2016/01/31

Quick Shots 31/Jan/2016

Cannabis In Focus

It's one of those days where the news is telling you something. First off, there's the report that the Budget Office modelled what the GST revenue would look like if marijuana was legalised. The estimate sits at about $300m year.
The PBO, which was set up to provide independent and non-partisan budget analysis to politicians, did the costings at the request of libertarian crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm, who wants marijuana fully legalised.
If such a policy were introduced in July 2017 it would raise $600 million in GST revenue in the first two years, the PBO found. 
That money would flow on to the states but the policy would also help the federal government through reduced law enforcement costs. 
The government would save about $100 million a year in reduced Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force costs, the PBO says.
So tire's actually a money incentive to legalise marijuana that's spelt out in a report. $300m a year is not chump change. That's money right now that's totally underground in the black market so you'd think it would been the interests of the government to stop letting that revenue going the pockets of criminals and put it to good use. There's even a $100m dividend for the savings with the AFP which could be put to use elsewhere. You'd think it's a no-brainer, but I guess it's just too permissive and too hard for conservatives to do it. 

In the mean time, there's reports of some idiot kid who consumed "synthetic cannabis" and got himself killed. I guess if you're young, you do these things. But you also think that if marihuana was legalised, then the temptation to put weird chemical cocktails into your system might be significantly lowered. 
So there's that too. 

When Amanda Writes You Off, Maybe You Should Go, Tony
Here's Amanda Vanstone doing the statesmanly thing and whacking her own
Unless I have been lied to, and that can happen, Abbott has told a number of people that he is young enough to have another crack at the leadership. Even if that is meant in the most pure and innocent form, as in "Well, the Prime Minister might be hit by a proverbial bus", it does not augur well for the future. It shows an incapacity on Abbott's part to see what went wrong and how much of that related to his own behaviour. It also reveals a failure to recognise that there are others who have come up in the ranks and will continue to so do. It is not a static world through which only he progresses. 
Sadly, it would also mean every decision Abbott makes will be firstly about positioning himself for that opportunity rather than firstly about securing a team win now.
Political teams are like rose bushes – you have to keep pruning or there are no new blooms. When John Howard gave me the flick in 2007 he offered to say that I had decided I would move on. I declined the offer; the truth is what it is. My press release thanked him and the Liberal Party for the opportunities I had enjoyed and others had missed out on. My spot was filled by Malcolm Turnbull. Pruning delivers results. 
Bronwyn Bishop, Philip Ruddock and a few others should stop being so selfish, start showing a bit of gratitude for all they have enjoyed, and allow some new blooms to burst forth. 
People might say that "You have had a fair go; now you should be fair and go" sounds harsh. But in this case I think it would be the best and fairest thing for Abbott. And for the party that gave him such tremendous opportunities.
It's kind weird when Amanda Vanstone is the voice of reason, but there you have it. It's noteworthy. 

It's A Horrible Year So Far And It's Forecast To Stay That Way

What do you do? The war opened pretty badly for the markets. If anything had anything to do with China, it's been like a baseball bat to the head, although ASX isn't as bad as other markets. It's been pretty ordinary more than anything else. The Santa rally was hardly anything to write home about. The IMF downgraded growth forecasts for the year, with only a month in. 

The survey run by Business Day says it's going to stay this way for the rest of the year. It's going to be not enough growth, not enough inflation, not enough employment, but not enough bad news for rates to be cut further. It's enough to make you take up Astrology, apparently. 

Of course, Japan's central bank just cut their interest rates to negative, so chances are, there'll be a flood of money form Japan looking at our 2% interest rate thinking it's a great deal. 

Over The Ditch And Down The Slope

New Zealand is apparently headed for outright deflation
A 1.8 per cent slump in tradeable prices drove the weak quarterly CPI number, particularly for vegetables and fuel, where a stronger Kiwi dollar over the period played a part in depressing prices. Domestic prices rose by 0.5 per cent, or by 1.8 per cent year-on-year, thanks to higher housing and airfare costs.
"With dairy prices still sliding, and 2 per cent inflation more elusive than ever, we expect a genuine easing bias" from the RBNZ next week, TD Securities economist Annette Beacher said. "Anything less will reverse today's NZD sell-off, and more."
No government or central bank likes a deflation. The thing is, it's not bad for everybody. If somebody is sitting on cash, waiting for the right price, a deflation is exactly what you want. The corresponding lowering of interest rates to spur you to spend that money is just the government and the central bank bullying you out of your cash position into riskier assets. 



2016/01/28

News That's Fit To Punt - 28/Jan/2016

The Republic Debate Again

Back in the 90's I was a Republican. Not the American kind but the Australian kind that wanted a head of state who was Australian. I have to admit that the choice was based on a few factors. One, was the 1975 Dismissal, which left a very bitter legacy in our polity. Another, was the fact that the Queen - with all her trappings and achievements - seemed not just an anachronism but an out-and-out irrelevance. This led me to think the Republican cause in Australia was progressive. The last factor was how Paul Keating as Prime Minister argued the case for a Republic, which was very persuasive.

Of course we know how that ended. At the time, the debates came down to Tony Abbott on the side the monarchists, and Malcolm Turnbull on the side of the Republicans. It didn't matter that Tony Abbott was largely incoherent in his logic, and that Malcolm Turnbull was persuasive; John Howard had managed to split the Republican vote between those who wanted a direct election of a President and those who wanted minimal change in the structure of the government.

More importantly, we find that Turnbull is not so bullish on the moment today. That stands in stark contrast to the new Australian of the Year who wants to push the issue.

I think about that today and a number of striking things pop out. First, there is the obvious strangeness of seeing Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull continue to tussle in the public eye; this, despite being on the same party. Tony Abbott went on to do in Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader back in 2010, and it took until late last year for Malcolm Turnbull to wrest back the leadership role with the Liberals. The rancour remains; Abbott will contest the seat of Warringah and will remain the thorn in Turnbull's side. Another words, the tussle between these two men is likely to continue a little bit longer.

The second, is the persistence of the idea that Australia should become a Republic, and that this symbolic change is somehow vital to our national identity. Thus, notwithstanding the loss, the Republicans aren't going to let it go. Naturally, the Monarchists won't either. But on a long enough time line, the Republicans may well get their way; and once they do, it's hard to conceive of a way back to a constitutional monarchy.

In the mean time, there's research to show that the younger generation are eminently okay with the Monarchy. Those who did not witness the Dismissal simply don't care. The people most wedded to the idea of the Republic are the people who came of age in the Whitlam era. That tells you something about the years since, and how they have slowly obscured the anger, obfuscated the problematic, and hung a veil over the ugliness that was palpable to those present in 1975. Maybe the Republic is not as inevitable as it seems.

Is The Property Bubble Finally Popping?

This is the question.
First off, Sydney house prices dropped 3.1% in the last quarter.
Rising mortgage rates, restrictions placed on investor lending, a surge of new apartments and a slowdown of Chinese buyers in the Sydney market were all behind the sluggish result, AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said. 
“The December quarter was a bit unusual in that a lot of negative things came together in a perfect storm,” Dr Oliver said. 
But this fall “exaggerates the weakness in the market” as it has to be viewed in the context of the huge growth Sydney already experienced, he said. 
Over the past three years, Sydney house prices are up 52.6 per cent or $349,183, Domain data shows, with house prices up 14.8 per cent over 2015.

So there's that account. Of the factors cited, the most ominous might be the retreat of Chinese investors, as it signals some kind of link to the collapse in Chinese economic sentiment. Of course, the Chinese share market is known not to be connected to much, but all the same, nobody believes the official account that the Chinese economy is growing at a 7% clip.

Apart from which, the Chinese markets themselves have popped. Who is doing the lending now to enable Chinese investment in to Australian real estate? That being the case, you have to wonder if the drop in Chinese buyers was a little hesitant drop or a tap turning off.

The Pot Calls

Rupert Murdoch is a funny tweeter. Rupert seems to think Google needs to pay more tax. The problem with Rupert taking such a position is, that his own companies also need to pay more tax.
Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp paid no UK net tax at all between 1987 and 1999, attacked Google parent's tax deal with the UK
"Google et al broke no tax laws,'' Murdoch wrote on Twitter. "Now paying token amounts for p r purposes. Won't work. Need strong new laws to pay like the rest of us.''
He was referring to Alphabet's agreement to pay £130 million pounds in taxes dating back to 2005.

Murdoch's attitude to low tax rates in 2016 put contrasts with data on his company's behavior in the past.
A 1999 report by The Economist showed Murdoch's own company, News Corp, had paid a tax rate of 6 percent over the previous four years.

In the UK, it had paid no net tax at all on £1.4 billion of profits made since 1987.
Fairfax Media reported earlier this month that eight of the 10 media companies that paid no income tax in Australia are linked to the Murdoch family.
What can you say to that kind of brazen hypocrisy? It's sort of funny he thinks there's a tax paying "us" that brackets him with the run of the mill taxpayer who can only dream of a holiday in the Barbados, let alone 23 subsidiaries in tax havens.

Well, here's to you Rupert.


2016/01/27

'Bone Tomahawk'

Grisly, Gruesome And Gross

Westerns are hard to do in this day and age. The American frontier is further behind us than a time when some of the people who saw it were still alive. Today, it may as well be any other time in history that gets a look, but the combination of dust, horse, guns and saloons always gets a look at some point. There was a spate of revival westerns in the 1990s that genuinely were great, and even more recently, the remake of 'True Grit' has put the Western back into the middle of American cinema, but the bottom line is that these are much harder to do than before.

So it's a brave director who decides to take one on. Gore Verbinski's 'The Lone Ranger' should have scared off anybody, but clearly there are brave souls. Of course this film is more of a hybrid with horror mixed into the Western context, but in most part, it is a Western. It is almost like 'The Searchers' meets 'The Thirteenth Warrior'.

Anyway... spoiler alert.


What's Good About It

The dialogue is very well written in this piece.  The way the characters go about phrasing their concerns with elaborate rhetoric makes for some fun viewing. The stars of the film make tremendous mileage out of the language. It's quite the feast if you like dialogue. Structurally, it's put together well so you never feel like the film is meandering into weird detours. The polemic is simple but effective in telling the story.

Yet overall, it's the performances that hold this film together nicely. Kurt Russell as the sheriff is solid; Patrick Wilson as the cowboy with the broken leg, strangely echoes his turn in Fargo season 2; Richard Jenkins as the second deputy Chicory is the standout, playing a doddering foolish old man; while Matthew Fox rounds out the quartet as the vain dandy.

The story is in its own way strange and haunting. There is an understated quality to the lighting and camera work. The darkness is simply dark and unknowable, while the day is bright and the intense sunlight blows away colour. The story feels coherent and things are carefully set up so each and every detail is shown to have its place and a consequence.

What's Bad About It

The bad guys in this film are cave dwelling troglodyte cannibals that even the ordinary Native American fears, dreads, despises and detests. It's hard to fathom such a tribe could exist except in fiction like this. The decidedly un-anthropological horror element is the surprise ingredient in this horror Western hybrid, but it robs the rest of the film of its power.

Part of the problem is casting the native Americans as out-and-out bad guys is just not going to wash anymore. So to replace the threat, the film provides us with a villainous bunch that we can all agree are bad guys and so deserving of the death that is dealt to them. Indeed, they are terrifying and do terrible things, but the extremeness of their transgression signals the film is not quite wedded to the realism it works so hard to establish.

There are also moments of anachronistic insight that are, while funny, totally disruptive to the sense of milieu.

What's Interesting About It

In trying to do 'the Searchers' type scenario of kidnap recovery, the film has had to invent a wildly monstrous group to replay a colonialist routine. They even set it up with a Native American character disavowing any relationship to this group so that the post-modern revision is intact, but they barrel along into the same Heart of Darkness problem. This suggests that we're never going to be done with this colonialist construction of there being a darkness into which civilised white men must venture. When you cast your mind to it, you could endlessly think up scenarios that play into this construct.

This cultural heritage must have some pretty deep roots, I would imagine. Recently there was a report where fairytales went longer into our past than previously thought. So it's entirely possible this construction of going into the heart of darkness to recover something goes back deep into our prehistory.

I was thinking about how this one might have been more interesting had it happened longer ago in prehistory, and it was Neanderthals in the cave and not some made-up indigenous tribal group. 'The Thirteenth Warrior' actually worked through a scenario where a bunch of Vikings and an itinerant Arab played by Antonio Banderas travel deep into the land of the cannibals, which is much the same story. In some ways it is interesting this film is getting critical kudos considering its lurid premise, because other films were panned for it.

Inglorious And Unattractive

All the above being said, it's hard to fathom if anybody found this to be affirming the white male dominance in the colonialist picture. Because the characters are hidebound by the historic context in which it is set, they cannot have the awareness we possess. Kurt Russell's sheriff Hunt is played as if he is over-compensating for some inadequacy, while Richard Jenkins' Chicory is played like a obsequious buffoon. Patrick Wilson's O'Dwyer is severely hampered by a  broken leg, and so doesn't get to be alpha male, while the hopeless self regard and vanity of Matthew Fox's Brooder makes him more of an annoying accomplice than a working partner. The irony is steep because the characters talk knowingly but the audience always knows better.

In short, they're not heroic, they're not even anti-heroes except perhaps Brooder, and as four horsemen go, they lose their horses halfway into their journey. The funniest line in the film is when Lili Simmons' Sam exclaims that the Frontier is not dangerous for its indigenous people or extreme wilderness, but because of idiots - idiots like these four horsemen. It might be the most post-modern moment in the film, where the barking irony eats itself. Somehow the film stays together because Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins are so good in the scene when receiving the admonishment.

The Malfunctioning Gun

It seems to have gone into the vernacular of American cinema where there is at least one moment where a gun fails. It makes it more interesting when a gun fails because it immediately dislodges the overwhelming advantage having a gun possesses. Yet, having seen that moment in a number of films lately, I think the device is getting old.

Freudians would probably argue that this would reflect a growing sense of impotence in the American psyche, but I strongly doubt that's the case. I think it's more of a case that it is the least offensive or noticeable of the Deus Ex Machinas a writer can put in. As such it provides a moment of relief or story turn, but when I reflect on it, it seems a little pat. Cheap thrills are hardly ever great art.


2016/01/26

'Sicario'

Government By Assassination

Some of these films to do with the war on drugs across the US Mexico border are becoming more and more extreme in their moral relativism. While I'm not one of these people with moral absolutes, I tend to think that if the premise of the film is to do with law enforcement, a film should provide some kind of position on moral reasoning that involves the state. We relinquish capacity for a personal or private war in exchange for justice law and order. Ultimately films to do with law enforcement have to take a position about the operation of laws to ensure order or peace or whatever is the social consensus might be.

Then there is this film.
So here is the obligatory spoiler alert!


What's Good About It

This is tough. I'm not entirely sure I saw a lot that I liked in this film. There are some nice shots showing the Arizona landscape, horizon and sense of the land. The writings isn't witty or sharp (and you really notice this after watching a Woody Allen film), and the directing is pretty ordinary. The sound track is interesting. It's reminiscent of 'Jaws', what with its pounding bass notes.

The story boils down to a CIA black ops unit trying to insert an assassin into a difficult spot, but in order to operate in the USA they need n FBI agent to be there and rubber stamp the operation. The main character is chosen because she's effectively too junior to buck the system. It's good that a female character is doing this kind of role. God knows the film would have been 10 times more boring if it was another young guy again.

Emma Blunt delivers a scowling concerned performance that gives it a joyless reality. Josh Brolin turns in a performance you would expect from him. He is sort of cast-to-type.

What's Bad About It

The film meanders a lot. The action is meant to be driving the story but there's something perfunctory and ridiculous about the movements. Because Emma Blunt's character is kept in the dark for half the film, we as the audience are kept in the dark as well. Much of the time you're wondering what the hell is going on and if it is ever going to reveal something profound. It doesn't. It simply never gets there. The crucial central action of the film does not belong to Emma Blunt's character. It belongs to Benicio del Toro's character, who is as nihilistic as they come.

The nihilism is entirely self-defeating in this film. There is no existential crisis - it's just crisis of faith in the government, but it's not even well explained. You're left with the sense that maybe the film makers don't really care about the underlying social issues in Mexico. After seeing the first season of 'Narcos' and then coming to this movie, you really feel let down with its absence social insight. Lots of people are shown dying, getting shot. You get to glimpse one Mexican cop and his family, but it's probably the wrong story to have focused upon.

What's Interesting About It

That's the thing; it's really not all that interesting, in of itself. It's another film that depicts the war on drugs on the US Mexico border. Yes, it's endless, draining, with terrible human cost. The film simply posits that the state will move into a phase where it will make and act upon amoral judgments, simply to bypass due process.

You rarely see a film where the moral purpose of the action on the screen are not underpinned by something bigger than the individual. If it is a film about the law, then it usually revolves around the moral ramification of how justice is carried out, or the unintended consequences laws, or the practice of law. If it is about law enforcement, they usually mount an argument that lawfulness is goodness. This film says we shouldn't care, we should just do what it takes to get bad guys wherever they are, by any means necessary. The crazy thing about it is that it's not entirely clear how assassinations of drug lords actually helps in a war on drugs. Yet, it is asserted this is the future.

An Ugly Future Of Fighting Non-States

Yes, we're already underway in this horrible little process. Because states fail, like Rwanda and Somalia, they give rise to international players that do not adhere to protocols of a state but exert the kind power that a state might exercise. These independent players are complicating factors for diplomacy. An earlier example might have been the financial power f cocaine cartels in the 80s and 90s, or the Somali pirates in the early 2000s. Al Qaeda certainly fit that bill in as much as it was very interested in international terror, while the current ISIL is a similar entity with roots in terrorism but with aspirations to being an actual state.

When such players enter the international politics, they can be difficult to engage, especially when their intent is hostile and their rhetoric inflammatory. The American track record in recent years i.e. under Barack Obama, has been to hunt down the leadership and then use drone-strikes to kill them. Many people object to this modus operandi because - amongst other notable reasons like collateral damage - it leaves no space for negotiation for the enemy leadership and so the drone-strike program ensures there will be no dialogue.

The assassination plot carried out by Benicio del Toro's character is a direct extension of this program whereby the US Government is willing to kill the leadership of a Mexican drug cartel instead of bringing the man to justice. And this may very well be the protocol that will be used on coming years whereby if one is a Mexican drug lord, there will be no due process and basic rights under the law. The US Government is interested in eliminating such people, not arresting and trying them.
If the film is right, then we've entered a zone where conventional moral reasoning will be useless, and whatever moral reasoning we cobble together will either be inadequate, truncated, or ineffective. If that, is the future as stated in this film, then this film is a bleak film indeed.

Clearly America struggles greatly with this problem. There are no easy answers, although the legalisation and proper regulation of drugs would actually change the economic dynamics of this situation greatly. Just saying...

The Economics Of Narcotics

I might have mentioned this in some other random entry, but it comes down to the fact that narcotics are derived from plant growth. They're farmed. Of all the things that are farmed and collected and sold, the price for narcotics in fact far outstrips anything else. The only reason it gets so expensive is because there is significant demand that is made to struggle for a small supply. The small supply derives out of law enforcement agencies trying to confiscate the contraband. The high prices encourages farmers in impoverished places like Afghanistan or Central America to opt for growing narcotic agents instead of proper crops. As with the bootlegging during Prohibition, the harder the state tries to squeeze the supply, the more lucrative the trade becomes for more parties to enter into the narcotics business.

That's the operational truth of the drug trade. In reality, drug syndicates would be charging what the market will bear, so the pricing of narcotics is presumably at the high end of whatever that can be charged. In that context, every drug bust announced by the police effectively drives up the price per unit weight and this all goes into the drug lords' pockets as profits. Given the above, any film that argues assassinating the drug lords as we do Terror cell leaders is clearly ignoring the economics of the whole enterprise.

When you look at this film in context with other films and TV shows dealing with the influx of drugs over the border into the US, it is clear that the current legal paradigm of prohibition is not working. A lot more money is going to have to be spent on education and rehab programmes and medical processes to deal with addiction than simply rounding up users and dealers and incarcerating them.

Of course, the United States is probably not the likeliest of places for such a radical re-think. That being the case we're probably going to be subjected to ever more nihilistic pointless movies about busting drug lords whatever meaning there waist the enterprise has evaporated out of the topic. There's just a fascist will to prosecute the war on drugs regardless of casualties or meaning.

Torture Is Condoned In American Films

One last thing I want to point out about this miserable film is how the drug lord's brother is tortured for information. The torture is done on US soil, but by Benicio del Toro's character who is amped for vengeance. Taken together with the torture scene at the start of 'Zero Dark Thirty', it appears that while we vocally denounce torture in the West, we're quite okay for it in our fiction. And this hypocrisy is reflected by the state.

It's actually the same old hypocritical split that was pointed out in 'A Few Good Men' whereby the state is happy to appoint a figure to do its dirty work, while claiming the highest of ethical standards for itself. Once again, the split manifests itself with the CIA black ops willing to do the dirty work on the one hand, and the FBI agents wanting to follow the book of the law, finding it hard to condone the CIA tactics. It's the reflected image of 'Homeland', where the FBI are made to look like chumps.

This hypocritical split is not new. When Allende fell in 1973 in Chile, CIA operatives were in there torturing people for information. We might put this down to statecraft, but we've become too accepting that this stuff happens. When it is in our fiction as a readily accepted given, we really ought to be thinking a bit harder about what our politicians are doing on our behalf. The most gruesome part of this film might be its hideous implied politics.

2016/01/25

'Irrational Man'

Philosophy As Enabling Bullshit

It's very hard to figure where Woody Allen posits classical and traditional Western Philosophy in his life. His earliest writings crack jokes about Plato ("He used to knock over little boys. What the hell would he know?") and even Kant's moral imperative ("if we all behave that way, willI get to eat my lunch and keep it?"). This fixation has wound its way through his career as plenty of punchlines were dished out at the expense of Socrates through to Heidegger at various junctures. It's worth wondering just how seriously he takes it if he wants to so talk about it. After all, his famous joke goes he was flunked from college in a metaphysics test when during an exam, he turned to the boy next to him and looked into his soul.

Here, with 'Irrational Man', we finally get the pastiche philosophical patter rolled into the dialogue of one character, The results are quite funny and funny because they are awkward, but also because what happens is in a way Woody Allen's admission that he holds no hope in philosophy. Maybe that's a good thing.

Spoiler alert as usual.


What's Good About It

In Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix, Woody Allen has two great actors who can carry the lines with adroitness and gusto. The two of them make hefty words sing as ordinary dialogue. It's quite the accomplishment. Woody Allen's dialogue doesn't seem to be getting easier in his old age. His recent films have been filled with difficult turns of phrases with demands for expert comic timing. As the film consists of many scenes that are two handers and three handers featuring the two, it is striking just how good Stone and Phoenix are in their respective roles.

Woody Allen's mordant wit is a kind of elaborate gallows humour, but he does a great job of holding off his plot twist. He is a magnificent writer of dialogue and excellent observer of character - he sure has the mettle of his men and women measured down pat. I wonder if a hundred years from now, people will watch his films and grapple with the vocabulary and the interchangeable vernacular of modernity and classical thought as expressed in a varsity context. He captures the anxious speech of educated people so well.

What's Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen is getting a little tired of the philosophy jokes themselves. If there is a single failing in his portrayal of character, it is that Phoenix's philosophy professor whois so deep in despair seems to be getting through the basic curriculum fairly breezily. It is basic sort of stuff, but he seems all too at ease with the dispensing of pedagogy.

Also the snippets of philosophy he teaches come across as cribbed notes and not very interesting. Maybe it's meant to show just how bored Phoenix's character Abe Lucas is with the framework and historic context Western Philosophy, but it comes over as way too glib. As one drop out to another, it makes me want to say, "well, hold up right there. That's totally an un-nuanced view of..." That's bad writing.

Similarly, his presentation of Emma Stone's Jill as being fundamentally middle-class and therefore unable to escape her own class prejudices is a harsh assessment of her character. After all, his film is positing an extraordinary position where murder might be acceptable. For a film that wants to show the attempt to transcend moral concerns of the bourgeoisie, it takes a harsh stance on the very same moral framework that allows the plot to turn.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that Philosophy is at the centre of this film, which is at its core a simple yarn about an attempt at a perfect crime. It's couched in terms of philosophy exactly because it serves to obfuscate the motive for the crime. Much like 'Throw Mama From The Train', the central point of getting away with the perfect crime, resides eliminating motive. And just as 'Throw Mama From the Train' works very hard to establish the ground rules as to why the motive needs to be eliminated for the perfect crime, this film posits that a man can arrive at the point of enacting a crime through philosophy, and because he does so through his philosophical excursion, he would be able to obscure his motive substantially as to make it look like there is no motive.

When one casts one mind to it, if a murder is completely without motive, it suggests the work of a psycho-killer; and such movies have a particular tenor that leads to detective fiction. Abe Lucas has a motive, and it is to do one deed that would have a positive impact on somebody he overheard in a cafe. It's arguable whether it is a strong enough motive to lead a man to murder somebody he doesn't really know.

On one level, for all the exposition that Abe is a brilliant philosopher, if all it leads to is this crime, then either we're being sold a crock or philosophy is a crock. This being Woody Allen writing and directing, we're given the slanted evidence that it is philosophy that is bullshit. Mind you, a lot of philosophy scholars I know have ended up in pedagogy of said bullshit, so much so that I'm even inclined to believe Woody Allen's dig at a big Western Institution. Nonetheless, I had to say it's probably Woody Allen who is selling a crock of shit in this instance. As fragile and vulnerable it may seem, there's a lot more intellectual muscle in Western Philosophy yet.

Existential Despair As Plaything

Finding tenure as a philosophy tutor in this day and age has to be pretty cool when you think about it. Abe's philosophical predicament of existential despair is actually a little unrealistic. Most PhD. grads I know who have done philosophy would love exactly that job. If there's one job that a philosophy major would not feel existential despair would actually be holding a chair in academia as a philosopher. There are many kinds of conditions of existence which induce the kind of nausea or despair that existentialists of old may have written about, but being a philosophy academic is not one of them. Complaining about that condition of life is a bit like complaining about being a rock star or a movie director. If anything, it's like Larry David's never-ending complaints in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

Still, it's one of Woody Allen's tropes whereby the main character is tormented. When it is Sean Penn playing a tormented guitar player in the 1920s, feeling outshone by Django Reinhardt, that's one kind of torture; but some of the other roles would invite the suspicion that these characters were posturing wankers rather than genuinely beset by existential despair. It's rather unclear where Woody Allen stands on the very topic because he's made so many jokes about it, at its expense and his own expense. Judging from this film, there are no new breakthroughs in his thinking - although the fact that he is able mount these discourses as grim black humour without inserting himself as a character shows that he's generalising his theory of existential despair as a plaything for the bored.

The Older Man, The Ingenue

Woody Allen's other trope for which he gets a lot of flack is the older man and younger woman set up. It recurs in his work because, seemingly, it's the only understanding of relationships he has any more. Oddly enough, because he writes it so often, he has written so many versions and inversions of this relationship dynamic, he's certainly the expert.

At least he's stopped casting himself as the older man, and the movies are better off for that.



2016/01/21

News That's Fit To Punt - 21/Jan/2016

Dick Smith And Rail

Dick Smith is a character. He's saying he'll run against Bronwyn Bishop if the Liberals preselect her again for the seat of Mackellar. If the Libs pick somebody younger and more open-minded to issues to do with economic growth and controlling population growth.
Mr Smith, who was on a yacht in Bass Strait on Thursday, said there had been a huge response to the news he might run in Mackellar. 
He estimated eight out of 10 people in the northern beaches electorate - where he has lived for decades - are concerned by the prospect of Australia's population rising to 100 million and beyond in coming decades. 
"I live in Terrey Hills and it can take an hour-and-a-half to drive into the city now. People will have to give up driving but there is no plan for a rail line [to the northern beaches]," he said. 
"People want to have backyards and maintain their way of life."
So Dick Smith is -interestingly enough - a conservative who wants a rail service up to the Northern Beaches. The mind kind of boggles at the thought, not because it's impossible but because he's talking about the neck of the woods that would hate having a rail line running through it, even if it were convenient. It's a completely different part of Sydney out there. Even with my North Shore roots I find cultural attitudes up in the Northern Beaches quite strange. It's certainly not helped by the fact that they've kept voting in Bronwyn Bishop to represent them. If there is over 70% electoral support for Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar as it is, it gives you a picture of just how ideologically whacko they are up there. 

Even if hypothetically Dick Smith runs and beats Bronwyn and goes to Canberra, running a train line out to the Northern Beaches is a state issue. He's going to the wrong place for that particular issue. Certainly if Dick Smith wants rail lines into his neck of the woods (presumably because rail services are convenient and good things), then he should be a lot more vocal and active in supporting rail lines in general, right across Sydney NSW and heck, Australia in general. There are people doing that, working very hard to get things like the Light Rail extension up and running. You don't hear Dick Smith supporting that issue all. 

Dick Smith usually puts his money where his mouth is, as he's done with his line of foods supporting Australian manufacturing, so it's not hard to imagine him actively supporting a good idea. It's just really strange to see him threatening to stand with one of his issues is wanting a rail line. In Mackellar of all places. 

Metaphorical Gun To The Head

The Liberal Party must hate this one. It might even be undemocratic on some level. The Liberal Party putting up Bronwyn Bishop as a candidate for Mackellar again is barely democratic. We all hate her; we think she's a rorter; she's insensitive to the wider electorates' discomfort with her continuing; but she has this crazy support in Mackellar. We don't know if this is because those people would vote for a wooden dummy if it were the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar, or it actually is her singular appeal, even in a blue ribbon seat (I doubt it, but it's possible). 

Nonetheless, the process by which Bronwyn Bishop is retained and preselected as the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar is not any more undemocratic (or, any less democratic in the conventional sense) than most other seats represented by the two major parties.  However if Dick Smith's threat derails Bishop's preselection, then Dick Smith has effectively exercised much great control over the electoral process than any mere single citizen can do. He's basically doing this on the back his wealth and fame, and to that point, he's not that different from Clive Palmer. The Liberal Party has got to hate that.  

Let's say for the moment the Liberal Party backs down and then Dick Smith backs down. That would be a good outcome, but it leaves major question marks about the decision itself being undemocratic. If the Liberal Party pushes ahead with Bronwyn Bishop, and forces Dick Smith to run, it might turn into a proper open race, thus depriving the Coalition of a safe seat. At least that would be more democratic in the proper sense, but the Liberal Party would hate that too. 

The Right Is Wedded To Bad Ideas

The one big thing to come out of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Left could no longer be wedded to Marxist economics. That was *it*. 1989 marked the year that the project of 1848 finally came to an end. After that point, you couldn't be a communist because you really only had China and Cuba to offer you intellectual proof of concept, and China was frantically opening itself up for the world to make money. 

One would kind of surmise that the GFC would have done something similar to the Right and disabused them of completely unregulated money markets. Judging from the articles over at Zero Hedge, it seems highly unlikely. That mob is still railing against the command and control model they perceive in the US Fed setting interest rates and carrying out QE exercises to get through the post-GFC era. 

It's this denial that there's a real world problem in not reassessing the framework that characterised Tony Abbott's opposition as well as government. That is to say, the GFC was probably the one time the government had to go in to debt to bail out banks and people's savings, and asset prices. That was the right call to make, if they didn't want the whole economy to spiral into a sequence of margin calls and debts being called in at once and massive liquidation of positions. So with that in some corner of the mind, the Coalition set about complaining about the government debt that essentially bailed them out personally as well as the entire asset-owning class of people in this country. 

With somebody like Bronwyn Bishop, you wonder if she actually understood the problem at all as it unfolded during te GFC, or if she was simply filling out more expense forms for more helicopter joyrides; but that is by the by. Amazingly, there are many people in the electorate who think the complaining-about-the-government-debt was somehow a legitimate intellectual position to hold, and voted for these knuckleheads. 

It is then perhaps a great irony to see China - yes, that still ostensibly communist nation - hit a big road bump in its economic development, and for Australian export revenues to collapse, leaving this Coalition government with ever-diminishing revenue. Even at this juncture, the treasurer Scott Morrison is insisting there won't be a hike on taxes, just more cuts. This low taxation mantra too is looking like one of those bad ideas. Misreading the world going towards renewable energies and insisting on making coal the future of Australia is another one. The climate change denial to stick to that already bad idea of selling coal, is another one of those bad ideas. Other nations have committed to reducing carbon emissions by creating market mechanisms for it. Our nation has decided to go with "direct action" while w try and sell as much coal; 'Direct Action' is costly, inefficient and quite probably ineffective and it's another bad idea they're wedded to, because they argued so vehemently against the market mechanism - the ETS - which of course was a mechanism they themselves proposed when they were in with the Howard Government, so they couldn't back away from it once they had to have some kind of policy.

These interlocking set of bad ideas the Right is wedded to, can only be described as a Clusterfuck. Yes, we're living in a nation of one big Clusterfuck. 

Why Do Climate Change Deniers Still Even Exist?











2016/01/20

Quick Shots - 20/Jan/2016

The Mining Boom's Well Over...

I've been a bit out of things this week so I haven't exactly followed the news or markets. I do want to point out that it's been 11 losing days out of 12 trading days this year so far, so everybody is getting their arses handed to them as Brent Crude hits US$28. Really, unthinkable sort of pricing.

Nobody with any familiarity with China believes in the GDP growth figures that come out of Beijing. There's going to be a big problem if we're counting on 7% or so GDP growth when in fact the likely number is mines 1%.

Pleiades sent in a Crikey article which is behind a paywall, but the gist of it is that our political class and bureaucrats missed the cue, and completely bungled the landing from the mining investment boom that overtook the entire Australian economy for a decade and a bit there. Among the things they failed to anticipate was how hard other nations would head towards renewable energy, even if our government under the Coalition sat in denial about climate change and resisted doing anything for as long as it could. Right now, the share markets are showing how and why we're going over the cliff.

Our Honey Is Poisonous

This is depressing.
Australian honeys are the most contaminated in the world with natural poisons linked to chronic disease including cancer, according to international researchers
Pregnant and breastfeeding women in particular should be wary, experts say, with unborn and breastfed infants at higher risk of organ damage from such toxins. 
The news affects varieties of honey sold by many leading brands and widely available on supermarket shelves. While the products do meet more relaxed Australian food safety standards, all but five Australian honeys tested had more contaminants than the European Food Safety Authority would consider safe or tolerable, the research published in the Food Additives and Contaminantsscientific journal shows. 
The Australian Food Code bans the use of poisonous weeds such as Paterson's curse (also known as Salvation Jane) and Fireweed in human food. Their flowers are laced with chemicals called pyrrolizidine alkaloids that are considered the most common cause of poisoning in humans and livestock worldwide. 
But Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) permits honey to be sourced from restricted plants, as long as it is blended with other honey to dilute it.
That's a worry. Of course, the article finishes with a line from the honey industry body about Australian consumers having nothing to fear. It's strangely reminiscent of what tobacco growers used to say about cigarettes. It's a bit of a giveaway that we ought to get very paranoid in a hurry.  

The Impossibility Of Sensible Conversation

It's always surprising just how lunar-crazy the right are in this country. I guess the lunar left are also crazy but they've not been anywhere near the controls, or making policies for this country in a long time. The infighting breaking out in the Liberal ranks about the next Federal election.
Just look at the craziness here:
"Our sovereignty has been signed away at the United Nations by Malcolm Turnbull, [Foreign Affairs Minister] Julie Bishop and [Defence Minister] Senator Marise Payne," he writes. 
"Now UN laws override Australian laws thus dictating what countries our refugee and immigration intake come from." 
"Former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed to take in 12,000 persecuted minority refugees, mostly being Christian. Malcolm Turnbull has already changed that to being 12,000 mostly Muslims, who clearly do not assimilate to the Australian way of life and our laws," he says.

(Mr Abbott denied Christians would be given preferential treatment, saying: "It's those who can never go back that we're focused on.") 
Cr Cornish goes on to "strongly question the Liberal Party's direction in regard to conservative values". 
"It currently shows little difference with the aims and objectives of the Labor Party, that being the removal of religion and replacing it with government founded [sic] tolerance of everything, climate control, over control of our everyday life and the erasing of our heritage and way of life through wanting to change our flag and changing our head of state to a corruptible president," he says. 
Cr Cornish also attacks Lindsay MP Fiona Scott over last year's leadership change that saw Mr Turnbull become Prime Minister. 
"Fiona Scott was only elected due to the hard work and support of Tony Abbott," he writes. 
"His many campaign visits to Lindsay along with his 'sex appeal comment' got Fiona just over the line, only to have her stab him in the back for his hard work and party loyalty."
So one part of the Liberal Party strongly believes in this kind of divisive politics. They pine for the days of Tony Abbott as PM (even though it was clear Tony Abbott had been an utter failure), and they play this line of absolute fear for international commitments that this country has made.  It's the same bunch of people who think nothing of locking up kids in detention centres or ignoring climate science, or complaining about political correctness. Basically, Malcolm Turnbull's job is to corral these crazies under the same party and somehow get to the election and win it. Even if he wins it, he's going to have to cajole these crazies to do what is required because these crazies are ideologically against it, and think there's some kind of principle at stake in their wrongness. 

Whatever it is disaffected ALP voters thought Malcolm Turnbull might do that was so much better than Tony Abbott, you have to say the the likelihood of that happening is quite minimal.

2016/01/19

'Straight Outta Compton'

The Moment We Weren't Privy To

Did you ever dream of there being a kick butt youth movement that you could belong to when you were young? Something really underground, anti-authoritarian, socially meaningful and far-reaching in its frankness? I did. And when it actually happened, I hated on it because it wasn't my shit. That's life in the slow lane for you - but I'm being brutally honest about it with you and myself. It was there for the taking except I was taken elsewhere by different things. You see, when Rap music broke, I was neck deep in Rock, playing in bands, recording demos, knocking on doors, and I was *committed* elsewhere.

The way Rap music broke was too far away from me in Sydney - I only got the reverberating shock wave of other rock musicians disapproving it before I got the real deal. It's amazing in retrospect that the negative view of Rap travelled to Australia far quicker than the medium itself. That's the post-modern global village for you.

Anyway, it's kind of cool to relive the crucial moments, even if one was on the wrong side of history and got bulldozed, and even if it is vicariously through a "historic reconstruction" of a biopic. 'Straight Outa Compton' is a triumphant film that spells it out. These kids were alright too.



What's Good About It

Sometimes all a film needs is a strong cast that can sell a mediocre script. My overall reaction to this film is that the script isn't too good, but the performances in this film are extraordinary. There's a furore going on about how black actors were totally disregarded in the Oscars nominations. I can feel the righteous anger in that indignation. This film has several performances that are breathtaking as they are complete.

It also captures the zeitgeist that was the late 80s and early 90s. It puts you face to face with the exact social angst that was writ large as it unfolded. It has the scope of 'Quadrophenia' and its Brighton Riots as well as moments that seem like riffs on'A Hard Days'Night'. N.W.A certainly were a socially important phenomenon, and that aspect is captured very well.

The music - yes, the brazen Rap music - is great.  I mean, bone-crunchingly, soul-shakingly good.
Really, warts and all, I loved this movie; so much so I watched it twice.

What's Bad About It

The directing had a few technical miscues. They cross the imaginary line a lot in this film, for no apparent reason so you can put it down to lack of discipline. Some of the shots are tricky but it's inconsistent stylistically so it ends up being more confusing than artistic. A film of this calibre shouldn't have problems like this, so you have to put it down to slackness. It's a shame because they're distracting moments.

The cinematography isn't particularly flash either. There's something generic Hollywood about the camera and lighting work. If anything the good bits were let down by the technical bits that Hollywood wouldn't necessarily get wrong in other movies. It could've been an excellent film, but it doesn't get there because of these blemishes. Instead, it's a kickass movie, but it's a shame that it could have been even more transcendent.

What's Interesting About It

What's truly interesting is the distance we've all travelled since the mid-80s when police brutality towards the black population was largely ignored or sweet under the carpet. I remember sitting in the AFTRS library and of all the printed material they could have, they had a copy of the Village Voice. You know, far, far away from America, cut off from information because there was no internet... I was glad I could get my hands on a Village Voice. So I flicked through the pages and what I discovered was a dystopian America where none of the racial tension made absolutely clear after the Civil Rights movement, had been addressed under Reagan and then Bush Snr. It was a stunning realisation that the black population in America had been economically cut adrift and persecuted through the police.

The rise of Rap was the black community talking back, making explicit the record of the anguish and humiliation. It was exactly the same impulse as the Blues, except it took a more sonically aggressive form. The realism - the social realism - of Rap lyrics was a sharp break from the entertainment mainstream, and the message it sought to convey was confrontational because there was nowhere left to run. Ice Cube was working in the best tradition of journalism, an astute observer who wrote down exactly what he witnessed and captured its full social meaning.

I look back on my band days and I think about what Ice Cube managed to capture and I have to take my hat off to him. He deservedly found a place in the world through his writing; it is no accident or anomalous turn of luck that made him succeed. When you listen to it altogether, it is impressive work.

Make Me Scream

I have to digress a little. There's this beautiful line in 'The Last Boy Scout' directed by Tony Scott, starring Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis plays a gumshoe named Joe; the villain captures him and ties him to a  chair. The gloating begins. The bad guy says, "you know Joseph, I'd like to hear you scream."
Bruce Willis' Joe replies, "that's easy. Just stick my head next to speaker and play Rap."
It's a great moment from an under-rated action movie.
That's how Rap music was viewed by the mainstream, even as late as 1991. We've come a long way since.

I think about it today, and I realise it's just a case of you can't be everywhere at once. Things are happening all the time, but you're not necessarily going to be able to get to it, because you're busy doing other things which are of no less importance. Nonetheless, the flip side to the regret is the understanding that I missed something really important as it rolled right by.

Rap As Poetry

Sometime in the early 90s, the esteemed literature academic Don Anderson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that poetry wasn't dead, it was alive and kicking in Rap. Around the same time, Neil Young made the observation that sometimes he doesn't want to sing a melody, he wants to rap his point, plaintively. To get to that point, Rap had to claim a platform. The film covers that battle to claim  platform from where they could speak their subjective angry truths.

What becomes clear in this film is just how much Ice Cube was switched on to his writerly mission. It's remarkable that he set out to capture the rhythm of speech and vernacular of his surroundings, and sublimate it into something he could deliver on stage. The stoic realism of that process puts most young writers to shame.

Is something that starts with "fuck the police" art? Many people think not. Indeed, they were so offended they tried to run N.W.A. out at many a town they toured. At each juncture, when asked about it, Ice Cube got up and took the line that it was indeed art - radically so - and that he made no apologies for something that stood as freedom of expression under the first amendment of the US Constitution.

It's hard to assess popular works; and by that I mean works that operate in the un-rarefied air of pop culture. Yet if one thing is a good indicator of the value of the work, it is the commotion it creates. If it were radically bad art, it is highly unlikely to have galvanised so many people. Instead the work done by N.W.A and other Rap artists essentially rewrote the social rules of engagement for the black population with the rest of America. Compared to the hope-filled beginnings of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the 1980s were the ugly confrontational decade where the nitty gritty was sorted out. N.W.A. essentially provided the hymn book for the re-constitution of black power politics, right for the picket lines.

So if a generation of youths found their identity in this phenomenon, charged by the words and meaning conjured by its authors, could it really not be art? We're at the point in history where we're finally seeing the outline of what that phenomenon was, and with it what meaning it carried.

But Most Of Us Rockers Missed It

This film is quite educational, if you are a student of Pop Music. It sounds so clear and present that you can actually feel the very architecture of the music mix. It's one of those rare films that just listening to the music alone is cool enough.

The stripped down sound of Rap is a highly calculated move. Pop Music had been going through man phases of construction and deconstruction and reconstruction. Through that process, Pop Music moved ever closer to a streamlined production with fewer filigrees. There is a fundamental issue of economic competitiveness inherent in the development of Pop Music that dates right back to jazz orchestras. Before electric amplification, you needed an orchestra to fill the concert room with sound. As jazz developed and played in smaller venues, this allowed for smaller combos. By theme Bebop came about, band sizes shrunk down to quintets, quartets and trios.

With the advent of rock music, the band sizes stayed at quintets, quartets and trios but the music itself became ever simpler. As early as the mid-60s, Paul McCartney mused of a possibility of a one-note pop song, even though he could not conceive of what that would sound like back then. All the while, the rhythm was getting more complicated. Rock'n'Roll started with a regular 4-beat, but eventually evolved to 8-beat; but then funk came along and were working 16-beat music.

When electronic music came about, it removed the band of a drummer with its machines, and ultimately gave rise to the DJ, who effectively fronted all the music through a record. And so, there was no longer a musician required. Merely the recorded sound being used against the economic interests of the musicians who recorded them. This is why rock musicians were so hostile to Techno, Dance, and Rap - those forms of music did away with dexterity-expertise,  and the entire vernacular of music that went with that dexterity-expertise. When that was gone, there was no more justification for a band to be a band. The writing was on the wall.

At Rap and Hip-Hop, Pop Music reached the point where a DJ would programme the rhythmic and harmonic content, and the vocalist would submit vocal sounds that did not feature a melody. It was (and probably still is) the ultimate end point for Pop Music's structural deconstruction as it reassembled itself for its own economic imperative. With Rap, you have music with only one musician-composer who essentially works off rhythm with minimal harmonic content. The vocalist raps. The rest is an elaboration of this structure. The way the five guys you see on stage for N.W.A. work the music, is nothing like the five guys you might have seen with say, jazz or rock quintet. Interestingly, it has more in common with how Kraftwerk work their music.

To join in with the phenomenon, rock musicians would have had to trade in their equipment for something else totally, abandon the complex accretion of the subculture, discard the musical vernacular that they loved, and go to the new music empty-handed. Some people made that move and became wildly successful. Others did not, and there is not a rock musician who didn't get left behind and becoming obsolete by staying with Rock. I do remember that moment when I was in a record shop (remember those?) in 1992, where the tough choice was going with the Public Enemy CD or The Baby Animals' CD. I ended up buying both, but through the 90s, I was acutely aware of the bifurcation in my engagement with Pop Music.

That aside, listening to the music track in this film is a singular treat. It plugs you right in to the energy and power of Rap when it was dangerous. It would have been something special to have been young and black in America, and to have N.W.A. blasting out of your ghetto-blaster as your anthem.
Then again, there's this advice from Chris Rock:

2016/01/14

'Homeland' - Seasons 1-5

Rooting For The CIA

Back in the 50s when the New York Yankees were truly dominating the American League, there was this complaint that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. The might of the Yankees' organisational success simply looked as monolithic as an industrial giant. In a similar vein, rooting for the CIA is a bit like rooting for US Steel, but much less glamorous and satisfying.

The premise of 'Homeland' is rooted in enough real world problems that the show is compelling from episode to episode, but there's something really odd about watching a show where we are emotionally pulling for a protagonist with fairly dodgy ideological credentials. Especially when there's at least one level of insanity thrown into the mix.

It's even harder when you binge-watch a TV series going from start to finish. There aren't exactly a whole lot of series that can withstand that kind of continuous viewing and this one was a challenge all of its own. This show gets very high marks from critics and audiences alike but there are moments where one wonders outlaid where everything is going and how could they possibly sustain 4-5 seasons of this stuff with these characters.

What's Good About It

The show is very current and abreast of the political and diplomatic problems of its subject matter. You keep watching because you genuinely want to know how the show is going to tackle these ideas and resolve the plot. The characters are interesting, and in many ways very challenging to digest. The performances are generally good across the board; Mandy Patinkin is always superb. Claire Danes is a bit scary.

Each episode has a requisite amount of intrigue which keeps you engaged, even as some less than stellar acting goes on in parts. It's not a winner scene to scene to scene, but it's definitely intriguing and interesting.

What's Bad About It

Some of what goes on is really hard to relate to, in any kind of emotional way. This is an odd complaint from me because usually I'm okay with shows that run with hard decisions over what the heart says. I do struggle with shows where I fundamentally disagree with the philosophical outlook of the protagonist, so this one gets pretty challenging when I have to endure being shown the consequences of a decision with which I as an audience member disagree. This isn't 'Desperate Housewives', this is a show about how the CIA ensures security for the Western hemisphere. It gets held to a higher standard for the story areas it chose.

The other issue I have is that when Carrie pushes for a moral reason, I can't help but think it reeks of hypocrisy because she herself is willing to do pretty immoral things for national security. When she pleads for special understanding, I can't help but think that she's overreaching because she never cuts anybody any slack - which is a virtue - so she shouldn't be pleading special cases. That she can swing so wildly with her moral outlook in any given season suggests the writers actually haven't got the character down completely.

It's a minor quibble. But it's a quibble.

What's Interesting About It

As the seasons progress, the main character Carrie Mathison gets crazier and crazier. She does have personal quirks that stick out as being possibly personality disordered as well as being clinically bipolar. It's not entirely explained just how the condition does not get discovered earlier and thus gets her disqualified from holding a position in Intelligence. Having to rely on a fairly regular supply of anti-psychotics puts Carrie into a lot of vulnerable situations where somebody who is normal might not suffer as much.

At the heart of the series is a personality issue wrapped in a mental health issue wrapped in a secretive agency that's used to manipulating people and information. It can get amoral faster than can get immoral, and the sort of choices these characters make can really make you think about the price of having something like the CIA do our society's dirty work.

Is The CIA As Good As Claimed?

The FBI comes in for some ridicule by this series. That would be the same FBI that we've been made familiar through all the other films and TV shows. The conceit of this series is that the people in the CIA are smarter and better informed than any FBI agent. So in light of that casual contempt, here's a quick question... does one prefer to work with Agent Dana Scully or Carrie Mathison? I'd pick Scully. She's far more professionally calm and sticks to logic and reason. Between the two, I think Scully's a lot smarter. Thus, being shown how dumb and unreliable the FBI are doesn't actually do the characters any justice.

Yet, the show proceeds with the uncontested assumption that Mathison as played by Claire Danes is super smart with an extraordinary intuition that never fails, and a special talent to be reckoned with. However, when you binge-watch the show, she seems to get by on wild intuitive hunches that happen to be right in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, because the writers need her to be right more than the audience. About the fifth time she refuses to stand down when ordered and she goes and just does her own thing, you feel like disowning her. Which, to some extent is what happens to her a couple of times; but it certainly isn't undeserving.

The other thing that sticks out at you is how awful it would be to work for any intelligence organisation. It really looks like horrible work, best avoided. If you are an analyst, you don't get to own your observations; if you are field agent, you don't get to own decisions; if you are a manager of operations, you don't get to own your conscience; if you are the director you don't get to own the politics. It's a bad scene all around. The nitty gritty of finding targets to attack with drones is bad enough. The weight of international politics and the incumbent diplomacy makes thing look simply impossible. If police procedural are supposed to make police work look glamorous, then this series certainly doesn't make the CIA look glamorous. It makes it look like a truly awful place to work, the glory be damned.

Anticipating Attacks, Anti-Terror, Anti-Psychotics 

Maybe I browned off Carrie Mathison somewhere around season 2. It struck me that what she thought she had to offer the intelligence service was overstated by her, while the evidence was clear that she was a terrible team player. The things that made her 'good' in her own eyes are in many ways a detriment to the service. Making things more complicated is the character setup where she is bipolar, psychotic and dependent on her medication. While interesting as a story point, it becomes glaringly obvious that such dependence places not only her but the entire service and by extension the state at jeopardy.

It's interesting because somewhere along the way, it is a show where you lose confidence in the protagonist as the character who leads you through the story. I got disinvested pretty quickly once I lost confidence, and started to look for different things within the show to keep me interested. One of the more worrisome notions was that perhaps when Carrie is on her meds and 'sane', she actually displays signs of Borderline Personality Disorder. I know it helps the writers to have a drama queen generate the drama, but in many ways they're problems that would not be there if Carrie didn't behave in the drama queen manner that she does.

The Dodgy Ethics Of Drone Attacks

There is a great anxiety about America's use of drones to attack the terror targets. This anxiety obviously extends into America, right through to the writers who write about the CIA. It's hard to imagine if this anxiety runs right into the CIA, but at least the CIA characters wrestle with their consciences about drone strikes. On the one hands the issue of collateral damage. In 'homeland', this manifests itself twice: once in the secret bombing of a Madrassa school, and another in a mistaken bombing of a wedding in Pakistan. The collateral damage being non-combatant civilians, some of whom are children rests very heavily on some of the people.

Yet, the alternatives are not really spelt out. Putting boots on the ground is politically prohibitive as well as financially unviable. It's one thing for SEAL Team Six to train for 6 months to take down Osama bin Laden in his compound; they just can't whipped up and around at the whim of a station chief. Then there is the diplomatic difficulty of letting a combat group into Pakistan to do these missions. Inevitably the decision tree narrows down to drone strikes based on intelligence.

Drone strikes get the loudest opposition from the far left and the far right of politics, leaving a largely mute middle. The silence is understandable because the majority would rather not have the allies/coalition of the willing/the West go into an all out ground war. The expedience of the drone strikes is exactly in proportion to the degree they do not want to commit to yet another war. The middle does not wish for another World War, nor even a Vietnam or even the ongoing Afghan and Iraq wars. It is to that Drone strikes are somehow more ethical, it is that they are more expedient. Yet we depend on the expediency so that we can live our lives mostly unchanged, and unchallenged.

Interestingly enough, the tenor of the show is that it's against drone strikes, but the fictional CIA in this series keeps benefiting from drones, it is as if they are writing self-defeating treatises. In any case, the whole exercise makes you think if what precarious world peace we have comes from this constant active espionage and drone strikes, then it's an expensive peace that we should enjoy and appreciate a little bit more because we're most certainly paying for it big time.

The Futile Joy Of Terrorism

War, as Von Clausewitz had it, was diplomacy through other means. Then, we have to look at terrorism as a kind of war representing some kind of diplomatic action, except it is hard to sustain that notion given the poor rewards terrorism. I understand the position that overtime we give up a bit of our civil liberties in response terror attacks, we are giving into terror in exactly the manner they wish it, but truly that is too abstract a notion given the cut and thrust of a proper war. This is because in war, we are willing to undertake many means that would defy moral sanction. That, is the nature of war.

In turn, even the most successful terrorist acts do not result in diplomatic shifts towards a better result for the terror-initiating organ. What happens is a concerted effort to hunt the perpetrators like criminals and not apply the civil liberties - like, say the Miranda Rights or innocent-until-proven-guilty assumptions - which means the tangible returns on the acts of terror are hardly like the results of war. While war is immoral, it can be argued that war can be part of an ethical solution. It's hard to mount it and sustain it, but logically, it is possible. For instance, it is ethical to mount an argument in favour of going to war to get Hitler and the Nazis.

Terror offers no such position. Even with Hitler as the enemy, it's hard to argue a case for blowing up a bomb on the streets of Berlin to get Hitler's Germany. The distinguishing characteristic of acts of terror as opposed acts of war might be the absence of both moral and ethical positions. Acts of terror are imbued with Nihilism. It's not a long bow to draw between Gavrilo Princip and political nihilism. As such, it is interesting how often the characters in 'Homeland' try and appeal to the humanity of the terrorist not to go through with their terrible plan. One would think these arguments would fall on deaf ears, but the writers keep finding a way for letting this ruse work.

Doing Bond's Work

I've pointed this out a couple times in reference to James Bond, but Bond never goes to these kinds of places to do his work. By 'these places' I mean the Middle East countries with their attendant messy politics and muddy ethics and totally distorted sense of justice. James Bond is instead busy chasing fanciful villains in nice places with beautiful hotels and wonderful cars. 'Homeland' is like the antithesis to the Bond movie version of espionage. Carrie Mathison does the kind of gritty spy work that seems unfathomably delicate and dependent human frailty. She draws her gun on the odd occasion but the job often doesn't come down to her gunning down the bad guy in person.

Most of Carrie's work involves tireless hours surveillance and building a timeline that gives shape to the suspect's actions. If this espionage-proper, it is more like an elaborate adult-world version of Cluedo rather than a Bond movie. In some ways, it's the espionage series we needed to see.






2016/01/11

RIP David Bowie 1947-2016

The Thin White Duke

There is absolutely no dispute about the breadth and depth of David Bowie and his musical legacy. So this entry is not anything to dispute it. It is immense, it is far reaching, and as with Michael Jackson he was a force of culture that constantly exerted this creative influence over so many people and things. In his passing, I am left astounded by the size of the hole he leaves behind, in our collective cultural consciousness.

I didn't come to David Bowie's oeuvre in the way most people seem to have done. There was no Ziggy Stardust or pantomime makeup. If anything those things were a hindrance. When I was a teenager listening to rock music to define my own sense of identity, there was nothing more superfluous than the trappings presented by an English Rock Star who wanted to obfuscate his identity. So while I was listening to the likes of The Who or King Crimson, it was a hard sell to get me to see past the makeup and the wardrobe and my swooning girl classmates. What the hell was that? It was hard to wrap your head around something wound in the opposite direction.

Oddly enough there is a cross over intersecting between Bowie and The Who. In his younger days, Bowie was a mod.



I was suspicious of the image machine he generated and maintained. At the same time I was deeply aware that he kept hiring guitar players I was deeply into. Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew both featured prominently on his late 70s work, and Stevie Ray Vaughn was the featured player on 'Let's Dance'. If nothing else, I could suspect that he had the same kind of ear for guitar that I did, if he was hiring these guys to do their thing on his records; and to that extent I could relate to the sonic space on 'Scary Monsters' and 'Low'.



Dramatically - or perhaps just drastically - sometime in the 1980s David Bowie formed a band called 'Tin Machine'. They recorded their first album in Sydney's 301 Studios, and his band were testing out their material on the Northern Beaches. It featured Reeves Gabrels as the guitar player and the music was unapologetically guitar rock. Suddenly he was a lot proximal than just about any rock star. And that was how I found myself listening to more Bowie. There is always the crowd who say they like the old stuff better than the new stuff, but for my money, the newer stuff was more up my alley. I spent hours trying to figure out Reeves Gabrels' moves on the fretboard.

 He was very productive deep into the 1990s, and even in to the 2000s until he suffered a heart attack. More recently he returned to the studio to produce 'The Next Day' and 'Blackstar'. Given his late battle with cancer, we can probably understand 'Blackstar' as his last testament.

To some, he will be Ziggy Stardust or one of his other characters. He may even be remembered for his movie roles more than his core area of rock music. I remember seeing him talking to Michael Parkinson in an interview and he was asked about his various pursuits, and Bowie responded quite strongly that it all begins and ends with his music, which is rock music. He was surprisingly forthright about that position; no prevarication or pandering to other arts. He was simply a rock star, and he knew it, and he was perfectly comfortable being just that.

Vale David Bowie, you were a glorious modern god.

2016/01/05

Quick Shots - 05/Jan/2016

Merch!

You can now go get yourself an Art Neuro teeshirt. Just follow the link.
I've also put it up on the top right hand side. After years of not really believing in this kind of thing, I've decided I'd give it a go.

It's a limited time offer. I'm not going to keep this thing out there forever and a day. It's just so you guys can go wear a teeshirt that nobody else has, and be pretty smug about it. It works, I know because I have limited edition teeshirts that will never be produced again, and I get to enjoy the special kind of smug when I get to explain, "well let me tell you about this shirt..."
Plus, by buying one you'll be supporting this blog. Really, you would be.

Sometime in the near future, I'll arrange for some hoodies too.

Releasing A Couple Of Singles

Yes, I'll be putting out couple of tracks through iTunes and Amazon. The first of the two is 'Dejah Thoris', which will be released on the 15th January, and the the second one will be "It's Okay It's Peachy", which will be released the 22nd of January.
It's a digital only release. It's not like I've made physical CDs of these things. They'll be there for downloading.

I'll post up the links when it's all official and out.

Hold On To Your (Made-In-China) Hats

The Bubble Has Burst

The Bubble in China has burst. We just haven't felt the ramifications of it yet because the process has only really begun this June when the equities market in China blew a gasket and went down from its bubbly heights. Make no mistake, that collapse in the equities market we witnessed in June was the point at which the Chinese economy hit its Minsky Moment. Yesterday's falls are merely the logical continuation of the spiral down. In September during the G-20, the head of POBC made comments to the effect that the market moved as if a bubble popped. Thus, we have to acknowledge the moment that we feared has in fact arrived.

The news in December was how China opened up a bond market for international investors, but somehow managed not to drum up good business. The tricky thing here is that like Japan, China's government debt is mostly held within China. There's very little debt owed to international markets. The complicating factor is how the Yuan/Renminbi is still tied to the US dollar in some way through a red - but if December was anything to go by, China has been devaluing the Yuan as quickly as it can. The long and short of it is that there won't be new money going into China from international markets. And if debt has reached saturation then, there's no inflating the sagging asset prices any more.

While China is too big to fail as an economy, it still has to navigate some kind of landing as it moves into a developed world, low-growth sort of economy. The long wished-for soft landing is looking less likely by the day, and instead it is looking more and more likely that China is headed for a solidly hard landing. A lot of this has to do with the inherent contradictions of containing an (ostensibly) market economy inside a pretty rigidly controlled economy. So on the one hand there is market competition, with say, many firms in any one area. But the prices of their output are still rigidly controlled, and so are wages. This leads to a situation where the central government demands 15% wage increases while not allowing for prices to go up because they're trying to control inflation.  The apparent growth that they report, is conjured from stealing from the margins of companies.

Under this arrangement, wages have exploded roughly 500% in the last decade, all of which was absorbed by the companies operating in China. Indications are now coming out of China that many foreign firms are retreating out of manufacturing in China, moving factories to Vietnam, Cambodia and even on to Myanmar and Ethiopia. Because the Yuan is pegged to the US Dollar, it also creates inflexibilities that result in phenomena where goods and services work out to be cheaper in Tokyo than Shanghai.

And that's just the framework showing signs of heavy contradictions between a market economy and a controlled economy.

Where Did Their Bubble Come From?

As it turns out, the single area where the government did not exert the usual controls turns out to be real estate. Technically, all of China's property belongs to the state, and farmers are leasing their land from the state. This has made it very easy to take the land from farmers in rural communities. Local municipal governments have paid a laughably small amount of money to remove the farming communities off the land, hand it to developers, and by the time they lease it out as commercial property, they are able to put a price tag on the same land that is 50 to a 100 times what they paid.

This magically large margin has gone into local municipalities as income; so much so that there are many municipalities that have anywhere between a third and a half of their revenue based on this mechanism. It means the municipalities don't have to raise taxes to find money to invest in infrastructure projects. The developers profit, the politicians profit, the bureaucrats arranging these deals profit form kickbacks, everybody involved gets a piece of the action.

Which illustrates why the Chinese government essentially let the property prices skyrocket. Of course, it is easy for the wants of the many to outweigh the needs of the few, but at a certain point the real estate prices became so unrealistic the whole market came off the boil. This led to sagging prices as well as people carrying enormous debt, sliding backwards and out of the market, putting even more pressure on property prices. In response the Chinese government stopped lending money for property and instead encouraged people to take out loans and buy financial products. In 24months, the Chinese equities market went up 250% and then this June, tumbled down 30% from its peak.

The thing to keep an eye on is the surge of money that flooded out of China, that financed other property bubbles around the globe. At the heart of it is the flipping of farm land into commercial land with no consideration for demand. If you were in a part of the chain that profited from this activity, you would have looked upon all this a once in a lifetime opportunity and really, there is nothing to do but take your money and run.

But consider this for a moment. The building of the massive ghost towns in China comes from this process of price controls and pegs on the one hand and abject profiteering off the land irrespective of demand on the other. Nobody wants to move to the ghost towns, certainly not at the prices being asked for, which means all of those developments are forces in asset price deflation waiting to be unleashed but for the moment are included in property prices in China. To some extent, there needs to be price discovery, but there are so many mitigating factors stopping that from happening, most of which are the state controls.

If China commits to moving to a market economy, then it effectively lets go of the controls it has been exercising for a long time. It's hard to imagine they'll do so. Instead, they are likely to keep applying controls in a bid to sustain the asset prices. You wonder how that scenario is going to play out. It can't be good - but the bubble has collapsed. Whatever kind of landing they can engineer, the landing gears are about to hit the tarmac.

How Much Of Our Bubble Is Their Bubble?

It's hard to say just how much of Australia's property bubble is directly because of China's bubble getting exported. It's not all of it, because Australian households themselves are carrying all-time debt. The private sector debt has been record high since well before the GFC. This suggests strongly that our bubble is not their bubble. That being said a few things come to mind. The recent growth in house prices coincided with the rise in revenue from high commodity prices. Those factors have all but disappeared with commodity prices hitting unthinkable lows and revenue dropping substantially. China's simply not going to buy iron ore and coking coal at the volumes and prices it did a few years ago. China's bubble bursting will hit our revenue even harder.

The other thing we learned this year was that even though Australia's economy is greatly dependent on growth in China, our economy is relatively unaffected by the daily gyrations of the Chinese Market. This is because not only is the Chinese market not really connected to the global financial markets, it doesn't seem to be connected to its own domestic economy. There are simply too many state run businesses lined up in the Chinese bourse, and everybody knows they are of some kind value, but they can't be understood from reading the balance sheets because nobody seems to be in the transparency business when it comes to business in China. And this means things take a long time to work their way out of the Chinese financial markets and affect the global financial markets. Add in the fact that most of Chinese government debt is held domestically by these state owned businesses, it gets very opaque as to how things might play out and at what rate.

We do, however know a few things. The real estate market in China had its Minsky moment in 2014. The state intervened to coerce investments into the equities market and this led to even more loans being made out to buy these assets to inflate. The bubble came undone in June this year. Commodity prices for things Australia has been selling China, have collapsed. There are serious signs the crunch is now on, but no indication for how this will spill out of China. But you have to say, when (not if) it happens there'll have to be a great readjustment of Australian asset prices, up to and including real estate.

Where To Now?

The new movement out of China is this Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. All these nations signed up to go with an institution that is designed to be a vehicle for Chinese construction firms to go around the place and build stuff. The AIIB is meant to be China's response to the US influence over the IMF, but closer examination reveals it is some kind of investment vehicle designed to carry out a kind of economic colonialism on unsuspecting Asian countries. This isn't small potatoes because there are something like 100 steel manufacturers alone that have basically hit the limit and are desperately undercutting one another. All this Chinese capacity for processing raw materials and constructing infrastructure is looking for somewhere to go and keep doing its thing. You can bet your bottom dollar we are going to see some extraordinary things as a result of this movement.

Thus, if the AIIB ploy of building a modern day Silk Road transpires and all those companies somehow manage not to go broke when China has its hard landing, then a commodity-driven country like Australia might be able to keep supplying that process. If the AIIB fails to deliver, then we're going to see big wobbles up ahead. China is not only too big to fail, it's too dangerous to fail.

A Bank of America analyst thinks the possibility of a Chinese financial crisis is 100%. On the other hand, a Citigroup/Citibank analyst says it's too early to worry. The indication therefore is, soon, if not imminent.

2016/01/04

Quick Shots - 04/Jan/2016

Belatedly, Happy New Year To You All!

Here's to the new year, may it be better than the last one.
I'm doing okay, I hope you are all okay or much better than okay. :)

Iran, Saudi Arabia, OPEC, Oil

This business of Saudi Arabia beheading people is the quiet problem nobody's willing to talk about. Thinking back to Gulf War I, the western media has always played reports on Saudi Arabia with a favourable view, by and large because they were most supportive of Bush Snr.'s Gulf War. They cemented that media handle by being all-in behind GWB's Iraq War, and beating up on Saddam. With Saddam gone, and the West largely withdrawing from the colonial project, Saudi Arabia is now at loggerheads with Iran because, well, religion and race are different.

And so it's now a Sunni versus Shi'ite spat with Saudi Arabia executing a Shi'ite cleric and of course Iran being the land of religious fundamentalist rule, they're not taking this lightly. Brent crude has gone up 6.5%.
CMC Markets chief market analyst Ric Spooner said the price rise was directly linked to the political unrest.

"News that Saudi Arabia has cut diplomatic relations with Iran has led to short covering in early trading on the oil market as traders build risk premium into prices," said Mr Spooner. 
"While there is no immediate threat to production implied by this situation, political unrest that directly impacts major OPEC producers is unsettling.
"Oil markets will be concerned that this could be an incremental step in a deteriorating political situation that might ultimately threaten world oil supply."
I guess it's a case of it-never-rains-it-pours. OPEC is as good as dead if nobody is sticking to the cartel's own supply plans. Saudi Arabia is trying to max out on market share through over-production which is surprising because if the peak oil advocates are to be believed, they're bringing about their own doom much sooner. One would think temperance would dictate they cut supplies to maintain prices.

Of course, Saudi Arabia being the strange place that it is, it is also fighting a waring Yemen and lots of the ruling elite are tacitly handing out money to ISIL (who are ostensibly Sunni crazies) ; ISIL is flooding the market with their cheap oil which they pump through Turkey, and Russia's trying to earn as much foreign currency as well as it struggles under sanctions so they're not exactly going to cut their oil production either. If peak oil is even remotely a true-ish concept, the rate at which we're pumping out crude oil beggars belief.

Turnbull's Frontbencher Woes

It's amazing how fragile the balance of agreements that places MPs as ministers on the frontbench. It might not even be their own good talent or character at all - it might just be that they're the right factional member with the right amount of seniority. It's hard to imagine why Mal Brough had to be brought back to Parliament after 2007's election wiped him out. The cloak and dagger conniptions involving Peter Slipper and his underling revel him to be a man of not-so-great character, but of course with the Abbott-Disposal and the rise of Malcolm Turnbull, he had to be a frontbencher.

Jamie Briggs is weirder. I've never even heard of this 37 year old idiot until he misbehaved and got himself into a world trouble. For the life of me I can't figure what exactly this man has done to be so deserving to be a frontbencher, but there he was until he fucked up.

Today, the news is turning into a discussion about Peter Dutton and his abusive text sent to a journalist. These people are proving to be far less professional than the local community theatre group.

I don't exactly have a lot of faith in the current crop of ALP frontbenchers after watching that Sarah Ferguson doco that dissected them, but this business shows just how lacking the Liberal Party is when it comes to proper, professional talent. Career politicians are going to ruin this country.

If It's So Good, Why's Everybody So Keen To Leave?

it's a genuine question. The Middle Flower Kingdom likes to beat its chest about all kinds things but somehow everybody seems to want to leave. They want to send their money overseas and get out. So despite being the world's second largest economy, they have to exert capital controls like Malaysia in the 1990s during the Asian Financial Crisis.
The latest move comes just three months after the People's Bank of China (PBOC) ordered banks to scrutinise clients' foreign exchange transactions to prevent illicit cross-border currency arbitrage between the offshore and onshore yuan. 
On Wednesday, the country's foreign exchange regulator also said it would improve its reserve position and contingency plans to curb risks from abnormal cross-border capital flows. 
"The main purpose is to crack down on excessive currency speculation and arbitrage, which may hurt the economy," said a senior economist at a think-tank linked to China's Cabinet. 
"They are worried about falling FX reserves. The yuan faces obvious depreciation pressure as the Fed (U.S. Federal Reserve) may continue to raise interest rates, so policymakers are concerned and intend to take effective measures to respond."
A source at one of the affected banks said China's central bank asked them to disclose the names of their foreign exchange clients buying spot and instructed any state-owned enterprises among them to stop trading. 
"The PBOC is robbing us. They're not being reasonable; even if we comply with everything, we provide all the documents, our spot volume is too large," the person said.
That's a great way to start the year. China's deep in the process of dealing with the end of its own financial bubble. It's not going to pull off any kind of soft landing

Blog Archive