This year as last at this time I pause a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation. I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once." It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time. One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvani...
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Philosopher R.G. Collingwood's aesthetics involves the following three points: 1. To express an emotion is to become conscious thereof. 2, Expression also individualises ; on this point Collingwood is following Croce, although perhaps due to the wartime climate he didn't give Croce credit. 3. The mind of the artist is made lighter and easier by this act of expression. This seems to have something to do with the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, but there are obvious differences.
Let's make the following assumption: Hillary Clinton is about to win the Presidency, and the Democratic Party is about to regain control of the U.S. Senate. Control of the House may remain in Republican hands. Further, let's assume that Trump responds to the loss with his usual grace. He announces that (a) the election was rigged, (b) all major media, including Fox News, were part of the rigging, and (c) he'll keep the revolution going, he's going to create the Trump News Network, offering Movement News (after a lot of gastroenterology jokes, that phrase will be abandoned). Assume all that, with some slight variations at your discretion. What does this mean? What will our politics look like during the first four years of the HRC administration? I suspect that the Grand Old Party is headed for its final crack-up. The Reagan coalition has consisted, roughly speaking, of three parts: white nationalists (more or less openly avowed, or hotly denied, to be such); smal...
In a London courtroom on Friday, October 14, a judge found for Goldman Sachs in a much watched case that pitted that notorious investment bank against late Qaddafi and post-Qaddafi Libya. Here's a Dealbook story on the ruling. Here's the first 120 pages of the decision by Judge Vivien Rose . The roots of the case go back well before the revolution in Libya in 2011, and before the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The roots of it go back to the period 2003-04 when the western industrialized countries began lifting their sanctions against Libya, became willing to buy its oil and accept its money in their banking institution's coffers. In this period, Libya created the Libya Investment Authority (LIA), a sovereign wealth fund. Goldman Sachs was one of many institutions that, in Judge Rose's words, "beat a path to the door" of the LIA with bright ideas as to how it should invest that money, The LIA in this litigation has portrayed itself as a bunch ...
I recently encountered a discussion of an early commentator on Aristotle's ETHICS. The commentator, named Aspasius, wrote: ]f a human being is a social animal in the sense of doing good things also to his fellow human beings, for this a complete life is needed as well as order for him to do as much good as possible. Oddly perhaps, this statement does not occur in the context of commenting on what Aristotle said about sociability. It occurs in the context of statements of Aristotle's about what it means to do well . [eu prattein] Aspasius is turning a "how to do well, how to flourish" comment into a "how to do good, how to help other human beings" comment. The principle of charity in commentary, so to speak. If you're interested, here's the source where I found this tidbit: https://www.academia.edu/28893443/Philosophy_of_the_Ancient_Commentators_on_Aristotle?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest
About a friend of his: "Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor, and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God." Aside from its tone, it reminds us that the two men were contemporaries, at a moment when Scotland was one of the world's great generators of intellectual fireworks.
We have reached a critical moment in the life of the institution known as a "central bank." A central bank, as many of you likely know, is paradigmatically a bank that is NOT part of the government that it serves, an institution that has both private and public characteristics, and an institution that serves as the grease for macro-economic gears in the machinery of governance. Alexander Hamilton, an admirer of the London model, brought the institution to The United States. We now have a rather peculiar form of central bank, the Federal Reserve Board, created by the Wilson administration more than a century ago. Its peculiarities need not interest us today. But as I said above, we have reached a critical juncture. The central banks of the developed world appear to be running out of their usual arrows. They'll have to come up with something non-traditional when the traditional quiver is empty. What might that be? They might adopt distributed ledger technology -- ...
October 1, 2016 was an important day for international money (monies) and an important day in the history of the People's Republic of China. The International Monetary Fund added the Chinese yuan to a basket of currencies that it uses for its loans, known as the Special Drawing Rights currencies. The SDR list also includes the US dollar, the Japanese yen, the British pound, and the euro. That's it. Full stop. With the addition of the yuan there are bow as many SFR currencies as there are veto power countries in the UN Security Council. One confusing fact about the yuan is semantic: it seems to be used as a synonym with "renminbi." Actually, the yuan is the base unit, the renminbi is the currency, in much the same way that the "pound" is the base unit of the British "sterling." But over the last few decades, "pound" has become the most customary term in any context, and "sterling" is finding itself moving into the linguisti...
It was a trend that I associate with some passages of the Sinclair Lewis novel ELMER GANTRY. More specifically, with the character of Judson Roberts in that novel, a small figure but one with a critical role in the protagonist's career. "It" is "muscular Christianity," and a blogger I admire, one who goes by the pixel name Ciceronianus, has recently discussed it with erudition and analytical zeal. Here is a link to that blog entry: http://theblogofciceronianus.blogspot.com/2016/09/thoughts-on-muscular-christianity.html I'll expound no more, but leave the rest to Ciceronianus.
At the movies recently I saw a preview for a soon-to-be released movie called GOLD, which will be a fictionalized version of the true story of Bre-X, a Canadian company that lost investors billions in the 1990s as a result of a spectacular rise in stock price and then a sudden fall, based first on a fraudulent claim to the discovery of vast gold reserves in Indonesia and then to the unravelling of those claims. In 1999 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrapped up a criminal investigation. The RCMP brought no charges. Somebody was presumably responsible, but proving who ... that seemed, and still seems, murky. The story is a fascinating one and although at the time it was rather overshadowed (for those of us in the US anyhow) by the dotcom madness on the one hand and the related rise-and-fall of Enron on the other, the Bre-X saga has its own archaic quality that makes it stand out in recollection. It was a tale that was in the 1990s but of an earlier time. It was a ta...
Does anyone else understand this? In the second debate, asked about energy policy, Trump responded with an example of his customary stream-of-consciousness. I won't quote it or try to dissect it all. But it ended with this. Trump talked about how foreign companies are buying US companies in the oil & gas market, in order to get a hold on their plants. They are "buying so many of our different plants and then rejiggering the plant so they can take care of their oil." Huh? I don't know what he means by this and nobody yet has been able to enlighten me. Let's take a stab at it: he means buying oil companies to get their refineries? Let's try to be specific. In 2011, a major international oil company, Statoil, spent $4.4 billion Brigham Resources, a small but innovative shale-oil firm active in North Dakota. Statoil is 67% owned by the Kingdom of Norway. So is Norway having refineries (or "plants" in any sense) rejiggered so they can t...
I went to bed Wednesday night, October 5, believing that there was a reasonable chance that, when I awoke, Philip Roth would at last have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. This was a mistake. The first problem was the scheduling. The Prizes are usually announced over the course of a single week, one announcement per day, and in the 'natural' course of events, the Lit Prize would have been announced after each of the 'hard sciences' on the list" medicine, physics, chemistry, had had its turn in the spotlight. So, that would have been last Thursday. Unbeknowst to me, though, the Lit panel had announced back in September, before I was paying attention, that it was taking longer than usual to make its decision, and that it would not bestow its prize this year until the Thursday after everybody else had bestowed the others. Maybe they're tired of always coming in the middle, after the hard sciences, before the Huge Publicity events of Peace and Economics. M...