Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2013

James Lileks compares the new Oz to the original and finds it sorely lacking

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Actually, just ignore all the stuff about the new film, because I think he’s really writing about the original Wizard of Oz:

I remember how hard the first part of the movie felt. The unsympathetic and careworn Auntie Em, the vicious Miss Gulch — we laugh now and say “dee-dee-dee-dee-deee deee” as a little joke for someone with a nasty personality, but when that dessicated = bitch showed up and took the dog, Dorothy’s misery broke your heart. I mean, she was taking the dog away to kill him. No one stood up to her. No one could.

The Kansas farmhouse was more ramshackle than my grandparent’s farm, but we had chickens and dirt roads, and every summer we feared the twister. The mindless twister scribbling destruction in the distance was our worst nightmare, because it could happen. It had happened. They tested sirens every month because they knew it would happen. When it came for Dorothy, she was alone; everyone else had taken shelter in the earth, leaving her to the winds.

[. . .]

It was the font of childhood terrors that were unstinting in their horrors, unmodulated for younger audiences: the implacable guards, the gibbering monkeys, the horrible moment when the witch upended the hourglass: that’s all you have longer to live, my pretty. Oz himself was terrifying, and he was supposed to be the guy who’d help them all.

There wasn’t anything else like this in the other things they let us see, and I’m not sure grown-ups realized how unreal and bizarre these things seemed. But they trusted us to process the morality of an extended song-and-dance sequence that celebrates the death of an oppressor. Not too many other shows we got to see had a coroner with a certificate who had good news, and the townsfolk shouting that the tyrant is in hell.

This was a good thing! Really. It was.

– The bittersweet and painful end, which was resolutely irresolute: the first time you see it as a kid you don’t know the farmhands are the characters from Oz, not really, and when they appear at the end at everything’s great because she’s home. But it’s not happily-ever-after, because no one but Dorothy knows what happened, or admits they knew; everyone’s face is a friend from the most wonderful dream she ever had, fading away before her eyes, replaced by the joy of being home in a world without color. A place she vows never to leave.

Cyprus to offer small depositors a slightly less nasty haircut

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

Megan McArdle on the most recent “concession” by the Cypriot bank regulators:

Cyprus seems to have realized what I wrote yesterday: violating your deposit insurance guarantees is a better way to start a bank run than to stabilize a banking crisis. After Cypriots rushed to withdraw their money ahead of the new rules, the Wall Street Journal reports that the government has cobbled together a new proposal: small depositors will pay a 3% “tax” on their accounts (instead of 6.75%); medium depositors (those with between €100,000 and €500,000 will be taxed at the same 10% they were supposed to pay before; and those with more than €500,000 will pay 15%.

That may check the runs on the small accounts. Now the question is: what about the big ones? Will the foreign depositors view 15% as the simple cost of stashing their money out of the watchful eye of their own government? Or will they seek a new haven?

If the foreign money runs, it seems unlikely that Cyprus will be able to bail out the banks again; this desperate bank levy is, after all, what they were forced to do just to raise the $5.8 billion that the EU and the IMF demanded they contribute to the bank rescue. But the higher Cyprus raises the levy on large accounts, the more likely it is that the foreign money will flee to somewhere less shaky.

By “less shaky”, one has to assume a non-European bank…

Update: Cyprus has extended the “bank holiday” to Thursday.

Britain’s left: they have to destroy press freedom to save it

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

In the Guardian, Nick Cohen explains why the rush to regulate the press is such a bad move for the left:

We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when “progressives” run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: “We’re only following the British example” when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.

Try warning them that one day they and this country will regret their hooliganism and they reply in the sing-song voice of a child in a playground: “Well, that’s what Murdoch and Dacre want you to say.” It’s no good pointing out that Murdoch and Dacre are tired old men from a dying newspaper industry and they will not be keeping us company for much longer. Nor can you quote Orwell’s words to the effect that just because a rightwing newspaper says something does not mean it is wrong. Nothing works.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are custodians of the best of Britain’s radical traditions: the traditions not only of Orwell, but of John Milton, John Stuart Mill and the men and women who struggled against the Stamp Acts and the blasphemy and seditious libel laws. Their successors are not worthy to follow in their footsteps. For the sake of a brief partisan victory, for the chance to shout: “Yah boo sucks” at the hated tabloids, they are inviting political regulation of the press at a time when the web revolution allows not only newspapers but also large blogs and the websites of campaign groups to be “significant news publishers”, to use the ominously vague phrase Labour and the Liberal Democrats are offering to the Commons tomorrow.

Mark Lynas and his break with the anti-GMO activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Mark Lynas was one of the most prominent activists working against the adoption of genetically modified crops. Over time, he realized he was fighting the wrong battle and publicly recanted his decades-long struggle. He talks about it in an interview with Charlie Gillis in Maclean’s:

Q: You’ve disavowed a cause you were identified with for decades. How are you feeling about your decision?

A: It’s been traumatic, but it’s also been something of a liberation. I’ve obviously been inconsistent in my life, but so are we all. In my view, it’s better to be inconsistent and half-right, than to be consistently wrong. Even the pope doesn’t claim these days to be infallible, yet that’s what most environmental groups do.

Q: Still, you’ve offended your former allies, a lot of whom are now trying to discredit you. Some say you exaggerated your part in founding the anti-GM movement to start with. What’s that been like on a personal level?

A: My whole social scene has been characterized by my environmentalism. I’m in a situation where I can go to a party and I don’t know who’s currently not speaking to me.

Q: On Twitter, Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist in India, likened your calls for farmers to be able to plant GMOs to saying rapists should have the freedom to rape.

A: That was simply astonishing, and frankly, hurtful to people who have actually suffered the trauma of rape. Look, these attacks on me are obviously done in the interests of damage limitation. It’s sort of an emperor’s-new-clothes thing. I have helped expose the fact most people’s concerns about GM foods are based on mythology. Once you can get past the idea that there’s something inherently dangerous about GM foods, it’s a whole different conversation. We actually can tell whether GM foods are safe. They have been extensively tested hundreds and hundreds of times, using different techniques. Many of the tests were conducted independently. The jury is entirely in on this issue.

[. . .]

Q. You argue that opposing GMOs is actually anti-environmental.

A. That was the realization that changed my mind. That recombinant DNA is actually a potentially very powerful technology for designing crop plants that can help humanity tackle our food-supply shortages, and also reduce our environmental footprint. They can help us use less fertilizer, and dramatically reduce pesticide applications. We can reduce our exposure to climate change through drought and heat-tolerant crops. So the potential is enormous.

Will the Cyprus bailout set the fuse to a new Great Depression?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

History may not repeat itself, but it’s quite likely that it paraphrases itself instead:

So, this is going to be a very sour reading of what has happened in Cyprus this weekend. It will also be a very partisan one, possibly even a partial one. But if Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz were right in their insistence that it was actually the Federal Reserve that caused the Great Depression (which is something that Ben Bernanke himself has insisted that the Fed will not repeat) then one way of interpreting what has happened is that the European Central Bank has just set us all up for another Depression. The trigger is that “tax” of a little over 6% on all depositors.

This isn’t an analysis that you’ll be able to get all economists to sign up to. But the basic story told by Friedman and Schwartz in A Monetary History of the United States was that the 1929 crash was indeed a serious crash. But it would not have led to the Great Depression without the Federal Reserve making some serious mistakes. Two of which were to allow the intertwined collapses of both the money supply and the banking system. Given that it is the banks that create credit and thus the wider money supply they are, to a great extent, the same thing.

[. . .]

But please note the central part of Friedman’s argument. Yes, there was the crash. Yes, there would have been a deep and painful recession as a result. But the tipping of that recession into depression was a result of the cascading series of bank failures in the absence of deposit insurance: that led to the calamitous shrinking of credit and the money supply.

So let us now look at Europe and the eurozone. Certainly there’s been a crash (or even a Crash). We’ve so far avoided the depression part (although not everywhere. Greece is certainly in one, Spain possibly and looking out my window at rural Portugal I see certain signs of a reversion to a non-cash economy.) but the important question is whether we manage to continue to do so?

[. . .]

Yes, I do know, they’ve called it a tax: but here we’ve got to make reference to that duck thing. The difference between a 6% or more “tax” on your bank deposit and a failure of the previously agreed deposit insurance to protect your deposit is quackery enough that it’s a duck.

As I’ve said before the importance of this is moot at present. It depends on who believes what. If the citizenry believe that they don’t have deposit insurance any more (whether we call this a tax or a duck) then we will see more mass withdrawals from banks and we will see more bank failures. And cascading bank failures are exactly the thing that will tumble us into a new depression.

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