If all else fails (has failed) I can at least describe a place
July 26, 2013 § Leave a comment
“Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.
“But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 per cent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to Muscle Shoals in some useful way…
“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either…”
“Are you going to have anything to do with outlining this proposed policy?” Mr. Edison was asked.
“I am just expressing my opinion as a citizen,” he replied. “Ford’s idea is flawless. They won’t like it…” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Thomas Demand
What’s Spanish for “I know you speak English”?
July 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
In 1940, the famed Soviet film director Sergey Eisenstein was suddenly invited to stage a production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi. Wagner was unlikely fare at this time – the Soviet Union was largely hostile to foreign art, especially that of its great political rival in Europe, Germany. Yet the signing of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact in 1939 opened up a brief window for the oddest of reconciliations. The historian Philip Bullock considers Eisenstein’s involvement in the production, and explores Russian interest in Wagner more generally, asking what happens when works of art get caught up in politics, propaganda and international diplomacy. listen
PHOTOGRAPH: Pascal Amoyel
all the angel’d syllables (uncounted)
July 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
Experimental philosophers, as we have repeatedly stressed in previous posts on this blog, regarded Francis Bacon as their progenitor and promoted observation and experiment and decried speculation and the use of hypotheses and premature system building.
It is of great interest, therefore, to find elements of the method of experimental natural philosophy being applied as early as 1670 in an attack on Thomas Hobbes’ doctrine of the state of nature. The divine Thomas Tenison in his The Creed of Mr Hobbes examined, London, 1670, attacked Hobbes’ doctrine of the state of nature for being the product of Hobbes’ own imagination. Hobbes postulated in his Leviathan (1651) that before the existence of civil society all people were in a state of ‘warre, as is of every man, against every man’’ in which life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. Here is how Tenison attacks him:
It is a very absurd and unsecure course to lay the ground-work of all civil Polity and formed Religion, upon such a supposed state of Nature, as hath no firmer support than the contrivance of your own fancy.
For Tenison, it is one thing for the various competing cosmological hypotheses of Ptolemy, Tycho, Copernicus and Descartes to be entertained, for, even if none of these happens to be true, ‘the interests of Men remain secure’. But it is another thing entirely to found the doctrines of civil, moral and Christian philosophy on ‘Hypotheses, framed by the imagination’. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Matthew Stone
I’ll quote Michael Serres’ reply to a journalist who was asking him – I can’t remember why – about the decision to build the Aswan Dam. The committee was made up of hydraulic engineers, specialists on different materials, developers and maybe even some ecologists, but no philosophers, and no Egyptologists. Michel Serres was shocked. And the journalist was shocked that he was shocked, and asked, ‘What would be the point of having a philosopher on a committee like that?’ Serres replied, ‘He would have noticed there wasn’t an Egyptologist.’
July 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
Sensing phantom phone vibrations is a strangely common experience. Around 80% of us have imagined a phone vibrating in our pockets when it’s actually completely still. Almost 30% of us have also heard non-existent ringing. Are these hallucinations ominous signs of impending madness caused by digital culture?
Not at all. In fact, phantom vibrations and ringing illustrate a fundamental principle in psychology.
You are an example of a perceptual system, just like a fire alarm, an automatic door, or a daffodil bulb that must decide when spring has truly started. Your brain has to make a perceptual judgment about whether the phone in your pocket is really vibrating. And, analogous to a daffodil bulb on a warm February morning, it has to decide whether the incoming signals from the skin near your pocket indicate a true change in the world.
Psychologists use a concept called Signal Detection Theory to guide their thinking about the problem of perceptual judgments. Working though the example of phone vibrations, we can see how this theory explains why they are a common and unavoidable part of healthy mental function.
When your phone is in your pocket, the world is in one of two possible states: the phone is either ringing or not. You also have two possible states of mind: the judgment that the phone is ringing, or the judgment that it isn’t. Obviously you’d like to match these states in the correct way. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Hajdu Tamas
What Hook means when he says that those wretched streets ‘covered the site of Regent Street’ is that Regent Street was really there first; it was just necessary to get rid of the rubbish on top of it
July 22, 2013 § Leave a comment
You photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. What effect did the invasion have on you personally?
My photographs of the Soviet invasion in 1968 are a very personal testimony, an expression of bewilderment, despair and unspeakable sadness. When I decided to go live in the West, I left my best negatives with a friend in Prague, because if the negatives were to be found in my luggage at the airport, I would not have been able to leave the country. I also left with this friend my negatives of the Soviet invasion. Unfortunately, his home was raided by the secret police, who were looking for anti-government documents. They did not find my negatives. However, after the police left, my friend, out of fear that they might return, burned my best negatives of the invasion.
Have you ever shown those pictures?
For years I searched in vain, trying to find at least some prints. Only recently did I find some photographs from the 1968 invasion in a box of my letters to my father, which his second wife gave to me after he died. He lived in the country, and I had sent him some photographs so that he could see how it looked in Prague in those days. I had totally forgotten that I sent them. About 20 of them were exhibited for the first time in the spring of 2009 at Michigan State University. Four photographs were exhibited and published in a catalog of a large show mounted to mark the 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion in Prague.
Czech photography has a rich history of innovation. Do you feel kinship with other documentary photographers like Josef Koudelka or Milon Novotný? And did you associate with any Czech photographers?
I used to visit an old and famous Czech photographer named Josef Sudek. He described my questions about his photographs as “picking his cherries.” Josef Koudelka is an old friend. We became friends in 1963, when he was working in a Prague airport designing aircraft. Milon Novotný was a friend of my husband, and once a week we would go to the pub together.
Is there such a thing as a “Czech” photographic aesthetic?
I don’t think so. But Czechs and Slovaks take photography very seriously. The Czech avant-garde art groups in the early 20th century included writers, painters, photographers and sculptors. And even during communism the official state body “The Artists Union” had departments of painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography. I became a member of The Artists Union in 1969, and in my identity card, in the column “profession,” was written: “visual artists—photographer.”…
I’m struck by the graphic power of your work, especially the strong contrast and pronounced grain. How did you arrive at this visual aesthetic?
In Czechoslovakia in the 1960s high-speed 35mm photographic film was not available. We used high-speed cinematographic film, which we bought on the black market from film cameramen. When pushed, the film was quite grainy, and I liked it very much. The style was born out of necessity, but I like the grain, I like the texture, even the faults in the emulsion. I don’t mind them; I consider them part of the image. read more
ART: Pieter Brueghel
Everything has already been said, just not by everyone
July 19, 2013 § Leave a comment
The economic vocabulary shapes the semantics of how reality is perceived, and conversely, as Orwell noted, “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes.” “Protecting savings” and “making savers whole” have become euphemisms for downsizing the economy and sacrificing new direct investment in order to preserve the fortunes of rentiers. While psychologists speak of well-adjusted individuals, economists may ask whether the economy’s debts should be adjusted to the ability to pay, or whether growth and living standards should be “adjusted” (that is, sacrificed) to preserve the value of creditor claims. One may ask similar questions regarding the terms “democracy,” “value,” and “efficiency,” and reality itself…
Addictive demand: Neoclassical price theory is based on the assumption of diminishing marginal utility: The more food, clothes or other consumption goods one has, the less pleasure each additional unit gives. But as the ancients knew, this principle is not true of wealth, especially of money. The more property one has, the more one wants. Wealth is addictive, sucking its possessors into a compulsive drive to accumulate. (See Hubris.)
Agio: Medieval Europe banned usury, but legalistic-minded Churchmen rationalized the practice of charging it in the form of a foreign-exchange fee. Money was borrowed in one country or currency, to be paid back in another at an exchange-rate which incorporated the usury charge in the guise of a money-changing fee (agio). The most egregious example was the “dry” exchange in which no goods actually were imported or exported. This agio loophole helped channel European banking along the lines of short-term trade financing and discounting bills of exchange.
Asset-price inflation: A policy in which the banking system recycles savings and extends new credit to finance the purchase of real estate, stocks and bonds so as to create windfall gains (euphemized as capital gains). The financial boom that resulted from steering pension-plan reserves into the stock market has inspired proposals to privatize Social Security’s wage withholding in a similar way (see Forced Saving, Labor Capitalism and Pension-Fund Capitalism). Meanwhile, property prices are inflated by steering mortgage credit into real estate, lowering interest rates so that higher mortgage debts can be carried, and loosening the terms of mortgage lending, reducing the down payments needed yet minimizing the repayment of principle by stretching out the loan maturity. Fiscal policy contributes to this phenomenon by shifting taxes off of finance and property onto labor (see Tax Shift).
Higher asset prices often are welcomed as increasing net worth (and hence the balance sheet of wealth), as long as the rise in market prices outpaces the growth of debt. But rising property prices increase living costs by panicking home buyers to buy now in order to avoid seeing the rise in property prices outstrip wage gains.
Asset-price inflation goes hand in hand with debt deflation and aggravates polarization as higher prices for homes oblige families to go further into debt. This diverts more income to the financial sector to channel into real estate, as well as into the stock and bond markets.
An inner contradiction of this process occurs as higher price/earnings ratios reduce the income yields on financial securities, while higher price/rent ratios for real estate reduces the ability of rental income to carry the interest and related financial charges. This leads to pressure to reduce property taxes in order to alleviate the financial squeeze.
Asset stripping: Corporate raiders take over companies, cut back research and development spending and other lines of business that do not produce short-term returns, and downsize their labor force in order to make the remaining employees work harder to pick up the slack. This practice is euphemized as wealth creation when its effect is to improve reported earnings. This raises stock prices over the short term, but undercuts long-term growth in production and competitiveness. (See Free Market.) read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Deborah Paauwe
She also mentioned Dr. Sherlock, and two Dutch Books which were Translated, Wrote upon Death, and several others: But Drelincourt she said, had the clearest Notions of Death, and of the Future State, of any who have handled that Subject
July 18, 2013 § Leave a comment
There are now around 100 companies worldwide that offer some form of neuromarketing services, many of them using these EEG devices, and their clients are some of the largest consumer businesses in the world. Perhaps the best-known neuromarketing company is NeuroFocus, founded in 2005 by A.K. Pradeep and now a subsidiary of the Neilsen Co., a behemoth in the market-research world. Pradeep has a background in engineering and business consulting and has recently released a book titled The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind. Other current big hitters in the field are NeuroSpire (recently founded by 22-year-old self-proclaimed wunderkind Jake Stauch) and Emotiv (developer of the EPOC EEG hardware and software suites that claim to monitor emotional and cognitive states in real time). These companies all use off-the-shelf hardware; their intellectual capital is largely based on their (proprietary and closely guarded) analysis techniques that claim to derive useful measures from the collected EEG data: measures related to attention, engagement, frustration, and supposedly even buying potential.
The EEG neuromarketers make big claims based on their research techniques. NeuroFocus says it measures the “neurological iconic signature” and “deep subconscious response” related to a tested product. NeuroSpire asserts that its technology allows you to “peer into the subconscious mind of the consumer.” Can they deliver on these promises?
The short answer is: It’s doubtful. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Stephen Gill
The Bolshevists are behind the labour unrest – but this man is behind the Bolshevists
July 17, 2013 § 1 Comment
Can you imagine ever reading a story about how guys have it so good while they are young men, only to discover too late the price they’ll likely pay for fucking around in college and holding off on relationships until they have had some experiences? No? Me either…
Throughout the piece, we are reminded that in spite of how strong/feminist these women are, that they didn’t want their names printed or their number of sexual partners…
ZOMG. WHO THE FUCK WANTS THEIR NUMBER OF SEXUAL PARTNERS EVER PRINTED ANYWHERE EVER FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER? Why would any woman be obligated to share her number of sexual partners with a reporter? To put her money where her vagina is? Also, there’s no mention of a slut-shaming culture to help contextualize their choice to remain anonymous, just that the women don’t want to give their names…
So there you have it. A super balanced look at the how young women at the top schools are continually reshaping our notions of feminism, choice, and equality and how it affects their lives, er, lack of husbands. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Julian Baker
Merdre!
July 16, 2013 § Leave a comment
We often hear that our ecological crisis is the result of our short-term egotism: obsessed with immediate pleasures and wealth, we forgot about the common good. However, it is here that Walter Benjamin’s notion of capitalism as religion becomes crucial: a true capitalist is not a hedonist egotist; he is, on the contrary, fanatically devoted to his task of multiplying his wealth, ready to neglect his health and happiness, not to mention the prosperity of his family and the well-being of environment, for it. There is thus no need to evoke some high-ground moralism and trash capitalist egotism. To put it in the terms of Alain Badiou: the subjectivity of capitalism is not that of the “human animal” but rather a call to subordinate egotism to the self-reproduction of the capital.
In other words, self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of our societies but its ideology – the ideology articulated in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit under the name of “the spiritual kingdom of animals” – his phrase for the modern civil society in which human animals are caught in self-interested interaction. read more
ART: Stefan Jellinek
Enter a gentle Astringer
July 15, 2013 § Leave a comment
Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater’s biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later.
It was only after a New York Times review of Tomalin’s book that American specialists in Russian literature started to wonder about this meeting, Dostoevsky’s account of which, according to Stephanie Harvey, had been documented in the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi (News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). “In what language did Dickens and Dostoevsky converse?” asked Russian scholars. Why had Dostoevsky’s revealing portrait of Dickens – “There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite” – not been included in his collected works? And why had they never previously come across the distinguished journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi?
Doubts about the authenticity of the Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting spread, retractions were made, the Dickensian had egg on its face. But only recently did the full story of the deception emerge when Eric Naiman, a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an immensely detailed six-page article in the TLS (“three days’ work”, says Harvey dismissively when I praise Naiman for his industry) establishing Harvey’s academic avatars – not just Stephanie Harvey, but Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham (author of Oxford: The Novel), Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra. Naiman traced the way in which, over the past 30 years, this group had been commenting on one another’s work in scholarly journals and little magazines, sometimes praising one ano ther but occasionally finding fault too. “How comforting,” Naiman commented drily, “to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticise each other’s work.”
AD Harvey doesn’t deny he is the creator of that community. Indeed, he says there are several identities which even Naiman has failed to unearth: Stephen Harvey, author of an article titled The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of Italy, published in the journal History in 1985; the Latvian poet Janis Blodnieks (“I search but cannot find the key/ Which will unlock the glowing door/ To the life which runs parallel/ To the world in which I am trapped”); and a variety of internet personalities which he prefers not to disclose as he says they might not reflect well on his output and interests. read more
ART: Hayv Kahraman
my nerves are bad to-night 
