There is a popular perception that only selected professions are undergoing the internet induced crisis. This is certainly not true, things will never be the same for every profession, not just journalists. This is what makes the current recession so dramatic, this is not a cyclical downturn, this is a revolution that leaves the creative class demolished without a clear path of survival. The article in The Telegraph: Apoca-lit Now has a distinct British accent but it looks into the universal recent history of book publishing and the current disaster.
March 2010
J&J, the largest drug company in America, caught with multimillion dollar kickbacks to Omincare, the largest pharmacy for nursing homes. The goal of J&J was to push the antipsychotic drug Risperdal on elderly patients without a diagnosed psychosis and even after a warning about the drug by the FDA. Just your mildly confused grandma force-fed the antipsychotic medication ($280 million profit in one year 2004 for J&J). This drug was pushed primarily on the elderly but also prescribed for children. In other words on the defenseless, silent citizens. The kickbacks discovered only after a tip from a whistle-blower working inside Omincare. The saddest part of this story is that J&J and Omincare will pay the settlement and continue as if nothing happened while a corner kid will be in prison for an once of dope: Bloomberg. (wasn’t Risperdal the drug they gave to the Lubavitcher Rebbe at some point. I think I heard the late Rothschild ranting about it?)
The big banks are nothing compared to the big pharma dealers. Take note of which stocks went up on the day after the health care reform.
El 'Lazer' Lissitzky, Had gadya, 1917-1919
We are just humans, we have the selective memory. When you see a Jew dressed in a Chassidic garb you might mistakenly think that this is the tradition, etc. In fact 99% of the time this Jew’s father or grandfather never dressed like that. But then it was the twentieth century, the century of the collective post traumatic amnesia. As far as the Jewish religion is concerned just a repressed memory. There was no industrialization, no communism, no Freud, no Marx, no Trotsky, no Einstein, no Holocaust and no Gulag, astonishingly not even members of own family, for many not even the state of Israel. The Jewish religion today is a collective rewind, pretending that we can safely ignore the preceding [and the current] centuries and instead reenact “remembrance” of the pyramids. Could you pass the salt please?
El 'Lazer' Lissitzky, Had gadya, 1917-1919
Of course the is the apocryphal version that didn’t even get through the soviet censors when El Lissitzky, the most innovative artist of the revolutionary wave, published the Had Gadya book in Kiev in 1919. In the final unpublished plate after Gott is done with the Malach Hamoves AKA the Angel of Death, in comes a hero and takes Gott to task for orchestrating the world as the perpetual game of slaughter, specifically the Darwinian murder of the weak, and the making of the unseemly, cruel song into the sweet dessert of the freedom holiday. After the improvised trial Gott is taken behind the shed once and for all… there must be a tune for that.
But even though the censor was the veteran of the Bolshevik revolution and a complete atheist, he couldn’t allow the publication on the last plate. Intuitively and from his chassidic youth the censor realized the practical implications of the metaphor. The last illustration would have deprived the fledgling Communist Russia of the blueprint for governing, the imitatio dei, the system that eats itself, the non believer understood that it was the prophetic blueprint for the entire century.
This is one of the best interviews by Jaron Lanier to the Publishers Weekly. Worth reading in it’s entirety but here is a highlight:
“I remember a few moments that were really dispiriting to me. I think the main thing that started to get to me was seeing my musician friends lose their careers. Since I’m a musician myself, I know quite a number of musicians, including some of the brand-name musicians, and the true numbers of what they make off of that are, with just a few exceptions, just bad, even though there’s an illusion that it’s better than it is.
I know that there are a number of responses that are very typical from the community that likes the stuff I criticize: well, it’s creative destruction, and a new world is coming about, and eventually it will create better things, and it’s their fault because they didn’t adapt. That’s what I used to say long ago. But when I looked at the individual cases, these were people who tried to adapt. They were doing something that was loved by other people and were being disenfranchised from benefiting in the society. It was almost like a new form of class warfare. Seeing the individual cases is what turned me. It wasn’t any abstraction…
The people who were hurt the most were what I call the creative middle class, people who were extremely successful—say, session musicians or record producers, songwriters. The thing about that is, as technology progresses, more and more human activity becomes similar to creative activity because the physical part gets mechanized. So what happens to musicians and journalists today is what happens to everybody at some point in the future.”
“The matzo balls provide firm texture in place of the meatballs, and the fruit soup is a mix of sweet and savory thanks to some onions and garlic” at Cafe Liz.
There is this amusing genre of the vintage cigarette commercials all over YouTube. Just give or take fifty years the commercials look strange, even grotesque. Like this one our brother Jesus might not approve. ►click to continue
God resides in the gap between our comprehension and mystery. The huge gap between things we understand and things we don’t understand is what people write off to God. To be sure no matter how much we learn, there is something that still must be up to God in the unknown realm. So from the point of the view of a clergy their job is to increase the inventory of things we don’t get. Less we understand, more real estate there is for God.
Sometimes a religious teaching masquerades as a philosophy, nothing is further from the truth. Philosophy attempts to interpret the world, religions attempt to misinterpret it leaving as much as possible to the unknown. The general purpose of a religious instruction is to pretend that linguistic manipulations or juggling of semantic images can pass for understanding. In reality that is a smoke screen at the entrance to rational inquiry. To throw you off track, to make sure God remains undisturbed in the blind spot of humanity.
And by the way, my last year’s Passover rant is still true, it will always be true, it will be true forever and ever: What would Rabbi Akiva do?
In the current article about economics The Return of History David Brooks predicts that “economics will be realistic, but it will be an art, not a science.” And what part of science is “science” as opposed to art may I ask? Which brings to mind the recent quotable tweets from Nassim Taleb:
- “Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (& the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals [individuals are predictable?]
- The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
- The 4 most influential modrns Darwin, Marx, Freud & (early) Einstein were scholars but not academics. Hard to do genuine wrk w institutions”
Are there any economists today that aren’t “institutionalized”, i.e. not working in academia, a bank, etc. For example today there are rouge mathematicians (Grisha Perelman), etc. Are there rogue economists who are into the art of the discipline, is it even possible?
This is a French and Canadian film that looks at the re-engineered component of the food supply and specifically at the monopolistic seed conglomerate Monsanto the world leader in production of GMs or genetically modified crops (amusing how Goggle becomes part of the narrative and the investigation). ►click to continue
On the subject of this post: TED – Alain de Botton on Career and Life Anxiety, there is a very nice short three-minute audio interview in the Guardian about work.
Alain speaks about the difficulty in describing a specialist work. Far greater difficulty is actually describing the general professions that people think they know something about. The truth is that all professions are exceedingly specialized today. So if you tell someone you are an architect, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, etc., people think they know what you do. At least with an obscure profession there is hope that eventually one can find a description, at least after several follow up questions but with the classical “commonly known” professions there is not even a hope that people would understand and appreciate what you do. One would have to overcome a life long mythology induced by books, movies, televisions. A hopeless task indeed. Someone who manufactures plastic containers knows what to put on his tombstone, he has an identity, no such luck for an engineer. And incidentally both are pretty limiting in announcing a human being, expect a specialized profession by the very nature of the narrow absurdity hints that there must be more to the person, it gives you a way out.
Let ‘s say you are talking to a child or a child-like adult. And you got yourself a treasure, afikoman or something. If you hide the treasure the child would look for it intensely and eventually will discover it. Just the invested effort in the search and discovery would make the treasure intimately valuable to the child. But what if you accidentally leave the treasure in a plain sight. This will guarantee that the treasure is ignored. But if the child stumbles on it by accident it will surely appear worthless. So is blogging, it is out there in the naked and obscure open.
On the subject of I Love NY – Manhattan Island Landing, this is a rare John Lennon gem from the Anthology album.
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