I'm Working On...

A Novella For An Omnibus

I haven't done the sort of writing that gets you in literary journals for a while. Make that 14 years. I gave it away when I decided to concentrate on screenwriting, except the screenwriting market has dried up in Australia so it's off to doing something I can control - namely writing a project that ends in print as opposed to oblivion, which is the usual case with screenwriting in this country. It's a bleeding miracle anybody is a full member of the Writers' Guild under the age o 45.

I don't feel like I want to talk about what the novella is about but I do want to say it's going to take me away from this blog for a while. My posts will be more sporadic. I'll be back in full swing once I get the first draft done. By then I'm hoping the Yankees to have won the World Series. If they haven't, you WILL hear from me. :)

The Other 'W'

False Recovery

The world's markets aren't repaired. they're just being propped up. That is what John R. Talbott thinks. I can't quote the article in detail because it's privileged content but the link is here (and it's worth signing up for the Business Spectator).

Isabelle Oderberg: You’re coming out to Australia to promote your book, The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street. If you had to pick one, the biggest and most damaging lie told by Wall Street that helped get us into the crisis we're in, what would it be?

John R Talbott: I think it would be this lie that I think originated in the United States back in 1981under Ronald Reagan that free markets work best without any government interference and it was taken almost as a religion that if there was any government regulation at all, it interfered with the proper functioning of a market and the supply and demand curves and we ended up at sub-optimal levels of equilibrium.

What we found out is that that’s complete nonsense and if you’re a student of economics, you should’ve known it beforehand, because students of economics know that you can’t have a free market unless you have lots of regulation. You need to protect against fraudulent behaviour. You need to enforce contracts. You need to protect property rights. You need to have a very well developed judicial system and if you look at the countries of the world, this is what the poor countries of the world are lacking. They don’t have the rule of law, they don’t have good institutions and thus they don’t have strong markets and good economies.

Talbott's advice is to watch for commodity prices to fall next year when the stimulus runs its course. Also, this isn't the recovery you thought it was. This is merely the first drop and rise in a 'W' curve. And Obama's not doing enough to fix Wall Street.

Pricing Cinema

What It Looks Like From Outside The Biz

Here's an article that shares some insight from what the non-film making portion of the population feels about the pricing of cinema tickets in Australia.

Imagine what the cinema industry could do if it matched innovation within the core product - the movie - with a more innovative in-cinema experience. Yes, big cinema chains are adding “extreme” screens, “gold-class sections”, specialist 3D cinemas and better sound and seating.

They deserve kudos for their technical innovations. But there is more to the customer experience than that. Price and service, two areas cinemas are weak on in my view, play such a big part.

I reckon cinemas could do so much more on pricing innovation, an area many entrepreneurs overlook.

Of course there are “cheap Tuesdays” but ticket prices are generally the same. So cinemas are mostly empty during the early part of the day, and crowded at nights, especially weekends.

Why not offer more innovative pricing structures that encourage people to spread their attendance.

What about $10 an adult ticket before 5pm, and $17 after 5pm? Would that get you to movies you otherwise would have missed? Would it make cinema chains more money overall by helping them sell more fat-margin candy and drinks, the real driver of cinema profits?

And there's the crux of the biscuit right there. You understand that exhibitors want to get as much on the premium product and the freshest product, but at the same time not all products are created equal, not all seats are created equal, not all times are created equal.

If the common punter has noted this:

Cinema executives will probably cringe at the thought, yet a strategy of just lifting ticket and food prices each year - without a comparable lift in value - is not great either.

...then the game is up. People are (and have) adjusted their spending strategy accordingly.

Which also goes to problems the film industry is facing globally. The ticket prices go up to pay larger and larger fees for  stars. people like stars because it telescopes a whole pile of narrative issues, namely, figuring out who the story is about. It helps to be able to say, "Oh, that's Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise/Matt Damon, the leading man. It must be about his character."

Which is all part of the audience's willful suspension of disbelief. This phenomenon in turn feeds the need to procure an A-List star for your movie because the paying audience will on the whole prefer a star-driven vehicle over one that is an ensemble piece or a foreign film.

And for some time now the cost of the A-List talent has been soaring, and this has been passed directly on to ticket prices without much debate, and it has been evenly distributed across all movies, regardless of budgets and costs. So, an Australian film with a $5 million budget equally charges a $17.00 per ticket that an American film with a $250 million budget gets. In a sense, the Australian film is forced to subsidise the excesses of Hollywood movie's budget as well as the Exhibitor's real estate value - and nobody in the industry is talking about this!

W.

A Fable Of Fallibility

In a most inopportune way, Oliver Stone came out with a biopic of the last POTUS in the last year of his office. And as much as Oliver Stone's pictures intrigue me for their bombast and over-reaching claims, I couldn't bring myself to put myself through this movie in the cinemas. Bottom line, the story of 2008 was Barack Obama, The GFC, and how the Neo-Con vision for the future all turned to shit, and everybody could see it - except the usual cabal of micro-cephalic right-wingers.

Bottom line for me as a paying audience was that I really didn't want to go over the GW Bush presidency all over again just to understand why it was such a faulty presidency. Nevertheless, Oliver Stone was making a film that was perhaps a little too soon, rather than a little too late.

What I'll talk about here is all under the caveat that Oliver Stone and his researchers have gotten their facts about 85% right. I am totally open to the possibility the accuracy is much lower, but in order to discuss the film, you sort of have to take on board the claims at face value.

What's Good About It

It's a film that helps us understand how we were in the grips of an idiot in the White House for 8 years. Eight Years! EIGHT FUCKING YEARS!

It's a bit like picking at a recently formed scab, where the itch is the worst. You come to realise the serious intellectual and conceptual limitations of the people involved. If George W Bush is an overly eager frat boy who simplified everything into silly little dichotomies, the people surrounding him seem equally maxed out on the Peter Principle scale.

There's nobody in the room smart enough to frame the issue properly. Collin Powell, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, are all insufficient to the proper task of combating the terror threat, as George W Bush eagerly marches into Iraq, convinced of the long term benefits. Worse still, Dubbya is making fundamental assumptions about people and faith and ignoring what is known in order to bring his vision to fruition.

He is so pathetic when it all unravels, you feel sorry for the guy - which is as Oliver Stone intended, whatever that is worth - and that is a weird feeling. Considering just how much he fucked up the world, it seems weird we feel sympathy for how much he fucked up his own presidency. And this is without considering the GFC.

The performances in this film are marvelous. Brolin's W., Cromwell's Bush Snr, Toby Jones' Karl Rove, Elizabeth Banks' Laura Bush are all great portrayals - especially considering the real figures are so fresh in our minds.

What's Bad About It

Some of the scenes where they discuss policy remain deeply unconvincing. We get the arguments and we get the direction of the rhetorical positions of Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld, but because they're telescoping the story down to the bare essentials, they sort of miss the nuanced, very subtly inflected polemic that was at the heart of the Iraq invasion.

I mean, I get the ideas and what Oliver Stone wants to tell us about Oil and Iran and geopolitics, but these scenes are so ham-fisted you think was the world really given to such nincompoops to drive into the ditch? Was this really the tenor of these meetings?

I guess I'm left incredulous and this is why I think this is a bad aspect of the film. But I can't offer how it might have really gone, so I don't really know; and in the absence of that knowledge, maybe Stone' version of it is as good as it can be. Shame it looks like a parody of the war room scene in 'Dr. Strangelove' - and heaven only knows we've seen a tonne of those over the years.

I don't want to be mean about it, but Thandie Newton's Condoleeza Rice was the second weakest portrayal next to the dude who played Tony Blair. The problem for Newton however is that you never stop seeing Newton enough to see Rice, whereas Brolin's Bush is so good, you see GW right there as we know him.

What's Interesting About It

The amount of importance attached to faith by the characters is noteworthy. The film spends a lot of time talking about Bush's faith and it's understandable that it does, given what a born-again Christian GWB was. The creepiest type of Christians are the most zealous ones, and we see that zealousness in abundance.

Then there is the depiction of Tony Blair as somebody who was motivated by his own conversion towards Catholicism which motivated his riding shotgun with GW Bush right into the Iraq fiasco.

There's also a argument to be made (and is hinted at in the film) that the world might have been a better place had GW Bush become Baseball Commissioner instead of Bud Selig. it might have fucked up MLB, but it would not have killed so many people.

Bud Selig's tenure has been *interesting* to say the least, but I can imagine GW Bush as commissioner being a bit more helpful, bit more decisive, bit more quick on the draw with respect to PEDs and what have you. And no war in Iraq.

The film also wastes no time on the 2000 election which may or may not have been stolen in Florida. That's an interesting choice given how dodgy GW Bush' ascension was in the first place; but it also frees the film up to investigate the actual agenda carried in to the White House by George W. Bush and how it went all awry.

Like a lot of Oliver Stone's films, this one is deeply thought-provoking and leaves a lasting impression. I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Dubya, Jeb And Dad

The singularly interesting thing about the dynamic between bush Snr and Jnr is the amount of disdain Dad has for his son. This is a disdain that seems to stem back decades and just might not be spent.I always assumed that the rise of GW Bush was a Bush family push to re-mount a second Bush term as such; but the film indicates that Bush Snr placed much more faith in Jeb and not W. Indeed,the Bush Snrs. try to talk W out from running for Governor of Texas, which is an interesting scene.

It's really hard to get a handle on George Snr.'s legacy because the man himself is strangely opaque. Interviews with the man yield remarkably banal observations, and his record essentially stands on war, whether it is his service during WWII or the war with Panama and the first Gulf War.He only went one term because his term was like an appendix to the Reagan administration - yet he was a very important President as time has shown.

The intractable Freudian struggle W. is forced to endure with George Bush Snr. thus may have been the greatest tragedy of our time. And I have to admit that I was largely unaware of how much of a gap existed between the two men. It may be the case that Jeb was always the better Presidential candidate but we may never get to find out thanks to W's legacy. There's something very strange about that dodged bullet.

Wayward Economics

Paul Krugman's Take

Here is a remarkable perspicacious article about how economists missed the onset of the GFC as we know it.

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.

There follows a beautiful account of just how weird the economists' view of the economy itself got with their insistence on the rational market. This bit also caught my eye so I think it's vry pertinent for us all:

And it wasn’t just Keynes whose ideas seemed to have been forgotten. As Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out in his laments about the Chicago school’s “intellectual collapse,” the school’s current stance amounts to a wholesale rejection of Milton Friedman’s ideas, as well. Friedman believed that Fed policy rather than changes in government spending should be used to stabilize the economy, but he never asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment. In fact, rereading Friedman’s 1970 summary of his ideas, “A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis,” what’s striking is how Keynesian it seems.

And Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments. Thus Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: “Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work . . . decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).” Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”

Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.

Yes, and it's amazing how much of this stuff you hear. It's as if these economists in the ivory tower don't comprehend the pain and suffering of what they are saying. Anyway, it's worth the time of the read so do check it out.

Yankees Update - 05/09/09

Rolling Right Along

The Yankees finished sweeping the White Sox, swept the Orioles and took 2 of the 4 game set with the Blue Jays this week. More importantly, the Yankees are ahead 8.5 in the AL East and have a 7.5 game edge on the Angels for the Home field advantage in the play offs. They have a 0.640 winning percentage for the season. This may in fact be the best Yankee team since 1998, because they're on pace to finish with 104 wins.

Looking back, this past August was great.It was the month where this team put its signature on the season by all but eliminating the Red Sox from the AL East contention by going 21-7 scoring 175 runs and allowing 123.

All is good.

7 Guys With 20 Homers

The Yankees tied the MLB record for having 20HR guys on a team. The previous marks were set by the '96 Orioles, '00 Blue Jays and the '05 Rangers. If Derek Jeter (17) can hit 3 more, they'll be breaking that record too. He may not, but it's something to aim for.

This might be the best lineup since 1980 according to the RLYW. Signing Tex might not have been so much a stroke of genius as a stroke of excess, but if there's anything the Steinbrenner years have taught us, nothing succeeds like excess.

Not Relinquishing Leads

The Yankees are 59-1 in games going in to the 7th with a lead according to the NYT.

“It’s not often when you get to save games on the Yankees when your name’s not Mariano,” Hughes said after retiring the final four hitters Saturday to collect his third save of the season in the Yankees’ 6-4 victory over the Blue Jays at the Rogers Centre.

Hughes finished a relief relay that included Dave Robertson and Brian Bruney. They did not allow a hit in three innings and preserved the victory for Andy Pettitte, who had a rare second-half sluggish start.

“The bullpen again came in the game and did their job, every single one of them” Manager Joe Girardi said. “Sometimes you need a little bit more from your bullpen and we got it today.”

The Yankees (87-49) improved to 59-1 when leading after six innings. A day after they may as well have wielded white flags in place of bats during Roy Halladay’s one-hit gem, Mark Teixeira and Robinson Cano paced the offense with solo home runs.

The bullpen's been pretty amazing as of late. If there's one thing I like about Joe Girardi, it's the fact that he goes with the effective arm rather than choose the veteran guys like Torre did.

If I Had To Nit Pick...

... but Joba is not pitching well. Regardless of the Joba rules and all else, he's simply pitching like crap at the moment.

Briefly On Ted Kennedy

The Last Shards of Camelot

I wrote obits for Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and Les Paul and Marilyn Chambers of all people but managed to not write one for Ted Kennedy. I thought about it, but I was left feeling strangely empty. He was important, he was the last remaining link to a mythical time, but I sort of shrugged and paid attention to something else instead.

So I feel a little stupid to be writing this today, but this bit got my attention:

Kennedy also writes in the memoir that he always accepted the official findings on his brother John's assassination.

He said he had a full briefing by Earl Warren, the chief justice on the commission that investigated the November 22, 1963, Dallas shooting, which was attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald.

He said he was convinced the Warren Commission got it right and he was "satisfied then, and satisfied now".

...which is really interesting at this point in time.

As the remaining patriarch of the Kennedy clan, I imagine that there would be no other recourse, even in the face of mounting arguments. I sort of wonder how he lived through that time in the early 1990s when Oliver Stone's film was sensationally making a case for a conspiracy.

I imagine if you were the last standing Kennedy brother who was at once a Senator of the United States of America, you wouldn't dare allow yourself to be swallowed up by that possibility;it would be too scary. What if Democracy was just a facade and the Military Industrial Complex really ruled America with a deft and bloody hand? What would he have done? What would it have meant? Surely a US Senator can't buy into that stuff, right? Although it would have been intriguing to have sat Ted Kennedy down and gone through the case bit by bit as Jim Garrison does in his book.

I guess the thing about Ted Kennedy was that he was remarkably disappointing in some ways when compared to the over-idealised brothers who were felled by assassins. That had he shared their imagination or idealism, he might have been a very different politician; but he wasn't. He was Ted Kennedy, the less inspiring brother.

Which in turn fed my own luke-warm indifference at his passing. I know that's a bit rough when you talk about a man who was a Senator for so long and got so many bills through. Yet it has to be said, he was no Jack or Bobby - for better or worse. I guess if he were that different guy, he might have seen the argument for the conspiracy that we all saw in the 1990s.

We still won't know until 2039.

That Election In Japan

The DPJ?

Here's a pretty cool article, thanks to Rasterfield.

When the great recession began last year, the fate of Japan was often held up as an awful warning to the west. If the US and the European Union failed to adopt the right policies, it was said, they too might suffer a Japanese-style “lost decade”, followed by years of feeble growth.

Now that the Japanese have used Sunday’s election to elect the Democratic party – breaking with more than 50 years of rule by the Liberal Democratic party – a new western narrative is taking hold. This is a political revolution; it is Japan’s big chance to break with the years of stagnation.

But both these stories are wrong. The Democrats are unlikely to shake things up hugely. Nor should they. For the story of Japan over the past 20 years is by no means as dismal as much western commentary would have it.

It is true that, since its asset-price bubble burst in 1990, the country’s economy has grown slowly, the stock market has slumped and national debt has risen to awesome proportions. But, despite these trials, it has remained a sane, stable, prosperous and exciting country. Politically, culturally and even economically, it offers not so much a warning as an inspiring example of how to deal with a long period of adversity.

The fact that, throughout the years of relative stagnation, the Japanese kept electing the LDP puzzled many outsiders. A few even saw it as evidence that Japan is somehow less than democratic. But it was willing to try and change. The country gave a mandate to Junichiro Koizumi, the flamboyant LDP prime minister, who pushed Japan in a more free-market direction from 2001 to 2006. Now it has turned to Yukio Hatoyama and the Democrats, who are less enamoured of the American model.

However, Japan has always gone for change within well-defined limits. Europeans and Americans worry that a deep recession could stoke political extremism – not without reason, perhaps, given the hysterical tone of politics in the US and the increase in the vote for far-right and far-left parties in Europe. But during almost 20 years of tough times, the Japanese have never flirted with political extremism.

Its a really cool article that illustrates some important points so I do recommend you have a read if you want to understand just what is going on with Japan.

I've been asked a bit about the election in Japan simply because the new guys are inscrutable to most observers including the Japanese media. The origins of the DPJ are as strange and strained as anything you'll read about murky backroom politics in Japan. One of the Democratic Party of Japan's architects is Ichiro Ozawa, who used to be a power-broker for the LDP, who then broke away from the LDP in order to bring it down.

At certain points in Ozawa's long tenure as architect of the second major party in Japan were the travails of the Hosokawa government that brought together a coalition of the most unlikely parties, just to temporarily oust the LDP. Since then, he's clearly been busily building the DPJ out of the tiny fragments of that coalition and other disaffected defectors from the LDP.

The LDP for its part played a historic role up to 1993, whereby they held power by being at once socially conservative, but instituting a welfare state that marginalised the Socialist and Communist Parties. So, basically people got the best of both worlds where socially values were kept intact as welfare was put into place that made Communist nations envious. Of course that system had to break down because it cost too much, and has made Japan less competitive in other ways. In short, the LDP were an amalgamated middle ground of Japanese politics which sat dead bang in the middle, marginalising the Socialists and Communists right out of the picture to the left, and squeezing the nationalists into the far right where they look decidedly retro and insane.

In other words, the '1955 system' as it came to be known is essentially a collusion of politicians in the centre to trade horses in order to hold on to power indefinitely. Which of course led to a whole weird synergy with the bureaucracy and General construction companies.

Ozawa's great accomplishment has been to forge a second party that could be - and has become - an alternative to the LDP that still is close to the centre of politics. The reason why the DPJ is inscrutable to even the media of Japan is that it's still yet to define the limits of how it will stack up against a LDP that is trying to couch itself as the 'conservative' party of Japan.The DPJ is still too new, fresh, and untested to be understood. The point of the election in a sense was to see if a two party system can replace the '1955 system' to better effect.

The position statement of the DPJ is not that different to the LDP in many ways, except they seem to be a little bit more on the welfare side of things. The proof of the pudding can only be in the tasting, and in a sense, this brings us to the present day. If the DPJ becomes a durable force in Japanese politics, thus ushering in a two party system, then this election will be come to be seen as a truly heroic event. If the DPJ gets ousted after 1 term and never gets back in, then we will likely see a reversion to the '1955 system' through lack of other models.

I tend to be a optimist in the sense that the DPJ looks like a possible stayer to me. Even though Ichiro Ozawa got kneecapped by a scandal and thus could not lead his DPJ to this election. The Japanese could have been given much worse alternatives in the re-packaged Socialists or the unflailingly ideological Communists.

One More Rambo Movie Says Sly

Last Blood?

It seems redundant, but I guess built in redundancy is the name of some sort of good design. Sylvester Stallone is talking about doing another Rambo movie.

Sylvester Stallone is to star in another Rambo movie.

The 63-year-old actor is set to reprise his role as Vietnam veteran John Rambo for the fifth time next year in a film which will see his character battling drug and people traffickers on the US-Mexico border.

Rambo, which was released in 2008, had initially been billed as the final instalment in the series.

A source said: “The character obviously fascinates Sylvester and he feels there's more life in him yet.

“This time Rambo will be taking on drug lords and human traffickers after the kidnap of a young girl. Like all the previous films it's bound to be very violent but the character always had big box-office appeal.”

Aiyah.  Maybe they should just re-boot the Rambo series/franchise with another actor and another director. I don't know what good it would do to have Sylvester Stallone whip his body into some semblance of shape to do this thing one more time. The last time he did it wasn't all that convincing.

The Oil Economy

Just How Does Crude Oil relate To All This GFC Stuff?

Here's a cool article courtesy of Pleiades. This bit halfway in got my attention:

During boom times, as we saw in the years leading up to 1973 and again after 2002, the rise in oil demand strengthens oil producers, which reap massive profits by intentionally underinvesting in oil-production capacity. Oil prices continue to rise, filling their treasuries with a sudden influx of capital that cannot be absorbed at home. Petrodollars flow out, seeking returns in already inflating financial markets and pushing bubbles to dangerous levels.

As the business cycle turns, the euphoria begins to wane. Investors assess financial risks more accurately. Interest rates rise, further feeding the downswing. The irrational exuberance that amplified the boom quickly reverses course, accelerating the bust. Demand for oil collapses, causing oil prices to crash. Petrodollar flows dry up, hitting financial markets and real-sector growth still harder. Then, reduced liquidity and credit prevent oil exporters from investing sufficiently in productive capacity during the recession, and our story eventually repeats, each time more dramatically than before.

The geopolitical component of this megacycle is equally insidious. As oil-producing countries amass substantial financial reserves, they tend to allocate investment and expenditure disproportionately less to oil-production capacity and more toward areas that benefit the ruling elites. In the Middle East, significant portions of oil receipts have been spent on arms purchases, which protect the ruling class from both external threats and internal challenges -- indirectly, by appeasing military leaders who might pose a threat, and directly, by stifling opposition through robust internal security spending. (Military personnel as a percentage of the labor force is a very high 3 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are also consistently high, for example 9 percent in Saudi Arabia.)

Oil-importing advanced economies such as France and the United States, which eagerly sell weapons as a means of recycling petrodollars, cannot escape their own complicity in this game. Middle Eastern arms races boost not only the arsenals of national militaries, but also of subnational militias and even terrorist organizations. Iran's long-standing support of Hezbollah, for example, is well documented. The flow of weapons increases geopolitical risks, once again increasing oil prices as fears grow that military conflict or terrorist threats will disrupt supplies. Put bluntly, a little bit of terrorism is good for oil exporters.

And the links between oil and terrorism don't stop there. As oil exporters mimic the consumption behavior of advanced economies during booms, young populations develop highly unrealistic expectations, premised on a sense of entitlement to oil wealth. It's these frustrated expectations that drive youth toward radical and militant ideologies, not poverty per se. In Saudi Arabia, for example, real per capita income in the early 1980s was higher than that of the United States. Saudi nationals were accustomed to free housing, guaranteed incomes, and subsidized electricity and gasoline until low oil prices caused budget cutbacks in the mid-1990s. The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, after all, were mainly educated middle-class men. They were undoubtedly influenced by the arguments of Osama bin Laden, who in the 1990s was raging against "the greatest theft in history," arguing that the real price of oil in late 1979 should have persisted for the next two decades.

Does anybody feel that gasoline/petroleum is actually under-priced give its value to our society? A bottle of water can cost more than the equivalent volume of oil. That's really weird - or it tells you that the next 'commodity' for us to run short of will be drinking water, and not oil. I'm not sure.

The last bit in the excerpt got me thinking about the nature of the hyper-angry Islamist Terrorist types who recruit from poor workers working in the oil fields, as depicted (in Hollywood style, that is) in 'Syrianna'.

It Was 70 Years Ago Today

Corporal Hitler Taught The Band To Play

And it's definitely gone more out of style than in, but all the same, today marks the 70th Anniversary of WWII, which commenced with Hitler's Germany invading Poland. Naturally there haven't been that many good jokes about it since then.

Bette Midler said about her marriage to a German: "at nights I dress up as Poland and let him invade me"

Then there's the 'Fawlty Towers' "Don't mention the war" gag that culminates in:

"You mentioned it first."

"You started it!"

"No, you started it"

"No, YOU started it when you invaded Polant in 1939!"

Then there's my favorite "Not the Nine O' Clock News" gag where they declared: "In 1982 Germany became the first nation to win the Eurovision Song Contest with a song about love and peace, having started two world wars."

In that spirit, I bring to you some interesting headlines.

This one's from the BBC.

This is Poland's take.

Relations between Poland and Russia are currently thorny, partly because of differing historical interpretations of events at the start of the war.
Mr Putin added that the pair should "rise above the problems of the past... and solve the problems of the future".
He went on to talk about trade and energy co-operation between the two.
Earlier, Mr Kaczynski and his prime minister Donald Tusk joined war veterans beside a monument to the heroes of Westerplatte at 0445 (0245 GMT).
The ceremony marked the exact time on 1 September 1939 when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at point-blank range on the fort.
At the same time, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland from east, west and south. The attacks triggered Britain and France's declaration of war against Germany two days later.

Poles, though, have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Gdansk.

It's just as John Cleese thundered. Putin for his part condemned the Nazi-Soviet Pact. I don't really know what that does for anybody today, but there you go. A gesture by the man who tranquilises tigers.

"Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations," said Mr Putin in the article, which was also published on the Russian government website.
"Our duty... is to turn the page and start to write a new one."

Memories of the 1939 pact - in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany essentially agreed to carve up Poland and the Baltic States between them - have long soured Moscow's relations with Poland and other east European states.

Within a month of the pact being signed, Soviet troops had invaded and occupied parts of eastern Poland.
"It is possible to condemn - and with good reason - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in August 1939," wrote Mr Putin, referring to the two foreign ministers who signed the pact at the Kremlin.
It was clear today, he said, that any form of agreement with the Nazi regime was "unacceptable from the moral point of view and had no chance of being realised".

"But after all," he added, "a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism."

Yes, yes, peace in our time and all that guff. What a load of Bollocks. It all rankles with somebody at some point in the story. WWII must be one of the most gripes-galore moments in human history, some of which are still being worked through in the Middle East. This next bit, caught my eye:

Mr Putin added that Russian people understood "all too well the acute emotions of Poles in connection with Katyn".
In 1940 Soviet secret police massacred more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk.
Moscow only took responsibility for the killings in 1990, having previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.

That's very grand of him, I think, but I imagine Poles still think the Russians are assholes who sold them out to the Nazis and then fucked them up the ass. At least if not in that language, we find these sentiments:

Speaking at the ceremonies, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the actions a "stab in the back."

"This blow came from Bolshevik Russia, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," Kaczynski said.

That view, widely held in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, has produced fury in Moscow.

In a newspaper interview on August 31, Putin called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact "immoral." But he said Moscow had no choice but to sign the agreement to postpone war after Western powers concluded their own agreement with Germany. He said the 1938 Munich Agreement ended "all hope of creating a united front against fascism."

In Moscow on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out against a recent resolution by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, equating Nazism and Stalinism, calling it "lies" and a "rewriting of history."

"Even during the Cold War no one ever tried to put the Nazi regime and Stalin's dictatorship on the same footing," he said. "It never occurred to anyone to equate the Nazi threat, which meant the enslavement and annihilation of entire nations, and the policy of the Soviet Union, which was the only force capable of standing up against the war machine of Hitler's Germany and in the end ensuring its defeat."

You know what? I don't think the Russians are ever going to get a pass out of the Poles on that one, just as the Japanese are never going to get a pass out of the Koreans and Chinese (and everybody else they fucked up), just as the Germans won't ever get a free pass from most of Europe (even though Hitler was Austrian - Austrians get an easier time of it, really), just as the Americans are never going to live down Vietnam, and England's never going to be let off the hook for her Colonial rule in India and Hong Kong, and so on.

There's a joke about a guy called Kosta who says, "I built all those ships in the bay. Do they call me Kosta the shipwright? No. I built all those houses on the hill. Do they call me Kosta the carpenter? No. I built all the tall spires in the town. Do they call me Kosta the architect? No. (pause) I fuck one goat!"

Well, I think these countries all fucked  at least one goat, and that's the story of WWII. It's really not as edifying as all the heroic tales you see and hear and read.  All those heroics are in the service of fucking metaphorical goats.

Speaking of fucking goats, you might be amused by this entry in the SMH today.

Opposition leaders have historically struggled to get on the front pages of newspapers.

Why else do you think they undertake listening tours, sit down with toddlers for cups of pretend tea, go on cabbage soup diets and go on Rove Live?

But in NSW, Barry O'Farrell's profile problem is a little more boutique.

He can't get on the front pages because he can't think of a human behaviour venal enough to displace the members of the Government.

Think about it.

What would O'Farrell have to do, exactly, to get a gallop in the media these days?

Intimacy with a goat probably wouldn't even do it.

Yup. WWII sure helped forge the world we live in today. Either that, or it's just that kind of day.