Movie Double - 'Sucker Punch' & 'Scotty Pilgrim Versus The World'

'Sucker Punch' & 'Scotty Pilgrim Versus The World'

Today's Movie double is a no-brainer. These are 2 films that essentially bring video game graphic sensibilities into the movies. As such it seems fitting to at least bash these 2 coconuts together to have a look at what comes out.

Manga Much?

'Sucker Punch' has been getting some strange responses around the traps. I think it's one of those films where it provokes a certain kind of wowserism out of all sides of the political spectrum. Personally, I don't see  what the big deal is with girls showing off their figures in dance studio trainers and fishnet tights if it's set in an asylum brothel cabaret. Yeah, it's degrading to women, but it's degrading to men too. In fact, most of our civilisation is degrading to everybody. It's not a good excuse, but sometimes some things are not as particular critics make them out to be. The point of 'Sucker Punch' seems to be - if it can have anything so poignant as a point - is that life is full of ugly men and a gal's simply got to fight her way through the crap they dish up.

In most part, the action of the girls shooting and stabbing and punching their way through fantasy fight sequences that looked like something out of Final Fantasy was reminiscent of 'Sailor Moon'. Nobody really complains about Sailor Moon's skirt being too short. Or maybe they do. I personally feel like I'm just too old for this stuff to be impressed by it, but even allowing for it, the film has some interesting moments.

'Scotty Pilgrim Versus the World' by contrast draws much of its inspiration from arcade game beat'em ups. The moment they start fighting, the scores start dialing up in the frame. The graphics work over time to convey the sense of frantic movement in combat games while hyper-real depictions of over-the-top-impossible action makes for some pretty plastic viewing. It's not good or bad, it is beyond that kind of critique; it's more surreal and dream-like  without being beholden to Dali's vision of the surreal. No melting clocks, no references to Dali.

In each instance, the exaggerated action and elastic portrayal of time harks back to manga and anime. It's not hard to see the gush of 'Cool Japan' washing up on the shores of Hollywood and getting appropriated.

Conflict Without Drama

There's a lot of killing and maiming and blowing things up in both films. What's interesting in each instance is that no matter what the stakes, there is no doubt whatsoever about who is supposed to win. As such, the suspense is less than optimal. To remedy this problem 'Sucker Punch' resorts to killing off the team members to show the conflict is deadly. This makes the film far less sentimental - which is a good thing - but in turn gives it a new problem of making the audience wonder about the narrative displacement. Every time the girls go on a mission, the film's narrative switches over to a computer game fantasy combat sequence. At one point the narratives overlap and we see how the two lines interconnect when Rocket dies; but it raises the question as to why the metaphorical combat sequence is truly necessary. Maybe there was an even more thrilling film in telling the straight up story of breaking out of the asylum. By displacing the narrative to the fantasy space, it actually detracts from the drama, not heighten it.

'Scotty Pilgrim' too suffers from the same issue. If the combat scenes are in fact 'real' in terms of the action on screen, then the film is simply too silly to sustain a full viewing. It is only when we understand the combat sequences as metaphorical representations of the interpersonal conflict, that the film starts to have any kind of emotional depth, but again the dissociation kills the drama.

It's an interesting development in narratives but I don't know if it really can sustain a lot of meaning. It's the opposite of a film like 'Never Let Me Down' I wrote about yesterday because in that film, the drama is particularly poignant because the problems for the characters are inescapable problems of the story. Once the problems get re-stated in these metaphor sequences, somehow the problems also get abstracted.

That being said some of these sequences on both these films are pretty spectacular and delightful to watch. Just don't look too deeply for meaning. Too much irony will kill a film.

Chicks With Guns

We're in a new period of cinema where guys like to watch girls beat up on bad guys. We can call this the Cinema of Ange, after Angelina Jolie who has been kicking butt since playing Lara Croft. Angelina Jolie has had a string of films where she plays the kick ass woman - 'Wanted', 'Salt', 'Mr & Mrs Smith' and in the wake has been an acceptance that maybe watching the feminine form - read "Hot Body" - beat up on bad guys is more fun than watching another bloke do it. This transition was particularly pronounced when Angelina Jolie got the role for 'Salt' instead of Tom Cruise.

Suddenly there is no shortage of movies where females are toting guns in sexy garb, showing a bit of leg in fishnets. It's like some BDSM fetishist dream come true, but there they are in 'Sucker Punch'. I found myself laughing mostly, but I can well imagine the film is going to be some kind of cult hit for years to come. It's a lot sexier than Snyder's other offerings in '300' and 'The Watchmen'. 'Scotty Pilgrim' also slides into the weird terrain of girls high-kicking with long leather boots. I mean, if there were girls like that back at my school, my high school days might not have been so miserable. Then again, they might have been worse.

The point of all this is unclear, but there seems to have been a change in demographic in the Hollywood system that readily accepts this and ever more vampire stories. Oh look, they're planning another incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Post-Modernity Goes Rococo

Both these films are pretty mannered. They have many sources which they then milk for effect and move on to the next influence they can milk. Both films are a kind of testament to the victory of form over function, style over content kind of movies - but for once the styles are enjoyable enough that you don't care too much about the shortage of content. After all, if you find yourself watching a movie with chicks in tight clothes fighting orcs, mechanical zombies and droids, while a B-24 Liberator dogfights with a dragon, just what kind of content is going to satisfy you as being sufficiently 'content-y'? Isn't it the case that sometimes, one should just go with the flow of visuals? Maybe at that point one should admit, asking for the kind of rich, thought-provoking content like in 'Cracks' or 'Never Let Me Go' is an entirely incorrect expectation for such films.

Anyway, I though I'd mention that because it's not as if I didn't have fun watching these films. It takes all kinds of films to make up cinema after all. We might have bitched about the obscurantist terror that is post-modernism back in the 1980s but at this point in time it is interesting to see that workable method of narrative has emerged from that soil.

Rickenbacker Bass Mention


It goes without saying, the coolest thing about Scotty might be his flame-glo Rickenbacker bass. Why that is his choice of bass guitar escapes me; maybe I missed it, but the choice gets my vote.

Movie Double - 'Cracks' & 'Never Let Me Go'

Boarding School Movies

There's a sub-genre in British movies about boarding schools, that's been added to greatly by the 8 films of Harry Potter, but more recently we've seen two films that mix it up with other genres. 'Cracks' is a film about the strange world of girls' boarding schools in England in the 1930s which veers into all kinds of voyeuristic fun, while 'Never Let Me Go' is a really bleak existentialist film with a Science Fiction tinge.

Both films are, in my humble opinion, very good and worth the viewing, but I'm bringing them up together because back to back, will be the most emotionally wrenching Sunday's viewing. These films are each tragedies that don the costume of English boarding schools but hark at very deep and disturbing issues in life. I think watching them together would make for a truly challenging viewing.

Still, I think I should go through a few things just to give you an idea of how interesting both these films are. As usual, here's the obligatory spoiler warning.

Faulty Adult Supervision

One of the themes in cinema this side of Gen-X coming of age in the mid 1980s has been films where adult supervision is either lacking or faulty. This is more pronounced in American cinema and I have touched upon it in crits of films such as 'Superbad', 'Better Off Dead' and the 'Back to the Future' series. Other films include the Home Alone movies, and even the Harry Potter series swings around the theme of absent parents. There are probably sociological reasons for this narrative movement, but in most part we are asked to see these setups as abnormal. This is because in American films, there is a strong impulse to re-assemble even the most fragmented of families.

In both 'Cracks' and 'Never Let Me Go', we see the opposite where there is no hope of any family - the kids cannot reassemble that myth - so they are forced to travel the terrain of the the strangely restrictive social order of the British boarding school. In each instance, the teachers are stern, conspiratorial, distant and authoritarian, rendering the children emotionally adrift. In both films we see the children become wanton but then they conform into exerting self-control in line with the school's discipline, which ends in tragedy.

Part of the rhetorical question in 'Cracks' is that if the teachers come from the same stilted mold, how can they confer anything of true value in the outside world to these children? Similarly, in 'Never Let Me Go', we find that the teachers' ultimate interest is not in education at all, but in the production of a commodity to suit the consumerist society and its never ending wants. In neither case can the adults said to be ethical or good - and I don't think this is the simple case of people getting back at their own boarding school experiences, but in fact a deeper despair about the meaning of education in our own society.

Rampant Emotions

We associate the British culture with the whole reserve and stiff upper lip thing and yet these characters in both films are extremely expressive of their feelings. There is a sense in both films that because the system squeezes so hard, the feelings cannot help but pour out. And when they do, they just don't seem like ordinary emotions but outpourings of primal rage and lust.

Eva Green's Miss G is a tremendous creation in fiction. The tremendous irony of a woman who claims to be of the world and is so distant from it, cloistered away teaching in a girl's boarding school is already a kind of novel tragedy. The irony and her inability to escape it makes for some punishing viewing. At the end of the film you come to realise that she never grew up, that she became a teacher and guardian to these children with about as much emotional maturity as the children in her care.

Similarly, Miss Lucy, a minor character played by Sally Hawkins in 'Never Let Me Go' is also unable to contain her emotions as she blurts out the truth to the children. As the film progresses we come to realise the weight of her confession to the children about their short destiny. The meaning of those words circle around to the denouement, when discussing souls and art, Miss Emily played by Charlotte Rampling declares, they were looking at the art to see if the children had any souls.

Tommy in 'Never Let Me Go' is subject to tremendous attacks of rage. The deeper angst about his existence is simply too much. In most part he is polite and self-controlled but he cannot accept his own death until just before the end. It's a furious kind of flame.

In both films, it's surprising to see just how deep the feelings run and then gushes to the surface like a geyser. You wouldn't believe it's about reserved English people.

Exchange Of Food

The exchange of food is a very important motif in both films. Fiamma's pastries from Spain in 'Cracks' at once represents her Christ-like appearance as well as presages her doom. Each meal with Fiamma is the last supper. Similarly the sharing of food is more intimate than the love-making in 'Never Let Me Down'. This could be because sex doesn't lead to life if you are a cloned organ donor unit, but food most certainly will be of sustenance.

'Cracks' spends a fair bit of time on showing food as an important social token. Food being shared immediately correlates with shared information and secrets. The party bonds the girls around food.

The flip-side of this is how dysfunctional pleasure is in both films. Miss G, for her pleasure drugs and rapes Fiamma. Not only is it transgressive, there is something craven about Miss G, not to mention the lesbian sex. Miss G clearly fears men and the outside world. Similarly, the sex depicted in 'Never Let Me Go' is not joyous but rather emotionally abortive. Kath, played by Carey Mulligan participates in sex vicariously by overhearing to her two best friends fuck. When she finally sleeps with Tommy, it is the most sad, mournful, depressing love scene I've ever seen on the screen. You're grateful it cuts away.

Love And The Soul

Oddly enough, both films want to discuss love and the soul. In 'Cracks', it is assumed that without love, then the soul cannot be. Miss G's exhortation to live with desire and for desire essentially leads her to her own demise. 'Never Let Me Go' is more elaborate in that it posits a litmus test wherein artistic expression is seen as the corollary for the existence of the soul. The main character Kath and her lover Tommy can only operate on the theory that love proves there is a soul. The ending runs in the opposite direction to the seeming momentum of the discourse, for Charlotte Rampling's character essentially represents a system that has no soul, and is totally willing to condemn Kath and Tommy.

In many ways 'Never Let Me Go' is the film 'Atonement' wasn't. It's a much better piece of narrative fiction by far, and the payoff is heavy, heavy, heavy.

The Film Beautiful

I just want to quickly say how beautiful both films look. There are some stunning moments of cinematography in both films.

Too Bad She Won't Live, But Then Again, Who Does?

So now, it's time to have a look at the 'Blade Runner' references. Jordan Scott, the director of 'Cracks' is the daughter of Ridley Scott, director of 'Blade Runner'. In 'Cracks', she pays homage to her old man's work in a key scene when Di witnesses Eva Green's Miss G rape Fiamma. Set-up -wise, it's a re-run of the scene when J.F Sebastian witnesses Roy kill Dr. Eldon Tyrell, down to the reaction as she turns and flees the scene.

In 'Never Let Me Go', we come to realise our main character and her cohorts in the school are not natural humans but some kind of genetically engineered organ donating surrogates; they are replicants, for want of a better word. The despair they feel for their destiny is in fact the despair of Roy Batty. They want more life, but they cannot get it. At the end, the main character asks if their short lives are any different to the lives of normal humans. It's very bleak, but you applaud the director who gets you there emotionally, without the cinematic pyrotechnics of a 'Blade Runner'. Then again, it's been 30years since that film.

The message is unsurprising because it has been 30 years since 'Blade Runner', and yet it gets delivered with the same gravitas. It's very well played.

What Housing Shortage?

This Made Me Laugh

They're talking about whether there is a shortage of property or not.

This line cracked me up:

More than two-thirds of the government’s shortage estimate arises by including people who can’t afford housing, such as the homeless or those living in trailer parks, Mr Sayce said.

In most part, the belief is that there isn't enough housing, but there's this bit here:

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens is among those flummoxed as to why homes are so pricey in a nation almost as big as the US, with just 22.7 million people.
“How is it that a country of our size - we are not short of land - how is it that we cannot add to the dwelling stock for the marginal new entrant more cheaply than we seem to be able to do,” Mr Stevens told a parliamentary panel in Melbourne late last month.

Now, what are we to make of that? Obviously the answer is people just want to live on coastal cities and the small areas along the coast, and not in that dirty big inhospitable bit in the middle people call The Outback.

Harry Dent Says...

Harry Dent has written some interesting books based on his observations to do with demographics and how they impact on the economy. He's out in Sydney saying that the Bubble is overdue to take a hit, and most likely will cop it next year.

"Australia is probably the best place in the world to survive this, but we do think Australia will not escape as well as it did from the last crisis (in 2008)," Mr Dent told AAP.

At the centre of the coming debt crisis is real estate, the forecaster says.

"People in places like Sydney or Tokyo or Miami say, 'Hey, real estate can never go down here, we're a great place, everyone wants to move here, there's not much land for development', and what I say is that is exactly the kind of place that bubbles," Mr Dent said.

"Outside Hong Kong and Shanghai, Australia is the most expensive real estate market in the world compared to income."

Mr Dent said Australia's house prices would return to late 1990s or early 2000 levels.

Driving all these changes is simple demographics, specifically the peak of the baby boomers' spending, Mr Dent said.

That is all pretty simple and obvious, but will it really happen? This is exactly the scenario the Reserve Bank of Australia is trying to fight off, isn't it?

From The Sidelines

The Gap Between Common Sense And A Coup

Following on from the post about the High Court judgment against the Malaysian Solution the other day, I had the rare opportunity to ask one of our preeminent human rights lawyers about our constitution and government - specifically about the spectre I raised the other day of "what happens if the Prime Minister pushes for policy and orders the ADF to ship the asylum seekers to Malaysia, ignoring the High Court's decision?"

The answer I got back was that the High Court would issue an injunction against that course of action, which in turn would lead to the ADF desisting.

"Even if it was a direct order from the Prime Minister?" I asked. And he said yes, because the top level of the ADF reports to the rule of law itself.

"What if the generals agreed with the Prime Minister and followed orders and did it?" I asked.

"Well then, you would have a coup."

As in Coup D'etat.

The way he explained it, the top level brass of the ADF are answerable to the rule of law, (and not the office of the Prime Minster) which is an abstraction of what is allowable under the law. Which is why the General would exercise common sense and desist when the injunction came; and is exactly the common sense being practised by the Prime Minister in not pursuing such a radical course of action to push policy, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer.In fact all of our top level government runs on the assumption that all these people will act with this common sense.

In fact, he went on, when the whole Gough Whitlam dismissal was going on, a Unionist piped up and told Gough he should mobilise the army to stop the Governor General getting his way. Whitlam dismissed the suggestion as being outrageous - and lacking in common sense - and so he never went to the army to back his government in 1975. And this, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer, is how democratic government is practiced in a civlilised nation.

I have to tell you I felt very afraid that the only thing standing in the way of a coup was the presumption of common sense being held by people in power. I look at Tony Abbott and the way he carries on and I doubt he has anything like what we would call common sense. I would live in fear that he would be entirely short of such common sense.

I share this with you all in the best spirit that may we all live under a government with plentiful common sense.

The Big Protest

Making the news today was the crowd of 30,000 + people in the domain protesting against the NSW government's attack on the public sector workers. They seem to do this every time a conservative government gets into office in NSW. I seem to recall they did this in the early 1990s when Nick Greiner got in, and the protests did nothing. They had the numbers and did as they pleased.

Big Warwick reports that the Police Union were there which was good for moral support, but that the prison wardens were there. "Who's looking after the prisoners today then?" asked some wag. If the Health Sector Union were in there, then it meant the mentally ill were also on the loose, so to speak. Crazies and Prisoners running riot was a nice mental image.

I get that these unions are angry to have their pay rises indexed at 2.5% which is below CPI - and we all know that CPI tends to under-report inflation. It's a kind of bad faith by the NSW Government. It's also part of a global trend in the wake of the GFC to try and pare back public spending. Why should these people take a pay cut? Because if they don't the NSW Government will have to sack a whole bunch of them instead. You can see both sides of the argument if you step back and look at it calmly, but nobody is ever going to be calm when it's their hip pocket (and you certainly have to respect that too).

The irony that doesn't get missed is that when it comes to politicians giving themselves a pay rise, they never say no.

Even More From Steve Keen

Makes For Interesting Reading

Here's the latest from Steve Keen, sent in by Pleiades.

So is the chopping of The Block a sign that the days of ever-rising house prices are over? Not if you listen to Christopher Joye (Property's fine forecast, August 25). The median forecast of the “21 leading market economists” he polled was for 5 per cent growth in nominal house prices per annum for the next ten years, which Chris notes would suggest “that they will likely be 55 per cent higher in ten years’ time”.

Good luck with that. As Chris notes, my forecast wasn’t included, but it should be no surprise that I expect a fall in house prices of about 40 per cent over the same time period.

I differ with the 20 who predicted positive price growth for one simple reason: I focus on the role of debt in driving house prices. Having argued that debt drove prices up over the last fifteen years, I now expect debt to drive them down again.

The mechanism is simple – but it’s not part of conventional 'neoclassical' economics, which is why Chris and his surveyed market economists don’t consider it. Aggregate demand is the sum of income plus the change in debt, and this is spent on both goods and services and assets. There is thus a link between the change in debt and the level of asset prices (and the fraction sold, and the quantity produced, but I’ll focus on just house prices for now).

Going one step further, the change in aggregate demand is the change in income plus the acceleration of debt. There is thus a link between the acceleration of debt and the rate of change of house prices. If this relationship is strong, then rising house prices require that the rate of growth of debt rises over time.

The first thing that pops into my head is that the moment the real estate asset class starts to nose dive, the RBA would be cutting interest rates to shore it up as much as it can, because let's face it, if the banks lost 40% on their mortgage books, there will be widespread panic. More likely is the scenario where the RBA is going to wind it back towards earlier norms slowly, but can it be done? At least for the next decade, you'd have to concede that Real Estate is a bad bet.

9/11 Remembered

A Decade of Two Wars

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is rapidly approaching. The media are rolling out interviews with people who worked at Ground Zero as well as digging up their archival footage. Just watching the TV promo spots for these things is bringing me down. I caught Channel Seven's effort tonight and an old hand from the FDNY was asked if the killing of Osama bin Laden brought closure. He replied caustically that he hated the word closure. He pointed out there was no filling the rupture in the lives of people, and that they cannot stop remembering. By extension the enemy cannot forget that day r the retribution upon bin Laden either, so there can never be such a thing as closure.

I'm trying to remember my 9/11 moment and it's pretty easy. I watched it on TV and couldn't sleep. I went to work that following Tuesday as Monday still played out in the USA and knew the world had changed. Amongst my friends I was most definitely the most hawkish in retaliating. This was because I had grown up in New York City and the World Trade Center towers meant a lot more to me than people around me. To the extent that it happened to a place I knew materially made my response a little more visceral. I had to explain to Australians that had it been a landmark of theirs like the Sydney Opera House, they wouldn't be so forgiving. To this day I find myself the least sympathetic to jihadists, terrorists, Islamists and other parties who actively hate on the West. I don't care about their grievances. It's not an intellectually satisfying position to take, but not all of our politics is for our intellectual satisfaction. Some times it is simply because a line is drawn in the sand - and we didn't even do the drawing of that line.

The toll of the Afghan War and the ill-advised Iraq War that followed has been well publicised. They are probably the two most covered wars in the history of mankind, thanks to modern communications. The freedoms we've lost, the intrusions we must endure, the suspicions we must sustain, the injuries and the dead we must accept; all keep mounting up on one side of the ledger. It is very hard to see the benefits of all this expenditure on the other side of the ledger. If Osama bin Laden wanted to see the collapse of the western world, the GFC of 2007-2008 certainly gave us an inkling of how that might already be happening - with or without this stupid pair of wars.

Still, I think it's important that the West have a quiet think about who exactly is the enemy. It might be surprised to find that it has more than a casual few.

David Hicks Again

For a guy who wants to live the rest of his life quietly, David Hicks seems to keep popping up. As you may know - long time readers here most certainly will - I have a reasonably fixed opinion of the man so it gets tedious to have him brought up in conversation and to hear both extremes of the discussion.

My own view to this day is that on 11th September 2001, upon witnessing the World Trade Center brought to ground by terrorist attacks, David Hicks chose to head to Afghanistan to side with the Taliban. I've said this before but I can't countenance his argument that he was somehow a wide-eyed kid who got caught up in these affairs almost by accident. The day he left for Afghanistan, he should have know that part of the risk would be capture by the US Marines.he shouldn't have been surprised to find himself in Guantanamo Bay.

Without going into the legalities of the plea-bargain or the Military Tribunal itself - long time readers know I covered that stuff in my previous blogs - it seems if there's one thing that could be said of David Hicks was that he got exactly what he asked for. And if he were as sanguine a human he claims to be about it today, then he might reflect on that fact and shut the fuck up and go away.

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Sep/2011

Can't Get An Even Break

What a mess this Malaysian solution has turned into. And here was Julia Gillard, looking for a result, any result, that got over the line to break up the 'business model' for people smugglers. Now that the High Court has ruled against the plan, it's back to square zero for the government.

The High Court's ruling seems to indicate that the Immigration minister can't send a minor to a country without UN protection, and there fore the Malaysian solution cannot be carried out by this government. this would suggest that the Pacific Solution on Nauru would be ruled out by this judgment as well. Of course it doesn't stop Tony Abbott from saying Nauru is a perfectly good location to send these people. It's as if Tony Abbott has totally failed to comprehend what the High Court has said. It's amusing to watch but infuriating all the same.

What ever the case, the ALP Federal government really is in a pickle now because the left faction is preemptively trying to ward off Julia Gillard from doing adopting the Nauru solution which would do 2 things. It would mean a policy capitulation to the  Coalition, and it would mean one of the reasons Kevin Rudd got elected in 2007 would be lost.

A quick look at the SMH Poll is interesting too. As of this writing 40% want the Asylum seekers processed on the Mainland but 20% want them sent to Nauru, and a whopping 35% want them sent back to where they come from. 55% of the electorate not only do not care, they're hostile to the asylum seekers.That's not some lunatic fringe. That's the weight of public opinion no matter how distasteful to one's own ideals.

More tellingly only 1% support the Malaysian plan - which probably shows that the Gillard ALP government at least are not doing this thing by focus groups. If they were, they'd be digging their heels in ti keep them on the mainland and be arguing with at least 40% electorate support. Again, I don't know if this is good or bad. It strongly suggests the electorate haven't digested the Malaysian solution but are instead sticking to party lines or being mean-spirited (how else do you explain that 35%?).

For my money, I actually thought the Malaysian solution was workable in as much as it accomplished a few things. It did mean we took 4000 legitimate refugees in exchange for the questionable 800. That's a 5 for 1 deal in terms of living up to our obligations. It would have put a big dent in the reasons for the asylum seekers to get into the boats in the first place, which is exactly what the government is trying to do.

So you have to feel for Julia Gillard. Not only could she not get a policy win out of this, she's been sent back to the drawing board when the opposition is actively setting fire to the house that houses the drawing board.If sending them overseas for processing is against the law, then what can you really do but process them on Christmas Island or the mainland? That would get you to 43% support on the issue, but it won't deter the people smugglers.

Actually, the question I've bee pondering is what happens if Julia Gillard, Chris Bowen and the government decided to ignore the High Court ruling and did it anyway. I was thinking, that would be really messy. In fact, messier than the circumstances of the Dismissal in 1975. If the government ordered the ADF to move these people, who could stop them from being moved? NSW Police? I'm laughing at that idea.

I guess the High Court judges could subpeona Julia Gillard and say she's in contempt of court, but how would they arrest her if she refused to show? The AFP reports to the Attorney General's office and that would mean the AFP couldn't get a warrant because the Attorney General would block it. What would happen then? A colossal showdown between Parliament and the High Court.

I have to tell you I imagined it, and got half excited, half-scared.

My Question Of The Day

Where do I sign up for 'Kevin '11'?

Manufacturers' Blues

What Should We Be Making?

Today's theme on the news feed seems to be manufacturing. Pleaides forwards this number here on Crikey behind a subscription wall. The salient bit is worth quoting so here it is:

But, as much as people didn’t want to lose jobs, most could see that the jig was up — that there was something absurd about making shoes in Collingwood, dresses in Redfern, fabric in Footscray — when they could be done so much cheaper elsewhere. On that, there was a broad deal of implicit agreement between the neoliberal elites and the masses.

The difficulty now, for both major parties supporting this move, is that it’s a one-time deal. Like a diet that goes too far — cutting first fat, and then muscle and organ tissue — the obsessive free trade/comparative advantage mantra makes no distinction about what is being lost. In that, it wilfully blinds itself with the abstract generalities of economic theory, to its particular effects on the ground, and how they are viewed. The  public lacks that bias, and retains its willingness to take things on a case-by-case basis.

Thus, the evisceration of manufacturing could proceed in the Keating era, because everyone could see the sense of it — there was no compelling collective reason we needed to produce our own shoes (though there may be all sorts of social and cultural reasons for it) and most people can see that. But steel is a different matter, and most people can see that too.

That one raises a few questions. First of all, when we sub out our manufacturing to the cheaper countries, do they hold to our standards? Anecdotally at least it seems this is not so. All our detailed standards for steel specifications are hardly met by the steelworks in China and South Korea. They churn out crap steel that ends up causing more problems when we buy their product. I've even seen this in a licensed Floyd Rose bridge on an electric guitar where a steel saddle snapped in half. That's not supposed to happen.

Anyway, the point is not to bash Chinese steel, but you get my point. Once we sub out an industry like steel making, then we're vulnerable to the crappy product standards of the developing world. We might be willing to live with that in fabrics (it's uncomfortable but it hasn't killed anybody has it?) but can we live with that arrangement with something like steel? In a sense, there's a lot of value added to the steel that comes out of our steel works, simply by having higher standards of specification.

Then there's Michael Pascoe:

Various people have cited the Barbienomics lesson in recent years, but to the best of my knowledge credit for it belongs to a Hong Kong University post-grad student of Professor Michael Enright. Barbienomics was part of Enright's presentation at an AICD conference in Shanghai in 2007.

In brief, the student worked across the border in a factory that made Barbie dolls for Mattel. American protectionists seemed to have a particular focus on Chinese toy manufacturers at the time, so the student broke down where the value was in a Barbie doll when it was purchased from an American store.

In rough numbers, the brand – Mattel's trade mark, the Barbie name and design, the intellectual property - captured 40 per cent of the value. The retailer grabbed another 40 per cent. Parts and materials accounted for about 10 per cent. Logistics, moving Barbie from the factory to the shop, took six or seven per cent, leaving just three or four per cent for the assembly.

Displayed as a graph with a smiling Barbie, the plastic doll effectively asked the audience an obvious question: which part of value capture is most worth having, which part least?
At the time, Chinese were asking just what America was complaining about when China's factories were capturing so little of the value and doing so much of the work.

Now, that's interesting information right there. In pursuit of profits, companies will move manufacturing to developing nations, but the point of moving such labor is to pay so little for labour costs it can take a bigger slice of the margins. The furore surrounding Pacific Brands in the last few years was essentially a move to do exactly that. Our cheaper apparel shops are flooded with goods from China but the the analysis quoted above suggests that 40% of the price goes to the brand, another 40% goes to the retailer and the labourers in China or wherever ends up with 6-7% of that pie. This is exactly why being marketed to by brand is a terrible thing for our own personal finances. You can count on the fact that well over 50% of the ticket goes to the brand and retailer for our pleasure of them being who they are and having it in a shop we can get to.

Try Apple for size.

We have become slaves to Apple's brand, which, according to the research company Millward Brown, today makes up more than half the company's $US350 billion ($328 billion) book value. By and large, what Apple makes, we buy - unquestioningly.

The logo and name have become the symbol of consumerist cool, an affordable piece of luxury that, if you believe Apple's marketing, divides consumers the world over into Apple lovers and others, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

But there is nothing very cool about the culture of the company Jobs has presided over since he returned as CEO in 1997, after being ousted some years earlier in a boardroom coup. Its ''my way or the highway'' approach to business has earned it few friends. Apple is one of the few technology companies in the world that has succeeded despite having a closed ecosystem that does not work with any other technology. This protectionist approach extends to Apple's aggressive policy towards patents and trademarks. Any company, be it large or small, that dares use the ''i'' or anything resembling an apple in its brand, invites the wrath of Apple's corporate lawyers.

Which is a bit of a rant article about how Steve Jobs is no saint, but it's worth pondering for a moment at the sheer power of Apple's brand and the fact that it is the world's biggest company by capitalisation - that never pays a dividend to its investors (!). It is worth asking if it is a good corporate citizen at all. If it weren't for their product, they'd be monopolists like... Microsoft.

There are people committing suicide in Apple's factories in China because of the grueling conditions and they probably get a tiny fraction of the 6-7% the factory gets out of the price of an iPod or iPad. It's getting to the point that the factory wants to automate so that it can get rid of labor costs. It's a contradictory kind of world. To deliver ever cheaper goods, a lot of companies have decided to cut labour costs but in turn this has led to poorer people who cannot afford the cheaper goods because they can't get the jobs they used to have. And given the cheaper cost of production, these companies all line up to collect the lion's share of the profits while some of them complain about having competition.

A Joke About Alan Jones

This One Is Doing The Rounds

Alan Jones is coaching the Barker Boys U-15 Rugby team. He turns up to the team training with a parrot on his shoulder and declares, "If any of you can tell me what this bird on my shoulder is, I will fuck them up the arse."

Confused, the U-15 boys rugby team confer with one another until they push the captain forward, who asks, "Is it an emu?"

Alan Jones says, "close enough!"

Update Of Sorts - 30/Aug/2011

Who Is This Noda You Speak Of?

Japanese politics is stranger than fiction sometimes. There's always too much drama and never enough substance to chart a course out of the troubled waters it finds itself in. Still, the ruling DPJ has managed to change Prime Minsters for the second time in this Diet term and installed Yoshihiko Noda, a man better known for not being the front runner in this leadership challenge.

THERE is not a lot that instantly stands out about Yoshihiko Noda, who was chosen in an internal ruling-party election on August 29th to become Japan’s seventh prime minister in only five years. But at least two things can be said for him before he is dismissed as yet another here-today, gone-tomorrow face in some G8 summit's photo: he has a healthy sense of crisis, and a nicely self-deprecating sense of humour.

In mid-August, he wrote a blog post (sorry, Japanese only), referring extensively to our cover story of July 30th, “Turning Japanese”, which is about debt and politics in the West. As Japan’s finance minister, he could have focused on the debt issue alone, but instead he chose to translate—and echo—our lament about Japan’s long-standing political paralysis. “I feel very keenly the eyes of the foreign media on our country. And I think a lot of Japanese people feel that things are not working the way they should.” He added, “When the time comes, I will put myself forward.”

At the time, some people would have shuddered at the thought that such a little known politician—and one closely aligned with that bureaucratic powerhouse, the ministry of finance—might replace the woefully uncharismatic Naoto Kan. But there is at least one thing to be thankful for in today’s victory: Mr Noda sidelined one of the main forces of paralysis in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Ichiro Ozawa, who continues to head the largest faction within the party though he has been indicted in a money scandal and his party membership is suspended.

Mr Ozawa backed Banri Kaieda, a trade minister who looked increasingly in danger of becoming a puppet for the backroom fixer. But though the first vote put Mr Kaieda in front, thanks to the support of Mr Ozawa’s cronies, it was not enough to win him an outright victory. In the run-off, Mr Noda’s supporters joined forces with those of Seiji Maehara, another anti-Ozawa candidate who lost in the first round (and whom we had thought would be the front-runner, because of his support among the electorate at large). Mr Noda won with 215 votes to Mr Kaieda’s 177. It is the second time this year—the first was a no-confidence vote against Mr Kan in June—that Mr Ozawa has failed to impose his will on the party, though that is not to say that he will stop making mischief for the new leader.

The long and short of it is that they couldn't go back to Maehara, and they didn't want the puppet of Ozawa, so they made the gutsy move of picking a guy who might actually have some stones. Mind you, stones wasn't the issue with Kan - it was more his inability to actually govern - while Hatoyama before him was essentially child-like in the wrong way. It will be interesting to see if Noda has any ability at all.

The more interesting aspect of his career to date is that he always wanted to be a politician so there's something of a motivated bastard in him; meanwhile he's not coming from a dynastic line of diet members like so many in the Japanese Diet so it is possible he might have a different perspective on what actually is the task for a member of the Diet. We shall see. The best thing about him so far as I can tell is that he reads the Economist magazine and so understands how the West view Japan today; and he is shocked. it shows that he understands the enormity of the problem and its urgencies. It might turn out he's the right man at the right time. That was most certainly not the case for Kan, Hatoyama, Aso, Fukuda, Abe and the latter part of the Koizumi years.

For once, they have a Prime Minister who understands the nature of the problem, and how far-reaching it is.

Those House Prices...

Don't look now but Steven Keen's actually been spot on about housing prices. In a nutshell, they're falling.

Although auction clearance rates have been relatively stable over the past few months, Australian Property Monitors data reveals Sydney's median house price fell from $646,806 over the April quarter this year to $639,484 over the July quarter, a decrease of 1.1 per cent.

The other capital cities also recorded declines in median house prices over the July quarter. Melbourne was the best performer with a fall of 0.9 per cent, and Perth and Brisbane the worst, with falls of 2.7 per cent and 2.1 per cent respectively.

Perth and Brisbane were the worst performing capitals over the July quarter with falls in median house prices of 2.7 percent and 2.1 percent.

Despite the decline over the July quarter, Sydney's median house price has remained steady over the past year - down just 0.6 per cent. This is good for stability and confidence, considering prices rose 20 per cent in the 18 months from January 2009 to June 2010.

Sydney has recorded the best outcome among capital cities through the market's recent corrective phase brought on by rising interest rates and house prices that put pressure on affordability in most centres.

So, Sydney isn't getting more affordable any time soon, but the asset bubble that is the property market is slowly deflating. You'd have to say the RBA is doing a bang up ob of managing the economy. Mind you, this slow decline and stagnation in property value is going to motivate the property-owning class to vote out the ALP at the next Federal election but really, even if the Libs were in power these prices were going to fall.

Building Approvals are also not recovering.

On an annual basis, approvals fell 15 per cent in the year to July, following a 15.5 per cent drop in the year to June. Analysts predicted a 12.4 per cent fall in the month.

"These were a little weaker than we expected," said Macquarie economist Ben Dinte. "It comes off a period of consistently falling building approvals so it's really just stabilisation at pretty soft levels rather than an indication of things picking up."

Taken with weak home loan data, building approvals will probably remain flat over the rest of 2011, said Mr Dinte.
The real estate market has shown signs of strain this year, posing risks for employment growth in construction and as well as bank earnings in the months ahead.

Data yesterday showed that new home sales have fallen to a 10-year low in July, according to the Housing Industry Association, dropping 8 per cent in July, following an 8.7 per cent fall in June.
Home prices, on a seasonally adjusted basis, have sunk 2.7 per cent in 2011 so far, according to RP-Data-Rismark, after rapid run-ups since 2008, making the purchase of property less attractive.

That's got to be joy too. Given the volatility of the share markets lately, and the stagnation in property prices, Gold has soared because there's not that many other places that are safe to put your money. The truth might be that there is actually nowhere you can put your money that is 'safe'. Think about just how much bad debts there were in 2008. It dwarfed the GDP of the  world.

Rickenbacker Restoration

Sorry I've not written for a little while I've been mightily distracted by things around me and haven't been the most inspired when it comes to writing stuff down.

My current project of sorts is an attempt to restore a vintage Rickenbacker 4001 bass dating from about 1980. I was originally going to work on assembling a new bass this half year leading up to Christmas but one thing led to another and I decided upon restoring a Ricky instead. Part of it is that I've always wanted a Rickenbacker 4001 bass because all my bass-playing heroes played one - Chris Squire, Paul McCartney, John Entiwstle each spent significant parts of their careers with one - so as long as I can remember I've just wanted one.

Of course in Australia this is a lot more difficult. They not only cost more, and for better parts f the last 3 decades the Australian dollar was at a significant disadvantage to the US dollar, but also the suppliers in Australia have had a devil of a time getting a supply of product from America. This has led to an absolute scarceness of Rickenbacker basses in Australia and fueled resale prices.It was simply rare to see anybody playing with one at all. And they all had collector-bound price tags. If ever there was a hall mark of Australian rock, you could say it was the utter absence of the Rickenbacker bass sound.

It's a nice thing that you can now buy Rickenbackers on-line. Of course being a little idiosyncratic, I picked a second hand 4001 that's been painted silver grey and discovered that most of the parts need replacing. So I've been spending my free time sanding back the paint and trying to get my head around the Rickenbacker circuit diagram. It's been quite a voyage of discovery as I've learnt things about something for which I only had a distant appreciation. In the process I feel like I'm exorcising ghosts and cutting away Karma from the instrument.

I expect this project to take a little while yet so I might be sporadic in my posts here.

History Is Now

The Sum Total of Human Experience For 2000 Years

A little while ago the Economist put up this chart in their Daily Chart section. I've been meaning to blog it but life has a way of getting in the way of blogging. It's a chart of summing up the years lived and the economic output of humanity for the last 2000 years.

SOME people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.

For a moment, I want people to consider what this means. That 28% of human history and experience was lived in the 20th Century tells us that whatever was important leading up to the 20th Century, things that were just as important happened in the 20th century. Add in the 23% from the last 11 years of the 21st Century and basically, the last 111 years account for 51% of the sum total of human experience for the last 2000 years.

If you look at that gentle slope to the left of the 20th century, that includes the Empire phase of the of the Roman Empire minus the first 49 years which fell before 1AD, the various empires in the Middle East and Persia, the multitude of Chinese Dynasties since the latter Han Dynasty, and so on. The cultural output probably correlates with economic output as a proxy, so what this all suggests is that everybody from (just randomly, no relative importance implied) Tacitus and Suetonius and Zhuge Liang and St Thomas Aquinas and Renee Descartes and Johann Sebastian Bach, and Constantine and Napoleon, all fall into 49% to the left of the 20th Century.

In turn, if you had a detailed understanding of the 20th Century and the 11years of this century, you'd actually be on top of 51% (and growing in proportion) of human history since 1AD. This doesn't immediately relegate the classics of any field to the dust bin, but it puts it all into a different perspective.

There was a study done in Germany that pointed to 1970 as the year classical education ended. That is to say, it was the year in which the teaching of classics was no longer the mainstay of education, that increasingly vocational education pushed aside the classical education. If you look at this chart, you can see why. The push of modernity was directly the push of the massive demographic that arose in the 20th century. It is possible more people were lost to war and violence than any other time in history in the 20th Century, and even then it managed to produce so many life-hours and economic output and by extension, cultural output.

In turn, what has happened since 1970 sheds a lot of light on this shift. The move from modernism to post-modernist philosophy was probably an attempt to accommodate this giant shift where overnight the classical teachings that formed the cultural framework became obsolete. Indeed, more humans have read the classics, listened to classical music alone in the last 111years, while things like cinema as a form of expression grew into maturity and needed to be discussed. Pop music of various shades supplanted the 'importance' of classical music and contemporary art keeps on rewriting the frontiers of expression at an ever more frantic pace.

The best book that in fact offers an insight into this might be 'Future Shock' by Alvin Toffler, because what is described in that book is precisely what this chart has shown, and the implications keep reaching out. I don't mean to praise the book, but rereading it today would offer confirmation that indeed the future is not only now, so is history.

One of the important take away messages from the chart is that what we are doing right now, is just as important as what happened before. Your poem, your short story, your film, your song is no less important than anything that preceded it. It's just that nobody has had the time to find your work unless you have become a celebrity. Not being famous and best-selling does not preclude you from being a valued contributor to the human experience. Be encouraged in knowing that what you are doing is meaningful. Go forth and create, secure in the knowledge that what you are doing is just as important as what came before. It's counter-intuitive, but history is in the making, right now as we speak, and you are doing it.

CPI And Cost Of Living Discrepancy

What To Make Of This

Just what good is the CPI - the 'Consumer Price Index - as a measure of inflation when the cost of living surges ahead of the CPI? This is the question in this article here.

Soaring food and rent costs have seen the cost of living outpace inflation over the past year, adding to evidence that households are being squeezed, new figures show.

"Employee" households saw their cost of living shoot up 4.5 per cent in the year to June, driven by soaring increases in the cost for food, alcohol and rent, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said.

The ABS said those rises were "due to increases in mortgage interest charges, fruit, automotive fuel, tobacco, electricity and rents".

The increase surpassed the 3.7 per cent rise in headline inflation over the year to June and comes as rising costs - combined with high debt levels for housing - have been blamed for Australia's slowing economy. The Reserve Bank uses its own underlying gauges of inflation based on data supplied by the ABS when deciding interest rates.

Food costs for employee households increased 5.8 per cent over the year, the ABS said, while alcohol and tobacco prices rose 5.6 per cent in that time. Housing costs, which exclude real estate purchases, increased 5.8 per cent for employee households in the year.

Now, that actually does fall in line with my own experiences of late. That is to say, the day to day things the form the inelastic end of my needs have been creeping up in price, while the things I have a fair bit of elasticity in have been falling in price. So if the CPI is measuring a wider spectrum of goods and it is coming in lower than the cost of living figures, then that indicates there's a bit of deflation going on at the bigger ticket end of the spectrum.

It's hard to say just how much we should be encouraged by the prices of computers today compared to even 5 years ago, but there does seem to be a trend for the bigger ticket items to be sitting cheaper than they did before. It is taking some stupidly obstinate pricing practices in the retail sector to keep the pricing at the same level as before we hit 95cents and above against the US Dollar. Most of anything imported has come down in price.

One imagines it benefits the government coffers greatly for things to be indexed to CPI rather than cost of living; especially things like pension and welfare payments, but that's basically the government making savings in a way that doesn't show up as a cut in the budget. Similarly, the mortgagees benefit greatly because it tempers the degree by which the RBA raises the interest rates. So it's a kind of passive transfer of wealth from the poor to the middle. Though saying that too loudly will get you labelled a crazy Marxist - or a gloating fascist.

 

 

Our Consumerist Ways - Part 2

More On Price Tags

In the market place for anything we have a sticker price and time and occasion willing we haggle and negotiate these things lower. What people don't seem to think too deeply about is what goes into that sticker price. The question that comes up about the retail sector in Australia for example is "why are their prices so expensive?"

The short answer is that they are 'uncompetitive' but this phrase dismisses quite a lot of factors that contribute to it. For instance, retailers in Australian capital cities pay the highest rent for their spaces in any city in the world except maybe New York City. the ones that are situated away from the cities have the tyranny of distance to pay for as well as the cost of having to pay for smaller orders which are more expensive than larger orders.

Indeed, there are so many little things that contribute to the price tag that are not immediately obvious but explains quite a bit. For a business to be around it has to have insurances in place, and all the people involved have to be covered by Work Cover. Everything and everybody that moves in our economy is covered by these insurances - and believe me they can be expensive - but it guarantees that goods are handled safely. We also have standards for certain things like fresh foods such as HACCP which is there to guarantee food safety but also adds cost to ensure this safety. All over our economy there are equivalent measures put in place to protect people and consumers; and it all adds up.

Part of the reason why parts of South East Asia are so inexpensive to do business is because they have none of these kinds of things in place. You can find all sorts of people willing to take extraordinary risks to earn a quid, which is the polar opposite of what we have here. There are captains of industry who think this is a great thing, and that our workers in Australia are less 'competitive' because we are too well protected. I don't necessarily agree with that, but you can see that part of living in a mature-economy part of the world is that risks and costs are spread across everything making everything more expensive.

None of that I would imagine makes it past the brain of the person who complains about the price of things in Australia, but there is one advantage of shopping from a retailer in Australia and that is the fact that when you make your exchange, you have the product in your hot little hand on the spot. The inherent risk of on-line shopping is always going to be the fact that you're sending your money to somebody you will never meet and then you have to wait for postal services to hand you your goods. Sometimes, that turns out to be a little more risky than you thought.

Our Consumerist Ways

Deciphering The Value Of Anything

Years ago I started wondering about the market for anything as to whether prices of anything would be representative for what as really out there. For instance, we had some carp in this pond where I lived in Japan. The carp grew to be about 50 to 60 centimeters length. I told a guy at a pet shop that we had these carp and he said "oh that would be worth 20 to 30 thousand yen." As a kid I thought, wow, that means there was about 750 thousand yen swimming around in our pond. The problem of course was, who would pay such money for these carp? To that extent, you could say the carp at least had a replacement price tag established.

That is to say, if for some reason you needed 25 carp at 50 to 60 centimeter lengths for whatever reason, you could be assured that you would have to fork out that sum of money. It seemed to me as a kid that may be prices of things weren't as obvious as what people said they were, certainly where use value was very unclear. Which is essentially the way the antique markets work and to some extent classic cars or vintage electric guitars. To most people, a piece of antique or classic car or vintage guitar simply doesn't have a lot of use value but they all have exorbitant price tags; there's also a market the corroborates the price tags as well, but the general level of demand in the market place would be much lower.

Conversely, staple foods might carry different branding, but just how much difference is there between Bega cheese and whatever brand that's sitting next to it at the super market? It's literally a matter of taste as they position themselves with tiny price differentiation. Indeed ad men stake their careers on convincing you about brands as if there's a magical connection between a brand and its product's use value.

I write this not to berate ad men, but because lately I've been made to ponder just how much of this linkage is forced upon us in our understanding of our consumerist world. In fact, we're made to interpret the complex system of signs of branding as if it is interchangeable with the use value. Economists talk about the marginal value of things quite a bit but when you apply it to products, you quickly realise how vague and arbitrary our system of values happen to be. That is to say, if you chose to buy product A over B in spite of product A being more expensive, then you're probably going to justify to yourself the difference in priceis exactly the difference in use value.If we're back to talking about cheese, then the difference between cheese A and B is the difference in taste value.

Now, if we start talking about cars, most people justify their choices on alleged performances of vehicles based on printed specs. The specs might be number of cylinders in the engine or size of the engine or even the rated power output of the engine. The point is, people are picking categories and then comparing prices and picking the listed spec that suits their needs. Yet how many buyers really are experts on cars? As with the cheese example, at some point the extra pricing over the competitor can only be justified on a vague issue of taste. In fact, most people are buying cars on the level of "this is an imported German car, it must be better than the Australian made sedan."

Right up and down the market place, people are funneled into thinking like this, which then goes into the structure of prestige and hierarchical thinking in society. And it's not just cars - we do it with housing, education, medical care and insurance, clothing (Ah, fashion!), food, and just about everything we buy. And all the while we rarely get to ask if this marginal value we are spending our money upon is something that we need. Does our cheese need to taste just that little bit better to our palates? Does our car really need to have the better spec even though 99% of the time we will drive at around the speed limit or be stationary at lights?

A good friend of mine always said, if something is twice as much as its competitor, you need to consider if you will enjoy it twice as much as the other thing.

I guess if you can afford the things you want then there's no need to ponder any of these things. I'm not exactly advocating restraint or anything here; just making observations. However, consumerist society being what it is, we're all forced into making these choices every time we need to get something - anything - and in so doing, we do this invisible dance in our heads. Do we like this one, as opposed to that one? Does this say the right thing about me to the world? That's all brand-speak and ad-speak.

When one is honest with oneself, one would come to realise that there are so few things we know about well enough to dig deeper than the advertising guff or the spec sheet. I could tell you a great deal about electric guitars and bass guitars but I doubt I could tell you much about, say, violins. Cars? I'm working off spec sheets. I'm neither a mechanic nor engineer enough to know better. Refrigerators, washing machines and other white goods? I'm guessing based on price tags. I know quite a bit about cameras but how often do I go buy one of those? If you are honest with yourself, I think you would realise that you rely quite a bit on hearsay, opinion and whatever information that is thrust in front of you.

And the funny thing is that we kind of just accept the price tags of these things that inherently come with some ancillary, marginal value attached, and by extension, even if we were vigilant we will always be playing by the rules of the market-assigned value hierarchy. You would have to be a committed rebel or revolutionary to walk away from our social system built up on judgments and prejudices based on advertising and branding.

Anarchy In The UK 2011 Redux

"Don't Know What I Want But I Know How To Get It"?

I'm still scratching my head over the riots in London this week. If ever there was something that made so little sense, well, these riots were it. It seems I'm not alone in thinking that the riots were pretty strange given that for all the ascribed motives the phenomenon of who turned out to be doing the looting and getting caught flew in its face of class prejudice in both directions.

Laura Johnson, a university student accused of looting during the London riots, could be thrown off her degree course.

The 19-year-old, who is studying English and Italian at Exeter University, appeared at Bexleyheath Magistrates' Court on Wednesday charged with theft after police stopped her car and found £5000 ($7860) of electrical items, allegedly looted from a branch of Currys in Charlton, south-east London.

Exeter University has warned Ms Johnson, whose parents are company directors, that she could be thrown off her course if she is convicted.

Which goes to show it was not all like the youths running riot in the last section of 'Harry Brown'.

Anyway, here's the Leviathan blog in The Economist trying to wrap its head around it.

Leviathan has begun collecting explanations for the turmoil across London and other British cities. On Newsnight, Ken Livingstone, once again a mayoral candidate, expressed the view that the riots were linked to young people’s “uncertainty about the future”. He had, the ex-mayor said, been to inner-city colleges where the pupils were worried about how to complete their courses, after proposed changes to the Education Maintenance Allowance.

That sounds suspect. The behaviour and targeting of the looters does not suggest undue concern about lost educational opportunities or public-spending cuts. However competent or otherwise the government has been in its deficit reduction, it has set out to protect students from low-earning families—and indeed, taxed the rich more highly.

The most intriguing explanation for misbehaviour so far was offered to Mark Stone, a Sky News reporter, who recorded looting in Clapham Junction on his phone. "Are you proud of what you're doing?" he asked one young woman who was stealing goods from a smashed-up store. "I’m just getting my taxes back," she replied. As appealing as this may be to Milton Friedman followers (in other circumstances), it is a pretty rubbish excuse for pillaging.

Mr Livingstone spoke amusingly of “clapped out politicians” denouncing criminality—and, in truth, the bromides against the rioters do have a certain ritual quality. One could predict that David Cameron would deploy the word “sickening”—and lo, he did.

Which goes some ways towards putting a circumference around the ball of confusion. Just as people marveled there wasn't any looting in Japan after natural disasters, we're left marveling at a section of England that want to go looting in the absence of any natural disaster.

I think this is going to provide more food for thought in the coming years, as it is clear nobody has understood anything as to how such a volatile crowd as (pardon the pun) critical mass, manifested itself like a perfect storm. Then again, judging from how the stock market has yoyo-ed this week, maybe we can put it down to the stupidity of the mob mind in stampede mode. After all, you would never guess the humble cow could amass the devastation of a stampede in numbers, but they can. Why not humans?