UK As Defiant Problem Child

Hello Dave Cameron, Eurosceptic

I have to say movies are a lot less interesting than what's been going on in the world since the GFC first reared its head in August 2007, a full year before the credit crunch that brought about things like TARP and stimulus packages. Since then the chaos has moved on from banks to sovereign states that paid money to buy out these bad debts, with the PIIGS nations getting a hammering the bond trading markets.

This week saw some extraordinary developments whereby some of the EU nations moved for greater union as the UK chose to sit it out. It's a tricky thing, but basically David Cameron might have been the right man at the wrong place or the wrong man at the right place. Given the choice of wanting more of an input or less into the affairs of Europe, he chose to opt for less.

For Britain the benefit of the bargain in Brussels is far from clear. It took a good half-hour after the end of Mr Sarkozy's appearance for Mr Cameron to emerge and explain his action. The prime minister claimed he had taken a “tough decision but the right one” for British interests—particularly for its financial-services industry. In return for his agreement to change the EU treaties, Mr Cameron had wanted a number of safeguards for Britain. When he did not get them, he used his veto.

After much studied vagueness on his part about Britain's objectives, Mr Cameron's demand came down to a protocol that would ensure Britain would be given a veto on financial-services regulation (see PDF copy here). The British government has become convinced that the European Commission, usually a bastion of liberalism in Europe, has been issuing regulations hostile to the City of London under the influence of its French single-market commissioner, Michel Barnier. And yet strangely, given the accusation that Brussels was taking aim at the heart of the British economy, almost all of the new rules issued so far have been passed with British approval (albeit after much bitter backroom fighting). Tactically, too, it seemed odd to make a stand in defence of the financiers that politicians, both in Britain and across the rest of European, prefer to denounce.

Mr Cameron said he is “relaxed” about the separation. The EU has always been about multiple speeds; he was glad Britain had stayed out of the euro and out of the passport-free Schengen area. He said that life in the EU, particularly the single market, will continue as normal. “We wish them well as we want the euro zone to sort out its problems, to achieve stability and growth that all of Europe needs.” The drawn faces of senior officials seemed to say otherwise.

That section is quite telling. Even prior to these meetings, it wasn't entirely clear what possible input the UK might have had given its history of not joining the monetary union. While that choice looks like a great choice in hindsight, it's also looking like the UK never really joined Europe in the way it was supposed to, so it now stands quite isolated.

As an Australian, the irony is rich, for the UK essentially had to abandon its preferred trade with Commonwealth nations in order to have access to the European markets and joining the EC, way back in the 1970s. That was one of the major changes that essentially push Australia towards embracing its Asian trade partners because it simply had no choice. In a sense the UK had to give up the baby to join the special club, only to find it didn't want to be a member of that club because it was more a cult, but now it has no baby.

As it turns out, giving up the portion of sovereignty that controls money is probably the least possible thing to do for the UK when you think about it. France, and Germany have lost their kings, and other royal families of Europe have long ceased to have any political or even significant economic power. This is in stark contrast to the United Kingdom that successfully (I wish I had a better word for it than successfully, but... you know what I mean) preserved its positively medieval monarchy with significant reserve powers. no Conservative government in the UK is going to hand over the controls to the treasury to a bunch of Republican Frogs and Gerries. And God save the Queen and all that.

So given these kinds of historic reasons, is it any surprise that Cameron chose to stay out of the room where important decisions will be made?

"He's thrown some meat to the eurosceptics who like to see the British PM wielding the veto. (But) it is going to make it harder to defend British interests," said Simon Tilford of the Centre for European Reform, a think tank in London.

"Cameron has played a bad hand poorly. He's been stung by the mounting rebellion here."
In Brussels, Germany failed in its campaign to persuade all 27 EU countries to write the tougher rules into the bloc's treaty, with just Britain and Hungary refusing to go along.

"Worried that Britain is starting to drift away from Europe in a serious way. To where? In a strong alliance with Hungary," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said in a tweet on Friday. By lunchtime, even Hungary had changed its mind.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague played down London's isolation and tried to put a positive spin on the treaty clash, noting that different groups of EU nations had long worked together on various issues like defence and border controls.

"Decisions about the European single market, the thing that matters most to us for jobs and businesses in the UK, still have to be made by the 27 countries together," he told Sky News from Brussels. "We will be very vigilant about any threat to that."

Sort of amusing, that. Not surprisingly the moment been likened to Neville Chamberlain's moment in history waving a piece of paper saying "peace in our time". Europe's suddenly been over run by the threat of sovereign collapses with 'Merkozy' emerging as a kind of force for further unification. I have a hunch that says even if I don't like Cameron's side of politics, he may have made the right call for the UK. He would have come to rue the day if he had laid down the burning spears of desire and given over to 'Merkozy'. I mean, what would Winston Churchill have done? Blood Sweat and Tears, right? So while Cameron is likely to cop a walloping for his defiance, I suspect history will prove to be kinder to him.

'The Company Men'

Social Realism In American Cinema?

It's quite the surprise when an American film comes along and the climax doesn't involve gun shots and car crashes. It's also surprising when the tenor of the whole film is about limitations of people within the society they live. Back in the day of the Soviet Republics, the Russians used to specialise in this terrain dubbed 'Social Realism', which happened to be Stalin's favourite genre of film making. More pointedly, Stalin didn't like escapist fantasies because he didn't want anybody to escape from the reality where he was the dictator of the Soviet Republics. Such ideological thinking might seem quaint through the haze of history looking back, but I can assure you many a film maker suffered for the institutionalised love of realism and socialist realism at that. And if I might extend it a little bit, the modern day inheritor of thinking happens to be alive and well in Australian film bureaucracies, thanks to our institutions being modeled on things like MosFilm.

Anyway... 'Company Men' is the first film to attempt to explore the effects of the Global Financial Crisis in some social sense. By casting the GFC as the first mover the story manages to cover the lives of people who work for a company that fires them.

What's Good About It

The film is understated and not terribly stylish. It eschews the kind of style that has become the staple of comic book movies and the story remains decidedly man-size. There are no supermen or people with a special gift who can save the day. The reality inhabited by the character is a great approximation of the kind of thing we have seen around us in the wake of the GFC. There are some aspects that ring hollow, only because it comes from a movie full of stars, but the problems that are wrestled with in the film are genuine problems. And weirdly enough, this is refreshing - mainly because the recent escapist fare has been much too much.

Yet it doesn't matter for a moment that the film mostly meanders through the lives of these mundane characters. The drama inherent in the situation lends itself to pretty good viewing. It's a film for adults - not that there's anything wrong with kids' films - but this film isn't interested in titillation or adrenal excitement. It just wants to tell a story that makes you think.

What's Bad About It

The performances are good. There just seems to be one too many star in there. Kevin Costner as the brother in law with the blue collar house renovation business is just too much in the casting department. I'm also not a big fan of how simplistic the moral framework is about work itself. The film never arrives at the point to question the inherent value placed in work when it works quite hard to establish that maybe the top echelon don't deserve their big paychecks.

Also, this leads to the principle at stake being rather blurry. If Tommy Lee Jones' character has such reservations about how the firm is run, he actually has the option to start his own company given that he has the money to do it. This gets glossed over until towards the end.

What's Interesting About It

First off, I think it's interesting it got made at all. I thought Hollywood had lost its testicular fortitude when it came to making adult-oriented-cinema (for want of a better phrase). Obviously the GFC is impacting on the lives of even the most cosetted film exec. It reminds one of 'Sullivan's Travels', but without the humour. It feels like Ben Affleck and Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper really wanted to make a film that meant something rather than any old entertainment fare. It has such noble intentions, and it's dripping with it from the script through to the performances. One can forgive its humourless-ness.

I know I bagged out Kevin Costner being cast in it, but even he provides a performance that's busily working towards a message. The film isn't moving; ironically, the fact these big names are in it, trying to prop it up is more moving.

Anatomy Of Debt-Fueled Prosperity

One of the stranger aspects of the story is actually the finances of the household in the movie. At the start, Ben Affleck's character Bobby is earning 120k p.a. He's been the head of sales for 3 years, so presumably he's been paid something like that for 3 years. He drives a Porsche Spider, which turns out to be leased. His wife drives a Volvo station wagon, which is presumably owned outright. He lives in a big house in the suburbs with his wife and 2 kids, paying off the mortgage. His wife,  has no job, but goes back to nursing, just to keep the cash flowing. The redundancy Bobby gets covers him for 3months of his 120k plus 4months support at an employment agency.

What I don't get is how he doesn't panic when he unexpectedly gets the redundancy. He gets angry, and then belligerent and insists he will find employment soon; but he simply doesn't panic about his money situation. instead he resists selling the house and giving up the Porsche all the way, and complains about not having his golf club membership paid. I found that really weird. It's like watching the finances of a crazy person until I realised that it captured the kind of sensibility about finance that was pervasive at the time the subprime mortgage crisis broke. Bobby isn't subprime, but he's in debt to his eyeballs and has stopped feeling it. the film gives you a unique insight into what that's like.

Myth Of American Manufacturing

The sting of post-modernity, as it were in both America and over here in Australia is that we lament the loss of manufacturing jobs. This film is right in line with the line of reasoning that the greatness of a country can only be shown to be true by the strength of the manufacturing sector it has. All the while analysis has shown that companies that outsource the manufacturing part still retain a great deal of wealth in America or Australia by and large, by doing so. The most poignant argument is that the skills lost would be hard to recover, but you sort of wonder if they were such great skills if they were so easily exported.

None of this aspect of the polemic is explored in the film - it's simply taken as a given that the hollowing out of industry is a sure sign of decay in industrial America when in fact the loss of low-skilled jobs has not been the real problem of the American economy of the last 30 years. Even 20years ago, Bill Clinton was on the campaign trail, talking to unions on his side of politics saying those low skilled jobs weren't coming back. America still prospered greatly in the 1990s.

The film does proceed on the assumption that if they could rebuild factories, then the prosperity due to Americans would return, but this makes the ending a lot more empty. Can there really be a future in putting back together the American manufacturing machine, using the reject workers that have been shed? It seems the solution is a lot more simplistic than the complexity of the problem. For every industry that goes into decline, there are things like Apple and Google and Facebook that come out of nowhere and become worth billions. One cannot help but feel there's something missing from the film makers' thinking on the subject - but hey, it's not often a movie allows you to ponder such problems deeply.

The Lies CEOs Tell

Tommy Lee Jones' character reports to his friend and co-founder of the company, who repeats that the share price is everything if they are to avoid a hostile takeover bid. To this end, the company engages in two rounds of restructuring to appease the investors. Interestingly enough, we see a scene where Tommy Lee Jones' character Gene has to field questions from fund managers, in a moment of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Of course he is damned for it, but that makes you wonder about CEOs of publicly listed firms.

These guys make a lot of money. If you want to know about the 1% that the occupy Wall Street movement is talking about, these guys are it. And yet, in the context of management speak, they freely present the fund managers and share holders and financial types who hold the corporate bonds as the bullies. They also tell you that if the company doesn't pay the absurd amounts of moneys, the company won't be able to attract the best talent to be CEOs, which is a dubious claim. I mention this because in light of the recent spates of shareholder activism, it seems that fund managers are finally being able to exercise the proper power that their shares represent. I mean, really, was Sir Ralph Norris really worth $16m a year? That's C.C. Sabathia money.

We can always see CC Sabathia's value in his stat line. How can anybody ever know if Ralph Norris's work is worth a star Major League Baseball player's annual salary? Babe Ruth was once asked about his pay being higher than the US President. He responded, "I had a better year didn't I?"

If you asked Ralph Norris and all these other CEOs with insane millions per annum in salary, they'd tell you they had a good year. But how would you know for sure?

Why People Go Into Business

This was the most interesting question that was half-raised and quickly abandoned by the film. Part of a company's function is to provide a service or  good for society. Why is it then that we feel that none of the big established firms would ever do something for the greater good unless it was out of blatant self-interest or self-preservation? The film comes close to talking about it, but instead of going deeper, the characters stop talking. I dare say they stop talking because the writer runs out of ideas or things for these characters to say, but the film is full of pregnant pauses that then cut to the next seemingly disconnected scene. It clearly isn't about just the money, but we're left wondering if that is all there is that makes American society. The film is interesting that way.

If the solution is to build a new company, then why are all these people struggling? Surely you need capital to make things work under capitalism. The disconnect is kind of interesting in this film. Somebody has to take the risk, but the negative results that come from taking the risks don't seem to land on the people who take the risks. Then again, that is the perfect description of the GFC. In any case it's an interesting film that way.

Movie Doubles - 'The Eagle' & 'Tucker & Dale Vs Evil'

The Heart of Darkness As Broken Metaphor

Today's movie double is an accidental doubleheader thanks to the fine machine from Fetch TV. A little word on IP-TV in Australia - it's still way slow in parts but it's only going to get better. When the NBN is everywhere, IP-TV is going to rock. Anyway. Free plug for Fetch TV out of the way, it's time to wrestle with two movies that go up the river in the heart of darkness.

'The Eagle' is a sword and sandal epic about a young Roman officer who goes deep under cover into the land of the Picts, north of Hadrian's Wall to recover a lost symbol of the Eagle. It's classic adventure movie fare but it does have the advantage of working off the question at the end of 'Heart of Darkness' by Conrad, who rhetorically asks whether the Romans traveling to Britain were the civilised, traveling up the river in the heart of darkness. 'The Eagle' in all its post-modernity brings to forth the symmetry of that question. For, in the Eagle, the Roman officer and his slave reverse roles as a Briton and his slave in the land of the Picts.

'Tucker and Dave Vs Evil' is about a bunch of college kids who go deep into the Appalachian mountains for a holiday, only to encounter two hillbillies they think are psychotic axe-murdering chainsaw-massacre-ing serial killers - except told from the point of view of the hillbillies who are innocent bumpkin yokels. Hilarity ensues when the college kids start killing themselves by accident in one bizarre twist after another. There's no mistaking it - it's the heart of darkness text again, but turned on its head for comedic effect.

The Denizens Of The Dark

Who are these people living in the dark? In the Post-Colonial era we're trying to identify and identify with them all at once. The process of colonisation brings Romans to Britain, just as it brought Europeans to the Americas. The people who are invaded in these movies are lumped with the legacies of this process as much as the real cultures are lumped with the tremendous historic losses. Yet, it seems really pertinent to point out that the indigenous Picts in 'The Eagle' may look weird with their woad coating, but they're white boys and gals; just as the Hillbillies who are the invaded 'Other' in 'Tucker and and Dale Vs Evil' are as white boy as they come.

'The Eagle' presents us with a text that tries to synthesise a position out of the antithetical Roman heirarchy and indigenous Briton that is at once uncomfortable in the light of history as it is uncomfortable as a plot device. The film persists with the presentation because the project is to turn Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', rather bleak views about European civilisation into a positive. One suspects that to tell that version of history - and it must be said it is amazing how people on the British Isles are painfully aware of the successive waves of migration - they preferred to do it all white white boys. You wonder if the ark really is all that dark in 'The Eagle'

'Tucker and Dale' milk the best laughs from the plight of the invaded hillbilly. Suddenly it is the hillbillies who are beset by an aggressive outsider who seeks to frame them in the preconceptions they bring about hillbillies. The derogatory prejudice breeds paranoia to the point that the college kids panic and stumble and kill themselves in one freakish accident after another. True to the tradition of psychopath-in-the-cabin, a sheriff comes to the rescue and he too dies haplessly. The plot devices are all too familiar but they are all turned on their heads to make the point that hillbillies in the American imagination have garnered way too much negative prejudice, thanks to such wonderful films such as 'Deliverance' (Squeal like a pig!") and 'Southern Comfort'.

The Asymmetry Of Colonisation

At this point in history, we understand the process of colonisation which took place this side of Columbus had devastating consequences for indigenous populations around the world, but what gets overlooked is that great population migrations are a staple of human history. The Chinese pushed west who sent the Turks to the west, who pushed other peoples who eventually  pushed against Ostrogoths and Visigoths. The Huns and Vandals come into history like marauding plagues but only because they flooded into the parts of the world that kept written records - and that world had regularly made expeditions to the edges of its known world.

In 'Tucker and Dale Vs Evil', the central joke lies in the fact that because both parties are culturally equivalent contemporary Americans, the difference in sub-cultural zones gets exaggerated into a kind of uncomprehending paranoia for both sides. At one, the fear of the other is projected outward onto fellow Americans which makes for great laughs. In 'The Eagle', we get to see the village of the Picts and it is strangely reminiscent of the village at the end of the river in 'Apocalypse Now'. In both films, what is asymmetrical in history is brought into symmetry by making equivalents out of 'the other'.

What's interesting is that it can only do this by positing the other as equally 'white' as the protagonists. This is notable in that in trying to slip away from imperialism, it has to accept the other as like 'us' - and this is much easier when they're white folk. In that sense these films are at the polar opposite of 'The Last Samurai' or 'Memoirs of a Geisha' which are attempts to re-colonise the colonised. (It's particularly bad in 'Memoirs of a Geisha' where they couldn't even cast real Japanese people to play Japanese people)

Why Go There?

This is a curious thing. Why does Alexander the Great go to Afghanistan and India? Why does Columbus set sail for America really? Or Cook for Australia or Armstrong for the Moon? The unknown has a way of filling the imagination and beckons adventurers. So, just as the West Indies failed to turn out to be the golden Japan of Columbus' dreams, equally, the Moon turned out to be a rocky, airless, hostile landscape. The places adventurers go are only interesting in as much as the imagination can project onto those places.

In that sense, the space in which Tucker and Dale exist is like a caricature of a certain kind of Americana, with forests, rivers, cabins and gas stands selling oddities. It looks more promising than the story can provide. There are echoes of 'Deliverance' but the space is a lot less textured. Equally, the college kids have no great ambition in going into that space. They just end up there for a holiday. The prosaic quality of this misadventure underscores the low mimetic comedy.

'The Eagle' spends a good deal of time on the Scottish Highlands, what with their wind-swept hills and craggy rock outcroppings. The landscape is made to look far more hostile that it might have been in its day. There were more trees in the British Isles at the time of the Romans, but that seems to not have crossed the minds of the film makers much. The space the characters travel in is a highly abstracted kind of Scotland. Again, the landscape helps to lend perspective to the small-ness of the human endeavor, which underscores a high mimetic tone, but only because it is not comedy. It could easily be the college kids or Tucker and Dale looking for the lost Roman Eagle.

Going Insane In The Darkness

There is a moment when the roles of the Roman Marcus and the Briton Esca reverse, and Marcus mus now play the role of the slave to survive. It is as if the paradigm is overturned upside down - a bit like the Prince and the Pauper. Then, there is a drunken party where the Picts all drink themselves stupid. The sequence of events is quite metaphorical, like an initiation rite. Equally, when Alison falls into the water and bumps her head, only to wake up with the hillbillies is a moment of transformation. Yet, the beautifiul twist in the film is that she seems to gain sanity through the transformation, for we find out it is the leader of the college kids who is genuinely psychotic.

People have to go insane in the darkness - like Kurtz - in order for the narrative to make sense.

Comic Book Movies

Frank Miller Is A Cryptofascist, You Say?

That Action Guy sent me a link this week which probably merits some discussion. It's about Frank Miller and how he's a cryptofascist, and how cryptofascism abounds in Hollywood.

The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation – in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation – and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. Ruthless enemy! From the Middle East! Heroic, rugged individualists! A big, sentimental score! Lots and lots of blue-screen! Endless amounts of body parts spewing theatrical blood!

It's a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys.

That sums up why I've lost a lot of energy recently when it comes to writing about film. Hollywood movies have become the refined sugar of the cultural staple we have. Now, I do confess I have that metaphorical sweet tooth - I like action movies. Yet lately, I'm kind of sick of the monotonous refinement of these action movies that aim to deliver the greatest adrenalin rush and spectacle. Talking about these films like '300' or 'Thor' ends up being an exercise in differentiating the finer points of different chocolate.

Still, the article goes on to hammer how it is that Frank Miller is a fascist, which is to say, if you watch the films based on his comics, they're bleeding obvious. The problem with post-modernism and the triumph of the thousand striated plateaus where everything is just text is that now we have to discuss McDonalds and fine cuisine alike, comics and Shakespeare alike, Rap Music and Mozart alike, and so on. On the one hand, if the flattening of the critical landscape allowed the proper appraisal of things I like that were poopoo-ed before, (like say, 'Blade Runner' and Frank Zappa), then I guess we're going to have to endure the legitimisation of such intellectual non-luminaries as Frank Miller along the ranks of authors of great works.

And pardon me if this sounds like sour grapes but, come on. He's a graphic artist who likes nasty turns in his stories. He's the cultural equivalent of a Bogan, except we're all egalitarian now and we have to at least give the ass hole his due and space in the public dialogue. To be blunt, I don't mind Frank Miller is a cryptofascist, because I'm what you might describe as a reconstructed cultural technocrat and I think his cryptofascism is idiotic next to the true lights of our contemporary cultural space. Sure his stuff is fun, but it's not like it's profound. he's just another guy toiling at what Woody Allen described as "the kids' table". He's just the clown at the party to entertain the kids, putting on scary masks. he's not even part of the moral decay of Western Civilization. Calling him a cryptofascist representative of Hollywood's propaganda machine gives him way too much credit. Unless of course you're the sort that thinks '300' is great cinematic art.

He's no Frank Zappa, and '300' is no 'Fight Club'. Everything else to be said is only deserving of a  jaded yawn.

Hanging Out At The 15th Japanese Film Festival

The 15th Japanese Film Festival finished on Sunday night. I worked the Q&A as interpreter for the panel discussion and watched the closing film. It was a pretty good festival this year except the glaringly awful 'Space Battleship Yamato'. Afterwards at the wrap party for the festival and I ran into YK, a cinematographer I know from way back when. YK was incredulous why they even made the film, let alone showed it at the festival

I pointed out that it made money in spite of itself, but YK was for totally flabbergasted at how awful it was. He said he saw the original Anime in 1977 and it was great. So why did they have to make it again and then make a hash of it? Good question. some times the comic book sensibility leads the film industry into really bad decisions. I just want to point out here that it's not just American Cinema that is contracting into some infantile state as it peddles its wares to the lowest common denominator.

Either Way, Labor Wins

Politics, Australiana

I've been thinking a bit about how awful it would be if and when Tony Abbott should become Prime Minister of Australia. Yes, Tony Abbott, he of the strident Monarchist position, the aggravatingly negative Opposition leadership, the un-costed, retrograde policies, the morbid fear of progressiveness, the dodgy accounting. That Tony Abbott. I often imagine other blue-blood Liberal Party types must be squirming at the hectoring boy-gone-sourly-bad routine Mr. Abbott displays. So much so that even Peter Costello has pointed out that Tony Abbott isn't genuinely a Liberal Party type; He's actually Catholic and from the old Democratic Labor Party mold. That is to say, it is as if the right wing Catholic breakaway of the ALP of old, has somehow infiltrated the WASP establishment Liberal Party. Had things been a little different in his life, he might have been one of those conniving pragmatists of the NSW Centre-Right Faction down in Sussex Street. He might have been their bovver boy instead of the other side.

Then there are the Greens. As far as I can tell, the 10-12% who vote for them seem to be former communists and disgruntled ones at that. They've certainly broken off the left side of the Australian Labor Party and their economic policies seem about as credible as the Comintern announcements of old. But they're unmistakably a breed of Labor gone bitter on the shelf as the NSW Centre-Right kept throwing them under the bus in the last two decades.

All of this is to say that Australian politics is moving into an era where even the right side is imbued with Labor Party thinking and the far Left is an off-shoot of the Labor Party. It's as if the entire polity has basically become Labor. The blue-bloods must really hate that.

The Aftermath of Intellectual Elitism

Educational Elitism gets a bad rap. In the days of old, elites got good education. That is all gone now. So today the leaders of the world are coming to the world stage equipped with pretty poor general education. This is true of Australia as well as many other countries around the world. If there actually were intellectual elites that could step in to the spot and change things, they would be most welcome. Instead, the tenor of debate, say in the US Republican Presidential race is abominably low. Barack Obama looks like a genius next to those guys - and that might be why he would be felled net year in the election; he's just too elite for the average, ignorant,  plumber Joe.

The Diet in Japan is filled with entitled fourth an fifth generation politicians who barely read a book in their varsity days. The bureaucrats who come from top flight universities are largely ineffectual and narrow-minded.Similar things are going on in France and Italy; and as for Greece, well, we've seen where that has gone.

The point is, the global crisis of economics and finance is partnered by a great global crisis and absence in intellectual courage and prowess by the politicians. And all of this came about because we thought things like classics and history were irrelevant so now we're busily living the dictum where we're fools, doomed to repeat history. There are big issues to be tackled, but what seems to consume our politicians is name-calling and idiotic prescriptions for immensely complicated problems.

'Moneyball'

Instant Nostalgia

Somewhere as a kid I used to sit there and figure out the on-base percentage of my fave players. This is way before I was introduced to Bill James. It came about because I made the observation that a guy who walked with 2 outs and then came home on a homerun was more valuable than the non-credit in the Batting Average that would represent.

Fast forward many years, and I was handed the Baseball Abstracts by Bill James, from a guy who was totally delighted to find I was interested in drawing walks and hitting for power on a team of weekend warriors. I've been a lurker over at Baseball Think Factory since the days it was called the Primer, and I've absorbed as much of the advanced metrics as I can find. Sabermetrics is a wonderful area of scholarship if one can understand the simple premise that the traditional baseball stats don't capture the whole story.

Michael Lewis' 'Moneyball' came out at exactly the moment when sabermetrics and its advanced stats were being picked up by the mainstream media and caused a furor; it was more or less a book that was pitched like a high, inside fastball. Nobody thought it could make a good movie - but amazingly Brad Pitt has staked his clout and persisted with it. In some ways it's amazing that it got made, but then it took a superstar like Brad Pitt to want to do it. Sometimes that's all it takes, and in some ways, it is everything you need to get a big movie up.

What's Good About It

The film is interestingly prosaic and discursive for a subject that is given to romanticism. In that sense, the film is just as dispassionate in its narrative as Michael Lewis was in his explications in the book. The cinematography has a rough and ready look which brings to life beautiful renderings of real locations; and if anything is reminiscent of the starkness of 'Bang the Drum Slowly'. The shooting style is also understated with nary a moment of glossy, over worked establishing shots. It's a very sharp film that tells a very sharp story.

Brad Pitt as Billy Beane is amusing as well as compassionate. It's passable enough that the performance can evoke the real Billy Beane in every one of these scenes, real and created for this movie. The biggest challenge was actually on the shoulders of Jonah Hill (Mr. Superbad) to tone down his usual bumbling fat guy schtick and play a fictional foil to Beane's largely intellectual concerns. He's certainly no Paul Depodesta, but the difference allows us to watch the film as fiction-loosely-based-on-fact than as a docudrama.

The casting is great, although Philip Seymour Hoffman (as much as I love his stuff) was probably just not right for Art Howe. The point of Art Howe in the book was that he looked like a skipper more than he contributed anything. Art Howe has since gone on the record saying the portrayal was more betrayal and unfair and you can see his point. Art Howe didn't resist Beane's moves out of resistance to the new ideas; he simply didn't get that they were new ideas or where they were coming from. So he wasn't Joe Morgan; he was more a buffoon. And you would get upset if you got likened to a Joe Morgan-like anti-intellectual loud mouth.

Plus, Royce Clayton plays Miguel Tejada, which is just awesome. Royce Clayton of course didn't played himself in 'The Rookie' about when he got struck out by Jim Morris as played by Dennis Quaid.

What's Bad About it

It was going to be impossible to do the whole book, but some of the things are out of balance. The 20 game winning streak was awesome, but it hardly proved that Beane was right any more than the post-season failure that year proved he was wrong. (It's called small sample size - any team could do anything in a month, just as a player could do anything in 60 plate appearances) The whole scouting for the draft got dropped in favour of telling the Major league club stories, but in some ways the most interesting lessons are in the 2003 draft.

I have quibbles but they are minor. I can understand the choices they made, and in telescoping the book into a movie, they've had to skip the more abstruse aspects of sabermetric analysis. It's not a major bad, but it's not a good thing for me.

What's Interesting About it

O where does one start?!

This might be the first baseball movie that doesn't end with a winning moment. The end credits trail out with a song about Beane being a loser and a postscript that his A's are yet to win the World Series. Its closest meme might be revenge of the nerds but I don't think that that is the point of the narrative - that the thinking types beat out the sports jock traditionalists. What the film does is in its own way illustrate the distance traveled by the public consciousness about baseball in the 10years between the 2001 playoffs and the 2011 release of the film.

Back in 2001, OBP was such a stand out stat that it necessitated the elevation of Scott Hatteburg as much as it over-emphasised the value of Jason Giambi. Because defensive stats were still in their early phase, nobody put real stock in them, while OBP was as tangible a benefit as they came. Yes, Jason Giambi's bat was great, but he gave back a lot of runs in the field. In the 10years since, we've come to appreciate such notions as the marginal win and what that costs. We understand the strengths of various projection systems as well as the limitations; we now know more about batting averages on balls in play and to what extent that belongs to the batter who has hit line-drives and speed than the defense behind the pitcher.

And they're just the baseball things. Since the book came out, the Moneyball concept has been taken up by Hollywood itself as they try to wrestle with the idea of which stars are worth the millions being paid and which ones are not.

Brad Pitt's 'Blind Side'?

There's a popular opinion out there that this could be Brad Pitt's answer to Sandra Bullock's 'The Blind Side'. Both are sports movies about nurturing talent, but also both are based on excellent books by Michael Lewis. They're like book-matched movies where one covers Football, this one covers Baseball; the other features Sandra Bullock as a foster mother, this one features Brad Pitt playing a divorcee father trying to stay in his daughter's life.

The problem - if such a thing is a problem (it sure isn't for me) - is that this film isn't so much heart-warming as 'The Blind Side' was, but more Brain-warming. The feverish intellectual excitement of the book is what is at the heart of this film, so I don't know if it's going to be enough to move the voting Academy members, who are in my humble opinion, always decidedly un-cerebral when it comes to movies.

I don't know if Brad Pitt deserves an Oscar for this. I don't know how such things come to be. Plenty of undeserving people have won them over the years. Should Brad Pitt get one, one of these years? Possibly. Should he get it for this film? That one's stronger than just a maybe. It's just so hard to tell with these things. The problem with stars being cast is you just can't get around the fact that you're always aware that you're watching the star. It's an interesting film that way, in that you're made to wonder what kind of performance a star should put in to win an Oscar. No wonder they hand them out to stars who wear the ugly makeup.

Billy Beane As Unbeliever In Baseball

The character of Billy Beane is fascinating exactly because he is looking at baseball as both a business and a game from the inside, but with the eyes of an outsider. His failures as a player earmark the reasons for his decisions on many a player. In the book, it is stated that he picks players who are unlike himself in temperament because he believes his temperament contributed greatly to his frustrating non-career as a player.

In the film, this gives rise to a beautiful irony when Peter Brand shows Billy the footage of Jeremy Brown, a fat catcher who stumbles and slips having rounded first, only to discover he's hit a homerun. The deep romanticism of baseball manifests itself for Billy, but Billy himself is largely a victim of that projected romanticism. His own cross, his suffering comes mostly in part from his experiences of other people projecting expectations on to him. It crippled him as a player, and he is unable to watch his own team play. The pent-up frustration of a man with a mission is palpable and fascinating.

The central myth of baseball is how important it is in the wider culture. Billy Beane in both the book and the film portrayed by Brad Pitt casts a great big stone at the myth, but at the same time affirms the myth by having such an interesting part in it. For every traditionalist baseball fan that hates sabermetrics, there's a sabermetrically inclined fan who reveres Billy Beane's A's. That kind of irony is delicious to watch in a film.

Does 'Moneyball' Really Work?

There are in fact many ways to approach any kind of market. The way that Billy Beane and the A's take in the book and movie is to quantitatively analyze players and find who is being under-valued by the market. The fundamental assumption implicit in this is that the market misjudges the value of players all the time, and this is made very explicit in the movie. To tell you the truth, I'm not so convinced that valuing players diverge as greatly as implied in the film. For instance, we all know that Albert Pujols is likely one of the top3 best hitters in baseball, and we knew that the likes of Barry Bonds and A-Rod were the ones keeping him company. It's actually the players that you try to decipher values for from rank 100 down that people's perception and opinions begin to diverge.

You can test this out in any fantasy draft. Nobody drafts a surprise player in the first 3-5rounds in a draft. It's after the 5th round or so that people start surprising you with the dark horse choices. So on the one hand, there probably is a better way to collect the players on your team to fill out the roster but you actually need to have your superstars in place. If anything, I think the benefits of shrewd analysis in finding unloved gems in any market is overstated.

Historically speaking, the other 30 teams have incorporated quantitative analysis as part of their arsenal of tools so clearly Billy Beane has lost that advantage already in the years since the release of 'Moneyball'. It's hard to say if he's been able to find a new inefficiency in the market.

Other Lessons From 'Moneyball'

The more subtle lesson to be drawn from 'Moneyball' is in how to assemble a group of people for a team. One of the choices taken away from Billy Beane is that of paying big money for a free agent star player. In fact, his is a position to lose his star players more than getting any. This situation actually applies to many small companies in various fields, and the best lesson I can relate is that the equivalent of the draft - recruiting junior staff - becomes extremely crucial. You want your young staff to grow up and grow into their roles within the company. It feels a bit risky, but it's not. It's more risky to get the equivalent of that 'star player signing', and have some veteran screw up your roster.

From my own experience, I can say this: it's more rewarding for the organisation to build teams from the ground up than to build them around stars you inherit.

Movie Doubles - 'Agora' & 'Thor'

Reassessing Faith

It's a weird day when you watch 2 films back to back and you catch a theme that leaves you wondering. Today's theme by accident is paganism and faith. On the surface, you have to say paganism is a lot more tolerant than monotheism in practice. This is because paganism is inbuilt with the tacit understanding that other gods might be around too, while monotheism kicks off with deny the other gods. It's a weird thing from an outsider's eye whether Yahweh of the Old Testament is one god amongst many who is denying the other gods access to human faith, or whether He really thinks he is only one and wants you to believe it too.It's also unclear as to whether Allah, and God and Yahweh of the three Levantine religion who are the same deity actually enjoys the havoc that these religions unleash upon the world.

'Agora' deals with the rise of Coptic Christians in ancient Egypt who essentially displace Paganism first and the the Jews. 'Thor' of course is the Norse god of thunder, reincarnated so to speak as a Marvel comic book hero. What's really weird is that in depicting ancient Egypt, there is a prosaic realism that eschews any kind of mysticism in 'Agora', and shows a world that is actually empty of any kind of divine act. 'Thor' on the other hand is set in the present day of some kind but a Norse God manifests itself in the story like some fish out of water and without really turning in to comedy proceeds to plug the audience right back into the Pagan belief system with gusto. The irony of this is hard to escape, for if Paganism is a kind of out-dated system of understanding in the ancient world, why are we suddenly inundated with the heavily meaning-laden pagan god Thor today? It is as if we haven't moved an inch from the ancient world.

The Merits Of Religion

'Agora' is deeply concerned with the why of religion as much as the untenable nature of the social order in the ancient world. Rampant slavery makes any discussion of freedoms and rights and equality virtually impossible. Part of what perpetuates this social system we find is indeed religion, whether it be paganism or Christianity, and so the elite are happy with the pagan faith because it bolsters their social claim. the Christians swell in numbers because it spread through the lower classes of society where there are greater numbers.

Paganism seems to bolster kings greatly because most pantheons preset themselves as courts. This dynamic is  adopted so seamlessly in 'Thor' that we simply accept the royal ruler of Asgard, Odin, and all the claims of kingship. This is in contrast to 'Agora' where the Roman empire is clearly crumbling and the political system can no longer control security in Alexandria. In Asgard, what we see is a kind of Shakespearean intrigue of kith and kin. What is odd about 'Thor' is that these gods of Asgard are so human that we never come to terms with what their divinity means - but it is implicit in the text because, well, this really is meant to be Thor.

Perhaps the even weirder thing is that hyper-Israeli Natalie Portman is playing the romantic love interest for the Norse God. I mean, where's the plausibility there? Or is Yahweh just another god? how does this all work? Okay, so that is a little too extra-textual, but one is forced to wonder even a little bit.

The Fable of Religion

At the core of the issue in Agora is the sense that morality emanates from God so what the religious patriarch says should be enough to bring to heel a political head. Prior to the notion of separation of church and state, a political leader had no way of combating the errant whims of a religious leader; the matter is made all the more complicated because there is no distinction between morality and law and ethics. This confusion - and it is really important to point out that it is confusion - abets the cause of religion and un-reason and general unreasonableness. Thus, we see today that Fred Nile essentially wants to confuse the water as much as possible between religion and state, morality, law and ethics, in order to find an ascendancy for his bogus claims for righteousness.

Even worse, the calls to fundamentalism in all faiths is essentially a desire to do away with careful distinctions between state and clergy, laws, morals and ethics in one retrograde swoop.

Counter to this is the largely post-modern fabulism of 'Thor'. Thor posits the Asimov notion that any technology sufficiently advanced from another culture will appear like magic.  In 'Thor', we ca see that the mighty Thor might not be the kind of god we envisage but the beneficiary of a great technological edge. That he's a kind of iron Man from another dimenstion. he merely appears to be godlike because we do not understand th technology he comes from.

Thus, in the 'Thor' text we see a subtle deconstruction of religion's role in our society. As much as 'Agora' argues against fundamentalism, 'Thor' posits a possibility that religion is a great misunderstanding of natural, explicable phenomena. 'Thor' is just as eqally a text that is post-modern and sceptical as to religion's claim.

Tolerance As Construct

On the face of it, paganism would be more tolerant than monotheism simply because in polytheism one is confronted by the possibility of a god for anything and everything. Just as there are gods for wisdom and war, it is conceivable under that schema that there is a god for stubbed toes and munps. Indeed, St. Paul sneaks in Yahweh as one of these gods that the polytheists may or may not know. The argument mounted in favour of monotheism essentially rests on the tolerance of polytheism.

Tolerance then is something that we create in order to entertain opposing views. It is then easy to understand why the intolerant rush to religious belief. If you could shut the door on the other, then what more joy could there be for the closed minded? The reason Paganism gives way to Monotheism in Agora is that people lose the capacity to entertain the thoughts of 'the other'.

The Injustice Of Religion

Perhaps it is possible in the Marvel universe that 'Thor' exists, that Yahweh exists as a kind of yet-another-god who walks around telling other gods that he is the only god. This is all very Philip K. Dick. it is this quality that makes the universe of 'Thor' so odd. In 'Agora', there is an absence of god in any of the action on screen. people lay claim to gods and God, but everything that happens on screen is prosaic and human-induced. The absence of justice as practiced by any pagan god or single God leaves the audience as to no doubt that religion is a fantasy. 'Agora' offers up a world of devastation wrought by the stupidity of humanity, wanting to believe.

'Thor' on the other hand is a depiction of a god doing mighty things, but at the same time posits that there is no god at all - merely technologically superior beings. 'Thor' is fantastical, but it does posit an explanation for the stranger phenomena in the world. Or ore pointedly, we humans created our gods to satisfy our own idiotic needs for entertainment.

The beauty of watching these films back to back is that you get to watch two dialectically opposite films about how we come to be believers, in spite of the obvious injustices of the world.

What The Hell Are They Thinking In Athens?

More Drama Than Drachma

I'm trying to get my head around the logic of why (oh why) the Prime Minister of Greece George Papendreou would propose a referendum on the rescue package.

First Mr Papandreou had to confront a hostile cabinet (although it has since endorsed the idea of a referendum). Then he faced the threat of a rebellion by his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok). And on November 2nd he will miss the opening session of a three-day confidence debate in parliament: Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, have summoned Mr Papandreou to emergency talks in Cannes. They will try to dissuade him from what one western European observer called “political suicide and financial ruin for Greece”.

Pasok lawmakers erupted in fury at the idea of a referendum, which may be held as early as December, but could not happen at all if the Greek government loses the vote of confidence. Two socialist backbenchers said they would henceforth sit as independents, reducing the party’s parliamentary majority to a bare minimum of 151 seats in the 300-member chamber. A third socialist deputy, former development minister Vasso Papandreou (no relation), said she had asked Greek’s president Carolos Papoulias to call a meeting to organise a government of national unity. It would push through fiscal and structural reforms, then take the country to elections. “Greece faces imminent bankruptcy,” Ms Papandreou warned. Separately, six veteran Pasok members urged the prime minister to resign, saying he was “taking Greece back to the 1950s”—a grim period in the country’s history, which was marked by widespread poverty and mass emigration.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle have joined the call for a snap election. Antonis Samaras, leader of New Democracy, the conservative opposition party, said that elections are “a national imperative”. A referendum “would put the country and the future of Europe at risk”. Alexis Tsipras, leader of the leftwing Syriza faction, also called for elections, saying Mr Papandreou “is finally being dragged to the polls under asphyxiating popular pressure, but it will be an election, not a referendum.”

It's a real head-scratcher as to what he thinks such a referendum would achieve, but off he goes, mouthing off this referendum. Naturally stocks took a nose dive everywhere, which is neither here nor there; although I really do want to point out that even if it doesn't look like altruism, the European Union is going a considerable way towards trying to bail out a reckless Greek government that went and squandered what it borrowed. It might not look like it but Sarkozy and Merkel went to great lengths to hammer out an agreement to ave Greece from itself. Now Papendeou has taken that fragile agreement and tossed it to the dogs, so to speak. And by dogs I mean those people baying for a change in Greece just so it doesn't have to go through with the austerity measures. It's a bit like he's gone and metaphorically spat in people's faces, now that he's secured agreements from them to save his metaphorical house on fire.

And I'm asking myself, what rational reason could he give for throwing all of that out the window? What the hell is he thinking? Is he seriously thinking it's a realistic choice to let the people decide and if the people decide to default, then history would somehow absolve him? Because if that's the idea, he's not only out of his depth, he's out of his tree.

Blast From The Past - 28/Oct/2011

Tarkus

It's been an interesting week for me with Walk-Off-HBP sending me this link of one Rachel Flowers. Ms Flowers is a 17 year old high school student who happens to be blind but is also a piano prodigy. Having run out of things to play, she has seized upon the catalogue of Keith Emerson recordings and made it her internet repertoire. The results are simply astounding.

Karn Evil 9 First Impression
Tarkus (on Piano)The Endless Enigma

...and so on. There are more videos of her playing swathes of ELP and all of it is jaw dropping, and staggeringly good. It makes you want to see if Keith Emerson has anything to say about it, but so far there hasn't been anything.

That opened the flood doors of YouTube into finding a version of Tarkus played by the Tokyo Philharmony Orchestra. Arranged by Takashi Yoshimatsu and conducted by Hiroshi Sado, this version  brings to life the Modernist angular harmonies and the sheer aggression of the sonic attack that was Tarkus. It's a corker. Don't miss it if you like Tarkus.  You can even get it on CD.



And then, there is Tarkus as played by a nine year old Japanese girl on an Electone at a competition. What's remarkable about this rendition is how complete the sonic assembly is to the extent that not only is she hammering out Keith Emerson's part, she's programmed Carl Palmer's part on the drum machine. It's as complete a sound of Tarkus you can get without Greg Lake. She did this some years ago. She's 13 now, and here's her doing Karn Evil 9 Second Impression. I liked this comment by the girl who goes by MiZ, in response to the praise that said it must be amazing when you unleash this prog rock at recitals and she says:

Thank you, but you find that the fine judges at competitions and recitals tend to prefer classical music and orthodox jazz. Prog just doesn't seem to cutit with this crowd. I cry every time they post results. :(

Which kind of cuts to core of the prejudice and lack of understanding out there for ... well, ...ALL of Prog but particularly ELP. However that's not something new.

Sometimes Emerson Lake & Palmer get short shrift even in the progressive rock conversations. Out of the triumvirate of Yes, King Crimson and ELP, the third has had the distinct disadvantage of being unable to change as mercurially as the other to bands. Indeed, the level at which the band is locked to their names has made it all but impossible for them to swap and change members in search of a new direction. Their work this side of 1980 has been disappointing compared to the dizzying heights of their early 1970s work. Maybe it's not surprising given just how much music has come since.

Yet, look at all these seriously talented musicians taking on board these works today. What does it say? I thought it was a really good opportunity to dust off my copy of Tarkus by ELP and have a blast. Forty years on (OMG!) the production sounds dated; some of the vernacular of the music is so much of the 1970s but Tarkus itself is packed with the most ambitious arranging and playing I can think of from 1971. Consider in 1971 they were putting this up against say Led Zeppelin doing 'Stairway to Heaven' or Paul McCartney doing his first album with Wings, the disappointing 'Wild Life'. The weird thing is, Tarkus, the one-side suite of songs, never really gets old on me. I listen to it with essentially the same awe I felt for it as a teenager. All of the angularity, the layered mono-synths, the distorting organs, the modern dissonance brings pure awe at the technique and the vision.

ELP did go on to record even more amazing things, but Tarkus is the first sign post that set the ambitions of rock very, very high. I don't think too many rock bands have gone and visited that sign post since, but today we find more and more musicians are finding it. Long Live Prog Rock, Long Live ELP.

Even More From Prof. Steven Keen

We're In It Deeper Than We Think

Pleiades sent in this link here. This bit caught my eye because in Europe they're talking about recapitalising their banks.

SK: There’s no sense trying to recapitalise the banks if you are also trying to maintain the debt they have currently issued and continue having the debtors have to repay that debt. If they’re talking about instead doing what’s now happening with Greece where they’re going to abolish about 50 per cent of the debt, that’s much more sensible. Basically the amount of money which was generated by lending activity of the banks was most drastically excessive. They made a mistake and they basically have to wear the consequences of it and that therefore means writing off the debt.
The trouble is it’s also being compliant with an austerity program and the trouble about the austerity program is that that itself bites back on itself by reducing the cash flows that are then needed to pay the government sector, and in fact the end result of an austerity program is that often the budget deficit gets worse rather than better. I would be in favour of wide-scale debt abolition, guaranteeing depositors funds at the same time, putting in mechanisms to mean that people who are genuine savers didn’t get disadvantaged from the whole thing. Fundamentally, it would be a dramatic shift in the proportion of money that was effectively credit money across to being effectively fiat money instead.
AP: What size of a shift are you talking about?
SK: If the finance sector was doing what it should be doing, which is simply providing working capital for the non-bank financial sector and businesses and innovation funds for entrepreneurs and so on, in an American case it would mean reducing the size of the finance sector by a factor of four or five. It’s literally that much too big. Of course it would mean large numbers of finance brokers, finance advisers, bank staff, would be out of a job and I’d be shot for it, but the reality is over time that’s going to happen anyway and I’d just be bringing it on more suddenly. But I’d be blamed for causing it.

And he's talking about a two decade time frame. Basically, we're staring down the barrel of how to solve the problem of too much debt. Everybody has two solutions: Inflate it away by printing money, or default and stiff payments. Neither one is a good option and both give rise to extreme winners and losers scenarios. The main thing that has to be said is that most governments get to such situations, like, say Japan or to a lesser extent the PIGS, America and the UK,  because the vested interests of the day win out over the long term health of the national budgets. If people could collectively foresee these problems, then they would have avoided things getting to such points. Instead, what politicians do is that they carry the interests of the day, putting the bill on tab. After a certain amount of years of such bad governance, the small debt problem eventually blows into a big debt problem.

There seems to be a recurring argument about debt that, people who can't repay debts shouldn't be and shouldn't have been allowed to borrow - whether it be subprime loans or money lent to Greece. Then there is the counter argument that perhaps lenders should have been more prudent (there's that word!) in their lending and whatever money is lost should be chalked up to bad lending. i.e the lender should take their lumps. However the truth is that people who are shackled with the debt but feel that they weren't the ones who asked to borrow the money, are rightfully angry that they've been lumped with this debt without their consent. And then there are people who deposited their money into a bank only to find the bank lent it to Greece, and now they might see their banks topple over, who are equally angry about the predicament they find themselves in.

All of this is just to say that the tribulations in Europe over Greece is going to get much worse before it gets better.

Occupy Everywhere

The Revolution We Have To Have?

There's something really interesting going on with this Occupy Wall Street business. First of all, the movement seems to be genuinely autochthonous out of Social Media. The even weirder thing about it is the persistent refusal to nominate a leadership. So the powers that be cannot negotiate with the massive body of people to get them out of Wall Street. What's less strange is that this movement is moving beyond Wall Street and around the world. And for once, you would think that the powers that be would be forced to reckon with this public show of anger.

The kinds of analysis that are out and about are hopelessly outdated by ideological frameworks of the past. What's particularly interesting about the movement is how it is basically moving out of the traditional - and largely stage-managed - American left and right dialectic, which the rest of us in the world know to be a in fact a weird bird with two right wings fighting over who gets to go to the right further. There are even original Tea Party people who have abandoned the Tea Party, turning up. And this makes sense because the outrage can really be described in a few short sentences.

The bankers got bailed out while the rest of the economy went to pot. Then, they paid themselves massive, obscene bonuses while lots of people lost houses and livelihoods. And now that people have noticed, they're wondering why these people are so angry and won't go away. Frankly, would you?

Not only did people lose half of their retirement savings in the catastrophe that was the GFC, many lost livelihoods, businesses, houses and whole communities went down the gurgler. it hasn't happened here in Australia, but it could well do if China happens to tank, thanks to Europe tanking. With the two speed economy straining, should China go, our mining sector will wilt and we'll be a one speed economy, equally in the pot. So we're not that far off the need to tell these bankers and in our case our CEOs to take a huge pay cut and come back to earth where the rest of us live.

But back to the phenomenon itself. A few weeks I ago I made the remark that all they needed was a Trotsky, but the amazing thing is that Social Media is going to obliviate the need for a organiser like Leon Trotsky was in his day. As long as people are angry, they'll be motivated enough to organise themselves through social media. It's like flash mob, but really angry and motivated. And the ramifications of this is what is truly interesting. You wonder how long the Republican Party in the US can keep pretending that these people are marginal weirdos when the crowd and movements grow day by day and around the world. You wonder how long before the sheer number puts some spine into Barack Obama's administration -and by extension fear of the electorate into the Republicans who just shot down Obama's 477billion dollar package for jobs.

Maybe Social Media really is going to change the world for the better by bypassing the information control exerted by the traditional mass media? That would be something to see.

 

Future Of Air Combat

F-35 or F-22?

Today's entry is going to be totally off the wall for this blog and is going to be about fighter jets. Bear with me... A couple weeks ago, Pleiades gave me the heads up on this article about the development of the F-35 and how it might be a turkey.

While all attention is on tax and falling markets, an even more important event for Australia and our region is unfolding: the trillion-dollar Joint Strike Fighter project has begun the early stages of a painful and extended death rattle. This threatens to inflict major harm on our defence partner, the United States, and the JSF is by far the largest military obligation in Australia’s history.

Even worse, we convinced our defence manufacturing industry to tool up to be major JSF contractors. As a result, a huge chunk of our defence manufacturing support capacity faces a financial disaster. Three companies have already failed. The long-term air defence planning of the US and Australia is now in tatters.

These are extreme statements which will, as always, be denied by the top brass in the Australian Defence Department. I have been warning about the dangers of the JSF for close to a decade and the defence officials, whose reputations are at risk, have always thrown cold water on my comments. Now, at last, the US marines have decided to tell the truth about the JSF in the American national interest. And the truth confirms all our worst fears.

But it is not all bad news because the US marines are also offering a solution. And better still, if Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Defence Minister Stephen Smith are courageous enough to bypass our reputation-preserving defence chiefs, and back the US marines’ solution, Australia can play a big role in overcoming the JSF problem. We would also maintain the significant US role in the air defence of our region and ensure survival for the large areas of Australia’s defence manufacturing that is hitched to the doomed JSF.

Few Australians will have heard of Major Christopher J Cannon, an operations analyst with the US Marines. Major Cannon did not tell the truth about the JSF by talking to the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Rather he did something far more powerful – he told the truth in the Marine Corps Gazette under the heading “F-35B (JSF) needs a Plan B”.

The link within the article links to another article that has this nice bit:

What about acquisitions costs? From program start in 2001, the JSF was estimated to cost $233 billion₅ for total program acquisition.₆ This was the teaser price, the estimate grew to $245 billion in 2004, $279 billion in 2007, and in 2008 the JSF program office’s estimate was $300 billion,₇ a 29 percent increase over the original figure. However, GAO found that this 2008 estimate was not reliable, comprehensive, accurate, well documented, or credible. Worse, no uncertainty analysis has been conducted (acquisition may cost $298 billion; it may cost $500 billion). The only thing that is certain, the $300 billion estimate was “virtually certain to be wrong.”₈ In 2010, after a Nunn-McCurdy breach—a required formal review whenever program costs increase anywhere from 15 percent to 50 percent over expectations—GAO’s latest 2011 estimate is a total JSF program acquisition cost of $383 billion. Using coarse analysis and acknowledging that from 2001 to 2011 estimated program cost grew about $16.7 billion a year, when IOC begins in 5 more years we might expect a $466 billion acquisition cost—exactly double the original estimate.

I'd hate to be up for that much money. The development for the F-35 has been one of those fraught projects where there are probably graveyards for careers of people who were put in charge to project manage it. The closest thing to the developmental debacle this project has been, is probably the Robert McNamara inspired F-111. The story of the F-111 was that it was an attempt to build a fighter bomber that was capable of covering all the bases with one aircraft instead of parallel development of different fighters and bombers.Instead the project ended up with an aircraft that pleased nobody except the Australians.

If the F-22 is already developed and can take over from our FA-18, then it seems crazy to keep throwing good money after bad in the development of something that is likely to be a camel-by-committee design fighter jet.

Today we find even the Economist has weighted in on just howmuch this thing is costing and whether it is worth it.

As China and other countries develop more accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, able to hit moving targets 1,000 miles away, America and its allies have become worried about the aircraft-carriers they have relied upon as a principal means of projecting power since 1945. Those worries are not much helped by the carrier version of the F-35 which, without external fuel tanks, has a combat radius of only 680 miles. The US Navy’s response has been to propose what it calls the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike aircraft. It has already asked for financing and hopes—somewhat optimistically—that it will enter service by 2018. If a big, long-range UAS can operate safely from a congested carrier flight deck at sea, that would go some way to allaying fears for the future of aircraft-carriers.

The future of aerial combat is likely to be between drones, not manned fighters. If the Chinese are simultaneously developing missile systems to make carrier systems obsolete AND they're building carriers, then there's an argument to be made that the era of carriers is over. Just as Joe Kennedy thought it was time to get out of shares when a shoe shine boy offered him advice, the advanced nations of the world should get out of carriers if a country with a poor naval record such as China starts playing with them. We are not going to see a battle between carriers as we did in World War II, and nor should we given that war is over 66years ago. World War I sure wasn't fought on the same technology as the US Civil War. It's doubtful even the Vietnam War and Desert Storm are going to offer us any indication of what the next war is going to look like.

However we do know the shape of the war we are fighting, and it is increasingly through unmanned 'drones'.

The British Ministry of Defence suggests the answer is: perhaps. In a thoughtful document on the British approach to UAS earlier this year, the ministry’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre argued that if the controlling system addressed the principles of the law on armed conflicts (military necessity, humanity, proportionality and the ability to distinguish between military targets and civilians) and if the rules of engagement were satisfied, then an armed strike would meet legal norms. However, it goes on to say that the software testing and certification of such a system would be expensive and difficult. And decisions about what is proportionate often require fine distinctions and sophisticated judgment. The authors conclude: “As technology matures and new capabilities appear, policymakers will need to be aware of the potential legal issues and take advice at a very early stage of any new system’s procurement cycle.”

David Deptula, a retired general who was until recently in charge of the US Air Force’s intelligence and surveillance operations agrees. He recently told Jane’s Defence Weekly: “Technologically, we can take [autonomy] pretty far, but it won’t be technology that is the limiting factor, it will be policy.” The Air Force’s chief scientist, Mark Maybury, points out that there will be an almost infinite combination of contingencies facing drones. Designing systems that ensure they respond in a safe and effective way may take a decade or more. Evangelists for drones concur that even when there is no longer “a man in the loop” piloting a UAS directly, it will still probably be necessary to have humans “on the loop” monitoring and intervening.

The ethical problems do not end there. There may be nothing in the laws of war saying combatants must be willing to put themselves in harm’s way, but some find creepy the idea of a UAS pilot stationed in Nevada driving home for supper with the family a few hours after surgically killing dozens of people in Pakistan. The peculiar detachment of drone warfare has given people close to the receiving end of drone attacks some success in depicting America’s use of them as the cowardly action of a bully sheltering behind superior technology. Looking farther ahead, there are fears that UAS and other robotised killing machines will so lower the political threshold for fighting that an essential element of restraint will be removed.

These kinds of caveats aside, the trend of high tech war has been extending to lessening risk for the high tech party in its war against the lower tech foe; the increasing accuracy of pin-point strikes; the asymmetrical 'whup' combat model that has come in where a great disparity in firepower and capability are seen. If the UAS system isn't a manifestation of exactly those trends, it's hard to think of what is more so.

Further to that is the lower cost of training a drone team compared to a combat aviator and then the readily available talent thanks to computer games and you begin to see a picture where he Top Gun model of combat aviators going into battle in the skies is firmly the thing of the past. History is marching right by the F-35 development. It is well worth asking if our government should be paying money for this expensive turkey.

Kodak Goes To The Wall?

When A Monopoly Isn't Enough

This has nothing to do with the GFC, but all the same Eastman Kodak has just appointed a bankruptcy law firm.

Eastman Kodak says it has no intention of filing for bankruptcy. Shares of the money losing company are recovering Monday after plummeting 54% on Friday on news that it hired law firm Jones Day - known as bankruptcy and restructuring experts.

Whether or not they go under, Kodak is a long suffering American icon. The company has not made a profit since 2007 and revenues has dwindled for the last decade. In 2004, the company was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 74 years on the blue chip index. In 2010, it was removed from the S&P 500.

Kodak, the maker of photography film for well over a century, once enjoyed 80% market share for film. The firm first started its decline in the 1980's when Japanese competitors like Fuji film took business with lower prices. In fact, as Peter Cohan writes in a recent Forbes column, stiff competition caused Kodak to lay off 19,900 workers in 1999. Another, 4,500 workers were let go in January 2009.

More than cheap film, the emergence of digital photography is what really killed Kodak's business. Ironically, Kodak invented digital photography back in 1975. Unfortunately, for them, they have not been able to leverage the technology in a profitable way. Memory cards simply don't offer the same kind of margins as film. Today, when people snap away on their smart-phones and post the pics to the Internet, there's no money to be made for Kodak.

It's interesting listening to the commentary in the accompanying video where they bury Eastman Kodak as being un-innovative and reluctant to change. The problem for Kodak is possibly that it got overly identified with its film product, and even when it went to the market with digital cameras, it had no branding power to fight camera companies that stole its thunder. All the same, all the Hollywood movies of the last 100 years were shot on one or another Eastman Kodak stock. Name a film and there's a cinematographer who can tell you exactly which stock was used to shoot that movie. And all those great cinematographers are deathly loyal to film. They poo-poo shooting digital like it's trying to create art with crayons instead of oil paints. The end of film is still a long way away in their minds.

So it's a little surprising to see that somehow Kodak could not sustain itself outside of the film industry. Or perhaps it spent too much energy servicing the film industry and not enough in staying afloat in the consumer sphere. It's not a company that isn't iconic that's getting lost in the fray - on the contrary, it's the flagship firm of its industry where everybody knows the yellow corporate colour. It's not company that is without a great deal of good will from its customers. Old school photographers and cinematographers alike delight in telling you how much they like film. Yet it is also surprising that a company that has a virtual monopoly on film with cinema can't survive somehow. I guess that much of it is the sign of the times.

Oddly enough I still have some rolls of Kodak sitting in my room without a real reason to use them. I do so much digital photography I'd simply forgotten about those little rolls of 400 film. It would be weird if film disappeared from the supermarket shelves in the coming months.

The Fall Of The Planet Of The Greedy Apes

They're Fighting In The Streets

There's a simple explanation for why the popular front of the 1960s gave way to a lethargic 1970s, and it is basically that the Baby Boomers who got motivated enough to go to the barricades got bought off. They got bought off with what turns out to be cheap credit, which, as it turns out has made a mountain of debt that we collectively cannot afford to repay. So, this time, it is Gen X and Gen Y taking to the streets because basically, not only can Gen X and Gen Y not pay for their debts, they feel they can't be asked to pay for the debts of the Baby Boomers. And that, in a nutshell is how we got to the GFC and its aftermath.

When I paint this broadly, I don't mean to say every Baby Boomer is equally to blame. It's just that demographically speaking, this is how the financial crisis has shaken out. And the rich got richer and to add insult to injury, they got taxed less and all that went hand in hand with the buying out process. So demographically speaking, the Baby Boomers had a good ride of it, putting it all on the big demographic credit card, and the whole system was workable as long as they stayed working. However now that they're retiring, they can't all ride off into the sunset without paying it off. In turn, the battles they didn't finish are now going to be fought in the streets by Gen X and Gen Y because they will say they'll be damned if they're going  to pay for Baby Boomer debts as well as their own.

I've had a brief e-conversation with a friend who is in the financial sector over in Hong Kong, and he doesn't see a bright future. He says it's going to be a bloodbath and that it's going to be like 'The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes' except without the hairy apes. When I asked him why, he basically said that the global economy is too linked together, and there's really no stopping the knock on effect. He says there will be riots in the streets like the one in London, the world over. We should all enjoy our lives while we can because this is all going to end in a literal bloodbath, he reckons. It seems drastic, but lately I've been thinking that if indeed there is more debt issued than there is money going around and accounted for, then when everybody decides to call their debts in, in one big avalanche of debts being called in, people are going to go out backwards. Worse than that, whole chunks of the economy are going to cease to function because banks are going to be forced to repossess everything, and then fire everybody in a bid to survive. Everybody will run on the banks. Whole currencies will lose value over night.

Every business would be forced to pay up, or go to the wall or get repossessed. Everybody with a mortgage? Tough, the bank's going to seize what you have. Everybody with a credit card? The banks going to cancel it, and seize money from your savings to cover the gap. If you have savings, they'll tax it out of your pockets because the government won't be able to pay its debts. If you have stocks, they'll keep going down because all those companies have some form of debt. Property bubble? Watch what happens when the whole thing starts contracting. In other words, the endgame is going to provoke a lot of anger and rioting.

They're going to riot harder in Greece because if all those austerity cuts go ahead, they're not going to have a country left. The government will be force to privatise everything - electricity- rail, ports, you name it. And if the so-called contagion hits Portugal and Spain, well, they'll have to do the same, and they're already rallying in Portugal. In New York, they've just arrested 700 people over demonstrations against Wall Street. It would only take a Trotsky to organise a mob like that and you have the seeds of a 1905 style revolution. Make no mistake, there will be more rioting in the streets before all of this is said and done.

But back to what some people have been telling me is this: Not even all the austerity measures are going to be enough to pay for these sovereign debts. And this means there will be a default, and when the default happens, there will be banks failing. When that happens, it might be enough to trigger the rest of the avalanche of debts being called in at once. That pain is going to go all the way around the world, and everybody is going to feel it. I'm looking at 700 arrests in New York City, and I'm thinking out loud what happens when that turns in to 7,000 and 70,000? And what happens when New York City can no longer pay their police? Will the police still turn up to arrest these people? If you were a fat cat Wall Street type, you might want to think of an exit strategy. The problem is, there's no where on the planet you can run to. Maybe they know this already. And my friend in Hong Kong would tell you, this is all on the cards, all on the table, right now.

China In The Spotlight

More Than Reading Tea Leaves

Okay, non-movie related entry today. Sorry guys, but this stuff keeps being so interesting, so bear with me.

Time Magazine had this article today, pondering the likelihood of China being able to help out Europe as the global financial crisis part 2 unfolds.

China certainly has the cash on hand ($3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves) to make a difference. It also seemingly has a strong interest in keeping global markets afloat. But that wasn't the take I got at a lunch this week in Hong Kong with a regional banker, an economist, and a Hong Kong politician.

For one thing, frugal Chinese citizens aren't keen on spending their country's savings to bail out profligate Europeans, they said. Beijing is already under enough pressure to spend more of its export cash on its own people. The government and China's sovereign wealth funds also aren't sold on the idea. That's partly because China doesn't feel as vulnerable to Europe's debt crisis as we might think.

That sounds oddly familiar. For one thing, the Germans don't want to spend the money to bail out the profligate Greeks but in their instance it can be argued that they should seeing that the Euro actually keeps Germany sheltered from a much more fluctuating and volatile currency. Some have done the sums and think that a re-issued Deutschmark would appreciate 30% above where the Germans are trading, putting a massive dent in their exports.  So an argument can be made that the lazy Greeks are in part keeping the Germans in business, even if they owe too much money.

Furthermore, there's this interesting article here.

The concerns about Europe's banks have been simmering in the background for some time. Economists have warned that at the core of the euro zone crisis is an unstable support system: Poorly capitalized banks were holding up poorly financed governments, which in turn were expected to back the poorly capitalized banks. As the sovereign debt crisis has escalated, sucking in giant Italy, those fears have only inched closer to becoming reality. Many influential voices have proclaimed that Europe's banks just don't' have the level of capital necessary to withstand a one-two punch of slowing growth and widening debt crisis. They could end up taking a massive smack from losses on their holdings of European sovereign debt.

Right. And when the European banks start really failing, what is that going to do to Europe which is China's great export market? Hot on the heels of that article is this article here in Yahoo7.

"Everyone is getting more concerned about risks accumulating domestically (in China)" said Ju Wang, a fixed income strategist at Barclays Capital in Singapore.

The implications for Australia are huge. Although BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto have both issued bullish statements about demand from China for our natural resources booming for at least another decade, experts say that producers such as our miners are often the last to know when demand from customers falls off a cliff.

If China's property market continues to fall, building will stop abruptly and demand for Australian iron ore will plummet because most of our goods go towards building China's infrastructure.

"This is certainly a big issue and one we cannot afford to be complacent about" said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital.

"The biggest concern are the loans from outside the banking sector that fuelled the property boom. But there are risks across the economy and it could have a big impact on our exports. China needs to look at loosening monetary policy sooner rather than later to help stop so many investors borrowing from unregulated lenders."

In other words, China actually needs Europe to sort out this Greek sovereign debt mess because if it doesn't, it has as much to lose in the ensuing global recession. One can't say with any confidence that wise heads will prevail in the Euro debate or the US policy debate, let alone who-know-what that passes for policy setting in Beijing. So strap yourselves in for the double-dip recession and hope like hell it doesn't devolve in to wars and destroy the world.

The Dark Crystal Ball Says...

This one is from Pleiades, and everybody who is vaguely interested in where things are likely to go should have a read of it.

Unless Germany moves quickly to reverse its current account surplus – which is very unlikely – the European crisis will force a sharp balance-of-trade adjustment onto Germany, which will cause its economy to slow sharply and even to contract. By 2015-16 German economic performance will be much worse than that of France and the UK.
If Germany does not take radical steps to push its current account surplus into deficit, the brunt of the European adjustment will fall on the deficit countries with a sharp decrease in domestic demand. This is what the world means when it insists that these countries “tighten their belts”.

If the deficit countries of Europe do not intervene in trade, they will bear the full employment impact of that drop in demand – i.e. unemployment will continue to rise. If they do intervene, they will force the brunt of the adjustment onto Germany and Germany will suffer the employment consequences.

For one or two years the deficit countries will try to bear the full brunt of the adjustment while Germany scolds and cajoles from the side. Eventually they will be unable politically to accept the necessary high unemployment and they will intervene in trade – almost certainly by abandoning the euro and devaluing. In that case they automatically push the brunt of the adjustment onto the surplus countries, i.e. Germany, and German unemployment will rise. I don’t know how soon this will happen, but remember that in global demand contractions it is the surplus countries who always suffer the most. I don’t see why this time will be any different.

About a week after I set down these “predictions”, and two days after I finished this point, I saw in the Financial Times that German growth has already hit a wall. Expect to see a lot more articles like this over the next few years.

The rest of the article makes for fascinating reading.

I was thinking the other day that there is far more debt than there is money in the economies all combined. So at some point somebody is going to be stuck with the un-payable debt, and that will lead to all kinds of conflict. There's really nowhere to run in the markets or even outside of it. The money you hold might evaporate in policy-led inflation; the assets you hold might devalue severely. The governments you vote in might have to tax you harder than you thought. And none of this would add up to what would be enough.

Ultimately we're going to end up like Argentina in the late 1990s. You wouldn't be able to insure anything because insurance companies will die back. All those Woody Allen jokes about insurance salesmen will sound quaint on that day. It's all in the cards. We live in interesting times, that's for sure.