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.

Not sure I can keep it much longer

Work is a tricky environment for the naturally outspoken. You need to maintain operating relationships with a lot of people you definitely did not choose. And many of them will tend to say very silly things.
But this can be magnified when you work in an environment where many people depend (or at any rate believe they do) for their income on investment banks.


And so I had a colleague explain (not for the first time) like an indisputable fact that the financial crisis had nothing to do with banks.

Ionesco

“Literature is what prevents man from being indifferent to man”. OK, that’s my translation and I am sure that it can be improved, but other than that this Ionesco quote was the entirety of my literature exam at Baccalaureat (well, you could choose between three subjects, but that’s the one I chose). Actually it presented me with a slight conundrum: the norm of the exercise is that, after an introduction, you should expose your position, then expose a contrary one, then blend them in a synthesis, then frantically write your conclusion because you have had a look at the clock and oh bother.

In my case, I quickly reasoned that I would not have much to say against the statement, so I found a way to explain, without sounding too weird, that there would only be two parts (actually, I remember also suggesting that possibly my admiration for the writer of Rhinoceros made it more difficult to find disagreement with him –although Rhinoceros really is the outlier in his work, a totally different kind of play from what he usually wrote). I first elaborated on the statement, then produced a few caveats on the lines that not all literature may have this effect, and that other arts would sometimes achieve that, too (I mentioned Picasso’s Guernica there). Still, because it uses words, which is the medium through which we form most our thoughts (and yet I would argue a few months later with my philosophy professor that it was possible to form thoughts without a language, through visualisation – she just stated that it was not possible, but then she was also adamant that Xeno’s paradoxes were unresolved, so I suppose she mostly was not very open to listening and considering an argument), I reckoned that literature was particularly strong in that.

I knew I was taking a risk, and in fact, having told the story to several Literature teachers afterwards, a few told me that they would have graded me severely on the basis of my not having demonstrated the understanding of the structure of the exercise. Thankfully, I was graded by someone who must have thought I made a strong enough case for my decision to throw conventions through the window and there was none of that.

All that introduction because it highlights two subjects that are very important to me: fighting indifference towards others, and the role of the language (also the arts, true) in that. And, well, of course you should always read George Monbiot, but he really is on a roll of late.

Two of his columns (here and here) touch upon the subject of how language has been perverted to make unthinkable things become, well, actually unthinkable. And awful things almost unobjectionable. Conversely, it aggrandises some who should be scorned –look how the press will use “wealth creators” where we once would have said “robber barons”.

I realise that there is nothing new in the observation –Ionesco above said it many decades earlier, and mostly George Orwell essentially spent his life banging on that drum. But it would be a crazy requirement to ask writers to only express entirely new ideas. Also, of course, Monbiot is able to talk of our present world and point out some of the latest fashions in Newspeak. One of the most sobering conclusions is how difficult it is, even for someone aware of the problem and trying to express the very opposite view to construct an entire argument while avoiding poisoned phrases.

And so it is on these shores, especially so in November, that people who deliberately join an organisation whose purpose is to kill on foreign soil are called “heroes”. So much propaganda has been expended that it is now almost subversive not to wear a “poppy” (I am a subversive there, by the way, but people reckon that it is because I am French), and indeed I read that someone got fired from the BBC because he would not wear one on air.

A Disclaimer

I suppose that it goes without saying, but there are indications that it may be best to make it clear: anything I publish here reflects my views and not those of my employer, nor of indeed any other organisation of which I may be a member.

I don’t ever mention them of course, but since I have chosen to write under my name, it is hardly impossible in this day and age to make the link should one be so inclined, which of course would in that particular case be a sign of having way too much time on your hands.

Of course, their views SHOULD be similar, because what I say makes so much sense, but I am not quite (yet?) in a position to ensure that they are, or even that they even have a view about the subjects I choose (does your employer have an official position about the Django Reinhardt festival?).

Today in breathtaking stupidity

Apparently, in both recent UK by-elections, won by the UKIP, voters were frequently reported (not by the author of the article I link to -but he mentions the fact) to have voted UKIP because the Tory incumbent had not done enough for them.

On the face of it, you might say, why not, even though this UK obsession of deciding a national election on purely local matters (over which an MP does not even have jurisdiction) is a little weird, and while one may question the choice of thus turning to UKIP, it could make sense (we are talking of former tory voters, don't set too high standards).

Now for an element of context: the by-elections were called because the incumbent tory had defected to UKIP.

So these people are supposed to have felt that the incumbent had not done what they wanted, which decided them to change their vote and thus voted for ... the incumbent. Right...
Either really, really stupid voters or highly cynical reporting banking on very low level of information and, well, profound stupidity.

Austrian groundgog decade

Via Paul Krugman, I see that Peter Schiff had this to say:
"The truth is that high levels of unemployment are historically correlated with higher inflation and low levels of unemployment with lower inflation. That is because an economy that more fully utilizes labor resources is more productive. More production brings down prices."

What??? Leave aside that pretty much everything in the Austrian worldview has been thoroughly refuted by evidence over the past 7 years -actually they will force you to leave it aside as they claim that Austrian economics is pure logic that is not refutable by evidence (handy, isn't it). Just look at the statement and... what???

The age of loneliness

George Monbiot has a column that you must read.

Admittedly, I could say that every week. And I strongly urge anyone to read every one of his Guardian columns. But this one strikes very close for me. He describes something that was a major (the major) factor in naming this blog Anachronicles. There are several ways in which I feel out of synch with my time, although I have already mentioned that I sometime question how much other times really were (or will be) different, and how much comes from biased perception.

But I have always reckoned that much of it is genuine. And it is confirmed by data, as he shows. He calls our epoch the Age of Loneliness, which is appropriate, although I reckon that it is also an age of individualism (and he does cover that too). This feeling must be magnified by living in the UK: it appears to be pretty much the capital of the lonely/individualistic world.

Maybe there is a kind of paradox that I should feel so strongly about that when I guess quite a few people over the years would have considered me some kind of loner –it’s true that I am not a natural herd follower and that I would often not feel like joining in some “group fun” that did not look like fun to me. But I know that I was feeling estranged from distinctly superficial interactions, not from interactions per se. Far from a total loner, I have come to realise that pretty much all of my aspirations are about human contacts. 

It’s true that I have too many times been hit by unbelievably individualistic, selfish and outrageous behaviour while myself acting as such a team-player that I was giving no more priority to my interests than to those of the person about to wrong me, which probably makes me even more sensitive to the defects of our age. But even ignoring those extreme events, individualism is everywhere. In the office, many people go straight to their desks without saying hello to anyone, and give every impression of avoiding eye contact all day long with anyone trying to maintain that modicum of civility; many people theorise that it’s completely fair play to defend your interest at all costs, even if it means maintaining the most iniquitous situation, and indeed express their expectation that anyone should and will do so; Tories famously theorised that there is no such thing as society.

Yet, and again Monbiot confirms my impressions with data, this simply creates misery. We would be much happier with much less, if only we remembered the skill of sharing it.

Stacey Kent

A year ago I missed her at Ronnie Scott’s. Not this time.

It was an unusual experience for me in a jazz concert in that I had pretty much heard all (or nearly so) the numbers. By the same artist. Not that I have her whole collection, but I do have her last couple of records and they were heavily drawn upon.

And it was also making a huge case for live music.

Not that studio recordings are inferior –far from it, indeed I would say that on balance they are clearly superior. And, OK, there were indeed several moments of unimpeachable bliss (many of which during instrumentals, although the undisputed star was the singer, Stacey), with all the players reaching a perfect balance, with a beautifully sensual sound. But there were also moments when it was clear that the possibility of repeated takes in a studio could help, such as when, singing Samba Saravah with a slightly faster tempo, Stacey (maybe also not so used to singing in French anymore, with her current Portuguese stream of inspiration) visibly struggled with the words.

My point is that, even during those fleeting moments, you would not in any way have wanted to be elsewhere, the experience was incredibly greater than listening to a recording. Numbers were introduced with every effort to communicating their significance, the band were visibly enjoying being there, and you knew you would not listen to these numbers in the same way back home.

As an aside, one number inadvertently made a clear display of why it is that there are genuine singers. I mean, you could think that it’s easy, they have a microphone so no volume problems, you could believe that if someone is very musical, singing should be the easy option (and indeed, many instruments are probably more technically demanding to play). Well, there was a number that was sung as a duet with her husband. Now, he is a phenomenal musician, writer of many of the songs the band plays, and you would like to make love to the sound of his saxophone. I am not saying that he is a bad singer –just that it was an unfair match. OK, the Waters of March probably works better for an agile, female voice anyway, but you had her just dancing effortlessly with the tune and he had to give a reply that could never approach it. Until it reached the instrumental, and he would blow you away.

I spent the concert waiting for her to sing in French. She would prolong the wait, with numbers exclusively in English and Portuguese. Then I recognised, at last, the opening chords to my favourite of her French language songs (ironically, it’s actually a Brasilian one, translated) –Samba Saravah. As she was saying her goodbyes after two verses and the waitress came asking for payment, I observed “there’s one more verse!” I needed not have worried, the band got back to playing and she sang it eventually, even adding a little da capo. And then an encore with The Ice Hotel. English got the last word after all.

Wherever you are, if she’s around, just go. You’ll remember it.

Now, if we could bring Cyrille Aimée to Ronnie Scott’s. 

With Esperanza Spalding as her bass, now that would be fun.