http://www.takimag.com/ The Online Magazine for Independent Conservatives, edited by Taki Theodoracopulos en jjackson@takimag.com Copyright 2010 2010-02-09T05:05:11+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/death_to_terrorists/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/death_to_terrorists/#When:05:05:11Z ‘He is plainly some crazed moral retard’. That stuck it to him. Or not. Yet on the night of 9/11, as I sat in a BBC Radio studio helping to dissect the bleak events of that day, it was the only response I could summon to the Al-Qa’eda ‘representative’ the Corporation had thoughtfully allowed on air. Make no mistake, I loathe such extremists. And such extremists had been around and preparing for a very long time. On that same radio show I was asked about the long-term ramifications of the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. War, I replied. War in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so, and I told you often. It was obvious to any who cared to look or think that the threat posed by mass terrorism was on the rise, that Osama bin Laden had a penchant for the spectacular, that the window-dressing response of Clinton in throwing a cruise-missile at an empty adobe hut somewhere in Afghanistan was risible as it was pointless. “Negotiation and political engagement were never their agenda. Targeted killing of them should be ours. It is a proportionate act taken in self-defense; it is discriminate and designed to prevent greater loss of life down the line; it is just.” For over a decade before 9/11 I had warned in lectures and in print of the encroaching menace of more nihilistic terror outfits inspired by a concept of the purity of violence and committed to destruction as the endgame in itself. Their lethal potency and scale of ambition were on the rise and our vulnerability invited attack. A propaganda coup was called for. So the evolution from using traditional bomb, bullet, and booby-trap toward employing something far more sinister began. The rest, as they say, is grim history and an awful lot of video-footage. In 1990 (Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 12) I wrote: “Commentators argue terrorists will follow established and predictable norms in tactics, target selection and choice of weaponry. This may be a mistake in that it encourages a preconception of future threat developments and limits flexibility in developing an adequate security response…Terrorist groups will search for new targets and customized forms of atrocity.” Two years later (Jane’s Intelligence Review, November 1992), I added: ‘Few of us should imagine that modern terrorist groups would refrain from doing as much damage as possible with whatever means are available’. For good measure, in 1997 I published the thriller Dead Headers to illustrate the kinds of scenario I believed would be soon upon us and to argue the case for pre-emptive strikes to ‘dead head’ the terror organizations before they could act. Well, we didn’t. They did. People died. It is not that I or others who voiced similar concerns were especially prescient or blessed with the gift of foresight, simply that western governments and their intelligence agencies were shamefully myopic and slow to react. They should have seen it coming. They should have had the balls to introduce protective measures at home and clamp down on Islamic radicalization and extremism (an affront and anathema to any western liberal democracy). They should have had the brains to go after the terrorist leaderships abroad before ever resorting to the expense in both lives and resource of a full-on military land campaign. On almost every count, they failed. I have never been overly squeamish at the notion of extra-judicial executions for terrorists. These players make their bed and their choice—have become outlaws and combatants as soon as they cross to the dark side—and are therefore fair game. Negotiation and political engagement were never their agenda. Targeted killing of them should be ours. It is a proportionate act taken in self-defense; it is discriminate and designed to prevent greater loss of life down the line; it is just. On its own, this hard-hitting and kinetic approach provides no cure-all solution. But as part of a layered defense it has its place. Of course there should be process, diligence and careful planning and the minimizing of civilian deaths. And, naturally, there are flaws. Few should forget how Israel—with its Wrath of God operations against the Black September movement—was blind to the larger picture and the preparations by Arab states for the 1973 launch of the Yom Kippur campaign. Fewer still should be unaware of the possibility of backlash and increased Pakistani militancy caused by CIA Reaper-drone attacks on Taliban and Al-Qa’eda targets in Waziristan and the tribal areas. During WW2, Britain’s Special Operations Executive developed a toxic lavatory paper in order to assassinate senior Wehrmacht officers and Nazi Party officials (an entirely new meaning to the term ‘wiping out the enemy’, I suppose). It was never deployed for fear of causing indiscriminate casualties. We should learn that lesson. Better the finesse, fentanyl (synthetic opiate) and exploding telephone handsets favored by Israeli kidon units than a brute sledgehammer to crack these particular nuts. There is ever room and need for hearts and minds. Forgive my tough stance and reluctance to swallow whole the line One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. If that is what you want to believe. Maybe I was conditioned by having an uncle who—as a burns surgeon—operated on victims of both the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in 1946 and the Birmingham pub bombings almost thirty years later. Or perhaps it was knowing as a teenager three friends of mine who lost their fathers (a diplomat, a surgeon, a judge) to the murderous instincts of the Provisional IRA. I sometimes wonder how many of the ineffably brave members of the New York fire and police departments who gave their lives to aid others at the World Trade Centre, by default or inclination supported the IRA through contributions to Noraid and Sinn Fein. Irony can be a bitter and bloody thing. Total casualties from acts of terrorism remain relatively low. That is not for want of trying on the part of the extremists. And with the skills-set of the terrorists growing and the bottleneck in availability of nuclear fissile material likely to ease in the years ahead, we are in for a challenge. Intelligence-gathering often demands still waters in which to fish. Occasionally, we need to dynamite the pond. There was a scene in Dead Headers in which I wrote of a terror attack on New York. In its aftermath, the silence spread across Manhattan and west throughout the land. It would not last. The Emergency had only just begun. Some details were inaccurate, a common complaint with all prediction. My chief error was to describe the actions of a suicide-bomber in blowing himself up inside the Statue of Liberty. I judged that the readers would not believe me had I demolished the Twin Towers.   Heart of Darkness 2010-02-09T05:05:11+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/why_a-rod_can_play_the_field_and_tiger_cant/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/why_a-rod_can_play_the_field_and_tiger_cant/#When:05:05:06Z There are some people who can carry off this having a girlfriend in every town thing: sailors for one. There’s also a number who can’t, as Tiger Woods recently found out. Being of that age when the mid-life crisis moves one from simple envy of those who can to trying to work out quite how one can lead me to investigate. A-Rod for example: I believe he’s something to do with what we English call “rounders”, a game we give up at 11 years of age. But apparently his inability to move on and learn cricket properly hasn’t stopped him from becoming both exceedingly rich and exceedingly famous. They might have something to do with his ability to date and then dump both Madonna, a rock star and Kate Hudson, ex-wife of one (apparently the Black Crowes drug scene was too much even for the daughter of an actress) and then move on to, as we’re told he currently is: Alex Rodriguez is playing the field like a man possessed in the aftermath of his split with Kate Hudson, and has been on dates with a cavalcade of women in the past two weeks—including a meeting in Manhattan with old flame Madonna. Sources tell Page Six the Yankee slugger has been seen with a pretty brunette from New York and a blond model in Miami, in addition to a secret rendezvous with the Material Girl while in town two weeks ago. OK, so, wealth, fame and physical fitness perhaps. However, there are also other examples out there: John Mayer perhaps. “I can text whatever I want to anybody in the world; I’m not married. I write a lot of dirty text messages to girls, and you’ve never seen any of them. Why? Because if a girl brought a dirty text message from me to the newspapers, they’d say ‘I don’t have an angle here. Someone wants to wear your ass like a hat? Big deal.” Women as headgear doesn’t particularly entice as my own kink, middle age or not, but given that John Mayer isn’t hugely physically fit, hugely famous nor hugely rich maybe there’s a chance still? Perhaps we can find the answer in our third example, a certain John Terry. No, none of you will ever have heard of him but in England he’s hugely famous, being captain until this afternoon of the England football side. He’s also hugely wealthy and physically fit. He did indeed have a string of lovers including, in a move that might have been unwise, the girlfriend of one of his team mates. Who he got pregnant and then procured an abortion for. However, John Terry did not get away with it, when the news came out of his 8 sidelines there was a few days of dithering and then he was sacked as the captain. The newspapers have been full of “John Terry’s Shame” stories all week. “If you think about it actually it’s all rather sweet. It appears that a politician is required merely not to fall over drunk while voting to keep our approval while something as mild as breaking a marriage vow is grounds for dismissal.” So of our four (fifth if we include the entirely non-famous, non-rich and non-physically fit such as your humble correspondent) two were able to get away with at least pursuing a harem fit for installation in a seraglio while two were not: John T and Tiger. What is it that marks them out as different from John M and Rod? Perhaps it’s simply that we’re used to reading about the “loves” (the quotation marks are there because the time spans always seem far too short to support “love” unless we are using the euphemism for sex that we make when adding the word “making”) of Rod and John M in a way that we’re not of the other two? Who would be surprised to hear that either had a new girlfriend? Is it just that, that they are no longer news stories any more but olds stories? Mr. Mayer to the microphone please: Tiger Woods’ problems come from him being married. Ahh, that’s it. As was John Terry of course (and as is your humble correspondent, it turns out that fame and fortune aren’t the limiting factors) and thus the failure of his plans to spread the seed. If you think about it actually it’s all rather sweet. Quaint even: there was a time when we expected politicians to keep their promises while we accepted that a man might get a little frisky inside marriage. Now it appears that a politician is required merely not to fall over drunk while voting to keep our approval while something as mild as breaking a marriage vow is grounds for dismissal. The last word though should go to the ex-captain, John Terry: Terry finished the interview by saying his favorite sportsman is Tiger Woods. Ephemera 2010-02-08T05:05:06+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/will_obama_play_the_war_card/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/will_obama_play_the_war_card/#When:04:59:59Z Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play. Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program and impose the “crippling” sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war. And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate. Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president’s side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator. Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes. And cutting off a country’s oil or gas is a proven path to war. “The Senate is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war—a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.” In 1941, the United States froze Japan’s assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies. The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel’s oil. Israel’s response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt’s air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran. Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama’s negotiating hand? The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war—a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003. Sound familiar? Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. “If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must.” U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse. For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran’s middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people. Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them. And despite the hysteria about Iran’s imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb. The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West’s deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran’s known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged. And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence? U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime. Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat. Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post—“How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran”—urges Obama to make a “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue” by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will “presumably rally around the flag” when the bombs fall. Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make “conservatives swoon,” in Pipes’ phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see. Warshington 2010-02-08T04:59:59+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_glitter_the_gays/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_glitter_the_gays/#When:14:17:48Z An invitation to a Vanity Fair dinner is not a bad one to have, though the very thought of having to communicate with famous and fabulous people makes me twitchy. Hollywood types really only like powerful people, and few of them are capable of polite conversation with individuals they don’t know. The conversation usually goes something like this: “Hello, I’m Mandolyna…” At this point the star usually produces an awkward smile, and walks away. But this night was going to be different, I said to myself. I was going to inquire and flatter the stars into a little dialogue. After all, I had been included in this intimate affair, I must have something to offer. The dinner at Harry’s Bar was in honor of, Tom Ford, after the London premiere of his film, A Single Man. I was seated between Carlos Souza, a charming Brazilian jeweler part of Valentino’s entourage, and Jon Kortajarena, one of the film’s sexy actors, ranked by Forbes as the world’s eighth most successful male model. I asked him about his career, his other interests, and even spoke to him in his native Spanish, but he had no interest in me, or in feigning interest, opting instead to chain-smoke Marlboro reds elsewhere. ”Just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, Tom Ford took my hand in both of his, and looked me in the eyes as if I were the only woman in the world he wanted to go to bed with. This lackluster seduction was just a small obstacle on my climb to success with the glitterati, but no twenty-four year old model was going to ruin my plan. I made my way over to Graydon Carter’s table to check on my walker for the evening, the esteemed writer William Shawcross. I had much more success with this lot, but then, most of them were not actors, and people over forty are much easier to talk to than many of my peers. From my new perch at Graydon’s table I chatted with William, and my new besty, Liz Elliot, from House & Garden, while peering into the lives of people like Thandie Newton, Brian Ferry, Guy Ritchie, Elle MacPherson, Mario Testino, and Kate Moss. Toward the end of the evening I found myself speaking to the film’s star, Colin Firth, and his enchanting wife, Livia. Success at last. An actor, and a gent, and an apparently normal person capable of a brief exchange. I nervously babbled on about how I had seen his colleagues revere him to excess for his charitable work on some English award show. He didn’t walk away. Then I thought, more flattery, maybe that wasn’t enough. I said he was infinitely watchable. He turned to his wife and asked her if she found him infinitely watchable. That lead absolutely nowhere, so I congratulated him on the film, and he thanked me for coming. This time, I walked away. But just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, Tom Ford took my hand in both of his, and looked me in the eyes as if I were the only woman in the world he wanted to go to bed with. My persistence was really paying off now. This was the first time I have ever been fully acknowledged by a famous person. More nervous chatter flew out of my mouth, something about how my dinner companions had all seen the movie multiple times, and how I would go see it again and again. He smiled, all the while looking deeply into my eyes. Like heroin, one sniff, and I was hooked…The fuss over Ford is definitely merited. He must be a zen master. His grace and beauty alone make him a megastar. But the list goes on of course, and Ford has many accomplishments, and talents to his credit, including A Single Man. Ford wrote, directed, and financed the film. Based on a Christopher Isherwood story, A Single Man is, as one might imagine, an aesthete’s dream, reminiscent of the 1967 hit, The Graduate. Ford’s interpretation of 1960s Los Angeles is thoroughly glamorous. For anyone who doesn’t know the city well, one is transported. The air, the light, and the loneliness of L.A. comes right off the screen. Ford’s measured personal nature is a powerful force in the movie’s rhythm, and he uses slow-motion to help the audience feel the weight a depressed person bears navigating daily life. The beat picks up with a deliciously humorous and macabre scene where Firth’s character, George, attempts to take his own life. This is interrupted by a telephone call from Julianne Moore’s, Charley, who lives an equally sad yet stylish life. She plays his best-friend and former lover impeccably. But Moore’s English accent is off. It is only slightly improved since her previous attempt in The End of the Affair, distracting from an otherwise captivating experience. The number of homo-erotic scenes throughout the film may be off-putting for some, though the story speaks more to the isolation within us all, than to the life. That night at Harry’s Bar Nicky Haslam bemoaned homosexuality. “Being gay is so common, I can’t stand it,”  he said. Haslam is right, and anything but an ordinary gay. So too, Ford, who is irrefutably unique. Along with his debut film, and my brief encounters with cordial superstars, it was an exceptional evening. Hollywood 2010-02-05T14:17:48+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/markets_fail_when_humans_are_unregulated/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/markets_fail_when_humans_are_unregulated/#When:05:00:37Z Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan answered that he had placed his trust in a flawed theory when he was called before Congress to explain why he, Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, prevented Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, a government regulatory agency, from doing her job of regulating over-the-counter derivatives. The efficient markets theory is that unregulated markets are efficient and rational. According to this theory in which Greenspan placed his trust, unregulated markets produce the best possible result. Any regulatory interference worsens the outcome. Greenspan blamed his own bad judgment on a theory. The theory, or Greenspan’s understanding of it, nevertheless still holds sway as Congress has proved impotent to re-regulate the gambling casino that is Wall Street. Clearly, the theory serves powerful interests. But what is the truth? The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. Socialists make the same mistake when they blame markets for the results of human action. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people. “Greed, and elected representatives who are toadies to special interests, are decimating the American economy.” The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement. The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out. If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces. Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation? The way to bring socialists and capitalists together is to recognize that markets are efficient and that self-interested human behavior requires social regulation. The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs’ bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street. As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force. This dispossession of American labor has been heralded by offshoring’s pimps in the major universities as “the New Economy.” The “New Economy” is a hoax like most everything else the bought-and-paid-for-media feeds to Americans. There is no new economy. There is an unemployed economy. The headlined unemployment rate is just over 10 percent. The real unemployment rate, as measured by the current methodology is 17 percent. The unemployment rate as measured by the methodology of 1980 is 22 percent. If jobs offshoring is a benefit to America, as the hired pimps of the transnational corporations claim, why is more than one-fifth of the U.S. work force unemployed? Why does the U.S. have the largest trade deficits in world history? Why is the U.S. dollar losing value over time to other tradable currencies? Greed, and elected representatives who are toadies to special interests, are decimating the American economy. Consider President Obama’s budgets for 2010 and 2011. The combined red ink is $2.9 trillion. No one anywhere in the world has this kind of money to lend to Washington. How will these massive deficits, never before experienced on earth, be financed? They can only be financed by the Federal Reserve destroying its own balance sheet by its purchase of toxic financial instruments from the banks thereby providing the banks with cash with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds, or by the Federal Reserve itself purchasing the Treasury’s bonds by creating new money, or by another collapse in equity values that sends investors fleeing into “safe” Treasury bonds. American power is on the precipice, about to fall. Perhaps it is a good thing. The world will be rid of bullying, of invasions of innocent countries based on blatant lies, of torture and murder of woman and children, of redistribution of income from the poor to the rich. The criminal record accumulated by the United States makes it the least indispensable country on earth. District of Corruption 2010-02-05T05:00:37+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/what_bigelow_learned_from_cameron_and_vice-versa/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/what_bigelow_learned_from_cameron_and_vice-versa/#When:05:05:55Z As you’ve no doubt heard by now, leading Oscar nominees Avatar and The Hurt Locker are directed by ex-spouses: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who were married from 1989-1991. What you might not know is that traces of each can be seen in the other’s movie. But first, the question of the female director. Although women have directed such solid films as Big, Clueless, and Sleepless in Seattle, Bigelow is only the fourth woman out of the last 170 Best Director nominees. Oscar nods are decided by members of each craft, and the old boys club of directors doesn’t see much need for diversity. Bigelow, however, has long been an honorary old boy, at least since Cameron executive-produced her boggling 1991 action flick about surfing bankrobbers, Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, and Gary Busey. As that cast suggests, Bigelow, who was trained in modern art theory, is intellectually rigorous about keeping her films non-intellectual. “That’s what The Hurt Locker is: soldiers filmed in Baghdad-like Amman, Jordan through telephoto lenses that deliver the exact opposite of Avatar’s famously immersive 3D. And that, ironically, makes her films simple enough to intellectualize over. The Hurt Locker begins with a title card: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The rest of the movie illustrates that single statement. Hit movies are generally about characters Learning Important Lessons that Will Change Their Lives Forever. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, is about a man, a reckless but brilliant Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, finding out what he already knows: that he doesn’t want to change his life, even if it will kill him. Indeed, that largely sums up Bigelow’s long career (she’s now 58): over-the-top explorations of male obsessiveness. And who provides a more memorable example of masculine single-mindedness than her prodigious and difficult ex-husband? Is it a coincidence that the name bestowed upon the hero of The Hurt Locker, who loves his job more than his wife, is “Sergeant First Class Will James?” Typically a Christian name, “James” makes an awkward surname in a movie in which the surest clue to how the three EOD soldiers feel at any moment is whether they are calling each other by their first names (comradely), last names (business-like), or ranks (homicidal). Perhaps Bigelow finds the name “James” personally compelling enough to hazard the confusion its use induces in its audience. (It’s hard to imagine the clarity-loving James Cameron taking a similar risk.) Or is it a coincidence that Bigelow rather resembles a real-life version of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, that classic nerd’s heroine in Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi film Aliens? Like Weaver (whom Cameron also cast in Avatar), Bigelow is almost six feet tall. And unsurprisingly, Cameron, to whom too much is never enough, made Avatar’s blue leading lady ten feet tall. Both Weaver and Bigelow are well bred, lady-like, and attractive, but Bigelow is also an expert at blowing stuff up. Bigelow is a real Ripley. For example, like the EOD specialists whom The Hurt Locker portrays, Bigelow disdains typical Hollywood gas fireball explosions. She strove to make her blasts “a very dense, black, thick, almost completely opaque explosion filled with lots of particulate matter and shrapnel.” Bigelow can talk explosions and lenses all day long. And that’s what The Hurt Locker is: soldiers filmed in Baghdad-like Amman, Jordan through telephoto lenses that deliver the exact opposite of Avatar’s famously immersive 3D. The telephoto effect compresses the apparent distance between the near and the far. For instance, in this typical street scene, if an Improvised Explosive Device were concealed within that hulk of the car behind the American G.I., would he be within the blast zone? The viewer can’t even guess. This art house action flick transpires in a disorientating, flat, and cluttered pictorial space. Bigelow’s telephoto shots keep the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the three heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, much like the potentially lethal uncertainty confronting the soldiers as they try to disarm IEDs of unknown magnitudes. Yet it concludes with a quiet bang. Back in America, still somehow in one piece, Sgt.  James is dispatched by his wife to pick out a box of breakfast cereal. After all those telephoto depictions of war, Bigelow unleashes one memorable fisheye lens shot of the valiant warrior in a supermarket cereal aisle seemingly a mile long, befuddled by peace. Oscar Mania 2010-02-04T05:05:55+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/my_affair_with_jd_salinger/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/my_affair_with_jd_salinger/#When:05:00:18Z “It was a dark and stormy night, but we were young and thought we could do anything. There was no looking back. None of that David Copperfield kind of nonsense. We were already men. We had our finger on what was going on between self and culture. We did away with the traditional architecture of the short story. It was bull—-t, so we dumped it. There was no beginning and no middle, just a lot of emotion, irony and mood. MMMooodd. It was Zen, man, and it never snapped shut. We said less, and it counted for more, and the suckers went wild. Holden grabbed them by the coogies and never let them go. Shawnie loved that stuff, but Susan Hayward really blew it in Uncle Wiggy. She of the Foolish Heart. They said I liked young women and manipulated them. Of course I did. Wouldn’t you? That bitch Joyce Maynard took me for some ride. I love you more for yourself than Catcher, she used to say, while I stuffed her. And like a fool I believed her. We used to lie down after chow and she’d tell me about the millions—millions—of boys who went to bed at night thinking they were Holden. And when I’d tell her those millions went to bed jerking off thinking of Marilyn Monroe, she’d squeal like a stuffed pig, and make me come. “Is this a joke? Believe it or not, it’s not. Suffice it to say that—unlike Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes—I have been in touch with Mr. S in the past. Better yet, he chose to contact me.” They say I am a recluse. Of course I am. Look what they did to Papa. Philip Roth, John Updike, Harold Brodkey, they say I shaped them all, and perhaps I did. Pitch perfect dialogue and sharp social observation is what it’s all about. Sure, Holden was my Gatsby, I got his fierce alienation just right. Adolescence and alienation, morality and distrust, you don’t need to be a genius. When The Catcher first caught fire, I thought only of getting laid. Holden’s inner voice was talking about a need which comes before love—honesty—or so they told me. I was dying to tell them the only need which comes before love is getting laid. Thank God, I didn’t. When I was writing The Catcher I was horny as hell. Marilyn, Jayne, Ava, Lana, they all drove me nuts. So I punished the bitches by showing them that love does not mean sex. I gave Holden an instinct of celibacy. And although my old man was a Jew, I never cared for all that bullshit. I made the only two good people Holden meets to be Catholic nuns. After that it was all down hill. I wanted to save the world but the world did not want to be saved. So I said fuck it. I invented the Glass family, a group ritually washing away the world’s guilt. This is a world of hypocrisy and false values, a world that needs love but does not know how to find it. The people who use the word love are all phonies, starting with that jerk Bono. The only man I trust and whom I’ve never met is Taki, the Greek Spectator correspondent.” Is this a joke? Believe it or not, it’s not. Apparently it will all soon come out, with the great man’s papers. How do I know it’s not a hoax? Ah, here we’re getting into deep waters. I am not at liberty to reveal certain facts, suffice it to say that—unlike Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes—I have been in touch with Mr. S in the past. Better yet, he chose to contact me. The only clue I will give is that Mr. S was a Spectator reader, and received the best weekly in the English-speaking world under a pseudonym, but in his New Hampshire address. Toward the end, he hinted to me that he read Takimag, but I’m not sure he could handle the internet or a word processor. Apparently I stand to inherit something from him, but that’s the least of my concerns. What I’m worried about is publicity, or the movie that’s sure to follow. I can see it now. “JD & Taki, a love story between two real men who never met.” Or “JD & Taki, a movie that will melt your heart the way Melvin & Howard did.” Joking aside, as soon as my pen pal died I contacted both the sainted editor of the Speccie as well as our executive editor. Both doubted my story but immediately changed their minds when I produced the proof. They both advised me to go with it but not to mention what I have in my possession until the will is probated. I have obviously also taken legal advice which, incidentally, was the same as the sainted one’s. I cannot go into details for legal reasons, but JD Salinger and I never spoke on the telephone, we only corresponded. He loathed modern Britain almost as much as I do, and particularly hated what he called phonies like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and, surprisingly, VS Naipaul. In fact he once hinted I should beat Naipaul up, but dropped it after I told him I was a friend of Shiva Naipaul’s, as well as of his wife Jenny. Nearly all adults were suspect to JD Salinger, as well they should have been—that’s why he has a man who Holden respects make a homosexual pass at the youngster. A boy alone in a world of hypocrisy and false values. That was the real JD Salinger, at least the one I got to know through hundreds of letters. Stay tuned. High Life 2010-02-04T05:00:18+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_crisis_is_not_over/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_crisis_is_not_over/#When:05:00:07Z Readers ask if the financial crisis is over, if the recovery is for real and, if not, what are Americans’ prospects. The short answer is that the financial crisis is not over, the recovery is not real, and the U.S. faces a far worse crisis than the financial one. Here is the situation as I understand it: The global crisis is understood as a banking crisis brought on by the mindless deregulation of the U.S. financial arena. Investment banks leveraged assets to highly irresponsible levels, issued questionable financial instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings, and issued the instruments through direct sales to customers rather than through markets. The crisis was initiated when the U.S. allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, thus threatening money market funds everywhere.The crisis was used by the investment banks, which controlled U.S. economic policy, to secure massive subsidies to their profits from a taxpayer bailout and from the Federal Reserve. How much of the crisis was real and how much was hype is not known at this time. As most of the derivative instruments had never been priced in the market, and as their exact composition between good and bad loans was unknown (the instruments are based on packages of securitized loans), the mark-to-market rule drove the values very low, thus threatening the solvency of many financial institutions. Also, the rule prohibiting continuous shorting had been removed, making it possible for hedge funds and speculators to destroy the market capitalization of targeted firms by driving down their share prices.  “A third crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. This crisis will disrupt the international payments mechanism. It will be especially difficult for the U.S. as the country will lose the ability to pay for its imports with its own currency. U.S. living standards will decline as the ability to import declines.” The obvious solution was to suspend the mark-to-market rule until some better idea of the values of the derivative instruments could be established and to prevent the abuse of shorting that was destroying market capitalization. Instead, the Goldman Sachs people in charge of the U.S. Treasury and, perhaps, the Federal Reserve as well, used the crisis to secure subsidies for the banks from U.S. taxpayers and from the Federal Reserve. It looks like a manipulated crisis as well as a real one due to greed unleashed by financial deregulation. The crisis will not be over until financial regulation is restored, but Wall Street has been able to block re-regulation. Moreover, the response to the crisis has planted seeds for new crises. Government budget deficits have exploded. In the U.S. the fiscal year 2009 federal budget deficit was $1.4 trillion, three times higher than the 2008 deficit.  President Obama’s budget deficits for 2010 and 2011, according to the latest report, will total $2.9 trillion, and this estimate is based on the assumption that the Great Recession is over. Where is the U.S. Treasury to borrow $4.3 trillion in three years? This sum greatly exceeds the combined trade surpluses of America’s trading partners, the recycling of which has financed past U.S. budget deficits, and perhaps exceeds total world savings. It is unclear how the 2009 budget deficit was financed.  A likely source was the bank reserves created for financial institutions by the Federal Reserve when it purchased their toxic financial instruments. These reserves were then used to purchase the new Treasury debt. In other words, the budget deficit was financed by deterioration in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. How long can such an exchange of assets continue before the Federal Reserve has to finance the government’s deficit by creating new money? Similar deficits and financing problems have affected the EU, particularly its financially weaker members. To conclude: the initial crisis has planted seeds for two new crises: rising government debt and inflation. A third crisis is also in place. This crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. This crisis will disrupt the international payments mechanism. It will be especially difficult for the U.S. as the country will lose the ability to pay for its imports with its own currency. U.S. living standards will decline as the ability to import declines. The financial crisis is essentially a U.S. crisis, spread abroad by the sale of toxic financial instruments. The rest of the world got into trouble by trusting Wall Street. The real American crisis is much worse than the financial crisis. The real American crisis is the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs such as software engineering and information technology. Jobs offshoring was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations for higher earnings and by performance-related bonuses becoming the main form of managerial compensation. Corporate executives increased profits and obtained bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S. Jobs offshoring is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made the U.S. an opportunity society and eroding the value of a university education. For the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic nontradable services, such as waitresses, bartenders, sales, health and social assistance and, prior to the real estate collapse, construction. These jobs are lower paid than the jobs were that have been offshored, and these jobs do not produce goods and services for export. Jobs offshoring has increased the U.S. trade deficit, putting more pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. When offshored goods and services return to the U.S., they add to imports, thus worsening the trade imbalance. The policy of jobs offshoring is insane. It is shifting U.S. GDP growth to the offshored locations, such as China, thus halting growth in U.S. consumer incomes. For the past decade, U.S. households substituted an increase in indebtedness for the lack of growth in income in order to continue increasing their consumption. With their home equity refinanced and spent, real estate values down, and credit card debt at unsustainable levels, it is no longer possible for the U.S. economy to base its growth on a rise in consumer debt. This fact is a brake on U.S. economic recovery. Stimulus packages cannot substitute for the growth in real income. As so many high value-added, high productivity U.S. jobs have been offshored, there is no way to achieve real growth in U.S. personal incomes. Stimulus spending simply adds to government debt and pressure on the dollar, and sows seeds for high inflation. The U.S. dollar survives as reserve currency because there is no apparent substitute. The euro has its own problems. Moreover, the euro is the currency of a non-existent political entity. National sovereignty continues despite the existence of a common currency on the continent (but not in Great Britain). If the dollar is abandoned, then the result is likely to be bilateral settlements in countries’ own currencies, as Brazil and China now are doing. Alternatively, John Maynard Keynes’ bancor scheme could be implemented, as it does not require a reserve currency country. Keynes’ plan is designed to maintain a country’s trade balance. Only a reserve currency country can get its trade and budget deficits so out of balance as the U.S. has done. The prospect of U.S. default and/or inflation and decline in the dollar’s exchange value is a threat to the reserve system. The threats to the U.S. economy are extreme. Yet, neither the Obama administration, the Republican opposition, economists, Wall Street, nor the media show any awareness. Instead, the public is provided with spin about recovery and with higher spending on pointless wars that are hastening America’s economic and financial ruin. Commerce 2010-02-04T05:00:07+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_hidden_inspiration_of_vampire_weekend/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_hidden_inspiration_of_vampire_weekend/#When:05:05:31Z New York City is for the rich and the young. If you’re not either of those things, get out. Those who stay are doomed to sitting in a tiny apartment all alone and bitching about rich kids in love. This is what the majority of my friends do. They gripe about mythical trust fund hipsters who are into fashion and partying and other shallow pursuits. It reminds me of tough guys from the 50s using “pretty boy” as a derogatory term. You realize you just called that guy young and attractive, right? No group of flippant and successful kids sums up this vacuum of hate more than Vampire Weekend. They are a New York band from the right side of the tracks that sing about pretty girls and having fun and sometimes they even do it using African music! Can you even wrap your head around the blasphemy? “I miss old New York” the forgotten geriatrics moan before mumbling, “These guys are ripping off black music so they can do coke with socialites.” (Are there any American bands that aren’t ripping off black music?) “This is what people don’t get. This band is about young people enjoying life—no matter what. They aren’t simply saying, ‘Put down the champagne, let’s go play tennis.’ They’re saying, ‘Put down the razor blade, let’s go play tennis.’” I personally never understood someone complaining about someone else having money. Music snobs vilified The Strokes because they came from money. The singer’s father owned a modeling agency and therefore their songs suck. The people who did this complaining were middle class kids from small town America who moved to New York for exactly the kind of scene The Strokes created. The real beef with these bands is “They made something and I didn’t so they must have cheated.” In the case of Vampire Weekend however, there is a much bigger picture their critics don’t get. The band’s singer comes from Bronxville High School, which is in the affluent suburb of Westchester. Thousands of children lost their parents on 9-11 but this school was hit particularly hard due to the disproportional number of parents who worked in finance. On the actual day, the school became a temporary bunker where hundreds of kids waited for parents who never came. At that year’s graduation ceremony, almost half the kids were staring out at a proud mother who was also a grieving widow. This led to a whole new generation of hedonism and apathy. They didn’t kill themselves but they turned to a smorgasbord of prescription pills my generation never had access to. Cocaine regained a popularity it hadn’t seen since the 80s and friends disappeared into the city where they could really focus on addiction. Money often does a lot more damage to young kids than drugs and these kids were left with inheritances that meant they’d never have to work again. Why get sober? In the midst of this limitless self-abuse, there was a group of kids who veered in the opposite direction and embraced an almost sappy optimism. They swore off drugs, went back to school and some even embraced religion. This scene is the opposite of punk rock and instead of screaming about “No future,” they sang, “You can turn your back on the bitter world.” I saw Vampire Weekend play at East River Park when they first started and although the turnout was paltry, every single person there was dancing. This is what people don’t get. This band is about young people enjoying life—no matter what. They aren’t simply saying, “Put down the champagne, let’s go play tennis.” They’re saying, “Put down the razor blade, let’s go play tennis.” It’s almost impossible for bitter, old New Yorkers to feel sympathy for rich white kids, especially when said kids are successful and having fun. I find Vampire Weekend inspiring and thoroughly enjoy their carefree music and I’m not alone. The first single from their new album (the one about the bitter world) debuted at number one and the band is headlining the music festival Coachella with platinum-selling rapper Jay- Z. This success will only make the bitter backlash more furious but like all adults complaining, the kids won’t hear it. They’re too busy having fun. Kids Today 2010-02-03T05:05:31+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/bring_our_marines_home/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/bring_our_marines_home/#When:05:00:44Z A month after Germany surrendered in May 1945, America’s eyes turned to the Far East, where the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was joined on the island of Okinawa. Twelve thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines would die—twice as many dead in 82 days of fighting as have died in all the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Within weeks of the battle’s end came Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three weeks later, Gen. MacArthur took the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri. That was 65 years ago, as far away in time from today as the Marines’ arrival at Da Nang was from Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. Yet the Marines are still on Okinawa. But, in 2006, the United States negotiated a $26 billion deal to move 8,000 to Guam and the other Marines from the Futenma air base in the south to the more isolated town of Nago on the northern tip. Okinawans have long protested the crime, noise and pollution at Futenma. “With the exception of the Soviet Union, few nations in history have suffered such a relative decline in power and influence as the United States in the last decade.” The problem arose last year when the Liberal Democratic Party that negotiated the deal was ousted and the Democratic Party of Japan elected on a promise to pursue a policy more balanced between Beijing and Washington. The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, indicated his unease with the Futenma deal, and promised to review it and decide by May. Voters in Nago just elected a mayor committed to keeping the new base out. This weekend, thousands demonstrated in Tokyo against moving the Marine air station to Nago. Some demanded removal of all U.S. forces from Japan. After 65 years, they want us out. And Prime Minister Hatoyama has been feeding the sentiment. In January, he terminated Japan’s eight-year mission refueling U.S. ships aiding in the Afghan war effort. All of which raises a question. If Tokyo does not want Marines on Okinawa, why stay? And if Japanese regard Marines as a public nuisance, rather than a protective force, why not remove the irritant and bring them home? Indeed, why are we still defending Japan? She is no longer the ruined nation of 1945, but the second-largest economy on earth and among the most technologically advanced. The Sino-Soviet bloc against which we defended her in the Cold War dissolved decades ago. The Soviet Union no longer exists. China is today a major trading partner of Japan. Russia and India have long borders with China, but neither needs U.S. troops to defend them. Should a clash come between China and Japan over the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, why should that involve us? Comes the retort: American troops are in Japan to defend South Korea and Taiwan. But South Korea has a population twice that of the North, an economy 40 times as large, access to the most advanced weapons in the U.S. arsenal and a U.S. commitment to come to her defense by air and sea in any second Korean War. And if there is a second Korean War, why should the 28,000 U.S. troops still in Korea, many on the DMZ, or Marines from Futenma have to fight and die? Is South Korea lacking for soldiers? Seoul, too, has been the site of anti-American demonstrations demanding we get out. Why do we Americans seem more desperate to defend these countries than their people are to have us defend them? Is letting go of the world we grew up in so difficult? Consider Taiwan. On his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Richard Nixon agreed Taiwan was part of China. Jimmy Carter recognized Beijing as the sole legitimate government. Ronald Reagan committed us to cut back arms sales to Taiwan. Yet, last week, we announced a $6.4 billion weapons sale to an island we agree is a province of China. Beijing, whose power is a product of the trade deficits we have run, is enraged that we are arming the lost province she is trying to bring back to the motherland. Is it worth a clash with China to prevent Taiwan from assuming the same relationship to Beijing the British acceded to with Hong Kong? In tourism, trade, travel and investment, Taiwan is herself deepening her relationship with the mainland. Is it not time for us to cut the cord? With the exception of the Soviet Union, few nations in history have suffered such a relative decline in power and influence as the United States in the last decade. We are tied down in two wars, are universally disliked and are running back-to-back deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product, as our debt is surging to 100 percent of GDP. A strategic retreat from Eurasia to our own continent and country is inevitable. Let it begin by graciously acceding to Japan’s request we remove our Marines from Okinawa and politely inquiring if they wish us to withdraw U.S. forces from the Home Islands, as well. Uncle Sam 2010-02-03T05:00:44+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/how_bono_destroyed_african_wildlife/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/how_bono_destroyed_african_wildlife/#When:05:00:49Z Most African governments are at best lacklustre in their response to environmental problems; at worst, in a host of countries they are fully complicit in a wide range of unlawful activities ranging from poaching, to uncontrolled fishing and logging. Worsening the problem are the ubiquitous ‘do-gooders’ from abroad who seem to spring up in all the wrong places with all the wrong ideas and invariably do more harm than good.  One need look no further than Gorongoza National Park in central Mozambique for an example. Prior to the end of Portuguese colonial rule it was one of the great African game reserves, with a range of flora that stretched from enchanting Fever Tree forests to sprawling plains and sandstone cliffs. It accommodated an abundant variety of wildlife that made it a unique natural marvel. Of course, this was before it was turned intoa butchery by the newly installed Frelimo regime following the end of Portuguese colonial rule. In the ghastly process the buffalo of the neighbouring Zambezi delta, numbering over 100,000 animals, were virtually wiped out; much of the meat processed into ‘bully-beef’ and shipped to Afghanistan to fill the bellies of Soviet soldiers. But despite the mayhem some game survived. This attracted the benevolent, but blundering attentions of an American IT multi-millionaire by the name of Greg Carr who admirably sought to save the park from further destruction. Sadly he has failed. Ignoring the advice of many regional experts familiar with the wiles of the crooked governing kleptocrats, he leapt joyfully into the latter’s welcoming embrace. Sickeningly, Carr appears to have lauded their labours in relieving him of over $20 million with little to show for it short of a mountain of wrecked vehicles and hundreds of bloated employees. Worse, word has spread, and he has managed to create a socio-economic magnet for people who now see Carr as a soft touch; instead of protecting the wildlife (it is a Game Reserve), he has triggered an influx of predatory villagers. The plight of the remaining game is now probably more precarious than before Carr’s intervention. “‘I know some people in high places would like him dead. It’s a great pity, but none of the NGOs will help a guy like Darrell because they are afraid of standing on political toes.’” But Carr keeps illustrious company in compounding Africa’s conservation woes. Western governments have long been generous benefactors for the various government agencies tasked with protecting wildlife, but sadly, much of the money is spent on the salaries of incorrigibly corrupt officials, providing them with transport to expand their nefarious activities. Thanks to the arrogance and ignorance of folks like Bill Gates, Bono, and Jeffrey Sachs, the continent has been showered in millions of chemically-treated mosquito nets, most of which have by-passed the bodies they were supposed to protect and ended up lining fishing nets. Perfect if one wants to poison fish and sterilise watercourses.  “Without Western aid the law-enforcement agencies would not have been able to move and sell all the illegal meat, ivory, and fish,” says a safari-operator who wishes to remain anonymous. Still, there might be hope: Mushingashi Game Ranch, in Western Zambia, is run by Darrell Watt—a former soldier and wildlife enthusiast. “Ten years ago there was little game there,” says friend and former game-ranger Terry Roach. “now it’s a little out of hand. The antelope don’t even move out the road anymore. The place is full of game; plenty of lion, the elephant are settling and the buffalo are back.” Of course, saving game was not an easy task for Watt. “Darrell has been harassed endlessly by government because he’s standing on their toes,” says a well-known Zambian hunter who also wishes to remain anonymous. “Most of the game that survived years of rampant poaching has found sanctuary with Darrell…I know some people in high places would like him dead. It’s a great pity, but none of the NGOs will help a guy like Darrell because they are afraid of standing on political toes.” In Mozambique, Derek Littleton, a former Zimbabwean Ranger, manages his concessions in Niassa Province, in the extreme north of the country, providing rare relief for the formally game-rich country’s dwindling wildlife population. “Derek is doing a good job but he’s got his work cut out for him. He holds a candle for wildlife in this country. For the rest of the country it’s really game-over. There is no real plan, people have a license to kill, and the government pays lip service to conservation. If you want ivory the Pemba Police Station is probably the best place to buy it.” Better known is Charles Davy from the Zimbabwe ‘Lowveld’ who, far from being applauded for his conservation efforts in saving a vast tract of wildlife wilderness, seems to be attracting all the wrong sort of attention. Unfortunately for him he is a serial offender; he is a white-hunter with a pretty daughter who dates Prince Harry—and he’s rich. In a cheap shot on a ‘usual suspect’, the London Daily Mail recently took a leap of faith in accusing Davy of involvement in rhino-horn trafficking on the strength of what one of their reporters gleaned from a taxi-driver. Paradoxically, to the chagrin of the hand-wringing do-gooders, what these three locales have in common is they are all hunting areas. But with strict take-off quotas in place and effective anti-poaching operations, only a small fraction of the game is ever killed. The formula works; these areas produce rare examples of relatively safe wildlife havens on a largely lawless continent. Again, much to the irritation of foreign know-alls, the people at the helm are hard-bitten professional hunters who have weathered war and hostile political turbulence with a fortitude of few whites who have lived a lifetime in the African wilderness. It’s a wrench upon the conventional wisdom, but the facts show the hunters have got it right and the rest have got it woefully wrong. Those who have come to help have only helped destroy. Humanitarian ‘feel-good’ philosophies aimed at stimulating population growth and Western guilt, which leads to ‘politically correct’ interventions that do not ruffle official feathers, seem set to stay. The only hope for African wildlife lies with those who make a living out of killing it. Heart of Darkness 2010-02-02T05:00:49+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/history_aint_bunk/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/history_aint_bunk/#When:05:05:42Z As a boy I once climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza in Egypt, sitting on its summit to watch the dawn break across the desert. That experience—and the visceral draw of climbing or walking into the past—has remained with me ever since. It has given me a respect for what has come before, a career in writing fictional accounts of it, a profound belief in its importance to our lives. For history is more than just a pile of mouldering books or some corduroy-clad and dandruff-dusted bore in full pontificating flow. It is our inheritance and hinterland, our collective consciousness and DNA, our identity and social glue. Ignore it, and a nation becomes as soulless and meaningless as an empty paper bag. Abandon it, and a nation is poorly placed for whatever lies ahead. The modern Left hates history and its concomitant, tradition (unless, of course, they abase themselves before the twin totems of slavery and worker rights). To the Left, history is distasteful, reactionary, elitist and by its very nature conservative. Cut the ties, the liberal-left believes, and you can stamp your brand (while stamping out stubborn resistance) and remould a nation as your own utopian idyll. The here, the now, the year zero, are what counts to them. It is why Blair conjured the grotesque and forgettable notion of ‘Cool Britannia’, why New Labour squandered a billion pounds on the vacuous and unloved Millennium Dome, why the dreadful Lord Mandelson dismissed those serving in the Guards Divison of the armed forces as being nothing more than ‘chinless wonders’. Those same chinless wonders have shed their blood in Afghanistan and Iraq papering over the inadequacies of their political masters. But then, Mandelson is possibly less judgemental of types who lie on their mortgage application forms. Had the Millennium Dome celebrated a thousand years of British history and tradition, had it embraced and embodied our contribution to arts, culture, exploration, and science (not to mention some pretty dramatic military campaigning) people would have flocked. The past gave us kings and queens, great cathedrals and beautiful gardens; the past gave us Shakespeare, Newton, Cook, Nelson, Wellington, Austen, Darwin, and Elgar. New Labour offered up a spirit zone, an oh-so-right-on hermaphrodite statue, and the grisly spectacle of Her Majesty transported by barge to spend a toe-curling 1999 New Year’s Eve holding hands with the Blairs and lip-synching Auld Lang Syne. History was thrown out and dignity and worth went with it. “Because we do not know our past, we are ill-at-ease with the present and ill-prepared for the future. The shopping mall is now the opiate of the masses.” It was Churchill who remarked that we need to look a long way back in order to see forward. How right he was and how lightly we discard his advice. We forgot that financial bubbles burst and greed catches up. We forgot that men fight and peace dividends are illusory. We forgot that peace is harder to prepare for and sustain than war. We forgot that Afghanistan will ever rise up to bite our Great Game backsides. We forgot that air power alone is no substitute for local knowledge and boots on the ground, and that technological supremacy is no guarantee of victory. We forgot there is no such thing as a risk-free conflict. We forgot too in Britain that Labour government profligacy and ineptitude will ever bring us to the point of ruin. And we forgot that in betraying our western heritage, we would end as little more than a sump tank for Third World grievances and atavistic practices (including hostile preaching, forced marriage, honor killing, vicious witch-doctoring and violent exorcism). Yes, we forgot. Historical illiteracy has done all this, and more. Because we do not know our past, we are ill-at-ease with the present and ill-prepared for the future. The shopping mall is now the opiate of the masses. And meantime, book-lending from UK libraries has fallen by forty percent over the past decade alone. Small wonder that basic understanding has become the more limited, shallow and bite-sized; academic rigour is spent; reality has been moulded by Wikipedia, touch-screen and computer-generated imagery. Then we are surprised when our children identify Churchill as an animated dog on an insurance commercial rather than the wartime British leader. We lose the references and in doing so have lost ourselves. My father was a true polymath, a brilliant linguist, classicist, scientist, and industrialist, a man who was present in New York for the ’29 Wall Street Crash, a hunter who shot big game with Hemingway in Africa and chamois with Hermann Goering in Europe (while apparently stealing Nazi secrets), a bon viveur who lived in Claridges between the wars and who later survived a Luftwaffe bomb on his Mayfair home (and a stabbing by a diamond thief). Now, that is history. For sure, his generation made mistakes—monumental ones. And there was never a golden era. Yet however described, it was populated by those who could talk in sentences, who were educated and informed, who were real people. History is rich in character, incident, and salutary lesson. Take, for example, the life and times of the legendary Elizabethan spymaster of England, Sir Francis Walsingham. As secret policeman and chief of both domestic and foreign espionage, he knew the value of human-intelligence. Not for him the sclerotic and bureaucratic behemoths that protect our national security today. Not for him a Department of Homeland Security that can employ over seventeen thousand souls and yet cannot stop a man with fireworks in his underwear. Plain old-fashioned groundwork, tradecraft, diligence and a sound reading of the enemy were his forte. He understood religious fanaticism, conspiracy and assassination plots, had witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Protestant innocents in Paris during St. Barholomew’s Day 1572. His wake-up call; his 9/11. It informed him of the coming threat. In blackmailing a groom to the chamber of the pope, Walsingham gained access to a letter from King Philip II of Spain detailing the entire battle-plan of the gathering Spanish Armada. In placing an agent at the heart of the private household of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, he was probably instrumental in the mysterious death of the Grand Admiral three months before he was to lead that Armada out. In planting false prophecies and astrological predictions among the Armada crews, he spread dissent and mutiny and encouraged many to jump ship. In relentlessly pursuing the Spanish fleet, he deployed one of his ‘intelligencers’ aboard the enemy galleon Floriana and, through expeditious use of gunpowder, sent her to the bottom. Some neat tricks. Walsingham was the spy-chief who introduced the concept of Extraordinary Rendition (he persuaded pirates in La Rochelle to attempt the kidnap of the papal legate to Paris). As for his sworn enemies, the Spanish Inquisition were experts in the notorious interrogation technique of waterboarding (referred to as toca). Perhaps the past is not so much a foreign country, after all. In losing our history, we lose part of ourselves and impoverish what is left. So forget textspeak and philistinism. My advice to the young is simple—climb to the highest vantage. And then look back.   Anthropology 2010-02-01T05:05:42+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_problem_with_hipster_porn/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_problem_with_hipster_porn/#When:05:05:48Z Anyone who’s seen Mike Tyson fight is aware of the benefits a violent childhood can bring. You don’t have to condone kids getting beat up every day to enjoy seeing him in the ring. You don’t want your children to follow the same path, but as far as Tyson’s shitty life goes, there’s no better job. Not just anybody can step in the ring. Athletic commissions regulate boxing licenses and make sure things don’t get too gory. Tyson himself had his license rescinded in 1997 after biting off his opponent’s ear. This is the way it should be. Boxing is a violent sport that can do serious, permanent damage. I have never been the same after challenging a professional MMA fighter to a fight. I didn’t have the experience to handle the guy and ended up in the hospital with cerebral contusions. I’ll never do that again. Pornography is exactly the same. I love watching porn stars like Ava Devine get violated, but I’m well aware the odds of her having been sexual abused as a child are about 99.99 percent. You don’t have to condone sexual abuse to watch porn. It’s a great job for someone who is dumb, unambitious, and devoid of sexuality. In fact, the only way you can do “sex work” (as naïve feminists like to call it) is to have no sex left in you. Some perverted uncle or disgusting friend of the family robs a girl of her most intimate and valuable asset and it’s like a light switch goes off. Now they can have sex with anyone because they’re numb. I’ve talked to a lot of strippers and prostitutes about this phenomenon and have yet to meet one who denied the vast majority of people who have sex for money are abuse victims. An ex-prostitute I dated for a while made it all too clear. “Sex isn’t the same thing to me as it is to you,” she said. “To me it’s like playing soccer or swimming.” I spent about half the relationship thinking of all the different ways I was going to kill her dad for what he did to her. This obsession eventually ended the relationship. There is no athletic commission to regulate who goes into porn and ensure no fragile eggs get trampled. The very nature of the business has always kept the innocent away. Until now. Until hipster porn: Also called alt porn, it’s a genre of pornography that is mostly pictures on websites but also includes actual pornographic videos. Hipster porn stars tend to be middle-class punk girls who come from pretty stable backgrounds and have been convinced what they’re doing isn’t porn at all and therefore doesn’t deserve a lot of money. These girls haven’t been molested as kids and are in way over their heads. This sexist plague began with Scene Queens: Young, punk girls on social networks who put up titillating pictures of themselves for free. They get thousands of friends and often correspond with them online. I’d never allow my daughter to do this, but it’s not the end of the world. I don’t even think I’d call it misogynist. Unfortunately, once this became cool, a new wave of pornography took hold. Websites like Suicide Girls (the Playboy of the genre) and Burning Angel (the very NSFW version) popped up and convinced even MORE girls it was hip to pose nude for next to nothing. They weren’t porn stars, they were “pin-ups”, and the whole thing was lumped in with Roller Derby and Burlesque as a fun and empowering way to show your Girl Power. Pornographic video jumped on the bandwagon and guys like Eon McKai (named after the singer of a punk band from the 80s) has convinced a whole new generation of girls porn isn’t porn. But it is porn. And porn is supposed to pay. Real porn stars hate hipster porn because they see it as rich kids devaluing the sex dollar for laughs. You’re not supposed to get $100 to have sex on camera. You’re supposed to get $1,500. These girls are stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson and getting knocked out for free again and again. When the religious right rails against pornography and portrays it as male predators taking advantage of vulnerable women, I roll my eyes. Porn is simply victims of abuse making the best of a terrible situation. Porn producers aren’t predators. They’re entrepreneurs. However, Pat Robertson is correct when it comes to hipster porn. The men who make money off this new breed of porn star are exactly the predator the religious right say he is. In my twenties, I lived with two punk chicks who were lazy and wanted a job where they didn’t have to leave the house. They chose phone sex. Neither of these girls were molested as kids and despite the tattoos and pink hair, ultimately just wanted a nice boyfriend whom they would eventually marry and make babies with. Guess what happened. The job rotted them. I would come home after a hard day’s work and feel glares burning through the back of my head. I would turn around and find them staring at me like I habitually raped them both. “That job made me hate men,” one of them admitted to me years after quitting. “It messes with your head.” Their boss eventually convinced one of them to go to hotels and urinate on perverts for money. She recently described the experience as “damaging”—though she’d never have admitted it back then. I’ve always said this kind of pornography is not cool, but it’s hard to prove something is damaging in the long run when it’s only been around for a few years. A few months ago, I was interviewed at dinner along with some other media types including a blogger/hipster porn star who called herself Baby Sinead. She told me her parents were totally cool with her doing pornography. I did my best to explain to her that her sexuality is actually very sacred and not something to be tossed around willy nilly. That’s why people pay so much for it. It has value. Lawsuits that include “violating a woman’s chastity” are a very big deal because the courts understand a woman unanimously seen as a slut is in for a lonely life. Now, if someone already took your chastity and threw it in the garbage, selling it isn’t such a big deal. She doesn’t fall into that category but I couldn’t convince her it mattered. “Take what’s left of your innocence and get out while you can,” I pleaded with her. “This job will ruin your life.” The eponymous Baby looked at me like I just told her Dick Cheney is sexy. In about ten years, when she’s a lonely cougar, she’ll realize I was right but by then it will be too late. Cougar isn’t a good thing by the way. That’s another lie women are told. Sex 2010-01-29T05:05:48+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_big_business_myth/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_big_business_myth/#When:05:00:27Z Would it surprise you to hear that the New York Times has managed an economics fail? Again? No, I suppose it probably wouldn’t but you will at least be interested in finding out which part of the dismal science they’ve managed to entirely misunderstand I have no doubt. It’s here, in one of the editorials, moaning about how big big business is: Big Oil is so big that Royal Dutch Shell is the world’s 25th-biggest economy, bigger than Norway. No, it isn’t. It’s not even close to that sort of level. This is entirely nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, nonsense that betrays a sad and woeful lack of knowledge about what an economy is and how we count and measure it. The truth is that Shell is around and about the size of Luxembourg, number 68 or so on the list. So, what is it that the New York Times has got wrong? Well, basically, they’ve looked at a few numbers, seen some that look about the same and then hared off cock-eyed to their conclusion: about what we expect from children just past the “why’s the sky blue, daddy?” stage. The GDP of Norway is (I’m rounding everything here, just to conserve the world’s supply of digits) around $400 billion. The turnover of Shell is around $400 billion. Thus Shell is the same size as Norway, right? “To equate the two numbers is somewhere between the apples and pears thing and comparing apples to Rush Limbaugh: somewhere between inappropriate and surreal.” No, entirely wrong. GDP is Gross Domestic Product. There are a number of different ways to think about it but the one we want here is that it is the value added in the economy over the year. What it isn’t is the turnover in the economy. Think of housing for a moment: you sell your house (umm, well, if you can at the moment of course) and someone else buys it. That’s a transaction and is it included in GDP? No, it most certainly isn’t. Total sales of houses in the US are around $12 trillion a year and the total economy is $15 trillion: whatever you might have thought of the past few years it isn’t true that housing is 80 percent of the US economy. No, the bits we include in GDP are the bits of added value: the realtors fees, the closing costs, the points you pay the mortgage broker. Yes, I know, tough to think of these as added value but to economists (a strange breed indeed) they are. However, to get that $400 billion figure for Shell we’re not measuring value added, we’re measuring turnover. So to equate the two numbers is somewhere between the apples and pears thing and comparing apples to Rush Limbaugh: somewhere between inappropriate and surreal. The value added at a company (and I’ll agree that there are different ways of doing this) is best represented by the profit that they make. Take all the sales, take all the costs, net them off and you’re left with that profit: the value that’s been added by incurring all those costs to make those sales. Shell’s profits are around $30 billion a year. So that’s the number that we want to equate to the GDP of a country and Luxembourg’s GDP is about $30 billion and so Shell is about the size of Luxembourg. “But, but, wait” I can hear the confused leftist at the back of the lecture hall saying “Shell is still the size of a country and that’s bad, right?” Well, no, not really sure that this is still bad. Shell employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business. Luxembourg employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business as a country. Why should anyone be surprised that a couple of hundred thousand rich world people produce about the same value added even if employed in different ways? As to the New York Times editorial writers, well, next time they tell us that politicians run things better than markets, that taxes or the minimum wage should be higher, you know, the sorts of things that those arts graduates love to lecture us on, just remember that on matters economic they simply haven’t the first clue of what they’re talking about. They might know where to put, commas, and how to spell stuff but numbers clearly confuse them. Moolah 2010-01-29T05:00:27+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/death_to_the_dictator/ http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/death_to_the_dictator/#When:15:22:29Z The opposition in Iran, as elsewhere, uses the language of human rights to assert its moral superiority over its enemies in their seats of power. Opposition spokesmen point to government kangaroo courts, rapes, beatings, electric shocks and imposition of the death penalty to convince the world outside that the regime is illegitimate. Vicious attacks on students by the modern brown-shirts of the Basij militia further undermine the right of the clergy to govern. Yet, amid the justifiable outrage at the punishments the Iranian regime metes out to those it suspects are trying to overthrow them, there are memories of a previous opposition movement that made the human rights case against the Shah in 1979. Then, Iran’s opposition groups, who were both democratic and theocratic, contended that torture and murder by the Shah’s secret police, the notorious SAVAK, proved that the Shah was not fit to govern.  As soon as the clergy seized power, however, prisons and torture chambers in which the new rulers themselves had once suffered were overflowing. Ayatollah Khalkhali sat in judgement day and night to send not only members of the ancien regime, but former revolutionaries, to the gallows. Born in idealism and supported by a broad base of democrats, secularists, leftists and prelates, the Iranian revolutionaries exceeded SAVAK in the use of intimidation, torture and killing. Evin Prison, symbol of the Shah’s hated police state, saw more torture and murder than the SAVAK had practiced. Moreover, the clergy did not take long to exceed the Shah’s cronies at siphoning off as much of the country’s wealth as they could stuff into the folds of their jellabas. Iranian men and women, however, enjoy more rights than their fellow Muslims across the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. Countries that support and trade with the Saudi monarchy lack credibility when condemning the Iranian mullahs for human rights abuses that are routine in Saudi Arabia. In both countries, women are made to cover themselves lest they invite the lust of men. Iranian women, however, enjoy legal protections that Saudi women have never known. They work in the professions, and they drive cars. They vote and stand for parliament, while their Saudi sisters have no parliament and must be driven by a male relation or retainer. Iran holds elections that in the past have expressed the popular will, but the rulers clearly tampered with the results of last June’s presidential poll to avoid relinquishing power—not to the opposition—but to a man from within the ranks of the theocracy who had twice been a much-feared prime minister. Mir Hosein Musavi’s election would not have portended a counter-revolution so much as a partial reform, but even that was too much for the Supreme Leader and the system over which he presides. Denying Musavi the presidency—more importantly, denying the electors their choice or president—may have initiated the counter-revolution that the ayatollahs of Qum fear most. “American manipulation of separatists in the Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri regions of Iran further diminishes any role the US can play among the vast majority of the Iranian population who believe in national unity and fear civil war.” As the regime fights for its life, Iranians suffer more abuse. Stories of those who have been released from prisons since the demonstrations against the fraudulent elections have been harrowing and well documented. Women and men have been raped in their cells. Beatings are routine. Policemen torture youngsters into informing on their friends. And there is nothing we in the Western world can do about it. Even before the elections, Iran executed children: twenty-six under the age of eighteen with another 130 awaiting the death penalty. (Saudi and Sudanese courts also execute children for criminal offenses.) Iranian courts put to death more than three hundred adults, after trials that barely deserve the name, in 2007. Human Rights Watch reported that another 29 men were hanged in one day in 2008 without so much as disclosing most of their names. Detentions without trial are commonplace, and political activists often disappear into a security system that has no habeas corpus. This was routine before the regime felt threatened, and it can only increase as its opponents mobilize for their overthrow. A year ago, a few activists asked for reforms. Now, they are openly shouting, “Death to the Dictator.” As the people lose their fear, that of the rulers increases. A frightened regime, like a wounded lion, is not interested in anyone’s rights. Condemnations of Iran’s human rights abuses are justified. Coming from the United States, however, they are little more than hypocrisy. The US government’s use of torture and maintenance of torturers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Colombia deny it credibility. American manipulation of separatists in the Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri regions of Iran further diminishes any role the US can play among the vast majority of the Iranian population who believe in national unity and fear civil war. Pleas by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other advocates of adherence to international law are welcomed by Iranian citizens who need to feel, as anti-apartheid militants in South Africa once did, that they are not alone in the world. However, the regime in Tehran is just as likely to ignore Amnesty as it does the US government. Noam Chomsky said recently, “Putting aside the details of the election, about which we don’t know much, the whole structure of the regime is oppressive and authoritarian, and undermines basic civil and other human rights. Protest against it is not only honorable but courageous, because it faces extreme violence.” The question is less how to persuade the regime to lessen the violence against its citizens than how to encourage those who are standing up to its violence that they can prevail. The duty for its friends abroad is then to hold them to the ideals for which they are risking their lives now. Civil society in the rest of the world can demonstrate its support of Iranian democrats. It can also restrain the Israeli and American governments from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that will give the regime a new breath of life, a blunder that would equal Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 that saved the Iranian revolution by forcing all Iranians to unite around Ayatollah Khomeini. Dr. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote in The Daily Beast in December, “No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip.” The signs are, though, that resistance to authority is having an impact. Parsi added, “The State’s ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance.” If the Resistance succeeds, it may embrace, as the mullahs have since 1979, religion as part of the state’s structure. It may also, like the mullahs, ignore our calls for it to respect the human rights of its own opponents. 2010-01-28T15:22:29+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/freak_friendly/ http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/freak_friendly/#When:15:19:14Z “You know, despite it all, it’s still really a miracle America elected a black man as president,” my 60-something neighbor said to me over beers recently. You get this a lot from people born before 1965. Apparently, America is a racist hellhole and the fact that they overcame this deep-seated hatred for blacks to allow one into the White House is physics defied. Um, as far as I can tell, a seemingly smart and in-control Democrat proceeded the most hated Republican president of all time. That’s not a “miracle.” It’s a “normal.” I get insulted when Boomers tell me how racist my country is. I understand where they’re coming from, I guess. They grew up with survivors of the Great Depression: Grumpy old traditionalists that worked their fingers to the bone in isolation and never tried anything weird. That was then however, so please shut up about it. There is not a gigantic ogre of racism controlling our brains that took time off during the election but rears its ugly head every time we have a problem with, say, unprecedented taxation. “When someone under 40 hears boomer anthems like, “There’s a land where the children are free,” we go, “What the hell is this song about? Where are the children NOT free?”’ Now, I’m sure you can dig up some redneck who still says nigger or half a dozen skinheads in the middle of nowhere but hate crimes are a miniscule percentage of total crimes in America and if you get into per capita, all races get it about equally. I heard some horrible stories about drinking fountains from forever ago and I saw a video where dogs were attacking some dude but that was a different universe than my generation’s America. We don’t care if people aren’t like us anymore. We don’t even get what you’re talking about. When someone under 40 hears boomer anthems like, “There’s a land where the children are free,” we go, “What the hell is this song about? Where are the children NOT free?” Old people grew up in a climate where nuns gave the strap if you wrote with your left hand and young boys were verboten from going near dolls. Our generation yawns at such superstitious claptrap. If my son turns out to be gay, I will go into a deep depression for about seven minutes and then I’ll get over it. The boomers grew up in a world where their parents dry-heaved at the thought of a black man breathing the same air as them. Even the boomers, I’m told, were occasionally mocked for not being exactly like the majority. My American Indian mother-in-law was nicknamed jungle bunny in college. Not only do we find that hard to comprehend. We think it’s funny. As Harmony Korine said, “I crack up at the race riots.” We never would have made fun of this guy.It seems like every children’s book I’m forced to read to my kid is about some freak that everyone learned isn’t a freak after all. We never thought he was a freak in the first place you ancient babies. If Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were born today, the other reindeers would high-five him and ask him what reindeer games they think he should play. In my school, the kid with Down Syndrome was the school hero and the football team adopted him as their favorite fan without a trace of irony. The pre-1970 people are unable to grasp this. They created movies like Mask where a boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, is mocked for his circus-like disfigurements. Or the show Square Pegs where the quirky, unusual kids were relegated to the bottom rung of the high school hierarchy. In my Secondary Education, all these people would have been rock stars. The same goes with sexism. Why Men Earn More pointed out the obvious error with assuming women get paid less for the same work. Namely: Why wouldn’t corporations hire them in droves? They’re cheap labor, right? Turns out they earn less because they tend to be more committed to family events than staying up all night preparing proposals. In other words, they choose to earn less. After waves of famine, a great depression, and a free-for-all orgy of whining, we’ve figured a lot of it out and the old wive’s tales no longer make any sense to us. We are the information generation. We know you’re born gay and there’s nothing you can do about it. We googled it. We know women can be just as capable at any job and we hire accordingly. We know freaks are not cursed by the almighty but just statistical inevitablilites. We are way too well-adjusted to push someone out of our life just because they don’t meet some strange parameters someone else invented so please stop doing a spit take when we don’t behave exactly like our grandfathers. 2010-01-28T15:19:14+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/survival_of_the_fattest/ http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/survival_of_the_fattest/#When:15:17:49Z Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the underclass and its malady is caused by welfare. A process of reverse evolution is in train. It is no longer the fittest or the brightest, the fastest or the best, who survive and thrive in our contemporary jungle. It is the moronic and the bovine, the fattest and the least productive, who are cosseted and subsidized and excused their behavior. Because of it, they breed. After all, sex is free and the State will ever pick up the pieces. Collect £200 and Get out of Jail for free. While the benighted and exploited middle-classes pay their tax, marry late, and have fewer children, the underclass procreates with abandon. They have every reason, and no reason not to. As Africa has systematically swallowed a trillion dollars in aid with precious little to show for it, so welfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly—housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs. Rather than imbue an ethic of hard work, discipline, and responsibility, through a process of handouts and hand-wringing we have promoted instead a culture in which it pays to be a dropout and where a man need not lift a finger (let alone a pick, shovel, mallet, chisel, or spanner) in order to earn a wage. Crack, smack, and street-robbery are so much more rewarding.  Whoever imagined nothing is for free was profoundly wrong. The underclass not only rejects the notion there is nobility in work, it cannot actually see the point. “I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? We have stripped the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead award it rights and benefits.” Every decade that passes, the habits become engrained (some would say, enshrined) and the mindset reinforced. The underclass grows, and not merely because teenage girls fail to discover contraception and believe the swiftest route to a council house is via their own birth-canals. Enabling and sustaining it, feeding it with ceaseless waves of new recruits, is a liberal-left education establishment that has conspired to beach successive generations on the shoals of illiteracy and phonetic spelling and the sandbars of underachievement. Init, well wicked, knowhaddamean? Of course you do. Education used to point the way out of the ghetto. Today it simply consigns our young to a lifetime of delivering pizza. Without the resources to renationalize industry, left-leaning governments have directed their energies towards taking the public back into state ownership. Create an underclass, make it dependent on your largesse, and you will garner its vote. That is the premise. Or maybe there is no logic; perhaps it is just the old knee-jerk and patronizing instincts of the left. They know best. And it has done irreparable harm. In place of parenting, there are social workers; instead of common sense, there is health and safety and the criminal records bureau; substituting for normal community interaction is diversity training; standing in for work there is always welfare. At every level the state intrudes and society suffers. I am not advocating we eat the poor—far be it for me to promote a fatty diet—and nor do I suggest we abandon all financial safety-nets. I simply propose we ditch the tired vocabulary of victim-hood that categorizes the handout-consuming and habitually unemployed as the ‘most vulnerable in society’. It is the wealth-creators who are the most vulnerable. Look closer and you will find that poverty is more often than not a matter of prioritization for those apparently caught in its maw. I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? Why at Christmas do you purchase the latest consumer durables, computer-games and plasma-screen televisions and yet baulk at spending on private health insurance? How come you are so fat when fruit and vegetables are cheaply available? It will not happen. For we have infantilized the populace, stripping the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead awarding it rights and benefits. In the liberal-left world of the welfare state, everything is a condition, an illness, a fault of someone else. Even obesity is to be blamed on rogue genes, thyroid-malfunction or the antics of food manufacturers rather than on the sloth and greed of individuals. People forget the mouth is generally larger than the anus and thus cram it with more food. They have been allowed to forget. The origin of yet another subspecies is revealed. But that’s okay. For the state will provide gastric bands and liposuction and will end up owning a few more souls. 2010-01-28T15:17:49+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/megalomaniac_filmmakers1/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/megalomaniac_filmmakers1/#When:05:05:44Z With James Cameron’s Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas’s original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron’s own Titanic), it’s a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film culture: the rise of the self-proclaimed do-it-all writer-director-producer. Of the last thirty Best Picture nominees (2003-2008), ten had directors who also took screenwriting credits (including George Clooney for Good Night and Good Luck). And of the top 30 box office hits of all time—a list dominated by recent films due to inflation—the director has also served double-duty as a screenwriter on 16. The growing allure of the writer-director extends even to Lucas and Cameron, both of whom seem more intrigued by technological innovation than by fine-tuning dialogue. Lucas is notoriously tin-eared, while Cameron abstains from originality in plot and dialogue to—as he explains it—avoid confusing the audience. After triumphing as the sole writer-director on the original Star Wars in 1977, Lucas took a public role for his 1980 sequel The Empire Strikes Back more like hypomanic producer David O. Selznick’s on 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Lucas handed the screenwriting credits to old-timer Leigh Brackett and young gun Lawrence Kasdan, and the directing credit to Irvin Kershner. Is it surprising that The Empire Strikes Back is widely considered the best of the five follow-ups? Indeed, when Lucas returned in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, he took sole credits for both writing and directing. And it showed. Still, The Phantom Menace made plenty of money. People like the idea of the embattled genius coming back after 16 years away (or 12 years in Cameron’s case) with his deeply personal revelation. Ironically, a variant of the auteur theory—that dauntingly intellectual Parisian rewrite of Hollywood history intended to establish the primacy of the director as the “author” of the film at the expense of the actors, screenwriter, producer, and the rest of the crew—is becoming the standard way to make crowd-pleasing popcorn movies. The public adores identifying with megalomaniac filmmakers. “Besides, saying “I like John Ford Westerns” sounds more sophisticated than saying “I like John Wayne Westerns,” even though they are more or less the same movies.” This is not to say that old time directors such as Howard Hawks never rewrote scripts. They were, though, more reluctant to insist upon a writer’s credit. Back then, directing was seen as a fun, fulfilling, well-paid job that introduced you to lots of beautiful women. Securing your place in artistic history by insisting upon your authorship was less of a priority. The young French critics, such as Francois Truffaut, who in the 1950s put forward the auteur theory extolling pre-WWII Hollywood directors had pressing career concerns. They wanted to direct, but the French film industry was then dominated by screenwriters. Moreover, the older generation of French intellectuals, such as Sartre, were pro-Soviet, so the (short-lived) pro-American bias of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd brought them welcome notoriety. (Eventually, General De Gaulle returned to power and gave them the money to make their New Wave movies.) This Parisian innovation of organizing Hollywood history around directors caught on in film schools and in Hollywood, where the auteur theory was less adopted than adapted. Insiders know perfectly well that no matter how talented the director, a film can’t get started until somebody does the typing, and that a film can’t get made until somebody arranges the financing. Hence, the trend has been less for the director to gain at the expense of writers and producers than for individual men (and they are almost always men) to try to take on at least part of all the major behind-the-scenes roles so as to fully stamp their authorship on films. I noticed its advantages in 1984, when I tried to explain to friends that I was looking forward to the upcoming baseball movie The Natural because its cinematographer Caleb Deschanel had done outstanding work on Black Stallion and The Right Stuff. I soon learned, though, that virtually nobody could keep track of anybody besides stars and directors. Describing The Natural to casual movie fans as “a Robert Redford movie” or to intense fans as “a Barry Levinson movie (you know, the guy who did Diner?)” worked, while references to cinematographers just led to blank expressions all around. Tracking anybody beyond stars and directors was just too much to keep in mind. Besides, saying “I like John Ford Westerns” sounds more sophisticated than saying “I like John Wayne Westerns,” even though they are more or less the same movies. The auteur theory is popular because it is less scholarly than it is Romantic, an aid to hero-worship. It personalizes the vastly complicated business of making movies into one man’s struggle for self-expression. In this way, it’s similar to the 1960s and 1970s Cult of Authenticity that worshipped Baby Boom singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, for writing their own material. Sure, the 1956 version of I’ve Got You Under My Skin is a finer piece of popular art than any Neil Young recording, but exactly which middle-aged pro’s work of art is it? Singer Frank Sinatra’s? Songwriter Cole Porter’s? Arranger Nelson Riddle’s? In contrast, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush (“Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun”) is lousier on every objective dimension, but Baby Boomers loved it because you can be sure that, whatever it means, Neil really meant it. And, sure, nobody much cared about Lucas’s leaden line in The Phantom Menace, “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” But at least you knew George cared about it. Zeitgeist 2010-01-28T05:05:44+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/lees-milne_homosexualist/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/lees-milne_homosexualist/#When:05:00:00Z Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact the other two were about. Now if someone had suggested to me long ago that I would be reading three books about three men who preferred their own sex, I’d have said they’ve been puffing on the magic dragon, but that’s neither here nor there. I was curious to read about James Lees-Milne, by Michael Bloch, because although I never met him, I knew and know some of his so-called straight friends. The other two are the biography of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and of John Cheever, by Blake Bailey. But let’s start with Lees-Milne. The homosexualist. Lees-Milne was—like the other two subjects—bisexual, but unlike the other two had no children. His was a benign idiopathic homosexuality, but he viewed things only through the prism of homosexual eroticism. Hence my calling him a homosexualist. Here was a man who fell in love with women, although the affairs were almost never consummated, a serious lover of beautiful old buildings, and a writer of note, whose whole life was shaped and influenced by his homosexual mentors and gay friends. Yet he had a horror of those who flaunted their proclivities and he often called such people buggers and homos. Mind you, this was the buttoned up England of the thirties and forties, with no Elton Johns around to wave the gay flag. Still, Lees-Milne emerges as a hell of a gay cat, cattiness being the operative word. He thought of many of his fellow gays as shallow, slick, sophisticated and absurd, adjectives I used to use about old queens who hung out around Monte Carlo in the fifties. He adored the Nicolsons, Harold Nicolson having been his lover earlier on, only to see Alvide, his wife, fall madly in love with Harold’s wife, the ghastly Vita, thirty years later. Nice upper class stuff, but not my cup of tea. James adored Vita almost as much as his wife did, but without the cigar. “Of the five men present all five were homosexual although three were married. Three of the five were Jim’s ex-lovers. “It was rather strained and uneasy,” wrote Harold Nicolson of the lunch party. I bet it was.” Lees-Milne is best known for his diaries, which I admit I never read. In his biography, however, I came across his mean-spirited and back-biting, waspish comments about some friends of mine—all heterosexual, I may add—which I obviously didn’t like. In contrast, he refers to Rory Cameron and to his mother’s house on Cap Ferrat, La Fiorentina, as something exceptional. Actually I went there about five times and thought it was the pits. Cameron was a grab-arse pansy, now long dead of Aids, who used the house to lure young tourists on board, his mother a terrible snob who pretended to come from something she didn’t come from. I smelled things early on and stayed away. I have to admit, however, I couldn’t put the book down, and Michael Bloch—a fellow gay—has done tremendous research and writes with love for his subject. There was one passage that made me laugh and wonder how the white, upper middle class of England ever survived, by which I mean the species. There is a wedding lunch in Thurloe Square after James’s and Alvide’s wedding. Of the five men present all five were homosexual although three were married. Three of the five were Jim’s ex-lovers. “It was rather strained and uneasy,” wrote Harold Nicolson of the lunch party. I bet it was. When I read Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh ten years or so ago, I was stunned by the extent of Waugh’s rampant homosexuality during his youth. I suppose it is an English thing, but the guy did have seven children, and with a woman to boot. I was also pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the author, whom I tried to put the moves on during a Spectator summer party, but she would have none of it. Her book on Maugham is as wonderful as she is. I was once asked when still in my teens by a renowned Riviera “bugger” to lunch at La Mauresque, Maugham’s grand villa. Like a fool, I declined because I was intimidated.  By the time I discovered that writing was what life’s all about it was too late. The great man was dying, but I did visit the house with my friend Leonidas Goulandris when it was put up for sale in 1965. Ronald Searle showed us around. The place reeked of old fashioned sin and old fashioned writing. If I had had the moolah back then, I would have bought it on the spot. Maugham is the most underrated writer in the world, and I read all of his works when I was young. In fact for awhile I wanted to be Larry Darrell, but then chose to be Dick Diver instead. I read Ted Morgan’s biography of the master twenty-five years ago, and this one is just as good. How anyone can call his work sentimental slush is beyond me. In fact how anyone can read a word by Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie is even more beyond me. But I’ve run out of space. I will get back to John Cheever in future, but for the moment, while still recovering from partying, I plan to read Marcus Scriven’s splendid book on yet another terrific bugger, John Bristol, a man who makes everyone I’ve mentioned above sound like choir boys. Beau Monde 2010-01-28T05:00:00+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/tintins_flawed_creator/ http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/tintins_flawed_creator/#When:15:25:57Z Few cartoon characters have been loved—or argued over—more than Tintin, the Belgian reporter-cum-detective whose adventures have been translated into over 50 languages and sold over 200 million books. To be precise, it is not Tintin as such who is controversial but the “contradictory and inscrutable” man (as Pierre Assouline describes him) who dreamed him up and guarded him jealously until his death in 1983. Assouline is the highly-regarded biographer of Georges Simenon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his penetrating study, Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, will add to a growing international reputation. Georges Remi—“Hergé” was derived from the pronunciation of his reversed initials—was born in Brussels in 1907, the first of two sons of a Walloon factory worker and a Flemish mother. His parentage symbolizes his persisting political importance to his deeply divided country. “Hergé was the personification of Belgium. He remains one of the last great myths of a Belgian Federation,” notes Assouline. Hergé enjoyed adventure stories, drawing, American cartoons, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton; these influences gave his stories clarity of line, camera-like angles, and inventive typography, including the use of text bubbles to indicate who was speaking (of which technique he may have been the first European practitioner). He began drawing for Scout journals, then got a job contributing cartoon strips to the children’s section of the respected Le Vingtième Siècle newspaper, Le Petit Vingtième. He invented a Scout called Totor, who eventually became the 15-year-old Tintin—a round-faced, snub-nosed, fair-haired, plus-four wearing Bruxellois, invariably accompanied by a white fox-terrier called Milou (Snowy in English). Tintin is brave, chivalrous, pure, intelligent—but without a past, a family, even a Christian name. It is curious how little personality Tintin has; the humour is almost all provided by his much more interesting friends—the hot-tempered alcoholic Captain Haddock, the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson, the deaf Cuthbert Calculus, the odious insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg, and the opera-singer Bianca Castafiore. Tintin is always a combination of Parsifal and straight man. But despite Tintin’s many appealing characteristics, Hergé’s reputation is today often occluded by generic allegations of racism, anti-Semitism and wartime collaboration—with frequent attempts in some European countries to have some of his books edited or even removed from circulation. Much of this controversy centers on Tintin in the Congo, published over 1930-1. Tintin goes to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) as a reporter, and in his spare time goes big-game hunting. Hergé portrays the Congolese as being lazy and foolish—and it is assumed that they are better off being run by Europeans. (Such social solecisms impelled Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality to urge a ban on the book in 2007.) Yet the Congolese are also kindly and well-meaning while all the baddies are white, and the book is extremely popular amongst modern Zaireans. “To add to his charge-sheet, Hergé also retained ties after the war with some ex-collaborationists—although seemingly not former Vingtième Siècle colleague turned SS officer Léon Degrelle, who claimed later that he had been the model for Tintin, which, says Assouline, “hardly seems likely”.” Hergé disliked big business as much as he disliked communism, and an unfortunate characteristic of anti-plutocracy is that it often merges into anti-Semitism, and Hergé was unquestionably guilty of producing caricatures such as the unscrupulous financier Blumenstein in The Shooting Star (later bowdlerised to “Bohlwinkel”) and, some feel, both Laszlo Carreidas in Flight 714 and Tintin’s persistent enemy Rastapopoulos. Other evils were battled by the plus-foured preux chevalier. Tintin in America bemoans the dispossession of the Indians. The Land of Black Gold assails the oil industry. The Red Sea Sharks attacks slavery. The Castafiore Emerald features gypsies being unjustly accused of theft. The Calculus Affair warns against the misuse of science for militaristic ends. Such concerns would hardly preoccupy a real fascist. Nor would a fascist have produced The Blue Lotus, Hergé’s first masterpiece, a denunciation of racial stereotypes and the cruel Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, written in conjunction with a life-long Chinese friend. Congo aside, Hergé’s reputation as Hitlerian fellow-traveller rests on his continuing to work for the Belgian press during the German occupation. His wartime strips (The Shooting Star, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Seven Crystal Balls) were apolitical, but they appeared sometimes alongside pro-Nazi editorials, and were thought by some to be legitimizing those opinions. Assouline writes in respect of Congo, “[Hergé’s] talent was an anæsthetic. It disarmed all challenges to the established order”—inferring that his wartime work may have had the same effect. But Assouline also observes that Tintin was read “avidly” in prisons and camps; would the inmates really have been better off without the cub reporter’s expeditions to find meteorites, latter-day Incas or pirate treasure? Hergé said afterwards that he saw his work as being no more politically significant than that of a plumber or carpenter. For Hergé, the cartoon was always more important than the context—to the extent that when in 1943 he received friendly advice to scale back his output in order to minimize likely Allied repercussions, he replied defiantly: “Now is the time to appear in the greatest number of newspapers possible…In any case I will have reached the largest public”. To add to his charge-sheet, Hergé also retained ties after the war with some ex-collaborationists—although seemingly not former Vingtième Siècle colleague turned SS officer Léon Degrelle, who claimed later that he had been the model for Tintin, which, says Assouline, “hardly seems likely”. Hergé believed always in loyalty to friends, a Scoutlike virtue for which he would now be honoured had his friends been on history’s winning side. Hergé was arrested on the day the Allies liberated Brussels, by resistants clutching a bulletin showing him as part of a “Gallery of Traitors”, with the threat that “The punishment that we will exact from them is merciless”. He was saved because of the popularity (and profitability) of his creation, but also because he had never been involved in politics and his brother had been a prisoner of war. But the legal process lasted almost two years, while professional disadvantage persisted long afterwards. Although he threw himself back into making Tintin perfect (including canny redrawing to chime with new sensitivities), he was riven by doubt. He took unscheduled absences, and moved in with a mistress without divorcing his wife. He developed interests in Jungian psychology, jazz, Taoism, “cryptozoology”, and abstract art. His inner conflicts emerged into his output; the frigid tableaux of Tintin in Tibet were drawn from recurring nightmares of the time. “Elegant to the last”, notes Assouline, “he adhered to the dictum that humour is the courteous expression of despair”. But Hergé’s genius has never been in doubt—giving rise to the term “hergémony” to describe his importance. His inventiveness, sly wit, slapstick humour, and the ever-growing period charm of his universe (not to mention that the first of a series of Tintin films should be released next year) means that Tintin will continue to be read for many decades to come.   2010-01-27T15:25:57+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/embrace_prejudice/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/embrace_prejudice/#When:05:05:25Z I do not much care for the obese. Worse, they make me feel nauseous. I dislike their shuffling and snuffling ways and believe them to be slothful, gluttonous, self-indulgent, undisciplined, manifestly unattractive and malodorous. You like them, you keep them, cherish them, embrace them as they invade your space with their open pores and stretch-elastic pants and eat noisily in the seat beside you on the airline. There, I’ve said it. For I am prejudiced—unashamedly so—and I defy any to find a fellow-human who is not. Prejudice is simply gut reaction and preconception, is to have a point of view, is the bias within us all. It is as natural to Mankind as walking, talking, and making love. To attempt its control or suppression is as predestined to fail as commanding back the waves; to decry it is sheer cant and hypocrisy and ignorance of the human condition. Which brings me to the smug liberal-left. As self-appointed guardians of modern orthodoxy and rigorous policers of our thoughts, these touchy-feely fascists go after dissenters with preachy and puritanical zeal. After all, to be left-of-centre is enlightened, while to be on the right is regarded as beyond the pail. Yet in my experience, the most blinkered, judgemental and lacking in common warmth are these brothers and sisters of the Left (ask the chauffeurs who have ferried Labour ministers around Britain for the past thirteen years). Prejudice on their terms is somehow acceptable, for double-standards ever were the norm. They may attack me on grounds of class, but woe betide should I accuse one of their own of being unutterably common; a black MP may whine over a surfeit of blonde and blue-eyed nurses in the Health Service, but I cannot carp at African-sourced cleaners tramping the same wards; the Left will talk of ‘inclusivity’, but falls remarkably silent when asked to represent the interests of those—among them huntsmen and armed forces personnel—outside their immediate voter base. How unpleasant. Scratch a ‘liberal-thinker’ and you will invariably encounter a proto-Robespierre or St. Juste itching to consign you to the nearest re-education camp or guillotine. “Stereotyping exists because it captures the whisper of a truth, because it provides a convenient shorthand and is fun. Thus, Frenchmen have halitosis and Englishmen are repressed.” When recently in Scotland, I listened to the mewling complaints of those discussing racism and homophobia. Call me brave or foolish, but I felt compelled to point out that latent racism is merely tribalism by another name (of which we all are guilty); mild homophobia is often little more than residual dislike of difference, irritation at evangelistic ‘pride’ and foot-stamping special pleading, and the by-product of concern felt by a species for its long-term genetic survival (something buggery and fellatio are unlikely to achieve). For good measure, I illustrated their own pet hates and prejudices: against the privately-educated, against town-dwellers, against any English incomer to Scotland. The revelation appeared to shock them. Later, during an interview with Radio Inverness, and bored with repeated questioning as to why I had never visited the Highlands, I replied that my forbears had doubtless been there to help with the Clearances. More controversy and consternation. For chippiness is as endemic to the Scots as alcoholism, meanness and acid-ginger hair. Oops. I commit the cardinal sin of stereotyping. But stereotyping exists because it captures the whisper of a truth, because it provides a convenient shorthand and is fun. Thus, Frenchmen have halitosis and Englishmen are repressed; Scandinavian males are dull and Welshmen lachrymose and depressive; German men are hidebound and Italian men are spoilt hysterics with peckers scaled to their classical statues. As for the Greeks…Another time, maybe. It is—or should be—a free market. That is how ideas are traded and tested and society thrives, with humor, insult, and ribald remark. To micromanage and legislate for every nuance and slight is to drain away our lifeblood. In some quarters, there is such innate fear at the risk of causing offence that many in conversation will hesitate to complete a sentences. As one British actor remarked, throughout Hollywood they simply use Oh, my God as a non-specific and uncommitted catchall. It has come to this. There is a need for manners, fairness and compassion; there is also a desperate requirement for space in which opinion and offense can be given. That balance is our birthright and the key to a robust democracy. You cannot iron out every kink. I am no fan of the tyrant, the thug, or the bully. Nor would I condone the persecution or prosecution of an individual on grounds of race, color, creed, career, class, earnings potential, gender, age, size or shape, dress, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or lifestyle. But I recognize and accept that people will choose their group and comfort zone, will judge others by such criteria. I myself might even stoop to the occasional low jibe. The world is imperfect and so too its inhabitants. So, be like me. Throw off the shackles of political correctness and the dead hand of the Orwellian apparatchiks. Kick back and be kind to your inner intolerant self. Dream of hanging cyclists like voles from lampposts as a warning to others or dropping your least favorite thespian down a well. Articulate your views. And embrace prejudice. Beau Monde 2010-01-27T05:05:25+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/saving_professor_bernanke/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/saving_professor_bernanke/#When:05:00:31Z “Elections don’t matter!” conservatives have long groused. “No matter who you vote for, things never change.” Well, we may have an exception here. Scott Brown told Massachusetts’ voters if they elected him to what David Gergen calls “the Kennedy seat” in the Senate, he would go to Washington and run a sword through Obamacare. Thirty-six hours after Brown’s triumph, a disconsolate Nancy Pelosi emerged from the House Democratic caucus to announce that the votes were not there to pass a bill that had, on Christmas Eve, gotten 60 votes in the Senate. A 78-seat Democratic margin is apparently insufficient to save a health care reform bill that is the highest priority of a Democratic president elected just a year go. What argument is then left for Democratic control of Congress? The shock wave from Brown’s victory also appears to have killed cap-and-trade and immigration reform. Democrats are in open flight. For what Massachusetts revealed is that this Congress, where Democrats still hold 59 percent of the Senate and 59 percent of all House seats, is no longer representative of America, if ever it was. We have a center-left Congress imposing a minority ideology on a center-right country. “Was not Ben in the wheelhouse when we hit the iceberg? In his first two years, did he not preside over an easy money policy that fueled the housing boom that created the housing bubble, the popping of which brought on the crisis from which the good professor has helped to save the republic?” Obama has gotten the message. Thursday, doing a passable imitation of William Jennings Bryan, he ripped the Wall Street banks and endorsed “the Volcker Rule” to force Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to divest themselves of their hedge funds and stock-trading operations, or lose their protections as banks. Panic is also evident in Harry Reid’s caucus, where the Brown victory put in sudden doubt Obama’s nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Sens. Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer immediately bailed on Bernanke, as has Sen. McCain. Liberals are asking why they should go to the wall to confer a second terms on a Fed chairman appointed by George W. Bush. Reacting to the president’s attack on the Street and the sudden peril to Bernanke’s reappointment, the Dow went into a three-day dive that wiped out 5 percent of its value. Should Bernanke be rejected, it is said, the effect on Europe’s markets will be like that on Europe’s monarchs when news arrived that Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine. “Chairman Bernanke helped the president ... steer through some very turbulent times and rough waters,” said the White House Monday. Fine. But was not Ben in the wheelhouse when we hit the iceberg? And never saw it. In his first two years, did he not preside over an easy money policy that fueled the housing boom that created the housing bubble, the popping of which brought on the crisis from which the good professor has helped to save the republic? If a snoozing camper’s unattended fire sets Yellowstone ablaze, do we single him out for honor for alerting the Park rangers and leading a bucket brigade? Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman who wrung inflation out of the economy to prepare the ground for the Reagan tax cuts, said of his harried successor, “Bernanke has been through a fire, and given the experience he has had, he’s a lot more ... qualified than he was four years ago.” Were Bernanke to be rejected, Volcker added, “I don’t think that would be received well here or abroad.” But if rejection of Bernanke would cause turmoil in U.S. and world markets, what does that say about the real stability of the system? And is it not time we stopped treating the Fed as a holy of holies? In 1913, when the Fed was created with the duty of preserving the dollar, one 20-dollar bill could buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Fifty 20-dollar bills are needed today to buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Under the Fed’s custody, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value. Against the euro, in the George W. Bush decade, the dollar lost close to half its value. The dollar is the storehouse of our wealth. Has the Fed faithfully safeguarded that storehouse? Was it not Thomas Jefferson who taught us, “In questions of power let us hear no more of trust in men, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution”? Every monetary crisis is a result of Fed action or inaction, for the Fed controls the money supply. As Milton Friedman wrote in the book that won him a Nobel, the Fed’s easy money fueled the market bubble that burst in 1929. In our time, the Fed fueled the dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble and the housing bubble. Bubbles appear when money is created faster than the supply of goods that money buys. This populist uprising is a product of rage and revulsion at the Washington and Wall Street elites, the unindicted co-conspirators who created this crisis, neither of which has paid a price commensurate with what they did to the country. Let this rebellion not end until all receive their just desserts, and we get real “change we can believe in.” Commerce 2010-01-27T05:00:31+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/tame_that_tiger/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/tame_that_tiger/#When:05:00:58Z “Tiger Woods in sex rehab clinic” seemed to be all that the newspapers of my native land could talk about one day last week. If you managed to miss the more staid US dailies’ coverage of the momentous event it is simply that Tiger is hanging out at a “clinic” somewhere in Hicksville, The South, getting “treatment” for his sex addiction. I say “clinic” and “treatment” as activities seem to include “art classes, exercise and fitness regimes, shame reduction work, a spirituality group, a grief group, and yoga”. Plus sharing a room and having, horror of horrors, to have to clean it himself. This sounds a great deal more like a New Age retreat center than it does treatment for ambitious and wandering gonads—but we’ll come to that in a moment. The next day the same papers were full of pieces about whether sex addiction is in fact an addiction. Details of the treatment do amuse: first, a ban on Tiger pleasuring himself for 90 days. The New Puritanism has gone too far if a sporting god and near billionaire isn’t allowed even to play with himself. Indeed, a complete and total ban on sex of any kind might also not be the way to convince a healthy young man to resist any cocktail waitresses who might throw themselves at him. Finally, the revelation that, unlike the others, Tiger gets maid service also raises a snigger: maid service of what? The greatest surprise to me was that this clinic seems to be unisex: men and women with any (but obviously voracious) sexual habits are treated together—which, again, doesn’t seem likely to lead to a reduction in sexual activity. Perhaps appropriate is a story from a friend who did medical training: one young man was seen trolling for dates amongst those attending the sexual diseases clinic. When asked why, given the obvious probability that they were infectious, the response was that, well, at least the young man did know that they were up for it in theory, even if not right now. “All this sounds terribly Catholic to me really. Confession, contrition, and penance being the center of that sacrament normally called confession and all those being present in this treatment for “sex addiction”.” But I think there’s a more serious observation that can be made about this whole hoopla. Sex addiction, whether it’s a disease or not (I think not), clearly and obviously transgresses the boundaries of what the society thinks is acceptable. Even in this very much less religious age, it is a sin against public expectations. And sins, even if they are simply against public expectations, need to be expiated. Which is where other details of the treatment come in. Apparently Tiger must recount all his transgressions to his wife Elin, in sordid and excruciating detail. He must, as above, serve a period of abstinence, during which he must exercise and meditate (“mens sana in corpore sano”, no?). Then, if all of this is done successfully, he can be forgiven and welcomed back into the arms of his family and the hearts of the public. All of which sounds terribly Catholic to me really. Confession, contrition, and penance being the center of that sacrament normally called confession and all those being present in this treatment for “sex addiction”. You might, if a cynic like me, simply assume that both the Church and the clinic have hit on the same psychological dramas that need to be played out before wives or the public will forgive. You might be more cynical and think that the clinic has simply copied a system that has worked well for a millenia or more. Or you might simply look at this and think that while organized religion is direct, the belief in a vengeful and omniscient God has declined the form of religion necessary to carry on. And as to whether sex addiction actually exists or not we might go along with Chesterton. When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. The idea that 90 days of enforced celibacy is the way to induce a man to be faithful on day 91 certainly counts as “anything”. Low Life 2010-01-26T05:00:58+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/heartbreak_hotel/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/heartbreak_hotel/#When:05:00:08Z In 1935, British journalist James Agate admitted to obsession with a juicy but fundamentally parochial murder case, while from Quetta—now in Pakistan, then in the Raj—came news of a quake which had left 20,000 dead. He told readers of his diary, Ego: “This trial has moved me immensely, while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The thousands who perished in that earthquake might be flies. I see no remedy for this, since one can’t order one’s feelings, and to pretend something different is merely hypocrisy.” (Alistair Cooke and Jacques Barzun have been but two of the nine-volume Ego’s admirers.) A decade after Agate’s musing, George Orwell either offered in person, or saw somebody else offer, to a woman (whom he only identifies as “intelligent”) a book that dealt with Nazi atrocities. The woman responded to this offer by begging: “Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.” To watch the coverage of Port-au-Prince’s latest and most spectacular descent into Hobbesianism is to wonder how widespread, in the West, similar sentiments now are apropos Haiti. Of course no-one—at least, no-one who wishes to hold down a responsible job—will now actually admit to being as indifferent to suffering Haitians as Agate was to suffering Quettans, or as shockingly malevolent as was the female whom Orwell mentioned toward exterminated Jews.  We are all weepers now; have been ever since Dianamania first compelled the entire West’s population to check into Heartbreak Hotel. (“Now hear this. You will sob your heads off when contemplating the death of the People’s Princess in a car crash. And you will like it.”) Of global citizenship’s public demands on the tear-ducts, there is today simply no opting out. In private ... it might, just might, be another tale. “It would necessitate a Bono—worse, a Bob Geldof—to conclude that the average post-tsunami welfare donation was ever put to anything even vaguely resembling post-tsunami welfare. It would be even more obviously another tale if more Westerners were to acquaint themselves, or reacquaint themselves, with the outcome of a disaster almost as great as Haiti’s in terms of lives lost (approximately 100,000), but on the other side of the world. The earthquake in question, starting two minutes before noon and finishing at approximately seven minutes after noon on September 1, 1923, precipitated the wiping-out of Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. There is no improving, for sheer evocativeness, upon the words used by Richard Storry (1913-1982), Professor of Japanese Studies at Oxford, in his History of Modern Japan: “Nearly everything ... redolent of Yedo [the medieval Japanese capital] was a heap of ashes. In its place there rose a city of a striking beauty, with wide streets and high modern buildings at its core, surrounded by a vast jumble of new wooden houses clustered along undistinguished thoroughfares; some of these resembled country lanes and so acquired a certain pensive charm. Within three or four years there was little sign that Tokyo had ever known calamity.” [Emphasis added] Does anyone not a moron seriously suppose that within three or four years, or within 30 or 40 years, Haiti will be similarly furbished? Does anyone with the smallest knowledge of the devastation which the December 2004 tsunami inflicted on Indonesia and Sri Lanka, in particular, imagine that Tokyo-style infrastructural improvement will take place in those miserable lands? Confronted with the ample evidence that successive Indonesian regimes since the 1940s have diverted all foreign aid either to Zurich bank accounts, or to improved military methods of turning subject races into glue (or, of course, to both), it would necessitate a Bono—worse, a Bob Geldof—to conclude that the average post-tsunami welfare donation was ever put to anything even vaguely resembling post-tsunami welfare. But we can’t continue thinking on these lines now, can we? The horrible suggestion that Japanese can run a country, and that Haitians can’t, might lead to the equally horrible suggestion that Japanese have a recognizable civilization and that Haitians don’t. Or the comparably unmentionable conjecture that the Marshall Plan did good to Italy and the Netherlands but would probably have been wasted on, say, Liberia. Which in turn—gasp!—foreshadows the appalling premise that some groups of people might conceivably be worthier of our practical help than are other groups of people. And once we’ve taken that diabolical idea on board, well, it’s Auschwitz all over again by Tuesday next. With Haiti, then, as with most of life in 2010, it is quite simply better (as well as easier) not to think. Deciding which charities we can legitimately support, and which charities are merely shills for Idi Amin’s heirs, is a procedure too risky to be tried. Let us suppress all tendencies to the evils of Thought by recalling Steve Sailer’s words from 2005: “the economics of mass media are: ‘Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared’.” So when the next natural catastrophe occurs—in Togo or Nicaragua or Laos or wherever—let us operate feel-good campaigns on the same non-principle we now employ, the one spelt out by Woodrow Wilson in 1915. “I am going to teach the South American republics,” he harrumphed, “to elect good men.”  He was really talking about Mexico—not about the South American republics at all—but then, geography and foreign history were never his strong points. Heaven forbid that they should ever be ours. Haiti 2010-01-26T05:00:08+00:00 http://www.takimag.com/site/article/bete_noire/ http://www.takimag.com/site/article/bete_noire/#When:17:13:04Z The dead and displaced now run into the millions, lawless ruination continues unabated in Zimbabwe. But, Morgan Tsvangirai, the president, and man Zimbabweans looked to for salvation, looks surprisingly pleased with himself. He is not easily embarrassed. Caught on film recently, looking rather smug beneath a portrait of his bête noire, Robert Mugabe, Mugabe’s face seems to say it all: real power remains with me, and the one in the chair is a political dummy deployed to deflect world anger. Tsvangirai’s recent behavior might be without precedent: where in history do we find a politician who clearly won a murderously skewed election, who then tosses a political lifeline to the killers, reinstates them, and effectively surrenders all real power to the losers? Maybe we should not be surprised. For years, Tsvangirai groveled at South African President Thabo Mbeki’s feet, rising only to sing his tormentor’s praises while Mbeki connived with Mugabe to destroy him and his party. Still, it was an understandably furious and combative Morgan Tsvangirai we bore sympathetic witness to following the stolen election of 2008. He assured us repeatedly there would be no compromise with the electoral villainy of Robert Mugabe and his gang. Those of us who sought vindication of the democratic will, cheered. But then, the rhetoric suddenly softened. Interestingly, this followed the precipitous transfer of R300,000,000 (US$40,000,000) from the South African Government to Zimbabwe, ostensibly for agriculture. Just where this money went remains as clear as mud. But soon thereafter convoys of new Mercedes Benzes rolled in to town, and Morgan and his merry men changed their tune entirely. No sooner had their bottoms hit the soft German leather than they bolted to the signing table to sell the peoples’ mandate for real change and started clucking loudly in praise of their assailants.  (A chuckling ZANU PF Minister Francis Nhema is reported to have said that his associates had no idea it was going to be so easy to ‘buy off’ their MDC opponents.) Clearly, treachery was afoot when Roy Bennett, a dispossessed white farmer and senior opposition figure who some say is the most popular politician in the land was thrown into jail and charged with treason—despite assurances from the new prime minister, and the South African president, that he would be safe from arrest. As the prosecution process unfolded, Tsvangirai maintained a thunderous silence. Obviously, a political stitch-up, Bennett still sits in the dock with a rope around his neck while the MDC mutters its disapproval. “Some paid for their commitment to him and his party with their lives—the rest with their homes, land, and livelihoods. All this while the nation starves, food aid pours in, and the populace flees the country in waves overwhelming the country’s neighbors. Despite a commitment in the newly signed, so called (Global Political Agreement) GPA to “… a nation where all citizens respect and therefore enjoy equal protection of the law and have equal opportunity to compete and prosper in all spheres of life,”  his party’s supporters have been jailed, tortured, and murdered, and the few white farmers left on the land are being mercilessly evicted. Tsvangirai has trivialized these outrages as “isolated incidents” while talking up his relationship with Mugabe and calling for world support for him and his quislings. Conveniently forgotten by Tsvangirai and his cohorts is the fact that it was the commercial farmers and their labor who provided the vital impetus that made him and the MDC a serious political force. Some paid for their commitment to him and his party with their lives—the rest with their homes, land, and livelihoods. All this while the nation starves, food aid pours in, and the populace flees the country in waves overwhelming the country’s neighbors. Tragically, it appears Tsvangirai, along with his MDC colleagues, has betrayed the people who died for the cause of freedom. And yet the opposition hierarchy have their heads firmly stuck in the national feeding trough. The miserable farce seems set to play on! All politics in Africa is business, as the cynics say, and the MDC proves that right. Against this back-drop came recent news that Giles Mutsekwa from the MDC has joined Kemba Mohadi, his partner in crime at Home Affairs, and overseen the arrest, torture, and death of political activists. But this should come as no surprise. Just in case investors thought it was safe to go back in the water, he also co-signed a Stalinist ‘specification’ order aimed at plundering the Meikles Group, one of the country’s largest business conglomerates. Critics are now calling for Mutsekwa and other MDC ministers (recently accused of corruption) to be put on the sanctions list with their ZANU PF cronies. Frustrated though he may be, a beleaguered Roy Bennett may one day be appreciative of Mugabe’s obstinacy. Mugabe has denied him his place at the cabinet table because he is a ‘white settler’.  History will be harsh on the gluttons who now gorge on the carcass of the country they were elected to preserve while their people starve.  District of Corruption 2010-01-25T17:13:04+00:00