[hour glass icon]

The below thought was prompted from reading this, literally thought provoking article on the current "third sector" management capitalism that is evolving in Britain and other western economies in the wake of last years financial meltdown. Maybe saying "a key" would have been more appropriate, but it definitely crystallizes in my mind a structural trick that seems to have become quite prevalent in many different places these days. Particularly things like the financial "conduits" and "structured investment vehicles" that banks used as part of their wonderfully sinister-sounding "shadow banking system" in order to off-load the responsibility (and financial accounting) of their riskiest investments. Or the US government using defense contractors (aka mercenaries) to do much of their dirty work in places like Iraq, even when they have a perfectly good, and in fact, cheaper to operate, army all of their own. Extraordinary rendition too, the outsourcing of torture, would be another excellent example. And thus "we don't torture": well strictly speaking true, as long as the "we" doesn't include those we pay to do our unpleasant tasks for us.

I don't want to overstate this case too much, the contrary impulse can also be quite strong: the desire to control and decide. Within my own company I can certainly think of multiple examples of this type of person. But the interesting thing is that these two competing impulses can easily cohabit in a single person. Prime example being George "The Decider" Bush, he of the heartfelt conviction and the disavowed result. Iraq was a good idea that struggled due to "a few bad eggs" who were left outside in the hot sun to go bad by the very people later condemning them.

Either way, I keep wondering how these companies and institutions manage to not only keep functioning but grow in size and power when so many that run them are so manifestly not wizards of management and foresight, but in fact quite normal fallible humans.  I've always been struck by how, in all my experiences in both university and work, how rare it has been to run into people in management and administrative positions who on a personal level have the knowledge and foresight that their position would indicate as a necessity. Of course we have just witnessed, with the credit crunch and sub-prime mortgage fiasco, perhaps the greatest failure of management in living memory: the point where it became clear that, indeed, those wielding great power and influence are as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to what it is exactly that we are doing with ourselves here. As we build up an institution larger and larger, it begins to function in ways that are increasingly different from the way humans interact and related on an individual level: that is, the more it becomes inhuman in its behaviour. No one is in charge and no one is responsible.

The key to the functioning of the modern headless bureaucracy is that the ones making the decisions are not the ones deciding upon them.  A disconnect between the the decision and the decision maker: hence the role of the consultant (as well, the expert, the specialized team, outsourcing, diffuse and distant organizational arms). The consultant does not care about the overall end result of his decision, because he will not be there in the organization to witness the result. Furthermore, the manager who contracted the consultant can thus disavow and step away from the decision, stating his own ignorance and citing the superior knowledge of the consultant. In this way the decision can be cast as inevitable and unavoidable; it has to be this way, a higher authority has verified it, how can we, with our meager knowledge, contradict? Even if management knew full well of what the decision was likely to be, and even if *neither* side can truly conceive of what the eventual outcome of such a decision may be, the decision was always already inevitable. Thus do extremely stupid people make extremely stupid decisions and wield great power.

he speaks

I have, just now, never heard so much sycophantic laughter in my life.

2 2 get

2x2CD 2 GET:
1. 2CD Jesse Somfay - A Catch in the Voice
2. 2CD DJ Hell - Teufelswerk

2!

Oh my god this looks awesome!!!

http://www.residentadvisor.net/event-detail.aspx?id=95591

Fucking Juan Maclean AND The Field!! Soooo stoked. Must go, etc etc. Too bad it's on a Tuesday but still I am THERE. Best line-up to appear in vancouver for a while.

Wow

Are you following all these torture revelations going on in Washington right now? The whole Khalid-Sheikh-Mohammed-waterboarded-183-times-in-a-month-and-then-oh-surprise-he-admitted-to-planning-all-of-911 stuff? Here's another great addition: the torture tactics they approved were taken from a training program to give soldiers a taste of how they could potentially be treated by enemy combatants if they became POWs. The kicker is that, apparently, nobody at the top tried to investigate one step further and ask, well, where did the military get these tactics in the first place? Turns out they were "a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans."

It took about 50 years for America to literally become it's own worst enemy, complete with utter blindness to the results of their own actions. Unbelievable. How the fuck did Bush not get impeached? The man is a war criminal.

Oh ya

New Lindstromm & Prins Thomas album!!
Also Prins Thomas - Live @ Robert Johnson mix
Meanderthals - Desire Lines <--super balearicish, actually all three of the above should be
A-Trak - Infinity + 1 <--could be good party mix, could be horrible blog-house

I have not bought or downloaded any new music in a least a month! Well except for RA podcasts...that Culoe de Song one was pretty good. But really! Stupid moving has thrown me way off.

Also to check

Was just listening to this song, that I got from, I believe, the DJHistory forum's "Top 25 Balearic Tunes" list, and I was pretty excited to discover she had an album back in '88, so let's add Mandy Smith - Mandy to the list of albums I should check. But more importantly, have you seen the outfit she's wearing on that record cover?? It's INCREDIBLE! Gigantic tasseled shoulderpads and no pants is totally a boss look.

OH NOES MAN EATING LOBSTERS!!

Ok let's start this game again: Music to check

Pheonix - Wolfgang Amadeus Pheonix --could be annoying over-compressed indie-electro, could be very enjoyable dancey pop
Juan Maclean - The Future Will Come --it's got Happy House on it, what more is there to say?
Kris Menace-Idiosyncrasies --should be hella dope big room electro-house
Was gonna say the new royksopp but thankfully dan has that now! So there's that issue fixed.

Damn, as always, I could have sworn that there was more but I just can't remember.

+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+

Anyway, posts have been thin on the ground here recently, which I would excuse because I've been doing moving related things, but then I realized that I post most while at work so this story hardly holds now doesn't it? I guess work has been busy too. How lame are those excuses? It is very, very easy to move through time.

(ps. no man eating lobsters were hurt in the writing of this post, except for OH GOD NO IT'S TRYING TO EAT ME DIE DIE DIE YOU SLAVERING CRUSACEOID HORROR!!!)

"Deep into the bowels of house music..."

I never did a "best of 2008" list, much to my own chagrin, and now I can't really remember what I would have said was my favorite album of year was. But the more I listen to it, the more DJ Sprinkles's Midtown 120 Blues, released late 2008 and not heard by me until 2009, has become quite possibly my favorite album of last year. The most intelligent house album, about house music, i have heard, possibly ever? And beautiful, deep lush piano, warm warm beats, not so much for dancing as for inhabiting a mindset where dancing is assumed to already be happening, and instead you can sit there and think about why people would dance in the first place. But that's not fair either, because this is not a cold, cerebral album, it is warmth and caring, soothing the pains and cares of the world. When you're tired on a Monday morning after moving boxes and furniture all weekend (as I am, as I did), this music is pure balm for the mind and body.

I would go on, but I am tired and my ability to write is negligible right now. But get this album. A beautiful house album made with intelligence and insight.

Informational black holes

The thing about places like Sudan and Somalia or the North-west regions of Pakistan, is that the US and other nations claim that due to their lawlessness and general lack of outside access, they are perfect breading grounds for terrorism, where the ever elusive forces of the worldwide islamist jihad can gather together in secrecy to plot the western worlds demise. But the thing is, this same lawlessness, same lack of access is also used as cover by western nations to perform acts of aggression that they could never get away with in countries with a more developed infrastructure. Case in point, Israel's bombing of a convoy of trucks in Sudan, or any of the recent US drone attacks in pakistan. The same factors that make it hard for Western nations to know what's going on in these regions makes it hard, well, for Western nations to know what's going on in these regions! The Israeli attack occurred about 2 months ago, and it wasn't until a complaint from the Sudanese minister of highways that news of these information slowly leaked into the western world.

Point being that both sides of these conflicts are knowingly using the informational black hole of these regions to perform some very criminal acts.

Capitalism Today!

So let's try and parse the latest Obama bailout plan. Bad debts, these bloody mortgage back securities and the like, are auctioned off by this program, whatever the hell its called now. And who knows how it's decided which securities get auctioned off and which don't, let's just assume lot's of political back-room influence peddling and, if we're lucky, some outright bribes. Anyway, so private investors are making the bids at this auction, setting the price of these securities through "the magic of the market" so that they get valued somewhere below their face value but above zero. But here's the thing, though they are setting the price, they are not actually footing all the cash to make the purchase. Oh no not at all. They are, in fact, footing 1/14th of the cash, aka ~7.14%. Where does the rest of the cash come from? Well the US Treasury foots another 14th, part of the leftover cash from TARP. The rest of it is covered by miracle of "leverage," a loan guarantee of the remainder of the amount from the FDIC (so essentially, the Federal Reserve Bank).

Now this all works out okay if the these securities never fall apart and mature at par. In fact everyone makes money that way. Hooray! Of course, the fact that the party setting the price of these securities (through the auction) has so little money at risk will likely drive up the prices to unnatural levels, but that's alright, cuz it just mean the banks will get more money from this, right?

But what happens when it all goes tits-up? Well the private investor loses his/her money first, since apparently this whole thing is structured like a CDO, with different tranches at different risk levels, and the private investor get the riskiest tranche. This is supposedly to ensure that the prices investor pay for the securities aren't inflated because the investors are insulated from all the risk. Which is questionable, because in a way they ARE insulated from all the risk, or at least most of it. The Fed has the lion's share of the risk. And that's how it goes, next the Treasury is hit up for cash, and then the Fed, which is really just another arm of the US Gov't. Which means it all ends up in the taxpayers lap, resulting in higher taxes and/or inflation. Especially since the reason why these mortgage backed securities would have defaulted would be because the economy would have continued to decline == less tax revenue for the gov't == no money for them to pay for any new debt.

Long term then, this plan sinks or swims on whether the assets that are these securities are based upon are actually worth what they say they are, or are, in fact, worth much less. Now recall that not long ago I was writing about how the model the mortgage-backed securities were based on assumed unlimited housing price growth as extrapolated from the last ten years-worth of housing boom, and that the housing prices themselves were inflated due to the fantastically shit-storm-creating feedback loop of the securities themselves. So let's just say that the prices may have been a bit skewed towards the high-end.

In the short term, there is also a good chance of fucked-up-ness. These auction will be interesting to see. Because if the banks sell their 'toxic' assets off for less then they are currently valuing them on their books, then they will have lost significant chunks of cash which they will then need to recoup somehow, either from the still largely frozen credit markets, or more likely from the government again. AIG in particular seems to be essentially insolvent, so even the smallest of losses could set of a serious chain reaction.

Really, just nationalize the fucking banks already.

What a complete and utter asshat

 Just another Bush factoid re: how horrendously evil a president he was (from the NYT):

Mr. Bush frequently used signing statements to declare that provisions in the bills he was signing were unconstitutional constraints on executive power, claiming that the laws did not need to be enforced or obeyed as written. The laws he challenged included a torture ban and requirements that Congress be given detailed reports about how the Justice Department was using the counter-terrorism powers in the USA Patriot Act.

Dating back to the 19th century, presidents have occasionally signed a bill while declaring that one or more provisions were unconstitutional. Presidents began doing so more frequently starting with the Reagan administration.

But Mr. Bush broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 bill sections over his eight years in office — about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined,[my emphasis] according to data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Many of Mr. Bush's challenges were based on an aggressive view of the president's power, as commander-in-chief, to take actions he believed necessary to protect national security regardless of what Congress said in federal statutes.

Asshole.

When good intentions really just ain't enough

Maybe charging the president of Sudan with war crimes wasn't such a great idea after all (via the always on-point lenin's tomb)

damn

Slipped up on posting again. It's hard damnit, trying to be witty or intelligent. But that's at least part of the goal, to keep writing, keep the ideas flowing see what pops out.

So I guess...speaking of writing I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which is amazingly well written and impressively agile in its ability to jump between narrative styles, points-of-views, dialects and ideas. Yesterday I read an  extended riff on telephones and the way people always doodle and only half-pay attention while talking on the phone yet somehow believe that the person on the opposite end of the line is paying them rapt attention, and the consequences therewith that would occur upon the widespread use of videophones. It was impressively conceived and written. And funny. Did I mention the books quite funny?

But...(there had to be a but) it all gets a bit tedious sometimes, the constant long winding witty monologues from desperate stoners or obsessive tennis players, indepth descriptions of quebec separatist movements or other bizarre fixations. Eventually it all starts to collapse a bit under the sheer monotonous weight of the thing; for realz, the book is hardcover size (though softcover) and over a thousand pages. Mostly this is due, for me at least, to a lack of narrative pull to the novel. Most of the reason for continuing to read on is just to see what other inventive situations Wallace thinks up, but the piecemeal, unconnected pick-n-mix style results in a sense that you could just start reading anywhere and not have too different an expereience. It's just more of the same, though it's a pretty good same. I figure at some point in time some over-arching theme might evolve, or some things will happen in succession that will build causally to something else, but right now I'm not seeing it. And it's taken me maybe 2-3 weeks to get 150 pages in and I don't know whether I'll be able to hang on long enough to see it.