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30 Nov 09

Scrubbing Major Hasan: The Strange & Silly Media Rewrite Of The Fort Hood Shooting Spree - By Mark Ames - The eXiled


  • We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then — poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I’d imagined it — such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory.


  • We’d also have to examine the link between Hasan’s rampage and the Army’s record number of suicides this year — which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq.

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24 Nov 09

How the American Press Mistook China for a Fish—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

  • It’s not just China, he adds; “There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.”
  • the same is true for the Clinton visit to Pakistan, which drew heavy coverage on points that were consistently misunderstood by those who wrote about them.
20 Nov 09

An appeal to the revolutionary socialists and communists of Bosnia

  • The nationalists are the politicians and businessmen who hate the other religious groups; the vast majority of them grew rich and powerful by committing war crimes and selling-off previously government-owned industries to foreign capitalists.
  • Bosnia’s nationalists always act firstly according to the interests of their foreign backers, never in the interests of the general population.
17 Nov 09

LRB · Michael Wood · Presence of Mind

  • Monuments may or may not endure, but they are not looked at very closely; and fragile-seeming gestures, songs, jokes, metaphors, teasing sentences, often have long lives in the intimacy of many minds.
  • For all these reasons, he says, he is not going to linger over the honour of being made a professor at the Collège de France and will concentrate on his joy at the occasion, ‘for an honour can be undeserved, joy never is’
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16 Nov 09

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.

  • Schiller's notion of Spieltrieb, the
    play-impulse that unifies form and substance through artistic beauty, still has
    some influence through such currents as Waldorf education.


  • The empire pawned its moral authority by calling Wallenstein and his monstrous
    army to its service, bringing more misery to its own people than ever did the
    invading Protestants.
15 Nov 09

Guernica / Chomsky on the Couch

  • the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be ‘open’ to transnational corporations—that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse.”
  • Systems of power don’t have good intentions.
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31 Oct 09

Six Questions for Desmond Travers on the Goldstone Report—By Ken Silverstein (Harper's Magazine)

  • there has been no credible criticism of the report itself or of the information elucidated in it.
  • if you give the state authority to be indiscriminate with the lives of civilians in pursuing insurgents, it plays into the hands of the insurgents.
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14 Oct 09

Akademikoden - Universitas



  • For som boken viser, fører ikke FrP en politikk som er spesielt mye mer i tråd med sine velgeres holdninger enn andre partier gjør
11 Oct 09

Germany: The role of the Free Democratic Party in the next government

  • This is precisely the role played by the FDP. The party leadership immediately moved to repudiate statements by CDU politicians that the new government would not contemplate changes to laws restricting the firing of workers.

  • There are to be rates of just 10 and 25 percent taxation, as well as a top tax rate of 35 percent. At present, the top tax rate is around 42 percent. Prior to the government of Gerhard Schröder (SPD) taking office in 1998, the top level of tax was around 53 percent.
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09 Oct 09

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs



  • After Greenspan, Ritholtz assigns the greatest blame to the Fed, twice - for
    keeping interest rates too low and failing as a bank regulator; then to rating
    agencies Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch for classifying risky bonds
    as Triple A; to the Securities and Exchange Commission, for loosening leverage
    restrictions on investment banks; to mortgage lenders for offering liar loans;
    to borrowers and home buyers for lying; to Congress for its complicity in all;
    to the big five Wall Street firms and their greed-addled chief executive
    officers for ignoring Ritholtz's "first rule of economics: 'There is no free
    lunch'."


  • After their government service, Gramm and Rubin took jobs at Swiss bank UBS and
    Citigroup respectively, leviathans they helped create and eventually beach,
    costing shareholders and the public billions. Gramm remains unrepentant,
    "Bailout Nation's most intellectually bankrupt citizen," Ritholtz writes. "Like
    Greenspan, Gramm had only one idea; unlike Greenspan, he had no comprehension
    it was wrong."

19 Sep 09

Futures Thinking: The Basics | Open The Future | Fast Company

  • Even if you're doing this for your own amusement or education, it's helpful to have a basic question in mind, simply as a framework for what follows.
  • Is there a way to answer that question that can lead to happy (or at least acceptable) results in each, even in the "worse" or "weird" futures? If not, is there a way to minimize the risks in those unacceptable scenarios?
04 Sep 09

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

  • That's a pretty fancy way of saying that basically, the
    US and Europe simply cannot consume as much as they did previously and will
    have to focus more on production for Asian and emerging markets.




    This in turn implies that the earnings of Asian exporters will need to implode
    as their ability to turn profits from the sales of minor widgets to the US and
    Europe will have to disappear over the near term (one to two years), to be
    replaced by gigantic profits of goods to their own consumers over the
    medium-long term (anywhere from three to 10 years).


  • In other words, any debt issued by entities that have no ability to print their
    own currencies - in which hopefully the debt is also denominated - will have to
    confront lower revenues entailed by deflation, which is only partially offset
    by lower borrowing costs.

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

  • This raises a
    serious intellectual question of why any investor would even bother thinking
    about the equity analysts who failed to say anything useful about the stock
    markets     from 2005 to 2007, and then consistently lagged the market through the
    course of 2008.
  • If there is one thing everyone has learned since 2007, it
    is that the single-best path to economic ruin is to buy something because (and
    only because) it is being chased by fiat liquidity.
31 Aug 09

2009 German parliamentary election: a conspiracy of silence on the implications of the economic crisis

  • As the Financial Times Deutschland reported on August 25 with reference to several top corporate executives, there is a “kind of moratorium between industry and the government” to postpone major job cuts until after election day.

  • Defense Secretary Franz Josef Jung even refuses to describe the conflict as a “war.” The real aims of the war—the imperialist subjection of a strategically important region—are being hushed up and denied.
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