RE CLASS WARFARE IN EGYPT NYT EDITORIAL Is global banker bashing exogenous?

Another NYT article, re fragile global markets, calls this type of event, 'exogenous', and so it is, for now.


Question: What if it happens all over the middle east? Still exogenous?


What if here too? Still exogenous? 


Or does it start to look endogenous?


Re Krugman's article today re Davos, what if it were limited strictly to a subspecies of class war, say a new pastime referred to by Krugman, called 'banker bashing'?


What is wrong with banker bashing?
Does it matter which kind of banker? Global banker? Local banker? Liberal banker? Planned economy banker?


Is, for example, global banker bashing exogenous? Does use of the term depend on the situs of the speaker?

RE THE TEA PARTY WAGS THE DOG

Frank Rich article. Great that he makes the connection with GE.  


GE and Reagan went way back. GE really got a big boost when Reagan then took office. 


It is interesting to see the connection between the Maverick Executive, the Maverick Republican, and the cowboy. 


John Wayne for example too. 


It is also interesting to see the connections, between people like Ayn Rand, rugged genius individual paradigm types, also Thurston Robert Macaire Howell types, and the American corporate right.

RE THOMAS FRIEDMAN NYT TODAY

I just never agree with him or his reasoning on virtually anything.


'America never would or should copy Singapore’s less-than-free politics.' Wrong, probably should long ago have moved in that direction, sadly.


'But Singapore has something to teach us about “attitude...” wrong word.


 — about taking governing seriously and thinking strategically. Wrongly put, in so many ways, but a right direction nonetheless. 


(This is really, beyond Friedman's superficial treatment, about radical political reform here, not merely about an attitude, or taking something seriously, for a minute or two. But Friedman cannot broach that kind of level for the subject; off limits, prohibido.)


 We used to do that... wrong, we never did.


and must again..., wrong, we never did it.


 because our little brick house... completely wrong metaphor.


with central heating is not going to be resistant to the storms much longer.' Wrong: no central heat; wrong tense


Every sentence and phrase here is nonsense really. 


Singapore is not a system based on a 'radical free market', but rather yet another developmental state feeding on loose open consumer markets everywhere. 


His term for the welfare state aspect is nanny state, not very appealing image.


He also quotes Mahbubani, icing on the cake.


He really won't back off his radical globalist pander stance, persisting in calling Singapore a radical free market system; even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this has not been the kind of 'global free trade' system he has portrayed it to be, has not achieved the kinds of results; but rather one of developmental state feeding off more open advanced suggestible societies.

RE STATE OF THE DISUNION

'We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.'


Most unfortunately, these are things Americans generally do not know, cannot do, and are not politically set up to act on. 

re gld puke indicator

I thought this comment rather interesting.

http://goldchat.blogspot.com/2011/01/funny-business-in-gld.html

cf also  Lance Lewis' 'puke indicator'................

RE STATE OF THE UNION

See David Kaiser's excellent site, and current post.


He also referred to Blow's editorial today, among many other things.


Here is a quote from DK:


'We now face the worst long-term unemployment problem that we have seen since the Great Depression and although it is less serous than it was then, we have, this time, no strategy to deal with it at all.'


At least back then there was a WPA, and still some union labor power in the society. 


Not anymore.


What really turned things around, however, was a world war; most unfortunately, for most everyone else.

RE HARD KNOCK LIFE NYT EDITORIAL CHARLES BLOW

Same thing has been happening since WW II re the role of the Presidency. Most Americans did not notice it happening.  


Kennedy, no exception. "Ask not..."


What nonsense, really.


"Maverick Team Players."

RE THE STONE PHILOSOPHY IN THE UK

This is Britain's version of The Stone apparently:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12279627

Quite vapid too.

RE THE STONE PHILOSOPHY NYT GOT STONED OFF THE AIR

Not a bad thing to be stoned silent, from what I saw.


Not enough Americans are good at it, 
and the NYT did it rather wrong.

RE PK AND THE RYAN RESPONSE

If, of course, oligopoly and monopoly are the rule, rather than the exception, and one never really sees hide nor hair of 'equilibrium', except in a Platonic dream world, as a sort of chimera, then why think of using equilibrium as a paradigm for a 'science'? 


Sort of like using 'The Forms'.... or calling God as a witness.


Beckett:
"Madame: Officer, as God is my witness, he had his hand upon it."
"Officer: madame, God is a witness that cannot be sworn."
Murphy


It would make a lot more sense to roll the whole 'discipline' (nondiscipline) of macroeconomics into the category of a subrubric of grand strategy, than to leave it flopping on the deck of history. 


Some countries no doubt actually have done it to some extent this way. Think of passages in Friedman and LeBard's book, The Coming War With Japan,  for example, on Grand Strategy. Paul Kennedy's work is also along these lines to some extent.

RE KRUGMAN CAN QUOTE KEYNES TOO SOMETIMES WITH REAL INSIGHT

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/the-ryan-response/

FACEBOOK MAVERICK CARTOON

Picture Mr Zuckerberg, in harness to a troika, a winter mountain scene, say Alois Arnegger painting of an Alpine ski slope scene; taxi's sign says SOCIAL NETWORK. 


It has prominent Russian top officials, yet wearing heavy mink-lined Robert Macaire type smokers, smoking huge cigars, and sipping champagne and holding the bottle; think Ken Russell's The Music Lovers, Tchaikovsky's troika,  etc.


The caption above reads: 
Information Superhighway.


The one below:
The Maverick Executive In Harness

RE FACEBOOK

See prior post above, and NYT January 4 article.


Russians are effusive about the development of the amazing personality of Mr Zuckerberg.


Very interesting to note the close ties of these backers to the top men.


Just one of those wonderful coincidences in a lazy fare world, here even a nonpublic company investment world.


Wonderful to have such a system really.


Eg what would a Milton Friedman, or even a Krugman, say?


Facebook control or twinkies, the product or security doesn't matter. 


Zuckerberg is our laissez faire man!

RE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS

See my comment on Pauline Maier's article NYT Dec 22; and see also David Kaiser's current post, and comments.

RE KRUGMAN NYT THE COMPETITION MYTH OR RATHER THE ECONOMICS MYTH

This 'myth' butts right up against the 'economics' myth, so Krugman has to somehow, against an avalanche of evidence now, try to show that economics is not a myth, while competitiveness is.


Economists will say things like it doesn't really matter to a country whether it makes machine tools or twinkies. 


(Perhaps bad example, in that twinkies probably are tweaked to the last degree by technology. Picture cheap hand made spaghetti republic twinkies.)


The sad truth is: economics is the myth. 


Here is a classic statement from a classic source:


"Ch 24 IV The General Theory
But if nations can learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy...there need be no important economic forces calculated to set the interest of one country against that of its neighbours. There would still be room for the international division of labour and for international lending in appropriate conditions. But there would no longer be a pressing motive why one country need force its wares on another or repulse the offerings of its neighbour...with the express object of upsetting the equilibrium of payments so as to develop a balance of trade in its own favour. International trade would cease to be what it is, namely, a desperate expedient to maintain employment at home by forcing sales on foreign markets and restricting purchases, which, if successful, will merely shift the problem of unemployment to the neighbor which is worsted in the struggle, but a willing and unimpeded exchange of goods and services in conditions of mutual advantage."


At least Keynes was more or less an economic nationalist. 


BACK THEN, THERE WAS ROOM FOR A VERY LIMITED NOTION OF AN INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOR, AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE, AS WHOLESOME LIMITED IDEAS. 


NOT ANY MORE.  ECONOMISTS HAVE GONE IN A GLOBALIST DIRECTION, FOLLOWING ADAM SMITH, WITH A VENGEANCE. 


Few Western economists have had the insight, or gumption, or both, to follow Keynes' view of a primarily nationalistic economics. 


Except for people like Hamilton, List, etc., this has been left to Asian developmental thinkers to exploit.


Terms search also other related posts, Keynes, free trade, laissez faire, economics, etc., etc.


PK is really the wrong kind of person, an economist, to try to explain the pros or cons of something like competitiveness. 


Kind of like asking a chemist to expostulate on military strategy.


One has to read things like Chalmers Johnson, or the early Prestowitz, to get a flavor of what the implications of competitiveness might have meant.


I also liked Ravi Batra, The Myth of Free Trade.


However, Ravi Batra also favored, quite anomalously, aggressive technology transfer, to places like India presumably. Can anyone see why?


But at this point, re competitiveness, it is already 'game over'.

RE BERLUSCONI

La Donna e Mobile

RE ROBERT REICH NYT RECOVER OUR SPENDING POWER BRAUDEL THE MEDITERRANEAN NOT THE WILD WEST

Income redistribution, taken in isolation, makes some sense. 


The rest of it is mostly the same globalist consumerist model nonsense we see even from ostensibly 'progressive' pundits. 


They are essentially one trick ponies: blobalism is good. 
Let's just try to tweak it, and somehow everything will turn out all right.


Rather, we should discourage (even attempt to prevent), not encourage, further or high speed growth in China, for the most obvious military, commercial, financial, resource, and environmental reasons; just as we should have in Japan, which pundits seem everywhere now to be analogizing to China, deja vu, for very similar reasons. 


(The pundits say 'like Japan 20 years ago', but 50 years back, for Japan, would be closer, if you do the research.


Pundits will say China has almost all of certain metals. One reason is that we did not bother to mine them somewhere else.) 


Even back then, 50 years ago, Japan was playing three sides in the Cold War behind our back, investing in China, its ostensible cold war enemy.


Here is a quote from The Coming Conflict With China: 


'"(As for the United States) for a relatively long time it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance....We must conceal our abilities and bide our time."--Lieutenant General Mi Zhenyu, Vice Commandant, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing.'


For Japan, similar quotes can be found. 
See also  The Coming War With Japan, especially "The Grand Strategy of Japan".


As I have pointed out, as well as their own pundits, Japan was allowed to hollow out the American industrial base (ie Japan's own ostensible defense umbrella industrial base). On this topic, a passage from The coming War With Japan is apposite, see p. 


China has been in process of squashing it flat. No more umbrella. 


It is not 'the world is flat', but the American producer economy, that is flat.


There is no trade and investment learning curve in the US.


Matter of fact, 'high growth' per se should be discouraged, everywhere. 


Especially, why grow your future enemies, even if it seems a great bargain today?


Reich, and American elites, both share the view that it is basically a hunky dory situation, and all we need to do is a little trade tweaking, and some domestic income redistribution, in order to continue to high grow these developmental regimes. They think of the world as one of open opportunity, on the model of the American West, where capitalism can create its own sources of opportunity as it goes along.


Think instead of the Mediterranean world, as described by Braudel, a world of relative scarcity surrounded by hungry societies each striving, since ancient times, Rome, Carthage, Persia, etc., for a livelihood. See also Clifford A. Wright, A Mediterranean Feast, a cookbook with some history included.


That is emphatically not how it will turn out, either for American elites, or for American middle or lower class persons.


Term search also Chalmers Johnson, Prestowitz, etc. 


Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? Esp. Ch. 5 is useful, for Americans who cannot understand why their political system and economy do not flourished, are now flat; in spite of, and crushed by, all this great blobalization.


People like James Grant would not agree with any of this. I use his ideas, re currencies, when they happen to agree with mine.

RE JAMES GRANT U VIRGINIA PRESENTATION

His last presentation words, wonderful, 
before the happy hour there, 
re the expanded activities of the fed,
'so much disillusion is yet to come'.

RE FACEBOOK ARENDT ORIGINS ETC

There are I am sure as many views of the significance of this development as there are distinct thinkers around the glob.


I tend to see it, down the road a little way, perhaps as a powerful tool to be coopted, or transformed; 


starts out what appears to be private, Mark Zuckerberg, individualistic, enter preener, laissez faire, rail to rail, Maverick Executive, Casanova hand, enterprise (terms search these); 


then may turn, some day soon, in the direction of 1984, BIG BROTHER, pops out, back to the future. 


Perhaps that is why certain 'illiberal' regimes have taken a ravenous interest in it. 


One cannot help but think of some implications, from the old Soviet regime especially, described in Arendt's Origins and elsewhere, or for newer ones of similar scope.


Volunteer Facebook Guppies are legion. What are their views and who are their friends, enemies, or merely acquaintances, and why might that some day seem to matter, not just for 'marketing', etc.; facebook tells most all of it, and more. 


At least my blog site is mostly 'mine', with limited references to known others.

Re A message passed on here

This is the kind of response one might expect with such a legislative volte face; see my recent comments re Nevins Volume 2:

'Dear Friend,

Over the past two years, especially during the election, Republicans and a select few Democrats did everything they could to derail health care reform.

Now they've fulfilled their campaign promise and voted for a full repeal. But what most haven't done is given up the affordable, subsidized federal care that they voted today to deny so many of us.

Call out this health care hypocrisy. Send a Rep. who voted for repeal the actual form to cancel their own federal insurance benefits:

http://act.credoaction.com/fax/signup.html?cp_id=61&rc=paste_1

'

Not that the passed healthcare reform bill was necessarily good legislation; we can't really do good legislation, here in this political structural framework anyway..............


further, it is not really just a 'recent problem', as references to Nevins' works, on the run up to the Civil War, or Pauline Maier on Ratification, are intended to indicate.

RE WHAT'S GOOD FOR GM IS GOOD FOR HOMEOWNERS NYT THURSTON ROBERT MACAIRE HOWELL

Thurston had gotten it right, back in 06.  


'WHO DO YOU THINK THEY ARE GOING TO BAIL OUT, YOU OR ME?' (ie nonculpable residential homeowner guppies, or Thurston/GM) 


This is p 7, PREVIOUSLY PUT ON THIS SITE

RE AMERICAN ELITES CUT OUT BY ELITE FOREIGNERS CHINA ETC IN THE NEW BLOBALPLACE DRIFT

In the new blobal 'marketplace' BLOBALPLACE, elites will not hesitate to cut out those foreign elites, from whom they heretofore have benefitted.


Civilizationally, it will become an elite dog eat elite foreign dog world, going forward, with many different types of foreign dogs at each others' elite throats. 


Ultimately, morality, ethnicity, and necessity, will overcome the liberal market blobal system, blobalplace.


This is just the kind of situation a cleverer, more strategically attuned, regime might have tried to anticipate, not that hard to foresee really, going forward, and have tried to avoid, after WW II. 


Other agendas, whirling within what Nevins, re another time, liked to call 'drift', remained in the way, a hundred years later.

RE NEVINS VOLUME II REPEALING THE RECENT COMPROMISE

Re healthcare law repeal, and our deeply flawed system,


think back, for example, to 1854,
see Nevins Ordeal, V. 2, "Disaster: 1854", 
to the sudden Democratic Majority, 
and to Douglas' Kansas bill, 
betraying the Compromise of 1850.


(Not so much that the 1850 Compromise had been a wonderful thing, but rather about the flaws in the political system then and now.)

RE PRESIDENT OBAMA'S CONSTITUENCY NYT ARTICLE

'American companies concerned with being left out by China-backed businesses have given President Obama support to pursue a tough approach with President Hu Jintao.'

Give me another break.


'A series of trade restrictions imposed by the Chinese government within China, including administrative controls, requirements to transfer sophisticated technology, state subsidies to favored domestic companies and so-called indigenous laws meant to favor homegrown businesses, have angered many American manufacturing and high-tech companies, which are rapidly finding themselves cut out of the world’s fastest growing market.'


These are measures we should have implemented here, in favor of this population, 5 decades ago now.

RE CHINA'S CURRENCY ISN'T OUR PROBLEM nyt editorial

Take a glance at Mark Wu's background. Goes fairly far back already.


Wu is mainly an international lawyer, promoting trade, negotiating trade deals, for money, and teaching promoting trade.  


Council On Foreign Relations...etc etc

RE SARAH PALIN

Her reference, to an anti semitic historic persecution term indicates, in that she is relatively historically and intellectually guileless, that she is readily manipulated by those not guileless.

RE David Kaiser BACK TO THE FUTURE

'But paradoxically, as observers at the time such as Henry Adams noted, the Civil War did not in the long run strengthen the authority of the federal government: it weakened it....'


'...The country was deadlocked on the major social problem of the time, Reconstruction and the fate of the newly freed slaves--one that it was destined not to solve.'


Great commentary.

RE CAN EUROPE BE SAVED KRUGMAN NYT

Answer: no.

RE DAUMIER term search

The image below, Third Class Carriage drawing.

Old Canson & Montgolfier paper, watermark, even has an old hot air balloon I think.

Daumier Drawings, Metropolitan Museum, p 136, contains scholarship re attribution of Baltimore's drawing, as tracery item for its painting.

Several problems there:

One is, Baltimore's drawing omits his self portrait at center back, which its painting, and other known examples, nevertheless contain.

Another (big) problem, Baltimore's drawing's faces often do not resemble the Met's painting's faces. Those on mine do, more than less; but then, too, its painting has been 'softened', somewhat, let us say.

Another lurking issue, age of either, or mine. Daumier had been doing railway images from at least the mid 50s; they show one. It had 3 windows.

Mine shows the edge of a third window at near left. I believe it may be older than either Baltimore drawing, or their painting.

Certainly there is a resignation, defeat, intra-class antagonism, and perhaps seldom seen sexism for Daumier, in my drawing, absent from others.

RE ANDY CLARK OPINIONATOR MIND BRAIN THE ULTIMATE PROSTHETIC

'Really understanding the mind, if the theorists of embodied and extended cognition are right, will require a lot more than just understanding the brain.'

Right. Of course, really; but compartmentalization has tended to prevent broader understandings, like this. He even qualifies, if so and so are right.....

Question:

Why, really, should understanding the mind be conditioned on whether certain cognition theorists he mentions are right?


Following Hegel, re internet (the ultimate 'prosthetic'):
The Mind and The World are one.

RE SECRETARY CLINTON'S ADDRESS MIDDLE EAST

The laissez faire hand of the blobal market place at work.

Trying to foment a middle class (rule of law) there, and ostensibly everywhere else, while eliminating the embattled one here.

That's the Casanova hand, through which money and politics are conducted, there, and ever increasingly, here.

Take a look at some of the items David Kaiser has posted recently, on the corrupting influence of mere money in American politics.

The parallels are striking:

Clinton, on the Middle East:

“Trying to get a permit..., you have to pass money through so many different hands. Trying to open up, you have to pay people off. Trying to stay open, you have to pay people off. Trying to export your goods, you have to pay people off. So by the time you pay everybody off, it’s not a very profitable venture.”

DK on the US:

'Abramoff overdid it, of course--along with that sweetheart Ralph Reed of the Christian coalition, he was taking money from rival casinos, one trying to shut down the other--money from casino A to shut down B, and then money from B to re-open. It apparently takes a certain amount of money to get introduced to certain powerful Congressmen.'

It's been getting more and more like that every day, over here, while middle class is vanishing. Although a systemic problem, few really see it that way, and no one really is pushing for structural reforms.

RE overlapping and intertwining jurisdictions GLOCALIZATION CROCKALIZATION

This was a phrase from another's commentary on Sovereignty At Bay, not long ago, discussing, and waffling, whether nation state sovereignty had really been dissolved by MNC trade and investment phenomena, and quibbling about the definition Vernon had meant.

(Albeit, in the US, we never had many indicia of nation state sovereignty, to begin with. This, after all, had been the problem with the Articles of Confederation, and has remained a deep but lesser problem under the Constitution.)

Moreover, I had written a few comments, some time ago about a great book, on State and Local Politics, in the US, its subtitle 'The Great Entanglement'. Eg, Why Iowa?, etc.

What an apt subtitle for both the local state federal, and the global, situation, 'OVERLAPPING AND INTERTWINING JURISDICTIONS'.

It fits nicely into the 'blobalization of weak sovereignty' theme.

One might call it globlocalization, or Glocalization.

MARKET CAPITALISM AS A PROCESS FOR GLOCALIZATION.

A science fiction book once used a term for alien love, or something, 'Grock' was it?

BLOCS ARE NOT SO EFFECTIVE, IT SEEMS, GOING FORWARD, AND

ARE GLOBS THEMSELVES, EACH SUBJECT TO BUBBLING ASUNDER AT FAULT LINES OR ELSEWHERE.

My father had a pet term for things he disdained, a contraction, he called such things a 'Crock'.

Thus,

Crockalization.

Re Volcanic magma

http://geraldmeaders.blogspot.com/2011/01/blobal-bubblization.html

Think also of these bubbles as pockets of volcanic magma beneath the surface of social and economic experience, under extreme pressure, building up to explode at or near fault lines everywhere.

Huntington, The Clash..., had used the metaphor of fault lines, at borders of civilizations, and gave a number of well known examples.

RE KRUGMAN'S CLIMATE OF HATE EDITORIAL

At least he has a long enough memory and attention span to recall Clinton's time and Oklahoma City.

Clinton recalled that, too, on a video I just saw.

In the intervening decades, and actually going back to the beginning of the Republic really, Americans have not been helped to see or to act on the systemic aspects of their political fragmentation.

They tend to blame eachother and/or foreigners, in predictable partisan ways, class, sections, or interest groups, sent in these directions by many types of centrifugal forces, of all kinds, public and private, unleashed, rather beyond the common welfare, and never really brought under the level of integrity and control associated even with a nation state.

Reading Ratification, and reading about the yearning of some rather important, and well meaning people, like Washington, who had long suffered through the weaknesses and embarrassments under the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress, who hoped for a stronger, respectable, national government, maybe not tomorrow, in 1787, but some day.

RE GLOBBALIZATION

I FOUND THIS SITE AND QUOTE ON MY NEW PET TERM:

Stalwart blogger Stuart Koehl has sent me a very interesting article by Ralph Peters of The Weekly Standard,arguing that tribes -- old local loyalties and identities -- are returning and will resist the push to the globbalization of all things. I use the technically correct term "globbalization" advisedly; the idea of the globbalizers is that we all dwell on this same glob, and since by the definition of globbularity one portion of a glob is indistinguishable from another, we should likewise be indistinguishable one from another. We should all be citizens of one vast globbal village, which of course will not be a village at all, though it certainly will be globbal. The article can be found here:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/616fcajg.asp

RE CURRENCIES

http://seekingalpha.com/article/245928-gold-outlook-2011-irreversible-upward-pressures-and-the-china-effect?source=marketwatch

GLOBAL BLOBBAL BUBBLELIZATION

Another implication,

'overlapping and intertwining jurisdictions'.

Globbalization leads to Blobalization,

which can result in the development of increased Bubblelization

(speculative bubbles of all kinds, developing more or less at the same time, everywhere),

within the larger Blobalized quasi-entity.

Some of these impending bubbles, ready to burst, are eg the following:

fiat currency bubbles, everywhere;

Security bubbles;

security 'blanket' (terms search this site, eg Mary Poppins) bubbles;

IT bubbles;

pollution bubbles;

enormous population bubbles;

adverse civilization bubbles;

nationalism bubbles within, and across, civilizations;

excess capacity bubbles;

Here an image from a prior post:

It is the opposite of The World is Flat paradigm.

RE SOVEREIGNTY AT BAY AGAIN BLOBALIZATION REALLY

Books like Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles appear to only confirm Vernon's original intuition, no waffling.

Kobrin from my post below:

'by overlapping and intertwining jurisdictions rather than formal or legal sovereignty....'

This sounds very much like what I have called Blobalization.

RE ECONOMIC STIMULUS ARTICLE NYT CHINA

The most important point was that China, in 2009, had required virtually all of its own 600B economic stimulus package be spent within China.

Japan had taken similar measures in the 50s through 70s, very successfully.Trading Places is a classic exposition. MITI is also useful.

The US has had no domestic industrial trade commercial policy which might compete with such strategic measures. In fact, its policies have made such policies possible.

RE NAVAL BUILDUP

Should have thought of that about 40 years ago.

With trade, manufacturing, strategic, IT,and financial weaknesses, as against Asia, having been allowed to accrue in the past 50 years, why bother, now, with a naval buildup, really?

When our creditors, and manufacturers, are our new 'enemy',

why bother?

What was it, was it Secretary Clinton, said about leverage?

RE CASH COW

This term comes, as I recall, and as Wikipedia confirms, from the 'growth-share matrix' from Boston Consulting group.

It is associated with a life-cycle concept for businesses.

Re Order versus disorder and lobbyists condottieri

Re Patricia Mathews' post, on DK's site, a look at Wikipedia firms up my recollection of one theory of the origins of the Mafia, as revolt against Anjou rule in Sicily, in the 13th Century.

True or not, it seems to have started at least in part as an organization for security, if not also for despotic power, in a lawless and/or hostile political place.

That is the kind of relatively lawless world, such as many places have never left behind, and toward which some even of our 'civilized' political practices appear once again to tend.

RE A CLOSE-UP LOOK AT THE NEW GILDED AGE AND BRUCE POST

Great commentary by DK.

Coincidentally, I looked again, tonight, at the passage in Arendt, Origins, The Movement, the section beginning at citation to Alexandre Koyre, 'the secret society in broad daylight', to the end of the chapter.  Great stuff, Arendt.

See also, Koyre, on which Arendt relied, "The Political Function of the Modern Lie",

https://nasepblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/koyre-the-political-function-of-the-modern-lie-1945.pdf

I have to agree with Bruce Post's comment. 
Right on the mark so to speak.

RE SOVEREIGNTY AT BAY OR NOT

Some authors try to explicitly waffle about this.

There is no waffling really to it.

Here is a snippet from Kobrin, sophistically waffling:

'In his retrospective review of Sovereignty at Bay ten years after its publication, Vernon

(1981, p 517 ) expresses concern that readers remember the title of the book rather than its

message; that he is unfairly associated with the argument that the nation state is ‘… done for,

finished off by the multinational enterprise.’ However, both the title and the opening lines of the

book, which argue that concepts such as sovereignty seem ‘curiously drained of meaning,’

appear unambiguous. The apparent contradiction between these two statements is resolved when

one pays closer attention to what Vernon actually means by ‘sovereignty.’ In Sovereignty at

Bay, (and his other writing) he is concerned with autonomy and control, with the problems posed

by overlapping and intertwining jurisdictions rather than formal or legal sovereignty....'

the menu

Leftover roast Australian lamb leg, sliced, curried,

with black eyed peas, kale, carrots,

potatoes, fresh ground cumin, curry powder (an organic mixture), raw garlic, tomato, Eureka lemon juice, both sauteed and raw purple onion, etc.

Red and green organic romaine lettuce vinaigrette.

Black walnut ice cream

Organic drip coffee

etc

RE GREAT HISTORY SCHOLARSHIP QUOTATION

"My idea of a historian involves the broadest possible knowledge of at least several centuries of the past, which in turn allows one to put any given era in a broader context and draw some meaningful conclusions about its particular characteristics that intelligent lay people will find intersting. No one knows better than myself that that is not a marketable skill in today's American universities."

Borrowed verbatim from David Kaiser's great site. Great poignant quote.

Deserves to be reprised here and elsewhere.

the menu

Roast leg of Australian lamb, rosemary, garlic cloves, flat side down potatoes, diced onion, capers, pepperoncini. Bacon drippings.

Field greens vinaigrette.

Eureka lemons from the yard, whipped cream, almond flour birthday cake, garnished with strawberries.

French roast organic coffee.

RE EVERYMAN A GOD

I happened to watch Rufus' lecture on Julius Caesar the other night.

Wonderful lecturer.

The conspirators all claimed to want a restored republic.

Even Brutus, Caesar's own ostensible son.

Brutus, on mother's side, long family Roman Republican heritage, etc.

Yet, while keeping as far away as he could in the East, after the parricide, he, too, had coins struck with his image, during his life.....

The Romans deified many human beings, as gods,

but it was said that only of Julius Caesar

had even they really believed it.

RE NYT ARTICLE China's Push to Modernize Military Is Bearing Fruit

Great stuff.

We have been making all this wonderful power possible.

See also previous post,

Part 3:

http://www.realecontv.com/videos/us/the-dollar-the-euro-and-china.html

Can you say,

Death of Cobdenist notion 'peace through free trade'?

Death of anarchist, individualist, laissez faire, weak government, model?

It is happening fast,

all over the world,

all at once.

The blobalization of instability.

To paraphrase Prestowitz' book,

Three Billion New Gods.

If you listen to popular teen music,

they are all, now,

little Madison Avenue

gods, and goddesses,

every one of them.

RE KARL DENNIGER PART 3

http://www.realecontv.com/videos/us/the-dollar-the-euro-and-china.html

RE FLW AESTHETICS POLITICS AYN RAND BEAUTY UGLY UTILITARIAN THINGS ARCHITECTURE

Speaking of him, Frank Lloyd Wright, he was too taken with Asian models, in my judgment, just as European aesthetes, especially the Impressionists, were; but they are beautiful living spaces, the private bungalows.

Also, and for similar reasons, he really needed a good structural, and perhaps also a drainage, engineer on board, for many of these things with flat roofs had standing water, sagging water, or worse, snow, roofs caving in, rather than merely the 'Falling Water' running past and through some of them, etc. Places like Taliesen didn't have such bad problems of this type perhaps.

Kind of Ironic, and comical, really.

Think especially of Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's character in The Fountainhead.

Think also of American conservatism, Hayek, etc. See also previous recent post, term search: EVERYMAN A GOD

I actually have a couple of his Foursquare series armchairs, his very rare, and unsuccessful, foray into mass production.

Wonderful chairs, beautiful to look at, not all that comfortable, kind of like Rand's 'ideas'.

As Wittgenstein had said, in a somewhat different context,

back to the rough ground!

RE GOLD ANTIINTELLECTUALISM

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/breaking-news/economy/scott-sumner-gold-the-dollar-and-anti-intellectualism.html

RE MAVERICK MADISON AVENUE HOLLYWOOD FRONTIER SOLIPSIST

This was a comment on DK's site recently.

A very perceptive remark.

This has been the thinly veiled 'Wagnerian' 'dream' of Western market capitalistic democracy:

'Perhaps another trend was operative: let's call it a pyschological/marketing/Hollywood dream of everyman a millionaire, a narcisisim in which the self became the ultimate moral compass, and, the group or society became the enemy. Marketers, lobbyists as agents of "capitalists" (Republicans), exploited this adroitly from Reagan to Obama. And here we are.'

Let's just also add:

(Democrats, too.)

And: EVERYMAN A GOD

What few, perhaps, may acknowledge, or realize, is that the rugged individualism of the American frontier past is, also, the anarchism, narcissism, and perhaps solipsism, of the modern 'Western' predicament, albeit in maverick cowboy attire.

RE THE UNICORN ECONOMY

Great image.

Recalls various philosophical discussions in analytic philosophy.

Here, it is a metaphor for the economy, here and elsewhere now.

Karl Denniger video:

http://www.realecontv.com/page/896.html

Let's put it this way, the Maverick Executive often rides (or is) a unicorn, rather than a mustang.

RE CHINA'S NAVAL AMBITIONS NYT EDITORIAL

This is the kind of pablum from the press, over decades, which has in part permitted the US to go blithely on this disastrous course.

It has hardly been merely a question of 'better diplomacy',

or a slight tweaking of an enlightened politico-economic-military strategy.

How do you think China got into a position to threaten Asian hegemony?

By 'fattening herself' up, much as China's Premier told Nixon in 1972, regarding how the US had already fattened Japan up, and how it was the US' problem back then, not China's, that Japan had gotten so bloated.

See federal record reference in this prior post:

 

By the laissez faire hand of the American market system itself, which they now have been gaming for a couple of decades at our expense, and openly against our interests, just as other Asian regimes like Japan had done before them.

The Coming Conflict With China (over 10 years old now) set out some of the history, but unfortunately, it was written by free traders themselves, who also, and more importantly, appear to be unacknowledged but eager Japan (China's enemy) panders to boot, who had an apparent interest in reaffirmed closer military ties with Japan against China.

The Coming War With Japan (older) was a similar book in some ways, but containing a lot more Asian and global naval strategic details. Chalmers Johnson thought it had been unwisely poo pood in the US at the time it had been published. Yet, a half million copies, according to Johnson, had been sold in Japan (! Were they just buying up copies, to take it off the American market?).

All this is kind of ridiculous really, in the larger post WW II scheme of things.

See prior posts re fattening things up, Japan, China, lazy fair, etc.

We must need a good Maverick diplomat or two to go over there and clear up all this. It's really smart to send ones in skirts.

Re Modern Societies

'Modern societies need large and effective governments.'

http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-era-begins.html

Quite true.

Very few societies have them.

Ours has not been particularly effective.