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?

The Rant Of The Day - 10/Aug/2011

Here's A Rant Worth Taking In

Pleiades gave me a heads up on this one tonight. It's Dylan Ratigan doing his nut about how bought Congress is.  It's quite passionate and furious. This is the bit you should at least have a read of when he is asked what Mr. Obama should do:

I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, “People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it. But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy ... I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did, and I’m going to go to the people of the United States get rid of the bought Congress." ... Until a President says that’s the problem and says he’s going to fix it, there is no policy that I can possibly see no matter how brilliant your idea may be or your idea or my idea or her idea or your idea at home, is that idea will not happen as long as there’s a capacity to basically fire a politician who disagrees with me by taking funding away from him. Is that a fair assessment?

Here's something from Huffington talking about the rant.

It's most probably true.

Ratigan has outlined his ideas that are editorialised upon here.

 

News That's Fit To Punt - 06/Aug/2011

Turning Japanese As A Headline

Last week, the Economist ran with the headline 'Turning Japanese'. The gist of it is that the very model for the current behaviour of both the EU and US governments in propping up the economy with stimulus spending while racking up debt is essentially what Japan did after the property bubble.

In the early days of the economic crisis the West’s leaders did a reasonable job of clearing up a mess that was only partly of their making. Now the politicians have become the problem. In both America and Europe, they are exhibiting the sort of behaviour that could turn a downturn into stagnation. The West’s leaders are not willing to make tough choices; and everybody—the markets, the leaders of the emerging world, the banks, even the voters—knows it. It is a mark of how low expectations have sunk that the euro zone’s half-rescue of Greece on July 21st was greeted with relief. As The Economist went to press, it still was not clear on what terms America’s debt limit would be raised, and for how long. Even if the current crises abate or are averted, the real danger persists: that the West’s political system cannot take the difficult decisions needed to recover from a crisis and prosper in the years ahead.

The world has seen this before. Two decades ago, Japan’s economic bubble popped; since then its leaders have procrastinated and postured. The years of political paralysis have done Japan more harm than the economic excesses of the 1980s. Its economy has barely grown and its regional influence has withered. As a proportion of GDP, its gross public debt is the highest in the world, twice America’s and nearly twice Italy’s. If something similar were to happen to its fellow democracies in Europe and America, the consequences would be far larger. No wonder China’s autocrats, flush with cash and an (only partly deserved) reputation for getting things done, feel as if the future is on their side.

That just about sums up the observation and the rest of the article is a discursive chat about government debt and the inability of politicians to find a way to reduce debt.

Except right now might be the moment of truth for all these people who both hold debt and are indebted. To be honest it is a terrible time to be in debt or to be a lender because it all hinges on whether the mountain of debt can be repaid at all. If it can't, then all bets are off.

Here's yesterday's SMH:

Broadly there seem to be two options on the policy menu. One is the deflation option: let market forces take over, let the defaults begin and provide a social safety net.

The other is the inflation option: keep splashing the cash to reduce the debts to zero. This is clearly the favoured Wall Street option. Wall Street's proxies in Washington may duly deliver more stimulus: stimulus the public can ill afford - stimulus that could bring about another Weimar Republic - but stimulus that will diminish the size of the debt.

Which is of course what I've been seeing articles in  Japan about Japan's debt. Now, the politicians can't readily opt for the former option because this would mean everybody's houses will have to lose value and lots of people will be kicked out of their houses and mortgages. There's really no way either side of politics can bite the bullet and survive such an adjustment in the extreme. Neither side of politics could proscribe this as a solution and stay in office. But that might be the devil you know.

The politicians cannot openly opt for the latter because it means it's going to burn down everybody's retirement savings as well as term deposits and cash. People will rightfully leap toward gold and silver - and other precious metals but not commodities as a whole - in that post-apocalyptic kind of scenario where everybody would be running to the hills with their guns or joining the fascists or communists just to feel safety in numbers (which is what happened in the Weimar Republic. It would be like the fall of Rome if it happened across the USA and Europe. That's the devil you don't know; or maybe it's the Deep Blue Sea.

In the twenty years since the Bubble burst in Japan, no politician has come close to proposing a way out of this situation. In fact Heizo Takenaka who was an economics professor before becoming Koizumi's Finance Minister was looking to opt for the latter with the assumption that even if things get terrible in Japan, the people of Japan would still have a high governability. In other words he was willing to burn down savings in order to get out of debt through inflating the currency. I'm just trying to imagine Obama or Merkel or Gillard or Swan having that kind of gumption with their own people. Needless to say, he's not in office now.

Anyway, I think we're only beginning to see the unraveling of the highly distorted financial system that's been built up over a century and a half.

Inflation Figures Not Adding Up For You?


Long time readers here would know that for some time I've been a big sceptic of the CPI. It turns out that the CPI might have been biased upwards in the last few years.

In a post-mortem of the previous cycle of CPI data, which ran from 2000 to 2005, the bureau found that its methodology over time created an ''upward bias'' in the CPI figures. The methodology assumes that consumers keep buying the same basket of goods and services, regardless of their price. And over time, that increases the relative weighting of items whose prices are rising rapidly, and reduces the weighting of those whose prices are falling or relatively stable.

Over time, the basket of goods and services that comprises the CPI becomes increasingly unrepresentative of the real world of consumer purchasing, because it assumes that consumers pay no heed to price signals. Without correct weightings for each of the 90 categories in its basket, the CPI figures are inaccurate, and so are their derivatives, such as measures of underlying inflation.

This is serious. There is a flaw in the inflation data that we should have known about, but didn't. And it almost cost us dearly.

The bureau's post-mortem estimated that between 2000 and 2005, this upward bias had overstated the level of inflation by a cumulative 1.2 percentage points. In the year to June 2005 alone, inflation was overstated by 0.4 percentage points. That was the fifth and final year of the cycle. Inflation was reported as 2.5 per cent, but when the bureau surveyed what households were actually buying it found the true inflation rate was 2.1 per cent.

All f this is to say that one can't be certain about inflation based on one's own life circumstance. My own view is that regionally speaking, inflation has run higher in Sydney than elsewhere in NSW and if anything the raise in interest rates might be appropriate for Sydney but of course it can't be done like that. Even that is by the by. The important message seems to be that the interest rates are actually too high given the CPI the RBA has been using has had an upward bias, and so interest rates should be lower.

I would like to add into the mix that unemployment figures are not what they used to be. In the old days they'd simply count up the people on the dole. These days they work hard to push and nudge and coax and intimidate and irritate people off the dole queue so there are quite a number of people who are part-time employed with 1-4 hours of work a week but are not considered unemployed. Yet if unemployment figures are to be believed, we're close to maximum employment. So if the RBA is working off "garbage in" figures like that,  no wonder there are people who think the interest rates they are putting up are "garbage out".

It is quite reasonable to argue the interest rates are in fact already too high for the RBA's own stated purpose. Unless of course they want people to voluntarily de-leverage and are concocting an environment for that to happen.

 

Space Battleship Yamato

In Live Action!

I watch a lot of bad films. I watch a lot of good films. So I'm comfortable in saying good and bad don't seem to be a yardstick by which I watch films. When I do little crits here, I'm often the least interested in what is good or bad about a film, but what's interesting about it. Sometimes it's hard to pin down what is interesting about any film, but clearly they are the worst films.This isn't in that category. It's a bad film, but there are quite a number of interesting things to talk about.

'Space Battleship Yamato' was the big release last year in Japan. It stars Takuya Kimura as Susumu Kodai, one of the iconic characters from manga in the 1970s. It's a little like 36years after the event, Disney comes out with a live action 'Toy Story'. I've not been able to get a hold of this picture for a while but I finally procured one down in Chinatown - a pirate release that's been transferred at the wrong aspect ratio - and had a viewing. I have to say, I sat and watched uncomfortably for the duration.

What's Good About It

The best thing about it is that the Japanese film industry can make this kind of action movie with special effects with spaceships zooming around doing dogfights. It's 35years too late compared to 'Star Wars' but it finally got there. The computer generated Yamato looks a bit chintzy, but so did the Yamato in this movie. The fire fight looks fast and furious to the point of sensory overload and the explosions are big. It goes so fast it's hard to tell what's going on, but it goes.

What's Bad About It

Directing. Acting. Script. It's terrible. There's a side of me that says I'd be embarrassed to be associated with this material, but there's also a side that feels it would have liked to have directed it, just so it made some kind of sense, and had a bit more tension.

Also, it's like a bad Star Trek movie as opposed to a good one.

What's Interesting About It

Back in the summer of 1977, a film opened in Japan that changed the industry forever. It wasn't Star Wars, it was the anime movie 'Space Battleship Yamato' which later got turned into a  TV series and then exported to the US as 'Star Blazers'. The thing about that 1977 movie was that it ignited the anime market just as Star Wars ignited the cinema market and rewrote the rules of the respective cinema. Just as there would be no modern blockbuster movie without Star Wars, the Japanese anime movie would not exist without the massive success of the original 1977anime version.

What possessed the rights owners that a live action version would be a good idea, I will never know. This is a terrible rendition of the story.

All the same, it's worth pondering what the heck this thing is all about and it comes down to two things. One is the reconstruction of the World War II text, and the other is trying to overcome World War II as it stood. The most interesting thing about the Space Battleship Yamato text is how it mirrors 'Star Wars', both of which involve dogfights of spaceships. I always felt the kernel of the Death Star traces back to the US encounters with the battleships Musashi and Yamato which were the 2 largest battleships ever built. The awe-filled line "Look at the size of the thing." is an echo of that experience. And the method by which the US sunk the two ships, but pinpoint air raids is relfected in the demise of not one but two Death Stars across the first Star Wars series.

By the same token, the battleship Yamato is brought back to life as a space-faring battlestar to take on the ever-encroaching enemy who have bombed the crap out of Earth. Yamato's mission is the final mission, just as the last mission towards Okinawa for the real battleship Yamato was the final operation of the Imperial Japanese Navy Grand Fleet. The mythology of both stem from the titanic moment in World War II. It's not surprising that 'Star Wars' appeared two yars after the end of the socially damaging Vietnam War, and 'Space Battleship Yamato' appeared a generation after the end of World War II to rewrite the myth.

Which raises the question, what is the meaning of the live action movie appearing today?

One suspects that the long economic doldrums has weighed on the cultural psyche of Japan to the point that the legend of Yamato had to be summoned once more to give a mythic story about rebirth and hope. It's strange but at the same time also very understandable and sad. If the newer three films of 'Star Wars' indicate to us that fascism's return is part of an endless cycle, then this new installment of Yamato seems to tell us the people must endure the cycle of fascism over and over and over again. It's amazing how the two mythoologies dovetail. George Lucas needs to talk to Leiji Matsumoto.

Self Sacrifice And The Cycle of Violence

The suicide missions of Kamikaze and the final mission of the original Yamato are enshrined as founding myths for post-War Japan. There's always been this tenor of they died for their country - an the lesson is that you boys and girls have to behave. No wonder Gen-X in Japan grew up to be irresponsible and largely uninterested in history. If you had to take it seriously you'd probably want to go shoot yourself - for your country - and be done with it.

Leiji Matsumoto who created the series, is largely antipathic to such formulations. So it is a little disappointing to see the final part of the film involves Kodai and the ship going on a suicide run. Matsumoto's own work is filled with long discourses on the need to survive and live on through conflict. The self-sacrificial hero who does a kamikaze mission isn't exactly high on Matsumoto's own hero list; and I think this is very healthy. It's a shame this version had to go back to the Kamikaze myth.

Also, it's worth mentioning the bad guy in the series 'Dessler' is actually 'Death-ler' as in, 'Death' and 'Hitler' rolled into one. Matsumoto was clearly down on fascism, even though his work is fetishistic about military equipment. It's a weird contradiction, but I guess if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.

Lord of The Fliers

One of the ur-texts in the developing the original Space Battleship Yamato series was 'Lord of the Flies', where children are left to their own devices and fall to bits. Why that might have been an inspiration for the original producer Nishizaki is a bit of a mystery but there's something of a world missing adults, running as a theme in the film.

In a sense the film is an allegory of post-war Japan that has had to find a way to be strong in spite of the old ways passing and dying out. The clearly patriarchal Captain Okita is dying and with him will go all the old traditions, reeking of the wet navy. The crew of the ship are all energetic and switched on but every single one of them seems like they are emotional retards. Which reminds me that Douglas MacArthur famously described the Japanese as having a mental age of seven. In this instance there is some emotional truth to the general's observation.

The renewed space battleship Yamato heads off into deep space with a half-assed plan to go to where the message came from, with a crew of emotional retards, led by a dying captain. When they get there and find what they are looking for isn't what they expected, they begin to quibble. It's the moment you get the glimpse of the 'Lord of the Flies' ur-text. Sill, this being a Japanese text, it doesn't turn into boar's heads on sticks; everybody cooperates and the good die in self-sacrificing acts. They really need to stop doing that in Japanese movies.

The West As A Duality

When the Space Battleship Yamato arrives at the destination in the Large Magellanic cloud, they find that the enemy Gamilas are from the same world as the people who sent the capsule to help them. Clearly the destination Iskandar (or 'Alexander the Great in Hindi') is a metaphor for the West. Even the name of Magellan and the great age of sailing is invoked in the names and of course the bad guy 'Dessler/Death-Hitler' hails from the same place as where the cure will come.

It is true, the Japanese got both modern military methods and medicine from the Germans.

I often wonder how the Space Battleship Yamato thing plays out in Germany. They must be perplexed by the love and disappointment from Japan.

Radio Activity Remover

The most sad angle in the story might b the reason for the ultimate journey, the recovery of a radiation cleaning device. In the beginning they talk about 14 sieverts of radiation and it's poignant that at the time they made the film, such units were largely academic to the wider audience. Little would they know that the unit sieverts would become a daily word in the newspaper in the wake of the Fukushima plant melting down.

The radiation removal technology is a kind of wish-machine unique to science fiction so you take it with the grain of salt, and clearly the concern about radiation crept into the initial comic book out of the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is oddly ironic then that people might really want to make a trip out to Iskandar now that there is a major radiation problem in Fukushima. In that sense, the film achieves a kind of weird prescience about the problems that unfolded after the Tsunami of 11th March 2011. I guess it was also prescient about how government authority structures are prone to lying to its own populace.

They fluked a kind of relevance, but it is oddly more relevant today than when it was released summer last year.

Yes Have A New Album Out

Fly From Here

Yes have a new album out for the first time in ten true summers. I spent the afternoon listening to it because it arrived from Amazon today and I have to report it's quite a number. Old habits die hard. Still, this may be the first time I'm blogging about a new Yes album.

What's Good About It

As usual with all Yes album, it's not short of good playing good arrangements and good production. The over all sound is more organic and natural compared with some of their more modernistic recordings. Gone are the angular reverbs and compressors, with dynamically enhanced imaging. The mix on the album sounds more in line with 'The Ladder' and the 1970s recordings in the sense that the effects take a back seat to the playing.

The same sounds are back, only, brought up to our digital context. The bass still dominates the bottom end, the guitars sound like Steve Howe's tones, the keyboards fill out the mix until they step forward for a lead, and the vocals are dense and lush.

What's Bad About It

I love Yes, but I have to be honest. The guys are getting old so the playing is lacking in attack and bite. It's prog rock but these guys sound pretty mellow. They were sounding pretty mellow on 'Magnification', but I put that down to playing with an orchestra. On this album, you feel the guys are that much older - wiser, yes - but generally less energetic.

It's a minor quibble, because the album offers plenty of pulse-quickening moments, but when compared to what this bunch did on 'Drama', you feel the distance of time.

What's interesting About It

As usual they've had a lineup change and for the second time they're going without Jon Anderson. Jon Anderson's not been well recently - not surprising for a man of his age - and so Yes have been touring with a stand-in Benoit David, who they have now made a permanent member. He sounds more like Trevor Horn than Jon Anderson in the lower register, and when he goes high, he sounds like David Surkamp from Pavlov's Dog.

Sonically, he's an interesting addition, and what he provides is a Yes that harks back to 'Drama'. 'Drama' of course was the other album without Jon Anderson, and probably not coincidentally, the Keyboard chair is filled with Geoff Downes from that album, while the producing chores went to Trevor Horn.

The overall sound of the album is surprisingly un-Horn-like. There are no angular stabs or disorienting sonic effects. There are moments that do hark back to the austere majesty of 'Drama' but this album is more lush. I'm surprised at the restraint by Trevor Horn but that too suggests he too has grown old. It's a little sad. The pic inside of the band is fearless and also a tad depressing.

Still, I love the playing. The playing is the thing - as always - on a Yes album, and there's plenty to take in. Chris Squire and Alan White are still rock solid. One of the best rhythm sections in rock lives on. Steve Howe is still the amazing Steve Howe of old, in good many sections. Geoff Downes is a fine keyboard player and Benoit David adds something different to Jon Anderson. So far, I like it more than 'Magnification'. It may even be as good as 'The Ladder'. I actually hope these guys have a couple more albums in them, but I might be being greedy there.

The Roger Dean artwork makes a welcome return. It's always nice to have a new addition to the growing narrative of what happened to the planet from Fragile. These days the landscape seems more green and inviting while the Yes logo itself has taken on snake scales like the scales on the serpent in 'Relayer'. the growing conceptual continuity of Roger Dean's images linked with Yes music is always fascinating. I wish I could get this album as a gate-fold LP. Alas, there hasn't been one of those since 'Yesshows'.

Self Promotion

Hey, You Can Buy My Stuff From Amazon Now!

I've got my songs up on Amazon now. You can purchase mp3 files for download, here.

I'm slowly working up to a proper CD release, but for the moment I'm posting up songs that may be (and hopefully) the wider public beyond on-line musos might be interested in.

Songs I've put up are mostly the most naughty ones I could find from my own catalogue, just to see if Amazon has a good taste policy - and they don't seem to have one that stops my music from being available to the general public, so there you go. Yes, 'Dungeon Dad' and 'Pony the Orangutan' and 'Pasta Sauce Man' and 'Astronaughty' are all available for your purchasing pleasure!

So hop right along to the link above and start buying! :)

Murdoch-Watching

Eminently Despicable

The first time I had to consider what it might be like to work for Rupert Murdoch was when I was in high school. My parents made friends with somebody who worked in newspapers for years and he was so kind as to invite our family over for lunch and regaled some interesting stories about the time he was a strapping young journalist and a young Rupert Murdoch turned up as the owner of the paper. According to the old journalist, Rupert was certain there was only the three 'esses' that could sell newspapers and they were Sex, Scandal and Sensation. When you think about it, one leads to the other and it's exactly the kind of bundle that Rupert Murdoch's muck-raking rags have long made an institution thereof. It seemed like a very cut-and-dry proposition, even for a kid like me - if a little vulgar. But you could see that that could be a style that worked with a vulgar public of which we could all count upon.

The second time I seriously had to consider Rupert Murdoch's style in the mid-90s when I popped over to Hong Kong for a short contract working for Star TV Japan. That too was an interesting business because once you're inside the Murdoch machine, you really do feel the cut-throat corporate culture of Murdoch's companies, right up against your nose. At the time it was a little contentious because I might have stayed on had they offered the contract with the terms I wanted, but at that point in history they were making a point of not handing out ex-pat deals, and so our negotiations hit the rocks pretty quickly. I was told they would play hardball, and I figured there was no point being polite about it, so in the end I flew back.

The third time I came across the Murdoch corporate culture was when I was working on a music project with an elaborate proposal and a business plan which ended up being presented to people in Lachlan Murdoch's orbit. It went nowhere as more and people attempted to pee in the same pot. Again, we came up against some hard-ball style negotiations and this time I sat back and watched as my colleagues wilted under the withering pressure. And I recognised the style from when I dealt with Star TV Japan.

All this is to say that even if you're just drifting along in the world, you can run into a lot of Murdoch enterprises and they're invariably crass, vulgar and promote a kind of idiotic dualism which makes you wonder if they are twisted Manicheans. What's really amazing is that nobody seems to tell Rupert how stupid this is and how he and his press organs are contributing the significant dumbing down of the public. But even if you could mention it, it would appear he would hardly listen, after all why should a man as powerful like Rupert Murdoch suffer such contrary opinions? What's infuriating is that because his papers spread fear and ignorance like black rats bringing the Bubonic plague, it finds converts everywhere, writing in ill-informed  comments on newspaper sites, arguing arcane right-wing paranoia shit.

Anyway, here's something in 'The Economist' which is interesting in the light of the recent developments.

One of the distinguishing features of News Corporation is aggression. The firm combines the heft of a big company with the scrappiness of a start-up. Even more than at other media firms, executives sometimes seem inspired by Machiavelli—or Richard III. Competitors are to be crushed. Executives in other companies that take an opposite view on strategic questions are idiots. In 2009 the usually cerebral James Murdoch launched a scathing attack on the BBC, whose size and zeal for expansion into new areas he described as “chilling”.

This take-no-prisoners approach makes the company extremely bold. It was News Corporation that broached the possibility of releasing films early on pay-television—a move that still enrages cinema owners. Together with the Financial Times (part-owner of this newspaper) it has led the charge to demand money for newspapers on the web. In America the firm drives a particularly hard bargain over payments from cable and satellite carriers for its broadcast network. BSkyB is a similarly brutal negotiator.

Unfortunately, this attitude earns the company enemies as well as revenues. Over the years News Corporation has offended governments and regulators. Its aggression and sheer size terrify rival media firms. In October 2010 the BBC and the owners of the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian newspapers signed a letter opposing its bid to take complete control of BSkyB, in which it now has a 39% stake. Part of the reason News Corporation has handled the phone-hacking crisis so badly is that it tends to view hostile reporting as motivated by rivalry.

As the company braces for further embarrassment and disruption, it will also have to work out a future without BSkyB. Public and political opinion have become so hostile that the government may refuse to sign off on any attempt to renew the bid, even at the risk of a judicial review. This makes the transition News Corporation wants to make to a new, eventually post-Rupert world a lot harder.

You'd hate to be a News Corporation shareholder right now. The other part of the business, the newspapers themselves might be in for some stick too.

Frankly, Murdoch's political leverage has been spent. The era of media moguls bullying politicians is finished. It went down the plughole from the moment the Milly Dowler story broke and it has diminished further with each passing day. News Corp's leverage will be completely shot in the US if it is discovered its employees or agents have hacked the phones of the families of September 11 victims. The Justice Department has been asked by members of Congress to investigate that issue.

If the capacity to hold politicians to ransom is critically injured, what is the point of continuing to own newspapers that do not return a profit? That is the question which in the days and weeks ahead will open up some deep divisions in the upper reaches of the News Corp estate.

There are other possible violations to be weighed. If a subsidiary in London made illegal payments to police officers, that is a breach of US law.

This story is unravelling so fast that it's impossible to predict all the ramifications. Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who has done so much to crack open this scandal, says Murdoch has lost control of the outcome. It now has a life of its own and to a very large extent markets, not oligarchs, will determine what happens.

What has risen so quickly to the surface is the deep dislike and resentment of Murdoch on the part of the political establishment. For years they had to fawn all over him, now they're pleased as Punch to be kicking him all the way down.

We can well imagine there would be much joy amongst the ranks of politicians. Somebody was describing somewhere - I can't find it now - that the British Parliament resembled a populace freed from tyranny once they realised they all hated the tyrant.

Paul Keating Says...

This one came in from Pleiades. It's a transcript of an interview with Paul Keating from Lateline on the 14th. It has several interesting portions on it covering Julia Gillard and the Carbon Pricing reforms, but while we're on the topic of Murdoch, he had this to say:

PAUL KEATING: Well there's one thing that's clear for sure comes out of this and that is self-regulation by the media is a joke. A joke. You know, I notice tonight John Hartigan talking about the Press Council of Australia. I mean, people shouldn't have a right to appeal about invasions of their privacy to some body funded by newspapers; they should have a right at law.

What we need, what we seriously need, which has been now recommended by the Commonwealth Law Reform Commission, the Victorian Law Reform Commission and the New South Wales Law Reform Commission is a separate right-of-action in privacy, a separate tort.

So in other words, you don't have a right of appeal to some body, you have a right to action, you have a right to the law. In the end, the only regulator of this bad behaviour is the law. And, this episode in Britain ...

TONY JONES: Well there's certainly no right to privacy in the law in Australia at this time. And in actual fact, at a broader level, it's sometimes said that privacy will be one of the great issues of our time, because of the internet, because of Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc. But it doesn't seem that there's any chance at the moment you're going to get a consensus on this. Could the Murdoch issue reflect into this debate in Australia?

PAUL KEATING: Well, I mean, Minister Conroy's now sitting on the Commonwealth Law Reform Commission report. Very reasonable recommendations. It basically says if you had a reasonable right to privacy and there are no public issues involved and they are infringed, you have a right of action at law.

For instance, those people in London who News International or the News of the World was asking the police to finger by their movements off their mobile telephone, those people had a reasonable right to believe that their free movement through London was their own affair, that they weren't to be tracked by the police via the telephone system for the benefit of a newspaper.

TONY JONES: But do you believe this sort of thing only happens in Britain? I mean, could it also have happened in Australia?

PAUL KEATING: It could have happened in Australia. In fact, your chief executive officer made the very same point in a speech a year or so ago. He - I brought the quotation in, which is a point.

He said that - Mark Scott, "With digital surveillance, location tracking and genetic tracing becoming commonplace, there's a very firm case for the law to allow people to protect their privacy." Correct. Correct.

TONY JONES: Let's talk about the politics of this with the time we've got left. Do you think Murdoch's News Limited is effectively at war with the Gillard Government?

PAUL KEATING: I think it's beyond doubt. I mean, when the Daily Telegraph yesterday is saying, "Let's have a national election," why do we need a national election? We have an operating - a clear operating majority in the House of Representatives, it's a stable majority, the business of the Government is reasonable business, that is the controversial matter is putting a price on carbon.

There is a consensus, it seems, in both Houses of Parliament for it. Why should there be an early election, other than the editors of that newspaper believing that were there to be an early election, the existing government would be defeated.

So this is why ministers are saying News Corporation is after - or News Limited is after regime change. You know, I think, you know, how can you read it any other way?

So there you have it. In a nutshell, our privacy could be law, but Stephen Conroy is just sitting on the report not doing anything. I'm sure Stephen Conroy's ears were stinging when he got a wind of that one. Anyway, it's also quaint to note that Paul Keating knows exactly what's going on over at News Corporation - they're after a 'regime change'. He always had a way with words.

Blast From The Past - 12/Jul/2011

This Is Serious, Mum

When I was eight, I was given this album for a present.

It's a Russian dude by the name of Leonid Kogan playing Tchaikovsky's famous Opus 35 Violin Concerto in D. I randomly came across the page in Amazon the other week, and it set my mind racing, at first wondering if I still owned that LP - I did! - and whether I could get a CD of it. To the best of my knowledge, I think this performance is now re-packaged in this CD here.

It arrived today, and I skipped the piano concerto bit and went straight to the violin concerto, and sure enough it was the recording I thought it was. They even had the photo from the LP in the inner liner notes.

I'm not big on romantic period composers, but this record is an exception because of my own sentimental attachment. I don't know much about Leonid Kogan except that he played a violin that was strung with steel strings right across, and that his technique has been likened to 'heavy metal of violinists', which I think it means, he had prodigious technique which he liked to flaunt. Certainly a fresh listen to this recording revealed that he had exquisite tone out of his 1729 violin, and played with amazing gusto. I have a Izthak Perlman version somewhere which is also played aggressively, but Kogan in this version supplies plenty of pyrotechnics. I don't know how important a recording it is in the annals of classical recording buffs - I imagine it doesn't rate that highly, but having revisited it after all these years, I'm very happy I managed to track it down.

Anti Everything, Don't You Mean?

The other album I want to share with you today is this one, 'We Are The League' by the Anti-Nowhere League.

I was introduced to  recordings by the Anti-Nowhere League by a girl who was really into obscure crazy punk bands from the UK. It was white-bread milk-and-cookies rebellion, but it was rebellion all the same. Even back in the day it was obvious Punk was pretty silly in parts, and the Anti-Nowhere League certainly inhabited the silliest areas of Punk. Mind you, make no mistake, these guys were superlative bad-taste punk players. Their records are brimming with dissident energy and anti-social rants.

I always liked their song 'So What' because it lyrically echoed King Crimson's 'I Talk To The Wind' while the actual sound was more or less Sex Pistols on 'roid rage.

Well I've been to Hastings
And I've been to Brighton
I've been to Eastbourne too
So what, so what

Well I've been here
And I've been there
And I've been every fucking where
So what, so what

So what, so what you boring little cunt
Well who cares, who cares what you do
Who cares, who cares about you
You, you, you

Well I've sucked sweets
And I've sucked rock
And I've even sucked an old man's cock
So what, so what

Well I've fucked a sheep
And I've fucked a goat
I've had my cock right down its throat
So what, so what
So what, so what you boring little cunt
Well who cares, who cares what you do
Who cares, who cares about you
You, you, you, you

Well I've drunk that
And I've drunk this
And I've spewed up on a pint of piss
So what, so what

And I've had scag
I've had speed
I've jacked up until I bleed
So what, so what
So what, so what you boring little cunt
Well who cares, who cares what you do
Who cares, who cares about you
You, you, you, you

Well I've had crabs
And I've had lice
And I've had the pox and that ain't nice
So what, so what

Well I've fucked this
And I've fucked that
And I've even fucked a schoolgirl's crack
So what, so what
So what, so what you boring little cunt
Who cares, who cares about you
Who cares, who cares about you
You, you, you, you....

I mean, how can you turn away from such honest, forthright, brutally frank, ugly sentiments? For years I would snigger through listening to Miles Davis' track 'So What' off 'Kind of Blue' because the title reminded me of this song.

It took me a long while to track down this album too, but in the end I relied on Amazon's third party seller to send me this number. I cherish it like I cherish my other CD by the Anti-Nowhere League, 'Kings & Queens of Rock'n'Roll'.

Look, I'm probably the only guy to recommend both Leonid Kogan and the Anti-Nowhere League in the same entry, but that doesn't mean I'm completely without taste.

Carbon Price Banter

Finally Something In Place

We know the story: Kevin Rudd swept to power in 2007 with the promise of an ETS. He decided to negotiate one with the Coalition, finding common cause with his counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, which led to the demise of both men as leaders. Julia Gillard became Prime Minister having buried both the ETs and Kevin Rudd, went to the polls promising not to price carbon. Tony Abbott did worse, he supported the ETS, then in the expediency of his leadership challenge opposed it and buried Malcolm Turnbull. Both went to the polls and the electorate were so disenchanted, it resulted in the hung parliament. So off they went talking to the cross bench independents and the lonce Greens MP who negotiated the carbon price back on to the agenda, - which made Julia Gillard a 'liar'  but that was the price of keeping office. Tony Abbott's been running around siding with the loonies and climate change deniers drumming up a fear campaign, while the Greens and independents negotiated with the ALP to get this legislation.

And that's how we got the second-best policy according to Petr Hartcher.

For Gillard, carbon pricing is the reform she didn't want. She proposed the vacuous "citizen's assembly" as a way of killing carbon pricing. She has negotiated this tax not because she believes in it but because it was the price of bringing the Greens and independents together in support of her minority government.
Brown decided to block Rudd's emissions trading scheme in the Senate to hold out for a more ambitious one, then bewailed the government's failure to reform carbon pricing. He is now supporting Gillard's second-best scheme in an effort to salvage something from nothing.

And Abbott once urged the opposition to support the Rudd scheme in the interests of expediency, and then, as leader, opposed it in the same cause.

Even so, industry leaders thought he should have negotiated the terms of the carbon tax with Gillard. This would have reduced the power of the Greens and made it more business friendly. Instead, he pursued his populist oppositionism and left Gillard to deal with the Greens.

And there's the crux of the biscuit for the industrial lobbies that opposed the carbon tax along with Tony Abbott this time through. In a game of double or nothing, they doubled down on the side of not having any kind of policy on carbon in this country but badly misread the prevailing winds. If Julia Gillard's only reason for being PM was that she negotiated *something* with the independents and Greens, then they should have been awake to the probability that this time, the thing was going through. The greater irony is of course is that had the last one gone through, it might have been a bit better for the industry lobbies.They really misread the public mood, which has resulted in this legislation.

The funny thing is that this was on the cards ever since the hung Parliament election last year and when Julia Gillard announced she would price carbon as a result of her deals. It's amazing such a poliy got through in a hung Parliament, but maybe sometimes that is what it takes to get change.

Phil Coorey writes the Greens had to compromise greatly too.

The Greens complained last time abut the lack of restrictions on polluters to stop them buying permits overseas, enabling them to keep polluting at home. This scheme has restrictions but they do little more than pay lip service to the concern.

The CPRS was to start with a fixed price of $10 for a year before turning into an emissions trading scheme with an estimated starting price of $26. This scheme will start as a fixed price of $23, indexed upwards for three years, and has a floor. The government claims it will be a net lower carbon price over the first three years.

Today, the already febrile nature of federal politics will increase to that of an election campaign, with Gillard and Abbott locked in a fight to the death. The Greens and the government can ill-afford to bicker.

Either way, the Greens' policy purity of two years ago has gone. Like Labor, the minor party could not afford to fail to reach a deal this time. It's called compromise.
Welcome to political reality.

It seems in the final wash up, the Greens didn't come close to getting everything they wanted, and that perhaps this is a good thing for industrial Australia. After the last time through, it raised serious questions as to what on earth the Greens were doing in parliament if they couldn't get some kind of carbon trading scheme up and running. So it seems this round of negotiations was indeed a last ditch effort to salvage something from a real political opportunity with their names carved in to it. It was do or die for the Greens as much as the ALP.

Why Are You In Politics, Tony?

Which brings me to Mr. Abbott, who made a laughable speech after the Prime Minister made her speech. He said taxation was bad. I laughed out loud because if taxation per se was bad, then the Liberal Governments he was part of did a lot of bad things - like introduce the GST. There is no way taxation in of itself is 'bad' - it depends on the tax policy and this why policies get debated (like, d'uh Tony). So it seems it's quite appropriate to point out that had Mr.Abbott done some negotiating instead of fear-mongering in the public arena, they might have gotten something that better suited their perceived constituency of big business.

I guess he decided it was better to play the political game than to wrestle policy - which he already seems to choose every time - but just this once it seems he missed an opportunity to do something worthwhile and participate in a historic decision. Instead he's going to go down as the clown who went jumping around playing politics in the polls while an important legislation worked through Parliament with nary an input from his party.

The polls might suggest he's way ahead of Julia Gillard right now, but once this thing goes through, he's going to look weak and powerless for not being able to stop it. All this talk of repealing it is not going to help his cause at the next election when the pricing will already be in place. So really, what the hell are you doing in politics, Mr. Abbott?

Dumb And Dumber

Men Who Fake Feminism

There's something really unedifying about two blokes arguing hammer and tongs about feminism. I don't know about you, but it's irksome in the same way as say, two atheists arguing about the interpretation of passages in the bible. In both cases, the participants are endowed with the wrong set of tools that disqualifies them from having any kind of credibility in the field. If you're a guy, having a penis sort of disqualifies you from having too much moral authority on the topic expect to say, "yeah, what she said." And in the instance of the atheists, having reason but no faith, is the wrong equipment with which to wrap one self around the arcane illogicality and irrationality of religion.

In that light I bring you today's internet biffo between Bob Ellis and John Birmingham. It's really obtuse and idiotic, but I guess Bob Ellis kicked off the stupidities first:

Why are deeds long common at office Christmas parties used by women to ruin good men's careers? Why are left-wing harassers smashed, and right-wing harassers like Bill O'Reilly unharmed by it?

The Strauss-Kahn Moment has arrived, and the question must be asked: has wowser-feminism gone too far?

For, if we look back a bit, we will see I think that the Socialist Oscar Wilde, accused of pederasty, rightly, wrote no more plays, and the pro-Communist Charles Chaplin, accused of engendering a bastard child, wrongly, made only three more films in 36 years; and the Jewish ex-Communist Roman Polanski, accused of pederasty, correctly, made no more Hollywood films, and despite his evident genius was blocked, harassed and menaced for 35 years and faces jail in his 80s.

You wonder if this Bob has lost the plot. What has feminism got to do with the downfall of Dominic Strauss-Kahn, one can only guess at. Yes there's been a lot of moralism disguised as feminism, but I don't think any sane person is going to pin DSK's woes upon the general acceptance of feminist ideas. Then you get John Birmingham lambasting Bob Ellis:

What you wrote yesterday wasn't just any old bullshit. It was dangerous, hurtful bullshit of the worst kind. It didn't set women's rights back by years or decades or even five lousy minutes, because these days women don't hold their rights at the whim of fools who think assault, harassment and betrayal are no big deal. Women are stronger than that and we are all better for it.

But mate, you set back the cause for the rest us; for every bloke who ever decided to keep his pants on, and his hands to himself; for every bloke who took seriously the admonition that it wasn't all about him and his one-eyed little friend. That crap you filed yesterday, sure, it insulted women. But it insulted men on a much deeper level. It implied we can never change, we can never get better. And hell, maybe, as a gender, we can't. But as individuals we can and do every day. And the first step is not making excuses for our bad behaviour or shifting the blame onto women as a whole, or on to some ill-defined political construct.

The moral indignation is a bit on the nose. I always found it highly suspicious when guys back in the 1980s would take up the cause of feminism to such an extent you'd wonder if they'd forgotten that they were blokes and as blokes still had those entitlements, but were willing to overlook that and to relentlessly argue on behalf of women - to impress women. I figured it was a brilliant new tactic to get laid. I don't know if it worked but there were sure as heck a lot of guys wanting to argue about 'The Female Eunuch'. I guess I was a little too rigid (and therefore an unreconstructed male chauvinist pig, penis-like - read, "dickhead")  that I found those guys to be a new variety of hypocrites running around being moralistic.

To that degree, I sort of get Bob Ellis - I don't agree with him, but I can extend the charity of understanding what he's trying to say. And I get that Birmingham thinks this is bad and understand why one might morally  (self-)righteously take that position. But I think John Birmingham is being incredibly uncharitable when he says Ellis' entire point is to justify criminal acts such as sexual assault and rape. It's way overstating what can be inferred about Bob Ellis from what he has written in that entry.

What's really surprising is the gusto with which people are lining up to kick Bob Ellis for being wrong-headed. it's like there's been an outbreak of sanctimonious feminism-sympathy by a bunch of guys. For my part, I intensely dislike moralist critiques in general. If you've been any reader of this blog and the ones before it, you'll know I squirm in discomfort at moralists thumping on their tubs. Where there's a moralist, my experience tells me there's always the foul stench of hypocrisy, and by my own nature I can abide hypocrisy less than failure to adhere to strict moral codes. Laws are one thing, they must be obeyed as Socrates noted;  but moral codes as dictated by the clergy or the general discourse of feminism are highly suspect things, for they invariably invoke an 'ought' out of a described state of 'is'. And any ideology is a catalogue of 'oughts' construed out of what they see in the way the world 'is'. There is no categorical imperative. Kant's simply wrong.

The last time I looked at this direction, feminist moralists were lining up to hang French culture in its entirety as an extension of the Dominic Strauss-Kahn case. I think Bob Ellis did a terrible job of writing about it, but it is a line of discourse out there. And maybe labeling it 'wowser feminism' does get you into the dog house of intellectuals in this country, it's still worth asking the question all the same. Similarly, John Birmingham is right that we cannot condone rape and sexual assault no matter how culturally normative it once looked - but who is really arguing against that? Put on the spot, Bob wouldn't say that rape and sexual assaults are good things or acceptable to society. By deliberately ignoring the ramification of such moralist argumentation, Birmingham is also deliberately underplaying that there might be a problem in burying a person's accomplishments for their peccadilloes. When Ellis asks if he is willing to bury Kennedy's legacy in exchange for Kennedy's moral failings, Birmingham says:

Er, I think you'll find JFK was president. A large part of his voter appeal? A fresh clean image. A war hero and family man with a beautiful, glamourous wife.
To bad he was banging the actress.

But it wouldn't be for me to say whether that disqualified him from office. (My personal opinion? 'Meh'). That'd be the choice of voters in November 1960. It wasn't one they were offered, because they had no information about his future sexual trangressions. Just as they had no information about Nixon's future crimes.
Do you really think it's helping? All this time you spend in the TARDIS?

In other words, he's deliberately not seeing the point of the hypothetical exchange. Nor shall he make commitments:

Ellis: No, no, do YOU think he should have been elected President? He was a serial harasser, a grinning adulterer, he knowingly transmitted non-specific urethritis to unsuspecting film stars, he availed himself of the mentally unstable Marilyn Monroe and sped her suicide...
Just do it, Birmingham.
Man up.

Birmingham: t's a silly question, Bob. An undergrad question. You're asking would I make him President knowing now what I know about him. What you need to ask is 'would JB vote for him knowing 'was a serial harasser, a grinning adulterer, he knowingly transmitted non-specific urethritis to unsuspecting film stars, he availed himself of the mentally unstable Marilyn Monroe and sped her suicide...'
Knowing just that? And being voter in 1960? Probably not, no. I wouldn't have voted for him.
But nor would I have voted for Nixon.
In the US system you dont have to vote.
In the Australian system when faced with unpalatable choices I usually just deface my ballot paper with some sort of message for the scrutineers. Just because a candidate hitched his or her wagon to the 'progressive' mule isnt reason enough for me to climb on board.
I'm not seeing a lot of point in voting for Gillard for instance. Other than to keep Abbott out. And that's not nearly enough.

So Birmingham says he would trade off Kennedy's legacy for his moral failings, even though he wants to hide behind the caveat of historically not being able to do so because there is only one history. Frankly, it's weak and dumb. If one believes there is only reality and no hypotheticals in history, then one must necessarily embrace both Kennedy's legacy AND his moral failings. If Bob Ellis' argument was arcane and abstruse, bordering on the nonsensical, Birmingham is plain obtuse. But this is what I mean when I say dumb and dumber.

It's a strange media spectacle when two people generally on the left side of politics have a go at one another for not being politically correct or astute enough. It's even worse when they choose to misconstrue the other party for their own moral indignation. I guess these thing are amusing because people get so hot under the collar and a good argey-bargey beats a unison chorus from the choir.