Art and politics . . .

— Leo Fender's Stratocaster —

THE ECONOMIST has a fascinating tale of Jackie Shin. Jackie who? Considered to be Korea's Jimi Hendrix , Jackie had to struggle with the demands of the Korean government and when he wouldn't play nice, the fascists made sure Jackie couldn't play at all. Being imprisoned in a mental hospital sure puts a crimp in the recording career . . .

Shin Joong-hyun first learned to play guitar in the 1950s, and soon found a following among the American soldiers stationed here. Jackie Shin, as they knew him, was a master of jazz, rock ’n roll, rhythm-and-blues, and country.

• • •

But as it happens his best music is now seeing renewed interest, four decades after its heyday. A musical featuring his songs is in the works. A night at Gopchang Jeongol—an increasingly cool underground den of vinyl records and rice wine, in the student area of Hongdae—is not complete without the DJ spinning a few old Shin Joong-hyun records. And two years ago Fender, a renowned guitar-maker, gave him his own Custom Shop Tribute Guitar, putting him in an exclusive club of six (other members include Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton).

The recording could be better, but Jackie's got fabulous chops, go to YouTube to see other tracks of his, the dude can really wring out that neck. Nice Strat, too.

Nazi wants privacy?

Regardless of whether Anonymous was right or wrong in releasing personal data, I might suggest that Nazis lost any reasonable expectation of privacy somewhere between Kristalnacht and the invasion of Poland, although I'd lean more toward the Beer Hall Putsch.  Genocide and tens of millions dead will do that to a brand.

The only concern I might have is that if any of these unfortunately-inked examples of societal failure actually mature out of the movement, they might have hard time starting over given the infinite memory of the internet.

Occupy American Anthropological Associaton

For unfamiliar readers, the vast majority of published peer reviewed academic research appears in journals controlled by massive for-profit publishing houses. Academics do not see the monetary profit, the publishers do because they control distribution and access to their journals through expensive subscriptions. The lay public, independent researchers, and others must pay through the nose in order to access this research. The advent of the internet has challenged this middle-corporation driven model by allowing journals to flourish free of the need for massive publishing houses. All you need is some server space and bandwidth and away you go, able to publish really groovy research that anyone with an internet connection can look at. If you haven't got your own IT person and html programmer, there's even open source software to get you set-up.

Via a post on one of my listserve subscriptions this morning, I learn that the American Anthropological Association has come out against open access journals because the rights of Wiley, Sage, T and F, Elsevier, etc to profit from the free labour of professors (and, ahem, grad students!).

Yet, in other corners of the academic universe, pissed-off profs are forming  posses.

It's interesting reading the comments around this topic. There seem to be two very clear camps emerging among the rank and file scholars. On one side there are those big-picture idealists who see the social value in open access and decry the fact that their work is essentially being sold for profits they never see and are willing to do something about it. These are the ones willing to challenge the field.

However, on the other side, you've got people afraid to boycott the Wileys and Elseviers of the world because they wouldn't be able to publish in the places they need to publish in order to further their careers. That sort of cowardice is fair enough I suppose: I've been hanging around universities long enough now to know that that many professors exist solely to attract grant money and add publications to their CV in a sort of weird egocentric-indentured servant-chicken-egg driven feedback loop. Challenge the big ideas of your subject matter, but don't you dare try to knock down a few ivory walls or leave gate open so the plebes can get in. They've also got to eat and stable academic work is harder and harder to come by.

Nevertheless, as internet file-sharing revolutionised the music and video industries, so too internet open access is radically shifting the business of knowledge sharing. It is telling that, like his entertainment counterparts, the head of a major astroturf org scholarly association has to run to policy-makers to prevent well, the common folk from seeing the results of the tax-dollars and not those tax-dollars appearing on corporate publishers' balance sheets. 

Midwinter's Freditorium . . .

— Fred —

MIDWINTER: AKA GROUNDHOG DAY. Actually, celebrating midwinter happened a long time before some American marketing weenie thought of promoting a rodent. According to thepaganperspective, 

Midwinter began as a celebration of the returning sun and sometimes a propitiation to assure that same return. Neolithic chambers, such as An Lianh Greine (Cave of the Sun) at New Grange were built to capture the sun’s power, while the Zuni and the Hopi Indians performed sacred dances to guide the returning sun. The temples of Egypt in Karnac, Thebes, and Abydos focused the midwinter sun’s rays into the heart of the pyramid’s chambers. It was also a celebration of the midwinter sun, the birth of the sacrificial god(s) (Mithras, Attis, Osiris, Jesus, etc.) that assured the promise of the ensuing year.

— The Freditorium —

Part of the promise is a return to using the barbecue with the advent of Spring. You see, we have a particularly energetic red squirrel, Fred, who has decided it makes a perfect Freditorium. If there were a Costco for red squirrels, he'd belong. Fred collects stuff, lots of pine cones, leaves, insulation, well, just ponder:

— Fredstuff —

Great little guy, a real gonzo spirit, loves walnuts.

The Komen cave

If it's got a pink ribbon on it, I'm not buying it. Simple.


As TBogg points out, the upper end of the Susan G Komen foundation had to know that THIS bombshell was being released in the same week at they issued a press release severing their breast cancer funding from Planned Parenthood. And, as he asks, is that hubris or stupidity?

Run for the cure? Apparently the mega-charity holding the trademark rights on that line (in the US) doesn't really give a damn about the cure part, especially since they've been hijacked by the religiously-driven woman-haters.

Cowards.

Hardware Dep't Bulletin . . .

DEFENSE TECH follows military happenings world wide. Of interest, India has decided to buy 129 French Rafale fighters after comparing "against everything from the Eurofighter Typhoon and Mig-29 to the American made F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16." That's the Rafale, below. They will definitely give China and Pakistan something to ponder, because gaining air superiority over the Indians isn't going to get any easier in the next decade.

Next, we have the dispatch of HMS Dauntless to the Falklands, to the relief of the inhabitants. You see, over the last 18 months, the Argentine government has become ever more truculent, and it's starting to look like the Argies might just be stupid enough to give it another try. While Dauntless is a mere 7,000 tons, according to Denfense Tech, it's not your average destroyer, and the Argies really don't want to try this one on for size:

The Type 45 destroyer is the most advanced anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic ship in the world equipped with 48 Sea Viper missiles and the Sampson radar, which is more advanced than Heathrow air traffic control.

Last, it appears the USAF is up-grading its bunker-busters. It seems they spent close to $60 million on 16 of 'em, but they're not sure they will go deep enough to take out the deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities, but another 80 or 90 million bucks should fix the problem. As it is now, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is a 30,000-pound tool for penetrating 32 stories of reinforced concrete, carried in pairs by a B-2.

The decision to ask now for more money to develop the weapon was directly related to efforts by the U.S. military’s Central Command to prepare military options against Iran as quickly as possible, according to a person briefed on the request for additional funds.

Hmmm . . . 6 months, 12 months?

Dream life . . .

EXCELLENT! Cartoon Brew is a fine site for classic animation aficionados. As Jerry wrote:

Here’s the perfect film for me to post in the middle of the night. Andres Tapeton’s graduation film from the Classical Animation program at the Vancouver Film School. It’s quite a trip.

Ya gotta wonder . . .

WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE of Noah's house? Somehow, he remembered cockroaches and black flies, and a couple of Sasquatch to make up for it, I guess. Then there's bed bugs. Way to go, Noah.

Aislin . . .

Wente suggests you read the psuedo-science of a racist

The woman really needs to hire a research assistant who can click on and read the results of any one of these links.

Unlike Wente's fawning over Charles Murray's latest piece of fiction based on fantasy, others have already relegated it to the irrelevant bin. Good party game; no place in the library.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Oh yeah. The concept promoted by Murray in The Bell Curve, that race and inferior intelligence are linked, is racism, pure and simple.

Robbing seniors to pay the well-to-do

Greg nails it. The Harper agenda to carry out "pension reform" because the population of seniors in Canada threaten to undermine the economy is based solely on ideological propaganda and not an analysis of the facts.

For one thing, most of these PMO talking points are propaganda utilizing grade 4 arithmetic (at best):

OAS is funded primarily through taxes on working people and is unsustainable on its current course.

For example:

• The number of Canadians over the age of 65 will increase from 4.7 million to 9.3 million over the next 20 years.
• The OAS program was built when Canadians were not living the longer, healthier lives they are today.
• Consequently, the cost of the OAS program will increase from $36B per year in 2010 to $108B per year in 2030.
• Meanwhile, by 2030, the number of taxpayers for every senior will be 2 - down from 4 in 2010.

If we do nothing, OAS will eventually become too expensive and unsustainable.

Simplistic enough for some, (the group that would buy that line of tripe), but unsubstantiated with any statistical evidence. So, The Jurist engages in a statistical exercise which immediately puts the Harper PMO sputtering to the lie.

The Cons' estimated total cost is about $108 billion. But based on Statistics Canada's medium-case demographic estimates, seniors ages 65 and 66 will make up only 11.5% of the total population aged 65 and up as of 2031.

So if OAS is relatively evenly applied across the age spectrum, the savings from pushing back the retirement age for Canadians in general will amount to 11.5% of $108 billion - or just over $12 billion per year.

And then he takes aim at the real plan. The Harperites promised that, once they've balanced the budget, as long as you have a large enough income, you can increase the amount of money you put into a Tax-Free Savings account from the current $5,000 to $10,000 annually.

At the same time, the Cons plan to push through general income splitting and increases to tax-free savings accounts. And those plans - targeted squarely at large-single-income households and those wealthy enough to have $10,000 to sock away every single year - will cost...just under $12 billion per year. And unlike the Cons' numbers for OAS, that's without taking into account any growth in the size of the tax base in the meantime.  

Just so we're clear here, the cost of the Harper frat-boys' plan to allow income splitting in high-earning-single-income households and to double the amount that those with a spare ten-thousand bucks laying around can shelter from interest and investment income taxes is about the same as would be saved by forcing seniors to delay an old age benefit until they reach aged 67.

The question is, how many wage-earning Canadians have an extra $10,000 laying around to toss into a tax-shelter? Not many, I reckon, so it would be a benefit acquired by a smaller percentage of the population than would be surrendering that same amount of needed survival income.

The truth is, a solid majority of Canadians in their peak earning years do not or cannot afford to make annual contributions to the primary retirement savings instrument (RRSP) and only 12% of those in their 40s make the maximum allowable contribution. Of those in their 50s, only 14% make the maximum contribution.

Is the fog coming off the mirror yet? The Harper plan for "prosperity" is to rob seniors of their past tax payments and give it to the wealthiest portion of the population.

And if you're a Harper Conservative, that's as it should be.

Oppression is eternal . . .

Bad Hair Day: Execution of the Czech 'heretic' Jan Hus
at the Council of Constance, anonymous woodcut, 1415 ©AKG-images

THE NEW HUMANIST is a delightful site, at the other end of the intellectual rainbow from the GOP and its chimps, and well worth a visit anytime. Currently, there's a fascinating article about the Holy Inquisition. Why should you care, in a Stevie world, about stuff that happened 500 years ago? Well, Cullen Murphy believes its echoes are to be heard today:

Interrogation. Surveillance. Ethnic profiling. Censorship. The words come from 21st-century headlines, but they have an ancient pedigree. Inside the heresy files: how the Inquisition ignited the modern police state.

• • •

Here’s the central question: why did the Inquisition come into being when it did? Intolerance, hatred and suspicion of one group by another had always existed. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution – to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life – did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those embers of hatred did not exist. Once the tools do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, people controls became more powerful. With the October Revolution in 1917, the Russian Marxists got their turn in 1930, with the supremacy of Stalin in the Party, and the advent of collectivization. From this effort to remake society, Stalin created the Gulag system. Richard Overy discusses this in an article on the NEW STATESMAN site, "The killing fields".

Once shrouded in secrecy, the history of the Soviet concentration camps is now well known. But why did these open-air prisons really exist? 

• • •

The camp system has usually been regarded as a way of extracting compulsory labour for a rapidly industrialising Soviet economy, but Khlevniuk insists this was not its primary motivation. The camps were the product of a bizarre shift in the Soviet penal system in the early 1930s, when trivial infractions became state crimes. As a result, the conventional prison system became swamped. In effect, the camps were open-air prisons, easily assembled and cheap to run, and capable of accommodating millions. The labour extracted was unproductive, and many of the projects on which prisoners worked had little economic value. Free labour would have been more productive. And the slaughter of 700,000 in the Great Terror makes no sense if the regime's objective was the extraction of forced labour. The camps existed, rather, because of the regime's vision of a classless, productive and cultured communist society - a vision that required the violent exclusion of all those deemed by behaviour, social origin or ethnicity to be a threat to its achievement.

In his way, Stevie wants to do the same thing: remake Canada, starting with his crime legislation.

Just wondering...

Does it always take a lethal mill fire before the minister will leap into action to help displaced mill-workers?

I only ask because between 2000 and 2010 the Canadian forest industry lost 144 900 direct jobs, hitting fully two-thirds of the forest-dependent communities in the country. I wonder where the leaping ministers were then?

Putting the boots to granny (updated)

If the priorities of the Harper government aren't fairly clear by now you, you've been living under rock. Everything is driven by the ideology espoused in this Harper speech.

Now, Harper is going to start executing the agenda everyone on the right said he didn't have. You know - the hidden one.

One would like to think that Harper's blustering at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland was simply his continuing attempt to pat himself on the back for no other reason than his very existence. It was these lines which have everyones' ears pricked up:

As I said earlier, one of the backdrops for my concerns is Canada's aging population.

If not addressed promptly this has the capacity to undermine Canada's economic position and, for that matter that of all western nations, well beyond the current economic crises.
...

We must do the same for our retirement income system.

Fortunately, the centrepiece of that system, the Canada Pension Plan, is fully funded, actuarially sound and does not need to be changed.

For those elements of the system that are not funded, we will make the changes necessary to ensure sustainability for the next generation while not affecting current recipients.

That generated immediate speculation. And so it should. Harper is nothing if not the dirtiest player in the room. He has already demonstrated that he will publicly smear anyone who stands in the way of his plans. He has used government to attack any and all who express the slightest opposition to his authoritarian advance on power.

He's also a coward for failing to stand on Canadian ground and make such a pronouncement. And if he goes ahead with what many suspect is a rise in the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement to age 67, it also makes him a Mulronyesque liar. During the 2011 election campaign, in a blatant vote buy, he promised something completely different. (Page 28).

As a real economist has pointed out, Canada is in good shape to deal with the wave of baby-boomers approaching retirement age. There is no need to adjust retirement ages upward in this country and Harper has no legitimate mandate to implement such a change.

The only pension plan that needs to be overhauled is the one in which he and his political cronies reside. The original purpose of that plan has long since vanished.

As far as attacking wasteful spending, (something all conservatives talk about but never actually do), his first target should be the things he created.

Harper, devoid of conscience, steeped in his personal fable and determined to enrich his corporate masters will likely forget the name Solange Denis, the 63-year old woman who stood up to Brian Mulroney. And if he proceeds to gut this country's retiring generation, intent on ignoring the single largest active voting block in the country, you might brace yourself for the next ugly maneouvre.

Update: As might be expected from somewhere among the tax-payer funded, very expensive battalion that constitutes the PMO, the talking points have been issued. Interesting isn't it? The body of the Conservative caucus is so unreliable that they need "talking points" on every single issue.

In any case, as Kady points out, the author fails to acknowledge that all this speculation (and the pulling down of the Harper mask) was caused by Harper himself.

And I will point out that not one, not a single one of those talking points puts the speculation to rest nor does it address facts.

Advice for the Liberals . . .

GOOD ADVICE from CalgaryGrit: "Advice from South of the Border". How the Liberals can learn from Obama — if only the back-room wizards would pay attention. I sure hope that the party chimps that clustered around Ken Dryden and the rest of the Liberal insiders have been sacked. In talking to them, I was impressed with their arrogant obliviousness, but that's another story.

Check out CalgaryGrit's post, which outlines what the Liberal party has to do to off Stevie. More important, it outlines what YOU have to do to off Stevie. Capice? It all starts with you. Indifference and laziness are Stevie's best allies.

The art of death . . .

THE BONES OF WAR, indeed. That's the article title at WEB URBANIST: "The Bones of War: Haunting Skeleton Photography"

When Francois Robert unexpectedly acquired a human skeleton in the 1990s, he knew he had to do something wonderful with it. Several years later when the economy collapsed and he found himself with time on his hands, Robert finally settled on a project: powerful anti-war images spelled out in human bones.

Powerful stuff. Check out the rest.

A bit rich, dontcha think?

Steph Harper.

"To be sure, our government has no grand scheme to repeal or to unilaterally rewrite the Indian Act," Harper said in his opening speech.
"After 136 years, that tree has deep roots. Blowing up the stump would just leave a big hole."

This, from a man who seems quite comfortable with subverting 500 years of parliamentary evolution and convention?

Follow the money . . .

WHILE WE WAIT FOR STEVIE and the chiefs to get really going, check out WIRED's accounting of who spends how much to advertise on Google. According to John C. Abell's article, "Who Buys All Those Google Ads? An Infographic Breakdown", 

Google cleared $37.9 billion in 2011 revenue, which equates to more than $3 billion a month, mostly from those little text ads next to your search results that neither you or anybody you know will admit to ever clicking on.

Insurance and finance buys for Google Adsense words accounted for $4.2 billion of that total — more than 10 percent — according to Larry Kim, the founder of Wordstream, a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns and commissioned the infographic above. The most expensive search term in that niche was “Self employed health insurance” — not surprising in the aftermath of the recession and the Affordable Care Act, which will eventually require nearly everyone to have health care insurance (unless the Supreme Court nullifies the law later this year).

That phrase cost $43.39 per click, nearly $10 more than the next most expensive term, “cheap car insurance”.

Retail has its share:

Retailers were a somewhat distant second, but still accounted for a hefty $2.8 billion in ad buys, and were led by e-commerce behemoth Amazon. Inexplicably, the top-priced search term in this niche was for “zumba dance DVD.”

The web is so wonderful. Any universe that creates a place for Uncle Booger's Bumper Dumper is doing alright.

Hehehe

Revolting.

Dear Keith Baldry and associates ...

We don't believe you anymore.

All of you need an assignment where the food ain't so good, the alcohol can kill you and the perks mean you don't get eaten alive by bedbugs.

You guys are far too comfortable being thrown a comforter by the slimy creatures that inhabit the halls of power.

You peddle bovine scatology.

You are all in conflict of interest.