A Cloud In Trousers

Pyongyang and Cuba

2012-01-18T13:00:00.003Z

In the current LRB Tariq Ali writes of his first visit, in 1973 to Pynongyang in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (which as a phrase is a bit like the Holy Roman Empire, or even the Socialist Workers Party, in that very few of the terms apply to the organisation). Ali meets some Cuban students who take him to meet the Cuban ambassador:

The ambassador was a veteran of the revolution. Sending him to Korea had not been a friendly act: ‘I’d got a bit critical of Fidel and the way things were being done in Cuba. I talked to many others about this and Fidel got angry. I would have preferred prison but they sent me here instead. It’s worked. Havana’s a paradise and Fidel is god. Just get me out of here. I’ll never open my mouth again.’ It was the most enjoyable evening I spent in the DPRK.

Just as paradise needs its fallen angels, its Lucifer Morningstar's, so any society needs its dissidents to stay healthy. Without dissidents, and dissidence, society becomes stale and loses any belief in progress.

In the case of Cuba you get several types of dissident. There are those who wish the revolution had never happened ( but most of those, and their descendents, now live in the US), and these can be dismissed as reactionaries.

Then you get those who support the revolution but believe things are stuck and need changing (like opening the borders for travel). This dissidence can be seen as seeking to extend the revolution.

Any society is healthier for being able to satirise the leaders or call the leaders useless or corrupt or anything at all. Irreverence to leaders is healthy. After all you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Why Dis-Credit Rating Agencies Suck

2012-01-18T12:54:00.000Z

We all think that Standard and Poor, and Moody's are a bunch of incompetent, corrupt and politically motivated gangsters, destroying value in the wake of every announcement.Aditya Chakrabortty at the Guardian ofers his take on the record of dis-credit rating agencies:

Why should S&P and Moody's earn such vast sums? Certainly not for their oracular genius – the agencies have as much foresight as Mr Magoo. In my working life, the credit-rating duopoly has failed to warn investors about the Asian financial crisis, Enron, the subprime crisis, Lehman Brothers – and Greece. My particular favourite, Moody's report dates from December 2009 and is titled "Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced". Six months later, Athens received a $147bn rescue package.Nor are they much cop at analysing corporates, either. Consider this statistic from Sukhdev Johal at Royal Holloway University of London: of the corporate debt rated by S&P as AAA, 32% has been downgraded within just three years, 57% within seven years. That is a huge discrepancy and one that you and I end up paying for through losses on our pension funds.

.........

Since they can't rest on their records, the dis-credit agencies prefer to drape themselves in the cloak of science, claiming the work they do is highly technical and independent. But the anthropologist Alexandra Ouroussoff has spent years studying the agencies; she remembers how in the middle of last January's turmoil in Tunisia, S&P issued a report warning of "downward ratings pressures" on neighbouring governments if they tried to calm social unrest with "populist" tax cuts or spending increases. That extraordinary intervention in the middle of a revolution amounted to one dictum: screw your people and screw political stability; to remain financially viable, you have to stick to your spending plans.

They are paid to give opinions that the people paying for the opinions like and want to hear. That's not very honest. Sweep them away into the dustbin of history.

Books, books and organisation

2012-01-10T16:45:00.001Z

Like the proletariat, my books need organising.Here's an article in the Guardian all about book organisation.

Here's a brilliant stop-motion film re-organising a bookcase:

Here's a brilliant stop-motion film about re-organising a bookshop:

This one's for Rullsenberg.

Joe, I'm Only Dancing

2012-01-09T12:27:00.000Z

Here's a party: (from an Interview between Teresa Toranska and Jakub Berman, Granta 17, (Autumn 1985), pp 47-65, p48)

Berman: 'Once, I think it was in 1948, I danced with Molotov?'
Interviewer: 'You mean with Mrs Molotov?'
B: 'No, she wasn't there; she'd been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov - it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, becuase I haven't a clue about how to dance - and I just moved my feet to the rhythm.'
I: 'As the woman?'
B: 'Molotov led; I wouldn't know how. He wasn't a bad dancer, actually, and I tried to keep in step with him, but for my part it was more like clowning than dancing.'
I: 'What about Stalin, whom did he dance with?'
B: 'Oh no, Stalin didn't dance. Stalin turned the gramophone: he treated that as his duty. He never left it. He would put on a record and watch.'
I: 'He watched you?'
B: 'He watched us dance.'
I: 'So you had a good time?'
B: 'Yes it was pleasant but with an inner tension.'
I: 'You didn't really have fun?'
B: 'Stalin really had fun.'

[as recounted in Vinen, Richard. (2002). Taking Sides. In: A History in Fragments - Europe in the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. London: Abacus. p302]

Temporary Perfections

2012-01-01T17:49:00.000Z

Living as we all do in a kakistocracy it's good to have temporary perfections. It's also good to read, as it opens up new pathways in our brains, according to Gail Rebuck.

And it's good to read Temporary Perfections by Gianrico Carofiglio.

How can you not like a book that references fictional detectives; gives a list of movies that make you cry; quotes Umberto Eco on Charlie Brown; and comes out supporting the intelligent and lazy and warning of the dangers of the stupid and enterprising?

Why I Read The Guardian

2011-12-13T09:33:00.003Z

Here's justification enough. Two letters, on the same page: one about tax transparency; and the other about whistleblowers and the appalling behaviour of HMRC.

like the idea that information collected by the government should be available to anyone (Cameron prescribes NHS reform in bid for economic upturn, 5 December). But it's not just the NHS data that might be interesting. What about the Inland Revenue? It has an equally large data bank. I will be quite happy to toss information about my prostate, varicose veins and mild asthma into the limpid pool of transparency, if the chief executives of big pharma and other FTSE 100 companies will share the intimate details of the development of their taxes over a similar period. They are also welcome to my tax details as an incentive. I propose two sets of online directories, one containing all information about everybody's health and the other holding all information about everybody's earnings and the tax paid on those earnings. That would be a start for a hugely transparent society.Will TaylorCheriton Fitzpaine, Devon

• I was shocked to hear the HM Revenue and Customs solicitor Osita Mba is "facing disciplinary procedures" for disclosing to parliament details of the Goldman Sachs tax debacle (Report, 9 December). These documents were not furtively leaked for personal profit, but presented honourably to parliament to enable it to better perform its duty of holding the Revenue properly to account. Mr Mba is a public benefactor who deserves praise for his courage, not intimidation from his embarrassed bosses. This squalid hounding of a courageous whistleblower should be seen as a contempt of parliament, and the HMRC managers responsible should be hauled before the relevant parliamentary committee to explain themselves.Dr Martin TreacyCardigan, Ceredigion

No further comment required.

Come On In

2011-12-11T22:19:00.001Z

Here's a welcome, make yourself at home sign outside a pub in Cromford, Derbyshire:

Noties at Arkwright's Mill

2011-12-11T22:14:00.001Z

Here's a "noties" from the site of Arkwright's Mill at Cromford

And here's some info from another notice:

Don't borrow my towel notice by anonymous

2011-12-11T21:49:00.001Z

Some people like putting up notices:

Feel the passive aggressive rage in that notice. And see that it's an anonymous angry message.

Libel - what is it good for?

2011-11-13T15:53:00.001Z

Has anyone really had their reputation cleansed by bringing a libel (or slander or defamation) case?

It went well for Oscar Wilde and for Tommy Sheridan. And nobody now laughs at Max Spanker Mosely.

A self-published writer is suing Vaughan Jones, and Richard Dawkins, and Amazon, over some book reviews. I know this should be nothing to see, move along. But the complaint is being taken seriously. O for a serious legal system.

Index on Censorship write:

John Kampfner, the Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, said: “That a family man from Nuneaton can face a potentially ruinous libel action for a book review on Amazon shows how archaic and expensive our libel law is.”

Kampfner added that the Libel Reform Campaign, which is underway with English Pen and Sense about Science, is hoping to commit to a bill in the next Queen’s speech to reform the chilling effect libel has on freedom of speech.

Debt - the first 5000 years

2011-11-13T14:04:00.003Z

Over the summer I picked up David Graeber's book Debt - The First 5000 years.

I have just got around to starting it. Even though I'm not far in, I can recommend it without reservation. It's definitely the hot book of the moment.

There's a good review of David Graeber's Debt at Social Text by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi.

There's a good interview with David Graeber by Philip Pilkington at Naked Capitalism:

David Graeber: Yes there’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale.

It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. “Tell you what, I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Or three arrow-heads for that beaver pelt or what-have-you. This created inconveniences, because maybe your neighbor doesn’t need chickens right now, so you have to invent money.

The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it’s the founding myth of economics. Now, I’m an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow,” we’d have found one or two by now. After all people have been looking since 1776, when the Wealth of Nations first came out. But if you think about it for just a second, it’s hardly surprising that we haven’t found anything.

Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. So, if your neighbor doesn’t have what you want right now, no big deal. Obviously what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don’t even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women’s councils.

So the real question is not how does barter generate some sort of medium of exchange, that then becomes money, but rather, how does that broad sense of ‘I owe you one’ turn into a precise system of measurement – that is: money as a unit of account?

By the time the curtain goes up on the historical record in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3200 BC, it’s already happened. There’s an elaborate system of money of account and complex credit systems. (Money as medium of exchange or as a standardized circulating units of gold, silver, bronze or whatever, only comes much later.)

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

There's a video interview with David Graeber:

The New York Times describes David Graber as: "A scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist and a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World".

6th and Mission

2011-11-06T18:28:00.003Z

Over the summer we spent several days staying around Market Street in San Francisco. I have just found this brilliant and thoughtful piece about gentrification, and the difference between 5th and 6th streets

6th is a lacuna for fruit and veg and 5th is the place for bakeries and coffee and food for all who can afford it. As the piece says "A block away. A unverse away."

People may live in the same city but what is it they share, apart from a post code? When a place changes what happens to the people? And pople are the most important part of any city.

Credit to the brilliant artist, Wendy Macnaughton.

Absurdly expensive shopping

2011-11-06T18:08:00.001Z

Just finished reading Voices by Arnaldur Indridason. A good Icelandic detective story featuring the misanthropic Erlandur.

A line just needs sharing. A suspect in a sub-plot is wearing "a T-shirt with a designer label on one of the breast pockets, which he wore like a medal rewarding him for absurdly expensive shopping." [p167, Voices, Arnaldur Indridason].

Kant, Capitalism, Immorality and Petitio Principii

2011-09-15T19:13:00.005+01:00

Critical thinking and philosophy in schools in schools is an idea whose time is now. That's the gist of a letter in today's Guardian.

Combine that with a course in scientific method, experimental design and enough statistics to keep the Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fleece being pulled over people's eyes and that's a basis of a winning curriculum.

I couldn't agree more. Critical thinking and philosophy is vital to the well being of a society. If only some of the signatories followed some of the basic rules of logic. A recent issue of Chartist has Bob Brecher's and Phil Vellender's essay on Capitalism and Immorality. I believe that capitalism is immoral but providing a watertight argument why it is is harder than it seems.

Brecher rightly approves Kant's Categorical Imperative,

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end."

And

"Kant's principle seems undeniable (try it). To be a person – to be recognised as such and not just a member of the species, Homo sapiens — is already to have a moral and political status. A person's life isn't merely a means to another's, or their own, ends. So if you deny Kant's principle, you're denying that you're a person - that's a contradiction."

Brecher here constructs a syllogism whose premises are: to be a person is already to have a moral and political status; a person's life isn't merely a means to another's, or their own, ends; therefore we conclude with Kant's Categorical Imperative. To deny the Imperative is to deny the premise. But the second premise is just a paraphrase of the conclusion. This is like saying X is a number; X is 3; therefore we conclude that X is 3. To deny that X is 3 contradicts our second premise.

The argument is guilty of assuming what it is trying to argue for. Avoiding the Latin, petitio principii, this is begging the question, and makes for an invalid argument.

As an aside it is important to realise that it is only in the 20th century that women were considered as persons in English law.
In the LRB, Vol 33 No 9 28th April 2011, Stephen Sedley wrote of

"When Parliament gave women the right to stand for election, Lady Sandhurst was unseated from the London County Council by an opponent who claimed that, not being a person, she could not be ‘a fit person of full age’. But when a Miss Cobden was elected and waited till the time for challenge was past before taking her seat, she was promptly prosecuted for being a person sitting as councillor when unqualified. She put up the seemingly impregnable defence that if she was not a person for the purpose of being elected she could not be a person for the purpose of being prosecuted. Naturally, she was convicted."

I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative is a fine formulation for treating people, but I bet Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, could have adhered to the imperative, barring an accident of chronology. If you don't see all people as persons then the Imperative can easily become justification for slavery, concentration camps and Fascism. Persons are well treated, as ends and not merely as means, but people are treated however the order of the day sees fit, often merely as means.

Something we didn't do in San Francisco

2011-09-13T20:48:00.001+01:00

No. I didn't.

I was home by the date in question.

Graffiti in San Francisco

2011-09-13T20:32:00.001+01:00

Spotted in San Francisco, opposite City Lights.

And here's City Lights.

Take Five

2011-08-05T18:36:00.002+01:00

Here's the Sachal Orchestra with Take Five.

and there's more.

Clean Clothes

2011-07-20T13:54:00.002+01:00

Who wants to go about in dirty clothes? Not me.

That's why I have signed up to the Clean Clothes Campaign.

There's a song by the ~~folk singer Chris Wood~~ Oyster Band that talks about the saddest thing is workers in developing countries putting holes in jeans.

But some companies still sandblast jeans in a process that kills the workers.

If you want to wear distressed clothes buy second hand clothes that have been distressed and have the patina of experience. Don't wear some factory fresh distress.

[ Thanks to Nick for the correction ]

On Documentary

2011-07-17T14:04:00.000+01:00

A brilliant critique of Adam Curtis's style over substance.

[ Hat tip: Paul Stott ]

Nazi Iconography

2011-05-29T16:35:00.007+01:00

I have a confession to make: I don't watch much football. But last night I watched Barcelona outplay Manchester United. Barcelona were superb with their control, possession and all round footballing play.

Something was disturbing me about Man Utd's strip. After several minutes I realised what it was. The red arm patch with the black and white logo, of the Champions League starball, evokes the image of a Nazi arm band. I'm not saying this was an intentional design conceit but I don't think you can have a red band on your arm with a white circle with a black geometric shape without it evoking a Nazi arm band.

See this image taken by Tom Jenkins for the Observer

The arm patch of the geometric ball on a red band evokes a nazi arm band.

There is a history of designers "playing" with Nazi imagery. Often it's not through any malevolent intent but purely through ignorance of the historical and political context of the imagery. An example is when Bryan Ferry apologized for liking Nazi imagery.

He told Welt am Sonntag: "The Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves.

"Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful."

At the risk of summarising and simplifying too much, part of the appeal of the Nazis to 1930s Europeans, was their style, showmanship, iconography and their ability to put on a show. Another part of their appeal was scapegoating and offering brutal and simple answers but here let's just say the Nazis were a criminally bad and murderous organisation with an iconography that still sppeals to some people today. It's not that most designers use the iconography because they have Nazi sympathies, it's often because the imagery, shorn of its political and historic context, looks simple and modern. To separate the imagery from the context takes an almost incomprehensible level of ignorance but we do live in a world where too many still suffer from Beveridge's five 'Giant Evils' of 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness'.

To summarise, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think you can have a red band with a black geometric shape in a white circle without it evoking nazism.

Some Musings on Universities

2011-05-17T00:12:00.009+01:00

In trying to formulate a response to Howard Hotson's piece in the current LRB, "Don't Look to the Ivy League", I found this quote about an English university:

The University of Cambridge is an exempt charity subject to regulation by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) under the Charities Act 2006.

The University is a common law corporation, being a corporation by prescription consisting of a Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars who from time out of mind have had the government of their members and enjoyed the privileges of such a corporation. By Act of Parliament 13 Elizabeth Cap. 29 passed in the year 1571 the incorporation of the University and all privileges then held under charter or by prescription were duly confirmed.

I was tickled by the phrase "from time out of mind". Since, like yonks ago, to put it in the contemporary vernacular.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England, HEFCE, points out that all bar one, of England's higher education institutions, are incorporated as private charitable corporations. Essentially, in England, the only public institution of higher education is Guildhall School of Music which is controlled by the, not very democratic, Corporation of the City of London. All other institutions are in reality private corporations that are publicly funded. There is little democratic control of the trustees and management of these institutions. There is little in law to stop English universities deciding to go fully private, and refuse public funds tomorrow. That surely means they are not public institutions.

Hotson's argument amounts to looking at the different resources, including GDP and population in the US and the UK, contrary to accepted wisdom, the US actually underperfoms in the THE-QS World University rankings. He makes a welcome contribution to the debate when he argues that there is no evidence of private sector competition driving up academic standards, and, if anything, treating students as customers only serves to introduce grade inflation and leads to expenditure on "the student experience" instead of education. All reasonable conclusions with which I agree. However some of Hotson's reasoning is a bit squiffy.

In looking at the geographical distribution of the top 100 universities in the THE rankings for 2010-11, by which I assume he means this, he says "The wealthiest private universities at the top of the league table .. are concentrated on the northeastern seaboard of the United States". Now the list begins

Harvard
CalTech
MIT
Stanford
Princeton
Cambridge
Oxford
Berkeley
Imperial
Yale
UCLA

Now, CalTech and Stanford are private institutions in California, which is nowhere near the northeastern seaboard. Perhaps he means another THE ranking?

Now, just because you can manipulate numbers it doesn't mean that you should. Hotson argues

According to Unesco, there are 5758 recognised higher education institutions in the US, about 1600 of which grant four-year degrees. So the 72 US universities in the top 200 represent fewer than 5 per cent of those offering four-year degrees. The US university system overall appears to offer poor value for money: none of the funding, public or private, pouring into 95 per cent of the higher education institutions in America makes any impact at all on the world university rankings. By comparison, the 29 UK universities in the top 200 represent nearly a fifth of the 165 listed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. So British universities appear, on average, to be almost four times better at breaking into the global top 200 than their American counterparts.

That is statistical garbage. If all of the top 200 places were taken by US institutions that would mean that 1400/1600 or 87.5% of US institutions were outwith the top 200 and would mean that the funding of just under 90% "of the higher education institutions in America makes [no] impact at all on the world university rankings". Only 12.5% of US institutions can be in the global top 200. It's all a matter of scale.

Simply on the basis of numbers all 165 of the UK higher education institutions could get into the top 200. That would not make UK universities better at breaking into the global top 200 than other countries' universities. On the basis of Hotson's logic if a country gets 100% of its universities into the top 200, even if it only has one university, then its record at breaking into the top 200 cannot be surpassed. In this case ratios, and percentages, tell us very little.

I'm not disputing Hotson's conclusions it's just that some of his arguments are nonsense.

Tindersticks - My Sister

2011-05-07T20:17:00.001+01:00

Years ago I borrowed a Tindersticks album from Wolverhampton Central Library. What a find.

Here's a video of My Sister.

Agents Provacateur

2011-04-02T20:30:00.000+01:00

Ever since The Man Who Was Thursday some people believe that activists are all government agents. There was also the case in the USA where, at one point in the 1960s 10 percent of the SWP were FBI informants.

COINTELPRO operations began against the SW in 1961, when court records show they had around 600 members-10 percent were FBI informants who were paid in excess of $1.6 million over the years for their efforts.22 Infiltration began in response to the SW's electoral campaigns and desegregation activities-perfectly legal undertakings. Over the years, member informants supplied the government with membership lists, financial records, budgets, minutes of meetings, mailing lists, and correspondence. From 1961-1976, fifty-five informants held offices or committee positions and fifty-one served on executive committees of the party. 13

Dan Hind points out that at 5:54 into this footage of the MArch 26th 2011 demo a black clad psuedo anarchist passes through police lines by showing a pass.

UK Uncut - How To Do a Bail In

2011-04-02T19:48:00.003+01:00

How To Do a Bail In. A guide by UK Uncut.

[Via Socialist Unity]

The Famous Five and a Polyester Emporium

2011-04-02T19:15:00.000+01:00

Lasy Saturday a branch of the static inducing, misogynistic, Anne Summers chain had its windows smashed.

The heroes of the hour were George, Julian, Dick, Anne and Timmy. They explain why they did what they did here.

Ann Summers presents a thin veneer of respectability to what is ultimately total exploitation of our attachments, insecurities and fears. It is a point of capture for the feelings of inadequacy synthesized by capitalist marketing.

The present commodification of sex is so successful because the insecurity it generates distracts us from rejecting capitalist values as the only possible precondition for meaningful sexual relations. As if worth and value can be calculated from the frequency of orgasms. Good sex becomes quantifiable. Pleasures must be maximized. Are you missing out because you are not flirtatious, adventurous or daring enough?

But let us not spend too long missing the wood for the trees. This is the nature of the real subsumption beneath capital: once capitalist production is established it seeks to permeate every aspect of life that exists within it.

Our act was not one of destruction but one of rejection. A rejection of a process of capture. Of ensnaring and taking our desires from us. Of taking everything we want in life and returning it to us in a box.

To resist this is to live and, in the words of Jacques Camatte, this world we must leave.

For F.J. Titmus read Titmus F.J.

2011-03-24T13:00:00.001Z

Sad to hear of the death of Fred Titmus, a Middlesex and England off-spinner.

Here's the anecdote about the amateurs and gentlemen days of English cricket.

There is a famous cricket story from the days when a strict divide was maintained between amateurs and professionals. It maintains that there was once an announcement at Lord’s that ran:

For F.J. Titmus read Titmus, F.J.

The point was that amateurs had their initials placed before their names and professionals had them afterwards.

An analysis of the fall of the Celtic Tiger

2011-03-20T18:04:00.004Z

Here's a fairly decent analysis of the economic crisis with particular reference to the Celtic Tiger.

[Hat tip: Bob Piper]

Census 2011

2011-03-11T19:58:00.000Z

Now then. Now then. There are differences of opinion about the census. Is it important for the future planning of local, and national, services, sorry the Big Society. Must get up to speed with the vernacular.

Should it be boycotted because it's another example of the Big Brother state?

Should it be boycotted because part of the data collection is done by the arms making, and arms dealing, Lockheed Martin?

If you do fill it in what should you put in the religious section?
The Leicester Secular Society and British Humanist Association are running a campaign - "if you're not religious, for God's sake say so".

Here's a picture:

The Killing

2011-01-23T11:22:00.000Z

Did you see The Killing last night on BBC4?

If you didn't I recommend that you catch up. It's a Danish tv drama about a 20 day investigation into the murder of a young woman. Soon after the investigation begins evidence is found pointing to local politicians and the media.

What gives this show an edge is that, unlike most tv detectives, the lead character is a woman investigating what you could call a hate crime against women.

Genuinely thrilling stuff.

House of Books

2011-01-16T18:04:00.001Z

There's something about the physical paper book that cannot be replaced by an e-reader. It's the feel, the texture, the weight, and the sense that you're doing something that people have been doing at least since the days of Wynkyn de Worde.

Here's Saul Abramsky's account of his grandfather's house of books a house of books.

A little over 30 years ago, a family friend of my mother's came from Los Angeles to visit us in London, and was taken to see my grandparents' house near Hampstead Heath. An artist, he immortalised that evening with a black and white ink drawing. Titled Chimen Abramsky's House of Books, it showed a house the walls of which consisted entirely of books; the occupants sat around cluttered tables in old chairs drinking endless cups of coffee or tea while engaged in animated conversation.

Every single room of the house, except the bathroom and kitchen, was, indeed, lined floor to ceiling with books. And when the shelves were filled, the floors succumbed to great, twisting piles of paperbacks and hardbacks. To me, growing up, this house was my school, my library and my sanctuary when things got tough at home. My grandfather had been a bookseller in the East End from 1940 until the mid-1960s, an antiquarian, an academic – self-made, without even a completed degree. He had been studying history in Jerusalem in 1939, had come to London to visit his parents, and had been stranded by the outbreak of war; he never returned to his undergraduate studies. But he was soon corresponding with many of the world's leading intellects, sometimes writing as many as 10 letters a day.

To that extraordinary place traipsed generations of scholars and rabbis, politicians, refugees, artists, students.

Books, tea, coffee, cake, biscuits and conversation makes for a damn good afternoon.

A Nice Cup of Tea

2011-01-03T15:32:00.004Z

Over in the USA Christopher Hitchens is complaining about the difficulty of finding a nice cup of tea. It's good to see the Hitch drinking tea. He discusses George Orwell's 11 golden rules for a nice cup of tea. Here are the tenth and eleventh rules:

# Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

# Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

Go on, have a nice cup of tea.

[Hat tip: Norm]

A critique of Brecher on universities and the neo-liberal revolution

2011-01-02T17:53:00.012Z

In the current Chartist magazine Bob Brecher writes on universities and the neo-liberal revolution.

Education has always served two quite contrary needs: continuity and renewal. Now, provided the numbers are small, that is no great problem. The majority of that small minority can be safely relied upon to deal with continuity: the universities of Oxford and Cambridge have performed that task magnificently for centuries. And the small minority (of the small minority) who do concern themselves with renewal will have in mind only those forms of renewal that serve, rather than undermine, the ruling order. So we should not be surprised that Cameron has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (I'm not joking) from Oxford; his sidekick, Clegg, a BA in Social Anthropology from Cambridge. This presents a problem for contemporary capitalism. It needs to engage the vast majority for its project – as consumers, if not as producers. As it becomes more technologically complex, so it needs workers with more and more skills and more and more knowledge. With the increasing pace of technological change, it also needs those workers to be 'flexible', as Browne so disarmingly tells us. In short, the old division between those fit only for secondary modern schools and those who can be permitted to enter grammar school needs to go much deeper and to go on for much longer.

So we have the two conflicting needs served by education of continuity, the majority, and renewal, the task of a small minority of graduates or institutions? Whether these are "needs" of capital or "needs" of society is left unclear.

When Brecher argues that "[those who] do concern themselves with renewal will have in mind only those forms of renewal that serve, rather than undermine, the ruling order" he is negating the existence of left parties and groups who seek renewal of society through undermining and overthrowing the ruling order.

Why does Brecher write "we should not be surprised that Cameron has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (I'm not joking) from Oxford"? Does Brecher find it funny that there is a PPE degree? Or does he find it funny that someone should have studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics and not be a socialist? Just as studying humanities subjects does not necessarily humanise the individual, the way, the truth and the light do not all appear to everyone who has followed the path of PPE. In any case Cameron and Clegg have both "proceeded MA" and relinquished all rights to their BA degree, as is the Oxbridge way.

How do you jump from saying an increasingly complex capitalism "needs [flexible] workers with more and more skills and more and more knowledge" to saying the "old division between those fit only for secondary modern schools and those who can be permitted to enter grammar school needs to go much deeper and to go on for much longer." The "old division" does not necessarily follow from the need for workers with more skills and more knowledge and more flexibility (whatever that means).

[I]t comes as no surprise that the most noticeable thing about academic responses to the Browne Report is that no one has seen fit to locate its recommendations in the context of the government's commitment to using the so-called economic crisis as a pretext for initiating a neo-liberal revolution beyond Thatcher's wildest dreams. It is as though its plans for the universities were ignorant, spiteful, blatantly illogical or all three. But they are not; unless we understand government policy for what it is we have not the slightest chance of overturning it, whether in the universities or elsewhere. The transformation of the universities from being a public good, and recognised as such, to being at once providers of private consumables and a vanguard of the values thus entrenched is an integral part of the neo-liberal fundamentalists' opportunistic revolution.

Now "no one has seen fit to locate [the Browne report's] recommendations in the context of the government's commitment to using the so-called economic crisis as a pretext for initiating a neo-liberal revolution beyond Thatcher's wildest dreams" is a claim of bewildering chutzpah. Does he mean that I, Bob Brecher, am the first to locate the recommendations as part of a neo-liberal putsch? Most people I talk to, some of them academics and some not, see everything this Con-Dem government does as part of a neo-liberal realignment.

It is, almost, beyond dispute that universities are a recognised public good. A university is failing its community if it does not dominate the culture and debate in its region. Also society benefits from having skilled and knowledgeable members but there has always been a private benefit to the individual from higher education. The individual often gets confidence and satisfaction from understanding how to come to terms with how the world works, or at least how a part of the world works, and, often, is paid more than those who haven't been through higher education. So universities produce a public good and, at the same time, a private good for its alumni. That has always been the case, even since William of Ockham's time.

Later Brecher asks why neo-liberals need to marketise the universities.

First, because neo-liberalism requires that the majority of people are taught not to think clearly and not to question what they're told, lest they rebel. Second, and this is even more important, if the universities can be made into vehicles of the neo-liberal creed then they will do more than most other social institutions to reproduce and enforce that creed. Not only will 'students' come to believe that everything – and perhaps everyone – is a commodity, but their teachers will themselves be products of the same ideology. For who but the rich will be able or willing to take on postgraduate work once they're already tens of thousands of pounds in undergraduate debt?

That is bollocks. That's more a description of the demands of a command and control economyy than neo-liberalism. Surely neo-liberalism requires that people believe in the tenets of neo-liberalism. It does not require "that the majority of people are taught not to think clearly and not to question what they're told". Neo-liberalism as a doctrine may be something I don't like and oppose, but it has its own logic and its own problems that require clear thinking to overcome. The neo-liberal doctrine of renewal through creative destruction also requires a reqular questioning of orthodoxy to do things in new ways.

Does Brecher suppose there are courses in universities on teaching people how not to think clearly? Surely it's more likely that people are just not taught how to think clearly. At the moment hardly any English universities have modules on critical thinking that teach logic and reasoning skills.

Just because the neo-liberal creed is being driven into universities that does not mean universities are neo-liberal vehicles. There is no necessary causal relationship between how a university, or university department, is funded and what it teaches. When Brecher asks "who but the rich will be able or willing to take on postgraduate work once they're already tens of thousands of pounds in undergraduate debt" surely the answer is those who know that that is what they need to do if they want to do what they want to do. It's not about being rich it's about coming to terms with a debt that you're not going to have to consider paying while you're still a student, even a postgrad. The debt may deter some people; it may attract some people in the way that some people prefer to pay to go to an attraction rather than to a cost-free art gallery. At the moment we don't know the debt's impact.

The next bit

Everything else – from engineering to physics to business to design – will become bereft of critical content, taught – again if that is the right word – by people who understand themselves to be 'delivering' quantifiable commodities to their customers.

is just more speculative bollocks. Why will these subjects "become bereft of critical content"? It's an interesting, and agreeable, definition of "teach" to only include subjects with critical content but can you teach calculus critically, and if you could, should you?

Yes, we can all agree that the Con-Dem government is taking advantage of the current fiscal crisis to drive ideological change.

So again, it will not be 'a huge mistake' to 'value our students simply for what we can get out of them or what they might earn in the future' because 'they will in turn estimate our value by what they can get out of us' ('Hefce chief: prepare for tough journey', Times Higher Educational Supplement. 28 Oct. 2010). On the contrary: that is exactly what Browne intends. The neo-liberal revolutionaries know exactly what they are doing and why. They intend to take advantage of the current 'crisis' – the ideological power of which is in inverse proportion to its material reality — by encouraging the élite universities to go private in frustration if for no other reason, forcing the 'bottom of the range' into the hands of commercial companies such as Kaplan and BBP and slowly strangling the rest as any sort of public institution. At least some academics are coming to realise this, and have just formed the Campaign for the Public University (http://publicuniversity.org.uk/).

It is a mistake to "value our students simply for what we can get out of them or what they might earn in the future", irrespective of Browne's intentions. If you don't see it as an egregious mistake it is still the wrong thing to do even if they are Browne's intentions. And, I think, Brecher, believes it is the wrong thing to do. If it is the wrong thing then, it is mistaken, even deliberately so.

As I understand it, all, bar one, of the higher education institutions in England are incorporated as private charities. The single exception is the Guildhall School of Music which is part of the Corporation of the City of London. So legally all, bar one, of England's universities are already private institutions.

Now we are heading to the conclusion:

So what is to be done? We must understand the ideological nature of the Coalition's attack on the universities and not be sidelined by their disguising it as a cost-cutting exercise: this year's planned bonuses for top bankers amount to three times current public spending on the universities. We have to understand and oppose it, not in isolation, as though it concerned the universities alone, but for what it is: a genuinely revolutionary policy.

Yes, it is important to understand this is an ideological attack on universities and society and is merely disguised as a cost-cutting exercise. That's fine and dandy. To then say "this year's planned bonuses for top bankers amount to three times current public spending on the universities" has no relevance to anything unless the money available for banker's bonuses is appropriated by the government. As an argument it's like saying that the money spent on scratch and sniff lotto cards each week is twice current public spending on universities. There is no connection, it's just 3 oranges added to a pomegranate. Now this final paragraph is fine.

Students, administrators and academics need to take themselves seriously as members of a university and to join forces with all the other workers, paid and unpaid, whom the multi-millionaire fundamentalists around the Cabinet table regard as so much dross. Most pressingly of all, academics have to understand, realise and use the power that as academics they have. A good starting-point would be to refuse to act as the self-interested egoists which too many of them have become and whom the neo-liberals would have the rest of us become; to refuse to compete with one another, whether within or across institutions, or with other groups of workers; and to make a new reality of what was once known as solidarity.

I have very little disagreement with the conclusion but the arguments used to reach the conclusion are a mix of speculation and ranting polemic with little evidence to back them up.

As always unite and fight against the neo-liberal agenda.

Gaza Manifesto for Change

2011-01-02T14:37:00.002Z

Gaza Youth Breaks Out has issued a manifesto against Hamas; against Israel; against Fatah.

GAZAN YOUTH’S MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!

We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!

We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom.

We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.

There is a revolution growing inside of us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a way of canalizing this energy into something that can challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope.

The final drop that made our hearts tremble with frustration and hopelessness happened 30rd November, when Hamas’ officers came to Sharek Youth Forum, a leading youth organization (www.sharek.ps) with their guns, lies and aggressiveness, throwing everybody outside, incarcerating some and prohibiting Sharek from working. A few days later, demonstrators in front of Sharek were beaten and some incarcerated.

We are really living a nightmare inside a nightmare. It is difficult to find words for the pressure we are under. We barely survived the Operation Cast Lead, where Israel very effectively bombed the shit out of us, destroying thousands of homes and even more lives and dreams. They did not get rid of Hamas, as they intended, but they sure scared us forever and distributed post traumatic stress syndrome to everybody, as there was nowhere to run.

We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them?

We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now.

During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations.

We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime.

Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.

History is repeating itself in its most cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared.

Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed.

We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even cant think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage!

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore.

ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration!

WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

We want three things.
We want to be free.
We want to be able to live a normal life.
We want peace.
Is that too much to ask? We are a peace movement consistent of young people in Gaza and supporters elsewhere that will not rest until the truth about Gaza is known by everybody in this whole world and in such a degree that no more silent consent or loud indifference will be accepted.

This is the Gazan youth’s manifesto for change!

We will start by destroying the occupation that surrounds ourselves, we will break free from this mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect.

We will carry our heads high even though we will face resistance.

We will work day and night in order to change these miserable conditions we are living under.

We will build dreams where we meet walls.

We only hope that you – yes, you reading this statement right now! – can support us. In order to find out how, please write on our wall or contact us directly: freegazayouth@hotmail.com

We want to be free, we want to live, we want peace.
FREE GAZA YOUTH!
GYBO
December, 2010

They are to be found on Facebook, of course.

The revolution will be twittered and facebooked.

Desolation Row

2011-01-02T13:21:00.002Z

When you think of Detroit you think of Motown, the MC5, Iggy And the Stooges. Now look at these images of the decline of Detroit. If the buildings are just left, abandoned as if a couple of minutes notice were given of impending destruction, what of the people of Detroit?

In the related article the photographers say:

"As Europeans, we were looking with an outsider's eye, which made downtown Detroit seem even more strange and dramatic," says Meffre. "We are not used to seeing empty buildings left intact. In Europe, salvage companies move in immediately and take what they can sell as antiques. Here, they only take the metal piping to sell for scrap. In the Vanity ballroom alone, we saw four giant art deco chandeliers, beautiful objects, each one unique. It was almost unbelievable that they could still be there. It is as if America has no sense of its own architectural history and culture."

This is very much a symptom of the cycles of capital with the decline of Detroits' reason for being (that being the motor industry), and racial politics with "white flight" leaving a largely poor, and African-American city centre. To overthrow capitalism and replace it by something better is a laudable, and vital, aim. In Detroit it is as if capitalism has abandoned the people and their infrastructure, leaving little in the way of food shops and all the other essesntials of modern existence.

The conclusion is worth reading:

as [Thomas J Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit] puts it: "The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present."

Assange and Misogyny

2010-12-16T12:32:00.004Z

It's difficult for some people to grasp but it is possible to have an opinion on Wikileaks *A*N*D to have an opinion on Julian Assange *A*N*D to have an opinion on the case against him.

Here's a link to a collection of posts on the misogyny of some of Assange's supporters.

Being a tad old-fashioned I always thought that castigating the character of women alleging sexual assault was the preserve of antediluvian neanderthals, high court judges, and Premiership footballers. For a take on this see Attila the Stockbroker's poem Contributory Negligence.

Whatever happened with Assange and these two women, it should be left to a court to decide.

There are dynamics at work in this story that are particularly unpleasant.

Something that has not been discussed is that the case may have progressed as far as it has only because of Julian Assange's celebrity. Imagine, you are a little known prosecutor, and a case involving a celebrity crosses your desk. Taking on the case could be the making, Or even the breaking, of your career. Do you take the case? Some ambitious people would do just that.

There's a good piece on Feministe criticizing Naomi Wolfe.

it is totally possible to support the WikiLeaks project and to think that the international response to Assange and the project is thoroughly fucked up and to think we should withhold judgment on whether or not Assange is actually a rapist and also to think that we should withhold judgment on whether the women are lying, and to not discredit the women involved, and to not create a hostile climate for rape survivors, and to not play into every tired old stereotype about women and rape.

Seriously, we can chew gum and walk at the same time.

Let's have less misogynistic bollocks spoken. There's a time to wait quietly. And that time is now.

Nepotism in the harmonious state of China

2010-10-25T12:34:00.004+01:00

In the current LRB Slavoj Zizek writes about the state of China in a review of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
Allen Lane, 302 pp, £25.00, June 2010, ISBN 978 1 84614 173 7.

It seems that the Chinese Communist Party is like a provincial branch of the Freemasons (aka "the mafia of the mediocre") in giving jobs to family and friends of members and contacts.

The irony is that the Party itself, its complex workings hidden from public scrutiny, is the ultimate source of corruption. The inner circle, comprising top Party and state functionaries as well as chiefs of industry, communicate via an exclusive phone network, the ‘Red Machine’ – possessing one of its unlisted numbers is a clear sign of one’s status. A vice-minister tells McGregor that ‘more than half of the calls he received on his “red machine” were requests for favours from senior Party officials, along the lines of: “Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?”’

Zizek ends by raising the fragile state of China's much proclaimed "harmony"

Every year, thousands of rebellions by workers, farmers and minorities have to be put down by the police and the army. No wonder official propaganda insists obsessively on the notion of the harmonious society: this very excess bears witness to the opposite, to the threat of chaos and disorder. One should bear in mind the basic rule of Stalinist hermeneutics: since the official media do not openly report trouble, the most reliable way to detect it is to look out for compensatory excesses in state propaganda: the more ‘harmony’ is celebrated, the more chaos and antagonism there is in reality. China is barely under control. It threatens to explode.

Like Littlejohn, Clarkson and Bushell on homosexuality, the Chinese State protests too much.

Things and First Principles

2010-10-16T18:41:00.003+01:00

Tidying up I found a copy of the Guardian's obit of Tony Judt. I liked this story:

Mixing with the elite at the École Normale began another process of disenchantment, when he observed at firsthand that "cardinal axiom of French intellectual life", as he drily called it, "a radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles".

Deriving facts from first prnciples should, largely, be left to pure mathematics.

GMB Ballot Paper for Leader of the Labour Party

2010-09-14T18:56:00.002+01:00

I'm not a member of the Labour Party but then again I'm not "a supporter of any organisation opposed to it" so according to my GMB ballot paper I can vote for the next leader of the Labour Party.

There is encouragement on the form to vote online as it is

immediate
secret and secure
carbon neutral
saves GMB money

Fine.

To vote online you have to enter the Security Code part one and the Security Code part two from your ballot paper. Guess what? My ballot paper has a blank security code part one and a blank security code part two.

I can't be the only one, can I?

So my vote is going via Royal Mail.

The Globe and Hal IV

2010-09-14T18:42:00.003+01:00

Sunday we saw Henry IV Part i at the Globe.

The seats were nominally priced as they were sold as restricted view, in the corner at the side of the stage. We managed to see most of the action.

Roger Allam as Falstaff was brilliant. It's only now that I understand Robert Nye's novel Falstaff.

Art Deco In Eltham

2010-09-14T18:21:00.004+01:00

Saturday we went to see the Art-Deco Eltham Palace.

Rullsenberg enjoyed the Art-Deco world and I enjoyed the happiness on Rullsenberg's face!

It's a great day out in South London according to English Heritage.

Thomas Carlyle's House

2010-09-14T18:02:00.002+01:00

After visiting the Red House we wandered through Chelsea, just in time to see the privileged scion leave their privileged schools. Finally we found Thomas Carlyle's House.

Now Thomas Carlyle is one of hose eminent Victorians that you think you should read, then you read bits and pieces and sum him up as an old racist curmudgeon. There must be more to him than that.

Samuel Butler, in a letter of 21st November 1884, wrote "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four." And that's a good epitaph.

The Red House

2010-09-14T17:35:00.003+01:00

Just back from a weekend in London with Rullsenberg.

Visited William Morris's Red House at Bexley Heath. Discovered that much of the refurb and reinstantiation of the original Arts and Crafts features from the 1950's onward was done by Ted and Doris Hollamby. Admirably done.

According to his obit in the Gruaniad Ted Hollamby also oversaw "refurbishment of the exterior of the bombed-out church of St George's-in-the-East, a gloriously eccentric work by England's greatest architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor."

One big stain on his career, was the plan for the desolation that is Thamesmead. So the film A Clockwork Orange is connected to William Morris. Nice.

Economics: A Fantasy

2010-09-05T18:08:00.006+01:00

Much of economic theory is abstraction, built upon a foundation of mixed metaphors, that sets a policy agenda that then becomes a way of impoverishing countries.

Kickitover has a sticker to stick on introductory economics text books. *C*O*R*R*E*C*T*I*O*N

And here's two economic theorists doing a rap: Keynes and Hayek.

Where is a free market? I've yet to see one.

[ The rap video came via Duncan's Economic Blog.]

The Earth Shakes

2010-09-05T18:05:00.002+01:00

I get hiccups and the earth quakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Seems it was scary for all involved. Thankfully that's now all over but my hiccups are giving me aftershocks.

Street Fighting Mathematics

2010-08-02T09:02:00.006+01:00

Sanjoy Mahajan has written a book on practical mathematics. It sounds good and, even better, it's available for free download under a Creative Commons Edition, see Street Fighting Mathematics here.

Here's the first example

1.1 Economics: The power of multinational corporations

Critics of globalization often make the following comparison [25] to prove the excessive power of multinational corporations: In Nigeria, a relatively economically strong country, the GDP [gross domestic product] is $99 billion. The net worth of Exxon is $119 billion. “When multinationals have a net worth higher than the GDP of the country in which they operate, what kind of power relationship are we talking about?” asks Laura Morosini.
Before continuing, explore the following question:

What is the most egregious fault in the comparison between Exxon and Nigeria? The field is competitive, but one fault stands out. It becomes evident after unpacking the meaning of GDP. A GDP of $99 billion is shorthand for a monetary flow of $99 billion per year. A year, which is the time for the earth to travel around the sun, is an astronomical phenomenon that A dimensionally valid comparison would compare like with like: either Nigeria’s GDP with Exxon’s revenues, or Exxon’s net worth with Nigeria’s net worth. Because net worths of countries are not often tabulated, whereas corporate revenues are widely available, try comparing Exxon’s annual revenues with Nigeria’s GDP. By 2006, Exxon had become Exxon Mobil with annual revenues of roughly $350 billion—almost twice Nigeria’s 2006 GDP of $200 billion. This valid comparison is stronger than the flawed one, so retaining the flawed comparison was not even expedient!

That compared quantities must have identical dimensions is a necessary condition for making valid comparisons, but it is not sufficient.

Make sure to mind your dimensions and units.

Go and read it. Recommended.

Family Matters

2010-07-28T20:03:00.004+01:00

In an idle moment I did something I haven't done for a long time, I read Socialist Worker. There's an interesting piece, in that brief, digestible, Readers Digest style the SW has, on hedge funds.

In the Indian state of Goa mines are being dug with haste and a lack of attention to health and safety for the workers and the villagers. Water is diverted and silt floods houses. The company that owns the mines, Sesa Goa

gets much of its funding from Hermitage Capital, based in Mayfair.

Bill Browder, the head of Hermitage, says he fears that governments in the West will deal with the huge bank bailout debts by printing money, instead of taking on the working class and forcing through cuts.

B[r]owder and his friends are worried this would devalue any financial investments wealthy investors own. So Hermitage is turning to betting on “hard assets” like commodities and land to make money.

Hermitage’s “Global Fund”, which manages £650 million for the rich, is pushing its money into gold and mining companies.

In the 1990s the company made money investing in the newly opened up markets of Russia. Hermitage’s London officers have a modest exterior. But it is rumoured that the interior is modelled on the St Petersburg palace in Russia that it shares a name with.

A bit of internet searching reveals that this caricature of a cigar chomping capitalist is the grandson of a former head of the CPUSA, Earl Russell Browder.

Here's a video of Earl Russell Browder

Talk on Development and Statistics

2010-07-04T17:37:00.003+01:00

A worthy and not dull talk on development and statistics by Hans Rosling.

For more interesting, informative and sometimes world changing talks look at TED.

Management

2010-06-23T19:27:00.002+01:00

It's a truth universally acknowledged that there is no underestimating the intelligence of management.

Video of BP management in action.

Okay. It's a skit.

International Brigade memorial at Nottingham County Hall - redux

2010-06-10T12:23:00.004+01:00

Last year I wrote about the Tory vandalism to the International Brigade Memorial at Nottinghamshire County Hall.

On Saturday 17th July there is a rededication ceremony.

The re-dedication is an opportunity to remember those who went to Spain to fight fascism and also to counter the blatant attempts to bury the memorial's still radical political content.

The event will be held at County Hall, West Bridgford, Nottingham, Saturday July 17, from 10.30am - 12 noon. There will be speakers from the Trades Council, International Brigades Memorial Trust, Labour Party, LibDems and the Spanish Embassy have been invited.

Entertainment will be provided by Nottingham Clarion Choir.

[Starting the next week] the city council will be hosting a display organised by the International Brigades Memorial Trust which is touring the country.

The exhibition called "Antifascista!" is about British and Irish volunteers in the civil war and will be on display in the Council House, Market Square from 12 noon Tuesday July 20 - Saturday 31 July.

As one of the plaques says:
==============================================
In honour of the volunteers who left Nottinghamshire to fight in the International Brigade Spain 1936 - 1939.

They fought alongside the Spanish people to stop Fascism and save Liberty and Peace for all

They went because their open eyes could see no other way.

NO PASARAN
============================================

Pics of Life in North Korea

2010-06-03T12:16:00.004+01:00

Here's some pictures, taken from the border, of life in North Korea.

Here's an informative couple of films on life in North Korea by the journalist Sue Lloyd-Roberts shown on BBC Newsnight on 1st and 2nd June 2010.

Eyeless In Gaza

2010-06-01T12:44:00.002+01:00

There is justified anger at the Israeli attack on boats in international waters. That anger is much discussed elsewhere.

I have just discovered that Henning Mankell, the author of the Wallander books, is sitting in an Israeli gaol.

It's always good to see an author beliving in the power of the word and the deed.

No Deportations

2010-05-07T16:18:00.004+01:00

There was at least one good thing about the Icelandic volcano eruption that closed Eurpean airspace and that was, it temporarily, stopped deportations from the UK.

Now an Iranian woman gets a welcome reprieve from deportation to Iran.

[Bita] Ghaedi has spoken out against sharia law, forced marriage and human rights abuses in Iran. She has also criticised the regime on TV channels widely available across the Middle East. These actions, along with her public support of the PMOI (People's Mujahedin of Iran), which is opposed to the Iranian regime, are enough to put her life in danger if she is deported, according to Zadshir and her lawyer.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Nicol said that given the "very considerable amount of further information which has been supplied, concerning (in particular) the claimant's association with Iranian opposition groups and the subsequent publicity given thereto", the court should hear her renewed application for judicial review.

Now to get the deportation permanently stopped.

Dave C

2010-05-03T18:09:00.002+01:00

As Caitlin Moran reportedly said, "Dave Cameron looks like C3Po made of ham". Close your eyes and the image is there. Now, how do I get rid of it?

Vote Labour - if only to keep out the Tories

2010-05-03T16:55:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Will I have rediscovered this post from the last election.

Life under a Labour administration is bearable as it gives something to campaign against.
Life under a Tory administration would be so vile that life is despairing for those caught in its binds.

Vote Labour. They're not as depressing as the Tories.

That's my motivation.

Goldman Sachs Conviction Buy List

2010-04-21T19:23:00.002+01:00

There was I looking for news on the Goldman Sachs fraud case and I find this Goldman Sachs Conviction Buy List.

Is it about convicted bankers? Is it about bankers accused of fraud? Nope. It's about Goldman Sachs' tips of companies expected to outperform the market.

As Richard Adams put it, the fraud was all about selling fire insurance to arsonists.

Or as the chair of the US Congress hearings into the credit crunch said when questioning Goldman Sachs' own Lloyd Blankfein the bank was "selling a used car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on those cars".

Crooked. Crooked. Crooked. And unethical to boot. And that's how capitalism works.

It's Absolutely True

2010-04-10T20:36:00.002+01:00

Because I read it in the Daily Mail.

Dan and Dan's Daily Mail Song.

As someone once said: "I wouldn't wipe my arse with it".

And as Jo Caulfield said about the Express: "she's still dead".

Somethings are Better Revisited

2010-03-26T10:42:00.001Z

Scary Mary Poppins, the recut.

[ Via Three Wise Men ]

On the importance of knowing stuff

2010-03-19T09:24:00.002Z

I was reading an old Joel on Software article on software, for the day job, and saw this peach of a quote.

People who only know one world get really smarmy, and every time they hear about the complications in the other world, it makes them think that their world doesn't have complications. But they do. You've just moved beyond them because you are proficient in them. These worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. Lord Palmerston: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it."

That's similar to the tale of Arthur Eddington.

[Eddington] was an early apologist of Einstein's General Relativity, and an interesting anecdote well illustrates his personal intellectual investment: Ludwig Silberstein approached Eddington at the Royal Society's (November 6) 1919 meeting wherein he had defended Einstein's Relativity with his Brazil-Principe Solar Eclipse calculations with some degree of skepticality and ruefully charged Arthur as one who claimed to be one of three men who actually understood the theory. When Eddington refrained from replying, he insisted Arthur not be "so shy", whereupon Eddington replied, "Oh, no! I was wondering who the third one might be!"

That's all for today.

Music of the Future

2010-03-17T11:04:00.004Z

Tonight I am off to see the poetic Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip.

Next week I am off to see A Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band.

Royal mail Stamps

2010-03-08T12:59:00.003Z

At the moment I am reading the Martin Beck Police Mysteries by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The series was wriiten in the 1960s and 1970s by a couple of Marxists who used detective fiction to reveal the state of Swedish society under capitalism.

The book I am currently reading is "The Abominable Man". On page 96 of the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition (2009) there is this quote:

Then he looked suspiciously at the stamp. It was rather pretty, with a picture of a bird. It belonged to a series of newly released stamps which, if he understood the thing correctly, guaranteed that letters bearing them would be conveyed with special sluggishness. The kind of sublety so typical of the post office.

That speaks as much of early 1970s Sweden as it does of The UK's Royal Mail in 2010.

Royal Mail: Stand and Deliver

2010-03-08T12:45:00.003Z

Recently the Royal Mail has been criticised for failing to deliver one in four first class letters on time. See this Torygraph report.

In the last quarter of 2009 less than 80 per cent of first class letters arrived the next day, this compared badly to the first quarter when 94 percent arrived the next day.

This report being in the Torygraph it stresses that the strikes, together with management failure to plan for the disruption, were to blame for the performance failure.

During October's dispute almost 60 million parcels, packets and letters clogged up sorting offices.

Nigel Woods, of Consumer Focus, said: "Whether or not these results are down to industrial action, consumers were let down by Royal Mail last autumn.

"The figures are similar to those recorded during the industrial action of 2007-8 and show how important it is for Royal Mail to resolve their industrial relations problems once and for all.

"It also shows that Royal Mail's contingency plans have not stopped severe service disruptions from taking place during strike action.

So, to summarise, the stike caused the disruption which wouldn't have been as bad if management had arranged a massive scabbing operation.

No Redemption

2010-01-31T16:37:00.004Z

Life goes on. Things happen. Terrible things happen. Good things happen. Terrible things happen. Good things happen. And so it goes. And then it stops. Mr D comes in and out goes that last breath of life. But before then there is life.

Sometimes the media, in the UK, acts as if everyone is immortal and appears shocked when someone is told that they are going to die. Let me let you into a secret: you are going to die. Very few people know when they will die but everyone will die. There is no deus ex machina to prevent it. There is no redemption. Bob Marley may have a redemption song but redemption is rare.

Anyway Pere Ubu are back on tour with a version of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. The album is called "Long Live Pere Ubu" and the stage show is called "Long Live Pere Ubu - The Spectacle". As David Thomas said

"Long Live Père Ubu!" is the album of songs that was the genesis of the entire mess. It is a great leap forward in our pursuit of hyper-naturalistic recording techniques by which we replace microphones in the studio with wooden boxes, junked radio speakers, metal horns, and electrically charged window panes. Sound itself becomes the narrative. Everyone is going to hate it. We know that. The story, though satiric and comedic, is utterly bleak, lacking charm (the usual counter-weight to the band's noire tendencies) and devoid of redemption. Few people have ever read Ubu Roi, fewer heard of it. Wonderful. Altogether two years of work. Père Ubu, the character, ruined Jarry's life. And now he's ruined our career. This thing is our Waterloo, our Bridge Too Far, our Pickett's Charge.

Well, somebody had to do it.

Those things that people do that make the world a better, more interesting place. See more here at Pere Ubu's place. For dates see the calendar page.

Must be Santa

2009-12-15T21:09:00.004Z

This, from the man who brought you, "even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have/To stand naked", is a seasonal jape.

A polka filled sack of seasonal merriment.

No Pasaran

2009-10-25T18:06:00.017Z

Remembrance is one of those human actions that we do in quiet moments. Remembering friends and family who are no longer with us. Remembering those who sacrificed themselves to a cause that hoped to change the world. Remembrance for what may have been if they had not volunteered.

Memorials should be there as a motivation to remember. Sometimes remembrance is provoked by seeing something you see everyday in a fresh light. Last year some friends and I parked at County Hall Nottingham to watch a cricket match at nearby Trent Bridge.

On the way back we noticed a memorial to International Brigade volunteers from Nottinghamshire:

==============================================
In honour of the volunteers who left Nottinghamshire to fight in the International Brigade Spain 1936 - 1939.

They fought alongside the Spanish people to stop Fascism and save Liberty and Peace for all

They went because their open eyes could see no other way.

NO PASARAN
============================================
International Brigade
Volunteers from Nottinghamshire
Five Rest in the soil of Spain

R Goodman, Nottingham
Killed Jarama February 1937

R Grant, Nottingham
Killed Calaceitte March 1938

F Turnhill, Worksop
Killed Teruel January 1938

Eric Whalley, Mansfield
Killed Fuentes de Ebro October 1937

Bernard Whinfield, Nottingham
Killed Teruel January 1937
============================================
Thirteen Returned TO Continue The Struggle

G Alcock Nottingham
Robert Brown, Bircotes
Frank Ellis, Linby
James Feeney, Nottingham
Walter Gregory, Nottingham
J Hardy, Sutton Bonnington
Lionel Jacobs, Nottingham
Anthony McClean, Nottingham
G Richards, Nottingham
William Rowe, Nottingham
AS Sheppard, Hucknall
RA Soar, Nottingham
SR Stevenson, Nottingham
===========================================

To the right of these three plaques is a sculpture by the artist Michael Johnson, unveiled by the Spanish Ambassador on the 4th of September 1993 in front of nearly fifty surviving International Brigade volunteers.

The sculpture "depicts bombarded buildings similar to the ones that still remain in the Spanish town of Belchite".

The artist Michael Johnson describes the installation as "1992 International Brigade Memorial, County Hall Nottingham. A 3m x 1.5m bronze panel With two cast brass balconies to either side".

The International Brigades Memorial trust describes the Nottingham, County Hall memorial as "Nottingham. Sculpted relief and 3 plaques in County Hall, West Bridgeford (sic), Nottingham. Erected by Nottinghamshire County Hall, 24 September 1993".

The UK National Inventory of War Memorials also lists the County Hall memorial to the Nottinghamshire International Brigade volunteers.

This monument is now under threat from ideological vandalism. Spoiling the view of the International Brigade memorial is a new brass plaque proclaiming "In proud and grateful memory of the men and women of this county who have sacrificed their lives for others and for freedom. We will remember them."

On first reading that's fine. On second reading the use of "freedom" seems to be there as a deliberate counterpoint to the "liberty and peace" of the International Brigade volunteer memorial. "Freedom" is a term laden with meaning. Everyone "knows" what it means. Few people are prepared to unpack what it stands for.

We could discuss the Isaiah Berlin positive and negative freedoms, or the anarchist concept of freedom but that's for another post. Here on the brass plaque it is being used as a Tory would use it: to stand for the freedom to exploit; to stand for the freedom to abuse; to stand for the freedom to kill in the call of capitalism.

Today's local rag has a feature on the Memorial and the brass plaque

A spokesman for Notts County Council said: "We're not removing the Spanish Civil War Memorial. It's a beautiful piece of artwork at the front of County Hall.

"We are replacing the information board, which replicates the text on one of the plaques, with a brass memorial plaque which will remember all of the people from Notts who lost their lives in service of their country.

Just a couple of points. The "information board" gave background information on the Spanish Civil War and I find it helpful when I see a sculpture memorializing an event to have some historical information. By providing historical context the information board prevents the memorial becoming just another piece of street furniture.

And there is nothing on the brass plaque about "in service of their country". As the text stands it could be in honour of anyone from Nottinghamshire who believed they sacrificed their life in the cause of "freedom". It could honour anyone from Nottinghamshire who died for a cause, whatever the cause. Because it is such a generic, broad and bland statement that covers everyone who has died for a cause it detracts from the specific anti-Fascist sacrifice of the Nottinghamshire International Brigade volunteers.

No Pasaran.

Business Clean Up

2009-09-17T12:57:00.004+01:00

Capitalism at work.
This is what the nice, caring capitalists at Trafigura did:

dozens of damning internal Trafigura emails which have now come to light reveal how traders were told in advance that their planned chemical operation, a cheap and dirty process called "caustic washing", generated such dangerous wastes that it was widely outlawed in the west.

The documents reveal that the London-based traders hoped to make profits of $7m a time by buying up what they called "bloody cheap" cargoes of sulphur-contaminated Mexican gasoline. They decided to try to process the fuel on board a tanker anchored offshore, creating toxic waste they called "slops".

One trader wrote on 10 March 2006: "I don't know how we dispose of the slops and I don't imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them." The resulting black, stinking, slurry was eventually dumped around landfills in Abidjan, after Trafigura paid an unqualified local man to take it away in tanker trucks at a cheap rate.

And

The UN human rights special rapporteur, Professor Okechukwu Ibeanu, criticised Trafigura ...

He wrote: "According to official estimates, there were 15 deaths, 69 persons hospitalised and more than 108,000 medical consultations … there seems to be strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping."

And that is life under capitalism for too many in this world.
As the man sang

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

Amen.

Foreigners and what they do

2009-09-02T17:48:00.015+01:00

What do foreigners do? Oh, foreigners support David Thomas.

Foreigner had a 1970's rock band.

And foreigners are responsible for poverty in Russia.

Statistics are collected and analyzed at a sedate rate and Russian statistics for the first quarter of 2009 are just in. Almost 25 million Russians were living in poverty (defined as "an adult income of less than 5,497 roubles, or £110, a month") in the first quarter of 2009 compared with 18.5 million at the end of 2008.

According to Natalia Zubarevich, a professor of economic geography at Moscow's state university, Russians are adept at dealing with crises; many grow vegetables in small kitchen gardens to survive, and others rely on a network of close relatives. Most willingly accept unpaid time off work, or reduced salaries, she added.

The rise in poverty levels did not pose a serious political challenge to the Kremlin, she said. "The (state-controlled) Russian media is quite clear who is responsible for the crisis. Foreigners are responsible, enemies are responsible and big business, especially, is responsible. But not Putin."

Ah, how easy politics would be if all problems could be blamed on foreigners. Ah, to fall into a Daily Express world where all problems are down to foreigners. If it weren't for those pesky foreigners...

It would never happen here. It's difficult to imagine an England with a newspaper and political party with an agenda of blaming everything on foreigners; seeing foreigners as responsible for every problem and never responsible for a solution. The liberal, xenophilic, anti-racist people of England would rise up and decry such a paper and party for being the small minded, xenophobic, nasty, curtain twitchers that they are. It would never happen here.

Oh, just had a phone call, it already has happened here. Thanks for treading on my dreams.

Vampires and Mathematics

2009-08-26T12:33:00.003+01:00

Vampires have no shadow but they leave impressions everywhere.

Kpunk lay a stake into the hearts of vampires

Remember that you have to invite a vampire over your threshold - and grey vampires, like trolls, lose all their power once you cease to pay them attention or think about them. That is why, when they feel that your attention is gone, GVs will try any trick to regain it - the appeal to 'democratic' values is a particularly scurrilous tactic ('you must give me your attention! It's your duty').

...

at some people are getting ahead of themselves, that there is rather too much unseemly excitement about X or Y.... As if what was required in intellectual life is more bent heads, more bitterness, less enthusiasm.... Some teachers and lecturers do think that way, see it as their role duty to pass on the arid petrification which calcified their spirit usually sometime during their postgraduate career ... Remember: all vampires are victims of vampirism...

But I see motivating students, passing on enthusiasm, as the first and most important task of a teacher. (Which isn't to say that one has to blindly encourage everyting a student says or writes; far from it.)

The job of a teacher is N*O*T to produce more gray vampires but to inspire people with a near reckless enthusiasm for inquiry.

More Richard Feynmans' than Bourbaki (mathematical grey vampires formalising the intuitive; formalising reason and taking away the joy of mathematics).

First Amendment And Idiots

2009-08-25T05:24:00.002+01:00

Here's the glorious Barney Frank in full flow berating an idiot.

Can someone explain why a universal health service, free at the point of delivery is seen as a Nazi policy?

[ Thanks to Hocemo Li Na Kafu? ]

Summer Sundae 09

2009-08-25T05:11:00.002+01:00

Had a great time over in Leicester at the Summer Sundae Weekender.

Highlights were Mum the Band, David Thomas Broughton and the "gloriously untethered" Monotonix.

More over at Rullsenberg's place. And here and here and also here.

My profile

2009-08-09T16:31:00.002+01:00

A week ago I was kindly asked to contribute a profile to Norm's blog.

It's here at Norm's.

Onwards from Gutenberg

2009-07-30T12:25:00.004+01:00

Ever since Gutenberg, Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde changed the world with movable type there has been no excuse to avoid print.

Pamphlets, books, brochures, fanzines all owe a debt to the makers of the printing press.

And here's a site telling you all about letter press printing.

Here's a good link to pictures and descriptions of printing presses. I am always amazed at how something so functional can also be so beautiful, but that may just be me.

Without the printing press there would be no easy access to literature or science.

Three cheers for the printing press.

Gutenberg and Caxton had their part to play but for furthering the art of printing the plaudit must go to the printer Wynkyn de Worde.

More Spooky Men's Chorale

2009-07-18T14:17:00.005+01:00

Back in 2007 the Spooky Men's Chorale had a solution to Australia's political, economic and social problems. Their solution was to Vote the Bastards Out.

Spooky Men's Chorale

2009-07-18T13:56:00.002+01:00

A mate introduced me to the Spooky Men's Chorale:

And here they are singing about men and tools:

Innuendo never made me smile so much!

Life, Zizek and Kung Fu Panda

2009-07-17T11:57:00.002+01:00

Sometimes when you have things to do, places to go, cricket matches to watch, books to read, films to see work rears its ugly head and you have to put the important things on hold.

Today, over breakfast, reading the LRB, I caught Zizek's latest piece on Iran, Ahmadinejad, Berlusconi and Kung Fu Panda.

But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

And then comes the punchline:

Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

So how do you deal with idiocracy?

Full Picture

2009-07-13T18:57:00.003+01:00

Not a partial picture. Not a bit of the picture. But a whole picture.

An ancient advert for the Guardian.

An event seen from one point of view gives one impression.
Seen from another point of view it gives a quite different impression.
But it’s only when you get the full picture you can fully understand what’s going on!

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Trains and the Delights of Heavy Engineering

2009-06-29T12:28:00.008+01:00

In yesterday's glorious sunshine I went with Rullsenberg on a reconnaissance mission to the Midland Railway Centre near Ripley in Derbyshire.

Yesterday they were running an English Electric event with, you've guessed it, electric trains.

It's also got shiny steam trains, shiny diesel trains and shiny electric trains. Nostalgia is in the air sending you back to the day when heavy engineering was about making things that worked and looked good, or to put it another way, making things that combined form and function to make a perfect whole.

If you do go, make time to go on the Golden Valley Light Railway, and visit the workshop to see the brilliant restoration work.

Also find time to go on the Butterley Park Miniature Railway, hold on for a fun ride.

The Midland railway Centre is full of enthusiastic, friendly people, willing to help you have a fun day out. Now some of you will go trains, how dull. It's not like that. Honest. You may even get the chance to drive a train, be it electric, diesel or steam.

And here's a signal box.

Tax Dodgers Plead for Sympathy

2009-06-23T12:21:00.003+01:00

Yes that's U2, the notorious tax dodgers.

U2 drummer Larry Mullen believes rich and successful people are being unnecessarily humiliated when coming in and out of Ireland, describing this as “part of a new resentment of rich people in this country”.

“We have experienced [a situation] where coming in and out of the country at certain times is made more difficult than it should be — not only for us, but for a lot of wealthy people,” he said. “So it wasn’t personal. It was to do with the better-off being sort of humiliated.”

It's great that Bono advocates revoking the debt of developing nations. It would be even greater if he paid some tax.

[ Thanks to Will Rubbish ]

New Deals and False Promises

2009-06-22T20:41:00.003+01:00

In the 1930's Roosevelt put into place the New Deal, which put in place much of America's public infrastructure and gave work to Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster and Joseph Cotten in the Federal Theatre Project. Not a bad thing.

In the first decade of the 21st century in the UK we have a scabby programme where private providers are paid to give support to unemployed people. Sometimes that support involves help with writing a CV and a covering letter. Sometimes people turn up with a perfectly good CV, indeed people turn up with several CVs adapted for the jobs they apply for. Sometimes those perfectly good CVs get passed off as the work of the private provider so the private provider can be paid by the Department for Work and Pensions. Here's a site with peoples' negative experiences of New Deal programmes.

The site has some powerful accounts of how New Deal is not working, but they don't like anyone quoting, being advocates of copyright and not for copylefting, or Creative Commons or the GPL.

When the private sector gets involved in the public realm, purely because of the money to be made, you just know the service will be crap, the people on the programme will be patronised, and they will get a crap service. It does not work.

[Via the comments at Dave Spart]

Back to My Roots

2009-06-21T18:58:00.003+01:00

For those who don't talk proper here's a guide.

And here's the alphabet for those who want to talk proper.

Will Kaufman and Billy Bragg at Big Session 2009

2009-06-21T18:03:00.005+01:00

On Saturday I scooted (actually by bus and train) over to Leicester for a day of the Big Session. It was lucky I got my ticket well in advance as the day was sold out.

After getting my bearings and seeing some performance poetry and the charming Delta Maid (the delta being that of the Mersey) I bumped into my friends. After beer and conversation we went to the see the amazing Will Kaufman do his brilliant Woody Guthrie show. He covers parts of the Great depression , the Dustbowl, Tin Pan Alley, and Fascism all through the songs and life story of Woody Guthrie. If you haven't seen his show I recommend you make an effort when he comes to a place near you.

All together "This land is our land ... it was made for you and me".

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
Saying this land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

The night ended with another cracking peformance from the Milkman of Human Kindness. And here's a url if you can't recall the song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Goxm0x4dTw.

Gaza Blockade

2009-06-18T20:05:00.004+01:00

Via Gisha, via B'Tselem, I picked up this video protesting the blockade of Gaza.

Now make like the audience for the Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll.

The End of Our Elaborate Plans

2009-06-09T12:36:00.006+01:00

There's a cracking discussion of the late 1970s and Andy Beckett's cracking book When the Lights Went Out. Here the article contrasts Callaghan and Brown.

If Callaghan could invariably, even in the most stressful moments of his immensely stressful premiership, come across as 'Sunny Jim', it was because he was never under many illusions. He was built for (and from) compromise. He accepted disappointment from the start - rather like the Freud who thought the point of psychoanalysis was to deliver patients from excruciating mental agony to 'ordinary misery', Callaghan believed that in politics there were only bad and worse decisions. Yet what counted as 'realism' for Callaghan was partly conditioned by forces outside the parliamentary machine and the financial system [.]

...

And the grandfatherly Callaghan, chirpy and self-possessed, rarely depressed, even amidst the Winter of Discontent that would bring him down, could not strike a greater contrast with the morose Brown, a resentful Richard who carries a wintry discontent with him always, on his heavy brows. For Callaghan stood only at what he thought would be a moment of painful transition for the Labour party, whereas Brown looks like the mortfied personification of the final death of the labour movement itself.

It is time to leave behind stale, decaying, dying representational democracy with its minimum engagement to a system of participatory democracy where people make real decisions that affect their lives.

That's not a call for the will of the noisiest. That's a call for real participatory democracy where people come together to make decsions about the places they live. Real decisions made by local people should encourage more people to take part in the political process instead of leaving it to the political classes.

[ Thanks to Will Rubbish in the comments over there. ]

The Stupid Party.

2009-06-08T12:29:00.002+01:00

It's time for a quote from John Stuart Mill.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
Letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March 1866)

And so say I.

I hardly think any sentient being would deny it.

Depths of Despond

2009-06-08T05:59:00.004+01:00

With fascists winning two seats in England in the 2009 Euro elections has English politics reached a nadir or are there further depths to plummet?

Nazi Andrew Brons got 9.8 percent in Yorkshire.

Nazi Nick Griffin got 8 per cent in the North West.

The fascist party got 8.9 per cent in the North East; and 8.6 percent in the East and West Midlands.

A large section of the public has spoken and revealed itself as nasty, vicious, self obsessed, supporting a bullying fascist party revelling in jackboots smashing a human face forever.

And here's a picture:

Here's that quote in full from Frederick Douglass:

* If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
o An address on West India Emancipation (1857-08-04)

Hope Not Hate.

Censure me in your wisdom

2009-06-07T18:27:00.006+01:00

Yesterday went to see a splendid production of Julius Caesar at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford.

It was gory. The blood flew about the stage. And the politics proved contemporary enough.

These are the speeches that impressed:

From Act 2 scene 1

DECIUS
Never fear that. If he be so resolved,
I can o'ersway him. For he loves to hear
That unicorns may be betrayed with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils, and men with flatterers.
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flatterèd.
Let me work.
For I can give his humor the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.

Then from Act III scene 1

CASCA and the other conspirators stab CAESAR. BRUTUS stabs him last.
CAESAR
Et tu, Bruté?—Then fall, Caesar.
(dies)

CAESAR
And you too, Brutus? In that case, die, Caesar.
(he dies)
CINNA
Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.

CINNA
Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! Run and proclaim it in the streets.
CASSIUS
Some to the common pulpits, and cry out,
“Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!”

And again from Act III Scene 1

ANTONY
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever livèd in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Given the current parliamentary political circumstances I could not help imagining the heroic Regicides and the current, less than heroic, cabinet.

Money Swears

2009-05-31T17:07:00.002+01:00

Over at the Brooklyn Rail Paul Mattick argues for the end of money:

if the whole financial system fell away, and money ceased to be the power source turning the wheels of production, the whole productive apparatus of society—machines, raw materials, and above all working people—would still be there, along with the human needs it can be made to serve. The fewer years of suffering and confusion it takes for people to figure this out, the better.

If you can't spend it money just becomes paper and metal. You can't eat it. You can't drink it. What is the point of it? Okay, you could set fire to it to keep yourself warm. But how long would that last.

Thanks to the ever perspicacious Will Rubbish.

The Social Command

2009-05-24T18:55:00.004+01:00

Several years ago I blogged on some old notes I'd made on Mayakovsky's method.

Well, I've just found the second page:

As you were.

Random Opinions

2009-05-24T18:24:00.004+01:00

More years ago than I care to remember I was browsing in a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye and found a book called Dissenting Opinions. At the time I was on the dole and just had the cash in my pocket to buy it. It's the musings of a liberal historian called Page Smith.

Tardy as ever, I have only just discovered anything about the man. Page was born in 1917 and died in 1995, spending a long fulfilled life in academia even after almost failing his BA.

More generally he absorbed Jamesian values and attitudes - respect for human individuality, service to society, disdain for the merely respectable, abiding sympathy for the eccentric. This blended with a predisposition toward a Calvinist view of human nature, a combination often puzzling to his contemporaries and collaborators. But contrarieties and contradictions, the mysteries of human conduct, did not disturb him, and he responded feelingly to words of Walt Whitman's which conveyed this unfathomable complexity.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself.
I contain certain multitudes.

I particularly liked Page's Rules for Historians where he disdains the objective:

7. Never write about anything that you do not find of consuming interest, ideally, that you have not fallen in love with. It was once thought that objectivity (often interpreted as not caring) was essential to the writing of good history. The reverse is true; in Hegel's words: "Nothing great is accomplished without passion;" or, as Nietzsche put: "One is only creative in the shadow of love and love's illusions." Controlled and disciplined passion is the only proper mode for the historian.

I also liked

15. Professional historians often behave (and teach) as though they thought history was something embalmed in monographs; that it had a tapeworm-like structure made up of successive monographic increments; that it is cumulative, constructed of facts and units of facts (monographs) which in time will add up to TRUTH. The fact is that history, both past and present, is almost frighteningly "open". That is to say, the past exists only in some kind of relationship to the future and, in a real sense, vice versa, i.e., it is only possible to conceive of the future in terms of the past.

16. The historians passion for explanation and for constructing casual sequences in history is a dangerous delusion. It is the product of a world view in which manipulation and control are the dominant values. It obscures the fact that the unexpected is the only certainty in history and thus leaves people unprepared to cope with that same ultimate certainty - the unexpected. The teaching of history must reflect the openness of history. This means a new way of thinking about and teaching history. Indeed, it may mean not teaching history at all - simply studying history. History, while it has been written and read since the ancient Hebrews, has only lately been taught in colleges and universities. Some would argue that its decline as a humane study can be dated from the time when it was organized into part of the academic curriculum.

This I take to mean disdain a belief in progress, and moreover a belief in the inevitability of progress. Some things get better, such as the eradication of diseases like smallpox make life now better than in the medium term past. Some things get worse, such as the immiseration of working class communities, caused by capitalism's deskilling of swathes of the workforce, in the rich Northern countries. Other things get worse like Coca-Cola's ravages in the global South.

What we need is passionate accounts of the past to guide us into the future.

March of Greed

2009-05-24T15:13:00.003+01:00

If you don't hand over some meat and gold you'll be thrown out on your big ass in a few hours.

The Past is a Foreign Country

2009-05-24T14:44:00.006+01:00

I have always been a great believer in nurture having the upper hand over nature in human behaviour, after all you only have to watch Trading Places to see nurture beating nature. That's just a trite pop culture example but sometimes one discovers things about oneself that only strengthen one's beliefs.

Way back when there was an organisation called the Croydon Association for Moral Welfare. Here's proof of its existence for whose who doubt the joining of the words Croydon and Moral and Welfare.

Sometimes I think it was more to do with the welfare of Morals than the welfare of the people it "helped".

Coffee In the Morning, Coffee in the Evening

2009-05-23T14:37:00.003+01:00

Coffee any time just as long as it ain't Starbucks. Starbucks is a determined anti-union shop, as detailed at drink soaked trots and stopstarbucks.com.

Here's a question: what's the difference between Starbucks and Walmart? The answer is that they both spend a fortune on union busting lawyers rather than concentrate on what they do, in Starbucks case, making and selling coffee.

Here's a link to the Starbucks Union which is affiliated to the IWW - Industrial Workers of the World.

This links to loads of other accounts of Starbuck's union busting activities.

Levellers' Day 2009

2009-05-15T14:02:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow I am going to Levellers' day in Burford, Oxfordshire.

Levellers' day commemorates the day

17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.

During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.

A good day of traditional marching and chanting and changing the world.

Castro on OAS

2009-05-10T14:14:00.001+01:00

Here's Fidel Castro Ruz's criticism of the statement from the Organisation of American States on Cuba's Human Rights record.

In this hemisphere, the poor never had freedom of expression because they never received quality education and knowledge was reserved solely for the privileged and bourgeois elite. Don’t blame Venezuela now, which has done so much for education since the Bolivarian revolution, or the Republic of Haiti, crushed by poverty, diseases and natural catastrophes, as if any of these were ideal conditions for the freedom of expression proclaimed by the OAS. Do what Cuba is doing: first help to massively train quality healthcare personnel and send revolutionary doctors to the most remote corners of the country so that they may contribute to the saving of lives, and transmit to them educational programs and experiences; insist that the financial institutions of the developed and rich world send resources to build schools, train teachers, produce medicines, develop their agriculture and industries, and then talk about the rights of Man.

The right of freedom of expression means nothing when most of the people with that right have no means of asserting that right. That's not to say that Freedom of Expression will automatically fall, fully formed, out of a certain stage of development but it is an important part of all stages of development.

Meniningitis in Africa Ignored

2009-05-09T21:35:00.002+01:00

West Africa has had over 2,000 people die this year from meningitis.

Has anyone read anything about this in newspapers? Has anyone read anything about this in blogs? Has anyone seen anything about this in television news? Well I haven't. It was only listening to the World Service on digital radio that I heard about this pandemic.

Doctors without borders (MSF) say

More than 1,900 people affected by meningitis have died since January in the “meningitis belt” of sub-Saharan Africa, which stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east. In Nigeria, Niger, and Chad alone, more than 56,000 cases of meningitis have been recorded in the areas where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical teams, working alongside Ministry of Health staff, are treating sick patents. They are also vaccinating more than seven million people, making this the largest vaccination MSF has ever carried out.

Currently, dozens of MSF teams together with health authorities are performing vaccination campaigns throughout these countries to reduce the impact of the epidemic. Meanwhile, other MSF teams are travelling to urban and remote health centers to collect data, review and treat patients, and donate medicines.

The increasingly maligned and neo-liberal Europeam Community has

allocated 4.7 million Euros to eradicate meningitis in Nigeria and Niger as well as support the Economic Community of West African States in preventing conflict and enhancing good governance.

So what is the split between money for vaccines for meningitis and money for preventing conflict and enhancing good governance?

May Day in Caracas

2009-05-08T12:14:00.002+01:00

I wasn't there but there's a good report at Venezuela Analysis.

The National Front of Bolivarian Workers march, supported by the National Union of Workers (Unete, which split from the CTV after it supported the coup against Chávez in April 2002), the Socialist Confederation of Workers (CST) and the Cruz Villegas current of the Confederation of United Venezuelan Workers (CUTV), began at three different points in Caracas then converged on Avenue Urdaneta, extending a kilometer and half as participants listened to a range of speakers and bands.

Marchers interviewed by national channel VTV expressed repeatedly that they were out marching in order to support the revolutionary process and the Chávez government.

President Hugo Chávez, addressing the large crowd said, "There's no socialism without the working class... solid, conscientious, and committed to what is being born in Venezuela, which is Socialism."

"The happiness and passion in the streets of Caracas [today] and the excellent transmission by [community and government run media] VTV, TeleSur, TVes, Radio Nacional, YVKE Mundial...affected me so much that although it wasn't planned that I would speak today, the enthusiasm motivated me."

That's like Fidel Castro announcing "unaccustomed as I am to public speaking I'll be brief".

The attempts of the Bolivarian Revolution to overcome Venezuela's problems by reducing poverty, increasing education resources, and increasing the rights of the poorest Venzuelans are to be applauded.

Secular Arguers, Befrienders, Controversialists, Debaters and Jokers

2009-04-18T20:11:00.005+01:00

The National Secular Society has recently exposed the cost to the taxpayer of hospital chaplains being between £32 millions and £40 million.

The NSS says they should be paid for by churches (that's churches as in

"advocates for religions and for faith—i.e. the total surrender of rational autonomy, the submission to unreason and illegitimate authority. A G_d that cares, judges, and lays down taboos, customs, rules, rewards, punishments, traditions and social hierarchies is a monstrous deceit and a vile, sick, inanity. An evil ideology in sum".)

And that's right unless the role was changed to a secular one of wandering around the hospital and talking to patients, friends, family and visitors.

Imagine being a patient stuck in a ward for a week or two. Would you like someone to have an intelligent debate about the expulsion of the anarchists from the First International? A debate about whether Alex Cox's Repo Man is a classic depiction of Los Angeles Suburban Punks and early 1980s capitalism or just a cracking film with a cool soundtrack? A debate about why Slavoj Zizek in his book The Parallax View does not discuss the film The Parallax View?

And talking of The Parallax View, here's the montage scene.

But I digress, some people would welcome someone to share an intelligent conversation; or even to have a heated debate while they have to stay in hospital.
It may even aid people's mental health to have a good conversation or debate. And at least it will stop patients dying of boredom.

Such a service should be delivered by the staff, with no responsibility but to engage patients, and others, in conversation, debate and maybe even tell a few jokes. Intelligent conversation, debate and reasoned argument should be as much a right during a stay in hospital as good medical treatment. And to guarantee that right you need full time staff to deliver the service.

Bankers not to Blame

2009-04-06T12:15:00.005+01:00

Here's an essay from Krisis arguing bankers are not to blame for the financial crisis, it's an endemic problem inherent to capitalism.

Crash Course
Erstellt von Achim

Why the collapsing of the financial bubble is not the fault of “greedy bankers” and why there can be no going back to a social welfare capitalism.

A new version of the “stab in the back” legend of the 1920s and ‘30s is making the rounds: “our” economy has supposedly fallen victim to the limitless greed of a handful of bankers and speculators. Gorged on the cheap money of the U.S. Federal Reserve and backed up by irresponsible politicians, these greedy bankers have–so the legend goes–brought the world to the edge of the abyss, while honest people are made to play the fools.

Nothing could be more contrary to fact nor, given its demagogic and even anti-Semitic propensity, as dangerously irrational as this notion–now being broadcast across the entire spectrum of public opinion. It stands things on their heads. The cause for the current misery is not to be sought in the huge over-valuation of financial markets; the latter was itself not a cause but an effect, a mechanism aimed at avoiding the real, underlying crisis with which capitalist society has been confronted ever since the 1970s. That was when the post-WWII boom, and the long and self-sustaining period of growth made possible by the generalization of industrial production methods and their expansion into new sectors such as auto-making, came to an end. Mass production of commodities in the 1950s and 1960s required additional masses of labor-power–labor-power thereby in a position to attract the flow of wages and means of subsistence that in turn enabled it to go on mass-producing such commodities. Since then, however, widespread rationalization of the core, world market-oriented sectors of production has displaced ever greater quantities of labor-power through processes of automation, thus destroying the basis for this “Fordist” mechanism and with it the precondition for any renewed tendency towards prosperity in the real economy. Capitalist crisis in its classical form gives way to an even more fundamental crisis in which the viability of labor itself comes to the fore.

De-valorized labor power –“superfluous” human beings?
The real insanity of the capitalist mode of production is expressed in the contradiction between the enormous advance in productivity brought about by the “microelectronic revolution” and the fact that that advance has not even come close to guaranteeing the possibility of a good life for all. On the contrary: work itself has been intensified, its tempo accelerated and the pressure to produce ramped up even more. Across the world, more and more people must sell their labor-power under the worst possible conditions because, as measured against the standard set by the current level of productivity worldwide, that labor-power is increasingly de-valorized.

But it is also a contradiction of capitalism that, in the process of becoming ‘too productive,’ it wrenches its own foundations out from under its feet. For a society that rests on the exploitation of human labor-power collides with its own structural limits as it renders this labor-power, to an ever-greater degree, superfluous. For over thirty years, the dynamic of the world economy has only been sustained thanks to the inflation of a speculative and credit bubble – what Marx termed “fictional capital.” Capital is diverted into the financial markets because the real economy no longer offers adequate investment possibilities. States go into debt to maintain their budgets and more and more people finance their own consumption, directly or indirectly, at the credit pump. In this way finance turned into the “basic industry” of the world market and the motor of capitalist growth. The “real economy” now so suddenly prized is not forced into submission by finance. On the contrary: it could only flourish as the latter’s appendage. The “Chinese economic miracle” and Germany’s so-called world-class export economy would never have been possible except for the gigantic, global recycling of debt that has been going on for more than twenty years, with the USA at the center of it all.

Crisis management and stagflation
Such methods of postponing an eventual collapse have now reached their limit. There is no reason to be overjoyed about this. The effects will be dramatic in the extreme. For the combined potential for economic crisis and de-valorization that has been building up over the last thirty years is now exploding violently into the here and now. Politics in the accepted sense may be able to influence the tempo and the trajectory of this process. But it is inherently incapable of stopping what has, in truth, become unstoppable. Either the rescue packages themselves, already topping the trillions, will go up in smoke, and the crisis will break through into the “real economy” with catastrophic results. Or they will catch hold of the runaway train one more time with the result being an exorbitant increase in national debt, followed by another, still more gigantic collapse in the near future. The return of “stagflation”—galloping inflation combined with a simultaneous recession—is already looming, and at much higher levels than in the 1970s.

The last decades have already seen massive downward pressure on wages, a descent into ever more precarious working conditions and the privatization of large parts of the public sector. The present crisis means that, to a degree previously undreamt of, ever-greater numbers of human beings will simply be declared “superfluous.” The much-invoked “new role of the state” has not the slightest chance of recreating a 1960s style social welfare capitalism, with full employment and a rising standard of living. What it portends, rather, is the organization and administering of racist and nationalist policies of social exclusion. The return of “regulation” and “state capitalism” is at this point conceivable only as an authoritarian and repressive form of crisis management.

The world is too wealthy for capitalism
The present financial crisis marks a turning point in the epoch of fictional capital and with it a new stage in the underlying crisis of capitalism already discernable in the 1970s. This is not just the crisis of a specifically “Anglo-Saxon system” of “neoliberalism,” as is widely affirmed amidst the current emotional outburst of European anti-Americanism–an outburst in which, however faint as yet, the echoes of anti-Semitism are unmistakable. What is clearly apparent now, rather, is that the world is and has long been too rich in relation to the stinginess of the capitalist mode of production—and that society will break apart, unravel and sink into a morass of poverty, violence and irrationalism if we do not succeed in overcoming that mode of production.

It is not the “speculators” and the financial markets that are the problem, but the utter absurdity of a society that produces wealth only as a waste product of the valorization of capital, whether as a real or a fictional process. The return to a seemingly stable capitalism, kept standing by the onslaught of massive armies of labor, is neither possible nor anything worth striving for.

Whatever sacrifices now being demanded of us in order to perpetuate the (self)destructive dynamic of this senseless mode of production and the capitalist way of life count only as an obscene mockery of the good and decent existence long since within reach in a society beyond commodity production, beyond money and beyond the state. With the present crisis the question of the system itself is finally being posed. It is time that we answered it.

Please distribute this text as widely as possible. Downloadable as a .PDF file at: www.krisis.org

Printed by: Förderverein Krisis e.V.
Postfach 81 02 69, 90247 Nürnberg

If you like this, you'll also like this essay by Norbert Trenkle, "Fictitious Capital and the Structural Crisis of Capitalist Reproduction".

Deference and the Elder Statesman

2009-03-21T19:30:00.007Z

There is a tradition in the European Parliament that the eldest member becomes "the father of the chamber" and delivers the keynote opening address after the election. That's a gesture of deference to the wisdom of age. Just because you have lived through a greater number of years than any one else it does not automatically mean you are wiser. It just means you have blown out more candles on your birthday cake. With time some juvenile arseholes mature and become wiser people. Others just become older, wrinklier arseholes.

After the election the oldest member of the chamber could be a fascist, specifically, Jean Marie Le Pen. So the European Parliament, set up in the wake of the horrors of fascism, will give a platform to a fascist. Such is the way of history, and democracy, to repeat, like a bad gherkin, the first time as tragedy ... .

Stop Le Pen getting to the parliament.

In a further warning about the activities of fascists, the MEP for South-West England and Gibraltar warns of a BNP surge in the forhcoming election.

On the Sanctity of Contracts

2009-03-17T08:38:00.002Z

There's a piece in the Guardian about tax fiddling banks.

A comment there points to this Huffington Post piece on how to stop bankers and insurers getting their bonus, contracts be damned.

"Sanctity of contracts" has for some time been TARP's equivalent of Harry Potter's magic wand, the thing you waved to make difficulties disappear (for financiers, of course; if you are an ordinary worker with a pension contract, by contrast, the magic doesn't work for you).

Those who want bonuses can have their jobs transferred to a new unit with all the toxic debt. If they refuse to waive their bonus then that new unit will be made bankrupt and has no money to pay any bonues. Problem solved.

The magical realist army

2009-03-15T19:39:00.002Z

Reasons to be Impossible discusses the Borgean army.

Barmy Army

Though commanded by a real Lieutenant General, headquartered in Padua, Italy's so-called Terzo corpo designato d'Armata was a fiction - a giant cold-war bluff. It was dreamed up in the early 50s to convince Moscow that Nato's frontline was altogether more solid than was the case.

Successive commanders and their minuscule staffs generated mountains of paperwork to show that any commie troops breaching the Yugoslav border would have to reckon with an entire army corps, up to 300,000-strong, on the flat Venetian hinterland. Troops - most of them imaginary - were recruited and promoted, fuel was notionally stored, and ammunition supposedly distributed in perhaps the most elaborate exercise ever in Italian fantasia.

The army was disbanded in 1972 but archives and barracks the length of Italy have remained clogged with what La Stampa said was "tonnes" of paper. And none of it can be destroyed. Under Italian law, officially secret documents can only be pulped once they have been declassified. And they can only be declassified by the office or unit that created them. And, of course, this no longer exists ...

In your dreams you are a four star general. Some dreams.

If all that is solid melts into air what does that stuff that was in the air to begin with melt into?