RE NEVINS ORDEAL VOLUME ONE

I will have some comments, and excerpts, on this work, shortly.

Wonderful work.

RE TO CONQUER WIND POWER, CHINA WRITES THE RULES

Not that hard to figure out where all this is heading,

is it?

Here is the Wind God, Zephyr, in this case he is now Chinese,

landing in a forest glade en pointe:

Translated from the French: "He sways slightly, Foot barely touching the water:Flora admires in silence Says: Ah! credit that is beautiful! Anacreon translated by Ratapoil, retired police colonel,

a member of society

belles lettres at Chalons sur Marne

and the company's tenth day of December in Paris."

the menu

Cold weather menu:

roast lamb shanks, kartoshka, onion, garlic, rosemary.

sauteed kale, baby field green salad, Fetzer Merlot

strawberry banana ice cream (Why ask why?)

Jojo's Java

NPR REPORT TODAY CHINA INDIA TRADE PARTNERS

The obvious...................old rivals,... new friends.

Each building big ports near each other's borders................

Kind of predictable, really.

The US, talking recently about India, its really big new trading friend;

after geopolitical relations with China have soured, surprisingly enough.

Don't believe the India thing will last.

We 'started it all', in the 20th Century, in a 'really big way'.

RE DAVID MCCULLOUGH

Started reading his biography of Truman.

Ugh.

RE BLOCK THOSE METAPHORS KRUGMAN NYT

'The root of our current troubles lies in the debt American families ran up during the Bush-era housing bubble.'

This is not the root of our current troubles.

The roots of our current troubles lie deeper than that.

They have to do with:

1. the permanent structure of our political system (from the beginning), and political and economic practices in light of that political system;

2. most notably our post WWII laissez faire Am/Com ideology ; and

3. the fact that the rest of the world has not stood still while we tinker with isolated tax or spend or morality issues, but rather has taken advantage of our weaknesses to accrue power.

The fix for these problems does not lie in economics alone.

Americans have long needed a more strategically 'able' political system, a more consolidated not more fragmented structure, one that favors and fosters domestic development over foreign development. This aspect of the problem has become critical going forward.

A few people have begun to realize that developed countries cannot merely even further globalize their way out of malaise by use of cheaper labor and skills abroad;

or by trying to use foreign sites for manufacturing or services without soon losing the very reasons for doing so in the first place.

RE TOWN AND COUNTRY ETC

Lester Thurow did an interesting talk, saw it recently, re the Chinese industrialization break through in the 80s.

It apparently, according to Thurow, began quietly with an agricultural reform in the 70s, allowing peasants to work their own small plots, so that a surplus was eventually created; whereas the previous collective system had failed.

He contrasted that with the Russian transition to 'capitalism'.

Very interesting.

RE CHINA'S ARMY OF GRADUATES STRUGGLE FOR JOBS EDITORIAL NYT SUNDAY

More evidence of global 'smelling the coffee'.

RE HIVE-MINDS AND KLEPTOCRATS KRUGMAN MNC BLOBALIZATION BLOG TOPIC SELLING BIG CORPORATE NEWSPAPERS

Commenting on another blog post, he poo poos the notion of the big corporation as bad actor,

fails to impugn the political system, and the bi-partisan understanding, that allowed these very powerful entities to overgrow,

and blames individual bad actors at the tops of the ones most visibly acting bad.

This is not a very helpful image, and wildly distorts what has been going on to drive globalism blobalism in such an unhelpful direction and extent.

Not that corporations themselves initiated the process of accruing too much reach and power, blobalizing everywhere, or are intrinsically bad,

but now that they're there, not very helpful to blame only certain allegedly bad imperial corporate controlling individuals (even if themselves bloblike) manipulating otherwise benevolent MNCS.

The Republicans permanently abandoned the domestic economy, as even someone like Buchanan pointed out in The Great Betrayal, when MNCs, and foreign interests, not imperial American individuals, became so influential in the 70s that there was no going back.

Buchanan's Chapter "Companies Without A Country", contains some passages, which could be multiplied many times in the literature, showing that it is not individual imperial 'bad actors', but the MNC phenomenon itself, which has been allowed to swell and take over politics.

One can find similar history in Prestowitz, Chalmers Johnson, Alfred Eckes, Jr., Gilpin, Gill, Reich, Greider, Batra, and others.

Of course, if you work for a MNC that has a subsidiary corporation that sells newspapers, it's hard to impugn the entity that pays your salary.............

Or, if you are a politician, like say Buchanan, not very popular to attack the corporate powers that be, imperial or not.

the menu

The menu:

sauteed garlic kale;

roast lamb leg in red wine and cumin reduction;

basmati rice from the foothills of the Himalayas, buttered;

beet and cabbage dill vinaigrette salad;

Red Truck Organic California zinfandel 2006.

Breyers vanilla ice cream, with banana crushed in.

Jim's whole bean organic Witch's Brew drip.

Brandy.

RE EUROPE CLAMPS DOWN ON BANKERS' BONUSES WILL THEY EMIGRATE BBC EDITORIAL

Starting the open season on bankers in the EU.

Not that bad an idea.

The US cannot go there, with so much banker power over here.

RE OBAMA'S HOSTAGE DEAL KRUGMAN EDITORIAL

This is probably a fairly accurate depiction of the status.

It is typical of the kinds of small potatoes turnstile politics the US has been engaged in, since the beginning.

The difference is that it is winding down, now that there are no frontiers, or permanent hoards, of really cheap labor or materials, left to awkwardly and inefficiently and ever so gradually absorb.

Want a lot of good ole market competition:

Be careful what you wish for. Cf. Prestowitz'

Three Billion New Capitalists

RE KRUGMAN DECEMBER 2011

At least he is talking 'political economy'.

That is a small relief.

Unfortunately, when you take a close look at American political structures and their workings, together with economics,

you end up just wanting a much better system.

Unfortunately, almost no way that will happen,

and a catastrophe of some kind, either a war or economic further melt down, would likely bring on not necessarily a better structured political/economic system, but worse changes, within the existing one.

RE A SOUND TRADE DEAL WITH SOUTH KOREA EDITORIAL NYT

Don't believe a word of this.

Same old same old, Trading American Interests

RE EUROPE'S LEADERSHIP DEFICIT NYT ARTICLE

Pointing a finger at Europe's leaders is not useful, because the unstable system put in place after WW II, and the EU which we also promoted, are things that have gotten them into this glob alist instability quagmire.

RE THOMAS FRIEDMAN PISA TEST ARTICLE ECONOMICS IS WAR BY OTHER MEANS

Sec of Education says 'wake up call'.

It's really a 'game over' call.

Friedman, still the glob alist, still says ridiculous things like

'economics is not war',

'it can be win-win'............

No, economics,

rather than the peace idea we and our economists have had,

Economics Is War.

It cannot in the long, OR EVEN THE SHORT, run be win-win.

WE SHOULD HAVE ADOPTED A MORE MERCANTILISTIC IDEA FOR OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM LONG AGO.

How well do you think the 'Casanova hand' of the free market would produce better educational standards?

The free market would say, privatize education.We already have, to some extent, 'marketized' it elsewhere, from our end:

subsidizing it by making it pay, in other places, by public order of foreign regimes, because they know they have to do it to live.

The same principle applies to funding education as has been applied to labor costs: if it is cheaper elsewhere, do it there; education therefore is better funded where it is cheaper. Let them be better educated. That's Friedman's win-win.

RE FLORE ET ZEPHYR DE LA MEURTHE DAUMIER

"FLORA AND Zephir (de la Meurthe.)
He sways slightly,
Foot barely touching the water:
Flora admires in silence
Says: Ah! credit that is beautiful!
Anacreon translated by Ratapoil, retired police colonel,

a member of society belles lettres at Chalons sur Marne

and the company's tenth day of December in Paris."

Thurston Robert Macaire Howell,

alias the Maverick Executive,

landing in a forest glade.

(The early ballet, Flore et Zephyr, was the origin of ballerinas going en pointe, as the technology of this ballet allowed them, and their partners, as the above image attests, to fly through the air on wires, and poise momentarily on the tips of their toes. Later dancers developed special shoes and techniques to achieve the effect without the wires.)

RE PAT BUCHANAN

Because some of my comments re economic nationalism are similar to those of such religious right figures as Buchanan,

it may have given some the impression that I am on the religious right.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

RE DAVID BROOKS' COMPLEX CREATURES AND WHAT PASSES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE AND NAVIGATING PAST NIHILISM SEAN KELLY EDITORIALS

'.... a day without sunshine.'

Perhaps we need a reprise of some recent The Bell Curve - related social science research works, to further raise our spirits, during this holiday season.

Reading random isolated articles on a broad array of picayune topics, as Brooks recommends, is rather idiotic;

and may even qualify as an example, or an expression, or even a proof, of the kind of suburban nihilism Kelly refers to in criticizing Brooks;

and qualifies as a valid and related point, (moving from literature as such to the loosely related fields of the social sciences),

similar in some ways to those implied by Kelly against Brooks' suppositions of an absence of nihilism, or its containment within a literary sub world.

(I LIKE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE,

BUT NOT MOST OF WHAT PASSES FOR IT NOWADAYS, EITHER.)

One can read Harvard Business School Management articles,

we had a hundred or so of them while I was at BU,

until you are purple,

but I still rather prefer The Maverick Executive,

for 'management social science'.

Terms search various terms for other articles on this site.

RE NATION STATES AND MARKET STATES AND GLOBS AND BLOBALIZATION

This is my new term for 'it':

BLOBALIZATION

I still think I see the spectre of nationalisms, good and bad, and more importantly, civilizationalisms,

hovering above and within  the blobalizations now long under way.

'The world is flat' metaphor, just doesn't 'cut' it,

liposuctionally, or obesity surgery-wise.