho’s nationalist credentials. It also claims he was directly involved in the forced land redistribution program of 1953-56, which killed more than 170,000 people, and may have attended the show trial of some wealthy landowners. The party and the government tend not to refute such allegations. Instead, they insist on maintaining outdated forms of control and micromanaging trivial issues, like the depth of the decolletage on singers’ dresses. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Michael Totten in WORLD AFFAIRS, <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/dispatch-vietnam-will-us-foster-natural-ally"target="_blank">"Dispatch from Vietnam"</a>.
<blockquote>
The Vietnamese treat these former enemy soldiers and prisoners of war like rock stars, even heroes. They may be more loved in Vietnam than they are at home, especially Peterson. Most Americans aren’t familiar with him, but his is a household name in Hanoi. We know what the Vietnamese think of Peterson now, but what about when he first arrived as ambassador in 1997? I asked him when I telephoned him in Melbourne, Australia, where he lives with his Vietnamese-born wife. “They were gracious and open and made no attempt to make me feel unwelcome,” he says, “but it took them a while to realize my desire for reconciliation was sincere....” He wouldn’t quite describe Vietnam as an American ally, but he said that it certainly wants to become one. “They want to be under an American security umbrella,” Peterson says, “and to be defended from China with an American trip wire, like South Korea.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Edward Wong in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/world/asia/labor-program-in-china-moves-to-scatter-uighurs-across-han-territory.html"target="_blank">"To Quell Unrest Beijing Moves to Scatter Uighurs Across China"</a>.
<blockquote>
The policy comes from the top. At a two-day work forum on Xinjiang in May, President Xi Jinping expressed support for sending more Uighurs to work and be educated in Han areas “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them,” according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. That was preceded by a conference in September 2013 in which other top party leaders called for local governments across China to help find work for members of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. (Uighurs in Xinjiang complain about losing jobs to Han migrants, whose relocations to the region are supported by the state.) </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
June Teufel Dreyer at <i>yaleglobal.yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/china%E2%80%99s-tianxia-do-all-under-heaven-need-one-arbiter"target="_blank">"China’s Tianxia: Do All Under Heaven Need One Arbiter? "</a>.
<blockquote>
Well before the arrival of the westerners, there had been a gradual shift away from tribute to trade. During the Ming dynasty, commercial transactions existed between the Ryukyus and parts of Southeast Asia. Private trade existed between China and Japan, even during the so-called <i>sakoku</i> period of the 17th century when Japan was theoretically closed to foreign commerce. Chinese court records from the late 1400s indicate concern about trade growth. Despite serious consequences, including decapitation, by the 15th century, a trading system had evolved that encompassed Southeast and North Asia. Since the earliest western power, the Portuguese, did not arrive until 1524, this undermines the contention that trade was imposed from the Occident. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Andrew Jacobs in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/world/asia/in-china-myths-of-social-cohesion.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"In China Myths of Social Cohesion"</a>.
<blockquote>
They come for the camel rides, the chance to dress up like a conquering Qing dynasty soldier or to take selfies in front of one of the most historic Islamic shrines in Xinjiang, the sprawling region in China’s far northwest. But the busloads of Chinese tourists who converge on the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum each day are mostly interested in a single raised crypt amid the dozens of tombs ensconced under the shrine’s soaring 17th-century dome. It is the one said to belong to Iparhan, a Uighur imperial consort, who, according to legend, was so sweetly fragrant that she caught the attention of a Chinese emperor 2,700 miles away in Beijing — and was either invited to live with him or dragooned into the palace as a trophy of war. But with the group out of earshot, a local resident offered up a starkly different version, describing Iparhan as a tragic figure, little more than a sex slave who was murdered by the emperor’s mother after she repeatedly rejected Qianlong’s advances. “The story that most Chinese know is completely made up,” said the man, an ethnic Uighur, who asked that his name be withheld for fear of angering the authorities. “The truth is she isn’t even buried here.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Nury Vittachi in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/chinas-crime-free-crime-films.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"China’s Crime-Free Crime Films"</a>.
<blockquote>
A few years back I got a call from a film director based in China who had read one of my detective novels. “Can you help me write a screenplay for a crime story?” he asked. “The tricky thing is that it’s set in Beijing, so no crime can be involved.” Welcome to the world of screenwriting for China, where crime stories are crime free, ghost tales have no ghosts and crooked politicians can’t be crooked. China has a large film industry and the second-biggest box office in the world, but few people outside the country have ever watched a Chinese movie released there: Once you’ve seen one acrobatic hero single-handedly dispatch an enemy platoon, you’ve seen a lifetime’s worth. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPvpLFSVwifMlWakR-jhyphenhyphen2LYF0LUdHGW4THfgTQN-k5rB2phaL1_UQM8BVM4QOWwTbtU5zp8stuGk9vlnptYmeocpr7DNiddrliyaDy4Z4dAnnOvBaKMVUtgTzIUEeTqnB_LIRt_jCWfdc/s1600/vulgate-prc-remembrance.png">Ian Johnson in NYRB, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/chinas-brave-underground-journal/"target="_blank">"China’s Brave Underground Journal"</a>
: <i>prchistory.org/remembrance</i>.
<blockquote>
In 1968, when he was seventeen, he was exiled to Inner Mongolia along with millions of youths sent to remote areas to get them out of China’s cities, a move that allowed Mao to restore control after the anarchy of the early phase of the Cultural Revolution. Wu lived among the herders and horsemen of the great steppes north of Beijing. One day, several youths were accused of beating a man who had robbed them. Wu spoke out in favor of them and was immediately arrested. He was thrown into a jail cell about twenty feet long filled with twenty men. They were accused of having organized a plot for Mongolian independence centered around the ethnic Mongolian Communist leader Ulanhu…. When he eventually returned to Beijing, he took a university degree, became a teacher, and explored the outside world through foreign films, which became his specialty. He published widely on the topic, including an amusing book on foreign and Chinese cinema that could be translated as <i>East–West: Apples and Oranges</i>. Yet the memories of his youth stayed with him. He knew he had witnessed history and spent the 1980s carefully writing down what he’d heard, corroborating information with eyewitnesses. A fresh finding was the degree of ethnic hatred that underlay the violence. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Gordon Fairclough in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB21912131382502414519004580246052253464986"target="_blank">"At India Edge Herdsmen Find Chinese Troops"</a>.
<blockquote>
Earlier this year, Mr. Tsering and other local leaders said, several herdsmen from Chumar were attacked by mounted Chinese soldiers who beat them with whips. China’s Defense Ministry declined to comment. Then in September, Indian security forces discovered Chinese soldiers using earth-moving equipment to build a dirt road into territory India considers its own. Chinese soldiers also took up positions at an area of high ground near Chumar known to India’s military as 30R. “Everybody was worried and asking if we should stay or go,” said Mr. Tsering. Convoys of olive-drab troop trucks rushed in Indian reinforcements and China sent in more troops. Chinese officers showed maps indicating that the 30R hill and Buddhist stupas closer to Chumar were in Chinese territory, said an Indo-Tibetan Border Police officer, who declined to be named. “That is a new claim. Next year they’ll be back with a map that moves the border even farther,” said the Indian officer. </blockquote>
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Sonia Faleiro in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/its-not-jihad-its-just-love.html"target="_blank">"An Attack on Love"</a>.
<blockquote>
Pamphlets warning against love jihad have been found in college campuses and even at wedding venues. This cynical ploy, love jihad, could have been constructed around money, or land, and in a country with a recent history of communal unrest, even self-defense, but it invoked women because the idea that women “belong” — as opposed to simply being — is one that is embraced by men of all classes and religions in India. Even a poor man with few possessions feels he has something if he has a wife or a daughter whose destiny is his to control. Thus did a provocateur from the right-wing Vishva Hindu Parishad organization say, recently, that Muslim men “should leave our women and cows alone or be prepared for a massive retaliation.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Ceylan Yeginsu in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-president-says-contraception-supporters-traitors.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Turkey’s President Accuses Advocates of Birth Control of Being Traitors"</a>.
<blockquote>
As a witness to the newlyweds, the president urged them to have at least three children, and blamed contraception advocates for hindering the country’s growth. “For years they committed a treason of birth control in this country, seeking to dry up our bloodline,” he said in a speech during the wedding ceremony. “Lineage is very important, both economically and spiritually.” Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist leader, has made comments on the subject of reproduction that others view as divisive and chauvinist. Over the course of his 11 years as the dominant leader of Turkey, he has expressed strong opposition toward abortion and contraception, and has called on women to have at least three children, but preferably four or five. But until now he had not equated birth control with an act of treason. Last month, he drew the ire of women when he declared that they were not equal to men. Speaking at a women’s conference, he said Islam had “defined a position for women: motherhood.” Explaining his position, Mr. Erdogan said: “Some people can understand this, while others can’t. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.” </blockquote>
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<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>, <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2015/01/harvard-law-school-and-title-ix"target="_blank">"Harvard Law School and Title IX"</a>.
<blockquote>
As government press releases go, the one of December 30 from the federal department of education is really something. It begins, "The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced today that it has entered into a resolution agreement with Harvard University and its Law School after finding the Law School in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 for its response to sexual harassment, including sexual assault." This is a law school whose dean from 2003 to 2009 was Elena Kagan, and whose dean from 2009 to now has been Martha Minow (a former law clerk to Thurgood Marshall). Since 2007 the president of Harvard has been Drew Faust. If an institution led by these eminent and almost certainly well-intentioned women can't follow the law, what does it say about the law? </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Naftali Bendavid in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-empty-churches-go-on-sale-1420245359"target="_blank">"Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale"</a>.
<blockquote>
The Church of England closes about 20 churches a year. Roughly 200 Danish churches have been deemed nonviable or underused. The Roman Catholic Church in Germany has shut about 515 churches in the past decade. But it is in the Netherlands where the trend appears to be most advanced. The country’s Roman Catholic leaders estimate that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be out of commission in a decade, and 700 of Holland’s Protestant churches are expected to close within four years. “The numbers are so huge that the whole society will be confronted with it,” says Ms. Grootswagers, an activist with Future for Religious Heritage, which works to preserve churches. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Y. Carmon at <i>memri.org</i>, <a href="http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8364.htm"target="_blank">"From Carnage to Culture"</a>.
<blockquote>
Looking at the history of Europe across the centuries, renowned Arab intellectual Hashem Saleh questioned in <i>Asharq Al-Awsat</i> on August 10, 2013 whether there might be any shortcuts that would spare the Arab and Muslim world its present devastation. He answers, painfully, in the negative, and expresses a hypothetical desire to fall asleep and wake in years to come to see Syria like present-day Holland. In this way, the Arab and Muslim world would be spared all the suffering Europe endured as it developed to its present state. Alas, there are no shortcuts in history; the process will take just as long and be just as arduous for the Arab and Muslim world as it was for Europe. The situation in the region will get worse – perhaps much worse – before it gets better. One can understand the need of Western policy-makers to impact this process in a meaningful and urgent way. However, very little can be done to change the course of history. It was not possible in Europe's history, and it is not possible today. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
David Kirkpatrick and Merna Thomas in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/world/middleeast/egyptian-leader-visits-coptic-christmas-eve-service.html"target="_blank">"Egyptian Leader Visits Coptic Christmas Eve Service"</a>.
<blockquote>
In the last two weeks, Pope Tawadros has further raised eyebrows by urging Christians not to dwell on the killings of 28 primarily Coptic demonstrators by troops in October 2011, during a period of military rule. He suggested implausibly that the mass killing had in fact been a plot perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. At the service Tuesday night, the pope beamed at Mr. Sisi’s unannounced visit. In footage broadcast on Egyptian television, Mr. Sisi seemed to appear by surprise, wearing a red tie and dark suit and surrounded by burly bodyguards. Standing by the pope’s side, the president spoke without notes, blinking several times as though his eyes were moist. The crowd chanted in adulation. “I don’t want His Holiness the pope to get upset this way!” Mr. Sisi joked at one point, eliciting chuckles from Tawadros and a friendly shoulder pat from a bishop nearby. “We will love each other for real, so that people may see,” Mr. Sisi declared. “A happy year for you and all Egyptians!” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
WSJ: <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamist-terror-in-paris-1420675706"target="_blank">"Islamist Terror in Paris"</a>.
<blockquote>
Wednesday’s attack also demonstrates again that violent Islam isn’t a reaction to poverty or Western policies in the Middle East. It is an ideological challenge to Western civilization and principles, including a free press and religious pluralism…. Muslim leaders in the West will no doubt react by denouncing the attack and insisting that the attackers were perverting the meaning of Islam. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t no nearly far enough. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi struck the right note earlier this month when he called for a “religious revolution” within Islam. “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world,” he told an audience at Cairo’s 1,000-year-old Al Azhar university. “The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move.” </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Sylvain Bourmeau in PARIS REVIEW, <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/02/scare-tactics-michel-houellebecq-on-his-new-book/"target="_blank">"Michel Houellebecq"</a> on his novel, <i>Soumission</i>
<blockquote>
<b>It’s not necessarily racial, it can be religious. In this case, your book describes the replacement of the Catholic religion by Islam.</b>
<BR>
No. My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.
<P><b>You who have become an agnostic, you can look on cheerfully and watch the destruction of Enlightenment philosophy?</b>
<BR>
Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear. </blockquote>
<P><P>***<P><P><P><P>
Katrin Bennhold in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/world/in-torrent-of-rapes-in-britain-an-uncomfortable-focus-on-race-and-ethnicity.html"target="_blank">"In Torrent of Rapes in Britain an Uncomfortable Focus on Race and Ethnicity"</a>.
<blockquote>
The police and other agencies were alerted more than 100 times over six years to the possibility that something very wrong was happening before Mr. Ahmed, now 61, was arrested and charged as the leader of a sexual exploitation ring that involved eight men of Pakistani descent and one Afghan. In May 2012, he was given a 19-year prison sentence for raping and abetting rape in a case involving at least 47 girls, all of them white. Mr. Ahmed showed no remorse. He called the judge a “racist bastard,” the girls “prostitutes” and blamed white Britons for “training” their daughters in drinking and sexual activity at a young age. The recent revelations that at least 1,400 teenage and preteenage girls had been sexually exploited over 16 years by so-called grooming gangs in another northern English city, Rotherham, stunned the nation because of the sheer scale of the abuse. And it put an uncomfortable spotlight on issues of race, religion and ethnicity in an increasingly multicultural nation: Nearly all of the rape suspects are Pakistani men, and nearly all of the victims are white. </blockquote>
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Callie Rennison in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/who-suffers-most-from-rape-and-sexual-assault-in-america.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Privilege Among Rape Victims"</a>.
<blockquote>
Lynn A. Addington at American University and I recently published a study based on the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1995 to 2011. We found that the estimated rate of sexual assault and rape of female college students, ages 18 to 24, was 6.1 per 1,000 students. This is nothing to be proud of, but it is significantly lower than the rate experienced by women that age who don’t attend college — eight per 1,000. In other words, these women are victims of sexual violence at a rate around 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts. The focus on sexual violence against some of our most privileged young people has distracted us from the victimization of those enjoying less social and economic advantage. Surprisingly, we don’t know much about the latter group. After an exhaustive search, colleagues and I could find no major study that focuses on the relationship between social and economic disadvantage and rape and sexual assault risk in the United States. </blockquote>
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Meredith Tax at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/meredith-tax/antis-antiimperialist-or-antifeminist-0"target="_blank">"The Antis: Anti-Imperialist or Anti-Feminist?"</a>.
<blockquote>
A leftwing analysis that blames the suffering of women in Muslim-majority countries on the feminist movement - variously identified as "white feminists", "liberal feminists", or "colonial feminists" and their "native informants" or "comprador intellectuals in the South" – has become influential in US academic feminist circles. While its proponents call themselves "anti-imperialist feminists", in the interests of brevity I will call them simply the Antis, in tribute to the anti-suffrage leftists who considered women's rights a bourgeois distraction from socialist revolution. </blockquote>
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Thomas Rogers in TNR, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120379/german-green-party-pedophilia-scandal"target="_blank">"A Major German Political Party Used to Support Pedophilia – And It’s Coming Back to Haunt Them"</a>.
<blockquote>
The current scandal dates back to last year’s federal election, when a German researcher revealed that one of the party’s leaders, Juergen Trittin, had signed off on a 1981 local party platform arguing that sex between adults and children, in some cases, be legal. Trittin quickly acknowledged that he had made a mistake, blaming it on an oversight—but conservative political opponents were quick to describe the Greens’ actions as “repulsive.” This came on the heels of other revelations—which had prompted the report in the first place—that another senior Green Party figure had once written about his “flirtations” with children while working in a kindergarten. Largely as a result, the party only received a disappointing 8.4 percent of the popular vote. Although it is little remembered these days, the move to legalize pedophilia in the 1980s went far beyond Germany. In the United States, the Childhood Sensuality Circle and, more notoriously, North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) advocated (with little success) for legalized pedophilia, and other countries, including the Netherlands, Canada and the UK, had similar movements. But the movement fared exceedingly well in the unique political climate of West Germany, where the Nazi past made the left especially sensitive (and, in some cases, susceptible) to arguments about individual freedom. “It was a widely-held belief in West Germany that sexual freedom was a way to prevent authoritarianism,” says Stephan Klecha, one of the researchers who worked on the report. </blockquote>
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Brendan Simms in WSJ on Roger Moorhouse’s book, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-devils-alliance-by-roger-moorhouse-1417387043?KEYWORDS=Brendan+Simms+Comrades+in+Arms"target="_blank">"The Devil’s Alliance – Hitler’s Pact with Stalin 1939-1941"</a>.
<blockquote>
What is striking throughout is the extent to which Nazis and Communists felt at ease in one another’s presence, at all levels. Mr. Moorhouse’s chilling description of the handover ceremony at Brest (in Poland) in mid-September 1939, when the Germans ceded the city to the Russians, describes fraternization between the two sides and a joint military march. He cites Nazi and Soviet statements about the ways in which their alliance would “scupper the pious plans of the Western Democracies” and quotes Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, who negotiated the pact, saying that he felt in Moscow as if he were “amongst old comrades.” </blockquote>
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Donald Rayfield in LITERARY REVIEW on Stephen Kotkin’s book, <a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_11_14.php"target="_blank">"Stalin, Vol. 1 – Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928"</a>.
<blockquote>
Books that Stalin annotated reveal that we are dealing with the ultimate proofreader, a man who never missed an author's or an editor's mistake. No wonder Soviet literature's greatest achievement was eliminating misprints, which were considered 'raids by the class enemy' (an attitude one wishes Penguin Press might adopt). Kotkin's study becomes masterful when he follows Stalin's activities in October 1917. Less than a decision-maker but more than a gofer, Stalin, in his capacity as general secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee, effectively became the party's chief whip before transforming this role into that of absolute dictator. Kotkin emphasises the stupidity of such articulate intellectuals as Trotsky and Kamenev, who considered themselves Stalin's cultural superiors. Trotsky ignored Stalin in London in 1907 and disdained him in Vienna in 1913. Stalin took an immediate dislike to such eloquent Bolsheviks and sought support not from the alphas, but from the omegas, such as Voroshilov and Kaganovich, who would remain in his debt. Unlike more liberal Bolsheviks, Stalin realised that the secret police sought a leader who would employ them, not retire them. His courting of Feliks Dzierzynski was a masterstroke. </blockquote>
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACh01wPzPahQ9ZboRPGhzT0zM4hKUpmuqKUolrSJMIfPqYZYT09VzfR0qrxzRMO0H1ekCyHVNSd-FgtqB_p32xWkQqy7nyYeGNC_Bm8dwoMUw06PqdT_IELqhFtJ59XsFzKh3ierolrzz/s1600/vulgate-seeinglikeastate.png">Venkat at <i>ribbonfarm.com</i> on James Scott’s book, <a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/"target="_blank">"Seeing Like a State – How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed"</a>.
<blockquote>
Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
Here is the recipe:
• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for <i>legibility</i>. </blockquote>
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Erica Vasquez at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/erica-vasquez/resistance-in-occupied-western-sahara-women-defining-society"target="_blank">"Resistance in Occupied Western Sahara: Women Defining a Society"</a>.
<blockquote>
At the start of the military occupation in 1976, many Sahrawi men joined the liberation army and fought against the Moroccan state for several years. In their absence, Sahrawi women were primarily responsible for their household, children, and finances. At the same time, many women reported to the Frente Polisario about the internal dynamics of the occupation. Those who worked as informants for the opposition were arrested and unlawfully imprisoned by the Moroccan state. Many women, forcefully, were unexpectedly separated from their families and children and locked away for up to 11 years. They were tortured, interrogated, and abused all throughout their prison term in secret prisons located throughout the occupied territories and Morocco-proper. </blockquote>
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<i>MercoPress</i>: <a href="http://en.mercopress.com/2014/12/26/nicaragua-civic-organisations-want-protesters-freed-chinese-invaders-out"target="_blank">"“Chinese invaders” out"</a>.
<blockquote>
The peasants, many of whom showed signs calling President Danuiel Ortega “a traitor”, are unhappy with a provision of the canal's expropriation law that effectively compels residents along the route to sell their land at whatever price HKND offers. The $50 billion project officially got under way on Monday despite widespread opposition spurred by the government’s failure even to conduct studies of the canal’s potential impact on the environment and on the affected communities. </blockquote>
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Steve Sailer at <i>takimag.com</i>, <a href="http://takimag.com/article/a_new_caste_society_steve_sailer/print#axzz3MIFBVQxe"target="_blank">"A New Caste Society"</a>.
<blockquote>
What I hadn’t guessed in 1988 was that the powers that be in Chicago would simply unload their unwanted public housing project residents on the rest of the Midwest via Section 8 vouchers, with the federal government ready to persecute for discrimination any two-bit burgh that tried to resist. That seemed a little too cynical for even me to imagine in 1988. Pushing poor blacks out of elite cities has become a noteworthy trend in the years since. For example, San Francisco has fallen from 13.4% black in 1970 to only 6.1% black in 2010. Just as predicted in the African-American conspiracy theory known as “the Plan,” Washington D.C. is no longer majority black. Brooklyn has become strikingly shinier in just the seven years Google Street View has been in operation. If you wonder why the New York and Washington-based news media periodically erupt into hysterias over purported racism in obscure fly-overvilles such as Sanford, Florida and Ferguson, Missouri, one reason is because the very idea that nobody-Americans might resist the expulsion of poor blacks from rich cities makes media elites angry. How can they fully cash in on their condos in gentrifying neighborhoods if blacks won’t go away? </blockquote>
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Kevin Helliker in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB41298764822961154139104580226882813120398"target="_blank">"Fitzgerald and the Football Revolution"</a>.
<blockquote>
In 1956, a Michigan graduate student in romance languages did something that apparently no other Fitzgerald scholar had done before. The student, Donald A. Yates, asked Crisler if during his Princeton years he’d had any contact with Fitzgerald. Mr. Yates got an earful, and in 1956 he published an article about it in the Michigan Daily, the university’s student newspaper. During his Princeton years, Crisler told Mr. Yates, his phone would ring late at night before games…. “Sometimes he had a play or a new strategy he wanted me to use,” said Crisler. “Some of the ideas Scott used to suggest to me over the phone were reasonable—and some were fantastic.” In the fantastic department, Crisler cited an example: Fitzgerald, he said, “came up with a scheme for a whole new offense. Something that involved a two-platoon system.” At the time of the interview, the coach was already known as the father of two-platoon football. But Mr. Yates didn’t know that. “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to sports,” says Mr. Yates, now 84 and a professor emeritus of Latin American literature at Michigan State University. So Mr. Yates didn’t ask Crisler the million-dollar question: Did he get the idea for a two-platoon system from Fitzgerald? Looking back at the statements Crisler made to him, Mr. Yates says, “That seems to be what he is saying.” </blockquote>
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Wailin Wong in CT, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/hub/chi-distance-horween-tannery-bsi-hub-story.html#page=2"target="_blank">"Chicago’s Last Tannery"</a>.
<blockquote>
Football is a major part of both Horween family history and the story of the business. Arnold Horween Sr. and his brother, Ralph, played on the Harvard team that won the 1920 Rose Bowl. Then they went pro, playing for the Chicago Cardinals—but using the fake surname “McMahon” to hide their activity from their mother, fearing her disapproval. Arnold Horween Sr. later coached the team at his alma mater and Arnold Horween Jr. was also a Harvard football player. (Skip grew up playing ice hockey.) The elder Horweens’ football careers put them in contact with George Halas, the founder and owner of the Chicago Bears. That connection in turn helped make Horween a near-exclusive provider of leather for Chicago-based Wilson. The tannery makes football leather from cowhide (not pigskin) for Wilson, as well as big manufacturers like Nike, Adidas and Spalding. A 1,000-ton press outfitted with German-made embossing plates gives the leather its distinctive pebbling, while a proprietary finishing process called “tanned in tack” imbues the leather with a stickiness that allows players to more easily grip the ball. “We really try and make those guys know we don’t take (the Wilson relationship) for granted,” Skip said. “That’s a piece of business that lots of people would like to do.” </blockquote>
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Andrew Browne in WSJ, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-golf-heads-into-the-rough-as-xi-takes-a-swing-1419325953"target="_blank">"Golf Hits the Rough as Xi Takes a Swing"</a>.
<blockquote>
The just-completed Yanqi Lake course, with views of the Great Wall, was closed. Like almost all of China’s 600-odd golf courses, it’s technically illegal. Allowing delegates to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to tee off would have sent all the wrong signals. President Xi Jinping has had the same effect on golf in China as a weekend thunderstorm: The entire game is on hold. In China, golf has long been considered a bourgeois pastime. After the 1949 revolution, Mao had all the courses dug up and forbade government officials from playing—a ban never officially lifted. A tiny handful of golf courses were allowed in the early 1980s when China opened its doors to foreign investment. Then, unlicensed courses started popping up as golf’s popularity took off among the middle classes. That led to a 2004 blanket ban on construction of new courses to preserve arable land. Ironically, most of China’s golf courses have been built since then. But under Mr. Xi, the country is starting to take the rules seriously. </blockquote>
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<B>Obituaries of the Issue</B>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/sports/baseball/sy-berger-91-dies-created-the-modern-baseball-trading-card.html"target="_blank">"Sy Berger"</a> (1923-2014)
<blockquote>
Mr. Berger introduced Topps cards in 1951. They came with taffy, rather than chewing gum, because a competitor seemed to have exclusive rights to market baseball cards with gum. But the taffy wound up picking up the flavor of the varnish on the cards. “You wouldn’t dare put that taffy near your mouth,” Mr. Berger said, adding, “that ’51 series was really a disaster.” A year later, after switching to gum, he conceived the prototype for the modern baseball card, supplanting the unimaginative, smallish and often black-and-white offerings of the existing card companies. </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-kass-met-0921-20140922-column.html"target="_blank">"Clarence McClain"</a> (1941-2014)
<blockquote>
He said his father was a butcher at the Union Stock Yards. Washington's father worked on the killing floor. McClain had little schooling, he hustled around in what he called the music industry and while he was climbing the political ranks with Washington, McClain was arrested at a party. "There were ladies there, dancers and entertainers you know, but they weren't whores," he said. "The police busted the door and arrested me for keeping a house of prostitution. But there weren't any johns there. Never, ever, any johns. How do you run a whorehouse without johns?" I said I didn't know. "It was ridiculous," he said. Washington's people despised McClain, but they couldn't remove his influence, even when he was out of City Hall. It was awkward. How could Washington be lionized as a reformer with Clarence always around? It caught up to McClain. He was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for accepting a $35,000 bribe in a city parking ticket collection scheme. He hit some tough patches afterward. But he did get help, eventually, from an old foe. "Mr. Vrdolyak helped my dad in later years," said his daughter. "My dad had a company, McClain and Associates, that was hired by Mr. Vrdolyak and got some work from him," she said. "It helped." Vrdolyak didn't return my call, but I didn't expect one. Phonies hold news conferences to brag about offering charity. Old-school guys don't talk about the help they give. </blockquote>
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitOKnojvbtNzFMIEqfVXPf27GOjpnh2TdG8E4mqGA4OMkRHRmQUNEHtPrUQ9SRZrPtKCVyvzpKfxGHlmhv3vS2X68oTEd8-ROSBlFHroqBrHhXKyDnSqcVXzYn1lmbN3wqSR-x-sWF-gLt/s1600/vulgate-yamaguchi.png"><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fb107f72-3f37-11e4-a861-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"Yoshiko Yamaguchi"</a> (1920-2014)
<blockquote>
Born in Manchuria on February 12 1920 to Sinophile members of the Japanese colonial elite, she had grown up, she said, “loving one country as my homeland and another as my ancestral land”. It was a dual identity that grew hard to reconcile as Japan and China slid into war in the 1930s and as she rose to fame – an ethnic imposter deployed in Tokyo’s propaganda films. Ian Buruma reimagined her time as a mysterious, politicised sex symbol in his 2008 novel <i>The China Lover</i>. Yet Yamaguchi, who has died aged 94, lived a life that would count as extraordinary even without the years she spent masquerading as Li Xianglan, a “Chinese” actress whose roles in cinematic melodramas often had her succumbing to the charms of Japanese heroes. There was more to her story after the imperial forces’ defeat: acting in Japan and in Hollywood, where she took another name, Shirley Yamaguchi, after Shirley Temple; a marriage to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi; a stint as a television presenter; and 18 years in Japan’s parliament. But it was her youth in China that defined her. </blockquote>
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JPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09864821766051273422noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-37777403693217901362014-08-19T05:00:00.002-07:002014-08-22T13:49:30.389-07:00Issue #146 (August 20, 2014)<b>South of Snowy Range peaks, Wyoming</b><br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4aN7GGhjGZM/U_Jywixw8xI/AAAAAAAAE6U/OYKfbCLUoQI/w650/SouthofSnowyRangepeaks-small_650.jpg">
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Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>A Prop-man's Centenary – John and Francis Ford in Early Hollywood</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br /><br />
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John Ford literature grows every year as if the old man resents mightily the scale of John Wayne studies. No slouch, he might also burn in his Irish heaven over the burdened shelves of Welles and Hitchcock tomes, or even the endless “noir” volumes which may someday subsume all of film studies if not the Humanities in toto.<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-EEMyHK_RJEE/U_alIEZf9tI/AAAAAAAAE8c/523bO5ECAdk/w298/Centaur-BayonneNJ.png">But one hundred years ago this August a real boy named John Feeney just out of a Maine high school arrived in Hollywood. He wasn’t running away from home, but the older brother he joined there, Francis Feeney, was the black sheep of the family and <i>had</i> run off after a shotgun marriage to enlist for the Spanish-American War. Being too young Francis settled for the circus, then the theater in New York where he took the name Ford and married an actress. John had been three when Francis bolted and so barely remembered him. As fate had it, by 1914 Francis had become one of the first real movie stars and he was running his own production unit at Universal – a dream come true for John who’d ushered at both the movie theater and the legit stage in Portland to study drama, thinking he might want to be a writer. But if becoming prop-man for his brother was less hazardous than running away from home, it would do.<br /><br />
At the turn of the century in New York Francis was too often just another out-of-work actor so he drifted into the new art of moving pictures. In his unpublished memoir he wrote of taking “back screen talking jobs” where an actor and actress would stand behind the screen and provide spoken dialogue in voices tailored to the characters on the screen. He wrote of it as good training in improvisation and acting.<br /><br />
There had already been several boom-busts for the novelty of living pictures projected onto silver screens in converted storefronts. Francis entered pictures in the final early boom, the one that established story-telling cinema as the norm over earlier contenders (travelogues, newsreels, re-stagings of fights and theatrical attractions). It was the breakthrough success of <i>The Great Train Robbery</i> (1903) that reoriented picturemaking and brought in new producers. Ford found work with Centaur Films of Bayonne, New Jersey. In his 1933 manuscript Francis claimed he was up a ladder cleaning a gas-lamp on a New York street when the Centaur production company happened by and offered him $2 to fall off for their camera. This was probably in late 1907 or into the next year. In 1908 Edison and his licensed film producers formed a Trust and Centaur was not admitted and became the first of the aggressive independents who filmed on the sly to avoid the Trust’s toughs out searching for evidence of unlicensed use of the Edison camera.<br /><br />
In 1908 the one-reel format (10-14 minutes) for drama and comedy was becoming the standard. D.W. Griffith began elaborating on the conventions of dramatic story-telling for pictures that year at Biograph. Mack Sennett was also there doing the same for comedies, while Centaur and others, especially Selig Polyscope in Chicago, began to produce Westerns. Characters named Frank begin to appear in Centaur productions according to early trade publications notices and ads (there were no credits and virtually none of these early films survive). These shorts were essentially improvised and actors doubled as crew. After the filming, a story-line could easily be changed by rewriting title cards and rearranging scene order; outside Biograph, the cameraman was still more important than the director in determining the look of a picture.<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-SGATy8G_1CY/U_aq_bG0l_I/AAAAAAAAE9k/MAJp_JmtCcA/w425/FFord-StarFilm-FThompson-small.png">In 1909, after working on an unknown number of Centaur films, Frank Ford joined the new American branch of Georges Melies’ Star Film Co., which was run by his brother Gaston. Star Film responded to the demand for more realistic Westerns that the Selig and Essanay companies were stimulating with their Colorado-set productions, by moving the unit to San Antonio, Texas. Here Ford continued to learn filmmaking under company director William Haddock. According to author Frank Thompson, Ford in addition to playing leads or heavies was also the location scout and property-man (<i>The Star Film Ranch: Texas’ First Picture Show</i>). Like Selig and Essanay, Star hired local ranch-hands and cowboys to ride, stunt and act in their now more authentic-looking pictures.<br /><br />
In Spring 1911 the Star company moved again, this time to Santa Barbara, California. And by the end of that year Ford himself moved and was making films for the then leading independent producer, the New York Motion Picture Co. (NYMPCo), whose Western unit, Bison Life, changed its name in Los Angeles to Bison, then to “101” Bison, and finally Broncho. Here under the supervision of Thomas Ince, Francis Ford became the director of significant Westerns and historical subjects (he specialized in portraying Lincoln). The new film standard was the two-reeler (22-28 minutes). The best surviving of the “101” Bisons is <i>The Invaders</i> (1912), a three-reel “special” available as a DVD add-on to <i>The Sundown Trail</i> (1934) from <i>oldies.com</i>. Scott Simmons spends a chapter of his book <i>The Invention of the Western</i> on this film which is some of the scarce literature available on the elder Ford.<br /><br />
The leading independent producers merged to form Universal Pictures in April 1912 in expectation of a final showdown with the Edison Trust. This brought independent pioneer producers Carl Laemmle, Charles Baumann, Adam Kessel, Pat Powers, Centaur’s David Horsley and others together. Laemmle strong-armed the others out but Ford stayed with Universal where he escaped Ince’s credit-stealing oversight and was able to write his own ticket.<br /><br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-SC3mJaGVgDY/U_a2y6Z5AFI/AAAAAAAAE_E/0DYvioS1ph8/w550/FFord-LLserial-MPNMay2-1914-small.png"><br /><br />
Records and memories as parsed by John Ford’s biographers aren’t conclusive but Hollywood historian Robert Birchard puts John’s arrival in the new movie capitol at August 1914. By then Frank was running his own unit, producing, directing and starring opposite Grace Cunard who was also his screenwriter and girlfriend. Ford and Cunard were the first power-couple of Hollywood in the years before Mary Pickford met Douglas Fairbanks in 1918. They were making shorts and the new chapter-play serials which had become huge successes in 1913. Francis Ford was known for action. Birchard in a two-part 1993 essay, “The Adventures of Francis Ford and Grace Cunard,” describes their chapter-plays:<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“While all the early serials favored action over plot, the Ford-Cunard offerings had a wacky, even surreal quality that caught the imagination of the audience. And, while many chapter plays of the time presented more or less self-contained episodes, Ford and Cunard delighted in developing true cliffhangers to end each chapter.” (<i>American Cinematographer</i>)
</blockquote><br /><br />
He goes on to describe the hoked up ballyhoo they and their newspaper partner, <i>The Chicago Herald</i>, used, inferring that the serial, <i>Lucille Love – The Girl of Mystery</i> (1914), was written secretly by some famous author who required he be credited as “The Master Pen.”<br /><br />
Birchard goes on to quote a 1916 issue of <i>Photoplay</i>:<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“…Ford freely admits that Miss Cunard provides most of the ideas for their stories. Then they work them out together in scenario form and stage them. ‘It takes us about two hours to make a two reel scenario,’ said Ford. ‘If we both agree on the plan for the story, we make the scenario together; if we disagree, each writes a scenario and then we either take the best one or combine the two.’ …(Ford and Cunard) always have two cameras,’ the reporter continued, ‘and about half the time Ford is off in one corner of the Universal ‘lot’ taking scenes in which he appears while Miss Cunard is off on location with the other camera taking scenes in which she, and not Ford, appear(s).” (<i>Ibid.</i>)
</blockquote><br /><br />
There are a number of episodes from these serials that survive in archives and collections but Francis Ford may not be a priority for scarce restoration dollars. It’s been noted that Francis was often left unmentioned in trade magazine write-ups of his films, and even the standard early history of cinema to 1920, <i>A Million and One Nights</i> by Terry Ramsaye, mentions him only in a chronology of these early serials. He was a busy, inspired man and in the doing he likely neglected self-promotion and wound up used. What can be found easily on DVD are Frank’s later serials, <i>The Power God</i> (1925; 15 chapters) and <i>Officer 444</i> (1926; 10 chapters), where his stars were Ben Wilson and Neva Gerber. By then though the serial was no longer a prestige format and the budgets and perhaps the inspiration too suffers, though these have their sci-fi gothic action charms.<br /><br />
The Edison Trust was ended by a federal court in October 1915, but those producers (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Selig, etc.) ultimately failed because their joint distribution deal kept them tied to two-reeler production while the independents innovated. Griffith had left Biograph to make longer films and that year his independently produced 12-reel special, <i>The Birth of a Nation</i> (1915), was a game-changer for the ages and by the twenties the feature was the standard and serials and shorts were second-class peripherals. The large independents bought out the old Trust members. Ford’s own studio, Fordart-Francis Ford Productions, was short-lived. It failed in 1922 and though his features in this period were often quite good the independent producers he worked for were also failing as the modern major studios took shape. These new studios and their production bureaucracies often judged the earliest filmmakers with their independent spirit as more trouble than they were worth.<br /><br />
*<br /><br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bInPtXmbkC4/U_avnIhb6DI/AAAAAAAAE-M/2l8rBvbmtxE/w550/TheInvaders-opening-DavidLeeGuss-650.png"><br /><br />
John Ford, however, began to flourish. Property-man was a good position from which to train for bigger things. Back in 1914 the Southern California studios did not yet feature warehouses cataloguing every historical era’s dress, furniture, transportation, etc. Units built around stars and directors lived off the land and a prop-man had to develop a sense of where he could find exteriors, cars, dress, firearms, interiors, etc. for whatever script was lined-up for next week. He might have to go door-to-door hoping to lease furniture or wall-hangings from a nearby home, or if money was tight charm folks out use of a piano in exchange for a part in the picture. Jack also filled in as stuntman when Frank couldn’t shame an actor into doing a gag. And Frank used Jack as a whipping boy, a prop so-to-speak, to keep the unit – its actors, cameramen, lighting techs, stuntmen, cowboys, musicians, cook, etc. – on its toes, ready to shoot and then move on to the next shot quickly. Jack learned this too from Frank, but later when he used some innocent crew-member or new actor as whipping boy he was showing some sadistic edge all his own.<br /><br />
Jack’s apprenticeship with Frank ended in 1917 after working on about fifty two-reelers and four serials and a feature or two. John became one of Harry Carey’s directors at Universal. The initial run of their “Cheyenne Harry” two-reelers are lost, but their first feature survives. <i>Straight Shooting</i> (1917), made without authorization after Carey and Ford conspired to husband film-stock and shooting days, angered their supervisor but won the approval of studio head Carl Laemmle. They now continued making features. Three survive. The two I’ve seen are pictorially quite sophisticated, <i>Straight Shooting</i> (see below) is even overdone a bit as if Jack, only 22, was throwing everything he could think of into it. <i>Bucking Broadway</i> (1917) is a bonus feature on the Criterion edition of Stagecoach (1939), and a print of <i>Hell Bent</i> (1918) apparently survives in a Czech film archive.<br /><br />
Joseph MacBride in his book, <i>Searching for John Ford</i>, sketches out the early 1920s in detail. Carey was dropped by Universal in 1921 while John Ford stayed another couple years before moving over to Fox where he directed two Tom Mix features. Carey continued to make good films but these were harder to mount and his productivity fell. MacBride has one of Carey’s unit, actor Joe Harris, expressing the unit’s bitterness over their young wunderkind moving up and away. Harris apparently joked that Jack’s new preference for the flashier Mix indicated he might be gay. As Jack was so young and naïve this hit its target harder than intended. They were all a rough crew and most of them lived at Carey’s Newhall ranch as if it was still the 19th century.<br /><br />
They were all tough. The early Western-makers were in thrall to the frontier cowhand and the Indian, and the artists among them hoped they might manage to create a picture version of what Jack London was doing in literature. Jack Ford was no pansy, his high school football nickname was “Bull” Feeney, after all. But when Carey himself indulged Harris’ jokes MacBride has it that Ford banished Carey. They did work again together so I’m not convinced about that. And Harry’s wife and co-star Olive Golden, who had introduced them, was there to advise the young man and chide his antagonists. More likely Harry Carey reflexively asserted control on the set of <i>The Prisoner of Shark Island</i> (1936) just as Ford did later to John Wayne’s panicked discomfort when he visited the set of Wayne’s <i>The Alamo</i> (1960), and Ford couldn’t have that.<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-agziyRMMTIs/U_Eia59SppI/AAAAAAAAE28/QQ2rAokdiJc/w450/HC-StraightShootingadv-small.png">But John <i>was</i> an unusually sensitive young artist. This was what he brought to everything he had learned from his brother. He had a way of working with his actors, especially in close-ups where they did nothing but think that lets us feel we read their minds. He’d dismiss the rest of the company, set the lights, camera, have musicians play something, and then talk the actor through the shot for as long as it might take to get the duration of the look he knew would work. This was Griffith’s method with his actresses. These silent passages are pure cinema and more eloquent than any dialogue could be. Given a decent script, bad acting and wrong performance notes are a director’s fault, even when he simply lets actors do what they want. But to know what he wants from an actor a director must know human beings as they are and love them enough to idealize them a bit, even the villain, even as he ruthlessly manipulates them on the set, trusting all might be forgiven if the picture works.<br /><br />
John Ford weathered the treacherous transition to sound in the late 1920s; studios used the coming of sound to purge less nimble high-priced directorial and writing talent and their voices had nothing to do with it. He directed many fine talkies through the 1930s, building toward his astonishing run of pre-WWII masterpieces which ran from <i>Stagecoach</i> (1939) through <i>How Green Was My Valley</i> (1941) after which he was the consensus best filmmaker in Hollywood. Frank drifted down the cast credits and he stopped directing in 1928. Jack cast his brother in small, usually uncredited parts; Frank often played silent backwoods reprobates one catches being called Fen, Frank, or Feeney.. He did many bits and supporting roles in other films too, notably <i>The Arizonian</i> (1935), <i>The Ox-Bow Incident</i> (1943), <i>Driftwood</i> (1947), and two Monte Hale Westerns directed by his son Phil Ford: <i>The Timber Trail</i> (1948), <i>San Antone Ambush </i>(1949).<br /><br />
Jack continued the m.o. Frank had developed, only now Frank acting in Jack’s pictures could find himself the safety, the whipping boy. Later it was John Wayne, John Ford’s former prop-man, the nation’s number-one movie star after the war but one who could still find himself the butt of any back-of-the-camera “scene” Ford felt necessary to keep the now even larger film companies on point. In Francis’ day the small units on location operated with camaraderie enforced by their isolation; they memorialized their pictures by having an assistant cameraman take a portrait of the cast and crew. This practice ended when the business got serious and centralized on backlots and soundstages. Jack could handle the studios and still knock out great pictures; Frank could not. John had a fortuitous appetite for the struggle with studio bureaucrats. Francis had once had complete freedom back in the heady days of inventing moving pictures, back when only his reputation as a pioneer filmmaker was denied him. As I write in the next issue of <i>Film International</i> magazine:<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“What D.W. Griffith did for the woman’s picture, Francis Ford did for the action picture. John, then, essentially put the two together against significant market – not to say idiomorphic – forces of repulsion.” (<i>Film Int.</i>)
</blockquote><br /><br />
Andrew McLaglen was about the last of the extended Ford company family working in Hollywood and though he made features, his best work was directing over a hundred early episodes of <i>“Gunsmoke”</i> and <i>“Have Gun – Will Travel”</i>, the half-hour episodes, a format for drama now extinct but which recapitulated the two-reeler of the 1910s. McLaglen stressed to Scott Eyman how nice Francis was, “I won’t say, ‘unlike his brother,’ but he was different from Jack.” (<i>Print the Legend</i>) Of course when McLaglen knew Francis he had long ago ceded the fight to his younger brother and according to MacBride would pace the floor when the bits and small parts were scarce toward the end of his life.<br /><br />
The struggle to make a heartful action picture that has ambition to be true to art, history, people and this particular country… to make that film consistently in the face of movie studio provisos and star demands has proved beyond just about everyone except a touchy Irishman born John Feeney who claimed to have been born Sean O’Fearna, was called “Bull” in high school but took his brother’s stage name Ford on arrival in Hollywood. He was scrupulous about what was true, loved people and their blarney, had an landscape artist’s eye for composition and a portrait painter’s sense of light, an editor’s sense of what to leave out of a story and a 19th-century novelist’s feel for cutting along the moving parts of a plot to disguise the mechanics of this most mechanical art and conjure a kind of gravitational pull on the audience toward the resolution that when it comes both surprises and seems inevitable. And also I think he was mortified at how easily he cried at the movies.<br /><br />
<i>(Illustration credits: •Broken Coin unit 1915, Francis Ford & Grace Cunard center top, <b>John Ford third from left</b> - Wisconsin Historical Society/Wikipedia; •Centaur Film Co., Bayonne NJ; •Francis Ford & Edith Storey on a Texas set, Star Film – Frank Thompson collection; •Lucille Love, mediahistoryproject.org; •The Invaders theater display 1912: David Lee Guss; •Straight Shooting trade ad 1917: Wikipedia)</i><br /><br />
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Addenda<br /><br />
<u><b>-Frank Ford-</b></u><br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-rac1HohkyWU/U_EipsM0nLI/AAAAAAAAE5c/feIhDSI3CzE/w300-h200-no/BillyandhisPal.jpg">Francis Ford stars with Edith Storey in this Star Film one-reel production shot near San Antonio. As one of the later Texas productions it is possible Ford directed all or part of it though William Haddock was the company’s director of record; author Frank Thompson (<i>The Star Film Ranch</i>) tells me the Texas troop had a farmhouse lab “so they could strike a single print of each film. They'd watch it and if it was okay, they'd ship the neg to New York so distribution prints could be made.” In that day “okay” was often a simple technical judgment on the quality of the shots, but once in a film-a-week production groove this first look might also encourage experimentation: <br /><br />
<a href="http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/billy-and-his-pal-1911"target="_blank">"<i>Billy and His Pal</i>"</a> (1911 15m., Star Film)<br /><br />
Francis Ford directed himself in this three-reel special for producer Ince in Santa Ynez Canyon. It was written by C. Gardner Sullivan who became one of the top screenwriters of the silent era and wrote many William S. Hart pictures. This also features Ethel Grandin, Ann Little, Luther Standing Bear, and Art Acord:<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/the-invaders-1912"target="_blank">"<i>The Invaders</i>"</a> (1912 41m., “101” Bison)<br /><br />
A print of <i>When Lincoln Paid</i> (1913 30m., Kay-Bee) was found in a New Hampshire barn in 2006 and it’s restoration premiered in 2010. Francis Ford directs himself as Abraham Lincoln and the two-reeler was written by William Clifford and features Ethel Grandin, Jack Conway, and Grace Cunard:<br /><br />
Action sequence: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHOtP0mAdRk"target="_blank">"Clip 1"</a>,<br /><br />
Ford as Lincoln: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxKZRbvjfw"target="_blank">"Clip 2"</a>.<br /><br />
--for comparison, here’s D.W. Griffith’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgs7iV9Mmyo"target="_blank">"<i>The Female of the Species</i>"</a> (1912 14m., Biograph), a one-reeler he made in San Fernando during his second winter production trip to California. Here he brought his actress-centered melodrama whole to the desert setting the Western-makers had popularized. The stars are Claire MacDowell, Dorothy Bernard, and Mary Pickford. More of Griffith’s early work survives than anyone else’s and the collections available on DVD are well worth searching out and feature excellent commentary tracks.<br /><br />
<u><b>-Jack Ford-</b></u><br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6VwYnUtGKtk/U_EisshzQ0I/AAAAAAAAE5c/95AgqOAYViM/w317-h238-no/PeteMorrisonIndianPost12.jpg">Two years after long lost brother Frank was seen on screen in Portland Maine, Jack joined him in Hollywood. He was Frank’s prop-man for three years before Harry Carey made him one of his unit’s directors. They made five two-reelers together until this, Jack’s first feature, which was filmed in Santa Clarita and Newhall and starred Carey, Duke Lee, Ted Brooks, Hoot Gibson, Molly Malone, and Vester Pegg:<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS5W38_Zmmc"target="_blank">"<i>Straight Shooting</i>"</a> (1917 57m., Universal)<br /><br />
Here is one surviving reel of a Pete Morrison two-reeler. Pete had been a Colorado cowboy picked up by the Selig Polyscope Co. in 1909 for stunts and acting and he followed films to Hollywood. Jack Ford directed Morrison in five two-reelers in 1919, this one features Morrison, Duke Lee, Hoot Gibson, Magda Lane, and Otto Meyer who came to Hollywood with the Star Film unit:<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1d5dy_by-indian-post-john-ford-1919_shortfilms"target="_blank">"<i>By Indian Post</i>"</a> (1919 20m., Universal)<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<i>Film International</i> magazine, now a quarterly, is publishing a version of my next book’s first chapter; at over 10,000 words it won’t likely be posted at the site so look for this year’s No. 2 issue soon. It’s probably worth the price; here’s a bit from it:<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wXiGf1v9a1U/U_EiYqoWgjI/AAAAAAAAE28/XL20MdtDZD4/w263-h375-no/FilmIntNo2_350.png"><b>The Ford Brothers and the Men Who Shot Westerns – G.M. Anderson, Francis Boggs, William Haddock, James Young Deer, Allan Dwan, Tom Mix, Romaine Fielding…</b>
by Joe Carducci in <a href="http://filmint.nu/?page_id=230"target="_blank">"<i>Film International</i>"</a> 68, vol. 12, no. 2 (August 2014)<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Teacup dramas made on stages in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago were technically motion pictures, but since they proceeded from some assumption that an audience of strivers or nouveau riche wanted nothing more than to see the latest dinner wear modeled in parlors and ballrooms those pictures stopped moving. These new Westerns though were <i>living</i> pictures. The pre-cinema Living Picture was a staged live tableaux of models dressed to reenact historical events, preferably risqué ones…. That Living Picture was stage-bound and referenced great paintings and sculpture; the new living picture framed life across landscape. Producers cast actors to be sure, although the pantomime or posing as it was often called was already removed from theatrical styles. But the non-actors they found in Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and California – the cowboys and the Indians – who could invent and perform the action required moved film style further down its own naturalistic path. This untheatrical acting for the camera worked in a new way with audiences, and initially it worked with a shock. Frank Thompson quotes an interview with Star’s William Haddock claiming their standard distribution print order for New York productions of 1909 had been 25 to 30 and that orders went up to nearly 100 for these Texas productions the next year. <i>The Moving Picture World</i>’s regular column, ‘With the Western Producers,’ came to be titled, ‘Doings in Los Angeles.’ An April 22 1911 announcement of Star Film’s departing San Antonio for Santa Barbara refers to Francis Ford as Gaston Méliès’ assistant manager. A Mrs Ford moves with them as do a number of the Texas cowboys who are now fully Western motion picture specialists. Thompson numbers the American pictures made by Star Film as follows: 15 from their New Jersey base; 71 in and around San Antonio; 89 in the Santa Barbara-Santa Paula area. Ford was involved in perhaps the last ten of the NJ pictures, all of the Texas productions, and perhaps all of the California ones.”<br /><br />
(adapted from the Fall 2015 book, <i>Stone Male – Requiem for The Living Picture</i>)</blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EVAifLHOA7w/U_EitvQv56I/AAAAAAAAE5c/GLCghMCdeSM/w288-h405-no/StoneMale-cover.jpg"><i>Stone Male</i> proposed film stills and illustrations <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/2bes6nbf3k2hz0o/StoneMale%20Photo%20layout%207-202014-small.pdf"target="_blank">assemblage</a> for my book is shaping up; been collecting for it since by first book came out in 1991. Cover art is by James Fotopoulos.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/brother-feeney-francis-ford/"target="_blank">"Brother Feeney – Francis Ford"</a> by Tag Gallagher at <i>Sensesofcinema</i>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Meanwhile, back in Portland, Maine, no one had heard a word of Frank until one day Jack and his mother ran home all excited: they had found Frank – on the Greeley Theater’s screen, in a Melies western! Through a New York agent, the prodigal was located and in the summer of 1914 came home in cashmere and a Stutz Bearcat and with Grace Cunard…. Awestruck, Jack went out to California by train in July, in time to work on the last episodes of <i>Lucille Love</i> as “assistant, handyman, everything,” for $12 a week, and for three years shadowed Frank. He could not have had a more expert teacher in every aspect of the craft. He appeared as an actor in more than a dozen of Frank’s pictures through 1916, all of them lost films today. Often he performed stunts. Frank liked his action grit-real, so injuries, including at least one death, were frequent, but he paid bonuses for injuries and would goad them to it: ‘Now boys, remember you are not in a drawing room; don’t bow to each other or apologise if you should happen to take a piece of skin away from the man you are fighting. This is to be the real thing – go to it. Who will roll down that bank? Who will fall off a horse? I don’t believe one of you dare – huh! You will? – and you will? Good! I thought there might be one or two of you who did not want a cushion to fall on – no, I don’t want any more. Listen, boys, a dollar for a bloody nose and two for a black eye.’ That last line would be echoed twenty-five years later in <i>How Green Was My Valley</i> (John Ford, 1941). Frank took especial care of Jack. He blew up a dynamite-wired desk where Jack was sitting by firing a cannonball through the tent. He had him jump seventy-five feet from a freight car rolling along a trestle; had him blown up in a car by mining the road; had him dodging shells on a Confederate battlefield before bouncing a powder grenade off his head (for a close shot) – it exploded just beneath his chin. ‘That was a close thing,’ Frank told him in the hospital. ‘Another second and audiences would have realized I was using a double.’”</blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Charles Glass in <i>Spectator</i> on Scott Eyman’s book, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9269121/john-wayne-by-scott-eyman-review/"target="_blank">"John Wayne – The Life and Legend</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Something that emerges in this biography, as well as in the more critical <i>John Wayne’s America</i> by Garry Wills, is that, in addition to being a fine actor, Wayne was a very nice guy. Eyman quotes a college friend: ‘He could have been a great football player, but he never wanted to hurt anybody.’ Tom Kane, story editor at Wayne’s production company, Batjac, told me that he and Wayne saw the actor Alan Ladd, who stood only 5’ 6” to Wayne’s 6’ 3¾”, walking towards them. Wayne hid to avoid embarrassing Ladd in front of his fans. I witnessed a similar occasion at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1972, when Cesar Romero was signing autographs. The fans looked at Wayne and forgot all about Romero. Romero, deprived of his audience, said without enthusiasm, ‘Hi, Duke.’ Wayne praised Romero and made sure the ladies knew the old Latin lover was still a big star. Eyman relates an encounter between Carl Foreman, director of <i>High Noon</i>, whom Wayne and other right-wingers had helped to blacklist in the 1950s, and Wayne in a Los Angeles restaurant years afterwards: ‘The two men looked at each other, then quickly embraced as if they were old friends.’ Foreman explained to his mystified English wife, ‘He was a patriot. I was a patriot. He didn’t do it to hurt me.’ I checked this story with Foreman’s son, Jonathan, who swears it’s true. He’s another Wayne fan. Whenever I was walking to the car with Wayne in some part of Los Angeles, people would stop him for autographs. He was happy to sign. Older men would say, ‘Mr Wayne, I joined the marines because of you.’ He would lean back as if a punch were about to follow, and the veterans would laugh.”</blockquote><br /><br />
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<b>Emergence</b><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-G4t40-LBK_8/U_Ei0xBIVqI/AAAAAAAAE28/y5-KhV1-Ckk/w550/3.%2BMike%2BSafran-Emergence_550.png"><br />
by <a href="http://mjsaf.com/mjsaf/HOME.html"target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br /><br />
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<b>From Steve Beeho at the London Desk…</b><br /><br />
Kristoffer Smemo at SOCIETY FOR U.S. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY on <a href="http://s-usih.org/2014/06/guest-post-kristoffer-smemo-on-black-flag-and-the-political-economy-of-hardcore.html"target="_blank">"Black Flag and the Political Economy of Hardcore"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The avant-garde commitments cultivated by Ginn and Flag in Hermosa Beach, rested on an almost Toquevillean notion of independence and self-reliance. Mass culture provided a wealth of material from which to draw from and distort, but it also signified the crushing conformity and exploitation of a mass society, governed by an expansive set of interlocking corporations and government agencies. Black Flag looked backward, to an era of small producers hewing and building what they needed for themselves and their tight knit communities. Thus, Black Flag booked its own shows and created its own record label, SST, pioneering the ‘DIY’ ethos so central to punk’s bona fides as a true counterculture. In this sense Black Flag could relate to the hippies’ desire for authentic communitarianism and even the participatory democracy of the Students for a Democratic Society. But Black Flag’s alternative to corporate and neoliberal marginalization found expression not in a New Left revolutionary posture, but in a decidedly petit-bourgeois entrepreneurship. Black Flag’s work ethic became legendary. Incessant touring, marathon rehearsals, and ’round-the-clock sweat and black coffee kept the SST label afloat – and burned out one band member after another.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Kristoffer Smemo at S-USIH on <a href="http://s-usih.org/2014/07/guest-post-kristoffer-smemo-on-black-flags-electric-church-or-how-working-men-rock.html"target="_blank">"Black Flag’s Electric Church, or, How Working Men Rock"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Carducci does present a quite radical critique of popular music that puts a class analysis of cultural work at its center. Though rock might be most easily identified within the electric church’s triumvirate of guitar, bass, and drums, Carducci leaves open the possibility that rock as an aesthetic form cannot be reduced to the basic elements of its composition. Though pop usually wins in a capitalist mode of cultural production, those who succumb nevertheless still provide the grist necessary for future generations to remake rock. Just because the once rockin’ ZZ Top of ‘La Grange’ became pop when they added synthesizers and made cheesy videos to promote ‘Eliminator’ on MTV, this by no means precluded the dudes in Black Flag from playing that tape to death in the van.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Kristoffer Smemo at S-USIH on <a href="http://s-usih.org/2014/07/guest-post-lets-see-you-do-better-kristoffer-smemo-on-black-flag-and-the-cinema-of-transgression.html"target="_blank">"Black Flag and the Cinema of Transgression"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Like his highly influential drawings, Pettibon’s forays into filmmaking in the late ’80s explore in great detail a cynical and conservative vision of the ’60s as decadent, ludicrous, and above all exceptional moment in American history. Shot on camcorders and peopled with various SST artists and hangers-on, these purposefully amateurish, homemade movies illustrate an era out of step with an almost Hartzian notion of consensus. Pettibon’s suggests that the broadly collectivist ethos of ’60s antiauthoritarianism stood awkwardly apart from a stoic individualism at the core of American political culture.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Hank Shteamer at pitchfork.com on <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18763-black-flag-what-the/"target="_blank">Black Flag - "What The..."</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“As baffling as the record's aesthetic is, it yields a handful of really good songs. These make up roughly a third of the album's 22 tracks; issued as an EP, they would've made a much stronger impression than the precariously bloated package that is ‘What The...’. The crowning jewel is ‘The Chase,’ an uptempo two-minute rager propelled by a series of lean, vicious Ginn riffs, each crisper and more catchy than the last. The guitarist's instrumental expression once seemed like the work of an antisocial sadist, but here, as is often the case on ‘What The…’ it registers more as the expression of an unflappable stuntman – closer to Dick Dale than Sonny Sharrock. Ginn is similarly incendiary on ‘Down in the Dirt,’ where he combines spiky eccentricity with no-nonsense rhythmic drive, illustrating anew his wizardly ability to propel a band while at the same time indulging his twisted imagination. Here, his lines act as a kind of shadow lead vocal, augmenting and enhancing Ron Reyes's squalid narrative.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wxvtPf9gRO8/U_EkgEOwFfI/AAAAAAAAE38/4PETh3Pfvm4/s198-no/GoodForYou.png">…and Shteamer at his <i>darkforces</i> blog on the infinitely superior <a href="http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/good-for-you-real-new-black-flag.html"target="_blank">Good For You recordings</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“My main problem with the new Black Flag record is its rushed, tossed-off quality – the sense of a flood of indistinguishable songs arriving at a merciless pace, as though the band only had one day in the studio not only to track a new record, but to compose it as well. ‘Full Serving,’ on the other hand, feels deeply lived in. The tempos are varied, the music has room to breathe; Ginn and vocalist Mike Vallely (mainly known prior to this venture as a pro skateboarder) consistently sound like they're challenging each other and themselves. Whereas ‘What The…’ homes in on a kind of relentless, vapid drive, a seemingly willful obnoxiousness, ‘Full Serving’ takes its time, plays with dynamic tension, coils up and reserves its energy, wallows in its own gross churn, practically dares the listener to tune out or cry foul at some perceived betrayal of a stock ‘punk’ aesthetic, much in the way that my favorite Black Flag lineup of Ginn, Rollins, Roessler and Stevenson learned to. The rhythm-section shortcomings of ‘What The…’ are still somewhat in evidence here; Ginn's still handling bass himself (as Dale Nixon). But there's a different drummer on board (Matthew Cortez rather than Gregory Moore), and there's generally more of a live-band feel to the bass/drums on this record, rather than the sense of rudimentary backing tracks laid down with haste.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Mike Watt at <i>thequietus.com</i> on his <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/14671-mike-watt-minutemen-the-missingmen-favourite-albums"target="_blank">13 favourite albums</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The Who - Live At Leeds<br /><br />
Now, D. Boon went all trebly for Minutemen, but actually he was the biggest fan of Townsend's playing style. He loved Townsend's slashing rhythm guitar. And also that record had that bass/guitar interplay that we always tried to replicate in Minutemen. George Hurley learnt how to drum from listening The Who's ‘A Quick One’; and the first song I wrote before Minutemen I wrote after listening ‘A Quick One.’ It was terrible.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
The selected journalism of <a href="http://www.handsomeproductions.com/wordsbypeterlaughner.htm"target="_blank">Peter Laughner at <i>handsomeproductions.com</i></a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Lou Reed – Rock 'n' Roll Heart (Arista) ::<br /><br />
Dear Lou, Honest to god, I played this album at least 46 times ALL THE WAY THROUGH, listened to it in every possible condition I could put myself into, went to see the ‘show’ with the 40-odd video screens wanking behind you got a bottle lofted at me from the balcony there, too, so had to be taking some chances), have only been drunk twice and filled my Valium script once since it came out, quit seeing my shrink, got a steady job...blah blah blah. All I can say is: your LP IS LESS TEDIOUS than Stevie Wonder's latest, but that's like saying Novocaine is more effective than Procaine... I don't feel anything. I find it as painless and boring as modern dentistry. Two questions: 1) Where did you hide the guitars? 2) What in the name of modern science is a ‘Rock 'n' Roll Heart’?<br /><br />
Sincerely, P.L.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-VRCm5uzfS74/U_EkfoaGAeI/AAAAAAAAE30/fQKa82TU8GM/s113-no/JackRuby.png">Robin Hall and Randy Cohen of <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/15398-jack-ruby-robin-hall-randy-cohen-interview"target="_blank">"Jack Ruby"</a> interviewed at <i>thequietus.com</i> by Charlie Frame.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Randy Cohen: I do feel we were ahead of our time, which is as much a guarantee of failure as being behind your time. ‘The readiness is all,’ as Shakespeare said, or maybe it was Phil Spector – two guys who really knew the tone of their own times. When the punk scene started gaining an audience, I was an enthusiastic fan – these were some terrific bands – which did not inhibit my being bitter and resentful and jealous.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Jon Savage's sleeve notes for the phenomenal <a href="http://x--x.co.uk/wow/note.html"target="_blank">"X_X"</a> compilation released in Finland (where else?).<br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
An interview with <a href="http://boredout305.tumblr.com/day/2014/03/06"target="_blank">"The Consumers"</a> which originally ran in <i>Razorcake</i>.<br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Ernie Brooks at <i>vice.com</i> recounts to Legs McNeill his time in <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/jonathan-richman-in-love-with-the-modern-world"target="_blank">"The Modern Lovers"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“So Jonathan was into poetry – but he was also into the first Stooges album, which had just come out. So I talked with Jonathan about what a great rhythm section the Stooges had, and he was really into that, and he was really funny. He also loved the Velvet Underground, but he was very conflicted about them, because of the darkness they presented. I always had this theory that our sound was almost the opposite of the Velvets, that basically we were playing into the light as opposed to the darkness. But you could argue that about anybody – any art that expresses pain is also suggesting a way out of the pain.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Julie Burchill in SPECTATOR, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9270141/want-a-fun-job-you-just-have-to-pick-the-right-parents/"target="_blank">"Meet the New Faces of Nepotism"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“It’s no secret that social mobility – which just a few years back we all presumed would rock on regardless – has reversed, doing over the already vulnerable working class with the force of a steamroller. Yes, you chirpy Cockneys and you stoic Northerners, not only have the jobs your parents did – making things – disappeared, but the cushy jobs that a blessed few of you once might have escaped the surly bonds of the proletariat by nabbing – modelling, acting, writing for newspapers – have now been colonised by the children of the rich/famous/well-connected, too.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Philip Hensher at SPECTATOR on Ben MacIntyre's biography, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9150411/a-spy-among-friends-by-ben-macintyre-review/"target="_blank">"Kim Philby – A Spy Among Friends"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Why did [MI6] stand by him? Insanely, the head of MI6, even after very serious doubts had been raised about Philby’s loyalty, wrote in a memo that ‘it is entirely contrary to the English tradition for a man to have to prove his innocence.’ In a court of law, perhaps, but surely not in the case of such an important figure in the security services? Hilariously, one of Philby’s main concerns at the height of his treachery was to get his sons into as expensive a school as he could. ‘Eton and Westminster were beyond his budget, but Elliott came up with the solution.’ It might be that Philby was maintaining a useful front, but it is hard to see from his biography that this devoted communist ever spent a voluntary moment with a single horny-handed son of toil.”</blockquote><br /><br />
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<b> Flower and 5th street, looking south, downtown Los Angeles</b><br />
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxqW0f3j0Opvk6Apf6iIzA2ZXf7IHO1ZswBXix8G3TlrOqgrfVqct7hxpjG_yuyWLvg8l1Ci8J6X2h3FpmL-x4S6imrzRlQY5DuW2oNr6P0b1filS7xFwB-3mVe4SGcsFuHMRcEzq2dJk/w650/roll125frame18.jpg">
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Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/immane" target="_blank">Chris Collins</a><br />
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<b>Notes on Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence” [Interscope-Universal/Polydor]</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br /><br />
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-erK4pIGxiDc/U_Eiq2zYFnI/AAAAAAAAE28/EuSWJBLMAzg/w300-h292-no/LDRUV.png">I haven’t paid attention to Interscope Records since its first year in operation when it had a few good bands and Ray Farrell told me they were the one major affiliate that was trying to cut a profile with interesting bands. Before then I mostly read references to the company in the Chicago papers and <i>Wall Street Journal</i> as it was launched by Ted Field who had forced the sale of Marshall Field including the <i>Sun-Times</i> to become a film producer, then label owner too. This sale (to Murdoch) was the first of many blows that major metropolitan daily has absorbed. Field was cursed by old Chicagoans who read newspapers and he’s made little difference in Hollywood, but who does? These days he is gone from the label and most press the label gets is centered on Jimmy Iovine, usually accompanied by that ridiculous photo of him as a young greaseball-ponce at the board with John Lennon in 1974 working on a record the figures only in the Iovine legend as <i>People</i> magazine understands it.<br /><br />
I vaguely remembered some noise about some singer who’d been unmasked over the “indie” principles all of Williamsburg hold dear and then had botched a <i>Saturday Night</i> performance but I knew none of Del Rey’s music ’til I caught a video on <i>Vevo</i>, which pushes its new golden downloads at you whatever old mersh rock you’re looking at (I was pulling links for my <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2011/08/issue-111-august-17-2011.html"target="_blank">Cheese-metal essay</a> for NV111). I ignore pop-thing trending but it was there so I checked it to clarify my vague sense of who she might be.<br /><br />
I liked the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bag1gUxuU0g"target="_blank">"Born to Die"</a> video, especially as the images seemed to posit a better, lost America, even a lost Western civilization as she and her roughneck boyfriend race to a crash against an artfully enervated hip hop beat. The icons pass by stately: American flag; Black Flag “bars” tattoo; Detroit muscle car; Roman cathedral; Greek wreath headdress; African court tigers… while she in gown alone or in cut-offs with boyf wander free and unworthy. Not your typical pop thrush sensibility. So I bought the CD of the same name and liked most of it. I only ever heard a remix of “Summertime Sadness” on the radio itself out here; the remix put her vocal atop a sequencer dance-beat. She’s a much better singer than need be these days but she makes some of the left turns and anti-classical song-smithing decisions that show D.I.Y. for better and worse no matter how heavy the management hand. The second tune on that first album, “Off to the Races,” is particularly nutty and effective; hard to imagine another female vocalist conceiving it then attempting it and having it work inside a song structure.<br /><br />
The music on most tunes includes a guitar, bass and drums according to credits but the arrangements on “Born to Die” really just suspend her lux voice in slack hip hop aspic: synthetic percussion, keyboards, strings, mostly just space…. Between albums (she’s really a singles artist) a tune called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_-3di1yx0"target="_blank">"Ride"</a> was released with an extended film-like video. It’s produced the same but her ideas about the world and our culture are spelled out more directly in words (“I believe in the country America used to be.”) and images (the west, the road, bikers, fireworks, campfires, Indian headdress, guns, truck-stop, smoking, Jack Daniels, and older men in this one – probable Laurel Nakadate video-art influence). She struck me as the female sensibility that Camille Paglia regretted that Feminism had come to preclude in its hopelessly literal and jealous critique of what it once took to be the world of men. And as reductive and reflexive as that politik is, it’s been no help providing aesthetic structure most female singers need from outside. The pop tarts get it imposed from the music industry machine, but the sophistas of “indie” don’t get it unless they ground themselves in music history; few have. In this LGBT cultural moment we’ve been in since the greatest generation passed and the waning of the 9-11 period, Del Rey hasn’t valorized a single gayish hipster fop.<br /><br />
So I thought there might be a move toward a straighter rock presentation of her songs when I heard that Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys had produced her new album, “Ultraviolence.” Hard to imagine what his take would be as there are far subtler and warmer-toned guitarists to better suit her voice, and sure enough it’s a good record but largely on the strength of her vocals, her lyrics, her phrasing experiments, and the pros around her – including the songwriters, Auerbach, the other guitarists, engineers, A&R, management – their determination to stay out of the way of that voice. But there’s very little improvement in the placing of her voice into a musical arrangement as opposed to some <i>musique concrete</i> sculpture. It’s mostly just appropriate enough wallpaper backing. I like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xcnjAG8pE"target="_blank">"Brooklyn Baby"</a> best of the tunes, and “Fucked My Way Up to the Top” is good. And even the musical dud, “The Other Woman,” like “Born to Die”’s musically weak closer “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” is still a decent lyric of hers, and these aren’t conventional pop notions so much as they are time-honored but now discarded American sentiments, some bohemian, some traditional.<br /><br />
Pop is now so internationalized that the industry likely assumes Del Rey’s sound, a cool art song, must require some sort of non-dance hip hop setting, what else is there? They forget that the contemporary studio approach also allows for any group of session players one can dream up. Players who might never be available to tour can do any studio date. But there’s barely one guitar hook on the whole gatefold-less double album. So I suspect Dan Auerbach is one of those vicarious ex-pats I wrote about in <b>R&TPN</b>. Forming his own band without a bass-player hardly argues against that no matter how popular or necessary economically it seemed back before he became a collector of antique motorcycles.<br /><br />
At the risk of trying to teach the ineducable, my corrective for Lana Del Rey’s misconceived, unambitious sound:<br /><br />
Listen first to how Bobby Troup, a pianist, places his wife Julie London into a stark guitar-bass-only arrangement on their classic, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fdynmsMomw"target="_blank">"Cry Me a River"</a>, and you hear what was possible in an earlier live music jazz trio nightclub pop framework. There are more practical versions that can apply in this still semi-rock era that make a contemporary use of blues and/or psychedelic guitar approaches. And guitar masters generally do need vocalists.<br /><br />
I like what the Toiling Midgets have been doing on youtube, posting old song sketches put to public domain films. These pieces (at <i>cgmidget</i>), are usually just the two guitars of Craig Gray and Paul Hood. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NUa5wb8vE"target="_blank">"Spawn"</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXKpg558YH4&list=UU6Hr6dI-FRdlLJdqOB7ucSA&index=9"target="_blank">"In C#"</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQCK7I5Wyo8&list=UU6Hr6dI-FRdlLJdqOB7ucSA"target="_blank">"Two Memories"</a> might have been backings for the late great fuck-up genius vocalist Ricky Williams but instead they sit on the web, soundtracks to lost films.<br /><br />
Another applicable guitarist, Michael Belfer, also wrote for Williams in their band The Sleepers. In between lineups they sometimes did demo duets together with a click track. My favorite is the version of “B-Side” from the Mediumistic 45, but that isn’t online. It shows how Belfer can play off even a machine and careen back and forth around that perfect time with his own internal expressive rhythm; precisely what one needs in the modern studio and never gets. Belfer is another member of music’s lost generation in good standing, meaning he’s still breathing. Here’s something similar to “B-Side”: The Sleepers <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHmiCUrkTFc"target="_blank">"Mirror"</a>.<br /><br />
A more blues-based but also psychedelic approach is Robin Trower’s. It isn’t generally recognized that he’s still alive, much less that he’s better and subtler than he ever was in “the freedomland of the seventies” as Del Rey terms it in “Brooklyn Baby.” He’s been doing great albums with different lineups and singers since 2000. Here’s a ballad called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9Giqp7sjc"target="_blank">"This Blue Love"</a> that Robin sings himself on the album “Another Day’s Blues,” though I think this may be his regular vocalist’s version which was bumped for his own demo. My favorite psych workout is on his “Go My Way” album which isn’t up but this one from “Living Out of Time” is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUmVK9c-smw"target="_blank">"I Want to Take You With Me"</a>. An even cooler psychedelic guitarist with jazz and classical ambitions is Terje Rypdal; he too doesn’t often sing but this is his 1968 tune, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmPQOhjpgqc"target="_blank">"Dead Man’s Tale"</a>, from before he got onto the ECM label.<br /><br />
The last player I’d suggest as capable of supplying a musical backing more appropriate to Lana Del Rey’s voice than Dan Auerbach or the other five guitarists on the album is Scott Weinrich. That’d be putting this most female vocal artist together with about the most male guitarist still alive. There were two musicians I remember one always heard enter the room, Wino and Ted Falconi, and it wasn’t that they were talking, it was that, in Townes Van Zandt’s words, they wore their skin like iron. Yet Weinrich has a unique slow heavy psychedelic touch on the strings and unlike most guitarists he is his own best singer but he has done some acoustic and duo recordings recently, here’s the acoustic instrumental <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srwa1tcBpcw"target="_blank">"Suzanne’s Song"</a>, and one of his nicest electric tunes and vocals, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME0eeap4eHM"target="_blank">"Lost Sun Dance"</a>, from a Spirit Caravan album but which I believe was first released on the Shine 45.<br /><br />
“Ultraviolence” instead finds her making do with six guitarists, of which only one gets to do anything as expressive as a solo; the rest are just functional when audible. Maybe some are fine writing partners but this is like putting carefully honed vocals on top of instrumental demos. Might as well go back to hip hop style bells and whistles. There seems never a shortage of people reminding us of pop’s omnivorous subversive creativity here in late capitalism, but they and the industry they’ve run interference for can’t as easily remember what-all that once made possible.<br /><br />
___<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-I8XpnIvKz0A/U_Eiuk_7HMI/AAAAAAAAE28/QPaclKYrmps/w338-h210-no/spotbookcover-small.png"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Two-Eyes-Opening-California/dp/1938265106"target="_blank"><b>The Sound of Two Eyes Opening – Southern California Life: Skate Beach Punk 1969-1982</b></a> by Spot (Sinecure Books; Sept. 30)<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Spot landed in Hermosa Beach, CA in the mid-1970s. A serious musician, he helped build Media Art Recording Studio and stumbled into photojournalism via Easy Reader, the local news weekly. Hermosa proved to be a crossroads abounding with oddball roller skaters who were mostly overshadowed by Venice disco rollers and the Dogtown-inspired leaps into professional skateboarding (never mind that the first skateboard competition ever was in Hermosa in 1963). Then, in the late 70s, a cultural shift hit, fueled largely by music. This time the South Bay was in the vanguard.” </blockquote><br /><br />
___<br /><br />
ONO live performance and interview with travis and P. Michael on, <a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/56283"target="_blank">"Brian Turner’s show"</a>, WFMU FM.<br /><br />
<i>The Delirious Insomniac</i> <a href="http://posterityplaylists.blogspot.com/2014/05/overlays-interview-with-travis-ono.html"target="_blank">travis</a> interview, excerpts:<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-RmUywFbjtSY/U_EidhZxt_I/AAAAAAAAE28/JxgP20qLbYA/s300-no/ONOalbums_400.png">travis/ONO:<br /><br />
<blockquote>
--As a kid, very early on, my great grandmother established this church, and this little community, called Carter's chapel. She and her Native American husband, and I was a child, 3, 4, 5 years old. And in Carter's Chapel what I did was sing in that church and I played any kind of sounds I wanted in the church and because it was a small church, a small community, now it feels as if I had my run of the place. But in doing all these things, it turns out that they liked the way I recited and so my school teachers would have me recite. At Christmas time I'd do The Night Before Christmas in it's entirety at the church and at the school and that was on one side of the family in Amory, Mississippi. The other side of the family was up in Itawamba County, which is much much smaller, not even 200 people there, even now.<br /><br />
--Then aboard ship, it gets strange because, you're completely removed from the world that you knew for nine months at a time. Well, I was a great supervisor, and it turns out all the people that I supervised loved me, and so what wound up happening, is that yes, Arvo, we went, me and all my crew would go ashore and fuck together! We would go to French ports and have these French prostitutes who would wager about who could last longest with them. That's another life, another part that, who knows how it was happening, but I was in it, and so it wasn't as if I was being male or even queer or even bi or anything like that, I was in the moment. That was for me. I was doing some very very bad things with these sailors, in every port around the world ... Let’s just say I was a sailor in the traditional sense of the word, baby!<br /><br />
--If you're in an ordinary city like Chicago or Cleveland and you're back from 6 years of military responsibility in places like the South China Seas or the Middle East, what do you do? What do you do to make your life interesting? There really isn't that much reason to live in an environment unless you give it a reason. And what kind of reasoning do you give? I wasn't thinking of it at the time, but I went back to Akron University and discovered that jeez, I'm very very bored here. Off I went to Cleveland, Ohio. Then between Akron and Cleveland, all of these things, these 1960s people are now transforming themselves. I run into this music community and these INSANE people in Cleveland who are doing all of the things that people talked about years ago. Peter and Crocus and Billy Bass and all those folks are in the neighborhood. And on the weekends, you're going down to Mayfield Road and designing new costuming to dance in.<br /><br />
--Every morning I do art stuff. Now my work is exhibiting in Tokyo. My Tokyo solo show just came down last week, and another one man show will go up in Tokyo next April, that's fun. I have another show in Europe at the end of this summer. My interest in art has much to do with concepts that I grew up with in Mississippi. There, art is decadent. Art for art's sake really has no bearing on life to a Mississippian, a black Mississippian. That's how I grew up. Any art work that you find from Mississippi black artists are functional items. But that work became known as Art outside of Mississippi. In Mississippi they're functional objects. </blockquote><br /><br />
___<br /><br />
Tuesday, Nov. 4, 6pm: <a href="http://www2.mcachicago.org/event/mca-live-ono-covers-bowie/"target="_blank">ONO at Museum of Contemporary Art</a><br /><br />
<a href="http://latravisa.tumblr.com/"target="_blank">Travis at tumblr</a><br /><br />
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<b>Near Tie Siding, Wyoming</b><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zKYH5vuqfy4/U_EiENon_mI/AAAAAAAAE28/_G6gxELZBiU/w650/7.%2BNunzioCarducci-TieSidingWyom_650.png"><br />
Photo by Nunzio Carducci<br /><br />
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…</b><br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-p5KA6FJrdmo/U_EknDZqCOI/AAAAAAAAE4U/1zlf5dC4aig/w171-h260-no/NV146-HankWilliamsReader.png">Barry Mazor in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304886904579473290377428258"target="_blank"><b>The Hank Williams Reader</b>, ed. by Patrick Huber, Steve Goodson, David Anderson</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“From the late 1940s into the early '50s, when Williams was rising from obscurity to country stardom as a charismatic, hit-producing, singing songwriter, there were essentially no national pop reporters or critics covering his like. The stories collected from the period include glowing local features about Montgomery's favorite son, puff pieces from fanzines such as <i>National Hillbilly News</i> and then, as the hits started to roll out, sometimes-startled reports from the trades chronicling his financial success and his crossover appeal as he placed songs with mainstream acts such as Tony Bennett and Jo Stafford. <i>Billboard</i> would note in October 1951: ‘Hank Williams . . . has blossomed out as a full-fledged pop writer. . . . Not only is Williams the first h.b. [i.e., ‘hillbilly’] writer to score big as a writer of country ditties that hit later in the pop field, but the majority of his 22 hits to make the pop charts were songs which he either wrote or co-authored.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Eddie Dean in <i>WSJ</i> on Do Not Sell at Any Price by Amanda Petrusich, and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304287704579650904101854122"target="_blank">"Pioneers of the Blues Revival by Steve Cushing"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The book is a timely reminder of an era when this music was largely reviled, which made it easy for early collectors to get started on the cheap. ‘No one wanted blues records,’ says Bob Koester, who as a college kid in the Midwest had amassed several thousand 78s by the early 1950s. ‘You could pick them up. They were left behind by the collectors in secondhand stores. I remember going to one. It was a funny little store, a secondhand store a guy had, but he had apparently bought a jukebox stock. . . . He said, 'Oh you don't want to hear those. Those are nigger records!'’ Soon after, Mr. Koester started the renowned music emporium Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, where he still runs the seminal independent label Delmark. For six decades the label has recorded postwar blues luminaries from Otis Rush to Magic Sam, as well as traditional and avant-garde jazz. The respect and affection that Mr. Koester has for the artists he has produced are echoed in the comments of other ‘pioneers’ when they talk about the music they love and the musicians they have met.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
David Kipen in <i>WSJ</i> on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB30001424052702304256404579453441188055828"target="_blank">"The Bohemians by Ben Tarnoff, and Frog Music by Emma Donoghue"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“San Francisco in the 1860s counted more newspapers per capita than any other American city, and more professional writers too. At its apex, Harte’s literary magazine, the <i>Overland Monthly</i> – the name a bumptious variation on stuffy Boston’s pre-eminent periodical – had at least as many readers out east as in California. Its emblem was a California grizzly bear crossing a railroad track, and the publication itself carried off a similar, reckless insouciance.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n5_i87rOssw/U_EkuFIy6EI/AAAAAAAAE48/RPyFsCGJyHM/w189-h297-no/NV146-WhiteSavage.png">Caleb Crain in <i>NYTBR</i> on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/review/16crain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0"target="_blank">"White Savage – William Johnson and the Invention of America by Fintan O’Toole"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Balanced between two worlds, Johnson shone with glamour. From one vantage he seemed free of conventions, and from another, heedful of two or three sets of them. But it would be naïve to be too star-struck by him, because what he accomplished with his glamour is ambiguous. O'Toole, a drama critic for <i>The Irish Times</i>, is hard-nosed about the realpolitik. When Johnson arrived, the Mohawks were not as powerful or rich as they had once been. By linking themselves with the English, they hoped to recoup their status. Meanwhile, by linking himself with the Mohawks, Johnson made himself invaluable to the authorities back in London. As the price of his support, he asked the Mohawks to persuade the Iroquois confederacy to take Britain's side in its wars with France. He got his wish. In 1746, during King George's War, a couple of dozen Iroquois agreed to ‘go a Scalping’ on England's behalf. A few years before the start of the French and Indian War, Johnson told his superiors that he could bring 1,000 Iroquois into battle. In the event he led far fewer, but they scored a public relations coup by capturing a French general near Lake George.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Gerard Helferich in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304453104580037311615380320"target="_blank">"West of the Revolution by Claudio Saunt"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Though native peoples generally suffered from the white man’s machinations, a few managed to benefit from the redrawn map, at least for a time. One such group was the Osages, who lived between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers west of the Mississippi. Before the Treaty of Paris, the tribe had only the French to barter with. But afterward they found themselves within trading distance of both the Spanish and the British. In the coming decades, the Osages neatly played one group against the other. By 1800 they had added 100,000 square miles to their domain – ‘a rate of expansion equal to that of the thirteen colonies and United States over the same period,’ Mr. Saunt writes.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
WSJ Weekend Interview: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579396093119215448"target="_blank">"Mark Watte by Allysia Finley"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“By 2009, Ms. Feinstein’s views had reversed: She backed the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act, whose goal was to restore fish to what had been a dry river bed. But not just any fish – specifically, cold-water salmon that hadn’t been documented at the site since the 1940s. Cold-water salmon require ‘huge volumes of water’ to thrive, Mr. Watte notes, and he thinks that was exactly the point. The environmentalists ‘don’t care about fish,’ he says, ‘The fish are just a prop, a vehicle to get our water.’ That may sound paranoid, but consider that about 400,000 acre-feet of water over the past two years have been diverted from farm use merely to conduct salmon test-runs on the dry river.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
WSJ: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/cheese-whizzes-1403305247"target="_blank">"Cheese Whizzes"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The FDA’s problem is with the common practice of aging cheese on wooden boards, which is how humans have been making the stuff since cuisine advanced beyond hunting and gathering. In a January regulatory ‘clarification’ latter, the low-level chief of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition’s Dairy and Egg Branch let it be known that for the first time that ‘wooden shelves and boards cannot be adequately cleaned and sanitized.’ The new interpretation only recently leaked…. Naturally, cheeseheads were thunderous under the Twitter hashtag #saveourcheese, while even many liberals in Congress found an instance of overregulation they could oppose. The FDA brass scrambled to walk back the letter, first claiming last week to be ‘always open to evidence that shows that wood can be safely used for specific purposes.’ The next day, the FDA surrendered, said it wouldn’t ban wood boards and the original rule ‘may have appeared more definitive than it should have.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Lizette Alvarez in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/us/after-150-years-of-rolling-them-tampa-is-close-to-no-cigars.html"target="_blank">"After 150 Years of Rolling Them, Tampa Is Close to No Cigars"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, history is cloaked in the woody, earthen notes of a cigar, the product that helped define this once-quiet town and propel it well into the 20th century. Today, the 150 cigar factory sites that dotted this historic neighborhood once redolent with the aroma of tobacco have faded away, one by one, done in by cigarettes, health concerns, the trade embargo on Cuba and competition from abroad. Many were torn down; others stand there empty or recycled for more profitable ventures. There is one exception: On the northern side of Ybor City sits the J. C. Newman Cigar Company factory, a family-owned business tucked inside a classic brick building nicknamed El Reloj, a nod to its clock tower. Both have defied the maw of modernity to outlive a century. But now J. C. Newman faces its biggest threat: the possibility that the Food and Drug Administration may introduce strict, expensive regulations on cigars that the Newman brothers, who operate the company, say could close the last working cigar factory in town.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Rachel Feintzeig in WSJ, <a href="
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702303789904579602510156372836"target="_blank">"U.S. Government Struggles to Draw Young, Savvy Staff"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The percentage of its employees under the age of 30 hit an eight-year low of 7% in 2013, government statistics show, compared with about 25% for the private-sector workforce. Back in 1975, more than 20% of the federal workforce was under 30. Without a pipeline of young talent, the government risks falling behind in an increasingly digital world, current and former government officials say. Meanwhile, critics say that government hiring is confusing, opaque and lengthy, deterring even those who want to devote their lives to public service.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Michael Boskin in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/michael-boskin-how-washington-whittles-away-property-rights-1405552997"target="_blank">"How Washington Whittles Away Property Rights"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare are now several times the national debt; the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments for pensions and other benefits are in the trillions of dollars and mounting. The panoply of other government programs nonetheless continues to expand. The result, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, is that federal spending will reach 36% of GDP in a generation. This implies that taxes will have to double from the current, near-historic average, 18% of GDP. All federal taxes will increase – on income, capital gains, dividends, corporate earnings, employer and employee payrolls. Left unchecked, many middle-income earners eventually will face marginal tax rates of 70% or higher – reducing them to minority partners in their own additional work and sundering the value of the investments in their own education.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-FJY_Yj1yBbo/U_EklnNlkHI/AAAAAAAAE4M/xRt63kqmO-E/w198-h302-no/NV146-CriticalReview.png">Alan Ryan in CRITICAL REVIEW, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.854084#preview"target="_blank">"The Planners and the Planned"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“There is an obvious tension between a belief in historical inevitability and in the necessity of planning, but most enthusiasts for a planned economy, at least most of those whom Hayek went after in <i>The Road to Serfdom</i> and <i>The Counter-Revolution of Science</i>, were historicists in his and Popper’s sense of the term. History had, so to speak, brought us to the point where we had to take conscious control of our productive powers as a society. This was not the banality that individuals should use forethought and common sense to plan their individual futures, but the claim that society <i>as a whole</i> should use its collective intelligence to plan its future. What <i>The Counter-Revolution of Science</i> argued, and what <i>The Road to Serfdom</i> depended on, was the claim – multiple claims really – that there was no such entity as society as a whole. There were patterns of interaction between individuals, but these had to be understood from the inside as the unintended outcomes of intended actions. There were genuine patterns, otherwise the discipline of economics would have been impossible. But these were not ‘natural’ in the sense in which the patterned interactions of physical and chemical phenomena are natural.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Morris Kleiner in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/opinion/why-license-a-florist.html?_r=0"target="_blank">"Why License a Florist? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“These regulations are not just unusual cases of state laws run amok but deliberate policies from one of the fastest growing labor market institutions in the United States: government licensing of jobs. This form of regulation — largely established by state governments and implemented through their licensing boards — is often referred to as ‘the right to practice.’ Under these laws, working in a licensed occupation is illegal without first meeting government standards.
In the 1970s, about 10 percent of individuals who worked had to have licenses, but by 2008, almost 30 percent of the work force needed them. With this explosion of licensing laws has come a national patchwork of stealth regulation that has, among other things, restricted labor markets, innovation and worker mobility.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
James Huffman in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304512504579496060586409076"target="_blank">"A Climate of Crisis by Patrick Allitt"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The environmental lobby seldom acknowledged its failures – or even its successes. Since 1990, there has been a 90% reduction in automobile emissions (and a 99% reduction since 1960), yet the car remains public enemy No. 1. Despite widespread recognition that ethanol has few if any environmental benefits, subsidies and mandated use persist – and food prices have been driven higher by the diversion of corn from food to fuel production. Environmentalism has grown into an industry of interest groups, lobbyists, litigators, impact assessors and bureaucrats who rely on warnings of impending disaster to sustain and expand their enterprises. It is much the same with their opponents, for whom the wolf is always at the door – notwithstanding numerous examples of their somehow surviving what they had vehemently insisted were business-killing regulations. Both sides reacted in predictable ways when climate change reared its political head in the early 1990s.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ira Stoll at <i>reason.com</i>, <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/16/the-compliance-boom"target="_blank">"The Compliance Boom"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Indeed, if there is a single fact that sums up the state of American political economy at the present moment, it is this: the Boston office building once home to <i>Inc. Magazine</i> and <i>Fast Company</i>, which chronicled and celebrated small and fast-growing businesses, is now the headquarters of a publication called <i>Compliance Week</i>. <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, which used to advertise itself as ‘The Daily Diary of the American Dream,’ this month launched its own <i>Risk & Compliance Journal</i>. And <i>The New York Times</i>, which usually devotes its ‘30-Minute Interview’ feature to a real estate developer, last week featured the co-founder of <i>SiteCompli</i>, Jason Griffith. Founded in 2009, the company has 20 employees and plans to double that by the end of the year. Its business, the <i>Times</i> reports, is helping building owners ‘comply with the myriad rules and regulations within various New York City agencies.’ ‘We are growing very fast,’ Griffith told the <i>Times</i>. ‘Our revenues have been up 1,200 percent.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
WSJ: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/obamas-corinthian-kill-1406327662"target="_blank">"Obama’s Corinthian Kill"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“For five years the White House has been tightening the screws on for-profit colleges. So it's curious that the Obama Administration is now denying that it deliberately drove Corinthian Colleges out of business, all evidence to the contrary. Shouldn't it be declaring mission accomplished? Last month the Department of Education triggered a liquidity crisis at the Santa Ana-based Corinthian by cutting off federal student aid. Regulators then coerced the for-profit into an agreement to wind down 12 of its U.S. campuses and sell 85 others over the next six months. Last week, DOE appointed Chicago lawyer Patrick Fitzgerald, notorious for prosecutorial bullying, to oversee the liquidation. Corinthian's 72,000 students will be allowed to transfer, finish their degrees or withdraw with a full refund, but 12,000 jobs are in jeopardy.
The White House is putatively trying to avert a chaotic Chapter 7 bankruptcy like the one that transpired in 2001 after regulators abruptly yanked federal aid from the for-profit Computer Learning Centers. Congress lashed department officials for their heavy-handed response that threw 10,000 students out of school. Yet the drive-by shooting of Corinthian may be even more vicious. California Attorney General Kamala Harris during a news conference in 2013 in San Francisco announcing the filing of a lawsuit against the for-profit Corinthian Colleges. Getty Images Department officials claimed on a call with reporters this month that ‘we did not know their cash situation’ when they blocked federal aid and ‘had no foreknowledge that this would be the reaction.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Doug Sosnik at <i>politico.com</i>, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/left-took-over-democratic-party-109348_full.html#.U9cKKoBkHPb"target="_blank">"Blue Crush – How the Left Took Over the Democratic Party"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The victory of cultural liberalism has not been accompanied by a desire for a more active federal government. If anything, the country’s diminishing faith in its institutions has translated into a desire for <i>less</i> government, not more. It is difficult to overstate the depth of the anger and alienation that a majority of all Americans feel toward the federal government. A June 30, 2014, Gallup poll found that Americans’ level of confidence has dropped to near record lows for all three branches—the presidency (30 percent), Congress (7 percent) and the U.S. Supreme Court (29 percent).” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ira Stoll at <i>reason.com</i>, <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2014/07/07/big-government-and-the-campus-rape-contr"target="_blank">"Big Government and the Campus Rape Controversy"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Later this month, Valerie Simons will start a $150,000-a-year job as Title IX coordinator at the University of Colorado. <i>The Boulder Daily Camera</i> reports that Simons ‘served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Education Section, where she was the lead attorney in charge of enforcing Title IX and other civil rights laws around the U.S.’ In her new position, she will report directly to the university’s chancellor. In May of this year, Stanford announced that Catherine Criswell would join that university as its Title IX coordinator after a 19-year career at the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Harvard last year hired as its Title IX coordinator Mia Karvonides, another Department of Education Office of Civil Rights lawyer; a Harvard memo at the time reported by the <i>Boston Globe</i> reported that her ‘duties at the Office of Civil Rights included investigating post-secondary and elementary/ secondary institutions for compliance with Title IX.’ More such hires are on the way. The University of Missouri announced last month that it will add a full-time Title IX coordinator and an investigator to deal with sexual assault cases. And Harvard will hire what a <i>New York Times</i> article described as an in-house, on-campus ‘team of investigators’ to follow-up on complaints of sexual assault or harassment.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
WSJ Weekend Interview: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920"target="_blank">"Camille Paglia by Bari Weiss"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of ‘female values’ – such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation – as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts. By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. ‘This PC gender politics thing – the way gender is being taught in the universities – in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ryan Wallerson in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350892629229918"target="_blank">"Team Sports Don’t Make the Cut with American Kids"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Social networking, videogames and other technology may be drawing children away from sports. As many as 140 kids used to try out for 45 slots on the baseball team at Shawnee Mission North High School in Overland Park, Kan. Today, fewer than 45 kids try out, says George Sallas, the school’s athletic director. ‘Kids are more trained now to stay at home and play videogames,’ he says. ‘Sports don’t intrigue them.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/how-many-american-men-are-gay.html?pagewanted=all"target="_blank">"How Many American Men Are Gay? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more common in the least tolerant states. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average. Craigslist lets us look at this from a different angle. I analyzed ads for males looking for ‘casual encounters.’ The percentage of these ads that are seeking casual encounters with men tends to be larger in less tolerant states. Among the states with the highest percentages are Kentucky, Louisiana and Alabama.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Joel Millman in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/why-sexual-minorities-have-an-inside-track-to-a-u-s-green-card-1402676258"target="_blank">"If You’re Seeking Asylum, It Helps to Be Gay"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The report notes that ‘NGOs reported 24 violent deaths of LGBT individuals’ through last September. Such official assessments have fueled a surge of successful asylum petitions from gays and lesbians in the Americas. Arguing that they suffer persecution because of their sexual orientation, hundreds if not thousands have managed to find safe haven, and a potential path to U.S. citizenship, in recent years. Fellow Latin Americans lodging asylum claims based on generalized violence, meanwhile, are routinely denied.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Roni Rabin in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/us/ban-on-medicare-coverage-of-sex-change-surgery-is-lifted.html"target="_blank">"Ban on Medicare Coverage of Sex-Change Surgery Is Lifted"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“It said the current exclusion was ‘no longer reasonable’ because the surgery is safe and effective and can no longer be considered experimental. The decision, handed down Friday by a Department of Health and Human Services appeals board, reverses a Medicare policy in place since 1981. It comes as a small but growing number of university health plans and large companies — including some Fortune 500 companies like Shell Oil and Campbell Soup — have started covering gender transition services, and could signal further changes since many health plans follow Medicare’s lead on coverage.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Donald McNeil Jr in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/opinion/sunday/ready-for-hivs-sexual-revolution.html"target="_blank">"Are We Ready for H.I.V.’s Sexual Revolution? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Some of the dire predictions of moralists did come true: Gonorrhea rates among women rose. Side effects like blood clots emerged. But the revolution stuck. For gay men — not to mention millions of Africans, drug users and others at risk for contracting H.I.V. — the world is again at such a moment. The F.D.A. has taken a drug — Truvada — that was approved for H.I.V. treatment in 2004, and approved it for prevention, a use called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. On May 14, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed PrEP, saying it could benefit up to 500,000 Americans. Predictably, a backlash has arisen. Some men who use it instead of condoms are called ‘Truvada whores.’ Some complain of being ‘slut-shamed’ by their own doctors, who are reluctant to write prescriptions. Opponents said that syphilis and gonorrhea rates, already high among gay men, would worsen.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Camille Paglia at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-in-Bondage/139251/"target="_blank">"Scholars in Bondage"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunkies in the Vatican Curia. First of all, every gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda. Second, the study of ancient tribal and agrarian cultures is crucial to end the present narrow focus on modern capitalist society. Third, the cynical disdain for religion that permeates high-level academe must end. (I am speaking as an atheist.) It is precisely the blindness to spiritual quest patterns that has most disabled the three books under review. The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Christina Hoff Sommers at <a href="http://www.ravishly.com/ladies-we-love/christina-sommers-author-who-stole-feminism"target="_blank">"<i>ravishly.com</i>"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The Millennials have been cheated out of a serious education by their Baby Boomer teachers. Call it a generational swindle. Even the best and brightest among the 20-somethings have been shortchanged. Instead of great books, they wasted a lot of time with third-rate political tracts and courses with titles like ‘Women Writers of the Oklahoma Panhandle.’ Instead of spending their college years debating and challenging received ideas, they had to cope with speech codes and identity politics. College educated young women in the U.S. are arguably the most fortunate people in history; yet many of them have drunk deeply from the gender feminist Kool-Aid. Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed. That is madness. And madness can only last so long.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Janan Ganesh in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d38f48e-749a-11e3-9125-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"Bad Luck, Not Policy, Is the Scourge of the Young"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“They are a generation of unique good fortune, preceded by parents who never knew Keynesian full employment and followed by heirs who have not been cocooned from global wage competition. To think of their experience as something replicable with the right mix of government policies and good intentions is a superbly efficient way of bankrupting a country.
Surveys of social attitudes suggest that the young know this better than those who simper and protest on their behalf. People born after 1979 are more hostile to higher taxes to pay for welfare benefits than the baby-boomers or the generation before them. They are also more supportive of fiscal deficit-reduction, less enamoured of the National Health Service and generally questioning of the state – as you would be if you were about to spend your working life paying down a public debt accrued by other people.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-6ImDYh2JpnI/U_EksZm0gjI/AAAAAAAAE40/1lmeRJuFc-k/w166-h260-no/NV146-TheReckoning.png">James Grant in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB40001424052702303825604579518580804566214"target="_blank">"The Reckoning by Jacob Soll"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Early and late, Mr. Soll teaches the lesson of how hard it is to see with one’s eyes closed. Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France were divinely seated sovereigns who were, perhaps, even less welcoming of accountants bearing bad financial news than are today’s popularly elected governors and presidents. Nor did the institution of enlightened accounting always protect a republic against disorder and violence. Johan de Witt, a mathematically learned member of the 17th-century Dutch ruling elite, was a stickler for rigorous financial management. He ended his days in the hands of a mob that expressed its displeasure by cutting off his fingers and toes and eating his internal organs. One thinks, a little, in this context of the dispute between Standard & Poor’s and Timothy Geithner. In 2011, S&P demoted the credit of the U.S. Treasury, which Mr. Geithner then led. News of the downgrade, to double-A-plus from triple-A, did not amuse the Obama administration, which may or may not have expressed its pique by singling out S&P in a lawsuit for the crime of bungling the ratings of mortgage-backed securities during the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The matter is before the courts, so far sans mob.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Delphine Strauss in FT on <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3292e37a-838d-11e3-86c9-00144feab7de.html"target="_blank">"The Power of Currencies and Currencies of Power ed. by Alan Wheatley"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Wheatley poses two overarching questions. How has the US used the ‘exorbitant privilege’ conferred by the dollar’s reserve currency ranking to project its power? And will China ultimately want to bid for similar status for the renminbi, given the loss of control over exchange rate policy this would require? Several writers argue here that the privilege for the US is far from unalloyed. Yes, the US earns seignorage – profits made by the issuer of a currency when people hold cash without earning interest – and demand for the dollar means it can issue debt and print money freely. Consequences include the US’s ability to sustain defence spending, which in turn reinforces the dollar’s appeal as a haven. But Robert Zoellick, former World Bank president, points out in a critique of the monetary system that there are two big costs to the dollar’s international role: the fact that other countries can hold down their exchange rates by buying dollars, which damages US trade and jobs; and the moral hazard that comes when there is no pressure to adjust economic and fiscal policy as imbalances increase.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Jeremy Hammond in BARRON’S on <a href="http://online.barrons.com/news/articles/SB50001424053111904897104579155340836111248?mod=BOL_mp_commented_week#articleTabs_article%3D2"target="_blank">"Crony Capitalism in America: 2008-2012"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The corruption has numerous manifestations apart from the familiar one of politicians showering their private benefactors with special privileges. There is also the revolving door of Washington, where the public servants ‘regulating’ corporate behavior are drawn from the very same corporate world they are charged with overseeing. Then, after passing regulations favorable to their own industry, they go right back to work in the ‘private’ sector, making profits from the policies they helped enact. Whatever the means, the purpose is to circumvent or eliminate the free market. While government bailouts are an obvious example, sleight of hand is often involved. Thus, for example, the public may be deceived into thinking that regulations are aimed at limiting corporate abuses when their effect is just opposite. The legal complexities of dense regulations alone benefit big businesses, since they ‘discourage new competitors, especially small companies, which have not grown big enough to afford an army of accountants lawyers, and political advisors.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Daniel Ben-Ami at <i>spiked-online.com</i>, <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_books/article/liberals-against-liberalism/15365#.U9eo3Wd0zIU"target="_blank">"Liberals Against Liberalism"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“For Siegel, a defining feature of modern liberalism is its attachment to what he calls the clerisy – a technocratic elite which he identifies with academia, Hollywood, the prestige press, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Despite its professed attachment to equality of opportunity, this elite holds the mass of the American public, what Siegel refers to as ‘the middle class’, in contempt. The clerisy sees itself as superior to the rest of the population on meritocratic grounds. As the reach of the state has burgeoned, the clerisy has taken on an increasingly important social role. Over the years, American government has grown vastly, commanding more resources and employing more people, than ever before. As Joel Kotkin, one of the sharpest observers of contemporary American politics, has pointed out: ‘Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some 20 million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.’ Members of the technocratic elite present themselves as impartial experts, but their interests are closely tied to the fortunes of this vast state apparatus.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-n3PNdRGlGNg/U_EkrZDHmjI/AAAAAAAAE4s/KLgZWsJeHMU/w165-h247-no/NV146-RevoltAgainsttheMasses.png">Barton Swaim in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579382882678398034"target="_blank">"The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Siegel's chronicle begins with the breach that occurred between progressives and liberals during the Woodrow Wilson administration. When the administration began repressing dissent and ‘disloyal’ expressions even after World War I ended, intellectuals like Mencken and Croly, editor of the <i>New Republic</i>, were rightly outraged. Their outrage didn't, however, spring from a principled stance against the concentration of governmental power. Liberal intellectuals held fast to their belief that middle-class Americans were too stupid and spiritually impoverished to lead their own lives; indeed, the next time they got their hands on federal power – the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt – they used it for all it was worth. Liberal dislike for middle America, Mr. Siegel shows, is rooted in aesthetics rather than political principle, taste rather than empirical argument. Randolph Bourne, for instance, the Columbia-educated writer associated with the <i>New Republic</i>, wrote of ‘the downward undertow of our [that is, American] civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of crowds on the city street.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
William Deresiewicz in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere"target="_blank">"Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of <i>not</i> being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Jonathan Rose in LITERARY REVIEW on <a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rose_07_14.php"target="_blank">"Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age by James Secord"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Around 1830, revolutionary information technology – steam-powered presses and paper-making machines – made possible the dissemination of 'useful knowledge' to a mass public. At that point professional scientists scarcely existed as a class, but there were genteel amateur researchers who, with literary panache, wrote for a fascinated lay audience. The term 'scientist' was invented only in 1833, by the polymath William Whewell, who gave it a faintly pejorative odour, drawing analogies to 'journalist', 'sciolist', 'atheist', and 'tobacconist'. 'Better die ... than bestialise our tongue by such barbarisms,' scowled the geologist Adam Sedgwick. 'To anyone who respects the English language,' said T.H. Huxley, 'I think "Scientist" must be about as pleasing a word as "Electrocution".' These men preferred to call themselves 'natural philosophers' and there was a real distinction. Scientists were narrowly focused utilitarian data-grubbers; natural philosophers thought deeply and wrote elegantly about the moral, cosmological and metaphysical implications of their work.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ollie Cussen in PROSPECT, <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/the-enlightenment-and-why-it-still-matters-anthony-pagden-review"target="_blank">"The Trouble with the Enlightenment"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Pagden’s story begins with the world that the Enlightenment saw itself as replacing. The great thinkers of the 17th century – Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke – destroyed the scholasticism of the universities, which held that the human mind is hardwired with innate, God-given ideas, and replaced it with an account of human nature that relied instead on empirical experience and self-interest. The 18th century therefore inherited a worldview with rational man, not God, at its centre. But with Christianity no longer pulling the intellectual strings, what was to stop humanity from lapsing into self-centredness, cruelty and conflict? The Enlightenment’s great achievement, Pagden argues, was to repair the bonds of mankind. Its distinctive feature was not that it held history, nature, theology and political authority to the scrutiny of reason, as most of its critics and many of its champions claim, but instead that it recognised our common humanity – our ability to place ourselves in another’s situation and, ultimately, to sympathise with them.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
John Kaag at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/A-New-Fathers-Conceptions/146907"target="_blank">"The Fathers of Philosophy"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Our own lives are defined by anguish, despair, and existential crises – so obviously any offspring would face similar hardships. Why be complicit in that sort of suffering? Schopenhauer, who never raised kids, couldn’t think of a reason: ‘If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?’ That sounded reasonable to me.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Tom Shippey in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304003604579642920343251090"target="_blank">"Philology by James Turner"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“All but one of our modern disciplines have philology in their ancestry – all except philosophy, which, he declares, ‘arrives at universally valid generalizations’ rather than scrutinizing individual cases. One may quibble with him here about how much philological influence persists. In the English-speaking world, the last century has seen a determined war of extermination fought against comparative philologists by their deadly enemies, the literary critics. J.R.R. Tolkien in particular, who said of himself ‘I am a pure philologist,’ fought all his career to promote and then to save a remnant of philology within the Oxford syllabus. The critics won within academia, only to find their aces trumped by Tolkien's success in the wider world. Tolkien nevertheless used his 1959 Oxford ‘Valedictory Lecture’ to lambaste the colleagues he called ‘misologists.’ Philology played little part in the 20th-century rise of New Criticism, now very old, with its emphasis on context-free close reading, and even less in the craze for literary theory, which has wandered off in the direction of philosophical speculation.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Jed Perl in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118958/liberals-are-killing-art-insisting-its-always-political"target="_blank">"Liberals Are Killing Art"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The problem is by no means a new one. Writing about Yeats’s poetry in the magazine <i>Horizon</i> in 1943, Orwell was abundant in his praise of Yeats’s art, rightly troubled by his authoritarian and perhaps even fascist politics, but could not resist, in closing, observing that ‘a writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.’ Here we have what I would call the classic example of the liberal attack on the freestanding value of art. For while avatars of the left and the right are glad to impose upon the arts a relatively crude ideological test – are the characters the sort of people we regard as good? are the opinions stated ones with which we agree? – the liberal wants to tease out of the very texture of the work of art some ideological stance. The liberal imagination all too often yearns for an art that is logical, responsible, well-behaved. And so formal values – ‘the smallest detail of the work,’ as Orwell puts it – are dissected to see if they accord with some social or political stance.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Xw1SA6aJWU8/U_EkljVw9ZI/AAAAAAAAE4I/6VlPgxtBFqE/w190-h249-no/NV146-Chronicles.png">Thomas Fleming in CHRONICLES, <a href="http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2014/July/38/7/magazine/article/13799/"target="_blank">"The Wasted Century"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Our civilization, as Pound knew better than Eliot, was already botched before the Great War put the finishing touch to the collapse: The war was the high wind that demolished the tottering antiquities of post-Christian civility. Throughout the century that followed, leftists would try to dynamite the ruins into which frightened conservatives had moved as squatters and scavengers. Like an extermination squad, the leftists have gone from block to block, from generation to generation, chivvying the squatters from ruined churches and blowing up every little bit of shelter, from classical studies to marriage to the very nature and identity of the human race. Eliot drew a sort of weary strength from the bits of Latin, Italian, and Sanskrit he inserted into <i>The Waste Land</i>: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ but nearly a century later our schools and universities have dumped those fragments into the trash. It is not an easy truth to face. It drove Eliot, before his conversion, to despair, and the unrepentant Pound into madness.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Steven Lee Myers in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/weekinreview/09myers.html"target="_blank">"For a New Russia, New Relics"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“At first, the Bolsheviks struggled mightily to eradicate the church's traditional rites of burial; later, they embraced similar rites, in a way, in their quest to establish the eternal sainthood of their own heroes. ‘Soviet power, which sought in so many ways to deny the power of death, turned the heart of its capital, the ceremonial core of its government, into a grave,’ Catherine Merridale, a historian, wrote in <i>Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th-Century Russia</i>, published in 2000, describing Lenin's tomb. Those who had forced open the coffins of the Orthodox saints during the Bolshevik Revolution, she wrote, ‘now jealously preserved a relic of their own.’ Almost certainly not by accident, the rites for General Denikin and Mr. Ilyin coincided with a new debate over what to do with Lenin himself, whose waxy remains have been on display in Red Square, intermittently, since he died in 1924. Stalin was once embalmed and entombed on display there, as well, from his death in 1953 until 1961. His corpse had to be removed after his place in Soviet mythology was rewritten under Nikita S. Khrushchev. He now lies beneath the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's tomb.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Pierre Souchon in LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, <a href="http://mondediplo.com/2014/02/09romania"target="_blank">"Back to the Land in Romania"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“A little further on, a kestrel eyed an old peasant farmer sitting in long grass, his scythe by his side. He was reading a book, glancing up to keep an eye on his one cow. ‘He is cultivating his mind,’ said Garban, reminding us of the words of the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga: ‘Eternity was born in the village.’ When we reached Sercaia in the centre of the country, eternity had put its foot on the accelerator. ‘The National Rural Development Programme (NRDP) is coming to your village,’ announced a poster on the door of the town hall. In a tent at the football stadium six uniformed Europeanisation agents were giving a PowerPoint presentation on financing a dairy farm.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Scott Sayare in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/world/europe/as-wolves-return-to-french-alps-a-way-of-life-is-threatened.html?pagewanted=all"target="_blank">"As Wolves Return to French Alps, a Way of Life Is Threatened"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Bruno’s lonely, pastoral approach – one still practiced by 60,000 French herders, though their numbers have fallen drastically in recent decades – is indeed supported by environmentalists, the government and the European Union as a model of sustainable agriculture. It is just the sort of communion of tradition and progressivism that appeals to European notions of modernity, and it is heavily subsidized as a result. Nonetheless, the average shepherd finishes the year with earnings that approximate the minimum wage, according to government figures. It is a hard living made harder by the wolf. ‘If you ask me, when they talk about ˈenvironmentalismˈ today, it’s meant for city people,’ Mr. Bruno said. ‘You go talk about the bear, the wolf, about nature that’s a bit wild, and you send them all off dreaming. ˈCome ask us, the shepherds, about putting sharks in the Mediterranean,ˈ he added wryly. ‘You’ll get 99 percent in favor. I don’t go swimming, I don’t give a damn!’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Gaspard Koenig in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b157369c-f095-11e2-929c-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"France Is Run for the Benefit of the Old"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“It is a story common to other countries. On one side, we have the baby boomers born shortly after the second world war who control most of the country’s structures; the average age of a French MP is 60. They had it all: sexual revolution, complacent neo-Marxist ideology, easy employment, rising property prices, generous social transfers, free and high-quality health services and a generous retirement. They are designing a society that looks like them: fearful, risk-averse and inward-looking, Nationalism is also on the rise, echoed by politicians from all stripes, from industry minister Arnaud Montebourg to the leader of the far-right National Front Marine Le Pen. On the other side of the argument is the ‘deficit generation’, or Generation D. Given that the last time the French government passed a balanced budget was in 1974, anyone born after that point should qualify.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Simon Kuper in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d76b5fcc-b83f-11e2-bd62-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"The French Elite: How It Went Wrong"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Whereas an American CEO and novelist will never meet, the French political, business and cultural elites have practically fused. They meet at breakfasts, exhibition openings and dinner parties. They become friends or spouses. They give each other jobs, cover up each other’s transgressions, write rave reviews of each other’s books. (Contrast the euphoria that greets Bernard-Henri Lévy’s books in France with his reception abroad.) The elite is the only French class that displays class solidarity, says Pinçon-Charlot. It’s tied together by shared secrets: for instance, many elite members knew about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s peculiar bedroom practices, but they were willing to let him run for president rather than inform the peasants beyond the Parisian ring road. To paraphrase the English writer E.M. Forster, these people would rather betray their country than betray a friend. Elite members justify these mutual favours in the name of friendship. In fact (as noted by the journalist Serge Halimi and others), it’s corruption.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Gideon Rachman in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eb265a64-3a42-11e3-b234-00144feab7de.html"target="_blank">"Watch Out for the Rise of a European Tea Party"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Europe’s rebel parties are very far from forming a coherent bloc. They range from proto-fascists such as Hungary’s Jobbik to the far-left Syriza in Greece – and from conservative nationalists such as Poland’s Law and Justice party to semi-anarchists such as the Five Star Movement in Italy. Some of the anti-establishment parties, such as France’s National Front, are trying to make the journey from the far right towards political respectability. A few, such as Ukip and parts of the Italian right, share the tax-cutting, small-government agenda of the Tea Party. Other rebel parties in Europe, including the Dutch Freedom party, have cast themselves as defenders of the traditional welfare state. What almost all Europe’s anti-establishment parties share with the Tea Party, however, is an anti-elitist rhetoric that casts mainstream politicians as the servants of a remote, globalised elite.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Charlotte Allen in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324787004578495711470936512"target="_blank">"Christian Martyrs to Islam, Past and Present"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The Cordoban emirate of that era, called Al-Andalus, has been lavishly praised by modern historians as a model of tolerant coexistence, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived peacefully while the arts and letters flourished. This even though the Christians, the vast majority of the population, had seen their churches destroyed, were required to pay an annual poll tax as infidels, and as non-Muslim <i>djimmis</i> were treated (along with Jews) as second-class citizens under Shariah law. A tapestry featuring the portrait of the Ontranto martyrs is draped from the balcony overlooking St. Peter Square in Vatican City, Vatican, on May 12th. In Cordoba, Christians were under relentless social pressure to change religions, or at the very least to accommodate quietly to reality. So most historians these days describe the Cordoban martyrs either as secular nationalist revolutionaries or as suicide-seekers who deliberately insulted the Prophet Muhammad in their personal quests for heavenly glory or expiation for their sins. In truth, the crimes for which the Cordoban martyrs were executed – typically they were accused of blasphemy and apostasy for converting to Christianity – bear a striking resemblance to the ‘crimes’ against Shariah for which Christians are becoming martyrs or near-martyrs today in Muslim lands.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Paul Berman in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114030/camus-algerian-chronicles-new-english-translation"target="_blank">"What Camus Understood About the Middle East"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The revolutionary parties in the mid-twentieth century dreamed of purifying society by eliminating entire social classes, either through expulsion or extermination, and this was precisely a Soviet concept, even a Soviet invention, although widely adaptable. Nasser in Egypt was keen on expulsions. Under his nationalist revolution, the city of Alexandria gradually lost its Europeans as well as, by decree, its Jews – ancient populations in Egypt, who did not owe their existence to the European empires of the previous century or two. Arabist doctrine deemed the non-Arab populations to be nonetheless incompatible with the revolutionary goal. Camus observed that, by the 1950s, the Jews of Algeria were likewise beginning to flee. The gigantic exodus of the French Algerians, the pieds-noirs, took place only later, after his death. But the logic of expulsion was already evident. It goes without saying that during the last few years we have been witnessing still another phase of mass expulsions, namely, the flight of Arab Christians from many places across the region – in their case, fleeing not from the nationalist wing of the ‘Islamic Empire’ that Camus feared but from its overtly religious wing, the fanatical Islamists.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Peter Hitchens in AMERICAN SPECTATOR, <a href="http://spectator.org/articles/55104/arab-spasm"target="_blank">"The Arab Spasm"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Democracy is not what made the Anglosphere nations great. In fact they greatly distrusted it – or else why was Washington D.C. built miles from anywhere, and provided by Pierre L’Enfant with wide avenues, which could easily be swept clear of mobs with a whiff of grapeshot? I might add that the U.S. Senate itself was originally protected from what Edmund Randolph called ‘the fury of democracy’ and until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913 (opposed by several honorable people including Elihu Root) was not elected by popular vote. The real heritage of liberty comes from other sources – the rule of law over power that began with Magna Carta, habeas corpus, separation of powers, jury trial, freedom of the press, and the independent judiciary. These safeguards, as it happens, have been weakened or belittled just as the powers of the West have conducted their noisy love affair with democracy at home and abroad. It is democracy, egged on by a gullible fourth estate, that has given us Homeland Security and its arbitrary powers, and liberal interventionism. It is the same democracy, aided by atrocity propaganda, that has been used to override old concerns for national sovereignty. Yet it is only in sovereign nations, which make their own laws, that liberty can be successfully sustained.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Sudarsan Raghavan in WP, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/timbuktus-slaves-liberated-as-islamists-flee/2013/05/31/ea4d3e1a-c142-11e2-9aa6-fc21ae807a8a_story.html"target="_blank">"Slavery in Mali"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Her light-skinned master no longer beats her with a camel whip. He no longer makes her work from dawn to night without pay. He fled with his family four months ago, along with the Islamists who briefly ruled this historic city. ‘I am free,’ said Aminaya Traore, a 50-year-old woman who was born into slavery. ‘I can do whatever I want.’ Across this sand-swept city, hundreds of modern-day slaves are experiencing a sense of liberation, many for the first time. Nearly all the lighter-skinned Tuaregs and Arab Moors who for generations exploited them have fled the city, fearing reprisal attacks for supporting supporting the Islamists or the Tuareg separatists whose rebellion helped ignite the Islamist takeover of Mali’s north last year. ‘Under the Islamists, blacks were exploited even more by the pink-skinned people,’ said Roukiatou Cisse, a social worker with Temedt, a human rights group, referring to the Tuaregs and Arab Moors. ‘They told them, ˈWe are with the Islamists. We are in power. We are the masters and you are our slaves. We will do what we want.ˈ” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Mujib Mashal in WSJ, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579147522009631400"target="_blank">"Taliban Silence Pakistani Musicians"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“For centuries, Pashto musicians such as Mr. Alam were based in Dabgari Bazaar in Peshawar's ancient, walled inner city. Music shops lined the top floors of old two-story buildings with wooden balconies. The ground floors housed merchants who sold household material such as woven beds and embroidered cushions for newlyweds. ‘The place was full of music shops – it was like a packed train,’ said 72-year-old Ustad Ahmad Gul. A musical prodigy who recorded his first tracks for Radio Pakistan when he was 8 years old, Mr. Gul had a shop in Dabgari for 18 years. But amid the new climate of intolerance, the neighborhood's residents took the initiative to start expelling the musicians from Dabgari in 2004, said Mohamaed Ershad, an elderly shopkeeper there who sells cotton. The musicians ‘had changed – they were no longer the old respected artists,’ complained Mr. Ershad, who at the time had rented his top floor to a musician. ‘There was dancing here.’ When the musicians resisted leaving Dabgari, shops were set on fire and musical instruments flung to the streets. Police also barged into Nishtar Hall, the city's premium space for performing arts, during a concert and kicked the microphones as a live audience watched.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-HEeu7v3lR2I/U_Eko_exJzI/AAAAAAAAE4c/K2MEHzXryMc/w171-h258-no/NV146-IndonesiaEtcbook.png">Dominic Berger at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/content/indonesias-new-anarchists-eager-to-lose-their-innocence"target="_blank">"Indonesia’s New Anarchists"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Another sign that insurrectionary anarchism is growing in Indonesia is the appearance of entirely new groups. Between June and September 2013, the internationally active Earth Liberation Front (ELF) claimed responsibility for attacks on a car and shop belonging to the vice secretary of the Democratic Party in South Sumatra, arson attacks against ATMs in Makassar, sabotage of electricity stations in Jakarta, and setting fire to a factory in Bandung producing bullet proof vests. The communiqué states that ‘police must be attacked, as hard as possible.’ Like the FAI, the ELF subscribes to an ‘anti-civilisation’ form of insurrectionary anarchism. On 20 August 2013, the ELF claimed responsibility for placing an incendiary device that burned out the third floor of the Institute Kesenian (Arts Institute) in the upscale central Jakarta suburb of Cikini, stating that artists are ‘the puppets of civilisation’.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Simon Winchester in WSJ on <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304068704579628164045331776"target="_blank">"Indonesia Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Why is there no Indonesian diaspora? Filipinos and Vietnamese and Indians and Chinese are sprinkled liberally around the planet. But Javans, Sumatrans, Ambonese, Kalimantanese, Papuans – there are relatively few outside Indonesia, even in the great melting pots, like the outer boroughs of New York City. Ms. Pisani explains: ‘Even Indonesians who are less contented with their lot... don't need to go overseas to look for a better life. Why bother, when there are plenty of places within your own country that provide opportunities almost as foreign? By drifting to another island, you can unlace the stays of place and clan.’ As does Mr. Pisani herself, unlacing and drifting, across the months, across thousands of miles, always delightfully up for an adventure. She seems never to have met a motorcycle she didn't get on, a ship she didn't board, an offer she wished to refuse. Though we sometimes fear for her – will she emerge safe and sound? – she always does, with another story to be told. ‘I resolved to go Haloban to talk to the Crocodile Whisperer,’ she writes engagingly from one remote islet, ‘hitching a lift on a boat . . . from a turtle monitoring station. The weather was filthy, but that didn't deter the boat boys. They emptied the water out... plugged the hole with a bit of an old flip-flop... It took nearly two hours, plenty of time to wonder how many weeks it would be before anyone noticed if I drowned out here.’ The impressionistic portrait of Indonesia that emerges – occasionally confusing, like her subject – is truly memorable. Memorable, and perhaps reassuring too.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Andrew Jacobs in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/world/asia/china-moves-against-2-churches-in-campaign-against-christianity.html"target="_blank">"China Removes Crosses From Two More Churches in Crackdown"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Church leaders and analysts say the battle in Zhejiang, one of China’s wealthiest provinces, highlights the Chinese leadership’s discomfort with the growing allure of Christianity, whose adherents are said to rival in number the 86 million members of the Communist Party. The crackdown on Christianity in Zhejiang also coincides with a nationwide campaign that has been directed at legal rights defenders, pro-democracy advocates and liberal online commentators. Although the government has cited zoning rules in its fight against the churches, a provincial policy paper suggests that there may be other reasons, advising officials to use the zoning language in an effort to avoid international scrutiny. ‘This is crucial to investigate and prosecute from the perspective of laws and regulations to avoid inviting heavy criticism,’ according to the paper, called a Working Document Concerning the Realization of Handling of Illegal Religious Buildings, which began circulating last summer.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ian Johnson in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/asia/church-state-clash-in-china-coalesces-around-a-toppled-spire.html"target="_blank">"A Toppled Spire Points to a Church-State Clash in China"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“While churches in China are mainly privately financed – Sanjiang was built with $5.5 million in donations – traditional religious sites have expanded with strong government support. The government has also made a U-turn on how it treats indigenous religious practices. Just a decade ago, the Communist Party condemned fortunetelling, feng shui and many traditional funerary rites as ‘feudal superstition.’ Now, these are protected under government programs to support ‘intangible cultural heritage.’ Christianity, however, is seen by some in the government as a colonial vestige at odds with the party’s control of political and social life. ‘There’s also uneasiness that some of these Christian religions are getting infusions of logistical and financial and doctrinal support from abroad,’ Professor Yang said. Protestantism is also linked to a national debate about ‘universal values.’ Some Chinese Protestants argue that rights such as freedom of expression are God-given, and thus cannot be taken away by the state. These beliefs have led many Protestants to take up human rights work. A disproportionate number of lawyers handling prominent political cases, for example, are Protestant.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XOlPfnZzQiM/U_Ekqnqt2pI/AAAAAAAAE4k/5ahnqW8BDlE/s263-no/NV146-LivingShrinesofUyghurChina.png">Ian Johnson at <i>nybooks.com</i> on <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/25/china-xinjiang-sufi-shrines/"target="_blank"><b>Living Shrines of Uyghur China</b> by Lisa Ross</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“One of China’s most turbulent areas, the huge autonomous region in the country’s northwest was brought under permanent Chinese control only in the mid-twentieth century. Officially, it is populated mostly by non-ethnic Chinese – Turkic peoples like Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs), Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, as well as Mongolians and even Russians – and its population has long had difficult relations with Beijing. In 2008, 2009, and 2012, Xinjiang was the site of bloody protests. Instead of representing these political conflicts, however, Ross’s photographs are unassuming and quiet; people are never present and the objects she captures – stone on sand, cloth on stone, the skeleton of a dried animal – have an incandescent glow, as if lit by another sun. In fact, these images reveal a little-known religious tradition in Xinjiang – its desert shrines to Sufi saints.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Mark Kitto in <i>PROSPECT</i>, <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/phantom-enemies-mark-kitto-hetian-xinjiang-uighurs-china"target="_blank">"Phantom Enemies"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In the evening I wandered the town, hoping to find familiar sites, such as the sports ground where we’d danced and the parade ground where the imams had blessed our camels. Of course everything had changed. I would like to say it had ‘developed.’ But development in China means razing and rebuilding. There was no trace of the original Uighur architecture. The Han Chinese template for a modern town had been imposed on the flattened mud-brick houses: a large square dominated by an ‘artistic’ sculpture, white-tiled government offices, broad streets laid out in a grid, all signage in the same colour and font, residential areas of apartment blocks behind gates and walls, an ‘industrial development zone’ on one edge of town, empty, unused. Even the outlying villages had been unified, or ‘harmonised,’ to use the phrase of Chinese internet users mocking the government’s jargon. On the road we had passed brand new hamlets of identikit one-storey brick buildings with yards, and beside them large posters explaining which Chinese city, county or state had donated the funds for construction. The Makit officials told me that every Uighur rural household was given about 24,000 yuan (£2,500) with which to build a new house. Of the compounds we saw, perhaps half were inhabited.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-LLnIo3RrxBs/U_Jyy7ulXCI/AAAAAAAAE58/zAZG-MSSTM8/w122-h188-no/EdSprinkle-card.png">Obituary of the Issue.<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/palos/ct-ed-sprinkle-obituary-met-20140812-story.html"target="_blank">Ed "The Claw" Sprinkle (1923-2014)</a>.<br /><br />
"Mr. Sprinkle always contended his style of play was rough but legal. His techniques, according to the Collier's article, included tripping and spinning his opponents. 'As far as anybody from the Bears or Green Bay trying to hurt somebody or play dirty, it wasn't in the cards as far as I'm concerned,' Mr. Sprinkle told the authors of the 1997 book on the Bears-Packers rivalry, Mudbaths and Bloodbaths: The Inside Story of the Bears-Packers Rivalry. 'But if you got a chance to kill a guy, you killed 'im.' Mr. Sprinkle, who played in four Pro Bowls, worked during the off-season for Inland Steel as an engineer. He retired from the Bears after the 1955 season but remained a frequent presence in town.... Sprinkle owned a tile and carpeting store in Chicago's Mt. Greenwood neighborhood and later moved his family and his store to Palos Park. He also owned a bowling alley in Chicago Ridge for a time, his daughter said."<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks to Mike Vann Gray, Mark Carducci, Mike Carducci, Don Fausett, Nick Lindsay, Andy Schwartz, Steve Beeho.<br /><br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://mjsaf.com/mjsaf/HOME.html"target="_blank">Mike Safran</a><br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i>Chris Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16761596531459681739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-46014343466525303222013-04-30T19:30:00.000-07:002013-05-01T01:17:17.461-07:00Issue #145 (April 3, 2013)<b>East of Sand Lake, Wyoming</b>
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-59Vq9fz_SUw/UYBvH4imINI/AAAAAAAAEk0/nfFarEJf3bc/s650/1.eastofsandlakerd-sm_650.jpg"><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>The Gay Blues Unsung</b><br />
by Joe Carducci<br /><br />
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-9DBErnKG4wk/UYBvLlu_pxI/AAAAAAAAElQ/wIECOFR9oiE/s503/FinancialTimes-Reuters-AFP.jpg">I went to Catholic schools and Latin Mass in the small-town Midwest during the sixties. Naperville was about 6,000 German-Americans and a few Poles, Irish, and Italians when we moved there in 1956. Hard to say what any of us thought of homosexuality other than we laughed whenever anybody referred to “Homo Milk” or some assigned novel used the word “faggots”. By the time I was on the west coast in the seventies I noticed on visits home that my youngest siblings’ grade school cohort would judge, “Aw that’s gay,” anytime something offended their moppet sense of propriety. For them: Randy Mantooth was cool; Donnie Osmond was gay.<br /><br />
The sexual revolutions happened slowly in old working class Naperville, but they smoked pot at Central High by 1970, and while the city fathers passed a law preventing the Naper Theater from playing R-rated movies effectively closing it down, the small-town pharmacists at some point stowed their qualms and just sold the un-marital aids to all comers.<br /><br />
The west coast as I knew it wasn’t much like Naperville. I looked around Hollywood for a couple days on arrival in August 1976, then I went up to the bay area and looked around San Francisco and Berkeley, and then went back to Hollywood and took a room at the YMCA. I found a job at a movie theater, the Vogue, and got a cheap apt at Yucca & Wilcox. You didn’t have to look for trouble to notice it was available. One of the theater’s assistant managers disappeared suddenly; I heard later he sold speed at all hours at the nearby Gold Cup diner and got himself into a fix. One evening one of the Hollywood High Filipina beauties who worked behind the candy counter exclaimed, “Hey, I think that Ed who just walk pass.” I turned but he was gone. The Vogue had a recessed glass front and in the long, slow minutes between show-times the constant stream of tourists, local deviants and panhandling regulars walking the Boulevard was our own mesmerizing movie. Could this really be Hollywood?!<br /><br />
It was. Never mind what might be going on under the bleachers at Naper Central, seventies Hollywood High girls were in Midwest terms, loose. Unfortunately not the Island girls, God bless ’em. Into 1977 they wondered about a new guy; they thought him handsome but a little… fussy maybe. Steve on the other hand just got fruitier and fruitier, especially on the quiet afternoon shifts. He hit on me once or twice, gave up, and then just stopped hiding that he wanted to dance around the lobby like a prima ballerina.<br /><br />
The street life was harsher just a bit south on Selma, and Santa Monica. There were different kinds of tourists rubbernecking those streets. I mostly saw them during the day walking to some record shop or bookstore. Selma was where prostitutes did the stroll, and the papers reported housewives complaints that men propositioned them from cars even if they were pushing a baby-stroller in broad daylight. Santa Monica Blvd was where the male hustlers worked, though I didn’t see that myself until years later when I moved back down to L.A. to work with Black Flag; Unicorn Records and the SST sublet office were there next to the Tropicana Motel. It was interesting to read in the late Brendan Mullen’s L.A. punk oral history, <b>We Got the Neutron Bomb</b>, what all punk-wise was going on around me that year that I didn’t see.<br /><br />
I was paying attention to Hollywood’s cinemabilia shops; you didn’t see those in Chicago or Denver, the other cities I’d lived in. I began to pick through Larry Edmunds Bookstore, and I still do that any time I’m in L.A. I did a lot of writing that year in Hollywood and saw a lot of films, then moved up to Portland for breathable air and less despair.<br /><br />
Portland is where I got into the music business, such as it was. The town had a small punk rock scene and as I got to working a few hours a day at a record shop which produced a few concerts and got to do a punk show on KBOO, I met the whole scene quickly. There were the punks themselves, kids into the music and finally finding others with similar interests. Then there was the rocker wing of the scene, a bit older and still related to sixties garage bands and seventies hard rock bands and hanging out at a music instrument shop. Also, there was the gay wing, older too but more sophisticated or pretending such; they seemed to hang out at clothing shops or museums and galleries. The punks often went to San Francisco to be in bands or to see them. SF was also where they could really live the punk dream, a weird mix of asserted cultural idealism overlaying whatever base realism it might take to get by. Neither wing, nor the punks themselves bought many records from us but I do remember that the Monday after my Sunday night show played songs from the Tubeway Army’s first album Peter said he sold all the copies to the gay wing who immediately cottoned to Gary Numan’s desolate future-world of android love in the park. I liked his guitar playing on the early records but he soon parked the guitar for a sci-fi synthesizer. I lost interest; he went solo and hit No. 1 worldwide.<br /><br />
As I’ve written about elsewhere we turned Renaissance Records into Systematic Record Distribution and moved it to Berkeley at the end of 1979. We’d been encouraged to do so by SF bands we’d distributed and promoted shows for, and by Rough Trade who had been working thru us for American distribution and promotion and who would be opening up their own new world branch alongside us in Berkeley.<br /><br />
Systematic was well off the beaten bay area path, though also on Heinz Ave was the Berkeley Barb, and Kicking Mule Records. Whatever was gay in the bay area shared space with various well-aged hippie and folkie and beatnik dreams. Also late communism in the form of the RCP, the UC-Berkeley faculty, hairy-legged feminists, and the Black Panthers. One thing about the bay area punk scene in the early eighties is that it lacked the dividing line that L.A. had. Down south the gay or gayish Hollywood punk scene quarantined itself from the younger hetero suburban scenes. (<i>Slash</i> magazine, The Germs, and X were notable exceptions.) In San Francisco the gay or gayish art bands blended through to the younger rock-oriented bands in a large gray area, and though bands were from all over the area, the scene mostly operated in a concentrated space in a couple seedy San Francisco neighborhoods.<br /><br />
Punks talked loosely and roughly and in many ways the entire movement was really just a foul-mouthed sexualized extension of what kids had been obsessed with since the fifties: rock and roll, Mad Magazine, comics, horror movies, etc. Only the old enthusiasm for westerns didn’t survive into punk-era iconography, probably due to the decadent aspects of both the late John Wayne westerns and the early counter-culture westerns. (Malcolm McLaren did steal some gay cowboy porn <a href="http://www.paulgormanis.com/?p=2935"target="_blank">"art"</a> for a T-shirt.) But in an amplification of what my little brother and sister were doing, the nominal adults of punk rock used words like “faggot” and “nigger” quite a lot, and in their art used swastikas and pornography as often. I recall Peter, who owned the Portland record shop that became Systematic, feeling he had to make excuses as a hippie negrophile who liked Patti Smith for her song, “Rock and Roll Nigger” and for her own excuses as well, which she made every time she surfaced in mainstream rock media. (She was the only punk to surface in some part due to the way punk etiquette took aim squarely at hippie sensitivities.) Patti claimed to be able to greet black people on the street with, “Hey nigger!” ‘course that street was probably Avenue B.<br /><br />
Maybe it’s only in retrospect that it seems the word “faggot” flew around San Francisco’s punk scene more often than in L.A.’s. I recently programmed my SF Special on John Allen’s WFMU program with records and live tapes of The Sleepers, Negative Trend, Flipper, and Toiling Midgets, and John told me my name had been besmirched on the station blog by some righteous homophile activist and by an ex-Rough Trade San Franciscan who might’ve known better. I mentioned to John off air how the invective flew in the olden days, and then as we did the show such was evident as use of the words “fag” and “faggot” piled up, flying out the mouths of singers, audience members, girls or boys, punk-ass mo-fos one and all. (The program is archived at
<a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/47727"target="_blank">"wfmu.org"</a> and you can tune in and be outraged all you want all over again as many times as you’d like; but I warn you, you’ll have to put up with some of the best music of the era.)<br /><br />
Most surviving punks long ago became hippies in a very middle class way, suddenly paying more for artisanal this and compostable that. Punks used to laugh or wretch at pretense. They lived hard and left cigarette burns and DNA wherever they went. L.A. was a bigger mess than San Francisco but SF had its own confusion. Greg Ginn asked me once if the guys in Flipper were gay. Black Flag played with them often and they got along though didn’t know each other really well. I didn’t think so but his question made it clear that the scene in the bay area had adopted a kind of gayish local accent. At the same time Will Shatter’s comment on KPFA that Flipper wanted to experiment with music “without becoming an art band” might have been taken as homophobic by many an art band in the city. Bruce Lose of Flipper had famously presided over Jello Biafra’s wedding, asking his intended, “Do you, Therese, take this flaming faggot to be your lawfully wedded husband?” She answered yes. Patrick Miller’s band, Minimal Man, seemed to split that rock band/art band difference even closer. Patrick had been in Voice Farm and Tuxedo Moon but his own band put his keyboard experimentalism atop a hot rhythm section and played on bills with Flipper and Dead Kennedys. Not all the albums are fully band lineup recordings but Patrick’s music was distinguished by his way with punk mess in an art band. In his life too. There was an unusual and welcome appreciation of Patrick by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/arts/the-pop-life-drugs-demons-a-man-in-a-mask.html"target="_blank">Neil Strauss</a> in the <i>New York Times</i>, of all places. Patrick was a very funny, grubby, grabby character who could worm his way into your space and be stroking your stomach when you thought you were discussing record promotion. Or maybe he didn’t do that with everyone.<br /><br />
I remember some art band party in SF that was a kind of business-mandatory for me in the early days of Berkeley-Systematic, probably a Club Foot, Ralph Records or Voice Farm soiree. The guys in those scenes were great guys with a musical genius or two thrown in too, but mostly people at the party talked about their apartments and who’d been able to trade up to a better location in North Beach or the Castro at what price. Though the gay or gayish musos were not living as sloppy as the hetero or heteroish they did for awhile share the general punk objection to hippie or disco sell-out style consumerism (audiophile stereos, Volvos, designer jeans, cocaine…). And the younger gay punks carried puritan aspects of the aesthetic rock and roll reformation into their lives and so rejected the established thirty-something gay culture of rococo body-building and high-style Epicurean living as well as, say, the sloppier sex lives of the pre-movement bath-house cowboys. These men-with-no-name were out chasing anonymous group sex to insure the fieriest damnation possible.<br /><br />
Those outlaws indeed died horrible deaths and that changed gay culture. The gay rights movement defaulted to lesbians and middle class movementeers who’d never been comfortable with the crazed exhibitionist wing. And further, something about the legal system’s concurrent colonization of American politics and then the culture itself had forcibly calmed the cross-currents, whorls and eddies that once made not only counter-cultures but the American mainstream itself so rich and interesting. Now culture and counter-culture have been homogenized like the milk. Music is thin and doesn’t reach back to true folk-root mess, and the stand-alone feature film has lost its mojo to TV series whose open-ended unraveling of tragicomic metaphor leaves just a burlesque of drama.<br /><br />
In this Gay Marriage moment the debate exists as this kind of neutered legal exercise. Some principle or other may well result tomorrow from today’s linguistic legerdemain. In the <i>New York Times</i> last week
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/douthat-marriage-looks-different-now.html"target="_blank">Ross Douthat</a> recounts a 1997 Slate debate between David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, both then conservatives. Frum thought to defend a “weakened” traditional family against the sixties and seventies “process of social dissolution”; Sullivan countered that marriage was already done-to by the Pill and divorce and was no longer about procreation so might as well be Holy Sodomy as Holy Matrimony (not his words!). Days later in the <i>NYT</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/opinion/brooks-freedom-loses-one.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0"target="_blank">David Brooks</a> teases out a sotto voce thread that’s contributed a faint counter-melody through these court proceedings: “same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.” Douthat notes that Frum like almost everyone else in this one-sided polite society non-debate is now in favor of gay marriage. In the <i>WSJ</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/global_view.html"target="_blank">Bret Stephens</a> ties things together nicely, “[T]he reality we find is millions of Americans who want to participate in all the institutions of American life, from politics to the military to marriage. What is there not to like?” The stopgap of civil union with the promise of tax and inheritance equality was offered too late in the New Deal Great Society day, and the middle class needs of today’s “GLBT community” have comforted the mainstream about the very idea. And counselors and researchers no longer fret that each micro-generation of young gay men will suddenly reprise their seventies fore-uncles’ idea of table manners.<br /><br />
Douthat notes that Frum like almost everyone else in this one-sided polite society non-debate is now in favor of gay marriage. The stopgap of civil union with the promise of tax and inheritance equality was offered too late in the New Deal Great Society day, and the middle class needs of today’s “GLBT community” have comforted the mainstream about the very idea. Counselors and researchers no longer fret that each micro-generation of young gay men will suddenly reprise their seventies fore-uncles’ idea of table manners.<br /><br />
When the media chorus harmonizes it can be as mellifluous as a gay men’s choir, but there is usually a missing note in the chording. In this case I think that missing note is the true character of this moment. One has to remember those sexual outlaws of the seventies, and then recall that nobody young in the seventies, whether gay or straight, believed in marriage, other than practicing Christians. That homosexuals now want to come in out of the cold is hinted at in Brook’s column but nowhere else. Any such admission would require humility or even gratitude on the petitioners’ part to whomever-all it might have been kept the damn institution of marriage upright and afloat on the rough seas of the sexual revolution. But as any attorney advises: Concede nothing! And so the petition becomes one more in-your-face maneuver, even as it covertly counts on our uniquely American-style of Christian good will. Think of how the issue sets in Latin America, east Asia, south Asia, Russia, and black Africa, never mind the Islamic world before gagging at the very idea.<br /><br />
Middle class feminists and gay activists stole from black America’s march to basic civil rights and playacted their own liberation fantasy as farce. Now with regard to same-sex marriage gays are stealing something from women, something ancient and designed to protect the interests and shore up the vulnerabilities of both sexes in the parenting couple. Maybe “stealing” is too strong a word when feminists are so determined to give it away. Today for young women birth control is protection enough, leaving young men free to fuck around any old way they want, though I wouldn’t dignify it as sexual outlawry. As Sullivan might say, there’s just no backdrop context of a law-abiding citizenry anymore so there can be no brigandage. There’s merely a stylistic judgment of bad form made as if by the old hereditary ruling class. Much of the hipster mystique is just hetero theft of what gay mannerisms can help young bucks pose as user-friendly dildos to women with the upper hand. Marriage will still be around for these too as a kind of ambulatory retirement once they can’t swing it at the bars and cafés.<br /><br />
Next, whither moves the eternal battle for civil rights? Mormons and Muslims want to know. So do NAMBLA, the animal loving community, the Parental Infanticide Rights Organization, and the Mercy Killers of America.<br /><br /><br /><br />
<i>Image: Financial Times, March 27, 2013 clipping (photos: Reuters/AFP)</i><br /><br />
____<br /><br />
<b>The New Vulgate Top Ten<br />
(Should really be a Top 40.)<br /></b>
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1. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2009/09/issue-10-september-9-2009.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #10</a><br /><br />
David Lightbourne – “Elvis Up North”; Joe Carducci – “Breakdown Lowdown: Upland Breakdown 10”; Chris Collins – “The FYF Fest 2009”; art by James Fotopoulos; art by Maya Carducci; photograph by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The cops came out for Elvis in force, as did twelve thousand shrieking girls of all ages. From our folding metal seats, six rows back stage left, all the hall looked like a sea of young women. A high, box-like, unpainted temporary stage projected out from the wall at our end, maybe seven feet above the floor and fifteen-feet square. A cordon of police, arms locked, ringed the three exposed sides, hats well below stage level, with very little to worry about, on generous overtime. As our family entourage of six waited for the hall to totally fill and house lights go down, I scanned the stage and had a true shock of recognition. The microphone stand at center stage, a pro Atlas with the large, heavy base, rose only chest-high, where a horizontal extension rod held, side by side, a pair of large microphones, one at each end on stubs, about four feet apart. I knew those mikes well. Five years earlier an identical one had occupied the center of the table during our family’s daily breakfast radio show.” </blockquote><br /><br />
2. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2011/07/issue-106-july-13-2011.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #106</a><br /><br />
James Fotopoulos – “Thoughts on Tron”; Steve Beeho – “A Voicemail Hack Scandal Handbook of the Players for Americans”; art by James Fotopoulos; photography by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“And to this day I ask myself when making work = how much is that machine doing? The film stocks… The computer programs… Therefore the need to master the parts, control them, fracture and reduce them in order to repress the level of their influence and maintain a primitive core, so that these pieces move through and brush against the primal center as the maker weaves them into a whole. When I began to show my work I described what I was attempting to do as trying to “elevate a film above the machinery that creates it.” If one could master the breakdown and assembly of the parts, an “elevation” could occur = the creation of a unified whole, which creates tension in the viewer’s perception, pushing him back onto his own personal history and into a state of strangeness and unknowing. As I got older this was further complicated when it became clear that a lack of mastery can also achieve the same affect.” </blockquote><br /><br />
3. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/04/issue-41-april-14-2010.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #41</a><br /><br />
Bart Bull – “Fuck a Duck: A Flocking of Canards”; art by James Fotopoulos; photograph by Rodilla Tumanda; photograph by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In 1928, Charles Pathé, announcing that film was no longer profitable, stripped Pathé Cinema down to a shell company and sold off its assets. Bernard Natan risked acquiring it, transforming it into the dynamic Pathé-Natan. He began purchasing theaters, sixty-two of them across France; in September of 1929, he produced France's first talkies, licensing RCA's sound system for his new theaters; he re-launched Pathé's newsreels and added sound to the pioneering international news source that would be both distributed and widely imitated worldwide and which would lead to television news; by November of 1929, he had created France's first television company; it developed a transmission of television using telephone lines. He funded the research that led to the anamorphic lens, which led to Cinemascope and the contemporary wide-screen film. He innovated what we would now call vertical integration, controlling not only the means of production but the production labs as well, and the distribution and the theaters themselves. By 1930, no longer so convinced it was impossible to make money with movies, Charles Pathé wanted his company back. Articles began to appear in the press, so many that they could surely be considered a well-organized campaign. Despite the fact that he'd been married to the same woman since 1909, despite the fact that he had two children, despite the fact that he made at least 60 major movies during the first half of the 1930s, he was now under steady attack: a Jew, an étranger, a pornographer, a pederast, perhaps even a foul violator of feathered fowl, and yet with his grasping grip clutching such an important economic institution of la France.” </blockquote><br /><br />
4. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2009/07/issue-4-july-29-2009.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #4</a><br /><br />
David Lightbourne – “The Little Sandy Review and the Birth of Rock Criticism”; Amy Annelle – “Okemah, Okfuskee Country, Oklahoma USA”; photograph by Glen E. Friedman; photograph by Chris Collins.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Thus, from 1957 on, as “folk music” records suddenly multiplied, countless other pop artists acceded to this marketing bandwagon and rushed to record blatantly dubious “folk” albums of every conceivable description. Obliged to acknowledge these ersatz offerings and in the same breath dismiss them forever, Pankake and Nelson located their first enduring neologism at the intersection of genuine “folk” and carnival “hokum.” “Folkum” meant just what it sounded like it meant, and in its utter brevity implied far more. Readers never knew when the next howls of empty-calorie outrage would carry all the way to Minneapolis from some professional schlockmeister sitting on a stack of cheese-ball musical arrangements on the east or west coasts.” </blockquote><br /><br />
5. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/08/issue-59-august-18-2010.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #59</a><br /><br />
Steve Beeho – “Rough Trade Records”; Ray Farrell – “Rough Trade U.S.”; Joe Carducci – “Renaissance Records, Systematic Record Distribution, and Rough Trade”; Joseph Pope – “Tower Records, Systematic, and Rough Trade U.S.”<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“A new, smaller, Independent Distribution system for rock music was a necessity in the mid-seventies. In fact the reigning powers that were/are made us reinvent the rock label, the club circuit, and radio outlets, too. We weren't good enough to air, though the Ramones can now be heard all over MLB PA systems. And after we and others did it we now have to hear it called by the diminutive ‘indie’, used as a flavor of college rock. If that's what it means then everything below is a lie.” </blockquote><br /><br />
6. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/05/issue-45-may-12-2010.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #45</a><br /><br />
Spot – “Tale of the White Snake”; Carolyn Heinze – “Attack of the Carpet Munchers”; Nick Hill – “Goose Hollow Blues”; Steve Beeho - “The Stooges, ‘Raw Power’, Hammersmith Apollo, London”; David Lightbourne RIP miscellany; art by James Fotopoulos; photograph by Bart Bull; photograph by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“As I stated early on, hot rod fare was de riguer for the average teenager in the early 60's and this beautiful little American hot rod happened to be manufactured within mere miles of where my family lived at the time. The Shelby-American plant was located on some undeveloped acreage in the middle of what was once swampland in Venice, California; not very far at all from the old Hughes Aircraft plant where Howard had built the legendary Spruce Goose. For some reason SoCal's post-WWII landscape not only invited real estate developers but also, and perhaps more significantly, encouraged Oddballs and Beat-Gennies to erect their "freak flags" ala coffeehouse cool, pinstriped ethical, flamed surfboard, the Dodgers have left Brooklyn and come here! Ecstasy! WOW! So why shouldn't a rabid Texan establish a foothold in the middle of a cultural hotbed of ideas that was already infecting the rest of the nation's sensibilities? It couldn't have been a better time and California was full of both dreamers and doers.” </blockquote><br /><br />
7. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/07/issue-56-july-28-2010.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #56</a><br /><br />
Jane Stokes – “In Cambridge, Mass. 1969”; Joe Carducci – “David Lightbourne and Outlaw Folk in Seventies’ Oregon”; Shaun Kelley – “David Loe Lightbourne: Folk Musicologist”; Mike Safran – “High Country Nail Puller”; Michael Hurley – “The InformaTon”; photographs by Chris Collins; art by James Fotopoulos; photographs by Liz Fitting; photographs by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“We weren’t political, as David reminded me later; from the different themes of the sixties -- political, music, black, drugs -- we were black and drugs. Johnny was black -- tall, thin with very black dark skin. He was always moving around quiet and graceful, finding small treasures with his eagle eyes. He and his cousins, who were never far behind, came from nearby Medford. By profession, Johnny was a silversmith. The exquisite hash pipe he made for David never left David’s hands. David called Johnny a true prince. Even after Johnny died a decade later, David continued to find new adjectives for him -- regal, judicious, wise. If you didn’t know Johnny, you would still want to luxuriate in David’s description of him. Johnny and David could talk forever-- fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that -- twenty times a fuckin’ sentence. David would gradually bring out his blues collection as the night went on, and they would comment together about back fuckin’ then in the 19 fucking 20s and it would go on all night from Robert Johnson to B.B. King. I would fall asleep in the hallway room where our mattress was, listening to their melodious circumlocutions all fuckin’ nightlong.” </blockquote><br /><br />
8. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2011/10/issue-120-october-19-2011.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #120</a><br /><br />
Joe Carducci – “Paul Nelson: First You Dream Then You Die”; art by James Fotopoulos; photograph by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“When friends want to chop me down to size they often insist I am just another rock critic, no better than all those guys I reamed in R&TPN. Paul was one of those deeper critics who so loved certain work by certain artists that he obsessed about jumping the fence and becoming the creator Satan’s compulsion. Lionel Trilling was a high culture version of this. He wrote fiction enough to realize his limitations and stopped, but he had options in the world of scholarly publishing that Paul did not. Paul had an ass-wipe like Wenner, or friends not much more solvent than he. My vague sense of Paul’s actual living situation, which I got from Lightbourne, was that he was trading off a more comfortable life by his determination to stay in Manhattan. I’ve moved all over west of Chicago, and not many knew this country more thoroughly than Dave, so we’d just shake our heads over what some folks will put up with. In their conversation on Lightbourne’s tapes Dave explores their common small town Midwestern origins and mentions how much he liked living in Laramie. He’d been dug deep into the Portland music-drug scene when I convinced him to leave it for his own good and my benefit. I could offer him free rent until he found his footing, an album deal of sorts, and Jane helped him with some emergency dentistry -- emergency because she didn’t want to be seen with him anymore. (Like Paul, Dave drank Coca-Cola as others drink coffee or alcohol.) Paul received similar help but Manhattan doesn’t allow for free rent.” </blockquote><br /><br />
9. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2010/12/issue-78-december-29-2010.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #78</a><br /><br />
Joe Carducci – “Pirates-Yankees Game 7, Oct. 1960”; photograph by Stephanie Smith; art by James Fotopoulos; photographs by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“We moved back to the Chicago area in 1956 and settled in Naperville the next year where Dad looked around at all the Germans and wondered if they’d allow an Italian to touch them. But it worked out great; they had nine kids, and Dad is well remembered and often out at a restaurant he is approached by former patients, so many he often couldn’t remember their names even before he developed Alzheimer’s. Mom worked at the office often enough in later years as my brother took over the practice to remember many of them though. Sometimes Mom or my sisters have to reassure him that he has no worries financially because that immigrant kid’s fearful drive can still surface. That and Alzheimer’s paranoia made caretakers and an anti-depressant necessary, so I moved back to Wyoming last spring. In November I linked to an interesting story about the discovery of a complete 16mm kinescope of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series when the Pirates beat the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski’s 9th inning home run -- the only time a World Series ended that way. Bing Crosby was part owner of the team which played at Forbes Field in those years. Crosby, the article related was too nervous to watch the game. The series was tied and the Yankees had crushed the Pirates three times while Pittsburgh had barely won three close games. Just before he stepped on a plane to Paris Crosby decided to have an assistant film the game just in case the unimaginable happened. The game is one of the only full baseball games filmed before the 1965 introduction of videotape. My Dad would’ve understand Crosby’s anxiety. He often listened to Bob Prince call the Pirates games on KDKA-AM in the car at night, or up in his room when reception permitted once games got important late in the season.” </blockquote><br /><br />
10. <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2011/05/issue-99-may-25-2011.html"target="_blank">New Vulgate #99</a><br /><br />
James Fotopoulos – “Alice in Wonderland”; Alan Licht – “Don Krim and Kino International c. 1990 (and beyond)”; Joe Carducci – “Christopher Hitchens-90% Atheist / 10% Socialist”; art by James Fotopoulos; photograph by Joe Carducci.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In 2003 I was invited to an opening of an art exhibit and while wandering in the museum’s lower level, I stumbled upon a Lewis Carroll photography exhibit. A number of images struck me in what at the time they were created was probably perceived as amateurism and how now in the 21st century, this sense of the amateur was erased. It evolved into something completely different and not just because the technique used was unique, fragile and antiquated – but I felt a certain level of mastery in the repetition, construction and choice of the images. This fusion of both amateurish approach and mastery was at the heart, from my own experience, of the creative process – in a way the territory of the artist and his personal space – through this perception, this sense of the uncanny that I mentioned earlier is revealed. A line is created through time that emotionally connected me to the past (I had a similar sense of this when I saw Chaplin’s The Circus and I could see very clearly the makeup on his face and it filled me with a strange sense of horror) – revealing the similarities of the human experiences of the past – and through the images, sounds, colors – the ever present sense of decay and death.” </blockquote><br /><br />
(Thanks to all our contributors over the last few years: David Lightbourne, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Safran, Mike Vann Gray, Steve Beeho, Bart Bull, Carolyn Heinze, Spot, Jane Stokes, Jack Hammond, Valbona Shujaku, Ray Farrell, Joseph Pope, Chris Carlsen, Henry Carlsen, Nina Carlsen, Mark Carducci, Nunzio Carducci, Maya Carducci, Dana Carducci, Alexandre Cohen, Travis, DB, Mike Watt, Glen E. Friedman, Jordan Mamone, Rebecca Pavlatos, Mike Wolf, Arthur Krim, Elliott Johnston, Pat Banks, Ben Hanna, Shaun Kelley, Carlo Prosperi, Amy Annelle, Michael Hurley, Jon Boshard, Janet Lynn, Alan Licht, Grace Krilanovich, Naomi Petersen, Chris Petersen, Jake Austen, Liz Fitting, Michael Lightbourne, Priscilla Lightbourne, Lindsay Olson, Al Rivers, Johnny Myers, David Buelow, David Fitschen, Chris Woods, Tamara L. Smith, Vincent Anton, Jean Chien, Jon Fine, Tan Nguyen, Kendra , Jan Leonhardt, Dan Burbach, Lee Ranaldo, Don Fausett, Anthony Collins, Jonathan Haynes, Rosetta Mason, Josh Mason, Doug Cawker, Kathryn Frederick, Tillie Whitt, Asakura Akira, Stephanie Smith, Rodilla Tumanda, Nick Hill, Gary Sisco, Cheshire Bat…)<br /><br /><br /><br />
***<br /><br /><br />
<b>List Addenda…</b><br /><br />
<b>Top Five New Labels</b><br /><br />
<a href="http://electric-cowbell.com/wp/"target="_blank">Electric Cowbell Records</a> (Brooklyn, NY)
-jazz-funk imprint run like a punk rock label except the 45s are better looking.<br /><br />
<a href="http://testostertunes.blogspot.com/"target="_blank">Richie Records</a> (Philadelphia, PA)
-Nice mix of bands and one crazed wailing 2xLP: Birds of Maya – “Ready to Howl.”<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.superiorviaduct.com/"target="_blank">Superior Viaduct</a> (San Francisco, CA)
-Nicely turned reissue label moving from SF to L.A. and beyond.<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.feedingtuberecords.com/Feedingtuberecords.com/WELCOME_TO_FEEDING_TUBE_RECORDS.html"target="_blank">Feeding Tube Records</a> (Easthampton, MA)
-How is it the most experimental label is also the busiest?<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.moniker-records.com/"target="_blank">Moniker Records</a> (Chicago, IL)
-The new ONO record sounds and looks great and there’s other good stuff too.<br /><br />
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<b>Centennial Valley from Sand Lake, Wyoming</b><br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bZ_ZHTZzWGQ/UYBvHkEk6TI/AAAAAAAAEkw/DmUUBrA0mmc/s650/2.CentennialValleyfromSandLakeRd-2-sm_650.jpg"><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br /><br />
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<b>From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…</b><br /><br /><br />
<a href="http://www.heavymetalbebop.com/post/41782901627/9-greg-ginn"target="_blank">Greg Ginn interview</a> by Hank Shteamer at <i>heavymetalbebop.com</i>. <blockquote><br /><br />
“<b>What was it about them that stood out?</b><br /><br />
Well, there wasn’t anything like it. I don’t know if you’d call it jazz or rock; it had a lot of classical influences too. It was kind of a fusion of more than rock and jazz. Just real powerful and I just loved the songs—the intensity of the songs. Sometimes I’ll just go back to it and have a Mahavishnu Orchestra phase. But I think that had a lot of impact, starting in ’72, ’73, something like that. They kind of had a groove. I love Rick Laird’s bass playing; I think it’s just amazing. And I think that was very key when you have a drummer like Billy Cobham who was really going off. He had good time, but he’s not really a groove drummer by any stretch, so having that kind of bass player that’s really not like later fusion bass players—I don’t like much in terms of later fusion. I like some Chick Corea and that kind of stuff, but I started in losing interest in all that. But I’ve always liked the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But when it started to smooth out… When you bring up metal and jazz, I see a lot more crossover between fusion and metal, and I’m probably not real big on that. As far as metal, I’d rather hear Ritchie Blackmore—with more groove. In that sense, my jazz influence is more the older jazz or the first wave of fusion.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ksoUILSzHAs/UYBvMEzBnFI/AAAAAAAAElc/Hxpi-ZSamec/s303/RichardHell%2520book.jpg">Robert Christgau at <i>barnesandnoble.com</i> on Richard Hell's book, <a href="http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Rock-Roll/Richard-Hell-The-Thrill-Seeking-Years/ba-p/10073"target="_blank"><b>I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp</b></a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Although he's self-deprecating about it of course -- mocking his early incompetence, shrugging that he ‘knew how to pick 'em’ -- Hell was New York punk's great ladies' man, and here again he scrupulously acknowledges his debts. Although his portraits of male musical buddies -- Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Johnny Thunders, Dee Dee Ramone, Lester Bangs, Peter Laughner -- are equalled only by Dylan's in the rock memoirs I've read, he's even more impressive honoring major girlfriends for a few paragraphs or pages: Patty (Mrs. Claes) Oldenburg schooling the artist as a young man; Marisol assistant Anni cushioning their amicable breakup; Aphrodite-with-money Jennifer Wylie and her nice apartment; gracious scenester-photographer Roberta Bayley (‘the prettiest breasts I've ever seen’); Stiletto and ‘slut (like me)’ Elda Gentile; supergroupie Sabel Starr (‘She truly lived for fun and joy, and the thing that was the most joyous of all to her was to make a meaningful rock musician happy’); lifelong beloved Lizzy Mercier (‘hair so wild and abundant it looked like it would have leaves and twigs in it’); ‘psycho fiend’ Nancy Spungen before she bagged Sid Vicious; dominatrix turned sub Anya Phillips before she bagged James Chance; rent-a-punk Paula Yates before she bagged Bob Geldof, shagged Michael Hutchence, and OD'd; photographer and future Mrs. David Johansen Kate Simon (‘I didn't treat her right’); big-hearted John Waters/Nan Goldin fetish object Cookie Mueller; childlike Dutch prostitute Liva; and the ‘stupendously generous’ Susan Springfield of the Erasers, who my wife and I would watch from our corner window walking sweetly hand-in-hand with Hell toward his apartment a few blocks east.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Richard Williams at <i>thebluemoment.com</i>, <a href="http://thebluemoment.com/2013/04/05/double-exposure/"target="_blank">"Double Exposure"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Hell and Verlaine didn’t speak for a long time. ‘Tom was highly protected, well defended,’ Richard writes in a shrewd but hardly impartial assessment of his erstwhile partner’s temperament. ‘There are good things and bad things about that. It gave him a certain kind of integrity — he wasn’t going to be blown around by fashion, he was discreet and reliable, but it made him really difficult to work with or be friends with. He was afraid of infection and robbery, so he lived in this high, remote, walled-in place, which enabled him to look down on everybody else… I respected his abilities and valued his friendship, but his coldness and egotism came more and more to the fore as he began to get more public attention. He was a lot easier to get along with before strangers started admiring him.’ Maybe Hell saw me as one of those strangers. I didn’t keep up with him because his side of the new wave didn’t interest me greatly, but I listen to everything Verlaine does in order to see if he’s still trying to get closer to the ideal version of what Hell calls his ‘crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites’. In my view he came nearest to such perfection in Television’s 1992 reunion album, in great songs such as ‘Shane, She Wrote This’, ‘1880 or So’, ‘No Glamour for Willi’ and ‘Call Mr Lee’.”</blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Ben Watson at <i>ukant.com</i>, <a href="http://www.unkant.com/2013/01/ben-watson-anti-wire.html"target="_blank">"Anti-Wire"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“A drunk Evan Parker once tried to turn a whole roomful of free improvisors against me because I'd written a book on Frank Zappa. Sober, his line on reviews is that it's 'damaging' to write any negative reviews of Free Improv events or releases, because it's a form which must be protected and nurtured. This is like SWP members being told to stop talking about rape allegations. It's a ridiculous injunction on a writer or indeed anybody, who should be told to follow their conscience and tell the truth as they see it. How stupid Parker's line is was proved when the London Musicians Collective started issuing a magazine. It named this radio station: Resonance. Pages and pages of mates extolling each others' albums? Reading it was stomach-churning, I tell you. And economic nonsense too. The only people it could convince to buy albums were the musicians, and they all expect to get them free anyway.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-billy-childish-2/"target="_blank">Billy Childish interview</a> at <i>thewhitereview.org</i>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The White Review — <b>You have often been referred to as an outsider but you have said that this label is a bit patronising, that instead you’re the ultimate insider. Do you think living outside of London, living in a provincial town has affected the way you are perceived?</b><br /><br />
Billy Childish — Possibly, but my contention is that London and major cities are the most provincial places on earth because they’re full of provincials trying to make out that they’re not provincial. For years and years we came to London every week to play music and I’d always deplored Londoners because they had no sense of humour and worried about everything. Then we had a Londoner join our group, ‘You’ve never met any Londoners,’ he said. ‘These po-faced bastards aren’t from London! Laughing] These people have come from the provinces desperate to appear not provincial.’ In a way major cities are magnets for the provincial and the worldly people stay in the provinces. Or some of us do.” </blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
Gerard Cosloy in <a href="http://issuu.com/conflict2013/docs/conflict53"target="_blank"><i>CONFLICT #53</i></a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Over the course of 52 issues (1979-1991), with a slight hiatus in the mid-’80’s), <i>Conflict</i> was one of the most overrated fanzines of the era. Sure, there were funny moments here & there (over the final dozen or so issues at least), but the early years were mostly typified by horrible writing and lousy taste. There were slight improvements towards the end, but none of it was helped by a generally bullying tone and a penchant for petty vendettas. It is my fervent hope that with this possibly (HOPEFULLY) final issue, <i>Conflict</i> will experience some measure of redemption.”</blockquote><br /><br />
^^^<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/23/shane-smith-vice-interview"target="_blank"><i>Vice</i>’s Shane Smith interview</a> in <i>GUARDIAN</i>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“<i>Vice</i> has come an awful long way from its origins as a free and underground music magazine in Smith's native Montreal 20 years ago. He created it with a couple of friends – having persuaded the city fathers to let them take over an earnest community title called the <i>Voice</i>. In the two decades since <i>Vice</i> dropped its middle ‘o’ it has grown from being a ‘hipsters' bible’, given away on street corners and in record stores, to a global brand with offices in 34 countries. The high-traffic online and documentary film incarnations of the <i>Vice</i> sensibility are about to spawn a 24-hour terrestrial news channel available in 18 countries. A documentary series in partnership with august HBO will include the Rodman and McAfee films. There is also a record label and an ad agency, Virtue, which numbers Nike and Dell among its clients. Announcing some of those departures at an industry event in Abu Dhabi last year, Smith envisioned ‘a changing of the guard within the media,’ and announced his ambition for <i>Vice</i> to become both the largest online media network in the world and ‘the voice of the angry youth’.” </blockquote><br /><br />
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<b>Burbank and LA from the Verdugos</b><br />
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Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/immane" target="_blank">Chris Collins</a>
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Drawing by <a href="http://www.jamesfotopoulos.com/" target="_blank">James Fotopoulos</a><br /><br />
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<b>From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…</b><br /><br />
Abigail Pesta in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323628804578348572687608806.html"target="_blank">"Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don’t Try This"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In a world dominated by smarter and smarter gadgets, one of the dumbest machines on earth is making a quiet comeback. Invented in the 1950s by an artificial-intelligence expert, the device is known as the ‘useless machine.’ It is typically a small box with an on/off switch and a hinged lid. Turn on the switch and a lever pops out, turns off the switch, then retreats. That is the machine's sole purpose: You turn it on, and it turns itself off. Largely forgotten for a half-century, the useless machine is now finding a new purpose: entertaining a subculture of people who want to build their own. In the past few years, people around the world have created versions of the machine, boasting of their work with videos online.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
smartertimes.com: <a href="http://www.smartertimes.com/812/palm-oil-doughnuts"target="_blank">"Palm Oil Doughnuts"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“A Times news article reports on a successful campaign by the New York State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, to convince Dunkin' Donuts to remove ‘environmentally destructive’ palm oil from its doughnut recipe. The Times article reports that palm oil's production has ‘in some places" led "to the destruction of rainforests and increased greenhouse gas emissions.’ The article further reports that Dunkin' Donuts began using the palm oil ‘in 2007 when it moved to rid its menu of trans fats.’ Now why, one wonders, would Dunkin' Donuts have ‘moved to rid its menu of trans fats’ in 2007? The Times article doesn't mention it, but that is when Mayor Bloomberg's ban on trans fats went into effect. Include that fact, and the story becomes one about the unintended consequences of government action, and how a trans fat ban intended to improve public health by reducing heart disease wound up wreaking environmental destruction and perhaps even death (if you think Sandy was a result of climate change) by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, as presented by the Times, the story is about a government official intervening to protect the fragile rainforest from a corporation that would otherwise ravage it.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Sean Collins at spiked-online.com, <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_article/13398/"target="_blank">"Scourge of the Elites"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“He was raising a question that continues today: has the decline of the family been liberating for people? He argued no: the family has been unravelling, but alternative arrangements that have emerged in its wake, such as co-habitation, are accommodations to the family’s demise rather than positive and viable forms of commitment. More broadly, he was critical of the state’s encroachment on all aspects of family life. The ‘helping professions’ were practitioners of a new form of ‘priestcraft’ that ‘undermined the family’s capacity to provide for itself’, he said. For example, schools had become a vehicle for the state to override the family: ‘The school claims to be able to teach you how to live, how to cook, drive a car, get along with people, and all the other things that were formerly left, wisely, to agencies better equipped for this kind of training.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-tNE2iqwWCJE/UYBvLg-sOqI/AAAAAAAAElM/TmhyoGYEpQU/s323/GabrieledeAnnunzio.jpg">Christopher Duggan in TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT on Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1225715.ece"target="_blank">"The Pike – Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“There was a tragic irony in Italy’s cultural drift at this time. In the wake of unification in the 1860s the most respected arbiters of the nation’s civic values had called for sober realism after the “poetry” of the Risorgimento. The country needed, they said, to address the complex social and economic problems confronting it with harsh sobriety and not succumb to the old traditions of rhetoric in which words began to drift free from thought (and morality) and become vehicles for the generation of emotion. But many of the most influential cultural figures from the 1870s vented their disappointment with what they saw as the paltriness of the new Italy with grandiloquent appeals for glory and escape from the dull ‘prose’ of liberal politics. As Giosuè Carducci, Italy’s most revered poet until his death in 1907 (when D’Annunzio publicly assumed his mantle as national ‘prophet-bard’), famously put it, the country had called out in the Risorgimento for ‘Rome’ – with its attendant associations of greatness and strength – but instead had been saddled with “Byzantium” – flaccid, weak and corrupt.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Leon Wieseltier in NEW REPUBLIC, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112481/darwinist-mob-goes-after-serious-philosopher#"target="_blank">"A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that ‘the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,’ and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life – consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience – cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was ‘the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,’ Fuck him, he explained. Here was a signal to the Darwinist dittoheads that a mob needed to be formed.” <br /><br /></blockquote>
***<br /><br />
Nicholas Wade in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/napoleon-chagnons-war-stories-in-the-amazon-and-at-home.html"target="_blank">"An Anthropologist’s War Stories"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Men form coalitions to gain access to women. Because some men will be able to have many wives, others must share a wife or go without, creating a great scarcity of women. This is why Yanomamo villages constantly raid one another. The raiding over women creates a more complex problem, that of maintaining the social cohesion required to support warfare. A major cause of a village’s splitting up is fights over women. But a smaller village is less able to defend itself against larger neighbors. The most efficient strategy to keep a village both large and cohesive through kinship bonds is for two male lineage groups to exchange cousins in marriage. Dr. Chagnon found that this is indeed the general system practiced by the Yanomamo. After overtaxing one of his informants, the shaman Dedeheiwa, about the reason for a succession of village fissions into smaller hostile groups, Dr. Chagnon found himself rebuked with the outburst, ‘Don’t ask such stupid questions! Women! Women! Women! Women! Women!’”<br /><br /> </blockquote>
***<br /><br />
Ross Douthat in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-secrets-of-princeton.html"target="_blank">"The Secrets of Princeton"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding. Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next. The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services.”</blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Helen Rittelmeyer in FIRST THINGS, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/01/sex-in-the-meritocracy"target="_blank">"Sex in the Meritocracy"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism. It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress.”<br /><br /> </blockquote>
***<br /><br />
Ann Friedman at newrepublic.com on Emily Matchar’s book, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112877/emily-matchars-homeward-bound-reviewed-ann-friedman?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED"target="_blank">"Homeward Bound – Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“For all of the profiles of “lushly bearded” artisanal chocolate-makers in Brooklyn and Portlandia sketches about avian accessories, broadly speaking we still associate domesticity with female subservience, usually with a religious bent. Matchar shows that this isn’t quite right. While many of the gurus of the new domesticity have deeply conservative religious ties—the greatest concentration of Etsy sellers is in Provo; the founder of attachment parenting is a conservative Christian; a disproportionate number of popular mommy bloggers are Mormon—the newer practitioners of the new domesticity are just as likely to be avowed liberals. Many of the women, despite nominally occupying a far-left niche of the ideological spectrum, venerate an idea of authentic femininity rooted in nurturing, and chalk up their traditional gender-role breakdown to natural inclinations.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Maria Massi Dakake in FIRST THINGS on Tom Holland’s book, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/01/islamrsquos-origins"target="_blank">"In the Shadow of the Sword – The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“If Holland’s thesis about Bakka places the geographical origin of the Islamic movement closer to Byzantine territory, his focus on the Qur’an’s reference to the Persian defeat of the Byzantines gives him not only a temporal marker, but also a possible catalyst for the origin of the movement. Since this is the only independently corroborated historical event mentioned in the Qur’an, Holland argues that it must be integrally significant to the early Arab-Islamic movement. Holland suggests that the Arabs drawn to Muhammad’s movement were tribesmen who had been part of a federation (shirkah, or shirkat, as Holland renders it) of Arabs allied with the Byzantines and working to secure its southern border. He speculates that these Arab ‘confederates’ were likely paid handsomely for their service to the Byzantines, but when the Persians overran substantial portions of the Byzantine Empire in the early seventh century, the confederates lost this valuable income and were ripe for new, more profitable modes of association, which Muhammad offered them with his movement. Holland argues that those tribesmen who were initially reluctant to abandon the confederation were none other than the mushrikun, Muhammad’s most implacable religious opponents in the Qur’an, where they are identified with the pagan and polytheistic Arabs of Mecca.”<br /><br /> </blockquote>
***<br /><br />
Kanan Makiya in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/the-arab-spring-started-in-iraq.html"target="_blank">"The Arab Spring Started in Iraq"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“To see the connection between the overthrow of Mr. Hussein in 2003 and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, one must go back to 1990, when Iraq’s army marched into Kuwait. The first gulf war — in which an American-led coalition ousted Iraq’s occupying army — enjoyed the support of most Arab governments, but not of their populations. Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait threatened the order that had kept authoritarian regimes in power for decades and Arab leaders were willing to fight to restore it. Citizens tend to rally around their leaders when faced with external attacks. But Iraqis didn’t. Millions of Iraqis rose up against Mr. Hussein following the 1991 war, and did what was then unthinkable: they called upon the foreign forces that had been bombing them to help rid them of their own dictator. Mr. Hussein’s brutal response to the 1991 uprising killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. For the first time, the rhetoric used by Mr. Hussein’s so-called secular nationalist regime turned explicitly sectarian, a forerunner of what we see in Syria today.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-zIJ-K7QqYZY/UYBvL_fGIrI/AAAAAAAAElU/6FfJHwl8vO0/s302/NewLeftReview.jpg">Jacob Collins in NEW LEFT REVIEW, <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/78/jacob-collins-an-anthropological-turn"target="_blank">"The Other French Theory"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Clastres put the political at the very origins of human society in his research on Amerindian chiefdom. He argued, contrary to existing anthropological canons, that primitive societies were not just stateless, but were specifically against the state – a refusal of power that revealed a complex political attitude among societies that pre-existed the state form. This insight was the impetus behind Gauchet’s early work: ‘I was convinced’, he wrote many years later, ‘that this enigma of primitive politics – politics in the apparent absence of politics – contained the keys to the understanding of our political condition. It’s on this wager that I staked my intellectual career. The rest came as a solution that I believed could answer this problem.’ Gauchet supplemented Clastres’ work by focusing on the religious origins of political reason. In the religious structure of primitive societies, founded on the separation of the visible from the invisible, the here from the above, Gauchet detected the origins of the state: ‘In this primordial knot, the political and the religious illuminate one another.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Robert Paxton in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Cecile Desprairies’ book <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/vichy-lives-in-a-way/?pagination=false&printpage=true"target="_blank">"The Heritage of Vichy – One Hundred Measures That Are Still in Force"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The Vichy regime was a welfare state. L’Héritage de Vichy serves as a useful reminder that the welfare state was not originally a socialist or Communist project. It was introduced into European political life from the right, first by Bismarck, with sickness and accident insurance in imperial Germany in 1883–1884, and emulated by Count Eduard von Taaffe in the Austrian Empire in 1887. Bismarck had just outlawed the German Social Democratic Party, and his intention was to eliminate its reason for being as well as to consolidate a paternalist and statist social order. Continental European Marxists opposed piecemeal welfare measures as likely to dilute worker militancy without changing anything fundamental about the distribution of wealth and power. It was only after World War II, when they abandoned Marxism (in 1959 in West Germany, for example), that continental European socialist parties and unions fully accepted the welfare state as their ultimate goal.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Barton Swaim in WSJ on Leszek Kolakowski’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324329204578272261736385142.html"target="_blank">"Is God Happy? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The collection begins with a grouping of nine essays examining the Western responses to Soviet communism. One of these, ‘What Is Socialism?’ (1956), enjoyed a long notoriety within the Polish underground. It is a satirical enumeration of things that socialism wasn't supposed to be: ‘a state whose neighbors curse geography’; ‘a state that produces superb jet planes and lousy shoes’; ‘a state whose philosophers and writers always say the same things as the generals and ministers, but always after the latter have said them.’ The essay was posted for a brief time on a bulletin board at Warsaw University, where Kolakowski taught, before being taken down by government minders. Twelve years later its author was pushed out of Polish academic life altogether, freed to take positions in England and North America. To those younger than 35, communism must seem like some ridiculous hoax. How could so many Western intellectuals have defended an ideology—and defended it into the late 1980s—that had never produced anything but economic devastation, cultural perversion and mass murder? And yet they did. In ‘Genocide and Ideology,’ from 1977, Kolakowski asked why Soviet communism attracted so many artists and intellectuals and Nazism so few. He pointed out that Nazism at least stated its aims straightforwardly: Nazis promoted Teutonic racial superiority and the conquest of Europe. Communism, on the other hand, ‘never preached conquest, only liberation from oppression; it never extolled the state as a value in itself, only stressed the necessity of reinforcing the state as an indispensable lever to destroy the enemies of freedom.’ All it took to gain the loyalty of influential writers and thinkers, in other words, was some heavy-handed rhetorical legerdemain.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Tod Lindberg in POLICY REVIEW, <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/139271"target="_blank">"Left 3.0"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Though largely unspoken, the Left’s implicit acceptance of limiting principles for its egalitarianism now constitutes one of its key strengths and is the first element that distinguishes Left 3.0 from its progenitors. The acceptance of limiting principles allows the Left to avoid the temptation of radicalism. It keeps the Left in ‘the system.’ The Left’s ambition is to obtain majority political support — no more, no less. The Revolution has been canceled. ‘The system is the solution.’ The Democratic Party is the sole legitimate representative of the aspirations of Left 3.0. There are, no doubt, a few aging radicals who still dream of sweeping the whole capitalist system away and starting over. But never in the history of the Left have such views been so marginal. Once the vanguard of the Left, the radicals are now its pets. Violence on the Left seems largely confined to scuffles during demonstrations, and indeed, the Left is now heavily vested in the proposition that the real danger of political violence comes from the extreme right. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, casts a longer shadow now than any remnant of the Weather Underground. The last thing Left 3.0 would wish to be thought is dangerous.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Christopher Caldwell in BOOKFORUM on Angus Burgin’s book, <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10823"target="_blank">"The Great Persuasion – Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“But where Hayek had been diffident and tragical, Friedman was ebullient and constructive. His rise marked an end to the Mount Pelerin Society’s – and to conservatism’s – attempt to reconcile capitalism and traditional values. Friedman didn’t solve the contradictions; he just failed to see them. As Bertrand de Jouvenel put it around this time, the society ‘had turned increasingly to a Manicheism according to which the State can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong.’ It was now a much more efficient engine of battle and a much less interesting intellectual movement.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Janan Ganesh in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2825e446-a044-11e2-88b6-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"The Iron Lady Towers Over the Country She Reshaped"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Still, most of the grievances fudge the essential reality that the UK needed to go through some approximation of what came to be known as Thatcherism. That became obvious not as late as the winter of discontent in 1978, but in 1976, when the world’s first industrial nation had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. The remaining question then becomes the manner in which the painful reforms were executed, and here there is too much cant that goes unchallenged. “Divisive” – the charge that dogs Thatcher like no other – is the most feeble, mealy-mouthed word in politics. It is almost impossible to do anything significant without enraging some people. Attlee’s creation of the NHS was divisive – it angered much of the medical establishment – but that does not mean it was wrong. Even Thatcher’s moderate critics sometimes indulge the fantasy that her reforms could have been undertaken consensually, as though the National Union of Mineworkers and hard-left local councils were led by biddable technocrats aching to strike a bargain. It is true she lacked her friend Ronald Reagan’s flair for radiating emollience while shaking up a country, but he himself became a villain to many Americans.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
David Brooks in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/brooks-the-axis-of-ennui.html"target="_blank">"The Axis of Ennui"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“My main impression over the past five years is that the conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations have turned out to be marginal to history while the people who are too boring and unfashionable to get invited to the conferences in the first place have actually changed the world under our noses. Shai Agassi’s company, Better Place, for example, has generated glowing magazine profiles, but it has managed to lose more than $500 million while selling astoundingly few cars…. Meanwhile, the anonymous drudges at American farming corporations are exporting $135 billion worth of products every year and transforming the American Midwest.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Paul Berman in NYT on Marie Arana’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/bolivar-by-marie-arana.html?ref=todayspaper"target="_blank">"Bolivar – American Liberator"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Indian warriors with bows and arrows made up a portion of his armies, and Indian women a large portion of his camp followers. Slaves and the descendants of slaves from Africa played a central role in the war, sometimes fighting on the Spanish royalist side, ultimately on Bolívar’s republican side; and the spirit of conspiracy being what it was, he executed the finest of his black republican generals. Unfortunate executions apart, Bolívar’s positions on slavery and race were in every respect superior to Washington’s. At a moment when the anti-Spanish struggle seemed hopeless, the president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, came to Bolívar’s aid (as no president of the United States ever managed to do, which is pitiful to see), and Bolívar responded in 1816 by ordering the abolition of slavery, not merely for strategic reasons. Arana quotes a speech from 1819: ‘Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wQSZT8ptPKQ/UYBvMbUpeFI/AAAAAAAAElk/wkylI9Zc1Mo/s305/RiverofDarkDreams.jpg">Mark Smith in WSJ on Walter Johnson’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324880504578297992942894884.html"target="_blank">"River of Dark Dreams"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Johnson's appreciation of the global and imperial aspirations of Mississippi Valley slaveholders helps us to make sense of the events leading up to the Civil War. These ‘full-throttle capitalists’ were filled with expansionist zeal. Valley planters and politicians made dedicated efforts to overthrow Cuba's Spanish colonial government in the 1850s. They feared what might happen if the anti-slavery British gained control of Cuba. Emancipation there might inspire slave insurrections and even race wars in their own part of the world. More optimistically, they thought Cuba could be the key to further economic success, valley-style. ‘It is sufficient to look over the extensive valley of the Mississippi,’ wrote one supporter of annexation, ‘to understand that the natural direction of its growth, the point of connection of its prodigious European commerce and of its rational defense, is Cuba.’ So, too, with Nicaragua. If Cuba functioned as the imperial slaveholders' transatlantic connection, Nicaragua, at least in the conviction of William Walker (who invaded the country in 1855, proclaimed himself president and promptly reinstituted slavery), represented the slaveholders' ambitions to link to the Pacific. (Walker was overthrown by local troops and shot in Honduras in 1860 after another attempt to establish a colony.) Louisiana and Mississippi slaveholders were keen to reopen the African slave trade in the late 1850s, which, the thinking went, would allow more whites to own slaves and dilute the tensions from an emerging class of slaveless whites.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
David Stockman in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/sundown-in-america.html"target="_blank">"State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net. All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ishmael Reed in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/opinion/how-the-gop-can-win-black-voters.html"target="_blank">"Neo-Classical Republicanism"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The original Republicans were born from a challenge to the far right — Lincoln gained influence by criticizing the Know-Nothing Party, the far right of his time. The same could happen today, gaining millions of adherents tired of the right’s racism and the left’s big-government stereotypes. Call it ‘neo-Classical Republicanism.’ The door is wide open. As Mr. Obama’s critics on the black left have noted, blacks haven’t benefited from his presidency as much as other factions of the Democratic coalition. He’s less of a Malcolm X than a Booker T. Washington, who would have endorsed the president’s belief that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ Yet most of Mr. Obama’s black critics, mainly from academia, want him only to move further left; they seem to lack confidence in the ability of blacks to create businesses, when blacks have been operating businesses since colonial times. Since 1979, when I moved to inner-city Oakland, I’ve observed the work ethic of those residents holding legitimate low-wage jobs as well as those engaged in the underground economy.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Michael Ames in HARPER’S, <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2013/04/the-awakening-2/"target="_blank">"The Awakening"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Ron Paul insists that he is the only true small-government conservative on the national stage. But listening to Schottenheimer and White, I had the disorienting thought that the man Jon Stewart once diagnosed as ‘Tea Party patient zero’ might also be the only compelling liberal among recent presidential candidates, or at least the only one who seems genuinely interested in pushing certain causes that progressives hold dear. President Obama claims that his administration reformed the financial industry, yet his Wall Street fund-raising suggests that the banks know well they have nothing to fear from him. Five years after ‘Too big to fail,’ the biggest banks are all larger than before. Yesterday’s moral hazards have become tomorrow’s federal guarantees.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Elizabeth Hoffman in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/opinion/come-home-america.html?pagewanted=all"target="_blank">"Come Home, America"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Everyone talks about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about Germany and Japan? The sequester — $85 billion this year in across-the-board budget cuts, about half of which will come from the Pentagon — gives Americans an opportunity to discuss a question we’ve put off too long: Why we are still fighting World War II?” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ron Rosenbaum in SMITHSONIAN on Bernard Bailyn’s book, <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Shocking-Savagery-of-Americas-Early-History-192122641.html"target="_blank">"The Barbarous Years"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“‘The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,’ Bailyn says. ‘The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.’ Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study. The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well. ‘The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory’ were driven by ‘elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them.’” <br /><br /></blockquote>
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-HYEnHdXQs0o/UYBvMe4YujI/AAAAAAAAElo/NKqKMXZybFc/s303/capital-novel-john-lanchester.jpg">Michael Lewis in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on John Lanchester’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/way-they-live-now/?pagination=false"target="_blank">"Capital"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Nothing functioned properly; everything that wasn’t broken was about to fall apart. The food was almost deliberately inedible, an inside joke cooked up by the locals to see what human beings would willingly consume. (I had a friend from Manhattan who said that every time he passed a British sandwich shop ‘I want to go in and strangle the owner.’) And the most extraordinary anticommercial attitudes could be found, in places that existed for no purpose other than commerce. There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. ‘Oh, we used to sell those,’ said the very sweet woman who ran the place, ‘but we kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.’ If you had to pick a city on earth where the American investment banker did not belong, London would have been on any shortlist. In London, circa 1980, the American investment banker had going against him not just widespread commercial lassitude but the locals’ near-constant state of irony.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Olivier Guez in NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/are-there-any-europeans-left.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0"target="_blank">"Are There Any Europeans Left? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In important ways, the Europe of 1913 was more cosmopolitan and European than the Europe of today. Ideas and nationalities mingled and converged in a hotbed of creativity. That year saw the height of Futurism, the beginnings of abstraction in Picasso and Braque, the debut of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring,’ the publication of ‘Swann’s Way’ by Proust. Collaborations to uncover science’s deepest secrets jumped borders easily. The architecture of imperial Austria and republican France found imitators in smaller gems of cities throughout Central and Southern Europe; they were called Little Vienna or Little Paris. And there were large communities of cosmopolitan expatriates — ‘passeurs’ between cultures, notably urbanized Jews, as well as German minorities, scattered throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Though prejudice ran deep and they were harshly mistreated in many places, in others they could identify as citizens of a broader European group, not merely the land they inhabited, and aspire to respect and comfort. Later, at the hands of totalitarians, most of the Jews would be slaughtered, and the Germans — like other groups — deported to their country of origin. Alongside their greater crimes, Hitler and Stalin thus did their parts to erase the idea of cosmopolitanism as the old Europe had understood it. Which makes the usual starting point of the modern European narrative — the rubble of 1945 — all the more poignant.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Michael Pettis in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0796bcce-9558-11e2-a151-00144feabdc0.html"target="_blank">"Why the World Needs Reckless Bankers"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Banks, after all, act as middlemen between savers, who value stability above all, and borrowers, who usually want to take risks with their loans. History suggests he was right. No growing economy has sustained a stable financial system. In fact, long-term wealth creation accrues most to societies in which the financial system most willingly funds risk-taking entrepreneurs. But the more a financial system is willing to finance risky new ventures, the greater the likelihood of banking instability. That, perhaps, is why the system that delivered the subprime crisis also funded the computing and internet revolutions. The Belgian historian Raymond de Roover once explained that, in the 19th century, ‘reckless banking, while causing many losses to creditors, speeded up the economic development of the United States, while sound banking may have retarded the economic development of Canada’.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
David Pilling in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/70503028#axzz2OyU2YDAg"target="_blank">"Abe Is Right to Take From the Old and Give to the Young"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“One objection to ‘Abenomics’, the reflationary creed adopted by Japan's new government, is that it will erode hard-earned savings. Instead of simply grabbing them over the weekend - as has become fashionable in certain parts of Europe - the government hopes to siphon them off gradually through gentle inflation. This is a dastardly plan. It is unlikely to prove popular with the over-60s, who make up a quarter of Japan's population, but who control two-thirds of its vast household assets. It is a good idea all the same. The reason for welcoming this intergenerational theft is that, for 20 years, Japan has prioritised the interests of older generations over younger ones. That is not only unfair. Penalising youth is also not the best way to build a nation's future.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Joseph Chamie at yaleglobal, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/us-could-be-worlds-most-populous-country?utm_source=YaleGlobal+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0d28c7bdf5-Newsletter9_14_2010&utm_medium=email"target="_blank">"US Could Be World’s Most Populous Country"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“If immigration to America were increased to 10 million immigrants per year throughout the remainder of this century, the demographic result would be a US population of about 940 million by 2060 and 1.60 billion by the close the 21st century (see Figure 1). The world’s second and third largest populations in 2100 are projected to be India, 1.55 billion, and China, 0.94 billion.<br /><br />
However, if in the coming decades America continues with net immigration of about 1.2 million annually, as currently assumed, the US population would reach 420 million by year 2060. Although this projected growth would be an increase of more than 100 million, the US population would fall to fourth place as Nigeria takes over the number three position with a projected population of 460 million in 2060. The populations of the three countries currently larger than Nigeria – Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan – are expected to peak around midcentury and begin declining thereafter due to projected low fertility rates falling below replacement levels. Also in the longer term, the gap between projected US population, with 1.2 million immigrants annually, versus the larger US population, with 10 million immigrants annually, widens rapidly, resulting in a difference of 1.1 billion Americans at the close of the century.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ian Johnson in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/will-chinese-be-supreme/?pagination=false"target="_blank">"Will the Chinese Be Supreme? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Luttwak argues that China’s growth will cause countries to band together and stymie its rise. Just as nineteenth-century Germany’s economic and military growth caused one-time enemies like France and England to ally with each other (and England to swallow its disgust over tsarist Russia’s primitive repression of human rights and make friends with it), China’s beeline to the top is already causing a reaction, as we see with Japan and the Philippines, not to mention the new welcome being shown to the United States in the region. Why doesn’t China change course? Here is one of Luttwak’s most interesting ideas, which he calls ‘great-state autism’—the failure of powers to break free of ways of acting and behaving. Just as Wilhelminian Germany should surely have seen that building a blue-water navy would cause Britain to form alliances against it, so too should China understand that demanding control over islands far from its shores but close to its neighbors’ would cause a backlash. (Here one thinks not so much of the Senkaku/Diaoyus but of the shoals, reefs, and islets in the South China Sea.) Even the battle for the Senkaku-Diaoyus seems to have no satisfactory endgame for China except a permanent state of tension with its most important neighbor.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Lamido Sanusi in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/562692b0-898c-11e2-ad3f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2OyTQIgOD"target="_blank">"Africa Must Get Real About Its Romance with China"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The days of the Non-Aligned Movement that united us after colonialism are gone. China is no longer a fellow under-developed economy – it is the world’s second-biggest, capable of the same forms of exploitation as the west. It is a significant contributor to Africa’s deindustrialisation and underdevelopment. My father was Nigeria’s ambassador to Beijing in the early 1970s. He adored Chairman Mao Zedong’s China, which for him was one in which the black African – seen everywhere else at the time as inferior – was worthy of respect. His experience was not unique. A romantic view of China is quite common among African imaginations – including mine. Before his sojourn in Beijing, he was the typical Europhile, committed to a vision of African ‘progress’ defined by replicating western ways of doing things. Afterwards, when he became permanent secretary in the external affairs ministry, the influence of China’s anti-colonial stance was written all over the foreign policy he crafted, backing liberation movements in Portuguese colonies and challenging South Africa’s apartheid regime. This African love of China is founded on a vision of the country as a saviour, a partner, a model. But working as governor of Nigeria’s central bank has given me pause for thought.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ali Sadrzadeh at qantara.de, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/A-Tsunami-of-Atheism/20649c22799i0p9/"target="_blank">"A Tsunami of Atheism"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“The official campaign against ‘false mysticism’ was started more than two years ago personally by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He spent a week in the holy city of Ghom in October 2010, where he met with a number of Grand Ayatollahs. On the last day of his visit, he gave a keynote address to theology students in which he said, ‘The prevalence of licentiousness, the propagation of false mysticism, and the so-called house churches are attempts undertaken by the Zionists and other enemies to fight against Islam.’ As soon as he left the city, which is seen as the main centre of Shiite scholarship, one Ayatollah after another issued a fatwa against ‘false mysticism’, declaring that the propagation of its teachings meant apostasy and sacrilege. In spite of repression, the numbers who seek their salvation in sects or other religious minorities continues to grow. The number of New Christians who organise themselves in underground churches is believed to have increased significantly in recent years. According to the website of the evangelical organisation ‘Open Doors’, the number of Christians in Iran has risen from 300,000 to 460,000. There's no evidence for the figures, but the trend towards faiths other than Islam is unmistakable.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
CHICAGO TRIBUNE Gallery: <a href="http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-20th-century-entertainers-20130125/"target="_blank">"Union Station stopovers"</a>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Johan Kugelberg at PERFECT SOUND FOREVER, <a href="http://www.furious.com/perfect/60spunkcompilations.html"target="_blank">"60’s Punk Compilations"</a>.
<blockquote>
“I started buying '60's Punk/garage compilations in the fall of 1982. Friends of mine pointed out that you could purchase cut-out copies of Nuggets in its Sire Records incarnation, as well as cheap copies of Pebbles volume 9 and 10 from Ginza, the biggest of the Swedish cut-out mail order houses, where we furthermore bought cheapo copies of albums by the Seeds, the Sonics, the Chocolate Watch Band and the Standells. My friends, who were older than me, provided context for the albums (‘so you think you are a punk kid, you know nothing’) and motivated us to form a band playing Count Five, Seeds and Kim Fowley covers. The first two volumes of Back From The Grave were purchased in '83/'84, and were so much better than anything else on the market, that I remember the listening experience ended up feeling a bit baffling. To this day, as most collectors of the genre will attest, nothing else comes close, pretty much. And in that 'pretty much' I compile this list of my favorite '60's punk/garage compilations with the BFTGs on top. The '60's punk compilation narrative also contains the fascinating story of independent record shops of the 1980's, especially those that put together mail order catalogues. In Sweden, it was Musik & Konst in Malmö, which was one of the few outlets in the old country for you to obtain '60's punk comps, alongside obscure U.S.-import seven-inchers, fanzines and bootleg LP's by the Velvets and the Cramps. As I spent my teen years in the absolute boonies, these mail order catalogues were lifelines of hep, and they also provided aesthetic directives in a manner much more efficient (and important to us) than the Brit music weeklies, radio, or even fanzines.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Andy Langer in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/us/zz-tops-billy-gibbons-and-his-former-band-return-to-psychedelia.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0"target="_blank">"Psychedelia Redux for Billy Gibbons and His Old Band"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“<b>Q. The set list featured the Jimi Hendrix songs ‘Foxy Lady’ and ‘Red House.’ I imagine that’s a nod to the fact that Hendrix championed the Moving Sidewalks in the press, toured with you and invited you to jam.</b><br /><br />
A. We’ll always cherish that time. It was like school. We were front and center watching a guy inventing things on a guitar the designers never imagined. And it stayed with me the rest of my life. Our bassist, Don Summers, turned to me at one point onstage and said, ‘Man, I didn’t know Hendrix was still inside of you.’ He always is. He always is.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Archie Patterson at rocksbackpagesblogs.com, <a href="http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2013/04/behind-the-red-door/"target="_blank">"Giorgio Gomelsky – Behind the Red Door"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In the 1970’s Giorgio migrated to NYC and bought a 3-story building, he christened it the ‘ZU House’. There Bill Laswell and many New York artists came to practice. Laswell formed the ‘ZU Band’, later renamed Material, who put out one of the most powerful No Wave 12 Eps along with an album, before he went on to become a major force in the music industry.<br /><br />
In 1978, I visited NYC for Giorgio’s ZU Manifestival that was one of the first showcases of Indie and Alternative experimental rock in those days. I crashed on the second floor of Giorgio’s ZU House for 3 days, helping him when he brought his travelling alternative rock caravan across country for another Manifestival in Los Angeles. Over the years, we have kept in sporadic contact and met up a couple other times at music festivals. By the end of the 1970’s the ZU House had been rechristened ‘The Red Door’ and became an intimate performance and rehearsal space, as well as crash pad for a host of luminaries, to mention a few – Nico post VU when she was broke and homeless, Bad Brains, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd and countless others.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Kevin McCaighy at thequietus.com, <a href="http://thequietus.com/"target="_blank">"Joe Carducci"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
<b>“Can you tell me about the non-music business-related books that you've written since the publication of ‘Rock & the Pop Narcotic’?</b><br /><br />
The new book, ‘Life against Dementia’, is an anthology and about half of it is music, one quarter film including material from work on my next book, ‘Stone Male – Requiem for the Living Picture’, which is about the action-film and its acting style going back to the silent era, and one quarter on political stuff. The earliest stuff is a piece on film I wrote for an anarchist paper called The Match! in 1975 when I was 19, and some music and film pieces I wrote when I was at Systematic before I went to SST. I should’ve done some writing while at SST when D. Boon and Raymond Pettibon asked me, but I was writing the PR stuff and by 1984 had resumed writing screenplays once I wasn’t living at the office anymore. ‘Wyoming Stories’ is a collection of the three Wyoming-set screenplays I’ve written after ‘Rock & The Pop Narcotic’, each of which will get made in the next five years. There’s another ten scripts but not sure I’ll publish those. I started ‘Stone Male’ in 1991 right after finishing ‘Rock and The Pop Narcotic’ and all the other stuff has been produced during interruptions in this work, so I see it as a big book like the Rock book, but much better researched and will be better written.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Tony Rettman at vice.com, <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/we-interviewed-sleepers-guitarist-michael-belfer"target="_blank">"We Interviewed Sleepers Guitarist Michael Belfer"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
<b>What exactly happened?</b><br /><br />
We were just met with so much adversity on that tour. The guy who put out Painless Nights was holding the record back because he was bitter at us; I guess he could feel that we regretted working with him. So he held the record back. They were no copies to be found anywhere. Then, he flew out to New York with a guitar in a case that he didn’t know how to play. He just decided to follow us around. He’d carry this guitar, walk into the club and say he was with the band, even though we didn’t really want him there. When we were in New York, we were staying with a girl named Ray Anne Deanstag and he wanted a place to put this guitar and his other stuff. So he leaves this guitar at her place and her and my girlfriend at the time Kim Hunt pawn it and go buy drugs with the money. This happened without me knowing it. At the time, I was in a cab with Ricky and our tour manager, Patrick Roques. We pulled into the Union Square area and Ricky somehow spots someone doing a transaction and he jumps out of the cab and ran and grabbed this guy. The guy was selling Ricky’s favorite pills; tuinals. I don’t know how he spotted the guy. I didn’t know what was going on, but Alex did. He chased Ricky and finally cornered him in an alley. The guy he bought them from ran away and Ricky just looked at Alex and swallowed them all. We get back into the cab and go back to Ray Anne’s place at Avenue B and 14th Street. Ray Anne and Kim look really happy and tell me ‘Hey! We got you some dope!’ I was like ‘Uh…ok. How’d you get the money for that?’ They tell me and I hit the roof. We get back in a cab, get to the show and the pills start to take effect of Ricky.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Lost Stooge interview: <a href="http://stashdauber.blogspot.com/2013/03/jimmy-recca-lost-stooge-resurfaces.html"target="_blank">Jimmy Recca</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Finally, the grand finale, we went into this jam, and Iggy came flying back to the stage, ‘Just keep playing!’ We just played the same groove for maybe like 20 minutes, 30 minutes. He’s starts and he’s going across the stage and jumping out in the crowd. He comes back and he’s got the fucking microphone, doing a Roger Daltrey, swinging it out, and I’m ducking, here it comes again, this SM-57 Shure microphone, just swinging it around, I duck again and it just clears the top of Scotty’s cymbals, Ron’s walking away and it just fucking nails him, right in the center of the back. He got the full impact of that microphone, and he just dropped to his knees, guitar fell down, and he was done. Took him out. That was the end of the show right there. I guess they didn’t pay us much, if anything. They wanted to charge us damages to the club, because they fucked up that place. The roadies -- this guy Don Kuhl from Hamtramck, he was straight up from the coal mines, and this guy Tim, we used to call him Groovy Tim -- got pissed off because [the promoters] held the money or didn’t pay us, so they broke into their store and stole cases and cases of candy bars from the movie theater. We found out when we got back to unload the truck and there’s all these Almond Joys…ridiculous! Those were our spoils.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.vice.com/read/we-interviewed-richard-hell-he-was-surprised-we-didnt-ask-about-his-peen"target="_blank">"Richard Hell interview"</a> by Brad Cohan at vice.com.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“You devote a big chunk of Tramp to Bob Quine. Is there a song of yours you can point to where Bob just floored you with what he could do with a guitar? One that always blows my mind is the solo on ‘Betrayal Takes Two’ from Blank Generation and also the solo on the original demo version of my song ‘Time.’ People always single out the solo on ‘Blank Generation,’ and that’s really good, too.
You write in Tramp that sometimes you’ll see Verlaine in the street, and you describe a happenstance where the two of you spoke. Are you friends or at least on speaking terms? No. We haven’t been friends since 1975.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Steve Appleford at latimes.com, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-black-flag-20130331,0,635876.story"target="_blank">" Black Flag Fans, After Years of No Band, Now Get Two"</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“They acknowledge the strangeness of two versions of the same band hitting the road this year. Flag's announced dates begin April 26 at the Monster Bash Festival in Munich, Germany, and include the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival in Las Vegas on May 27. Ginn's Black Flag begins its tour May 15 in Luxembourg and arrives at the Observatory in Santa Ana July 12-13 and at Vex Arts in Los Angeles on July 14. ‘Part of me wants to be angry, but it's just not worth getting angry over,’ says Morris, looking and sounding as energetic as always, despite a recent diabetic coma that caused the cancellation of tour dates with his other band, acclaimed modern hard-core act Off! ‘Ron's my friend. I'm happy for him. As for Greg Ginn, that whole thing is a giant question mark.’” <br /><br /></blockquote>
***<br /><br />
Erick Lyle at vice.com, <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/can-i-get-in-the-van-000288-v20n4?Contentpage=-1"target="_blank">"Can I Get in the Van?"</a><br /><br />
<blockquote>
“There were no songs, I quickly discovered; the audition would be completely improvised. A couple minutes in, we locked into a tight groove. Ginn played with his eyes closed, his head swiveling around in a trancelike headbang. Anytime I’d try to play a fill on the bass, one of Ginn’s eyes would snap open and glare at me. At first, I thought he was signaling me to stop. Then I realized he was just paying attention to see where I might be trying to take the song. When he suddenly blasted off on a series of guitar solos, I finally realized, Holy shit! I’m playing with GREG GINN, and his solos are melting my mind! The wordless communication of forming the songs on the spot together was fascinating, and for the first time, I understood the appeal of improvised music. I had been playing with Ginn for less than an hour, and I had already learned something important.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Last Ron Asheton Stooges <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isSvowmdhQY"target="_blank">tune</a> from Three Stooges movie credit roll?<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
West Magoon exhibit, <a href="http://www.muddymountainpottery.com/raku-ray-guns.html"target="_blank">"Raku Ray Guns and the Books that Spawned Them"</a><br />
Night Heron Books, 107 Ivinson Ave in Laramie<br />
April 1 until June 1, artist's reception Friday, April 12 5-7 pm.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-slHc9qzOnrI/UYBvLFvFa6I/AAAAAAAAElI/0D7Aor6IH88/s302/Eurock%25201.jpg">EUROCK <a href="http://www.eurock.com/Display.aspx?Content=EurockCVRS.aspx"target="_blank">cover gallery</a>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Ralph White in <a href="http://vimeo.com/56669065"target="_blank">"Hardly Sound"</a>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<i>NAPERVILLE SUN</i>: <a href="http://napervillesun.suntimes.com/business/18787227-420/building-memories-105-107-w-jefferson-ave.html"target="_blank">"Is there a doctor here? "</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“A few days before Dr. Donald Carducci moved in to his new office at 107 W. Jefferson Ave. at the end of 1956, he turned a corner driving there and his 3-month-old son, Matthew, in the front seat with his brother Joe, fell out. ‘Don was so excited, he jumped out of the car to get him, but the car was still moving, so when he realized that, he jumped back in the car, and someone stopped and picked up Matthew. The man said, ˈyou’ve got to take him to the doctor, he just fell out of your car!ˈ My husband never told the man he was the doctor!’ Jacquie Carducci said. ‘My husband just ran down there, and the kids were in their pajamas. He was giving me a break. I’m not sure why the door opened. Joe might have tried to open it! After that, they rode in the back seat, and we took the inside handles out!’ The Carduccis had just moved to Naperville because Jacquie’s sister lived here. She told Donald that Edward Hospital had just converted from a TB sanitarium to a full-service hospital with opportunities for family practice physicians. Dr. Carducci’s new office consisted of an exam room, a bathroom (where he tested specimens) and a small waiting room. ‘Sometimes people waited on the front stoop — it was like an extension of the waiting room, the waiting room was so small,’ said Matthew Carducci, who survived the car fall to become a Naperville doctor himself.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Obituaries of the months</b><br /><br />
• <a href="http://extramustard.si.com/2013/03/07/basketball-with-12-foot-rims-it-was-closer-to-happening-than-you-may-think/"target="_blank">Tom Boerwinkle</a> (1945-2013)<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“On this day in 1954, the Hawks and Lakers played a game with 12-foot rims instead of the standard 10-footers. Why? Because there was a mounting concern that it was too easy to score – “Something has to be done to make a basket worth a cheer,” wrote one sports columnist — and many feared the dominance of the big man was undermining the game. There was no bigger man in those days than Lakers’ post man George Mikan, who’d led the Minneapolis club to four league championships in five years. A quick glance at the box score from the game suggests mission accomplished: Mikan scored 12 points on 2-for-14 shooting — more than six below his season average. Most reactions to the rule change were negative. ‘It threw the whole game out of sync and made it tougher on the smaller man,’ Mikan said. ‘It just makes the big man bigger.’…What surprised many was that the biggest man, Boerwinkle, who is fairly agile and quick, had the most difficulty. While he had 15 rebounds, a little above his average, he had trouble getting them, although most of the missed shots fell within a 12-foot radius of the basket. He had no chance at all to get the shots that hit the front of the rim. The rebounds usually caromed over his head and were taken by one of the smaller men. On many shots the ball took longer to come down, giving the other players time to crowd into the lane and fight Boerwinkle for the ball. Several times he had the ball stolen away when he came down with it. He failed to block a single shot and did not score on a tip-in. He made only one basket in 16 tries, a jump shot from the foul line.” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
• <a href="http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/global/1554929/paul-williams-crawdaddy-founder-godfather-of-rock-criticism-dead-at"target="_blank">Paul Williams</a> (1948-2013)<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“In its two-to-three-year run (as Williams described it), the magazine's distribution went from 500 copies to 25,000 and could count among its fans Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Luc Sante. Following the initial success of Crawdaddy!, Williams closed up shop in New York and moved to Mendocino, Calif. where he traveled with Timothy Leary and ‘ended up at John and Yoko's Bed-In for Peace in Montreal.’ It was also around this time that Williams struck up a friendship with the influential science fiction author Philip K. Dick, a relationship that continued after Dick's death, when Williams was named his literary executor. Williams is credited with helping to secure Dick's literary legacy.” </blockquote><br /><br />
<a href="http://www.crawdaddyarchive.com/index.php/sixties-archives/"target="_blank">Crawdaddy! archive</a> 1966-1968.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
• <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/arts/music/lawrence-mckiver-singer-for-mcintosh-county-shouters-dies-at-97.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0"target="_blank">Lawrence McKiver</a> (1915-2013)<br /><br />
<blockquote>
With the founding of the McIntosh County Shouters in 1980, Mr. McKiver introduced the ring shout to wide audiences throughout the country. Despite its name, the ring shout entails little shouting. That word refers not to the singing but to the movement: small, deliberate steps in a counterclockwise ring. (‘Shout’ has been said to be a Gullah survival of the Afro-Arabic word ‘saut,’ the name of a ritual dance around the Kaaba, a sacred site in Mecca.) Mr. McKiver was the Shouters’ songster, as the lead singer is known. A shout typically begins with the songster singing the opening lines; other singers, known as basers, reply in call-and-response fashion. The group’s ‘stick man’ beats a syncopated rhythm on the floor with a tree branch or broomstick as other members clap contrasting rhythms. The circular steps for which shouting is known are by no means dancing. To avoid even the faint appearance of dance (considered sinful in some Christian traditions), shouters may neither cross their feet nor lift them high. The result — a low, measured step that is sometimes described as a shuffle — is shouting’s visual hallmark. On the plantations of the antebellum South, where it took on elements of Christianity, the ring shout flourished covertly for generations of slaves. ‘They were just doing something to keep their mind off the past tense,’ Mr. McKiver said, speaking in the local dialect, in an oral history in Mr. Rosenbaum’s book. ‘It was their happiness. They didn’t sing it for nothing at all sad.’” </blockquote><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks to Amy Annelle, Peter Aaron, Jay Babcock, Archie Patterson, Jacqueline Carducci, Ray Farrell, Andy Schwartz.<br />
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<i>To receive a weekly update notice for the NV, send an email to newvulgate[at]sbcglobal.net with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. To stop receiving notices, do the same with the word UNSUBSCRIBE.</i><br /><br />
<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010)<br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i>Chris Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16761596531459681739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-89172733836915833572013-02-20T18:46:00.002-08:002013-02-21T16:38:47.214-08:00Issue #144 (Feb. 6, 2013)<b>Centennial Beach, Naperville IL</b>
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Photo by Joe Carducci
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<b>United States of Nigger – Beasts, Lincoln, and Django</b><br />
by Joe Carducci<br />
___
<br /><br />
There was a blip in the recent election over American exceptionalism, whether there is any and if so who denies it. That there is any question begged on that tells us how resilient the European standard is for American behavior. That old world standard survived its own twentieth century cataclysms to create an ongoing vicarious ex-pat perspective within the American culturati. Our exceptionalism is a simple matter really; it’s the result of centuries of free, indentured, and enslaved immigrants to the United States “going native.” It was a term of British Imperialism mostly associated with India, where the early officers of British Raj (née the British East India Co., 1600) arrived without family and could find in India an attractive new way of life. The mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, where Lt. Bligh lost his crew to the lure of Tahiti, was a similar moment of temptation as Imperial Europe and its business and high cultures’ rises began to slow and turn toward decadence and death wish. The English culture in particular was quite strong but not impervious to the temptations of other ways. Whatever its crimes, it actually speaks well of the Anglos that such temptations were a continuity; the French and Spanish Imperial cultures seemed more horrified at temptations to leave their European hierarchical frame of reference and dissolve into another’s, though they left plenty of métis and meztisos behind. That a Francophone or Hispanophone United States cannot quite be imagined should tell us something about the maniacs who bought one-way passage from the British Isles.<br />
<br />
<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-QnICHP8MKPk/UR6DhIObasI/AAAAAAAAEiI/qHLki_hxJ3s/s300/Eyes-of-Eagles-book.jpg">What the English, Scots and all first contended with was the land and the stone-age tribes who jostled around in it. Joined by French, Dutch, Germans, Spaniards and more, the ideas of the explorers and adventurers and the fortune-hunters who intended to return to their home hierarchies with status earned and baronies awarded evolved to staying and building something new in an unsettled land. Mere hard-won steps up in old world status suddenly seemed less ambitious to them. This wasn’t simply going native though, as the North American Indian tribes hadn’t yet developed the hierarchies of India or Mesoamerica. The tribes and confederations of bands were protean and their presence and influence shadowed the less obvious drama of how subjects of the various European Kingdoms came to understand they might come together and govern themselves against all crowns. Much later came tides of Catholics from Ireland, Italy and Poland, the Orthodox Slavs, Jews, Chinese and Mexicans, but the cultural bastardy was well underway in the port towns of the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean.<br /><br />
Against the native backdrop, from the early “savage years” of the sixteenth century to the 19th century Indian wars out west, the de-Europeanizing mass of whites found the imported African slaves to be another influence and one somehow all the more culturally potent for its utter lack of civic standing. The slaves unloaded in Charleston, New Orleans and other ports were overwhelmingly male and mostly paired up with Indian women. Centuries later our cultural shorthand moves from Philip Rahv’s categorization of American writers as either Palefaces (James, Melville…) or Redskins (Whitman, Twain…), to Norman Mailer going on about the white negro in the twentieth century. It’s all that and more and “going native,” “special providence,” and “American exceptionalism” are terms that get at what it’s adding up to. There are too many variables for it to be so simple. Even our President had to convince black Chicago that his lack of specifically American black heritage, meaning his Kenyan father and white mother and Indonesian stepfather, put him outside of slavery’s fallout, if not outside racism as it lingers in his lifetime. This is a distinction to be made, and American blacks have always made and/or resisted such distinctions of color and style. And slaves in the American south were on the whole far better off than those shipped to Caribbean and South American destinies, but that’s just irrelevant to black Americans today who can only consider that their own due special providence. Still quite frightening to contemplate. Further, the south has come of age finally and as the limits of the north become apparent there is a reverse migration, from a north that respected the rights of blacks but doesn’t much want to live with them to a south that never really minded living with blacks. Slavery itself in mother Africa was an ongoing African-on-African crime when the Portuguese first explored the west African coast. It was also and remains an Arab-on-African crime which makes the Muslim affectations of American blacks a kind of blowback as vexed as any other attempt to simplify things American. Lingering black nationalists and white supremacists surely know them horses are out the barn. It’s more like Back to Alabama, than Back to Africa.<br /> <br />
<img src=" https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-QDM2JazZspw/UR6DlkFqXlI/AAAAAAAAEi4/nGvWNIZMqoY/s568/beatsofsouthernwild_jpg.jpg " style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />I wouldn’t have thought to write about two recent films about these issues, <u>Lincoln</u> (2012), or <u>Django Unchained</u> (2013), if I hadn’t first thought to write about <u>Beasts of the Southern Wild</u> (2012). <u>Beasts</u> is a rare film and it’s hard to believe it’s a product of the Sundance lab with its “indie film” template. The young girl’s performance is great, up there with young Ana Torrent’s work (<u>Spirit of the Beehive</u>, <u>Cria Cuervos</u>), but it’s the conception of the father’s character and the Louisiana setting that determines the film. It’s as if novelist Richard Wright’s <b>Native Son</b> character, Bigger Thomas, had been born into a natural state rather than southside Chicago. There were free or freeish black communities in peripheral southern wilds, and some unknown numbers escaped into Indian tribes and shared their fates westward. <u>Beasts of the Southern Wild</u> portrays a vibrant mixed race life along the Louisiana bayou out beyond the levee which protects the city and its industry but destroys the people according to Wink, a rough living black man raising his six-year-old daughter in this bounteous wild. There’s little exposition but he’s older than his years due to drink but he loves his daughter and sternly prepares her for the hard life ahead in between leaving her to her own devices wandering this nether land.<br /> <br />
The film’s been criticized for lacking a political consciousness but though the literalist types might feel better had filmmaker Benh Zeitlin had Wink railing to Hushpuppy about rich white people, its truer and more resonant to the generic natural harshness that life will offer his daughter that he does as he does. I suspect the politics of the film is of the neo-anarchist style, which would account for Wink’s blanket dismissal of the world beyond the levee, dominated by a refinery, as ugly and to be avoided. Artistically this is justified as the kind of rural eccentricity Flannery O’Connor specialized in (the film is adapted from a one-act play by Lucy Alibar called “Juicy and Delicious”). The kids learn at a makeshift dock-side school about the world and its likely end in flood as if its folklore rather than science or religion. They flee the government’s relief center when captured and placed there, but it’s no critique of George Bush or Ray Nagin. The lack of religion and any gospel service may be a white imposition on the material as well. Day to day Hushpuppy’s father teaches her to fish and prepares her to send him off like a Viking when he dies. He insists to her, “The brave man must watch it happen; they don’t run!” and she accepts everything he says though she is afraid and wants to go with him when he dies. During the hurricane that floods the world of “the bathtub” Wink begins cursing the storm as the rains pour through their patchwork roof, then he grabs his shotgun, runs out into the dark and fires up at it. There may be no religion in the film but her father is her god.<br /> <br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-pQaZhnbde60/UR6Dk6Pc_-I/AAAAAAAAEi0/vvhFZMDXpNY/s640/StateJournalRegisterSpringfieldILinaug.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" /><u>Beasts of the Southern Wild</u> is a very good performers movie. Not exactly a great movie by my out-of-date timeless standard, but the nonprofessionals who carry the film are both excellent (Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry). And in research for my film book I’ve seen a ton of older cinematic marginalia that one watches for such nonprofessional performers magic rather than for the writing or direction. The film seems structurally similar to many contemporary digital dramas as if edited together from a ton of footage. It has a number of striking bayou images but overall seems to have been shot quickly without the luxury of waiting for light, weather, etc. The theme of the film is important and rare too as the culture produced by American blacks now speaks almost entirely in urban cadences. Hushpuppy holds birds up to her ear and explains to us in narration what it is they say to each other.<br /> <br />
There is no such charm to be found in <u>Django Uchained</u> though amid the mayhem there is a horse that takes a headshot which is at least novel (when the end-credits come the first declaims that no horses were harmed in the making of the film as if the ASPCA is the top concern). As it’s a Quentin Tarantino film it’s a pastiche of other films. I had heard he was remaking <u>Skin Game</u> (1971) which is a very sharp feature made by television talent starring James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. Now it’s other lesser films that are referenced. Django is not well written as Tarantino’s penchant for jabbering dialogue conflicts fundamentally with the western, even the spaghetti western. Also, our hero Django is tutored all through the film by a fussy German ex-dentist. The best gag is when the freed Django is allowed to pick out his own set of clothes and chooses a blue silk Little Lord Fauntleroy number which leads later to doubts expressed by plantation slaves that he is a free man: “You mean you a free man and you wearin’ that?!” This calls to mind the late David Lightbourne’s fashion axiom: “Black people can wear anything.” Another of his insights regarded Italian-Americans utility, once they’d joined blacks in the cities, with translating radical black couture gestures into something white folks could countenance adapting for themselves. There isn’t a straight parallel from fashion to film with regard to what it is Tarantino is doing but then my point is that the free self-directed ambition of Americans, which often strikes foreigners as selfish or spoiled, is really the freed subject of various old world Crowns. The freed slave in America is that in extremis. And that further boiled down to pure concentrate of America is nigger off the hook! The nigger may not be hero material unalloyed but there’s shared DNA with the American hero who since the sixties has wound like a double helix where Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and others twin Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and more. Box office equality doesn’t exist either but films got made and today the old Irish-American everyman hero of the thirties has been in some large part supplanted by a black American everyman hero (Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Ice Cube, Jamie Foxx…)<br /> <br />
The films made back in the seventies that fired Tarantino’s VCR-like imagination were made for Americans about America, but as Hollywood began to make action films for the world we got Europeans as actions stars which signaled a decadent decline. <u>Django Unchained</u> suffers from Tarantino’s interest in the pop junk of world cinema. American popular culture was once our high folk culture worked out by artists who might have been painters or playwrights in classical civilizations, but they were born bastards in a democratic land without a high art voice. In his pr tour for this film Tarantino has made a number of silly statements but referring to John Ford as a racist is kind of a pointless point, especially as another point he’s been making about old age not serving filmmakers well seems to refer to Ford’s later films, especially the failed “pro-Indian” film <u>Cheyenne Autumn</u> (1964). The Irish were translators for blacks and others as well, political translators as the rabble demos of the growing cities needed English-speaking interlocutors with the WASP elites, and it hardly matters if Ford really was under one of those sheets in <u>Birth of a Nation</u> (1915) when one watches <u>The Searchers</u> (1956) or <u>Judge Priest</u> (1934) or any of many other great films he made. What’s often called racism and deemed an American original sin is really the rough world historical accommodation between peoples who had no experience with each other when they found themselves suddenly here. Might’ve been nice to get through it all more quickly and coolly, but then our ancestors were benighted foreigners once up on a time. It’s only recently that foreigners in their godforsaken nations are finding out just how racist they might be and one reads constantly of the Chinese versus the Africans, the French and the Moroccans, the Japanese and the Koreans, the Swedes and the Arabs. The New York Times usually calls this ethnic tension reserving the word racism for us with our half black Europhile president with game.<br /> <br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-GIoVm2MHMdY/UR6DhuwDo7I/AAAAAAAAEiM/YHPZocuJc50/s325/Lincoln-Spielberg-Lewis.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />John Ford’s early mentor and older brother Francis Ford (who ranks with Griffith and Dwan as architects of the Hollywood drama) in his long sound-era dotage created an often silent character in his brother’s films sometimes referred to as Feeney (their actual family name) about whom film scholar Tag Gallagher writes regarding one of Francis’ last film appearances in John’s <u>The Sun Shines Bright</u> (1953): “…only ‘Brother Feeney’ can kill and retain his innocence, and Priest’s decision to accept it for the best adds to the suggestion that Finney acts for God and Brother John. Indeed, Finney and Mink are the only whites who, like the blacks, resist Fairfield’s white society.” [<b>John Ford – The Man And His Films</b>] In Judge Priest Will Rogers sits in judgment over his fishing pal and accused chicken thief Jeff Poindexter played by Lincoln Perry, a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit. Rogers and Perry were always great together – high schtick in black and white. Ford trusted them and in <u>Steamboat Round the Bend</u> (1935) Ford lets the movie stop while the two of them go for whole pages of dialogue they seem to be making up as they go. I suppose Tarantino is one of those black power rangers who consider Lincoln Perry an Uncle Tom, but given that even Uncle Tom of the novel <b>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</b> may not have been an Uncle Tom, Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson’s creation of the house Negro character Stephen is the best conception in the film and something new, though he’s no Uncle Tom neither.<br /> <br />
<u>Lincoln</u> (2012) is no Uncle Tom but Steven Spielberg might have a drop or two of Tom in him. The film is an impressive portrayal of the political battle in the Congress and White House to pass the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, during the Civil War. Not something easy to portray well. The countervailing risks and cross-purposed rewards don’t add up for Abe quite realistically, judging by what we see with our contemporary issues or non-issues. The film’s history comes from the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, <b>Team of Rivals</b>, but when the film leaves the political machinations only Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field’s scenes together work at all. The rest is Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner bleating for our empathy or respect; they don’t seem to believe Americans can relate to the best aspects of their work so they stoop low and lower yet.<br /> <br />
At one point in <u>Lincoln</u> some border state congressman maybe the one played by Jackie Earle Haley rails at the attempt to “niggerize” the country with this 13th Amendment. I see the “nigger” count in <u>Django Unchained</u> stands at 109. The word isn’t used in <u>Beasts of the Southern Wild</u>, in fact, I can’t recall much real cursing in it. The acting and writing is so good that a drunk railing country nigger works in a PG-13 film that kid’s should see. Whatever Wink’s hostility to the city, that city, New Orleans, is the great capitol of Creole America. It’s where the Indian in the African in the American is remembered and observed in the French Catholic pre-Lenten fast Mardi Gras carnival. How… (I’ll say!) Back in the recent election Barack Obama, President of the United States, hazarded as how he was sure there were other exceptionalisms in the rest of the world like American exceptionalism. He must have misunderstood the question.<br /> <br />
___<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Addenda…</i>
<br /> <br />
<u>Within Our Gates</u> (1920)<br />
Noon Saturday<br />
Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., Chicago<br /> <br />
Christopher Borrelli in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-ent-0207-oscar-micheaux-20130206,0,3879184.column" target="_blank">"Oscar Micheaux: Two Stars of Director's Final Film Recall the Man"</a>.<br /> <br />
<blockquote>
"In 1900, he followed his oldest brother, William, to Chicago, where he lived near the Union Stock Yards and worked in the steel mills around Joliet; he then worked as a porter for the Pullman Palace Car Company; he left Chicago to become a farmer in South Dakota, where he found great success (and failure); in 1913, he wrote a self-published novel, <b>The Conquest</b>, which, like his next six novels, was semi-autobiographical; the success of those first books led him back to Chicago, where in 1918 he opened a film office in the South Loop; his first film, <u>The Homesteader</u> (1919) led him to become a mini-mogul, a contemporary of the Chicago silent film scene that was dominated by Essanay studios, home of Charlie Chaplin; he had hits and bombs but remained a leading source of 'race movies' — films produced specifically for black audiences. 'I think of tenacity when I think of Micheaux,' Stewart said. 'A didactic filmmaker who saw himself speaking to a race, instructing them about how they were on the wrong track, pushing ideas about business ownership, land ownership, the problems with black clergy. And you could argue with his politics, or the quality of the films, which were criticized for not looking as good as Hollywood films. But he was a pioneer, and he carved out a meaningful space.' But by 1940, he had spent two decades on the road, hand-delivering to theaters the few prints of his films that he had. So he left the movies to write books — and seven years later, when those literary prospects dimmed, he returned. <u>The Betrayal</u> was meant to be his comeback."</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Hillary Weston at <i>blackbookmag.com</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/lucy-alibar-on-adapting-her-stage-play-into-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-1.50249" target="_blank">"Lucy Alibar on Adapting Her Stage Play Into <u>Beasts of the Southern Wild</u>"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“<b>How did you find her? What did she do for the audition?</b><br /><br />
Behn tells it better than I do, but for the auditions they did a lot of structured improvisations to see what the kids could do. She had to have a fight with Michael, our producer, because they had to see about that scene where they’re trashing the house and they turn over the table. So she and Michael are fighting and Ben gives Nazzy an empty plastic bottle and is like, Throw this bottle at Michael. She would start to and then she wouldn’t, then she’d start to and she wouldn’t. So Ben was like, Throw the bottle at him! And she turns to him and says, ‘No I can’t, it would be wrong to do that.’ Ben was really struck by that strong sense of ethics and morality that even when there’s a grown-up telling you to do something, she didn’t do it because it was wrong and it involved hurting someone else. So much of the movie is about taking care of people and the courage of empathy and she just had that so strongly—that’s Nazzy’s primary characteristic. She’s so vibrant, too; she’s like flint, shiny flint.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Christopher Caldwell in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fb2e5468-55b7-11e2-bdd2-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Tarantino’s Strange Crusade to Ennoble Horrific Violence"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The film-maker Spike Lee has called this film ‘disrespectful to my ancestors’. The remark has puzzled people but it should not. Monsieur Candie reminisces, ‘surrounded by black faces, day in, day out, I had one question: Why don’t they kill us?’ It is an excellent question. However you answer it, the fact is, they didn’t. In the eyes of history, antebellum blacks retain an honour that their white oppressors will forever be denied. Maybe Mr Lee objects to a failure to see that honour. Where Mr Tarantino sees a solidarity with the victims of the past, others might see a contemporary white American eager to believe that, given the opportunity, other peoples of yesteryear would have behaved as shabbily as his own people did.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Scott Reynolds Nelson at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Django-Untangled-the-Legend/136643/" target="_blank">"<u>Django</u> Untangled: The Legend of the Bad Black Man"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Like the characters in the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the bad men in post-Civil War black folklore were ciphers. Never fully described, they wore big hats, rode horses, and spoke with their pistols…. To fight against ‘the man’ was suicide — but it was a beautiful death.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Edward Kosner in <i>WSJ</i> on Bruce Levine’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324581504578231644288307774.html" target="_blank"><b>The Fall of the House of Dixie</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The scope of slavery at its crest in the decade before Fort Sumter was as vast as it was appalling. In 1858, writes Mr. Levine, there were nearly 60,000 Americans who owned at least 20 slaves. Three thousand men owned 100 or more, and one Georgia planter boasted 1,500 human chattels spread over several properties. In all, there were four million slaves in the states that would form the Confederacy and elsewhere in the Union and its territories. They were valued at the equivalent of $83 billion in today's dollars. The cotton they raised represented fully half of the exports of the young republic, mostly to Britain's ‘dark satanic mills.’ The power of the slave interests was as much political as it was economic. Of the 15 presidents before Lincoln, all but three—the two Adamses and William Henry Harrison, who died after just a month in office—were slave owners or their enablers. Across the South, planters dominated state houses, local governments and congressional delegations.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Barton Swaim in <i>WSJ</i> on Michele Gillespie’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324374004578217831801499760.html" target="_blank"><b>Katherine and R.J. Reynolds</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In 1874 or 1875, Reynolds headed south to the tiny but rail-connected village of Winston, N.C., and there he stayed, literally putting Winston on the map—the town became Winston-Salem when Reynolds, by then the head of one of the largest companies in the region, persuaded the two towns' officials to consolidate in order to attract investment. A few years and a great deal of wealth and capital later, when the tobacco giant Buck Duke temporarily subsumed his company under the American Tobacco Co., Reynolds refused to move his headquarters to New Jersey. That, as Michele Gillespie shows in <b>Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune in the Making of the New South</b>, was just one way in which Reynolds resisted the corporatization of American manufacturing. His ledger books are also full of gifts to churches and civic groups, both black and white, and he was famous for encouraging his workers to approach him for help. Ms. Gillespie calls this ‘paternalism’ and points out that Reynolds's concern for his employees had as much to do with his own interests as any moral concern.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Blain Roberts in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/opinion/racial-politics-and-miss-america.html?_r=0" target="_blank">"The Ugly Side of the Southern Belle"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Southern Miss Americas also symbolized what was at stake in the battle over desegregation: the possibility of interracial sex. Their scantily clad bodies splashed across newspapers nationwide, young white women were the Southerners who would supposedly suffer most if schools were integrated. They would become vulnerable to black men in other public facilities as well, especially swimming pools. Indeed, precisely because they were ‘more sensitive than schools,’ a judge upheld the segregation of Baltimore’s municipal pools in 1954. The Southern Miss Americas of the 1950s and ’60s embodied the Southern ‘way of life’ and justified its defense, however strident. ‘The winner always carries the ideals of her city and state throughout the world,’ Miss South Carolina, Marian McKnight, announced during the 1956 finals (she won the crown). She added that those of her home state were ‘the finest ideals there are.’ It makes sense that white Southerners would celebrate these ideals, but the rest of the nation was also complicit in the South’s Miss America reign. After all, the region’s strong showing at the pageant post-Brown coincided with the contest’s television debut, and during much of this period, the Miss America Pageant annually rated as the first- or second-most-popular show on television.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Adam White in <i>WSJ</i> on Constance Jordan’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324407504578185223975247946.html" target="_blank"><b>Reason and Imagination</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Judge Hand rejected Brown not in spite of his progressive values but because of them. That is the major lesson imparted by <b>Reason and Imagination</b>, a collection of Hand's selected correspondence edited by Constance Jordan (a retired English professor and Hand's granddaughter). The book traces Hand's intellectual journey through the words of Hand himself and those of his correspondents, especially his friends Felix Frankfurter and Walter Lippmann. It becomes clear, over the course of these letters, that the views that propelled Hand to acclaim in the first half of his career were also those that, retained with increasing rigidity and even bitterness, put him at odds with the defining legal decision of his lifetime.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
John Kass in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0206-20130206,0,3431928.column" target="_blank">"Symbolism Buried with an Imperfect Victim"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
"Stokes wasn't an innocent. Far from it. Police said he was a Gangster Disciple. But there were people who loved him, children and parents and friends, and they wept at his grave with the snow falling Tuesday. About 10 days ago, he was shot in a dice game on the South Side, one of more than 40 homicide victims during Chicago's bloody January. Because he wasn't that perfect victim, there were no politicians eager to make the big speech at St. Andrews Temple on Marquette Road, or later at the graveside at Mount Hope Cemetery. So there was no reason to turn him into a symbol for political policies and political agendas. The dozens of young men in mourning at the funeral weren't big speechmakers. They wore stony faces under the straight brims of their baseball caps. They stood on the steps of that church on the edge of Englewood and stared hard at the cops who were in the street, providing security, staring right back at them. The only big speech was made by a gravedigger at Mount Hope after all the mourners had walked back to their cars in the snow. The gravedigger told me to call him Mississippi. His partner was named Raul. 'They never learn,' said Mississippi as he turned a crank and set the gears to grinding. 'I see all these young men up in here. And I try to tell them. And then I see them again up here.'"</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Rebecca Keegan in <i>LAT</i>, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-ca-mn-movie-guns-20130203,0,5347462.story" target="_blank">"Database Catalogs Movie Firearms"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
"Relying on the same wisdom-of-the-crowd model as Wikipedia, Christopher Serrano, 29, and a stable of about 300 regular volunteers have meticulously cataloged the weapons, along with screen shots, in more than 11,500 articles, including entries on underwater firearms, missile launchers and flame throwers. The site is laid out in a simple, schematic style, with pictures, quotes and trivia. But it's the searchable database — similar to the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database (IMDB) — that has made IMFDB.org a resource for Hollywood prop masters, casual gun collectors and anyone looking to settle a bar bet about what kind of rifles Jamie Foxx is carrying in <u>Django Unchained</u> (a variant of a Sharps rifle and a Remington 1858 'Cattleman's Carbine')."</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Nick Street in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324900204578284293699868444.html" target="_blank">"How Megan Fox Got the Holy Spirit"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
"The L.A. of 1906 was very different from the relatively stable, suburbanized metropolis of today. Racial unrest, violent labor protests and the threat of typhus, cholera and even bubonic plague roiled Southern California. Los Angeles itself was experiencing difficult growing pains—the city would triple in size during that first decade of the 20th century, and a boom-and-bust economy had created a restive underclass. In the midst of this turmoil an unorthodox black preacher named William J. Seymour appeared. Seymour's testimony about the spiritual transformation that followed the believer's personal experience of the Holy Spirit connected a radically individualist form of Christianity to the event at Pentecost—an account in the New Testament that serves as a touchstone for both Pentecostals and their Catholic counterparts, Charismatic Renewalists. During the Pentecost event, which is supposed to have occurred 50 days after Jesus' resurrection, his 12 main disciples and several dozen other followers were visited by the Holy Spirit, an ecstatic encounter that bestowed on them abilities such as healing, prophesy and supernatural speech—or 'speaking in tongues.' Seymour's church on Azusa Street in downtown L.A. drew motley throngs that alarmed members of a civic and religious establishment. They saw little to like in a black preacher leading an interracial flock that engaged in a noisily emotional form of worship. But the emphasis on emotion in Pentecostalism was, arguably, the primary reason it proved so attractive."</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cTPoVHYdmgQ/UR6Dh0HJxpI/AAAAAAAAEiQ/P9rpWaVy4XM/s300/NYmagDjango.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Fred "The Hammer" Williamson <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/02/fred-williamson-on-slavery-django-unchained.html" target="_blank">interview in <i>New York</i></a>:<br /><br />
<blockquote>"<b>Eric Benson: Have you seen <u>Django</u>?</b><br /><br />
Fred Williamson: No, I haven’t seen it. I’m not sure I will.<br /><br />
<b>Why is that?</b><br /><br />
I don’t want to see me in the film. I know my friend Jamie Foxx gave a good performance. But I’m still alive. I’m still capable. I’m still able. I still look the way I looked in the seventies. There are no new wrinkles. I can still jump out of cars and jump out of planes and do all the things I did. I still want to be in a position where they say, 'Bring me the Hammer! Don’t bring me somebody that looks like the Hammer, acts like the Hammer, talks like the Hammer; bring me the Hammer!'<br /><br />
<b>Are you in touch with Tarantino at all?</b><br /><br />
I appreciate the acknowledgement by Quentin of <u>The Legend of Nigger Charley</u>. I did a good performance with Quentin in <u>From Dusk Till Dawn</u>. But you don’t go knocking on the door of a guy like that and say, 'Hey, put me in your movie.' If he wants you in the movie, then he’ll call you. I haven’t been called, so I’m not needed. But I’m emulated. I’m not needed, but I’m emulated.<br /><br />
<b>What did you think of Spike Lee’s comment that seeing <u>Django</u> would be disrespectful to his ancestors?</b><br /><br />
That’s ridiculous. That’s flat-out ridiculous. Movies don’t emulate life. Why doesn’t Spike make a slavery movie? I’m available, Spike! We can make <u>Nigger Charley 2</u>, or <u>Nigger Charley 3</u> and <u>4</u>."<br /><br /></blockquote>
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<b>From the London desk of Steve Beeho...</b><br /><br />
The Manchester District Music Archive has started to digitise the back issues of the legendary <a href="http://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/cityfun/" target="_blank">City Fun zine</a>, which ran from 1978 - 1984.<br /> <br />
^^^
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/targetvideo77?feature=watch" target="_blank">Target Video's YouTube channel</a> which seems to have slipped under the radar, judging by the general number of views. More please!<br /> <br />
^^^
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-nXPSA_vOo44/USa6vHmvn9I/AAAAAAAAEjo/YDKwxu2mOgU/s300/Society-of-the-spectacle_300.jpg">Class Wargames film <a href="http://vimeo.com/17116481" target="_blank"><u>The Game of War</u></a>, inspired by Guy Debord's and Alice Becker-Ho's board game.<br /> <br />
^^^
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John Barker at <i>3ammagazine</i> <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/history-in-miniature/" target="_blank">reviews</a> Richard Barbrook and Fabian Thompsett's accompanying book:
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"It describes how a group was formed to popularise and play the Game of War which Guy Debord spent the last 10 years of his life developing and playing with Alice Becker-Ho. It lists the various public venues where the group has played the game in real time, but also describes the game in detail and hints at why they think it is important. The first, unstated, is to rescue Debord, long term member and survivor of the Situationist International (SI), from the ironic recuperation of him and the SI by the cultural establishment they despised. Ironic because they were so hot on any kind of politics that could be, as they called it, recuperated, that is, absorbed by the very ‘Spectacle’ they had described. To have an exhibition devoted to them at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and then for his personal archive to be described as ‘a national treasure’ by the French Minister of Culture in 2009 was the unkindest cut for someone who lived by the sword."</blockquote><br /> <br />
^^^
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The publisher-endorsed <a href="http://nebulabooks.dk/ExpectAnything.pdf" target="_blank">pdf</a> of "Expect Anything Fear Nothing" which focuses primarily on Scandinavian Situationist activity, emphasising the usually down-played significance of Asger Jorn.<br /><br />
The most entertaining piece is Stewart Home's "The Self-Mythologisation of the Situationist International":
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<blockquote>
"It could almost go without saying that Debord was a comic figure who was unable to understand anything happening beyond the end of his own nose; the way in which he attempted to replicate the organisational structure he’d established in Paris elsewhere in the world shows he had no understanding of how different Northern Europe and North America was
at that time from his native France. In England he recruited Chris Gray
and Charlie Radcliffe as London activists to do his donkey work, and then
put them together with a couple of English students who hung around with
him in Paris; Debord didn’t actually tell T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-
Smith they were supposed to control Radcliffe and Gray, and when things
went wrong they were expelled for failing in a task they didn't know they’d
been charged with."</blockquote><br /> <br />
^^^
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The unjustly obscure <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylVAhH_uJHI" target="_blank"><u>Punk: The Early Years</u></a> documentary, packed with great live footage and interviews with first generation British punk luminaries.<br /> <br />
^^^
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Andrew Earle in <i>Spin</i> on the <a href="http://www.spin.com/#articles/blame-nirvana-40-weirdest-post-nevermind-major-label-albums" target="_blank">"40 Weirdest Post-Nevermind Major Label Albums"</a>:
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<blockquote>
"Flipper - American Grafishy (Def American, 1993)
In early-'80s American hardcore, Flipper were a special band of antagonists for a scene in need of antagonism. No major label was jumping at their monolithic, slo-mo, sludge-drone, which was usually based around an intentionally plodding single riff repeated into oblivion. However, it's no secret that Flipper were influential in the underground: see Black Flag's later records, Melvins' use of space, the entire Pissed Jeans' discography, and everything about Rick Rubin's lesser-known art-punk hobby, Hose. In the early '90s, Rubin was in the process of reissuing classic Flipper material (through the Infinite Zero label that he ran with Henry Rollins) and decided to give the guys a chance to record a new album. If Flipper itself was a bizarre thing to invest in, then consider this dismal version of the band, minus co-frontman/bassist Will Shatter, who died in 1987."</blockquote><br /> <br />
^^^
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<img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;hand;" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-yXCDLPeWQvU/USa6wafiXiI/AAAAAAAAEj4/6VGaLbc6JpQ/s300/SNSD_s_Seohyun_displays_a_doll_like_pose_with_her_guitar_400.jpg">Fred Macpherson at <i>Vice.com</i> <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-future-of-guitar-music" target="_blank">"The future of guitar music"</a>:<br />
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<blockquote>
"The guitar continues to hold a consistent place in our lives on both a commercial and cultural level, yet we're still patronised on the subject of how popular it's about to become by the UK media every other January. This has been going on for at least the last decade. <i>NME</i>'s pre-occupation with it all is, at least, understandable – they've been Miss Havisham in Converse since 2001, yet to come to terms with the fact that The Strokes' Is This It really was "It". And "It" was the final line drawn under indie as a cultural phenomenon, leaving only a dressing up box of sound and style."</blockquote><br /> <br />
^^^
<br /><br />
David Brown on a new Dangerhouse release, <a href="http://www.frontierrecords.com/31081.html" target="_blank">Sienna Nanini - "Pants Down Time"</a>
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<blockquote>
"After Wall of Voodoo flamed out and failed to get new bands or liver transplants, percussionist Joe Nanini (the first drummer to combine live and e-drums in recorded and live punk) made an LP in the late 1990s on his way to buy some more heroin in Koreatown. Calling on old friends Billy Bass Nelson (he of pre-Bootsy Funkadelic), multi-sax/reed Hollywood genius Spyder Mitellmann, proto-punk KK Barrett of the Screamers, Rhino 39 superstars Jason Scharback and Larry Parrott, as well as the undead, unmatched Dangerhouse Records production team, all these souls spewed forth a sound that couldn't be repeated in public, and never was, as band members kept dying more quickly than they could be replaced. Deep shit to say the least, and its lyrical quiescence should be completely thawed before fundamental assimilation, as the instrumentals contain no words. As a special down-low bonus, the cover art is Joe's homosexual cartoon animal salute to the original Beggar's Banquet LP sleeve. Why release this record now? Cuz everything else is such unlistenable, boring trash! Pants Down Time is a forgotten, raw slab of vinyl whose time has (perhaps) finally arrived! Sienna Nanini, Joe's vision of a questionable pre-recorded, neo-Eurotrash band with limp wrists and ponytails, wraps a unique, densely-mixed screech around your head. No-core collectors should scratch themselves with wonderment as this is the first release of new material on the original Dangerhouse label since 1979!!! Whatever!"</blockquote><br /> <br />
^^^
<br /><br />
The UCLA class of 1975 <a href="http://www.ucla.edu/optimists/" target="_blank">gets its due</a>.
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<b>Quarry Pond in Naperville</b><br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-D8vTyN-lOh0/UR6DgnP0DUI/AAAAAAAAEiA/Ds3L4uowl4E/s700/QuarryPondNapervilleIll-700.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci
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<b>From the DuPage desk of Joe Carducci…</b><br /><br />
Michael Cieply & Brooks Barnes in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/media/in-hollywood-movies-for-china-bureaucrats-want-a-say.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" target="_blank">"To Get Movies Into China, Hollywood Gives Censors a Preview"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“One production currently facing scrutiny is Disney and Marvel’s ‘Iron Man 3,’ parts of which were filmed in Beijing in the last month. It proceeded under the watchful eye of Chinese bureaucrats, who were invited to the set and asked to advise on creative decisions, according to people briefed on the production who asked for anonymity to avoid conflict with government or company officials. Marvel and Disney had no comment. Another prominent film, Ang Lee’s ‘Life of Pi,’ which was nominated last week for 11 Academy Awards, made it through the process mostly unscathed, but got some pushback over a line in which a character declared that ‘religion is darkness.’ ‘They modified the translation a little, for fear of provoking religious people,’ Mr. Lee said. Hollywood as a whole is shifting toward China-friendly fantasies that will fit comfortably within a revised quota system, which allows more international films to be distributed in China, where 3-D and large-format Imax pictures are particularly favored. <br /><br />
At the same time, it is avoiding subject matter and situations that are likely to cause conflict with the roughly three dozen members of a censorship board run by China’s powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or S.A.R.F.T.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Peter Aspden in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a56312e8-5fd6-11e2-b128-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Western Values"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“It is both a boon and a curse for American civilisation to be the only one mythologised in modern popular culture. In a fledgling nation, this art form immediately resonated with a public anxious to establish an ethical code. The frontier: beautiful metaphor, scary place. America needed its heroes to be better, and badder, than the baddest guys in town. It needed expert gunslingers to persuade people that their future prosperity should not depend on guns. In that respect, the cowboy was a self-destructive hero, which doubly ennobled him. But the symbiosis between America and its fables also posed a problem. Westerns lacked the gravitas of the centuries-old mythologies. The Greeks don’t mess about with Aeschylus. The words of Confucius continue to weigh heavily on the Chinese. But westerns, like all great popular art forms, swayed with the times. They were malleable, able to reflect subtle changes in social attitudes. The taciturn heroes of the 1930s turned into the light-hearted rebels of the 1970s’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and then the redemption-seeking outlaw of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Westerns found themselves unable to remain constant in their moral viewpoints.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Gary Silverman in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/63153088-5fdb-11e2-8d8d-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Bricks, Mortar, Stones and Ramones"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Once I popped into the store and spotted a guy rummaging through the rare albums who had skin so translucent he resembled one of those pictures in an anatomy textbook that identifies the blood vessels of the human body. We made eye contact and I said to myself: ‘That’s Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.’ I’m sure I was right, and here’s why: every time the see-through man found something he liked, he would say, ‘Fantastic’ in an English accent and fling the album cover over his shoulder (they kept the vinyl in the back so you couldn’t steal it). A big man wearing a sweat suit would then pick it up from the floor and pay for the record using a roll of bills as thick as a Chippendale’s bicep. Another of my rock ’n’ roll moments involved Dee Dee Ramone, late bassist of punk rock group the Ramones. Resplendent in a black-and-white leather jacket with western fringe, Dee Dee proved every inch a Ramone as he engaged in a lengthy circular conversation with the sullen guy behind the counter. At issue was Dee Dee’s rap album (described by at least one reviewer as ‘one of the worst recordings of all time’). ‘You like it?’ Dee Dee began. ‘Yeah,’ was the response. ‘Really?’ Dee Dee asked. ‘Yeah,’ the guy replied. After a pause to collect his thoughts, Dee Dee returned to his opening gambit. ‘You like it?’ he asked – and the colloquy was repeated, more or less verbatim. Today, as I look back on those punk rock days, I realise that the people I most wanted to meet at record stores weren’t celebrities but people who were like me – and might like me because of that. If these people happened to look like Julie Christie, or the women at university who did their homework in the art museum library, so much the better. Things worked out differently for me, as they probably did for many other young men who took their music seriously in those days. But I remain grateful to those old record stores for giving me a reason to move about in the world and see what I could find.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Mike Hobart in FT on Duncan Heining’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b8a0007a-4544-11e2-838f-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank"><b>Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers – British Jazz, 1960-1975</b></a>.
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<blockquote>
“Yet Heining is critical of those who make too much of divisions within jazz, preferring to emphasise continuity. We soon learn that the sectarianism voiced in Birmingham, though great copy, was an aberration, certainly for most working musicians. They mingled and mixed, drew lessons from one style and transported them to another. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, such figures of rock as Cream’s Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce started off playing in traditional jazz bands. Heining quotes Pete Townshend: ‘You hear some very weird shit in The Who’s sound, and some of it has got to do with the fact that we used to play a lot of ‘trad’ jazz.’ Of course, the rapid aesthetic changes Heining so accurately captures were fuelled in part by what was happening in the US. But the author, who has previously written about the late American pianist and composer George Russell, shows how British jazz had its own lineages and dynamics. Indeed musicians of all stripes were extraordinarily driven in their search for personal authenticity. When the book opens, jazz is both promoted on variety bills and lurking in pub back rooms. By the book’s end, a college circuit has come and withered, and musicians are scrabbling for Arts Council grants.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-f9pUQdD2RxY/UR6DcYzF6OI/AAAAAAAAEg4/8axPC6QMT_E/s307/MaeMurraybook.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Scott Eyman in <i>WSJ</i> on Michael Ankerich’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203707604578093021695524596.html" target="_blank"><b>Mae Murray</b></a>.
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<blockquote>
“There's a priceless story about Mae Murray going to see ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece about a silent-movie queen hopelessly barricaded behind fantasies of her own enduring stardom. ‘None of us floozies were that nuts,’ Murray is reported to have said in dismissing the film. Michael Ankerich, in this always interesting biography, suggests that, tragically, the story may be apocryphal. My own doubts revolve around where Murray would have gotten the money to see the movie: She was broke by the mid-1930s and destitute by 1950. But if the story is true, Murray was wrong. Some of those floozies were that nuts, and she was Exhibit A. In an era of indulgence—movie stars in the 1920s made huge sums, and income tax was a minor annoyance—no actress put on a gaudier show than Mae Murray. She was born Anna Mary Koenig on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 1885, but by 1920 she lived at the Hotel Des Artistes in Manhattan and painted her living-room ceiling with $7,000 of gold leaf. Her Rolls-Royce had solid gold trim and sable lap rugs. She gave birth to a son, apparently without benefit of wedlock, after flings with Rudolph Valentino and Georges Carpentier. Nobody is sure who the father was, although shortly after the birth she married David Mdivani, one of the marrying Mdivanis—bogus Georgian princes who specialized in wedding rich women, soon to be considerably less so. (Other victims included Pola Negri and Barbara Hutton.)” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Christopher Caldwell in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8c831b72-4a16-11e2-a7b1-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Gangnam Stylishly Debunks Myth of US Cultural Genius"</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
“Why have Americans so dominated the globalised part of popular culture up till now? Despite complaints from France and elsewhere, it was not a matter of ‘cultural imperialism’. The US has little in the way of cultural infrastructure abroad, like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the British Council. And that should not matter because, to repeat, the culture we are talking about is not American culture – it is an international culture in which Americans have played the leading role. The US has benefited from intangible advantages. It uses the lingua franca, the cultural equivalent of printing a reserve currency. It is easier for authors to get translated from English than into English, and the same principle holds for movies. US corporations have the longest familiarity with the relatively new business models used in cultural markets. For instance, iTunes is an American invention. This magnifies US cultural advantages because the market into which artists from other countries must sell is often abysmal. A superb report by Youkyung Lee and Ryan Nakashima showed how little Psy has made from ‘Gangnam Style’ in his native South Korea: about $50,000 from CD sales and $61,000 from 3.6m downloads.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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Stephen Budiansky in <i>WSJ</i> on Jared Diamond’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323277504578189871656766216.html" target="_blank"><b>The World Until Yesterday</b></a>.
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<blockquote>
“He notes that in most hunter-gatherer cultures children are nursed on demand until age 3 or 4, sleep with their parents, are comforted instantly when they cry, and play together in multi-age play groups. They also are rarely punished and allowed far more freedom than we are generally comfortable with. Among the !Kung and Aka pygmies of Africa, children are never physically disciplined, on the grounds that they ‘have no wits and are not responsible for their actions,’ Mr. Diamond writes. ‘Instead, !Kung and Aka children are permitted to slap and insult their parents.’ In one tribe in the New Guinea Highlands, Mr. Diamond noticed that most of the adults had serious burn scars. It turned out these were mostly acquired in infancy: The adults made it a practice never to interfere with a baby, to the point of not preventing them playing around or touching a fire. (Other groups let small children play with sharp knives.) Westerners who have lived with these small-scale societies are ‘struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children’; they are responsible, articulate and competent, and the ‘adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren't an issue.’ But Mr. Diamond admits that all these impressions ‘are just impressions,’ hard to measure and prove, and his ultimate verdict is nuanced: ‘At a minimum . . . one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren't disastrous, and they don't produce societies of obvious sociopaths.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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Lisa Pevtzow in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-16/news/ct-x-0116-free-range-kids-20130116_1_parents-children-monica" target="_blank">"Kids Given Free Range"</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
“Monica said she first began thinking about this two years ago when her daughter Cassidy, now 9, asked her why the children in the books she reads, books written in the 1960s and 1970s, all wander around by themselves. ‘I told her that was how I grew up, and she said she wanted to do it too,’ Monica said. Monica and her husband thought about moving to the suburbs. Their friend told them not to bother, because suburban parents don't really let their children out either. Instead, they decided to meet up with some like-minded parents and try something that seems almost radical in this day and age. For several years now, parents have been told by child-rearing experts that they need to throw the helicopter out with the bathwater and raise resilient children who can handle failure and are able to move independently through the world. They are told to unwrap the down comforter their children are smothered in and let them experience the consequences of boredom, the occasional bad teacher or a bad grade. But Monica's group did not want her last name used in this article. Although the parents have taken a stand about letting their children explore their neighborhood unsupervised and believe the risks of predators are overblown, a newspaper story about them still pushes the edge of their comfort zone, and they feel that giving too much identifying information tempts fate.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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Paige Hochschild in <i>FIRST THINGS</i>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/12/what-are-children-for" target="_blank">"What Are Children For? "</a>.
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<blockquote>
“The law increasingly required that marriage be entered into freely by both parties and that both ‘must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties.’ It is easier he condescendingly notes, for the impoverished proletariat to enter into such marriages because they have no real property to preserve in marriage and thus can marry solely for love. If love, however is the chief motivation for entering into a marriage, then ‘falling out of’ love is naturally a good reason to end a marriage, and the wife – until then rarely permitted legally to divorce – should be as free to end it as the husband. Where are the children in this evolving picture of marriage? Engels argues that in traditional societies, the motivation for having offspring was largely a matter of economics, honor, family lineage, and so on. In modern societies, children no longer confer any necessary economic advantage and instead are clearly a financial burden. The only possible reason to have them now is natural affectivity, and Engels believes this ought to be the sole reason for having a child – indeed, this motivation safeguards children from the logic of capitalist society. Though parents, particularly mothers, have natural affection for their offspring, Engels insists that children are just one of the many effects of marriage, all of which are meant to contribute to the couple’s personal fulfillment. He has absolutely no vision of a further social good to which the having of children might be ordered in the absence of economic considerations. And on precisely that point he proves prophetic. Affective models of marriage and parenting dominate today, with attendant obsessions with psychological fulfillment, behavior, status, and methodology. Indeed, there are no longer many good reasons to have children, to the extent that they no longer contribute usefully to the running of a household.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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Mark Oppenheimer in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/us/a-home-schooling-pioneer-looks-to-the-future.html" target="_blank">"A Pioneer of Home Schooling Looks to Its Technological Future"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Back in 1993, when Mary Pride and her husband appeared with their eight children in the first issue of Wired magazine, it was hard to say what seemed strangest: that the Prides were Protestants who rejected birth control, that they home-schooled their children or that in home schooling they relied heavily on computer software. All those choices would have seemed bravely countercultural, or just weird. ‘Bill and Mary Pride have eight kids, all of them home-schooled,’ begins the short profile, under the headline ‘Crash-Tested Homework.’ The family’s home classroom is ‘stuffed with a Mac, Apple IIGS, Amiga, a 386 clone, various CD-ROM devices, Nintendo, a Miracle piano system, and so on.’ The small photograph accompanying the article shows Bill Pride, with his beard and wide red suspenders, presiding over a gaggle of children and two stone-age desktop computers. ‘In between lessons,’ the article continues, ‘Ma and Pa and their computer-savvy kids have evaluated every piece of educational software known to be on the market. The kids are ceaseless and merciless testers.’ Curious readers could find the family’s judgments summed up in ‘Prides’ Guide to Educational Software,’ published the previous year.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Sue Shellenbarger in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324624404578255792399791294.html" target="_blank">"At-Home Dads Make Parenting More of a ‘Guy’ Thing"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“At-home dads aren't trying to be perfect moms, says a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Instead, they take pride in letting their children take more risks on the playground, compared with their spouses. They tend to jettison daily routines in favor of spontaneous adventures with the kids. And many use technology or DIY skills to squeeze household budgets, or find shortcuts through projects and chores, says the study, based on interviews, observation of father-child outings and an analysis of thousands of pages of at-home dads' blogs and online commentary. ‘Just as we saw a feminization of the workplace in the past few decades, with more emphasis on such skills as empathy and listening, we are seeing the opposite at home—a masculinization of domestic tasks and routines,’ says Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, an assistant professor of marketing at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and lead author of the study. ‘Many men are building this alternative model of home life that is outdoorsy, playful and more technology-oriented.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-U--p7gVAxFs/UR6DbB451EI/AAAAAAAAEgs/5hEEkh46B_Q/s234/AgainstFairness.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Meghan Clyne in <i>WSJ</i> on Stephen Asma’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323277504578193373169684976.html" target="_blank"><b>Against Fairness</b></a>.
<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“Many of Mr. Asma's claims rest on evolutionary biology. We are biologically wired for favoritism, he says. It begins with our ‘first circle of favorites’: the nuclear family, to whom we are bonded by processes like imprinting and hormones like oxytocin. Darwinian kin selection, meanwhile, has shaped social animals to prize the well-being of their clans above their own safety, as when prairie dogs chirp to warn relatives of nearby predators. Over several centuries, though, Western cultural developments have driven us to resist our natural favoritism. Where medieval art allowed ‘favorites’—saints, patrons—to be portrayed larger than life, the introduction of perspective standardized dimensions. After Galileo and Newton, the Earth was no longer the center of the universe but simply one of many celestial bodies all governed by the same laws of motion. And the revolution wasn't just limited to science. Adam Smith called for an ‘impartial spectator’ perspective in ethics; Jeremy Bentham tried to mathematize pleasure and pain. Today, Mr. Asma says, ‘well-educated liberal secular Westerners see morality exclusively as the respecting of individual rights,’ which requires every individual to be treated the same. Our contemporary egalitarianism, the author argues, is reinforced by some unhappy conditions of modern life. The digital world offers networks of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ‘friends,’ but these are hollow imitations of real tribes, forged through shared histories and mutual sacrifices. False advertising helps, too. Children's entertainment, like ‘Sesame Street,’ erroneously labels basic good behavior—don't be racist, share—as "fairness" when in fact it is ‘tolerance’ or ‘generosity,’ both of which are fully compatible with favoritism. Mr. Asma makes a powerful case that egalitarianism is driven principally by envy, and in our materialistic, post-religious age, emotions like envy ‘find new secular outlets.’ </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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<i>WSJ</i>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578220002834225378.html" target="_blank">"We, Too, Are Violent Animals"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“The violence among chimpanzees is impressively humanlike in several ways. Consider primitive human warfare, which has been well documented around the world. Groups of hunter-gatherers who come into contact with militarily superior groups of farmers rapidly abandon war, but where power is more equal, the hostility between societies that speak different languages is almost endless. Under those conditions, hunter-gatherers are remarkably similar to chimpanzees: Killings are mostly carried out by males, the killers tend to act in small gangs attacking vulnerable individuals, and every adult male in the society readily participates. Moreover, with hunter-gatherers as with chimpanzees, the ordinary response to encountering strangers who are vulnerable is to attack them. Most animals do not exhibit this striking constellation of behaviors, but chimpanzees and humans are not the only species that form coalitions for killing. Other animals that use this strategy to kill their own species include group-living carnivores such as lions, spotted hyenas and wolves. The resulting mortality rate can be high: Among wolves, up to 40% of adults die from attacks by other packs. Killing among these carnivores shows that ape-sized brains and grasping hands do not account for this unusual violent behavior. Two other features appear to be critical: variable group size and group-held territory.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Dennis Byrne in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-22/news/ct-oped-0122-byrne-20130122_1_roe-and-doe-late-term-abortion-personal-pac" target="_blank">"Reflecting on 40 Years of Roe, Doe"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“Doe v. Bolton is the companion to the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion. Doe v. Bolton, issued on the same day, took Roe a step further by legalizing abortion for any reason at any time during pregnancy. In effect, Doe v. Bolton, however unintentionally, negated Roe's reasonable proclamation that the constitutional right to an abortion is not absolute. Despite Doe's import, you'll notice that very few stories today about Roe's 40th anniversary mention it. This omission is extreme in its ignorance or dishonesty. Doe's significance is that it seeks to define Roe's declaration that abortion is permitted to preserve a woman's health. Doe's interpretation of the meaning of ‘health’ is so broad that it encompasses just about every possible reason — real or concocted — put forward by the woman and her doctor to legally justify an abortion up to and including the very moment of birth. In Doe, the court said: ‘We agree … that the medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age — relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Stephen Asma at <i>nytimes.com</i>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/the-myth-of-universal-love/" target="_blank">"The Myth of Universal Love"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Singer seems to be suggesting that I arrive at perfect egalitarian ethics by first accepting perfect egalitarian metaphysics. But I, for one, do not accept it. Nor, I venture to guess, do many others. All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties — and only conjectural assumption can make them appear so. (For many of us, family members are more entitled than friends, and friends more entitled than acquaintances, and acquaintances more than strangers, and so on.) It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption. Singer’s abstract ‘ethical point of view’ is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Our actual lives are punctuated by moral gravity, which makes some people (kith and kin) much more central and forceful in our daily orbit of values. (Gravity is actually an apt metaphor. Some people in our lives take on great ‘affection mass’ and bend our continuum of values into a solar-system of biases. Family members usually have more moral gravity —what Robert Nozick calls ‘ethical pull.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
James Taranto at <i>wsj.com</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323596204578241691461160054.html" target="_blank">"Gray Lady Dumps Darwin"</a>.
<br /><br />
<blockquote>
“It's unclear why we should think that responses to hypothetical proposals, such as those in the Conley study, would be a better guide to actual behavior than responses to play-acts that the experimental subjects believe to be genuine proposals. Do words speak louder than actions in Ann Arbor? That objection aside, the results of Conley's study are in no way inconsistent with those of the famous 1989 one. The latter found that men are far likelier than women to say yes to a proposal of sex on the basis of no information except physical appearance and a fleeting first impression. The former found that women are as apt as men to say yes to an offer of sex with a high-status partner, one who has proved himself either by becoming famous or by sexually satisfying a presumably trusted common friend. Men incline toward promiscuity, women toward hypergamy. Darwin 2, Slater 0. Why would the New York Times, which scoffs at creationism, publish such an intellectually slipshod attack on evolution? Because evolutionary psychology contradicts the feminist dogma that the sexes are created equal, that all differences between men and women (or at least those differences that represent male dominance or superiority) are pure products of cultural conditioning. Feminism is the new creationism. The left loves to scoff at people who believe that Genesis is literally true, but these days feminist beliefs are a lot more influential.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Supriya Sharma in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2088dd62-5664-11e2-aa70-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"India Has at Last Broken Its Silence About Sexual Violence"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In a country where an unborn girl faces the threat of annihilation, why did the tragedy of one woman resonate so deeply? The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with the multiple empowerments under way in India: of women, of youth, of the middle class. This was visible in the village where a Jat girl, a schoolmate of the victim, shared information on the men from her own community accused of rape, choosing sisterhood over caste. Until it was cut short, the life of the 23-year-old woman contained the same kernel of promise: she was bright enough to inspire her father to sell his small parcel of land in the village to fund her college education. Even the most cynical of urban, affluent Indians could not look away. India’s urban middle class is notoriously apathetic. It safeguards its hard-earned prosperity by cocooning itself from the country’s daily cruelties. It can be berated for not caring about sexual violence in the conflict zones of Kashmir and Chhattisgarh, but, as the recent events show, it has at least begun to care about what happens in its cities.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Gardiner Harris in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/world/asia/in-rapes-aftermath-india-debates-violence-against-women.html" target="_blank">"India’s New Focus on Rape Shows Only the Surface of Women’s Perils"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“Using techniques pioneered by Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1998, researchers estimate that there are as many as 100 million ‘missing women,’ as Mr. Sen called them, in India. These are women who would be alive if they died at the same rates relative to men as woman die relative to men in more developed countries, and their ranks grow by nearly two million each year, studies by an American and Canadian research team concluded. <br /><br />
Some of these lives are ended before they begin: Indian women are far more likely to abort female fetuses than male ones. Still, such birth selection accounts for, at most, 12 percent of the figure, the researchers found. The official explanation for many of the deaths of ‘missing women’ is that they died from accidents or injuries, but there is little reason to believe that Indians are especially clumsy or accident-prone, the researchers said. Instead, they believe that in many cases the official explanations mask deadly crimes. ‘Our guess is that a lot of these deaths are due to the dowry phenomenon, but it just doesn’t get reported that way,’ said Siwan Anderson, an associate professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and an author of the studies.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Ananth Krishnan at <i>yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/china-delhi-gang-rape-spurs-online-debate-censorship" target="_blank">"In China, Delhi Gang Rape Spurs Online Debate, Censorship"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“Chinese authorities have moved to censor news about the Delhi gang rape and ensuing protests after the incident triggered a heated debate online between State media outlets and pro-democracy voices. The incident and the protests in New Delhi in recent days have received wide attention in China. While the brutal attack was initially highlighted by Communist Party-run outlets as indicative of the failures of India’s democratic system to ensure stability, the following protests in New Delhi triggered calls from pro-reform bloggers for the Chinese government to learn from India and to allow the public to express its voice.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Angshukanta Chakraborty at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/angshukanta-chakraborty/at-root-of-rape-is-language" target="_blank">"At the Root of Rape Is Language"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“All foundational stories and histories of origin contain the rape of women and murder of men, women and children. From Livy’s history of Rome’s origins, to the present day extraction of historical records during medieval or colonial times, politics has been inextricably linked with the bodypolitic —especially of the woman. Raped, mutilated, dead or disappeared women litter the pages of history. The American state of Virginia is named after a historico-mythical character Verginia, who, when threatened with rape, is killed by her own father to let her escape the fate of being ‘violated.’ A number of American presidents have been known to rape their female acquaintances or attendants, but the tales are either hushed up as unsubstantiated rumours, or are circulated as juicy gossip of the President’s sexual bravado. In the world wars, women have been routinely used and raped: more so if they were from the working class, or had communist inclinations. Chastity is not a deterrent to rape: the hitherto chaste woman becomes defiled the moment she’s forcibly consumed. Closer home, in traditional Hindu scriptures and ancient lore, the ultimate authority of a husband over his wife was indicated by ‘his operational availability over her body’, as suggested by scholars of Indian gender studies. ‘Marriage makes man master of his wife’s womb,’ thus overruling any possibility of such a thing as ‘marital rape.’Further, the ideal wife, according to scriptures, is ‘one who does household chores like a servant, gives counsel like a minister, is as beautiful and charming as the goddess Laxmi, is as patient as the earth-goddess, bestows love and tenderness like a mother, and gives pleasure like a courtesan.’ A classic example of the treatment meted out to the wife is how Ram banishes Sita to the forest because he cannot fathom how a man, Raavan, can leave a woman within his power untouched. In the Hindutva-laced veneration of Ram as ‘maryada purushottam’ (the first among honourable men), his despicable but socially-enforced misogyny is firmly reinforced as the strength and nobility of his character, while Raavan, who indeed deserves respect for knowing how to behave with a woman, and who had vowed never to touch a woman without her consent, is cast as an evil abductor and the arch-villain.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Sara Schonhardt in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/world/asia/indonesian-city-plans-to-ban-women-from-straddling-motorbikes.html" target="_blank">"Indonesian Women Told How to Ride Motorbikes"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“Leaflets have been circulating for a week in Lhokseumawe, in Aceh Province on the island of Sumatra, informing residents about a proposed bylaw that would prohibit women from sitting in a straddle position or holding on to the driver while riding on the back of a motorbike. <br /><br />
Most Indonesians are Muslims, but Aceh is the only province that seeks to strictly enforce Islamic law, or Shariah. The province already has bylaws prohibiting gambling and adultery and restricting how women may dress in public, with penalties that include public canings.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
John Eligon in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/16women.html" target="_blank">"An Oil Town Where Men Are Many, and Women Are Hounded"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“Over the past six years, North Dakota has shot from the middle of the pack to become the state with the third-highest ratio of single young men to single young women in the country. In 2011, nearly 58 percent of North Dakota’s unmarried 18-to-34-year-olds were men, according to census data. That disparity was even starker in the three counties where the oil boom is heaviest — there were more than 1.6 young single men for every young single woman. And most people around here say the gap is considerably larger. Census data mostly captures permanent residents. Most of the men who come here to work maintain their primary residences elsewhere and split time between the oil fields and their homes. And women note that many of the men who approach them are married. Some women have banked on the female shortage. Williston’s two strip clubs attract dancers from around the country. Prostitutes from out of state troll the bars.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Pam Belluck in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/health/the-long-life-of-the-perfect-woman.html" target="_blank">"Zest a Likely Factor in ‘Perfect’ Woman’s Long Life"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Published reports from 1912 and 1913 provide glimpses of the type of person Miss Scheel was and of her immediate-post-‘perfect’ experience. She participated in many sports, playing basketball at Cornell. ‘I play a guard, where my weight helps,’ she told a newspaper. She was a suffragette and, the Times article said, ‘doesn’t know what fear is.’ She ate only three meals every two days, loved beefsteak and shunned candy and caffeine. An article in The Oregonian asked her about her advice for healthy living, reporting that ‘Miss Scheel feels that the average girl does too much of the wrong sort of thing — too many dances and not enough good bracing tramps. I just got back from a 25-mile tramp to Enfield Falls.’ Some of the news media coverage was catty, even brutal. And it was extremely detailed. Her particulars — the size of her chest, waist and hips — were compared to the Venus de Milo. A day after the Times article, The New York Herald ran a story about Miss Scheel above the fold on its front page: ‘Brooklyn Venus Much Too Large is Verdict of Physical Culturists.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Sara Llana in <i>CSM</i>, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0108/Do-French-women-need-feminism" target="_blank">"Do French Women Need Feminism? "</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“French professor Anne Deneys-Tunney, at New York University, says that she finds the US, where she has spent the last 20 years, to be a more egalitarian society for gender relations. American women have certain protections such as clear sexual harassment policies that are strictly enforced, yet it comes at a social cost, including a cultural tone that many French would find distasteful and too politically correct. The French want legal equality that doesn't come bound up in the inability to compliment women at work. ‘Women are freer here, but on the other hand, it has destroyed a certain charm, an innocence and lightness of life,’ she says. But that freedom can, at its worst, have a social cost. In July in the wake of the Strauss-Kahn case, for example, the country's female housing minister, Cécile Duflot, was subject to shouts and wolf whistles from the right-wing opposition as she prepared to address the national Parliament in a flowery but professional dress. The speaker of the chamber had to ask the male representatives to stop hooting at her. Yet Ms. Duflot didn't shy away from responding. As she began her address to the chamber amid taunting from the opposition, she said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen representatives, but mostly gentlemen, apparently.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zGKUU-RgGro/UR6DdejN-tI/AAAAAAAAEhI/yZxqsd_qt58/s327/The%2520Pike%2520D%2527Annunzio.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Ian Thomson in <i>FT</i> on Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f124fa24-5a5a-11e2-bc93-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank"><b>The Pike – Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In September 1919, in an attempt to restore Italy’s pride after the ‘mutilated victory’ of the first world war, d’Annunzio led 2,000 nationalist irregulars in seizing the Adriatic port of Fiume (later Rijeka, part of Croatia) in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Amid displays of balcony-ranting and other braggadocio he sought to reclaim the city as Italian territory. His fighters were dubbed ‘legionnaires’ to recall ancient Roman greatness, and they wore black shirts before the term fascismo was current. For more than a year, Fiume operated as an independent quasi-Fascist republic, giving Europe a glimpse of the dark decades ahead.
Hughes-Hallett describes d’Annunzio as a ‘brilliant pasticheur’ – a man whom a contemporary likened to a lurking pike, snapping at passing fads and influences. But in many ways, his life was his own finest creation. He could come up with the wildest nonsense about himself (prematurely bald at the age of 22, he considered his egg-like cranium one of the ‘beauties of creation’). At the age of 52 he volunteered for frontline duty against the Austrians, crash-landing his warplane and losing his right eye. His lakeside villa in northern Italy, the Vittoriale, is a memorial to his bellicose exploits. On display are captured Austrian machine-guns as well as the coffin on which he used to lie and contemplate death, surrounded by leopard skins. Mussolini was impressed both by d’Annunzio’s priapic endeavours and his violent contempt for parliamentary liberalism. Yet d’Annunzio was unhappy about Mussolini’s ties to Hitler: the Germans were a barbarous horde from the wrong side of the Alps, he thought.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
David Roman in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578217384062120520.html" target="_blank">"Spain Drains Fund Backing Pensions"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Spain has been quietly tapping the country's richest piggy bank, the Social Security Reserve Fund, as a buyer of last resort for Spanish government bonds, raising questions about the fund's role as guarantor of future pension payouts. Now the scarcely noticed borrowing spree, carried out amid a prolonged economic crisis, is about to end, because there is little left to take. At least 90% of the €65 billion ($85.7 billion) fund has been invested in increasingly risky Spanish debt, according to official figures, and the government has begun withdrawing cash for emergency payments.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
Jack Ewing in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/global/german-central-bank-to-repatriate-gold-reserves.html" target="_blank">"Germany Will Cart Home Some of Its Buried Treasure"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“During the cold war, West Germany followed a policy of storing its gold as far west as possible in case of a Soviet invasion. While that worry is gone, there is still an argument for keeping some gold in financial centers like New York and London. It remains the one currency that is accepted everywhere. In the event of a currency crisis, the gold could be quickly deployed in financial markets to help restore confidence. The New York Fed stores the German gold without cost on the theory that the presence of foreign gold supports the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. A spokesman for the New York Fed declined to comment. The Bundesbank announcement follows a public outcry last year after a clash in Parliament about whether all the bank’s gold was properly accounted for. For the great many Germans who still rue the day they had to trade their marks for euros, there has been at least one consolation. If the common currency did not work out, Germany still had huge reserves of the hardest currency of all: gold. Except, as many people learned for the first time last year, it did not — at least not in the country itself. More than two-thirds of Germany’s gold reserves, valued at 137 billion euros, or $183 billion, is abroad, stored in vaults in New York, Paris and London. The new policy will include the complete withdrawal of 374 tons of German gold stored at the Banque de France in Paris, about 11 percent of the total. Bundesbank officials were quick to note that the decision was not a reflection of French trustworthiness.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Kostas Vaxevanis in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/opinion/greeces-rotten-oligarchy.html" target="_blank">"Greece’s Rotten Oligarchy"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the past 40 years the ruling parties handed out government jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications. <br /><br />
But the real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as ‘entrepreneurs.’ They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br /><br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_QiZqDGzZ5Q/UR6DfDFEfHI/AAAAAAAAEhg/UDjBo76v5ww/s296/TheDevilinHistory.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Leon Aron in <i>WSJ</i> on Vladimir Tismaneanu’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578220063102364592.html" target="_blank"><b>The Devil in History</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Quite properly, there is more in this book about communism and Stalinism than fascism and Nazism. Although the former survived the latter, in Europe, by almost half a century (and still rules Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam), documentation of communism, its crimes and, especially, its victims has been minuscule compared with the myriad studies of fascism, even as, by one estimate in the book, fascism cost 25 million lives and communism between 80 and 100 million. The ‘Black Book of Communism,’ a catalog of killings, tortures, famines, mass deportations and deaths in camps, was not published until 1997—and even then, as Mr. Tismaneanu reminds us, it met with fierce critique by defenders of the communist ‘experiment.’ <br /><br />
The greater attention to communism is justified not only as the correction of a glaring historical and analytical imbalance. Despite occasional pathetic attempts at revival, fascism died with Hitler and Mussolini, but the dragon teeth that Lenin and Stalin and Mao sowed in the soil of Marxism have not been extracted or lost their potency, even with the fall, or erosion, of state communism. Whether in the streets of major European cities, ‘occupied’ Wall Street or al Qaeda hide-outs, the key elements of the ‘totalitarian temptation,’ of which we have been warned by Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Czeslaw Miłosz, Karl Popper, Jean-François Revel and Boris Souvarine, are instantly recognizable, embodying the themes explored by Mr. Tismaneanu: the zero-sum Manichaeism of Lenin's ‘kto kogo’ (‘Who [defeats] whom’) political philosophy; the stigmatization, demonization and, eventually, dehumanization of the ‘enemy’; radical egalitarianism; the fanatical hatred of ‘bourgeois philistinism’ and democratic capitalism; and the ecstatic hope of deliverance from the uncertainties of economic and political competition into a conflictless Eden under an omnipotent state.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Patricia Kowsmann in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324660404578201484035826330.html" target="_blank">"Slowing Birthrates Weigh on Europe’s Weak Economies"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Experts say a 2.1 fertility rate is needed to keep the population stable, assuming net migration is zero. In crisis-stricken Greece, the fertility rate dropped to an estimated 1.43 in 2011 after rising to 1.51 in 2008 from 1.27 in 2000, Mr. Sobotka said. Official data from Greece show abortions there rose 50% to 300,000 in 2011 from 2010. In Spain, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe, the fertility rate fell to 1.36 in 2011, after increasing to 1.46 in 2008 from 1.23 in 2000, according to Mr. Sobotka's data. In Ireland, the economy is still growing despite the country's austerity regime, begun when it took a bailout in 2010. The Irish birthrate registered only a modest fall in 2011, Mr. Sobotka said, to 2.05 from 2.1 in 2008. In Portugal, the number of births in 2012 is expected to tally around 90,000, the lowest level in more than 60 years.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Satyajit Das in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7599cf50-59d4-11e2-b728-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"More Closed Economies Will Not Aid Recovery"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In a world of lower growth, nations seek to improve their own position through trade restrictions, manipulating currency values, capital controls and different regulatory regimes. These policies reinforce the trend to autarky. Despite oft-repeated statements at G20 meetings about the importance of free trade and avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s, trade restrictions are increasing. Subsidies, government procurement policies favouring national suppliers, ‘buy local’ campaigns, preferential financing and industry assistance policies are used to direct demand. Safety and environmental standards are used to prevent foreign products penetrating national markets.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Samuel Brittan in FT, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e6e90348-5596-11e2-bdd2-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"The Long Foreshadowed Decline of Western Dominance"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“It may be worth starting with the German writer Oswald Spengler who published in 1918-1923 an alarmist book, <b>The Decline of the West</b>. He was not so much wrong as premature. And like many ‘declinists’ he failed to see that a decline in relative position was compatible with high and even rising western living standards. Indeed, what has to be explained is not the west’s looming relative decline but its temporary pre-eminence. Of a world population approaching 7bn, the US and western Europe together account for a mere 770m. Their gross domestic product per head – a very approximate guide to living standards – is three times the world average. Such discrepancies can hardly be expected to last in an increasingly globalised planet. In 1500, just after Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery, China and India were both estimated to have had a total GDP considerably higher than western Europe’s and GDP per head only slightly lower. Earlier still, in about 1000, living standards were fairly uniform – and low – throughout the world but the estimates show China slightly in the lead. The reversal towards an earlier norm has already started. Emerging and developing countries now account, for the first time in the modern era, for about half of total world output. Historians have offered endless explanations for the west’s temporary surge: religions that put more emphasis on the individual and his activities in this life; an intellectual climate more favourable to scientific thought; property rights that safeguarded acquisitions of wealth; less autocratic forms of government. The list is endless and doubtless all these elements played a part. In the late 18th century the government of England’s George III sent a trade mission to China, only to be rebuffed by the Chinese emperor who declared that his country had everything it required and did not need western trinkets.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Harry Eyres in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/997dfa36-50e2-11e2-b287-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Tales of Colonial Derring-do"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The tensions that arose between Raffles and Farquhar when Raffles returned to Singapore in 1822, and resulted in Farquhar’s summary dismissal from the post of Resident, were partly caused by disagreements over style of administration. Farquhar had a ‘native wife’, the half-Malay Nonya Clemaine by whom he had six children, whom he supported even when he returned to Scotland and married a younger bride. He was thus embedded in Malay society in a way that Raffles, for all his mastery of the language, never was. His ‘mild sway’ included the toleration – among the native though not the European population – of the opium trade and of slavery. In one way, despite his unfair treatment at the hands both of Raffles and of posterity, Farquhar was fortunate. He managed to preserve the most enchanting and appropriate monument, for a man who made himself widely loved and appreciated in a far-off place, and had the intensest interest in its flora and fauna. That monument consists of his collection of 477 natural history drawings, commissioned from unnamed Chinese artists when he was Resident of Melaka from 1795 to 1818, brought by him to Singapore and then on to London. Unlike the greater part of the collection of his rival Raffles, which was burnt in a ship fire, the collection survived these perilous journeys; in 1826 Farquhar donated it to the Royal Asiatic Society in London.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Hazem Saghieh at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/hazem-saghieh-samer-frangie/syrias-regime-and-populist-left" target="_blank">"Syria’s Regime and a Populist Left"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The unease of much of the western left in face of the popular uprising in Syria has taken several different forms. Among them are scepticism about its ‘revolutionary’ character; the notion that it is rather a civil war in the making; and the belief that it is a ‘western conspiracy’ against the ‘last bastion of resistance’ in the Arab world. This unease - which contrasts sharply with the left's endorsement of the other Arab revolutions - has less to do with the facts on the ground than with the long, tortuous love-affair that has bound what might be called the ‘western populist left’ to the dying Syrian regime. This populist group, a brand of the third-worldist left, obviously does not represent the left as a whole, but it has emerged as one of the family's most prominent currents in relation to the Arab world. Its connection to the Syrian regime highlights both the flaws of its thinking and this regime's capacity to co-opt radical discourses for dubious aims. After 1967, the western left became obsessed with the Palestinian cause. Perhaps a double atonement was involved: for the west’s colonial history in the region, but also for the left's own affection for Israel in the twenty years since its inception, on the grounds that the country had a ‘socialist’ character embodied by its kibbutz movement. This drive for atonement ended in 1993, when the Oslo accords were signed. The left then lost interest in Palestine, at a time when the Palestinian struggle was morphing into various forms of Islamism. The western left had (and has) many ways of excusing and justifying Islamism, but for a myriad of reasons can never join forces with it.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Diana Appelbaum at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3419/turkey-islamic-supremacy" target="_blank">"Islamic Supremacy Alive and Well in Ankara"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Islamic supersession can be understood in two senses, as replacement and as erasure. Going forward, Islam will supplant all other faiths. But Islam also controls the time before the birth of Muhammad; it claims to have preexisted all other faiths with the Qur'an preexisting all other scripture. Because Islam has always existed, all children are born Muslim although their parents may rear them in another faith. The proof text is in the reported words of Muhammad: ‘Every child is born according to God's plan; then his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian [Zoroastrian].’ The claim that Islam has always existed effectively erases all that went before Muhammad. The notion that Islam is the final, true faith, divinely ordained to rule everywhere, has driven Islamic imperialism for 1,400 years. Supersessionist erasure can also be enacted on the landscape. The ancient pagan shrine in Mecca was converted into the Muslim Kaaba. But the Muslim claim is not that monotheism has replaced pagan worship at the Kaaba in the way that a thousand Christian churches were built on pagan altars, but rather that the Kaaba was the "first house" of God (Qur'an 3:96-97) built by Abraham and Ishmael. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was superseded by the erection of the Dome of the Rock, bolstered by the myth of Muhammad's ‘Night Journey’ to Jerusalem, erasing the pre-Islamic history of the temple and, with it, all Christian and Jewish claims.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Efraim Karsh at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3429/ankara-unacknowledged-genocide" target="_blank">"Ankara’s Unacknowledged Genocide"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The ethnic cleansing of a virtually unarmed nation cannot, therefore, but indicate that, in the words of Turkish-American scholar Taner Akçam, ‘the wartime policies of the Ottoman government toward the Armenians were never … the result of military exigencies’ but were rather the culmination of a preconceived design to destroy Armenian nationalism, for which war provided the ideal pretext. Drawing on a wealth of Ottoman, German, British, and U.S. documents, Akçam unveils a disturbing picture of elaborate planning and meticulous execution of Ottoman Armenia's ethnic cleansing. He traces this design to the Ottomans' defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, which sealed their creeping expulsion from Europe and convinced the Young Turks leadership, dominated since January 1913 by the radical triumvirate—minister of war Enver Pasha, minister of the interior Talat Pasha, and minister of the navy Djemal Pasha—of the empire's imminent demise absent drastic homogenization of the Anatolian homeland: "The Christian population was to be reduced; that is, removed, and the non-Turkish Muslim groups were to be assimilated.’ This resulted in a campaign of massacres and expulsions against the Ottoman Greeks, suspended after November 1914 under German pressure, and culminating in the cleansing of the Armenians. The six historically Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia were emptied of their inhabitants, who either perished on the harrowing track to exile or were resettled in the deserts of present-day Syria and Iraq. Most of the Cilician and West Anatolian Armenians endured a similar fate.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-gQUEqzKgp8Y/UR6Dd3DOtdI/AAAAAAAAEhQ/62P7cW6Hczs/s278/The-Nativist-Prophets-of-Early-Islamic-Iran-Rural-Revolt-and-Local-Zoroastrianism.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Peter Brown in <i>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</i> on Patricia Crone’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article1180199.ece" target="_blank"><b>The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In the third century a Zoroastrian priest, Zardusht son of Khrosak, propounded an analysis of the ills of society and their remedy through the redistribution of land and through a reform of marriage (a sharing of land and a sharing of wives) that was far more consequential than any scheme dreamed up by Plato. Two centuries later, his follower, Mazdak, put these ideas into action. He propounded what was ‘one of the most striking examples of pre-modern communism’. From the late fifth to the early sixth centuries, at a time of famine and looting, ‘a communist vision of Iran’ held sway across the plateau, until it was suppressed (around 530) with memorable (and much-praised) savagery by the great Shah Khusraw Anushirwan. Two centuries later, as the Muslim armies of the East turned back towards the West to fight the civil war that led to the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the men of the mountains and of the villages, along with the petty gentry of the small castles, pitched in. They first appeared as followers of pious Muslim warlords bent on the reform of Islam. But few of them had been Islamized. Many of them returned to their villages, disillusioned, demobilized, but still dangerous.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Hassan Hassan at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/Dont-Blame-It-on-al-Ghazali/20481c22458i0p9/index.html" target="_blank">"Don’t Blame It on al-Ghazali"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“After writing his book, The Incoherence of Philosophers, Algazel as he was known in medieval Europe, is said to have ‘stabbed falsafa in such a manner that it could not rise again in the Muslim world’. Thanks to his unparalleled mastery of falsafa and Islamic theology, he injected repugnance among Muslims for science that ultimately led to its decline and, in the process, the decline of Islamic civilisation. Or at least, this is what academics and Orientalists have argued for over a century. I believe this assessment is misinformed. Academics are correct in pinpointing the exact period in which Muslims began turning away from scientific innovation – the 11th century – but they have identified the wrong person. Abu Ali al-Hassan al-Tusi (1018–1092), better known as Nizam al-Mulk, the grand vizier of the Seljuq dynasty, was in fact the driving force. Nizam al-Mulk had created a system of education known as ‘Nizamiyah’ that focused on religious studies at the expense of independent inquiry. For the first time in Islamic history, religious studies became institutionalised and religious studies were seen as a more lucrative career path. Previously, sciences and Islamic law were intertwined.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Ziauddin Sardar <a href="http://en.qantara.de/Muslims-yearn-for-real-debate/20501c22482i0p9/index.html" target="_blank">interview</a> at <i>qantara.de</i>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“It is known that the second issue of CM, on The Idea of Islam, was banned in Malaysia. Could you say more about bans or negative feedback; what issues have aroused most controversy among governments or individual readers?
Ziauddin Sardar: While the reaction to CM has generally been quite ecstatic, we do have our critics. It is not for those who see themselves as guardians of 'truth', in Muslim societies or the West, and we expect harsh reactions from these quarters. Not every Salafist or Wahhabis will approve its contents. Neither will the traditionalists be comfortable with what we have to say. So the second issue, The Idea of Islam, was banned in Malaysia because the religious authorities there disapproved of the content. Our co-publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP) Pakistan, did not publish issue 3, Fear and Loathing, because they thought that an article on 'Islamic beards', and another one arguing that Muslims need to develop a language to deal with homosexuality, could produce repercussions from 'the Jihadis'. Frankly, we are not too bothered: we will say what needs to be said.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Isabel Kershner in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/world/middleeast/documents-illuminate-jewish-life-in-ancient-muslim-empire.html" target="_blank">"Illuminating Jewish Life in a Muslim Empire"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“‘This is the first time that we have actual physical evidence of the Jewish life and culture within the Iranian culture of the 11th century,’ said Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai, the library’s academic director. While other historical sources have pointed to the existence of Jewish communities in that area in the early Middle Ages, he said, the documents offer ‘proof that they were there.’ The texts are known collectively as the Afghan Geniza, a Hebrew term for a repository of sacred texts and objects. They were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic and Arabic, and some used the Babylonian system for vowels, a linguistic assortment that scholars said would have been nearly impossible to forge. One text includes a discussion of Hebrew words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Another is a letter between two brothers in which one denied rumors that he was no longer an observant Jew.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Benjamin Balint in <i>WSJ</i> on Frederic Raphael’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323984704578205833909945430.html" target="_blank"><b>A Jew Among Romans</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Captured by the Romans in the town of Jotapata, Josephus saved his skin by switching sides and predicting to Vespasian, the Roman commander, that he would soon become emperor. Like his biblical namesake, Josephus ventured an oracular prediction and when it came to pass was rescued by the ruler whose future he forecast. Two years later, in the year 70, Josephus accompanied Titus—Vespasian's son and his successor as Rome's commander in Judaea—to the fateful siege of Jerusalem. He faced a difficult position: ‘My life was frequently in danger,’ he wrote, ‘both from the Jews, who were eager to get me into their hands to gratify their revenge, and from the Romans, who attributed every reverse to some treachery on my part.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
John Kay in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fe905396-5e62-11e2-a771-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"The Lesson of Victorian London’s Rise from Sewer to Spectacle"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Over the next decade an extensive network of sewers was built under the supervision of the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. The project benefited not just the nostrils of Londoners but the face of London itself; most strikingly through the creation of embankments on each side of the Thames. The northern embankment is one of London’s major traffic arteries and supports a series of gardens. Beneath is an underground railway line and the city’s principal sewer. On the south bank, a walkway from County Hall to Tower Bridge atop the sewer offers one of the world’s most spectacular riverscapes. These sewers have met the needs of the capital for 150 years. Only recently has their capacity come under pressure and work will soon begin on a new Thames tunnel, deep underground. The technology needed for such construction did not exist in Bazalgette’s day: 20 years earlier the Brunels had built the first river tunnel under the Thames, barely a quarter of a mile long, at ruinous cost in financial and human terms. Yet if Bazalgette’s scheme had been subjected to current appraisal procedures, it is hard to imagine that it would have been built.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-kaPxtLfz8NM/UR6DempjmnI/AAAAAAAAEhY/PDF61FnmmI0/s300/TheBarbarousYears.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Charles Mann in <i>NYT</i> on Bernard Bailyn’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/books/review/the-barbarous-years-by-bernard-bailyn.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><b>The Barbarous Years – The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Once the colony’s backers discovered that Chesapeake Bay was, contrary to their initial belief, laden with neither gold and silver nor a passage to the Pacific, they tried everything they could think of to salvage their investment. Ship after ship of ill-equipped migrants — many of them abducted, many of them children — went out, each vessel intended to fulfill some new harebrained scheme: winemaking, silk-making, glassmaking. Each and every one failed, as did the Virginia Company, which went bankrupt in 1624. By then three-quarters or more of the Jamestown colonists had died, felled by starvation, disease, murder, wolves, Indian arrows and even cannibalism. English people kept coming anyway, lured by a discovery that the Crown and company hated: tobacco. Hip, fun, disdained by stuffy authorities and wildly addictive, the smoking weed was an ideal consumer product. Thousands of migrants were willing to risk death for the chance to cash in on England’s squadrons of new nicotine junkies. The Chesapeake Bay became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Robert Merry in <i>NATIONAL INTEREST</i>, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/article/spenglers-ominous-prophecy-7878" target="_blank">"Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“A similar distinction is seen in architecture. While the Ionic hovers, the Gothic soars. It was no accident that Western man invented the flying buttress, enabling him to construct cathedrals reflecting his relentless drive toward space. Or that he developed the window as architecture: ‘In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless.’ And just as classical architecture led to sculpture as the premier Apollinian art form, Western architecture led inexorably to music. From around 1500 to about 1800, writes Spengler, as Faustian man grappled with his ‘will to spacial transcendence,’ instrumental music emerged as the West’s ruling art form. But first Western man transformed painting, which went through its own ‘decisive epochal turn’ in the sixteenth century. Using light and shadow to burst through space and time, Western painters brought dimension to their work, and background became a symbol of the infinite. Thus was ‘the depth-experience of the Faustian soul . . . captured in the kinesis of a picture.’ This artistic expression reached its fullest flowering with Rembrandt. And it is significant that, as Dutch Baroque painting reached culmination, the West’s cultural momentum was picked up by the soaring new expression of Baroque music. As for Western science, it wasn’t accidental that the telescope was a Western invention or that human flight first occurred in the West. Likewise, with drama, particularly tragedy, the West developed a penetrating ‘biographical’ approach, as opposed to the Greeks’ ‘anecdotal’ outlook.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Heba Saleh in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/68411680" target="_blank">"Fortress Algeria Wary of Western Influence Over Its Policies"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Having vanquished a violent Islamic insurgency that killed 200,000 people during the 1990s and having evaded the upheavals of the Arab uprising – possibly due to the traumas of its recent past – Algeria had largely disappeared from the headlines until last week. Algeria is not insular in the way North Korea is. It is, however, a country with an opaque regime dominated by a shadowy intelligence service that is hoping to keep its distance from a meddling world. Western journalists are only intermittently welcome, and a form of economic nationalism, which the country has only recently started to ease, has governed prickly relations with international investors in oil and gas, the mainstay of the economy.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Katrina Manson in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c85b0054-42c0-11e2-a4e4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Radical Islam Puts Zanzibar’s Relaxed Way of Life in Jeopardy"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Al-Noor charity, set up four years ago with money from private donors in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, is among a clutch of new foreign-funded religious institutions to increase its investment on the island. As well as the radio, it has established a mosque, internet rooms and a nationwide network of madrassas. It plans to build more, and every year pays for students and teachers alike to study in Sudan, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. Academics estimate that Saudi Arabia – where Wahhabi Islam is practised – alone spends $1m a year on Islamic institutions in Zanzibar. ‘Wahhabi madrasas are just starting – they are now many and Saudi funds are spreading their work – they have nice buildings, they are well off and well organised; they preach and convince the parents to come there, so the effect of the madrassa is very powerful,’ says Idrissa Ahmad Khamis, a teacher who is from the Sufi tradition, a mystical form of Islam opposed by more literalist Wahhabis or Salafists.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
William Wallis in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b681453e-5e75-11e2-a771-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Continent’s Twin Poles on Different Trajectories"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Sub-Saharan Africa’s voice on the global stage has been strongest in the past decade and a half when its two most powerful players have worked together. When Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo were heads of state in South Africa and Nigeria, respectively, this was often the case. The two men had a shared history dating back to when Gen Obasanjo was military head of state in the late 1970s and Nigeria supported Mr Mbeki and other African National Congress exiles from apartheid South Africa. In different ways the gruff, former general, elected as civilian leader in 1999, and the prickly intellectual, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as head of state the same year, had clout and influence across the globe…. The same cannot be said of President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria and his counterpart Jacob Zuma in South Africa, both of whom have been struggling with domestic crises in the past year….”</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
David Gauthier-Villars & Drew Hinshaw in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323301104578257900207783508.html" target="_blank">"Mali Advance Shows Paris’s Africa Dilemma"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The Mali campaign, which comes just weeks after France dispatched soldiers to two other countries, underscores Paris's Africa dilemma: In spite of its increasingly stated desire to distance itself from the continent's conflicts, it has continued to step in. Late last year, President François Hollande gave voice to French reluctance, telling Senegalese lawmakers he would provide only logistical aid and training to West African countries fighting radical Islamists roaming through Mali and the vast Sahara. He wouldn't send troops, he stressed. Just weeks later, French soldiers are on the ground in Mali. After French troops helped to retake the towns of Diabaly and Douentza from al Qaeda-backed rebels on Monday, Mr. Hollande says he is ready to see out a protracted war against a foe that is blamed for last week's deadly attack on a remote natural-gas complex in Algeria, which left at least 37 foreign nationals dead. ‘Only France could decide and make this intervention,’ Mr. Hollande said in a speech in Dubai last week.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Odd Westad in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/opinion/why-china-and-japan-cant-get-along.html" target="_blank">"In Asia, Ill Will Runs Deep"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The long shadow of history continues to haunt relations between the two countries. In Asia, World War II started in 1937 as a Sino-Japanese war; millions of Chinese were killed as a result of Japan’s expansionism. But that does not explain why young people in China and Japan today are more inimical in their views of one another than their forebears — even immediately after the war — were. The real explanation lies further back. Japan’s rise in the late 19th century was seen as an affront by China, which had always felt entitled to the mantle of regional leadership. Mao Zedong and other founders of the Chinese Communist Party adopted these views and bequeathed them to their successors. Most Chinese today therefore regard Japan’s wealth, and its position as America’s main ally in Asia, as results of ill-gotten gains. Even when the Chinese state was at its weakest, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its elites felt that the Confucianism China had exported to its key neighbors — Korea, Japan and Vietnam — was the root of a common culture. Other countries in the ‘Confucian zone’ were supposed to simply accept China’s natural leadership.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Peter Tasker in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/24bb561a-5b25-11e2-8ccc-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Japanomics Goes Where Few Nations Have Gone Before"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“For the past 15 years Japan has been trying to shrink its way out of its problems. That did not work. Now it is about to try the opposite approach. Japan’s ‘lost decades’ have long been an awful warning to the world of the damage that a spectacular boom and bust can inflict on an economy’s long-term prospects. Now Japan could become another kind of example. If the pedal-to-the-metal reflationary policies of Shinzo Abe, the recently elected prime minister, succeed, there will be a profound impact on post-crisis policy making everywhere. History shows that Japan rarely does things by half-measures. The financial bubble of the 1980s was probably the biggest in history. At its peak the Tokyo stock market was worth more than half of global market capitalisation. The contraction was equally intense.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-to51G3NMILM/UR6DfWOiuUI/AAAAAAAAEho/q9gK0iyAQ2I/s300/TokyoANewAvantGarde.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />Ian Buruma in <i>NY REVIEW OF BOOKS</i> on Doryun Chong’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/obsessions-tokyo/?pagination=false" target="_blank"><b>Tokyo 1955-1970 – A New Avant-Garde</b>, and MoMA’s “Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1962-1984"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Many Japanese artists and intellectuals in the 1950s rebelled against the overwhelming American influence of the immediate postwar by looking to Europe, especially France, for ideas. Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty were widely read. French berets and long hair became the common badges of the thinking man (still in evidence today, among men of a certain age). The French action painter Georges Mathieu visited Japan in 1957, and demonstrated his art wearing a kimono. The Bauhaus was another source of inspiration. But the main point was to be engage, and the main sponsor of engaged art was a most peculiar one: the conservative Yomiuri newspaper company, which had been the most zealous promoter of wartime propaganda only a few years before. To scrub this blot on its reputation, the Yomiuri did its best to promote avant-garde shows and events under a radical manifesto that promised an ‘art revolution’; Japanese society would be ‘democratized’ through art.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Patti Waldmeir in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6be76698-63c0-11e2-af8c-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Smoking Out the Tree-Hugging Set"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Slavish devotees to materialism are scarcely thin on the ground even now: how could it be otherwise, in a country where credit card debt is still a new and exciting concept? But tucked away in rural corners of this vast country are more and more urban professionals who have chosen to drop out and make goat’s cheese (or the Chinese equivalent: live off the land, open a guest house or start an artists’ commune). They are, for lack of a better word, Chinese ‘hippies’.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Jamil Anderlini in <i>FT</i> on Juan Cardenal & Heriberto Araujo’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/49aa4532-5ff6-11e2-8d8d-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank"><b>China’s Silent Army – The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing’s Image</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“It is the sympathetic accounts of ordinary emigrants’ experiences that provide the backdrop for the real insights of the book. At various points the authors point out that the bad behaviour of some Chinese companies abroad often comes down to their willingness to cut corrupt deals with local elites, who benefit directly from Chinese investment while their own people miss out. This pattern is exacerbated by the fact that authoritarian China itself lacks a strong rule of law, free press or civil society that can ‘keep watch, set limits, denounce or punish the inappropriate actions of China’s corporations abroad – as happens in democratic countries’.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Kathrin Hille in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/68443631" target="_blank">"Fighting Talk is Beijing’s Shot at Gluing the Nation Together"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“For many years, western military officials have been urging Beijing to be more transparent about its military modernization and strategic intentions. You should be careful what you wish for. Beijing is now much more straightforward and few like the message. To put it simply, China is talking about war. Xu Qiliang, deputy chairman of the Central Military Commission, told troops in Qingdao and Luoyang last weekend that they ‘must do everything to focus on winning wars.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Simon Rabinovitch in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/68443632" target="_blank">"China’s Lottery Boom Conceals Worry at Damage to the Vulnerable"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In the late 1980s, seeking to boost revenue, the government made an exception to a ban on all gambling that had been strictly enforced since Mao’s day and created a lottery to support the development of a welfare system. More than two decades on, this anomaly has grown into the biggest lottery boom the world has ever seen. Annual ticket sales are nearly 15,000-times higher than at their humble beginnings. China is on track to be the world’s largest lottery market within this decade. Ticket sales were up nearly 20 per cent last year and the industry is worth $40bn, ranking only behind the US, which pulls in more than $50bn.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Jamil Anderlini in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b23f7d90-4a95-11e2-968a-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Beijing Pre-empts End of the World in Crackdown on Eastern Lightning Cult"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“A nationwide crackdown has so far led to the arrest of about 1,000 followers of the quasi-Christian group, which also calls itself the Church of Almighty God. Eastern Lightning, one of China’s most aggressive millenarian sects, believes that Christ has been reincarnated as a woman in central China and is on a mission to lead the faithful in a decisive battle to slay the ‘great red dragon’ of the Communist party.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
David Brown at <i>yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/state-secrets-revealed-vietnam" target="_blank">"State Secrets Revealed in Vietnam"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Thanh's principal mission was to explain why, in the view of Vietnam's leaders, a policy of restraint is the nation's only rational course vis-a-vis its huge neighbor. Had he stuck to that theme, the recording might not have made much of a splash. However, Thanh chose to embroider his two-hour talk with riffs on the treachery of Americans, the admirable qualities of the North Korean and Iranian regimes, the likely return of Russia to the region, and a lengthy, sometimes impenetrable discussion of Vietnam's millennium-plus co-existence with the resurgent giant to the north. For critics of the Vietnamese regime, the rambling remarks of this hitherto obscure professor epitomize what's wrong with the nation's politics. It is not the foreign policy discussion that has most energized the blogosphere, however. Domestic attention has riveted on a short passage near the beginning of Thanh's talk, when he noted that in his first term as President of Russia, Vladimir Putin had banned Communist Party activities and abolished the pensions of former Soviet Union officials. That could also happen in Vietnam if the Party were to fall from power, Thanh warned. ‘Comrades now working don't yet have a pension but sooner or later, we'll all be eligible for our retirement pay, and we hope every one of us will draw it in full. I'm explaining this so that each of you realizes that defending our nation and socialist ideology covers a lot of things, and among these is the very practical fact that we are protecting our own pensions and the pensions of those who will come after us... So, I have to say clearly, we must do everything we can to protect our socialist Vietnamese regime at all costs.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Gardiner Harris in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/world/asia/india-takes-aim-at-poverty-with-cash-transfer-program.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"India Aims to Keep Money for Poor Out of Other’s Pockets"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“India has more poor people than any nation on earth, but many of its antipoverty programs end up feeding the rich more than the needy. A new program hopes to change that. On Jan. 1, India eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts of about 245,000 people in 20 of the nation’s hundreds of districts, in a bid to prevent corrupt state and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own pockets. Hundreds of thousands more people will be added to the program in the coming months. In a country of 1.2 billion, the numbers so far are modest, but some officials and economists see the start of direct payments as revolutionary — a program intended not only to curb corruption but also to serve as a vehicle for lifting countless millions out of poverty altogether.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
James Harrigan & Anthony Davis in <i>IBD</i>, <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/011013-640173-16-trillion-federal-debt-causes-inflation.htm?ven=rss" target="_blank">"Runaway Debt Inevitably Will Bring Inflation"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“From 1954 through 2012, the federal government shelled out a total of almost $72 trillion on all spending, combined. Over the same period, it collected revenues of under $56 trillion from all sources. The $16 trillion difference is today's federal debt. But this simple math hides the fact that the dollar in your pocket today doesn't buy what the dollar in your grandfather's pocket bought years ago. There is a sleight-of-hand to Washington's method of dealing with long-term debt. Like every shell game, those who play will lose to those who make the rules. And make no mistake, we are all playing by Washington's rules.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Stephen Foley in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38d48444-5e3d-11e2-a771-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Outlook Unchanged"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Rating agencies’ processes for managing conflicts of interest are now more closely scrutinised following a demand by the G20 in 2009 that they be brought under the oversight of regulators. Nine agencies are formally registered in the US and 20 in Europe. Outside the big three there is consternation. Smaller rivals fear that the cost of new rules is entrenching the status quo, making it ever harder to shake up the industry. ‘It’s hard for anybody to complain too loudly about all this new, relatively onerous regulation because it’s pretty obvious why we are finding ourselves in this situation,’ says Dan Curry, president at DBRS, Canada’s dominant rater, which has been trying to build a bigger global footprint. ‘We tried to politely point out to regulators that they designed all this regulation looking at, particularly, Moody’s and S&P, and a lot of these smaller agencies are going to get caught in the crossfire. Everyone’s saying they’d like more competition but what you’re doing is impeding competition and creating big barriers to entry.’ According to executives at the big three companies, they are entrenched for a reason: reputations and analytical prowess built up over generations. S&P traces its history back to 1860, when Henry Varnum Poor published his History of the Railroads and Canals of the United States; John Moody & Company published Moody’s Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities in 1900. Fitch, established in 1913, thinks of itself as a hungry young challenger, and the best horse for those looking to back competition in the industry.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
James Mackintosh in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f755949e-5b4a-11e2-8ccc-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"The Short View"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Financial repression has been one of the buzzwords of the past three years: the idea that cash-strapped governments will raise a hidden tax by pushing up inflation while holding down interest rates. Thursday brought good and bad news on this front. The bad news first: the 10-year inflation-linked gilt yield – Britain’s benchmark real interest rates – plunged by the most in a quarter of a century, to a new low of minus 0.9 per cent. Buyers lock in a return below inflation for a decade. The good news, at least for investors, is that this was the result of the UK’s Office for National Statistics deciding not to fiddle with the calculation of the retail prices index, used for inflation-linked bonds. There are good reasons to change RPI: the ONS estimates it overstates inflation by almost a full percentage point, half of that the unintended effect of a change in clothing price measurement. Factor this back in, and the UK’s real 10-year real interest rate is zero. More relevant to investors is the compelling matter of close to £3bn in interest payments: taxpayers will keep paying it to bondholders. Index changes could be justified, but would smack of financial repression.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Shahien Nasiripour in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/de39aef8-5a84-11e2-b60e-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Ipo3s7qF" target="_blank">"Republicans Join Liberals to Control Rise of the ‘Megabank’"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“‘The Republican response to Dodd-Frank’s overkill is to break up the banks. The far left also wants to break up the big banks,’ said Jaret Seiberg, senior policy analyst at Guggenheim Securities. ‘There are . . . serious threats here.’ Among the critics of large financial groups is Ed Royce, a senior Republican on the House financial services committee. Mr Royce last week wrote a letter to Dan Tarullo, the US Federal Reserve governor overseeing financial regulation, asking that the Fed conduct a comprehensive analysis to determine the size at which big financial groups achieve economies of scale. The lawmaker also asked that the Fed determine whether the lower funding costs large banks presently enjoy is a result of those efficiencies or a market perception that financial groups are guaranteed by the US government.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Brian Barry in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-11/news/ct-perspec-0111-fiscal-20130111_1_electoral-college-electoral-votes-credit-ratings" target="_blank">"Blue States’ Fiscal Woes Test Obama"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“It may take a decade or more for this dynamic to take hold, but as leaders of both parties bargain over the debt ceiling and assess their strategies for deficit talks during Obama's second term, they should also think about the path of state finances. The prospects should unnerve Democrats, in particular: The 26 states Obama carried in November tended overwhelmingly to have lower credit ratings than the 24 where he lost. The most obvious examples are California and Illinois, two big states that are deep-blue politically and deep in the red fiscally. The pattern holds much more broadly, however, across the states that broke for Obama rather than the Republican nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. To see this, imagine an electoral college in which each state's worth, rather than being dependent on its population, was instead determined by the soundness of its Standard & Poor's credit rating.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ad787f38-5da4-11e2-ba99-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Republicans Split Between Tea Party and Business"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“While the Republican party is often seen as the party of big business, its shift toward populism has – on some issues, including fiscal matters – created a divide between corporate interests and the Tea Party-driven members in the House of Representatives. Some Republicans are quietly seething that business leaders were too closely aligned with the White House on the push for higher taxes in December. Members of Congress, such as Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a conservative leader, portray themselves as defenders of small business interests, not the Fortune 500, which pushed for increases in tax rates that Republicans say disproportionately hit small enterprises. Mr Patti says business is fighting a two-front war, with uncompromising anti-tax advocates on one side and the other that advocates public spending, saying ‘every government dollar is good’. ‘Because we are glass half full kind of people we are saying you are both kind of right,’ he says.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<i>CT</i>: <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-12-30/news/ct-met-illinois-pension-problem-20121230_1_pension-reform-pension-mess-chicago-teachers-pension-fund" target="_blank">"Pension-Mess Primer"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“That is where state government, Chicago's City Hall and some suburbs find themselves today, reeling from the very real consequences of decades of deferred financial maintenance on their retirement systems. Displaying a chronic lack of leadership that spans both Democratic and Republican control, elected officials committed to a costly array of retirement promises for government workers but failed to set aside anything close to adequate money to pay for them.
The how-we-got-here part of the story has resulted in furious finger-pointing among politicians and employee unions as the issue has come to dominate public policy debate in Illinois. Rhetoric aside, there's a reason average folks should care: Not only are taxpayers on the hook for the tens of billions of dollars, but the enormous pressure to put more toward retirement costs is leaving less money to spend on stuff voters tend to favor, including education.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Ann Pettifor at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ann-pettifor/power-to-create-money-out-of-thin-air" target="_blank">"The Power to ‘Create Money Out of Thin Air’"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“However, while Ingham’s review of heterodox analyses is illuminating, it is, by his own admission, not comprehensive and, I will argue, includes a number of flawed analyses which are the subject of current debate, and discussed in some detail in this review. First while acknowledging that capitalism’s hallmark is the ‘elastic production of money’ he then retracts, and suggests that private credit-creation is constrained by the practice of ‘fractional reserve banking’ – a form of commercial banking probably not practised since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Again this is the subject of heated debate within the economics sphere, so more on the subject below. Second Ingham, like many economists, blames the inflation of the 1970s on the ‘the power of monopoly capital and their labour forces to mark up their respective prices’. This analysis appears to discount the role played by the City of London in creating excessive credit - ‘too much money chasing too few goods and services’ - after Chancellor Anthony Barber’s assault on banking regulation in 1971. Third, by his own admission, Ingham arbitrarily excludes from his list of heterodox theorists a number of 20th century thinkers who have greatly illuminated our understanding of both the systemic nature of capitalism but also its dutiful hand-maiden, neoliberal economic theory. While I respect his right to choose the most influential, the inclusion of progressive 20th century thinkers would have added considerable value to this study of capitalism. These disagreements are not new, and I am not the first to raise them. However given the extent to which society, political parties and progressives have a ‘blind spot’ for the admittedly opaque role played by private bankers in the economic life of nations, I believe it important to raise further discussion about ‘fractional reserve banking’ and the causality of inflation.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Gillian Tett in <i>FT</i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0f1181e-60b2-11e2-a31a-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Reality Not Politics Dictates Corporate Cash Hoarding"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“But is there another way to look at that cash mountain? Finn Poschmann, vice president of research at the CD Howe Institute, a rightwing think-tank in Toronto, has recently analysed historical data on Canadian corporate balance sheets, and come to some striking conclusions. Looked at from a long-term perspective, this cash hoarding is not a new phenomenon, he argues. On the contrary, cash holdings first started to rise a couple of decades ago and then bounced up in 2003, shortly after the collapse of the internet bubble. They also jumped again after financial crisis of 2007-08 but, since that simply built on earlier rises, it implies the trend cannot be blamed on the financial crisis, or political uncertainty alone. Instead, Mr Poschmann thinks ‘changing trade conditions, improvements in technology and logistics, and responses to market incentives’ are the main reasons why cash holdings are rising.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Annie Lowrey in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/business/a-trillion-dollar-coin-brings-a-jackpot-of-jests.html" target="_blank">"A Trillion-Dollar Coin as a Way to Handle the Debt Hits a Jackpot of Jests"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“The workaround would come from exploiting a 1997 law that allows the Treasury to ‘mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the secretary, in the secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.’ The idea was that a secretary might authorize the creation of a commemorative eagle coin, for instance, to be put on sale for collectors. But the law inadvertently gave the Treasury secretary the power to mint, say, a $1 trillion coin, or even a $5 trillion coin, or even a $1 quadrillion coin. Rather than selling it, he might deposit it at the Federal Reserve. Presto! The shiny new asset would erase a trillion dollars in debt liabilities.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Annie Lowrey in <i>NYTMag</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/magazine/washingtons-economic-boom-financed-by-you.html?pagewanted=1&_r=5&" target="_blank">"The Bucks Stopped Here"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“When Abdo founded his business, in 1996, the United States was enjoying around 4 percent economic growth, but in Washington, dysfunction and Mayor Marion Barry Jr. reigned. The city government was locked in a mismanagement-driven fiscal crisis: traffic lights were malfunctioning; garbage trucks stopped picking up trash; District residents were advised to boil their own water; President Clinton and Congress placed the city into federal receivership. During the 1990s, while employment in Washington declined, Northern Virginia added 300,000 jobs, and the Maryland suburbs added about half that. ‘Washington was a national embarrassment,’ Abdo said back inside the Range Rover. ‘There was all this aggressive panhandling, all these vacant burned-out buildings. But I knew the city could only go so low. It’s one of the least cyclical economies in the country, and it has this tremendous urban fabric.’ Abdo figured that federal employment would remain relatively stable, even in recessions. The continued opening of Metro stations would also allow for transit-driven development. And of course, there was that tremendous urban fabric — the brick row houses that make up the bulk of the housing in the city’s center, from Georgetown in the west to Anacostia in the southeast, and give it some of its genteel European feel. Abdo’s timing, it turned out, couldn’t have been better. Billions in federal spending, largely a result of two foreign wars, were pouring into the local economy by the early 2000s. Then came the housing bubble. But after it burst, a remarkable inversion occurred: as the country withered, Washington bloomed.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Robert Self in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/opinion/is-a-political-realignment-possible.html" target="_blank">"Are We There Yet? "</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Roosevelt and Reagan were historical opponents in the 20th century version of our longstanding battle between empowered and limited government. Roosevelt argued that ‘we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.’ Reagan might as well have been talking to F.D.R. when he countered, ‘We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give.’ Yet to understand the full meaning of their re-election, we have to look closely at what allowed each party to define an era. The Democratic Party dominated the period between 1932 and 1980 with nearly unassailable Congressional majorities. The Republican Party was far more dependent on the executive branch and a few friendly Congresses. The House of Representatives had a Democratic majority every year but four between 1933 and 1995, the Senate every year but four between 1933 and 1981. While the Roosevelt-Truman and Kennedy-Johnson presidencies were instrumental in developing Democratic liberalism, it was Congressional Democratic strength that defined the era and boxed in Eisenhower and Nixon. That Republicans have rarely enjoyed such unassailable majorities helps us understand recent history.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Holman Jenkins in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235104578243593278114024.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank">"Green Energy’s Baptists and Bootleggers"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Twenty-nine states now have such mandates, and a recent defeat signals no topping out in this most enduring source of subsidies for solar entrepreneurs. In November, activists largely funded by a San Francisco green-energy promoter failed to amend Michigan's state constitution to up the state's existing mandate to 25% from 10%. Yes, amend the state constitution: Most greenies now agree the campaign failed by overreaching and should have settled for seeking a legislated increase. Political scholars use the term ‘baptists-and-bootleggers’ to describe the coalitions of do-gooders and mercenaries that gather around such agendas. The pitch wouldn't be complete without claims about how, with enough transmission (after all, the sun is always shining and the wind always blowing somewhere), renewables are a real answer to America's energy needs, not just a costly indulgence. Yet funny how the bootleggers' interests are the only ones that end up being served. Notice, for instance, that though shale gas has done more than wind or solar to reduce America's CO2 output by displacing coal, the green lobby has had to attack shale because it accentuates the high cost of wind and solar.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Steve Schmadeke in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-attorney-judge-was-legally-insane-when-she-shoved-deputy-20130204,0,5906103.story" target="_blank">"Judge Who Shoved Deputy Found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity"</a>
<br />
<blockquote>
"A Democratic Party-backed judge who won re-election in November while facing battery charges was found not guilty Monday — by reason of insanity. The insanity verdict could aid the judge's effort to return to the bench. Not long after Judge Cynthia Brim was charged in March with misdemeanor battery for shoving a deputy outside the Daley Center, a panel of supervising judges effectively suspended her, banning Brim from the county's courthouses without a police escort. Bar associations have recommended since 2000 that Brim be tossed from her $182,000-a-year job, but voters have kept returning her to the bench. Experts have said Brim's case highlights the difficulty of unseating a judge up for retention in Cook County. On Monday, less than a year after the judge embarked on what attorneys described as a delusional journey across the city that ended with her in handcuffs, Brim sat at a wooden table marked 'Defendant' on the 13th floor of the Daley Center for a highly unusual bench trial. Testimony revealed that Brim has been hospitalized five times after suffering mental breakdowns in the 18 years since she was first elected.... Brim, 54, was diagnosed years ago with a bipolar type of schizoaffective disorder, which means she experiences delusions and hallucinations, psychiatrist Mathew Markos testified."</blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Amity Shlaes in <i>WSJ</i> on Robert Dalzell’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324374004578222020344951326.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank"><b>The Good Rich – And What They Cost Us</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Even the ‘good rich’ cost us: They don't give wisely, Mr. Dalzell contends, spending too much on ‘elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT and Princeton, which seems unlikely to reduce the income gap by much.’ The extent of modern giving also falls short, in Mr. Dalzell's eyes. ‘The most striking feature of the figures for giving by the rich is how low they are,’ Mr. Dalzell writes, without noting that our wealthy give more than the wealthy of other countries. The money that the rich give away, he says, ‘might better be spent by leaving it to the democratic political process to decide what to do with the money.’ Read: No more charitable deduction; the IRS keeps the cash. For the sake of the public good, then, the rich must fashion better charity projects while handing over more of their money to the government. But there is another sort of giving that Mr. Dalzell doesn't consider. Charity is a sideshow: What matters about the rich, if we are considering the public good, isn't their charity but their investments—their ideas about what to do with ‘slimey petroleum’ and microchips—and the jobs and activity they create. At only one point does Mr. Dalzell come close to acknowledging this third possibility. Commenting in wonderment on Steve Jobs's indifference to charity, Mr. Dalzell observes: ‘He did not need it.’ Nor, one could add, was charity what the world needed from Steve Jobs.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Mark Mills in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323353204578128733463180210.html" target="_blank">"California Could Be the Next Shale Boom"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Do the math: The overall economic benefits of opening up the Monterey shale field could reach $1 trillion. One can only imagine the impact on California's education system, social programs, infrastructure, and even energy-tech R&D. Moreover, with that kind of revenue, Sacramento tax collections could wipe out debt and deficits. There is a precedent for this. Technologies of the early 20th century unleashed oil fields from Long Beach to Bakersfield. Beverly Hills sits atop a legacy field still in production, its surface hardware hidden artfully off Pico and Olympic Boulevards in large windowless buildings. Black gold, not the gold rush, funded many California businesses for the first half of the 20th century. In the heyday of the 1960s, when the state's education system was first in the nation, California's oil production ranked second nationally, at about 400 million barrels annually. Now with production down 50%, California has dropped to No. 4 in oil production, behind Texas, North Dakota and Alaska. North Dakota's embrace of the shale-oil revolution vaulted it to No. 2 and has led to low unemployment, no deficit, and university funding on the rise.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Hank Brown in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323442804578232232920012910.html" target="_blank">"The Rise of the Accreditor as Big Man on Campus"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“As the organizations that control access to federal student aid, accreditors hold much sway over colleges and universities. When they interfere with institutional autonomy there are few trustees—or presidents for that matter—who are willing to cry foul. Accreditors are supposed to protect students and taxpayers by ensuring that federal aid flows only to schools with ‘educational quality.’ But accreditors increasingly interfere in institutional decision-making and use their bully authority to tie the hands of colleges and universities. Frankly, there's nothing more intimidating to schools—public or private—than the threat of losing accreditation and with it federal financial aid. That's why most presidents and trustees quietly accede to accreditors' demands. When it comes to accreditors' real assignment—ensuring educational quality—the record is dismal. According to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, conducted by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, the literacy of college-educated citizens dropped significantly between 1992 and 2003. Of college graduates, only 31% were classified as proficient in reading compared with 40% in 1992. Academic rigor has also declined, evidenced by rampant grade inflation.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Ron Rosenbaum at <i>slate.com</i>, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2012/12/should_i_go_to_grad_school_ron_rosenbaum_explains.html" target="_blank">"Should You Go to Grad School? "</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“First, it seems intuitively true that for subjects such as history, philosophy, the hard sciences, and even some of the softer ones, it would be hard for me to make a case against graduate study.
But grad school for literature, I can't advocate. I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens. I can testify to it, having sat through enough seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America conferences to last a life time. Please don't waste your life this way.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-t3bYrYj1Qks/UR6DbF5TaoI/AAAAAAAAEgo/cjV6H7FIfB4/s298/EngineersofVictory.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;" />David Edgerton in FT on Paul Kennedy’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b3b826c-5e81-11e2-a771-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank"><b>Engineers of Victory – The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War</b></a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“None of these things were possible at the beginning of the period, but all were being achieved by the end. By mid-1944 Operation Bagration in the east, and the Normandy landings in the west, had succeeded; strategic bombing was already causing great damage to Germany and was soon to be unleashed on Japan. There was no doubt that the Axis powers were close to defeat, which was not the cast in early 1943. What made this possible is not easy to describe. It is nicely acknowledged through the book that writing seriously about the nuts and bolts of war-fighting is challenging, not least because neat, simplifying assumptions need confronting if the story is to convince. Thus although in early 1943 the United Nations (as the allies styled themselves from January 1942) had greater war production than the Axis powers, what mattered was the effective use of resources in the right places, something not captured by war production statistics, not easy to comprehend or achieve.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Clifford Bob at <i>yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/conservative-causes-go-global" target="_blank">"Conservative Causes Go Global"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Members of this informal ‘Baptist-burqa’ coalition may not agree among themselves on dogma. But conservative Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews and Muslims have worked together for years promoting long-established values, customs and prohibitions. This week’s protests against gay marriage in France exemplify the trend. As another example, in 2009 when Italian secularists backed by foreign rights NGOs brought a court case challenging crucifixes in classrooms, a transnational faith coalition fought it. Prominent in this and other European clashes were American-supported activists and legal advocacy groups such as the European Center for Law and Justice, ECLJ, and the Alliance Defense Fund, ADF. On more conventional human rights themes, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch face off not only against the governments they target, but also against other civil society groups. In the Middle East, rights activism now comes under microscopic analysis and scathing criticism from the Israeli group NGO Watch. Such organizations aim both to support their own countries’ policies and, more fundamentally, to challenge rights groups’ reputations as unbiased moral beacons.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
James Taranto at <i>wsj.com</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323482504578227664228137272.html" target="_blank">"Dr. Butterfield, I Presume"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“In that last story, Butterfield made reference to ‘the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population.’ The Butterfield Fallacy consists in misidentifying as a paradox what is in fact a simple cause-and-effect relationship: ‘Of course, the huge increase in the number of inmates has helped lower the crime rate by incapacitating more criminals behind bars.’ That quote is from Butterfield's own 1997 story, but it is a to-be-sure throwaway line, which he seems to have completely forgotten by 2004. The Butterfield Fallacy is rooted in ideological prejudice. The typical New York Times reporter does not like the idea of sending people to prison, because, among other reasons cited in Butterfield's reports on the subject, they think it is racially discriminatory (in 2004, ‘almost 10 percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison’), and it diverts tax money away from what they think should be higher priorities (in 1997, ‘already, California and Florida spend more to incarcerate people than to educate their college-age populations’).” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Michael Oneal & Steve Mills in <i>CT</i>, <a href="http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/brokendeal/" target="_blank">"Broken Deal"</a>.
<br />
<blockquote>
“So even as some recognized that a rollicking era of cheap-money capitalism was drawing to a close, many thought they could squeeze out one more high-wire deal, especially if an investor of Zell’s caliber was involved. One legacy of Zell’s Tribune Co. transaction is that it captures the very moment in the summer of 2007 when the machinery began to seize up and shift into reverse, exposing the mania for what it was. Until then, the world’s deal-makers were content to keep going, brushing aside the warning signs in pursuit of more profit.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Holman Jenkins in <i>WSJ</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324624404578257582356730460.html" target="_blank">"Where the Tribune LBO Went Wrong"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“The banks that went along and bore much of the losses, we have no sympathy for. But losses also were borne by Tribune creditors forced into bed with a fake buyer who (in the normal, healthy logic of capitalism) should have looked after their interests by looking after its own. The deal also inevitably deprived employees of compensation and 401(k) money that would have come their way had they not been dragooned into an overpriced ESOP. A year ago, a not very penetrating Labor Department investigation finally ended with a settlement that netted the affected employees less than $2,500 each. Sam Zell has been a fabulously successful real-estate investor and, in many ways, a great spokesman for sound economic policy in our country. Trib management, from a certain perspective, did a superlative job of getting top dollar for the controlling shareholders who wanted out from their Tribune investment. The disgrace of the Tribune LBO may have been out of character for all concerned, but it was a disgrace nonetheless, even if a big part of the fault lies with federal ESOP law. And the Tribune newspaper's own reliance on business-press bloviation about ‘an era of superheated Wall Street deal-making’ leaves us with a feeling the air has yet to be cleared.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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Neil Steinberg in <i>CST</i>, <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/17496219-452/monopoly-tokens-born-in-chicago.html" target="_blank">"Monopoly Tokens Born in Chicago"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Sam Dowst, like much of the city, attended the 1893 World’s Fair, where he saw the Mergenthaler Linotype machine, which creates type by shooting hot lead into molds. He realized that not only could it make type, but also buttons — of use to laundry owners. So the Dowsts bought a machine. One journal subscriber, Ole Odegard, wanted to win the loyalty of his customers’ children by giving them small prizes. He asked the Dowsts if they could whip up some kind of charm for his business, the Flat Iron Laundry. Something ... like ... a ... little flat iron. They did, as well as small die cast cars, which they called Tootsietoys. Nor were they the only Chicago company making charms; a company called Cosmo turned them out, too, selling to another local business, Cracker Jack. The two companies merged in 1926, becoming Strombecker Toys. Parker Brothers rolled out Monopoly in 1935, using wood dowels as tokens; it decided to include six made-in-Chicago metal tokens in 1937: a thimble, cannon, top hat (hooray!), shoe, battleship and that original flat iron. In the 1950s, it added a Scottie dog, race car and wheelbarrow, and lost the cannon.” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
<br />
Sam Borden in <i>NYT</i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/sports/ncaabasketball/college-basketball-catches-up-to-jerry-tarkanians-rebel-ways.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Legacy of a Rebel"</a>.
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<blockquote>
“Jerry Tarkanian is 82. His health, which began deteriorating about four years ago when he fell while walking in San Diego, has declined to the point that basic movements are difficult. When someone comes by for an introduction during the meal at Landry’s, Tarkanian shakes hands with his left hand because his right is anchored to the table, as if to keep him from slumping over. His eyes, which drooped like week-old balloons when he was 40, now seem to hang to his neck. After eating, as Tarkanian makes his way to the parking lot, he hesitates as he steps down from the curb, putting his hand on the shoulder of a visitor and grunting hard as he guides his walker a few inches in front of him. His Division I coaching career, which covered 31 seasons, 3 colleges and countless hearings, depositions and court dates as he fought the governing body of the sport he loves, feels far away. In the car on the way back to the family home, a two-story Spanish-style house that Tarkanian and his wife, Lois, bought in 1973, he is asked about his years of plenty. He nods twice when the championship team of 1990 is mentioned. He shakes his head when asked to remember coaching against John Wooden. ‘Played him three times,’ he says slowly. ‘Lost all three.’ He looks out the window. ‘Should have won one of them.’” </blockquote><br /> <br />
***
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-UrHQfCBspbw/UR6DciwAm-I/AAAAAAAAEhA/Bp3fhqS0D_Y/s500/Fotopoulos-thepearl_500.jpg" /><br /><br />
<a href="http://www.microscopegallery.com/" target="_blank">7 hours of VHS & 2 Premieres</a> at Microscope Gallery:<br /><br />
• February 24, 2pm-9pm<br />
4 Charles Place, Brooklyn NY 11221<br /><br />
<blockquote>"On February 24 the Microscope Gallery will be screening James Fotopoulos’ four video series <u>Jerusalem</u>, <u>Sublimation</u>, <u>Conjunction</u> and <u>The Pearl</u> on VHS from 2pm-9pm. The second and third installments of the series will be screening for the first time.</blockquote><br /><br />
<u>Jerusalem</u> (2003, 78 minutes)<br />
<u>Conjunction</u> (2003, 142 minutes - Premiere)<br />
<u>Sublimation</u> (2003, 76 minutes, - Premiere)<br />
<u>The Pearl</u> (2004, 120 minutes)"<br /> <br /><br />
***
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Alison Braun, L.A. Punk Photographer’s new site <a href="http://www.alisonbraun.com/#" target="_blank">alisonbraun.com</a>.<br /> <br />
***
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<i>Obituaries of the Month</i><br /><br />
• <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-16/news/ct-met-edelman-obit-0116-20130116_1_largest-pr-firm-richard-edelman-chicago-firm" target="_blank">Dan Edelman</a> (1920-2013)<br />
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<blockquote>
“Born in New York City in 1920, Mr. Edelman attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he was sports editor of the school newspaper. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1940 from Columbia University, where he tutored fraternity brother Sid Luckman, who went on to be a star quarterback for the Chicago Bears. In 1941, Mr. Edelman earned a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, taking a job as sports editor and reporter for a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., newspaper. Drafted into the Army in 1942, Mr. Edelman was assigned to the 5th Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, a psychological warfare unit. His job was to analyze German propaganda, providing information that was used by the Allies to counter with messages of their own. After the war, Mr. Edelman went from being a New York-based music publicist to heading up public relations for Toni, which was headquartered in Chicago. He moved to Chicago in 1948 and created the first of many public relations innovations, the media tour, by sending six sets of attractive twins on a cross-country road trip to promote the ubiquitous advertising campaign, ‘Which Twin has the Toni?’ In 1952 he went out on his own with Toni as a client. Over the years, he helped build brands such as Sara Lee, KFC and 9Lives cat food, for which he helped make Morris the Cat a household name.” </blockquote><br />
• <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/17612803-452/oh-he-was-a-good-man-103-year-old-owner-of-harrys-hot-dogs-dies.html" target="_blank">Harry Heftman</a> (1909-2013)
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<blockquote>
“Heftman opened the Little Snack Shop in 1954 in the four-story building on the northwest corner of Randolph and Franklin, home to the Showmen’s League of America, the national organization for carnival workers and circus performers, of which he was a proud member. The dark gray building was distinctive for its small elephant sculptures, trunks raised in joy, decorating each of the 24 windows, and for the mustard-yellow awnings of Harry’s Hot Dog’s — he changed the name in 1982 — on the ground floor. Heftman worried about his customers — when a fire damaged the building in 2003, and the hot dog stand had to close for a few weeks, he posted a sign on the front door that read, in essence: Don’t worry; we’ll be back soon; It’s not as bad as it looks — something of a life philosophy for Harry. When John Buck built the 42-story 155 W. Wacker next door and wanted the land under Harry’s, some urged Heftman to fight. <br /><br />
But Heftman decided it was time to close. He was, after all, 100 years old. Instead he had a big birthday party, with cake and hot dogs and TV cameras. The president of Vienna Hot Dogs came. Mayor Richard M. Daley showed up too and ate a hot dog. ‘My father used to come here,’ Daley said.” </blockquote><br />
• <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/world/asia/gen-yang-baibing-dies-at-93-led-tiananmen-crackdown.html" target="_blank">Yang Baibing</a> (1920-2013)<br />
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<blockquote>
“The younger half brother of Yang Shangkun, a former president of China and a Red Army luminary, General Yang had largely been forgotten in the two decades since the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, stripped the brothers of their posts out of concern that they were seeking to upend his succession plan with what some analysts described as a ‘minicoup.’ Their downfall was probably abetted by Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang Zemin, as he moved to isolate potential rivals in his drive to consolidate power. But during the politically turbulent years after the Tiananmen crackdown, General Yang was a prominent defender of the economic reforms being championed by Deng, who was facing resistance from conservatives. In a statement published by a party newspaper, General Yang declared the military to be the ‘protector and escort’ of reform, which included efforts to open China to the outside world.” </blockquote><br />
• <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/world/europe/prospero-gallinari-member-of-red-brigades-dies-at-62.html" target="_blank">Prospero Gallinari</a> (1951-2013)
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<blockquote>
“His parents were sharecroppers. His devotion to leftist causes began when he was 9, he said, after he attended a funeral for people killed in clashes between landowners and the police. At a young age he joined the Communist youth federation and remained with it until the late 1960s. <br /><br />
He then joined the Superclan, an ultrasecret leftist group (the name stands for ‘super clandestine’) that specialized in armed robberies. He became a full member of the Red Brigades around 1973. Modeling itself after urban guerrilla groups in Latin America, the Brigades hoped to destabilize Italy through sabotage, bank robberies, kidnappings and murder. Its members were known to cripple people by shooting them in the kneecaps. In 1974, Mr. Gallinari participated in the abduction and mock trial of Mario Sossi, a prosecutor. Convicted of the kidnapping, Mr. Gallinari escaped from a prison in Treviso in 1976. Two years later, on a Rome street, he was one of four armed terrorists who jumped out of bushes, automatic pistols blazing, to capture Mr. Moro.” </blockquote><br />
• <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-essie-mae-washington-williams-20130205,0,5790197.story" target="_blank">Essie Mae Washington-Williams</a> (1925-2013)
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<blockquote>
"The teenager knew Butler was taking her to meet her father, but 'I was surprised because she never mentioned that he was white,' Washington-Williams told CBS' Dan Rather many years later. She recalled that when they met, Thurmond told her, 'Well, you look like one of my sisters. You've got those cheekbones like our family.' But that was as close as he got to acknowledging that they were kin. From that point on, Thurmond regularly sent her money. After she graduated from high school in 1945, he encouraged her to attend the all-black South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. He paid her tuition and after he became governor in 1947, visited her on campus, causing rumors to swirl about why the coed had a friend in such a high place. Her relationship to Thurmond stirred complicated emotions, which she kept to herself. As governor, Thurmond was a proud, loud segregationist who in 1948 declared publicly that there were 'not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.' 'I wasn't proud of him at that time,' Washington-Williams told The Times in 2004. One time when she was in college she asked him why he was segregationist 'and he said, 'Well, that's the way things have always been',' she recalled in the CBS interview. 'I don't believe he was a racist at heart. And when the times changed, he changed,' she said."</blockquote><br /><br />
***
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Thanks to Archie Patterson, Jay Babcock, Steve Beeho, Geralyn Carducci.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nightheronbooks.com/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-5ogg5jDPWjc/T2cFaRW8XAI/AAAAAAAAEL8/Zx0nuYlBb7I/s600/LvD-Ad-Horizontal%2520600.jpg" /></a><br /><br />
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<i>To receive a weekly update notice for the NV, send an email to newvulgate[at]sbcglobal.net with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. To stop receiving notices, do the same with the word UNSUBSCRIBE.</i><br /><br />
<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010)<br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i><br /><br />Chris Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16761596531459681739noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-52421340721294522852013-01-01T11:42:00.000-08:002013-01-02T15:09:22.457-08:00Issue #143 (Jan. 2, 2013)<b>Sheep Mountain from east of Ehlin Rd.</b><br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-uxOL_IpoIHA/UN8iM5UEE_I/AAAAAAAAAYA/jEqr8FttdWQ/s640/SheepMtnfromeastofEhlinRd-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>The Culturati Headlock and the Reaction Shot</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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<br />
A dead-end is in the air. You can smell it in the reluctance to give up trouncing Romney and turn toward… governing if that’s what they call this. Four years ago the Democrats’ victory dance consisted mostly of trying to destroy Sarah Palin even though they’d won control of both houses of Congress as well. That was quite a spectacle, a mere defeated vice-presidential candidate being drafted by the newsmedia-comedy industrial complex as their fuck-toy (<i>def</i>. – a rock band on tour under certain conditions might make the first one who falls asleep a work of art fully decorated with ink, foodstuffs, or worse.). That Palin fought our leading constituency for civility in politics to a near-draw was something like what Pat Buchanan survived and Dan Quayle didn’t. Though the mass media was ending even then, what’s replacing it – massed media – is somehow even more overwhelming as all those like-minds stampede to their considered opinion without editing. No enemy of the people has a chance against such swarming high-minded freed speech as it becomes universal social coloration for the culturati. Back in the late 1980s “<i>Saturday Night Live</i>” eventually ran a sketch of a cocktail party consisting of unfunny self-satisfied Quayle jokes at which the audience only slowly picked up on the point of the satire and stopped laughing. With no network gatekeepers the social media world spins drunkenly onward, ever more self-satisfied, ever more ineducable.<br />
<br />
This election the polling seemed to miss two things: 1. The personal investment of Democrats in Barack Obama as first non-white in the office which evidently trumped their disappointments that he didn’t break with Bush on the wars, the banks, La Migra etc., and 2. The divestment of the libertarian-Ron Paul Republicans in the fate of the Romney campaign after the Convention. The disappointed “Ins” outvoted the less motivated than expected “Outs.” You can’t be too hard on pollsters since their marginal differences are always small and historically they’ve proved just how predictable are we-the-people. (Personally I don’t vote – a writer’s discipline, if not an anarchist’s indulgence.)<br />
<br />
The contempt visited upon the first Bush and the only Carter for being “one-termers” is a fate worse than death (there was another memorable “Sat. Night Live” sketch about that). Candidate Obama, though, helped himself and hurt Hillary in the Democratic nominating contest by his very claim that he was willing to be a one-term president if all the brave action he promised did him in. Hillary, like Bill it was assumed, would lie, cheat, steal, grovel, and triangulate to become president and to stay president. The main interest the newsmedia had in this last campaign for the Republican nomination was in the parade of boom-bust challengers making Romney look vulnerable but inevitable. All the great editors of national political coverage failed to register even a David Janssen half-smile when it was learned at the end of the campaign that in fact Ron Paul had actually won the first contest in Iowa. By rights of even the mere horse race coverage an entirely different campaign discourse, if not narrative, was warranted. That was a close one!<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-9wFvI9TYZio/UOMoWukn3AI/AAAAAAAAAcQ/VzM03OKQWa0/s381/Time.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Since the good old live televised days and nights of McGovern, Dukakis, Ford, and Bush-1 conventions spinning out of control and into small-d democratic brinksmanship and barter the networks’ and newspapers’ experts and editors have judged winning campaigns and political parties on their ability to present a Madison Avenue-smooth picture of smiling party unanimity. The networks’ news divisions in particular have punished political drama to the point that their own programming depts now won’t run them.<br />
<br />
That’s the myopia of the CBS eye that never blinks and the rest of our hard-news Edward R. Murrow-sucking-a-fag-in-a-trenchcoat can’t-we-nail-this-down courage-my-ass first-amendment-absolutist second-amendment-uhhh… newsmediators. But what the politicians and the parties themselves missed was this thing we can smell, the end of the progressive assumption which both parties have made serve their politicking needs even all these years after the philosophy has proven a fallacy.<br />
<br />
The anti-science faith of the Democrats is that there is enough money to fund a programmatic heaven on earth. It’s the Goddamn fishes and loaves all over again. Just last week Paul Krugman asked, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/opinion/krugman-is-growth-over.html?ref=todayspaper" target="_blank">"Is Growth Over?"</a>. He near admits the Bush-Obama plan has simply been to re-inflate the bubble all along when he questions whether federal stimuli will ever yield the expected return to historically average American growth rates. Democrats officially believe that wealth is created by federal redistribution of windfall caches of undeserved earnings by criminal conspiracies. Such greed must be tamed by taxation and regulation, harnessed and steered, excess profits redistributed for planned outcomes with multiplier effects, doubling as luck has it as vote-buying schemes.<br />
<br />
Professor Krugman was hired in 1999 by the <i>New York Times</i> to write about economics on the assumption that the next president, Al Gore, would need advice and support as the Clinton bubble popped…, or maybe it was the Bush-1 tax increase boom busting, or even just the Reagan restructuring beginning to run on fumes. Bush-2 and Greenspan were trying and failing to re-stoke the economy when the World Trade Center came down. Lame ducks in second terms usually turn to foreign affairs where they can still achieve something; 9-11 meant the world colonized the White House for Bush-1 by year 2! And while he became a war president he also eased and spent and finally ignited the real estate bubble with the help of Greenspan and Bernanke, not to mention former Democratic presidential runner-up nominee the Reverend Jesse Jackson whose campaign to end banks’ red-lining of the still-smoking Chicago ghettos gradually evolved into the paperless home loan securitization scam headmanned by the liberals at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA as well as assorted favored capitalists busy at the trough and racking up bonus brownie points as well. That was then. Now as Obama and Bernanke wait for animal spirits or greed or the business cycle to reinflate any old bubble, Krugman begins the job of lowering expectations to something more reasonable and European-like. Hillary surely hopes to be able to run on promising to return the economy to Clintonian growth rates, as Gingrichian growth rates are usually referred to. In July 2008 <i>The Onion</i> ran a story, <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-demands-new-bubble-to-inve,2486/" target="_blank">"Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In"</a>, only it wasn’t the nation demanding it really, but the experts, Great Depression obsessives and Nobel Prize-winning liquidity trap specialists alike, who create and sustain that demand. They might demand a re-tracking of just what the state is responsible for and just what capital risks in a free market that exacts its own punishments and rewards to the favored or the free, but where’s theirs in that? We might try to do without their legions of paper shuffling red-tape postmodernists.<br />
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Growth can be achieved by any society that is willing to stop selling today’s top corporations protection from new competitors or paradigm shifts in the form of higher startup costs by increased regulatory and tax burdens. Japan chose to stop growth to end risk to its one-time success; China’s rise is just now forcing a rethink. America with its de-centered regions isn’t so easily tamed. The computer revolution and the web are recent proof of that. And even in this sector it isn’t ITT, IBM, or Hewlett-Packard that dominate but new players. The mess in Europe, where in recent decades their welfare states hoped to grow 2% on the backs of our 4% growth, ought to give Democrats and their faithful culturati pause since they seem obsessed with European models, despite that its they who follow our model to the extent they dare risk their corrupt social peaces. To give them their due, an awful lot of people were killed in high-minded civilized Europe in the last century so there are worse things than corrupt social peaces. But the EU will remain an open question in Germany until Italy, Spain, and Greece get their acts together, which is to say for all time!<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-iipvGZTJxxA/UOMoXmcjweI/AAAAAAAAAcY/SNz2-TvD0bY/s450/davos-2011.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />More importantly for us there is earnest Scandinavian-style decay in California and grubby Mediterranean-style corruption in Illinois, New York, New Jersey and elsewhere that threatens American economic growth, bubble or no. If these states can get the Obama administration to federalize their dead-end debts then we are seeing the impetus the feds themselves might have to globalize their own fiasco into the great slush-fund wet-dream of Davos Man: a global currency.<br />
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The Democrats promise us ever more security when it is the trading away of freedom for those Ponzied mirages that threatens to close the circle against growth and tip us into a death spiral. The Republicans look up at this rhetorical high ground and lose faith in freedom. Democrats and their media friends merely stress discrete freedoms, usually sexual, and then gin up a Reaction Shot to some Republican’s proposal as if it might authorize a theocracy, or reinstitute slavery – see Bork’s obit below. The salty self-image of the cynical seen-it-all ink-stained wretch is gone in a wink and in its place the earnest horrified reaction shot of an offended rube his first day on the streets of the big city – the method acting of the anchorman. Actually the authoritative expert know-it-alls quick to anger have no natural affinity for democracy other than their own Americanness which unfortunately they seek to expunge for citizenship of the world.<br />
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What’s sad and costly is that as Nassim Taleb writes in the<i> New York Times</i>, “[T]he solution can be bipartisan, pleasing both those who decry a large federal government and those who distrust the market.” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/stabilization-wont-save-us.html" target="_blank">"Stabilization Won’t Save Us"</a>) Taleb’s book, Antifragile – Things That Gain From Disorder, looks like the big idea book of the moment and it sounds like he’s deduced this right-left potential that might have but did not occur around the Ron Paul runs. That Paul stayed in the party primaries rather than run third-party indicates that he believes his ideas, especially those on economic and monetary policy, are in line to be adopted by a Republican party caught with its hand in the cookie jar and unsure of its purpose. But the Republican Party has this clear alternative within it. The Democrats have no such contrapuntal theme within and as their politik is essentially a lifestyle accoutrement-as-ass-covering, something like a selfless class greed, their tensions are just the sub-interest groups jockeying for priority (wind vs solar, transit vs recycling…). On many issues the Republicans can now reprioritize, though the establishment as represented in the McCain and Romney candidacies surely doesn’t realize this. Conservatives have made life adjustments in the form of home-schooling, gated communities, etc. These allow battles to be fought elsewhere. And the wars are both over but for the ticker-tape parade. We won and we lost, as always. We always lose more of the habits of constitutional republican governance during war, not a bad thing for progressives, and they’re fond of using the military as a lab for social engineering.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Gjyr8DSzy_k/UOMoYVdcoyI/AAAAAAAAAcg/ug0GVXdJiNs/s270/Molotov-Ribbentrop.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />There won’t be call for much beyond patrolling the Pacific because China though not a good neighbor isn’t likely to go to war against its economy’s suppliers and customers, and the Pentagon has never really been a constituency for war itself; they’re mostly McClellans though they will fight for their budget. Best keep our eyes on the State Department and U.N. though. There’s a left-right draw-down possible here too. In political or policy terms this would hardly take a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, though it terms of our weird post-sixties lifestyle vanity it might seem so. How did the hippies and radicals end up control freak puritans? Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers don’t rule out violent rebellion, but are they in favor of gun control? Don’t ask.<br />
<br />
But it may be it’s the center that is the real problem; those whose quick reflex to compromise makes deals that pay-off both sides and doubles, then squares the cost of anything. It took decades after the Vietnam war to close stateside military bases dating from the Indian wars, and why are we still in Europe? It’s not the wars, it’s these peaces we can’t afford. Such go along-get along “stability” is what Taleb attacks. He also argues for decentralization which you wouldn’t think could be losing ground in a world where the zeitgeist is all about local access to everything via the web. But we get calls for more and steeper top-down hierarchies coming from the culturati, the thousands of useless counselor-types pumped out of higher edumucation annually, all bright-eyed about serving the public by telling them how to live, and determined to fight the man they have every intention of becoming.<br />
<br />
The formerly hip Ann Marlowe who wrote for the <i>Village Voice</i> and <i>ArtForum</i> and published her own downtown fanzine in the early 1990s, <i>Pretty Decorating</i>, and a heroin memoir no less, before she morphed right and began writing about Afghanistan for the <i>Weekly Standard</i> and <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, has fretted over the lack of cool on the right (<a href="http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/03/19/031911-opinions-oped-gopcool-marlowe-1-2/" target="_blank">"Hip Replacement"</a> in <i>The Daily</i>). But her complaint looks at the wrong end of the issue. The right can’t be expected to be hip no matter what cachet she, David Mamet, P.J. O’Rourke, and Nick Cohen might muster. A better focus is on the matter of the left’s alleged hipness. That Bruce Springsteen or any of <i>NPR</i>’s approved consciences of a generationlet are presumed to be within skunk-musk smelling distance of hip is just politicos once again stealing fire from a rock and roll they actually know nothing about. Very uncool.<br />
<br />
And back to the paper of broken record: days after Krugman entertains the end of growth, professor of economics Gregory Minkiw suggests tax increases on the middle class because there will be no cutting, and professor of constitutional law Louis Seidman cleverdick that he is suggests we give up on the Constitution. As we are obviously well into a post-Constitutional irrepublic I suggest we begin by firing the him. And then not to be outdone, former editor not quite off-loaded dead wood Bill Keller offers one of those patented Times fictional monologues wherein they invent their opponent’s comic rationale for daring to contradict the editorial page. You really have to wonder…<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-6rEJmnGtIOY/UOMoZR-shDI/AAAAAAAAAco/OLq8iSwwjAI/s360/collageflag.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />How modernity is waking and remaking different cultures and countries since the end of Communism ought to make this the golden age of an American reassessment of what it is we all have accomplished here in the new world. This is why I try to include a spin around the world in each NV: The rape-murder case in India… Sexual slavery in Belarus… Chasing millionaires out of France… Racism in China… Islamism in Sweden… Minority suppression in Turkey… all of it ought to prompt a recalibration of how we think about all our history has allowed and what it might still allow if we don’t shut it down and live off the past and a foreclosed future.<br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-i4X5k6MPmmw/UN8jY6fNVJI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/vgav7onKVcE/s640/locus2.jpg" /><br />
"Locus #2" by <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…<br />
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<a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/what-an-omnishambles-v10n12-1" target="_blank">"What an omnishables" – Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, discusses the post-Leveson state of the British media at <i>vice.com</i></a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The good thing about the hacking scandal is that the failures of journalism were uncovered by a journalist. That’s something to hold on to. It wasn’t an inquiry that turned it up, it wasn’t the police, it certainly wasn’t the government – they would have all happily done nothing. It was Nick Davies at the Guardian, and hats off. Journalism is quite difficult. Investigations can take months. You have to pay people and set it all up and it takes time and you might get nothing. So I do see why people wouldn’t want to do it. It’s troublesome and if it goes wrong there are legal costs and that’s expensive for proprietors. But I still think that if you do it well it should sell newspapers” </blockquote>
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^^^<br />
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Also at <i>vice.com</i>, Adam Curtis' <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/looking-beneath-the-waves-v10n12" target="_blank">media review</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It’s left my generation growing up in a supremely paranoid world. What also feeds into it is the fact that the baby boomers – the ageing generation of the first big individualists – are now beginning to understand they’re going to die. If you’re going to die and all you believe in is that you’re the centre of the world, then you can’t conceive of yourself dying. So what you do is you project your own death on to the planet and you say, “I won’t die, it’s the world that will cease to exist.” I think a lot of the exaggerated apocalyptic fears are about this generation projecting their own intimations of mortality on to the planet. For example, climate change is a serious problem, but it’s turned into this great apocalyptic thing.” </blockquote>
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^^^<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-YUivtEXSPCo/UOISuU0BIkI/AAAAAAAAAa4/mrEWg-Ft4oQ/s235/Standpoint.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Nick Cohen in <a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4833/full" target="_blank"><i>Standpoint</i> on "how not to write"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In class-ridden Britain, the parvenu is a stock figure of fun. The social climber or pseudo-intellectual with ‘ideas above his station’ is always good for a laugh. More ridiculous are university-educated commissioning editors and book publishers with ideas beneath their station. They think when they slum it that popular culture is so debased and easy any fool can rattle out a hit. They may be right about the debased nature of much popular culture, but they betray their ignorance when they assume that success is easy. If you want to succeed in pop culture, or indeed any culture, you have to attain a state of mind that is very hard for the ironic upper-middle class cultural bureaucrat to achieve. You have to believe.” </blockquote>
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^^^<br />
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Nicholas Dames in <i>n+1</i> on the <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/the-theory-generation" target="_blank">"Theory Generation" and how the tenets of critical theory are now being re-examined in contemporary fiction</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“[T]hese theoretical avant-gardistes were, thanks to employment and tenure, comfortably middle-class — a complaint that ignores the long tendency of Western modernity to remunerate its critics. The more potent irony was that by transforming itself into an engine for critique, the academy ceased to believe in the goal of socialization — making good citizens — that was still one of its functions. (As Richard Rorty had it, the price higher education paid to keep this irony unexamined was to cede secondary education to conservatives.) At the center of this irony was the liberal arts student, tasked with learning to critique social norms before having consciously or fully lived them. It is both socially and aesthetically significant that so much recent virtuoso realism has come from writers who were undergraduates at precisely this moment, often in the places where Theory had most prestige.” </blockquote>
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^^^<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-n0J_fvA630I/UOISvhohENI/AAAAAAAAAbA/wtLOkwtjTtw/s269/UglyThings11.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Mike Stax's original mind-blowing Monks cover story which appeared in <a href="http://ugly-things.com/the-monks-monk-time/" target="_blank"><i>Ugly Things</i> #11</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Eddie Shaw: The idea of it was to get as much ‘beat’ out of it as we could. As much ‘bam-bam-bam-bam’ on the beat or whatever. The only time cymbals would be used would be for accent. If anyone wasn’t contributing towards rhythm, then it wasn’t part of the Monks sound. We took every instrument and tried to make it a rhythmic instrument. At that point, Larry, with the organ, became the melody carrier when it came to the solos and stuff. His thing was not to play it pretty, but to just go up and down the keyboard; sarcastic and brutal. The idea was to keep the energy high. So, in summation of what that theory was, it was rhythm and energy. High energy and high rhythm. If one is confined to a cell and has to listen to it for six months, he’s gonna go stark raving mad, because it’s gonna drive him crazy. Even now, when I listen to it, it makes me nervous. It’s like my worst nightmare. If you do that every night for two years, it’s overdrive. You’re in overdrive all the time. It’s aggressive. If you listen to one song after another, it just attacks you.” </blockquote>
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^^^<br />
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Sam Fuller's berserk and rarely-screened <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PqMfb3gbHY" target="_blank">"<i>Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street</i>"</a> (1974) in its entirety, with Can (!) on the soundtrack.<br />
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^^^<br />
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Blazing footage of a full <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqDOJiI8Do&feature=player_embedded" target="_blank">Black Flag</a> set at the Mab on 9th January 1981 with Dez on vocals and Dirk Dirksen captured on film at the end.<br />
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^^^<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7iqCh3x1Ic&feature=player_embedded" target="_blank">Saint Vitus</a> live at Washington DC in July 1987:<br />
You can almost see the ceiling spinning during their dirge take on “Thirsty and Miserable.”<br />
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^^^<br />
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Two clips from the Dim Stars only live performance at the Ritz in New York in October 1991:<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtNm8dpGsPg" target="_blank">"Monkey "</a><br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2hcpnDbq3k" target="_blank">"The Night is Coming On"</a><br />
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<b>up behind Medicine Bow forest station</b><br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-6rWgN45G4Tg/UOISxkIF8kI/AAAAAAAAAbI/mNtCkb_s3I0/s640/upbehindmedicinebowforeststation2-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…<br />
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Tom Bartlett at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/This-Is-Not-a-Profile-of/136257/" target="_blank">"This Is Not a Profile of Nassim Taleb"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Taleb has a low opinion of most professors. He titles one section of the new book ‘The Charlatan, the Academic, and the Showman.’ In a chart, Taleb divides professions into three categories: fragile, robust, and antifragile. It's bad to be fragile, better to be robust, best to be antifragile. Artists and writers are antifragile. Postal employees and truck drivers are robust. Academics, bureaucrats, and the pope are fragile. Benedict, beware. Most of Taleb's ire is directed at business schools, specifically the one at Harvard. At Harvard they ‘lecture birds to fly,’ then arrogantly claim credit when the fledglings become airborne. He rails against the ‘Soviet-Harvard delusion,’ linking an institution that's graduated thousands with a state that killed millions. What is the delusion, exactly? It is a belief in a top-down system that tries to control and protect, purportedly for mankind's benefit, thereby eliminating the natural stressors and necessary randomness that create strength and encourage enterprise. Dekulakization and course catalogs are symptoms of the same ailment. Taleb has no patience for so-called structured learning. ‘Only the autodidacts are free,’ he writes in the book. He pursued his real education in his spare time, doing only as much as was required to pass his courses.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-fj_01TZ_ylQ/UN8ib1KUAFI/AAAAAAAAAZA/y8URsac7ZuI/s258/NassimTalebAntifragile.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Nassim Taleb in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/stabilization-wont-save-us.html" target="_blank">"Stabilization Won’t Save Us"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped. Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes. Our goal instead should be an antifragile system — one in which mistakes don’t ricochet throughout the economy, but can instead be used to fuel growth. The key elements to such a system are decentralization of decision making and ensuring that all economic and political actors have some ‘skin in the game.’” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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James Bowman in <b>NEW CRITERION</b>, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-cycle-repeats-7510" target="_blank">"The Cycle Repeats"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“To Professor Krugman and others of his persuasion, the austerity ‘strategy’ is so obviously the wrong one that they must wonder if those benighted Europeans who perversely persist in it aren’t as much the captives of the dark forces of ‘extremist’ Republican reaction as Messrs. Romney and Ryan. But there is another explanation. It is that ‘austerity’ is not really a strategy but the name we give to reality in order to avoid calling it – or thinking about it as – reality. When reality appears to us a long way off in the form of mere ‘austerity,’ it still looks like a strategy, still looks optional. Uh oh! This strategy doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s try another! And so we turn to intellectuals like Professors Krugman and Tilford who are the perpetual motion men of our era, people who have a system figured out to turn reality into an infinite number of strategies, or maybe just one killer strategy guaranteed to turn the hard reality easy again. Count on them if you need someone to persuade you, or re-persuade you, that reality is optional.” </blockquote>
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Jeffrey Sachs in <b>FT,</b> <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/369d77da-483f-11e2-a1c0-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"We Must Look Beyond Keynes to Fix Our Problems"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“There are three more reasons to doubt the Keynesian view. First, the fiscal expansion has been mostly in the form of temporary tax cuts and transfer payments. Much of these were probably saved, not spent. Second, the zero interest rate policy has a risk not acknowledged by the Fed: the creation of another bubble. The Fed has failed to appreciate that the 2008 bubble was partly caused by its own easy liquidity policies in the preceding six years. Friedrich Hayek was prescient: a surge of excessive liquidity can misdirect investments that lead to boom followed by bust. Third, our real challenge was not a great depression, as the Keynesians argued, but deep structural change. Keynesians persuaded Washington it was stimulus or bust. This was questionable. There was indeed a brief depression risk in late 2008 and early 2009, but it resulted from the panic after the abrupt and maladroit closure of Lehman Brothers.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Robin Harding in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cbfae4f4-45e0-11e2-b7ba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2GB2R9DXR" target="_blank">"Bernanke and Carney Give Voice to a Quiet Revolution"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Like most revolutions, it seems to come from nowhere but has deep roots. Like most revolutions, it holds the promise of great good but has the potential for harm. It is crucial that politicians and the public understand what this revolution in central bank thinking is and is not about. ‘A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation,’ said Vladimir Lenin, something of an authority in these matters. (A view from Lenin on recent monetary innovations would be interesting. ‘The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency’ is another of his dainty little remarks.) The past five years have led central banks to a revolutionary situation. When the crisis hit, they played their best moves, but to modest effect. Quantitative easing – the ugly term for buying long-term assets in order to drive down long-term interest rates – looks radical thanks to the many-zeroed numbers involved. In reality it is just another way to cut interest rates.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ml08aInikyc/UN8idNiaOmI/AAAAAAAAAZI/_S0SHbV6KJY/s282/NYRBks.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Gordon Wood in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b> on Kevin Phillips’ book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/was-big-revolution-1775/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"1775 – A Good Year for Revolution"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Most white Americans knew they were freer and less burdened with feudal and monarchical restraints than any other people in the eighteenth century. Indeed, they keenly realized that the liberties they enjoyed actually came from the heritage and traditions of the British nation of which they were a part. They were British subjects who had all the rights and privileges of British subjects—elected legislatures, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and widespread religious toleration. Why then would they have broken away from the nation that was the source of these rights and liberties? These peculiar circumstances made the American Revolution seem different from other revolutions. With none of the legendary tyranny that had so often driven desperate peoples into rebellion, the American Revolution has always seemed strange. To its victims, the Tories or loyalists, the Revolution was totally incomprehensible. Never in history, said Daniel Leonard, John Adams’s antagonist in the Massachusetts debates in 1775, had there been so much rebellion with so ‘little real cause.’ Peter Oliver, who wrote the most vitriolic Tory history of the Revolution, said that it was ‘the most wanton and unnatural rebellion that ever existed.’ The Americans’ response seemed out of all proportion to the stimuli. “The Annals of no Country,” declared a thoroughly bewildered imperial official at the outset, ‘can produce an Instance of so virulent a Rebellion, of such implacable madness and Fury, originating from such trivial Causes, as those alledged by these unhappy People.’” </blockquote>
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Sohrab Ahmari in <b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html" target="_blank">"Weekend Interview – Harvey Mansfield"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement ‘depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality.’ It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were ‘confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them.’ But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create ‘an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics.’ The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of ‘a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution.’ It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by ‘an alliance of experts and victims,’ Mr. Mansfield says. ‘Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Jennifer Schuessler in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/books/james-c-scott-farmer-and-scholar-of-anarchism.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Professor Who Learns from Peasants"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“As a newly minted Ph.D. teaching at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, he was active in the antiwar movement but soon realized — ‘if I do say so, more quickly than some of my friends,’ he notes — that wars of national liberation often led to much more oppressive governments. ‘I began to think that if revolution doesn’t work for peasants, maybe there’s not that much to say for it,’ he said. In the late 1970s Mr. Scott took his family to a Malaysian village for two years of fieldwork, despite colleagues’ warnings that it would be a ‘career-killing’ move for a political scientist. The result was ‘Weapons of the Weak,’ which (along with a follow-up, ‘Domination and the Arts of Resistance’) explored the ways peasants and other powerless people used evasion and subterfuge, rather than direct confrontation, to thwart efforts at centralized state control. ‘Seeing Like a State,’ published a decade later, looked at the limitations of state power from the other end, examining — through examples as diverse as 18th-century German scientific forestry and ‘villagization’ in 1970s Tanzania — the way that ‘high modernist’ social engineering doomed itself by ignoring local custom and practical knowledge, which Mr. Scott, borrowing the classical Greek word for wisdom, calls ‘metis.’” </blockquote>
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<br />
Robert George in <b>NYT</b> on Akhil Amar’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/americas-unwritten-constitution-by-akhil-reed-amar.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"America’s Unwritten Constitution – The Precedents and Principles We Live By"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Amar is a respectful critic of conservative originalism. He takes the written text seriously as limiting judicial freedom of maneuver, but argues that the Constitution is more than the text, even when supplemented by its original understanding. Like the distinguished conservative constitutional scholar Hadley Arkes, he contends that the written Constitution points beyond itself to principles that it presupposes or entails. This is far from a wholesale rejection of originalism. For example, Amar, a careful student of history, compellingly argues that the First Amendment’s prohibition of laws ‘respecting an establishment of religion’ was framed to leave the question to states, and to prevent the national government from establishing its own religion or interfering with state establishments. Thus, many issues now treated under the so-called establishment clause cannot properly be resolved there, but only (if at all) under other provisions, like the free exercise or equal protection clauses.” </blockquote>
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David Super in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/forget-the-warnings-lets-drive-over-the-fiscal-cliff.html" target="_blank">"Bring On the Fiscal Cliff"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In truth, going over the cliff — that is, accepting the ‘last ditch’ spending cuts agreed to in August 2011 as well as the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts — would have the opposite effect: it would reduce the deficit. That, after all, has been the aim all along. But even those who understand this often misjudge the likely impact of these automatic program cuts, known as the sequester, and the tax changes. Indeed, a closer look at this much-feared budget buzz saw reveals it’s better for the country than any likely deal would be.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Ross Douthat in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/douthat-bloomberg-lapierre-and-the-void.html" target="_blank">"Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Unfortunately for our country, the Bloomberg versus LaPierre contrast is basically all of American politics today. Our society is divided between an ascendant center-left that’s far too confident in its own rigor and righteousness and a conservatism that’s marched into an ideological cul-de-sac and is currently battering its head against the wall. The entire Obama era has been shaped by this conflict, and not for the good. On issue after issue, debate after debate, there is a near-unified establishment view of what the government should do, and then a furious right-wing reaction to this consensus that offers no real policy alternative at all. The establishment view is interventionist, corporatist and culturally liberal. It thinks that issues like health care and climate change and immigration are best worked out through comprehensive bills drawn up by enlightened officials working hand in glove with business interests. It regards sexual liberty as sacrosanct, and other liberties — from the freedoms of churches to the rights of gun owners — as negotiable at best.” </blockquote>
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Kimberley Strassel in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324461604578189960633266322.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank">"Big Business Sells Out Small Business"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The Business Roundtable let the cat out of the bag on Dec. 11 when it circulated a letter signed by 150 of its corporate titans sanctioning year-end income-tax hikes. The letter happened to appear a few hours after the White House leaked its offer to include corporate tax reform as part of any cliff deal. The reform, in theory, would lower corporate tax rates. Put another way, the Roundtable saw an opportunity to make the one million small American business owners who pay individual income taxes shoulder a big rate hike (up to 39.6%, from 35%) while radically lightening the tax load for the Roundtable's own corporate behemoths (to 28% from 35%). Any corporate tax reform hinges on closing ‘loopholes’ to pay for a lower corporate rate. Small business owners would lose tax perks along with everyone else—meaning they would pay even more—but they would not benefit from lower corporate rates.” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324001104578161501124560508.html" target="_blank">"Of Liberals and Loopholes"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Since the affluent tend to itemize their deductions more than do average taxpayers, and since the affluent pay higher marginal tax rates, they tend to benefit more from deductions. Ergo, limit deductions and you raise the effective tax rate (not the marginal rate) of the affluent. (The effective tax rate is the share of total income paid in taxes, while the marginal rate is the tax on the next dollar earned.) Such a reform would help tax efficiency and equity, and the economy would benefit from fewer investment distortions. But suddenly liberals are having second thoughts, and our guess is that this is because residents of high-tax Democratic-run states are about twice as likely to take advantage of tax loopholes as taxpayers in low-tax states. For example, 44% of Connecticut filers itemize their deductions, but only some 21% of North and South Dakota residents do. One tax writeoff in particular illustrates the point: the deduction for state and local income taxes. This allows a high-income tax filer who pays, say, $20,000 in state and local income taxes to deduct those payments from his federal taxable income. Because the highest federal tax rate is 35%, the value of the state and local deduction is enormous for high-tax states.” </blockquote>
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Thomas Donlan in <b>BARRON’S</b>, <a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748703496404578177643961783574.html" target="_blank">"Wrestlers in the Ring"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Until a few years ago, it was possible to assemble coalitions of special pleaders by tacking ‘earmarks’ onto appropriations bills designating a new park or a new highway interchange as an important national priority. Earmark abuse, however, became so rampant that even the members of Congress were appalled. They shut down a process that they had turned into bribery by another name. The unintended legislative consequence was to make it much harder to make little deals, and without little deals it became much harder to make the grand bargains so beloved by statesmen and political-science professors. Congress is now a cacophony. Committee chairmen can't lead because nobody will follow; Bigfoot lobbyists cancel other out. Every cause has become the "third rail of American politics," not just Social Security.” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323277504578191630132696220.html" target="_blank">"Pork for Christmas"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Trouble is, the ‘Sandy’ bill is laden with billions of dollars of spending stowaways wholly unrelated to the hurricane. Did anyone really think earmarks would stay buried? There's $150 million in there for Alaskan fisheries. We knew Sandy made it to the Midwest, but Alaska? Marine projects from New England to Mississippi also made the cut. Also along for the joyride is $8 million for new cars and other equipment for the Justice Department and Homeland Security, $2 million for roof repair at the Smithsonian in Washington, $4 million for the Kennedy Space Center, $3 million for oil-spill research and $348 million for the National Park Service. Nearly $17 billion is in the bill for the Community Development Fund and social service grants, two long-running initiatives to fund liberal activists. Amtrak would get $188 million, including funds for two new train tunnels in New York unrelated to Sandy. Amtrak already got $1.4 billion last year. And of course some $600 million is directed to the Environmental Protection Agency to support climate change adaptation.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-_sc1VT0Ki2g/UN8iUEGueVI/AAAAAAAAAYg/xsJtiRGm4KU/s415/Cybersyn-control-room-large.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Will Wiles in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/opinion/the-no-10-dashboard-and-cybernetics.html" target="_blank">"Before Fruit Ninja, Cybernetics"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“What’s the connection between men so widely separated by ideology, geography and time? After assuming power in 1970, Allende’s administration was faced with economic paralysis, inequality and civil strife. The usual socialist prescription of nationalization of industry was applied, but Allende also looked to an unexpected quarter: the relatively new and niche science of cybernetics. Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in large, complex systems, be they organisms, machines or organizations. It spans management theory, information technology, psychology, biology and sociology. The Chilean government approached a British cybernetician named Stafford Beer and asked him to build a cybernetic hub for the management of the country’s economy — something that had never been attempted before, or since.<br />
A recent history, ‘Cybernetic Revolutionaries,’ by Eden Medina, gives the subsequent project, Cybersyn, the serious attention it deserves. The system, once up and running, would have channeled data from Chile’s nationalized industries into an operations room in Santiago, where Allende’s ministers would have made informed decisions in chairs with control panels built into the armrests. Photos of this room still retain a veneer of giddy futurity. White surfaces, pared-down interfaces, rounded corners — a dash of Apple in the mix.” </blockquote>
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<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/12/the-government-publicist-boom" target="_blank">"The Government Publicist Boom"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“<i>The San Diego Union Tribune</i> reports on government-employed public relations professionals: Nationwide, the number of government PR workers more than doubled from 2003 to 2011 while the number of reporters and correspondents fell by a quarter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There used to be one government PR specialist for every four reporters in America; now the relationship is almost 1-to-1....The statistics also don't account for the government's extensive use of PR contractors. Rolling back the government public relations staffs to 2003 levels would be one way to help reduce deficits.” </blockquote>
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Tyler Durden at <i>zerohedge.com</i>, <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-28/guest-post-fiscal-cliff-and-grand-bargain" target="_blank">"The Fiscal Cliff and the Grand Bargain"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Now let's look at the size of government spending and taxation. In terms of the overall economy (GDP), government spending's share of the economy has been rising for decades. The Internet and housing bubbles briefly ‘grew’ the economy faster than government spending, but once these one-off expansions faded, government spending quickly returned to its trendline (ever higher). Federal spending rose exponentially until it exceeded the carrying capacity of the economy. For context, recall that Social Security costs $817 billion, Medicare and Medicaid costs total about $800 billion annually, and the Pentagon/National Security budget is around $690 billion. Add in interest on the ballooning national debt, and the vast majority of the Federal budget goes to these four. You could eliminate all other Federal spending and these four consume all the tax revenues and then some.” </blockquote>
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Michael Barone at <i>washingtonexaminer.com</i>, <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/barone-american-men-find-careers-in-collecting-disability/article/2514181" target="_blank">"American Men Find Careers in Collecting Disability"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, millions of public and private dollars have been spent on curb cuts, bus lifts and special elevators. The idea has been to enable people with disabilities to live and work with the same ease as others as they make their way forward in life. I feel sure the large majority of Americans are pleased that we are doing this. But there is another federal program for people with disabilities that has had an unhappier effect. This is the Disability Insurance program, which is part of Social Security. The idea is to provide income for those whose health makes them unable to work. For many years, it was a small and inexpensive program that few people or politicians paid much attention to. In his recent book ‘<i>A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic</i>,’ my American Enterprise Institute colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has shown how DI has grown in recent years. In 1960, some 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments. In 2011, the number was 8,600,000. In 1960, the percentage of the economically active 18-to-64-year-old population receiving disability benefits was 0.65 percent. In 2010, it was 5.6 percent.” </blockquote>
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Gretchen Morgenson in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/business/in-an-fha-checkup-a-startling-number.html" target="_blank">"In an F.H.A. Checkup, a Startling Number"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before it, the Federal Housing Administration is suffering in a mortgage hell of its own making. F.H.A. officials say they won’t need taxpayers’ help, but we’ve heard that kind of line before. The F.H.A. backs $1.1 trillion of American mortgages and, by the look of things, it’s in deep trouble. Last year, its mortgage insurance fund was valued at $1.2 billion. Today that fund is valued at <i>negative</i> $13.48 billion.” </blockquote>
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<i>bloomberg.com</i>: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-11/-822-000-worker-shows-california-leads-u-s-pay-giveaway.html" target="_blank">"$822,000 Worker Shows California Leads U.S. Pay Giveaway"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Nine years ago, California Democrat Gray Davis became the first U.S. governor in 82 years to be recalled by voters. The state’s 20 million taxpayers still bear the cost of his four years and 10 months on the job. Davis escalated salaries and benefits for 164,000 state workers, including a 34 percent raise for prison guards, the first of a series of steps in which he and successors saddled California with a legacy of dysfunction. Today, the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime. California Governor Jerry Brown, who granted state workers collective-bargaining rights during his first tenure as governor more than three decades ago, has reduced pension costs for new employees while leaving retirement benefits for current workers intact. Payroll data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million public employees in the 12 most populous states show that California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. From coast to coast, states are cutting funding for schools, public safety and the poor as they struggle with fallout left by politicians who made pay-and-pension promises that taxpayers couldn’t afford.” </blockquote>
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Jim Carlton & Mike Cherney in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324020804578149573438816136.html" target="_blank">"California Targets School Borrowing"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“California Treasurer Bill Lockyer Thursday called for overhauls in school districts' sales of so-called capital-appreciation bonds, saying too many schools are locking themselves into what he described as ‘terrible deals’ with onerous terms such as debt payments of more than 10 times the principal. Mr. Lockyer, a Democrat, said he has been meeting with legislators, underwriters and bond attorneys in recent weeks. His office has compiled spreadsheets showing that about 200 K-12 schools and community-college districts in California issued billions of dollars of this type of bond over the past five years. Many districts turned to capital-appreciation bonds, or CABs, after 2009, when the housing bust and recession dried up property-tax receipts the schools depend on. ‘It's the equivalent of payday loans,’ Mr. Lockyer said, adding that he plans to push for overhauls when the legislature convenes next week. ‘They go to voters and say they can build all these facilities with bonds. But as a consequence of that borrowing, they wind up with a huge balloon payment in the later years of borrowing.’” </blockquote>
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Judah Bellin in <b>NEW CRITERION</b> on Bruce Bawer’s book, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-fundamental-question-7513" target="_blank">"The Victim’s Revolution – The Rise of Identity Studies & the Closing of the Liberal Mind"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“One notion gaining steam in feminist studies departments is that racial and sexual groups possess different fixed traits. White men, according to the feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh, are rigid ‘vertical thinkers’ while women and minorities are ‘relational and inclusive.’ Others advocate abandoning the gains made by their particular groups: Bawer shows numerous Queer Studies professors disdaining the increasing public acceptance of gays as a sinister triumph of the ‘establishment’ and ‘normativity.’ One Chicano Studies teacher he interviews is horrified that her Hispanic students believe they are ‘equal partners’ in the United States. She takes it upon herself to teach them otherwise.” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324355904578157370368124476.html" target="_blank">"Calpers’s Bankruptcy Ploy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Who knew the Constitution's Supremacy Clause included an exemption for state pension funds? It doesn't, but that's essentially what the California Public Employees' Retirement System is arguing in federal bankruptcy court. When the Inland Empire city of San Bernardino filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy this summer, it deferred $34 million in payments to creditors including Calpers while it restructures in federal bankruptcy court, which automatically stays legal actions. Calpers wants federal bankruptcy judge Meredith Jury to lift the stay and let the pension fund collect a $7 million bill in state court. In a recent court filing, the pension giant cites an exemption in bankruptcy law for states to enforce their police power. As ‘an arm of the state,’ Calpers claims to enjoy police power and sovereign rights. Ergo, it can ignore the stay. Although Calpers and the state may both be arms of the public unions, this is a dangerous syllogistic pirouette. If Calpers has police power and sovereign rights, it could also seize private property or assess a special pension fee on taxpayers. Note also the pension fund's novel interpretation of a state's police power to regulate individuals and enforce order for the general welfare. By Calpers's reckoning, safeguarding government employees' pension benefits is tantamount to protecting the public. Never mind that insolvent cities like San Bernardino are having to lay off police officers to pay their pension bills.” </blockquote>
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Felicity Barringer in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/energy-environment/california-manufacturers-weigh-costs-of-new-greenhouse-gas-rules.html" target="_blank">"California Law Tests Company Responses to Carbon Costs"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Beginning Jan. 1, under the terms of a groundbreaking California environmental law known as AB 32, Morning Star and 350 other companies statewide will begin paying for those emissions, which trap heat and contribute to global warming. Companies are trying to figure out how this will affect their bottom lines and have lobbied state regulators to minimize the costs. In the meantime they are weighing their options. Should they stay and adapt or move operations elsewhere? Should they retrofit and innovate to reduce emissions? Should they swallow the regulatory costs or pass them on to customers? Each company’s calculus depends on its particular circumstance. Morning Star, a top producer in a $926 million industry, has to be near the tomato fields of California’s Central Valley, so relocating was never an option. Its biggest question is how to handle the extra costs. About 600 facilities with hefty emissions are covered by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Oil refiners, electric utilities and cement makers, whose greenhouse-gas output totals in the millions of metric tons annually, are the biggest. But over all, dozens of industries are affected.” </blockquote>
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Adam Nagourney in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/us/politics/for-california-democrats-supermajority-is-a-new-challenge.html" target="_blank">"With a Supermajority, California Democrats Begin to Make Plans"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Yet in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ department, Democrats are beginning to confront the struggles and complications that come with being in charge of the store. This authority came at least two years earlier than most Democrats had projected. And it is unleashing years of pent-up Democratic desires — to roll back spending cuts, approve a bond issue to rebuild the state’s water system, amend the state’s tax code, revamp California’s governance system — that had been largely checked by the Republican minority. At the same time, it is stirring concerns from Democrats, among them Gov. Jerry Brown, that the situation may inspire an overreach that could make the party’s reign brief. By contrast, some Democrats argue that handled correctly, the next two years could provide an opportunity to lock in long-term control. ‘The center of gravity of the Democratic Party will be restraint, but some people can’t help themselves,’ Mr. Brown said in an interview.” </blockquote>
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Sabrina Tavernise in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/health/antismoking-outlays-drop-despite-tobacco-revenue.html" target="_blank">"States Cut Antismoking Outlays Despite Record Tobacco Revenue"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Faced with tight budgets, states have spent less on tobacco prevention over the past two years than in any period since the national tobacco settlement in 1998, despite record high revenues from the settlement and tobacco taxes, according to a report to be released on Thursday. States are on track to collect a record $25.7 billion in tobacco taxes and settlement money in the current fiscal year, but they are set to spend less than 2 percent of that on prevention, according to the report, by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which compiles the revenue data annually.” </blockquote>
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Andrew Martin in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/business/colleges-debt-falls-on-students-after-construction-binges.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Building a Showcase Campus, Using an I.O.U. "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill. Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for <i>The New York Times</i> by the credit rating agency. In the same time, the amount of cash, pledged gifts and investments that colleges maintain declined more than 40 percent relative to the amount they owe. With revenue pinched at institutions big and small, financial experts and college officials are sounding alarms about the consequences of the spending and borrowing.” </blockquote>
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Christopher Caldwell in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/225f6620-4529-11e2-838f-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"The State of the Unions: Weak and Getting Weaker"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“During the 1970s a quarter of US workers were unionised. Now the figure is roughly half that and most of them work for the government. This is the result of a natural attrition, not of any concerted programme of ‘union-busting’. Private-sector unions have had the reverse Midas touch: everything they touch turns to lay-offs. Union pensions and benefits would have killed the Michigan-based automobile industry had not Mr Obama and George W. Bush, his predecessor, bailed it out. The only robust US unions today are the ones protected politically, and almost all unions are an arm of the Democratic party. The ‘bosses’ they ‘bargain’ with are allies. When Mr Obama complained that right-to-work laws ‘have everything to do with politics’, he was making a point that none of his adversaries would gainsay. Weakening the power of unions is unlikely to hurt the economy of Michigan, which has been a basket case over recent decades. Dozens of European and Asian vehicle manufacturers have opened plants in the US but they have stayed away from Michigan, despite the concentration of expertise there. The bravado of the state’s unions is a likely explanation. Unlike Britain in the 1970s, the US never had a moment when voters asked themselves whether they ruled the country or the unions did.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-LXFiZGYSgR8/UN8iQshTnLI/AAAAAAAAAYQ/Gs6JoD_u5qw/s280/Atlantic.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Charles Fishman in <b>ATLANTIC</b>, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/#" target="_blank">"The Insourcing Boom"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000, making cargo-ship fuel much more expensive now than it was then. The natural-gas boom in the U.S. has dramatically lowered the cost for running something as energy-intensive as a factory here at home. (Natural gas now costs four times as much in Asia as it does in the U.S.) In dollars, wages in China are some five times what they were in 2000—and they are expected to keep rising 18 percent a year. American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as ‘Strike City.’ That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be. U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can’t save much money chasing wages anymore. So much has changed that GE executives came to believe the GeoSpring could be made profitably at Appliance Park without increasing the price of the water heater. ‘First we said, ‘Let’s just bring it back here and build the exact same thing,’’ says Kevin Nolan, the vice president of technology for GE Appliances. But a problem soon became apparent. GE hadn’t made a water heater in the United States in decades. In all the recent years the company had been tucking water heaters into American garages and basements, it had lost track of how to actually make them.” </blockquote>
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John Dizard in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/41825810-0d6a-11e2-97a1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2GB2R9DXR" target="_blank">"The Gas Challenge that Europe and Asia Are Sure to Shirk"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The US and Canada, populated by overweight people with defective public schools, who then go on to put annoying bumper stickers on their excessively large autos, are getting ever-cheaper energy and increasing their share of manufacturing. That is not fair, is it? After all, in the second part of that first economics lecture, the instructor will say that if simple old natural gas, CH4, methane, is priced differently, then speculators will move it from one place to another, driving the price differential down to the minimum required by transport costs. Instead, the same unit of gas was selling last month for $3.47 in Louisiana, $10.50 in Spain, and $12.75 in coastal China. Given that it costs perhaps $3 at the most to ship the stuff, what happened to that Law of One Price? Is this another example of ‘market failure’ that the underpaid Trotskyite instructor thinks should be solved by more aggressive public policy? Should we just give up on Economics 101, and switch over to the Media Studies course in the same time slot that looks more fun?” </blockquote>
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Will Hickey at <i>yaleglobal.yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/east-asia-stop-squabbling-start-drilling" target="_blank">"East Asia: Stop Squabbling, Start Drilling"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the oil industry, border disputes between countries are resolved with joint development areas, or the oil and gas mechanism of ‘unitization.’ Essentially, unitization lets each nation access undersea resources that cross borders, but leaves national boundaries, or overlapping claims to boundaries, intact. There’s much at stake regarding recent territorial disputes with the Diaoyu-Senkakku Islands between China and Japan and the Spratly-Paracel Islands in the South China Sea overlapping borders with China and ASEAN members. Since 1947 and the revolution, China has linked maritime territorial claims with national sovereignty, pointing to historical maps showing a ‘9 dotted line’ stretching throughout the South China Sea. Through collaboration and unitization, China versus Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and others could develop the resources. But no incumbent government would lose credibility with its citizens over sovereignty rights. Oil reservoirs that cross national frontiers need special agreements. In petroleum states where cross-border reservoirs have been discovered, for example fields straddling Norway and the UK in the North Sea, the governments agreed on a common framework to develop these resources.” </blockquote>
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Geoffrey Cain in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b> on Daniel Tudor’s book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/shamans-and-samsung-south-koreas-rise" target="_blank">"Korea – The Impossible Country"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The book also demonstrates that development, like democracy, can take root in a very short period if the entire state is behind it. The South Korea that we know today is the result of a constant self-improving impulse that has dominated the country even amid political turmoil. There is a good chance your television, smart phone, or computer monitor came from South Korea—because, starting in the 1960s, South Korean companies spent decades copying, tinkering with, and improving other countries’ goods. Conglomerates like Samsung benefited from close relationships with the government, allowing them access to easy loans that pushed them into expansion. Samsung has made its mark with the Galaxy, but your Apple iPhone and iPad probably contain a Samsung chipset—the network of chips that makes your device function. Japan is now old news as far as gadgets go; in the mid-2000s, Samsung Electronics overtook Sony in both yearly sales and brand popularity, as measured by the company InterBrand.<br />
Tudor does not shy away from the more oppressive effects of all this forward motion. This culturally ingrained ambition—which he calls a value of striving toward self-perfection—means that pressures run high.” </blockquote>
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Choe Sang-Hun in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/world/asia/demographic-shifts-redefine-society-in-south-korea.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"In Changing South Korea, Who Counts as ‘Korean’? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Among the factors driving this development is the influx of women from Southeast Asia who have come to marry rural South Korean men, who have difficulty attracting Korean women willing to embrace country life. The number of marriage migrants grew to 211,000 last year from 127,000 in 2007, most of them women from Vietnam and other poorer Asian countries drawn to a better life in South Korea. In industrial towns, young men from Bangladesh and Pakistan toil at jobs shunned by Koreans as too dirty and dangerous, providing cheap labor that South Korea’s export-driven economy needs to compete with China. The number of such workers more than doubled to 553,000 last year, from 260,000 in 2007 — not counting those who overstay their visas and work illegally. One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although the overall number of schoolchildren in South Korea has been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birthrates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.” </blockquote>
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Eric Bellman in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578160830213287770.html" target="_blank">"Southeast Asia at a Crossroads on Wages"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Governments in this corner of Asia have to walk a fine line to maintain their export competitiveness as rising wages help another of their goals: to build a strong middle class of consumers. In this, they have to look no further than China, where wages rising almost to the level of those in Mexico have threatened the country's status as the world's factory floor, increasing calls on leaders to reduce the reliance on exports and shift to a growth model based on domestic consumption. How the vibrant economies of Southeast Asia upgrade their citizens' skills and salaries will help decide which ones can build sustainable domestic demand and continue to grow and which ones overheat or slow down.” </blockquote>
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<b>FT</b>: <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/250430bc-41ba-11e2-a8c3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2GB2R9DXR" target="_blank">"Philippines Backs Rearming of Japan"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘We would welcome that very much,’ Albert del Rosario told the <i>Financial Times</i> in an interview. ‘We are looking for balancing factors in the region and Japan could be a significant balancing factor.’ The unusual statement, which risks upsetting Beijing, reflects alarm in Manila at what it sees as Chinese provocation over the South China Sea, virtually all of which is claimed by Beijing. It also comes days before an election in Japan that could see the return as prime minister of Shinzo Abe, who is committed to revising Japan’s pacifist constitution and to beefing up its military.” </blockquote>
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Gary Silverman in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfe6b242-3f99-11e2-b2ce-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Cornered by a Blushing LaMotta"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Did I think it was fair, he asked, that Chinese students have to work so hard at their studies when American children have time to explore the woods and make things out of papier-mache? Before I had a chance to answer, he insisted that he knew what he was talking about because he had read about these things in books. I liked the kid right away. Sometimes I think I know what I’m talking about because I read about things in books, so I couldn’t argue with his method of operation. Speaking as a social commentator myself, I could only tip my hat; his characterization of Americans as people who explore the woods and make things out of papier-mache struck me as altogether poetic. For better or worse, ours is a daydream nation of people who wander and tinker, and either waste their lives, wind up forming Apple Inc or fall somewhere in between.” </blockquote>
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Michelle Woo in <b>O.C. WEEKLY</b>, <a href="http://www.ocweekly.com/2012-11-29/news/cambodia-town-long-beach-prach-ly/" target="_blank">"The Healing Fields of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“While parents went to work, many children got swept into the underworld of violence and crime that plagued Long Beach during the 1980s. ‘Youth were confronted by the ethnic racial hierarchy of poor neighborhoods with scarce resources,’ says Karen Quintiliani, co-director of the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project, a research initiative she runs with anthropologist Susan Needham inside the Historical Society of Long Beach. ‘There was conflict that erupted in the school with Mexican gangs and Central American gangs.’ Essentially, Quintiliani says, ‘they were entering another Killing Field.’ Ly was born in a Cambodian concentration camp during the final year of the Khmer Rouge reign. His mother had to keep the pregnancy a secret, he says, which wasn't difficult because captives were on the verge of starvation and forced to wear black to camouflage themselves.” </blockquote>
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Jim Yardley in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/world/asia/darjeeling-tea-growers-get-protection-from-european-union.html" target="_blank">"Good Name Is Restored in Terrain Known for Tea"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘Russians were not particular about the quality of Darjeeling,’ Mr. Datta said. ‘They took it if it was clear and black.’ Growers saturated their tea gardens with chemicals and pesticides to maximize output, and annual production rose to about 29 million pounds. But when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, so did the export deal, leaving Darjeeling with a crop it had trouble selling in Europe, where many customers, especially in Germany, were aghast at the chemical use. ‘There were no buyers,’ Mr. Jha recalled. ‘It took a long time to revive the image of Darjeeling.’ The key was to focus once again on quality. Tea growers began discarding chemicals and shifting toward organic farming practices. Total production fell, but prices rose steadily, as growers marketed Darjeeling teas according to the seasons, with the greatest demand during the two harvesting times, known as the first and second flushes, which run between February and July. Growers also developed luxury tea products, particularly ‘white tips’ tea, which is drawn from the white buds of tea leaves. But as Darjeeling’s reputation was restored, growers discovered that their teas were being repackaged overseas. Europe had become the biggest buyer again, but some wholesalers there were blending Darjeeling with other teas to bulk up their volume, while continuing to label the resulting mixture as Darjeeling tea.” </blockquote>
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<i>hurriyetdailynews.com</i>: <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/why-is-ozals-death-an-urban-legend.aspx?pageID=238&nid=36886" target="_blank">"Why is Özal’s Death an Urban Legend? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Why was Özal’s death an urban legend? First of all, no autopsy was carried out after he passed away; the authorities at the time claimed his family did not want it, and the family is still not 100 percent clear about it. Second, he had been a popular (first prime minister and then) president. But perhaps more important than those things, the year he passed away turned out to be a very bloody and controversial one as the days passed by; today, many observers of Turkish politics believe that the year 1993 marked a cursed turning point in recent history. The first big incident of the year was the assassination of prominent left-wing journalist Uğur Mumcu, who had been writing extensively on terrorism and its international connections with smuggling rings, on Jan. 24 in front of his house in Ankara. A few days later, on Feb. 5, Adnan Kahveci, former finance minister and one of Özal’s “princes,” died in a car accident near Ankara – suspicions about the accident remain to this day. Kahveci had served as Özal’s link with the intelligence services as a Cabinet secretary before becoming finance minister. On Feb. 17, General Eşref Bitlis, the Gendarmerie commander, died in a plane crash as he took off from a military airport in Ankara; his family still claims that the plane was downed by sabotage and that he might have been killed because he was working on a new Kurdish plan with Özal.” </blockquote>
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Ariel Zirulnick in <b>CSM</b>, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/hezbollah-stronghold-lebanese-christians-respect-stability-175748191.html" target="_blank">"In Hezbollah Stronghold, Lebanese Christians Find Respect, Stability"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Gholam, who throws a party every year in honor of Nasrallah’s birthday and places a photo of him in her Christmas tree, is certainly an anomaly. But other Christian families also speak approvingly of their life under Hezbollah, especially when compared to its predecessor, Amal, which they say forced many Christian residents to sell their homes. In contrast, Hezbollah extended financial support to the Christian families when Dahiyeh needed rebuilding after the civil war and the 2006 war with Israel. Rony Khoury, a Maronite Christian who was born in Harat Hreik and still lives in the same apartment, says he feels comfortable drinking alcohol on his front porch, in full view of members of Hezbollah, and his wife feels no pressure to don a head scarf or follow other rules governing Muslim women's attire. They have property in a predominantly Christian area of Beirut, but have no desire to move.” </blockquote>
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Haian Dukhan at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/haian-dukhan/tribes-and-tribalism-in-syrian-revolution" target="_blank">"Tribes and Tribalism in the Syrian Revolution"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In 2003, the regime used a network of clients from the Arab tribes to suppress the Kurdish uprising. It is reported that the armed tribesmen from Shammar tribe have participated in the military operations led by the regime forces. This big divide created between the Arab tribes and the Kurds in al-Hasakeh was clearly manifested later in the uprising. During a conference for the Syrian opposition held in Cairo in 2011, the Kurdish parties ended up withdrawing after a wrangle with the Council of the Syrian Arab Tribes in which the latter refused a Kurdish suggestion to abolish the ‘discriminatory’ projects initiated by the Syrian regime on their lands.<br />
Most of the research conducted so far into the Syrian uprising is focused on the sectarian element of the conflict, forgetting that there is a tribal dimension to the conflict as well. The spark of the Syrian revolution started in Dar’a, which is a predominantly tribal area. A tribal delegation went to meet Atif Najeeb, the head of the political security branch in Dar’a, to request the release of children imprisoned for writing anti-regime slogans on the wall of their school. In a traditional gesture, they took their headbands off and placed them on the table, saying they would take them up again when the matter had been resolved. The headband is the symbol of manhood and chivalry in tribal traditions. Therefore, when making a request, tribesmen would traditionally take off their headband expecting the other person to reply positively. By way of response Atif took the headbands of the senior tribal leaders from the table and threw them into the rubbish bin. In response to this disrespectful behaviour, the first demonstration to take place in Dar’a was organised by networks of tribesmen from al-Zu’bi and al-Masalmeh tribes. Therefore, ‘Friday of the Tribes’ is held in recognition of Syrian tribes participating in protests against the Syrian regime.” </blockquote>
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Matthew Brunwasser in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/europe/americans-who-helped-free-kosovo-return-as-entrepreneurs.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"That Crush at Kosovo’s Business Door? The Return of U.S. Heroes"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Kosovo is not the only nation where former officials have returned to conduct business — Iraq is another example — but it presents an extreme case, and perhaps a special ethical quandary, given the outsize American influence here. Pristina, the capital, may be the only city in the world where Bob Dole Street intersects Bill Clinton Boulevard. Foreign policy experts say the practice of former officials’ returning for business is more common than acknowledged publicly. Privately, former officials concede the possibility of conflicts of interest and even the potential to influence American foreign policy as diplomats who traditionally made careers in public service now rotate more frequently to lucrative jobs in the private sector.” </blockquote>
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Seera Marston at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/seera-marston/postcard-from-albania-december-2012" target="_blank">"Postcard from Albania"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For a country of just over 3 million people, we have 4 mobile phone networks! I wonder how they make any money, leader is Vodafone! Then others whose names do not clearly indicate to me where they come from; Eagle may be local given the prominence of eagles everywhere in Albania, including the national flag. Albanian flags are everywhere, particularly in this year when they are celebrating 100 years of independence, perhaps a way of reconciling people to 100 years of pretty turbulent history. The place is also plastered with EU and US flags, in houses, bars, and even in the streets. Presumably reflecting the ambition to join the EU, which is not making massive progress though still seems to be perceived as a good thing by many. Some pre-accession funds are arriving, mostly to bring various agricultural produce to EU standards. There is a long way to go.... Why the US flag is all over the place is not something I have managed to work out during this short trip.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-fvKjq6ect6Q/UN8iZcG8uGI/AAAAAAAAAYw/jinfvPEPWgA/s320/fascist-voices-an-intimate-history-of-mussolinis-italy.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Ian Thomson in <b>FT</b> on Christopher Duggan’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/10f78f5c-42f4-11e2-a3d2-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Fascist Voices – An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Parts of the British establishment initially saw a potential ally in Mussolini and a bulwark against Hitler’s Germany. The ‘virile’ alternative of Fascism in the 1920s appealed to many Britons disgruntled by an age of leftist poets, flappers and perceived Judeo-Bolshevik threats. Beforethe days of Hitler, it was a rare British writer who defended Jewish culture. Caricatures of ugly moneylenders had marked 19th-century British fiction – even Thackeray, that most likeable of Victorian novelists, disparaged a Rothschild banker as a ‘greasy-faced compound of donkey and pig’. Subsequently, many British writers and thinkers advocated racial rejuvenation through genetic engineering.” </blockquote>
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Philip Broughton in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324024004578171073386259636.html" target="_blank">"Italy’s Berlusconi Temptation"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Belusconi's popular touch has always been remarkable, and once again the contrast between the twinkling-eyed, soccer-loving 76-year-old in Milan and the hunted-looking Mr. Monti in Rome could not have been greater. Mr. Monti has a right to look tired. He was shovel-passed a disintegrating economy in November 2011 and has made an honorable attempt with an unenviable job. His personal credibility and austerity plan enabled Italy to skirt a Greek or Spanish fate. But the time was inevitably coming when he would have to run for election or stand down. Democracies can only take technocratic leadership for so long. The applause of the investment community is no substitute for a popular vote.” </blockquote>
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Delphine Strauss in <b>FT</b> on Jacques Chirac’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5a252028-40a5-11e2-8f90-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"My Life in Politics"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Beginning with his stint as employment minister under Georges Pompidou, when Chirac says he dissuaded unions from joining the 1968 student protests, the book ends with his second term as president, during which he won notoriety in the US and acclaim at home for opposing the Iraq war. In the intervening years, he spent much time governing, whether as prime minister or president, in tandem with opponents from the left or rivals of similar convictions. Of the two, the governments of cohabitation seem to have been easier.” </blockquote>
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Steven Erlanger in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/world/europe/young-and-educated-in-france-find-employment-elusive.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Young, Educated and Jobless in France"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘We have to begin with parents — ‘Stop dreaming of white collars!’’ Mr. Béharel said. ‘Blue collars, there really is a true path for them,’ he said. But small and medium-size companies, which are France’s primary employers, do not have the resources or the profit margins to train the untrained. ‘We’ve piled up battalions of students in general education, and everyone knows that there aren’t 10,000 among them who are going to find the job that they imagined when they entered university,’ he said. Only 40 percent of students entering university get their degree; the rest drop out, trained for nothing.” </blockquote>
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Paul Berman in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/110863/how-europe-earned-its-nobel-peace-prize" target="_blank">"How Europe Earned Its Nobel Peace Prize"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Alfred Nobel, the unfortunate inventor of dynamite, died before he was able to articulate the logic for his prize, but no explanation was necessary. The history of Europe during the last four 400 years has been punctuated by one attempt after another to avoid a recurrence of the mother-tragedy of all European tragedies, which was the Thirty Years War back in the seventeenth century, together with the sundry other religious wars of the time. Europeans slaughtered each other for the purpose of imposing on the entire continent a single theological truth, which was going to be Catholicism, or Protestantism, or some variation, but was not going to be more than one of the above. And the agreements that brought the slaughters to an end, codified in the seventeenth century, rested on the tolerant principle of cuius regio, eius religio, meaning, the local religion will be whatever the local potentate says it is, and neighboring potentates should mind their own business. This was a principle of renunciation. Europe agreed to give up on the ambition of discovering a single truth and set out instead to manage the multiple truths. Renunciation and muddling-through proved to be a success, within limits. During the 150 years that followed, European wars tended to be ritualized affairs fought by armies wearing colored jackets, as in sports, shooting at each other instead of at the bystanders. When the system broke down, it was only because the French Revolution had introduced a different dispute about right and wrong—instead of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a matter of feudalism versus post-feudalism. And when Napoleon was defeated and order was reestablished, the principles of peace conformed roughly to the same doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio as before, except extended this time to multiple sociopolitical systems.” </blockquote>
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Timothy Snyder in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/hitlers-logical-holocaust/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Hitler’s Logical Holocaust"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“As Donald Bloxham suggests in his <i>Final Solution</i>, the Holocaust can be seen, among many other things, as the final catastrophe accompanying the breakdown of what some historians call the first globalization, the expansions of world trade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It collapsed in three stages: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Its fatal flaw was its dependence upon European empire. The process of decolonization began within Europe itself, as the Balkan nation-states liberated themselves first from the Ottoman Empire and then from the dominance of their British, German, Austrian, or Russian imperial patrons. The leaders of these small, isolated, agrarian nation-states found a natural harmony between nationalist ideology and their own desperate economic situations: if only we liberate our fellow nationals beyond the next river or mountain range from foreign rule, we can expand our narrow tax base with their farmland. After a few false starts involving wars against one another, the Balkan nation-states turned against the Ottoman Empire itself in 1912 in the First Balkan War, effectively driving Ottoman power from Europe and dividing up the spoils (although not without a Second Balkan War, in 1913). The conflict that we remember as World War I can be seen as the Third Balkan War, as elements within the Serbian government tried to win territory from Austria just as they had recently done from the Ottomans. With the coming of World War I, the Balkan model of establishing nation-states spread to Turkey (which involved the mass murder of more than a million Armenians); afterward it was accepted in Central Europe. World War I also shattered a system of world trade, and inaugurated an era of European impoverishment that would last nearly half a century.” </blockquote>
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Matthew Kaminski in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323981504578179310418828782.html" target="_blank">"Weekend Interview: Leszek Balcerowicz"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘While the benefits of non-conventional [monetary] policies are short lived, the costs grow with time,’ he says. ‘The longer you practice these sorts of policies, the more difficult it is to exit it. Japan is trapped.’ Anemic Japan is the prime example, but now the U.S., Britain and potentially the European Central Bank are on the same road. If he were in Mr. Bernanke's shoes, Mr. Balcerowicz says he'd rethink the link between easy money and economic growth. Over time, he says, lower interest rates and money printing presses harm the economy—though not necessarily or primarily through higher inflation. First, Bernanke-style policies ‘weaken incentives for politicians to pursue structural reforms, including fiscal reforms,’ he says. ‘They can maintain large deficits at low current rates.’ It indulges the preference of many Western politicians for stimulus spending. It means they don't have to grapple as seriously with difficult choices, say, on Medicare. Another unappreciated consequence of easy money, according to Mr. Balcerowicz, is the easing of pressure on the private economy to restructure. With low interest rates, large companies ‘can just refinance their loans,’ he says. Banks are happy to go along. Adjustments are delayed, markets distorted.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-WOWzxiHw5kM/UN8igS20zmI/AAAAAAAAAZY/Z5mnLwbx-ZI/s300/RussiaALongView.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Edward Lucas in <b>WSJ</b> on Yegor Gaidar’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323901604578157862694358312.html" target="_blank">"Russia – A Long View"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Having established his theoretical framework, Gaidar turns to the root causes of Russia's backwardness. He places special emphasis on the eclipse of the self-governing medieval republic of Novgorod in northern Russia, a polity akin, he says, to Italy's then-thriving city-states. When Novgorod was subjugated by Moscow in the 15th century, becoming part of Russia's vast feudal apparatus, it lost its self-governance, and Russia became separated ‘culturally, religiously, politically and ideologically from the center of innovation that Western Europe was rapidly becoming.’ Russia came to perceive Western Europe ‘as something alien and foreign.’ The effect was ‘the narrowing of cultural exchange and more suspicion and isolationism.’ Whereas elements of a ‘taxpayers' democracy’ were becoming entrenched in Europe, Russia's system was of the ‘Eastern despotic type,’ based on maximizing the resources that the state could extract from the peasant population. Here Gaidar is echoing a point that has been ably made at greater length by the historian Alexander Etkind of Cambridge University. The natural abundance of Russia—furs and forests in the past, mineral resources later—encourages rulers to loot their country by ‘internal colonization’ rather than to develop it.” </blockquote>
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Yelena Akhtiorskaya in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b> on Douglas Smith’s book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/end-russian-aristocracy-nobility-tsar-nicholas-lenin" target="_blank">"Former People – The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Lenin’s father was a ‘Your Excellency’ whose financial support allowed young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to focus on his extracurricular interest in insurgence. The systematic extinction (though what an unsystematic system!) of the Russian elite was saturated in contradiction and irony, and Smith is light on his toes in exposing both. But he is always mindful of the gravity of his subject, and very persuasively makes the point that disinterest toward the destruction of the Russian elite is disinterest toward much of Russia. Moreover, the aristocracy pleads its own case convincingly, namely by not pleading it at all: most of them, as Smith chronicles, supported the revolution that would lead to their decline. If Russia shone with the nascent glimmer of a democratic republic between the deposing of the tsar and the Bolshevik coup it was due, largely, to the efforts of the nobility. ‘The old system was rotten, everyone knew that,’ encapsulated Baroness Meiendorff. But hanging red flags out of windows did not exempt the nobility from the terror to come (it would be disingenuous to say they didn’t hope that it might). When they wound up in the camps, their breeding was as much on display as it had been at the balls. Solzhenitsyn found them to be ‘genuine aristocrats.’ ‘Because of their upbringing, their traditions, they were too proud to show depression or fear, to whine and complain,’ he wrote. ‘It was a sign of good manners to take everything with a smile, even while being marched out to be shot.’” </blockquote>
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Moeletsi Mbeki in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d313b6b6-37bd-11e2-a97e-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"South Africa Needs an Industrial Revolution to Prosper"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The expectation was that a commodities super cycle, driven by the industrialization of China and other big Asian countries, had begun and was expected to last for several decades. The ANC saw this period of impending prosperity as a time to reward its political constituency – black South Africa – with accelerated private household consumption. Reality was very different. During the commodity boom years, South Africa’s mining sector shrunk by 1 per cent annually, according to the Fraser Institute, the leading think-tank on the global mining industry.” </blockquote>
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Lydia Polgreen in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/world/africa/south-africa-corruption-fuels-battle-for-political-spoils.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fP%2fPolgreen%2c%20Lydia" target="_blank">"In South Africa, Lethal Battles for Even Smallest of Political Posts"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Malunga and Mr. Chiliza were the latest casualties in an increasingly bloody battle for local political posts in South Africa. Dozens of officials, including ward councilors, party leaders and mayors, have been killed in what has become a desperate, deadly struggle for power and its spoils. The killings threaten to tarnish the image of the so-called rainbow nation, whose largely bloodless transition from white minority rule to nonracial democracy has made it a beacon of peace, tolerance and forgiveness. Amid rising corruption and waning economic opportunities, political killings are on the rise. Here in KwaZulu-Natal Province, nearly 40 politicians have been killed since 2010 in battles over political posts, more than triple the number in the previous three years, according to government figures.” </blockquote>
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Douglas Rogers in <b>WSJ</b> on Rian Malan’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578143181312280570.html" target="_blank">"The Lion Sleeps Tonight – And Other Stories of Africa"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The central and most controversial piece—one the author admits ‘will dog me to my grave’—is an investigation into the AIDS-denialism of Thabo Mbkei, South Africa's president from 1999 to 2008, which appeared in <i>Rolling Stone</i> in 2001. Or, rather, it didn't: What we get here is an astonishing 10,000-word letter Mr. Malan wrote to his editor, explaining how the assignment he had been given had veered wildly off course. What he found was a booming AIDS industry whose funding dwarfs that devoted to equally dire diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis. Lax testing methods for Africans meant that blood samples from a few HIV-positive pregnant women in, say, Uganda were fed into a computer model in Geneva which extrapolated that ‘14 million Africans’ have died of AIDS. The letter is riven with Mr. Malan's discomfort at the questions he is raising. The author was branded an AIDS denier in South Africa for his troubles, but it is apparent from the original letter that he never denied the existence or seriousness of the disease—just the predicted scale of it. Perhaps inevitably, the piece<i> Rolling Stone</i> ended up running was so watered down as to be almost unreadable. But Mr. Malan, it turned out, was right. AIDS statistics for Africa have been radically downscaled in the decade since.” </blockquote>
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Richard Dowden in <b>SPECTATOR</b>, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8780181/the-sick-man-of-africa/" target="_blank">"The Sick Man of Africa"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The politics of East Africa’s Rift Valley are as complex, fractured and violent as the tectonic plates that rend the landscape and throw up volcanic eruptions. The latest conflict is not primarily a war over resources. Areas rich in gold, diamonds and coltan have not been particular targets. The M23 rebels’ seizure of Goma is yet another aftershock of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which itself was part of a conflict that goes back centuries. History matters here. It is a vast <i>Götterdämmerung</i> saga. The two former kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi are a unique phenomenon. Two races, Hutu and Tutsi, became part of the same ethnic group from the 17th century. They live in the same space and society, speak the same language, worship the same gods, obey the same chiefs. The Hutu, a Bantu people, were farmers who moved into the area from about the 8th century. The Tutsi, a tall cattle-keeping people probably from the Horn of Africa, came later and settled in the same areas. They integrated their societies but maintained separate roles in complex but balanced power structures. But they did not, for the most part, intermarry. These two peculiar kingdoms covered today’s Rwanda and Burundi as well as parts of southern Uganda and Kivu in eastern Congo. German and then Belgian imperialists decided that the tall, long-headed Tutsi were superior and gave them education and positions of power, making them the ruling class and destroying the delicately balanced status quo. But the Tutsis were a minority and independence in 1962 brought majority rule, which turned into a pogrom and drove them into exile. In Burundi the Tutsis retained power but Rwanda became a Hutu-ruled state, driving thousands of Tutsis into exile.” </blockquote>
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Andres Schipani in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bc97da62-49e1-11e2-a625-00144feab49a.html" target="_blank">"Trial Begins of Peru’s Final Member of Shining Path"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“To the distress of Peruvians, some of the members of the Shining Path group who were imprisoned 20 years ago will start to leave prison next year. Several of the movement’s followers have sought to set up a political party, Movadef, which they say has up to 500,000 supporters already. ‘In today’s world, the armed struggle is a thing of the past. We just want political representation, we are never going to take up arms,’ Alfredo Crespo, Movadef’s leader told the <i>Financial Times</i>.” </blockquote>
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<i>mercopress.com</i>: <a href="http://en.mercopress.com/2012/12/22/preaching-resentment-and-confrontation-led-to-extended-rioting-in-argentina-says-leading-political-analyst?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily" target="_blank">"Preaching Resentment and Confrontation"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Morales Solá believes that inflation is one of the major punishments for the low income population. Real income was down 3.5% in the last twelve months, and one thing is 24% inflation with the economy expanding 8%, as in 2011, and 24% with 1% growth this year. Furthermore the subsidies policy without any matching efforts in education or work, has become an effective electoral instrument of Kirchnerism which has used and abused the resource, meaning there are generations of Argentines that have lost the work culture or have never known it. Thus when the looting of supermarkets there is a blend of all these factors and an overall feeling of resentment from vandals against those who ‘have’ something or very much, triggering confrontation.” </blockquote>
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Jillian Melchior in <b>WEEKLY STANDARD</b>, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/charity-begins-china_663832.html" target="_blank">"Charity Begins in China"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The Chinese public took notice. For all of communism’s promises, the Sichuan quake established that the Chinese government simply isn’t up to the job of responding to citizens in need. It’s not only victims of national disaster, either: From treating victims of AIDS to feeding the hungry to taking care of the country’s orphans, disabled, and elderly, it’s clear that Chinese Christian charities do a much better job than the government. And that reality is leading to a seismic change in modern Chinese society that has gone mostly unreported. Christian churches in Sichuan saw a dramatic increase in conversions after the earthquake. But the conversion of the government might be more dramatic. Despite its long antipathy toward Christianity, the government appears to realize that the churches fill a glaring gap in Chinese society. Beijing has taken some promising steps this year to encourage Christians and other believers to continue expanding their philanthropic pursuits.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EwrvbvVG1ko/UN8iSV0Mz1I/AAAAAAAAAYY/9uI6Ej3JuCM/s341/christianophobia-a-faith-under-attack-by-rupert-shortt-hardback--1489-p.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Brian Stanley in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Rupert Shortt’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1168704.ece" target="_blank">"Christianophobia – A Faith Under Attack"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For Christians in Western Europe and North America, freedom of belief and worship is universal and unquestioned. For perhaps 200 million of their fellow believers elsewhere – principally in Asia, the Middle East and some parts of Africa – this is not the case. Rupert Shortt, Religion Editor of the <i>TLS</i>, has written this book out of a conviction that this state of affairs ‘ought to be a major foreign policy issue for governments across a vast belt of the world’ (it is in fact governments in the Western world for whom this ought to be a foreign policy issue). That it is not so, Shortt maintains, ‘tells us much about a rarely acknowledged hierarchy of victimhood’ in which Christians occupy a low rank. That indifference to their predicament, Shortt suggests, is due to the lingering but largely false impression prevalent in the post-Enlightenment West that human conflicts can more often be traced to religion than to struggles for power, resources or status.” </blockquote>
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Judith Herrin in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Helen Evans & Brandie Ratliff’s anthology, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/arts_and_commentary/article1166588.ece" target="_blank">"Byzantium and Islam – Age of Transition"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In tackling the fundamental problem of how the Arabs achieved their conquests, this volume illuminates and documents the ways in which Islam gained a physical presence, manifested in mosques, copies of the Qur'an, textiles, metalware and glass objects specific to the new faith. Coming from a largely oral culture, with developed traditions of heroic poetry and unwritten tribal customs, the Arab warriors had no immediate need of documents. The revelations to Muhammad were learned by heart and passed from one generation to the next, while the five duties of all Muslims, like the daily prayers, did not require writing. At Mecca and Medina, the central shrine of the Ka'ba and the tomb of the Prophet created immediate centres of Muslim devotion. Beyond Arabia, however, the conquerors faced the deeply embedded cultures of the Hellenistic Near East and Persian Mesopotamia. In these regions, a competitive rivalry for dominance created great turmoil which was only resolved towards the end of the seventh century (roughly fifty years after the initial military victories). How this happened is the core problem of transition. Within the slow process of adaptation, a key point occurred in the 690s, two generations after the Arab invasions. After his victories in 692, Caliph Abd al-Malik decreed that administrative records should be kept in Arabic, rather than Greek; he began to issue coins with Qur'anic texts in Arabic, and built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is decorated with the same quotations from the Qur'an. This was the moment of fundamental change.” </blockquote>
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Anthony Esolen in <b>WSJ</b> on Joseph Ratzinger’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324024004578171632468816580.html" target="_blank">"Jesus of Nazareth – The Infancy Narratives"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Even to those who think themselves familiar with these texts, every page of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ will present some pearl of great value, something that should have been obvious but that has been passed over in haste or inattention. For example, when Luke places Jesus' birth in the context of the Augustan empire, and notes that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to register for the tax, he expects his readers, Benedict argues, to compare one ‘prince of peace’ with another, for that is what Augustus styled himself (‘Princeps Pacis’). The epithet was more than propaganda, Benedict says. It expressed a heartfelt longing in the people of the time, racked by the Roman civil wars and conflicts between the Roman empire and her rivals to the east. We might see how seriously it was taken if we study Augustus's Altar of Peace in Rome, consecrated a few years before Jesus' birth. It was so placed that on the emperor's birthday, between morning and evening, the sun cast the shadow of an obelisk, says the Pope, along a line that struck the very center of the altar, where Augustus himself was portrayed as supreme pontiff.” </blockquote>
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Jonathan Sacks in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/the-moral-animal.html" target="_blank">"The Moral Animal"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form. A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow. The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.<br />
If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-x9Pjsln9zsI/UN8ianj7Y1I/AAAAAAAAAY4/Piz6CbaMYlE/s300/HeavensPurge.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Peter Brown in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b> on Paula Fredriksen’s book, Sin – The Early History of an Idea, and Isabel Moreira’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/risks-being-christian/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Heaven’s Purge – Purgatory in Late Antiquity"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“They make a strong cast of characters. Some, like Jesus of Nazareth, Saint Paul, and Saint Augustine, need no introduction. But Marcion, Valentinus, Justin Martyr (who flourished around the middle of the second century), and even the great Origen (who lived half a century later) belong to a Christianity that is deeply unfamiliar to most modern people. Justin Martyr was accepted as orthodox by later generations of Christians. But several of the others came to be considered as heretics. Marcion was condemned for treating the Jewish past as irrelevant to Christianity. Valentinus regarded the universe as a vast mistake, caused by the rebellion of envious supernatural powers. Origen’s enemies claimed that he had castrated himself in his enthusiasm for the ascetic life, and that he was prepared to believe that even the Devil would be saved. In particular, those who wrote in the Greek East in the second and third centuries CE were a remarkable group. They were fierce intellectuals, engaged in teaching intense coteries of disciples. They were deeply engagé, and often at considerable risk. Justin was martyred because he was denounced as a Christian by a rival teacher of philosophy. Origen was the son of a martyr. When he was a boy he wished to follow his father, and his mother had to hide his clothes to prevent him from running out to defy the pagan authorities.” </blockquote>
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Ross Douthat in <b>NYT,</b> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/loss-of-the-innocents.html" target="_blank">"The Loss of the Innocents"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“But if the ideal of the Good Place, the lost Eden or Arcadia, can stir up the residue of religious hopes even in hardened materialists, the reality of what transpired in the real Newtown last week — the murder in cold blood of 20 small children — can make Ivan Karamazovs out of even the devout. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous novel, Ivan is the Karamazov brother who collects stories of children tortured, beaten, killed — babes caught on the points of soldiers’ bayonets, a serf boy run down by his master’s hounds, a child of 5 locked in a freezing outhouse by her parents. Ivan invokes these innocents in a speech that remains one of the most powerful rebukes to the idea of a loving, omniscient God — a speech that accepts the possibility that the Christian story of free will leading to suffering and then eventually redemption might be true, but rejects its Author anyway, on the grounds that the price of our freedom is too high.” </blockquote>
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David Carr in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/business/media/john-miller-of-cbs-at-home-on-both-sides-of-the-police-tape.html" target="_blank">"A TV Voice Rang True in Clamor of Shooting"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘I’ve been going to crime scenes since I was 9 years old,’ Mr. Miller said. ‘It would not be unusual for me to see Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copacabana on Friday night and then be at the scene of a murder in Washington Square on Saturday night.’ Mr. Miller’s credentials are further burnished by the fact that the Mafia boss Frank Costello was his godfather. By the time he was 14 he was getting his own assignments at Channel 5 News. He would skip gym at Montclair High in New Jersey and hop a bus to the station’s headquarters in New York. While reporters were busy finishing editing, he would be sent out on late-breaking stories to do interviews. He covered collapsed buildings, murders and perp walks, and had his own N.Y.P.D. press pass saying ‘John Miller is entitled to cross police and fire lines wherever formed.’ ‘It was like a golden ticket to the night,’ he said.” </blockquote>
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Hal Jensen in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b>, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article1169298.ece" target="_blank">"A Novel in E Flat"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Burgess sets up ‘an improbable Heaven with squabbling sanctified musicians in it’ and they sit around impatiently waiting for Mozart to arrive and give a recital. Eventually the genius turns up but to everyone's dismay it is the genius of the public imagination, the child prodigy. Mozart is saddled - for eternity, it seems - with the child prodigy label. And Burgess, no less eternally, is the man who wrote the book that Stanley Kubrick turned into a controversial film. In <i>This Man and Music</i> (1982), Burgess says ‘I have spent a good deal of time in the last ten years defending myself against charges of incitations to violence levelled by people who, reading the book after seeing the film, used the book as a mere memorandum of what they considered the primary artistic experience’. So, in 1987, twenty-five years after the original publication of <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>, Burgess published a stage version of the novel. This version, as well as allowing music - especially Beethoven's Ninth - a more prominent and powerful role in the story, was a corrective to Kubrick, for it restored the optimistic ending in which the ‘hero’ (Alex) matures and chooses freely to do no more evil. Burgess was reclaiming his work, a point he made with typical gusto by ending his play with a Chorus singing ‘choice is free but seldom easy’ (to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy) only to be interrupted by Kubrick himself coming on stage playing ‘Singin' in the Rain’ on a trumpet. Kubrick is kicked off and the Chorus resumes.” </blockquote>
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Emily Smith at <i>thedailybeast.com</i>, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/16/for-camille-paglia-the-spiritual-quest-defines-all-great-art.html" target="_blank">"For Camille Paglia, the Spiritual Quest Defines All Great Art"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“That was then. While she is still more than willing to dig into what is left of the feminist movement—‘feminism today is anti-intellectual’ and ‘defined by paranoia,’ she says—these days, she directs the venom of her sharp tongue to the dogmatic champions of secularism, liberals who narrow-mindedly dismiss religion and God. There is one, in particular, whom she cannot stand: the late Christopher Hitchens—like her, a libertarian-minded atheist. The key difference between the two is that he despised religion and God while Paglia respects both and thinks they are fundamental to Western culture and art. Paglia calls Hitchens ‘a sybaritic narcissist committed to no real ideas outside his personal advancement.’ Paglia’s problem with Hitchens reflects her larger concern about the state of art and culture. The arts world’s dismissal of religion, which came to a head in the 1980s and 1990s in the controversies over sacrilege, turned baiting Christianity into a litmus test of being avant-garde. ‘Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork,’ she writes in her new book. In rushing to defend third-rate works like Andres Serrano’s <i>Piss Christ</i> (1987) and Chris Ofili’s <i>The Holy Virgin Mary</i> (1996), the art establishment backed itself into a partisan corner from which it has been unable to emerge. Thanks to this, many Americans consider the art world to be snobbish, effete, and debased.” </blockquote>
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Mark Henninger in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323401904578159573738040636.html" target="_blank">"Alfred Hitchcock’s Surprise Ending"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“At the time, I was a graduate student in philosophy at UCLA, and I was (and remain) a Jesuit priest. A fellow priest, Tom Sullivan, who knew Hitchcock, said one Thursday that the next day he was going over to hear Hitchcock's confession. Tom asked whether on Saturday afternoon I would accompany him to celebrate a Mass in Hitchcock's house. I was dumbfounded, but of course said yes. On that Saturday, when we found Hitchcock asleep in the living room, Tom gently shook him. Hitchcock awoke, looked up and kissed Tom's hand, thanking him. Tom said, ‘Hitch, this is Mark Henninger, a young priest from Cleveland.’ ‘Cleveland?’ Hitchcock said. ‘Disgraceful!’ After we chatted for a while, we all crossed from the living room through a breezeway to his study, and there, with his wife, Alma, we celebrated a quiet Mass. Across from me were the bound volumes of his movie scripts, ‘The Birds,’ ‘Psycho,’ ‘North by Northwest’ and others—a great distraction. Hitchcock had been away from the church for some time, and he answered the responses in Latin the old way. But the most remarkable sight was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.” </blockquote>
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Morgan Meis at <i>thesmartset.com</i>, <a href="http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article12041201.aspx" target="_blank">"The Art of Shame"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In one of his essays, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’ Greenberg tried to explain what was going on in Romantic painting of the late 19th century. He wrote: The painted picture occurs in blank, indeterminate space; it just happens to be on a square of canvas and inside a frame. It might just as well have been breathed on air or formed out of plasma. It tries to be something you imagine rather than see…. Everything contributes to the denial of the medium, as if the artist were ashamed to admit that he had actually painted his picture instead of dreaming it forth. Greenberg meant this an insult. Greenberg thought that painting should revel in the sensuous qualities of paint, not evaporate into a dream world. But the true Romantic accepts the charge of denying his medium.” </blockquote>
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Norman Lebrecht in <b>STANDPOINT</b>, <a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4815/full" target="_blank">"The Artistic Legacy of the Great War"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The war shattered the formal rules of social relationships. To a generation that lost its moral anchor between 1914 and 1918, art became both refuge and beacon. The next decade proved to be among the most nervous and fertile in human civilisation, a fertility complicated by external insemination. The United States came late into the war. For three long, sideline years, it made do with domestic entertainments, augmented by the spread of new technology—the gramophone, the silent film, the motor car, the urge to fly. Popular music, a hybrid form, flourished in the absence of imports. Jazz became the bedrock music of dance and romance. When America entered the war, it took command of mass culture.” </blockquote>
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Stephen Rosen in <b>AMERICAN INTEREST</b>, <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1357" target="_blank">"War and the Intellectuals"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The educated New England elite had by the end of the 19th century lost its Puritan character, but it had not found a compelling replacement for it. Its younger elements were increasingly dissatisfied both with the New England provincialism, which was what remained, and the commercialism of new industrial American wealth. The younger educated elites began to redefine themselves as disinterested intellectuals who were or ought to be the moral leaders of society, and who pledged loyalty to a cosmopolitan ideal that legitimized the independent intellectual by justifying their unwillingness to subordinate themselves to the national majority. In that context, war threatened American intellectuals, not because war was costly to America, but because war aroused populist passions that threatened them by demanding they serve the nation, not their consciences.” </blockquote>
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Jonathan Foyle in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9e0ec1b8-3e34-11e2-91cb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2GB2R9DXR" target="_blank">"Glass from the Past"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Most figures in late medieval stained glass are light-haired because yellow was the de rigeur stain, the colour made economical for the first time after someone dabbled with washes of silver nitrate and a hot kiln just after 1300. Solid-coloured dark ‘pot metal’ glass was rejected for the brighter effects gained from fusing thin sheets of coloured glass on to clear glass. By 1400, the common method of making images on clear glass was through a simpler palette of brown-black oxide painting of outlines, with silver stain washes for hair, wings, and haloes: thereby, a host of blonde angels filled the land, lending a golden glow to the northern climate. At that time, Coventry was busy filling the windows of the largest of all English parish churches, St Michael, visible from many miles thanks to its tallest church steeple at 303ft. Coventry’s glass was paid for by merchants dealing in blue cloth and millinery – and sometimes a combination of those, to go by a fragment showing a blue hat with a gold hat-pin. That piece is one of about 8,000 from St Michael’s that miraculously escaped destruction, twice: first, in the 1640s, when Puritan iconoclasts attacked the graven images of the windows; the many surviving pieces were then reassembled in a jumble to fill the clerestory windows above the main arcades. All those panels were taken down for safe storage when war broke out in September 1939, one year before St Michael’s – now promoted to cathedral status – was destroyed by incendiary bombs on November 14 1940.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-gmMg9SydYuM/UN8iOB_WgvI/AAAAAAAAAYI/4rwCbQs-Z9A/s308/aeon_cover.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Roger Scruton in <b>AEON</b>, <a href="http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/roger-scruton-fake-culture/" target="_blank">"The Great Swindle"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The life of the mind has its intrinsic methods and rewards. It is concerned with the true, the beautiful and the good, which between them define the scope of reasoning and the goals of serious enquiry. But each of those goals can be faked, and one of the most interesting developments in our educational and cultural institutions over the past half century is the extent to which fake culture and fake scholarship have driven out the true varieties. It is important to ask why. The most important way of clearing intellectual space for fake scholarship and culture is to marginalise the concept of truth. This looks difficult at first. After all, every utterance, every discussion, seems to be aimed at truth by its very nature. How can knowledge come to us, if we are indifferent to the truth of what we read? But this is too simple. There is a way of debating that disregards the truth of another’s words, since it is concerned to <i>diagnose</i> them, to discover ‘where they are coming from’, and to reveal the emotional, moral and political attitudes that underlie a given choice of words. The habit of ‘going behind’ your opponent’s words stems from Karl Marx’s theory of ideology, which tells us that, in bourgeois conditions, concepts, habits of thought and ways of seeing the world are adopted because of their socio-economic function, not their truth. The idea of justice, for instance, which sees the world in terms of rights and responsibilities and assigns ownership and obligations across society, was dismissed by early Marxists as a piece of bourgeois ‘ideology’.” </blockquote>
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Tom Aitken in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on William Romanowski’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/tlssearch.do?querystring=tom+aitken&sectionId=13175&p=tls" target="_blank">"Reforming Hollywood – How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“By 1934, Hays had organized cooperation from everyone he needed and established the Production Code. The Catholic Church, working through its newly founded Legion of Decency, would preview movies, condemning any deemed ‘vile and unwholesome’, leaving implementation of their advice to the studios. They thought the system would work best if studios continued to own first-run theatres and enforced block booking. Thus, films not conforming to the Code could not be shown in the metropolitan areas which ensured commercial success. The Code accepted Catholic censorship of American movies. Catholics rejoiced, since they believed that judgment on entertainments affecting the moral standards of America should not be passed by Protestants, Jews and pagans, who ‘confused the issues’ with talk of art, business practices and free speech. Hays had outflanked his co-religionists, to prevent those who had no conception of Christian morals making indecent movies. Protestants were soon angered by Catholic decisions implying that mocking Protestant clerics was less offensive than mocking Catholic priests.” </blockquote>
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James Panero in <b>NEW CRITERION</b>, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Armory-Show-at-100-7494" target="_blank">"The Armory Show at 100"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“While the New York press was generally favorable, often full of praise save for some cranky responses from the city’s establishment critics, the show’s reception at its next stop, The Art Institute of Chicago, was far less gleeful. The Institute’s academic student body staged public protests during the exhibition and even burned in effigy the figure of Walter Pach. Today this display sounds gruesome, but I suspect at the time it was meant to be somewhat jocular. Pach, after all, never went into hiding during his stay in the Land of Lincoln. In fact, this free publicity helped boost the Chicago run of the show, a smaller version of New York stripped of its American art component. At 100,000, Chicago had the highest attendance numbers of all three venues, compared to 87,000 in New York. At only 17,000, Boston proved to be a disappointing third stop in late April, one that says much about the ‘Brahmin mind,’ writes Brown, and the city’s cultural passivity. The Chicago press largely vilified the show, calling it ‘profane,’ ‘blasphemous,’ ‘obscene,’ ‘vile,’ ‘suggestive,’ and a ‘desecration.’ But Chicago also saw some of the Armory’s most eloquent defenders, in particular Harriet Monroe in the <i>Sunday Tribune</i>. ‘In a profound sense these radical artists are right,’ she observed. ‘They represent a search for new beauty, impatience with formulae, a reaching out toward the inexpressible, a longing for new versions of truth observed.’ The excitement around the show, both in New York and Chicago, both positive and negative, speaks to the broad conversation the culture of art enjoyed in 1913. The heated response paralleled the modernist experience in Europe, where the 1913 Paris premiere of <i>The Rite of Spring</i> degenerated into a riot.” </blockquote>
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Raffi Khatchadourian in <b>NEW YORKER</b>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian" target="_blank">"Operation Delirium"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Edgewood had been built in a fit of urgency during the First World War, when weaponized gas—chlorine and, later, mustard—was used to devastating effect in the trenches of Europe. Fritz Haber, the German scientist who pioneered the rise of chemical weapons, proclaimed, ‘In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing.’ The U.S. Army took the threat seriously, and launched a program to study the chemicals, building laboratories and gas chambers in order to test human subjects. ‘We began to hear about the terrors of this place,’ a private wrote in 1918. ‘Everyone we talked to on the way out here said we were coming to the place God forgot! They tell tales about men being gassed and burned.’<br />
After the Second World War, intelligence reports emerged from Germany of chemical weapons far deadlier than mustard or chlorine. The new compounds, which had evolved out of research into insecticides, were called nerve gases, because they created a body-wide overflow of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, often triggering organ failure and near-sudden death. The Reich had invested primarily in three—tabun, soman, and sarin—and the victorious powers rushed to obtain them. The Soviet Union secretly dismantled an entire nerve-gas plant and relocated the technology behind the Iron Curtain. The American government, for its part, acquired the Nazi chemical formulas—and, in some cases, the scientists who developed them—and brought them to Edgewood.” </blockquote>
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Claudia Dreifus in <b>NYT,</b> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/studying-ethical-questions-as-we-unlock-the-black-box-of-the-brain.html?ref=claudiadreifus" target="_blank">"A Conversation with S. Matthew Liao"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“<b>Define neuroethics.</b><br />
It’s a kind of subspecialty of bioethics. Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box — a little. With functional magnetic imaging, f.M.R.I., you can get pictures of what the brain is doing during cognition. You see which parts light up during brain activity. Scientists are trying to match those lights with specific behaviors. At the same time this is moving forward, there are all kinds of drugs being developed and tested to modify behavior and the mind. So the question is: Are these new technologies ethical? A neuroethicist can look at the downstream implications of these new possibilities. We help map the conflicting arguments, which will, hopefully, lead to more informed decisions. What we want is for citizens and policy makers to be thinking in advance about how new technologies will affect them. As a society, we don’t do enough of that.” </blockquote>
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Gordon Crovitz in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323981504578181533577508260.html" target="_blank">"America’s First Big Digital Defeat"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“At the just-concluded conference of the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai, the U.S. and its allies got outmaneuvered. The ITU conference was highly technical, which may be why the media outside of tech blogs paid little attention, but the result is noteworthy: A majority of the 193 United Nations member countries approved a treaty giving governments new powers to close off access to the Internet in their countries. U.S. diplomats were shocked by the result, but they shouldn't have been surprised. Authoritarian regimes, led by Russia and China, have long schemed to use the U.N. to claim control over today's borderless Internet, whose open, decentralized architecture makes it hard for these countries to close their people off entirely. In the run-up to the conference, dozens of secret proposals by authoritarian governments were leaked online.” </blockquote>
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3 x John Strausbaugh at <i>chisler.org</i>:<br />
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<a href="http://chiseler.org/post/38071308208/maxwell-bodenheim" target="_blank">"Maxwell Bodenheim"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“He grew up poor and Jewish in smalltown Mississippi. He was bright but viciously boorish, physically handsome yet repulsively slovenly, and argumentative to a fault, with a genius for the insult that could end any discussion, usually with his being punched in the mouth. As young men Bodenheim and Hecht were the pranksters of the Chicago Renaissance. According to Allen Churchill’s <i>The Improper Bohemians</i>, they once filled a hall for a literary debate on the topic ‘Resolved: That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.’ Hecht strode center-stage to announce that he would take the affirmative. Then he stated, ‘The affirmative rests.’ Bodenheim shambled forward, scrutinized his confident opponent, and said, ‘You win.’ Bodenheim — Bogie to his long-suffering friends — was twenty-two when he blew into Greenwich Village with other Chicago émigrés in 1915, and instantly made a name for himself in the neighborhood as a poet of promise.” </blockquote>
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<a href="http://chiseler.org/post/37481282850/human-dialect-cocktails" target="_blank">"Human Dialect Cocktails"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“They were in many ways the female equivalent of minstrels, and some began their careers in blackface. They sang what white folks took to be blues and jazz and rag; they belted and moaned and shimmied; they exuded raw desire and humor, and generally performed in ways white folks thought black folks did. Just as the first minstrels, primarily of Irish or German descent, passed the form down to mostly Jewish ones by the 1900s, coon shouters of the twentieth century tended to be Jewish. It was entry-level schtick, especially for those who in one way or another didn’t conform to contemporary standards of stage pulchritude. May Irwin was one of the first coon shouters, and helped set a pattern followed by many others. Born Ada Campbell near Toronto in 1862, she was large and fleshy even by expansive Victorian standards, with a milk-and-roses complexion that showed her Irish heritage. She and her sister Georgia, who took the stage name Flo Irwin, became a singing sensation at Tony Pastor’s variety theater in the mid-1870s. They split up in the 1880s, and May went on to belt out coon songs both in blackface and not. ‘The Bully Song,’ her biggest hit, begins: ‘Have yo’ heard about dat bully dat’s just come to town/ He’s round among de niggers a-layin’ their bodies down.’ She performed it in a Broadway musical review of 1895, <i>The Widow Jones</i>, which also included a lingering kiss with her co-star. Thomas Edison caught the show and got the stars to come to his studio, where he filmed <i>The Kiss</i>.” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://chiseler.org/post/38876070301/the-old-bowery" target="_blank">"The Old Bowery"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“There wasn’t much professional theater in America before the Revolutionary War. A scant handful of English troupes braved the Atlantic crossing to perform in the colonies, but they did so under great duress. Colonial religious and civic leaders denounced theater as symptomatic of the Old World wickedness and frivolity they’d come to the Americas to escape. Theater was specifically associated with prostitution, as hookers had traditionally found the pickings easy in theater balconies stuffed with young males out for a good time. Preachers called theater ‘the Devil’s Church.’ Several colonies banned all stage plays outright. Even New York, a wide open party town from its beginnings as New Amsterdam, issued a ban against ‘play acting and prize fighting.’” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iOxdDSqBlu4/UN8iiJI6d2I/AAAAAAAAAZg/qGSthjfFDY8/s330/UglyThings.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Mike Stax in <b>UGLY THINGS</b> on Mike Markesich’s book, <a href="http://ugly-things.com/" target="_blank">"Teenbeat Mayhem! "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“<b>Q. With the book you’ve made a bold and concerted effort to redefine what has become known as ’60s ‘garage’ as ‘teenbeat.’ Could you explain why?</b><br />
<br />
A. I wouldn’t say that I am being audacious by swapping one term for the other. I’m merely placing these terms into historical context for purposes of the book. I find ‘teenbeat’ is a more forgiving and correct representation than that of ‘garage.’ Teenbeat was even used in Europe as a genre reference during the ’60s. A teenaged rock & roll group that made a record in 1966 is just that. Stereotyping a group as a garage band is quixotic, a revisionist means of categorization, besides being historically inaccurate. Nobody used that phrase in those days. In my mind, how can something be so when it had not been invented as spoken or printed vernacular of the time?” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Andy Schwartz at <i>boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com</i>, <a href="http://boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com/2012/12/bert-berns-seven-year-itch.html" target="_blank">"Bert Berns’ Seven-Year Itch"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Things began to pop when an old–school music publisher, Robert Mellin, hired Bert to be his firm’s conduit to teenage music. Berns and the African–American songwriter Phil Medley came up with ‘Push Push,’ recorded by Austin Taylor in a somewhat goofy but undeniably infectious production rife with Berns’ trademark Caribbean undertones. The Laurie Records release struggled to #90 on the Hot 100 – Bert’s first song to make the charts. September 1961 brought a career breakthrough when a Richmond VA group called the Jarmels made it all the way to #12 with his song ‘A Little Bit of Soap.’ Bum ticker be damned: Bert Berns was off and running. In the summer of ’62, he took the Isley Brothers all the way to #2 with ‘Twist and Shout,’ a Berns/Medley song and a Bert Berns production. On February 11, 1963, it became the last song recorded by the Beatles in nearly nine hours of recording for their debut album <i>Please Please Me</i>. (‘Twist And Shout’ was later covered by Johnny Rivers, Mae West, Booker T. & the MGs, The Mamas & Papas, and Rodney Dangerfield, among others.)” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
ONO – <a href="http://prioritymale.bigcartel.com/product/ono-machines-that-kill-people-colored-version-out-of-100" target="_blank">"Machines That Kill People"</a> $15pp.<br />
<blockquote>
“In another bout of pretending I run a record label, Steve Krakow (AKA Plastic Crimewave) and I are partnering up with the assistance of a generous grant from local arts preservation non-profit SOTA Chicago to reissue the incredible and timeless debut LP "Machines That Kill People" by ONO.” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CTEel1HvEJU/UN8ieY9bYCI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/8snrpbqRBGs/s405/RandyAndTheRandies-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><a href="http://www.philipchristianzimmerman.com/philip/randy-and-the-randies/" target="_blank">"Randy and the Randies"</a> by Philip Zimmerman.<br />
<blockquote>
“Randy and the Randies: Jennifer Lobianco, Randy Moe, Steve Lee Reade and Philip Zimmerman were a Portland band in existence from 1979 to 1982. Super-obscure and defying easy catagorization, they are of the Portland music lineage traced back through Jennifer to Formica and the Bitches, the Neoboys, becoming the strange little brother band to these more famous underground greats.” </blockquote>
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33VRIROV94Q" target="_blank">"Neo Boys"</a> live in studio, 1979; from <i>Northwest Passage</i> (2010)<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Raymond Cummings at <i>splicetoday.com</i>,<br />
<a href="http://www.splicetoday.com/music/this-is-not-some-sort-of-poetry-music" target="_blank">"Scarcity of Tanks interview"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“From the doom funk of <i>No Endowments</i> to the lurching noise grooves of <i>NZ Metals</i> to how <i>Sensational Grade</i>’s A+ rock through to the just-released <i>Ohio Captives</i>, the SOT sound is in a constant state of metamorphosis while remaining recognizably definitive, an endless baseline-coastline of roiling, probing electric blues as expressive and depthless as a Francisco Goya painting—anchored by Matthew Wascovich’s impressionistic non-sequiturs, punch line/joke combinations that bring to mind Mitch Hedberg at his best. These guys should garner way more acclaim than they currently receive. Next year, they plan to issue three more albums via Wascovich’s Total Life Society Records; maybe that’ll help get the ball rolling.<br />
I interviewed members of SOT over several months earlier this year.<br />
<br />
<b>Q: How and when did Scarcity Of Tanks get its start, and what inspired the name?</b><br />
A: I had been contemplating this idea of having a group like SOT for years. At first, the sound was completely improvised and primarily non-rock, sound-art but with a working class ethos, anti-authority, and non-academic kind of stuff. The group is fairly steady now with its line-ups.” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Archie Patterson at <i>rocksbackpagesblogs.com,</i> <a href="http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2012/12/the-all-american-underground-band-larry-mondello-band/" target="_blank">"The All-American Underground Band – Larry Mondello Band"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The actual music, if you can call it that, features a collection of primitive beats, noises, notes and strange sounds. Who can judge if it’s good, bad, or anything else, the two seem trying to bed trying to communicate something that is virtually incomprehensible. They do succeed however in creating a form of anti-music, which exists on a separate plane from any other music.” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://gulcher.bigcartel.com/" target="_blank">"Screamin' Mee-Mees - Clutching Hand Monster Mitt"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Released on vinyl in 1992 by the Screamin' Mee-Mees on their own Dog Face Records, this was the public follow-up to their debut EP unleashed fifteen years earlier in 1977! Bruce Cole and Jon Ashline (R.I.P.) made probably the best ‘worst’ record of the 1970s American punk era; the <i>Live From The Basement</i> EP is right down there with the Germs' ‘Forming’ and O. Rex's 1976 maxi-single. And then came <i>Clutching Hand Monster Mitt!</i> They're still in the basement, but with better equipment; technique that's still primitive, but more sure and much more experimental; a style that's equal parts ACID and STOOPID. Like, there's a song called ‘Mudflap,’ but it's instrumental and has a vibe somewhere 'twixt <i>The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn</i> and the Godz on ESP. ‘Riotous Crowd’ sets the tone for the whole thing with a kinda cranky paranoid narrative voice describing a world both surreal and mundane (like the Mee-Mees themselves). It goes on for a good while. The whole record's loaded with similar wah-wah guitar spasms, sloppy perfect drums, and oddball vocals. Dig ‘Visions Of The Dark Pumpkin’--Midwestern psycho-somethin'-delic with a shimmering dash of English acid-rock circa '67. And then comes the gruntspeak of ‘Visual Harm,’ staggering along like some very twisted Midwestern garage-rock-mutant locked away in a cellar for twenty years with nothing but Krautrock records and cheap beer. Urp. Like the Mee-Mees. (Eddie Flowers/Gizmos, Crawlspace)” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Chris Richards in <b>WASHINGTON POST</b>, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/arthur-magazine-a-counterculture-favorite-returns-to-print/2012/12/25/881179dc-4df2-11e2-950a-7863a013264b_story.html" target="_blank">"Arthur Magazine, a Counterculture Favorite, Returns to Print"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Four years later, <i>Arthur</i> has risen. ‘It’s good to be alive again, doing something that we love,’ writes editor and co-publisher Jay Babcock in the magazine’s new issue, which features a definitive interview with late outsider guitarist Jack Rose and an almost hallucinogenic appreciation of Waylon Jennings’s finest album, ‘Dreaming My Dreams,’ by Stewart Voegtlin.<br />
And then there’s the biggest surprise: You can actually hold this thing — a beautiful, 16-page broadsheet — in your hands. ‘Print is what our writers and artists want to do,’ says Babcock, 42, over the phone from his home in Joshua Tree, Calif. ‘And it’s what I want to publish. Print is the first thing for us — making a physical artifact and all that that means.’” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-FIsT8M23rPA/UN8iXRJLjEI/AAAAAAAAAYo/qEf4jeZD_jI/s382/EastwoodCoogan%2527sBluff-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Encore spotlight: <a href="http://www.starz.com/channels/encore" target="_blank">"Clint Eastwood"</a>, Sat. Jan. 5 all day from 8:30am eastern:<br />
<br />
Starz-Encore has about the worst website going so here’s the best info:<br />
<br />
Coogan’s Bluff 10:45am<br />
The Rookie 2:20pm<br />
The Gauntlet 4:30pm<br />
The Enforcer 6:20pm<br />
Play Misty For Me 1:45am<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/91083/Spirit-of-the-Beehive-The/articles.html" target="_blank">"Spirit of the Beehive (Spain, 1973)"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
(Victor Erice/Fernando F. Gomez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria)<br />
TCM - Mon., Jan. 7, 10:30pm eastern<br />
<br />
"The symbol-laden work is often considered a coded commentary on life in the authoritarian Franco regime, which was marked by isolationism and the persecution of political 'enemies.' But Erice's film is far richer than a mere political tract, with its acute rendering of everyday village life and its unique vision of the world of childhood imagination. Luis Cuadrado's cinematography is remarkable for its subdued color scheme and its painterly lighting effects, especially in the interiors of the family residence, which are bathed in golden light. (Cuadrado was reportedly going blind during this period and committed suicide in the 1980s.) But the aspect which seems to have stayed with viewers the most is the extraordinary performance of child actress Ana Torrent in the lead role." </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Dave Lang at <i>manwithoutshame.blogspot.com</i>, <a href="http://manwithoutshame.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/1980s90s-melbourne-record-shop-rundown_9.html" target="_blank">"Melbourne Record Shop Rundown"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“[I]n an interview I heard on the radio last year w/ Pepperell, he was saying that the standard procedure for record stores back in the day was to register the store, open an account w/ all the local record companies and <i>they</i> would decide what to stock in the store. You had ‘X’ amount of money to spend, and they would nominate the releases they would sell to you. If that business practice strikes you as fairly absurd and fascistic, you may be correct. And thus there came to be Archie & Jughead's... Both Glass and Pepperell deserve their own entries: there is simply too much to say in a brief spiel as this (<i>and one which isn't even supposed to be about them</i>). Keith Glass has his own Wikipedia entry…. Suffice to say, as an actor (in <i>Hair!</i>), singer, producer, DJ, label and retail owner, his CV spreads far and wide. I've never actually met him (he's lived in the US for a number of years), although I'm friends with his daughter, Daisy, but Pepperell is a different story. He's a larger than life motormouth who, similarly, has done a lot since he sold the store 30-odd years ago, as a journalist and music retail manager, and I'll certainly never forget his visit to Missing Link on the shop's 30th anniversary in 2001. For an hour, he regalled us w/ stories of the first few years of the store. In short, from the first day it opened, they knew they were onto a good thing: there were hundreds, maybe thousands of music-starved freaks who needed an outlet like Archie & Jugheads in their lives. The music <i>trucked</i> out the door. How did they evade prosecution? That's something you best ask them.” </blockquote>
<br />
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***<br />
<br />
<br />
Obituaries of the Week.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.tnr.com/print/blog/plank/111284/were-still-paying-the-price-the-borking-bork" target="_blank">"Robert Bork"</a> (1927-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
“In the summer of 1987, right out of college, I was a summer intern for Senator Joe Biden, who was chairing the Robert Bork confirmation hearings. My contribution to the epic battle was modest: I helped with research for a speech on the history of the confirmation process, in which Biden argued that the Senate had the duty to scrutinize not only the legal qualifications but also the constitutional views of nominees. This was a controversial proposition at the time; today it has been taken to extremes that neither Biden nor Bork, who died today at 85, could have imagined. But even from the sidelines, as I celebrated Bork’s defeat, I remember feeling that the nominee was being treated unfairly. Senator Edward Kennedy set the tone with a demagogic attack. ‘Robert Bork’s America,’ he said, ‘is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of Americans.’ Bork’s record was distorted beyond recognition, and his name was transformed from a noun into a verb.” </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-carey-20121229,0,6524990,full.story%20" target="_blank">"Harry Carey Jr."</a> (1927-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
"The red-haired, boyishly handsome Carey lacked the screen-dominating star quality of his longtime pal, John Wayne, with whom he appeared in nearly a dozen films. Instead, Carey made his mark as a character actor whose work in westerns bore an authenticity unmatched by most actors: He was considered one of Hollywood's best horsemen. That was amply illustrated in 1950's 'Rio Grande,' for which he and cowboy-turned-character actor Ben Johnson learned to ride two horses while standing up, with one foot on the back of each horse. His other Ford film credits include '3 Godfathers,' 'Wagon Master,' 'The Long Gray Line, 'Mister Roberts,' 'Two Rode Together' and 'Cheyenne Autumn.' Carey also appeared in dozens of television shows, most of them westerns such as 'Gunsmoke,' 'Bonanza,' "Have Gun-Will Travel,' 'The Rifleman' and 'Branded.' He also portrayed the boys' ranch counselor in the popular 'Spin and Marty' serials on 'The Mickey Mouse Club' in the 1950s. According to Dante, Carey's best role was in Ford's 1950 western 'Wagon Master,' in which Carey and Johnson co-starred as horse traders who join a Mormon wagon train."</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Thanks to Mike Carducci, Mark Carducci, Jay Babcock, Steve Beeho, Andy Schwartz, Joe Pope, <i>worldpress.org</i>.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-490173063172998122012-12-02T08:21:00.002-08:002012-12-02T19:13:11.775-08:00Issue #142 (Dec. 4, 2012)<b>southwest of Snowy Range, WY</b><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-ZvT51HnQnqs/ULjtC3KcopI/AAAAAAAAAUI/ak2ZotLSd_8/s640/westofpeaksmarsh-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-QZnVCJY0Z34/ULqcOuvdY8I/AAAAAAAAAWM/Ct9DV0Nirno/s512/Jane-American%2520Hebrew%2520cover%2520in%2520color.jpeg" /><br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The American Hebrew</i>, 1936<br />
Janet Lynn<br />
<br />
I would like to thank my father for a recent gift – an unexpected, even startling object I found in a box full of yellowed papers and decaying receipts. Though he died ten years ago at the age of 86, I recently came across, glossy and intact, an issue of a magazine called, <i>The American Hebrew</i>. The name itself seemed antique if not cryptic. While it is the heritage passed on by my father I couldn’t readily relate to the title – The Hebrew? Is that a language, a country, a people?<br />
<br />
The date on it is October 30, 1936. World War II hadn’t begun, and kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the holocaust was still 2 years off. In America, especially in New York, 1936 seems in high season judging by the magazine. There were charity events at the Plaza, weddings and sailings announcements, lectures, a movie reviewed that starred Martha Raye, Jack Benny and Stokowski, music reviews featuring Eugene Ormandy, and notables such as playwright Lillian Hellman sighted at luncheons. The city in full swing. Plus reminders to vote in November. American culture and the Hebrew successes as chronicled seemed one.<br />
<br />
A random issue of a 57-year-old national weekly? I don’t know why my father had held onto the magazine. I do know he was an avid reader and interested in all aspects of culture and philosophy which this magazine fed. At the time, my father was twenty years old and was just trying to survive by having a costume jewelry booth on the boardwalk of Coney Island (it later evolved into a medical manufacturing business). Maybe it was the moment-in-time the issue represented, and how its premonitions of what was to come over there could be laid out by the editors alongside the quotidian happenings here:<br />
<br />
What did they know and when did they know it?<br />
<br />
Right behind the front cover is the shock in a letter-to-the-editor from a correspondent. A conventional social justice frame-of-reference hides from view and disguises what they knew – ideologies that would utterly transform <i>The American Hebrew</i> in the generations to come:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“TO ESTABLISH GHETTO SCHOOLS<br />
<br />
The Nazi press forecasts the early segregation of the German Jewish children in the elementary schools. The Jewish community has awaited this move, on the part of the Government for some time and although this would officially establish the School Ghetto, nevertheless it would not be unwelcome by the Jews. For it is expected that as soon as the official ‘Jew-Schools’ are established, the Government will take over the support of these schools which are at present a burden on the shoulders of the Jewish community.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The editorial page comments on issues ranging from the pope to Syria, to a gift given by B’nai B’rith. It states its positions: the pope is sympathetic despite recent slanders that he is not and in Syria indigenous Jews will be threatened with revenge as soon as Syria obtains its independence from France, then being negotiated. But the editorial’s major focus was the gift which was for agricultural land in Palestine, which at that time was under British mandate.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-tkd1wzVA8EU/ULqcPc8BedI/AAAAAAAAAWU/M4r25fgbbxI/s303/Jane-American%2520Hebrew%2520text_BnaiBrithArticle.jpeg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />The American Hebrew was sensitive to the word Zionism and the world prejudices it had caused but saw Palestine as a place of refuge:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“…The significance of the B'nai B'rith grant at this point in Palestine's rehabilitation lies in the fact that the mutations of world events have dissipated the apprehensions and the fears of anti-Zionists and non-Zionists with regard to the Jews and political Zionism. So magnificent and constructive a lift to Palestine by a great non-Zionist organization is a message to Great Britain that non-Zionists are united with Zionists in the expectation that Majesty's Government may not default on the Palestine Mandate….” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The American Hebrew took a compromise position toward Palestine despite the limits on immigration. They left it for the future to settle Palestine, a theme that would go on to haunt the later generations:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
“…A safe and inviting land for… ‘Jews who choose Palestine as their homeland,’ leaving the political determination of the country to the future.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The political page, takes you further from the issues of the Jews in Europe. The “Potomac” column, while not formally endorsing a candidate, makes it clear that Franklin Roosevelt is the answer – for maintaining the relationship with Britain and for the still hoped-for recovery of the economy. My father was a Democrat his whole life – unquestioning, never moving left or right. A campaign advertisement in this issue describes the Democrat at the time:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“THINGS TO REMEMBER ON NOVEMBER 3, 1936<br />
<br />
DO NOT forget the soup line of America from 1929 to 1933.<br />
DO NOT forget the idleness of the mills and factories of this country from 1929 to 1933.<br />
DO NOT forget the meager wages paid in America from 1929 to 1933.<br />
DO NOT forget the ruinous prices of agricultural products from 1929 to 1933.<br />
DO NOT forget that humanity comes first with Roosevelt.<br />
DO NOT forget that the Roosevelt Administration stood and fought for the welfare and happiness not of one class but for the advancement and prosperity of every group, section, element of our diverse population.<br />
DO NOT forget it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who brought this country from the depth of depression to the highway of prosperity.<br />
DO NOT forget to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt for President on November 3, unless you favor a return to the dark days of 1932. – Adv.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The campaign for a second term is in full gear. The editors are drifting from the subject of the European crisis. I skip several pages to find the raw news. “Late happenings around the globe” are reported by on-the-scene correspondents. They pour out in alphabetical order:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“CZECHOSLOVAKIA<br />
Nazi Riots Force Law School to Close<br />
(Special to <i>The American Hebrew</i>)<br />
<br />
Prague, October 25 Nazi students left the lecture hall after their leaders had shouted: ‘All German students quit–only Communists and Jews remain.’ Most of the Jewish students were beaten after they left the classroom, whereupon the university authorities declared the law school closed.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-d_dZ3zHoF9s/ULqcRTCxCDI/AAAAAAAAAWc/NNo0EeBtyPk/s512/Jane-berlin%2520to%2520south%2520america.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />One can almost see how The American Hebrew could have missed the warning signs in Europe. There were riots but they seemed limited. It was a different world of slow communications and journalists after all report on what has happened. The Europe they knew seemed relatively safe and most believed or hoped the Great War had made another war inconceivable. The social events page reports on the frequent sailings and honeymoon cruises to Europe. However, a Berlin citizen is reported as going to South America to discuss future emigration. And the League of Nations was being presented with the issue of emigration to “alleviate the problem in Europe.” Still, it was not yet Europe of the second war or Europe as prisons feeding the furnaces of the holocaust.<br />
<br />
Hopeful signs, especially in England, counterbalanced the flare-ups of anti-Semitism on the continent.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
“CHURCH OF ENGLAND DEFENDS JEWS<br />
—the London diocesan conference urging Christians not to tolerate anti Semitism… a common front to meet the interference of outsiders.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
There is another article devoted entirely to the heroic episode in London, as Nazism is being rejected around Europe:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
“It is no doubt that when Parliament reassembles, the question of future Fascist demonstrations, the wearing of the black Fascist uniforms, and the existence of a private Fascist army, will become the storm centre of the session. The indications are that the Government itself will introduce legislation prohibiting at least the public provocations of Fascism. In any event, it is quite certain that Mosley will not attempt another march on the East End in the near future. He has met his defeat at the entrance to Whitechapel.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
But “Germany” is the listing that draws the eye. At this point, after the last influx of Jews after WWI, immigration to the United States was severely limited. No one really knew in the fog of deception that genocide was being planned. FDR in 1939 still doesn’t know genocide has begun, witness the case of the ship of refugees forced to return to Germany as portrayed in the film, <i>Voyage of the Damned</i> (1976).<br />
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Hitler had been in power three years by 1936, a short presidential term by American standards. He was voted in democratically and had just taken full power through constitutional means (the enabling act). Also, Hitler’s face was not the face in the news, but the faces were his various surrogates, as reported in the “Germany” section. Jewish meetings are not being closed down but merely postponed. Relatives are not killed; they just find themselves dealing with insidious bureaucracies.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">“GERMANY<br />
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Jewish Meetings Banned<br />
(From Our Own Correspondent)<br />
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Berlin, October 25 – A Proposal to affect mass trans-Jewish meetings, public gatherings and lectures was announced by the Gestapo this week. Consequently, many Jewish conferences scheduled for the week, including a Zionist meeting, have been postponed. Another Gestapo order prohibited individual Jews or Jewish organizations from contacting Gestapo officials in any way other than through the mails. This means that Jewish families or organizations may remain ignorant of the whereabouts of arrested relatives or members until such time as the Gestapo may care to answer their letters.<br />
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“Von Leers Made ‘Professor of Anti-Semitism’<br />
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The well-known anti-Jewish agitator, Dr. Von Leers, who is next to Julius Streicher, probably the most violent anti-Semite in Germany, has been awarded for his services in the cause of anti-Jewish propaganda by his nomination as the first professor of what may be called ‘Scientific Anti-Semitism.’ Dr. Von Leers has specialized in the so-called ‘science’ of anti-Semitism. The professorship conferred upon him is officially described as a professorship in the ‘legal-political and social science on a racial basis.’” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
There is fear, but it is not yet realized. There are rumors about the political plans:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">“Jews Fear New Measures<br />
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In circles of Berlin Jewry it is generally expected that new discriminatory laws against Jews are coming in the future. The basis for this belief is the new anti-Jewish drive against ‘World Enemy Number One’ recently launched by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. That drive is gaining in strength daily. Leading Nazi officials are addressing huge rallies in numerous cities in Germany. At these meetings the so-called ‘Jewish danger’ forms the chief subject and the people are incited against the Jews in the well-known Streicher manner. It is generally believed here that this drive was started to prepare the ground for the new measures. It is even mentioned with more or less certainty that these will be announced sometime toward the end of November on the occasion of the Frankfurter trial in Switzerland. It is said that the measures were in fact ready for promulgation at the last Nuremberg Congress, but a proper opportunity was missing. They were therefore postponed for the end of the Frankfurter trial. Incidentally, the food shortage in the country is getting stronger and this too, may serve as an occasion for new anti-Jewish measures as a means of diverting attention from the real trouble.” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The spin at the end of the posting – the “incidentally…food shortages…diverting attention…” – goes straight to the blind spot – “science”, “theories” – illustrating how even from an <i>American Hebrew</i> eyewitness reporter, genocide was inconceivable.<br />
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The Frankfurter trial is often referred to as the predecessor to kristallnacht, when the killing of the ambassador was used as the crisis to explain the supposed spontaneous attacks on the Jews in the night of broken glass. In the Frankfort case, a Jewish student in Switzerland killed a Nazi officer. The world is waiting to see how Switzerland will position itself and waiting and to see how the Nazis will use this “crisis”. History, at least in this week, was put on hold.<br />
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Piece by piece they saw and they didn’t see: Propaganda campaigns, politicized science, racializing the legal and political, bending social science to their ends, flooding the political system with impossible regulations…. How different, really, from governments of our own time?<br />
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Discrimination was not new. It’s an ancient theme. In Germany is was “the Jewish danger”; The American Hebrew readers were fortunate to live in a country where it was merely “the Jewish question”. Ultimately, the magazine saw the world situation through the lens of politics. It was about economic theory, social-justice political strategy. Discrimination was dealt with in the role it played in their own politics and the Jewish vote. They were diverted from seeing or even imagining the Final Solution. But what did <i>The American Hebrew</i> know on a deeper level?<br />
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The editorial page in the fateful days of the now – cries out in the voice of the rabbis: “Prejudice, hatred, wars flame the sky. We stand uncertain of the way. Is there a God who will protect the children of Israel…? Where is He now?”<br />
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The essay page has an article on the Catholic defense strategy, contrasting two methods of combating prejudice and persecution and it indirectly cautions the reader against “hysterical” reactions to the news. Interesting differences between the religions, but the advantage of reading a magazine, was I could skip between the attitudes and the news.<br />
But there was a gap where the politics left off and the religion began. Dispersed throughout the pages was, in the collage that only a magazine can present, games for children, recipes, a religious calendar, history lessons, woman issues, readers’ questions, bible stories….<br />
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What happened on that date in earlier history, for example, could give give a longer perspective than the American one:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
“October 24th 1870, …the decree of the Delegation de la Defense Nationale, …naturalized the Algerian Jews… ‘Suppressed Judaism as a nationality.’ Anti-Semitism on the European plan…<br />
“October 26th 1407, Riots at Cracow…..Blood Libel….. had followed hot on the trail of the Jews ….when they came to Poland” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-EqmaMJ0NS8E/ULqcS4SgfbI/AAAAAAAAAWk/0agCM5yAmd0/s348/Jane-women%2520having%2520tea.jpeg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />The candlelight club was what would be the “Home” page and refers to the ceremony of home and family, lighting the candles on Sabbath. Women who may be going to the latest Margaret Sanger lecture on birth control (as mentioned in the social happenings) are also given teachings on the nature of man and woman from the column “A Talmudic Tale”. One column, “Daniel’s windows open to Jerusalem,” meditates on the meaning of the return to the homeland with the verse in the bible that tells the history of the Hebrew in exile, told as a clergyman’s inquiry into anti-Semitism.<br />
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A letter in “Editorial” pleaded with the rabbis of America<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">“to begin to eschew constant references to our heroes and glories of ages gone and to begin to answer the questioning that agitate the Jewish heart in the dangerous fateful days of the now!” (<i>TAH</i>)</blockquote><br />
The fateful days of the now is presented as a question: With the distance between the rabbis and the common man, how does the religion apply?<br />
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But it was never answered. There were eyes to Jerusalem, and there was anti-Zionism. There was the rabbi with the stories of the past, and there was the common man with his suffering. Between the Hebrew and the American was a gap.<br />
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For <i>The American Hebrew</i> the American came first, the readership was assimilated and secure. My father as a demographic of one, a staunch atheist. And I am sure he skipped those religious columns altogether. But, he as the demographic of one, had a context to understand the fateful days of the now – one generation away from the persecutions in Europe. He understood the depth and varieties of anti-Semitism.<br />
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The generations that followed, however, seem to have fallen into that gap between the worlds of American and Hebrew. And the next generation of the sixties went even more in the American direction, veering distinctly leftward. And the generation after continued and was on the way to falling off the page. It is said of the Jewish New Left that politics became the religion.<br />
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As for the magazine it merged with <i>The Examiner</i> (Brooklyn) and in 1958 was renamed <i>The American Examiner</i> – the Hebrew was dropped but the American retained, and by the 1970s the magazine was seen no more.<br />
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<b>Libby Flats</b><br />
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Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>From the library of Chris Collins...</b><br />
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<i>Excerpts from <b>The Decline of the West, Vol. 2: Perspectives of World-History</b> (1922), by Oswald Spengler</i><br />
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<i>Chapter IV. Cities and Peoples. (A) The Soul of the City.</i><br />
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___<br />
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IV.<br />
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"The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world-history in the cities." (p. 96)<br />
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"The present-day piety of the peasant is older than Christianity; his gods are more ancient than those of any higher religion. Remove from him the pressure of the great cities and he will revert to the state of nature without feeling that he is losing anything."<br />
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-_48YBtDYBvU/UKSIOMVgQ7I/AAAAAAAAEgQ/s9ljnt69zic/s400/Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_The_Arcadian_or_Pastoral_State_1836_400.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />"Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of Tiers Etat, <i>liberal science</i>. The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the <b><i>absolute idea of money</i> as distinct from goods</b>. The immemorial country word for exchange of goods is "barter"; even when one of the things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet <i>monetary</i> -- ie. it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to <i>measure</i> things qua "commodities." "<br />
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"The notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely <i>serves</i> for the understanding of economic intercourse, but <i>subjects</i> the exchange of goods to <i>its own</i> evolution. It values things no longer as between each other, but <i>with reference to itself</i> ... Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual ... a power the reality of which resides in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population. A power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil ... "<br />
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" ... Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis for its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional <i>dictatorship of money</i>, though taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place." (p. 98)<br />
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"Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course of a world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of "the provinces." The "provinces" are now everything whatsoever -- land, town <i>and</i> city -- except these two or three points. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, <i>but only cosmopolitans and provincials</i>. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the world." (p. 99)<br />
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"It should not be forgotten that the word "province" first appears as a constitutional designation given by the Romans to Sicily; the subjugation of Sicily (Second Punic War, 212 BC. See: Siege of Syracuse. -ed), in fact, is the first example of a once pre-eminent Culture-landscape sinking so far as to be purely and simply an object. Syracuse, the first real great-city of the Classical world, had flourished when Rome was still an unimportant country town, but thenceforward, <i>vis-a-vis</i> Rome, it becomes a provincial city. In just the same way Habsburg Madrid and Papal Rome, leading cities in the Europe of the seventeenth century, were from the outset of the eighteenth depressed to the provincial level by the world-cities of Paris and London. And <b>the rise of New York to the position of world-city during the Civil War of 1861-5</b> may perhaps prove to have been the most pregnant event of the nineteenth century."<br />
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___<br />
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V.<br />
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"The stone Colossus "Cosmopolis" stands at the end of the life's course of every great Culture. The Culture-man whom the land has spiritually formed is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim. ... so long as the hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine centre of a family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when <i>that</i>, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants and bed-occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the "pre-" time, then the intellectual nomad is completely developed. ... I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness." (p. 101)<br />
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"But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the madness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force of these daemonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end; the birth of the City entails its death... Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her blood. Now <b>the giant city sucks the country dry</b>, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go.... He would sooner die upon the pavement than go "back" to the land. ... [he] has lost the country within [himself] and will never regain it outside."<br />
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"What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous.. ... the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa... tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension... Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension. ... The advance, too, from peasant wisdom -- "slimness," mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life -- through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence... can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality..."<br />
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"And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama -- the <i>sterility of civilized man</i>. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality...; it is to be understood as an essentially <b><i>metaphysical</i> turn towards death</b>. The last man of the world-city no longer <i>wants</i> to live -- he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has lost its meaning.... the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. <b>Children do not happen... principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence</b>.... Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality.... When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having children" as a question of <i>pros</i> and <i>cons</i>, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of <i>pro</i> and <i>con</i>... At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. ... in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as among peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life," becomes a problem of mentalities. ... The primary woman, the peasant woman, is <i>mother</i>. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one world. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is the craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself" -- they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. The same fact... is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and as a matter of course, in every other civilized society."<br />
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".... At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the <i>Fellah type</i>." (p. 105)<br />
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"If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical (Roman -ed), which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus -- amongst them the <i>Lex de maritandis ordinibus</i>, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions (9 AD, Teutoburg Forest, Germany: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4W6YKeQNnI" target="_blank">documentary</a> -ed) -- the wholesale adoptions, <b>the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side</b>, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents -- nothing availed to check the process. Italy, then North Africa and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early Caesars had been one of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, became empty and desolate... the historical student has only to turn his attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon everywhere... If the Maya population literally vanished within a very short time after the Spanish conquest, and their great empty cities were reabsorbed by the jungle, this does not prove merely the brutality of the conqueror -- which in this regard would have been helpless before the self-renewing power of a young and fruitful Culture-mankind -- but an extinction from within that no doubt had long been in process. And if we turn to our own civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were not... eradicated in the Revolution, but have died out since 1815, and their sterility has spread to the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still more in the United States -- particularly in the east, the very states where the stock is best and oldest -- the process of "race suicide" denounced by Roosevelt set in long ago on the largest scale." (p. 106)<br />
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<i><a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/search/label/oswald%20spengler" target="_blank">Previous Spengler excerpts</a></i><br />
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<i>(Painting: Thomas Cole, "The Arcadian or Pastoral State", 1836)</i><br />
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"Locus" by <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…<br />
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-2gRXBee88Dg/ULjtLL7UhoI/AAAAAAAAAUQ/kx6zloY0rfQ/s370/aesthetics-power-in-mussolinis-italy-simonetta-falasca-zamponi.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/simonetta-falasca-zamponi/politics-of-aesthetics-mussolini-and-fascist-italy" target="_blank">"The Politics of Aesthetics: Mussolini and Fascist Italy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Kant’s famous definition of art as “purposiveness without purpose” helped solidify the identification of the aesthetic realm with non-instrumental ends. For Kant, this did not mean that art should be disconnected from social life. In contrast, art provided an ideal space within which to envision a public forum away from concrete political or governmental action and where enlightened citizens could freely discuss political issues. Art was a self-proclaimed non-political space in which politics, however, worked as a motivational engine. In this sense, although seemingly founded on separation, modern aesthetics originated in relation to politics, domesticating the masses, with all their desires and impulses and winning them to democratic politics. How is all this discussion of aesthetics connected to Mussolini and to the centrality of aesthetics in Mussolini’s conception and exercise of power? What do I mean by “conception of” power? In my view, Mussolini’s subscription to aesthetics ensured that symbols, art and rituals were all seen as contributing to a transformative, moulding power. They deeply informed how Mussolini conceived and exercised power. Mussolini subscribed to the notion of aesthetics promoted by the art for art’s sake movement, that is, the notion of art as autonomous and self-referential and detached from worldly matters. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, Mussolini had a great intuition about the crucial role of affect in politics, an intuition that, combined with his approach to aesthetics, gave way to the strange and lethal alchemy that we know of as fascism.” </blockquote><br />
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Patrick McGuinness in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Carmen Bugan’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00304/contents_304628a.pdf" target="_blank">"Burying the Typewriter – Childhood under the eye of the secret police"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“It was only after he is arrested in 1983 that his children learn that Ion has already spent time in prison, also for political dissidence, before they were born. The Securitate dig up the typewriter on which he has been typing his anti-regime tracts (the book includes a photograph of it from the Securitate files), and which he buries in the garden every time he finishes his typing. Ion is arrested and sent to prison, and there begins the familiar story of persecution for those left behind, who are isolated, deprived of food, abused and bullied. In such a world, small acts of heroism and kindness stand out: Carmen’s literature teacher, who, under the pretence of taking her out of class to punish her, takes her to a quiet room and feeds her bread and salami….”</blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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Ian Brunskill in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Julian Preece’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00304/contents_304628a.pdf" target="_blank">"Baader-Meinhof and the Novel – Narratives of the nation, Fantasies of the revolution"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Preece is shrewd in his assessment of the political and intellectual vacuum at the heart of Baader-Meinhof. The group’s early actions, as it emerged from the student protests of 1968, were an adolescent attempt to provoke the state into acting as the ‘fascist’ coercive apparatus of radical caricature. Once the original leaders were imprisoned, the RAF’s only real objective was to get them out; for all its rhetoric, it was little more than a lethal personality cult. Violence acquires its own logic. When the bloody campaign to secure the release of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe ended in failure with the Stammheim suicides, the surviving members devoted a further futile twenty years to a murderous memorial campaign. The lack of political substance secured the RAF a depth and breadth of support it could never have enjoyed had it had coherent aims.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9E6x1GNz-DM/ULjtR2DfUCI/AAAAAAAAAU4/tWM6HKpaMVY/s300/Hip%2520Figures.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Michael LaPointe in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Michael Szalay’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00304/contents_304628a.pdf" target="_blank">"Hip Figures – A literary history of the Democratic Party"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“According to Szalay’s delicate thesis, novelists such as Norman Mailer, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow ‘invoked hip… to consolidate the voting constituencies of postwar liberalism’ on behalf of the Democratic Party. Szalay reads the invocation of ‘invigorating black hip’ as an attempt to ‘reconcile white suburbanites and working-class African Americans’, and therefore to ‘improve the product’ of a party out of step throughout the 1950s. Because ‘success or failure in political styles’, hipster novelists were ‘the most important political strategists of their time’.” </blockquote><br />
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Mark Bauerlein in <b>NEW CRITERION</b> on David Horowitz’s book, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-radical-passion-7489" target="_blank">"Radicals – Portraits of a Destructive Passion"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Radicalism has its political content, he agrees, but it marks a pathological condition as well. If it were only political, it would advocate for a single-payer healthcare system, a more steeply progressive income tax, and other policies expanding state control. People demand those reforms, of course, but they aren’t really radical, for they work through democratic channels to enact them. Genuine radicals target the channels themselves. To attempt this in a country as free and self-critical as the United States, however, they must distort the reality in front of their eyes and the identity they have constructed over the years. Horowitz alleges that they act and speak in bad faith: that contradictory psychosocial state first analyzed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s <i>Being and Nothingness</i> and illustrated by Horowitz’s subjects time and again. Radicals tenders five of them in in-depth portraits (Christopher Hitchens, Bettina Aptheker, Cornel West, Susan Lydon, Saul Alinsky), and dedicates another chapter on three female ‘bombers’ (Kathy Boudin, Linda Evans, Susan Rosenberg…)”</blockquote><br />
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Anders Rasmussen at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/anders-rasmussen/headscarfs-and-homosexuals-feminist-ideals-in-xenophobic-politics" target="_blank">"Headscarfs and Homosexuals – Feminist Ideals in Xenophobic Politics"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The controversial imam is known for his reactionary interpretation of Sharia law. He has repeatedly argued that men should be allowed to beat their wives, that extramarital sex should be punished by 200 lashes and, not least, that gay sex should be punished by death. Against this background, the dissatisfaction with Bilal Philips was understandable. As Trine Pertou Mach of the Socialist People’s Party wrote in an opinion piece on the portal <i>Modkraft</i> the week before the conference, he represents ‘the complete opposite of what a left wing characterised by solidarity works for’. Nevertheless, Mach was in doubt about how best to respond to the event. She remembered all too clearly what had happened three months earlier, when left-wing activists and politicians assembled outside the Danish Royal Library to demonstrate against the radical Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which held a public rally that was given considerable media attention. At that rally, Mach and her allies suddenly found themselves side by side with representatives of the right wing. Denmark’s National Front, the Nazi party DNSB and the organisation Stop the Islamisation of Denmark had turned up along with uniformed soldiers. They carried the Danish flag, sang the national anthem and raised banners bearing slogans such as ‘Deport These Fifth-Column Traitors’and ‘Go to Hell’.” </blockquote><br />
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Rochelle Gurstein in<b> BOOKFORUM</b> on Paul & Karen Avrich’s book, <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/" target="_blank">"Sasha and Emma – The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“These wildly misguided idealists justified the attempt on Frick’s life by regarding him, as Goldman put it, not ‘as a man, but as the enemy of labor,’ ‘antisocial and antihuman,’ ‘the perpetrator of coldblooded murder.’ Berkman went so far as to declare that ‘to remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.’ In such declarations, Berkman and Goldman were applying – or misapplying – lessons they had learned during their youths under the tyranny of czarist Russia, where public protest and even criticism were punished by long prison terms, exile, or execution, leaving those seeking to right economic and political inequalities only the most dramatic, violent gestures.” </blockquote><br />
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Richard Lewontin in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b> on Harry Ostrer’s book, <i>Legacy – A Genetic History of the Jewish People</i>, and Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/is-there-a-jewish-gene/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"The Genealogical Science – The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Nadia Abu El-Haj’s avowed purpose is to make clear ‘the ways in which <i>the past</i> is understood to be a constitutive element of the self.’ The key word here is “understood.” Her emphasis, over and over, is on how the <i>knowledge</i> of ancestry, revealed by modern techniques of genetics, may serve as a basis for and a legitimation of a self-image. For her, to ignore the genetic information about ancestry ‘is to abandon a historically authentic self that I carry around within.’ Once again, as in works on the genetics of race, we encounter the concept of an ‘authentic’ self that lies hidden and unexpressed, but which in some sense is the essence of what I am, even if unperceived and without a basis in any scientific demonstration. The concept of a self that is an authentic essence, but not clearly perceived, suggests that my manifest properties and attitudes are a mere patina and that, in ways that I do not recognize, my inherited inner self is struggling to assert itself. The Austrian Catholic Mendel and the Austrian Jew Freud meet on the speculative ground of our inner being.” </blockquote><br />
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Lawrence Solomon briefing at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3388/israel-energy-reserves" target="_blank">"The Huge Impact of Israel’s Energy Reserves"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Mr. Solomon projected that within the next one to two decades, the Muslim nations will lose their oil weapon and diplomatic clout due to a new emerging energy order. Recent discoveries of plentiful global resources of shale oil and shale gas reserves, in combination with technological advances in ‘fracking’ …will enable many countries to be less dependent on energy imports. According to Solomon, shale oil will be so abundant that in the future China will join the ranks of energy exporters, and a total of thirty-eight countries in every region of the world could achieve energy self-sufficiency. The boom will push prices down and North America, already engaged in developing its immense amounts of shale, can become energy independent in a decade. Israel is among the beneficiaries of this energy bonanza. The discovery of large shale oil resources on its land and natural gas reserves in the Mediterranean's Levant Basin near Cyprus, will enable it to become a major natural gas exporter to Europe. In addition to creating the potential for wooing back former allies in Western Europe, these discoveries are already enabling Israel to form commercial and military alliances with Cyprus and Greece to coordinate gas exploration and extraction and thwart Turkey's belligerence. Gazprom Israel, a new commercial partnership formed with Russia, provides geopolitical as well as economic benefits for the Jewish state.” </blockquote><br />
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David Barash at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Evolutionary-Mystery-of/135762/" target="_blank">"The Evolutionary Mystery of Homosexuality"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“What if one or more genes that predispose toward homosexuality (and with it, reduced reproductive output) in one sex actually work in the opposite manner in the other sex? I prefer the phrase ‘sexually <i>complementary</i> selection’: A fitness detriment when genes exist in one sex—say, gay males—could be more than compensated for by a fitness enhancement when they exist in another sex. One study has found that female relatives of gay men have more children than do those of straight men. This suggests that genes for homosexuality, although disadvantageous for gay men and their male relatives, could have a reproductive benefit among straight women. To my knowledge, however, there is as yet no evidence for a reciprocal influence, whereby the male relatives of female homosexuals have a higher reproductive fitness than do male relatives of heterosexual women. And perhaps there never will be, given the accumulating evidence that female homosexuality and male homosexuality may be genetically underwritten in different ways.” </blockquote><br />
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Dorothy Rabinowitz in <b>WSJ</b> on the tv program, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578133070785101076.html" target="_blank">"Enemies Within: Joe McCarthy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“By 1950 he had discovered he could attract the press attention he longed for by making sensational charges. That was the year of his Wheeling, W.Va., speech in which he charged that right at that moment he knew of 205 subversives in the State Department. It was the beginning of his grasp of the factor so vital in his rise to power—namely the attention of the press. Having understood, he never looked back. No McCarthy documentary in memory has so captured the role of his press acolytes. Reporters admired him, were charmed by him, and they were above all grateful for the inside information he gave them. The film offers testaments from witnesses both living and dead to the ways McCarthy courted reporters. Jack Anderson tells of being set up to listen in on McCarthy's phone while the senator called some other Republican, like Robert Taft, to ask what had happened at some important closed meeting that had just been held. It was a long while before McCarthy's appeal for that press wore off. He was a gregarious man who could strangely seem to forget any animus he felt for a witness he had just finished trying to destroy. One man tells of running into McCarthy in a hallway just after the senator had brutalized him at one of his hearings—and finding, to his amazement, McCarthy throwing his arm around him and asking if he'd like to go for a drink.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-tEtoFB7gCq4/ULjtMJvheGI/AAAAAAAAAUY/M9hwmSs_Mjw/s332/DarkestAmerica.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Kevin Young in <b>NYT</b> on Yuval Taylor & Jake Austen’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/review/darkest-america-by-yuval-taylor-and-jake-austen.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" target="_blank">"Darkest America – Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“While the authors of ‘Darkest America’ seek to trace this tradition — or bad habit — from its inception all the way to the present, they set out to examine its influence not on American culture but on the African-American culture it originally mocked. Their boldest choice comes early on, without fanfare: to refer to minstrelsy as ‘black,’ losing the ‘blackface’ that usually precedes it. While Taylor, a co-author of ‘Faking It,’ and Austen, the author of ‘Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll,’ don’t mention this change, it allows them to talk about minstrelsy both as a blackface phenomenon — started onstage by white minstrels in the 1820s and then later adopted and adapted by African-Americans in and out of blackface in the late 19th century — and as a force in plain-faced comedy. The authors provocatively contend that African-Americans have adopted black minstrelsy as a form of liberation: ‘It must have been a great joy to act silly, lazy, foolish and free while contributing to a tradition widely viewed as their greatest gift to American entertainment.’ To Taylor and Austen, black minstrelsy may be embraced, rejected or ‘signified on,’ but it remains ever-present: ‘Whichever approach is taken, the black minstrel image remains inescapable, something that every black performer, critic and thinker has to reckon with.’” </blockquote><br />
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Anna Vesterinen at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/anna-vesterinen/who-are-finns-ask-finns" target="_blank">"Who are the Finns? Ask The Finns! "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Finns further describe different cultures in their signature colloquial style: ‘an individual national culture is a gift that each nation can give to the diversity of the world’. And the gift of Finland is ‘Finnishness’. This type of sentimental argumentation is common in ethnonationalist thinking. Furthermore, as national differences are natural, The Finns underline that maintaining societal order and preserving the Finnish culture is not racism. For the party, highlighting the importance of separate cultures actually enhances the position of a society’s weaker members. This is because such nationalism acknowledges the uniqueness of individuals, unlike the prevailing “supranational’ policies, which ‘practically force people to move across national borders’.” </blockquote><br />
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James Fontanella-Khan at <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/59a17d68-1c47-11e2-a63b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"Global Taste for Trappist Ale brings Job Benefits"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“There are three basic rules that certify the Trappist trademark: the beer has to be brewed inside the abbey; monks have to be in control of the brewery; and profits must go to charity. These values are defended by the International Trappist Association, a group based in Vleteren, Belgium, that protects Trappist monks’ interests. ‘We are aware our family name has economic value. That’s why we want to protect the monastic economies that support our communities against unfair competition,’ it says. Mr Goffinet says the monks, who have ceased working on a day-to-day basis but still oversee the running of the brewery, had no interest in expanding but agreed to do so to generate local employment and support other chapters as well as charity projects. ‘If I owned Chimay I would not run it the way it is now,’ says Mr de Halleux. ‘I would produce way more beer with fewer people, but that’s not their philosophy and given that they still do a great beer, it should be respected.’” </blockquote><br />
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John Tagliabue in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/world/europe/swedish-school-de-emphasizes-gender-lines.html" target="_blank">"Swedish School’s Big Lesson Begins with Dropping Personal Pronouns"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns ‘him’ and ‘her,’ instead calling their 115 toddlers simply ‘friends.’ Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun ‘hen,’ an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles. In the little library, with its throw pillows where children sit to be read to, there are few classic fairy tales, like ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Snow White,’ with their heavy male and female stereotypes, but there are many stories that deal with single parents, adopted children or same-sex couples. Girls are not urged to play with toy kitchens, and wooden or Lego blocks are not considered toys for boys. And when boys hurt themselves, teachers are taught to give them every bit as much comforting as they would girls.” </blockquote><br />
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Laura Snyder in <b>WSJ</b> on Robyn Arianrhod’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203846804578101343958970144.html" target="_blank">"Seduced by Logic – Emilie du Chatelet, Mary Somerville"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Châtelet (1706-49) was born less than 20 years after the publication of Isaac Newton's ‘Principia Mathematica,’ in which the British physicist proved the law of universal gravitation and revolutionized physics. Châtelet had been dissuaded from her dream of studying mathematics until she embarked on a decades-long affair with a man who shared her interests, the philosophe François-Marie Arouet, known by the nom de plume Voltaire. Soon Châtelet would help Voltaire write his ‘Elements of Newton's Philosophy,’ which aimed to gain adherents for Newton's controversial views in France, where the opposing physics of René Descartes ruled supreme. Her most impressive project was a translation of the ‘Principia’ into French, still considered one of the finest 18th-century translations of Newton's book. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was born three decades after Châtelet's death. She too was discouraged from reading about mathematics as a child, her parents resorting to confiscating her candles at night. Encouraged by her second husband, Somerville began to study scientific topics in earnest. Her book ‘Mechanism of the Heavens’ (1831) was a translation, with detailed explanatory notes, of the first two volumes of Pierre-Simon Laplace's ‘Celestial Mechanics,’ a work which developed and extended Newtonian physics by applying to problems of mechanics the algebraic form of calculus devised by Gottfried Leibniz.” </blockquote><br />
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<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/11/anonymous-harvard-professors-trash-broadwell" target="_blank">"Anonymous Harvard Professors Trash Broadwell"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The professors here may well be violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (Ferpa) by discussing Ms. Broadwell's academic record without her consent. But never mind the possible illegality; what about the hypocrisy. Are we supposed to believe that the Harvard faculty, or the Kennedy school faculty, consists entirely of people who are not self-promoters and who never showed up at office hours when they were students? Come on. Let it be a warning to any prospective student considering plunking down the $70,000 or $80,000 that Harvard says one should budget for nine months at the Kennedy School (tuition, room and board, health insurance, books, etc.) If you wind up in the news, your professors will anonymously trash you to the <i>Boston Globe</i>. Maybe I am overreacting, but in my judgment, the actions of the professors in sliming their former student, and the actions of the <i>Globe</i> reporters and their editors in granting them anonymity to do so, are a breach of faith in a relationship (the student-teacher relationship) comparable, if perhaps on a different scale, to the breaches of faith that Ms. Broadwell and General Petraeus apparently made in their marital relationships. One other point: several Harvard Kennedy school professors are regular contributors to the<i> Globe</i> op-ed page and are paid for their contributions. <i>The Globe</i> doesn't say whether the two professors who talked anonymously about Ms. Broadwell are professors who write regularly for the <i>Globe</i> and who are paid for their contributions. But if they are, it opens up a whole other dimension.” </blockquote><br />
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Christopher Caldwell in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c7ddf69a-2998-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"A Last Chance to Strike a Bargain on US Immigration"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The problem is that, in border control as in fiscal policy, governments are inclined to take the path of least resistance. Ronald Reagan’s immigration reform of 1986 was passed to halt the flow of immigrants and wound up opening the floodgates. Voters in both parties demand enforcement.<br />
This week’s election complicated matters. It made evident an ethnicisation of the US party system. If Latinos and Asians are going to vote 75 per cent Democratic, then 9m of those 12m would-be citizens probably will too. That makes Republicans less comfortable with amnesty; it will also turn some Democrats against enforcement, lest they kill the goose that lays the golden political egg.” </blockquote><br />
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Scott Sayare in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/world/europe/in-france-in-bed-with-media-can-be-taken-more-literally.html?_r=0" target="_blank">"Where ‘In Bed With Media’ Can Be Taken More Literally"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The nation’s leading conservative newspaper ousted its top editor, apparently hoping to ingratiate itself with the new government. A cultural magazine brought in a new editor as well, opting for the partner of a newly minted government minister. The man she replaced took a job working for the new president. The springtime election of François Hollande, the first French president from the left in 17 years, has brought about a shuffling of the news media ranks, along with a host of potential conflicts of interest. Coverage has shifted too. Much of the news media, which largely lean left, used to revel in denouncing Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, but now many journalists are feeling bereft of material because of the new president’s less dramatic governing style. Mr. Hollande has proved confoundedly boring, they say, especially for news outlets that sometimes cover the government as if nothing else matters, relying on Paris politics to drive the news.” </blockquote><br />
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Fred Weir at <i>csmonitor.com</i>, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/1123/Russian-beauty-queen-puts-spotlight-on-Russia-s-official-corruption" target="_blank">"Russian Beauty Queen Puts Spotlight on Russia’s Official Corruption"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“A Russian beauty queen garnered global headlines this week by standing by her impassioned denunciation of the endemic corruption that demoralizes society and saps the economic life of her homeland, made in an essay she'd written that was supposed to be about why she's proud to be a Russian. ‘But my Russia – it is also my poor, long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest, unbelieving people,’ Natalia Pereverzeva wrote in an essay that was part of her entrance requirement to the Miss Earth competition this week in Manila, Philippines. ‘My Russia – it is a great artery, from which the 'chosen' few people are draining away its wealth. My Russia is a beggar. My Russia cannot help her elderly and orphans. From it, bleeding, like from a sinking ship, engineers, doctors, teachers are fleeing, because they have nothing to live on,’ she wrote. Ms. Pereverzeva's outburst was almost certainly spontaneous, based on her own personal experience and straight from the heart. But it also happens to coincide with one of the periodic anticorruption crusades launched from the Kremlin to convince the Russian public that something is being done to combat the official graft that by some accounts siphons off as much as a third of Russia's gross domestic product….”</blockquote><br />
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Catherine Belton in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/242db050-2cde-11e2-9211-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"Shale Surge Poses Threat to Gazprom in Europe"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“When Gazprom last month finally launched its new flagship project, the Bovanenkovo gasfield far above the Arctic Circle, it should have been a triumphant moment: the field contains enough gas to supply Europe’s needs for decades to come. But instead, the launch of the field – after years of delays and more than $44bn in capital expenditure – was overshadowed by a warning as Vladimir Putin called on the state gas company to pay more attention to the shale gas boom in the United States. The shale revolution that is revolutionising global gas markets is also threatening to undermine Gazprom’s export position in Europe, where it accounts for 25 per cent of gas sales, and to relegate projects like Bovanenkovo to relics of the past.” </blockquote><br />
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James Angelos in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578122970401177526.html" target="_blank">"IKEA Rues Using Prison Labor"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Some present during the announcement, however, urged IKEA to move quickly to compensate victims. Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel, a political activist and former detainee of the East German authorities, complimented the company for vowing to support further research, but also said IKEA was running out of time to help victims of forced labor camps. ‘They're dying out,’ said Mr. Holzapfel. Alexander Arnold, 51, claimed to have been forced to make office chair legs, allegedly for IKEA, while detained in Naumburg during the early 1980s. He described how forced laborers who didn't meet a stringent production quota were confined to a dark cellar. Those who refuse to work, he added, were bound by their feet and hands to a bed for days at a time. Mr. Arnold said he was pleased and surprised that IKEA has now decided to face up to its wrongdoings, but added that it was just the beginning of revelations into how companies may have used forced labor. ‘Our picture of the GDR,’ he said, referring to East Germany, ‘is still skewed.’” </blockquote><br />
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Liz Alderman in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/business/privatizing-greece-slowly-but-not-surely.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Privatizing Greece, Slowly but Not Surely"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The measure, which barely passed, cleared the way to privatize assets like Greece’s water utility. Yet even there, a new regulatory agency must be established, along with a public policy on how to price water. The government owes the utility around 700 million euros in unpaid bills; when it will ever pay is unclear. And then there is land: It is the bulk of the portfolio, and it comes with the biggest problems. Property registries are almost nonexistent in Greece, a curiosity that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. Ownership was almost never recorded, so investors could face potential lawsuits from people claiming land as theirs. ‘Just imagine — the state doesn’t know exactly what real estate it really owns,’ says George Katrougalos, a Greek constitutional lawyer who is currently a fellow at New York University. ‘It’s a legal mess.’ Worse still, Greeks built on state land probably while the government looked the other way. That was the situation that Mr. Taprantzis’s agency found in Katakolo, a once-verdant beachfront near ancient Olympia. in the Western Peloponnese, where thousands of people squatted on state land without paying for or registering the property. Local politicians enabled the activity. For decades, on days when national elections were held, hundreds of people would throw up cinder-block houses literally overnight. In exchange, locals supported candidates who would not sanction them or force them to pay taxes on the construction. Electricity was eventually brought in through political favors, and little by little, a community was established.” </blockquote><br />
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Richard Barley in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578122492295800214.html" target="_blank">"To Boost Bond Markets, Europe Needs to Promote Failure"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The European Commission Regulation on Insolvency only specifies that the law applicable to insolvency proceedings is to be that of the member state where proceedings are opened. The U.K. and Dutch frameworks are regarded as working relatively well. But elsewhere, creditors are subject to laws that vary in terms of their treatment of creditor rankings; the rights of existing management, shareholders and employees; and the ability of creditors to enforce their claims. Restructurings often therefore bypass the court system—particularly since judges can in some jurisdictions throw out deals that have been painstakingly negotiated between debtors and creditors. That risks companies ending up in liquidation rather than being rescued. The problems in Europe have led to complicated workarounds where companies from Germany and elsewhere suddenly rehome themselves in the U.K. to take advantage of the more flexible legal system.” </blockquote><br />
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Joshua Chaffin & James Fontanella-Khan in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/66426535#axzz2Da6sVTBh" target="_blank">"Threat to Growth Fund Highlights Painful Adjustment"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In addition to France and Italy, raiding the growth funds could also assuage some other unhappy countries. Chiefly, they could help to pay for the budget rebates demanded by a group of northern member states, such as Denmark, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands. The preservation of the much larger British rebate has made their demands even more insistent. The sudden vulnerability of the growth funds is a consequence of Mr Van Rompuy's effort in recent days to mollify David Cameron, the British prime minister, by limiting the overall size of the budget. The reductions that Mr Van Rompuy has made have, by necessity, already hit the biggest pillars of the budget - the common agricultural policy, and the development money known as "cohesion funds". Together, they would decline by more than €50bn.” </blockquote><br />
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Nick Jacobs at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="http://blogs.euobserver.com/jacobs/2012/11/15/why-the-eu-must-dare-to-debate-degrowth/" target="_blank">"Why the EU Must Dare to Debate ‘Degrowth’"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Do alternatives to growth really exist? The debate remains on the margins of the public political sphere, but in Europe and elsewhere serious academic theories and grassroots movements are building around the idea of a ‘steady state economy’ with zero growth, or even ‘sustainable degrowth’. The degrowth movements believe that producing more year on year will not make us truly better off, and cannot go on infinitely due to ecological limits. US ‘steady state economy’ advocate Herman Daly argues that we have already hit a threshold where growth no longer brings net gains even in purely economic terms, i.e. the costs of all the damage done by additional growth (e.g. paying for environmental clean-up and health afflictions linked to pollution) already outweighs the benefits.” </blockquote><br />
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Simon Heffer in <b>DAILY MAIL</b>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2237622/Why-listen-country-imploding-economy-drag-Europe-it.html" target="_blank">"Why Should Anyone Listen to a Country Whose Imploding Economy Could Drag the Whole of Europe Down with It? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“If France’s refusal to shed its socialist, high-spending habits does result in the country’s economic collapse, it will take many other European countries with it. Its banking system is especially vulnerable and has heavy liabilities in Spain and Greece. We have already noted the dependency of France’s vast rural areas on handouts from Brussels — and the threat to social stability if those subsidies were reduced. Northern France has big, modernised farms between Paris and the Belgian border; but further south and west is a more traditional peasant-style agriculture that is unviable without EU handouts. A properly run and healthy economy could deal with such a problem. However, the EU estimated that French exports dropped by 20 per cent between 2005 and 2010, a bigger fall than Greece’s.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-S5PoeEfIM7U/ULjtNl_v6SI/AAAAAAAAAUg/B6SVEaz5QuI/s307/economistcover.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><b>ECONOMIST</b>: <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21566233-france-slowly-heading-towards-crisis-says-john-peet-can-country-be-reformed" target="_blank">"France – So Much to Do, So Little Time"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Public spending accounts for almost 57% of national output, the public debt stands at over 90% of GDP (and rising) and the country seems to be running a near-permanent budget deficit. It is no surprise that in January France lost its AAA grade from Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency. Wealth, profits and high incomes are heavily taxed, the rich are routinely abused and people are instinctively hostile to capitalism. Everything from the labour market to pharmacies to taxis is heavily regulated: no wonder would-be entrepreneurs feel discouraged. No entirely new company has entered the CAC-40 stockmarket index since it started in 1987; redundancies can lead to endless court proceedings; and trade unions and protesters tend to take to the streets at the first hint of reform. It adds up to a deeply anti-business culture.” </blockquote><br />
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James Mackintosh in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2d2c713c-3323-11e2-aa83-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"The Short View"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“It is easy to see why independence looks attractive. Quite apart from a certain highhandedness from London and Madrid, more and more power is wielded from Brussels, while central governments offer little and demand austerity. An independent Catalonia would be richer but more indebted than Spain. Gross domestic product per head of €27,430 last year was ahead of Italy, while the rest of Spain at €22,284 was closer to Greece than the eurozone average. If debt was divided by GDP, Catalonia would have debt of 94 per cent of GDP, far ahead of the rest of Spain’s 79 per cent. But its taxes would no longer have to subsidise Spain. Scotland, meanwhile, would look much like the rest of the UK, at least until oil ran out. In the best case, investors would be miffed to find their bonds turned into debt of a country with no record. Yields would surely rise. The worst case would be that the new countries were locked out of Europe by vengeful Spanish or English politicians, destroying their trade.” </blockquote><br />
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Andres Cala at <i>csmonitor.com</i>, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/1116/A-role-reversal-as-former-colonies-meet-former-colonists-at-Ibero-American-summit" target="_blank">"A Role Reversal as Former Colonies Meet Former Colonists at Ibero-American Summit"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“On Friday in the historic Spanish port city of Cádiz, the leaders of Spain, Portugal, and Latin American nations gathered for the 22nd annual Ibero-American summit. But unlike past meetings, the European nations are no longer running the show: now the former colonists are seeking help from their empowered cousins. The tables have turned since the 2007 edition, when King Juan Carlos infamously said ‘Why don’t you be quiet’ to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in a moment which came to represent Spain’s arrogance and Latin American muscle flexing. Today, Spain and Portugal are in dire economic shape and will remain crippled for at least another couple of years, if not more. In contrast, Latin America is consolidating its political and economic transition toward stability, despite strong headwind from the global slowdown.” </blockquote><br />
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<i>mercopress.com</i>: <a href="http://en.mercopress.com/2012/11/21/brazil-increases-gold-holdings-to-52.5-tons-according-to-the-imf" target="_blank">"Brazil Increases Gold Holdings"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Brazil’s holdings expanded 17.2 tons last month to 52.5 tons, the most since January 2001, according to data on the International Monetary Fund’s website. The country’s 1.7-ton purchase in September was the first since December 2008. Kazakhstan’s holdings increased 7.5 tons, Russia added 0.4 ton and Turkey’s reserves rose 17.5 tons, the data show. Germany, the second-biggest holder, after the US, cut gold holdings by 4.2 tons, the first reduction since June. Central banks have been expanding reserves as the metal heads for a 12th straight annual gain.” </blockquote><br />
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Simon Romero in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/americas/swallowing-rain-forest-brazilian-cities-surge-in-amazon.html" target="_blank">"Swallowing Rain Forest, Cities Surge in Amazon"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The torrid expansion of rain forest cities is visible in places like Parauapebas, which has changed in a generation from an obscure frontier settlement with gold miners and gunfights to a sprawling urban area with an air-conditioned shopping mall, gated communities and a dealership selling Chevy pickup trucks. Scientists are studying such developments and focusing on the demands on the resources of the Amazon, the world’s largest remaining area of tropical forest. Though Brazilian officials have historically viewed the colonization of the Amazon as a matter of national security — military rulers built roads to the forest under the slogan ‘Occupy it to avoid surrendering it’ — deforestation in the region already ranks among the largest contributors to global greenhouse-gas emissions.” </blockquote><br />
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Simon Roughneen at <i>csmonitor.com</i>, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2012/1115/Vietnam-s-tiger-economy-losing-its-roar" target="_blank">"Vietnam’s ‘Tiger’ Economy Losing Its Roar"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“This summer, the country's central bank conceded that bad debts amounted to as much as 10 percent of all bank loans. And analysts speculate that the real number could be at least twice that. To compare, total nonperforming loans at four of China's biggest banks came to just 1 percent of all loans last year, meaning Vietnam's bad loans are likely closer to figures for Spain, where around 10 percent of bank loans are not being repaid according to the country's Central Bank.<br />
With the country under such an economic pall, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung recently made a rare apology for problems at state-owned enterprises – which make up 35 percent of the Vietnamese economy. The prime minister was on the end of a public rebuke from rival Communist Party bigwigs, leaving the party looking divided over the troubles facing the Vietnamese economy and the effect these travails could have on its legitimacy.” </blockquote><br />
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Andrew Ward in <b>FT</b> on Daniel Tudor’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/bb82930a-3493-11e2-8b86-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Korea – The Impossible Country"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Yet happiness often seems the one thing still eluding this country of 50m people. Koreans have a word, ‘han’, for the sense of melancholy ingrained in their national psyche. It is usually attributed to the peninsula’s history of invasion and oppression by neighbours and, more recently, the civil war that split families between the communist North and capitalist South. Growing wealth has done little to lighten the mood. The suicide rate has doubled during the past decade and is now second-highest in the world after Lithuania. Tudor attributes this to some of the same characteristics that have made the country so successful: intense competitiveness and a thirst for betterment, which mean that South Koreans are rarely satisfied with their lot.” </blockquote><br />
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Sarah Mishkin in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/489ed4c4-1eaa-11e2-bebc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"Taiwanese Society Opens New Front as Army Prepares for End of Conscription"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Current and former soldiers say the end of the draft will change Taiwan society, as men will no longer, regardless of home town or class, share the camaraderie that Mr Hsu says has long been ‘one good common topic’ to bond over. Strategically, the change means Taiwan can focus on training elite and longer serving troops such as pilots and naval crews who use the nation’s high-tech weapons systems, says Parris Chang, an opposition leader and former deputy head of Taiwan’s national security council. ‘In practice,’ however, says Arthur Ding, an academic specialising in military affairs, ‘I’m not so confident.’ A big concern, say both Mr Ding and Mr Chang, is that Taiwan is not fully prepared for the cost of the transition. While military spending in countries such as China, Japan and South Korea has risen sharply, Taiwan’s has fallen slightly, at $10bn last year compared with $10.8bn in 2008.” </blockquote><br />
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Simon Rabinovitch in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/66015960#axzz2DTitIuGd" target="_blank">"March of the State Presses Private Companies"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The boss of the factory called the police but was told they could do nothing - the demolition crew had been sent by an investment company owned by the municipal government. It was eager to get its hands on the land occupied by the factory in Hangzhou, a wealthy city in Zhejiang province, eastern China. ‘Our relationship with the investment company is like that between a sailboat and an aircraft carrier,’ said Xu Zhongwei, Wanqiang's vice-general manager. This battle between state owned juggernauts and smaller private companies has played out across China with increasing frequency over the past decade. The state has more often than not been the winner. A debate is raging inside and outside government on whether to halt this trend. With the country's leaders gathered in Beijing this week for the Communist party congress, held once every five years, this is the issue that lies at the heart of their discussions on economic policy.” </blockquote><br />
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Jamil Anderlini in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1c9af862-2e4a-11e2-8bb3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"Corrupt Party Displays Classic Signs of Dynasty in Slow Decline"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Some western diplomats estimate that as much as 40 per cent of China’s military budget is siphoned off through corruption. As a phalanx of senior PLA officers ascended the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square this week, many of them sported generous pot bellies, leading one party member to comment wryly to the <i>Financial Times</i> that nothing displays structural weakness like overweight generals. David Shambaugh is an expert on China’s political system at George Washington University and has written extensively about the Communist party’s uncanny ability to adapt to meet the needs of its citizens. But he now argues the party has begun to ossify and is starting to show classic signs of dynastic decline. These signs include a hollow state ideology in which nobody believes, cronyism, public apathy towards politics, an assertive military not fully under the control of civilian leaders, rampant corruption, capital flight, a rise in social vice and factionalism at the top of the system.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8y-ax5YsEXo/ULjtT9UHBOI/AAAAAAAAAVA/YtUZRBKwds0/s311/HistoryofChineseCivilization.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Michael Loewe in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on the book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00306/contents_306098a.pdf" target="_blank">"The History of Chinese Civilization"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Readers who have labored under the misapprehension of a China that long lay stagnant will appreciate the continuities of her culture and the onset of change over the centuries, and they will perceive the important role that hierarchies played in public and private activities. History is presented in these volumes not as an affirmation of progress, but rather as a search to establish harmony between conflicting motives of trends. China’s traditional historians assumed that change comes about within repetitive cycles, rather than in linear fashion. It would be within those cycles that they would see H.A.L. Fisher’s ‘emergences following upon one another as wave follows upon wave’ as taking place, rather than as deriving from identifiable causes of the moment.” </blockquote><br />
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Gary Schmitt & James Ceaser in <b>WEEKLY STANDARD</b>, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/reading-tocqueville-beijing_662231.html" target="_blank">"Reading Tocqueville in Beijing"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Strange indeed, but Tocqueville’s <i>Old Regime</i> may be exactly the book for this moment in Chinese history. As Tocqueville himself explains, his aim in writing about that bloody and ultimately disastrous revolution was ‘to discover not only what illness killed the patient, but how the patient could have been cured. . . . My purpose has been to paint a picture both accurate and instructive.’ Some major themes of the book cannot help but remind the Chinese of their own circumstances. For a Chinese reader, the revolution of 1789 is neither the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the last imperial dynasty and established the Republic of China, nor the Communist revolution of 1949, but the revolution they wish to avoid in the future by achieving a successful transition from their current situation to a more stable order. This reading suggests, paradoxically, that the Chinese are still living under the Old Regime.” </blockquote><br />
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James Hookway in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120911608780912.html" target="_blank">"Myanmar’s Ethnic Strife Undercuts Reform"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Sayataw Virathu, 43 years old, a charismatic preacher with a toothy smile, was jailed in 2003 for allegedly helping to spark anti-Muslim riots in the Mandalay area by handing out sectarian pamphlets. Within months of his release, he was again railing at Myanmar's Muslim minorities. The trigger was another feud—this time in the west of the country between Muslim Rohingyas and local Buddhists that erupted in a deadly spree of violence that has killed more than 170 and has pushed about 100,000 others, most Rohingyas, from their homes. Sayataw Virathu and his followers have traveled to the western state of Rakhine, site of the conflict, to assess its impact. ‘We have to expel the Muslims. We don't want what happened in Afghanistan to happen here,’ Sayataw Virathu said in an interview at the monastery, referring to the Taliban's 2001 bombing of two towering 6th century Buddha statues in Bamiyan.” </blockquote><br />
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Victor Mallet in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a29e6114-2eb4-11e2-9b98-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"A Task of Extremes to Modernise India"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“There are two shocking things about this number: its magnitude and the gap between the upper and lower estimates. The range means either that up to 100,000 children are dying in addition to the known 400,000, or that they are still alive. Or perhaps the extra 100,000 do die annually, but not from diarrhoea, for the total number of under-five deaths is a still more chilling 1.66 million – roughly equivalent to the population of Qatar or Hawaii. My purpose is not to criticise India or Ramesh – who has campaigned vigorously to end the health scandal of leaving 600 million Indians to defecate in the open – but to point out the terrifying scale of the challenges facing a country that will soon overtake China to become the world’s most populous nation.” </blockquote><br />
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Amy Kazmin in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/7596e71a-2eb7-11e2-9b98-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"India’s Party People"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In the early days of India’s information technology boom, Bangalore bars, clubs and discos were open until the early morning, catering to young people getting off work at all hours. These days, police are actively enforcing a previously ignored 1967 law that requires bars to shut down by 11.30pm – it also prohibits dancing in venues that serve alcohol. Ostensibly, these strictures help an overstretched police force maintain law and order. They have also curtailed a boom in seedy ‘dance bars’, where women were paid to dance for an almost exclusively male clientele – often a front for prostitution. But controls on upmarket pubs such as Love Shack – and others of its ilk, which cater to young men and women with money in their pockets – also have strong public support. Many older, middle-class Indians feel that clubs where young people mix, lubricated by alcohol, are a threat to Indian culture and to their own children. At one bar, I watched a very drunk 22-year-old IT company intern, from a conservative north Indian family, nearly fall off her bar-stool while sharing a bowl-sized Long Island Iced Tea with a male colleague, who pawed her hopefully. She confided she had recently split up with a boyfriend. Now, she says, she goes out in the evening ‘with anyone who treats me.’ Men on the lower rungs of the economic ladder – where cash is tight and tradition strong – often view upmarket bars, and the scenes that play out inside, with both disapproval and envious resentment.” </blockquote><br />
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John Kay in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/66332989#axzz2DTitIuGd" target="_blank">"Learn from the Moguls: Rent-Seeking Will Destroy Your Empire"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Like most visitors to northern India, I visited the Taj Mahal. Unlike most visitors, I asked economic questions. Reports of his tax policies suggest that Shah Jahan may have appropriated as much as 40 per cent of what we now call gross domestic product to support a lifestyle of exceptional ostentation and self-indulgence. He was overthrown by his son, who was exasperated by his father's penchant for monumental building, anxious to maximise his own share of the loot and concerned by the scale of the levies on the population. But it was all too late. The Mogul empire was in irretrievable decline. The activities of Shah Jahan epitomise rent-seeking – the accumulation of a fortune not by creating wealth through serving customers better but by the appropriation of such wealth after it has already been created by other people. Both are routes to personal enrichment and the tension between them has been a dominant theme of economic history. Whenever the balance shifts too far in favour of appropriation over creation, we see entrepreneurial talent diverted to unproductive activity, an accelerating cycle in which political power and economic power reinforce each other - until others become envious of the proceeds of appropriation, and the resentment of the oppressed undermines the legitimacy of the regime.” </blockquote><br />
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Tim Arango in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/world/europe/angry-turkish-secularists-plant-flag-at-ergenekon-trial.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Angry Turkish Secularists Plant Their Flag at Trial"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Turkey is endlessly fixated with the past. Its competing interpretations play out each day in the newspapers. From one edition of a local paper this week came these stories: Was the reformist president, Turgut Ozal, who died suddenly in 1993, actually poisoned by his enemies? Did Adnan Menderes, the prime minister in the 1950s who was hanged after a military coup, give orders for a pogrom in 1955 against non-Muslims? And who, exactly, was behind the coups of 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997? The courthouse in which the Ergenekon defendants are facing trial is in Silivri, a town on the Sea of Marmara an hour’s drive west of Istanbul. The caretakers of the tent encampment are dissidents, nationalists, secularists, the family and friends of the accused, and even some defendants. The tents, set up as a permanent base of protest, call to mind a refugee camp. And in a sense, the men and women who visit, sometimes for a day but often for longer, are exiles from Turkey’s past. They are a political minority in today’s Turkey and, as loyalists to the secular and nationalist traditions of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey in 1923, they are fearful that Mr. Erdogan has decisively banished them from the center of power.” </blockquote><br />
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Maria Abi-Habib in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578109492792634554.html" target="_blank">"Afghan Women Fear Rights Will Erode as U.S. Leaves"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘It's a men's country,’ says Hawa Alam Nuristani, one of a handful of female members on the High Peace Council, the government body appointed by Mr. Karzai to reach out to the insurgency. ‘Our only support is from the international community. What is the guarantee that we won't be faced with a similar regime as the Taliban when the Americans withdraw?’ The U.S. says women's rights will remain an important issue after the withdrawal, even though American officials acknowledge the limits of their waning influence. ‘Afghanistan is run by Afghans; we are significant partners,’ says Melanne Verveer, the U.S. Ambassador at large for global women's issues. ‘We will continue to ensure that women's rights are pivotal because of our partnership and because it is critical to the future.’” </blockquote><br />
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Binod kumar Singh at <i>satp.org</i>, <a href="http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/sair11/11_20.htm#assessment2" target="_blank">"Insurrections against the Insurgency"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Continuing violence and the Taliban’s increasing brutality in Afghanistan have sparked violent ‘uprisings’ across the country, as Taliban extremists are attacked and overwhelmed by Afghan villagers, at least on occasion with nothing more than farming tools, sticks, stones, or even their bare hands. While such acts of resistance are intermittent and unpredictable, at best, some of the most noticeable of recent incidents include:<br />
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July 9, 2012: Local residents fought Taliban militants and forced the latter to pull back from the eastern Paktia Province, when an estimated 400 Taliban attacked Mirazka District in the Province. May 27, 2012: In Andar District of Ghazni Province, 11 Taliban were killed by villagers and another 15 were held hostage. No further information about the hostages is available in open sources. April 12, 2012: Angry residents cut off a Taliban militant’s ear after two children were killed and another two injured in a roadside blast in the Garmsir District of southern Helmand Province. August 27, 2011: Residents in the Pirzada suburb of Ghazni city in Ghazni Province clashed with Taliban fighters who were attempting to forcibly collect <i>zakat</i> (alms) from locals. One Taliban terrorist was killed and another was injured during the attack. August 22, 2011: A mob of villagers stoned to death a Taliban ‘commander’ and his body guard in the Nawa District of Helmand Province. The villagers turned on the two Taliban insurgents for the unjust and brutal killing of a local village elder.” </blockquote><br />
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Jeffrey Gettleman in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/africa/congo-rebels-in-goma-vow-to-take-kinshasha.html" target="_blank">"Congo Rebels, After Victory, Vow to Take the Capitol"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“No visa is necessary to cross this border anymore. Nor do red-eyed soldiers hang around reeking of home-brew. Gone, too, are many of the quasi-government officials who used to buzz around this border post harassing travelers and squeezing out bribes, including one little man who claimed to be a health officer and had ‘Doc’ scribbled in Magic Marker on his coat. Instead, the doorway to Goma, one of Congo’s largest and most strategic cities, is now manned by lean, young rebels in crisp fatigues. They captured this town on Tuesday, ridding it of an often sloppy and menacing Congolese Army presence, and on Wednesday the rebels announced at a triumphant rally that Goma was just the beginning. ‘We’re going to Kinshasa!’ vowed Col. Vianney Kazarama, a spokesman for the M23 rebel group.” </blockquote><br />
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Robert Jenkins in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/63ffec6e-2a6a-11e2-a137-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"It’s Time to Think the Unthinkable on America’s Debt"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Will the US request a bailout? Will the International Monetary Fund grant it? On what terms and conditions? What writedown of US debt will be needed to restore sustainability to its fiscal accounts? What impact will this have on world financial markets? These are not questions being asked today but they are questions worth contemplating. Thinking the unthinkable is one of the lessons of the eurozone saga. Another is the speed with which complacency can convert to crisis. So although I am not predicting Armageddon, I would like to signal a series of factors that policy makers of all nationalities would do well to keep in mind.” </blockquote><br />
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Josh Mitchell in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578145092893766844.html" target="_blank">"Federal Student Lending Swells"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘Is there any way the federal government could possibly come out to the good?’ Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) asked at a Senate Banking Committee hearing in July on student loans, noting that the government demands no collateral and has no underwriting requirements. ‘What we're really doing is piling up debt down the road the same students are going to have to pay off.’ Others are asking whether the government is encouraging students to take on too much debt. ‘The way the system works now…put money on the stump, people come and get it,’ said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. ‘Can't blame them. It's sitting out there in plain view. It's easy to get.’ Unlike most other types of consumer credit, student debt is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. After falling behind on payments, a borrower typically finds it harder to obtain other types of consumer loans, or can only do so at higher interest rates.” </blockquote><br />
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<i><br />
</i> <i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/11/times-tax-error" target="_blank">"Times Tax Error"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“A front-page <i>New York Times</i> article by David Kocieniewski that is also republished at CNBC reports: ‘In 1970, there were 14 tax brackets for the top 2 percent of earners, with a top rate of 91 percent.’ That ‘91 percent’ figure for 1970 is inaccurate. According to the Tax Foundation, the top rate in 1970 was 70%; according to the Tax Policy Center, it was 71.75%. Maybe the reporter just hit a 7 instead of a 6, and meant 1960 instead of 1970. Or maybe it's just another example of the <i>Times</i> trying to pretend that the Kennedy tax cut never happened.” </blockquote><br />
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Bjorn Lomborg at <i>project-syndicate.org</i>, <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-right-and-wrong-way-to-reduce-hurricane-damage-by-bj-rn-lomborg" target="_blank">"The Moral of Sandy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“From Bill Clinton to Robert Redford, countless pundits blamed Sandy on climate change. Most spectacularly, the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek placed the monumental caption ‘IT’S GLOBAL WARMING, STUPID’ over a picture of flooded Manhattan. Now, global warming is real, and cutting CO2 is a good idea when the reduction cost is lower than that of the damage it prevents. There is also a grain of truth in the connection between hurricanes and global warming: the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects stronger but fewer hurricanes toward the end of this century. But the end of the century is 88 years from now, and blaming global warming now is simply unconvincing (Bloomberg’s first source for its claim was a 134-character tweet). In its 2012 report on extreme weather, the IPCC said that it puts little trust in any attribution of hurricanes to global warming. The authors of one of the central Science papers for the UN’s hurricane estimates put it clearly: ‘It is premature to conclude that human activities … have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.’ We will be unable to detect an impact ‘until we near the end of the century.’ In fact, the US has not seen a hurricane of Category 3 or higher since Wilma in 2005. Those seven years without strong hurricanes is the longest such span in more than a century. (Sandy, which was downgraded from a hurricane before it hit New York, was rebranded in the media as a ‘superstorm.’)” </blockquote><br />
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George Will in <b>WASHINGTON POST</b>, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-a-government-agency-answerable-to-no-one/2012/11/16/27a4f604-2f53-11e2-9f50-0308e1e75445_story.html" target="_blank">"Answerable to No One"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress’s constitutional role. The CFPB’s director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama’s spurious recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate’s power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB’s general lawlessness. The CFPB nullifies Congress’s power to use the power of the purse to control bureaucracies because its funding — ‘determined by the director’ — comes not from congressional appropriations but from the Federal Reserve. Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789, the CFPB is uniquely sovereign: The president appoints the director for a five-year term — he can stay indefinitely, if no successor is confirmed — and the director can be removed, but not for policy reasons. One CFPB request for $94 million in Federal Reserve funds was made on a single sheet of paper. Its 2012 budget estimated $130 million for — this is the full explanation — ‘other services.’ So it has been hiring promiscuously and paying its hires lavishly....” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-OdIHqWRduTI/ULjtWzGsMOI/AAAAAAAAAVM/Gzdd5jTAfII/s336/NewCriterion31-3.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />James Piereson in <b>NEW CRITERION</b>, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/He-was-the-change-7484" target="_blank">"He Was the Change"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The great political battles in the United States during the nineteenth century were never ideological contests in the modern sense but rather controversies fought over the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of the founding fathers. Political contests over expansion, the Bank of the United States, slavery, secession, and the regulation of commerce were fought out along constitutional lines. The politicians and statesmen of that era were not divided into liberal and conservative camps; those terms had little meaning in nineteenth-century America. Abraham Lincoln was not thought of as a ‘liberal,’ nor were slave owners derided as ‘conservatives.’ Both sides of that controversy appealed to the Constitution or to the Declaration of Independence to defend their positions. The Progressives introduced an ideological element into American politics by detaching their arguments from the Constitution and grounding them instead in claims about progress and historical development. Progressives (they were not yet called ‘liberals’) asserted that the Constitution, with its complex framework designed to limit government, was out of date in the modern age of science, industrialism, and large trusts and corporations. Constitutionalists looked backwards to the founding fathers; Progressives looked forward to a vast future of never-ending progress and change.” </blockquote><br />
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Andrew Sorkin in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/private-equity-and-hostess-stumbling-together/" target="_blank">"Private Equity and Hostess Stumbling Together"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The behind-the-scenes tale of Hostess and Ripplewood may be the opposite of a project to buy it, strip it and flip it. When Mr. Collins originally looked at Hostess, he was trying to make investments in troubled companies with union workers. He was convinced that he could work with labor organizations to turn around iconic American businesses, and he hoped Hostess would become a model for similar deals. Early on, Mr. Collins sought out Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader, who had become a consultant on labor issues, to help Ripplewood acquire Hostess and work with its unions. Mr. Collins had previously been a donor to Mr. Gephardt’s election campaigns, according to an article in Fortune magazine this year that described the relationship. It was Mr. Collins’s relationship with Mr. Gephardt — a Democrat and longtime friend of labor — that helped make the deal happen in the first place. While Ripplewood sought significant concessions from the unions in 2009, some insiders and outside analysts privately suggested that Ripplewood did not fight hard enough for even greater givebacks from the unions in the bankruptcy process — savings worth $110 million — perhaps as a function of Mr. Collins’s relationship with Mr. Gephardt.” </blockquote><br />
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Holman Jenkins in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578130912150512612.html" target="_blank">"Twinkies: A Defense"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Teamsters reluctantly agreed to givebacks to finance the company's latest turnaround attempt. The bakers rejected any concessions and went out on strike, despite being informed that the result would be the liquidation of the parent company and the loss of 18,500 jobs. Tsk tsk, went even the liberal media, assuming that union bloody-mindedness must be at work. Think again. As the bakers rightly saw it, they were being asked once more to prop up Teamster jobs that would likely guarantee that any Hostess resurrection would be short-lived. Start with the fact that Hostess's bakery operations are relatively efficient, and though the company planned to sell or close some of the plants anyway, the company had the power to do so already under its union contracts. Under the latest turnaround plan, the sticking point was Hostess's distribution operations, source of the Hostess horror stories filling the media. Union-imposed work rules stopped drivers from helping to load their trucks. A separate worker, arriving at the store in a separate vehicle, had to be employed to shift goods from a storage area to a retailer's shelf. Wonder Bread and Twinkies couldn't ride on the same truck.” </blockquote><br />
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Holman Jenkins in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578145102007752448.html" target="_blank">"The Media Choke on a Twinkie"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Where wealth and livelihood are entailed, where teams act together and have time and incentive to think carefully, a good assumption is that people—management, labor—act rationally. Unfortunately, journalists who might be prepared to brave bullets in a war zone nonetheless lack simple courage to see what's in front of their eyes in a matter like the Twinkies bankruptcy. The reason is endemic: Not enough is at stake for the media itself to cause the media to prefer an uncomfortable truth when a comfortable fallacy is at hand.” </blockquote><br />
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Paul Volcker at <i>nybooks.com</i>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/what-new-president-should-consider/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"What the New President Should Consider"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Virtually every day we read of polls about the president’s popularity, or the ups and downs of the Republican contenders during the recent election. The poll that concerns me is different, and much more challenging. ‘Do you trust your government to do the right thing most of the time?’ That question has been asked regularly for decades by experienced pollsters. These days only 20 percent or even less say yes. In other words, four out of five Americans don’t instinctively trust our own government to do the ‘right thing’ even half of the time. That’s not a platform upon which a great democracy can be sustained. I know we have been witnessing a large ideological debate. Much of that is beyond the concerns of financial or economic policy. But I also know that the political divide is too often put as ‘big government’ versus ‘small government.’ That particular argument may be—probably should be—endless. After all, it started back at the beginning of the republic, Jefferson against Hamilton, on and on. But can we not agree on some basic points of departure? Government is, after all, necessary. What we want is effective government, worthy of instinctive trust. I have long been concerned that our particular governments—large or small, federal, state, and local—are not consistently administered and managed as well as they should be, and can be.” </blockquote><br />
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James Mackintosh in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/149d375a-2ced-11e2-9211-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"The Short View"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The US has long been the Saudi Arabia of agriculture, producing about 40 per cent of the world’s maize. Now it is set to be the Saudi Arabia of oil, too. The International Energy Agency estimates US oil production will pass Saudi levels in five years, while the US should be almost energy independent in oil and gas in just over two decades. If the IEA is right (there are questions about shale sustainability), this has big implications for world politics as the US loses the economic incentive to interfere in the Middle East. It will have implications for asset prices rather sooner though. Already the flood of new oil from shale and Canadian sources has pushed the West Texas Intermediate benchmark to a discount of a fifth to Brent, the international benchmark. Big chunks of the US are getting oil on the cheap, which should make them more competitive.” </blockquote><br />
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John Bussey in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595904578121242654761004.html" target="_blank">"Export U.S. Gas, Yes or No? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The tricky part, though, is determining what demand may eventually be. Rock-bottom gas prices are already fueling a surge of new manufacturing activity in the U.S. Consumers, from big utilities to condo buildings in New York, are also converting to burning the cheap new gas. And what happens when natural gas fuels more of our trucking and transportation fleets? Dow and other chemical companies are busy building new plants in the U.S. to capitalize on cheap energy. Mr. Biltz shares a list Dow compiled of 102 big new manufacturing investments in the U.S. that he attributes in part to gas prices. The companies involved read like a Who's Who of industrial America: high-value, energy-intensive businesses like steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, vehicles and packaging. ‘This competitive advantage is just massive,’ he says. His energy costs are well below what many competitors abroad pay. That gives Dow an edge, and it's one reason total exports of chemicals from the U.S. have risen.” </blockquote><br />
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578123052059258768.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank">"Illinois the ‘Unfixable’"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Commercial Club of Chicago wrote that because the November elections did not bring in lawmakers willing to push real reform, the state's roughly $200 billion debt now threatens education, health care and basic public services. The problem is worsening so fast that the usual menu of reforms won't be enough to keep public pensions from sucking taxpayers and whole cities into its yawning maw. If you think Illinois lawmakers aren't taking the problems seriously enough, just ask Pat Quinn. On Sunday, the Illinois Governor kicked off a ‘grass-roots’ effort to rally the state around pension reform. The Governor hasn't come up with a plan, but don't despair: He introduced the state's new animated mascot, ‘Squeezy, the Pension Python,’ and encouraged voters to talk about the problem over Thanksgiving. Here's some food for thought. The state estimates its unfunded pension liabilities at around $95 billion. But that rosy scenario is based on the assumption that pension investments earn some 8% a year. In fiscal 2012, the Teachers Retirement System had a 0.76% return, the State Employees Retirement System 0.05%, and the General Assembly Retirement System a negative 0.14%.”</blockquote><br />
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Charlotte Allen in <b>WEEKLY STANDARD</b>, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/decline-and-fall_662233.html" target="_blank">"The Decline and Fall of California"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The center-right middle class is the demographic mainstay of the Republican party, and as the middle class has withered in California, so has the GOP, which is now pretty much confined to the state’s relatively unpopulated agricultural and desert interior, while the coastal metropolises where the vast majority of Californians live — with the exception of historically conservative Orange County — went solid blue for President Obama. The California legislature has been controlled by Democrats since 1970 (except for one year), but is now almost laughably lopsided. On November 6 the Democrats managed to secure their long-desired two-thirds supermajority in both houses (54 seats out of 80 in the Assembly, 27 out of 40 in the Senate) that will enable them come January to pass budgets and tax increases whenever and of whatever size they like. ‘The Republicans have been neutralized,’ says Robert J. Cristiano, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. ‘There’s not a single Republican holding statewide office,’ he adds. ‘Policy in this state is 100 percent dictated and determined by the Democratic party.’” </blockquote><br />
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Ross Douthat in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/douthat-The-Liberal-Gloat.html" target="_blank">"The Liberal Gloat"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear. Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-nJY47KBqbyY/ULjtaYamaqI/AAAAAAAAAVg/eyD0fw40UDc/s320/SlavojZizek.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />John Thornhill in <b>FT</b> on Slavoj Zizek’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9830195e-2f3e-11e2-b88b-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"The Year of Dreaming Dangerously"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Rejoicing in the fact that capitalism has re-emerged as the ‘name of the problem’, he cites the revolutionary mantra of Mao Zedong: ‘There is chaos under the heaven – the situation is excellent.’ But the hero of the Occupy movement, who has become something of a cult leader for the radical left, offers scant solutions to our present dilemmas, provoking and baffling the reader in equal measure. In spite of his revolutionary impulse, Zizek at one point suggests that Marxists should perhaps renounce the myth of the Great Awakening, that glorious emancipatory moment when the dispossessed seize power and lead the world to a more just future. Inaction, he concludes, could be even more revolutionary than action – a maxim that will comfort all those who believe they can change the world from the safety of their own sofa.” </blockquote><br />
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Michael Fitzpatrick at <i>spiked-online.com</i>, <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_preview/13093/" target="_blank">"After ‘New Atheism’, Let’s Re-humanise Humanism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Tallis takes off from the polemic against ‘scientism’ launched in his last book, <i>Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity</i>. In that work, he challenged the fashionable attempts to explain all human life in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and the associated denial of human agency and elevation of anti-humanist prejudices. As he ironically sums up the apologetic ideology of ‘neurotruistics’ proclaimed in a thousand banner headlines: ‘The latest findings of neuroscience confirm what we already know.’ Here, Tallis begins with the claims of physicists to have arrived at a theory of everything, noting that they ‘can get away with metaphysical murder because their technologies are practically so useful’ (not something that the biologists, surveying the hubris of the Human Genome Project and the ‘decade of the brain’, can claim). Quite apart from the problem that the two most comprehensive theories of the material world put forward by physicists – relativity and quantum mechanics – are incompatible, much of the natural world, including matters such as the relationship between the living cell and the organism, our relationship to our own bodies, vision, memory, language, remain beyond scientific explanation. As Tallis observes, the scientific gaze ‘chills as it amazes’, while philosophy ‘seeks to achieve most directly the state of wonder to which art brings us by indirection’, inviting us ‘to be surprised and puzzled by the things that lie closest to hand’.” </blockquote><br />
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Alvin Plantinga in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110189/why-darwinist-materialism-wrong" target="_blank">"Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The probability, with respect to our current evidence, that life has somehow come to be from non-life just by the working of the laws of physics and chemistry is vanishingly small. And given the existence of a primitive life form, the probability that all the current variety of life should have come to be by unguided evolution, while perhaps not quite as small, is nevertheless minuscule. These two conceptions of materialist naturalism are very likely false. But, someone will say, the improbable happens all the time. It is not at all improbable that something improbable should happen. Consider an example. You play a rubber of bridge involving, say, five deals. The probability that the cards should fall just as they do for those five deals is tiny—something like one out of ten to the 140th power. Still, they did. Right. It happened. The improbable does indeed happen. In any fair lottery, each ticket is unlikely to win; but it is certain that one of them will win, and so it is certain that something improbable will happen. But how is this relevant in the present context? In a fit of unbridled optimism, I claim that I will win the Nobel Prize in chemistry. You quite sensibly point out that this is extremely unlikely, given that I have never studied chemistry and know nothing about the subject. Could I defend my belief by pointing out that the improbable regularly happens? Of course not: you cannot sensibly hold a belief that is improbable with respect to all of your evidence. Nagel goes on: he thinks it is especially improbable that consciousness and reason should come to be if materialist naturalism is true. ‘Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.’ Why so? Nagel’s point seems to be that the physical sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, neurology—cannot explain or account for the fact that we human beings and presumably some other animals are conscious. Physical science can explain the tides, and why birds have hollow bones, and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness.” </blockquote><br />
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John Haldane in <b>FIRST THINGS</b>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/a-tale-of-two-thomases" target="_blank">"A Tale of Two Thomases"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The combination of subjectivism and progressivism has long been prominent within cultural, social, and historical studies, and it has received occasional endorsement and even encouragement from some ‘radical’ philosophers who have acquired a following outside their own discipline. A prominent example was the late Richard Rorty, who was explicit about forging a link between antirealism and liberalism, and eager to challenge what he regarded as the superstition of realism, be it metaphysical or noral. In one of his last publications, An Ethics for Today, published two years ago, he makes the link explicit and asks: ‘Is the Church right that there is such a thing as the structure of human existence, which can serve as a moral reference point? Or, do we human beings have no moral obligations except helping one another satisfy our desires, thus achieving the greatest possible amount of happiness?’ …It is significant that Rorty chose as his opponent Roman Catholicism and its present pope. He is right to view them as his principal opponents, since they represent one of the few contemporary institutional embodiments of the realist idea that morality is rooted in an objective moral order and the structure of reality.” </blockquote><br />
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Paul Gavrilyuk in <b>FIRST THINGS</b>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/the-orthodox-renaissance" target="_blank">"The Orthodox Renaissance"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Russian Religious Renaissance was an attempt to interpret all aspects of human existence – culture, politics, even economics – in Christian terms, brought about by the generation of Nicholas Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, Nocholas Lossky, and Lev Shestov. This older generation built upon the main currents of nineteenth century western European and Russian religious thought. For example, Berdyaev’s religious existentialism and personalism had its roots in German mystics, especially Jacob Boehme, as well as in the religious questions raised by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Bulgakov took as his point of departure the German Idealist tradition, especially Schelling, as worked out in the sophiology of Vladimir Solovyov. Lossky developed religious and philosophical intuitivism, whereas Shestov worked out a form of antirationalist existentialism akin to the religious vision of Soren Kierkegaard. The movement was interrupted midstream in Russia, but it continued with renewed vigor in the diaspora. The younger generation, whose thought matured in the emigration, was led by Georges Florovsky and Nicholas Lossky’s son Vladimir. This generation rebelled against the previous generation’s perceived theological ‘modernism’ and was concerned to free Orthodox theology from its centuries-old ‘Western captivity.’ They announced a reform of Orthodox theology through a return to the patristic sources.” </blockquote><br />
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Joseph Epstein in <b>WSJ</b> on Anka Muhlstein’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203846804578102932194914110.html" target="_blank">"M. Proust’s Library"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was immensely well read. ‘In Search of Lost Time’ encapsulates within itself the main traditions in French literature: both in fiction (from Madame de Lafayette through Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola) and in the belle-lettristic-philosophical line (from Montaigne through Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort). Proust formed a strong taste for generalization through these latter writers. I own a small book of his maxims, drawn from the novel and his discursive writings, and an unusually high quotient of them are dazzling. Let one example suffice: ‘It has been said that the greatest praise of God lies in the negation of the atheist, who considers creation sufficiently perfect to dispense with a creator.’” </blockquote><br />
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Christy Wampole at <i>nytimes.com</i>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/" target="_blank">"How to Live Without Irony"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to ‘secretly flee’ (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us. How did this happen? It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender and takes the form of reaction rather than action.” </blockquote><br />
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Christopher Caldwell in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2a2b6d82-2f1b-11e2-b88b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"It’s Only Right to Put Learning by Heart to the Test"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“While the SAT has certainly helped some recent Asian immigrants, its general tendency is to decrease, not increase, diversity. Where that happens, politics usually requires that the SAT be ignored or played down. Mr Gove is wrong, too, to scoff at the Labour leader Ed Miliband’s vision of a Britain that does more for the 50 per cent who do not attend university. In Poland, Mr Gove claims, 73 per cent of students matriculate. If so, some of them must be taking degrees in tyre realignment and pizza delivery. In a globalised economy, western countries will not need more than, say, 20 per cent of their populations in university, unless we assume a global division of labour in which the west continues to perform all the managerial work while the rest of the world remains content to hew wood and draw water. The argument Mr Gove makes in favour of memorising ‘scales or times tables or verse’ is considerably stronger. It has been attacked for years now – unfairly.” </blockquote><br />
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David Fontana in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b> on Brian Tamanaha’s book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/failing-law-schools-how-to-fix-legal-education-brian-tamanaha-harvard-yale" target="_blank">"Failing Law Schools"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The problems affect almost all law schools because law schools are required to be more similar to one another than different. There are at least two major reasons for this. First, the American Bar Association (ABA) decides which law schools can be accredited, and it requires that law schools primarily employ tenured or tenure-track professors. Sixty-five percent of professors in American universities are employed in positions not eligible for tenure, but any law school that tried to match that proportion could lose its accreditation. As a result, law schools shoulder the cost of a permanent crop of highly compensated professors. Law schools also lose the flexibility to shuffle professors in and out as pedagogical and scholarly needs change.” </blockquote><br />
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Anthony Daniels in <b>NEW CRITERION</b>, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-digital-challenge--I--Loss---gain--or-the-fate-of-the-book-7468" target="_blank">"Loss & Gain, or the Fate of the Book"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“These stories were of the wholesale abandonment or destruction of rare and valuable books by public institutions, even of those books willed by individuals to those public institutions. It was not as if librarians were merely ambivalent or negligent of the books in their charge, but as if they actually <i>hated</i> them, as workers in chocolate factories come to hate chocolate. One bookseller in Wales told me that he found seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books dumped in a skip outside a supposed institution of learning. Another found the librarians of a county library walking over the sixteenth-century books that they had pulled from the shelves preparatory to throwing them away in order to make space for more computer terminals. The process is called <i>deacquisitioning</i>, a truly Orwellian term, as if demolition or bombing were called <i>debuilding</i>; and one of the justifications for the process is that records show that the <i>deacquisitioned</i> items have not been consulted for years, for decades. A library is no longer a repository of all that has been thought or written but a department store where the readers determine by their borrowing habits what stock should be held.” </blockquote><br />
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James Taranto at <i>wsj.com</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323713104578131200617146638.html" target="_blank">"The Privilege to Speak"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Alito elaborated an argument this column made in January 2010, just after he and his colleagues handed down Citizens United. He noted that many landmark free-speech decisions vindicated the rights of corporations, including two that involved the New York Times Co. Here's the company's response: In <i>New York Times</i> v. Sullivan, in which the First Amendment was used to rein in the law of libel, the Supreme Court focused on the "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." It made almost no mention of the fact that <i>The Times</i> was a corporation. Nor were the free speech rights of a corporation any part of the ruling in the Pentagon Papers case. Really? The free speech rights of a corporation weren't "any part" of a case styled New York Times Co. v. United States? As for the libel case, it was similarly styled New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Leaving out the ‘Co.’ is a common journalistic shorthand, but in this case a misleading one. The editorial also omits that Times v. Sullivan concerned a political advertisement, the very sort of communication that the <i>Times</i> insists is not protected by the First Amendment. At least this time, unlike in its 2010 editorial about which we wrote back then, the Times Co. acknowledges that it had been exempted from the censorship regime it endorsed.” </blockquote><br />
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Gordon Crovitz in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578136902821852508.html" target="_blank">"The U.N.’s Internet Sneak Attack"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Many of the U.N.'s 193 member states oppose the open, uncontrolled nature of the Internet. Its interconnected global networks ignore national boundaries, making it hard for governments to censor or tax. And so, to send the freewheeling digital world back to the state control of the analog era, China, Russia, Iran and Arab countries are trying to hijack a U.N. agency that has nothing to do with the Internet. For more than a year, these countries have lobbied an agency called the International Telecommunications Union to take over the rules and workings of the Internet. Created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, the ITU last drafted a treaty on communications in 1988, before the commercial Internet, when telecommunications meant voice telephone calls via national telephone monopolies.” </blockquote><br />
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Jed Perl in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110175/the-curse-warholism" target="_blank">"The Curse of Warholism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Warhol without Warholism is a troubadour of café society and its mentality, his visual effects closer to the quicksilver insights of a fashion designer than the adamantine decision-making of a painter. These are period pieces with an enduring formal jolt, comparable in some respects to the work of Florine Stettheimer, who in the 1920s and 1930s chronicled the parties and pastorals of high bohemian Manhattan in paintings that transcend illustration, but just barely. If you want to know what the passing parade looked like when it included Marcel Duchamp, Stettheimer can tell you. Warhol can tell you a historical thing or two as well. What’s missing in Warhol’s work is Stettheimer’s artisanal energy, the intricate fashioning of the image that gives her social documents their poetic vibration. Warholism is not so much an outgrowth of Warhol’s paintings and sundry other products as it is the state of mind in which his work thrives. Warholism is bigger than Warhol. But Warhol’s work, fueled by popular culture’s cult of gigantism, is that rare hot air balloon that has been overinflated without ever bursting and collapsing, at least until now.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
Jackie Wullschlager in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f7a76ada-2e63-11e2-8bb3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DOM1EJZt" target="_blank">"Beyond the froth and jargon"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“It is inescapable that the connoisseur has declined, too, as the art professional has risen, with the empirical language of the former – brushstrokes, colour, form – drowned out by the theory-drenched jargon of the latter. Professional jargon is pernicious because it legitimises anything, especially weak, dry, over-theoretical art that cannot stand on its own legs. It keeps afloat, for instance, the current Turner Prize, whose works are impenetrable without explanatory captions.<br />
Since today’s curators tend to be products of a conceptually-driven rather than connoisseur-based education, this jargon dominates group shows, which have political not aesthetic agendas and rarely include great art for fear of exposing the rest as second-rate.” </blockquote><br />
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Roger Atwood in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Mario Vargas Llosa’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00306/contents_306098a.pdf" target="_blank">"La Civilizacion del Espectaculo"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Critical standards in art and literature have disintegrated to the point where we can no longer tell good from junk. Twenty years ago, people talked about the end of history. In fact, Vargas Llosa says, it was culture that was in danger of dying. ‘Culture, in the traditional sense of that word, is today on the verge of disappearing’, he writes. ‘Or perhaps it has already disappeared, discreetly emptied of its content and replaced by another, denatured version of itself.’ Elsewhere, we are told that our culture is drowning in ‘frivolity, superficiality, ignorance, gossip-mongering and bad taste’, a result of a post-war prosperity which democratized culture too quickly and made entertainment its highest aspiration. Academe and the mass media wanted to bring down snobbish elites, a laudable goal in itself. But instead, these forces created a new hierarchy which rated humour over gravity, surface over content, and – above all – image over words and ideas. We are left with a culture that seeks only to entertain and refuses to deal with humanity’s deepest dilemmas. The results include social fragmentation and the erosion of democracy.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-rxt5pggZOYg/ULjtQZDH_0I/AAAAAAAAAUw/pB76nFWIT58/s324/gothika.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Max Fincher in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b>, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00306/contents_306098a.pdf" target="_blank">"A Frame for History"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Gothic is now ubiquitous in post-millennial American popular culture, according to Victoria Nelson. In ‘Gothicka’, she shows how contemporary films, video games, graphic novels and television series have reinvented and transformed the Catholic iconography of the late medieval period and how the Gothic has even offered ‘a vehicle for developing the frameworks of new religious movements’. ‘Faux Catholic’ is the coinage Nelson uses to characterize this recurrent paradox: in the twenty-first century, ‘gothicka’, while appearing to be anticlerical, in fact ‘strangely empowers and elevates the very religious denomination it seems to slander’.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
Marc Myers in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578123332598062540.html" target="_blank">"When He Washed My Sins Away"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Ms. Morrison: One Sunday morning in early 1969, I was listening to a gospel radio show on KSAN-FM in San Francisco when our recording of ‘Oh Happy Day’ came on. I froze. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, that's us—that's me.’<br />
Mr. Hawkins: When the song caught on in San Francisco in March 1969, I began receiving calls from major record companies. They all wanted to buy the rights to release the recording nationwide on their labels. I asked Mel Reid of Reid's Records, a gospel store, in Berkeley, for advice. He said to go with Buddah Records [now known as Buddha]. A company representative flew out from New York to talk with me. Then I flew to New York to sign the deal. Meanwhile, the church thought what we were doing was sacrilegious and insisted we remove the choir's name from the record. So Buddah renamed the choir the Edwin Hawkins Singers. In early April 1969, Buddah released ‘Oh Happy Day’ as a single on Pavilion—a label it had set up for gospel music. By the end of May, it was No. 4 on Billboard's pop chart. In June, we appeared with the Isley Brothers at Yankee Stadium. That's when I realized the song's magnitude.<br />
Ms. Morrison: I wasn't paid for the record, but that doesn't matter. I was singing in the church, singing for the Lord. Soon after I was hired to sing backup on Simon & Garfunkel's ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ which led to work with Van Morrison, Boz Scaggs and so many other artists. Edwin performs the song today with his singers, and I do, too, with the Blues Broads. Audience reactions are always strong. People want to have a happy day, and that song helps them do it. My delivery is still innocent and real, but sometimes I get so caught up that I have to stop and cry. Hey, the song gets to me, too.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Marc Myers in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203347104578102952956343468.html" target="_blank">"Sounds of Suspense"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘When I write a suspenseful score, I need to make audiences forget they are in a safe place,’ said the 80-year-old composer, conductor and arranger, settling into a sofa in the dimly lit den of his home, which once belonged to Groucho Marx. ‘Movie composers, they are like magicians. The music is there to contribute to the make-believe. With suspense, you must create concern where none exists.’ Mr. Schifrin knows a thing or two about making palms sweat. Since 1963, he has written more than 100 suspenseful themes and scores for television and the movies—including ‘Mannix,’ ‘Bullitt,’ ‘The Cincinnati Kid,’ ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘The Eagle Has Landed,’ four of Clint Eastwood's five ‘Dirty Harry’ films, ‘The Amityville Horror’ and the ‘Rush Hour’ series. This month marks the 45th anniversary of Mr. Schifrin's most famous soundtrack—‘Mission: Impossible,’ which won him two Grammys and set new standards for TV and movie suspense music. On Tuesday, a four-CD set—‘My Life in Music’ (Aleph)—will be released, surveying Mr. Schifrin's prolific composing and recording career in film, jazz, bossa nova, classical and opera.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-rLhsvSe-dGA/ULjtPuKvngI/AAAAAAAAAUo/_kphNPm2EzM/s300/Filter50.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><b>FILTER</b>: <a href="http://filtermagazine.com/index.php/news/entry/filter_50_milo_turns_50_descendents_grow_up_whether_they_want_to_or_not_out" target="_blank">"Milo Turns 50"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Watt: Milo, how did you get connected? </blockquote><blockquote>Milo: Billy showed up at school with the ‘Ride the Wild/It’s a Hectic World’ single, where he was selling it to the students. </blockquote><blockquote>Watt: He was slinging! </blockquote><blockquote>Bill: Yeah, but I was more interested in trying to get attention for myself than anything else. I remember that Milo and I had this PE coach who was also our environmental studies teacher. He was very cruel to Milo, the typical thing of a jock picking on a nerd. And it endeared me to Milo because I sympathized with his position: here’s this idiot picking on the smartest guy in the class. Soon, Milo became a fixture at our practices, like part of the furniture. Frank didn’t want to sing and play guitar at the same time, and one day at practice Frank said in his high Frank voice: ‘Ah, fuck it, we should just make Milo sing the songs.’” </blockquote><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-m8HjXYCy-wQ/ULjtWY6HLDI/AAAAAAAAAVI/P1Em24FKdJU/s359/LvD-frontcover2.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Chris Estey reviews Carducci’s <i>Life Against Dementia</i> at <a href="http://blog.kexp.org/2012/11/23/scribes-sounding-off-black-friday-book-round-up/" target="_blank">"kexp.org"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Content worth noting first in this exhaustive, thrilling collection include a wonderful history of outlaw folk in Oregon in the 1970s (a must read for rustic, indie freaks); connecting to his work at SST Records, wonderful tributes to The Minutemen, and a beautiful ode to gnarled-metal demigods Saint Vitus and the small triumphs and bitter tragedies within the band; clear-eyed assessments of Meat Puppets ll, Sadistic Mika Band, Tangerine Dream, and a ton of bands that needed a good shit-kicking. Carducci loves to pinpoint what you’re missing in the ‘music press’ such as Rolling Stone and MTV, and lovingly theorizes on the films of Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, horror and violence in the movies. Also: Lyrics he’s written for bands, sports, ‘Metagaming of the System,’ and more. If previous books by Carducci seemed less cohesive or too scene-specific but you’ve enjoyed his literary vibrancy, raw perceptual energy, sophisticated yet street-level thinking, lack of fear for orthodox spiritual belief, etc., then this is the best book of his to own. It’s my personal favorite single author anthology of the year.” </blockquote><br />
<br />
Joe Carducci reading/q&a/signings…<br />
<br />
Thurs. Dec. 6, 7pm at <a href="http://www.wolverinefarm.org/life-against-dementia-book-reading-by-joe-carducci/" target="_blank">Wolverine Farm Bookstore</a>, Fort Collins.<br />
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Sat. Dec. 8, 6pm at <a href="http://www.nightheronbooks.com/" target="_blank">Night Heron Books</a>, Laramie.<br />
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<br />
Wed. Dec 5 Carducci live streamed 11am Mountain on Grady’s <a href="http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/programs/morning-music-grady-kirkpatrick-wyoming-public-radio" target="_blank">“Morning Music”</a> program on KUWR FM.<br />
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<br />
Carducci profile by Peter Baumann in <a href="http://www.laramieboomerang.com/articles/2012/11/18/news/doc50a864a2e68b4666498047.txt" target="_blank">Laramie Boomerang</a>.<br />
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***<br />
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Jay Babcock interview at<i> <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2012/11/19/arthur-founder-jay-babcock-on-the-magazines-return-to-print/" target="_blank">thefader.com</a></i>.<br />
<blockquote><b>“What voice or perspective is missing from the cultural conversation right now?</b> </blockquote><blockquote>Well, I don’t know how to answer that question directly. What I can say is I’m not aware of any cultural conversation existing anymore. What’s happened is in culture, broadly speaking, technology has trumped the arts. We all talk about what platforms we use, what devices we have, what luck we’ve had lately with what app. Those are the subjects of our conversation. Those are the metaphors that we use, and in other times, our culture and our conversation [revolved more around] the things we have in common. The things we had in common had to do with the arts, the entertainment, and the culture that we were embedded within. The songs, the films, the books, the TV shows, whatever you want to say in the twentieth century, those provided the metaphors we could either use or rebel against. They gave us a common language that we could all use. We could rebel against it, but at least we had stuff in common that was derived from human, artistic expression. Now what we have in common are the tools that we use that have been made for us by nerds and venture capitalists that have made it hard for us to speak with each other in a meaningful way. We’re interested in continuing to do the work that we always did, but I have no idea how far the conversation that we do or the work that we do—I have no idea how far that will stretch. It might only be for a few thousand people, and that’s okay. If that’s the best we can do, and if we can just keep doing it, then so be it.” </blockquote><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-bDz4kXODszA/ULwHMR9yh9I/AAAAAAAAAXY/jXKzWHkVkyk/s350/ArthurCover.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />“<i>Arthur</i> is no longer distributed for free anywhere. Those days are (sadly) long gone. Now you gotta buy <i>Arthur</i> or you won't see it.”<br />
<a href="http://arthur.bigcartel.com/product/arthur-no-33-january-2013?utm_source=Arthur+Magazine+Bulletin&utm_campaign=ea3fd3c295-Newsletter_No_111_15_2012&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">Pre-order ARTHUR No. 33</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Ben Sisario at <i>nytimes.com</i>, <a href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/a-counterculture-totem-to-return-as-a-leaner-magazine/?utm_source=Arthur+Magazine+Bulletin&utm_campaign=ea3fd3c295-Newsletter_No_111_15_2012&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">"A Counterculture Totem to Return as a Leaner Magazine"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“From 2002 to 2008, <i>Arthur</i> was music’s version of a literary-minded little magazine. Distributed free in record stores and coffee shops, it celebrated underground culture of all kinds and attracted writers like Alan Moore (‘Watchmen’), Douglas Rushkoff and even Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who wrote a reviews column with the critic Byron Coley. Like magazines of all sizes in the digital age, however, Arthur struggled to stay in print. It briefly suspended publication, and then resumed it, in 2007 before disappearing completely the next year. Now <i>Arthur</i> is back, with what its publisher and founding editor, Jay Babcock, says is a more stable business model. It will cost $5 an issue and be published on newsprint, with ads only on the back covers of its two sections, a move intended to shield the magazine from fluctuations in the economy and the ad market.’” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://waterunderthebridgerecords.bigcartel.com/product/the-exxtras-waiting-for-you-cassette-w-download" target="_blank">"The Exxtras – Waiting for You"</a><br />
(15-song cassette w/ MP3 download)<br />
Out Dec. 13, 2012.<br />
<blockquote>“It all began with two old friends from back in the day — the day being San Pedro in the mid-80s. Philo had been in a band called SWA, and Raenie worked at SST Records. Raenie moved to Eugene, OR, in 1990, where she learned to play drums and played in Eugene bands like the Shudders, the Danged, and the Naysayers. Back home in Pedro, Philo went on to play in Fishcamp, the Jack Brewer Band, and the Last. Then in 2010, after 20 years in Eugene, Raenie moved back to Pedro and called up Philo to see if he wanted to jam. They played around together in a little room at Koos Studios and soon realized they needed some help. Enter Bill. Bill is Philo’s cousin-in-law. That is to say, his wife’s cousin’s husband. He’s also a bass player, gigging around Southern and Northern California with singer/songwriter Julie Tan, among many others. Bill was a fan of Philo’s various bands, and never missed an opportunity to slip in an “if you ever need a bass player” comment at gigs or family gatherings. Philo finally made that call, and the original power trio that would become the Exxtras was off and running... After a couple of months, Philo invited Jack Brewer to come to band practice to hang out. Jack was another friend of Philo and Raenie’s from the old days, being the lead vocalist in Saccharine Trust, the Jack Brewer Band, and the Obstacles. Jack started to come to practice regularly, sitting in on guitar and vocals, and was soon a full member of the band. Besides his trademark showmanship and unique guitar skills, Jack contributed songs he co-wrote with Marshall ‘Mellow’ Dana, which became cornerstones of the setlist, and inspired him and the others to fill in the rest of the set with original songs. Jack also contributed the name for the band, the Exxtras.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
Chuck Berry in <b>JET LAG</b>, 1980, on punk singles at <a href="http://musicruinedmylife.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/chuck-berry-reviews-punk-singles-1980.html" target="_blank">"musicruinedmylife"</a>.<br />
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Sam Lefebvre at <i>eastbayexpress.com</i> on <a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/once-stranded-obscure-albums-find-a-champion/Content?oid=3400206" target="_blank">"Superior Viaduct records and the Stranded in Oakland shop"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The walls of Oakland's newest record store are adorned with black and white photographs of Bay Area bands mounted beneath effective lighting, the floor plan is spacious and intuitive, and the cover of the album currently playing rests on its own display. It reflects the attention to detail that Viaduct has honed for the last year with his record label, Superior Viaduct, which finds its first physical headquarters in Stranded. From behind the counter, Viaduct gestured to a display of LPs from his label's reissues and archival compilations — all early Bay Area punk bands such as Black Humor, Noh Mercy, Factrix, and Monte Cazzazza — but then he brandished his label's most recent reissue, the Sleepers' <i>Painless Nights</i>, out December 11.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
<br />
<br />
David Greenberger & Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound – <br />
<a href="http://duplexplanet.com/giftshop/cds.html" target="_blank">"They Like Me Around Here"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In a follow up to their 2009 CD, Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time, Artist David reenberger reprises his collaboration with Paul Cebar for the release of their new CD of monologues with music, They Like Me Around Here. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI commissioned this new work in conjunction with their exhibit Hiding Places: Memory in the Arts. Greenberger’s conversations with elderly at Sheboygan mealsites, Community centers, assisted living and nursing home, and private residences became the basis for the text he created. Recording with the full band in Milwaukee, Greenberger and Cebar then completed the work at engineer/musician Mark Greenberg’s (Coctails, Wilco, Mavis Staples, Andrew Bird), Chicago studio.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
Louis Bayard in <b>BOOKFORUM</b> on David Thomson’s book, <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/" target="_blank">"The Big Screen – The Story of the Movies"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“What happened to this golden era? Well, sometime around the mid-1960s, or maybe it was the late 1970s, ‘the shining light (became) a mockery of enlightenment and a means of imprisoning the mass.’ You nod as you listen, knowing the old man is engaging in just the kind of mushy mythography that a tough-minded critic should be immune to. (How, exactly, were the masses of the 1920s any less imprisoned than the masses of the 2010s?) But he’s revealed himself all the same. Helplessly, on might add, for ‘helpless’ is the qualifier he uses more than any other. The ‘helpless guilt’ of Vertigo. The ‘helpless authorship’ of Orson Welles, and Brando’s ‘helpless need… to become someone else.’ The ‘helpless gamble’ of casting and the ‘helpless progress’ of censorship and the ‘helpless respect’ of United Artists for Michael Cimino and the ‘merry admission of helplessness’ in Tarantino’s work. So much impotence, and no one more helpless than this veteran watcher of screens, who suspects that his greatest love as been his enemy – our enemy. Film has ‘enacted and armored our detachment from the world’ and steered us away ‘from inner truth to appearance.’ It may once have looked like a ‘lustrous, improved version’ of reality, but in truth it has ‘let us give up on reality, and use it as a story, a dream, a toy version of life.’” </blockquote><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Nb04pYqKjcM/ULjtbcROPII/AAAAAAAAAVo/nuHqryQa08g/s359/sparrows1926_poster_large.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Dave Kehr in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/movies/homevideo/new-dvds-mary-pickford-on-blu-ray-early-perry-mason.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Defending the Young and the Innocent"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Pickford’s uncanny business acumen stood in stark opposition to her screen image. With her cascading rolls of golden curls, expressive blue eyes and tiny frame (five feet and 105 pounds, or so the fan magazines said), she projected a childlike innocence and frailty (though with a strong mischievous streak), and as soon as she achieved her artistic independence she came to specialize in playing little girls and young teenagers. In ‘The Poor Little Rich Girl,’ directed with his usual rich atmospherics by the pioneer filmmaker Maurice Tourneur, a 24-year-old Pickford plays the 11-year-old daughter of a neglectful Wall Street financier; in Sidney A. Franklin’s social drama ‘The Hoodlum’ she’s a spoiled teenager who moves with her social reformer father from Fifth Avenue to a multiethnic Lower East Side; in William Beaudine’s ‘Sparrows,’ the latest film in this collection and the last in which she played an adolescent, Pickford is ineffably moving as Molly, the oldest girl (and self-appointed protector) of a group of orphans being held as slaves in a ‘child farm’ deep in a Southern swamp. Arguably Pickford’s masterpiece, ‘Sparrows’ is a radiant example of the timelessness and clarity of feeling that silent film could achieve. Made with an awareness of the formal developments of the contemporary German cinema, the film seems like a lost tale from the Brothers Grimm, immersed in primal fears. As Molly leads the children away from the ogrelike overseer, across the quicksand and through the Expressionist swamp, the film seems to burrow into the viewer’s subconscious.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
Obituary of the Fortnight…<br />
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<br />
<a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Eugene-D--Genovese--1930-2012-7492" target="_blank">"Eugene Genovese"</a> (1930-2012)<br />
<blockquote>“A leftwing colleague sent me Gene’s obituary from <i>The New York Times</i> with the comment that it contained the ‘worst summary of <i>Roll, Jordan, Roll</i> I have ever read.’ Be not surprised. The piece also included the obligatory cheap shot, a quote from the progressive historian Eric Foner on paternalism, the animating feature in Gene’s interpretation of the world masters and slaves made together in the Old South: ‘[P]arents do not normally sell their children, the historian Eric Foner wrote in 1982.’ Well, one might respond that if Professor Foner had checked out his Bible lately, the most frequently mentioned means of enslavement in the text is the buying and selling of children. And further, only after the eighteenth-century advent in the West of a full-blown capitalist system, which broke human communities out of Malthusian cycles, was the buying and selling of children put beyond the legal pale throughout the world. But let me move on to clear up confusion. At one level of analysis, paternalism – some variant of government by the father – can be found in every slave society in history and in many other societies based on other forms of coerced labor.” </blockquote><br />
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Thanks to Steve Beeho, Mark Carducci, Jay Babcock.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nightheronbooks.com/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wBJlRIA-FKs/ULjs-XfGtjI/AAAAAAAAAT4/qNpmYjJm5-s/s550/LAD_Ad2012.jpg" /></a><br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, <a href="http://jamesfotopoulos.com/" target="_blank">James Fotopoulos</a>, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-70504467932053256092012-11-13T19:21:00.002-08:002012-11-16T15:46:41.281-08:00Issue #141 (Nov. 15, 2012)<b>along the Snowy Range, WY</b><br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-VVcc0eLQX1I/UKF7IM2jPsI/AAAAAAAAARw/59BLCtdebWA/s640/along%2520the%2520snowy%2520range.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<br />
<b>This is Brainwash and This is a Clue</b><br />
Steve Beeho<br />
<br />
<i>Punk: An Aesthetic</i> by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)<br />
<i>Someday All the Adults Will Die</i> (Hayward Gallery)<br />
<br />
For a movement that was so obsessed about being oppressed by the media, it's ironic that punk has proceeded to be the most anthologised, commemorated and plain over-documented post-war cultural period of them all. It's impossible not to feel sometimes that saturation point was reached a long time ago - and what initially felt like a delayed sense of vindication has now become distinctly tiresome. Sick of being sick of being sick.<br />
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One thing that’s become particularly irritating is the quasi-imperialistic annexing of what preceded and followed as either part of a historical continuum which inexorably led to punk (<span class="SpellE">ie</span> proto-punk) or its arty spawn (post-punk). Nobody goes on about proto-rockabilly or post-<span class="SpellE">psychedelia</span>, do they?! There's something incredibly smug about the proposition that punk is the planet around which everything else orbits.</span><br />
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<img http:="http:" punk-etymology="punk-etymology" punk="punk" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-urOp25uelOY/UKGG4HfI1sI/AAAAAAAAASo/DEaBRCUf3g4/s390/NV-Austin%2520Vanguard-small.jpg%3EOne%20thing%20that%E2%80%99s%20become%20particularly%20irritating%20is%20the%20quasi-imperialistic%20annexing%20of%20what%20preceded%20and%20followed%20as%20either%20part%20of%20a%20historical%20continuum%20which%20inexorably%20led%20to%20punk%20%28ie%20proto-punk%29%20or%20its%20arty%20spawn%20%28post-punk%29.%C2%A0%20Nobody%20goes%20on%20about%20proto-rockabilly%20or%20post-psychedelia,%20do%20they?%21%20There%27s%20something%20incredibly%20smug%20about%20the%20proposition%20that%20punk%20is%20the%20planet%20around%20which%20everything%20else%20orbits.%3Cbr%20/%3E%0A%C2%A0%3Cbr%20/%3E%0ABut%20perhaps%20that%27s%20me%20being%20jaded.%20Even%20as%20I%20type%20this%20I%27m%20conscious%20of%20the%20fact%20that%20the%20very%20word%20%20%3Ca%20href=" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" target="_blank" www.jonsavage.com="www.jonsavage.com" /><span lang="EN-GB">But perhaps that's me being jaded. Even as I type this I'm conscious of the fact that the very word <a href="http://www.jonsavage.com/punk/punk-etymology/" target="_blank">"punk"</a></span> resists straightforward definition, as <a href="http://stewarthomesociety.org/cranked/nomo.htm" target="_blank">Stewart Home</a> has pointed out and paradoxically “Never Mind the Bollocks” and “The Clash” bear only a passing resemblance now to what history has enshrined as punk orthodoxy. So I should nail my colours to the mast and side on the whole with Richard Meltzer that anything post-1983 isn't punk: "Doesn't matter if it's ostensibly punk - up the yingyang - 'cause by then the moment had passed, the world which gave it rise had expired, the market was no longer resisted, and whatever it then was was no longer anything remotely else. It was part of the same damn, same old rock "thing".<br />
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Despite the fact that the original prime movers of punk were essentially elitist while publicly claiming the opposite (in classic vanguardist style), it represented the last time that all right-thinking hipsters were instinctively on the same side, no matter how fleetingly, and more importantly engaged on some level, no matter how significant/trivial . But no musical axis which could encompass reborn traditionalists like Nick Lowe as well as anti-rock provocateurs like Throbbing Gristle could sustain such extremes for long. (The self-negating trajectory of Mark Perry's career first time round embodies these polarities).<br />
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Of course it’s punk’s creative eruption and inspirational sense of possibility which explain why people are still avidly writing and arguing about it decades later, even though 1976 is more distant now than the end of WW2 was from the 100 Club Punk Festival. <br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-XfM6hyes1eM/UKGG3f5nvcI/AAAAAAAAASg/PuD_tPAZAZk/s440/NV-American%2520fanzines-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Underlining this, Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg recently curated <a href="http://boo-hooray.com/punk-aesthetics/someday-all-the-adults-will-die" target="_blank"><i>Some Day All the Adults Will Die</i></a>, a dazzling exhibition of punk graphics at the Hayward Gallery, and have also published an even more daunting book collection, <a href="http://www.rizzoliusa.com/book.php?isbn=9780847836628" target="_blank"><i>Punk: An Aesthetic</i>.</a><br />
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The exhibition, which was spread over two rooms (plus a third where you could sit and listen to a loop of obscure punk classics), acted as a taster for the book, which oddly doesn’t feature every exhibit. Entire walls and cabinets were devoted to banks of rare 7" sleeves, flyers, fanzines, posters, Seditionaries T-shirts and magazine covers, adding up to a sort of Valhalla for ebay KBD-sellers.<br />
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The first room kicked off with some Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg broadsides, as a reminder that the classic fanzine look long pre-dated Mark Perry. Although we're thankfully spared any grandiose parallels with Dada, <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-0a7wu2yyuF0/UKGG4tQNYZI/AAAAAAAAASw/RdMaVEcDFGg/s375/NV-Early%2520McLaren-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />the Situationists somewhat inevitably creep in, via a copy of the first issue of <i>Potlatch</i>, published by Guy Debord when he was still a member of the Lettrist International. Although its inclusion feels slightly fanciful, I love the fact that it was captioned as a fanzine, considering that Guy Debord is the last person in the world to have ever regarded himself as anything so ignominious as a <i>fan</i>.<br />
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Apart from the Pistols and the Ramones (as the respective UK and US fountainheads) the exhibition concentrated mainly on the margins so I'd imagine people more interested in mainstream punk (if that's not an oxymoron) would have been left rather bemused. In other words, The Horrible Nurds figured more extensively than The Clash, but then I know a Horrible Nurd so that was fine by me. The overt focus on the DIY and raw side of things meant that the exhibition leaned closely to the <a href="http://www.hyped2death.com/Kugelberg100.html" target="_blank"><i>Ugly Things</i> </a>perspective on punk, which is logical, I guess.<br />
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Considering how hapless the music industry's attempt to cash-in seemed at the time, it's an eye-opener to discover how hard the promotional push actually was in some quarters. Who would have imagined that copies of the first Ramones LP were sent out to American radio stations with plain white back covers signed by all four members in a doomed attempt to win them over? Prior the LP’s release, a Sire Records news sheet declared rather poignantly in retrospect that their sales "could surpass Kiss, Aerosmith and Black Sabbath", which shows that settling for cult credibility was the last thing on anybody’s mind.<br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-90sW62RDkwg/UKGQosbKFNI/AAAAAAAAATk/M_N4gcv7e4Y/s369/NV-Profoundly%2520clueless-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />And bearing in mind how slowly record companies move nowadays, it seems incredible that despite the Sex Pistols only being signed to A&M for a grand total of 7 days, that was still enough time for the label to gear up to press 25,000 copies of “God Save the Queen” and produce promotional T-shirts and "profoundly clueless" posters. The aesthetic and ideological gulf between A&M's in-house designers and Jamie Reid speaks volumes, because while Reid's artwork revelled in garish hyper-commercialism, A&M's earnest tackiness misses by a mile Reid’s gaudy irony.<br />
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An unseen rehearsal-list for the pre-Pistols band The Strand, written by Wally Nightingale in 1975 (or maybe early 1976), provided a glimpse into their formative state before Lydon's arrival transformed things. “Pretty Vacant”, “Did You No Wrong”, “Seventeen” and Submission already existed in one form or another, while they also had the good taste to cover “Shake Appeal”, which is unlikely to have been a staple of many bands' set-lists in the mid-70s. On the face of it, a song called “Younger Generation” seems as if it would have been far too literalist for what was to follow, while the discovery that a song called "Rabbit (Lonely Boy)" was also part of their repertoire back then probably explains why “Lonely Boy” sounded so desperately old-fashioned when it appeared on the <i>Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle</i> soundtrack.<br />
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Meanwhile a 1974 CBGBs flyer showed Angel and the Snakes (a nascent Blondie) headlining over the Ramones and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090105224619/http://www.synthpunk.org/screamers/8-18-74var.html" target="_blank">Slaves of Rhythm</a>, who featured Screamer-to-be Tomata Du Plenty. (Wait until you see a shot of him voguing in the book!)<br />
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<img gary-panters-drawing-tips="gary-panters-drawing-tips" http:="http:" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-4TSTogfWta4/UKGHA_rZK1I/AAAAAAAAATQ/0vi-KHAClC8/s369/screamers.jpg%3EThe%20West%20Coast%20gets%20its%20due%20too:%20as%20Dangerhouse%20was%20merely%20the%20greatest%20label%20of%20all%20time,%20it%27s%20only%20right%20and%20proper%20that%20handsome%20Black%20Randy%20and%20Randoms%20flyers%20were%20featured,%20as%20well%20as%20%3Ca%20href=" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" target="_blank" unbored.net="unbored.net" />The West Coast gets its due too: as Dangerhouse was merely the greatest label of all time, it's only right and proper that handsome Black Randy and Randoms flyers were featured, as well as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090105224619/http://unbored.net/gary-panters-drawing-tips/" target="_blank">Gary Panter's</a> original gouache of the Screamers logo and four off-set Pettibon prints.<br />
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It’s ironic that the collection of Crass stencils are superficially the least arty part of the collection, yet they were largely created by <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/white-punk-on-hope-611-v17n11%20" target="_blank">Gee Vaucher</a> whose pre-Crass illustrations had regularly featured in the <i>New York Times</i> in the mid-70s. Like Jamie Reid, her practical design experience had instilled a powerful instinct for what <i>worked</i>. Rather than flaunting her sophistication, Vaucher’s work was often far more elaborate than it appeared. "Bloody Revolutions" may look like an ingeniously-executed collage but seen in close-up it’s actually a stunning painting.<br />
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Great as it is to see the originals of all this stuff, exhibitions are by definition ephemeral, and it’s the book which will be the lasting monument. And “monumental” is the word. My shelves are bulging with punk books, but this is a delirious treasure trove.<br />
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<img http:="http:" pre-punk="pre-punk" punk="punk" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-_cV8vAv7r6k/UKGG83iIyiI/AAAAAAAAATI/ceBoE7N6Pt0/s369/NV-Nowhere%2520buses-small.jpg%3EIts%20336%20pages%20are%20divided%20into%20three%20sections:%20%3Ca%20href=" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" target="_blank" www.jonsavage.com="www.jonsavage.com" /> <span lang="EN-GB" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 255);">Its 336 pages are divided into three sections:</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-color: white;"></span> "Pre-Punk", Punk and Post-Punk, but these terms are used historically, rather than as aesthetic shorthand. The Pre-Punk section is probably the most revelatory, jammed full of images which either presage what would be picked up again later (blackmail lettering used on gig flyers in 1967, <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=10&hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1083&bih=541&q=martin+sharp+oz&oq=martin+sharp+oz&gs_l=img.3...827.6780.0.7465.21.13.3.5.4.0.126.1144.10j3.13.0...0.0...1ac.1.6j0LJppcPpU" target="_blank">Martin Sharp’s Oz montages</a>, the cover for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fEkkTd_H4A" target="_blank">“Voices Green and Purple”</a> by The Bees (looking as if it should be gracing a 7” recorded at <a href="http://www.btinternet.com/%7Es.gillitt/StreetLevel/" target="_blank">Street Level</a>) or simply get their first: a copy of <i>Fusion</i> with the strap-line “No More Heroes”, an early 70s Danish underground magazine called <i>Rotten</i>.<br />
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One of the most head-scratching inclusions is a striking self-photograph of Malcolm McLaren taken in 1971, with only one side of his face in the left of the frame, his blank stare and unruly hair making him look uncannily like………….. John Lydon (!). And a remarkably scrappy-looking ICA flyer for a Fashion Forum they hosted in early 1976 reveals McLaren and Westwood being interviewed by the Guardian’s Fashion Editor – showing that the pair were clearly getting primed to make their move, one way or another. <br />
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Although the book contains short essays by Savage, Kugelberg, Linder Sterling and William Gibson, it’s relatively light on commentary, leaving the vivid urgency of the images to speak for themselves. It culminates in a transcribed conversation between Savage, Kugelberg and Gibson packed full of apothegms which make you want to go back to the beginning and devour it all over again. Punk as eternal recurrence……… which is where we came in.<br />
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(Photographs by Nick Zak)<br />
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Earlier punk art coverage,<br />
<a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/issue-110-august-10-2011.html" target="_blank">New Vulgate No. 110</a><br />
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"Blue Nebula" by <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…<br />
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Jim Slater in <b>FT,</b> <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e51aac72-1925-11e2-af88-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"Dollar dangers and eurozone woes add to gold’s polish"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“A number of problems are close to tipping point. The most worrying is the risk that the Israelis may make a pre-emptive strike to delay Iran’s nuclear programme. It was thought this might happen before the US presidential election but seems to be more likely in 2013. This could be catastrophic, leading to war spreading in the Middle East and the possibility that Iran will block the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in the price of oil rising astronomically. Second is the US annual deficit, which has come in at more than $1tn in each of the past four years. There is more than $16tn in outstanding Treasury debt, of which about half is owned by foreign creditors. Unfunded liabilities for social security, Medicaid and Medicare add a further $60tn. The tipping point will be when overseas creditors realise the best they can hope for is to be repaid in much-depreciated US dollars.” </blockquote><br />
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James Mackintosh in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/30623618-237c-11e2-a46b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"The Short View"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The language was different in 1787 but restrictions imposed on the earliest insurance against government failure to pay almost perfectly matches today’s European ban on uncovered sovereign credit default swaps. The attacks now are on ‘speculators’ intent on hurting government finances. Back in 1787, insurance on government-issued lottery tickets was ‘the spirit of gambling in its most alarming extent’. In both cases, the aim was to stop side-bets and ease the flow of funding to government.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-nzH-w3GRaD0/UKF66OP8csI/AAAAAAAAAQw/McDECIt4YHg/s306/Burgin%2520Great%2520Persuasion.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Kenneth Minogue in <b>WSJ</b> on Angus Bugin’s book, <i>The Great Persuasion</i>, and Daniel Stedman Jones’ book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578002432460754000.html" target="_blank">"Masters of the Universe"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Both of these books talk of ‘faith’ in the free market, but such a faith in fact rests on sophisticated economic and philosophical arguments. Freedom certainly creates problems (inequalities most notably), but it also solves them. The Muslim world is currently in turmoil as people try to change their brutal and incompetent rulers. Free Western states solve the problem and save lives by a cunning device called an election. Friedman adopted Karl Popper's famous criterion of scientific theory—that it is in principle falsifiable by evidence. He thought that argument was better than breaking heads over who was right. But the central aspect of freedom advanced by these thinkers was the market, or what Adam Smith had described as the propensity to truck, barter and exchange. In this area, freedom allowed dispersed individuals—disposing of their own resources and choosing for themselves what they want to buy—to generate a level of prosperity that has had no precedent in human history. And the pricing system that emerges from the market—that is, from the push and pull of supply and demand—provides the indispensable knowledge needed to guide the economy. As Friedman argued, state experts implementing abstract ideals about satisfying human needs are merely blundering about in the dark. Price changes are an indispensable discovery procedure. Nothing here, of course, denigrates the essential role of the state in providing the infrastructure of law and justice (not to mention defense) on which freedom in all its forms rests. The Mont Pelerin Society's members were usually careful to distinguish their convictions from advocacy of a hyper-minimalist state. But their greatest worry was the authority of the state being used despotically to achieve some higher form of justice in which the needs of all would be satisfied by redistributing the national product.” </blockquote><br />
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Alan Beattie in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65921802-1e91-11e2-be82-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Tricks of the trade law"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, worldwide increases in import tariffs of the type seen during the Depression have been largely absent. But governments, richer with cash and regulatory power than in the 1930s, have found other ways to back their struggling producers at a time of deficient global demand. Disputes over state subsidies are spreading, the trade law to constrain them is not easy to use, and few governments can throw stones without worrying about the glass in their own houses. Some interventions have been crisis-related, like the many bailouts of car and financial services industries – France continues to proffer aid to the troubled carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën – but others predate the global recession. China, in particular, has for more than a decade raised hackles with an aggressive state-led growth model, supporting export industries with measures including direct subsidies, tax breaks, export credits, cheap land and electricity, and subsidised loans from state banks. An EU official says: ‘The subsidies issue is nothing less than a question of how to address state capitalism within a liberal global trading order.’ Litigation has escalated along with official rhetoric.” </blockquote><br />
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William Borucki interview in <b>DISCOVER</b>, <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/" target="_blank">"Planet Hunter"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“<b>How do you set up an experiment like that, testing conditions nobody has experienced before?</b> </blockquote><blockquote>We needed a gun that was almost beyond belief in terms of performance. You can’t shoot that much air that fast out of an ordinary rifle. But Ames had a procurer – a person who got things – and we gave him tough tasks, one of which was to get the guns off a Navy battleship. And so he did. Then we figured out how to screw one gun into another, so one battleship gun fired into the next battleship gun, until we created a giant gun that could fire all that air through a supersonic nozzle. See, at that time we needed to beat the Russians to the moon, before they got there and planted their communist flag. So at NASA there weren’t a lot of impediments. The philosophy was, let’s go and do it, and do it quickly. Today, most the things you want to get have to go through the whole form system, and it costs more to process something than it does to go out and buy it. Back then we were extremely efficient in many ways. We’re not that efficient today.” </blockquote><br />
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Shaila Dewan in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/business/popular-wrench-fights-a-chinese-rival.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" target="_blank">"An Innovator vs. a Follower"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Last Christmas, Sears had a brisk seller in the Bionic Wrench, an award-winning, patented tool with spiffy lime green accents. This holiday season, though, Sears has a special display for its own wrench, in the red and black colors of its house brand, Craftsman. One customer who recently spotted the new Craftsman tool, called the Max Axess wrench, thought it was an obvious knockoff, right down to the try-me packaging. ‘I saw it and I said, This is a Bionic Wrench,’ recalled Dana Craig, a retiree and tool enthusiast in Massachusetts who alerted the maker of the Bionic Wrench. ‘It’s a very distinctive tool,’ he added. The tools have one significant difference, Mr. Craig noted. The Bionic Wrench is made in the United States. The Max Axess wrench is made in China. The shift at Sears from a tool invented and manufactured in the United States to a very similar one made offshore has already led to a loss of American jobs and a brewing patent battle. The story of the Bionic Wrench versus Craftsman, which bills itself as ‘America’s most trusted tool brand,’ also raises questions about how much entrepreneurs and innovators, who rely on the country’s intellectual property laws, can protect themselves.” </blockquote><br />
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Christopher Caldwell in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ca525398-1df0-11e2-901e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"Charity: America’s alternative to tax"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Americans are right to be suspicious of charitable giving in general. The country’s philanthropy is unique. Its two key institutions are the tax deduction for charitable gifts and the tax-exempt foundation. Noting the role of the Ford Foundation in Lyndon Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ in the 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator, called foundations a ‘new level of American government’. Americans pat themselves on the back for their generosity, not always with good reason. Olivier Zunz, a historian of philanthropy at the University of Virginia, calls American charity a ‘capitalist venture in social betterment, not an act of kindness as understood in Christianity’. Giving to a foundation can be self-interested – a way for a rich person to launder economic power that he does not need into political power that he does. Foundations inevitably get politicised, not because donors are corrupt or insincere but because they are rational. Lobbying for a piece of a government budget is a more efficient way of serving most causes than simply spending donations.” </blockquote><br />
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324894104578106941506837334.html" target="_blank">"California’s Liberal Supermajority"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Then there's the more than $200 billion in unfunded liabilities the state has accrued for worker retirement benefits, which this year cost taxpayers $6.5 billion. The California State Teachers' Retirement System says it needs an additional $3.5 billion and $10 billion annually for the next 30 years to amortize its debt. The state has $73 billion in outstanding bonds for capital projects and $33 billion in voter-authorized bonds that the state hasn't sold in part because it can't afford higher debt payments. Unissued bonds include $9.5 billion for a bullet train, which will require $50 billion to $90 billion more to complete. Sacramento will also need more money to support an $11 billion bond to retrofit the state's water system, which is planned for the 2014 ballot. With no GOP restraint, liberals can now raise taxes to pay for all this. They'll probably start by repealing Proposition 13's tax cap for commercial property. Democrats in the Assembly held hearings on the idea this spring. Then they'll try to make it easier for cities to raise taxes. The greens want an oil severance tax. Other Democrats want to extend the sales tax to services, supposedly in return for a lower rate, but don't expect any ‘reform’ to be revenue neutral. Look for huge union pay raises and higher pension benefits. The silver lining here is that Americans will be able to see the modern liberal-union state in all its raw ambition. The Sacramento political class thinks it can tax and regulate the private economy endlessly without consequence. As a political experiment it all should be instructive, and at least Californians can still escape to Nevada or Idaho.” </blockquote><br />
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<i>futureofcapitalism.com</i>: <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/10/obama-no-red-tape" target="_blank">"Obama: No Red Tape"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Why does it take a disaster to make government run the way it should ordinarily run? Here was President Obama speaking on October 30: And so my instructions to the federal agency has been, do not figure out why we can't do something; I want you to figure out how we do something. I want you to cut through red tape. I want you to cut through bureaucracy. There's no excuse for inaction at this point. I want every agency to lean forward and to make sure that we are getting the resources where they need -- where they're needed as quickly as possible. So I want to repeat -- my message to the federal government: No bureaucracy, no red tape. What if President Obama had issued the instruction "No bureaucracy, no red tape" in his inaugural address, or to Congress as they were writing the ObamaCare law or the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" law? He didn't, of course. But in the aftermath of a natural disaster, all of a sudden the need to avoid bureaucracy and red tape becomes admirably obvious to the president. Is the need for a smoothly functioning government any less urgent the rest of the time?” </blockquote><br />
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Robert Bryce in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204349404578099360759535602.html" target="_blank">"After Sandy, No One Lined Up for Wind Turbines"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“A single kilogram of diesel fuel contains about 13,000 watt-hours of energy. That is about twice the energy density of coal, six times that of wood, and about 300 times that of lead-acid batteries. (And those batteries are useful only if they have been charged by some other energy source.)<br />
Combine diesel fuel's miraculous energy density with the power density and durability of a modern diesel engine—which can run for weeks at a time with little or no maintenance—and the size, speed, and cost advantages become apparent. The Sierra Club, Greenpeace and other groups claim that we can run our economies solely on renewable-energy sources such as wind. But if you are trying to pump water out of your rapidly molding basement, would you prefer a wind turbine that operates at full power about one-third of the time, or a greasy, diesel-fueled V-8?<br />
Let's consider what a wind-powered hospital in New York might look like. NYU's Langone Medical Center lost power shortly after Sandy hit. The hospital had diesel-fired emergency generators, but basement flooding caused them to fail. That required the evacuation of hundreds of patients. Assume the hospital needs one megawatt of emergency electricity-generation capacity. Lives are at stake. It needs power immediately. That capability could easily be provided by a single, trailer-mounted diesel generator, which would occupy a small corner of the hospital's garage (and be safely removed from any flooding threat). By contrast, providing that much wind-generation capacity would require about 5.6 million square feet of land—an area of nearly 100 football fields. And all of that assumes that the land is available, the wind is blowing, and there are enough transmission lines to carry those wind-generated electrons from the countryside into Lower Manhattan.” </blockquote><br />
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Ed Gogek in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/opinion/a-bad-trip-for-democrats.html" target="_blank">"A Bad Trip for Democrats"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“I’m a lifelong partisan Democrat, but I’ve also spent 25 years as a doctor treating drug abusers, and I know their games. They’re excellent con artists. Take, for example, medical marijuana laws. They were sold to more than a dozen states with promises that they’re only for serious illnesses like cancer. But that’s not how they work in practice. Almost all marijuana cardholders claim they need it for various kinds of pain, but pain is easy to fake and almost impossible to disprove. In Oregon and Colorado, 94 percent of cardholders get their pot for pain. In Arizona, it’s 90 percent. Serious illnesses barely register. It’s possible that they all really do need pot to help them. But consider this: pain patients are mostly female, whereas a recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that adult cannabis abusers were 74 percent male. So which one do marijuana patients resemble? Though only two states release data on gender, a vast majority of medical-marijuana cardholders are male. In Arizona, it’s 73 percent, and in Colorado, it’s 68 percent.” </blockquote><br />
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Andrew Klavan at <i>city-journal.org</i>, <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon1107ak.html" target="_blank">"The Long Game"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Recently, a number of books by secular intellectuals have noted the disaster that is postmodern relativism—the nihilist philosophy that has corrupted and gutted Western liberal education. <i>Education’s End</i>, by Anthony T. Kronman, <i>Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians</i>, by Marcello Pera, and <i>What Ever Happened to Modernism?</i>, by Gabriel Josipovici, come to mind. All lament the abandonment of our commitment to the Great Conversation—the intellectual’s belief that the creative tension of the uniquely brilliant Western literary and philosophical canon can lead us in the direction of moral truth. But the authors cannot fully grasp the nettle of the solution. Many assume that the Great Conversation depended on the sort of open mind only secularism can provide. As Kronman puts it: ‘Every religion insists, at the end of the day, that there is only one right answer to the question of life’s meaning,’ thus rendering the pluralism of the Great Conversation impossible. I would contend the opposite: only the existence of a God in whose image we are created can support the notion of moral truth at all. It was always Judeo-Christianity, and that alone, that made the Great Conversation possible. Pera understands this intellectually, but cannot really plunk for faith. And therein lies the problem. The triumph of science, the comfort of Western life, and a sophisticated elite virulently hostile to religion have all contributed to an intellectual atmosphere of unbelief—a sense that atheism should be the default mode of reasonable, thinking people. That is a mere prejudice and needs to be answered in the culture, not with Bible-thumping literalism and small-minded judgmentalism—nor with banal happy-talk optimism—but by sound argument made publicly, unabashedly, and without fear. John Adams and the other Founders were right about this: an irreligious people cannot be free.” </blockquote><br />
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Aaron O’Connell in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"The Permanent Militarization of America"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,’ he warned in 1953, early in his presidency. ‘The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.’ He also knew that Congress was a big part of the problem. (In earlier drafts, he referred to the ‘military-industrial-Congressional’ complex, but decided against alienating the legislature in his last days in office.) Today, there are just a select few in public life who are willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do — from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich — are dismissed as unrealistic.<br />
The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true ‘third rail’ of American politics. In this strange universe where those without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat to national security.” </blockquote><br />
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Elisabeth Bumiller in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/world/asia/us-militarys-new-focus-on-asia-becomes-clearer.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Words and Deeds Show Focus of the American Military on Asia"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Pentagon officials acknowledge that they are in the early stages of the policy and that much of the hardware — the new ships, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets and P-8 Poseidon maritime reconnaissance planes, to name a few — will not arrive in the region for years. They also say that if Congress does not agree to a fiscal deal this fall, the Pentagon will not be able to pay for much of the Asia strategy. For now, the Pentagon is shifting weapons like the B-1 and B-52 long-range bombers and Global Hawk drones to the Pacific from the Middle East and Southwest Asia as the war in Afghanistan winds down.” </blockquote><br />
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John Plender in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/012b2f68-282b-11e2-a335-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"Japan counts ‘zombie’ cost of ultra loose monetary move"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In effect, low funding costs in Japan have impeded the process that Joseph Schumpeter dubbed creative destruction because ‘zombie’ companies have been kept afloat at high cost to the competitiveness of others. Worse, the public credit guarantees introduced to help the banking system lend to industry and commerce have had unintended consequences. The Bank of Japan fears the banks’ capacity for credit assessment is being diminished, while the restructuring of non-viable small and medium sized businesses is discouraged. This is extraordinary because it suggests Japan is reverting to some of the worst habits of the 1980s bubble period. Back then, Japanese banks had no understanding of credit risk and the cost of capital was so low that a grotesque misallocation of capital across the economy resulted. Also extraordinary is that with declining investment, Japan has achieved the same kind of distortion China has brought about through the excessive investment that followed fiscal pump priming after the Lehman collapse.” </blockquote><br />
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Christian Oliver in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/853adf8e-21bd-11e2-9cb4-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Gangnam Style exposes Seoul’s folly"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“South Koreans are rightfully indignant that they have been overshadowed by China and Japan despite everything their rags-to-riches nation has achieved. They certainly do deserve a better global image. However, interference from a state body should belong to a bygone era of central planning and output targets. You cannot forge soft power in the same way as you pick industrial champions. Absurdly, Korean officials insisted the G20 summit in Seoul in 2010 – a technical meeting about global economic policy – would raise the popularity of the national brand. My argument ran that Korea’s breakthrough would arrive as a big cultural accident, unaided by bureaucrats. Seoul’s government is notorious for its lack of faith in its own people, who are even forbidden to read North Korean websites, but I argued it should just leave its people to their own devices and accept that Korean panache would shine through unexpectedly. I guessed the turning point would be a film. Maybe a sportsperson. (For me, Shin A-lam, the tearful Olympic fencer who spent a lonely, hour-long vigil of protest on the piste believing she had been robbed of a medal epitomised the pride and burn-yourself-to-ashes passion of the real Korean brand.)” </blockquote><br />
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Philip Bowring at <i>yaleglobal.yale.edu</i>, <a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/bigger-challenge-baby-boom-or-bust" target="_blank">"What’s the Bigger Challenge – Baby Boom or Bust?"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In opposing the bill Catholics have not merely resorted to papal doctrine, but suggest that easy availability of contraception would lead to a sharp fall in the birth rate similar to countries where the problem now is over-rapid aging. This is an opportunistic argument against enabling all members of society to have access to contraception. But it does have a grain of truth, indicated by the feast to famine changes in fertility elsewhere in East Asia. All the countries in East Asia with rapid declines in fertility have benefited by enjoying high savings rates and falling dependency ratios. But that is now changing so future growth will be much harder to achieve and several countries face future aging shocks more severe even than Japan’s.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-WEQYgSOM_Z8/UKF67Yj8PlI/AAAAAAAAARA/wnF16kMw6As/s383/joshchin-sina-weibo-too-much-traffic.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Josh Chin & Lilian Lin in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324894104578105182570632250.html" target="_blank">"Chinese Web Users See Contrast in Style"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Many Weibo users took to the site to express their support for Mr. Obama—long the preferred candidate in China, according to unscientific online polls. But at least as many used the occasion to comment on the lack of input Chinese have in choosing their own head of state. ‘They call it 'election,' we call it 'having a meeting,'’ wrote one Weibo user from Hunan province. ‘We are perfectly clear about how the U.S. presidential election works but are utterly ignorant about China's,’ wrote another in a post that was later deleted. After the nationalistic tabloid Global Times noted waiting times of up to seven hours at some U.S. polling stations, many Sina Weibo users said they would be happy to wait even longer to vote. ‘We've waited 63 years and we don't even know what a ballot looks like,’ wrote one anonymous user. One of the most memorable comments on Chinese interest in the U.S. presidential contest came from a popular Internet commentator writing under the name Yimaobuba. ‘It's the same reason porn films are popular,’ he wrote. ‘You want to do it but you can't so you content yourself with watching others.’” </blockquote><br />
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Ian Johnson in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/asia/wary-of-future-many-professionals-leave-china.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Wary of Future, Professionals Leave China in Record Numbers"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘It’s very stressful in China — sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,’ Ms. Chen said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. ‘And it will be easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.’ As China’s Communist Party prepares a momentous leadership change in early November, it is losing skilled professionals like Ms. Chen in record numbers. In 2010, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 508,000 Chinese left for the 34 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That is a 45 percent increase over 2000. Individual countries report the trend continuing. In 2011, the United States received 87,000 permanent residents from China, up from 70,000 the year before.” </blockquote><br />
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Andrew Jacobs in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/world/asia/educated-chinese-are-silent-amid-tibetan-self-immolations.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Many Chinese Intellectuals Are Silent Amid a Wave of Tibetan Self-Immolations"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Since the self-immolations began in earnest last year, few Chinese scholars have attempted to grapple with the subject. ‘The apathy is appalling,’ said Zhang Boshu, a political philosopher who lost his job at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences three years ago for criticizing the government’s human rights record. With a mounting toll of 69 self-immolations, at least 56 of them fatal, many Tibetans are asking themselves why their Han Chinese brethren seem unmoved by the suffering — or are at least uninterested in exploring why so many people have embraced such a horrifying means of protest. The silence, some say, is exposing an uncomfortable gulf between Tibetans and China’s Han majority, despite decades of propaganda that seeks to portray the nation as a harmonious family comprising 56 contented minorities.” </blockquote><br />
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Ian Johnson in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/asia/china-at-party-congress-touts-its-cultural-advances.html?ref=todayspaper" target="_blank">"China, at Party Congress, Lauds Its Cultural Advances"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The participants in the news conference, one of a series over the last few days intended to highlight Mr. Hu’s accomplishments, said that China had made great strides toward achieving its cultural goals. The officials made their case with a blizzard of statistics: China produced 558 feature films in 2011 compared with 140 in 2003; it now has 9,200 movie screens versus 1,953 in 2003; it has listed 43 cultural sites with the United Nations, the third-highest number in the world; it has set up 600,000 rural reading rooms and offers a free movie each month in villages; and it has 2,115 museums that do not charge for admission. Last year, it published 370,000 books, which officials said was more than any other country in the world. China Central Television has 249 million viewers in 171 countries. And the government has spent $30.4 million over the last decade to support 55 minority ethnic groups in China. Another theme was privatization. More than 2,000 cultural troupes have been privatized, although the government continues to sponsor worthy productions from a public fund that now has a treasury of $1.2 billion. None of this means that the government has relaxed control, officials said. ‘Guidance is the soul’ of these moves, said Tian Jin, party secretary of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. ‘We always insist on political responsibility, social responsibility and cultural responsibility.’” </blockquote><br />
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Simon Rabinovitch in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/008ac6ea-1dcc-11e2-901e-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Young feel hungrier for ‘golden rice bowl’ jobs"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In the 1980s and 1990s, as China’s market reforms sped up, the trend was for bureaucrats and the employees of state-owned companies to leave their government cocoon for the potential riches of the private sector. This career switch became known as ‘plunging into the sea’. But over the past decade, the government’s grip on the economy has strengthened, luring people back into the civil service. Jobs in the bureaucracy are perceived as cushy, with light workloads and plenty of benefits from subsidised housing to free meals – hence the term golden rice bowl.<br />
With corruption rampant, many also believe that the government offers opportunities for self-enrichment. This year’s downfall of Bo Xilai, the disgraced politician, has highlighted the extraordinary wealth available to high-level officials. State media have lamented the surge in job applicants over the past week. The Global Times, a popular government-run tabloid, described civil service careers as an ‘irresistible temptation’.” </blockquote><br />
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Fred Zilian in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578066441502204924.html" target="_blank">"Seeds of Chinese Liberalization, Made in America"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“I asked some of our Chinese students after graduation what they believe they had obtained at our boarding school that their friends in China had not. More practical knowledge, said one. ‘Here we have a lot of chances to apply the knowledge we have learned to see if we really understand them, such as essays and labs. These are very good ways to develop independent thinking as well.’ Another emphasized the confidence in herself that she developed. If she had not come to our school, she ‘wouldn't have become this strong person.’ These students have tasted freedom of thought and have been educated to think independently and critically. As adults they will not easily be made to kowtow to anyone or to any political system that suppresses their freedoms. Not Mycenaean warriors hiding in a wooden horse but Han students speaking native Mandarin—and excellent English—will return to China after their sojourns in America, carrying not weapons but liberal political ideas and critical-thinking skills.” </blockquote><br />
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Andrew Jacobs in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/world/asia/liberals-in-china-look-to-guangdongs-party-chief.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"As China Awaits New Leadership, Liberals Look to a Provincial Chief"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Known for his cherubic smile and a refusal to follow the pack of party elders who dye their graying hair jet black, Mr. Wang, the son of a laborer, is fond of folksy sound bites that sometimes take aim at the party elite. Since his appointment as Guangdong’s party chief in 2007, he has called on provincial officials to publicly reveal their assets and ordered government departments to communicate with the public via Sina Weibo, China’s wildly popular microblog platform. In June, after one of several recent visits to Singapore, he returned home to extol the city-state’s soft-glove approach to authoritarian rule. ‘If China doesn’t reform,’ he said, ‘we will be slow boiled like frogs.’ When he was faced with an insurrection last year in the fishing village of Wukan, Mr. Wang displayed a knack for coolheaded crisis management: he called off the riot police, tossed out Wukan’s corrupt party officials and allowed villagers to elect a new slate of leaders. Mr. Wang is often mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Bo, who also managed — at least for a while — to navigate the narrow space between party establishment and political maverick. Their jousting took the form of a debate over economic policy, expressed most notably in cryptic talk about cake — as a metaphor for China’s wealth. Mr. Bo argued for cutting up the cake and distributing it more equally; Mr. Wang insisted on first making the cake bigger.” </blockquote><br />
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Kathrin Hille in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/65556130#axzz2BxIk8W8w" target="_blank">"Wen has little to fear despite furore over family wealth"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The publication of an exposé by the New York Times on Friday detailing the riches amassed by his closest family members in the 10 years since Mr Wen rose to top office has brought him under attack. It has sparked anxiety that the discrediting of the premier could also deal a blow to the prospects for political reform, which Mr Wen has long advocated. Sina Weibo, China's Twitter equivalent, has been ablaze with allegations that the Times had been used by Mr Bo's faction to attack Mr Wen, and the family of the premier has tried to hit back with a highly unusual statement through two lawyers and anonymous rebuttals carried in Hong Kong media. But none of this means China's leadership transition will be impacted. The drama is the effect, not the cause, of changes in Chinese elite politics.” </blockquote><br />
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Ian Johnson in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/china-worse-you-ever-imagined/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“I met a pastor, a former political prisoner, and together we made a day trip to Rooster Mountain, a onetime summer retreat for Western missionaries and later for Communist officials. From its peak we looked down on China’s Central Plains, which stretch six hundred miles up toward Beijing. Over the past few decades, the region below us had become one of the centers of Christianity in China, and I asked him why. He said it was a reaction to the lawlessness and rootlessness in local society. ‘Henan is chaotic,’ he said, ‘and we offer something moral amid so much immorality.’ I thought of the many scandals that have hit Henan province in recent years—the ‘AIDS villages’ populated by locals who sold their blood to companies that reused infected needles, or the charismatic millennial movements that had sprung up. Crime is high and local officials notoriously brutal, running their districts like fiefdoms. But didn’t many other parts of China have such troubles? ‘It’s different here,’ he said slowly, looking at me carefully, trying to explain something very complex and painful that he wasn’t sure would be comprehensible. ‘Traditional life was wiped out around the time I was born, fifty years ago. Since then it has been a difficult area, with no foundation to society. Most people in China haven’t heard of this but here in Xinyang, people all know.’” </blockquote><br />
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Guy Chazan in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3fa97bf8-1dce-11e2-8e1d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"Balance of power shifts in changing world of oil"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘A new trade axis is being formed between Baghdad and Beijing,’ says Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. This relationship is part of a shift that is tipping the balance of power in the energy world. As its oil demand grows and its own reserves deplete, China is becoming increasingly dependent on crude imports from the Middle East. That is coinciding with an equally historic process in the western hemisphere – North America’s gradual transition towards self-sufficiency in energy and its waning reliance on imported oil. For decades, one of the US’s key strategic imperatives has been to protect the vital sea lanes linking oil suppliers in the Middle East to the rest of the world. The policy found expression in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which stated that the US would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Gulf. But the US is changing. Its exhausting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crash and the resulting recession, and alarm about fiscal deficits, have engendered a mood of introspection. The reduced public appetite for an aggressive foreign policy is prompting some to even speak of a new isolationism. This has coincided with the shale revolution, a development which, in the view of some observers, is only reinforcing the disengagement of the US from the outside world.” </blockquote><br />
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<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-HRPjzwt5l-M/UKF7BCIyxJI/AAAAAAAAARg/aySs8LbBi30/s306/Sutter-%2520ItWasaLongTimeAgoCarbon-Democracy.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Alexander Etkind in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on David Satter’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/" target="_blank">"It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Timothy Mitchell’s recent book, <i>Carbon Democracy</i> (2011), helps explain the consequences of the oil curse for contemporary Russia. In a subtle analysis, Mitchell describes the contrasting political significance of the two kinds of fossil fuels, coal and oil. Coal has traditionally been mined near its consumer, and was rarely transported for long distances by land or sea. In the era of coal, Mitchell shows, miners held serious power; their strikes could paralyse regional economies, and their organized labour provided the model for the Marxist idea of the proletariat. Coal-mining paved the way for ‘carbon democracy’, essentially a balance between labour and capital. Oil, in contrast, has been found mostly in distant and exotic locations. It is liquid and therefore easy to transport, but long pipelines present an immense security risk. Very few people are needed to serve the drills and pumps. Working in distant enclaves and having special sills, these people, often foreigners, are not connected to the centres of population. If in the coal economy the key figure was the miner and the major threat was the strike, in the oil economy the central figure is the security guard and the main threat is terrorism. This is why security personnel occupy the top positions of Russia’s hyper-extractive state. For its purposes, the population is superfluous…. Since the people do not create the state’s wealth, they cannot control its government. This mechanism of the emancipation of the state from its people is the essential truth of Putinism.” </blockquote><br />
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Louis Menand in <b>NEW YORKER</b> on Anne Applebaum’s book, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/11/12/121112crbo_books_menand" target="_blank">"Iron Curtain – The Crushing of Eastern Europe"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The term originated in Italy. According to Abbott Gleason, in his standard history of the concept, ‘Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War’ (1995), it was first used, in 1923, by an opponent of Benito Mussolini, who referred critically to the Fascist government as a ‘<i>sistema totalitaria</i>.’ Mussolini didn’t mind at all. By 1925, he was referring proudly to ‘<i>la nostra feroce volontà totalitaria</i>’—‘our fierce totalitarian will.’ By ‘totalitarian,’ he meant a politics that aimed at the total transformation of society. In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, the agent of this transformation was not the state. It was the party. The state, especially the judiciary, was simply the party’s bureaucratic dummy. This was because the purpose of totalitarian transformation was not mere efficiency—‘making the trains run on time,’ as people used to say of Fascist Italy. Nor was it the enjoyment of power for power’s sake, as many representations of totalitarian regimes, such as George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four,’ suggested. The purpose was the realization of a law of historical development, the correct understanding of which was a monopoly of the party. In Hitler’s Germany, life was transformed in the name of a single goal: racial purity. (‘The state is only a vessel,’ Hitler wrote, in ‘Mein Kampf,’ ‘and the race is what it contains.’) In the Soviet Union, it was done in the name of the classless society and the workers’ state. The authority of these chiliastic ideologies is what made totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia different from traditional dictatorships, and what made them terrifying. They were not just static systems of hyper-control. They were dynamic and dangerously unstable. They regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.” </blockquote><br />
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Anne Applebaum in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/how-communists-inexorably-changed-life/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"How the Communists Inexorably Changed Life"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Everywhere the Red Army went – even in Czechoslovakia, from which Soviet troops eventually withdrew – these newly minted secret policemen immediately began to use selective violence, carefully targeting their political enemies according to previously composed lists and criteria. Secondly, in every occupied nation, the Soviet authorities, while briefly allowing non-Communist newspapers and magazines to appear, placed trusted local Communists in charge of the era’s most powerful form of mass media: the radio…. Thirdly, wherever it was possible, Soviet authorities, again in conjunction with local Communist parties, carried out policies of mass ethnic cleansing, displacing millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others from towns and villages where they had lived for centuries. Trucks and trains moved people and a few scant possessions into refugee camps and new homes hundreds of miles away from where they had been born. Disoriented and displaced, the refugees were easier to manipulate and control than they might have been otherwise.” </blockquote><br />
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Anne Applebaum in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/opinion/sunday/the-dead-weight-of-past-dictatorships.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"After Tyrants, the People Must Act"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks and their East European acolytes eliminated or undermined churches, charities, newspapers, guilds, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, unions, banks, sports clubs and centuries-old universities. If nothing else, Eastern Europe’s postwar history proves just how fragile human organizations are. If enough people are sufficiently determined, they can utterly destroy ancient and seemingly permanent legal, political, educational and religious institutions of all kinds.” </blockquote><br />
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Tony Barber in <b>FT</b> on Donald Rayfield’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1157c792-1cfb-11e2-a17f-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Edge of Empire – A History of Georgia"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The book devotes several fascinating chapters to Georgia’s glorious medieval era, which began with the 1089-1125 reign of Davit the Builder. The nation’s greatest monarch, Davit ‘reunited the kingdom and expelled all invaders, created a flourishing civil administration, army, legal system, church, feudal hierarchy and secular culture, and made Georgia for the next century the regional power’. Yet Georgia, which converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, could do little to overcome its geopolitical weakness. From its origins, Georgia has existed in a peculiarly dangerous and much-contested part of the world. One after another, the ancient Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Persians and Russians – latterly, fitted in Soviet clothes – have occupied or sought to control the country. This often involved setting Georgia’s rival ethnic groups and political clans against each other, a practice visible in the post-communist era, too, when Russia has backed Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatists against the central government in Tbilisi. Georgia’s historical experience differs from that of other small nations such as the Baltic states and Finland, which fell under Russian or Soviet rule but eventually made a more complete escape. Georgia was absorbed into the tsarist empire in 1801, its royal family deported to Russia and its language replaced with Russian in public life. An opportunity for freedom arose after the February 1917 revolution, which overthrew the tsar, but after declaring independence in May 1918, the Georgians proved unable to sustain their state for more than three years.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-U6Ut8h2yQq8/UKF69TLlNzI/AAAAAAAAARI/KloyXqF8-GE/s336/moscow-bombings-of-september-1999.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Amy Knight in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b> on John Dunlop’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/finally-we-know-about-moscow-bombings/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 – Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In June 1999, two Western journalists, Jan Blomgren of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and Giulietto Chiesa, the respected, longtime Moscow correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, reported that there was going to be an act of ‘state terrorism’ in Russia. The goal would be to instill fear and panic in the population…. These reports were followed in July by an article by the Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin in the national paper Moskovskaya Pravda warning that there would be terrorist attacks in Moscow. Citing a leaked Kremlin document, Zhilin wrote that the purpose would be to derail Yeltsin’s political opponents, in particular Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and the former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Zhilin’s information was ignored. What he claimed appeared to be unthinkable.” </blockquote><br />
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Ellen Barry in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/europe/george-blake-british-double-agent-turns-90-in-moscow.html?ref=todayspaper" target="_blank">"Double Agent, Turning 90, Says, ‘I Am a Happy Person’"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“His story contrasts sharply with those of other Russian moles in British intelligence from around the same time, most notably Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Mr. Philby was said to suffer from depression and alcoholism afterward, which some said stemmed from disappointment and disillusionment with the Communist state he found there. He died in 1988. Mr. Blake, on the other hand, has lived well and apparently happily on his Russian pension, and over the years has rebuilt his contacts with his children in England, who traveled to Moscow for Sunday’s festivities. ‘I am a happy person, a very lucky person, exceptionally lucky,’ Mr. Blake told an interviewer from Rossisskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper. Though condemned as a traitor in Britain, where he is believed to have caused the deaths of scores of British agents, he made it clear that he is not agonizing over the past. ‘I do not believe in life after death,’ he said. ‘In my childhood, I wanted to become a priest, but that passed. As soon as our brain stops receiving blood, we go, and after that there will be nothing. No punishment for the bad things you did, nor rewards for the utterly wonderful.’” </blockquote><br />
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Ellen Barry in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/world/europe/russias-new-museum-offers-friendly-message-to-jews.html" target="_blank">"In Big New Museum, Russia Has a Message for Jews: We Like You"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Mr. Putin has extended his personal support to the lavish project, donating a month’s salary for its construction, which cost around $50 million. In part because of its scale — organizers say it is the largest Jewish history museum in the world — the project is meant to convey a powerful message to Jews whose ancestors fled or emigrated: Russia wants you back. President Shimon Peres of Israel, who attended the opening, said it affected him deeply. ‘My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart,’ said Mr. Peres, 89, who was born in what is now Belarus. ‘I came here to say thank you. Thank you for a thousand years of hospitality.’ There are practical reasons for Mr. Putin to rehabilitate Russia’s image among diaspora Jews who, as descendants of refugees or refuseniks, may have been raised on dark stories about Russia. The country’s Jews were confined to densely populated settlements, or shtetls, for long stretches under the czars. Then 70 years of Communism all but extinguished Jewish life and religious instruction, leaving in its wake an ingrained anti-Semitism. One donor, the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, said on Thursday that he hoped the museum would convey to outsiders the good health of Jewish society in Putin-era Russia, and perhaps ease recent tensions between Moscow and the United States.” </blockquote><br />
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Colin Shindler in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/europes-trouble-with-jews.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Beginning in the 1990s, many on the European left began to view the growing Muslim minorities in their countries as a new proletariat and the Palestinian cause as a recruiting mechanism. The issue of Palestine was particularly seductive for the children of immigrants, marooned between identities. Capitalism was depicted as undermining a perfect Islamic society while cultural imperialism corrupted Islam. The tactic has a distinguished revolutionary pedigree. Indeed, the cry, ‘Long live Soviet power, long live the Shariah,’ was heard in Central Asia during the 1920s after Lenin tried to cultivate Muslim nationalists in the Soviet East once his attempt to spread revolution to Europe had failed. But the question remains: why do today’s European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own? In recent years, there has been an increased blurring of the distinction between Jew, Zionist and Israeli.” </blockquote><br />
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Vibhuti Agarwal & Cassell Bryan-Low in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323894704578108880647502640.html" target="_blank">"Britain to Stop Providing Direct Funding to India"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Britain said it would stop providing direct financial aid to India because of the rapid economic growth of its former colony, symbolizing the changing nature of the centuries-old relationship between the two countries. India, which has received aid from the British for more than 50 years, has been one of the biggest recipients of U.K. financial assistance, with annual payments of about £280 million ($448 million). Spending has included child-malnutrition, education and health programs, such as providing bed nets to curb the spread of malaria. But the U.K. government Friday said it would phase out such direct financial aid between now and 2015. Beyond 2015, Britain will provide India technical assistance focused on areas such as trade, skills and private-sector investment intended to help the poor while generating a return—a program the U.K. says it expects to cost about £30 million annually.” </blockquote><br />
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James Crabtree in <b>FT</b> on Frances Harrison’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d8d15230-2286-11e2-8edf-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"Still Counting the Dead – Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Ultimately, it is hard to read this book and not agree with the need for a fuller reckoning. But the conflict raises other issues too, not least over the best way to end a civil war. The island is now relatively peaceful. Some look at this unflinchingly and say that the costs were worth it. There are even academics who support the conclusion that civil wars are more likely to end for good after a crushing military finale than through a negotiated solution that leaves both sides in place but fails to fix underlying problems. Even so, the appalling scenes recounted here provide the sharpest possible rebuke to those who might feel comfortable with the idea of a peace won in this way.” </blockquote><br />
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James Crabtree in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/65629546#axzz2BxIk8W8w" target="_blank">"A tight grip on the controls"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘This government is leaving behind the kind of boisterous, pluralist politics typical of countries in south Asia,’ says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, head of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based research group. ‘Instead it wants a more east Asian model, where nothing gets in the way of development.’ Sri Lanka's new era started on May 19 2009, when Mr Rajapaksa delivered a speech many in his country feared they would not live to hear. Hailing a decisive victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels, he marked the end of a war that had long divided the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese southern majority from the minority Hindu Tamils in the north. The ensuing celebrations propelled the charismatic Mr Rajapaksa to a resounding second election victory the following year, while swift postwar economic expansion raised hopes of a sustained ‘peace dividend’. Sri Lanka's economy grew by 8 per cent in each of the two years following the war, boosted by investments in highways and ports, along with expanding traditional industries such as garments and tea. Tourism recovered quickly, a fact visible in construction projects along the seafront of the capital Colombo.” </blockquote><br />
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Raymond Ibrahim at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3366/humanitarian-hypocrisy" target="_blank">"Humanitarian Hypocrisy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“First, a report exposed, in the words of the Turkish Coalition of America, ‘Turkey's continued interest in expanding business and cultural ties with the American Indian community’ and ‘Turkey's interest in building bridges to Native American communities across the U.S.’ Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., even introduced a bill that would give Turks special rights and privileges in Native American tribal areas, arguing that ‘[t]his bill is about helping American Indians,’ and about ‘helping the original inhabitants of the new world, which is exactly what this legislation would do.’ The very idea that Turkey's Islamist government is interested in ‘helping American Indians’ is preposterous, both from a historical and contemporary point of view. In the 15th century, when Christian Europeans were discovering the Americas, Muslim Turks were conquering and killing Christians in Europe (which, of course, is why Europeans starting sailing west in the first place). If early European settlers fought and killed natives, only recently, Turkey committed a mass genocide against Armenian Christians. And while the U.S. has made many reparations to its indigenous natives, Turkey not only denies the Armenian holocaust, but still abuses and persecutes its indigenous Christians. In short, if Turkey is looking to help the marginalized and oppressed, it should start at home.” </blockquote><br />
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Daniel Pipes at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/pipes/12103/islamism-unity" target="_blank">"Islamism’s Unity"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Broadly speaking, Islamists divide into three types: (1) Salafis, who revere the era of the <i>salaf</i> (the first three generations of Muslims) and aim to revive it by wearing Arabian clothing, adopting antique customs, and assuming a medieval mindset that leads to religious-based violence. (2) Muslim Brothers and like types who aspire to an Islamic version of modernity; depending on circumstances, they might act violently or not. (3) Lawful Islamists who work within the system, engaging in political, media, legal, and educational activities; by definition, they do not engage in violence. Their differences are real. But they are also secondary, for all Islamists pull in the same direction, toward the full and severe application of Islamic law (the Shari'a), and they often cooperate toward this end, sometimes covertly. For example, a recently leaked video from Tunisia spectacularly links Ennahda to the embassy violence. Initially broadcast in April 2012, the video resurfaced on October 9. In it, Ghannouchi talks tactics with young Salafis to achieve their common goals and boasts, ‘We've met with … the Salafis, including Sheikh Abou Iyadh.’ Oh really? Abou Iyadh, whose real name is Seifallah Ben Hassine, heads Ansar al-Sharia, a.k.a. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Tunisian police established a dragnet to question him about his role leading to the Sept. 14 attack. With the revelation of this meeting, the video undercuts Ennahda's condemnation of the Sept. 14 attack.” </blockquote><br />
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Dan Bilefsky in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/movies/in-turkey-ottoman-nostalgia-returns.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"As if the Ottoman Period Never Ended"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The Ottoman period, particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries, was marked by geopolitical dominance and cultural prowess, during which the sultans claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world, before the empire’s slow decline culminated in World War I. For years the period was underplayed in the history taught to schoolchildren, as the new Turkish Republic created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 sought to break with a decadent past. Now, as Turkey is emerging as a leader in the Middle East, buoyed by strong economic growth, a new fascination with history is being reflected in everything from foreign policy to facial hair. In the arts, framed examples of Ottoman-era designs, known as Ebru and associated with the geometric Islamic motifs adorning mosques, have gained in popularity among the country’s growing Islamic bourgeoisie, adorning walls of homes and offices, jewelry and even business cards. The three-year-old Panorama Museum, which showcases an imposing 360-degree, 45-foot-tall painting of the siege of Constantinople, complete with deafening cannon fire blasts and museum security guards dressed as Janissary soldiers, is drawing huge crowds.” </blockquote><br />
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Timothy Ash in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/freedom-diversity-liberal-pentagram/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Freedom & Diversity: A Liberal Pentagram for Living Together"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The multiculturalist literature, with its tendency to pigeonhole people by culture, often fails to acknowledge the sheer diversity of this increasingly mixed-up world. More than ever, that must include the diversity to be found inside a single human skin, mind, and heart. ‘Multiculturalism’ has become a term of wholly uncertain meaning. Does it refer to a social reality? A set of policies? A normative theory? An ideology? Last year, I served on a Council of Europe working group with members from eight other European countries. We found that the word meant something different, and usually confused, in every country. Some, though not all, of the policies described as ‘multiculturalism’ over the last thirty years have had deeply illiberal consequences. They have allowed the development of ‘parallel societies’ or ‘subsidized isolation.’ Self-appointed community leaders have used public funds to reinforce cultural norms that would be unacceptable in the wider society, especially in relation to women. This has come close to official endorsement of cultural and moral relativism. A perverse effect has been to disempower the voices of the more liberal, secular, and critical minority within such ethnically or culturally defined minorities. If, therefore, you want to elaborate a version of multiculturalism that is genuinely compatible with liberalism, as some distinguished political theorists do, you have to spend pages hedging the term about with clarifications and qualifications. By the time you have finished doing that, the justification for a separate new ‘ism’ has evaporated.” </blockquote><br />
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Leon Wieseltier at <i>tnr.com</i>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/108847/why-the-taliban-shot-the-schoolgirl?utm_source=The+New+Republic&utm_campaign=90d21986d4-TNR_Daily_111212&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">"Why the Taliban Shot the Schoolgirl"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“About the necessity and the nobility of her cause there can be no doubt. After all, she scared the Taliban. And it is not too much of an exaggeration to say, as Nicholas Kristof did in <i>The New York Times</i>, that ‘the global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century, equivalent to the campaigns against slavery in the 19th century and against totalitarianism in the 20th century.’ Except that, in places such as Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and Mali, and Yemen, and elsewhere, the struggle for gender equality is the campaign against totalitarianism. Pardon the heresy, but the twentieth century is not dead. This is not an academic point. The goodbyeto-all-that fantasy about the horrors of the last century—the merry conference-building certainty that we have transcended ideological conflict for a meliorating world of best practices— impedes a proper understanding of what many good people in many bad places now confront. They are not yet post-historical. The attempt on Malala Yousafzai’s life was not the expression of a problem, it was the expression of an evil. There are circumstances in which the term ‘evil’ is not moralistic, but analytical. Too much of the discussion of the world’s ills is conducted in the upbeat problem-solving vocabulary of the Philanthropy International, which, like the unaccountably cheerful Kristof, is forever edified by tales of local braveries and by the magnitude of its own compassion. In his column on Malala Yousafzai, for example, Kristof writes: ‘For those wanting to honor Malala’s courage, there are excellent organizations building schools in Pakistan, such as Developments in Literacy (dil.org) and The Citizens Foundation (tcfusa.org).’ I am sure that those enterprises are fully as worthy of support as Kristof says they are. A call to charity is never wrong. But there is something facile, emotionally and strategically, about the trend in good works. A few months ago, the Pakistani newspaper <i>Dawn</i> reported that 710 schools have been destroyed or damaged by Islamic militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 401 schools have been destroyed or damaged in Swat. Such violence, and its wildly misogynistic dimension, is precisely what Malala Yousafzai was defying; but it will not be defeated by charity. The war against schools is not just a war against schools.” </blockquote><br />
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Roula Khalaf in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/167164a6-1e34-11e2-8e1d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bwv7Okid" target="_blank">"The Muslim sisterhood"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Within the Brotherhood itself many leaders, including president Morsi, believe that the presidency, as well as the highest authority in the organisation, the position of murshid or supreme guide is off limits for women. This is an interpretation that many sisters I have met do not like but say they accept. But the Muslim sisters are something of a paradox, and one that defies the Islamist stereotype. There is no denying that they are skilful political activists and are now increasingly relied upon to further the goals of the FJP. What they are not, however, are feminists looking for the type of freedom that liberals and secular women cherish. Hard-working and determined, the Muslim sisters believe in economic and political advancement but are more docile when it comes to their role within the family. They see feminism at best as the path to the destruction of the family. ‘Most sisters are professionals, very active, very energetic, very strong, but they don’t have feminist consciousness,’ says Oumayma Abu Bakr, an Egyptian expert on Islam and gender. It is only now, moreover, as they join the FJP, that they are being offered an opportunity for influence. The sisters have never had any significant say within the Brotherhood, even though they make up 50 per cent of the movement (out of a total membership estimated at one million when the group was still banned). They have never paid monthly dues, never voted for the leadership and never been rewarded for their contribution with any official position.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xriVPN2KIoI/UKF7ClwBl3I/AAAAAAAAARo/abjazGVLtP4/s367/VirginiaQuarterly.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Jean Elshtain in <b>VIRGINIA QUARTERLY</b>, <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/fall/elshtain-female-conscience/" target="_blank">"Is There Such a Thing as the Female Conscience? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“So it was that the Greek philosophers consigned women to a world of lesser virtue, for the <i>oikos</i>, or household, can never rise to universal moral truths. The home is too mired in the realm of biology and reproduction—an indispensable realm, surely, but limited. Women, slaves, and laborers are ‘necessary conditions’ of the state. Men, by contrast, are integral. In such ways was the class or category ‘woman’ deemed inferior to the class or category ‘man.’ From that premise the rest was straightforward: Women are to be barred from citizenship and an active participation in the <i>polis</i>. They cannot be judged in the same way as a free male. And so, despite disagreements on the moral life, Plato and Aristotle held hands on the gender question—with exceptions here and there. That Plato was willing to admit a few women into his guardian class does little to remedy his overall view of the morally limited family and the private life that the overwhelming majority of women serve. This dispute about female conscience was repeated again and again in Western philosophy over the centuries, even as Christianity triumphed and Scripture declared that men and women were moral equals, that God loved all His creatures alike. It’s worth noting that Christianity also held that women were not deficient in the most vital of Christian virtues: love and charity. But that did not mean women were deemed capable of serving universal truths in the way of men. The spirit of the age was too firmly oriented otherwise. Feminism itself fell victim to gendered categories laid down many centuries before. Indeed, when it came to virtue, even thinkers whose overriding concerns differed dramatically from the Greeks’ were unable to shake the stranglehold of their forefathers’ assumptions about gender.” </blockquote><br />
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Vauhini Vara in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444657804578051181455004590.html" target="_blank">"Men’s College Faces New Era"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In 1967, nearly 150 of the nation's campuses were men-only, not including seminaries, says the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Now, Deep Springs and just three others remain men-only among secular liberal-arts institutions: Morehouse College in Atlanta, Wabash College in Indiana and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. A Morehouse spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment. Wabash and Hampden-Sydney spokesmen say their colleges considered going coed in the 1990s but trustees decided against it. The number of women's-only liberals arts colleges has dwindled, too, but about 50 remain. The trustees of Deep Springs had periodically considered making it coed but voted the proposal down because they thought it would hurt the college's ability to provide a good education or put off donors who objected to going coed. But last year the trustees decided to modify the college's deed of trust to adapt it to a world that Mr. Nunn couldn't have anticipated, says Prof. Neidorf.” </blockquote><br />
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Verlyn Klinkenborg in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/opinion/sunday/crop-rotation-and-the-future-of-farming.html" target="_blank">"Did Farmers of the Past Know More Than We Do? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Oats used to be a common sight all over the Midwest. They were often sown with alfalfa as a ‘nurse crop’ to provide some cover for alfalfa seedlings back when alfalfa was also a common sight. Until about 30 years ago, you could find all sorts of crops growing on Iowa farms, and livestock. Since then two things have happened. All the animals have moved indoors, into crowded confinement operations. And the number of crops has dwindled to exactly two: corn and soybeans. My uncle Everon, who died last summer, farmed the home place when I was growing up. He would have been surprised to learn that he was following the principles of an early 18th-century agricultural experimenter named Charles Townshend, who, apart from his fascination with turnips, was every inch a viscount. Townshend’s discovery — borrowed from Dutch and Flemish farmers — was that crops grow better, with fewer weeds and pest problems, if they are rotated in a careful sequence. Townshend’s rotation — like the ones George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used — included clover, wheat, other small grains and turnips, which made good winter food for sheep and cattle. My uncle grew no turnips, but he, like all his neighbors, was using his own version of the four-crop system, at the heart of which was alfalfa.” </blockquote><br />
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Matt Ridley in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204349404578100862654023702.html" target="_blank">"Can Medieval Heat Cool Warming Worries?"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Until the late 1990s, researchers generally agreed that the MWP was warmer than today and that the ‘Little Ice Age’ of 1500-1800 was colder. Then in 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted the ‘hockey stick’ graph devised by Michael Mann at the University of Virginia and colleagues. Using temperature indicators such as tree rings and lake sediments, the graph rewrote history by showing little warmth in the 11th century and little cold in the 17th, but a sharp spike in late-20th-century temperatures. That graph helped to persuade many people (such as me) that recent temperature rises were unprecedented in scale and speed in at least 1,400 years. But critics of the graph pointed out that it used a statistical technique that overemphasized hockey-stick shaped data from unreliable indicators, such as tree rings in bristlecone pine trees and Scandinavian lake sediments influenced by 20th-century land-use changes. Four recent studies have now rehabilitated the MWP as a period of unusual warmth, though they disagree on whether it was as warm or warmer than today. Jan Esper of the University of Mainz and his colleagues looked at pine wood densities from Sweden and Finland and found ‘evidence for substantial warmth during Roman and medieval times, larger in extent and longer in duration than 20th-century warmth.’ Bo Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute and Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University looked at 32 indicators across the Northern Hemisphere and found the level of warmth during the peak of the MWP ‘in the second half of the 10th century equaling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming.’” </blockquote><br />
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Steven Johnson in <b>STRATEGY & TACTICS</b>, <a href="http://strategyandtacticsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ST277-TOC.pdf" target="_blank">"Mongol Military Disasters"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Into Burma: In 1273 Kublai Khan sent emissaries to demand Burma’s submission. King Narathihapate treated them well, but sent them back without a reply; he later had a follow-on group of emissaries executed. Further, the Burmese invaded the Thai state of Kaungai, which was a protectorate of the Mongols. In retaliation, in 1277 some 12,000 Mongols advanced into Burma. The Burmese in turn moved against them with a force of 200 elephants before that day. The huge beasts terrified their horses, which refused to charge the pachyderms. Hundreds of horses bolted, throwing their riders to the ground. The Burmese elephants then charged and crashed into the already disorganized Mongol line, causing total havoc. Many Mongols were picked off by Burmese archers firing from platforms on the backs of the elephants. The Mongols regrouped and dismounted to form a firing line. Their archers concentrated hundreds of arrows against the elephants that, in pain and rage, turned on the nearby Burmese infantry, trampling many while smashing their platforms and running off. The Mongols gathered their horses and rode down and killed many of the fleeing Burmese infantry. The Mongols resumed their advance through the jungle, but heat and disease increasingly decimated their ranks and their horses…. They returned to China and presented Kublai Khan with 12 captured elephants. They were the only reward for the entire operation.” </blockquote><br />
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DRzbDjiAjks/UKF6_-iC6pI/AAAAAAAAARY/F5XFRLUVARU/s248/Strategy%2526Tactics.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />William Nester in <b>STRATEGY & TACTICS</b>, <a href="http://strategyandtacticsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ST277-TOC.pdf" target="_blank">"Ticonderoga: Battles for Lake George"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Beneath those superficial Anglo-French military similarities was a difference that proved crucial during the war’s first years: the French were far more adept at the diplomatic and tactical arts of wilderness war than were the British. Simply put, that involved inspiring Indian braves onto the warpath and then fighting alongside them. In practice both those stages of Indian involvement demanded Herculean diplomatic labors in which protocol, patience and gifting were essential. The popular view of Indians organized into hierarchic tribes led monolithically by a chief is historically inaccurate. Politics was centered in the villages rather than in the looser linguistic, cultural and military agglomerations called tribes. Each village in turn was splintered into often rival clans, societies and sub-cultures. Presiding over each village was a council of headmen who struggled to forge a consensus among contending factions as to how to overcome common problems, of which the most crucial was always whether to stay at peace or go to war. Even when consensus was reached, each villager was free to follow or ignore it as he pleased.” </blockquote><br />
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Elliott West in <b>AMERICAN HISTORY</b>, <a href="http://www.historynet.com/table-of-contents-december-2012-american-history.htm" target="_blank">"Tecumseh’s Last Stand"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“For all the Indians gained, however, Tecumseh realized that the cultural swapping left them increasingly vulnerable. They became more reliant on goods that only whites could provide. They were enmeshed in an international market beyond their influence. As the pace of trade quickened, they began overhunting the very creatures they had to have to keep up their side of the exchange. The most vicious consequences were from the illegal trade in alcohol. Addicted Indian men bartered for whiskey rather than needful goods and, once drunk, gave up their pelts for a pittance…. The only answer, Tecumseh came to believe, was to disengage from whites and to turn away entirely from their ways. Reject the temptations, he urged the Shawnees and other Indians, whether whiskey or wool blankets or linen shirts. Revive traditional means of living, cultivate the old skills and return to ancient virtues.” </blockquote><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T7bpXqpo9A4/UKF6-2qq3MI/AAAAAAAAARQ/LSbdfzJ-zaM/s288/stammering-century-.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Evan Kindley at <i>tnr.com</i> on Gilbert Seldes’ book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/gilbert-seldes-stammering-ninetheenth-century-jonathan-edwards" target="_blank">"The Stammering Century"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Gilbert Seldes came by his interest in wild ideas honestly: he was raised in an anarchist utopian community in Alliance, New Jersey, and though he subsequently tacked toward the Establishment—attending Harvard and serving as drama critic for the nonpareil high modernist little magazine <i>The Dial</i>—he maintained a ready sympathy for the lunatic fringe. His first (and most famous) book, <i>The Seven Lively Arts</i>, published in 1924, initiated the serious criticism of pop culture in the United States, declaring the greatness of Krazy Kat and Charlie Chaplin to a skeptical highbrow crowd. For his second book, he elected to inquire into the excitements of the past, and see whether or not they had extended beyond small circles of initiates. Insofar as <i>The Stammering Century</i> has a master narrative, it is ‘the decline of the Calvinist theology brought over in the <i>Mayflower</i>’ and the effects of that decline on the cultures of American belief. For Seldes, ‘nearly everything … of importance in the American mind of the nineteenth century … has its source in Jonathan Edwards,’ the galvanic New England minister whose terrifying sermons (such as ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’) established a tone of extremity that generations of successors would attempt to match. As Seldes sees it, it was not Edwards’s ideas that mattered, but the way he expressed them: ‘The theology of Jonathan Edwards suffered the most spectacular defeat in the history of American religious life,’ he writes, but ‘his methods gained the greatest victory.’” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Alma Guillermoprieto in <b>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/mexico-risking-life-truth/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Mexico: Risking Life for Truth"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Riddled with bullet wounds, Rodriquez was slumped over his daughter’s body, who he died protecting. Armando Rodriguez – known everywhere as El Choco (for ‘chocolate’) because of his skin color – started out in journalism as the cameraman for Blanca Martinez, who was then a TV reporter. They married, and while Blanca became the editor of the local Catholic church weekly, Rodriguez persuaded a Juarez newspaper to hire him, and he transferred to El Diario as a reporter. He worked the police beat hard, particularly at the time of a series of unspeakable <i>feminicidios</i>, or serial killings, of young Juarez women, and then again when the wave of drug violence started in 2008. An elder statesman on the police beat, Choco was respected by his editors and by his colleagues for his aggressive reporting…. In the weeks leading up to his murder, Choco Rodriguez had published articles linking relatives of the Chihuahua state attorney general, Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez (no relation), to the drug trade.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Steven Connor in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Slavoj Zizek’s book, <i>Less Than Nothing – Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism</i>, and Sean Sheehan’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/" target="_blank">"Zizek – A Guide for the Perplexed"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Although Zizek gives us plenty of pseudo-reasons for revolutionary change, it is plain that he can only keep up for short sprints his alleged outrage at the exploitation, brutality and misery that are all he will associate with capitalism. The real impulse to revolution is not to put any of this right, but to effect the joyous, violent emergence of the radically new, beyond any kind of prediction, likelihood or drearily utilitarian weighing of consequences. In this, Zizek may be said to adhere to a wholly formalist theory of revolution, which must be kept vigilantly void of any content save its own vehemence. What revolution is for, is not to usher in utopia, but to keep the dialectic alive.” </blockquote><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Carlin Romano at <i>chronicle.com</i>, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Slippery-Sloterdijk/135494/" target="_blank">"Slippery Sloterdijk: the Edgy European Philosopher, Circa 2012"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The most recent translated Sloterdijk—<i>The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice</i> (Columbia University Press)—appears chosen to be the Ur-text (95 pages) meant to ease new readers into Sloterdijk's spherical universe. A spirited brief for Aristotelian-moderated philosophy it is, urging "the life of practice" that doesn't veer too sharply to the ivory tower or the barricades. ‘My aim,’ Sloterdijk writes, ‘is to show why the idea that the thinking person has to be a kind of dead person on holiday is inseparable from the ancient European culture of rationality, particularly classical, Platonic-inspired philosophy.’” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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Janet Reitman in <b>RS</b>, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/" target="_blank">"Enemy of the State"</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>"Hammond's attorneys tell me they are in possession of nearly a terabyte of discovery material - some 20,000 bankers boxes, the equivalent of half a research library of reading material - with potentially more to come. But Hammond has been effectively locked out of his own defense. He can only view the material in the presence of his lawyers and cannot use prison computers to do legal research, even though they are not connected to the Internet ('It's like they think he's some kind of wizard who can magically get online no matter what,' says one person associated with the case). It could take years for him to review all of the discovery material. So far, all of the alleged Lulzsec hackers, who have been arrested have pleaded guilty or are soon expected to. Hammond has not, but even if he were to accept a plea, it is likely he will spend many years in prison."</blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-qBaUcJIAv8o/UKF66qXVuqI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/vOi-vwRjtp8/s320/Futurismo-Salaris.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Eric Bulson in <b>TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT</b> on Claudia Salaris & Pablo Echaurren’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/" target="_blank">"Riviste Futuriste"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“Though Marinetti was the self-proclaimed ‘caffeine of Europe’, even he needed others to make this Futurist conflagration of print possible. He was especially supportive of the young, encouraging them to produce riviste as part of an informal initiation rite. And what these student productions may lack in sophistication they make up for in spirit. One of them was edited in 1915 by Giorgio Balabani, a self-proclaimed young Futurist from Bassano del Grappa, who brought out five issues under five different titles, including La Torpedine (The Torpedo) and Lo Schrapnel. And there were still others such as Azione Imperiale from 1936, which was produced by the Fascist party (and co-edited by Marinetti) to garner the support of Italy’s youth for the conquest of Abyssinia. Futurism persisted while Italy underwent major political and social changes. But it did so only by modifying its stance on the relationship between art and politics again and again; and the rivista was one of the places where this happened….”</blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
<a href="http://arthurmag.com/" target="_blank">"Arthur magazine returns next month"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“The comeback issue — <i>Arthur</i> No. 33 — will be out the day after the end of the world — Dec. 22, 2012.<br />
<br />
The magazine will retail for $5 and publish as a broadsheet format on newsprint. There will be two eight-page sections, one in color; one in black and white. Maybe more. Ads will be on the back cover of each section and nowhere else. <i>Arthur</i> 33 will be distributed via direct mail order, via at least two distributors, and straight to some retailers. Total print-run has yet to be determined. Digital distribution of this issue has also yet to be determined.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Gene Wagendorf at <i>windycityrock.net</i>, <a href="http://www.windycityrock.net/2012/11/show-review-ono-hecks-at-quenchers-1031.html" target="_blank">"ONO at Hecks"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“ONO wasted no time getting into material from <i>Albino</i>, the album for which this ghastly bash was thrown. The group's singer, known simply as Travis, allowed a deep, stammering bass drum to build a brooding atmosphere before he began the deep croon of ‘I Been Changed.’ The traditional gospel tune was, like most ONO covers, deconstructed and rebuilt into something new. In this case the usual inspirational embellishments had been stripped, leaving Travis free to spit the lyrics with a haunting bitterness. As the percussive plod was joined by pulses, twinkles and backup vocals, the singer grew increasingly wild and direct, offering up the chorus as a challenge. The result felt almost like a confirmation of damnation; an ominous declaration that played as much with the audience as it did with the song's own history. The piece was given a surprisingly appropriate companion in the following number, a patient and malicious take on The Velvet Underground's ‘Venus in Furs.’” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Dave Markey <a href="http://www.vh1.com/music/tuner/2012-11-09/we-got-power-author-dave-markey-interview/" target="_blank">"interview"</a> at <i>vh1.com</i>.<br />
<br />
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***<br />
<br />
<br />
“Karthala 72” at <a href="http://electric-cowbell.com/wp/" target="_blank">"Electric Cowbell Records"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“‘…one of the heavier pieces of African psych that we’ve ever heard. Drums bounce over deep bass. Distorted guitars burn over chopping grooves, slowly decaying into echo. Melodies melt into free-jazz, then miraculously return.’ <i>Afropop Worldwide</i><br />
<br />
We’ve been waiting for this moment! At long last Electric Cowbell presents the mysterious dark and funky ‘Diable Du Feu’ from the elusive Karthala 72. It’s been a little over a year since we released the psych-burner 7″ Dans Le Coeur Du Feu/Delores and now we are finally ready to release the monster full-length in limited-edition 140-gram vinyl with a bevy of remixes!” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
<br />
<br />
Brad Cohan at <i>villagevoice.com</i>, <a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/11/oral_histor_rat_at_rat_r.php#more" target="_blank">"Rat At Rat R oral history"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>“In 1982, Poison-Tete and Anderson moved to the LES, guitarist John Myers followed suit (Anderson ultimately relocated to NYC but left the band to pursue other projects) and thus -- with its monumental move -- Rat At Rat R's singular vision bore the glorious dregs of downtown. Nearly three decades after its original release on Glenn Branca's Neutral imprint, <i>Amer$ide, Rock and Roll is Dead, Long Live Rat At Rat R</i>, its 1985 debut, finally receives the reissue/remastered treatment, courtesy of Finnish label Ektro and spearheaded by music scribe (and erstwhile <i>Voice</i> contributor) Jordan Mamone.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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<br />
William Lustig books Warner Bros at <a href="http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/40029" target="_blank">"Anthology Film Archives"</a>.<br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Carducci reading in Fort Collins, Thurs. Dec. 6, 7pm at<br />
<a href="http://www.wolverinefarm.org/life-against-dementia-book-reading-by-joe-carducci/" target="_blank">"Wolverine Farm Books"</a>.<br />
<br />
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***<br />
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<br />
Obituary of the fortnight.<br />
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<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/world/europe/patriarch-maxim-orthodox-leader-of-bulgaria-dies-at-98.html" target="_blank">"Marin Naidenov Minkov"</a> (1914-2012)<br />
<blockquote>“Born Marin Naidenov Minkov on Oct. 29, 1914, he graduated from the Sofia Seminary in 1935 and entered Sofia University’s theology department in 1938, before rising through the church ranks to be named patriarch on July 4, 1971. After the collapse of Communism in 1989, Bulgaria’s new democratic government sought to replace Communist-appointed figureheads, including the patriarch. The church split between supporters of Patriarch Maxim and breakaway clergymen, who tried to oust him and then formed their own synod. The division plunged the church into turmoil, with church buildings being occupied, priests breaking into fistfights on church steps, and water cannons and tear gas being turned on rebel bishops to clear the main St. Alexander Nevsky cathedral in Sofia. For more than a decade the two synods existed side by side. The schism ended in 2010, when the head of the alternative synod called for healing and the synod was dissolved.” </blockquote><br />
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***<br />
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Thanks to Andy Schwartz, Steve Beeho, Jay Babcock, Mark Carducci, aldaily.com.<br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, <a href="http://jamesfotopoulos.com/" target="_blank">James Fotopoulos</a>, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i><br />
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<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-43290447890417754202012-10-30T10:42:00.000-07:002012-11-13T10:44:29.838-08:00Issue #140 (Oct. 31, 2012)<b>Snowy Range, WY</b><br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EZvJvTRUs_I/UI74JmSQI5I/AAAAAAAAAO0/TIGJqt_XOOo/s640/SnowyRange2-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<b>Cali Punk 101: Five Lessons</b><br />
<b><br />
</b> Joe Carducci<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Lesson 1, Ricky Williams: The Sleepers, Toiling Midgets, Flipper</i><br />
<br />
San Francisco music mix featuring rare live recordings, with comments at John Allen’s<br />
<a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/47727" target="_blank">"WFMU program"</a>.<br />
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<br />
°<br />
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<i>Lesson 2, The Sleepers – Against the Day</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-5BrO-xfPVM0/UI74ns4XoyI/AAAAAAAAAPM/rlvHfdRyy5M/s300/Sleepers_PainlessNights_SV009.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
The Sleepers 1981 album, "Painless Nights",<br />
will be reissued on vinyl by<br />
<a href="http://superiorviaduct.com/sleepers/" target="_blank">"Superior Viaduct"</a> on November 13; these are the liner notes:<br />
<br />
Michael Belfer and Tim Mooney started the band and got Paul Draper and Ricky Williams together in 1977. They were recording their first record in January 1978. There was a strange lull that year when it came to bands putting out their debut 7” records. There had already been a glut of bad 45s after Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Television, and others got signed to major labels off of theirs. The earliest independent record distributors like Jem and Bomp! didn’t really differentiate the junk from what mattered; thus the glut reached the shops and made them leery of taking new records by unknowns. In late 1977 I started working at a record shop in Portland and we began turning it into a new kind of distributor that didn’t worry about German pressings of “Dark Side of the Moon” or French Bowie singles or UK major label punk, and would make a judgment on the records before we asked shops to buy them unheard C.O.D.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-T9-YD2DOPR0/UI74mc9ua6I/AAAAAAAAAPE/Au-QUwjR1Gk/s418/RickyWilliams1976byJamesStark.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />We were solicited on The Sleepers 5-song 7” e.p. by Jem Records by fall of ’78 and I ordered a few for the shop; I hadn’t heard of them. When the record came its picture sleeve went up on the display wall and I played it with the rest of the new stuff so I could describe it in our mail order catalog and figure out if I’d play it on <i>KBOO</i> or try to track it down for distribution purposes. I liked it but hadn’t really gotten into it before Rozz Rezabek came into the shop and flipped out when he saw it. He had me play it for him and bought a copy – the only time I ever saw him buy anything. Rozz was one of the Portland kids who practically commuted to San Francisco to participate in its much bigger music scene. He sang for Negative Trend awhile. Rozz came back into the shop a couple days later and I heard him tell somebody that he’d stayed home with his girlfriend and played The Sleepers record all day. That made me listen to it more closely and then I was hooked.<br />
<br />
Even though the 7" e.p. is 33rpm the opening guitar on “She’s Fun” cuts and all five songs are great and different. “Linda” is the long slow one and takes awhile to appreciate. But once you’ve acclimated to Ricky’s way with vocals that song is where he really has room and time to walk his crazy high-wire approach. We tried to order the record from the label but as I remember they’d shipped them all to Jem. Most San Francisco bands didn’t respond to letters requesting purchasing info. They were really living the music life in one of the best early punk era scenes. Bands sold their singles locally thru Aquarius, Tower, and Leopold’s. Systematic Record Distribution, the company we built in Portland and moved to Berkeley hoped to change that. Still in Portland though in 1979 Jem Records remaindered a bunch of small label stuff they couldn’t sell. The 7" records were a dime each. So we bought 75 copies of The Sleepers e.p. and were able to sell them easily deeply discounted via our mail order catalog and to the new kind of shop around the country that Jem didn’t sell to. I think we bought another hundred for ten bucks and moved those too. Later if I remember the same e.p. was re-issued as a 12” e.p. Maybe that got around a little better, I don’t recall.<br />
<br />
We saw mostly L.A. bands in Portland. No Sleepers anyway. In Berkeley, Vale of <i>Search & Destroy</i> magazine was helping Rough Trade and Systematic set up in the bay area, plus he was part of Adolescent Records and they were following up a Sleepers 45 ("Mirror"/"Theory") with the “Painless Nights” album. I liked the album but when I saw the new lineup Oct. 24, 1980 at the 10th St. Hall I was really impressed. I thought they were going to be big; their live sound was massive! If the board tape is out there for sale buy it.<br />
<br />
The Sleepers didn’t become big; they broke up in New York at the start of a tour. Not many of us knew what we were up against back then. We knew the rock press had disowned punk rock and radio wasn’t even worth talking about. The San Francisco scene seemed satisfied with the four college stations that were pretty good, but to make the jump to a major label and commercial radio, or to sell enough records on a small label for a band to buy a van or eat? Not likely for those early bands. Radio and press had stopped educating the music audience and gotten down to platinum business.<br />
<br />
<i>Rolling Stone</i> left San Francisco for New York in 1978 – perfect timing for anyone who wanted to preserve their ignorance: New York was over and San Francisco was happening. If the mag had stayed they’d have had to review or mention what was going on in their town. As it was they never wrote about The Sleepers until suddenly in 1992 Ricky’s career debuted in <i>Rolling Stone</i> as an obituary. He was a rock star if anybody was a rock star! He’d listened to a lot of Iggy and a lot of Bowie but <i>wherever</i> he started, he improvised from and ended up… wherever all over again – you just had to follow him. He had lyrics written down somewhere, I suppose, but he used phrases like he sang them, changing the words and sounds depending on the moment. Ricky was a handful no doubt, but Belfer and later, Craig Gray in the Toiling Midgets made allowances for genius.<br />
<br />
Belfer’s guitar had the power to calm one new wave spaz after another: Tuxedo Moon, BPeople, DNA… I think those guys were maybe especially susceptible to Belfer’s warm, heavy, careening psychedelia. I saw Michael play a duo set with Arto Lindsay if you can imagine that. And I remember being confused by a sudden change in the sound of The BPeople, a Pasadena art band, and Laurie O’Connell of the best art band of that day, Monitor, explained and complained that their guitarist Alex Gibson had fallen under the spell of The Sleepers and turned bassist Fred Nilsen’s concept into another “macho rock band.”<br />
<br />
I think about this now because west coast punk is being repackaged and misinterpreted sans “macho” at this late date in post-Death-of-Rock London. Back then this living music was actively kept out of the UK shops for any number of bogus reasons. Even in their hometown The Sleepers big re-debut in 1980 on the release of their first album found them having to play a truncated set opening for post-rock sub-stars Cabaret Voltaire. Though some early SF scene fans were out to see The Sleepers, there were more of the new-style Anglophiles yelling for them to get off the stage. Before their last tune that night (“She’s Fun”), after the best 35 minutes of music those deaf children had ever been exposed to, Ricky says, “I’m really sorry, I know you can’t take this any longer but….”<br />
<br />
Imagine sophisto stupidity so dense it’s not penetrable by such as The Sleepers? Well, that was the truth of it back in the day.<br />
<br />
(Ricky Williams, 1976; photograph by <a href="http://www.jamesstark.com/" target="_blank">James Stark</a>)<br />
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<br />
°<br />
<br />
<i>Lesson 3: “Black & Red,” “Shine,” “Preludes”</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> First version at issue 5 of <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2009/08/issue-5-august-5-2009.html" target="_blank">"The New Vulgate"</a>; Revised version can be found in Carducci’s new book, <b>Life Against Dementia</b>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Negative Trend was formed out of the ashes of one ground-zero nexus of early San Francisco punk, Grand Mal, which in 1977 split into Trend plus The Offs. I never saw Negative Trend though I did know their first singer, Rozz, as he bounced between SF and Portland, where I was doing punk radio on <i>KBOO</i> and turning an import record store called Renaissance into what we thought of as the first modern independent record distributor, Systematic Record Distribution. Negative Trend released one four song seven inch which was quickly out of print with nary a copy leaving the west coast. They played the bay area, toured the Northwest once, went to LA to play and record with a new singer, Rik L. Rik (formerly vocalist for LA band, F-Word). He replaced Mikal Waters as singer. F-Word had been on the Posh-Boy label, which probably owned Rik from his head to his anus. They recorded for Posh and then Robbie goes and has the Simpletones re-record the music and releases it under the Rik L. Rik name. They just didn’t know about that kind of shit in SF. Robbie must have thought this was pop music and was going to sell. It actually did in Los Angeles where media wasn’t in full hippie lockdown.<br />
<br />
Flipper was formed by Trend’s rhythm section, Will Shatter and Steve DePace, guitarist Ted Falconi, formerly of a band called SST and Ricky Williams who had floated away from The Sleepers for a moment (Rozz filled in for him). While in Portland I met a kid from SF named Bruce Calderwood who showed up with his girlfriend, Diane, who was one of the early Portland punks and moved back and forth between the cities. Bruce put the locals on edge slightly as he was a big city punk and Portland was definitely a backwater. He talked about this band he had back in SF called Flipper. He lolled around Portland for a month or more so I didn’t figure the band was much of a full time career move for him. He had replaced Ricky who then floated back to The Sleepers. I don’t think he ran into Rozz while in town. Systematic moved to Berkeley at the end of 1979 and I caught up with Bruce quickly as he worked at the folk label, Kicking Mule, just up the street….”</blockquote>
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°<br />
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<i>Lesson 4, Radio History of L.A. Punk, 1975-1985</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> Totaling five-plus hours, these 2008 programs are the only comprehensive, sequential survey of the most important, least understood Punk-era music scene, with comments at John Allen’s <i>WFMU</i> radio show.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/29352">”Part I”</a><br />
lesson begins at 49 minute mark<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/29667">”Part II”</a><br />
<br />
<br />
°<br />
<br />
<i>Lesson 5, Naomi Petersen & SST Records</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> 70 minute in-store talk-reading-Q&A, Other Music, New York, Apr. 2008<br />
<a href="http://archive.org/details/punkcast1311">”Other Music”</a><br />
<br />
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____<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>I-80 Radio Report</b><br />
<b><br />
</b> Joe Carducci<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-QJ-3RPQITmE/UI74qHZaKmI/AAAAAAAAAPU/SenpkgNliBE/s400/I-80iowa-nvsmall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />I put six good CDs into my dashboard plus a few extras for when radio let me down on my four thousand mile roundtrip to New York. And I didn’t play any of them. I just used the scan button on the FM most of the way to find something listenable. It doesn’t really make sense to me to be driving through cattle country or past cornfields or around Chicago and be listening to canned music. Most radio programming has been centralized and streams from some coastal data center, but not all of it. In any case I’d rather hear the best of what the peoples are listening to, though I reserve the right to hit the scan button the second I’m offended by any local programmer or The Programmer and His Algorithm, wherever they is.<br />
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I started the drives listening to the hard rock stations in southeastern Wyoming and central Nebraska, though their offenses got me to the country stations thereabouts about as often. The worst of the hard-rock tunes seem to center on bar-fight belligerence, someone stepping up, someone going down, etc. I prefer a less existential macho so one push usually found me a no-sweat practical rural one. Then, here, the offense might be the Taylor Swift android-in-overdrive or her now first-wave of fans now stepping up with their own Nashville roll-outs. Who knew ninnies could be so bold? Miranda Lambert has passed up Gretchen Wilson for wild girl of the CMA's, oddly her current hit, linked below, was censored everywhere east of Omaha ("haul some ass" is the offense to midwestern and easterner ears). Currently at Grand Newsstand you see Swift dolled up on the cover of <i>Glamour</i> or playing at Lohanoid crash-and-burn on the cover of <i>Rolling Stone</i>, cleared with her management firm and perhaps John Mayer’s as well, and carefully shot in faux-American Apparel-like grain by Theo Wenner no less – the prince for the princess, plus Jan won’t afford Annie Leibovitz anymore. Such offenses of C&W sent me scanning the dial again but never pushing play on the player.<br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-DSJn36PN5lE/UI74s8q6j3I/AAAAAAAAAPk/Hgr_M4hDpWg/s400/I-80ohio-nvsmall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />The tunes below were my favorites from that first five hundred miles – mostly I drive in thousand-mile legs whether heading east or west, and all in the car voted worst-on-the-road: The Pontiac Aztek – got no complaints. I heard this first song once again coming to me from Cleveland, but aside from bits of <i>NPR</i> and Limbaugh, baseball or gospel, I was usually on C&W the rest of the way, until I could pick up the Hudson Valley’s relay of <i>WFMU’</i>s signal, where some girl was playing what I took to be hipster metal. Luckily I was almost to my Uncle’s house by then. The first two songs are trying with some faint success to draw from 70s hard rock, back before metal when blues, and R&B influences, even if laundered by Brit neo-colonialism, were audible. Modern metal and hard rock needs as much black in its playing as it can get, only there’s not much of the old limber whipsnap can escape the hip-hop software to inspire them along these years:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESt3W__GNJw" target="_blank">Beware of Darkness “Howl”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpv2DYrE5eo" target="_blank">Tracer “Too Much”</a><br />
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-XGTeBYgEZDU/UI74uWC1uZI/AAAAAAAAAPs/btawZbypf3Q/s400/I-80omaha-nvsmall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />The next three tunes are my favorite products of the contemporary studio processes. I like them when they come on and turn up the volume to appreciate the sonic design more fully, but I wouldn’t call this rock or rock and roll, but, rather, well-written and -arranged musique concrete. And I like what the Janus dude does with his lockjaw mealy-mouthed phrasing; he don’t spill a note:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr3D0bYrcZY" target="_blank">Kopek “Love Is Dead”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_576hcydNo&feature=related" target="_blank">Janus “Promise to No One”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kuosykX4g" target="_blank">Deuce “America”</a><br />
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This is the one notable pop masterpiece I heard since Adele’s last single. I assumed it was Sting, but I guess it isn’t – scary in a way:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY" target="_blank">Gotye “Somebody That I Used to Know”</a><br />
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<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-kj9ElDsi_9Y/UI74vkgZMRI/AAAAAAAAAP0/5l4BIHthV9g/s400/I-80penna-nvsmall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />I left the scan button alone longest while on country stations while driving from Laramie to Eastchester and back. There’re always a couple great songs in Nashville’s mix, but lately it’s doing better at backing those up with a slate of high-mediocre: nice arrangements, good voices, clever lyrics, and outlandish accents. Musical trends feature quite a bit of Tom Petty; in fact, Eric Church’s tune, “Springsteen,” by the sound of it ought to be called, “Petty.” Through late Tom you hear earlier Byrds. Other post-Buffett country influences include AC/DC, rap, the afore-mentioned 70s rock, R&B…:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvDTlER1ZNc" target="_blank">Luke Bryan “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_80B8t45tFQ" target="_blank">Miranda Lambert “Fastest Girl in Town”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_5x58aQ2YY" target="_blank">Thomas Rhett “Something to Do with My Hands”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1GZzucDMlQ" target="_blank">Jason Aldean “Fly Over States”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_nponhytw&feature=related" target="_blank">Lee Brice “Hard to Love”</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02J61h9eqAM&feature=related" target="_blank">Eli Young Band “Even If It Breaks Your Heart”</a><br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-kcgoIa-VprM/UI74xJ7tHlI/AAAAAAAAAP8/IHfB0aCy00g/s400/I-80wy130-nvsmall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />In totality I’m guessing this gathering “monogenre” as the country blogger quoted just below terms it, might even have the makings of a decent non-public radio reglar-type ‘mericana format. He considers it a threat to just-passed once-contemporary country songcraft but overall it sounds like it might yield a better deal all around. Back in Wyoming, assembling these links I noticed Lana Del Rey has a new song-video-film posted. It’s good too. Not first-person art really, but it pays heed to good true lost American things. It’s called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_-3di1yx0&feature=branded" target="_blank">“Ride”</a>. But you can’t call it rock and roll either.<br />
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James McKinley in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/arts/music/billboards-chart-changes-draw-fire.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Changes to Charts by Billboard Draw Fire"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Billboard made one other change to its methodology that rewards crossover hits. Previously, the magazine only counted airplay on country stations for the country chart, and spins on R&B stations for the R&B chart, and so on. Now it is counting all the plays a song receives on 1,200 stations across genres. Kyle Coroneos, who writes a blog for the Saving Country Music site, said <i>Billboard</i>’s decision to count the airplay a country song gets on other formats is important. This means that traditional country artists, whose songs are played only on country stations, will be pushed down deeper into the charts, while pop-oriented stars, like Ms. Swift or Lady Antebellum, crowd the Top 10. Labels in turn are likely to encourage artists to make country records with a pop flavor, he said. ‘It erodes the autonomy of the country charts in general,’ he said. ‘I have a theory all the genres of music are coagulating into one big monogenre and this emphasizes that.’” </blockquote>
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Upcoming Carducci readings / signings / answerings…<br />
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Thurs. Dec. 6, 7pm, free<br />
<a href="http://www.wolverinefarm.org/bookstore/" target="_blank">"Wolverine Farm Bookstore"</a>, 144 N. College Ave., Fort Collins<br />
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Sat. Dec. 8, 7pm, free<br />
<a href="http://www.nightheronbooks.com/" target="_blank">"Night Heron Books"</a>, 107 Ivinson St., Laramie<br />
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The book event at Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn went good, though I may have sped through the selections from the new book, <b>Life Against Dementia</b>, but I found a theme about cultural damage which culminated in the piece, “Bring Me the Head of Lee Abrams.”<br />
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Tony Powell at <a href="http://www.imus.com/behind-the-scenes/2012/10/19/the-great-little-richard-shut-up.html" target="_blank">" “Imus in the Morning” "</a> has added a Little Richard to his Lightnin’ Hopkins bits; it’s on radio here and there and Fox Business channel. Not any video clips I can find of them though there are clips of his Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, and Herman Cain; they’re not as good. The white comic, Rob Bartlett, does funny bits as Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Elvis and others.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b><br />
</b></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><b>The BBf’nC</b></span><br />
<br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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It was probably a bad sign right off that the new CEO of the <i>New York Times</i> was coming in from the <i>BBC</i>. Back when the <i>NYT</i> was borrowing money from Carlos Slim to get past a tight spot that is known in journalism as the new normal, the absolute worst idea floated was to turn the <i>Times</i> into a non-profit. I don’t know what the <i>BBC</i> is exactly and neither does Britain, which if it is in the process of losing the Scots, Welsh, and Irish means Great Britain will cease to exist but we’ll always have the <i>British Broadcasting Corp</i> whether we live in a yurt in Mongolia, a mud-hut in Congo, or a cabin in the Rockies. Can you imagine where the editorial board of the Times would get off if they weren’t employed by strike breakers like any other ruthless capitalists? They’d cover music like <i>NPR</i> and politics like <i>Xinhua</i>. However disappointing the <i>NYT</i> can be, they aren’t that bad yet.<br />
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Given that a hard-hitting expose on the lifelong <i>BBC</i> paedophile presenter Jimmy Savile was stopped and a holiday tribute to the just-escaped-to-the-grave bastard broadcast instead, the<i> NYT</i> has stood by its own <i>BBC</i>-escapee while in Parliament his luckless replacement takes the heat. Meanwhile the tabloids have dug up another three hundred rape-and-molestation victims what got fixed by Jimmy, sprung chickens, some claiming to’ve had their lives ruined by <i>BBC</i> programming department heads.<br />
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I believe the <i>BBC</i>, as well as the <i>NYT</i>, might profitably seek counsel in this matter from the Vatican. The Church Universal has learned a lot in recent years about the myopia of pretentious institutions and how to deal with the massed plaintiffs and media scandal-mongers it can be counted on to attract.<br />
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Rod Liddle in <b>SPECTATOR</b>, <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8714951/bullets-over-the-beeb/" target="_blank">"Bullets over the Beeb"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Ring, ring, goes the telephone, every hour that God sends. And it’s always some producer from the <i>BBC</i>, ringing me up to ask me on to some programme to stick the boot in to the <i>BBC</i>. <i>Newsnight</i>, <i>The World at One</i>, <i>This Week</i>, <i>BBC</i> <i>Good Morning Biddulph</i>, <i>BBC Top o’The Mornin’ Paddy</i>. It is not enough that they should, like nematode worms which stab themselves to death with their own penises, -simply attack the <i>BBC</i> themselves; they want multitudes of other people to do it, too. ‘Tell me, just how useless is the <i>BBC</i>, and in particular its senior executives? Could they be more useless if they tried?’ This is evidence, if the <i>BBC</i>’s senior managers are to be believed, of the corporation’s honest and open approach to its own affairs. Yes, up to a point, so it is. That’s in there somewhere, along with schadenfreude at the plight of other bits of the <i>BBC</i> and internecine rivalry, and perhaps also a weird self-flagellating tendency that often grips the corporation, unsure as it is of why it still exists. But also, this openness, this candour, is a measure of the contempt in which the boss class of the <i>BBC</i> are held by the thousands of minions below. Rightly, in many cases, I should add. And so, as this ghastly Savile business unfolds, the little <i>BBC</i> programmes — the fiefdoms, the satrapies of the corporation — have gone for it with an excitation, hyperbole and overkill which almost matches the excitation, hyperbole and overkill of their phone-hacking coverage.” </blockquote>
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Dan Hind at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/dan-hind/bbc-above-reproach-or-beyond-reach" target="_blank">"The BBC: above reproach, or beyond reach? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“On the Trust’s website is a page on 'Sustaining citizenship and civil society’ - one of the core public purposes of the <i>BBC</i> as set out in the organisation’s Charter. Here you will learn that the Trust ‘after public consultation’ divided its remit for delivering this public purpose into ‘five specific priorities’. You might think that the Trust would want to show their working, so that the public could quickly find the evidence on which they base their decisions. But there’s no link to the results of this public consultation, although it is presumably on the site somewhere, in light of what’s quoted above. A search doesn’t help. Put the words <i>consultation</i> and <i>citizenship</i> together in the search box and you end up with zero results… according to Trust’s website, since 13 September the <i>BBC</i> has been ‘consulting publicly on some planned changes to what are called Purpose Remits – documents that explain what the <i>BBC</i> needs to do to fulfil each of its public purposes’. Among other things, the Trust wants to change the wording of some of the ‘five specific priorities’ regarding ‘citizenship and civil society’ mentioned above.” </blockquote>
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Andrew O'Hagan at <b>LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS</b>, <a href="http://media.lrb.co.uk/2012-10-27-andrew-ohagan-light-entertainment.html" target="_blank">"Light Entertainment"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the issue of <i>Lilliput magazine</i> for May 1943 Gamlin wrote an essay called ‘Why I Hate Boys’, which is signed ‘A School-Master’. It was a developing theme, boys, children, whatever, and in 1946 Methuen published a book written by Gamlin and Anthony Gilbert called <i>Don’t Be Afreud! A Short Guide to Youth Control (The Book of the Weak)</i>. The book is just about as funny as it wants to be, with author photographs (‘aged 7 and 8 approx’) and a caption: ‘The authors on their way to the Psychoanalyst’. Gamlin, in common with later youthquakers such as Jimmy Savile, never liked children, never had any, never wanted any, and on the whole couldn’t bear them, except on occasion to fuck. And, again like Savile, Gamlin managed all this quite brilliantly, hiding in plain sight as a youth presenter full of good sport but who didn’t really care for youth and all its pieties. This was in the days before ‘victims’ – days that our present media and their audiences find unimaginable – but it gives context and background to the idea of an eccentric presenter as a teasing anti-hero within the Corporation. Auntie was essentially being joshed by a child abuser posing as a child abuser.”</blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EEFodPWERd0/UI76DTADDOI/AAAAAAAAAQM/kjzsFE7IH8U/s640/october.jpg" /><br />
"October" by <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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From the Desk of Joe Carducci…<br />
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ONO news from Chicago:<br />
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Leor Galil at <i>chicagoreader.com</i>, <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/netherfriends-schubas-ono-albino-doug-perkins-eighth-blackbird/Content?oid=7737847&storyPage=3" target="_blank">"ONO release their first album in 26 years"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Ono got started in 1980, and the current seven-piece lineup includes two founding members: bassist-percussionist P. Michael and front man Travis, who's also a performance artist and LGBTQ activist. According to Michael, some of the songs on <i>Albino</i> date from 1981. In 2007 the group was dormant—it never really broke up—when Plastic Crimewave Sound front man and <i>Reader</i> contributor Steve Krakow interviewed Michael and Travis for his Secret History of Chicago Music strip. Krakow invited Ono to play at that year's 4 Million Tongues Festival, their first show after a long hiatus. They soon appeared on <i>Chic-a-Go-Go</i>, and the gigs started piling up.”</blockquote>
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Luca Cimarusti at <i>chicagoreader.com</i>, <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2012/10/25/more-ono-releases-reissues-and-shows-from-the-art-rock-locals" target="_blank">"More Ono! Releases, reissues, and shows from the art-rock locals"</a>.<br />
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zAxfb3_q8k8/UI74GMSqmvI/AAAAAAAAAOk/OyuqPZ-tdks/s295/Scam%2520%25239.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Scam #9, <a href="http://onthelowerfrequencies.com/2012/10/07/out-now-scam-9-the-story-of-black-flags-damaged/" target="_blank">"The Story of Black Flag’s “Damaged” "</a>.<br />
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Erick Lyle: “Here at last is the long awaited new issue of <i>SCAM</i>, the story of the making of my favorite record ever, Black Flag’s classic first LP, <i>Damaged</i>. Based on an expanded version of a story I wrote for the <i>LA Weekly</i> last winter to celebrate the record’s 30th anniversary, the zine includes primary interviews with Black Flag members, Henry Rollins, Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski, Dez Cadena, Kira Roessler and others around the band, including Mike Watt, Joe Carducci, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Colver, and Dave Markey.”<br />
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“Gallucci punches out the first ever episode of the <a href="http://www.diepunkdeath.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">diepunkdeath radio show</a>, and it's a big one! A documentary on 'The Man In The Van with The Bass in His Hand' Mr Mike Watt! We've mostly focused on his recorded efforts - You're gonna hear the cream from our 3+hr conversation with Watt and music from his awesome solo albums, Minutemen, Stooges, Banyan, Firehouse, Dos, Unknown Instructors and the million other projects you've never got around to listening to...... Here lies the ultimate dig deep into the mind of the thunderbroom sailor....... Get it!"<br />
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<a href="http://www.mediafire.com/?7odtdkzab776z14" target="_blank">Download the MP3 here!</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.trust-zine.de/trust-156-octobernovember-out-now/" target="_blank">"Trust fanzine # 156"</a> (Oct./Nov. 2012) has an interview with Grant Hart. <br />
<br />
“Hallo,<br />
die <i>Trust</i>-Ausgabe 1 (eins) von 1986 gibt es jetzt als gratis <a href="http://www.trust-zine.de/" target="_blank">"pdf-download"</a>.<br />
<br />
<i>Trust # 1</i> free download at our webpage, spread the word.<br />
Trust book II, # 11-20 is in the works.”<br />
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Brooke Allen in <b>NEW CRITERION</b>, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Strindberg-s-inferno-7448" target="_blank">"Strindberg’s Inferno"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Under the tutelage of Edvard Munch, another denizen of <i>Zum Schwarzen Ferkel</i>, Strindberg refined his painting skills. He had already exhibited his paintings in Sweden, where one critic had complained that they looked like dirty bed-sheets hung up to dry, but in Berlin he achieved a renommé as a painter that he retains to this day. (Pri-deaux has included several fine reproductions of his work in this volume.) Another new friend of the 1890s was Paul Gauguin, whom Strindberg met in Paris when the painter was between Tahitian voyages. “Gauguin played his mandolin and Strindberg played his guitar and they planned a South Seas musical entertainment which sadly came to naught,” Prideaux tells us. In May 1893 Strindberg married Frieda Uhl, a twenty-year-old Austrian girl he had known for three months and who was already widely renowned, Prideaux says, as “a man-eater who never passed up a meal.” Things began badly and got worse. On their wedding night Strindberg tried to strangle Frieda in his sleep; later that night she heard him say, also in his sleep, “She would not believe I could get such a young girl!” After a few weeks of marriage they went to England for a visit; there they began to quarrel violently. “As they walked along the banks of the Thames he harbored violent fantasies of pushing her into the river or of the rough dockers ravishing her.” By October Frieda was pregnant, and wanted an abortion and a divorce. He pleaded for reconciliation. The child was born (a girl), but each partner wanted out of the marriage, which was dissolved in 1895. Frieda, who specialized in the pursuit of famous men (Augustus John described her as “the walking hell-bitch of the western world”), eventually settled in London, opening a nightclub off Piccadilly. After his split from Frieda, Strindberg moved to Paris to devote himself to alchemy.” </blockquote>
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Harry Eyres in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ef9b6884-06f7-11e2-92b5-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Pussy Riot, punk and holy fools"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Anyone who bothers to read the women’s closing statements to the court – and they are well worth reading – will find that they are peppered with references to the New Testament. Their argument is rather that the official version of religion headed up by the current Orthodox hierarchy, in league with Putin, is a pseudo-religion, just as Putin’s regime is a pseudo-democracy. The members of Pussy Riot are appealing to a democratic, anarchic strain within Orthodoxy exemplified by the figure of the holy fool (<i>yurodivy</i> in Russian). The connection between punk antics and holy foolery is made explicitly by the youngest of the women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, but doesn’t seem to have been picked up by many commentators. The holy fool, or fool for Christ, is a key figure not just in Orthodox religion but in Russian culture. Holy fools are disruptive; they go around half-naked, act as Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to the poor; and, as Sergey Ivanov writes in <i>Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond</i> (2006), they “provoke outrage by [their] deliberate unruliness”. Perhaps the most famous and remarkable was Basil the Blessed (after whom Moscow’s most anarchic cathedral is named), who was born a serf and gained renown as a holy fool in the time of Ivan the Terrible. He rebuked the tyrant for not paying attention in church and for his cruel persecution of the innocent; Ivan rewarded him not by decapitating him or roasting him on a spit but by acting as pall-bearer at his funeral.”</blockquote>
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Andy Morgan in <b>GUARDIAN</b>, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/23/mali-militants-declare-war-music" target="_blank">"Mali: no rhythm or reason as militants declare war on music"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The pickup halted in Kidal, the far-flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy award-winning band Tinariwen. Seven AK47-toting militiamen got out and marched to the family home of a local musician. He wasn't home, but the message delivered to his sister was chilling: ‘If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we'll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.’ The gang then removed guitars, amplifiers, speakers, microphones and a drum kit from the house, doused them with petrol, and set them ablaze. In northern Mali, religious war has been declared on music. When a rabble of different Islamist groups took control of the region in April there were fears that its rich culture would suffer. But no one imagined that music would almost cease to exist – not in Mali, a country that has become internationally renowned for its sound.” </blockquote>
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Peter Thonemann in TLS on Thomas Heffernan's book,<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/" target="_blank">"The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, and Jan Bremmer & Marco Formisano’s book, Perpetua’s Passions"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A few days earlier, in the forum at Carthage, Perpetua and her friends had been put on trial before the Roman governor Hilarianus. All had refused to offer sacrifice to the reigning emperor, Septimius Severus; choosing to profess and call themselves Christians, they sentenced themselves to death. <i>The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity</i> is a short Latin account of their arrest, trial, imprisonment and eventual martyrdom. The anonymous author of the Passion – apparently a North African clergyman, with a rather unChristian taste for the Grand Guignol – predicted that these novel ‘examples of faith’ (<i>exempla fidel</i>) ‘will themselves one day be ancient, and will prove indispensable (necessaria) for future generations’, He has been proved right. In recent years, the Passion has probably excited more critical attention than any other single piece of early Christian writing.” </blockquote>
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Anthony O’Mahony in <b>TLS</b> on David Wilmshurst’s book, <a href="http://www.tlsarchive.com/tlsp/" target="_blank">"The Martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The Church of the East – sometimes also known as the Assyrian Church – is one of the most distinctive bodies in the Christian world. Long described inaccurately as ‘Nestorian’ – a reflection of its distinctively expressed teaching on the incarnation – the Church developed in isolation from most others, both Eastern and Western, for many centuries. Though originating in the Middle East, the Church displayed extraordinary energy, expanding well into the heartlands of Asia. Tellingly, it never became a state religion. At some point between the third and the thirteenth centuries, it was found between the Mediterranean and the Pacific, in Palestine and Cyprus, in Armenia, but also on the Malabar coast of India, modern-day Sri Lanka, the islands of Borneo, Sumatra and Java, the Moluccas, and Malaysia. Marked very early on by a distinct capacity to adapt to the different cultural environments, civilizations and peoples it encountered – Persian, Uighur, Turkish, Mongol, Chinese and Sogdian – it is often perceived by historians today as a model for interfaith relations.” </blockquote>
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Theo Hobson in <b>TLS </b> on Francis Spufford’s book, <a href="http://www.tlsarchive.com/tlsp/" target="_blank">"Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense."</a><br />
<blockquote>
“Effective defenders of Christianity must sound like ordinary citizens. They must be fluent in the skeptical, irreverent vernacular of mainstream liberal culture. Is this so hard? Yes. For they must also convey the awkward seriousness and strangeness of faith, its otherness. They must also show that belief has changed the way their minds work. The vast majority of Christian writers fall at the first step of this high-wire act. Within two pages they sound petulant at being misunderstood, or defiantly pious, or philosophically expert, or excessively concerned with some obscure turf war, or just plain bland. It is therefore surprising to see someone striding straight out on the high wire, as if it’s easy.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-inbZ790nCpg/UI74HLwgRTI/AAAAAAAAAOs/7hqxgunzDDU/s313/ShortNightsoftheShadowCatcher.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Wayne Curtis in <b>WSJ</b> on Timothy Egan’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443635404578038313305449342.html" target="_blank">"Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Curtis needed a benefactor. And for that he turned to one of the wealthiest men on the planet, J.P. Morgan, because, well, why not? By calling in favors with his well-connected friends, he obtained a rare personal audience with the banker in 1906. It was an encounter perhaps more alarming and fraught than with any of the other tribal chiefs he met, and it makes for one of the most vivid scenes in Mr. Egan's account. ‘Curtis had barely spoken his first words when Morgan interrupted him with a dismissive wave of his hand. 'Mr. Curtis, there are many demands on me for financial assistance.'’ Many suitors would have folded under Morgan's withering gaze and headed for the door, but as Mr. Egan writes, ‘instead of turning to leave, Curtis sat in place and went on the offensive,’ opening his portfolio and showing what he had amassed so far. In the end, Morgan—a passionate bibliophile who was then building the neoclassical Morgan Library and filling it with treasures—signed on, agreeing to pony up $75,000. Curtis assured him that the project would be complete within five years. In the end, it took 24, and the final cost to Morgan was $2.5 million. Curtis was an almost heroically bad businessman. He never thought to factor in a salary for himself when budgeting and threw himself so wholeheartedly into his documentary work that he neglected his thriving portrait business. In 1910, he tried to reduce his debts by staging a touring ‘picture opera.’ This was a sort of early precursor to a TED talk, with hand-colored magic-lantern photos in lieu of a PowerPoint. Curtis, accompanied by an orchestra, narrated the unfolding scenes. The reviews were ecstatic. He played sold-out shows in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities. After paying the musicians and covering his other expenses, Curtis lost between $300 and $500 per performance.” </blockquote>
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John McDermott in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/65067178#axzz2ASO4jZtN" target="_blank">"Bloody history and bleak future weigh heavily on the Sioux"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Alcoholism is the primary cause of early death. Liquor sales are illegal on the reservation. However, Whiteclay, a Nebraska town of 40 people two miles south of Pine Ridge, sells 5m beer cans a year, the vast majority drunk by the Oglala Sioux. ‘Every day I pray for an end to the drinking,’ says Catherine Looking Elk, a 75-year-old grandmother of 24 and an English teacher. ‘Soon there won't be any more elders.’” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-KBZeGIsmuYY/UI739tEpJNI/AAAAAAAAAN0/gDSzPiGwnFQ/s285/Camille%2520Paglia-Glittering-Images.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Gary Rosen in <b>WSJ</b> on Camille Paglia’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578058504002593338.html" target="_blank">"Glittering Images"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the book's introduction, Ms. Paglia observes that the challenge for anyone wanting to revive the fortunes of the visual arts in America is not just our lack of education; it is also our lack of focus and attention. The videogames and wide-screen spectacles that occupy so much of our leisure time don't exactly train us for the steady gaze of art appreciation. As she writes, ‘the eye is assaulted, coerced, densensitized.’ It is a surprise, then, to reach the final chapter of ‘<i>Glittering Images</i>’ to find Ms. Paglia asking, ‘Who is the greatest artist of our time?’ and answering: George Lucas. The particular object of her admiration is the climactic scene of ‘<i>Revenge of the Sith</i>’ (2005), in which the Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi and the young Anakin Skywalker (soon to be transformed into Darth Vader) fight an extended duel with lightsabers as they negotiate a menacing landscape of lava flows and falls. ‘Fire provides a sublime elemental poetry here,’ Ms. Paglia writes. The scene, for her, is a high-tech reimagining of Dante's ‘<i>Inferno</i>.’ You don't have to be a snooty killjoy to wonder at the hyperbole in this comparison. Ms. Paglia has always extolled the movies—they are, for her, the defining medium of modern paganism—but she has usually favored classic Hollywood fare. In the work of Mr. Lucas and his team, there is no denying the occasional striking image, but what dominates the eye is kinetic chaos. That much should be obvious to a critic determined to teach the redemptive possibilities of patient, informed observation.” </blockquote>
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Camille Paglia in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444223104578034480670026450.html" target="_blank">"How Capitalism Can Save Art"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned. The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today's college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship. Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair. That is certainly true of my birthplace, the once-bustling upstate town of Endicott, N.Y., to which my family immigrated to work in the now-vanished shoe factories. Manual labor was both a norm and an ideal in that era, when tools, machinery and industrial supplies dominated daily life. For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs. Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design.” </blockquote>
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Amy Wallace in <b>NYT</b> on William Baumol’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/cost-disease-offers-a-case-for-health-care-calm.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" target="_blank">"The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Baumol and a Princeton colleague coined the term ‘cost disease’ in the early 1960s. Put simply, it refers to the concept that the costs of health care, education, the live performing arts and several other ‘personal services’ depend largely on human evaluative skills — a ‘handicraft element’ that is not easily replaced by machines. These costs consistently rise at a rate much greater than that of inflation because the quantity of labor required to produce these services is hard to reduce, while costs in other areas of the economy can be brought down via technology or other factors What that means, writes Mr. Baumol, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and a professor emeritus at Princeton, sounds pretty frightening: ‘If health care costs continue to increase by the rate they have averaged in the recent past, they will rise from 15 percent of the average person’s total income in 2005 to 62 percent by 2105.’ In other words, our great-grandchildren will have less than 40 cents of every dollar to spend on everything besides their health.” </blockquote>
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Katherine Hobson in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204425904578072600080557958.html" target="_blank">"Treat Cheerleaders as Athletes, Pediatrics Academy Advises"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In a report published online Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that cheerleading should be designated a sport at the high school and collegiate levels ‘so that it is subject to rules and regulations set forth by sports governing bodies,’ such as the NCAA. Sports must petition to be recognized by the NCAA, and the criteria for inclusion, among other things, state that there must be an element of competition. Two groups emphasizing tumbling and stunts have asked for cheerleading recognized as an emerging sport. An NCAA spokeswoman says the petitions will be reviewed for three years. Sideline cheerleaders wouldn't be included. Cheerleading has a lower overall injury rate than women's sports like gymnastics, soccer and basketball. But the rate of catastrophic injury, causing death or permanent disability, is comparatively high, according to previously published data cited in the pediatrics academy report.” </blockquote>
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Alan Schwarz in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/health/attention-disorder-or-not-children-prescribed-pills-to-help-in-school.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools. “I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. It is not yet clear whether Dr. Anderson is representative of a widening trend. But some experts note that as wealthy students abuse stimulants to raise already-good grades in colleges and high schools, the medications are being used on low-income elementary school children with faltering grades and parents eager to see them succeed.” </blockquote>
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Freeman Dyson in <b>NY REVIEW OF BOOKS </b>on Jim Holt’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/what-can-you-really-know/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: ‘I get stupider and stupider every day.’ Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the <i>Tractatus</i>, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, ‘Which newspaper do you represent?’ I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question. Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room.” </blockquote>
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Robert Ito in <b>PACIFIC STANDARD</b> <a href="http://www.psmag.com/magazine/" target="_blank">"The Love Bot"</a><br />
<blockquote>
“Robots are used extensively in Japan to help take care of older people, which concerns Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. ‘The elderly, at the end of their lives, deserve to work out the meaning of their lives with someone who understands what it means to be born, to have parents, to consider the question of children, to fear death, ‘says Turkle. ‘That someone has to be a person. That doesn’t mean that robots can’t help with household chores. But as companions, I think it is the wrong choice.’ Then again, assistive robots for the elderly are a hot topic precisely because, as populations age, there are fewer human caregivers to go around.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-aMyp07LYhuk/UI74A8MKr0I/AAAAAAAAAOM/psJ3JNvHR8s/s288/LiteraryReview.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Lewis Wolpert in <b>LITERARY REVIEW</b> on Frances Ashcroft's book, <a href="http://www.exacteditions.com/read/literary-review/july-2012-31757/4/2" target="_blank">"The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“One of her major achievements came as a breakthrough late at night some twenty-four years ago, when she discovered a channel in the membrane of a beta cell of the pancreas that regulates its electrical activity and causes insulin secretion. Her surprising discovery led to a treatment with pills for those rare cases of babies born with diabetes. It also inspired in her a fascination with the electrical activity of cells. Channels in the membranes of our cells, through which tiny ions move, dominate our lives. About one-third of all our energy from the food we eat is used by our cells to pump out sodium. This is necessary to prevent water from entering cells by osmosis and making them swell and burst. This feature must have been present in the first cells that evolved, though plants do not need a sodium pump as their thick cell walls resist osmotic pressure. The pump, a protein in the membrane, regularly transports three sodium ions to the outside of the cell and two potassium ions to the inside. The difference in the concentration of sodium within and without the cell results in an electrical difference across the membrane.” </blockquote>
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Scott Gottlieb in <b>WSJ</b> on George Church & Ed Regis’ book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444180004578015171229004796.html" target="_blank">"Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions. Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation. The first such genome was made in 2000 in an experiment where scientists synthesized their own version of the hepatitis C virus so that they could alter it and discover a way to disable the infection. Today it is possible to read gene sequences into computers, where we can alter them and then print a modified gene into living cells. In ‘<i>Regenesis</i>,’ a book exploring the science of synthetic biology, George Church and Ed Regis imagine a world where micro-organisms are capable of producing clean petroleum or detecting arsenic in drinking water, where people sport genetic modifications that render their bodies impervious to the flu, or where a synthetic organism can be programmed to invade and destroy cancer cells.” </blockquote>
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Pierre Manent in <b>FIRST THINGS</b>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/09/human-unity-real-and-imagined" target="_blank">"Human Unity Real and Imagined"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Every epoch has its secular religion, a perverse imitation of Christianity that takes part of the Christian proposition and diverts it toward this world. It was not so long ago that communism transformed charity for the poor into hatred for capitalist society and ultimately for every society that recognizes the rights of the human person. Today, something like a ‘religion of humanity’ has taken hold of supposedly enlightened opinion and increasingly guides the judgments and actions, private or public, of people in the West, especially in Europe. This is not simply a passing fashion; it is a large-scale project for governing the world through international rules and institutions, and especially the organization of commerce, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, are henceforth only regions of a world en route to globalization, that is, unification.” </blockquote>
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Pierre Manent in <b>CITY JOURNAL,</b> <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_3_modernity.html" target="_blank">"City, Empire, Church, Nation"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The political landscape has been leveled. The webs of feelings, opinions, and language that once made up political convictions have unraveled. It is no longer possible to gain political ground by taking a position. This is why all political actors tend to use all political languages indiscriminately. Political speech has become increasingly removed from any essential relation to a possible action. The notion of a political program, reduced to that of “promises,” has been discredited. The explicit or implicit conviction that one has no choice has become widespread: what will be done will be determined by circumstances beyond our control. Political speech no longer aims to prepare a possible action but tries simply to cover conscientiously the range of political speech. Everyone, or almost everyone, admits that the final meeting between action and speech will be no more than a meeting of independent causal chains. The divorce between action and speech helps explain the new role of political correctness. Because speech is no longer tied to a possible and plausible action against which we might measure it, many take speech as seriously as if it were itself an action and consider speech they do not like equivalent to the worst possible action.” </blockquote>
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Gertrude Himmelfarb in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578006680365283160.html" target="_blank">"The Once-Born and the Twice-Born"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Alain de Botton does not attempt to refute religion; he simply stipulates that it is not true. It is, however, ‘sporadically useful, interesting, and consoling’ and can, therefore, be enlisted in the service of atheists. For people trying to cope with the pains and difficulties of life, religions are ‘repositories’ of goods that can assuage their ills. By appropriating those goods—‘music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts’ and the like—and introducing them into secular society, Mr. de Botton proposes to rescue that which is ‘beautiful, touching and wise’ from religions that are no longer true and put it to use by an atheism that is indubitably true but sadly deficient in such consolations. To anyone even casually familiar with the perennial debate between religion and science, both the New Atheism of the four horsemen and the ‘Neo-Atheism,’ as it might be dubbed, of Mr. de Botton seem peculiarly old-fashioned—retro, as we now say. And it is old-fashioned enough to recall a participant in that debate more than a century ago. The Harvard philosopher William James did not identify himself as an atheist. On the contrary, it was as a believer that he defended religion—but a believer of a special sort and a religion that the orthodox, then and now, would not recognize as such. If Mr. de Botton is a Neo-Atheist, James qualifies as a Neo-Believer. His 1896 lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ was prompted, James said, by the ‘freethinking and indifference’ he encountered at Harvard. He warned his audience that he would not offer either logical or theological arguments supporting the existence of God or any particular religion, ritual or dogma. His ‘justification of faith’ derived instead entirely from the ‘will’ or the ‘right’ to believe, to ‘adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, despite the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’ James knew this would not go down well with the students and philosophers in the eminent universities. To the obvious objection that the denial of the ‘logical intellect’ is to give up any claim to truth, he replied that it is in defense of truth that faith is justified—the truth provided not by logic or science but by experience and reflection. Moral questions, he pointed out, cannot be resolved with the certitude that comes from objective logic or science. And so with religious faith….”</blockquote>
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Laurie Goodstein in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/us/study-finds-that-percentage-of-protestant-americans-is-declining.html" target="_blank">"Study Finds That the Number of Protestant Americans Is in Steep Decline"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and ‘born again’ Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants, but not among black or minority Protestants, the study found, based on surveys conducted during the summer. When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular.’ This is a significant jump from only five years ago, when adults who claimed ‘no religion’ made up about 15 percent of the population. It is a seismic shift from 40 years ago, when about 7 percent of American adults said they had no religious affiliation. Now, more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated. These ‘younger millennials’ are replacing older generations who remained far more involved with religion throughout their lives. ‘We really haven’t seen anything like this before,’ said Gregory A. Smith, a senior researcher with the Pew Forum. ‘Even when the baby boomers came of age in the early ’70s, they were half as likely to be unaffiliated as compared with young people today.’ The ‘Nones,’ as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping. The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants has replaced the many Catholics who were raised in the church and left in the last five years, Mr. Smith said.” </blockquote>
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Kay Hymowitz in <b>WSJ </b>on Robert Self’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358804578017242554945624.html" target="_blank">"All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For many lower-middle-class women serving coffee to bosses and stocking grocery shelves, full-time motherhood wasn't the concentration camp described by feminists. They found a voice in antifeminists like Phyllis Schlafly, who almost single-handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s. Catholic women and men organized groups to oppose abortion and were soon joined by evangelicals. Other grass-root groups emerged, some in support of Vietnam veterans and others celebrating what came to be known as family values. What was taking shape was the profound class and cultural divide that vexes our politics to this day. In a vivid chapter, Mr. Self describes the 1972 Democratic National Convention, a pivotal moment in the reshaping of political alignments. AFL-CIO President George Meany railed that, in the party platform, ‘there were no steelworkers, no pipe fitters, and worst of all, no plumbers.’ Instead there were feminists, radical blacks, Chicanos and gays—co-conspirators in a left-wing attack on breadwinner liberalism. In reaction, a constellation of religious, white, ‘ethnic’ and anti-feminist objectors joined forces to create ‘breadwinner conservatism.’ By 1980, with the help of a vigorous evangelical revival, these one-time Democrats helped elect Ronald Reagan president. Mr. Self's history delves into the crosscurrents roiling this realignment. Black activists didn't like white, middle-class feminists hitching their cause to the Civil Rights Act. Black nationalists and Catholic Mexican liberationists eyed abortion as an attempt to curtail black and brown fertility. Anti-porn feminists echoed pro-decency conservatives. Eventually the anti-breadwinner groups made an uneasy truce within the Democratic Party.” </blockquote>
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Jacob Soll in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b> on Jane Gleeson-White’s book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/double-entry-venice-modern-finance-accounting-jane-gleeson-white" target="_blank">"Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In his <i>Oration on the Dignity of Man</i>, in 1486, Pico della Mirandola noted that Plato admonished ‘not to confuse this divine arithmetic with the arithmetic of the merchants.’ And for at least three hundred years, Europe listened to Pico, not Pacioli. Mathematics, Gleeson-White explains, became a pillar of university learning, but she omits to mention that accounting was excluded from of the official curriculum of universities and the Jesuit and Erasmian traditions of learning. Well-educated elites widely stigmatized accounting as a ‘merchant art,’ and this stigma arguably continues to this day. It was not until the eighteenth century that accounting became central to English merchant life—and thus widely accepted as the means to conduct business. In the three hundred years separating the merchant Renaissance of the Italian republics and the early English industrial revolution, double-entry failed to establish itself as a systematic tool for financial management.” </blockquote>
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Charles Duhigg & Steve Lohr in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"The Patent, Used as a Sword"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings. Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly. However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations.” </blockquote>
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Alan Feuer in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/liberty-dollar-creator-awaits-his-fate-behind-bars.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Prison May Be the Next Stop on a Gold Currency Journey"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Described by some as ‘the Rosa Parks of the constitutional currency movement,’ Mr. von NotHaus managed over the last decade to get more than 60 million real dollars’ worth of his precious metal-backed currency into circulation across the country — so much, and with such deep penetration, that the prosecutor overseeing his case accused him of ‘domestic terrorism’ for using them to undermine the government. Of course, if you ask him what caused him to be living here in exile, waiting with the rabbits for his sentence to be rendered, he will give a different account of what occurred. ‘This is the United States government,’ he said in an interview last week. ‘It’s got all the guns, all the surveillance, all the tanks, it has nuclear weapons, and it’s worried about some ex-surfer guy making his own money? Give me a break!’ The story of Mr. von NotHaus, from his beginnings as a hippie, can sound at times as if Ken Kesey had been paid in marijuana to write a script on spec for Representative Ron Paul. At 68, Mr. von NotHaus faces more than 20 years in prison for his crimes, and this decisive chapter of his tale has come, coincidentally, at a moment when his obsessions of 40 years — monetary policy, dollar depreciation and the Federal Reserve Bank — have finally found their place in the national discourse.” </blockquote>
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Dan McCrum in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/64751199#axzz2ASO4jZtN" target="_blank">"Muni bond issuers facing end to their smooth ride"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Changes are due in the autumn, but the main effect will be to remove the rose tint of official estimates: under Moody's new approach, the funding hole as of 2010 would treble, from $766bn to $2.2tn. The reason is that the rating agency proposes to assess liabilities for public sector schemes in a similar way to those in the private sector, rather than relying on reporting by public sector pension funds governed by a different set of standards to those for corporate pension plans. Public pensions have huge freedom to choose their own assumptions and approach, and the two most important concepts, when it comes to working out the gap between the size of assets in a fund and the future cost of its promises, are the discount rate used and an approach known as ‘smoothing’.” </blockquote>
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Peter Culp & Robert Glennon in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444517304577653432417208116.html" target="_blank">"Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China, Bale by Bale"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For example, if a California farmer sought to sell excess water to water-starved Las Vegas, he or she would encounter a Byzantine array of laws that make interstate transfers on the Colorado River all but impossible. Yet U.S. trade policy fosters the international export of those same water resources embedded in high-water-use crops such as alfalfa. The export of alfalfa to China reflects a larger trend in U.S. international trade. America increasingly exports raw materials that China converts into valuable products: cotton into shirts, hides into shoes, logs into furniture. It doesn't have to be this way.” </blockquote>
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David Brooks in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/opinion/brooks-a-sad-green-story.html" target="_blank">"A Sad Green Story"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Al Gore released his movie ‘<i>An Inconvenient Truth</i>’ in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.<br />
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program. Obama’s stimulus package set aside $90 billion for renewable energy loans and grants, but the number of actual jobs created has been small. Articles began to appear in the press of green technology grants that were costing $2 million per job created. The program began to look like a wasteful disappointment.” </blockquote>
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Carol Leonnig in <b>WASHINGTON POST</b>, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/al-gore-has-thrived-as-green-tech-investor/2012/10/10/1dfaa5b0-0b11-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html" target="_blank">"Al Gore has thrived as green-tech investor"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Just before leaving public office in 2001, Gore reported assets of less than $2 million; today, his wealth is estimated at $100 million. Gore charted this path by returning to his longtime passion — clean energy. He benefited from a powerful resume and a constellation of friends in the investment world and in Washington. And four years ago, his portfolio aligned smoothly with the agenda of an incoming administration and its plan to spend billions in stimulus funds on alternative energy. The recovering politician was pushing the right cause at the perfect time. Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama’s historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money.”</blockquote>
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James Taranto at <i>wsj.com</i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444734804578062683896716400.html" target="_blank">"The Envious Affluent"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“You hear a lot about ‘income inequality,’ but most people don't particularly care. Last year's effort to begin a mass movement around the question was a whimpering failure, yet it got hyped to the sky at first because it played into powerful class resentments--on the part not of poor or low-income working people but of academics and journalists, which is to say intellectuals.<br />
Now, academics and journalists are not exactly downtrodden. Although life as an adjunct or a freelancer can be a challenge, a professor with tenure or a journalist at a major media outlet makes a good enough living to make him affluent. Affluent people with elitist pretensions often have a strong distaste for the wealthy, especially those, like Romney, who earned their riches by being successful in business. If you want to find bitterness against ‘the 1%,’ don't look at ‘the 99%.’ Instead, focus in on the 98th percentile.” </blockquote>
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Scott Winship at <i>brookings.edu</i>, <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/10/18-inequality-winship" target="_blank">"Has Rising Inequality Actually Hurt Anyone? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The poor and middle class are doing far better today than their counterparts in Pittsburgh during the Gilded Age, evoked by Freeland, and far better than their counterparts in most of the rest of the world. That may seem like an irrelevant comparison, but it is not. The reason that offshoring, for example, is profitable for companies despite all the costs incurred in employing workers thousands of miles away is that those workers are so much more productive relative to the pay they demand. This is not an indictment of the work ethic of the American worker — our standards have quite reasonably risen as we have become wealthier. We are unwilling to sleep in company barracks, work on dangerous assembly lines unceasingly for 14-hour days, labor for Third World wages, accept environmental degradation, forgo weekends and holidays, or send our children into the workforce. We don’t have to — we can not only maintain but continue to improve our nearly peerless living standards with the high pay and benefits, strong worker and environmental protections, generous tax-payer-funded safety nets, tame work hours, and long retirements that we have.” </blockquote>
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Gary MacDougal in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/opinion/americas-ineffective-antipoverty-effort.html" target="_blank">"The Wrong Way to Help the Poor"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“But for now, let’s use that $1 trillion figure to ask a broader question: Are we spending this money in truly the best way to help the poor? Consider a thought experiment: Divide $1 trillion by 46 million and you get around $21,700 for each American in poverty, or nearly $87,000 for a family of four. That’s almost four times the $23,050 per year federal poverty line for that family. It’s intriguing to think about converting all of this to a cash payment that would instantly lift everyone in poverty up to the middle class. For a variety of reasons, of course, that’s not possible, either logistically or politically. But a middle path might resemble what Mr. Ryan has proposed for Medicaid — converting the behemoth program to block grants for each state, an idea that in some ways parallels the successful welfare reform plan of the Clinton era.” </blockquote>
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Yoram Hazony in <b>FIRST THINGS</b>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/09/the-biblical-case-for-limited-government" target="_blank">"The Biblical Case for Limited Government"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In universities, professors of philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history consistently pass over the ideas of Scripture as a subject worth researching and teaching to their students, since they see their work as a study of reason, not revelation. Yet the central literary structure of the Hebrew Bible – the great historical narrative extending from the creation of the world in Genesis to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah at the close of the Book of Kings – can be read not only as a work of reason but as a masterpiece in the history of political philosophy.” </blockquote>
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<br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-B0-5Ibd_hV8/UI73-V9Y7kI/AAAAAAAAAN8/_P1NiQbV4cw/s296/CityJournal.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Victor Hanson in <b>CITY JOURNAL</b>, <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_3_diarist-selma-ca-vandalism.html" target="_blank">"Life with the Vandals"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“As I write, my local community is confronting a peculiar epidemic. Bronze dedicatory plaques are being stolen from our ancestral institutions—churches, halls, clubs, parks—many of which my grandparents and great-grandparents helped establish. No records exist for most of the ancient dedicatory names, so all prior benefaction has been erased from our collective memory—and all for the recycled meltdown that supplies only a day or two’s drugs for the thieves. For central California’s parasitic criminal class, melting down what the departed bequeathed us is a growth industry. It reminds me of the fifteenth-century Turkish occupation of Greece, when scavengers pried the lead seals off the building clamps of classical temples, destroying in decades what nature had not damaged in centuries. The world outside my window reminds me a lot of what my grandfather told me about the wilderness that his pioneer grandmother discovered on arriving here in the 1870s. We’ve come full circle, tearing up what was handed down.” </blockquote>
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Joshua Hawley in <b>NATIONAL AFFAIRS</b>, <a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-most-dangerous-branch" target="_blank">"The Most Dangerous Branch"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In other words, the American people should be the Constitution's chief interpreters, filling out its principles and clearing up its ambiguities by their choices at the ballot box. This form of popular constitutionalism depends on a distinction between constitutional politics on one hand and constitutional law on the other. But here we confront a historical irony: The Supreme Court the framers designed holds the unique capacity to collapse that difference by treating questions of constitutional politics as law instead. When it does, it places political questions beyond the reach of the people and closes the public off from constitutional interpretation. Through the repeated exercise of this authority over the past 50 years, the Court has steadily drained political power away from the people and toward itself. And even as it has done so, more and more Americans seem eager to resolve questions of constitutional politics through legal channels. They either do not understand, or do not care, that this practice diminishes citizens as agents of self-rule and badly undermines our system of government.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-AN5o27Y7puw/UI74EfxUYpI/AAAAAAAAAOc/M9O3pzxRwyE/s276/PrairieFever.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Ben Downing in <b>NEW CRITERION</b> on Peter Pagnamenta’s book, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Of-nobs---nimrods-7465" target="_blank">"Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830-1890"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For the typical toff, however, getting to see ‘noble savages’ in their element was of secondary appeal. First and foremost, the frontier was a sportsman’s paradise. Bears and elk made tempting targets, but the real draw was the buffalo herds, which ‘were reputed to offer the supreme hunting experience,’ even though picking them off as they charged past was like shooting whales in a very large barrel. Certain ‘international Nimrods,’ as the Americans termed them, became positively crazed in their butchery, such as the aptly named Sir St. George Gore, who in 1857 brought down at least five thousand animals, from buffalo to mountain sheep to timber wolves; he even imported eighteen of his prize bloodhounds to go after antelope. According to Pagnamenta, Gore’s depredations ‘took such a toll on wildlife that protests were made on behalf of the Indians.’ It wasn’t just the immoderate bloodthirstiness of Gore and his kind that rubbed Americans the wrong way. Even more galling was their haughtiness. The West was, in Pagnamenta’s words, ‘a place where no one cared who your father was,’ and the assumed superiority of many aristocrats did not go over well.” </blockquote>
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Phil Gramm & Michael Solon in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444799904578052200695767968.html" target="_blank">"Can Government Benefits Turn an Election"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Voter behavior in the past has been based on the performance of the private economy. Markedly different today is the dramatic growth of public-sector benefits. In 1980 and 1992, only 3% of the American labor force drew disability benefits from the government. Today it is 6%. The number of workers qualifying for disability since the recession ended in 2009 has grown twice as fast as private employment. How would Presidents Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush have fared on their Election Day if 40% of the Americans who were unemployed had instead qualified for disability benefits? How would voters have reacted in 1980 or 1992 if food-stamp benefits had grown by 65% instead of an average of less than 25% during the first four years of their administrations? During the past four years, the Obama administration's aggressive promotion of the food-stamp program has increased the number of recipients by 18.5 million. Do these people feel the same level of discontent about economic conditions as the rest of the voting population?” </blockquote>
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Kaili Gray at <i>dailykos.com</i>, <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/24/1149741/-Here-s-that-story-CNN-doesn-t-want-you-to-see-about-how-ladies-vote-with-their-periods" target="_blank">"Here’s that story CNN doesn’t want you to see about how ladies vote with their periods"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Oops! Sorry. We shouldn't have run this pseudo-science story, so we'll just delete and pretend we didn't. Now stop making fun of us, Internets! Too bad CNN couldn't delete the whole Internet. Because it's still out there. So, below the fold, is the full article CNN doesn't want you to see. Sorry, CNN.<br />
<br />
‘While the campaigns eagerly pursue female voters, there’s something that may raise the chances for both presidential candidates that’s totally out of their control: women’s ovulation cycles. You read that right. New research suggests that hormones may influence female voting choices differently, depending on whether a woman is single or in a committed relationship. Please continue reading with caution. Although the study will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science, several political scientists who read the study have expressed skepticism about its conclusions.’”</blockquote>
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Mary Mitchell in <b>CST</b>, <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/15776902-418/unacceptable.html" target="_blank">"Unacceptable"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Jackson, who hasn’t represented his district since he disappeared from the public spotlight in June, is now poised to win re-election without even bothering to campaign. His wife, Ald. Sandi Jackson (7th), recently told reporters that he might not resurface until after the November election. That’s unacceptable. The congressman got a lot of sympathy when it was revealed he was suffering from a mental illness — and rightfully so. But now the Jackson camp is treating the public like a bunch of fools. There are plenty of people living with bipolar disorder. They see their doctors, take their meds and get up and go to work most days because they have to provide for themselves and their families. The tolerance for Jackson’s dereliction of duty exposes a glaring fault within the African-American community. Black voters can be loyal to a fault. That partly explains why a lot of black areas are worse off than they were 50 years ago. Major thoroughfares on the Southeast Side in Jackson’s district are overrun with vacant storefronts and boarded up properties. I drove through the old Roseland shopping district the other morning and it looked like a ghost town.” </blockquote>
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<b>CT</b>: <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-14/news/ct-edit-madigan-20121014_1_pension-debacle-house-speaker-michael-madigan-legislative-races" target="_blank">"Mr. 16 Percent"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Michael Madigan has spent 42 of his 70 years in the Illinois House, two-thirds of them as speaker. That alone attests to his ability to mastermind the election of fellow Democrats who in turn elect him leader of their chamber. But in this twilight of Madigan's career, the image he has built risks collapse. The Capitol he entered in 1971, like the state it governed, was muscular and robust. On his watch, and under his controlling management, state government and this state bear little resemblance to that relative grandeur. By measure after measure, Michael Madigan's Illinois has become one of the deadbeat states its residents once could mock. Those residents are catching on: A Tribune/WGN-TV poll finds only 16 percent of voters surveyed expressing a favorable opinion of Madigan; 35 percent have unfavorable views. The cold comfort for Madigan: 40 percent have no opinion of him. Asked about his job performance, 22 percent say they approve, 40 percent disapprove, and 38 percent have no opinion. As we begin our legislative endorsements for the election, we confront the cliche that introduces his five-word moniker — ‘powerful House Speaker Michael Madigan.’ He earned the cliche by massing clout: He crowns loyalists, crushes opponents. Publicly he focuses on preserving the Democratic majority in his chamber, yet when he shows keen interest in some agency or budget item, bureaucrats cower and administrators sweat. So singular is his devotion to dominion that we wonder if he thinks of much else. No doubt he's a proud father, a doting grandfather. But in the public space he monopolizes, he punishes this broke and broken state.” </blockquote>
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Simon Denyer in <b>WASHINGTON POST</b>, <a href="http://thewashingtonpostnie.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx" target="_blank">"In India, power corrupts"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“At its worst, India’s power sector is the perfect example of populism and patronage trumping sound economics, analysts say. Power symbolizes the way Indian democracy often fails to meet the most basic aspirations of voters for transparent government, jobs, empowerment and opportunity. ‘Power is often an important source of the struggle between the politics of patronage and the politics of aspiration,’ said Ashish Khanna, senior energy specialist at the World Bank in India. ‘The question is whether a credible promise of improved power delivery can be turned into a new narrative that meets those aspirations and reaps political dividends. India’s state electricity companies have run up losses of $46 billion, or 2 percent of national income, largely financed by lending from public-sector banks, straining the country’s financial system. As a result, the companies have little money to invest in equipment or pay salaries, or even to pay for the electricity they are receiving from newly built private-sector power plants.” </blockquote>
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Maitreya Samantaray at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/maitreya-buddha-samantaray/pakistan%E2%80%99s-disappearing-hindus" target="_blank">"Pakistan’s disappearing Hindus"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Over 50 Hindu families migrate to India every month. According to Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, the founder of the Karachi-based Pakistan Hindu Council, this is due to the failure of the Pakistani government to find a solution to the acute sense of discontentment among Hindus arising, in part, from increasing incidence of forced conversion, particularly in Sindh province in southern Pakistan. Recently, Pakistani parliamentarians blamed the Taliban for the plight of Hindus and attributed the development to an international conspiracy to defame Pakistan. In fact, many in the Pakistani political establishment consider the problem of Hindu migration as nothing more than individual cases of disgruntlement, rather than a worrying trend. There are over seven million Hindus in Pakistan and approximately 94 per cent of them are in Sindh province (especially in Hyderabad, Karachi, Tharparkat, Mithi, Mirpur Khas, Shikarpur and Sukkur). Soon after partition, Hindus constituted over 15 per cent of Pakistan's population but now make up less than two per cent.” </blockquote>
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Brahma Chellaney at<i> japantimes.co.jp</i>, <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20121019bc.html" target="_blank">"Lessons of the Sino-Indian war"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It was only after China's annexation of Tibet in 1950-1951 that Han Chinese troops appeared for the first time on India's Himalayan frontiers. Just over a decade later, China surprised India's ill-prepared army by launching a multi-pronged attack across the Himalayas on Oct. 20, 1962. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai publicly said that the war was intended ‘to teach India a lesson.’ Taking an enemy by surprise confers a significant tactical advantage in war, and the invasion inflicted an immense psychological and political shock on India that greatly magnified the initial military advances that China achieved. China's blitzkrieg created a defeatist mind-set in India, forcing its army to retreat to defensive positions. India, fearing unknown consequences, even shied away from employing its air power, although the Chinese military lacked effective air cover for its advancing forces. After more than a month of fighting, China declared a unilateral cease-fire from a position of strength, having seized Indian territory. The Chinese simultaneously announced that they would begin withdrawing their forces on Dec. 1, 1962, vacating their territorial gains in the eastern sector (where the borders of India, Myanmar, Tibet and Bhutan converge) but retaining the areas seized in the western sector (in the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir). These withdrawal parameters meshed with China's prewar aims.” </blockquote>
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Simon Rabinovitch in<b> FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5efe1c4a-11dd-11e2-b9fd-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">"Huawei hullabaloo hides arrival of Chinese minnows"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It is perfectly understandable that the fireworks over Huawei should attract more public attention. But they also serve to distract from the bigger trend, the one that was occurring in Wisconsin and off the international media’s radar: through a patchwork of smaller deals, Chinese outbound investment in the US and Europe is soaring, and is often being welcomed with open arms. The boom seems to be only beginning. Chinese direct investment in the US before 2009 totalled about 30 deals a year, worth less than $500m overall. Over the past two years that has mushroomed to an annual average of 100 deals, worth about $5bn, according to Rhodium Group, an economic consultancy. In Europe, it calculates that Chinese direct investment rose from less than $1bn a year for most of the past decade to about $10bn last year. The biggest deals are coming from the whales of Chinese industry, which are typically state-owned. But the vast majority of the deals – about two out of every three – are from the minnows.” </blockquote>
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<br />
Keith Bradsher in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/business/global/glut-of-solar-panels-is-a-new-test-for-china.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Strategy of Solar Dominance Now a Threat to China"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the solar panel sector, ‘If one-third of them survive, that’s good, and two-thirds of them die, but we don’t know how that happens,’ said Li Junfeng, a longtime director general for energy and climate policy at the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning agency. Mr. Li said in an interview that he wanted banks to cut off loans to all but the strongest solar panel companies and let the rest go bankrupt. But banks — which were encouraged by Beijing to make the loans — are not eager to acknowledge that the loans are bad and take large write-offs, preferring to lend more money to allow the repayment of previous loans. Many local and provincial governments also are determined to keep their hometown favorites afloat to avoid job losses and to avoid making payments on loan guarantees, he said. Mr. Li’s worries appear to be broadly shared in Beijing. ‘For the leading companies in the sector, if they’re not careful, the whole sector will disappear,’ said Chen Huiqing, the deputy director for solar products at the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products.” </blockquote>
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Evan Osnos in <b>NEW YORKER</b>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_osnos" target="_blank">"Boss Rail"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“There are two basic views of how corruption will affect China’s future. The optimistic scenario is that it is part of the ambitious transition from Socialism to a free market, with highways and trains that inspire envy even in the developed world. In July, the U.S. Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, told a reporter, ‘The Chinese are more successful because in their country only three people make the decision. In our country, three thousand people do.’ The other view holds that the compact between the people and their leaders is fraying, that the ruling class is scrambling to get what it can in the final years of frenzied growth, and that the Party will be no more capable of reforming itself from within than the Soviets were. Last year, the central bank accidentally posted an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials have fled the country, having stolen a hundred and twenty billion dollars—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. The government has vowed that officials will forgo luxury cigarettes and shark’s-fin soup, but vigilant Chinese bloggers continue to post photographs of cadres wearing luxury watches and police departments with Maseratis and Porsches painted blue and white. Even Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, who will leave the Politburo next month, declared that corruption was ‘the biggest danger facing the ruling party’—a threat that, left unchecked, could ‘terminate the political regime.’” </blockquote>
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Patti Waldmeir in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5a20d75a-116d-11e2-9c94-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ASDyHEU0" target="_blank">"Medics at the sharp edge of patient rage"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Ms Li says trust between patient and doctor has hit such a low level that both sides start assembling material for litigation even before they know there is a problem: patients video record doctor visits and doctors cover their backs by ordering extra tests that cost patients more money, all to defend themselves in a potential lawsuit. She dates the sharp rise in attacks to new rules of evidence issued in 2002, which require hospitals and doctors to bear the burden of proving their innocence. A People’s Daily Online poll, taken soon after the attack on Dr Wang, found that a chilling two-thirds of respondents had been ‘delighted’ to hear of the attack because the victim was a medical professional.” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b> Weekend Interview: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578010552215377098.html" target="_blank">"Zhang Weiying"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Letting people know that truth, he says, ‘is what an economist or scholar should do.’ Leaders should do this too, and he talks excitedly about the late 1990s, when the Asian economic crisis spurred the party to privatize state companies, even if it left 20 million unemployed. The crisis had brought Indonesia and others to their knees, says Mr. Zhang, and China's leaders understood at the time that ‘the lesson was not to have crony capitalism’ and a bloated public sector. Back then, the intellectual tide was going in Mr. Zhang's direction. State-controlled CCTV proclaimed him ‘Economist of the Year’ in 2002, and he remembers that at Peking University ‘the whole culture was reform-oriented too.’ He was appointed assistant president of the university that year and later dean of the Guanghua School of Management, where he pushed reform. The reforms proved successful, but the reformer was crucified. The old guard in the faculty lounges revolted, while accusations impugning Mr. Zhang's loyalty and questioning his credentials swirled over the Internet. He was forced out of his Guanghua post in 2010. Much of the trouble stemmed from internal campus politics, but he also says that the broader ‘environment changed.’ China's universities are a product of a planned economy, so ‘if the whole country [was] in the good process of reform, people like me won't be treated like that.’ What happened? China's leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, in place since 2002, reversed reforms. Rising inequality was the original excuse for favoring the public sector and, one suspects, high growth soon convinced policy makers to continue on that path. The new mantra in Beijing was ‘guo jin, min tui’—the state advances, the private sector retreats.” </blockquote>
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Yan Lianke in <b>IHT</b>, <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:GJgvIO6AFB8J:ihtbd.com/ihtuser/print/old/06-10-2012/a0610x06xxxxxxxxx.pdf+Yan+Lianke+Words+to+soothe+Asian+passions&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShDumhQgX7ZHoIpuaFT1uR4CWTJo5g9Tr-k2mD-kVi5wV7djaaIx_OBOV8UyZ1kCV4XNdL9onTZLT7GEvwYWKmDjvA6oRubDkxXsGhWuNpldJG0gW7okqMefCIwGcqiMm_H0wBn&sig=AHIEtbRGMJb56a94guBgdct-f1x9g9C9dw" target="_blank">"Words to soothe Asian passions"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
Again and again, I ask myself: What turns an interminable island dispute into a fireball? Who can put out the flames? Who can make politicians sit down to sip iced tea together and engage in calm and courteous dialogue? Where are the voices of reason? I long for more rational voices, I long to hear from my fellow writers. I was deeply touched after reading translations of the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s views on the territorial issues and Haruki Murakami’s recent commentary warning of the damage caused by the outbursts of nationalism. My long admiration for these Japanese writers now extends well beyond their literary achievements…. Compared with their humanity and courage, I am ashamed of myself as a Chinese writer for my slow response.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Jane Perlez in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/world/asia/china-korea-tensions-rise-after-failed-venture.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"China-Korea Tensions Rise After Failed Venture"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Lured by cheap iron ore and low wages, the Xiyang Group, one of China’s biggest mining conglomerates, took a significant risk, building a mine in economically backward North Korea that was designed to feed China’s steel mills and provide much-needed investment to China’s impoverished ally. Now that deal is in tatters. Xiyang says that the North Korean government sabotaged its $40 million investment, allowing the company to stay just long enough to steal its knowledge, then seizing the iron ore mine and sending armed guards to evict Chinese workers. And recent sniping over the failed venture has exposed the often testy relationship between China and North Korea that, in public, remains hidden beneath vows of friendship. The business spat came into the open last month when Xiyang posted a gritty, salacious blog item describing what the company called its ‘nightmare’ in running the mine. It included details of high living by the North Korean managers when they visited China, where they were said to have demanded female escorts, expensive alcohol and cars.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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In-Soo Nam in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443624204578057550057990388.html" target="_blank">"New Attitudes on Age Rattle Korean Hierarchies"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Park Jin-su, a ministry official who handles corporate equal opportunities, said the nation is gradually moving away from adherence to age hierarchy. ‘There's been a change in corporate mind about who's the right person for the company since the age-discrimination law took effect. Many companies know it's simply not right to block young people from leapfrogging old ones for higher posts,’ he said. South Korea has already tasted success in the sporting arena by prioritizing merit over age. When Dutch soccer coach Guus Hiddink took the reins of the South Korean men's national soccer team ahead of the 2002 World Cup, he confronted an internal hierarchy so stifling that younger players felt obliged to pass the ball to older players. Mr. Hiddink promoted junior players to the first team and tossed out the deference to elders as part of a wholesale revamp of the side. The South Korean team became the first from Asia to reach the semifinal stage of the tournament. Mr. Hiddink became a national hero and management courses briefly sprang up preaching the ‘Hiddink Way’ of running organizations.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Daniel Pipes at <i>nationalreview.com</i>, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/330499/erdogan-and-assad-war-daniel-pipes#" target="_blank">"Ankara at War"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It is now clear that initially seemed like a masterstroke was in fact Erdogan’s first major misstep. His jailing of much of the Turkish military leadership on the basis of outlandish conspiracy theories has left him with a less-than-effective fighting force. Unwelcome Syrian refugees have crowded into Turkish border towns and beyond. Turks overwhelmingly oppose the war policy vis-à-vis Syria, with especially powerful opposition coming from the Alevis, a religious community making up 15 to 20 percent of Turkey’s population, distinct from Syria’s Alawis but sharing a Shiite heritage with them. Assad took revenge by reviving support for the PKK, whose escalating violence creates a major domestic problem for Erdogan. Indeed, Kurds — who missed their chance when the Middle East was carved up after World War I — may be the major winners from the current hostilities; for the first time, the outlines of a Kurdish state with Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and even Iranian components can be imagined. Damascus still has a great patron in Moscow, where the government of Vladimir Putin offers its assistance via armaments and United Nations vetoes. Plus, Assad benefits from unstinting, brutal Iranian aid, which continues despite the mullah regime’s deep economic problems. In contrast, Ankara may still belong, formally, to NATO and enjoy the theoretical privilege of its famous Article 5, which promises that a military attack on one member country will lead to ‘such action as . . . necessary, including the use of armed force,’ but NATO heavyweights show no intention of intervening in Syria.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wc6o3qS_Fj8/UI74CRj4yZI/AAAAAAAAAOU/nc8H8SgRr5U/s333/Looking-for-Transwonderland-Travels-in-Nigeria.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Howard French in <b>WSJ</b> on Noo Saro-Wiwa’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443294904578048670659257136.html" target="_blank">"Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In 1995, Saro-Wiwa was hanged at the hands of Gen. Sani Abacha, one of the harshest and most venal African dictators of recent decades. Her father's death turned Ms. Saro-Wiwa's feelings about Nigeria from aversion to a mixture of disgust and dread. She avoided the country for years, even though she made a living in part as a contributor to travel guidebooks about other countries in the region. Her need to finally come to terms with her homeland gives this book its special touches. Ms. Saro-Wiwa writes perceptively about Africa's most populous country, home to 150 million people. By some estimates, Nigeria has over 400 ethnic groups, down to tiny ones, like the Bini. Historically, though, the country's politics have been dominated by a competition between Hausa and Fulani Muslims concentrated in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in the southeast. Ms. Saro-Wiwa travels to nearly every region of the country, seeking to understand what holds them all together. The Nigeria she depicts is a place of loud, pushy and argumentative people. This attitude, a kind of massive chip on the national shoulder, is reflected in the standoffish airport welcome sign that greets people upon arrival in the country's largest city, which simply announces: ‘This is Lagos.’” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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William Wallis in <b>FT </b>on Chinua Achebe’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fdce69c8-1152-11e2-8d5f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ASDyHEU0" target="_blank">"There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Coming as it does when fault lines in Africa’s most populous nation are painfully evident, <i>There Was a Country</i> ought to be essential reading. A new, dynamic generation is bursting from the shackles of the past in what looks like the start of a renaissance for business, politics and the arts. Yet some of the same religious, ethnic and regional tensions that combined to create the conditions for the Biafran war are tearing again at the fabric of the Nigerian federation. Back then, Achebe’s prophetic fourth novel, <i>A Man of the People</i>, published weeks before the first coup in 1966, foresaw the disastrous intervention of the military in the nation’s political affairs. It was this bungled effort, led by junior officers, that eventually triggered pogroms against Igbos who were scattered around Nigeria – in part because they had proved the ethnic group most adept at seizing the opportunity provided by western education and jobs in the colonial administration. Thousands were killed and as many as a million fled back to their eastern homeland, where, after a string of failed negotiations, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, then military governor of the east, declared the secession of Biafra, triggering what has remained to this day one of Africa’s most devastating civil wars.” </blockquote>
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Adam Curtis at <i>bbc.co.uk</i>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/10/hes_behind_you.html" target="_blank">"How Colonel Gaddafi and the Western Establishment Together Created a Pantomime World"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“What remains is all the footage recording Gaddafi's forty year career as a global weirdo. But the closer you look at the footage and what lies behind it - you begin to discover an odd story that casts a rather unflattering light on many of the elites in both the British and American establishments. Because over those forty years all sorts of people from the west got mixed up with Gaddafi. Some were simply after his money and they flattered and crept to him because they wanted to be his friend. But for many others he was more useful as an enemy and they helped to turn Gaddafi into a two-dimensional cartoon-like global villain. Those involved were not just politicians, but journalists, spies from the CIA and MI6, members of Washington think tanks, academics, PR firms, philosophers of humanitarian intervention, posh left wing revolutionaries and the leaders of the IRA.” </blockquote>
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Alvaro Llosa in <b>WSJ </b>on Alvaro Uribe Velez’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444138104578030642520389774.html" target="_blank">"No Lost Causes"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Uribe's feat was punctuated by daring moments, including the rescue of former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and several hostages in 2008, when an intelligence mission broke the enemy's code of communications and duped FARC into believing that the rescuers were humanitarian workers. What is most interesting about ‘No Lost Causes,’ Mr. Uribe's engaging memoir, isn't so much the narrative of his achievements but the insight he offers into his own character and the life experiences that created it. (Mr. Uribe has recently been nominated to be a director of News Corp., the owner of The Wall Street Journal.) The simplistic interpretation is that Mr. Uribe sought to avenge the murder of his father, killed by FARC in 1983. But his suffering wasn't so strikingly dissimilar to that of tens of thousands of other Colombians whose lives had been altered by two decades of civil war (in the 1940s and 1950s) and decades of drug-related violence and Marxist terrorism. Just after his father's murder Mr. Uribe served on a peace commission charged with exploring an end to the horror through dialogue. In fact, Colombian democracy had tried Chamberlain-like appeasement several times; it was desperate for Churchillian mettle.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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<b>FT</b> interview: <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/c76e6180-0c70-11e2-a776-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ASDyHEU0" target="_blank">"Dilma Rousseff"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“While the president does not promise a ‘big bang’ package of reforms, as seen recently in India, which deregulated the retail and airline sectors, Ms Rousseff says Brazil is cutting the cost of labour by reducing payroll taxes. So far 40 industrial sectors have benefited. Other tax measures are to come. ‘This is important because we don’t want to penalise those who employ people,’ she says. The government is also stepping up the sale of infrastructure concessions, having already sold airports in São Paulo, nearby Campinas and Brasília, the country’s biggest. It is also preparing to offload R$133bn of road and rail concessions. Ports are next.” </blockquote>
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***<br />
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Simon Kuper in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b7f38a7e-18b8-11e2-80af-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ASDyHEU0" target="_blank">"Why the French went off wine"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In Parisian cafés at breakfast, you seldom now see people fortifying themselves for the day ahead with a ballon de rouge. This is a story about globalisation, about France becoming more like the world. But it’s a happier story than you might think. The French once practically lived off wine. To borrow P.G. Wodehouse’s phrase, they discovered that alcohol was a food years before the doctors did. The medieval custom of drinking wine because it was cleaner than water persisted into the age of sanitation. In 1939 the average French person still consumed more than half a bottle of wine per day, or well above today’s recommended healthy maximum. No wonder that many commentators blamed the country’s collapse to Hitler on “the fact that France had a bar for every 80 persons, as compared with 270 in Germany, 430 in Britain, and 3,000 in Sweden”, writes Robert Paxton in Vichy France. Even postwar, wine remained integral to life. Gérard Faesch, a restaurateur in Paris, recalls that in the 1960s builders or sailors might down several litres during a working day. Peasants working the fields would subsist on trouspinette (wine mixed with blackthorn and sugar). Small children were given watered-down wine. The French seldom got visibly drunk, because that might induce the thing they fear above all else: an etiquette breach. However, many of them walked around almost permanently sozzled. From 1950 through 1965, Frenchmen were about 70 times more likely than British men to die of alcohol-related causes, says the UK’s Institute of Alcohol Studies.” </blockquote>
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Gideon Rachman in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/79c2af12-0ba4-11e2-8e06-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ASDyHEU0" target="_blank">"Blame the great men’s vision for Europe’s crisis"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘This is what you have to do, if you want the people to build statues of you on horseback.’ Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was doubtless being whimsical when he urged his colleagues to make bold decisions about the future of Europe. But the former French president’s remark offers a telling insight into the mentality that created the great euro-mess of today. The EU is now having to deal with the consequences of the hubris of the ‘great Europeans’ of a previous generation. The people who created the euro – men such as Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, and Jacques Delors, the one-time head of the European Commission – shared Giscard d’Estaing’s eye for the history books. But their dream of leaving a legacy of a United Europe, with a single currency at its core, has turned into a nightmare. In the middle of a full-blown economic and political crisis it might seem pointless – or even vindictive – to criticise the statesmen of yesterday. But answering the question ‘who is to blame?’ will be important in resolving the euro crisis.” </blockquote>
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Max Hastings at <b>DAILY MAIL</b>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2217013/As-protesters-dressed-Nazis-riot-Athens-ruled-Brussels-stooges-giving-Nobel-Peace-Prize-EU-satire.html" target="_blank">"Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU is beyond satire"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Relations between EU members are at their worst for decades and likely to deteriorate further — this week, protesters dressed as Nazis to greet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her visit to Greece. Europe’s economies are stagnant, with little early prospect of improvement. The future of the European project is in the melting pot, and every decision-maker on the continent knows it. Only the other day I happened to visit Oslo, where the Nobel committee holds its deliberations. A local acquaintance said to me: ‘We Norwegians find ourselves in a strange situation. We have all this oil and gas making us hugely rich, so we watch all the horrors going on in the EU rather as spectators on the balcony of a luxury hotel might look down upon a train wreck in the valley below.’ I do not think of Norwegians as sadistic people, but the Nobel judges have inflicted upon us all a huge, cruel practical joke awarding their Prize to the European Union at its lowest point since its inception — the moment at which almost every citizen of its 27 nations is asking: Where did the story go so horribly wrong?” </blockquote>
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<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-XfnG_W-a4n4/UI73_aW6q5I/AAAAAAAAAOE/AF4eGwuaRm8/s293/GoverningTheWorld.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Yascha Mounk in <b>WSJ</b> on Mark Mazower’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443635404578034571412932936.html" target="_blank">"Governing the World: The History of an Idea"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In his telling, the era of international government started after the Napoleonic wars. Prince Metternich, Austria's foreign minister, realized that the victorious forces of the old order needed to band together to contain revolutionary fervor. So he designed the ‘Concert of Europe,’ a kind of mutual-aid society for morose monarchies. Radicals of all stripes loathed the Concert's aims yet were inspired by its internationalism. A nascent peace movement hoped that a better set of institutions might do away with war. In England, Richard Cobden, a Radical member of parliament, argued that free trade would enrich every corner of the globe. Meanwhile, Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian unifier, dreamed of a ‘brotherhood’ of democratic, independent nations. These were partially competing visions. Even so, they were all important influences on the two most ambitious international institutions mankind has known: the League of Nations and the United Nations. Mr. Mazower's intellectual history of world government is highly compelling. But his book's greatest merit is the author's treatment of the practical realities of the U.N. He gives clear-minded attention to a crucial, oft-neglected question: What real impact have international organizations had on the world? His answer implicitly challenges both the realist and liberal camps in international relations.” </blockquote>
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<b>Obituaries of the Fortnight</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/arts/nguyen-chi-thien-vietnamese-dissident-poet-dies-at-73.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Nguyen Chi Thien"</a> (1939-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
“He was sentenced, without trial, to three and a half years’ hard labor. It was then that he began composing poems in his head. Released in 1964, Mr. Thien worked as a bricklayer, reciting his poems covertly to close friends. In 1966, he was arrested again on suspicion of having written those poems, which were by then circulating orally in Hanoi and elsewhere. He spent nearly a dozen years in North Vietnamese re-education camps, again without trial. ‘All he had to do at any time was sign a paper saying he was wrong and Communism was right, and he could have walked away,’ Ms. Libby said. ‘They offered him all this if he would say Ho Chi Minh is the hero and Communism is paradise.’ Mr. Thien would not sign. In 1977, two years after Saigon fell to the Communists, Mr. Thien was released along with many other political prisoners: Hanoi wanted to make room in its jails for the thousands of South Vietnamese officials it was then imprisoning.” </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/arts/jacques-barzun-historian-and-scholar-dies-at-104.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Jacques Barzun"</a> (1907-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
“Against that Romantic vitality, Mr. Barzun pitted anything ‘systematic’ or ‘absolute,’ particularly the ‘scientism’ that he saw as modernity’s unjust revenge against Romanticism. In another seminal book, ‘Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage’ (1941),” he argued that 20th-century thought had been skewed by the influence of those three major figures — harmful influence, he concluded. Darwin, Marx and Wagner, he wrote, had each created a variety of ‘mechanical materialism,’ in which all that is human and variable is subjected to domineering systems. Mr. Barzun associated those systems with the scientific worldview, extending its power over religion, society and art. This was to become a recurring theme; Mr. Barzun even considered science to have had a deleterious effect on university education. While he maintained that modern science was ‘one of the most stupendous and unexpected triumphs of the human mind,’ he attacked, again and again, any hint of ‘mechanical scientism,’ which he said had baleful consequences. In 1964, in his book ‘Science: The Glorious Entertainment,’ Mr. Barzun offered ironic praise for science’s ‘all-pervasive energy.’ ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion and faith as fanatical as any in history.’” </blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/music/howard-h-scott-a-developer-of-the-lp-dies-at-92.html" target="_blank">"Howard Scott"</a> (1920-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
“In the days before magnetic tape came into wide use, the process of transferring music to the new discs (soon to be known as LPs) was complex. Long pieces of music, split among multiple records, needed to be stitched together on the new discs without interruption. To do that, Mr. Scott and his colleagues turned to Columbia’s original recordings on large lacquer discs, which were recorded at 33 1/3 and sometimes had multiple or incomplete takes, said Marc C. Kirkeby, a music archivist who has worked closely with the lacquers. They lined up overlapping segments of music, and — with Mr. Scott snapping his finger in coordination — switched the audio signal from one lacquer to another, seamlessly joining the segments on the resulting LP. As the industry began to use magnetic tape, beginning in the late 1940s, such work was no longer necessary.” </blockquote>
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Thanks to Steve Beeho, Jay Babcock, Futureofcapitalism.com, Poynter.org.<br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, <a href="http://jamesfotopoulos.com/" target="_blank">James Fotopoulos</a>, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-31339834422540202842012-10-06T18:43:00.003-07:002012-11-05T10:31:39.402-08:00Issue #139 (Oct. 8, 2012)<b>2nd above 57th Street, NYC</b><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dsKYclcC0Ng/UHDLjsNNk9I/AAAAAAAAANA/YFCH_Ow78g8/s640/2ndAveabove57thSt-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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The Reckless Don’t Mind<br />
Joe Carducci<br />
<br />
Last week Columbia professor Mark Lilla reviewed two books, <img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_0lMlrUaZp8/UHDLoJ8-vdI/AAAAAAAAANY/Iz7ttFdjGqw/s321/RecklessMind.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />one for <i>The New Republic</i> and one for the<i> New York Times Book Review</i>. The <i>TNR</i> review was of the Brad Gregory book, <b>The Unintended Reformation</b>, (we linked to Ephraim Radner’s review in <i>First Things</i> back in <a href="http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2012_06_01_archive.html" target="_blank">NV 134</a>, and both of these reviews are linked below). The <i>NYTBR</i> last week lead with Lilla’s review of Charles Kesler’s book, <b>I Am the Change – Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism</b>. I haven’t read either book but I have read other essays by Lilla, as well as his book, <b>The Reckless Mind – Intellectuals in Politics</b>, written while he was at Univ of Chicago. What stands out is how useless his deep understandings of medieval and modern philosophy are when he tries to think usefully about mere contemporary politics.<br />
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The Gregory book is a Catholic analysis conceding the cause of the Reformation but regretting as well the results. Luther had his regrets when his carefully tendered objections were forgotten in the resulting riots; all God’s children have their regrets. Still the Church needed the Reformation so that American Catholics could live as an ensouled minority within the best national realization of early Protestant idealism. Protestant governance in America was far preferable to Catholic governance anywhere – new world or old. Lilla seems fine with our contemporary drift away from the old Constitutional order even as we begin to circle, unconsciously yet with pretentions drawn, the drain introduced by his rogues gallery of greatest 20th century right-left reckless minds: Heidegger, Schmitt, Benjamin, Kojeve, Foucault, Derrida…<br />
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Lilla doesn’t respect Gregory’s “project.” At least he considers it part of a useless nostalgic Church Universal syndrome. He doesn’t seem to understand academia’s interest in interpreting-critiquing-salvaging even blood-soaked bad boys as anything other than the search for knowledge. Even less reckless minds might laugh their asses off at that idea. Such Euros consider Americans, one and all, to be simple spoiled children-gone-native, even those who’ve studied the requisite dead languages and run down gothic hallways looking for old world approval, and after all, <b>The Reckless Mind</b> is essentially a checking up on our betters in Europe as they <i>detourne</i> their own failures: the ends of history, philosophy, man… and the comings of communism – ever immaculate in expectant conception – and the now formerly human automata, no longer capable of objecting to it.<br />
<br />
Lilla refers to himself as a lapsed Catholic in the <i>TNR</i> and a centrist Democrat in the <i>NYTBR</i>,<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8g42T4vpLl0/UHDLnWTBmDI/AAAAAAAAANQ/Jk4B1JsVGWQ/s270/IamTheChange.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />but once he steps into the force field of contemporary politics and its many ramifications on the Columbia campus if not across Manhattan itself he seems to be positing himself as a prelapsarian who hears neither echo nor rhyme of medieval or modern tempests in Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Wilson, Reagan, never mind such sunny reformers as Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Saul Alinsky, or any of Glen Beck’s dartboard bête noirs he rolls eyes over in his review of Charles Kesler’s book, <b>I Am The Change</b>. Professor Lilla does admit to cringing at the name McGovern but I guess that’s the centrist Democrat in him. He writes approvingly of the old “modest narrative” that “used to convince conservatives” as a critique of Kesler who is editor of <i>The Claremont Review of Books</i> and teaches at Claremont McKenna College. Centrist Democrats have their own nostalgic proclivities: Nixon, Reagan, Aquinas….<br />
<br />
To quote Mike Brinson, the second greatest stagehand-roadie of the punk era, who described for <i>The Rise and The Fall</i> fanzine how it looked from the stage as Black Flag played on while their audience destroyed the club, “What bigger boner can a band have?” Luther wrote his objections down and all hell broke loose.<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hBEm1N25S4w/UHDLpRh_oNI/AAAAAAAAANg/hqwZWCvrs1g/s320/RiseandtheFall.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Marx wrote a coupla books and two hundred million extra people were killed. Not bad for mere writers, and so they remain heroes to impotent scribblers everywhere in lingos living or dead, plus French. I especially liked Lilla’s chapter in <b>The Reckless Mind</b> on Alexandre Kojeve, tracing his lifelong attempt to merge into the state, annihilating his self in his moment so as to have a world-historical impact-effect on his fellow citizens without the distracting mess of mass upheaval, not that he minded any necessary violence coolly applied by the state. (He was a high-born Russian communist émigré to France, Alexander Kojevnikov, who barely survived the revolution; thankfully he was unable to flee France for America during WWII.) None of Kojeve’s manuscripts were published in his lifetime as they would have ended his ability to rise in the French bureaucracy and as confidant of French Presidents become the very voice of the expanding state of the totalizing EEC/EU project, merging what, national socialism, international socialism and the prerogative of Kings? Sadly, perhaps the biggest boner a Hegelian master/servant can imagine.<br />
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"Rumination" by <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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<b>From the Desk of Joe Carducci...</b><br />
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Frank Close in <b>PROSPECT</b>, <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-twin-child-of-the-big-bang-frank-close/" target="_blank">"In the first moments of the universe, matter overpowered antimatter"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Antimatter is real. Scientists have made a few thousand atoms of anti-hydrogen, although none of them lasted very long before being annihilated by their surroundings. If you were to see a lump of antimatter, you wouldn’t know it; to all outward appearances it looks no different to ordinary stuff. However, touching some would be lethal, as atoms in our hands would be destroyed completely, and anything of us that remained would be irradiated with the resulting gamma rays. Were there large clumps of antimatter in the cosmos, any interstellar material that hit them would lead to mutual destruction, leaving behind these tell-tale gamma rays. No such signals have been seen, which suggests that antimatter galaxies do not exist. The vanishing of antimatter is the greatest disappearing act in history. The material universe that survives today contains the remnants of a great annihilation between antimatter and matter, which was one of the first events after the Big Bang. The intense radiation that ensued—a feebler replay of the original Big Bang—has cooled for billions of years, and today forms the ubiquitous microwave background radiation, at a temperature just three degrees above absolute zero, or minus 270 degrees Celsius. Astronomers have measured its temperature, and, by knowing how fast the universe is expanding, can play back history on their computers. This confirms that around 13.6bn years ago the universe was indeed so hot that matter and antimatter would have formed from the radiant energy. Our observations and experiments are all consistent with this theory, but we remain unsure on one thing: how did some matter survive the great annihilation?<br />
Everything that we can see, from the world around us to the galaxies, appears to be the debris of an even grander creation.” </blockquote>
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<br />
<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-KkgbyC8YYZY/UGzbVxa5GaI/AAAAAAAAALI/3NkM7YTru80/s277/automate_this_1.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Evgeny Morozov in <b>WSJ</b> on Christopher Steiner’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443686004577633491013088640.html" target="_blank">"Automate This – How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Algorithms don't build their judgments on anything—their creators do. One can easily imagine a very different music industry that would still profit from algorithms but favor very different kinds of artists. The inherent risk associated with Mr. Steiner's technology-centric approach is that the institutional logic inscribed in the algorithms suddenly becomes invisible, as we direct our fury at the technology instead. On the whole, though, Mr. Steiner believes that we need to accept our algorithmic overlords. Accept them we might—but first we should vigorously, and transparently, debate the rules they are imposing.” </blockquote>
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Jerome Groopman in <b>NEW YORKER</b>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/01/121001fa_fact_groopman" target="_blank">"Sex and the Superbug"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In the nineteen-thirties, antibiotics changed the clinical picture of gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases, and, with it, social attitudes. Once feared for its devastating complications, gonorrhea was now viewed as a bothersome but temporary price to pay for sexual freedom. The sexual revolution of the ninetten-sixties ushered in rising rates of gonorrhea, as condoms, which effectively prevent transmission, were abandoned in favor of oral contraceptives. Only after the risk of death from AIDS began to increase, in the nineteen-eighties, did condom use again become a norm. A federally funded gonorrhea-control program, started in 1972, perhaps made a difference; by 1997, the number of yearly cases of gonorrhea reported to the C.D.C. had fallen by nearly three-quarters compared with its peak, in 1975. In 2009, the number of gonorrhea cases in the U.S. was at an all-time low. ‘Ten or fifteen years ago, we thought it was going to be eradicated in some Western countries,’ Unemo told me. But as modern medicine has adapted so has the microbe.”</blockquote>
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Michael Steen in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/558d7996-01af-11e2-8aaa-00144feabdc0.html#axzz280agIaSh" target="_blank">"Caught between the devil and the ECB"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“After weeks of macro-economic sniping following his isolation at the European Central Bank over its new bond-buying policy, Jens Weidmann, on Tuesday resorted to Goethe’s <i>Faust</i> to make his point. The classic play highlighted, he argued, ‘the core problem of today’s paper money-based monetary policy’ and the ‘potentially dangerous correlation of paper money creation, state financing and inflation’. In early scenes from Goethe’s tragedy, Mephistopheles persuades the heavily indebted Holy Roman Emperor to print paper money – notionally backed by gold that had not yet been mined – to solve an economic crisis, with initially happy results until more and more money is printed and rampant inflation ensues.” </blockquote>
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Serge Halimi at <i>Le Monde Diplomatique</i>, <a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/10/01time" target="_blank">"Time to stop and read"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
"More people need to know we exist as the paper is less often seen on French newsstands, as the distribution network crumbles, and newsstands and newsagents go out of business (918 in France in 2011 alone). The friendly promotion Le Monde diplomatique enjoyed from other French media outlets has suddenly hit a wall of silence. Between 19 March and 20 April, press reviews on Europe 1, RTL and France Inter quoted 133 publications, including even France Football, but not Le Monde diplomatique. This is poor support for the most widely read French newspaper in the world, with 51 editions in 30 languages." </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-E3MRLtUl1xQ/UGzbn_7LsqI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/t8ttXM9aoEM/s275/reveillez-vous-nicolas-baverez.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Hugh Carnegy in <b>FT</b> on Nicolas Baverez’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/059dee86-fdcf-11e1-8fc3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz280agIaSh" target="_blank">"Reveillez-vous!"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In his book <i>Réveillez-vous!</i> (Wake up!) – the title is intended to be a counter-echo to <i>Indignez-vous!</i> (Get Angry!), the anti-capitalist pamphlet by Stéphane Hessel – he seeks to blow away any complacency. In his portrayal, France is a country on the verge of debacle – and not just a French debacle. ‘There is no doubt that France, which last had a budget surplus in 1973, is on the same trajectory that today threatens to carry off Spain and Italy,’ he writes. ‘If it hits the debt wall after Spain and Italy, the probability of the single currency surviving is minimal because Germany could no longer, even if it still wanted to, prop up the eurozone alone.’ The book is far from being a party political assault on Mr Hollande, who is scarcely mentioned. Baverez’s thesis is that France has for decades been led by both left and right down a path of debt-financed welfare and declining productivity, and into a dangerous state of denial over the true state of its economy.” </blockquote>
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Jack Ewing in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/business/global/for-the-euro-a-costly-shelter-from-the-storm.html" target="_blank">"For the ‘Irreversible’ Euro, an Enormously Costly Shelter From the Storm"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In effect, the new building sets in concrete — and lots of steel and glass — the declaration this month by Mario Draghi, the bank’s president, that ‘the euro is irreversible.’ But in an embarrassing disclosure for an institution that has preached austerity to countries like Greece and Spain, the central bank said it had encountered a little spending problem. Increases in the cost of materials and unexpected construction problems will add as much as 350 million euros ($450 million) to the original estimated price tag of 850 million euros. That would make it a 1.2 billion euro building.” </blockquote>
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Valentina Pop at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="http://euobserver.com/political/117689" target="_blank">"Berlusconi: euro is a ‘swindle’ and Germany wants ‘hegemony’"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Speaking at a book presentation event in Rome on Thursday, he called the euro a ‘big swindle’ and said that it would be no ‘tragedy’ if Germany - which has displayed ‘hegemony, not solidarity’ in the crisis - left the common currency. He also criticised the eurozone bailout fund, the ESM, which was ratified by Berlin the same day. Belrusconi said that it only contributes to the vicious circle of recession and debt: ‘To receive aid you have to sign a memorandum with austerity measures, which bring the economy to collapse and into a recessionary spiral.’” </blockquote>
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Matthew Kaminski in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578002160195531922.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank">"The Accidental Architect of a New Europe"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“There was no hint of such a future during her first 35 years. She was an academic physicist in Communist East Germany, married to Joachim Sauer, a respected chemist. She still vacations at her modest holiday dacha from those days. With her dry wit, Ms. Merkel likes to perform impersonations for friends in private, according to biographer Margaret Heckel. To the public, the chancellor—befitting the daughter of a Protestant pastor raised in northern Germany—is all business, which is how Germans prefer their leaders. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Ms. Merkel got involved with a start-up democratic party. Her management skills stood out in those chaotic days, and she caught the eye of the chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl. Ms. Merkel's early years in his center-right Christian Democratic Union were ‘horrible,’ says Ms. Heckel. Being known as ‘the girl’ in the Kohl cabinet ‘kindled her fighting spirit . . . She wanted to show that someone from the East, a woman, an outsider could do it.’ Ms. Merkel is said to have learned from Mr. Kohl most of what she knows about getting and keeping power. A decade ago, when her mentor was embroiled in a party-financing scandal, the men in the CDU kept quiet. Ms. Merkel called for Mr. Kohl to step aside, in a front-page letter to Germany's main conservative paper. The audacity of this patricide, never forgiven by Mr. Kohl, secured her leadership of the CDU.” </blockquote>
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Valentina Pop at <i>euobserver.com</i>, <a href="http://euobserver.com/economic/117586" target="_blank">"Merkel surprisingly popular in Spain"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Asked who is showing the best leadership during the euro-crisis, 50 percent of respondents said Merkel - the queen of EU-demanded austerity programmes in troubled countries, French President Francois Hollande came in second, at 11 percent, while Spain's own Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy received only three percent support. EU commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso is seen as a competent leader by two percent of the Spaniards, while EU council chief Herman Van Rompuy and British PM David Cameron came in last, at one percent. Merkel's high popularity rate is consistent with what Spaniards believe has caused the severe economic crisis they are in: 84 percent blame their own politicians for it, while 70 percent say it was the Spanish banks' fault. Only 18 percent blamed the EU or being a member of the eurozone.” </blockquote>
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Jack Ewing in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/world/europe/circumcision-debate-in-europe-reflects-deeper-tensions.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Some Religious Leaders See a Threat as Europe Grows More Secular"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The more serious threat, in the eyes of Rabbi Goldberg and many Jews, Muslims and Christians in Europe, comes from what they see as an attack by secular society on religious ritual, on faith itself. A seemingly insignificant decision by a lower court in Cologne, against a doctor who circumcised a Muslim boy, has fed a rapidly spreading drive to criminalize a practice that is core to Jewish and Muslim belief. In contrast to the United States, baby boys in Germany and other European countries are not routinely circumcised for health reasons. The World Health Organization recommends circumcision as a way to reduce the spread of AIDS, but many doctors in European countries regard the practice as harmful and even barbaric.” </blockquote>
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Mary O’Grady in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444620104578008780171915620.html" target="_blank">"How Canada Saved Its Bacon"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It wasn't Greece, but by 1994 Canada's federal debt-to-GDP ratio was getting close to 80%, and the cost of servicing the debt had begun to eat up an incredible one-third of government revenue.<br />
The central lesson from that crisis, Mr. Martin told an American Enterprise Institute audience in Washington last week, is that delay only ensures that the inevitable adjustment will be more painful. Truer words were never spoken. Nor has it ever been more likely that they will fall on deaf ears, at least as long as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps financing the partying in our nation's capital. When the Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien took power in October 1993, Mr. Martin was charged with pulling his nation out of the fiscal death spiral. He did it with deep cuts in federal spending over two years that amounted to 10% of the budget, excluding interest costs. Nothing was spared. Even federal transfers to the provinces to fund Canada's sacred national health-care system got hit. The federal government also cut and block-granted money for welfare programs to the provinces, giving them almost full control over how the money would be spent. In the 1997 election, the Liberals won reelection. The Chrétien government followed with tax cuts starting in 1998 and one of the largest tax cuts—both corporate and personal—in the history of the country in 2000. The Liberals not only won again in 2000 but also increased their majority. What drove the left-of-center Liberals to shoulder the burden of downsizing government in the 1994 and 1995 budgets—Mr. Martin takes great pains to point out—was not ideology but ‘arithmetic.’” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578008291279754994.html" target="_blank">"An Illinois Pension Bailout? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Illinois now has some $8 billion in current debts outstanding and taxpayers are on the hook for more than $200 billion in unfunded retirement costs for government workers. By some estimates, the system could be the first in the nation to go broke, as early as 2018. Liabilities are also spiralling nationwide, with some $2.5 trillion in unfunded state pension costs. According to a paper released Thursday by the Illinois Policy Institute, the crisis will end up pitting states against each other as taxpayers in places like Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Utah will be asked to subsidize the undisciplined likes of Illinois and California. For years, states have engaged in elaborate accounting tricks to improve appearances, including using an unrealistically high 8% ‘discount’ rate to account for future liabilities. To make that fairy tale come true, state pension funds would have to average returns of 8% a year, which even the toothless Government Accounting Standards Board and Moody's have said are unrealistic. It's no surprise that many of the states deepest in the red are public union strongholds. For decades, Democrats have bought union support in elections by using surplus revenue during good times to pad pension and retiree health-care benefits.” </blockquote>
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John Kass in <b>CT</b>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-09-30/news/ct-met-kass-0930-20120930_1_william-cellini-asylum-seeker-power-broker" target="_blank">"Have mercy, your honor, for the people of Illinois"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘The 364 letters attest to the fact that Mr. Cellini went far beyond making a positive difference in certain individuals' lives,’ Cellini's lawyers argued in a court document, adding that ‘simply put, through thousands of individual instances over the course of a lifetime of quiet beneficence and charity, Mr. Cellini transformed lives. …’ When I think of Illinois political corruption and the bipartisan Combine that runs things, the first thing I think of is ‘quiet beneficence.’ Don't you? The document lists his countless selfless acts, how Cellini cleaned chickens on a poultry farm, how he showed kindness to strangers, including the Indonesian orphan, and how he sponsored youth baseball teams. Edgar, in his letter, insisted that Cellini never asked him to break even one little rule. Not one. So I've decided to write my own letter. Please put this one in the docket too. Like the other 364, this one asks you to search your heart for mercy and compassion. But not for Big Bill Cellini, shadow Republican boss of the Combine.” </blockquote>
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Tim Novak in <b>CST</b>, <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/15350469-418/jackson-son-sought-city-tax-subsidy-last-year-for-beer-distributorship.html" target="_blank">"Jackson son sought city tax subsidy last year for beer distributorship"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Jackson won’t comment, first asking that questions be submitted in writing, then declining to answer them. But he’d still like the city’s financial backing, according to Ald. Walter Burnett (27th), who says, ‘He’s trying.’ Jackson — whose sister-in-law, as a member of the Chicago City Council, would be asked to vote on any request for a city tax subsidy — has begun construction work on the new home for his beer-delivery business. But the job site has been hit with pickets protesting his use of non-union labor, according to Burnett, whose ward includes the property on Ogden. City Hall is rebuilding the street, curbs and sidewalks on the south side of the property — a $2.8 million project that city officials say was in the works before Jackson bought the building. Jackson, then 28, bought the Budweiser distributorship with an older brother, Jonathan Jackson, in 1998. That was 16 years after their father led a national boycott of the nation’s largest brewery over its lack of minority-owned beer distributorships. Their purchase price was never made public, but the Jacksons got a $6.7 million loan to pay Anheuser-Busch Co. — Budweiser’s corporate parent — for a warehouse and equipment on Goose Island. Anheuser-Busch had spent $10.5 million to build the North Side warehouse and got a $2.6 million tax subsidy toward that from City Hall.” </blockquote>
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Kelly Nolan in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358804578016314130168932.html" target="_blank">"California Muni Sale Sizzles"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Individual investors placed orders for roughly $1 billion of the deal Friday and Monday, and interest from institutional investors was also ‘heavy,’ the spokesman, Tom Dresslar, said.<br />
Since California is a high-tax state, its tax-free bonds typically are in high demand from individuals and the state usually offers its bonds to these smaller buyers first before it opens it up its deals to institutional buyers such as mutual funds. Given its chronic budget issues and boom-and-bust economy, California is one of the lowest-rated U.S. states, alongside Illinois. But the Golden State has made some fiscal strides, passing an on-time budget in the past two years and shrinking the size of its deficits, making investors more comfortable buying California bonds as they look for higher returns in the ultralow interest-rate environment. California also recently passed pension overhaul.” </blockquote>
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Ross Douthat in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/douthat-washington-versus-america.html" target="_blank">"Washington Versus America"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States. Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work. This growth is a bipartisan affair. It’s been driven by the contracting-out of government services under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; by the Bush-era security buildup, whose ripples are spreading to this day (witness the new Department of Homeland Security facility intended for still-impoverished Anacostia); and by the bright young college graduates who flooded the city at the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency and the lobbyists who followed to claim a piece of his attempt at a new New Deal. If you don’t mind congested roads and insanely competitive child rearing, all this growth is good news for those of us inside the Beltway bubble. But is it good for America?” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-adkIp0vKgQo/UGzbgGCzPPI/AAAAAAAAALg/bb9bnoeQ5z4/s264/Fannie%2520Mae.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Gene Epstein in<b> BARRON’S</b> on Oonagh McDonald’s book, <a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111904414004578016373986855276.html#articleTabs_article%3D1" target="_blank">"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – Turning the American Dream into a Nightmare"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A ‘large slice of the blame,’ she writes, must go to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises in the book's title. ‘But above all,’ McDonald declares, ‘it was the distortion of the banking sector to achieve political ends that ultimately caused the crisis.’<br />
She elaborates: ‘Politicians, with their unthinking political stances, must…take the lion's share of the responsibility. The vast subprime market…was the child of the affordable-housing ideology.’<br />
As the book recounts, the politics and ideology were clearly articulated, and aggressively implemented, by Obama's two predecessors. When President Clinton announced his National Homeownership Strategy in June 1995, he spoke of the need to ‘make it easy for people to own their own homes.’ And, when President Bush introduced his American Dream Down Payment Initiative in 2002, he deplored the ‘home-ownership gap’ and spoke of ‘dismantling the barriers that prevent minorities from owning a piece of the American dream.’” </blockquote>
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Nicholas Eberstadt in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444914904577619671931313542.html" target="_blank">"Are Entitlements Corrupting Us? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic. In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government's total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.” </blockquote>
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James Bovard in <b>USA TODAY</b>, <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-09-26/school-lunches-breakfast-obesity/57846220/1" target="_blank">"Why expand school free food programs? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“A 2010 University of Michigan study found that students who regularly eat school lunches are 29% more likely to be overweight, and that consumption of school lunches was the single strongest predictor of childhood obesity. Unfortunately, at the same time brakes are being tapped on caloric intake at lunch, the Obama administration is championing a vast expansion of the school breakfast program. At the same time some kids are getting smaller lunches, others are having multiple breakfasts. Twelve million kids currently eat school breakfasts, but that number will soar. Under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, all schools with 40% low-income students will be allowed to offer free breakfasts and lunch to all students. That will lead to expanding waistlines. New York City recently suspended expansion of its Breakfast in the Classrooms after discovering that 20% of pupils were eating two breakfasts -- one at home and another at school.” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443507204578020900744277668.html" target="_blank">"Handmaid to the Plutocrats"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“‘People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged,’ declared Elizabeth Warren in prime time at the Democratic convention—and she should know. By her own logic, she was one of the riggers. One pleasure of the Massachusetts Senate race is that we are all learning about the remunerative outside legal work on behalf of corporate defendants done by Harvard Law School's resident bankruptcy law expert. Let's just say she doesn't do this work pro bono. Everyone has to make a living, but Ms. Warren's legal moonlighting does raise a question or two about her posture as the tribune of the powerless little guy. One of her first important cases turns on Johns-Manville Corporation, which used to be America's major asbestos manufacturer and distributor, and its primary insurance company, Travelers. Tens of thousands of personal injury lawsuits drove Manville into Chapter 11, where its Travelers policies were the estate's most valuable and basically only asset.” </blockquote>
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Thomas Frank in<b> HARPER’S</b>, <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/10/0084081" target="_blank">"The Maintenance Crew"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“I myself was never really convinced that Obama was a heartfelt liberal, but I did believe that the financial crisis was going to force the man’s hand. However much he may have wanted to be another Bill Clinton, cleverly triangulating between enemy camps, economic necessity would compel him to take bolder action. If he wanted to reverse the rising tide of unemployment, he would have to consider something like a modern-day WPA, I reasoned. If he wanted to make sure the banks didn’t steer us into another iceberg, he would have to break them up or install some more serious kind of oversight regime. If he wanted to build a government that worked, he would have to look forthrightly at what had gone wrong in the first place. He would have no other choice. But I was wrong. We were the ones who would have no choice.” </blockquote>
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Frank Rich in <b>NEW YORK</b>, <a href="http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/right-wing-media-2012-9/" target="_blank">"My Embed in Red"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“What did I learn in my week imbibing the current installment of the Reagan revolution? I came away with empathy for those in the right’s base, who are often sold out by the GOP Establishment, and admiration for a number of writers, particularly the youngish conservative commentators at sites like the American Conservative and National Review Online whose writing is as sharp as any on the left (and sometimes as unforgiving of Republican follies) but who are mostly unknown beyond their own ideological circles. What many of the right’s foot soldiers and pundits have in common is their keen awareness that they got a bum deal in Tampa, a convention that didn’t much represent either their fiercely held ideology or their contempt for the incumbent. They know, too, that their presidential candidate is the Republican counterpart to Al Gore—not only in robotic personality but in his cautious hesitance to give full voice to the message of his troops. Even Paul Ryan, the right’s No. 1 living hero, let many of his fans down with his convention speech—not because he fudged facts but because he soft-pedaled his “big ideas” about small government once in the national spotlight.” </blockquote>
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Matt Ridley in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358804578016291138331904.html" target="_blank">"Inside the Cold, Calculating Libertarian Mind"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Studies show that conservatives are more conscientious and sensitive to disgust but less tolerant of change; liberals are more empathic and open to new experiences. But ideology does not have to be bipolar. It need not fall on a line from conservative to liberal. In a recently published paper, Ravi Iyer from the University of Southern California, together with Dr. Haidt and other researchers at the data-collection platform YourMorals.org, dissect the personalities of those who describe themselves as libertarian. These are people who often call themselves economically conservative but socially liberal. They like free societies as well as free markets, and they want the government to get out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom. They don't see why, in order to get a small-government president, they have to vote for somebody who is keen on military spending and religion; or to get a tolerant and compassionate society they have to vote for a large and intrusive state.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NHttaveCjCg/UGzbSNDVdOI/AAAAAAAAALA/6I5EeL9sXsU/s200/AmericanSpectator.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Paul Kengor in <b>AMERICAN SPECTATOR</b>, <a href="http://spectator.org/issues/october-2012" target="_blank">"Dreams from Frank Marshall Davis"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In April 1948, Jarrett and Davis put their minds together for the Packing-House Committee and their pens to joint service defending Chicago’s oppressed proletariat. ‘The duty of this Committee,’ declared their statement ‘is to give publicity to… the plight of the workers.’ Today their political heirs put their minds to joint service at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1983, Jarrett’s son, Dr. William Robert Jarrett, married a young woman named Valerie Bowman. Valerie Bowman became Valerie Jarrett, who today is Barack Obama’s top adviser. If that’s not eerie enough, there is another connection between Valerie Jarrett’s and Obama’s political ancestors. His name was Robert R. Taylor, and Davis worked with him at a CPUSA/Comintern ‘antiwar’ rally in Chicago in November 1940. The group behind the rally was the hideous American Peace Mobilization, later described by Congress as ‘one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States.’ This ‘instrument of the Communist Party line’ was ‘one of the most notorious and blatantly Communist fronts ever organized in this country.’ The goal of the American Peach Mobilization was to keep the U.S. out of World War II, because, at the time, Hitler was allied with Stalin via the Hitler-Stalin pact. And so, the good comrades at CPUSA saluted the red flag. Davis and Taylor worked together on an event billed as ‘Negroes and National Defense.’ Robert Taylor was the first African American head of the Chicago Housing Authority. He also appears in the major 1944 congressional report ‘Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States.’ Taylor was the maternal grandfather of Valerie Jarrett.” </blockquote>
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William Cohan at <b>BLOOMBERGBUSINESS</b>, <a href="http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/09/bloomberg-on-robert-rubin" target="_blank">"Rethinking Robert Rubin"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It’s a mystery why Rubin vanished at such a crucial moment in the nation’s financial history, but there were distractions. In October 2007, as Citigroup was imploding, Rubin went to South Beach to visit his father, who died a year later at 101. In line at an upscale grocery, he met Iris Mack. One of the first African American women to get a Harvard Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Mack also worked at Enron and the Harvard Management Co. Over the next 14 months, Rubin pursued her romantically. They would meet, according to Mack, in his Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite, where he would stay after flying in on the Citigroup corporate jet. ‘It’s one of the perks,’ Mack says Rubin told her. This is not news, but it does call into question how hard Rubin was working for his $15 million annual salary. Mack, who is single and 46, wrote about her relationship with Rubin in an April 2010 Huffington Post article. She decided to go public after watching Rubin testify before the FCIC. ‘I really think he was in a vacuum, a little bubble,’ Mack says now. ‘I don’t think all these people start out as evil creatures, but you get in this environment, like we were in Wall Street and Enron, and it’s so much stuff thrown at you. … If you don’t have your head on straight, you can get totally screwed.’ Mack enjoyed Rubin’s company. ‘But the more I talked to him, I realized he was a good liar,’ she says. ‘I point-blank asked the guy if he was married. He never did answer a simple damn question. He would say stuff like, ‘Well, are you married? Have you ever been married?’ So it got to the point where I would still talk to him, but eventually I started ignoring him, or he would come down [and] I would lie and tell him I was out of town. I just felt like the guy had a double personality.’” </blockquote>
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Adam Liptak in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/us/clarence-thomas-discusses-his-life-and-the-supreme-court.html" target="_blank">"From Justice Thomas, a Little Talk About Race, Faith and the Court"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Even as Justice Thomas spoke passionately about the stain that slavery and segregation left on the nation’s history, he seemed wary about giving the courts too large a role in addressing their legacy. On Oct. 10, the court will hear a major case about affirmative action in higher education, Fisher v. University of Texas, and Justice Thomas will almost certainly vote against allowing the university to take account of race in admissions decisions. In reflecting on his youth, Justice Thomas rejected one of the rationales the Supreme Court offered in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education for forbidding segregation in public schools. ‘I hear people say, it affected your self-esteem to be segregated,’ he said. ‘It never affected mine.’ He also shared a memory about Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown case and whom Justice Thomas succeeded on the Supreme Court. ‘I sat with him in a meeting when I first got to the court, a courtesy visit that was supposed to last 10 minutes,’ Justice Thomas said. ‘It lasted two-and-a-half hours, and he regaled me with stories.’ The meeting included a bit of advice, Justice Thomas said. ‘He looked at me very quiet and said, ‘I had to do in my time what I had to do, and you have to do in your time what you have to do.’” </blockquote>
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Mona Naggar at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/Caught-between-the-Frontlines/19848c21192i0p9/index.html" target="_blank">"Caught between the Frontlines"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Prospects of an impending collapse of the Assad regime in Syria present Lebanon with its greatest challenge in recent history. Lebanese Christians, who make up around 25 per cent of the population, were for a long time politically marginalised under Syrian occupation, which lasted until 2005. Christian politicians have shown renewed confidence in recent years. Now, as Syria and pro-Syrian forces in Lebanon show signs of weakening, they could garner even more strength. But just like the rest of the country, Lebanese Christians are deeply divided over events in Syria. ‘Christian political leaders on both sides are prisoners of their own history and the bloody conflicts of the past.’ – Pictured: Memorial service for the victims of Lebanon's civil war (1975–1990) The political representatives of Christians in Lebanon are distributed between the two enemy camps – The March 8 Alliance and The March 14 Alliance. The Free Patriotic Movement sides with the Shiite Hezbollah, which is allied with the regime in Damascus. The Forces Libanaises and the Phalangists form an alliance with the Sunni ‘Future Movement’. They side with the rebels. The designations ‘Shiite Christian’ and ‘Sunni Christian’ have long been incorporated into Lebanese parlance. Those who do not want to take sides in this abominable conflict, often experience deep frustration.” </blockquote>
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Alan Beattie in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feabdc0.html#axzz280agIaSh" target="_blank">"A new world of royalties"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Intellectual property has been an established if controversial part of trade deals since the early 1990s, when Washington succeeded in writing the Trips (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreement into WTO law. Trips, to the anger of some developing countries dependent on generic pharmaceutical production, forced WTO members to enact a minimum level of patent, copyright and trademark protection. Many nations argued this was onerous and the move also disturbed some orthodox free-trade economists, who noted that granting a monopoly right like a patent is a very different principle to lowering import tariffs to liberalise commerce. As the software, technology and entertainment industries have grown, and the digitisation of media and the internet have integrated global markets, the US – continually lobbied by the likes of Disney, Universal and Microsoft – has pushed for ever tougher rules. For them, it is about rule of law: for some developing countries, and campaigners already sceptical of trade pacts, it is another power-grab by rich-world companies.” </blockquote>
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Hari Kunzru in <b>NYT</b> on Pankaj Mishra’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/books/review/from-the-ruins-of-empire-by-pankaj-mishra.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"From the Ruins of Empire – The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Kang and Liang were instrumental in the formulation of a decisive new category in Chinese political discourse: ‘the people.’ Traditionally, popular opinion was considered irrelevant. Now they proposed that the state needed the consent of an educated citizenry to govern. Kang even believed that such reforms as mass education and free elections could realize the Confucian notion of <i>ren</i> (benevolence), a ‘utopian vision of an inevitable universal moral community, where egoism and the habit of making hierarchies would vanish.’ After the failed 1898 reforms, Liang went into exile in Japan, which in the Meiji period was as much a hotbed of international revolutionary plotting as London or Paris. It was a cosmopolitan milieu in which radicals from across Asia met, studied and argued in an atmosphere whose prevailing sentiments were ‘cultural pride, political resentment and self-pity.’ Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and T. H. Huxley had been newly translated into Chinese, and social Darwinism became especially influential.” </blockquote>
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Khaled Hroub at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/A-Culture-of-Religious-Fanaticism/19845c21189i1p497/index.html" target="_blank">"A Culture of Religious Fanaticism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The problem is that such scenarios are repeated every year, and no one learns anything from it. The fanning of base instincts began with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie's ‘Satanic Verses’ in the 1980s. Khomeini tried to be imam for all the faithful, casting himself as a defender of Islam – thereby shooting an average writer to fame and ensuring his book became a global bestseller.<br />
We experienced the ‘world war of instincts’ yet again with the Danish cartoon row several years ago. By drawing a few racist caricatures, a single illustrator drove millions of Muslims onto the streets, resulting in death and destruction in many cities across the Muslim world. Again, an unknown illustrator became a world-famous hero, and his cartoons were disseminated across the world. The list of examples goes on and on. They are all sad and repellent. The most worrying and dangerous thing about them though is how the advancing radicalisation is threatening our own societies. Election results since the beginning of the Arab Spring appear to be accelerating this tendency, and it is incumbent upon the more intelligent opinion formers of these nations to regard religious extremism as an enemy much more dangerous than all foreign enemies. The mob currently rampaging through the streets is ready to destroy anything in its path, and possibly ready to kill. The thought structure of these masses rests on the exclusion of others, on the non-recognition of others and the desire to be rid of these others – and this in nations that are themselves multi-religious and multi-ethnic.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-atH4g7aQERY/UGzbhXPHv3I/AAAAAAAAALo/LrxIaIrPD70/s216/Jacobinissue_7-8.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Alan Johnson in <b>JACOBIN</b>, <a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/the-power-of-nonsense/" target="_blank">"The Power of Nonsense"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“By treating these maladies as indicators of ‘what is wrong in the very structure’ of the system Žižek has put back on the agenda of the Left the question of a global alternative to capitalism, warning that we are living through ‘the self-annihilation of humanity itself.’ And as a cultural critic he can be brilliant in forcing us to adopt strange angles of vision on a vast array of familiar objects and mind-sets, high and low, so that we see them afresh as forms of meaning in the service of this system-in-crisis. Žižek’s remedy however – his call for Terror and Dictatorship set out in the extract from the paperback edition of <i>Living in the End Times</i> reproduced in this issue of Jacobin – is another matter entirely. Mark Lilla in his book <i>The Reckless Mind</i> predicted that the ‘extraordinary displays of intellectual philotyranny’ that disfigured the twentieth century left would not simply disappear just because the wall had fallen. So it has proved. Since 2000, Žižek has established his ‘New Communism’ on two foundations. First, a system of concepts – Egalitarian Terror, the Absolute Act, Absolute Negativity, Divine Violence, the Messianic Moment, the Revolutionary Truth-Event, the Future Anterieur, and so on. Second, a human type and an associated sensibility – that ideologized and cruel fanatic, contemptuous of morality and trained to enormity that Žižek calls the ‘freedom fighter with an inhuman face.’ In his passive-aggressive way, Zikek has even admitted what this so-called New Communism amounts to: ‘[Peter] Sloterdijk even mentions the ‘re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia,’ where, I guess, I belong.’” </blockquote>
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Gertrude Himmelfarb in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578006680365283160.html?mod=wsj_article" target="_blank">"The Once-Born and the Twice-Born"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“To anyone even casually familiar with the perennial debate between religion and science, both the New Atheism of the four horsemen and the ‘Neo-Atheism,’ as it might be dubbed, of Mr. de Botton seem peculiarly old-fashioned—retro, as we now say. And it is old-fashioned enough to recall a participant in that debate more than a century ago. The Harvard philosopher William James did not identify himself as an atheist. On the contrary, it was as a believer that he defended religion—but a believer of a special sort and a religion that the orthodox, then and now, would not recognize as such. If Mr. de Botton is a Neo-Atheist, James qualifies as a Neo-Believer.<br />
His 1896 lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ was prompted, James said, by the ‘freethinking and indifference’ he encountered at Harvard. He warned his audience that he would not offer either logical or theological arguments supporting the existence of God or any particular religion, ritual or dogma. His ‘justification of faith’ derived instead entirely from the ‘will’ or the ‘right’ to believe, to ‘adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, despite the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’ James knew this would not go down well with the students and philosophers in the eminent universities. To the obvious objection that the denial of the ‘logical intellect’ is to give up any claim to truth, he replied that it is in defense of truth that faith is justified—the truth provided not by logic or science but by experience and reflection. Moral questions, he pointed out, cannot be resolved with the certitude that comes from objective logic or science.” </blockquote>
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Mark Lilla in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b> on Brad Gregory’s book, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107211/wittenberg-wal-mart" target="_blank">"The Unintended Reformation – How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“It is a revealing psychological fact that the most common historical myths that early civilizations comforted themselves with were stories of fated decline, which give temporal reasons why life is so hard. We suffer because we live in an Age of Iron, far removed from our origins in the Age of Gold. It’s not our fault, and perhaps one day the gods will smile down and return us to the world we have lost. <i>Pazienza</i>. Christianity turned its back on these ancient stories of fated decline. But it has never been able to escape historical mythmaking, despite the best efforts of theologians from Augustine to Karl Barth. The reason, as Hegel formulated it so well, is that Christian revelation is based on a unique divine incursion into the flow of historical time that altered but did not delegitimize an earlier divine-human relationship. Christianity therefore begs for a story that connects the historical periods created by this event: the age before the Incarnation, the age of the present <i>saeculum</i>, and the age to be inaugurated by Christ’s redemptive return. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early fourth century C.E., was the first Christian thinker to have a serious go at this, and his progressive narrative shaped much subsequent Western thinking about history. In his account, God used one providential hand to ‘prepare the Gospel’ by guiding Hebrew history from Abraham to Jesus; and with the other hand, He built Rome up from a small republic to a vast and powerful empire. With the conversion of Constantine to Christianity these two trajectories met, fusing divine truth with mundane power and inaugurating a new epoch of God’s kingdom on Earth. Against the pessimistic pagan myth of the World We Have Lost, Eusebius offered his optimistic Goodbye to All That.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rzogTB5PtGI/UGzbiDfyp1I/AAAAAAAAALw/oXii4a66lKQ/s265/MoralMinority.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Molly Worthen in <b>NYTBR</b> on David Swartz’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/books/review/moral-minority-by-david-r-swartz.html?_r=1&ref=review" target="_blank">"Moral Minority – The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Many of Swartz’s subjects, with their formidable facial hair and self-published protest literature, fit right in with the radicals of the secular New Left. Yet they were also typical evangelicals. For the most part they attended conservative Christian colleges and seminaries; they fielded speaking invitations from national missions conferences; evangelical bookstores stocked their treatises defending gender equality and their cookbooks advocating ‘simple living.’ When George McGovern accepted an invitation to speak at Wheaton in 1972, he received a standing ovation. So why did the evangelical left seem to dissolve into irrelevance? Swartz argues that evangelicals’ mass enlistment in the conservative Republicanism of the ‘culture wars’ was not the inevitable consequence of doctrine or history: Jesus did not leave behind a clear party platform. But while members of the Christian right set aside doctrinal differences to rally around a shared cultural agenda, the left fell victim to internal identity politics and theological disputes. Black and female evangelicals argued that the left’s leadership was too white and too male. Anabaptists who emphasized nonviolence clashed with Reformed evangelicals who had ambitious plans to transform American culture. Meanwhile, secular liberals, eager to make abortion rights a nonnegotiable plank of the Democratic platform, drove anti-abortion Christians into the arms of savvy Republicans.” </blockquote>
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Mark Lilla in <b>NYTBR</b> on Charles Kesler’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/books/review/the-great-disconnect.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"I Am the Change – Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For some years now the Claremont Institute has been promoting the idea that Wilson was a kind of double agent, whipping the Huns in World War I while surreptitiously introducing the Hegelian bacillus into the American water supply and turning us into zombie-slaves of an elite-run progressivist State. Glenn Beck popularized the notion among grass-roots conservatives by placing Wilson at the center of his Jackson Pollock blackboards, with spokes running out to Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Saul Alinsky, Acorn, George Soros, Cass Sunstein and now I’m forgetting who else. Kesler gives us a more sober account of what Wilson wrought. The history books tell us that the Progressive Era began in the 1890s, when all sorts of little reform and good-government groups began popping up to fight corruption, clean up the slums and rein in the banks and trusts. Kesler, though, sees two opposing tendencies at work back then. One was populist, like the Tea Party; it distrusted business and government equally and wanted to return power to the people by adhering to strict constitutional principles. The other was an elite, paternalistic movement led by self-appointed reformers who ran roughshod over the Constitution in order to ‘modernize’ the state as they saw fit. The Populists loved America, the Progressives not so much. ‘Before the left’s avant-garde became captivated by the Soviet Union,’ Kesler informs us, ‘it fell in love with Germany.’” </blockquote>
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Paul Berman in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/world/magazine/107238/baathism-obituary" target="_blank">"Baath Time"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“German nationalism in the ’30s mooned over an imaginary long-ago when Teutonic Aryans roamed the ancient pan-Germanic forests. The German nationalists dreamed of reuniting the scattered Germanic tribes, and dreamed of reviving, through purification of the blood, the heroic Teutonic virtues. They inebriated themselves with mystic hoodoo about their own spiritual loftiness. They knew how to loathe. And all of these impulses proved to be transplantable to the Arab East. The post-communist Aflaq took to mooning over the Arab seventh century. He imagined a return to yore through a revived appreciation of blood ties. He attached to those ideas the modern-sounding concept of socialism, thus arriving at a national-socialism. He identified the spiritual loftiness of the Arabs. He located ethnic enemies, some of whom, by odd coincidence, turned out to be the very enemies that German nationalism likewise loathed. And he began to picture the pan-Arab resurrection.” </blockquote>
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David Pilling in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/64191160#axzz284ZF9gSx" target="_blank">"Manmohan gets his mojo back – better late than never"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Since he was re-elected in 2009, Mr Singh has wasted a lot of time. Only a couple of years ago, Indians were talking breezily about growth edging up to double digits without the need for any further legislative shove. That proved a fantasy. Instead, growth has sunk back to around 5.5 per cent, not nearly enough for a country with a rapidly expanding population where poverty is still rife. The fiscal deficit, at national level alone, has widened to 6 per cent and rating agencies have threatened to downgrade India's sovereign debt to junk just when countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia are going the other way. Domestic investors, let alone foreign ones, had all but given up on the Indian story. The government was drowning in corruption scandals, a bitter pill for Mr Singh, who is considered impeccably clean. Today's malaise has a faint echo of the 1991 balance of payments crisis, which persuaded the government of Narasimha Rao to dismantle the Licence Raj. As finance minister Mr Singh drafted much of the legislation and has taken most of the credit - some say too much - for enacting the reforms that allowed India to escape its plodding Hindu rate of growth. Mr Singh's uninspiring second term was putting his very legacy at risk.” </blockquote>
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John Cornwell in <b>FT</b> on Peter Ackroyd’s book, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/64023142#axzz284ZF9gSx" target="_blank">"Tudors – The History of England, Volume II"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Under Edward, who succeeded Henry VIII in 1547 aged nine, the religious reforms of the Church in England were impelled by the protectorate of Edward Seymour, first duke of Somerset. Migrant Protestants from Europe were welcomed in London. It was the period when England was denuded of its rich Catholic iconographic and liturgical heritage. Statues, stained glass, crucifixes were smashed, wall paintings whitewashed, relics burnt. Corpus Christi processions, liturgical kisses of peace, genuflecting, the playing of organs, were all banned. Ackroyd evokes the purging of Catholic popular piety with a controlled, rueful passion, revealing, or perhaps betraying, his own Catholic upbringing. ‘The theatre of piety,’ he writes, ‘was being deconstructed ... There were to be no more intimations of sacrifice and the minister, no longer called priest, was ordered simply to place the bread and wine upon the altar. The Mass was therefore stripped of its mystery.’ After Edward's early death and Queen Jane's nine-day reign, Mary Tudor acceded to the throne in 1553 by what she judged a ‘sacred dispensation’.<br />
The old faith, and the Mass, were back, and in Latin. The statues of the Virgin and saints that had survived the iconoclasts' hammers were restored to their niches. A thousand Protestant divines fled the country. Of the 22 bishops of the former reign, only seven retained their dioceses. The ardent reforming prelates - Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer - were subjected to show trials before their deaths. All in vain.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-m-AYkXvP_Hg/UGzbkp7ZIZI/AAAAAAAAAMA/WB3Aajv2Gq8/s215/My-Old-Man-A-Personal-Histor.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />Andrew Martin in <b>FT</b> on John Major’s book, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/64023135#axzz284ZF9gSx" target="_blank">"My Old Man – A Personal History of Music Hall"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“The book begins and ends with accounts of Major's father Tom, who was 64 when John was born, and entering a long hangover of poor health and poverty after his glory years (1900-30) as a peripatetic music hall artist. As Tom lay dying in the family's two rented rooms in Brixton, the 19-year-old John answered the door to a succession of shabby eccentrics. They were other Micawber-ish relics of music hall, coming to say goodbye to Tom and drinking whisky at his bedside, singing and yarning. In between these rather stilted evocations (‘tears of mirth rolled down their and my father's cheeks’), we have a well-organised history of an entertainment that started as ‘tavernbased’. As disposable income and leisure time increased, it progressed to larger venues that were partly pubs, and ended up in the plush custom-built halls of the 1890s, whose bars were entirely separate from the auditoriums, and whose proprietors demonstrated their modernity by showing short films between the turns, thus unwittingly launching the medium that would kill their main business. That John Major is thoroughly at home with this story is shown by the density of well-chosen detail.” </blockquote>
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Joseph Harriss in <b>AMERICAN SPECTATOR</b>, <a href="http://spectator.org/issues/october-2012" target="_blank">"Franglais as She Is Spoke"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Helas, the sad truth for Francophonies is that Moliere’s tongue is being coated by a bad case of Franglais. Some nations, like the practical Dutch and Scandinavians, easily adopt American expressions while retaining their cultural identity. The Spanish wield Spanglish and the Germans Denglish with relatively little travail. In culture-proud France, however, this pidgin version of American English is fraught with painful self-consciousness. As the commentator Eric Zemmour put it dolefully to Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, ‘The end of French political power has brought the end of French. Now even the French elite have given up. They don’t care anymore. They all speak English.’” </blockquote>
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<b>WSJ</b>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444450004578001971243057726.html" target="_blank">"No Fracking, We’re French"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For a man who's staked his presidency on restarting France's economy, François Hollande seems oddly averse to the stuff that fuels growth. Last week, he announced his government will levy €20 billion in new taxes. Now he says he will not permit hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. France imports 98% of the natural gas it uses each year. Yet according to U.S. Department of Energy data, the country's technically recoverable shale gas is second only to Poland's in Europe, and equal to more than a century's worth of French gas consumption.” </blockquote>
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Bernhard Schmid at <i>qantara.de</i>, <a href="http://en.qantara.de/wcsite.php?wc_c=19909&wc_id=21315" target="_blank">"Charlie Hebdo: Provocation as a Marketing Strategy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In France, the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo were set on fire in reaction to the announced publication of the controversial edition. The newspaper's web site was temporarily blocked by Internet pirates. It has since emerged that the Internet activists and their attacks were based in Turkey. This is now the third time that Charlie Hebdo is drawing attention to itself with Islam and its Prophet on the front page. Among many on the Left, whose appreciation of the satirical newspaper has had its ups and downs, the recent action has tended to evoke a disparaging response. Some even accuse the newspaper of simply trying to increase sales figures in these times of economic crises. The editors have tersely responded that they merely want to react to current events and issues. The fact is, however, that Charlie Hebdo is looking forward to its largest sales success by far, similar to the year of the caricature controversy. The usual number of papers on sale at kiosks, a run of 75,000 copies, was already sold out on the first day of print.” </blockquote>
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Dan Bilefsky in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/arts/design/turkeys-efforts-to-repatriate-art-alarm-museums.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Turkey Demands Return of Art, Alarming the World’s Museums"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Turkey is not alone in demanding the return of artifacts removed from its borders; Egypt and Greece have made similar demands of museums, and Italy persuaded the Met to return an ancient bowl known as the Euphronios krater in 2006. But Turkey’s aggressive tactics, which come as the country has been asserting itself politically in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, have particularly alarmed museums. Officials here are refusing to lend treasures, delaying the licensing of archaeological excavations and publicly shaming museums. ‘The Turks are engaging in polemics and nasty politics,’ said Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Pergamon. ‘They should be careful about making moral claims when their museums are full of looted treasures’ acquired, he said, by the Ottomans in their centuries ruling parts of the Middle East and southeast Europe. One example is a prized sarcophagus named for Alexander the Great, discovered in Sidon, Lebanon, in 1887, and now in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum.” </blockquote>
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James Bowman in <b>AMERICAN SPECTATOR</b>, <a href="http://spectator.org/issues/october-2012" target="_blank">"The State of Our Nature"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“In more recent years, the work of both Mr. Lynch and Mr. Tarantino has grown ever more bizarre and remote from any recognizable reality, but their pessimistic or absurdist vision of the evil at the heart of everyday life has been adopted, so most people seem to think, by such marquee television series as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, all of them the inspiration for endless analysis and philosophizing among intellectuals and critics who come out of the same stable as Martin Amis. Let me propose that they are all missing something. It is this: Anthony Burgess had to stick Alex and his droogs in a ‘dystopian’ future and give them their own hipster argot to make their evil even somewhat believable. Mart Amis in Lionel Asbo feels confident enough of his shared vision of the world to dispense with believability altogether.” </blockquote>
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Selina O’Grady at <i>opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/selina-ogrady/gun-and-cross-religion-of-america-in-john-ford-mitt-romney-and-clint-eastwood" target="_blank">"The Gun and the Cross – The religion of America in John Ford, Mitt Romney and Clint Eastwood"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Mormonism sacralised America - that is why Harold Bloom, the famously high-brow Eng Lit professor, considers its visionary founder, Joseph Smith, to equal in imaginative power to Melville or Whitman. The broader sacred mission, however, was embodied in the cowboy. He is the pioneering independent spirit who brings justice, law and order, just as Aeneas did in the Roman Empire’s great founding myth the Aeneid. Mormon and cowboy myths are married in the film Wagonmaster by John Ford (who is mystifyingly revered by the French Nouvelle Vague and their successors). The film is about the Mormon leader Elder Wiggs, who leads a small group of followers through the Wild West to set up his own version of ‘a city upon a hill’ in Utah. ‘God has reserved for us a promised land’ he tells a horse trader on the wagon trail. As the film ends, that tinny triumphalist music of Westerns blares out, and Ford’s large expressionist shots of couples smiling and embracing as they ride their wagons into the new settlement are intercut with shots of the folk dancing. A new community, a vision realized. It is genuinely moving. I caught a friend of mine – the quintessence of anti-patriotism – smiling as he watched.” </blockquote>
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David Denby in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107212/has-hollywood-murdered-the-movies" target="_blank">"Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Nostalgia is history altered through sentiment. What’s necessary for survival is not nostalgia, but defiance. I’m made crazy by the way the business structure of movies is now constricting the art of movies. I don’t understand why more people are not made crazy by the same thing. Perhaps their best hopes have been defeated; perhaps, if they are journalists, they do not want to argue themselves out of a job; perhaps they are too frightened of sounding like cranks to point out what is obvious and have merely, with a suppressed sigh, accommodated themselves to the strange thing that American movies have become. A successful marketplace has a vast bullying force to enforce acquiescence.” </blockquote>
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David Thomson in <b>NEW REPUBLIC</b>, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107218/not-dead-just-dying" target="_blank">"Not Dead, Just Dying"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“I am inclined to see the funny and positive sides in all this dying, but before we go any further, let us remember the fallen. Where do you begin? The cinema threatened daylight and the out-of-doors as primary pleasures. Nature itself took a body blow, and reality would never be the same again. We were so stricken by dignity and respectability that we let full-length feature films quash shorts—one- and two-reelers, maybe the natural length for film entertainment. We erased silence; we betrayed black-and-white; and when we had color we decided that Technicolor was too gaudy and too expensive. We grew too high-minded for B pictures, Westerns, and musicals. We wiped out the audience. No, not for real, but crowds of close to 100 million a week (in 1946, say) have been cut by three-quarters, though the population has doubled in the meantime.” </blockquote>
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<br />
<a href="http://momaps1.org/calendar/view/380/" target="_blank">"Sunday Sessions"</a> hosted by Lia Gangitano with the premiere of James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes’ video <i>Ten Ways of Doing Time</i> and performances by CANDIDATE and BEAUT<br />
Sunday, October 14, 2012 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM<br />
<blockquote>
“MoMA PS1 hosts the global premiere of James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes’ <i>Ten Ways of Doing Time</i>. The feature length video, starring Jim Fletcher and Stephanie Vella, fuses prison drama with science fiction genre, creating an experimental narrative that follows the disintegration of a science project to transform the inmates into super-soldiers. Both outrageous and irreverent, the sprawling scope of this chapter-based video mirrors its content through its structure, allowing the tight formality initially employed to explode into controlled states of anarchy.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-wpRdP_Y-jgg/UGzbo8UumHI/AAAAAAAAAMY/EzXNKd2KXM0/s500/Sleepers77.jpg" /><br />
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<br />
Joe Carducci:<br />
<br />
I return to John Allen’s WFMU show on Wednesday. Last time we did a five-hour history of L.A. punk; this time we’ll do a three-hour San Francisco special focusing on The Sleepers, Negative Trend, Toiling Midgets, and Flipper. The show streams live on Wednesday Oct. 10 6am eastern, at <a href="http://www.wfmu.org/" target="_blank">"WFMU.org"</a>. Then on Friday Oct. 12 7:30pm I'll be at <a href="http://www.bookthugnation.com/ai1ec_event/joe-carducci-founder-of-sst-records-reads-from-new-essay-collection-life-against-dementia/?instance_id=24" target="_blank">"Book Thug Nation"</a> 100 N. Third Ave, Brooklyn to read from my new book, <b>Life Against Dementia</b>, and answer questions about my old books and older record labels.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-KQPKpxT6mPo/UGzbdgALPmI/AAAAAAAAALQ/WgXQ54g5fIs/s440/Carducci-Bookthug-flyer.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />I moved to Berkeley from Portland with Systematic Record Distribution after Christmas 1979 and the first band I checked out was Flipper; they were playing small bars like Dew Drop Inn in Berkeley, and Sound of Music in SF. It was hard to recall the effect of their early messed-up rock minimalism so I bought a small recorder and began taping their shows. I caught some crazed gigs as they moved on to bigger clubs and halls. I also collected some tapes of The Sleepers, Toiling Midgets, and others. Turns out Aaron at Book Thug and I met in Berkeley at Krishna Copy where I printed Systematic mail order catalogs and he was doing a little micro-fanzine that I understood to be mostly about Flipper. This grew into Cometbus. <br />
<br />
When John asked for some Sleepers I started going through my old tapes. Amazing to hear those musicians and their audiences again. SF had one of the deeper music scenes coming out of the 1970s but The City's urban provincialism, plus drugs, politics, and Rolling Stone leaving town shrunk its profile fast. Flipper had been a name rejected by The Sleepers back in 1977; Sleepers vocalist Ricky Williams was in Flipper at the beginning and he went on to sing for Toiling Midgets, formed by Craig Gray who had been in Negative Trend with Will Shatter who explained Flipper's loose noisy sound on Tim Yohannon's KPFA show: "We want to experiment with the music without becoming an art band." On the evidence of today's "indie rock" stasis, you'd have to judge those art bands won out. <br />
<br />
So we will toast the vanquished. About a third of the show will feature unreleased versions, live rants, audience participation, crimes in progress, etc., from a San Francisco on fire, 1980-1982. <br />
<br />
The WFMU <a href="http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2012/10/joe-carducci-is-best-known-as-the-author-of-rock-and-the-pop-narcotic-perhaps-the-manifesto-of-rock-as-an-artistic-form-he.html" target="_blank">blog</a> will post my liner notes, "The Sleepers - Against the Day," for the November 13 vinyl re-release of The Sleepers "Painless Nights" album by <a href="http://www.superiorviaduct.com/sleepers/" target="_blank">"Superior Viaduct"</a>.<br />
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Don Snowden at <i>rocksbackpagesblogs.com</i>, <a href="http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2012/09/avengers-summer/" target="_blank">"Avengers Summer"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“God, the Avengers were a great little band. And I say little band only because time and geography conspired against any possibility of them being recognized as a great band for the music in their time. But those things happen when a band’s lifespan lasts all of two years (from mid-’77 to mid-’79), home base is San Francisco and the farthest they ever apparently played from the Pacific Ocean was 75 miles inland at Riverside (where a small punk and very early college radio scene flourished down in Orange County). That gig looks to be the farthest east they got by a good 50 miles, too, so you can imagine it was well nigh the impossible dream for a band that pegged to the left coast to escape the ranks of minor players when the idea of cred (street or otherwise) for any West Coast punk band then would be one of the more laughable propositions imaginable in faraway New York or UK punk circles.” </blockquote>
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Saint Vitus interview by Linda Leseman in <a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/09/saint_vitus_at.php" target="_blank">"VILLAGE VOICE"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“<b>You're touring with Scott Weinrich on vocals -- the Born Too Late lineup. But your earliest albums had Scott Reagers singing. Where is he these days?</b><br />
We keep in touch with him. Mark [Adams] does more than me because they both live in California. . . . [Scott Reagers] works at a company, and he repairs their machines. I guess that's the best way to say it. And when he needs extra money, he does a bartending job. He's not with his wife anymore, and his kids are all grown, but he has a new little kid with a new girl.<br />
<br />
<b>Why does he seem reclusive? There's hardly anything about him online</b>.<br />
If he's still the same way he was, he doesn't like stuff like that. So he would never, ever be on a Facebook or a Myspace. There's like no way. When he was raising his kids with his wife, they weren't even allowed to watch TV. They homeschooled. So there's no way he's going to get into the, quote, social network, unquote. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>The first Saint Vitus album, from 1984, is considered a classic now. It's our favorite of yours.</b><br />
The first one is actually a live album. We played it live in the studio, no overdubs, no nothing. Just like practice. We had no time. We had, like 24 hours. We just went into this weird, giant warehouse and put blockades between the amps and just played it exactly like rehearsal. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>How many takes did you do of each song?</b><br />
One. . . . At that time, we were practicing like five days a week.” </blockquote>
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Ben Ratliff in <b>NYT</b>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/arts/music/saint-vitus-the-band-at-saint-vitus-the-bar.html" target="_blank">"Right Place And Sound For a ‘70s Time Warp"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Saint Vitus, the excellent metal bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that opened in the spring of last year, was named after the band. Its proprietors have wanted to bring the father to the son from the start, and on Tuesday their wish came true. Historically, it might seem weird that this is happening: the ritual christening, the reformation, this music’s third wave, Saint Vitus’s lasting appeal — all of it. Metal had become virtuosic by the time the band made its first records; this is not virtuosic music. A lot of its fan base, such as it was, came on loan from the punk scene — since Saint Vitus operated out of the South Bay region of Los Angeles, as did Black Flag and Minutemen; and because it recorded for SST, Black Flag’s label; and because Mr. Chandler’s guitar solos were pretty punk, full of practiced rawness. The band was out of place in most respects, but seemingly calm about it. Anyway, its songs are about living backward or too late for one’s own time, in a dark world where nothing ever changes (to paraphrase and conflate four of its songs — ‘Living Backwards,’ ‘Born Too Late,’ “’ Bleed Black,’ ‘The Troll’). It’s a band entirely about a weird view of history.” </blockquote>
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Archie Patterson at <i>eurock.com</i>, <a href="http://www.eurock.com/Display.aspx?Content=CosmicCouriers.aspx" target="_blank">"Once Upon a Time in Germany..."</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
"This article tells a very particular story, presenting the words of The Cosmic Couriers translated from various original documents given to a friend of Eurock was studying at the Goethe Institute in the Summer of 1973 visited the couple at their home in Germany and brought back gifts and a wealth of information from Rolf & Gille. Following that, we kept in touch via written personal correspondence over a couple of years until they vanished. While combing through the entire Eurock Archives the last couple years I have unearthed a treasure trove of original documents, photos and personal correspondences from not only Rolf & Gille, but also many other artists, labels and producers from around the globe. Much of this material was not included in the previous Eurock productions - The Golden Age (CD-ROM) and Eurock: European Rock & the Second Culture (Book + eBook) that featured real-time, written while the scene unfolded over the years articles, interviews & reviews covering the original German, European and International scene." </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-RWRIEnQVTLE/UGzbjVoNAjI/AAAAAAAAAL4/6Ua-yCcFZjg/s484/MtnGazette.gif" /><br />
<br />
Andy Anderson’s Timeline in <a href="http://www.mountaingazette.com/magazine/august-2012/mountain-gazette-timeline/" target="_blank">MOUNTAIN GAZETTE</a> 40th Anniversary Issue.<br />
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Richard Brody at <i>newyorker.com</i> on <a href="http://www.newyorker.com//online/blogs/movies/2012/09/dvd-of-the-week-rio-bravo.html?mbid=nl_Weekly%20%2822%29%20" target="_blank">"Rio Bravo"</a> (1959).<br />
<blockquote>
“The Western is an essentially philosophical genre, in its conversion of society’s abstract or bureaucratic functions to direct and physical action. For John Ford, its implications are political; for Hawks, they’re moral and aesthetic (and, for Hawks, the moral and the aesthetic are inseparable). The pressure to take action that has immediate, ineluctible, and irreparable consequences makes the Wild West an exposed grid of existential crises. And the way that Hawks measures the response to crises is with style, which is why it’s apt that two members of his trio of principled lawmen— Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson—are suave singers. Their gunmanship and their wiles are tied to their laid-back elegance—which rubs off on John Wayne, who, in turn, lends them the solidity of his own ineffable command.” </blockquote>
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<br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EF954ZDn1GE/UGzbmemNwpI/AAAAAAAAAMI/ZT3HR1R8qk8/s253/ONO-AlbinoLP.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />ONO <a href="http://monikerrecordsss.bandcamp.com/album/ono-albino-2" target="_blank">“Albino” </a>LP.<br />
<blockquote>
“To non-locals, ONO's stunning Albino might have fallen from the sky, but to an enlightened and ever-growing bunch of Chicago heads the band is already full-on legend, and the release of their first recorded music since 1986 is a majorly epic landmark that needs no introduction. For the rest of y'all: ONO is a unit of transcendent noise-making now in its fourth decade. Both notorious and neglected in their early years, ONO's unholy bitches' brew of noisy snarl, avant-garde R&B, gospel-heavy blackness, queer sensibility and extravagant, performance-art theatrics (they once played a concert at Navy Pier in which singer travis was dragged through the audience in a steel cage, naked but for a jockstrap) was in a whole 'nuther galaxy from the macho Chicago punk scene that spawned them.” </blockquote>
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Randy Holden interview at <a href="http://psychedelicbaby.blogspot.com/2011/09/randy-holden-interview.html" target="_blank">"pychedelicbaby"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“Dick was a Great Player, lot of energy, and a far different sound for that era, especially on the east coast. I was into instrumentals with a big sound in those days. The audience wasn't quite sure what I was doing, since all the bands in Baltimore did nothing but Ray Charles, James Brown R&B. They were starting to relate to instrumentals though. Dwayne Eddy did a couple of big live performance shows and was top bill over guys like Bo Diddley, and the Coasters, who were doing something besides Ray Charles, and James Brown. When Dick Dale came on at the gig we were doing, it was really interesting. I really dug what he was doing, but then I understood it, but the audience was completely clueless. Dick Dale had such a special gig going for himself, he should have never gone on tour. His dad I guess leased an old wood ballroom, and it was a great venue, and it was exclusively Dick Dale, and he always filled the house with surfer kids. The rest of the country had no Surf, so they couldn't participate in the specialized identity at that time. Then Capitol Records, I recall that was the label that had Dick Dale, decided to Change the concept from Surf Music, to Hotrod Music, in the effort to identify what every American kid could identify with, but the concept bombed. In California where Dick had his audience, the Hotrod Music image was thought of as Greasers, and was not what Surfers identified with at all, and he lost his audience at home. Corp nonsense to make bucks. I always felt id he'd never gone on tour, but kept doing his ballroom gig, he would have continued to gain audience, even in spite of the British Rock invasion.” </blockquote>
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<br />
John Owens in <b>CT</b>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-09-20/sports/ct-met-veeck-symposium-20120918_1_bill-veeck-william-veeck-mary-frances-veeck" target="_blank">"Move under way to get Bill Veeck’s father in Hall of Fame"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“For this storied career, Veeck was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in 1991, five years after his death at age 71. Now historians are ramping up a campaign to add Veeck's father to the hall because of his accomplishments as a Cubs executive, including his pioneering role in banning gambling, promoting Ladies Day, proposing interleague play and instituting sweeping reforms in how the major leagues are run. The campaign for the senior Veeck will be launched Thursday in Chicago by Dr. David Fletcher, president and founder of the Chicago Baseball Museum, at a symposium on the Veecks at the Chicago History Museum. Conference participants will be Fletcher, baseball historian Paul Dickson, Chicago historian Timuel Black, sports journalist Ron Rapoport, filmmaker and former Veeck Jr. colleague Tom Weinberg and others. Veeck Sr., who built the last great Cubs dynasty of pennant-winning teams, died of leukemia in 1933 at age 56. ‘Sadly, his career wasn't as long as it could have been, but what he did in a short time is phenomenal,’ said Fletcher, whose museum is in the organizational stages. ‘He basically saved baseball after the Black Sox scandal (in which White Sox players threw the 1919 World Series). He was able to reorganize basically a cottage industry into a major entertainment industry by having consolidated leadership through one commissioner.’ ‘William Veeck was at the forefront of a new movement to make the baseball park a place where women and families would feel comfortable,’ added Dickson, whose biography of Bill Veeck, ‘Baseball's Greatest Maverick,’ was released this year.” </blockquote>
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Obituary of the Fortnight<br />
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<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/books/maurice-h-keen-dies-at-78-redefined-chivalry.html" target="_blank">"Maurice Keen"</a> (1933-2012)<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Keen wrote or edited almost a dozen books on the Middle Ages. But ‘Chivalry,’ published in 1984, was his most influential because it so sharply redefined medieval court life, challenging a view that had been dominant for hundreds of years. In that view, chivalry was a code of behavior that emerged in the 12th century as a kind of self-improvement guide for men — who spent a lot of time killing — seeking to familiarize themselves with Christian values and humane principles and become gentlemen. It promoted fair fighting, for example, and the protection of women and children. ‘Keen said that that was true enough, but only part of the picture,’ said Clifford Rogers, a professor of history at West Point. ‘His great insight was that chivalry was synonymous with the law of war — an international body of law agreed upon by the aristocratic classes across just about all of Europe, from the 12th to the 15th centuries.’ Mr. Keen’s book was among the first to ‘cut through all the stuff about courtly love and show that chivalry was an important part of the social history of warfare,’ said C. Stephen Jaeger, a medieval historian and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. The code was enforced in chivalric courts. To illustrate how they worked, Mr. Keen cited the trial of a 14th-century knight charged with rape, arson, murder and kidnapping. The knight was convicted and executed — but not for those barbarous acts.” </blockquote>
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Thanks to Jay Babcock, Archie Patterson, Steve Beeho, <i>Futureofcapitalism.com</i>.<br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3406381472393404083.post-50542650153303089212012-09-19T17:35:00.001-07:002012-11-05T10:30:52.837-08:00Issue #138 (Sept. 20, 2012)<b>East of Centennial Ridge, Wyoming</b><br />
<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-IhZwaiCh-vo/UFfEkA3QGZI/AAAAAAAAAIE/BbsXiyT0Ovc/s576/CentennialRidge-sm.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Joe Carducci<br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-7R9J5UCI_io/UFfFDMfKKaI/AAAAAAAAAJk/DEnFJ_pirJI/s450/RNC-NunzioCarducci-small.jpg" /><br />
Photo by Nunzio Carducci<br />
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<b>Notes on Convention</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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!” <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-f0Ixdu7sK7k/UFfFEo3qrmI/AAAAAAAAAJs/HNCIBD3ISTE/s419/SFlukeDNConv-sm.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />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 “<i>The Beverly Hillbillies</i>”, and “<i>Hee-Haw</i>”, not to mention “<i>Rawhide</i>”. How sharp does one need to be in an aquarium-ful of tropical fish.<br />
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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!<br />
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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. <img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IRMfJdaRxDs/UFfE9hSxo0I/AAAAAAAAAJc/u6bl4AgxpgU/s389/RNC-NunzioCarducci-2-small.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" />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.<br />
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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…<br />
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Andy Kroll & David Corn at Motherjones.com, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/ron-paul-supporters-rebel-convention-floor-fuck-you-tyrants" target="_blank">"“Fuck You, Tyrants!”: Ron Paul Supporters Rebel on Convention Floor"</a>.<br />
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Seth Lipsky in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444914904577619383218788846.html" target="_blank">"The Gold Standard Goes Mainstream"</a>.<br />
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<b>Hanna and Her Editors</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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One thing of interest that I’ve noticed, kind of spins from my essay in NV 134, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2012/06/issue-134-june-27-2012.html" target="_blank">" “Magazines, Women and Women’s Magazines”"</a>. There has been a flurry of work by Hanna Rosin, her book, <i><b>The End of Men – And the Rise of Women</b></i>, and the original cover story in The Atlantic called “<i>The End of Men – How Women Are Taking Control of Everything</i>” which I referenced, plus her Sept. 2 essay in the <i>New York Times Magazine</i>, “<i>Who Wears the Pants in This Economy</i>”. <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-7j4OEgZzLWQ/UFfE8c1AWJI/AAAAAAAAAJU/k-19lZY-xy4/s313/NYTMagazinecover.png" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
I really didn’t intend to read the <i>Times Mag</i> essay after <br />
having read The <i>Atlantic</i> piece, which followed other recent gender stoops there. But the <i>Magazine</i>’s essay read as if written by another writer. And then to confirm my suspicion this Sunday’s <i>New York Times Book Review</i> trashes Rosin’s book in a review by Jennifer Homans who is an historian of ballet. Also in the <i>Book Review</i> this week is ex-ballet dancer and over-sharing memoirist Toni Bentley’s similar dispatch of Naomi Wolf’s latest best smeller, <b>Vagina – A New Biography</b>. 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 <i>Times Magazine</i> editors will apparently make you rethink and rewrite what <i>The Atlantic </i>editors will simply cheer on. I did not know that.<br />
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<b>Bumrush the Sensitivos</b><br />
Joe Carducci<br />
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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, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/2011/10/issue-119-october-12-2011.html" target="_blank">"“An Etiquette of Djimmitude”"</a>, in<br />
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, <b>Catholics & Unbelievers in 18th Century France</b>, notes:<br />
<blockquote>
“By and large the religious did not believe in their doctrines with the intensity, the sense of personal discovery and conviction, with which the <i>philosophes</i> believed in theirs. The implications of this fact are many. On the one hand, it made Catholics often more reasonable than <i>philosophes</i>, more willing to persuade, examine, or remonstrate, less given to sarcasm, mockery and abuse.” (R.R. Palmer)</blockquote>
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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 <i>philosophes</i>’ descendents would take state power to their own extreme in the nations unlucky enough to be ruled by scientific socialism.<br />
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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 <i>New Yorker</i> Salman Rushdie writes about the early weeks of hiding out from Khomeini’s fatwa over his novel, <b>The Satanic Verses</b>. 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.<br />
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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:<br />
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“<i>Did you hear, Salman Rushdie has written a new book</i>.”<br />
“<i>Really</i>?”<br />
“<i>Yes, it’s called, Buddha You Fat Fuck</i>.”<br />
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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.<br />
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<b>Along Sand Lake Road, Medicine Bow, Wyoming</b><br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Wi2skmZ2i9c/UFpXatZK7-I/AAAAAAAAAKY/L7meWZ0bUT8/s576/SandLakeRd-small.jpg" /><br />
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<b>From the Desk of Joe Carducci...</b><br />
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Andrew Kramer in <i><b>NYT</b></i>,<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/business/global/in-russia-chinese-run-farms-solve-each-sides-needs.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Nation Rich in Land Draws Labor From One Rich in People"</a>.<br />
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“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.” </blockquote>
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Brian Spegele & Wayne Ma in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444233104577592890738740290.html" target="_blank">"For China Boss, Deep-Water Rigs Are a ‘Strategic Weapon’"</a>.<br />
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“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.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-wK2o3CuKjhc/UFfEtPBFg_I/AAAAAAAAAIk/M66KQrx6UD4/s275/NeverForgetNationalHumiliation.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Gideon Rachman in <b>FT</b> on Zheng Wang’s book, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/634a39ec-e888-11e1-8ffc-00144feab49a.html#axzz26SwXVbVZ" target="_blank">"Never Forget National Humiliation – Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations"</a>.<br />
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“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.” </blockquote>
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Kathrin Hille in <b>FT</b>,<a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/bb1cfa16-f8d6-11e1-b4ba-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank"> "The ascent of the bureaucrat"</a>.<br />
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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.” </blockquote>
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Simon Rabinovitch in <b>FT</b>, <a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/63946819#axzz26ZMPHtXy" target="_blank">"China gears up for next investment boom"</a>.<br />
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“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.” </blockquote>
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Harsh Pant at <i>YaleGlobal</i>,<a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/south-china-sea-new-arena-sino-indian-rivalry" target="_blank"> "South China Seas – New Arena of Sino-Indian Rivalry"</a>.<br />
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“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.” </blockquote>
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Jeff Smith at <i>YaleGlobal</i>,<a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/forgotten-war-himalayas" target="_blank"> "A Forgotten War in the Himalayas"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.’” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rodU_LxbjKs/UFfEyQdKOSI/AAAAAAAAAI0/dJEbuztEwUA/s293/theBritishWayinCounterinsurgency.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Kenneth Payne in <b>Times Literary Supplement</b> on David French’s book,<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00291/contents_291684a.pdf" target="_blank"> "The British Way in Counter-insurgency, 1945-1967"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Veronica Khangchian at <i>Satp.org</i>,<a href="http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/sair11/11_9.htm#assessment1" target="_blank"> "Manipur: An Ever-present Danger"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Rahila Gupta at <i>Opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/rahila-gupta/sexual-violence-in-indian-cities" target="_blank">"Sexual violence in Indian cities"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.’” </blockquote>
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Paul Adams in <i><b>FT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e1e49034-f5aa-11e1-a6bb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz26SwXVbVZ" target="_blank">"Society is evolving faster than the political system"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Seyla Benhabib at <i>Qantara.de</i>,<a href="http://en.qantara.de/Constructing-the-Self-Constructing-the-Other/19722c500/index.html" target="_blank"> "Debate on Muslim Identity in the West"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Daniel Dombey in <i><b>FT</b></i>,<a href="http://presscuttings.ft.com/presscuttings/s/3/articleText/63748736#axzz26T22TisY" target="_blank"> "Eastward turn stirs Turks’ fear of catching instability"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Farnaz Fassihi in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>,<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444914904577620531297888956.html" target="_blank"> "Prized Guests Slam Iranian Policies"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.<br />
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.” </blockquote>
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Husain Haqqani in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444017504577647880299665696.html" target="_blank">"Manipulated Outrage and Misplaced Fury"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Raymond Ibrahim at <i>meforum.org</i>, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3334/egypt-father-kills-daughters-snakes" target="_blank">"Egyptian Father Kills Three Daughters with Snakes"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Ekrem Guzeldere at <i>Qantara.de</i>,<a href="http://en.qantara.de/Nothing-Left-But-the-Colour/19701c20987i0p9/index.html" target="_blank"> "Nothing Left But the Colour"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.’” </blockquote>
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Jeffrey Gettleman in <i><b>New York Review of Books</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/aug/16/war-against-nuba/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"The War Against the Nuba"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Adam Nossiter in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/world/africa/holding-northern-mali-by-force-islamists-struggle-to-run-it.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Islamists Struggle to Run North Mali"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.’” </blockquote>
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Samir Yousif at <i>Opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/samir-yousif/failure-of-democracy-under-islamism" target="_blank">"The failure of democracy under Islamism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<i><b>WSJ</b></i> Weekend Interview: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444318104577587641175010510.html" target="_blank">"Mohammed Ibrahim"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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?’” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-qhnYuhAqZm4/UFfEpLpt-TI/AAAAAAAAAIM/-DspF-QMfL0/s360/collective-bargaining-postal.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Paul Moreno in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444017504577645550224040874.html" target="_blank">"How Public Unions Became So Powerful"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Sebastian Mallaby in <i><b>FT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/697e5ad4-f5ec-11e1-a6c2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz26SwXVbVZ" target="_blank">"Regulators should keep it simple"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.<br />
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.” </blockquote>
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John Kay in <i><b>FT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e5436a62-fb49-11e1-87ae-00144feabdc0.html#axzz26SwXVbVZ" target="_blank">"The law that explains the folly of bank regulation"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<i><b><br />
</b></i> <i><b>WSJ</b></i>: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444273704577637792879194380.html" target="_blank">"Speech of the Year"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Fred Bergsten & Joseph Gagnon in <i><b>FT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2041f5b8-f5bc-11e1-a6bb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz26SwXVbVZ" target="_blank">"Time for a fightback in the currency wars"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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John Cochrane at <i>The Grumpy Economist</i>, <a href="http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-not-to-blow-it-with-phase-outs.html" target="_blank">"How not to blow it with phase-outs"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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E.J. McMahon at <i>Publicsectorinc.com</i>, <a href="http://www.publicsectorinc.com/forum/2012/09/shiller-on-government-jobs-whos-framing-whom.html" target="_blank">"Shiller on government jobs: who’s ‘framing’ whom? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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:<br />
<br />
‘<i>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</i>.’<br />
<br />
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 <b>adding</b> 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 <b>gained</b> 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.” </blockquote>
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James Hagerty in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772804577622012226706948.html" target="_blank">"Assessing Fannie’s Past and Future"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<i><b>NYT</b></i>: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/opinion/cutting-government-blindfolded.html" target="_blank">"Cutting Government, Blindfolded"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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).” </blockquote>
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Holman Jenkins in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444426404577645331915213166.html" target="_blank">"The Day Health Insurance Died"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.’” </blockquote>
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<i><b>WSJ</b></i> Weekend Interview: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444443504577601664135014368.html" target="_blank">"Gloria Romero"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-arZRt-CgO9M/UFfExfpT42I/AAAAAAAAAIs/SumYrQfU0bM/s307/Time.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Michael Grunwald in <i><b>Time</b></i>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2123809,00.html" target="_blank">"One Nation Subsidized"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Ian Lovett in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/us/to-add-jobs-many-in-california-look-to-alter-green-law.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Critics Say California Law Hurts Effort to Add Jobs"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZKO0tuEuRWk/UFfErujVWII/AAAAAAAAAIc/f5xa_PoHrec/s300/National-Accident-Helpline.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Tim Black at <i>Spiked-online.com</i>, <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/12855/" target="_blank">"The immorality of compensation culture"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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, <i>The Social Cost of Litigation</i>, 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.” </blockquote>
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Liz Alderman in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/europe/french-president-must-cut-deficit-but-how.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"French President Must Cut Deficit, but How? "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Nicola Clark in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/world/europe/energy-policy-divides-governing-coalition-in-france.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"Energy Policy in France Divides Governing Coalition of Socialists and Greens"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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. <br />
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.’” </blockquote>
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Hans Steketee at <i>Opendemocracy.net</i>, <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/hans-steketee/how-swiss-see-%E2%80%98swiss-option%E2%80%99" target="_blank">"How the Swiss see the ‘Swiss option’"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Roger Scruton in <b><i>Times Literary Supplement</i></b> on Alain Badiou’s book, <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/archive/00290/contents_290267a.pdf" target="_blank">"The Adventure of French Philosophy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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 <i>Le livre noir du communisme</i> 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 <i>la douce France</i> are not just unmentionable but strictly imperceivable.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-WV3_k8O_3iE/UFfE4KFMwhI/AAAAAAAAAJM/Ghq4ilg-1WQ/s356/where-the-conflict-really-lies.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Thomas Nagel in <b><i>New York Review of Books </i></b>on Alvin Plantinga’s book, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/philosopher-defends-religion/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"Where the Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion, and Naturalism"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Ronald Radosh in <i><b>Commentary</b></i>, <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/when-the-radical-american-left-loved-israel/" target="_blank">"When the Radical American Left Loved Israel"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson at <i>NYbooks.com</i>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/04/jesus-vs-mao-interview-yuan-zhiming/" target="_blank">"Jesus vs. Mao? An Interview With Yuan Zhiming"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.<br />
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.” </blockquote>
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Ian Johnson in <i><b>New York Review of Books</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/chinas-lost-decade/?pagination=false" target="_blank">"China’s Lost Decade"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Patrick Chovanec in <b>WSJ</b>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443686004577634220147568022.html" target="_blank">"China’s Solyndra Economy"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Andrew Jacobs & Adam Century in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/world/asia/beijing-updates-parables-the-24-paragons-of-filial-piety.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"As China Ages, Beijing Turns to Morality Tales to Spur Filial Devotion"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Thomas Fuller in <i><b>NYT</b></i>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/world/asia/in-vietnam-message-of-equality-challenged-by-wealth-gap.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">"In Vietnam, Message of Equality Is Challenged by Widening Wealth Gap"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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John Naughton in <i><b>Guardian</b></i>, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions" target="_blank">"Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-mthOxopO8Kw/UFfEqT10lbI/AAAAAAAAAIU/VGfCHqdy5M4/s272/EpidemicofAbsence.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Abigail Zuger in <i><b>NYT</b></i> on Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/science/an-epidemic-of-absence-review-seeing-hygiene-as-driver-of-disease.html" target="_blank">"An Epidemic of Absence – A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Greta Anand in <i><b>WSJ</b></i>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444273704577633431646496346.html" target="_blank">"A Woman’s ‘Untreatable’ TB Echoes Around the World"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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John Strausbaugh at <i>Chiseler.org</i>, <a href="http://chiseler.org/post/30677651927/izzy-and-moe" target="_blank">"Izzy and Moe"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Sept. 23, EncoreWesterns: <a href="http://www.starz.com/titles/ridethehighcountry" target="_blank">"Joel McCrea"</a>. “Six-gun salute” features Ride the High Country (1962).<br />
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-y_NNIozxv50/UFfE3IB6DsI/AAAAAAAAAJE/siB1W28AhdQ/s347/UnfairtoGenius.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /><br />
Ken Emerson in <i><b>WSJ</b></i> on Gary Rosen’s book, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444327204577614533857436886.html?mod=googlenews_wsj" target="_blank">"Unfair to Genius – The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein"</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Gene Sculatti at <i>Rocksbackpagesblogs.com</i>, <a href="http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2012/08/where-were-you-in-62-pops-last-pre-beatle-year-flowed-with-undercurrents-and-hinted-at-the-future-including-the-fab-fours/" target="_blank">"Where Were You in ’62 "</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
“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.” </blockquote>
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Chuck Dukowski Sextet interview at <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/ABvluJ/www.verbicidemagazine.com/2012/08/09/interview-the-chuck-dukowski-sextet-2/" target="_blank">"Verbicide.com"</a>.<br />
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“<b>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</b>? </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>Chuck</b>: 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 <i>Haunted</i>, 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.</blockquote>
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<b><br />
</b> <b>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</b>. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>Chuck</b>: The reed instruments phased out during the recording of <i>Reverse The Polarity</i>. Lynn got sick, but luckily Milo found his full voice on guitar at the same time. On <i>Haunted</i> you get to hear Milo as a fully realized player.” </blockquote>
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<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-XlLbK0or_4Q/UFfE1ixcewI/AAAAAAAAAI8/sisP62oESss/s370/trust_153.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /> <a href="http://www.trust-zine.de/trust-155-augustseptember-out-now/" target="_blank">"Meat Puppets"</a> in <b><i>Trust</i></b> #155<br />
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The first review of my new book appears in <i>Deutsche</i> also in this issue; what can this mean?<br />
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Jan Roehlk on <b>Life Against Dementia</b> in <i><b>Trust</b></i> #155, August / September 2012: <br />
<blockquote>
“<b>Life against Dementia – Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1975 – 2011</b> - Joe Carducci </blockquote>
<blockquote>
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” </blockquote>
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Dolf Hermannstadter’s <i><b>Trust</b></i> review of my last book, <b>Enter Naomi – SST, L.A. and All That</b>…, was posted in <a href="http://www.trust-zine.de/enter-naomi-%E2%80%93-sst-l-a-and-all-that-%E2%80%93-joe-carducci/" target="_blank">English</a>.<br />
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Flipside’s <a href="http://hudleyflipside.org/trust-fanzine-from-germany-interview-with-hudley-of-flipside-fanzine/" target="_blank">"Hudley interview"</a> from <i><b>Trust</b></i> #154 at <i>Hudleyflipside.org </i><br />
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<a href="http://www.trust-zine.de/trust-153-aprilmay-out-now/" target="_blank">"Descendents"</a> in <b>Trust</b> #153<br />
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Saccharine Trust at <a href="http://theelectricsunshine.blogspot.com/2012/09/saccharine-trust.html" target="_blank">"theelectricsunshine"</a>.<br />
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Alan Licht book-signing for <a href="http://www.housingworks.org/events/detail/will-oldham-on-bonnie-prince-billy-release-party-with-mcnally-jackson-vol-1" target="_blank">"Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy"</a>, Monday, September 24th, Housing Works Bookstore/Cafe, 126 Crosby St., NYC, 7pm, free.<br />
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Thanks to <i>Futureofcapitalism.com.</i><br />
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<i>• The New Vulgate</i><br />
<i>• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, <a href="http://www.snowyrangegraphics.com/" target="_blank">Mike Vann Gray</a>, David Lightbourne (1942 - 2010), <a href="http://www.mjsaf.com/" target="_blank">Michael J. Safran</a><br />
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