Dressed to Sell

Today is the `Opera in the Park` show in Golden Gate. You get to hear some of the best singers of the season, grab a nosh while the glitterati are patting themselves on the back, and lounge in the sun. I'm in. The first set of links relate to economics.

• Understanding America's Class System: For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
• Scott vs. Hayek: And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard.
• Rome is Burning: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Next a bit of hackery in the Sterling style.

• Hacktivist: The deniable patriot hacktivists who work for Russia, China and India can talk just as patriotically as any Fox News fan. So, if you’re from USA and hammering Russia for underhanded cyberattacks, you’ve gotta figure out what America’s own “citizen hacker vigilantes” are up to someplace. And your answer is, you don’t have the foggiest idea. Not a clue, brother.

Now for the culture portion of the show.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass.
• The OED: Bibliophilic considerations aside, however, the OED Online is my dictionary of choice. This remarkable resource displays both the second edition of the OED, published with great fanfare in 20 volumes in 1989, and the gradually accumulating third edition, begun in 2000 and due to be completed some decades hence.
• Technique and Food: Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient.

I was paging through the TV channels this morning (Sun) while I was cleaning the hovel. In almost every case a talking head was castigating the other media outlets and patting himself (or herself) on the back for the team's nuanced reporting of a report about the influence of an article about a report on a blog that said... In other words, the TV version of a circle jerk. The P.R. department has become a primary news source and some jake, with the approved ethno-signifiers (discrete gold cross nestled in a not so discrete décolleté, refined hint of indeterministic accent), gets elevated to expert status. (as long as you can read the teleprompter) Thank God for the cartoon channel. At least the inside references are both clever and inclusive. This little jeremiad brings us to the last links: politics

• Obama, Anticolonial Hegemonist?: Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy.
• The Tricky New American Moment: Let's take alliances first. Clinton celebrated NATO, ritualistically, as "the world's most successful alliance." Left unmentioned was the growing divergence among U.S. and European politicians—and their electorates—on its ultimate purpose.
• Taming the Tea Parties: All of this is rank nonsense. Federal power has been exploding for decades under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. And it is not at all clear that what George Washington or even Dwight Eisenhower understood as “constitutional limits” on federal power were the ones that still existed under George W. Bush. What Lowry and his crew really want is to neutralize the Tea Party.