Discreet Illusion of Academic Freedom

The latest JSTOR imbroglio - see here and here for instance - culminates in the wisdom of concealment: 

Giving libraries the power to change the default setting such that non-accessible articles remain hidden is now a “number one priority,” see: Inside Higher Ed

Galileo to Hannity, Limbaugh, misc. asshats etc.

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.  ~ The Assayer.

rules of the game

Today (2007) any wealthy individual can take $1 million and go to a prime broker and leverage this amount three times; then the resulting $4 million ($1 equity and $3 debt) can be invested in a fund or funds that will in turn leverage these $4 million three or four times and invest them in a hedge fund; then the hedge fund will take these funds and leverage them three or four times and buy some very junior tranche of a CDO that is itself leveraged nine or ten times. At the end of this credit chain, the initial $1 million of equity becomes a $100 million investment out of which $99 million is debt (leverage) and only $1 million is equity. So we got an overall leverage ratio of 100 to 1. Then, even a small 1% fall in the price of the final investment (CDO) wipes out the initial capital and creates a chain of margin calls that unravel this debt house of cards. roubini

More from The Great Crash 1929

...[Paulson] doesn’t dispute that he changed direction. Mr. Paulson said that by Oct. 2, as he was departing for a weekend getaway to an island with his family — his first weekend off in nearly two months — he told his staff, “We are going to put capital into banks first.”

Although the bailout bill still had not passed, the financial markets had deteriorated. He did not, however, inform Congress of his change of heart, and the House debate revolved almost entirely around the asset-purchase plan. media entity

bankrupting Sarah

The cheery, well-oiled mooseshit streaming from Sarah Palin, e.g.. . .

He knows to learn from the mistakes and blunders we have seen in the war in Iraq, especially. He will know how to implement the strategies, working with our commanders and listening to what they have to say, taking the politics out of these war issues. He'll know how to win a war.

. . .smacks of the perky fraudulence of certain mortgage maestros who got us into the mess we're in. The next time she says "John McCain and I will fix this you betcha!" someone needs to invite her to offer a few details.

How come we never do? A hypothesis: it's because we have become so habituated to commercial advertising speech -- its intonation, its cheerful confidence, its sound bites innocent of logic, evidence, truth-claims -- that we've forgotten that arguments are supposed to cohere, gather force from reference and relation, connect with historical and scientific knowledge, carry within them their own auto-critique.

We've forgotten that. USians growing up in a TV dominated household have been exposed to Yottabytes of commercial bilge over the past 25 years, but not a single passage from Homer, or Aquinas, or Epictetus, or Spinoza. 

Media are as media do.

NewsPorn

The US media has apparently learned nothing from the hot anal action it provided leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in view of its Pre-K-level coverage of the conflict in Georgia/Ossetia.






A couple of salubrious correctives:

CounterSpin - Interview with Helen Cobban. (See also this earlier bit).

Informant here, here, here, here, and passim.

reality-based reality check

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I believe we can find common ground to get something done mumble mumble get something done mumble big mumble mumble bigness, big dick, dickness, mighty bollock of greensnap mumble mumble really frickin big.

Asia calls bushit.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I think the place to start is to recognize why this recession is different from all other recessions. This began and is continuing with a collapse in credit markets, and the collapse in credit markets is, in turn, the result of deregulation gone nuts. And it’s a repeat of a lot of things that happened in the 1920s, where there was too much speculation with too much borrowed money and a complete lack of transparency. The regulators, the public had no idea of what these bonds that had been created out of subprime mortgages really contained, what they were worth. The people who packaged them were not subject to any kind of regulatory scrutiny.

And when it turned out that a lot of these loans were never going to be paid back, the layer upon layer upon layer of bonds and then securities based on the bonds—you know, if you can picture the World Trade Center collapsing floor by floor or you can picture the collapse of the Ponzi schemes of the 1920s, that’s a good—or horrible—analogy. And when you have a credit contraction, it means that banks have less capital against which to make loans, and lowering interest rates doesn’t fix that.

There are two other things that lowering interest rates and an ordinary stimulus package won’t fix. One, you alluded to in your opening comments, Amy, and that’s the collapse in housing prices. At the current rate of decline in housing values, American homeowners—and that’s about 70 percent of Americans—are going to lose $2.2 trillion of net worth this year alone. Well, when you lose $2.2 trillion of savings, you’re not inclined to rush out and do home improvements, you’re not inclined to rush out and buy durable goods. And again, compared to that kind of a loss, a stimulus—and they’re talking about $140–$145 billion, that’s one percent of GDP—that’s a drop in the bucket.

Lastly, this occurs on top of thirty years of increasing insecurity on a whole bunch of fronts: the greater risk of losing your job, the greater risk of having your paycheck not keep pace with inflation, rising energy costs, rising tuition costs, rising health insurance costs. All of the things that make you middle class have become more difficult to attain in the past thirty years. So you’ve got a three-layer cake here. You’ve got this thirty-year history of flat or declining living standards for most Americans, you’ve got this terrible weakness in financial markets, and you’ve got this housing collapse.

OA: Obviate Arseholiationism

Reminder to US citizens

Please contact your Senators this week, and ask them to support an OA mandate at the NIH. Here are some links to help:

• The alert from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This includes some useful background and talking points. (Also see my blog post on it with comments.)
• The alert from the American Library Association. This includes a web form to make it easier to get your message to your Senators.

via Open Access News