"In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show."

Grimes, Genesis

Cat Power, Lived in Bars

Sonic Youth, 100%

The Original Position

Goosebumps, always!

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1.
Half a league, half a league,
 Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.

2.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
 Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.

3.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
 Rode the six hundred.

4.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
 All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
 Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
 Not the six hundred.

5.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
 Left of six hundred.

6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
 All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
 Noble six hundred.

Against Me!, I was a Teenage Anarchist

Do the left wing react the same way to some austerity measures as some environmentalists do to GMO farming? Are measures such as labour law reforms eschewed because the left wing have the same paranoid concerns about the influence of big business as the environmentalists? Should politicians and economists adopt a more evidence base approach to social and economic changes? Is an evidence based approach even possible in the emotionally charged popularity competition that is politics? Do ideologically driven politicians even care about evidence?

Clarity about Austerity

"It is only in I960 that Lacan develops his classic opposition between jouissance and pleasure, an opposition which alludes to the Hegelian/Kojevian distinction between Genuβ (enjoyment) and Lust (pleasure) (cl. Kojève, 1947: 46). The pleausure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same lime, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can hear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance: 'jouissance is suffering' (S7. 184). The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction (Frend's ‘primary gain from illness’)." ~ Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

"By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude." ~ Ingmar Bergman

"This is an exciting time."

Modest Mouse, Broke

"Cameron couldn't galvanise a flea circus."

"As the world found out the hard way in the 1930s and is now discovering afresh, there is quite simply a limit to how much austerity people will swallow."

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Two articles in the left wing media about the same man. Fascinatingly different interpretations.

Niall Ferguson: admirable historian, or imperial mischief maker?

Niall Ferguson and the brain-dead American right.

El Greco, View of Toledo, ~1600