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about
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
Frontline is the only documentary series on American television where the information density doesn’t leave you feeling you are watching something in slow motion. They don’t disappoint with this solid but uninspired piece on last October’s crash. It would be unfair to ask for more, however, so soon after the event, and this is a subject that will eventually require something truly epic in scope to capture. Even Bonfire of the Vanities seems tame in comparison with the magnitude of current events.
Nice to see that highbrow thinkers such as John Cassidy and Paul Krugman were core interviewees. Its also refreshing to see an officially endorsed embed, and one that works across countries, unlike the BBC iPlayer or Hulu. I’m putting this in the Smashing List.
America likes democracy and i’m quite fond of it too. But a portion of America’s interests are controlled by the equivalent of Oligarchs – the heads of financial corporations. This used to be a belief held only by idiots, but its now a reasonable way of looking at things, given the natural coagulation of banks into a too-big-to-fail sticky mess.
Bank heads like BofA’s Ken Lewis are not bad people per se, I like them more than politicians, but they are part of a web of interest with natural loyalty to give proceeds to the worker (bank executives) rather than the owner (taxpayer), they are communists, if you like. As a result, money will flow into these institutions, which will eventually return large profits benefiting workers with options and current losses will be picked up by future taxpayers.
This is Simon Johnson’s, former chief economist of the IMF, premise. His proposed solution is one that I’ve noticed has been gaining traction lately, to break up the big banks into smaller ones. This seems so obviously a good way to flush out bad assets, remove undue political influence and maintain what is good about free markets that I cannot see a downside. And politically you could even persuade the French left of something like this: instead of bad=capitalism, good=privatization think bad=giant bank, good=family boulangerie. In America, selling this to voters would be trivial: would you rather be in a Rock and Roll band (small private enterprise) or behind a desk at the DMV (public state bank)?
The problem is that nobody in elected government dares to suggest it, which does look awful like an Oligarchy.
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry – an underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower.
But if there is one problem with the shallow and the fickle, its that they are shallow and fickle, they won’t put down deep roots and they won’t remain loyal to Dubai. The people who appear in People magazine need to be told what is cool by Wallpaper magazine who in turn will discover something after the hipsters have moved on. The problem is that Dubai was never hipster-cool and is no longer Wallpaper-cool. This realization will have the same impact as suburbanite bachelorette party in a Wallpaper-cool nightclub. It will spread like the sighting of a floating turd in a public pool, flushing people to the exits with silent panic, unacknowledged for fear of embarrassment.
As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?
Remember the point last September where treasury secretary, Paulson delivered a ’secret’ message to congress that was designed to scare them into action? Many people have now seen the infamous clip where Democratic Representative Kanjorski explains what Congress was told (2 mins 20 secs into this clip):
“by 2pm that afternoon [18th September 2009], $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”
Like the myth of Popeye’s spinach, which was due to a decimal point error in its iron content at a Chicago food fair, Kanjorski’s armageddon myth which will, no doubt, form a part of every conspiracy theorist’s armory for years to come, is based upon a quote of a misquote which exagerates the truth by a factor of ten and which Felix Salmon wisely and definitively demolishes:
“This is all, frankly, fiction, and it’s not clear where most of it came from, although maybe Kanjorski’s “friends” on Wall Street are the same people as Michael Gray’s sources at the New York Post. Thinking back to that crazy week it’s easy to get details wrong, especially when you’re speaking off the cuff on a call-in show. But let’s stop treating it as though there’s any substance to it.”
George Soros is the economics equivalent to Stephen Wolfram and physics. Wolfram is a wealthy businessman who discovered a big idea independently of others, that isn’t new or original but that appears to be correct – that the world is based upon algorithmic feedback loops rather than equations. Soros’ equivalent idea is Reflexivity a model of economics based upon feedback loops in an open system – money flows into a system held far from equiibrium which grows, becomes more complex and has periods of turbulence.
Until recently, Soros was considered a maverick, at least academically, proposing that the economy was an open system regulated by events which are provably unpredictable, if deterministic. The alternative and wideley accepted system of economics that people like Greenspan practiced was based on the idea of economics as a closed system which would tend to equilibrium in a free market. It assumed that turbulence was the result of external impediments to smooth free market influences.
When I found out that this was the case, I nearly fell off my chair. It meant that the economy was being run based upon scientific ideas that come from the age of steam engines.
The economy is an open system with a scale free system of interconnected attractors. It means, among other things that the current crisis was a statistically innevitable event and that another crash crash capable event is just as likely to happen tomorrow (just like having thrown a six in a dice throw does not reduce the chances of throwing a six again). This counterintuitive notion, is the same for earthquakes which were found to follow a pattern which was not the result of the release of built up tension and suggests that the economy is similarly susceptabe to events which are removed from simplistic chains of direct cause and effect.
Understanding these phenomena are crucial to our survival as a species, so we shouldn’t waste time even listening to people who are unaware of them. People like Greenspan or many other practitioners of economics, the dismal pseudo science. Soros, on the other hand, has economics ideas that are at least based on science which is less than 100 years old. Here he is at Davos, where James Bond villains hang out and decide how to run the world.
