The Breakfast Club (Légion d’Honneur)

So Thomas Piketty has turned down the Légion d’Honneur.

Piketty’s snub

The Economist

Jan 2nd, 2015

With a popularity rating below 20%, France’s Socialist president, François Hollande, is no stranger to criticism. But the decision on January 1st by Thomas Piketty, a French economist and bestselling author of “Capital in the 21st Century“, to refuse the award of the Légion d’Honneur was a cruel snub. Close to the Socialist Party, Mr Piketty backed Mr Hollande for election in 2012. Now he says that his government “would do better to concentrate on reviving growth in France and Europe” rather than handing out honours.

…

(H)e has in the past voiced two broad criticisms of Mr Hollande, whose presidency he recently called a “disaster”.

First is Mr Hollande’s failure to press his case in the euro zone for less austerity and more pro-growth policies. During his election campaign, Mr Hollande promised to put an end to austerity in the currency area. In office, he then tried to rally a “club Med” group of Mediterranean euro-zone countries in an effort to force the hand of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. But it came to little, and Mr Hollande’s political weakness now is such that he has constantly been defeated by German intransigence.

Mr Piketty’s second criticism touches on Mr Hollande’s tax policy. For years the French economist has argued for a more progressive tax system, which would merge both income tax, currently paid by only half of French households, and the “contribution sociale généralisée“, a non-progressive social charge paid by all. This too was one of Mr Hollande’s campaign promises. Yet the president has shelved any plans to overhaul the tax structure, preferring instead simply to increase taxes on the middle-classes and the rich.

Paradoxically, the one measure brought in by Mr Hollande that Mr Piketty did approve of was a top income-tax rate of 75%. An advocate of a global wealth tax, Mr Piketty once said approvingly of this flagship campaign proposal that “lots of other countries will inevitably follow this route.” Instead, the French government quietly let the 75% tax die on December 31st 2014.

As it turns out he has a lot of company.

French economist Thomas Piketty turns down the Legion of Honor

By Martina Stewart, Washington Post

January 2 at 3:47 AM

In April, New York Times columnist and liberal economist Paul Krugman called the book “a bona fide phenomenon.” And Krugman observed that the book “demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.”

The Legion of Honor is France’s “premier award,” according to the French Embassy in the United States. It was created by Napolean Bonaparte “to recognize eminent accomplishments of service to France.” It “is made up of three ranks – chevalier, officier, commandeur – and two high offices – grand officier and grand croix.” The Legion of Honor has an Order of Academic Palms that recognizes accomplishments in the areas of teaching, scholarship and research.

…

In turning down the award, Piketty was in good company. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Georges Brassens and Pierre Curie all turned down the honor, as did Maurice Ravel, according to the New York Times.

Piketty’s animosity towards the award appears to stem in part from differences with the administration of French President Francois Hollande. “There is a degree of improvisation in Francois Hollande’s economic policy that is appalling,” he said in June, according to Reuters.

Which will bring us back to Doh, Doh, Doh, Doh and Maurice Ravel (these pieces are about Art Music, News is merely bait and pandering).

Now most United States audiences will recognize Ravel as the composer of Bolero which gentlemen of a certain age have been using to time their climaxes (anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the enthusiasm of the conductor) without resorting to Baseball statistics, the homoeroticism of Throwball (’tis the season of accepting the casual butt slap, the between the legs center snap, the gang shower towel snap, and having your team mate stick their penis in your ear while shouting “YOU KNOW YOU WANT SOME OF THIS, MAN!”), or unfavorably comparing their current partner to Bo Derek or Marge Simpson.

Yes ladies, I know I’m no Gene Kelly either.  As my Sainted Aunty Mame said- that’s why they invented lights.

Surprisingly enough very little is known of Ravel’s romantic life which has led some to speculate he was an extremely closeted homosexual.  Considering that Cosmopolitan Europe in general and Paris in particular was amazingly tolerant, while I admit the possibility I have no difficulty at all accepting his own explanation, which was that he was married to his work.  This is the way I feel about things and one of the reasons I score so high on the Sherlock scale (though I’m a polymath and not a specialist) and don’t have problems working with women as colleagues or superiors.

Harry: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

Harry: No you don’t.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: You only think you do.

Sally: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Harry: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?

Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.

Have I mentioned Harry is a pretty big asshole?  I’m telling you without pervasive cultural brainwashing and Rom-Com (what’s so damn romantic about it anyway?) people like him would never, ever get laid which would go far in improving the gene pool.

So, was it good for you?

Back to the Cheese Shop-

What a senseless waste of human life.

If you think your companion an enthusiast of the Terpsichorean muse, take them dancing.  Dancing is all about sex.  It makes the mid-back and shoulder erogenous zones, the touch of the hand an electric zap, the scent of pheromones an exotic perfume.

Ballet on the other hand is an esoteric intellectual enterprise, a soulless display of Athleticsm and Art deliberately stylized to remove any icky feelings other than pity.  Feigning an appreciation for it is the preening of a peacock.  If you’re not staring at the company considering who can crush you with their thighs, you’re probably surreptitiously checking your iPhone for the latest scores and longing for the sweet release of Death.

My suggestion is that you close your eyes and tell your companion that you’re trying to appreciate the music (some of which is not so bad) and if you fall asleep pray that you don’t snore or drool on yourself too much.

Today’s case in point- Daphnis et Chloé.

Ravel called it a “symphonie choréographique” (choreographic symphony) and it was commissioned by Diaghilev, unlike most Ballets (and Operas) it has a happy ending.

The intervention of Pan is manifest. The old shepherd Lammon explains that, if Pan has saved Chloe, it is in memory of the nymph Syrinx, whom the god once loved. Daphnis and Chloe mime the tale of Pan and Syrinx. Chloe plays the young nymph wandering in the meadow. Daphnis as Pan appears and declares his love. The nymph rebuffs him. The god becomes more insistent. She disappears into the reeds. In despair, he picks several stalks to form a flute and plays a melancholy air. Chloe reappears and interprets in her dance the accents of the flute. The dance becomes more and more animated and, in a mad whirling, Chloe falls into Daphnis’s arms. Before the altar of the Nymphs, he pledges his love, offering two sheep. A group of girls enters dressed as bacchantes, shaking tambourines. Daphnis and Chloe embrace tenderly. A group of youths rushes onstage. There is joyful commotion.

A joyful commotion, what’s not to like?  Unless you’re an unlucky sheep of course.

I’m sure I’ve told you about grandfather’s old ram.

You see, Sile Hawkins was-no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all-it was a galoot by the name of Filkins-I disremember his first name; but he was a stump-come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuzhe thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson’s head, poor old filly. She was a good soul-had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn’t any, to receive company in; it warn’t big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn’t noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t’other one was looking as straight ahead as a spyglass. Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn’t work, somehow-the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, ‘Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss Wagner dear’-and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again-wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway, becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yeller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow.

Oh, yeah.  So here’s grandfather’s old ram Daphnis et Chloé in a 9 part playlist performed by the Royal Ballet.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

News

A Stress Test for Mario Draghi and the European Central Bank

By JACK EWING and BINYAMIN APPELBAUM, The New York Times

JAN. 2, 2015

Mr. Draghi, the central bank’s president, told reporters on that early December afternoon that it was ready to deploy new weapons against the eurozone’s dangerously low inflation rate. Though this 19-nation bloc is one of the world’s richest economies, it has never really recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis. And low inflation is one of the impediments to growth.

…

“I find the European policies to be baffling in terms of how bad they are,” Frederic Mishkin, a former Fed governor who is now a professor of banking and financial institutions at Columbia University, said at a monetary policy conference in November. “If it’s all about inflation, then inflation is way too low.”

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“I certainly believe that both in Europe and in Japan, the willingness to tackle a declining inflation rate has been too gradual, and it’s much less effective if it’s gradual,” said Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

The Art World’s Patron Satan

By CHRISTOPHER GLAZEK, The New York Times

DEC. 30, 2014

Over a lunch of salad and steamed vegetables – Simchowitz was trying to lose 15 pounds and had instructed his staff to snatch away pastries and schedule sessions at SoulCycle to help him tone his physique – I asked Simchowitz why he was so unpopular among his art-world peers. “I’m the poster child of evil speculation,” Simchowitz acknowledged, munching his veggies, “but it’s totally incorrect.” Every dollar he made, he claimed, went directly back to feeding emerging artists. “I am 100 percent invested in art. I have no working capital. I make $100,000, I pay my taxes and overhead, $50,000 goes back to supporting some young artist’s career. It’s a very efficient system.” Galleries and museums, he pointed out, effectively forced artists to subsidize sky-high rents and unwieldy bureaucracies. It was true that he traded pieces with speculators, but as a necessary evil to fund his artists in advance of their eventual payday.

Art speculators caused trouble, argued Simchowitz, not when they flipped their works but when they cashed out. “The problem is when the parasites come and extract dollars to buy a Ferrari or go to St. Bart’s for the weekend. You have a lot of people coming in – literally stockbrokers, bankers, speculators – who have no interest in art, who are just trying to gain. I am not one of these people. You can spend five minutes here and see I invest in cultural production.” Indeed, the fruits of Simchowitz’s cultural investments lined the walls. Over the sofa in the living room hung three large Parker Itos from the series “The Agony and the Ecstasy”; Sterling Ruby adorned his bedroom and kitchen.

He went on to claim, though, that many of the worst offenders were not the speculator-barbarians at the gate but high-profile collectors – he wouldn’t name them on the record – revered within the community. “The vampires of the business are in the system! The problem is that these people are at St. Bart’s. They’ve got names. The galleries like names.” Museums liked names, too, and would often blindly award board seats to regal-sounding donors with deep pockets. “They don’t understand it’s actually a divorced drug addict or a rich socialite who basically wants to be on a board as a trophy.” Simchowitz suggested that galleries and museums preferred “social investors” to “capital investors” because wealthy divorcés were easier to control than market sharks. “My ex-stepmother was on the board of MoCA. I know what these women are like. My father has collected my whole life. I know what they’re like. The galleries want a very specific song. They want Beethoven’s Fifth.” Simchowitz, on the other hand, was serving Iggy Azalea, bringing “realness” – or his idea of realness – to an art culture plagued by hypocrisy and prevarication.

…

Among art-world rituals, the studio visit is one of the holiest. Whereas film directors do their scouting like cattle drivers, corralling actors through humiliating casting calls, gallerists and curators cultivate relationships with artists by trekking to far-flung neighborhoods (Bushwick, Highland Park) and indulging long, wandering discussions about theory and practice, inflected by deadly, half-read undergrad syllabuses. Dealers make these journeys because they bolster the important art-world conceit that gallerists and artists meet as equals. For artists, studio visits provide the opportunity to explain how individual pieces fit within their broader practice, thereby giving contextual heft to work that might otherwise appear flimsy or mysterious. Simchowitz, however, mostly shuns this convention. If he’s interested in an artist’s work, he asks the artist to forward images via email or text message. His decision to drop by and check on Morgan Richard Murphey was partly for my benefit but also motivated by practicality: Murphey, who didn’t own a cellphone, seemed ill prepared for his impending show. It was face to face or not at all.

…

The first call came from Guy Starkman, a restaurateur and nightclub owner, who explained that he was thankful to Simchowitz for introducing him to the emerging art market. It felt, he said, like a game where a guy like him could actually get an edge.

“I’m not a big fan in investing in other people’s businesses,” he said in a raspy, aggressive voice suggestive of a minor character on HBO’s “Entourage.” “If you’re not an insider, you’re just some idiot throwing darts at a board. I don’t have a lot of input into what Tim Cook and Apple are doing with their next iPhone, but Stefan is finding these young artists that he’s trying to nurture. He shows me images, and I give him input, and I feel like I’m part of the process.” Starkman seemed to get a contact high from being, as he put it, “present at the creation.” The feeling was apparently infectious. “I can tell you 20 guys that I know that five years ago didn’t know anything about art and now they’re all over art.”

Starkman was referring to people like the professional poker player Justin Smith and the Buffalo Bills linebacker Keith Rivers. “They just want to go to Stefan’s house,” Starkman said. “They want to talk about who’s next and what he’s working on. He’s created a culture.” Starkman acknowledged that Simchowitz’s crew was different from the collecting circles typically found in Europe or New York. “In New York it’s all hobnob and high society, very aristocratic, all these old-school guys. Who says that art is only for Eli Broad and the Rockefellers?”

Most of Simchowitz’s clients weren’t rich enough to buy a Gerhard Richter, but they were rich enough to not have to think twice about dropping 20 grand on a couch. Why not spend that money on emerging art? Nobody cares about your couch, Starkman observed. “But if you have a great Oscar Murillo hanging in your house, and you can tell the story about how you found this guy three years ago and you loved his work, and you can chart it, it’s a much more interesting thing to do.”

After getting off the phone with Starkman, Simchowitz singled him out as exactly the kind of upstanding American that the traditional art world refused to countenance. “They’re not going to deal with Guy Starkman because Guy has three kids and he hasn’t missed a soccer match in three years.” Starkman couldn’t go to Art Basel if it meant missing five of his kids’ games. Other clients of Simchowitz’s were simply too busy. “Sean Parker does not have time to be at Art Basel at 12 o’clock – generally he wakes up at 3.”

Obama imposes new sanctions against North Korea in response to Sony hack

Dan Roberts, The Guardian

Friday 2 January 2015 16.08 EST

Despite some continued claims from outside the US government that the hack may have been the work of disgruntled employees instead, the White House on Friday followed through on its threat to seek revenge, blaming the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for “provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies, particularly its destructive and coercive cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment”.

…

Nevertheless, a senior administration official told reporters in a phone briefing that the FBI continued to be adamant that North Korea was to blame for the attack, insisting independent experts questioning its theory were limited in number and did not have access to the same information.

“We are standing by our assessment,” said one US official.

The White House also insists that the sanctions, though barring only limited further commercial engagement with the already heavily-isolated state, were a significant step because they were the first time it has retaliated for cyber-attacks against a company.

North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

01/01/2015 10:30 AM

The New York Times – as usual – corruptly granted anonymity to “senior administration officials” to disseminate their inflammatory claims with no accountability. These hidden “American officials” used the Paper of Record to announce that they “have concluded that North Korea was ‘centrally involved’ in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.” With virtually no skepticism about the official accusation, reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth deemed the incident a “cyberterrorism attack” and devoted the bulk of the article to examining the retaliatory actions the government could take against the North Koreans.

…

The NYT and Post engaged in this stenography in the face of numerous security experts loudly noting how sparse and unconvincing was the available evidence against North Korea. Kim Zetter in Wired – literally moments before the NYT laundered the accusation via anonymous officials – proclaimed the evidence of North Korea’s involvement “flimsy.” About the U.S. government’s accusation in the NYT, she wisely wrote: “they have provided no evidence to support this and without knowing even what agency the officials belong to, it’s difficult to know what to make of the claim. And we should point out that intelligence agencies and government officials have jumped to hasty conclusions or misled the public in the past because it was politically expedient.”

Numerous cyber experts subsequently echoed the same sentiments. Bruce Schneier wrote: “I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it.” The day before Obama’s press conference, long-time expert Marc Rogers detailed his reasons for viewing the North Korea theory as “unlikely”; after Obama’s definitive accusation, he comprehensively reviewed the disclosed evidence and was even more assertive: “there is NOTHING here that directly implicates the North Koreans” (emphasis in original) and “the evidence is flimsy and speculative at best.”

Yet none of this expert skepticism made its way into countless media accounts of the Sony hack. Time and again, many journalists mindlessly regurgitated the U.S. Government’s accusation against North Korea without a shred of doubt, blindly assuming it to be true, and then discussing, often demanding, strong retaliation. Coverage of the episode was largely driven by the long-standing, central tenet of the establishment U.S. media: government assertions are to be treated as Truth.

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It’s tempting to say that the U.S. media should have learned by now not to uncritically disseminate government claims, particularly when those claims can serve as a pretext for U.S. aggression. But to say that, at this point, almost gives them too little credit. It assumes that they want to improve, but just haven’t yet come to understand what they’re doing wrong.

But that’s deeply implausible. At this point – eleven years after the run-up to the Iraq War and 50 years after the Gulf of Tonkin fraud – any minimally sentient American knows full well that their government lies frequently. Any journalist understands full well that assuming government claims to be true, with no evidence, is the primary means by which U.S. media outlets become tools of government propaganda.

U.S. journalists don’t engage in this behavior because they haven’t yet realized this. To the contrary, they engage in this behavior precisely because they do realize this: because that is what they aspire to be. If you know how journalistically corrupt it is for large media outlets to uncritically disseminate evidence-free official claims, they know it, too. Calling on them to stop doing that wrongly assumes that they seek to comport with their ostensible mission of serving as watchdogs over power. That’s their brand, not their aspiration or function.

Many of them benefit in all sorts of ways by dutifully performing this role. Others are True Believers: hard-core nationalists and tribalists who see their “journalism” as a means of nobly advancing the interests of the state and corporate officials whom they admire and serve. At this point, journalists who mindlessly repeat government claims like this are guilty of many things; ignorance of what they are doing is definitely not one of them.

Another Reactor Closes, Punctuating New Reality for U.S. Nuclear Power

by Christina Nunez, National Geographic

Published January 1, 2015

As another nuclear power plant closed this week, the United States faced a dwindling fleet of aging reactors, few new projects, and the challenge of safely mothballing radioactive fuel for decades.

Almost all its nearly 100 remaining reactors will be more than 60 years old by 2050. Their owners will have to decide whether the investments needed to keep them running are worth it, given the influx of cheap natural gas that has reshaped the U.S. energy economy.

So far, nuclear isn’t winning. Vermont Yankee, which shut down Monday after 42 years of operation, is the fourth U.S. nuclear facility to close in two years. For the owners of each recent retiree-from Vermont Yankee to San Onofre in California, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, and Crystal River in Florida-the math just didn’t work.

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In a final rule issued this year, the NRC said that spent fuel could be stored safely at nuclear sites for 60 years or more. Timothy Frazier, a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which advocates for a federal waste site, says that decision contributed to a lack of urgency in Washington to hammer out a long-term solution to the nation’s nuclear waste.

“It can sit for 60 years, or it can sit for 100 years,” says Frazier, noting that spent nuclear fuel has to be isolated for hundreds of thousands of years as a potential hazard to people and the environment. “That’s not the end of the problem.”

Blogs

• Tell me how “effective” “Broken Windows Policing” is again Mr. Bratton, by: ek hornbeck, DocuDharma
• Wrapping up one year and unwrapping the next, by: Robyn, DocuDharma
• Regulations for Pissing on Cheney’s Grave Announced, by: mishima, DocuDharma
• As FBI’s Amerithrax Case Continues to Crumble, Bureau Digs in on North Korea Claims, By emptywheel
• Oregon Football Players Chant ‘No Means No’ At Quarterback Accused Of Rape, by Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress