In Buddhist tradition the dew drop is an allegory of the evanescence of our world. The vicissitudes of life are transitory and ephemeral like dewdropsIn Buddhist tradition the dew drop is an allegory of the evanescence of our world. The vicissitudes of life are transitory and ephemeral like dewdrops soon to evaporate under the sun. Kobayashi Issa in the eighteenth century wrote a haiku including this image of the dew drop that expressed the difficulty he found in reconciling this Buddhist view of the world with tragedies he had experienced in his own personal life:
露の世は露の世ながらさりながら tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara This world of dew is just a world of dew, and yet...
...And yet despite such knowledge of the suffering of the world Issa’s own personal suffering was every bit as painful to him.
Dogen, a Buddhist teacher, poet and founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in the thirteenth century, thought of the dewdrop as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, one that could reflect our whole world:
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Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
Marvell’s poem “On A Drop of Dew” written in the seventeenth century and included in this charming volume has strikingly similar images.
For Marvell the dew drop is a microcosm reflecting the whole world and also a symbol of the spirit descending from heaven to abide briefly on earth before evaporating again to return to the celestial realm.
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See how the orient dew, Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new, For the clear region where ’twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe’s extent, Frames as it can its native element. How it the purple flow’r does slight, Scarce touching where it lies, But gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light, Like its own tear, Because so long divided from the sphere. Restless it rolls and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure, Till the warm sun pity its pain, And to the skies exhale it back again.
How remarkable that three poets separated not only by five centuries in time but also by different languages, cultures and modes of thought should all find the same inspiration in their deliberate and profound observation of natural beauty. It would be satisfying to read something of greater spiritual significance into this shared vision - that these three poets all saw in the dew drop an image of their spiritual thought – but I sadly I think this is no more than a charming co-incidence.
But I believe we can say with more certainty that early one morning a young Andrew Marvell walked through a meadow near the home of his youth in Winestead-in-Holderness in East Yorkshire and, in the stillness of that morning, he knelt in that meadow to examine a dew drop left on a small, purple rose - much as one morning four hundred years before Dogen also knelt on the ridge of a rice field planted in the margins of Imperial Kyoto and, while sheltering in the dappled shade of the bamboo ahead of the oppressive heat of the day, picked up a rice stalk and contemplated the delicacy of the dewdrop resting thereon.
Marvell’s father, a clergyman, and Dogen’s father, who may have been a nobleman but who is forgotten to history, will both have watched as each of their sons halted on their morning walk from home, knelt and were still, each boy immersed in their own metaphysic.
Both fathers will, at that same moment, have shared the very same thought - a thought that also transcends space, time, language and culture:
“Why is my son lolling around on the grass like that staring into space? Doesn’t he have some work to do? Shouldn’t he be helping his mother? That boy will come to nothing.”
as some thoughts are truly universal.
Fortunately for us today Andrew Marvell, Dogen and Issa all did come to something, giving us a chance to enjoy their wonderful poetry even in this century and time spent contemplating dew drops isn’t time wasted at all....more
My grandmother hated the Germans until the day she died. Nothing I could say about the greatness of Bach or German regret over the war would make any My grandmother hated the Germans until the day she died. Nothing I could say about the greatness of Bach or German regret over the war would make any difference. I could sympathize with her view, though, given she had lived through the Blitz in East Ham and been bombed by the Germans on a daily basis for weeks on end.
So maybe it was my Grandmother who made me think that the plans of US neo-conservatives to bomb the Iraqis into a state of western democracy would never work. Surely such bombing would do no more than create a new generation of terrorists, just like my grandmother would have been if Germany had won the war? (She was a very strong minded woman). Except that this next generation of terrorists would, quite understandably, be even more radical and hate-filled than the last.
But was I really clever enough to work all this out on my own? Or is my subconscious just tricking me into believing a certain expertise in international relations? Most of the western media supported Gulf War II, but might there have been dissenting voices that I now remember as my own? Let’s take a look:
Bernie Sanders seems to have got it about right in this speech made the day after bombing commenced in Gulf War I:
“Despite the fact that we are now aligned with such Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Syria, a terrorist dictatorship, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, feudalistic dictatorships, and Egypt, a one-party state that receives seven billion dollars in debt forgiveness to wage this war with us, I believe that in the long run, the action unleashed last night will go strongly against our interests in the Middle East. Clearly the United States and allies will win this war, but the death and destruction caused, will in my opinion, not be forgotten by the poor people of the Third World and the people of the Middle East in particular. ... I fear that one day we will regret that decision and that we are in fact laying the ground-work for more and more wars for years to come….”
Bernie goes to prove what we all knew already, that he is the only US presidential candidate with any foresight or independent powers of analysis. But can we find a more accurate prediction of the outcome of Gulf War II?
“...This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher... And it will not lay the groundwork for the flourishing of democracy throughout the Mideast; it will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence. If you thought Osama bin Laden was bad, just wait until the countless children who become orphaned by U.S. bombs in the coming weeks are all grown up. Do you think they will forget what country dropped the bombs that killed their parents? In 10 or 15 years, we will look back fondly on the days when there were only a few thousand Middle Easterners dedicated to destroying the U.S. and willing to die for the fundamentalist cause. From this war, a million bin Ladens will bloom.
And what exactly is our endgame here? Do we really believe that we can install Gen. Tommy Franks as the ruler of Iraq? Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one's own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.
A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster…”
For the sake of balance The Onion included an opposing viewpoint in their article, which was also the view promulgated by most of the mainstream media at the time, namely:
“...You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You're really overreacting..”.
The Onion was spot on and as an occasional reader I may have subconsciously adopted their view. However it is still worth looking at the details of how the current disaster in the Syria and Iraq developed to help assess how things may go in the future . This work is an excellent starting point to understanding how events moved on from the days of Bush’s pathetic “Mission Accomplished” to the fulfillment of The Onion’s well thought out and tragically correct prediction.
Despite the somewhat lurid title, “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” is not sensationalist but rather a serious journalist work with a great deal of information about the early history of ISIS and its precursor groups in Syria and Iraq. The main actors in this story are the governments of Syria, Iraq and Iran, Al Qaeda, Sunni and Shi’ite communities across those countries and the various individuals opposing or acting in their name.
The main thesis of the book is illustrated by this diagram which recently appeared in The New York Times. It is a diagram showing the distribution of Sunni, Shi’ite and mixed areas of Baghdad in 2005 and 2007.
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You will notice that in 2007 there are far fewer mixed areas and far more areas that are purely Sunni or Shi’ite. This diagram is evidence of the increasing sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite that was first broken open by the coalition invasion and US attempts at regime change. This split - which is fundamentally a political rather than a religious divide; religion plays a very secondary role here - was fed by the favoritism and patronage of al-Maliki, the first post invasion Prime Minister of Iraq, and by the meddling of other Shi’ite sponsors - Assad in Syria and Iran - all made possible by the invasion. Based on this book I would tag al-Maliki as a rarely recognised villain in this story for his Shi’ite partisanship and for his betrayal of the Sunni moslems who did try and stand up to extremism.
The Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian split started to show signs of widening to a dangerous level with the first round of democratic elections in Iraq which were boycotted by most of the Sunni population amid concerns that the majority Shi’ite government, once elected, would be biased against the Sunni. This concern seem to have been borne out in practice.
In this early post invasion period the main activity of the founders of ISIS was shit-stirring. Al Qaeda in Iraq at that time behaved like the younger kids in a playground looking for attention while the bigger boys are having a fight. Tragically their shit-stirring was very successful, promoting the sectarian split through the bombing of important Shi’ite shrines and Iraqi government targets and helping raise their profile as a possible Sunni opposition.
The heroic but ultimately tragic people who emerged in this period were the Sunni individuals who responded to requests from the US occupiers to oppose the al Qaeda style terrorist groups and help enforce law and order in the Sunni areas, mainly in the provinces to the west of Baghdad extending to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. Governments of countries that participated in Gulf War II have betrayed these people and for that we should truly feel shame and regret.
By this time much of the Sunni population in Iraq was sick and tired of al Qaeda and other assorted jihadis, who were often foreign, running around setting bombs or dictating to them in their homes. The Sunni groups that stood up to the extremists were the main reason for the success of the US “surge”; extra US troops had far less to do with it. However these people were let down by al-Maliki’s government as soon as the US forces departed. They received no support so were exposed to revenge from the terrorist groups; their wages were unpaid; they were abandoned. In due course they would be victims of ISIS or, if they were lucky, end up joining them.
Iran played and must continue to play a key role in the crisis, mainly through supporting Shi’ite groups including the Iraqi government under al-Maliki and the Shi’ite Syrian state under Assad. This support comes from mainly from Iran sponsored proxy groups such as Hizbollah or Hamas.
My reading of Assad from the book is that he is one part ruthless dictator to nine parts fool. His main error in relation to ISIS was encouraging them in the earlier years of their development in order, pretty much, to make his regime look good in comparison. After all, how can he show his importance in the world fight against terrorism if there aren’t any terrorists around to fight? Assad assisted ISIS by letting its members train in Syria, travel freely through the Syria/Iraq border and sometimes by coordinating military attacks with ISIS while their movement was still growing.
Assad adopted his policy towards ISIS despite his being a Shi’ite and hence their natural enemy, given ISIS’s belief that Shi’ites are heretics whose killing can be justified on religious grounds In doing so, as the books says, Assad may now be suffering from the worst case of “blowback” ever seen.
The book puts forward a good case that ISIS is, in many senses, a replay of Saddam Hussein with extra religious baggage to help distinguish themselves from his secular Baathist regime. Most of the senior leadership of ISIS is comprised of ex-Baathists, which is one reason they are so successful raising money and organising among the Sunni tribes. The Baathists who now head up ISIS were responsible for oil smuggling routes and similar covert action when the worked for Hussein. Also, like Hussein, ISIS powerbase is in the Sunni tribes; like Hussein ISIS, are uncompromising totalitarians. What more sensationalist reporting ignores but the book makes clear is that - along with the more insane aspects of their rule - ISIS had, at least to begin with, brought some order to the region by establishing a modicum of civil infrastructure, relief from fighting and sharia courts and similar. Almost a return to the good old, pre-invasion days of Hussein.
What are we to make of the neo-conservatives who orchestrated this mess?
I am still left speechless at the utter stupidity of the idiots who believed that - as a result of bombing, invading and occupying Iraq - US troops would somehow be welcomed as friends. What were they thinking? Had they never read a book? Could they not have ordered any history of the Middle East from amazon.com and spent a few evenings reading it so inevitably coming to the conclusion that their ideas were utterly insane? I am always prepared to credit a lot of what goes on to the raw power of human stupidity rather than malice, greed or other evil intentions. But could the neo-conservatives really be this stupid? It’s difficult to tell.
So where are we now?
- Fighting on the Shi’ite side: Assad, Russia, Iran, Iraqi government (more or less), various rebel groups fighting Assad. - Fighting on the Sunni side: ISIS, Turkey, Saudi Arabia; various rebel groups fighting Assad. - Fighting, but not sure whose side they are on: US, UK, France. - Fighting for their lives: the Kurds; the populations of Iraq and Syria who want to be left to carry on their lives in peace.
And what of the future? We now have a small region of the earth’s surface filled with bombs being dropped, guns being shot and and missiles being launched by a whole range of trigger happy gun-slingers (including more than one Hitler admirer) who bear a whole imosity of grudges against each other. The targets these bombs, bullets or missiles are going to hit are increasingly a matter of random chance, as Turkey and Russia have already demonstrated. This situation does not bode well for the future, even before we think of the utter devastation of the homes and lives of the people trying to live under all this.
My guess would be that the ISIS controlled areas will remain a battleground for years to come. The ISIS genie is out of the bottle and will be very difficult to bomb back in, especially given there is little appetite to put neutral troops on the ground who might be able to at least slow down the madness. Look at Afghanistan and ask yourself, why should it be any different?
To my mind the real risk is that the dispute expands into a larger Sunni-Shi’ite conflict destabilizing the rest of the Middle East. My biggest worry here would be Saudi Arabia descending into chaos as a result of escalating social and economic problems and increasing belligerence in the rest of the Middle East. That would also not end well.
There is little doubt about it. In decades to come historians will look on Gulf War II as the biggest error in the history of US foreign policy by a large margin. And let’s not forget the culpability of fools like Blair who, in his case apparently on advice from God, were stupid enough to go along with it....more
“He lies on his back for a time and pulls the hair on his stomach, considering.”
What man has not done this? Whether part of God’s grand design or
“He lies on his back for a time and pulls the hair on his stomach, considering.”
What man has not done this? Whether part of God’s grand design or good old fashioned evolution Raymond Carver has revealed to the world the purpose of male stomach hair: an aid to male cognition. I wonder what women do?
As well as being full of acute observations about male stomach hair and other aspects of human behavior these stories are full of the psychology of things unsaid or understandings not shared. As well as mastering natural dialogue Carver has mastered the spaces between that dialogue, a space full of misdirection or of motivations not explained or only half understood, of powerful emotions left un-expressed. Many stories communicate a failure to communicate; characters often seem to end a story lonely but unable to quite pinpoint where this loneliness comes from – surely a common human experience and a reason why the stories are often easy to relate to.
“Short Cuts” was a great film and I am sure anyone who liked these stories would enjoy the movie as well. I am embarrassed to say I only realized it was based on Raymond Carver stories after finishing this. ...more
Having only ever read Yeats "easier" and often anthologised poems I hadn't realised how difficult much of his work could be. Well, at least I learnt sHaving only ever read Yeats "easier" and often anthologised poems I hadn't realised how difficult much of his work could be. Well, at least I learnt some Irish history and mythology.
And here is one of his that even I could understand, although given his Celtic roots shouldn't this be about redheads rather than blondes?
For Anne Gregory
"Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair."
"But I shall get a hair dye And set such colour there, Brown, or black, or carrot, That young men in despair May love me for myself alone And not my yellow hair"
"I heard an old religious man But yesternight declare That he had found a text to prove That only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair"...more
“Criminal Capital” – you assume the book is cheap pulp fiction peopled with low-life crooks and cunning shysters. That’s an easy assumption to make si“Criminal Capital” – you assume the book is cheap pulp fiction peopled with low-life crooks and cunning shysters. That’s an easy assumption to make since those are the type of people that make up so much of the financial services industry today.
Placing, layering and other assorted nonsense
This isn’t pulp fiction but a serious and enlightened academic work on money laundering as it is really practiced, written by an expert.
Maybe you thought the classic placing, layering and incorporation money laundering model was so much bullshit? Turns out you were right. The typical prime minister of a small South East Asian country would run out of bank branches before he could place the half billion odd he might embezzle in an average year.
It just doesn’t work like that. Here's how it does work:
David, Boris and George
David, a banker, has retired to Chelsea with millions in bonuses earned from arranging IPOs of fraudulent Chinese shell companies on the New York Stock Exchange. The money is in offshore accounts but he needs cash in Chelsea to slip to the builders working on the new swimming pool in his basement.
Boris runs Plastic Person in Fulham, with a side business selling drugs to the sons and daughters of his old University buddies. Controlled substances gets stuck up well- appointed noses in his chi-chi night club toilets, turning small packages of white powder into alarmingly large bundles of pink fifty pound notes. Boris stares at these every evening as they pile up in his club office wondering what the hell to do with them all.
George is financial adviser to both David and Boris, holding David’s money in his client account invested in a hedge fund.
All George needs to do is have a courier take Boris’s cash round from the nightclub to David’s builders. As simple as that. George updates his own Moleskin notebook, remembering to put the money in Boris’ name instead of David’s. No records in any external financial institution need be updated and no cash placed, layered or the rest of it.
Once David’s swimming pool is finished and George’s Moleskin is brought up to date with the money now in Boris’s name, George can arrange to use the client account as collateral for a loan from the Vaticanial Bank for that Tuscan villa Boris has always had his eye on.
And in this whole process there is no cash or wire movement of funds into or out of the UK. Practically nothing is visible to the authorities. Do you see how the traditional money laundering model is flawed?
Unicorns and the Loch Ness Monster
This book would be a great reference work for regulators and prosecutors who want to hold financial institutions accountable for money laundering, and the facilitation of financial crime. Similar to Unicorns and the Loch Ness Monster, there is now plenty of evidence that such regulators exist.
There is also plenty of evidence that our democratically elected representatives, consciously or unconsciously, collude with the criminals. The book has many great examples, here is one:
Did you know Luxembourg is the only European country where the definition of money laundering does not include the handling of funds derived from tax evasion?
Crafty, those Luxembourgoise. Reflect that this re-definition of what is criminal and what is not did not happen by accident.
Some Luxembourg government lawyer had to finish digesting a heavy lunch, pick up his pen and chose to strike out tax evasion from the definition of criminal activity before starting his commute home, a good days work done with the full approval of this superiors.
With this type of soporific detail Luxembourg have undermined every attempt by the rest of Europe to tackle tax evasion, giving Luxembourg the highest per capita GDP in the EU based entirely on the crumbs falling from the rich tax-evader's table.
Luxembourg should go back to pirating trade on the Moselle. It would be more honest....more
Good for students of Japanese wanting to expand their vocabulary around drug-taking, drunken vomiting and rough sex. I rarely participate in two out oGood for students of Japanese wanting to expand their vocabulary around drug-taking, drunken vomiting and rough sex. I rarely participate in two out of these three activities, so for me the book was of limited utility.
This book was a controversial shocker when it first came out but I don’t see why it was ever quite so popular. I think it reflected a lifestyle which Japanese people of that age secretly envied, when they weren't too busy with their math homework. Seriously, who takes drugs listening to the Rolling Stones these days? The book is redeemed at the end by as good a description of drug induced alienation and confusion as anywhere, so there is that.
At least I now have the vocabulary for a great night out in Roppongi: dribble (noun) – yodare/涎; nausea – hakike/吐き気; vomit (verb) –haku/吐く; vomit (noun) – outomono/嘔吐物; groan – umeku/呻く....more
"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired."
Two of the three stories in this well chose
"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired."
Two of the three stories in this well chosen collection prove Chekov decisively wrong. If you have mastered human psychology and looked deep into the human soul like Dostoyevsky then the pistol can appear but its hammer does not need even to be cocked.
All three stories are about dreams and dreamers. Dreams are extremely strange things which, in and of themselves, are only dreams so are neither good nor evil.
The mischief in each story lies in how simple dreams become bound to an ever more complex reality; a reality that, with all its contingencies and uncertainties, is also tied to the dreams of others. The dreams in each story are not rare. They may even be universal: the first a dream of romantic love, then one of absolute power and finally of peace and human brotherhood.
In White Nights the dream is of transcendent love rescuing the dreamer from his solitude and alienation. The hero meets by chance a young lady who waits each night by the Yekaterinsky canal for the return after a year of one she promised herself to in marriage. Her almost overpowering yearning for marriage seems to come from the desire to escape from a stifling life alongside her ageing grandmother. Will her hopes for marriage be met or will she recognise the emotions the hero holds for her, so realising his dream of redemption through pure romantic love?
In a Gentle Creature the dream is of absolute power over the innocent and vulnerable. The protagonist, a forty one year old pawnbroker, marries his desperately poor but proud and beautiful sixteen year old customer. He enters the marriage with the sole desire to break her spirit and control her. His motive is the self-justification of his own inadequacies - his cowardice and loss of social status. But the human spirit is not so easily constrained and his young wife finds what may be the only path that can lead her to freedom.
The last dream is one of human brotherhood. The dream of a paradise uncontaminated by human corruption where people live in harmony with the world and each other unafraid of death. This dream is The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.
Well done to Oxford Classics for putting these three stories into one volume. They complement each other perfectly and distill many of the themes of Dostoyevsky's work. ...more
Dostoevsky's two novellas, "The Double" and the "The Gambler", are both tales of madness.
The Double tells of the paranoia and schizophrenic breakdown Dostoevsky's two novellas, "The Double" and the "The Gambler", are both tales of madness.
The Double tells of the paranoia and schizophrenic breakdown of its hero, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a man who has little insight into his own character and who struggles to empathize with others. Golyadkin does not possess the social graces to be invited to the grand coming-out ball of his employer's daughter, a girl whom he obsesses about but has likely never met. His shame on such exclusion from polite society and the worse humiliation he experiences on gate-crashing the ball are the triggers of his mental breakdown: Golyadkin meets his double - a man with the same name, background and place of origin as himself but with all the political skills and extraversion that Golyadkin lacks. The double remorselessly subverts Golyadkin's position, gradually eroding his identity. We never learn whether the double is a real person on whom Golyadkin projects an alternate self or else is simply a delusion A closing bathetic scene has Golyadkin in the early hours of the morning hiding alone in the dark and the snow, concealed behind a woodpile in the grounds of his employer watching the daughter's window and waiting to be invited inside. His madness places him alone in a world utterly different from that of the girl he loves, assuming Golyadkin can be said to love at all.
In contrast to Golyadkin, the hero of "The Gambler", Alexei Ivanovich, is a connoisseur of the finest human interactions. As the tutor to a struggling aristocratic Russian family holidaying in a German gambling resort he watches how the family tries to defend what remains of its wealth from avaricious French aristocrats and "actresses". He can well read the motives and emotions of the people surrounding him, no matter how artfully hidden they are behind a screen of social convention. He is intelligent and, except when his passions overtake him, entirely rational. Alexei's' flaw is a lack of insight into his own condition: at the end of the story he cannot control his passion for gambling and, for whatever reason and despite many clues, he fails to recognize that Polina, the elder stepdaughter of the family and the love of his life, is also in love with him. Like Golyadkin, Alexei's madness has left him alone a world away from that of his love.
Which is worst, I wonder - to be mad like Golyadkin, tortured by delusion but unaware of your insanity? Or mad like Alexei, rational but unable to control your compulsions? Hell may well be other people, but madness can surely leave you very alone. ...more
Wallace Stevens, as well as being a great modernist poet, was Head of Legal at the Hartford Insurance Company. He wrote brilliant, refined poetry whilWallace Stevens, as well as being a great modernist poet, was Head of Legal at the Hartford Insurance Company. He wrote brilliant, refined poetry while working at a boring job in an industry that actively tries to be dull. We can reasonably assume that he spent many hours in the office bunking off and editing his poems.
The twenty first century is no longer so kind to the office poet. E-mails, blackberries, on-line training, town-halls, conference calls and the rest of that corporate baggage leave us little opportunity to develop our ars poetica. These days anyone who seriously wants to develop as a poet has no choice but to combine poetry and work.
From now on all personnel matters will be dealt with in free verse
About suffering they were never wrong, The HR department: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is photocopying or sending an e-mail or just reading a dull memo; How, when the downsized are litigiously, passionately waiting For their pink slips, there must always be Outside contractors who did not specially want it to happen, surfing On the internet outside the conference room.
All interaction with vendor management will be rhymed with a heavy and distinct meter.
Annie of procurement from distant Twickenham Walking down the corridor in double quick time With a cargo of staplers, Memo pads and sticky notes, Glue sticks, biro pens and heavy duty twine
As an aspiring office poet I have read a number of books on how to read poetry and this is certainly one of the best. A key strength is how it breaks down the poetic experience to its most basic concepts, giving each a separate chapter – words and diction, simile and metaphor, syntax and so on – and then fits these concepts together going from the simplest most basic level but building up to a more complex but cohesive whole.
There are a few points where the book gets a little academic and the eyes begin to glaze over, but the choice of poems is good and in the main the explanations very enlightening. In fact the book was so good I might actually go and read some poems instead of reading books about how to read poems.
Recommended for people struck by the muse while switching the printer off and on again....more
Here is a picture of George Bush meeting Vladimir Putin. Take a look at that stupid grin on Bush’s face. A few moments before Bush, that subtle judge Here is a picture of George Bush meeting Vladimir Putin. Take a look at that stupid grin on Bush’s face. A few moments before Bush, that subtle judge of human character, would have “…looked into his eyes…and got a sense of the soul…” of Pootie-Poot, and Bush liked what he saw. Could that be a small, self-satisfied smile falling across Pootie-Poot’s normally severe face?
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Here is a picture of David Cameron meeting Vladimir Putin. Cameron looks earnest but Putin looks bored. Putin knows that the UK has taken privatization further than any other country and the best of the UK state’s assets have already been spirited away. Pickings would be slim, so no wonder he's bored.
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Here is a picture of Angela Merkel meeting Vladimir Putin. Merkel doesn’t look happy while Putin looks amused.
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Can you spot something in this picture that isn’t in the other two? That’s right – a large black dog. Merkel is phobic about dogs and if you believe Putin’s excuse that he didn’t know about Merkel’s phobia and just wanted to be friendly then you will also believe in the objectivity of the review below by “smith”, who joined goodreads in November 2014 but who apparently has only ever read one book. There surely must be openings for more subtle propagandists in the Russian Ministry of Information,
Chronologically Putin’s Kleptocracy tails nicely onto Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. The book begins shortly before the 1991 coup which lead to the collapse and ban of the Communist Party. A significant problem facing the KGB in the period up to the coup was what to do with the loot, with the billions in funds under Communist Party control that might help sustain its future or at worst provide a decent retirement package for ex-spies and apparatchiks.
The solution was to hide these funds in lawless tax havens far from any government control, such as Jersey or the City of London. This money became the seed money helping pay for much of the subsequent fraud and theft.
Right through Putin’s career he has been the man in the right place at the right time. In this era he was with the KGB in Dresden, so was one of the relatively few KGB operatives with an understanding of foreign trade and business and contacts overseas who could facilitate later fraud. This book starts by explaining how Putin began to acquire the circle of friends and cronies that were to support his later career, with the next stage working on economic liaison board in St Petersburg,
Putin’s career in St Petersburg seems to have given him ample opportunity to build his and his cronies’ fortunes and the book goes into some detail in this area. This is a daunting read as once you have read through the first few plots to enrich Putin’s judo instructors (now billionaires), his old interpreter (now a billionaire) or other ex KGB friends (now mostly billionaires) you’ve pretty much read them all. Two hundred odd pages of secret bank accounts, fake invoicing, money laundering, share swindles, wire fraud, black market dealings, real estate swindles and so on could be skipped by a casual reader or anyone who isn’t researching a crime novel.
The latter half of the book gets more interesting, concentrating on Putin’s election to President. A key issue in Putin’s rise seems to have been the need of Yeltsin’s supporters to find a candidate who would issue a Presidential Pardon to Yeltsin and help shut down related corruption investigations as soon as they took office. Again, Putin was best placed for the job, having more than a few of his own corruption investigations that needed suppression.
Putin and his cronies now face the problem of staying in power and preventing their own past catching up with them. Thanks partly to the complacency of the rest of the world during the first few years of Putin’s rule - during which Bush looked to Putin for support on the misguided and failed “War on Terror” - this is looking like a challenge Putin looks well able to meet.
To what do we owe the Putin-Trump bromance - those honeyed words of mutual admiration and affection - the "Putin's praise is a great honor" and the "Donald Trump is a very bright and talented person"? Could this come from a shared love of bling?
The book includes a famous anecdote about Putin pocketing the jewel encrusted Superbowl ring of Robert Kraft, the US billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, who was attending a trade delegation at the time.
In truth I doubt that a joint appreciation of the use of gold plating in interior decoration is what really ties Putin, Trump, the US right wing and Fox News together in their communal love-in. More likely what they have in common is an authoritarian streak, as this interesting article on The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether you are a Trump Supporter explains.
In theory the US Right wing should see Putin as an enemy of freedom and American values and oppose everything he stands for, but like some love struck teenage girl they just can’t stop themselves fawning over that bad-boy persona. Frankly it's embarrassing.
The introduction to Putin’s Kleptocracy includes a very telling point. The author notes that for the first time in US history sanctions against state action, Putin's annexation of the Crimea, were imposed not on the state itself but on named individuals, being the cronies surrounding Putin. This book goes a long way to explaining the logic of that approach and is a good case study in where twenty first century authoritarianism can lead....more
The first time I got hit on the head by a bread roll was at the age of twenty one. As a grammar school boy I was an obvious target. The assailant was The first time I got hit on the head by a bread roll was at the age of twenty one. As a grammar school boy I was an obvious target. The assailant was a Hooray Henry (the generic term for a member of the British minor aristocracy) and the venue a restaurant in the City of London. I felt quite privileged. Many people never have the chance to see the English upper classes recreate a food fight straight out of PG Wodehouse. From an anthropological perspective it was quite wonderful, although crumbs down the back of the neck itched all night.
I hadn’t met a Hooray Henry before before then. Most English people never met a Hooray Henry the whole of their life, although in recent years the average Englishman has seen plenty of Hoorays on our TV screens; the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (most of the Cabinet in fact), the Mayor of London.
I was working with the Hoorays at now notorious accountancy firm based near Temple. My republican views made it difficult at times - I thought the French had worked out how to deal with the aristocracy more than two hundred years earlier. In general, I found it better to keep these views to myself.
The Hoorays were OK to me though, so I can’t really complain. They invited me to their parties, but I never got-off with any of their girls who might as well have been aliens. Cassandra, Samantha, Jasmine, Eddie the Head - where are you now?
But I do remember how the Hoorays could be very rude to oiks, plebs, foreign types and the tenantry in general. After my middle class upbringing I just didn’t have it in me to be quite so offensive. One evening we were chucked out of the Won Kee Inn (the name is real), a restaurant in Chinatown whose reputation was based entirely on the rudeness of its waiters and the inauthenticity of its food. Being ruder than the waiters in the Won Kee Inn took some doing. Being ruder and being thrown out was in a different league altogether.
So for the past two decades I’ve avoided reading P G Wodehouse. I’ve always worried it would bring back too many flashbacks of skirmishes in the English class war, maybe bringing on another episode of class war shellshock. A depressing thought given that the war was comprehensively lost by my class some years ago. The Nasty Party is in office and more Old Etonians in the current Cabinet than were ever in Queen Victoria’s.
But after twenty years as a class war refugee in Japan I was prepared to give P G Wodehouse a go. After all, isn’t it really a satire? Shouldn’t I identify with Jeeves, clearly a grammar school boy like me? Can I not read P G Wodehouse as a searing indictment of the hopelessness of English elites and their failure to save the country from its terminal decline? That’s probably going a bit far, but it was a pretty funny book and a very decent read.
P G Wodehouse was very prolific and carried on writing until his nineties. However few people are aware of the controversy surrounding his last, unpublished work. His usual publisher thought that the story was too outlandish to ever sell, which is certainly saying something given the plot of many P G Wodehouse novels. Since then critics have puzzled over the manuscript with some saying the work was ahead of its time, strangely prophetic even. I can’t see that, but the story was certainly unusual. Let’s take a look:
P G Wodehouse’ last work - “Jeeves the Hedge Fund Millionaire”
Bertie’s long lost American cousin, Stanley Morgan Wooster the Third, persuades Bertie’s Scottish banker friend, Shredder McGoodwin, to lend all the bank’s money to rich Mexican peasants buying country houses in the middle of California. Apparently they’ll pay premium prices because the desert reminds them of home.
But before the Season’s even over the Mexican peasants have done a runner. Stanley’s bolted off to Brazil like a fox scented by the Quorn and it looks like Shredder’s bank is going to go belly up. It might be back to Bank of Pater and Mater for Bertie and his friends!
As the threat of bankruptcy looms a Stygian gloom descends over the Drones Club. But all is not lost when Mervyn Prince, Bertie’s old Bullingdon chum and now Head of the Bank of England, gets a bit of a fright. It turns out that Mervyn’s Italian bimbo Lucinda Lolipopolo - the famous chocolate-hazelnut spread heiress - might lose the inheritance she deposited in Shredder’s bank. Mervyn arranges a bailout, having the Old Lady pass out wads of cash to Bertie and his friends with the same gay abandon Auntie Dahlia hands out kisses on Ladies’ Day at Ascot.
Everything’s back on track until some newspaper chaps and chapesses start to stir up the tenantry. Mervyn shouldn’t have given all that cash to Bertie’s chums because it was really the country’s cash and not his to give, they say. Of course this is total tosh, as Mervyn created the dosh in his Threadneedle Street office using his patented “Excelling Spread Sheet” device, just like he always does. It wasn’t anyone’s money, and certainly not the plebs’.
Nevertheless Bertie’s friends are in a bit of a tiz, worried they might have to cough up for Mervyn one day. Shredder comes up with the brilliant wheeze of making Bertie Prime Minister so he can kick arse, take names and bury the bodies. After all, Bertie has mastered the common touch and can put the tenantry back in their place.
But things are not plain sailing for a new Prime Minister Wooster. Jeeves has done a bunk!
Jeeves, it turns out, has made a sly fortune buying and selling privet bushes. Who would have guessed, but there is an awful lot of money in that line of business. Privet, yew, beech - it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Bertie can’t quite get his head round it but, along with a few other smart coves, Jeeves had studied the market and made more money than Croesus from hedges.
Jeeves and his so called “hedge fund” friends are bivouacked in the Cayman Islands downing mojitos far away from Prime Minister Wooster’s problems. Or at least that’s what Jeeves wants us to think - turns out it’s a clever ruse for Mr Taxman. Fortunately one night Bertie stumbles across Jeeves helping a lady find her stockings in the one of the private rooms at the Peppermint Rhino, a new East London Gentlemen’s Club competing with the Drones. Jeeves agrees to help out.
The country needs some money fast, so Jeeves concocts a cunning plan. He arranges for shares in all the hospitals all across Britain to be sold share-by-share to the patients while they are under heavy sedation, waiting for their operation and too confused to say no.
The money from selling the hospitals pays off Bertie’s friends. Bertie’s friends pay off Shredder and Shredder pays off Mervyn, who can continue his tryst with a still flush Lucinda Lolipopolo. Of course the tenantry complain about having to pay to go to the doctor after all this, but who ever told them Harley Street was free?
The tale ends with Prime Minister Bertram Wooster spending a relaxing weekend at Chequers with new chums in the media from nearby Chipping Norton. Meanwhile, Jeeves is hard at work making everyone richer from thinking up schemes in his new position as Bertie’s Minister of Health for a privatized health service. Jeeves sorts it out again!...more
This book is an excellent introduction to political philosophy.
The opening, with a discussion of Amgrogio Lorenzetti's painting "The Allegory of Good This book is an excellent introduction to political philosophy.
The opening, with a discussion of Amgrogio Lorenzetti's painting "The Allegory of Good and Bad Government", provides an interesting reminder of the deep historical roots of political philosophy.
Key issues, such as the sources of political authority, the practical limitations of democracy and the tension between the freedom of the individual and the obligations of the state to provide just social outcomes, are described effectively and concisely.
Later chapters extend the discussion to cover naturally and in context more recent topics of feminism, multiculturalism and minority rights. The final chapter on the challenges to the nation state from globalization, market fundamentalism and other forces allegedly beyond the political control of governments is very relevant to today.
The book's discussion of justice and trust as important sources of political authority is also timely given that governments these days seem to be doing the very best they can to undermine the trust of many of their citizens while denying many others justice.
Matters such as the illegal spying by an unaccountable NSA or GCHQ on innocent citizens and the refusal to prosecute well connected criminal bankers and tax evaders are becoming too much for even the most politically apathetic person to ignore.
The book is scattered with some amusing quotes and references. In commentating on the lack of opportunity available to British citizens to substantively participate in democracy Rousseau shows that even in the 18th century he had a better understanding of British politics than many commentators have today:
"…The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, are nothing,. And thus, by the use they make of their brief moments of liberty, they deserve to lose it…"
Another quote I enjoyed from Dean Inge:
".. a nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors…"
That's certainly true. The English hate the French, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles, the Poles hate the Russians and I suspect the Russians don't love all their neighbors… I wonder if you can trace a chain of national hatreds around the world? Rather depressingly I suspect you could trace more than a few. Perhaps a little more political philosophy could help. ...more
If you are a hard line communist apparatchik about to launch a coup d’état against those who libel World Socialism and defame the noble memory of StalIf you are a hard line communist apparatchik about to launch a coup d’état against those who libel World Socialism and defame the noble memory of Stalin then here is some advice: plan your coup well and don’t confuse planning with plotting.
This is plotting:
the traitor Yeltsin will be arrested and held accountable for his crimes; Yanev will replace him as President of a new USSR, its historic glory restored.
This is planning:
Yeltsin will be arrested at his Dacha in Vnukovo at 04:00 hours on 19 August by a contingent of five trusted soldiers of the Felix Dzerhinsky division, dispatched from the Nemchinovka barracks at 03:33 travelling south west on the road to Krasnoznamensk.
The August 1991 coup by soviet hardliners was very well plotted, but wholly lacking in planning.
Why wasn’t the Russian Parliament building, the White House, sealed and surrounded to prevent the Russian democratic parliamentarians from taking refuge in it, copying the techniques of democratic supporters in Vilnius only a few months before? How did Yeltsin drive past whole brigades of tanks to make his last stand there? Why were practically none of the people on the arrest list actually arrested?
Here is some more advice: lock up the drinks cabinet. Being ‘zapoi’ – the Russian word for several days of drunkenness when one withdraws from society – seemed to be a requirement for high office in a restored Soviet State. If the plotters had sobered up enough to issue some half decent emergency decrees and order a few summary executions they would have probably succeeded.
Of Yanayev, made President of Russia by the plotters:
"...He was a vain man of small intelligence, a womanizer, and a drunk. I'm not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia..."
My Thai friend told me that there were so many coups in the country because Thailand has a food surplus. Demonstrators on the barricades are never quite hungry enough to decisively overthrow the state; at the end of the day they can go back home and eat. This seems to explain the deteriorating quality of the Russian coup over the seventy odd years from 1917 to 1991. The plotters lived a life of privilege, of Zils, Dachas and caviar. They just weren’t hungry enough.
Gorbachov started channeling Shakespeare around 1985. Like Lear he had a vision of a harmonious state, failing to foresee how vested interests and human rivalry would make it impossible; like Hamlet he is suspicious and not as innocent as he seems but is also vacillating and indecisive at key junctures; like Macbeth he believes he is bigger than the situation, headed for a greater destiny. When the curtain closes he is reviled by all sides and lucky to be alive.
The audience to this play is kept in a state of high dramatic tension. Gorbachov is blind to his friends of forty years changing to enemies, oblivious as they cut him off from rivals who, in truth, are the only people he can trust. For God’s sake Gorbachov, the butler did it! Of course the Head of the KGB is plotting your downfall. It isn’t the State Minster for Woman’s Issues that’s going to knife you in the back for heaven’s sake.
This is a great book, well deserving of its Pulitzer Prize. The tension grows leading up to the final section with details of the coup.
If this was a thriller it would all be too thrilling. But as a work of non-fiction, reality intrudes with all its messy reality. Events are driven by dumb luck, ambition, personal grudges and – that key to understanding all human endeavors - routine incompetence. Even so some outstanding characters worthy of the finest novelist appear on its pages: saints – Sakharov; villains – Ligachev; buffoons – Yanayev; tragic heroes: Gorbachov, Yeltsin.
The events of August 1991 in Russia have faded into memory. Things could have gone much worse for Russia and the world that summer. But as observers saw at the time once these events were over and done with Russia’s future remained very uncertain, as it still remains today....more
My first insight into man's inhumanity to man came to me as a seventeen year old one evening in Amersham, a well off London dormitory suburb. I was stMy first insight into man's inhumanity to man came to me as a seventeen year old one evening in Amersham, a well off London dormitory suburb. I was standing in queue after pub-closing time, waiting to buy a kebab.
I had joined the queue behind two girls out for the evening. In front of them was a drunk looking hard man and in front of him a guy, let's call him the victim, who was just about to take a bite out of a gently steaming, newly purchased kebab.
Without warning the hard man punched the victim on the side of his face and pushed him to the ground - a completely unprovoked assault right in front of my eyes.
It was one of those moments when instinct told me to act immediately. I stepped forward next to the prettiest of the two girls and started trying to chat her up. “Look at that disgusting brute”, I was about to say, hoping to contrast my sophisticated fine-dining self favorably against this vicious thug.
The look of blissful excitement on her face stopped me from speaking. "Go on, hit him harder" she shouted. The best way to say it is that she was aroused. I cannot pretend that my opinion of women did not drop at that moment, albeit from an unrealistically high level.
I choked back my chat up line and did what any nerdy, middle-class Englishman would do in the situation. While the girl was distracted I stepped around her to the front of the queue and ordered a large kebab.
It was a valuable life lesson. Not everyone shares my high-minded, if rarely acted upon, set of moral values. I have since learnt that there are crimes against humanity far greater than a punch up in front of a kebab van. I have also learnt that humanity's response to them has often not been much better than that of the girl I wanted to chat up.
I have never come close to experiencing a war directly. The Cold War ended when I was old enough to serve in a hot war but now I am too old serve in any war, except as one of those desperate militia that always seem to be called up when the war is about to be lost. I count myself very lucky but also think I owe it to people not so as lucky as I to understand what they have experienced of war
So with that view in mind I am fortunate that Chris Hedges has spent much of his life descending into war’s dark pit and truthfully reporting what he found there. The truth of war is not a pretty sight and he doesn’t spare us the details. Take this report on the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars:
“...it is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported…[from the battlefields of Europe and used as fertilizer]...They have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam engines and powerful machinery for the purposes of reducing them to a granulary state…”.
The truth of Hedges basic thesis on the nature of war is self evident: War is a myth, a collective delusion constructed around false narratives which is exploited by criminals, psychopaths and the very worst of us for their own ends:
“...They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetrated by fear, greed and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect…”
How different is Dick Cheney, adding up the value of his Halliburton stock options after a hard day's golf, from Arkan, one of the Serbian gangsters promoting the Balkan war, who spends his money on nightclubs and strippers. The difference is down only to scale and preferred leisure time activities.
What is the myth of war constructed on? The “Plague of Nationalism” -the title of one of the book’s chapters - and the exaggeration of ethnic differences and historical wrongs. Nationalist and ethnic conflicts are often myths sustained by absurdities and almost imperceptible nuances within society:
“...there were heated debates over the origin of gingerbread hearts...The Croats insisted that the cookies were Croatian. The Serbs angrily countered that the cookies were Serbian . The suggestion to one ethnic group that gingerbread hearts were invented by the other ethnic group could start a fight…”
Sadly historians, the media, archaeologists and others that should know better help to sell these myths without caring about the consequences:
“..Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble…”
And what of those in opposition to the myth of war? The collective failure of the US media to challenge the lies that sustained the second war in Iraq are a fresh example.
“...Those voices within the ethnic group or the nation that question the state’s lust and need for war are targeted. These dissidents are the most dangerous. They give us an alternative language...one that recognises the humanity of the enemy…”.
The damage done after ethnic hatreds are stirred into a war is not easily undone. Kurdish captives speak after liberating their prison from their Iraqi guards:
“....We wanted them all to come back to life...so we could kill them again…”
My first experience of human cruelty was limited to a dust up in a kebab queue and that was enough for me.
But I think it is the moral duty of every person to understand the evils perpetrated during war. So I owe Chris Hedges an enormous debt for having done the dirty work for me. I am glad and, based on some of the places he went, also a little surprised he survived the trip to report back.
“The military histories - which tell little of war’s reality- crowd out the wrenching tales by the emotionally maimed. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment - often after a terrible price…”
I wonder whether my children are old enough to avoid serving in a war? The odds are looking good for the oldest one but not quite as favorable for the younger.
But if either of them show any hints of believing the war myth I will leave my copy of Chris Hedges book by their bedside table. A few nightmares are worth it for the chance to save their lives....more
"...There is no such thing as society, only individuals..."
"...greed, for lack of a better word, is good..."
Margret Thatcher and Gordon Gekko together"...There is no such thing as society, only individuals..."
"...greed, for lack of a better word, is good..."
Margret Thatcher and Gordon Gekko together summed up the essence of neo-liberalism in two quotes. This book is an excellent summary of the history and damage done by the impoverished ideology of these two neo-liberal icons.
Harvey's "Brief History of Neoliberalism" reads like a true-life detective story investigating the mugging of the world economy in autumn 2008. What's unusual about Harvey's detective work is that the victims were identified, the weapon discovered and the crooks fingered before the crime was even uncovered.
The battered body of the economy was found alive but barely breathing in an alley in Lower Manhattan on 15th September 2008, three years after the book was published and the day that Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history. That was the same day 99% of the population began to understand their wallets had been emptied by billionaire thieves carrying a neoliberal cosh who had left them with nothing but the small change in their pockets.
Neoliberalism is:
"…a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve the institutional framework appropriate to such practices…"
In case you're wondering, Neo-conservatism is Neoliberalism plus God and guns.
It all sounds innocent enough, which is one reason for the success of neoliberal dogma. But as with most public discourse these days, the mischief is in what is left unsaid by words designed to conceal rather than to reveal. The "..institutional framework…" created by the state is the use of its monopoly on violence to preserve private property rights. The state encourages its citizens to be used as the tools of private enterprise and cares nothing for them as individuals and members of society.
Neoliberalism's main success has been to enrich the few at the cost of the many. The evidence is everywhere and irrefutable: unprecedented growth in inequality and stagnation or falls in real wages for ninety percent of the population while those already rich watch their wealth grow from tax cuts and subsidies to corporations.
The magic spells neoliberalism uses to make wealth flow uphill to the rich instead of trickling down to the rest of us as are as numerous as the bedrooms in a billionaire's mansion and as subtle as a lawyer's undisclosed side letter. Chapter six explains the methods in detail: privatization and commodification, excessive financialization, the management and manipulation of crises and state redistribution.
Privatization is particularly invidious. As a trained accountant I well know how the tiniest change to a pension fund's expected investment return or the smallest tweak to the priority of a lien can send large sums of money out of the taxpayer's pocket and into the ether, only to rematerialize in the hands of a well connected businessman.
If you don't believe this just pause to reflect, how did the twenty four Mexican billionaires appeared on the Forbes rich list after Mexican privatization? Are these billionaires genuine "wealth creators"? Did Mexico spontaneously generate twenty four Bill Gates or Steve Jobs practically overnight?
Harvey outdid many trained economists with his insight into the financial markets and the phantom speculative profits they were reporting. As events in 2008 showed, Harvey was spot on in foreseeing how:
"…So-called global cities of finance…become spectacular islands of wealth and prvilege, with towering skyscrapers…Within these towers, trading between floors creates a vast amount of fictitious wealth…"
The only thing he got wrong was underestimating the depths of criminality in the financial system. Even Harvey couldn't imagine the extent to which bankers were shamelessly breaking out the Bollinger to toast their rigging of LIBOR, FX, commodity and other markets. Neoliberalism has failed to live up even to its limited ambition of preserving private property rights and creating fair markets: the markets were rigged and if you ever took out a loan or changed foreign currency then your pocket was picked.
The discussion on neo-liberalism's theft of the human desire for individual freedom as a cover story for its rapaciousness is the best section in the book. Harvey is known as a Marxist and he has some controversial quotes up his sleeve. Take this for example:
"…Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well…we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him and his a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life, is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power…"
Who is this preferring the freedom evinced by proper security, reasonable leisure and a decent living throughout life ahead of the acquisition of wealth and power? Roosevelt of course - who these days is a dangerous radical given Neoliberalism's current hold on public debate.
It only took the US a few decades to abandon the freedoms Roosevelt spoke about and replace them with the freedom of unregulated markets.
I admire how French intellectuals can look at the same fundamental issues of the human condition from so many different angles.
In the "Myth of SisyphI admire how French intellectuals can look at the same fundamental issues of the human condition from so many different angles.
In the "Myth of Sisyphus" Camus examines the absurdity of human existence through a careful analysis of whether or not we should commit suicide. He includes references to many great works of literature which I wish I had the time to read.
In "Platform" Houellebecq examines the absurdity of human existence through a careful analysis of the marketing strategy of mid-market club-style French tourist resorts. He includes references to many great pornographic movie scenes which I wish I had the time to watch.
I guessed the "shock ending" to the story, but I used hindsight so, sad to say, these days it can't really be called a shock ending at all....more
The past, as they say, is a foreign country and also a more literate one.
The USSR in the first half of the twentieth century was a place where a fatheThe past, as they say, is a foreign country and also a more literate one.
The USSR in the first half of the twentieth century was a place where a father would worry about which poets were read by his daughter’s boyfriend, a place where you might still love someone despite their inability to distinguish Balzac from Flaubert and where a soldier on the front line of one of the most dreadful military conflicts in history would complain that their comrade-in-arms did not properly understand Chekov.
The USSR at that time was also a place where the individual’s relation to the State was at its most complex and paradoxical. At the same time that the State was organizing one of the greatest collective endeavors in history - the defeat of Fascism - it was also interrogating the history, family life and motivations of each and every individual engaged in that endeavor. Every relationship - officer to commissar, husband to wife, parent to child, between friends, between colleagues, between lovers - was colored by fear of informers, fear of compromise, fear of arrest.
Grossman expertly describes life in the USSR at that time and incorporates its paradoxes into this novel of the Russian victory at Stalingrad. His is a voice of real authenticity. The events depicted and internal hopes and fears of the characters are entirely consistent with descriptions of life in the USSR from “The Gulag Archipelago” or from histories of the Eastern Front in WW2. You can only believe that Grossman himself experienced many of the things he describes.
“Life and Fate” is about two types of human freedom. I was expecting to read about the battle between Russian and German armies over the physical freedom from occupation of Stalingrad. Until I read the work I had not appreciated it was equally about the struggle for psychological freedom under an oppressive, totalitarian State. The battle for this freedom of the self, illustrated by the story of a Russian professor of physics who is fearful of arrest, is more gripping than the military battle having more twists and turns and a far less certain outcome. I don’t want to give too much of the story away, so would only say that this psychological battle is swayed by an extraordinarily powerful weapon whose intervention on the front line I never expected.
Undoubtedly a long book, but fascinating and easy to read. Essential for anyone with an interest in the Russian history of the twentieth century....more
The story begins, where else, with smoking - that ur-science denial project which spawned many of the weapons of modern-day sowing of doubt. AmazinglyThe story begins, where else, with smoking - that ur-science denial project which spawned many of the weapons of modern-day sowing of doubt. Amazingly denying the dangers of smoking is a project which still lumbers on in dark corners of the developing world hiding from the scrutiny of western media.
The story moves on to acid rain, then passive smoking, ozone depletion and - one I wasn't expecting - a born-again denialist program praising the long forgotten benefits to human wellbeing of DDT.
But this is all just warm up for the mother of science denial projects, climate change, which the authors remind us "..strikes at the very root of economic activity: the use of energy…" and which might be the last battle for scientific truth ever fought.
While good fights evil in the climate change debate new science denial projects, the toxic fusion of vested interests and shady PR companies, ooze their pollution into the scientific world as swiftly and penetratingly as the run-off from a Koch brothers mine.
Deniers are opening a new front in their war against truth with the claim that sugar and processed foods have nothing to do with obesity. This New York Times article is the latest report from the trenches.
Sadly the denialists' weapons are getting ever more sophisticated. In those heady early days of defending tobacco we had groups like the "Tobacco Industry Research Committee"; including "Industry" in the title shows a charming naivety that no longer exists today.
Now we have the cleverly named "Global Energy Balance Foundation" - a front group for soft drinks companies whose mission is to remind us that, if lazy slobs like you and I spent most of our waking hours in the gym, then we would have no trouble burning off the calories from the sugar laced foods and drinks which advertisers force down our throats every day.
Denying science only works for as long as you can deny reality. Sooner or later reality catches up.
"Merchants of Doubt" lets us see how the denialists' arguments become more refined as reality piles up the evidence against them. For example, an early salvo of climate change denial was the claim that human migration would allow the peoples of the world to avoid its worst effects. These days, when we can see the problems caused by a fraction of the refugees that would be created by climate change as they try to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, such facile arguments have been quietly dropped.
Nowadays the latest tactic in the battle over climate change is for US politicians to proudly boast about their ignorance, saying that they can't make any climate policies because "we are not scientists". This is accepted by the media, who don't seem to wonder why their elected representatives lack the personal initiative to phone their scientific advisors and take some advice.
The smoking deniers delayed adoption of anti-smoking measures by a couple of decades. Such a delay I doubt caused more than a few tens of millions of unnecessary early deaths. Climate change deniers must have a few decades in front of them before reality catches up, although if phenomenon such as the Californian drought continue much longer reality may catch up that bit sooner.
Sadly for our children and grand-children climate change may be an irreversible, discontinuous process causing human suffering orders of magnitude greater than ever caused by tobacco. I hope there is a special circle in hell for climate change deniers and their facilitators.
Although this book tells you the history of science denial it doesn't aim to give you the nitty-gritty details of how such knavery is carried out. For this you need a book on public relations and I would recommend Toxic Sludge is Good For You.
Here is an example from that book of the cynicism of the PR industry that will make you fear for the future of the human values of honesty and integrity.
Many thinking people know that the PR companies have units that set up fake "grass roots" campaigns ("astro-turf" campaigns) intended to pressurize politicians.
But did you imagine there are even companies that specialize in telephoning round to try and find individuals who they can groom with a few "grass roots" opinions on a topic? These companies then conference-call their mark through to the relevant politician's phone while dropping off the line. And this book was written back in 1995 - just imagine how worse things must be today.
So where are we now? We have Senator Inhofe, head of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, bringing a snowball onto the Senate Floor as evidence that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, demonstrating to any scientist watching a level of ignorance so deep it cannot understand the difference between "weather" and "climate". This brings me close to despair.
Although science denialists may win a few of their battles against the truth, reality will ultimately win the war. We can only hope that victory comes soon enough to allow us to repair the damage the denialists will have caused. ...more
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