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THE ISSUES

margin matters

Third Hearty Connection
Candidate Jim Duensing to upset Republicans

LW: Saturday, January 30, 2010 Lew the Soothsayer

Republicans have no chance, thanks to Jim Duensing. Just as Libertarian Michael Cloud knocked out John Ensign in the 1998 race. Duensing will do the same to this year's Republican Senate candidate. His call for small government and fiscal responsibility will pull enough conservative votes away from the left to sway an election. Current odds are 120:100 that Duensing will cover the margin between the two major party candidates with Reid winning. I see him beating the margin by thousands of votes.
So far Duensing is the only Nevada senate candidate promising to sponsor the sister legislation to Ron Paul's H.R. 1207 and H.R. 833, which would drastically improve the strength, security, and value of our American dollar at home and around the world.
As an Economist, Duensing knows that you cannot spend or inflate your way out of debt. Instead we need substantial and systemic reform of Big Banking that will make sure every dollar in every working man's pocket is as good as gold. His first act upon taking a seat in the United States Senate, would be to sponsor the sister legislation to Ron Paul's H.R. 1207 and H.R. 833. What other candidate is doing that?

lazy days sum'ore

high beams

NIRVANA: LIVE AT READING

Rolling Stone 10/92
"The staggering energy and intensity radiating from the stage never let up... Cobain's ravaged pop songs coming off like some dream marriage of the Sex Pistols and the Beatles."

Product Information: Ranked #1 in Kerrang Magazine's "100 Gigs That Shook The World" and voted as "Nirvana's #1 Greatest Moment" by fans in an NME poll, Nirvana's historic August 30, 1992 headlining appearance at the UK's Reading Festival is one of the most bootlegged concerts in the annals of rock n roll.

cinema

The Union: The Business Behind Getting High

Starring Joe Rogan, Tommy Chong,and Brett Harvey
by Lewis Whitten
This movie makes a good argument for legalizing marijuana. Along the way you’ll tour thru twenty box cars buried underground in the mountains of British Columbia, used as a huge grow operation. Learn about corruption in the prison and drug testing industry. All the while getting a review of things you may already know - facts like nobody has ever died from smoking marijuana and other bits of marijuana trivia and history. There’s a discussion of the marijuana industry, that almost comes off as a guide on how to start your grow business. Its easy to watch and not to distracting from my FarmVille game.

learning curve

The Poetics of Spontaneous Order:
Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism

Mises Daily: Friday, January 22, 2010 by Paul A. Cantor

'The Money Lender and His Wife'
by Marinus van Reymerswaele (c. 1490–1567)

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
– Samuel Beckett

"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
– Theodor Adorno

[Chapter 1 of Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture]

I.

In the contemporary academy, to say that one is taking an economic approach to literature seems tantamount to saying that one is taking a Marxist approach. Despite the fact that there are many flourishing schools of economic thought (Keynesian, neoclassical, monetarist, supply side, public choice, to name but a few) — some of them quite antithetical to Marxism — only one seems to be employed in the study of culture, and indeed the whole field of what is called cultural studies is Marxist in its foundations.[1] One can of course find a good deal of variation among literary critics interested in economics, but it is almost always variation among different Marxist paradigms. One critic may use Marx himself, another may draw upon a twentieth-century Marxist revisionist such as Lukács or Adorno, still another may rely on even more sophisticated interpreters of Marx, such as Gramsci or Althusser. Consider, for example, this characterization of the development of the Birmingham school of cultural studies, which is supposed to give us an idea of its wide-ranging intellectual roots:
[Stuart] Hall sketches the achievements of the Birmingham Centre as a series of theoretical illuminations from abroad, beginning with a progressively radical or quasi-Marxist (but not clearly Marxist enough) tripartite Raymond Williams, through the importation of French structuralism (Barthes, Lévi-Strauss) and an older German Marxist tradition (Benjamin, Brecht), to an also tripartite but much more satisfactorily Marxist and vanguard Louis Althusser.
This passage comes close to summing up the standard recipe for economic criticism of literature — mix quasi-Marxism with vanguard Marxism, and add just a soupçon of fashionable French thought (structuralist or poststructuralist) to give it flavor.