don't forget to vote, BCers!

A Stalled Counterrevolution

Today, however, orthodoxy has come to mean doing whatever it takes to revive the Wall Street casino. The plan recently announced by Treasury Secretary Geithner and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is intended not to drive the money changers from the temple but to lend them public funds so that they can double down on their bets. The Fed’s own balance sheet will quadruple. The one common thread that links the failed central bankers of Ahamed’s tale with the folly of Geithner and Bernanke is that all were working hand in glove with private financial elites.

The economic ideology of laissez-faire has been shattered, but the political power of Wall Street is oddly intact...

Black and White and Dead All Over

Meanwhile, David Simon’s peewings are hurt. He told the Senate committee: “I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes that American institutions as insulated, self-preserving, and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures, and chief executives can be held to [account] by amateurs, pursuing the task without compensation, training, or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information."

Offended, he is. Offended! And I am laughing out loud that defenders of “American institutions as insulated, self-preserving, and self-justifying” as daily newspapers think they’re anything special or at all different from the institutions that Simon describes. As a beat reporter who has covered hundreds of those city council and school board meetings, legislative sessions, court cases, etcetera, I’ve read just as many stories in the next day’s daily by those with such overrated “compensation, training (and)… sufficient standing to make public officials even care,” and have wondered, again and again, what meeting or hearing (or planet!) those “professionals” had attended because their write-ups didn’t at all reflect the realities that I witnessed and heard at each event.

Simon’s focus on government institutions betrays the real problem with his mindset in an age when the private sector has superceded the powers of the State in so many areas of daily life: Newspapers are corporations and naturally allied with all other profit-motive ventures. They may sometimes report a good story about malfeasance in the private sector, but they will never touch, not even with the petal of a rose, the systemic causes of matters like the current economic crisis because they’re invested in the same mechanisms: stock marketeering, mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, outsourcing, union-busting and unregulated market rules that encourage playing fast-and-loose with the truth...

fans of surf arcana will wonder how they ever learned to live without Rautalanka

...a Finnish style of instrumental music played by a quartet (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drum kit). Rautalanka music can also include other instruments and vocals. The word rautalanka literally means "iron wire" and refers to the strings of the electric guitar. The heyday of rautalanka was in the early 1960s, but it has enthusiasts even today. Typical features of rautalanka are sharp and clear melodies, fast tempos and extensive use of tape echo, but little or no overdrive or fuzz. What distinguishes rautalanka most clearly from other twangy guitar genres is that the melodies tend to be in minor keys and melancholic, based on slavic folk tunes and schlager songs...

Local trees & c.

new & old translations of Lucretius

So, when our mortal frame shall be disjoin’d,
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.

The rest of John Dryden's translation in here

Lucretius and Epicureanism

Are we drinking enough vintage port?

“Declaring a vintage port is a difficult decision,” he said. “Only about three times a decade do we decide to stake our reputation on a single year.” Perhaps, as Symington himself suggested, it seemed a bit discordant to be introducing a traditional luxury product like vintage port at the Four Seasons on a springtime Monday afternoon, in the midst of a global economic collapse? “Well,” he said, “we’ve made the wine already. To hell with the crisis!”

I can't believe the Biltmore is a "cabaret" now: I used to be scared to go in there for off-sales back in the 80's...

Henry Roddick, born yesterday about 2 in the morning...

The slow demolition of the grain elevator at Milton & Hecate in Nanaimo continues...unfortunately someone working on the second floor was injured yesterday.

Robin Blaser 1925-2009

Spice Paper - The MUJI Taste-Leaf Book

Need some pepper? Just tear out the perforated page and add it to the dish! Edible quality paper embedded with the spice dissolve into the
food, adding the much needed flavoring. The moisture and heat ensure that the spices mix in well...

The Science of Kevin Bacon

When mathematician Steven Strogatz and his PhD student Duncan Watts set out to investigate why some crickets chirp in unison the young Australian got inspired by his father's words in a phone call: "Did you know that you are only six handshakes from any person on Earth?" Watts thought this might explain why his crickets are such good synchronizers but he had no idea that this question would lead him to a major discovery in an emerging branch of research - network science...

Paul Clayton - Sailing and Whaling songs of the 19th century (1954)

great album!!

A Journey Round My Skull: Poets Ranked by Beard Weight

Excerpted and abridged from The Language of the Beard, originally circulated by The Torchbearer Society, London, 1913. Commentary by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert...

TCM has an interesting lineup tonight, including early Charles Laughton, the terrific film of Kenneth Fearing's "The Big Clock" & von Sternberg's "Crime & Punishment" with Peter Lorre!!

I missed Bill Moyers Journal on Friday, too...

A new debate followed the release of the Department of Justice's Office
of Legal Counsel memos approving extreme measures of interrogation
under the Bush administration. Bill Moyers sits down with Bruce Fein,
former deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and
chairman of the American Freedom Agenda, and Mark Danner, who has been
reporting on the US treatment and interrogation of detainees for the
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS...