Atomic Razor

New World Order

The markets are sharply up this morning on the news that the US government is going to launch some kind of scheme for acquiring high risk assets. Let's nationalise risk!  All the rich people can continue to have their fat bonus , while the poor people can pick up the tab for the irrational exuberance. It has been ever thus, of course, and it wasn't just the bankers who were racking up those credit bills and taking out those mortgages, but clearly many (most?) sun-prime mortgages were mis-sold, a high proportion fraudulently. The little people are paying the bill for malfeasance.

What I would like to know is where is the money to buy for the purchase of these assets? The various institutions involved might have some money (or near money) reserves, but these reserves must have been sorely deleted by the nationalisations of Fannie, Freddie and AIG . They can obtain borrowing, but the capacity of the (new) institution(s) to borrow must be limited, except in so far as the government/Federal Reserve can make (i.e. print) money - this going to be the government lending money to the government. Which makes me wonder if the idea is to create a burst of inflation that will inflate the value of the assets away. - five years of 10% inflation will make that mortgage debt look at lot more manageable.

There is also the issue  of using tax revenues, but I think I need to do a degree in economics (or a partial one at least).

The general consensus had appeared to be that the LDs had a pretty bad conference and that Clegg's speech was lame and lacklustre. But the Newsnight focus group of Manchester floating voters liked him better than Brown or Cameron, perhaps because the Cameron clone is less familiar to them, but it also suggests that his Daily Mail talking points are playing well with the targeted demographic (the outcome of elections is not decided by people like you and me).

In other news, the first episode of No Heroics wasn't bad, perhaps not as sharp as the taster reel had suggested, but worth a second look next week, especially as one shouldn't judge a sitcom (or any programme) by its first episode. At least it had verve and imagination (and can someone really ask for much more from a a show on ITV2 - or a show on any channel for that matter?), something that Belle de Jour sadly lacks, along with Orlowskiesque references to the Singularity. The show would work a lot better with a much larger budget and without the constant attempts to try and make Belle likable. 

Good Site...

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right

I've been pretty impressed with their analysis.

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Temporary Public Ownership

HBOS is down 34.06% this morning already. I suspect that the British public will own their second mortgage bank by the end of this week (Manchester United is now sponsored by a company 80% owned by the American public). It will be possible to sell on BoS as a retail/wholescale bank. The Northern Rock and Halifax mortgage bank operations can be folded together.

Nationalise, Mr Darling, nationalise now. We are living in interesting times.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Newsnight is reporting that Bloomberg is reporting that AIG is about to be nationalised. This follows on with the sale of Merrill Lynch, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the nationalisation of Fannie and Freddie. We're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, we seem to be witnessing the final implosion of the neoliberal economic dispensation. The question is what comes next? For years, we were told that there was alternative. Is the world really ready for the implementation of some kind of neo-Keynesianism on a global scale? Would the SMotU allow it? Stafford Beer, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Which makes the Liberal Democrats decision yesterday to reduce taxes (by nebulous savings) all the stranger. Given the direction in which the winds of history are currently, now does seem the time for Lib Dems to start trying to triangulate between Brown and Cameron. Yesterday's vote was hailed as a victory of the Liberals over the Social Democrats, yet that victory was obtained at the very moment that economic liberalism was imploding under the weight of its internal contradictions. It would have been the perfect moment for the Social Democrats to have seized the high ground by promising economic policies based on those that brought us  high growth, low inflation, low unemployment and high quality of life between 1945 and 1973.

I wonder what Nick Clegg was thinking as he appeared on Newsnight last night in perfect blue tie and perfect blue shirt. Yes, he'll have no problem at all  sitting as Foreign Secretary in a David Cameron cabinet. He's pretty much our age and he has done all right out of neoliberalism and it has been until now pretty much the only game in town. The Liberal Democrats did well in the last three elections on the back of the anti-Tory vote. Appealling directly to Tory-leaning floating voters makes perfect sense in terms of the electoral calculus, even if it risks alienating a significant portion of the membership base. But given that the most likely outcome of the 2010 election is some kind of hung parliament, Clegg has to appear to be able to climb into bed with either Brown or Cameron even if the direction the party is rapidly heading in does make pretty clear who he'd like to be climbing into bed with. It does look though that once again the forces of destiny are conspiring to reduce the LDs to irrelevancy.

80 Not Out

As the other half of the Razor is now discovering and as I have no doubt said before, the only good thing about turning 40 is that you don't have to do it again.

I have particularly fond memories of 9 September. Leaving aside spending several hours stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 failing to get to Dave's birthday curry in Hoddesdon in 1999 (9/9/99!), I have particularly fond memories of David's birthday bash at the condo in Redwood City in 2001. That was a good day. Of course, none of us could have known. There is a novel in there I am sure.

As for that Captain Kirk shirt I bought Dave in 2001, I hope he wore it at Space camp.

Today also appears to be the official launch date of Anathem, at least in the US; God alone knows what is going on in the UK. I wonder if Dave can waggle himself an invite to the (Seattle) History Book Club?

ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT!

Obama: The Price of Being Black - The New York Review of Books

Money quote: "Pollsters contend that respondents often change their minds at the last minute, or that conservatives are less willing to cooperate with surveys. Another twist is that more voters are mailing in absentee ballots, and it’s not clear how those early decisions are reflected in the polls. Yet the Bradley gap persists after voters have actually cast their ballots. Just out of the booth, we hear them telling white exit pollers that they supported the black candidate, whereas returns from these precincts show far fewer such votes. Thus they lie to interviewers they don’t know and will never see again. Barack Obama wants to think “white guilt [over treatment of blacks] has largely exhausted itself in America.” ^[6] I’m less sure. Almost all people who reject black candidates say they have nonracial reasons for doing so. And many undoubtedly believe what they’re saying. So I’m not persuaded that the Bradley gap won’t emerge this year. The Obama campaign would do well to print signs to post prominently in all its offices: ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT!"

Zogby is currently calling it this way, but it is unclear how recent are the polls this forecast is based and to what to what extent Zogby is taking into account the Bradley Effect.

Obama	Blue	260
McCain	Red	173
Too close to call	Purple	105

Knock seven percent off Obama's figures and the election turns into a landslide for McCain, which is what I have always expected and feared and was why I was for Hilary, on the grounds that she was the better of the two non-ideal candidates (in hindsight, Edwards probably wouldn't have been any better, but what about someone like Tim Kaine?- Jim Webb might be well-positioned too in 2012). It is possible that the Bradley Effect won't hurt Obama as badly as more traditional black candidates, but Obama is (that is, is perceived to be) an effete, intellectual liberal elitist snob with a strange name, a highly unorthodox background, a difficult wife and no executive experience (neither has McCain, but his years in a Viet Cong prison cell and Palin's time as a mayor of a small town in Alaska cancel out that negative), but I would like to see Obama a consistent seven points ahead in the polls before I have any confidence at all that we won't be seeing President Bullock... sorry,... sorry... Palin (her name even sounds like the name of the character that SAndra Bullock would play in the movie) pressing the button sometime in the next four years.

Perhaps it is just the cultural filters that my perception of things is seen through, but it seems to me that Republican America has finally arrived (OK, OK, it was pretty much there all along!) at the kind of Topsy-Turvy-Alice in Wonderland polity that George Orwell wrote about in 1984:

• War is Peace
• Freedom is Slavery
• Ignorance is Strength
  

Each of those slogans is literally true of the mindset of Republican Americans: War is Peace - the perpetual War Against Terror, the permanent national security state; Freedom is Slavery: the neoliberal economic dispensation, "stress and duress"; Ignorance is Strength - denial of biological evolution and anthropogenic climate change, attempting to sack librarians (for refusing to ban books). The sheer effort that Republican Americans must have to expand in order to try and maintain a world-view that is flatly contradicted by the nature of the physical world, common sense and basic human decency must be truly enormous. Of course, it is easier when that world-view is supported by the faith and ideology of an entire culture. Ideas Have Consequences as conservatives like to say (the consequences are often the gulag - - the American gulag, for instances of the obscenely high proportion of the American (black) population incarcerated - and the gas chamber - the United States might no longer literally gas people, but it is certainly still keen, like the Nazis, on lethal injection). The consequences of the ideas of Republican American, the ideas used to generate the Ecoian bubble of hyperreality in which Republic America believes itself to exist, are likely to be the destruction of wesrern civilisation and the end of the world (which might very well be what Palin and her ilk actually want).

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Normal Service Will Be Resumed

Back from a week's holiday in Cornwall, Treyarnon Bay, near St Merryn, near Padstow. And., yes, we all (four adults, three children) came down with the norovirus outbreak, which certainly hadn't petered out a week after this article appeared.

As Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics and now we have the Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing that the UK economy is meltdown (well, yes, but what does he know that we don't), a new cold war (perhaps they are jobs going at the MoD) and a God-lovin', gun-tottin', flag-wavin' MILF as the next President-But-One of the United States (I assume Sarah Palin was chosen because she sounds like a character profile from a lame Sandra Bullock vehicle- her name even suggests Sarah O'Connor - and I fear this was a stroke of genius on the party of McCain's advisors: they recognise the truth that we live in an Baudrillardian/Ecoian world of hyperreality - Disneyland is America and America is Disneyland), just in time to get us into a nice thermonuclear conflagration in 2012. I think the odds for a safe Singularity have shifted sharply upwards over the last seven days.

I am currently reading Umberto Eco's brilliant The Name of the Rose, another of those books, like Borges's Labyrinths and The Book of Fantasy, that I am kicking myself for not having read twenty years ago. Today is the official publication day of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a novel featuring scholars in a monastery. I am also reading A.S. Byatt's Possession: a Romance, a novel about  1980s scholars investigating the mystery surrounding the lives of two (fictional) Victorian poets, authors, naturally, of  fairy tales and epics somewhat in the style of Robert Browning and William Morris and thus necessarily infused with an imagined nostalgia for an invented middle ages - everything is connected and my head wants to explode.

The Wikipedia article on hyperreality suggesting that readers See also 

• Allegory of the cave
• Authenticity
• Consensus reality
• Reality shifts
• Simulacrum
• Simulated reality
• Solipsism
• Truthiness
• Cyberspace
• Theme park
• Game theory

Consensus reality. Truthiness. Theme park...

What is interesting is that the kinds of people who will vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, the NASCAR dads, the Soccer moms, the Angry White Males and the Security moms tend to think of themselves as pretty much plain, straightforward, God-fearing, black-and-white, down-to-Earth, common sense kinds of folk. They may not be anti-education, but they might consider much book learning to be irrelevant or uninteresting or wrong or just downright stupid ("The Gulf War didn't happen?") They would see themselves as living about as far from the rarefied, bookish atmosphere of the elite, secular, humanist, relativist, liberal intellectual circles of the hyperrealist theorists as one could be. And yet it is that very air that they necessarily and unconsciously breath. In The Name of the Rose, Adso of Melk and William of Baskerville discuss the function of the simple. It wasn't simple in fourteenth century Europe or 1970s Italy and it isn't simple in 2000s America. We're not in Kansas anymore, if we ever were, and the sooner more people realise that the greater the chance we have of saving the world.