Beware Greeks Bearing Axes

Also spotted in the NYT, this amazing article about the discovery of tools on the island of Crete, which pushes back the history of Mediterranean maritime travel by 100,000 years.

Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.

Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.

Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

Keeping Up with the Taylors

The New York Times reports that Americans are slowly catching on to the pleasures that are Thinking Allowed and In Our Time. The editorial also provides a useful link to the Open Culture site. Worth a gander.

It's Shakey. Let's Boogie!

The Bars - Say It Isn't So.

An Open Book

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale. 318 pp.

Central to Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making excuses for misdemeanours by blaming their genes, their upbringing, their parents, their gender, by finding all sorts of extenuating circumstances that shift the cause for their actions away from themselves. What these behaviours all have in common is that each constitutes an attempt to turn subject into object, to deny that the source of the action in question lies in the free choice of the individual by making the individual itself nothing more than an object at the mercy of forces outside of its own control. Sartre spends many many pages of his first masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, trying to explain why humans should want to adopt such a position and drawing out the ontological pre-requisites for such an attitude to even be possible. Despite the intimidating jargon taken from phenomenology and Hegel, as well as a few neologisms of Sartre's own thrown into the mix, Being and Nothingness is not an impossible work to understand, and despite the willful misunderstandings that Sartre's work has received at the hands of certain analytic philosophers (and from much lesser lights, such as Clive James's dismissive ignorance), existentialism is not a difficult philosophy to grasp. If you can understand why an individual's subjective experience is itself proof of free will, you can fairly quickly disentangle the intricacies of Sartre's early thought.

Sartre attempted to derive an ethical theory on the basis of the ontology outlined in his book. He argued in a lecture, published in English as Existentialism and Humanism, that to adopt the attitude of Bad Faith was in itself morally wrong since to do so is to deny human freedom, and this is to deny the very essence of what it is to be human. To be human is to be free, and to deny that is to deny our own humanity. In the series of interviews with John Gerassi that make up Talking with Sartre, we see this philosophy in action. Sartre attempted in his own life to be totally transparent, to hide nothing, to deny nothing, to make no excuses for himself. Before this sounds like a bad plot for a movie starring Ricky Gervais, let me add that transparency does not mean being rude or feeling obliged to express every single thought one has regardless of how they affect others. What it does mean is to be honest with oneself and with others about oneself, so that there is no privacy, nothing hidden, no deceit or attempt to create an impression in the minds of others that is different from who you actually are.

In conversation the impact can be quite brutal, particularly if you aren't ready for it. These are not interviews in which Gerassi comes to his subject with a sense of awe or deference. It helped, no doubt, that Gerassi's parents were part of Sartre and Beauvoir's circle (Gerassi's father, Fernando, was a painter who fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and who became the character Gomez in Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy; his mother, Stepha, had been one of Beauvoir's best friends at the Sorbonne and became "Sarah" in the same trilogy) and Gerassi himself later became accepted too. Interviewer and interviewee thus know each other very well and have established a high degree of trust between them, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why Sartre authorized Gerassi to write his biography, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. It also helps explain why Sartre does not bridle at the sometimes aggressive tone of the questioning. Gerassi's own history as an activist and revolutionary in the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s lend the questioning a sense of urgency: Sartre, while not on the defensive, is frequently taken to task by Gerassi for not having done enough or gone far enough for a particular cause. He is taken to task, for instance, for not having followed Gerassi's father to Spain to fight, instead holding the view that Fernando had betrayed his artistic commitment in deciding to go (Gerassi senior was in fact one of the last generals to leave Barcelona. You can read his story here.) Sartre struggles to explain his position on this occasion, and on many others throughout the interviews, but very rarely does he make excuses for himself or try to shift the blame onto circumstances. Each position he adopted seems to have been carefully thought through—cynics might say every desire was given retrospective justification—and only on occasion is he caught out saying, "What else could I do? I'm a Bourgeois, after all."

The interviews in the book took place between November 1970 and November 1974, with the subject matter in each interview going back and forth from past to present. Thus, at the same time as we learn about Sartre's childhood (b. 1905) in Paris and La Rochelle, we get Sartre's opinions on contemporaneous events, such as Mao's cultural revolution and the Munich Olympics massacre. The language sometimes seems somewhat stilted even though conversational. There's a good reason for this, I think. Sartre admits that he did not become political or develop any sense of society until the end of the war, having experienced life as a P.O.W. in a German prison camp, the kind of place where there was very little privacy or dignity (in an interview elsewhere I recall him recounting an epiphany when he and Beauvoir decided to go skiing in the mountains one Sunday and were amazed to find that hundreds of other people had also decided, with comparable free will, to engage in the same activity). The turn to Marxism that Sartre's philosophy subsequently underwent as he tried to reconcile it with existentialism meant that he had to do an awful lot of catching up in terms not just of acquainting himself with the reality of workers' lives but also of learning the language of Marxist philosophy. Spend long enough working with and thinking in abstractions, and eventually they end up seeming more real than the entities they're supposed to be referring to. A typical exchange might go something like

Gerassi: Hi, Sartre, I'm early today.

Sartre: Yes. You caught me coming back from the tobacco kiosk.

Gerassi: Really? Did you get a chance to talk to the Masses?

Sartre: Yes, I did. I spoke to them about the need for the Black Panthers to develop a revolutionary strategy that reflected the decomposition of the proletariat.

Gerassi: Very good. Did they seem receptive?

Sartre: Not particularly. The Masses said they had to go home because their cystitis was playing up.

I exaggerate for comic effect, but the absence of self-awareness that usually accompanies similar such exchanges will be familiar to anyone with experience of ultra-leftist organizations, and Sartre and Gerassi's own apparent ease with the executions of counter-revolutionaries in Cuba suggests the sort of latent sociopathy one often finds in those high up hierarchical organizations used to pushing people around checkerboards by the thousand.

Josef Stalin is supposed, erroneously, to have said, "the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic." It isn't of course. It's a million tragedies. Sartre freely admits his failure to either reconcile existentialism, his philosophy of the individual par excellence, with Marxism, or to complete his promised Ethics. The first of these he intended to achieve with his massive Critique of Dialectical Reason, a work that attempts to situate the individual within history, as understood by Marxism. Sartre regarded this as an attempt to save the individual, to demonstrate that there is a small margin of freedom, a glint of light, beneath the overwhelming economic forces that carry societies, states, classes, and history along. It is another intimidating work that rewards reading, a Marxist version of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action, if you will. It remained incomplete, as Sartre was overtaken by the force of history himself. His use of speed for 40 years of his life on a routine basis had destroyed his health and ruined his eyesight, making completion of the work impossible. But Sartre had also witnessed the "Events" of 1968, in which many of his cherished Marxist ideas were thrown into doubt by not just the New Left but by the feminist and black power movements that undermined the primacy of class as the principal determinant of social structure, change, and history (when asked by the students occupying the Sorbonne what he was doing there, Sartre received a round of applause for his canny answer: to learn). Unable to bring himself to completely align himself with anarchism while nevertheless cherishing the anarchist implications of his philosophy, he went from being a fellow traveller of the Communists to a defender of Maoism, the form of Marxism that, as he understood it, came closest to a nonhierarchical Marxist organization; the cultural revolution, in his view, was a radical casting into doubt of the right of the Communist Party bureaucracy to legislate for the people. Putting lawyers, writers, ballet dancers, and assorted bureaucrats to work in the fields and factories could not but help them gain some empathy for the struggles of the peasants and workers. I wouldn't mind seeing it myself.

Sartre had also been moving towards a more "situational" ethics, recognizing, at last, the impossibility of legislating for humanity as a whole, as he had once tried to do in Existentialism and Humanism. Rather than espousing a kind of modified Kantian categorical imperative, he increasingly returned to the specificity of each individual event, situation, occasion. To generate an ethics on that basis requires once more that we recognize and value the importance of each individual, a message explicit in Sartre's early philosophy. Arguably it was necessary for Sartre's thinking to go through the detour of Marxism to achieve the more sophisticated, socially aware form that it acquired toward the end of his life; ironic, even, that Marxism should be responsible for this dialectical Aufhebung. Sadly, however, that detour also meant that Sartre did not live long enough to see his project through. We can only speculate as to what his third masterpiece might have looked like.

Talking with Sartre offers a warts and all profile of Sartre. He is candid about his many love affairs, sometimes, perhaps often, to his detriment. Some readers might reflect that it is easier for some people to be candid than others. In the preface, Gerassi recounts how he turns up for lunch with Sartre and Beauvoir on one occasion after breaking up with a girl and clearly upset:

Sartre looked hard at my face through his walleyes, then said: "Well, I envy you. I have never cried for a woman in my life."

Beauvoir was crushed. Sartre sensed it, so he quickly tried to explain. "When Castor [Beauvoir] and I decided to have what you call an open relationship, we realized that passion inevitably leads to possessiveness and jealousies. So, as you know, we decided that our relationship would be 'necessary' but that we would be free to have others, which we called 'contingent.' That demanded that we eliminate passion, the kind of hard emotions which often manifest themselves with tears. But I now realize . . . well, I envy you—you can cry at forty, and I never have at seventy."

I could see that Beauvoir was suffering deeply. Obviously, she had often shed a tear for her lover, Sartre or another, and obviously was hurt that he had not.

Even in the most transparent of relationships, some compromises are more painful than others.

In 1976, the three-hour documentary Sartre par lui-même (Sartre by Himself) featured Sartre, Beauvoir, and a number of close friends covering similar ground to that in Gerassi's book. The text of the documentary was released in English in paperback, but it's very difficult to find now. The video itself is out there on VHS with English subtitles, I believe, and a special 30th-anniversary 2-disc edition came out on DVD in 2007, if your French is up to it (I had to follow the conversation with English text in hand). If not, then Gerassi's book is a fine alternative, offering an intimate and representative introduction to Sartre the man, the writer, and the philosopher. And a fascinating read, to boot.

So Many Unanswered Questions

In the latest issue of Orion magazine, Lou Bendrick reports on the launch of the DoggieLoverDoll, for all your pet's masturbation needs. Those dog owners frustrated by their pets' tendency to shag anything and everything now have the answer to hand, as it were, in the form of this canine sex doll. Or maybe not, since Bendrick reckons that the doll, which hails from Brazil, will inevitably flop (fnur fnur) in the States because,

" . . . while watching our little buddy fulfill his 'great sexual appettite' without apology on a public sidewalk pains us, it pales in comparison to explaining to an unwitting houseguest why your dog toy has an artificial vagina."

And besides, who's going to wash it every evening? Is your dog that well trained? I don't see many dog owners going for that, unless the manufacturers have also come up with dog-size condoms for you to slip on his tumescent member every time he gets the urge, and then you might as well cut out the middle-man altogether.

Or maybe this is a piece of marketing genius, and the manufacturers expect you to buy a new doll for your dog after each time it's used. Cue some cheap joke about seeing dog owners coming.

Speak, Memory

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, by Andy Beckett. Faber and Faber, 448 pp.

About a quarter of the way into Guardian journalist Andy Beckett's impressive account of Britain in the 1970s, self-satisfied Labour Party politician Denis Healey, who served as Harold Wilson's chancellor of the exchequer, observes that he knew "bugger all about economics" when he was appointed to the post, but soon learned, as chancellor that "economics is just a branch of social science" and was able to get on top of the job within the space of three months. It's a striking admission not just for what it tells us about Healey's complacency and the lack of expertise required of a politician even at the giddy heights of government, but also because it draws attention to the fact that much of what matters in history actually takes place elsewhere. Beckett might have done well to heed the content of Healey's observation and pursued its implications. Economics is indeed no more than branch of social science, but you wouldn't know this from what is, by Beckett's own admission, a history of the period confined to political and economic events. This isn't to belittle his achievement, since the book is substantial and stands in its own right as a well-researched and thorough piece of journalism within its own self-defined parameters, but a good deal of context is lost if significant social forces—demographics, crime, scientific and technological developments, deskilling, shifts in religious allegiance, patterns of geographical and social mobility, changes in youth culture, etc., etc.,—are treated as epiphenomena or mere ephemera that have no enduring structural impact. It's a history that only the vulgarest of Marxists could love.

Beckett has also taken a top-down approach to history, interviewing the individuals at the heart of things, as though they were the key players rather than merely representative or indicative of larger social forces and mass movements. To interview the founders of Spare Rib or Sid Rawle, the "king of the hippies," is all well and good, to the extent that they embody the rise feminism or the free festival movement, but the idea that these individuals were the prime movers or somehow "led" the movement rather than just surfed a wave (some may even say, cynically, "took advantage") of those movements is to mistake cause and effect. In sum, I would have preferred to read a People's History of the 70s rather than a one-sided Great Man's History of the 70s.

The definition of politics used by Beckett is conventional, too. It's what you'd expect of a Guardian journalist, touching all the right bases—gay rights, feminism, Grunwick and Saltley Gates, Northern Ireland, the rise of environmentalism, the increasing visibility of minorities—but because of the limitations he places on himself there is precious little on, for example, the anti-Apartheid movement, Britain's relationship to the Commonwealth, immigration from Uganda, or the issues of Rhodesia and Cyprus; nor is there any indication that Beckett understands the political significance of other aspects of everyday life, such as youth culture, most notably punk rock and its entire DIY ethic, the role of sports in generating nationalist sentiment (this was a decade that saw not just the British Lions tour South Africa but also Buster Mottram joining the National Front, of hooliganism, of Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon, Scotland going to World Cups and England not), nor the importance of the mass media in generating a set of communal values, along with the accompanying marginalization or demonization of "outsiders." Such a change in terms might well have required Beckett to do double the legwork required to produce the book he has (he tells us it was five years in the making), but it would have yielded a more comprehensive, more rounded and contextualised account of the period while also countering the standard Spenglerian "decline of empire" narrative that is usually imposed on the decade. The 1970s were certainly turbulent, but they were also colourful and exciting and brimming with new possibilities, with hope, with resistance and struggle; they just need to be looked at from a perspective other than that of a Telegraph reader.

Lest I be accused of some nostalgie de la boue, I'll happily acknowledge to growing up in the 1970s and that consequently I'm prone to a rose-tinted view of those years. Even the blackouts caused by power cuts were a source of excitement, our generation's equivalent of the Blitz. But I'd make the point, too, that my elders who saw the 1970s in apocalyptic terms were themselves guilty of romanticizing earlier decades, as though the Second World War was a triumph of communal spirit and victory a demonstration of British superiority, the empire and commonwealth a source of pride rather than shame. The message to take away, I'd suggest, is to be very careful when compartmentalizing the past, either chronologically or sociologically, because the process of categorization carries with it implicit assumptions that will inevitably shape the final result. The truth lies in the interstices.

It's The Future. Let's Boogie!

Future of the Left : Manchasm

Tevez Has Taste

The Return of Topo Gigio!

The Coming Property Crash

Megan McArdle, business and economics editor at The Atlantic magazine, warns in her article "Capitalist Fools" of the upcoming bust in the commercial real estate market.

According to Joseph Gyourko, a Wharton real-estate professor, at least $250 billion worth of commercial loans are going to roll over in each of the next few years. When they do, many landlords will probably be caught short—and so will their bankers. Although most U.S. residential mortgages were bundled into mortgage-backed securities, only a fraction of commercial mortgages were securitized. Some bank or finance company still carries the rest on its books and will have to write them down if they can’t be rolled over; some of those banks will ultimately have to be taken over by the FDIC. As the banks’ loan portfolios are sold off, the write-downs of the underlying collateral will give bank examiners a new, lower reference price for the collateral held by other banks, possibly tipping those banks into insolvency as well. You get the picture.

Oops!

Chicago School veterans suddenly discover the virtues of Keynesianism. An article by John Cassidy in the January 11th New Yorker.

What the Hell Is His Story?

I always understood that Native Americans acquired their name by virtue of the first thing their mother saw after giving birth:

Clarence Wolf Guts was one of South Dakota's most celebrated World War II veterans. A U.S. Army code talker, he and other Lakota soldiers conversed in Indian to confuse the Japanese who were intercepting transmission. His valuable service became known following the release in 2002 of the film Wind Talkers.

Spotted in South Dakota magazine.

Hedge Your Bets

There's an absorbing piece by Malcolm Gladwell here in the January 18th issue of The New Yorker in which he discusses the truth behind the success of entrepreneurs. Some excerpts of note:

In a recent study, “From Predators to Icons,” the French scholars Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires - ranging from Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, to Bernard Arnault, of the luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H. - and chart what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur's career. There is almost always, they conclude, a moment of great capital accumulation - a particular transaction that catapults him into prominence. The entrepreneur has access to that deal by virtue of occupying “a ”structural hole,“ a niche that gives him ”a unique perspective on a particular market. Vilette and Vuillermot go on, 'The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation.“ He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and - most crucially - his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure. The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot's telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting.

. . .

People like Dassault and Eastman and Arnault and Turner are all successful entrepreneurs, businessmen whose insights and decisions have transformed the economy, but their entrepreneurial spirit could not have less in common with that of the daring risk-taker of popular imagination. Would we so revere risk-taking if we realized that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?

. . .

(Hank) Paulson's story also casts a harsh light on the prevailing assumptions behind corporate compensation policies. One of the main arguments for the generous stock options that are so often given to C.E.O.'s is that they are necessary to encourage risk-taking in the corporate suite. This notion comes from what is known as “agency theory,” which Freek Vermeulen, of the London Business School, calls “one of the few academic theories in management academia that has actually influenced the world of management practice.” Agency theory, Vermeulen observes, “says that managers are inherently risk-averse; much more risk-averse than shareholders would like them to be. And the theory prescribes that you should give them stock options, rather than stock, to stimulate them to take more risk” Why do shareholders want managers to take more risks? Because they want stodgy companies to be more entrepreneurial, and taking risks is what everyone says that entrepreneurs do.

The result has been to turn executives into risk-takers. Paulson, for his part, was stunned at the reckless behavior of his Wall Street counterparts. Some of the mortgage bundles he was betting against - collections of some of the sketchiest subprime loans - were paying the investors who bought them six-percent interest. Treasury bonds, the safest investment in the world, were paying almost five percent at that point. Nor could he comprehend why so many banks were willing to sell him C.D.S. insurance at such low prices. Why would someone, in the middle of a housing bubble, demand only one cent on the dollar? At the end of 2006, Merrill Lynch paid $1.3 billion for First Franklin Financial, one of the biggest subprime lenders in the country, bringing the total value of subprime mortgages on its books to eleven billion dollars. Paulson was so risk-averse that he didn't so much as put a toe in the water of subprime mortgage default swaps until Pellegrini had done months of analysis. But Merrill Lynch bought First Franklin even though the firm's own economists were predicting that housing prices were about to drop by as much as five percent. “It just doesn't make sense,” an incredulous Paulson told his friend Howard Gurvitch. “These are supposedly the smart people.”

Backhanded Compliment of the Week

What else would you expect from the Telegraph?

"One of the finest machines ever," said a friend who has owned several. Land Rover owners possess the sort of brand loyalty that makes even Altrincham FC supporters look fickle. There are specialist clubs and magazines for the various sub-tribes of owner.

I'd suspect it was written by a Macc fan if I thought they knew how to hold a pen.

An Unfortunate Ambiguity

I had to read the entire article about Mary J. Blige in the December 28 issue of Jet magazine to make sure I understood the logic behind the title of her new album. Apparently she cried alot:

Mary J. Blige has turned personal adversity to her benefit. Having survived child abuse and a string of abusive adult relationships, she is stronger than ever, as suggested by the title of her new CD, Stronger with Each Tear. She is also using her music and high profile to help other women to heal, and she believes that women who have suffered abuse by men must take the difficult step toward forgiveness. The singer recently opened the Mary J. Blige Center for Women in her hometown of Yonkers, New York, an initiative of her Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now, which seeks to educate, empower, and encourage women.

One-Dimensional Bragg

An inaccurate and unfair post title, but what the hell. In last week's In Our Time program, Melvyn Bragg discussed the Frankfurt School with Jonathan Rée, Esther Leslie, and Raymond Geuss. You can listen here.

While I'm here, I'll mention also the latest issue of the New Humanist magazine, which has Laurie Taylor discussing the clerical child sexual abuse scandals in Ireland and an interview between A.C. Grayling and Tzvetan Todorov, among its many other delights. And Terry Eagleton picks up a Bad Faith award along with Karen Armstrong.

It's Freezing. Let's Boogie!

The Ex: Jack Frost Is Innocent

More Podcast Pleasure

In Our Time broadcast on Mary Wolstonecraft here.

Old broadcast on anarchism here.

Oh Sting, Where is Thy Death?

Good news from the NYT.

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

That's Class

The latest podcast from Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed programme, which I now some regular readers listen to regularly, features a discussion on class and social mobility in contemporary Britain. Contributors are Richard Reeves, Director of the think tank Demos; Danny Dorling professor of geography at Sheffield University; Dick Hobbs, sociologist at the London School of Economics; and our favourite Brummie (for this week, anyway) Lynsey Hanley, Guardian journalist and author of the very excellent Estates - an Intimate History, reviewed by Lisa here.

The previous podcast on Bourgeois marriage in Victorian England passed me by. I'm off to download it now.

All Gods are (Nonexistent) Scumbags

Atheist Ireland has posted 25 blasphemous quotations in protest at the new Irish blasphemy law. If 25 aren't enough for you, you can read the Comments.

Facebook page here.

Ete Yor Branes

A miscellany of articles that didn't make it into the 2009 lineup:

An article by Nicholas Wade in the NYT on research into brain synapses.

Benedict Carey's piece in the same paper on the theory that our adaptive capacity to predict the near future is responsible for some perceptual illusions.

Another one by Carey on a theory of mental disorders that made me laugh because Badcock was one of my lecturers at the LSE and used to come up with daft ideas even then.

An article by Brian Bethune in Maclean's on the theories of Keith Stanovich on Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and his idea of a Rationality Quotient.

Sandra Steingraber's article in Orion on epigenetics, which includes these interesting paragraphs:

Consider this: identical twins are epigenetically unique; attached to their identical chromosomes are nonidentical patterns of methyl groups and histones. Moreover, in a phenomenon called epigenetic drift, twins become more different with time. As revealed in a 2005 study, younger twins are more alike than older twins. As twins age and have different environmental experiences, their genetic expression diverges. Twins who spend more of their lives together in the same environment have gene-expression portraits that are more similar than twins who go their separate ways.

. . .

Perhaps most astonishing of all, epigenetic changes can be inherited. This means that the environmental exposures we experienced as children can have consequences not just for us but also for our descendants. More philosophically, it means that, contrary to current biological dogma, the nineteenth-century idea that acquired traits can be passed down the generations may not be so wrong-headed after all. And this brings us back to Darwin, who developed his ideas before we had a working understanding of genes and who was agnostic on the subject of the heritability of acquired characteristics. The reality of epigenetic inheritance hardly overturns natural selection—indeed it shows us another route by which species can adapt. Finally, it shines a spotlight on one of Darwin’s lesser-appreciated insights: that all of life is interrelated—not only by our common origins but also by our common ecology.

and finally a piece from Wired by Clive Thompson on the virtues of a wandering mind. For anyone who gets their best ideas while out for a walk.

It's Friday. Last Boogie Before Xmas!

Camera Obscura - French Navy

While the Iron is Hot . . . Do the Ironing

Justifiably angry piece by Andrew Flood over at the Irish Left Review.

WSM Press release here.

Management Go-Slow

In chaotic times, an executive’s instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success at knowledge firms, even during crises. Our research provides hard evidence that leaders who give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.

Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control—establishing nonhierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company’s decisions—guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare. Two of them, however, compellingly demonstrate that if it’s implemented properly, this counterintuitive idea can dramatically improve results.

. . .

Furthermore, we’ve found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business. This applies mainly to knowledge organizations, but even production-oriented companies can benefit from having employees who feel more empowered and engaged.

If abdication of authority is to yield value for the corporation, however, individuals must be self-motivated. CSC Germany does this by allowing employees to work on the one of five topics that best utilizes their talents and excites their interest. This involves joining a topic community, such as the one focusing on strategy and innovation. Issues are discussed in these groups until all participants come to an agreement, and leadership within the groups shifts frequently, settling on individuals who have the most competence in the areas of focus and are accepted by others as leaders.

We call such practices “mutualism.” It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don’t dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

From "To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority," by A.D. Amar, Carsten Hentrich, and Vlatka Hlupic, in the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

"No modern factory could function for twenty-four hours without [the] spontaneous organization of work that groups of workers, independent of the official business management, carry out by filling in the gaps of official production directives, by preparing for the unforeseen and for regular breakdowns of equipment, by compensating for management's mistakes, etc."

From "The Proletarian Revolution Against the Bureaucracy," by Cornelius Castoriadis, in the December 1956 issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Reverse Psychology

"This is not a book you want on your coffee table," says Michael Pavletic in an interview with Reader's Digest about his latest work, Atlas of Small Animal Wound Management & Reconstructive Surgery (Third Edition).

It's already on my Amazon Wishlist.

Sixty-Nine and Eighty-Seven

What filthy minds you have.

These are the categories of interest in this year's Grammy Awards as far as we at C&S are concerned. Neko Case's fantastic album Middle Cyclone has been nominated for the Best Contemporary Folk Album, and she and Judge have received a nomination for Best Recording Package for the same album. Fingers crossed.

Nearly as good as a Children's BAFTA.

Blogroll Alert

New addition to the blogroll (left): Enclosure of the Commons

We Love Charlize Theron #2

"Sometimes No Comment speaks louder than words."

Theron tonight upon France's name being drawn out.

It's Friday. Let's Wrestle!

Let's Wrestle - We Are The Men You'll Grow To Love soon

We Love Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron détend l'atmosphère

L'actrice sud-africaine sait suivre les modes, et se moquer gentiment de la France en est devenue une. Lors d'un répétition préalable à la cérémonie, en tirant la boule "France", Charlize Theron a volontairement prononcé "Irlande". "Oui, c'est ce qu'elle a fait mais ça n'était qu'une blague", a assuré Jérôme Valcke, secrétaire général de la FIFA, cité par lequipe.fr.

Translation.

Thank God for Low Achievers

Ever Google your old mates from university to see what they're up to these days? One of my closest friends from back then, it transpires (scroll down), was earlier this year appointed head of communications for the International Olympic Committee after serving as managing director and head of media and communications for the World Economic Forum.

The article even mentions that:

A 2005 profile of Adams in PR Week takes note of his days in Manchester as an "Old Labour activist" and as radio disc jockey.

This is the only previous connection I've had with Lausanne. I think it had best stay that way.

Which Side Are You On?

This could be interesting. The first police union in France (the CRS are the riot police, IIRC) is organizing protests today to express its members' great dissatisfaction with government cutbacks.

I wonder who will be policing it. And what if it turns ugly? Who should I support?

Either way, one thing will be for sure: The police started it.

He's Making It Up as He Goes Along!!!

France miss out on seedings in the World Cup finals due to the decision to use the October rankings rather than past performances in World Cups combined with rankings:

Had the old formula been used, France would have been one of the top seeds and Holland would have missed out. The Guardian tells us:

Jérôme Valcke, Fifa's general secretary, insisted there was no agenda against France as a result of the play-off controversy. He said: "In the past the seedings have been determined by a mixture of world rankings and performances in past World Cups but this time the feeling was the October rankings most closely represented the best teams in the tournament."

Had November's rankings been used, England would have missed out and France seeded.

Valcke added: "We made the decision last month that the October rankings would be used because they were fairer. Countries who had been involved in the play-offs would have had an unfair advantage because they would have played more games and that affects their ranking.

"This is not a case of wanting Holland to be seeded instead of France, just that the feeling was the October seedings represented the best teams."

The best teams that will be in South Africa, anyway. Le Monde, however, believes that France and Ireland are now united in suffering an injustice:

Alors s'est posée la question du mode de désignation de ces têtes de série. On pensait l'équipe de France protégée par son statut de finaliste du Mondial 2006. Mais le doute existait. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'à la FIFA les règlements sont faits au jour le jour, semble-t-il. La commission d'organisation de la Coupe du monde se réunissait mercredi pour fixer les modalités du tirage au sort, deux jours seulement avant celui-ci, et a décidé d'établir une nouvelle règle : "Par le passé, [la répartition des équipes] s'était faite en fonction à la fois du classement mondial et des performances dans les précédentes Coupes du monde ; il est apparu cette fois que le classement du mois d'octobre donnait une photo assez fidèle la hiérarchie mondiale."

In other words, you'd expect France to be seeded by virtue of the fact that they made it to the last World Cup final. Why aren't they? Well, apparently because the rules of FIFA are being invented on a daily basis.

That'll be thanks to Sepp "loose cannon" Blatter, no doubt.

I dunno. Maybe France should ask FIFA to designate them as the ninth seed. Just this once.

"Cowen, You Bastard!"

Irish National Public Sector Strike on Tuesday 24th November 2009

Thanks to Conor at D.O.

I'll Scratch Your Back . . .

Tuesday's New York Times is always good for one or two evolutionary psychology-type articles in the Science section. Today's looks at Michael Tomasello's research into humans' innate desire to help others:

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

This bit in particular I thought interesting:

An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.

But then so was this:

The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.

The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.

Feck it, read the whole thing.

And the Price of Everything

The November 16 issue of Publishers Weekly has a too-brief interview with Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing (£8.59 at Amazon):


Is the confluence of the economic crisis with the climate and food crises an auspicious moment for change?

This is one of the last moments ecologically where, if we make a profound change now, we will be able to leave a world to our children and grandchildren that is roughly familiar to what we have today. But there's nothing inevitable about us doing the right thing. The last time we went through a depression, the politics that came out were not at all progressive. Part of the motivation behind this book is to point out the dangers that lie in wait at a time like this, but also the solutions that are already being practiced, which we need to learn from in a hurry.


You describe a “countermovement” that seems more pragmatic and less rigid than neoliberalism.

It's ironic, right? The idea of the free market is that everyone can do whatever they like, and yet the dogma for the free market is profoundly centralized, whereas the movements that I point to have political principles about equality, inclusion, and human rights, [but] beyond that, the everyday politics of how to figure things out is done in a very democratic way. The Zapatistas have rotating citizens' courts that effectively act as a municipal council. They've been so successful in resolving disputes and dealing with economic planning that regular Mexicans will come to these courts because they're much fairer and more just than the Mexican legal system.

You distinguish between consumer-choice democracy and a more fully participatory version. What's the difference and how do we get more of the real thing in the U.S.?

We need to shun the idea that the only way we can shape the world is through our consumption choices. In terms of “the real thing,” I don't want to set up any imaginary perfect democracy because there's never been one. But in every courtroom in the U.S., 12 people deliberate the cases of their peers. You can see people actively engaged in building substantive change everywhere from communities of the homeless in New York to the farm workers of Immokalee, in Florida—who just had their salaries increased by 70% as a result of their organizing. As the book went to press, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics for her work on community governance. So the theory and the practice are very much alive in this country; it's one of the reasons that I'm applying to become an American citizen right now. If there's one country where it's possible to make these changes, and make democracy work best, it's going to be here.

Unfinished Muslim Business

Ian Brown launches his career on an unsuspecting Middle East.

(File under Signs of the Apocalypse #2)

Signs of the Apocalypse

The moral high ground just got a bit closer to the flood waters.

"Fair Play": Just a Suggestion

Head of FIFA says players are under no obligation to play by the rules.

In other news, FIFA has announced that it will be introducing a new card for cheating to go with the yellow and red: the carte blanche.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Geoff Berner - Official Theme Song Of The Vanvouver Whistler 2010 Winter Olympic Games (The Dead Children Were Worth It)

Marx on My Lenin, or just Seaman Stains?

Art in America magazine has a couple of particularly entertaining reviews in its November issue. Here's some of Sarah Valdez's piece on Genesis P.Orridge's show at Invisible Exports:

P-Orridge’s work often contains an odd but compelling mixture of playfulness, the paranormal and radical erotica. English Breakfast (2002-09) consists of a head shot of the Queen—her visage replaced by a fried egg with red beans, tomatoes, bacon, sausage and a mushroom, the food (an English breakfast) contrasting nicely with her many jewels. A sort of “E” with the vertical line running down the middle, the insignia for Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth—an occult organization P-Orridge founded but has since dissociated h/erself from—embellishes several compositions, including the psychedelic Electric Newspaper, Issue Two (1995), which served as album art for P-Orridge’s still-operative band Psychic TV. A 1989 series of illustrations for Terrence Sellers’s classic underground book The Correct Sadist blends what look like historical etchings of variously suffering nudes, snakes, tigers and demons with present-day fetish erotica. In a striking self-portrait, Flowering Pain Give Space (1998), P-Orridge appears enthroned, bound and blindfolded, wearing a corset, red stilettos and nipple clamps, with weights hanging from h/er shackled penis and a catheter running to h/er mouth—surrounded by a repeated image of yellow flowers in a gold vase.

and here's Brian Boucher's review of Mary Reid Kelley's work at Fredericks & Freiser:

In her first solo show, Mary Reid Kelley combined animation and live action in two pungent and funny videos. Both feature the artist alternately reciting and singing original verse inspired by WWI-era patriotic doggerel. In each black-and-white video, she wears period costume and thick makeup, outlining and obscuring her features, lending a cartoonish appearance. In one video, she wears black ovals that cover her eyes; for the other, she dons bulbous prosthetics with eyes drawn on them, making her face, in both cases, masklike. Reid Kelley’s punning libretto, her sly references to Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and her unified esthetic made for a convincing debut.

Sadie, the Saddest Sadist (7 minutes, 23 seconds), 2009, is set in Great Britain in 1915, according to a free booklet that includes the video’s lyrics (one is provided for each piece). The title character, a munitions worker, wants to learn a trade “so [she] could be a traitor.” She meets Jack, a sailor (played by Reid Kelley in drag), and with “passions inflamed,” she requests rousing war stories. His sung reply: “Calm down sweetheart / Britannia rules the waves.” In pledging herself to him, she offers her “surplus devotion,” and after their off-camera tryst, she sings, “The stains on my sheets / will come out with some lemon / I know that you care / by these Marx on my Lenin.” Live action alternates with stop-motion animation in which dancing refrigerator magnet-style letters spell out the dialogue or toy with it, as when “surplus devotion” is anagrammatized into “spurs devolution.”

More somber, The Queen’s English (4 minutes, 20 seconds), 2009, features a nurse who observes the demise of a soldier at the Western Front in 1915. She speaks in front of a drawn backdrop of a ward where soldiers are represented as primary shapes in beds, alluding at once to Analytical Cubism and to contemporary descriptions of men as interchangeable cogs in the war machine. The nurse’s monologue is marked by sad allusions to Humpty Dumpty and grisly references to decomposing flesh, and also by anachronistic humor, as when she professes to love the soldier “the way a Dutchman loves a dike / the way a woman needs a man / that needs a fish that needs a bike.” When he died, she explains, “I laid him, gently / in a Marquee piece of sod.”

One might want to read these pieces as sardonic commentary on current wars, but Reid Kelley’s interest seems to be primarily in historical material, expressed in details such as the patriotic flyers that hang on the walls behind Sadie and Jack when they meet, which urge citizens to conserve food and to fight for king and country. Her fine ear for popular verse makes Reid Kelley’s work rich fun for those who are, as Jack describes himself, “verbally inclined.”

Philistine that I am, I can't make out if they're meant to be funny or not.

An Adult's Christmas in Wales

Or "When The Red Robins Meet The Red Red Robins"

Saturday Dec 12th Wrexham v Altrincham (FA Trophy)

Saturday Dec 26th Wrexham v Altrincham (League)

Friday Jan 1st Altrincham v Wrexham (League)

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Trashcan Sinatras - Only Tongue Can Tell

Folk Devils and Moral Panics (for Reidski)

The Staines News reports on the widespread panic on Wheatsheaf Lane over the impending match between Staines and Millwall.

One Wheatsheaf Lane resident, who didn't want to be named, said: "I am concerned because of the history of the club. I will have no hesitation in ringing 999 if there is any trouble.

"One of my neighbours has said they will board up the front windows of the house."
Jenny Hutt, of Wheatsheaf Lane, said: "I will be putting my car in my garage, because you never know what might happen."

. . .

Rana Yewer, who lives nearby, said: "We are quite near the town centre here, so the fans could have a few drinks. I am a bit concerned.

Another resident said: "I wasn't concerned until I heard about the Millwall and West Ham fight recently, so I am going to hide my car around the back."

Of course, the Comments section has attracted the usual scurrility:



mark my pants said:

The residents of Staines are to blame for this.
You have been flaunting the trappings of capitalism and treading down the working classes for too long.


Superintendent Duncan Greenhalgh said:

I'd just like to remind residents in Wheatsheaf Lane that parking any kind of vehicle in your rear garden is a breach of the road traffic act 1966 and would result in a fixed penalty notice. I personally will be attending a grenade diversity training course that weekend but our community officers will be available to give commendations for the best use of weapons of mass destruction, and geraniums.


Carl Blainey said:

This is the chance I've been waiting for for years. I really hate the people of Staines. I'm going to disguise myself as a Millwall fan and mingle with them then set light to whatever I can find.

What colour do Millwall play in?


danny dyer said:

make no mistake this one is gonna be pwoper pwoper nawty. so nawty that i am turning up wiv me mate woss kemp. he is pwoper ard and wont take no nonsense from any tweatment or f twoop i tell yer.



Private Parts said:

My mate Charlie Bright is in the army and based at Aldershot just down the road from Staines. Anyway he is a Millwall supporter and is proper loony tunes. He's gone AWOL and I hope it is no coincidence that a box grenades from under his bed and a sniper rifle have gone missing. Please please let there be no grassy knolls down Wheatsheaf Lane.....


Concerned Resident said:

I hope none of the above is true. I live in Wheatsheaf Lane and we held a community meeting last night to voice ouur fears & concerns. The police seemed to play down the fear of violence but having looked at Millwall on youtube this morning and the comments above, I'm very worried, especially as we have just bought a new car and got new windows.


Steve from Egham said:

Let's not forget that the people of Staines aren't exactly angels themselves. A lot of us think they've had this coming for a long time.



I think we've been here before, haven't we?

You Know What to Do

Vote Here.

You Are (Not) the Ref

Q: Many Irish people are going to say that France qualified because they cheated.

TH: I am not the referee. The ball touched my hand. I am honest, there was a hand.

I am not a cheat. I am honest. I cheated.

COCK SHITTING FUCK BOLLOCK WANK #2

Now in glorious RTE-o-vision

Cock Shitting Fuck Bollock Wank

OFFSIDE. HANDBALL. YOU CHOOSE.

Ireland's Investment Strike

A very interesting article here by Michael Burke on the current shambles that is the Irish economy and the government's rescue plans (although the term "shambles" obscures the fact that the government knows exactly what it's doing):

The crisis of the economy and of the banking sector, as well as a potentially looming crisis in the balance of payments all have the same primary source. Bank lending to private sector developers and other speculators has brought about a ruinous situation for the Irish economy, its banks and the level of its foreign debt. These issues need to be confronted head-on, and any policy prescriptions which do not are sure to end in failure.

Irish Government's Response to the Crisis

The coalition government of the Irish Republic, comprised of Fianna Fail and the Green Party, has set out its policy response to the economic and banking crisis. Perhaps it is the catastrophic scope of recent of events which has led policy in a Biblical direction. Whatever the cause, the government's stance is summarised in Matthew 4:25, "For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him."

The thrust of policy is to bail out bank shareholders and large-scale property developers by using taxpayer funds. This represents a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, on a very large scale. The two planks of the policy have been an austerity Budget and the proposed establishment of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). This Agency will purchase banks' bad debts owed by property developers and speculators, paid for by issuing bonds, ultimately covered by Irish taxpayers.

The two aspects of the government's stance are clearly linked. Their main aim is to rescue the greatest possible amount of private capital from the economic and financial wreckage, with Irish taxpayers picking up the bill. At the same time, the enormous levels of debt associated with NAMA (at least Euros 54bn in bond issues have been suggested) are offered as justification for large-scale cuts in government spending, including on social welfare and other provisions.

Austerity Budget

The Emergency Budget unveiled in April focused on reducing social spending in a series of measures that included a raid on state employees' pensions, pay cuts, job losses and reductions in welfare spending. At the same time, taxes were also increased. As outlined above, the automatic increase in government spending was one of the few bright spots on the economic horizon.

Now, to replace that with an austerity budget in the depth of recession is, at least, a high risk strategy. According to Finance Minister Lenihan, the combined total of spending cuts in the Emergency Budget and previous public sector pay cuts amounts to Euros 3.3bn. In addition, tax increases announced in April amount to an estimated Euros 1.8bn [10]. This represents a fiscal tightening of 3% of GDP. Given that the economy is already contracting at double digit rates, this represents a gross overreaction, effectively ensuring that the 'cure' is as bad as the disease. Worse, the tax increases are not progressive ones, aimed at higher income groups or the wealthy, but aimed at the poorest in society (along with a halving of the jobseekers' allowance, which is explicitly aimed at young workers).

While these policies could easily be criticised in terms of morality or justice, they also make no economic sense. If it is accepted that taxes have to rise at some point to stabilise government finances, it is imperative now that these do not fall on the poor, as they have a far greater propensity to consume their income, which is precisely what is needed during recession. By contrast, sheltering the rich from tax rises merely increases their ability to save, or to purchase luxury goods.

NAMA

The leadership of the FF/Green coalition government has argued that the austerity budget is a necessary measure to stabilise government finances. But the proposed NAMA legislation threatens to overwhelm government finances entirely.

The outline of the plan is reasonably straightforward. At the time of writing the proposed legislation is being debated in the Dail. The government intention is that NAMA will be established in order to purchase up to Euros 77bn in bad debts from the banks, relieving them of this burden on their balance sheets. For reference, Euros this is over 42% of Ireland's 2008 GDP, and, given the contraction in the economy, will be a greater proportion of 2009 GDP. The government will issue at least 54bn in bonds to pay the banks for these bad debts, that is, the debt will owed by Irish taxpayers. The government claims that this discount or 'haircut' represents a potential bargain for taxpayers, while admitting that it is overpaying for the assets by at least Euros 7bn. Of this Euros 54bn total, the government admits that Euros 9bn will be eaten up by loans where the borrowers have already defaulted. The plan is highly controversial because many commentators expect the eventual losses to be much greater, leaving the bill with taxpayers. It has also been suggested that the resources of the National Pension Reserve Fund be used in part to fun NAMA.

Yet, as we have previously shown, it would be possible to restore a function banking system and to alleviate the worst effects of the downturn by taking control of the leading elements of the property and construction industries. In this way it would be wholly unnecessary to compensate either bankrupt property developers or bank shareholders in order to revive economic activity and restore the provision of credit to viable businesses. As even the big home builders have pointed out, NAMA does nothing even to ensure that builders have any working capital over the next 6 to 9 months. NAMA is a gargantuan error, completely missing the main transmission processes which could restore economic and financial stability.

Very Interesting

A multipage article by Pedro Sánchez and Gord Westmacott in Canadian magazine The Walrus discusses the problems facing leftist governments in South America. After a five-page nation-by-nation account, they conclude:

So, despite an undeniable rise in popular political expression across the region, nothing in Latin America is certain. “What’s happening,” argues Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “is that the poor — which was an inert political factor, an inert sociological factor — has become a hotbed of rising expectations. What you’re seeing in Latin America is a kind of new political law emerging from the street — if you defraud us on running on a campaign agenda, if you use your platform to simply get into office and then dismiss it, then the people have a right to recall the election by hitting the streets.” For now, the populist wave has cast its lot with the democratic left. But populist movements have a long history of flying any number of flags of political convenience, from doctrinaire Marxism to military dictatorships. Such movements also show a persistent and problematic willingness to blindly deliver their collective power into the waiting hands of a caudillo, the archetypal and charismatic strongman, the father figure who is not always benevolent.

In Macondo, the residents fought valiantly against the hundred years of solitude that threatened to engulf their town. They experienced blissful moments, moments of magic and miracle, but all was ultimately lost. Today, in Caracas and Montevideo, in Buenos Aires and Brasília, the people are demanding a different ending to their own story.

What made me laugh, though, was the lone, anonymous comment.

Poor Taste or Modern Ballet?

The November issue of Dance magazine reports on Stephen Mills's Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project, performed by Pittsburgh Ballet Theater as the centerpiece of its 40th-anniversary season. The work deals directly with the Holocaust, which is presented from the perspective of the victims, according to Mills. Mills, who is not Jewish and has some misgivings about creating Light, believes that there is an urgency to the project because soon there will be no more survivors with firsthand accounts.

Yes, from the perspective of the victims. As you can see above.

Bloody Prima Donnas

Birmingham's just not good enough for some people.

In the highly competitive upper echelons of the ballet world, what Clara Blanco did several years ago is almost unheard of.

In 2006, the San Francisco Ballet corps member quit the company and headed for England’s Birmingham Royal Ballet. A year later, she was eager, if not desperate, to return to San Francisco.

. . .

The Birmingham year did afford Blanco the opportunity to perform in major ballets by Ashton and MacMillan, who are rarely represented in SFB’s repertory. But she hated the weather in the English city (“I think it rained 300 days that year”) and the touring, and wasn’t prepared for the rigid casting system. (“You are not permitted to do roles until dancers with more seniority have performed them first.”)

Since when was ballet performed outdoors, you whining prancer?

Good news for Sookie Stackhouse

French woman marries her dead fiancé.

The Burning Question

Will Britt Ekland be dancing nude at his cremation?

Which Is Why Channel M Gave Him His Own Show

Congratulations to John Robb and the students of Salford University.

The Raffles Of Timperley

The run of luck that has seen me collect 5 (and a half) bodies of Little Frank in various raffles continued at last night's Frank Sidebottom show at The Salutation. A last minute decision to pop along after seeing Airborne Toxic Event at The Ritz was rewarded with the winning of the above Amoeba Frank ball puzzle.Aren't you jealous?

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Wilco - California Stars

A Brief Message for Anyone Who Works in Marketing

Kill Yourself.


No. Seriously.

Pedigree Chum

I recall reading somewhere that in medieval Russia, caviar was so plentiful it was part of the staple diet of peasants and only acquired its cachet as stocks declined and it became a relative rarity, suggesting that taste has less to do with refinement than simple supply and demand. I was reminded of this minor detail of history by this sidebar in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine on the rebranding of fish species. Anyone for Slimehead?

Kicking Ngog Around

Rafa speaks: "It was a pity to score with a penalty that maybe wasn't a penalty. It is not fair sometimes but we have had a lot of things go against us this season and we deserved more from this game."

So that's alright then. Any supposed prior injustice justifies cheating. Glad to have had that cleared up finally.

What is the Secret of Great Comedy?

Pat Leahy in yesterday's Sunday Business Post:

Former president Mary Robinson was expressing her disappointment last week about how few women are involved in politics at a senior level in this country.

"I am disappointed at the number of women in parliament in Ireland in both houses of the Oireachtas," the former president told Claire Byrne on the Breakfast Show on Newstalk.

Indeed. Of course, the situation isn’t helped by women who, having achieved high political office, then bugger off early to some other job, like . . . er, Mary Robinson.

The former president suggested that Ireland take inspiration from abroad. "When you think of Rwanda as having 56 per cent women in the parliament, the highest in the world now, half the cabinet and the chief of police, etc, we don’t have a high proportion of women in our defence forces or in our police." Yup. Things are just great in Rwanda.

Philip Gourevitch in yesterday's Observer Magazine:

On the 15th anniversary of the genocide, Rwanda is one of the safest countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita GDP has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by almost 25%, to more than 10 million. There is national health insurance and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry. In Kigali, the capital, broom-wielding women in frocks and gloves sweep the streets at dawn. Plastic bags are outlawed. Broadband and mobile phones are widespread. Traffic police enforce speed limits and the mandatory use of seat belts and motorbike helmets. Rwanda's is the only government on earth in which the majority of parliamentarians are women. Soldiers in uniform are almost nowhere to be seen.

Not that they could teach us anything, eh, Pat?

No Further Convincing Required

Laurie Taylor's latest newsletter promoting his Thinking Allowed program on Radio 4:


Plenty to read in the papers this morning. The Sun has the story of a grandfather being beaten to within an inch of his life while the Mirror gives me all the details of how a drunken man stabbed his friend in a bust-up over a packet of sausages.

But nowadays I’m reading such stories with rather less appetite than usual. What’s changed my attitude is the recognition that their appearance tends to obscure or even deny the presence in our society of other serious criminals – smiling white collar fraudsters who during the course of their everyday jobs steal massive amounts of money from banks, pension funds, corporations, government and private individuals.

According to even the most conservative estimate £20 billion was stolen in 2005 and City accountants believe such fraud figures may treble as a result of the current recession.

And how much of that fraud will be detected? One leading police fraud officer told me that the figure was probably no more than five per cent. Cases of financial crime are complex, but can that really be sufficient explanation for the news that the Financial Services Authority failed to initiate a single prosecution last year?

You can tell the story of the neglect of fraud in a little flowchart. Even if a serious fraud is detected in a company it’s rarely reported to the police or financial authorities. (Frankly, your bank would rather no-one else knew about their lack of security). Even if a fraud is reported it may not then be subsequently investigated. Former police officers who’ve worked in this area told me that outside London I’d be hard pressed to find a force with even a couple of officers dedicated to the crime. Then after a successful investigation there may be no prosecution (long drawn-out cases which end in failure are a serious embarrassment to bodies like the Serious Fraud Office which knows full well that between 2003 and 2007 four out of every ten fraud prosecutions failed). But if at the end of this hazardous path, a verdict of guilty is finally achieved, then the white collar criminal can usually look forward to a light sentence in an open prison.

Does the existence of so much unchecked, undiscovered, unpunished fraud matter? Former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken MacDonald put it this way in The Times earlier this year. Regulation and enforcement, he argued, ‘create an environment in which people can make decisions…confident in the knowledge that what they legally hold will not be stolen from them. That is the basis of all law and it is shockingly absent from our financial markets.’

Brave words. It's unlikely that a public figure will ever express such a sense of outrage about another group of white collar criminals who never made an appearance in my seminars and rarely warranted a single headline. And yet their actions, or lack of action, lay behind, according to official statistics, over two hundred deaths and as many as 28,000 serious injuries every year. The perpetrators of this mayhem are the UK employers who failed in one way or another to secure the safety of their own workers. Official figures admit 229 people died at work last year: crushed in building sites, consumed by machinery, decapitated by cranes , burned to death by acid, and other grizzly ends, but these figures go up enormously when one adds in all those who continue to perish from the effects of such known work-place hazards as asbestos.

Of course a small proportion of these deaths and injuries may be nobody’s fault or the fault of the victim. But how might we ever know? The body charged with regulating safety at work, investigating deaths and injuries, and prosecuting offenders, is the Health and Safety Executive. But my visit to the HSE headquarters on Merseyside revealed that the total number of inspectors has dropped to 1415. There is no more dangerous workplace than the construction site, but a recent estimate suggests that there is now a single inspector available for every 3,300 building sites. I also learned at the HSE that the numbers of prosecutions for safety crimes had fallen by 46 per cent over the last six years.

Perhaps it’s our traditionally cavalier attitude to white collar crime which means that so little attention is currently paid to computer fraud. Stories may regularly surface about how people have been cheated out of their savings by ‘phishing’ (e-mails offering unexpected legacies in return for bank details) and ‘scareware (the use of bogus viruses to achieve similar ends). But despite an estimated 294,600 computer fraud offences in 2008 alone, there have been just 200 prosecutions for such offences under the Misuse of Computer Act in the last 20 years.

Why don’t we bother more about white collar crime? And why should we give it more attention? Over a hundred years ago, the American sociologist, Edward Alsworth Ross, perfectly captured the problem. ‘The stealings and slaying that lurk in the complexities of today’s social relations are not deeds of the dive, the dark alley, the lonely road and the midnight hour. The modern high-power dealer of woe wears immaculate linen and sins with a calm countenance and a serene soul, leagues or months from the evil he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence the eventual blood and tears do not obtrude themselves. The hurt passes into that vague mass, the ‘public’ and is there lost from view’.

How might we ensure that more of these white collar criminals in their immaculate suits are brought to justice? Attitudes might just start to shift if readers of the popular press – and that includes the mass of politicians – woke up every morning to some slightly unusual headlines. How about:

‘Rich City boss robs poor pensioner blind.’ or ‘Top Company Executive drowns worker in vat of acid.’
I’ll be introducing a special three part exploration of White Collar Crime at four o’clock today or after the midnight news on Sunday (or download our podcast).

In next week’s programme I will take a critical look at the various agencies which attempt to regulate this form of crime (the Serious Fraud Office, the Financial Services Authority and the Health and Safety Executive). And in the third programme on the following Wednesday (18th November) I’ll be looking at the very modest punishments which await the few people ever successfully convicted of white collar crime.

This means that this will be my last newsletter until we resume normal programming again on Wednesday 25th November. I trust you won’t miss me too much!

You can hear the programmes which were made in association with the Open University, and have your say on the issue of white collar crime, by going to a dedicated website: http://www.open2.net/thinkingallowed/index.html

Laurie