A great description of privilege

Not much to add to this terrific comic.


   

Big fauna

At a British zoo recently, I was reading the boards describing tigers. They were part of a conservation effort (which should of course be commended), and there was explanation of how their situation was getting worse because of shrinking habitat and hunting.


All of it quite true, of course. But, as with other of the boards they had, with the way it was written you could easily end up feeling "ah, what a shame that those unenlightened populations should be like that, what a relief that the British should be there to give those animals a chance".


So I thought it would be useful to reflect on what the biggest carnivorous animal left on the British Isles is. It happens to be the grey seal, which ventures on some Scottish islands. What about on land then? It is the Red fox - a frightening prospect indeed. Want to throw in omnivores? Then you have the badger as the largest.
Not that it was always thus. Large mammals, carnivorous and otherwise, used to be plentiful here as elsewhere. But they were exterminated. They were so ages ago would you argue, people nowadays would be far more enlightened? Well, you will find that the UK was not thrilled even with its badger monsters -the last government spent a fortune to get many of them killed, on health grounds that were rejected by the specialists in the field. It is hard to avoid the impression that they were being hunted because some Tory voters wanted them dead.


We would be wise to consider these points when we lament the disappearance of the habitat of animals we admire. Yes, I do lament that - but without re-wilding great chunks of our lands these laments are collectively hypocritical.


Amusingly, a few days after I was having those thoughts, George Monbiot had a column about our past large fauna. It is well worth a read. 

A clearheaded take on the recent UK general elections

With all the recent noise from blairites and right-wingers stating that the only way for Labour to be relevant is to be Tories-light, it is good to see someone make some sense after all -even though it's on a blog, not on very public media.

So, take a look at that.


As an aside, I find it remarkable (though not surprising -there has been a strong tendency in developed countries to make sure that polities only get the choice between parties that elites approve of, something a friend called "elites having solved democracy") that this call to move on Tories ground should be made so strongly and be dubbed "moving to the centre ground", when:

-Well, that was essentially the positioning that the Liberal Democrats took and they got resoundly thrashed
-Labour, as it was, ran to the right of the median voter, a fact that is evidenced by countless polls of preferred policies, by the results of the SNP when running against austerity, and by the fact that people picked by some distance the Green programme when programmes were presented without being attributed to their parties of origin. So how can moving further to the right be called moving to the centre?

Anyway, have a look at the link, it makes good reading.

Awful

By now, everyone probably knows that the Conservative party has achieved an absolute majority in the latest general elections in the UK.

And that is tragic in many ways.

Cyrille at Ronnie's

No, not a bout of megalomania.

You see, French artists taking some of their roots in Gipsy jazz have been in view of late at Ronnie Scott's.

Biréli Lagrène in March, and six months after I finished a post about Stacey Kent with these words: "Now, if we could bring Cyrille Aimée to Ronnie Scott’s.", she was indeed the star of the show.

Admittedly, I had suggested in October that it would be fun to pair her with Esperanza Spalding playing bass, and that did not happen (although it really would be the ultimate curly hair match), but I was not going to complain.

It was her debut at the club, apart from her joining in the jam session a few years back, and she was touring with her band. 

I had last seen her at another debut, when she sang at the Django Reinhardt festival for the first time, in Samois, where she grew up, a concert at the end of which I heard a new friend who had been following them for a while mention how they had by now gelled into an incredibly tight band. This had been a great, unforgettable moment. I jumped on the chance to book my tickets, but prepared myself for a concert that could never quite live up to that of course.

From Greece

The invaluable talos from European Tribune once again weighs in with information that you will not find in the Western media.
And if you won't take my word for his reliability (though you could), his report is solidly backed with evidence.

Whatever the reasons, the picture of Greece that is painted for our eyes is highly misleading. And for those of us who don't read Greek (or even some who do: I read Greek - I just cannot understand anything I read), it is difficult to get another view. Unless you know talos and are lucky enough that he has had some time to write.

Here is the opening, but you should really read it at its source. And if you have not avidly been following Greece yet, or even if you have, you could do worse than to read his previous entries.


There is a coordinated PR attack against the Greek government, unfortunately also deceiving people from the left, regarding the Greek government's intentions and actions so far. It is far from certain what the results of the negotiations will be, but preemptively announcing SYRIZA's retreat seems to me to be a performative assessment, meant to both flatter the prejudices on which most of the austerian EU governments have built their TINA alternative, and to dissipate international support away from a government that has up to now, in a small but significant way, made the first steps against the dominant narrative, anywhere in the West, over the past 20 years
So let me put to rest some of the more obnoxious misinformation that is being peddled by "EU / ECB circles" and international media, subservient to the cause of pressuring the new Greek government to submission, by pointing out a few facts...

Quote of the day

Hat tips to Migeru of European Tribune:


"Imagine 18 ministers telling a 19th that his government is not throwing enough virgins into the volcano. When the 19th replies with lectures about how how that's not the way the world works, the 18 react by rolling their eyes and calling him unprofessional and a gambler. "




And that is exactly that.
A case in point among many: the insistence that Greece privatises pretty much everything.
Markets demand much higher return on equity than any reasonable sovereign debt interest rates. So unless you are so misleading as to be liable to be sued, you should expect to get a much lower price than the net present value of the future flows.


That's in normal circumstances. Of course, in the case of Greece, the assets will be considered to require a massive discount due to the poor economic situation of the country. So they would not bring anywhere near the normal inflow which, as I said, would itself not be anywhere near the net present value (for the State) of the economic stream that the State would lose.


But that will not stop the Eurogroup from demanding it on the grounds of improving the fiscal position...

Post-Democracy

Imagine that you learnt that, in a Europeran country, very proud of its democratic history, a party had just massively won elections but, since the electoral system is mostly proportional and there are very many parties, it came just short of an absolute majority and needs a few seats from a coalition party to reach it.
And yet, absolutely no party accepts going into a coalition with them. In fact, almost all of them went as far as categorically stating, before the elections, that they would not join them in a majority.

Before learning any more, what would be your expectations about this party?
Categorically refusing to join the clear winner of a popular vote is a fairly strong statement. It might make sense if you are at the polar opposite, but here EVERY party refuses to enter into a coalition with them, so what do you think?

Romantic violin

I hadn't listened to it in years, but had no particular idea that morning and my eyes fell on it. It was a recording of the Bruch and Mendelssohn (second -his famous one is his second) violin concertos by Yehudi Menuhin.

And let's be honest, it is a far from faultless recording. It was 1994 and Menuhin (then 78) was far too old, he who experienced hand problems too. It is clear that his virtuosity, never what you really looked for in Menuhin anyway, no longer could spell out clearly the quicker passages of both third movements.
But it does not matter one bit. Sit yourself right in front of the speakers and just let fly, enjoy his musicality. Bruch is powerful, primal music, the notes seem written exactly to make the violin resonate to the maximum. Mendelssohn is etheral subtlety and obsessive melodies. And, of course, Menuhin, a superbly passionate player, plays a superb instrument. This is not an exam of hitting the right notes. It is performing music.

Though I had listened to both concertos (particularly the Mendelssohn) many times in the interval, I probably had not played this CD for many years. It carried an impressive passion. As the acceleration and then first chords of Bruch's third movement happened, they brought far stronger shivers than the recent London bout of cold could manage.

Sometimes you can only quote

Paul Krugman brings very clear light on a couple of data points that may go unnoticed to those who don't deeply follow macroeconomics.

I don't see much to add -or much to substract for that matter, which I feel compelled to do for it not to be a direct copy and paste (Mark Thoma told me in an email how difficult he sometimes found this exercise, in deference to him I will force myself to carry it too).

[...] One thing is not a risk, because it has already happened: the euro area has entered a Japan-style deflationary trap.

No, it’s not literally deflation at an EA-wide level, but that doesn’t matter — slightly positive and slightly negative inflation with interest rates already at the zero lower bound are essentially the same. Furthermore, southern Europe still needs substantial amounts of “internal devaluation” — that is, still needs to reduce costs and prices relative to Germany — so that a low overall euro area inflation rate means destructive deflation in much of the continent.

And if you look at the implied market forecast, it’s truly disastrous. Right now, German 5-year bonds offer a yield of zero — an implicit firm forecast that Europe will be in a liquidity trap for the foreseeable future, while 5-year index bonds are yielding about -0.35 percent. That’s telling you two things: investors see so little in the way of profitable investment opportunities that they’re willing to pay the German government to protect their wealth, and they expect something like 0.3 percent inflation over the next five years, which is catastrophically below target.

How is this supposed to end? [...] It’s really hard to see how the ECB could gain enough traction here to solve the problem even if it didn’t face internal dissent from the hard-money types.

So don’t think of Europe as having a tough but workable economic strategy, endangered by Greek voters and such. Europe is at a dead end; if anything, Greece is doing the rest of Europe a favor by sounding a wake-up call.

Still crazy after all these years

Quick (because the train home would not wait) visit to the Louvre during the holidays.

With little time there is no way to see many sections, so after the African rooms (mostly because the queue to get in there was shorter than at the main entrance), onwards to ancient Greece.

And, despite many previous sightings, it still comes as a shock. From the archaic, xoanon copies with strong Egyptian influence -which are by all means interesting by themselves- what a jump to the Hellenistic period, and their expressive attitudes!

In several of the rooms, you just want to stop in awe at many of the sculptures. No wonder artists of the Renaissance went crazy about them.So many incredible details were captured and are still visible -it makes me wonder how far some of the sculptors may have gone: Bernini's efforts in the 1600s are arguably much more delicate, but would also not have survived had they been carved in antique Athens (there is no way the small laurels there would have coped with the tumultuous destiny of Greek statues). We may not see their most ambitious efforts, and yet we are in awe.

It is such a contrast to the stability of Egyptian art (I know, there were religious reasons behind their stability and, in contrast, Greek evolutions) to witness this comparatively rapid change, laying the foundations for so much of later art.

Even a quick visit is always good use of your time. The Louvre may be oversized, often overcrowded, it certainly is not overhyped.