Category Archives: Cultural

Waffle Street on IMDb

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It really is going to be a movie and how I know is because it is now up on the IMDb website. The movie is, of course, Waffle Street and this is the plot line as described:

Waffle Street’s riches-to-rags tale is an adaptation of James Adams’ 2010 memoir of the same name (published by Sourced Media Books), which chronicles the financier’s foray into the food industry. After being laid off at the hedge fund where he worked, and further jaded by his culpability in the crisis, Adams chose to work at a popular 24-hour diner where he claims “most of his financial knowledge has been gleaned.” Offering a fresh take on the fallout of corporate greed, Adams’ is a tale of the redemption and unlikely friendship found under the tutelage of Glover’s character Edward, the best short-order cook in town.

My own way of thinking about it, however, is how a bond trader at the top of the income tree is felled by the GFC and finds himself a few weeks later as the night manager of a Waffle House. He therefore enters a world that until then had only been seen at a distance but is now his daily presence. Part of what he learns is the up-close reality behind the kinds of things that are taught in economics and finance courses – things such as Say’s Law – discovering their deeper meaning by seeing them as an inseparable part of the way in which the world works. But the most astonishing lesson is embodied in the person of Edward Collins, an ex-convict who has found his own productive meaning in life by becoming not just a Waffle House cook but a moral philosopher. It is Jean Valjean again except rather than Collins being a character from a novel, he is someone from real life.

The story is exceptional, but a movie is not a book. They have the makings for the film of the year but we shall see. Release date is 2015 so it’s not long to go. I’ll let you know how well it’s been done right after the premier.

When it comes to the capital stock size matters

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A third world economy is not one in which everyone is poor, only most of the people with the elites still managing to do all right. The US is not there yet, but it is trying. This is an astonishing story, from The New York Times even, titled, The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less.

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

To understand all this, you need to understand the nature of economies from a classical perspective. A modern textbook will leave you almost incapable of seeing what’s happening, in the same way that knowing one economy had 6% growth and another had 3% will tell you nothing about the relative standards of living.

But this much is clear. The US is heading into an astonishing level of poverty across a wide expanse of what had not that long ago been the world’s most productive nation.

We are dealing with pure evil

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taliban-prisoners-of-war

There are tunnels which can have no other purpose than to inflict harm on Israel and its citizens. These are the reports of the intentions behind the building of such tunnels.

Leaks have begun to trickle out on what Israeli interogators are learning from captured Hamas fighters. One plot in particular is getting overwhelming attention.

Hamas was apparently a few months away from conducting a mass attack on Israeli civilians during the upcoming Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, on September 24. The raid would have been like something out of a movie: hundreds of heavily-armed Hamas fighters would have emerged from over a dozen underground tunnels in the dead of night, jogged 10 minutes to their targets, and then infiltrated a set of lightly-populated and lightly-guarded Israeli communities. Casualties could have reached the thousands, and some of the victims would have been taken back alive as hostages.

The offensive attack tunnels seem to quite literally have been built for this kind of purpose. The IDF recently published a map of how they were dug to spill out on both sides of nearby communities (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtYjL4mCAAAI6c6.png). Israeli soldiers have been reporting that just inside some of the tunnels were storage units filled with tranquilizers, handcuffs, ropes, and so on.

The reports on this are mostly in Hebrew right now (the original one is here if you want it: http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/600/825.html?hp=1&cat=875&loc=1). There are bits and pieces are getting translated on blogs and in think tank bulletins. The Gatestone Institute’s Lawrence Franklin has the best English-language I’ve seen so far, and I’ve pasted it below.

If the reports are confirmed, there are some immediate adjustments that analysts, journalists, and diplomats will all but certainly make:

(1) A ceasefire without at least the destruction of Hamas’s tunnel network would likely becomes a non-starter. It would be militarily untenable – and probably politically impossible – for Israeli leaders to accept anything less.

(2) The inevitable Israeli investigation into pre-conflict failures – and the Israelis always hold these, no matter how well things go – will have to take into account both how so many tunnels got built and why Israeli intelligence failed to crack the tunnel plot earlier. There’s a lot of focus right now on the former, but a lot of the digging and earth moving happened underground. It’s the latter debate, about sigint and humint, that has the potential to cost people careers.

(3) Confirmation of the plot would raise the stakes in the growing controversy over how human rights groups and diplomatic bodies pressured the Israelis into liberalizing restrictions on cement imports. Kilometers and kilometers of reinforced tunnels were being built deep into Israeli territory while Gaza-based offiicals railed against cement shortages. Some critics have already begun to name names, and the debate is already become very granular: TIP held a conference call yesterday in which one expert described how Hamas filled emptied UNRWA relief bags with dirt and then drove them away in UN-painted trucks, so that drones overhead saw what looked like a UN-sanctioned aid convoy.

(4) The public debate over the degree to which Operation Protective Edge was a “war of choice” for the Israelis would become constrained. A full-blown war would be seen as in some sense inevitable, with the only difference being whether it came before or after the Jewish High Holidays this fall.

The picture is there as a reminder of how ISIS-types treat people of their own religion. How much is too much for Israel to protect itself and its citizens?

[From Powerline]

After the IRS the American left thinks it can do anything it wants

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What is one to make of this?

The chairman of the Federal Election Commission today blasted Democratic colleagues opposed to his effort to protect conservative media after they imposed rules on the publisher of Rep. Paul Ryan’s new book, opening the door to future book regulations — or even a ban.

“By failing to affirm this publisher’s constitutional right, statutory right, to disseminate a political book free from FEC conditions and regulations, we have effectively asserted regulatory jurisdiction over a book publisher,” warned Chairman Lee E. Goodman, one of three Republicans on the six-person FEC.

“That failure reveals a festering legal uncertainty and chill for the free press rights of books and book publishers to publish and disseminate political books free from government regulation,” he added.

The left in the US no longer even pretends.

Barbarism against Western civilization

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Phyllis Chesler is by a long long way my favourite feminist. She has written an article on the traison de clercs which she has titled, J’Accuse whose significance and historical roots will be missed by the dumbed down members of the academy today. This is how it begins:

J’accuse every single Western academic, each intellectual and journalist who has ever circulated and signed a Resolution against Israel and in favor of Hamas is a supporter of Islamist barbarism against Western civilization.

They are the West’s equivalent of suicide (or really, homicide) bombers.

These are the professors and activists who are, essentially, anti-American in their point of view and who, like President Obama (who studied with them), want a de-militarized and diminished America. The 21st century manifestation of this sentiment in academia is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose aim is to starve the Israeli government by bullying even further already indoctrinated academics, artists, and businessmen into not working in Israel and/or into covering the news in only a pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian way.

Support for Hamas is merely a particular instance of this hatred of our civilisation, not just the most prosperous in history but also the kindest and most open. That others hate us is how things happen. That so many within the citadel hate us as well may yet doom us, but if they are successful they will be responsible for the dark age that will be the successor civilisation to what we have now.

Sleeping on the left or right side of the bed

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I wasn’t going to get into this business about Senator Lambie but this story has another dimension which is also about the nature of journalism. It does seem from the way this tale unfolds that reporters who start from the left side are different from the journalists on the right, or at least this seems to be true about the female side.

As is well known by now, our new Senator Lambie has struck a new low in public discourse with her on-air search for some male to bed down with, as discussed here. Speaking for myself, she has lowered the tone of public discourse in Australia. She would only be of interest to a radio audience because she is a Senator, and it is, of course, interesting to find out how her mind works. But it does make trying to find a way through our many social and economic problems more difficult when someone like this has so much political power.

Yet this now seems to be the level of public debate which I am not going to do anything myself to elevate, and indeed, am going to further contribute to its descent. The Spectator in the UK has published an article by a well known lefty – at least well known to them – which is possibly of some interest although I cannot think of much actual social value in what he says. It is mostly prurience that leads me this way. The title, of course, gives away the nature of its content, My secret lust for right-wing women. This will give an idea of what the article is about:

Women of the right will not tolerate sexism; but nor do they have that tendency of some left-wing women always to play the victim of sexism. They have a robust, get-on-with-it attitude to life that makes them less prone to the neurotic, whiney, oh-poor-me melodrama that has infected so much thinking of left-leaning feminists. . . .

I have slept with women who write for the New Statesman and women who write for the Daily Telegraph and I can’t honestly claim that one lot is better than the other. But there are certain post-coital benefits that come with women of the right. They never subject a man to the music of Nick Drake or Nina Simone. As good libertarians, they don’t mind if you smoke in bed or pick up a newspaper or roll over and go to sleep — come to think of it, that’s what they are more likely to do. Nor do you ever have to lie in bed and watch some mawkish film about Nelson Mandela or one made by Michael Moore. (They don’t think you’re demented because you’d rather watch Die Hard.) And right-wing women never think that leaving the toilet seat up is a passive-aggressive act of patriarchy.

Sorry, comrades, but when it comes to the bedroom I’ll have to vote Tory.

People of opposite political views don’t really get on, not if politics is important in their lives. I think he is a man who has changed his side but is at an age where it is much too late to change his friends.

There is no progress

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isis destroys 1800 hundred year old church

The picture, which I have only come across by accident, is from a story titled, ISIS burns 1,800-year-old church in Mosul. Here’s the start of the story:

Militants from the radical jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have set fire to a 1,800-year-old church in Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul, a photo released Saturday shows.

The burning of the church is the latest in a series of destruction of Christian property in Mosul, which was taken by the Islamist rebels last month, along with other swathes of Iraqi territory.

You won’t be surprised that they didn’t press charges

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Buzz Aldren being hassled about whether he had gone to the moon.

Bart Sibrel is one of those lunar truthers. And back in 2002, he ambushed Aldrin outside a Los Angeles hotel and berated him about his supposed role in the hoax, asking him to swear on a Bible he landed on the moon and calling him a “liar” and a “coward.” Offended that someone would question his integrity, and fed up with being pestered for so long, Aldrin finally snapped and socked Sibrel in the face.