Richard Dawkins interviews Nicholas Humphrey
The full uncut interview originally filmed for Channel 4’s “The Enemies of Reason.” Nicholas Humphrey is a Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics.
Running time: 35 mins.
The Ideas of Chomsky
A decades old interview with Chomsky, talking about linguistics. So much more interesting and important than politics.
Running time: 45 mins.
The Wonders of Inflation
If there is one thing that’s worse than inflation, its deflation. It grinds the economy to a standstill because you wait to buy and can’t pay off debts (which increase regardless of interest rates). This often results in political extremism or revolution, like the Chartist rebellion of the 1840s, in England.
Only a few months after catastrophic inflationary fears because of oil prices tripling, we now have the threat of deflation. With an economy that is is recession and no more interest to cut, there are no more monetary weapons available except to print money and stimulate inflation.
The euphemism for this is ‘quantitative easing’. What it means is: print money but do it very carefully, in case you end up getting runaway inflation. In which case, to put it plainly, you are fucked.
When this film was made, inflation wasn’t such a dirty word that expressions such as quantitative easing were needed and it actually extols the virtues of diluting the value of money. Because of this frankness, its worth watching now.
America came off OK in the 30s, Germany did not. Germany ended up with hyper-inflation and it created political extremism. In the United States government sponsored home building and mortgages created a home ownership democracy that stalled the emergence of communism. This time, it is the home ownership democracy that was the root cause of failure.
When I watch this film, a nasty though comes to mind. What if the oil spike returned as the economy eased, and we were still printing money?
Claude Francois – spot the cover game
I’m in Paris for a month, because my wife is plotting a move here. Which is a poor excuse to include these two clips of ‘so bad its good, actually possibly just good’ French singer, Claude Francois, who supposedly died while changing a light bulb in the bath.
Both these songs have well known English versions: Sinatra’s My Way and the Four Seasons’ Oh What a Night.
The video for Cette Annee La is possibly the nadir of French style. The glamorous dancing girls appear to be wearing builders’ vests and Jockey Y-Fronts.
The quiz question is: which of Francois’ versions is a cover and which is the original?
Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art
If Robert Hughes is the grand statesman of art criticism, Matthew Collings represents the best of a newer generation. This is the first part of his BAFTA award winning series.
Running time: 50 mins.
The Protestant Revolution
Although they are, perhaps, less ridiculous than Catholics, the problem with Protestants is that they take things way too seriously.
Tristram Hunt examines the Protestant cult in this first part of a mammoth series aired in 2007.
Running time, part 1: 1 hour.
Generic Ass Video Site
Jeff writes in the comments: “you’ve really stepped down the quality of your posts recently. you got yourself a srsly generic ass video site now. congrats.”
And you know what, Jeff is right. In defense, I was experimenting, Smashing Telly has no ads, makes no money and is a hobby site It was for me to have some fun doing something I enjoy, it has won a couple of awards and people say nice things about it.
I was thinking about closing the site down, but am going to try and turn it into more of a community site, based upon link suggestions sent in. In the interim I am going to revert to full length media instead of clips.
Angkor Wat
I’m posting this in time for the publicity bandwagon surrounding Indiana Jones and the Blah of Blah, because Angkor Wat is everything that an India Jones setting should be: a giant, alien looking ruin in the middle of the Jungle, encased in slithering tree roots. Except, of course, that Angkor Wat is real.
Gyaru – extreme Japanese fashionistas
Perhaps the trashy magazine aspect of the show about Japan where this clip was taken is the best format for the subject matter. In any case, expect to be deluged with stuff from it on SmashingTelly.
I love this clip about weird Japanese women’s fashion tribes, Gyaru, including the evolution of styles up to the exceptionally weird, reverse Geisha: Ganguro.
For Wealth and Empire – the Chinese Threat?
For Wealth and Empire-NHD-Conflict and Compromise
This video, a State finalist, in National History Day looks at the history of massive scale government sanctioned drug dealing by the British in China, that created Hong Kong. I’m posting it after spotting the first, of what I think will be many, hand wringing pieces in newspapers about how China doesn’t share “Western Values” and is taking over the world. These articles will be trotted out as people get terrified by how modern China looks in Olympic TV coverage and continue to get worked up about Tibet while being bored by Iraq.
The Daily Mail, a UK national newspaper, is best described to an American audience a the kind of paper Lou Dobbs would read. Its a tabloid without the humor and a broadsheet without the brains. A couple of days ago, this Daily Mail fear piece on China became a minor Internet meme, hitting the front page on Digg etc. I’ll summarize: it suggests that an evil China that doesn’t share Western values, will inevitably take over the world and that American hegemony was preferable, if not as good as Britain’s.
Here is my summary of why this point of view is moronic and dangerous, based on the history that follows the video:
Britain’s obsession with cups of tea made its trade deficit with China a problem, rather like the US obsession with consuming Chinese made, injection molded, plastic crap from Walmart is currently doing the same. To solve this they grew Opium in India, shipped it East and pushed it illegally to the Chinese who bought it in exchange for the tea, thus eliminating the deficit.
The Chinese government went to war with the British to prevent them from drug dealing, and the British took control of Hong Kong, making it a modern capitalist outpost, when the Chinese disappeared into the productive black hole of the communist cultural revolution.
When the British lease on Hong Kong expired, the communist Chinese could not afford to lose its revenue, so they let it remain capitalist, with a buffer zone. Capitalism spread through the buffer zone and beyond. Chinese cities became like British industrial cities at the time when the British were pushing drugs on the Chinese.
While the communist Soviet Union had destroyed itself from within and communist China was rebuilding itself from without, the Americans and British were fighting against the people in Afghanistan that they supported against the communists – who were now funded by Opium which they sold illegally to places like Britain and America – how ironic.
In the US, t-shirts and lawnmowers and electric can openers and the Apple computer that I am writing this on, cost less than they did when the people that bought them were children. People were encouraged to buy some things that they didn’t need, and they became addicted to consumerism itself, which became the opiate of the masses. Since this drug was capitalism itself, it didn’t seem as threatening to society as black tar heroin. Americans borrowed money from banks who repackaged the debt and sold it to other banks as an asset. Banks became addicted to the money to be made from bundling up more and more packaged assets and shaving off a commission, without really knowing what was inside the package.
The money that was loaned to people to buy injection molded crap from China, was made with the same thing that you put in your tank to drive to Walmart to buy it, and was secured on the value of your home and mortgage based on other homes in a package that the bank hadn’t opened. So when the value of your home collapses for one of the first times in history, because of mortgage commitments that were worth nothing but people hadn’t checked, when the gas in your tank goes up, while you are at war with the people in the region where the gas comes from, when the cost of the injection molded crap goes up because inflation and wages increase in China and when the Chinese rub our faces in it with gleaming new airports and stadia and high speed trains, as we watch the Olympics – newspapers like the Daily Mail will bleat “but they don’t share our values”.
Because of our own history, we are not always in a position to complain about China’s values in the West, but we don’t need to sell the Chinese Opium to stop the bleeding this time. If the US economy stumbles badly, so does China’s. The globalization that the zenophobic Daily Mail is a right-wing opponent of, consists of the shared economic values that hold us together.