Horner's Corner

Let Michael Caine leave. Fairer taxes must be made to stick if we’re to avoid the cuts in services Cameron has in mind

It’s more than a week since Alistair Darling’s budget, but the howls of protest haven’t stopped for a day ever since. That’s not been the public sector employees facing a harsh squeeze on jobs and pay who’ve been squealing, or the million workers expected to join the dole queues in the next year, or even the majority or people who will have to stump up another half per cent of national insurance contributions every month. No, the outrage has come from the richest 2% of taxpayers who are going to have to part with 50% of earnings over £150,000 – and personal allowances over £100,000 – and later stand to lose top-rate tax relief on pension contributions.

Never mind that the wealthiest taxpayers will still be contributing to the public purse at a 10% lower rate than for nine of Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in office, or that six of the richest OECD countries have higher rates. From the Mail to the Financial Times, a crusade has been joined against the new 50p tax. This is nothing but a “fiscal lynching”, it’s claimed, a “spiteful” display of the “age of envy”, and a disastrous outbreak of “class war”. Sir Richard Branson, whose business empire is ultimately owned in the Virgin Islands, insisted that 50% would be a “block on the next wave of entrepreneurs”.

via Seumas Milne: This naked display of class egotism has to be defeated | Comment is free | The Guardian.

A nondescript express in from the South,

Crowds round the ticket barrier, A face

To welcome which the mayor has not contrived

Bugles or braid: Something about the face

Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,

He walks out briskly to infect a city

Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

WH Auden

Let me tell you the basics of risk communication, and then I want to apply them, a little bit, to bird flu. The fundamental principle of risk communication can be summarized in a number, [which] is the correlation between how much harm a risk does and how upset people get about it. If you look at a long list of risks, and you rank them in order of how upset people get [about them], then you rank them again in order of how much harm they do, then you correlate the two, you get a glorious 0.2. Those of you who remember your statistics know you can square a correlation coefficient to get the percentage of variance accounted for: If you square 0.2, you get 0.04, or 4% of the variance. That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not.

more from UPMC here.

via 3quarksdaily.

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The “NAFTA Flu”: Critics Say Swine Flu Has Roots in Forcing Poor Countries to Accept Western Agribusiness

As the US reports its first known death from the global swine flu, the World Health Organization has raised its pandemic threat level. Several countries around the world have banned the import of US and Mexican pork products. We speak to professor and author Robert Wallace, who says the swine flu is partly the outcome of neoliberal policies that forced poorer countries to open their markets to poorly regulated Western agribusiness giants. [includes rush transcript]
http://www.democracynow.org

Democracy Now! | Radio and TV News.

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So What..(1) (c. 1959)

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So What (2) (1964)

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. (Henri Matisse)

It’s been a hard day, the economy is in trouble and the future is, as ever, uncertain. So welcome M. Matisse, ready to offer you a glimpse of beauty – albeit a domestic, intimate kind of beauty. Here is a view of the bourgeois family at home.  A music lesson – and the piece is by Haydn.

Matisse has something in common with Joseph Haydn.  Both made remarks to the effect that they viewed their art as a way of bringing refreshment and renewal to the ordinary person (or ordinary bourgeois, in Matisse’s case). Pleasure to the people: one can’t think of  a less “romantic’ attitude – imagine Wagner saying anything like it. But these artists come from the epochs preceding and following what the books call the romantic period, and both often aim to please (although they can do a lot more than that).

So sit back and relax….

Long Sunday: The Discomfort of the Establishment

I cite: Long Sunday: The Discomfort of the Establishment.

Slavoj Zizek

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what most is already known for a long time.

More here

I find this painting peculiarly strange and haunting. I first came across it in the 1970s, reproduced on the front  cover of the old Penguin edition of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, so it’s got that association for me. It crops up now and again in all sorts of places. Rachmaninov wrote an Isle of the Dead symphonic movement with a motif that evokes the rowing of Charon, ferryman to the land of the shades. Is that him, in the boat there?

It’s fin de siecle piece of German (in Bocklin’s case Swiss-German) symbolist and somewhat ‘decadent’ art, a minor genre that is an acquired taste perhaps. I find it only suits certain dreamy, melancholic moods. When I went to Venice and saw their island cemetery I got a sort of shiver of recognition – it reminded me of this, and again, when I saw tombs cut into the Lydian rock face on the southern Anatolian coast. . Did Bocklin know either of them? did they influence him? Whatever the answer to that, this painting subsists in the dimension of dreamscape, of sleep, of the Big Sleep…

The artist returned to the idea several times, and I’ve reproduced some below, an in addition The Sacred Grove and The Villa by the Sea. He’s an artist I find capable of provoking reverie and repulsion..

What are these strange dreams?

The Villa by the Sea:

The Sacred Grove

The Little Rock Nine

The people pictured here are worth our memories. They are part of the challenge to US racism that began before they were born and which continues to this day – whatever the colour of the President may be.

The Little Rock Nine, as they later came to be called, were the first black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. These remarkable young African-American students challenged segregation in the deep South and won.

Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating and threatening black students—Central High School was a notorious example. But the Little Rock Nine were determined to attend the school and receive the same education offered to white students, no matter what. Things grew ugly and frightening right away. On the first day of school, the governor of Arkansas ordered the state’s National Guard to block the black students from entering the school. President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to protect the students.

Nine black teenagers challenged a racist system and defeated it. Sometimes the good guys do win. But is isn’t over, for here’s the thing: in the USA (and not only there, of course) being black goes with being poor, being in prison, being the victim of crime and economic bad times. The victims of the sub-prime mortgage crisis were disproportionately poor and black; the bankers who were bailed out mainly well off and white.

There’s still a lot to be done.

It’s Better to Have Rich Parents Than to be Educated, in the US

Via Andrew Sullivan, Ryan Avent points to a remarkable finding in some recent research on education and economic well-being:

More here:

via 3quarksdaily.

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