Yuval Noah Harari explores the power of truth in the age of AI in this thought-provoking conversation about his new book “Nexus”. Don’t miss out on this deep dive into the intersection of democracy, artificial intelligence, history, and the concept of truth.
Yuval Noah Harari published an essay in the New York Times recently. “Large-scale democracies,” he wrote, “became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.” Well, we’re witnessing a major change in the underlying technology right now. Artificial intelligence is here, and if its proponents are to be believed, it will fundamentally transform how we consume information and communicate with each other. What this means for the future of democracy — and society as we know it — is the subject of Harari’s new book “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.”
Last weekend, I watched the movie “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg). I ended up thinking with Brody, Hooper, and Quint in the boat as an analogy for the US (and the West) especially when Quint’s decisions leave all three in a boat filling up with water, with a dead engine, and with no radio to call for help. 🙂
Quint is our current leadership. He refuses to acknowledge that the problem (a 25-foot great white shark) is beyond anything that his experience has dealt, so he tries all the old solutions and they fail, and fail catastrophically. He is motivated by pride and greed, he doesn’t want to share the reward for killing the shark.
Hooper is the scientist. He is ignored until the boat is a wreck, and he is only approached for help then, but by then he can’t do much.
Brody is (maybe?) the economist or activist. He sees the problem is way bigger than anticipated, the first thing he calls for is more resources to be brought to bear, but when I tries to call for that Quint destroys the radio.
In the end, Quint is eaten by the shark, Hooper escapes, and Brody kills the shark by the dumbest of luck. A more realistic ending is that they all get eaten.
(PS. I liked the movie far better than the book. Despite the million-to-one ending in the movie, it’s still more believable than the ending in the book).
If you limit credit card interest rates to 10%, you’re looking at a LOT of people who won’t be able to qualify for credit cards anymore. No bank is going to issue a 10% card to someone just out of college or someone who missed a couple of car payments in the past. And those people will simply be forced into even more predatory unregulated lending like payday loans.
What we really need is wages people can live on so they don’t have to carry so much debt. Capping credit card rates isn’t even serious as a band-aid proposal.
Good post yesterday on medieval universities. I didn’t know all that.
@ Bruce Wilder-
Bruce: “Any serious usury cap would cause a financial crisis for banks and related systems. As opposed to the financial crises of households caused by usury.”
I saw this come up on NC earlier today, and Yves S. said the more or less the same as you — it won’t happen — but with interesting specificity of details on why.
To whit: “There was a mini-crisis that was not well covered in connection with the Global Financial Crisis. Banks has sold off portfolios of credit card receivables. These were supposed to be transfers even though banks were still servicing the cards. When defaults mounted in the crisis, the buyers said, “You need to eat the losses or we will never buy this stuff again.” There was no way banks had the balance sheet capacity, much the less in a crisis, to retain new credit card receivables.
“However, if Trump finds a way to implement a variant of this idea (a cap at a higher level for new credit card loans), it would force the industry to go back to something like its model as of the 1980s: being much much much more stringent about extending credit, and imposing annual fees (which they all had as of then, the purpose was to assure they made some money on the consumer side from customers who paid off balances in full every month).”
Me: I recall the 1980s actually, and I don’t think the US economy now could survive the stringency on credit there was then, what with about one-third of the US population unable to cover an emergency/unexpected payout of $400 with cash on hand.
that’s why you go to postal banking. I’d probably give them a credit card w/prime +.5% in exchange for signing an organ donor permission (which is worth 60 or 70K iirc.) Let them have credit equal to their average income for the past 10 years + 5k or so, if they go over, let them go bankrupt if they choose, but no gov. credit for 5 years or whatever.
Bruce– what you share shows that Trump still has a few (right) “populist” instincts, and may not (?) be entirely sidelined with butt-hurt that Kamala ridiculed him about crowds leaving early, or spending his time explaining that “he’s a much better looking person than she is.”
Of course, it’s just as likely to actually happen if DJT gets into office as Kamala’s empty promises about finally helping the “middle class” under her administration. On the other hand, judging the millionaire & billionaire crowds who attended the DNC to her cabal that might mean people earning annually $275K to $1.5 million are “the middle”, so the rest of us will continue to be fvcked . . .
Real material benefits for anyone but lobbyists, the MIC, the FIRE sector, Big Pharma, etc. are not what either side of the duopoly, a 2-headed, rabid swine, will deliver. It’ll be more war, more environmental and social degradation, more spying and censorship, more cop violence and rabid nationalist (we can defeat Putin!! shriek the Dems, We are the Greatest Empire that ever existed in human history!”, we can jail the college brats who consider Palestinians human & put all the homeless & immigrants in work camps, promise the Rs) . . . In Leonard Cohen’s words, “Everybody knows that the good guys lost.” TINA, No hope, no change, just an Empire falling to pieces.
This is Trump, so this is a “a concept of a plan” not an actual practical policy proposal.
Like his raising taxes on hedge fund managers (he lowered them) or giving ‘everyone great health care’ (his ‘plan’ would have someone 60 paying the average personal income in PREMIUMS ALONE, let alone getting actual health care) or ‘bringing back manufacturing ‘ (his 2017 tax cut made it easier, not harder, for companies to outsource production elsewhere). And there’s “renegotiating NAFTA’ where he put int he same people who had originally negotiated the treaty and these made essentially no changes.
As someone who had hoped back then that the anti-immigration and veiled racism of his 2016 campaign was just ‘theater’, ‘red meat’, for his base, while proposals like those above were his ‘real agenda’, it turns out that Trump’s hatred of the ‘other’ was the only thing you could count on while all the other policy proposals were ‘theater’. Yet people fell for them, and astonishingly still fall for them.
Damn Mark Level, you nailed it.
Rolling over now.
Stick a knife in my belly.
I’m done.
Just kidding—not so nihilistic.
But it’s a cold cruel world out there, and few seem to give a good flying f*ck.
Ha ha. When my credit card rate jumped 20 points from 8%, I tried to plead my case, but my only recipient was some poor girl in a Bombay call center, so I took my bankruptcy lawyer’s advice and said screw it.
A few months later I’m called to the phone in a foreign country while I’m in the kitchen doing dinner prep, and I find myself talking to a Bank of America bounty hunter who’s trying to cut me a deal to erase my debt for 5k or something.
And I’m like screw you. (By the way, I never missed a payment in 20 years and always payed on the principle above the interest. Once I even paid it off.)
So we argued back and forth with me demanding how the hell he tracked me down while he played coy, but finally conceded probably out of pride, that the trick is contact your previous employer to find your whereabouts. I thanked him and hung up.
After the call, the kitchen staff was all porque tal agresivo? And I’m like cuños, the world’s full of assholes.
Anyway, you need a card, and thank god for credit unions and debit cards that allow you to pay as you go, although cold cash is best of all.
Ta.
Here lies the body of Mary Lee
Died at the age of a hundred and three
For fifteen years she kept her virginity
Not a bad record for this vicinity
Quint was an ‘old-school’ working class boater/fisherman who had a lifetime of real-world experience with sharks. This was a time when guys like him could live on their boat in a harbor (near impossible in most locales these days) or perhaps stay in any number of very affordable units on Long Island (or in New England) at the time.
Quint lived ‘outside the matrix’ or largely outside the mainstream economic/political system – probably not paying any income taxes of note, though obviously paying taxes on, say gas for the boat (I think Quint’s boat was diesel) and other products and – to a lesser degree in the case of a Quint – services.
Quint may have paid a boat slip fee, or he may have worked something out with the truly local owner of the harbor. This local owner did their banking at one of the many small banks or savings and loans that were available because ‘big finance’ wasn’t nearly as big, and structures in place and enforced by personnel (is policy) enforced more competition among them.
This was all accepted by a majority of society such that it could be said to be the generally accepted and approved of (not just ‘tolerated’) ‘zeitgeist’ of the overall society.
A large complex society must allow for this. There must be sufficient ‘space’ and inbuilt opportunities for ‘self-employment’ of all manner, and cheap housing, which are obviously the result of political/economic structures that allow them to exist. A general ‘societal zeitgeist’ follows from this, if done artfully/skillfully.
The ‘zeitgeist’ in modern complex societies is set and ingrained and subsequently repeatedly ‘enforced’ (and thus deeply ingrained) by the media, This was true then, but to a much much lesser degree. There was much more ‘space’ in life away from media, The zeitgeist wasn’t nearly as propaganda and media-saturated as it is now because the full spectrum surveillance-state structure of which the media is an integral part wasn’t in place yet.
You couldn’t make the movie ‘Network’ today. What would you possibly say? Throw away the phones forever?
Of course, no one stopped watching TV after that movie was made. And the movie itself didn’t dare talk about propaganda you might find embedded in movies at the movie theater, like where you’d go to see Network at the time.
In fact, that movie was made just in time for the soon-to-be released wholesale introduction of ‘music televison’ to society. What a rollicking combination of image and narrative!
And Joe Turner read books for the CIA.
Again, due to the wanton wholesale destruction of the previous ‘order of things’ which included enforced regulations that prompted competition among many many players, we are now down to I believe five media conglomerates – themselves now largely controlled by PE or ‘larger finance’ – as opposed to the 50-100 or so companies at the time of the making of Jaws.
Yves Smith wrote a piece a few months ago about all the affordable housing options available for humans like Quint that were largely borne of New Deal political/economic structuring policies – policies that were in fact pushed for by a wide range of political factions including ‘populists’ and those to the left of FDR.
These are all gone now.
It was the middle class people on Amity Island who, god forbid, may have had to go on welfare if the beaches were closed due to ongoing shark attacks.
It was a tourist town whose populations swell in summer and many of its year-round residents often depend on having a good summer season to get them through the entire year.
Interestingly, neither Brody nor Hooper have this particular limiting economic/resource factor in their lives. Both have more stable jobs with benefits.
Perhaps even more interestingly, nor does Quint, though for different reasons.
In this particular situation, Brody, Hooper, and Quint are more ‘stable’ in their economic autonomy, though Brody/Hooper for quite different reasons than Quint. The people who sell their wares and sell food and ice cream during the summer are closer to taking a big hit – within the system – than Brody and Hooper.
Quint, who lives on the outskirts of the system, doesn’t have this issue either.
But notice that Quint simply says that they’ll ‘be on welfare for the winter’ if they don’t act quickly and pay him ten grand for the shark-kill mission – which he wants to do alone because he’s only ever known how to operate largely alone, and presumably also because the payout will be all his.
Quint’s a rather savvy businessman in his own right.
In fact, he may have ginned the whole thing up, sharks and all, in order to put himself in position to for the big payout. That would be quite a ‘deep state’ endeavor carried out by the lone Quint!
Seriously though, notice that Quint DOES NOT say something like ‘that’ll put all your business’ on a payin’ basis OTHERWISE YOU’LL BE IN DESPERATE STRAITS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AND YOU’LL BE FACING HOMELESSNESS LIKE SO MANY OTHERS IN THIS COUNTRY THESE DAYS.’
And none of the townspeople are in fact worried that things will get that bad because there is at least a minimal welfare system in place that people can use as needed to avoid such precarity.
At worst, they’d have to resort to welfare which wasn’t something someone necessarily wanted to be on and which wasn’t exactly something that one would go screaming from the rooftops. But it was there, it provided adequate resources as opposed to today, and it was relatively easy to navigate.
And this was the generally accepted zeitgeist of society in this place at this time.
Brody was both a ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ guy who was both somewhat ‘educated’ (not as ‘highly’ as Hooper from the out-of-town ocean institute) but also lived and worked in town and thus was both well-known among the townfolk and wasn’t seen or perceived as ‘over-educated’ or ‘high-brow’ in any way. Sheriff Brody was generally liked and certainly respected by the majority of the town.
This was also before the local police became highly militarized in this country.
Brody, who didn’t like ‘the water’ himself (that’s some bad hat, Harry), acted as the bridge between two guys who loved the water, though in very different ways.
Hooper’s scientism didn’t in any way tie him to theory above practice and experience, but could perhaps be said to be less immediately experiential than Quint. And Quint certainly didn’t have time for what he considered to be both an overemphasis on, and an overclassification of, things that were outside his purview anyway. Guy’s got a life to live.
Upon first meeting Hooper and seeing all his fancy sciency stuff, the very experienced Quint wondered aloud how it could possibly ever be useful: “Not sure what the shark is going to do with that tank…might eat it I suppose. Seen one eat a rocking chair one time.”
And Hooper, once out on the boat and really experiencing things the way perhaps he never had before, was quite keen to be part of the ‘old school’ way of using the barrels to bring the shark to the surface.
‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’
Quint correctly called the size of the shark when they first saw it. Hooper thought it was smaller than it actually was. Perhaps he needed a little more perspective of the kind Brody refused to give him a little later. Quint’s raw experiential background instantly ‘sizes’ the shark more accurately than Hooper’s largely theoretical background.
Once they do decide to use Hooper’s tank and poison dart, things don’t exactly go well. Quint was right – the shark ate the damn thing!
Jaws was ultimately killed by inserting a highly flammable tank of compressed gas into its mouth and shooting the tank with a rifle, this blowing Jaws up forever. Even though Quint was dead by this time, the method of killing turned out to be rather rudimentary – a method the Quint character himself would certainly have employed were he still around.
Of the three main characters, only Sheriff Brody has a ‘stable’ woman in his life – the wonderful Lorraine Gary:
“We’re also planning on bringing in some experts from the oceanographic institute on the mainland.”
Turns out you didn’t need them.
How much did the town have to pay for this ‘expertise’ from Big Science? Does the oceanographic institute itself depend on contracts like this, such that there are vested interests of a larger bureaacracy at play here? Did Hooper get commission on top of salary?
By the way, in Jaws II Cable Junction’s cable was the shark killer. Science advances, but rudimentary techniques continue to kill the sharks that plague us.
those people will simply be forced into even more predatory unregulated lending like payday loans.
There is no upside for the debtor in easy credit at 25%. That there is predatory lending at 400% is horrifying. But, credit at usurious interest rate doesn’t help someone who lacks the income — it just reduces their future income. Nor does it help “the economy” to draw resources into the dark business of extracting blood from turnips.
Yves Smith loves to stroke her own ego with knowing remarks about obscure back office arrangements constraining financial policy. It is nonsense. The big banks should have been broken and broken up in the financial crisis of 2007-8. Most key banking functions, like assessing credit risk, do not scale and banking becomes less efficient as very large institutions are forced by their own size and scope to adopt algorithmic methods. Credit card operations are very profitable for the big banks because it is all a numbers game run by computers for monopoly cartels, with people supplying only the colorful marketing offers to draw new suckers in the door, but from a social welfare point-of-view, it is a social loss that destroys lives and reduces net household income for poor and merely middle-class credit card users. Rich credit card users get airline points and cash back, further exacerbating income inequality. Most will think they deserve these benefits and many will congratulate themselves on the social conscience that tenderly advocates for keeping the lifeline of “easy” credit open to those people who “need” it.
The Israeli population of Israel since 1967 has never been more than one smaill US state.
It is clamed that US aid to Israel is a few billion a year and has been a few billion a year for decacdes, up until 2023.
Niether Symour Hirsh nor Chris Hedges nor Pepe Escobar nor anyone else for that matter has ever claimed that the US provides more aid than that every year to Israel.
i myself have doubts about whether or not any country could do what Israel does without substantially more aid from the US than is publically claimed.
Have I missed a publicly released information??
Escalation cycle intensifying. Reporting indicates that the IAF struck 300-400 aim points across Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah responded with ~140 rockets, ranging targets as far South as Haifa (reporting indicates that Ramat David AB was among the targets). This after a similar scale of Hezbollah launches on Friday on targets closer to the border, preceded by IAF strikes on Thursday night.
It harms them if they believe that their access to state services is predicated on their willingness to donate their organs, *particularly* if they believe that the level of medical care (or any other state service) they may receive is at all influenced by their potential value as an organ donor. The opinion polling on this would be apocalyptic and the offensive IO potential massive.
I wouldn’t view this as Hezbollah being pushed “over the edge” into some sort of emotional response. In my view, they’ve been deliberately placed on the horns of a strategic dilemma as a central element of Israeli national strategy. Whether the intensification cycle continues will tell us a lot about how Gallant’s rhetoric should be interpreted (i.e., are they attempting a relatively low-cost reset of the deterrence calculus or are they gearing up for something bigger).
Yes, the pager attacks were an escalation requiring Hezbollah to respond. There haven’t been attacks that deep into Israel since 2006. This is going to deeply intensify Israel’s internal refugee crisis if it continues.
But note that if the US really won’t support Israel in an offensive on Lebanon, seeing it as “Israel causing the war”, well, it’s going to be ugly for Israel.
I don’t buy Quint as the “working class hero” shtick. The very reason they end up in a boat with no working radio, taking in water, and with a blown engine was due to Quint’s decision-making. He was the one in-charge, he was the captain, and he was responsible for the situation they ended up in. That shark was just beyond his experience.
What’s your excuse for him destroying the radio? Even without a shark, you you might need to call for help (rogue wave? medical emergency?). And destroying his own boat’s engine? Hey, Quint could have admitted failure on the first try, refitted to go out for a second try, and still claim the money. He was just too prideful.
I don’t necessarily disparage ‘folk wisdom’ (my criticism of the old Jonny Quest cartoons was because the ‘Western arrogance’ of Dr. Quest and crew going to strange countries and knowing more about it than the natives about the place, in addition to the natives looking like buffoons). But I don’t worship it either. You’ll have the locals tell you that we have water moccasins here (we don’t) and all sorts of things about that simply aren’t true (many rat, corn, and king snakes die because they’re ‘copperheads’), and I’ve seen them do plenty of egregiously stupid things (like burn brush like ten feet away from their house). Also, I don’t see our lives as being governed by science, but by religion and tradition usually in the service of supporting and justifying the existing power structures and inequalities in society. I’m with Marvin Harris, taking a scientific perspective on human lifestyles is ‘the only thing that’s never been tried.”
To me, true ‘folk wisdom’ isn’t arrogant. Let me give as an example a TV show on an ultramarathon I saw ran on in the Australian outback. Most of the competitors were experienced ultramarathoners and/or triathletes, but one was a Australian aborigine who was pushing 70. The show followed the race, and showed how one experienced ultra athlete after another dropped out due to dehydration, blisters, sunburn, and other medical issues, while it showed the aborigine sitting in the shade in the middle of the day–he knew better to try to move in the middle of the during under the sun and in that heat! In other words, he was smart, he didn’t force things, or try to do anything beyond his means; and such his ‘folk wisdom’ was the exact opposite of someone like Quint. In the end the aborigine was only one of three participants to finish. The other two experienced ultra athletes were amazed at him walking up towards them near the finish line, and they all decided to cross the finish line together, simultaneously, so that all would ‘win’.
If you want to talk about the big issue of credit and loans in America, that’s a conversation worth having. Trump’s proposal isn’t that. It isn’t even in the same universe as that.
Trump’s “proposal,” such as it is, has three big problems:
1) It’s addressing a symptom rather than the root of the problem. People borrow money at high interest rates because it’s the only way they can make ends meet. Sure, there are some out there who go into credit card debt for luxury purchases, but for the majority, they have to do it to make ends meet. The best way to deal with that would be to address wages and the cost of necessities. Capping credit card interest barely even qualifies as a band-aid.
2) It will have the (presumably) unintended consequence of making it impossible for large numbers of people to get credit cards. Since the proposal does nothing to address the root causes of why those people need to carry so much debt, all it will do is force them to seek other avenues to get loans. Those avenues are lightly regulated or totally unregulated and are even more predatory toward borrowers.
3) But it’s actually even worse than that, because credit cards with 10% interest don’t exist today for even the people with the very best credit. So limiting rates to 10% would effectively kill the credit card industry. Now, maybe killing the credit card industry as it currently exists would be a good thing–you could certainly argue that. But if you’re going to do something so drastic, you’d better have a plan for how to do it and something to replace it with. Trump’s proposal has neither of those things. And without them, you’re just knocking out one of the major pillars that supports our economy.
Now, again, you can say “well our economy shouldn’t be supported by mountains of consumer debt.” And sure, I’d agree with that. But if you want to change that, you need to have an idea for how to replace it with something better. Saying “well we’ll just kick this leg out from under the table and see what happens” is a recipe for disaster.
2 threads back, KT Chong claimed that Jimmy Dore is now “right wing.” Actually, JD says he is not right wing & that it’s a smear of the ShitLibs. (The Grayzone is called a “horseshoe” left AND right site by the MSM; it is anti-Imperialist and clearly left.)
Anyway, here’s a JD piece I just watched, Jimmy & Kurt Metzger are glad the Georgia D.A. dropped phony “money-laundering” charges against the Cop City Protesters there. They joke about the man with no powder burns on his arms shot 57 times by the Cop City Crew . . . I don’t think this is Right wing Narrative, but maybe KTC can explain what I’m missing?
(Posting here ‘coz I don’t know how far back Ian updates comments.)
I dunno.
Punch an organ.
Inflate your worth.
Lucy and a football.
Epstein and a tape.
Punch up punch down
Everybody’s going down
No need to pretend or deny
All of us are gonna die
Good night good gosh good golly
You get yourself twisted up in your undisciplined counterfactuals and lose all perspective.
Yes, a usury cap on credit card interest rates would cause the credit card “industry” as we know it to collapse. That’s a good thing. We certainly would not “need” to replace it. That is like saying we need new diseases to replace smallpox and polio.
Just as a factual matter, there are credit cards that charge 8%. They are hard to find, being the quiet products of small banks and credit unions offered only to established customers and members. Notice it isn’t so much the creditworthiness of the customer that enables low interest rate credit cards as it is the small scale of the bank or credit union and the personal relationship that entails. The big banks, with their computerized portfolio management, cannot do it. The diseconomies of scale in banking are significant. Those diseconomies of scale are overcome by the enormous economic and political power that we allow big, universal banks to wield and the financial sector is oversized, inefficient and a drain on social welfare.
The idea that high-interest rate consumer debt could be fuel for consumer spending is sheer idiocy. It is a vacuum that drains income away into upward redistribution. How it could it be anything else. The net result is always to reduce the disposable income of people who borrow to finance consumption. It could hardly be any other way. That is just arithmetic.
The transactions systems we all use are adequately financed by transaction fees, if you are worried about that.
Yes, a usury cap on credit card interest rates would cause the credit card “industry” as we know it to collapse. That’s a good thing. We certainly would not “need” to replace it.
Credit card spending in the United States in 2022 was $3.2 trillion. If you remove that money from the economy without systems in place to replace it you are going to cause massive damage to many industries.
You want to kill the credit card industry? Fine, I’ll support that. But first you have to show me something better that you’re going to replace it with. Trump hasn’t done that.
Credit card spending in the United States in 2022 was $3.2 trillion. If you remove that money from the economy without systems in place to replace it you are going to cause massive damage to many industries.
You want to kill the credit card industry? Fine, I’ll support that. But first you have to show me something better that you’re going to replace it with.
You are not thinking this through at all. Do the arithmetic, please, before you claim against all reason that credit cards are a support on net to consumer spending.
Spending in the Keynesian cycle depends quite simply on income. Consumer credit creation at interest rates of 25%+ drains income off the cycle into upward redistribution. The reason Trump’s admittedly ill-defined and practically impossible “proposal” has political appeal is exactly and precisely because it promises to reduce the financial expenses and therefore increase the net disposable income (and by implication, spending) of people trapped by credit card debt. That is a lot of people and a lot of consumer income (and spending) being siphoned off.
A usury cap would be good policy precisely because it is a simple, bright-line rule that is hard to evade. Imnsho, bright-line rules should form the main architecture of financial regulation, and not dubious “enhanced supervision” of “systemically important” too-big-to-fail institutions whose very size and scope is predicated on strategies undermining the integrity of the financial system. (See the movie, The Big Short, for dramatic illustration of how the self-dealing of universal banks and financial conglomeration undermines integrity.) The very fact that the fierce marketing rivalry of credit card companies somehow never drives down prevailing credit card interest rates ought to clue you in to the fundamentally corrupted nature of the system being run by a few, very large and grossly inefficient institutions whose size enables the political power to dominate despite their inefficiency.
A propane tank can’t be exploded with a bullet. That’s pure Hollywood.
It’s all hollywood now, mago. It’s all hollwood.
@StewartM
My rambling long-winded comment was a poor attempt at trying to make a firm point about what’s gone on economically and how it’s affected people both individually – and society as a whole. The intentional changing of a zeitgeist.
I was using the movie as a vehicle for this, prompted by your thoughts.
Interspersed with these ramblings were some facts on the relationship between ‘the media’ in all its forms, including popular entertainment, and how they are part and parcel of the warmaking security surveillance state – and vice versa.
Some of it was tongue-in-cheek.
Without Quint’s eccentric antagonisms where is the movie? It would be like watching paint dry.
———————-
Quint was a loner who drank too much and who was used to living life a certain way. And to this point it had worked for both him and those around him. And there was absolutely no indication given that he had a criminal record or anything violent in his past.
He may have ‘scared’ Ellen Brody, but he wasn’t presented to us as someone with a history of physical violence. He was a character – the dirty unkempt eccentric guy with the boat who drank a bunch and lived his own life. People probably got a kick out of him so long as appropriate space was allowed.
Then the shark comes and circumstance brings these men together. Remember, Quint was adamant that he didn’t want any help: ‘I don’t want any mates. I don’t want any volunteers. There’s too many captains on this island.’
Now, if the mayor and council and sherriff are going to bring in outside experts to help with the situation, why would they team them up with Quint? We know there’s plenty of other captains on Amity because Quint himself told us so.
Doesn’t the ‘oceanographic institute’ have people who can navigate the ocean on its staff? Does ‘the institute’ even have vessels? Talk about the problems inherent in specialization!
This is where we invoke mago’s ‘pure hollywood.’
The smashing of the radio and eventually the boat itself are profound.
Remember once again, Quint never wanted anyone with him anyway. He has these outsiders on his boat, one who doesn’t even like the water, and another who’s more interested in vivisecting life and classifying it, as opposed to purely living it.
Despite all this, the men got along okay for a time – they even had fun together and got to know each other a little better via personal reminisces over spirits.
In fact, the shark as antagonist and outside agitator ruined their experience of coming together. Things had settled down for a time and the guys were actually getting to know each other a little better – opening up by telling war stories which also allow for shared vulnerability. They had even broken out in shared song!
Speaking of war stories, Quint had gone through the horrors of war with the added bonus of having to experience and endure the trauma of being surrounded by feeding sharks.
And Hooper and Brody were both all ears as the story unfolds. Hooper had some war stories of his own, and Brody – who was noticeably shy about opening up throughout – Brody gets in on the narrative as well.
This is not only ‘outside of time’ like when you get so ‘in’ to something, so caught up in a project that you’re not even aware of ‘clock’ time rather you’re in tune with the innate, biological rhythms of life. This is ecologist Paul Shepherd’s non-history. This is life sans all the intellectual and theoretical baggage – the excessive ambition to figure it all out and classify it all – which paradoxically ends up deadening life.
Thought experiment: If Quint had gone alone and done things his way, would he be dead? The shark? How about if Hooper and Brody had gone together without Quint?
I think Jaws would have his way with any of the various scenarios we can conjure.
Again, this is hollywood.
*The actor Robert Shaw who played Quint was apparently quite a drinker himself. He wanted to have a buzz on to do the scene but he got too drunk and it didn’t go well. His pride didn’t overcome his shame in real life and he showed up the next day and nailed the scene:
‘For the last seven years of his life, Shaw lived at Drimbawn House in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, Ireland. Like his father, Shaw was an alcoholic for most of his life.
Shaw referred to himself as a Socialist during the 1976 Cork International Film Festival. “I started as a militant socialist, and I couldn’t even now vote Tory under pain of death,” he elaborated in an interview later the same year, adding that “I still think I am a socialist in a way.’
Incidentally, you may have been able to catch Speilberg at the meeting of the scantly-reported-on Mega Group, although I imagine you didn’t get an invite. You’re not psycopathically rich. And even if you’re Jewish, I doubt you’re ‘their kind’ of Jew. I hope not:
‘When movie mogul Steven Spielberg, Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman Sr. and former hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt met at Mr. Steinhardt’s Manhattan apartment last month, the main topic was neither films nor high finance but considerably more complex than either: being Jewish.
The three men, among others, were convened for a meeting of the “Study Group,” also known informally as the “Mega Group,” a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen.
Formed seven years ago by Leslie Wexner, chairman of Limited Inc. and Charles Bronfman, Edgar’s brother and Seagram Co. cochairman, the group meets twice a year for two days of seminars on topics related to philanthropy and Jewishness.
At the April meeting, Mr. Spielberg spoke about his personal religious journey, and then the group discussed Jewish summer camps.’
The group’s last meeting was in early May 2001 – four months before the September 11 event.
Spielberg and Hollywood put out two movies to distract the masses during the summer of 1982 when Ariel Sharon – the butcher of Lebanon – attacked his nicknamesake in the interest of Israel and the global Zionist project.
Spielberg wasn’t able to direct Poltergeist due to contractual obligations for E.T. so they brought in Tobe Hooper. E.T. debuted at Cannes in late May. Poltergeist debuted June 4, and was then released to the masses on June 11.
The 1982 ‘Lebanon War’ – in actuality another of the countless unproked warmaking invasions by Israel – began on June 6, 1982 and ended June 5, 1985 (Reagan and his administration didn’t slow things down at all despite what their acolytes believe).
According to Wikipedia, the ‘main phase’ – which was obviously instrumental in getting the entire op ‘off the ground and rolling – was June to September 1982.
Interestingly, Spielberg’s Jaws was instrumental in launching these ‘summer blockbuster’ type of films.
‘Regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster and won several awards for its music and editing. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars two years later; both films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily.
“E.T. debuted at Cannes in late May. Poltergeist debuted June 4, and was then released to the masses on June 11.”
E.T. was released to the masses on June 11.
I was ten at the time and saw it with my parents and sister at a drive-in movie theater in Welfleet, Cape Cod, MA. My sister can’t stand the movie to this day because she was actually scared at the time and hid under her sleeping bag in the back seat. Upon rewatching it later in life – or attempting to anyway – she just thought it was stupid. My recollection is essentially the same. I vaguely remember going to get snacks multiple times which I wouldnt’ have done had I thought anything of the movie. I’ve never watched it again.
“You are not thinking this through at all. ” – That statement seems unwarranted. NR does seem to understand the unsustainable idiocy of the arithmetic, but is merely pointing out that people rely on said idiocy to actually get by. That is not an endorsement of said idiocy, and your condemning it for being idiotic does not a plan for getting by make.
does the idiocy “work” for the people borrowing money at usurious rates? do people “get by” by means of digging themselves into an ever deeper hole?
I stand by my assertion that prohibition of usury is obviously good public policy. The idea that poor people couldn’t survive if banksters were not actively making them poorer is absurd and I won’t dignify such poorly reasoned arguments with any degree of respect.
. . . ” TINA, No hope, no change, just an Empire falling to pieces.”
If an Empire is falling to pieces, that is certainly a change-process for that Empire. If the Empire falls all the way to pieces, then that Empire doesn’t exist anymore. And that is certainly a change.
” Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to learn how to survivalize between the pieces.”
It “works” in enacting the predatory goal of instilling debt slavery. I think we all agree that this is a bad thing. But you seem determined to conclude that acknowledging this reality on the ground is tantamount to endorsing it.
Chuck Mire
Yuval Noah Harari on The Power of Truth in the Age of AI:
https://youtu.be/9IHplMvBLys (1:38:26)
Yuval Noah Harari explores the power of truth in the age of AI in this thought-provoking conversation about his new book “Nexus”. Don’t miss out on this deep dive into the intersection of democracy, artificial intelligence, history, and the concept of truth.
Yuval Noah Harari published an essay in the New York Times recently. “Large-scale democracies,” he wrote, “became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.” Well, we’re witnessing a major change in the underlying technology right now. Artificial intelligence is here, and if its proponents are to be believed, it will fundamentally transform how we consume information and communicate with each other. What this means for the future of democracy — and society as we know it — is the subject of Harari’s new book “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.”
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/059373422X/
StewartM
Last weekend, I watched the movie “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg). I ended up thinking with Brody, Hooper, and Quint in the boat as an analogy for the US (and the West) especially when Quint’s decisions leave all three in a boat filling up with water, with a dead engine, and with no radio to call for help. 🙂
Quint is our current leadership. He refuses to acknowledge that the problem (a 25-foot great white shark) is beyond anything that his experience has dealt, so he tries all the old solutions and they fail, and fail catastrophically. He is motivated by pride and greed, he doesn’t want to share the reward for killing the shark.
Hooper is the scientist. He is ignored until the boat is a wreck, and he is only approached for help then, but by then he can’t do much.
Brody is (maybe?) the economist or activist. He sees the problem is way bigger than anticipated, the first thing he calls for is more resources to be brought to bear, but when I tries to call for that Quint destroys the radio.
In the end, Quint is eaten by the shark, Hooper escapes, and Brody kills the shark by the dumbest of luck. A more realistic ending is that they all get eaten.
(PS. I liked the movie far better than the book. Despite the million-to-one ending in the movie, it’s still more believable than the ending in the book).
bruce wilder
Trump announces that as president, he will immediately implement a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates
This is Trump, so this is a “a concept of a plan” not an actual practical policy proposal. And, of course, “it’s complicated”.
Usury caps are obvious good policy and typify good populism.
Any serious usury cap would cause a financial crisis for banks and related systems. As opposed to the financial crises of households caused by usury.
Watch carefully how this is attacked and by whom.
NR
If you limit credit card interest rates to 10%, you’re looking at a LOT of people who won’t be able to qualify for credit cards anymore. No bank is going to issue a 10% card to someone just out of college or someone who missed a couple of car payments in the past. And those people will simply be forced into even more predatory unregulated lending like payday loans.
What we really need is wages people can live on so they don’t have to carry so much debt. Capping credit card rates isn’t even serious as a band-aid proposal.
Mark Pontin
@ Ian –
Good post yesterday on medieval universities. I didn’t know all that.
@ Bruce Wilder-
Bruce: “Any serious usury cap would cause a financial crisis for banks and related systems. As opposed to the financial crises of households caused by usury.”
I saw this come up on NC earlier today, and Yves S. said the more or less the same as you — it won’t happen — but with interesting specificity of details on why.
To whit: “There was a mini-crisis that was not well covered in connection with the Global Financial Crisis. Banks has sold off portfolios of credit card receivables. These were supposed to be transfers even though banks were still servicing the cards. When defaults mounted in the crisis, the buyers said, “You need to eat the losses or we will never buy this stuff again.” There was no way banks had the balance sheet capacity, much the less in a crisis, to retain new credit card receivables.
“However, if Trump finds a way to implement a variant of this idea (a cap at a higher level for new credit card loans), it would force the industry to go back to something like its model as of the 1980s: being much much much more stringent about extending credit, and imposing annual fees (which they all had as of then, the purpose was to assure they made some money on the consumer side from customers who paid off balances in full every month).”
Me: I recall the 1980s actually, and I don’t think the US economy now could survive the stringency on credit there was then, what with about one-third of the US population unable to cover an emergency/unexpected payout of $400 with cash on hand.
Ian Welsh
NR,
that’s why you go to postal banking. I’d probably give them a credit card w/prime +.5% in exchange for signing an organ donor permission (which is worth 60 or 70K iirc.) Let them have credit equal to their average income for the past 10 years + 5k or so, if they go over, let them go bankrupt if they choose, but no gov. credit for 5 years or whatever.
Mark Level
Bruce– what you share shows that Trump still has a few (right) “populist” instincts, and may not (?) be entirely sidelined with butt-hurt that Kamala ridiculed him about crowds leaving early, or spending his time explaining that “he’s a much better looking person than she is.”
Of course, it’s just as likely to actually happen if DJT gets into office as Kamala’s empty promises about finally helping the “middle class” under her administration. On the other hand, judging the millionaire & billionaire crowds who attended the DNC to her cabal that might mean people earning annually $275K to $1.5 million are “the middle”, so the rest of us will continue to be fvcked . . .
Real material benefits for anyone but lobbyists, the MIC, the FIRE sector, Big Pharma, etc. are not what either side of the duopoly, a 2-headed, rabid swine, will deliver. It’ll be more war, more environmental and social degradation, more spying and censorship, more cop violence and rabid nationalist (we can defeat Putin!! shriek the Dems, We are the Greatest Empire that ever existed in human history!”, we can jail the college brats who consider Palestinians human & put all the homeless & immigrants in work camps, promise the Rs) . . . In Leonard Cohen’s words, “Everybody knows that the good guys lost.” TINA, No hope, no change, just an Empire falling to pieces.
NR
Ian,
Sure, government-issued credit would be a serious proposal worth talking about, unlike the credit card interest cap.
Although I will say that people signing over their organs in exchange for credit sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.
StewartM
Bruce Wilder
This is Trump, so this is a “a concept of a plan” not an actual practical policy proposal.
Like his raising taxes on hedge fund managers (he lowered them) or giving ‘everyone great health care’ (his ‘plan’ would have someone 60 paying the average personal income in PREMIUMS ALONE, let alone getting actual health care) or ‘bringing back manufacturing ‘ (his 2017 tax cut made it easier, not harder, for companies to outsource production elsewhere). And there’s “renegotiating NAFTA’ where he put int he same people who had originally negotiated the treaty and these made essentially no changes.
As someone who had hoped back then that the anti-immigration and veiled racism of his 2016 campaign was just ‘theater’, ‘red meat’, for his base, while proposals like those above were his ‘real agenda’, it turns out that Trump’s hatred of the ‘other’ was the only thing you could count on while all the other policy proposals were ‘theater’. Yet people fell for them, and astonishingly still fall for them.
mago
Damn Mark Level, you nailed it.
Rolling over now.
Stick a knife in my belly.
I’m done.
Just kidding—not so nihilistic.
But it’s a cold cruel world out there, and few seem to give a good flying f*ck.
Ha ha. When my credit card rate jumped 20 points from 8%, I tried to plead my case, but my only recipient was some poor girl in a Bombay call center, so I took my bankruptcy lawyer’s advice and said screw it.
A few months later I’m called to the phone in a foreign country while I’m in the kitchen doing dinner prep, and I find myself talking to a Bank of America bounty hunter who’s trying to cut me a deal to erase my debt for 5k or something.
And I’m like screw you. (By the way, I never missed a payment in 20 years and always payed on the principle above the interest. Once I even paid it off.)
So we argued back and forth with me demanding how the hell he tracked me down while he played coy, but finally conceded probably out of pride, that the trick is contact your previous employer to find your whereabouts. I thanked him and hung up.
After the call, the kitchen staff was all porque tal agresivo? And I’m like cuños, the world’s full of assholes.
Anyway, you need a card, and thank god for credit unions and debit cards that allow you to pay as you go, although cold cash is best of all.
Ta.
Dan Kelly
Here lies the body of Mary Lee
Died at the age of a hundred and three
For fifteen years she kept her virginity
Not a bad record for this vicinity
Quint was an ‘old-school’ working class boater/fisherman who had a lifetime of real-world experience with sharks. This was a time when guys like him could live on their boat in a harbor (near impossible in most locales these days) or perhaps stay in any number of very affordable units on Long Island (or in New England) at the time.
Quint lived ‘outside the matrix’ or largely outside the mainstream economic/political system – probably not paying any income taxes of note, though obviously paying taxes on, say gas for the boat (I think Quint’s boat was diesel) and other products and – to a lesser degree in the case of a Quint – services.
Quint may have paid a boat slip fee, or he may have worked something out with the truly local owner of the harbor. This local owner did their banking at one of the many small banks or savings and loans that were available because ‘big finance’ wasn’t nearly as big, and structures in place and enforced by personnel (is policy) enforced more competition among them.
This was all accepted by a majority of society such that it could be said to be the generally accepted and approved of (not just ‘tolerated’) ‘zeitgeist’ of the overall society.
A large complex society must allow for this. There must be sufficient ‘space’ and inbuilt opportunities for ‘self-employment’ of all manner, and cheap housing, which are obviously the result of political/economic structures that allow them to exist. A general ‘societal zeitgeist’ follows from this, if done artfully/skillfully.
The ‘zeitgeist’ in modern complex societies is set and ingrained and subsequently repeatedly ‘enforced’ (and thus deeply ingrained) by the media, This was true then, but to a much much lesser degree. There was much more ‘space’ in life away from media, The zeitgeist wasn’t nearly as propaganda and media-saturated as it is now because the full spectrum surveillance-state structure of which the media is an integral part wasn’t in place yet.
You couldn’t make the movie ‘Network’ today. What would you possibly say? Throw away the phones forever?
Of course, no one stopped watching TV after that movie was made. And the movie itself didn’t dare talk about propaganda you might find embedded in movies at the movie theater, like where you’d go to see Network at the time.
In fact, that movie was made just in time for the soon-to-be released wholesale introduction of ‘music televison’ to society. What a rollicking combination of image and narrative!
And Joe Turner read books for the CIA.
Again, due to the wanton wholesale destruction of the previous ‘order of things’ which included enforced regulations that prompted competition among many many players, we are now down to I believe five media conglomerates – themselves now largely controlled by PE or ‘larger finance’ – as opposed to the 50-100 or so companies at the time of the making of Jaws.
Yves Smith wrote a piece a few months ago about all the affordable housing options available for humans like Quint that were largely borne of New Deal political/economic structuring policies – policies that were in fact pushed for by a wide range of political factions including ‘populists’ and those to the left of FDR.
These are all gone now.
It was the middle class people on Amity Island who, god forbid, may have had to go on welfare if the beaches were closed due to ongoing shark attacks.
It was a tourist town whose populations swell in summer and many of its year-round residents often depend on having a good summer season to get them through the entire year.
Interestingly, neither Brody nor Hooper have this particular limiting economic/resource factor in their lives. Both have more stable jobs with benefits.
Perhaps even more interestingly, nor does Quint, though for different reasons.
In this particular situation, Brody, Hooper, and Quint are more ‘stable’ in their economic autonomy, though Brody/Hooper for quite different reasons than Quint. The people who sell their wares and sell food and ice cream during the summer are closer to taking a big hit – within the system – than Brody and Hooper.
Quint, who lives on the outskirts of the system, doesn’t have this issue either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPi40lQetew
But notice that Quint simply says that they’ll ‘be on welfare for the winter’ if they don’t act quickly and pay him ten grand for the shark-kill mission – which he wants to do alone because he’s only ever known how to operate largely alone, and presumably also because the payout will be all his.
Quint’s a rather savvy businessman in his own right.
In fact, he may have ginned the whole thing up, sharks and all, in order to put himself in position to for the big payout. That would be quite a ‘deep state’ endeavor carried out by the lone Quint!
Seriously though, notice that Quint DOES NOT say something like ‘that’ll put all your business’ on a payin’ basis OTHERWISE YOU’LL BE IN DESPERATE STRAITS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AND YOU’LL BE FACING HOMELESSNESS LIKE SO MANY OTHERS IN THIS COUNTRY THESE DAYS.’
And none of the townspeople are in fact worried that things will get that bad because there is at least a minimal welfare system in place that people can use as needed to avoid such precarity.
At worst, they’d have to resort to welfare which wasn’t something someone necessarily wanted to be on and which wasn’t exactly something that one would go screaming from the rooftops. But it was there, it provided adequate resources as opposed to today, and it was relatively easy to navigate.
And this was the generally accepted zeitgeist of society in this place at this time.
Brody was both a ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ guy who was both somewhat ‘educated’ (not as ‘highly’ as Hooper from the out-of-town ocean institute) but also lived and worked in town and thus was both well-known among the townfolk and wasn’t seen or perceived as ‘over-educated’ or ‘high-brow’ in any way. Sheriff Brody was generally liked and certainly respected by the majority of the town.
This was also before the local police became highly militarized in this country.
Brody, who didn’t like ‘the water’ himself (that’s some bad hat, Harry), acted as the bridge between two guys who loved the water, though in very different ways.
Hooper’s scientism didn’t in any way tie him to theory above practice and experience, but could perhaps be said to be less immediately experiential than Quint. And Quint certainly didn’t have time for what he considered to be both an overemphasis on, and an overclassification of, things that were outside his purview anyway. Guy’s got a life to live.
Upon first meeting Hooper and seeing all his fancy sciency stuff, the very experienced Quint wondered aloud how it could possibly ever be useful: “Not sure what the shark is going to do with that tank…might eat it I suppose. Seen one eat a rocking chair one time.”
And Hooper, once out on the boat and really experiencing things the way perhaps he never had before, was quite keen to be part of the ‘old school’ way of using the barrels to bring the shark to the surface.
‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’
Quint correctly called the size of the shark when they first saw it. Hooper thought it was smaller than it actually was. Perhaps he needed a little more perspective of the kind Brody refused to give him a little later. Quint’s raw experiential background instantly ‘sizes’ the shark more accurately than Hooper’s largely theoretical background.
Once they do decide to use Hooper’s tank and poison dart, things don’t exactly go well. Quint was right – the shark ate the damn thing!
Jaws was ultimately killed by inserting a highly flammable tank of compressed gas into its mouth and shooting the tank with a rifle, this blowing Jaws up forever. Even though Quint was dead by this time, the method of killing turned out to be rather rudimentary – a method the Quint character himself would certainly have employed were he still around.
Of the three main characters, only Sheriff Brody has a ‘stable’ woman in his life – the wonderful Lorraine Gary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOgnSbW_OJk
And now for something completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqBC33jBc8w&t=1023s
Dan Kelly
“We’re also planning on bringing in some experts from the oceanographic institute on the mainland.”
Turns out you didn’t need them.
How much did the town have to pay for this ‘expertise’ from Big Science? Does the oceanographic institute itself depend on contracts like this, such that there are vested interests of a larger bureaacracy at play here? Did Hooper get commission on top of salary?
By the way, in Jaws II Cable Junction’s cable was the shark killer. Science advances, but rudimentary techniques continue to kill the sharks that plague us.
bruce wilder
those people will simply be forced into even more predatory unregulated lending like payday loans.
There is no upside for the debtor in easy credit at 25%. That there is predatory lending at 400% is horrifying. But, credit at usurious interest rate doesn’t help someone who lacks the income — it just reduces their future income. Nor does it help “the economy” to draw resources into the dark business of extracting blood from turnips.
Yves Smith loves to stroke her own ego with knowing remarks about obscure back office arrangements constraining financial policy. It is nonsense. The big banks should have been broken and broken up in the financial crisis of 2007-8. Most key banking functions, like assessing credit risk, do not scale and banking becomes less efficient as very large institutions are forced by their own size and scope to adopt algorithmic methods. Credit card operations are very profitable for the big banks because it is all a numbers game run by computers for monopoly cartels, with people supplying only the colorful marketing offers to draw new suckers in the door, but from a social welfare point-of-view, it is a social loss that destroys lives and reduces net household income for poor and merely middle-class credit card users. Rich credit card users get airline points and cash back, further exacerbating income inequality. Most will think they deserve these benefits and many will congratulate themselves on the social conscience that tenderly advocates for keeping the lifeline of “easy” credit open to those people who “need” it.
And, Ian, organ donation, really? jeebus.
mago
A propane tank can’t be exploded with a bullet. That’s pure Hollywood.
Curt Kastens
The Israeli population of Israel since 1967 has never been more than one smaill US state.
It is clamed that US aid to Israel is a few billion a year and has been a few billion a year for decacdes, up until 2023.
Niether Symour Hirsh nor Chris Hedges nor Pepe Escobar nor anyone else for that matter has ever claimed that the US provides more aid than that every year to Israel.
i myself have doubts about whether or not any country could do what Israel does without substantially more aid from the US than is publically claimed.
Have I missed a publicly released information??
Ian Welsh
In what way does it harm anyone to have their organs donated after they’re dead?
Carborundum
Escalation cycle intensifying. Reporting indicates that the IAF struck 300-400 aim points across Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah responded with ~140 rockets, ranging targets as far South as Haifa (reporting indicates that Ramat David AB was among the targets). This after a similar scale of Hezbollah launches on Friday on targets closer to the border, preceded by IAF strikes on Thursday night.
Ian Welsh
Yeah, the pager attacks were so vicious they’ve pushed Hezbollah over the edge, it appears (They claim not, but the timing suggests otherwise.)
Can’t say I blame them.
Carborundum
It harms them if they believe that their access to state services is predicated on their willingness to donate their organs, *particularly* if they believe that the level of medical care (or any other state service) they may receive is at all influenced by their potential value as an organ donor. The opinion polling on this would be apocalyptic and the offensive IO potential massive.
Ian Welsh
Yeah, I was wrong about the organ thing. Oh well.
Carborundum
I wouldn’t view this as Hezbollah being pushed “over the edge” into some sort of emotional response. In my view, they’ve been deliberately placed on the horns of a strategic dilemma as a central element of Israeli national strategy. Whether the intensification cycle continues will tell us a lot about how Gallant’s rhetoric should be interpreted (i.e., are they attempting a relatively low-cost reset of the deterrence calculus or are they gearing up for something bigger).
Ian Welsh
Yes, the pager attacks were an escalation requiring Hezbollah to respond. There haven’t been attacks that deep into Israel since 2006. This is going to deeply intensify Israel’s internal refugee crisis if it continues.
But note that if the US really won’t support Israel in an offensive on Lebanon, seeing it as “Israel causing the war”, well, it’s going to be ugly for Israel.
bruce wilder
Headline in The Guardian:
Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’
Locals support and volunteer at Haitian-owned businesses to stand against Trump and Vance’s anti-immigrant lies
I just stare at this report and wonder at the processes of payment and professional imperative that drive it into existence.
StewartM
Dan Kelly
I don’t buy Quint as the “working class hero” shtick. The very reason they end up in a boat with no working radio, taking in water, and with a blown engine was due to Quint’s decision-making. He was the one in-charge, he was the captain, and he was responsible for the situation they ended up in. That shark was just beyond his experience.
What’s your excuse for him destroying the radio? Even without a shark, you you might need to call for help (rogue wave? medical emergency?). And destroying his own boat’s engine? Hey, Quint could have admitted failure on the first try, refitted to go out for a second try, and still claim the money. He was just too prideful.
I don’t necessarily disparage ‘folk wisdom’ (my criticism of the old Jonny Quest cartoons was because the ‘Western arrogance’ of Dr. Quest and crew going to strange countries and knowing more about it than the natives about the place, in addition to the natives looking like buffoons). But I don’t worship it either. You’ll have the locals tell you that we have water moccasins here (we don’t) and all sorts of things about that simply aren’t true (many rat, corn, and king snakes die because they’re ‘copperheads’), and I’ve seen them do plenty of egregiously stupid things (like burn brush like ten feet away from their house). Also, I don’t see our lives as being governed by science, but by religion and tradition usually in the service of supporting and justifying the existing power structures and inequalities in society. I’m with Marvin Harris, taking a scientific perspective on human lifestyles is ‘the only thing that’s never been tried.”
To me, true ‘folk wisdom’ isn’t arrogant. Let me give as an example a TV show on an ultramarathon I saw ran on in the Australian outback. Most of the competitors were experienced ultramarathoners and/or triathletes, but one was a Australian aborigine who was pushing 70. The show followed the race, and showed how one experienced ultra athlete after another dropped out due to dehydration, blisters, sunburn, and other medical issues, while it showed the aborigine sitting in the shade in the middle of the day–he knew better to try to move in the middle of the during under the sun and in that heat! In other words, he was smart, he didn’t force things, or try to do anything beyond his means; and such his ‘folk wisdom’ was the exact opposite of someone like Quint. In the end the aborigine was only one of three participants to finish. The other two experienced ultra athletes were amazed at him walking up towards them near the finish line, and they all decided to cross the finish line together, simultaneously, so that all would ‘win’.
NR
Bruce:
If you want to talk about the big issue of credit and loans in America, that’s a conversation worth having. Trump’s proposal isn’t that. It isn’t even in the same universe as that.
Trump’s “proposal,” such as it is, has three big problems:
1) It’s addressing a symptom rather than the root of the problem. People borrow money at high interest rates because it’s the only way they can make ends meet. Sure, there are some out there who go into credit card debt for luxury purchases, but for the majority, they have to do it to make ends meet. The best way to deal with that would be to address wages and the cost of necessities. Capping credit card interest barely even qualifies as a band-aid.
2) It will have the (presumably) unintended consequence of making it impossible for large numbers of people to get credit cards. Since the proposal does nothing to address the root causes of why those people need to carry so much debt, all it will do is force them to seek other avenues to get loans. Those avenues are lightly regulated or totally unregulated and are even more predatory toward borrowers.
3) But it’s actually even worse than that, because credit cards with 10% interest don’t exist today for even the people with the very best credit. So limiting rates to 10% would effectively kill the credit card industry. Now, maybe killing the credit card industry as it currently exists would be a good thing–you could certainly argue that. But if you’re going to do something so drastic, you’d better have a plan for how to do it and something to replace it with. Trump’s proposal has neither of those things. And without them, you’re just knocking out one of the major pillars that supports our economy.
Now, again, you can say “well our economy shouldn’t be supported by mountains of consumer debt.” And sure, I’d agree with that. But if you want to change that, you need to have an idea for how to replace it with something better. Saying “well we’ll just kick this leg out from under the table and see what happens” is a recipe for disaster.
Mark Level
2 threads back, KT Chong claimed that Jimmy Dore is now “right wing.” Actually, JD says he is not right wing & that it’s a smear of the ShitLibs. (The Grayzone is called a “horseshoe” left AND right site by the MSM; it is anti-Imperialist and clearly left.)
Anyway, here’s a JD piece I just watched, Jimmy & Kurt Metzger are glad the Georgia D.A. dropped phony “money-laundering” charges against the Cop City Protesters there. They joke about the man with no powder burns on his arms shot 57 times by the Cop City Crew . . . I don’t think this is Right wing Narrative, but maybe KTC can explain what I’m missing?
(Posting here ‘coz I don’t know how far back Ian updates comments.)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_FNI07Gqvg
mago
I dunno.
Punch an organ.
Inflate your worth.
Lucy and a football.
Epstein and a tape.
Punch up punch down
Everybody’s going down
No need to pretend or deny
All of us are gonna die
Good night good gosh good golly
bruce wilder
@NR
You get yourself twisted up in your undisciplined counterfactuals and lose all perspective.
Yes, a usury cap on credit card interest rates would cause the credit card “industry” as we know it to collapse. That’s a good thing. We certainly would not “need” to replace it. That is like saying we need new diseases to replace smallpox and polio.
Just as a factual matter, there are credit cards that charge 8%. They are hard to find, being the quiet products of small banks and credit unions offered only to established customers and members. Notice it isn’t so much the creditworthiness of the customer that enables low interest rate credit cards as it is the small scale of the bank or credit union and the personal relationship that entails. The big banks, with their computerized portfolio management, cannot do it. The diseconomies of scale in banking are significant. Those diseconomies of scale are overcome by the enormous economic and political power that we allow big, universal banks to wield and the financial sector is oversized, inefficient and a drain on social welfare.
The idea that high-interest rate consumer debt could be fuel for consumer spending is sheer idiocy. It is a vacuum that drains income away into upward redistribution. How it could it be anything else. The net result is always to reduce the disposable income of people who borrow to finance consumption. It could hardly be any other way. That is just arithmetic.
The transactions systems we all use are adequately financed by transaction fees, if you are worried about that.
NR
Credit card spending in the United States in 2022 was $3.2 trillion. If you remove that money from the economy without systems in place to replace it you are going to cause massive damage to many industries.
You want to kill the credit card industry? Fine, I’ll support that. But first you have to show me something better that you’re going to replace it with. Trump hasn’t done that.
bruce wilder
Credit card spending in the United States in 2022 was $3.2 trillion. If you remove that money from the economy without systems in place to replace it you are going to cause massive damage to many industries.
You want to kill the credit card industry? Fine, I’ll support that. But first you have to show me something better that you’re going to replace it with.
You are not thinking this through at all. Do the arithmetic, please, before you claim against all reason that credit cards are a support on net to consumer spending.
Spending in the Keynesian cycle depends quite simply on income. Consumer credit creation at interest rates of 25%+ drains income off the cycle into upward redistribution. The reason Trump’s admittedly ill-defined and practically impossible “proposal” has political appeal is exactly and precisely because it promises to reduce the financial expenses and therefore increase the net disposable income (and by implication, spending) of people trapped by credit card debt. That is a lot of people and a lot of consumer income (and spending) being siphoned off.
A usury cap would be good policy precisely because it is a simple, bright-line rule that is hard to evade. Imnsho, bright-line rules should form the main architecture of financial regulation, and not dubious “enhanced supervision” of “systemically important” too-big-to-fail institutions whose very size and scope is predicated on strategies undermining the integrity of the financial system. (See the movie, The Big Short, for dramatic illustration of how the self-dealing of universal banks and financial conglomeration undermines integrity.) The very fact that the fierce marketing rivalry of credit card companies somehow never drives down prevailing credit card interest rates ought to clue you in to the fundamentally corrupted nature of the system being run by a few, very large and grossly inefficient institutions whose size enables the political power to dominate despite their inefficiency.
Dan Kelly
A propane tank can’t be exploded with a bullet. That’s pure Hollywood.
It’s all hollywood now, mago. It’s all hollwood.
@StewartM
My rambling long-winded comment was a poor attempt at trying to make a firm point about what’s gone on economically and how it’s affected people both individually – and society as a whole. The intentional changing of a zeitgeist.
I was using the movie as a vehicle for this, prompted by your thoughts.
Interspersed with these ramblings were some facts on the relationship between ‘the media’ in all its forms, including popular entertainment, and how they are part and parcel of the warmaking security surveillance state – and vice versa.
Some of it was tongue-in-cheek.
Without Quint’s eccentric antagonisms where is the movie? It would be like watching paint dry.
———————-
Quint was a loner who drank too much and who was used to living life a certain way. And to this point it had worked for both him and those around him. And there was absolutely no indication given that he had a criminal record or anything violent in his past.
He may have ‘scared’ Ellen Brody, but he wasn’t presented to us as someone with a history of physical violence. He was a character – the dirty unkempt eccentric guy with the boat who drank a bunch and lived his own life. People probably got a kick out of him so long as appropriate space was allowed.
Then the shark comes and circumstance brings these men together. Remember, Quint was adamant that he didn’t want any help: ‘I don’t want any mates. I don’t want any volunteers. There’s too many captains on this island.’
Now, if the mayor and council and sherriff are going to bring in outside experts to help with the situation, why would they team them up with Quint? We know there’s plenty of other captains on Amity because Quint himself told us so.
Doesn’t the ‘oceanographic institute’ have people who can navigate the ocean on its staff? Does ‘the institute’ even have vessels? Talk about the problems inherent in specialization!
This is where we invoke mago’s ‘pure hollywood.’
The smashing of the radio and eventually the boat itself are profound.
Remember once again, Quint never wanted anyone with him anyway. He has these outsiders on his boat, one who doesn’t even like the water, and another who’s more interested in vivisecting life and classifying it, as opposed to purely living it.
Despite all this, the men got along okay for a time – they even had fun together and got to know each other a little better via personal reminisces over spirits.
In fact, the shark as antagonist and outside agitator ruined their experience of coming together. Things had settled down for a time and the guys were actually getting to know each other a little better – opening up by telling war stories which also allow for shared vulnerability. They had even broken out in shared song!
And then Jaws strikes again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1gdre5Nij8
Speaking of war stories, Quint had gone through the horrors of war with the added bonus of having to experience and endure the trauma of being surrounded by feeding sharks.
And Hooper and Brody were both all ears as the story unfolds. Hooper had some war stories of his own, and Brody – who was noticeably shy about opening up throughout – Brody gets in on the narrative as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO60RohuARY
‘But anyway, we delivered the bomb: https://youtu.be/E4_Qb1dALCU?t=470s
The shark hunt is the full embodiment of life for Quint – and for Hooper and Brody for a time too: ‘Bring me another barrel…I’m coming around again!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsdls9VHCjE
This is not only ‘outside of time’ like when you get so ‘in’ to something, so caught up in a project that you’re not even aware of ‘clock’ time rather you’re in tune with the innate, biological rhythms of life. This is ecologist Paul Shepherd’s non-history. This is life sans all the intellectual and theoretical baggage – the excessive ambition to figure it all out and classify it all – which paradoxically ends up deadening life.
https://archive.org/details/Post-historicPrimitivism/mode/1up?view=theater
https://azinelibrary.org/trash/Shepard_-_Coming_Home_to_the_Pleistocene.pdf
https://annas-archive.org/md5/b6f7ef83906dd74d709b3702d315a910
Thought experiment: If Quint had gone alone and done things his way, would he be dead? The shark? How about if Hooper and Brody had gone together without Quint?
I think Jaws would have his way with any of the various scenarios we can conjure.
Again, this is hollywood.
*The actor Robert Shaw who played Quint was apparently quite a drinker himself. He wanted to have a buzz on to do the scene but he got too drunk and it didn’t go well. His pride didn’t overcome his shame in real life and he showed up the next day and nailed the scene:
‘For the last seven years of his life, Shaw lived at Drimbawn House in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, Ireland. Like his father, Shaw was an alcoholic for most of his life.
Shaw referred to himself as a Socialist during the 1976 Cork International Film Festival. “I started as a militant socialist, and I couldn’t even now vote Tory under pain of death,” he elaborated in an interview later the same year, adding that “I still think I am a socialist in a way.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shaw_(actor)#cite_note-34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKX0n99hX5U
—————————-
Incidentally, you may have been able to catch Speilberg at the meeting of the scantly-reported-on Mega Group, although I imagine you didn’t get an invite. You’re not psycopathically rich. And even if you’re Jewish, I doubt you’re ‘their kind’ of Jew. I hope not:
‘When movie mogul Steven Spielberg, Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman Sr. and former hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt met at Mr. Steinhardt’s Manhattan apartment last month, the main topic was neither films nor high finance but considerably more complex than either: being Jewish.
The three men, among others, were convened for a meeting of the “Study Group,” also known informally as the “Mega Group,” a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen.
Formed seven years ago by Leslie Wexner, chairman of Limited Inc. and Charles Bronfman, Edgar’s brother and Seagram Co. cochairman, the group meets twice a year for two days of seminars on topics related to philanthropy and Jewishness.
At the April meeting, Mr. Spielberg spoke about his personal religious journey, and then the group discussed Jewish summer camps.’
https://archive.ph/nHq7g
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Mega_Group
https://archive.ph/tVHpm#selection-1123.0-1171.42
The group’s last meeting was in early May 2001 – four months before the September 11 event.
Spielberg and Hollywood put out two movies to distract the masses during the summer of 1982 when Ariel Sharon – the butcher of Lebanon – attacked his nicknamesake in the interest of Israel and the global Zionist project.
Spielberg wasn’t able to direct Poltergeist due to contractual obligations for E.T. so they brought in Tobe Hooper. E.T. debuted at Cannes in late May. Poltergeist debuted June 4, and was then released to the masses on June 11.
The 1982 ‘Lebanon War’ – in actuality another of the countless unproked warmaking invasions by Israel – began on June 6, 1982 and ended June 5, 1985 (Reagan and his administration didn’t slow things down at all despite what their acolytes believe).
According to Wikipedia, the ‘main phase’ – which was obviously instrumental in getting the entire op ‘off the ground and rolling – was June to September 1982.
https://archive.ph/QnCD9#selection-2515.0-2515.32
Interestingly, Spielberg’s Jaws was instrumental in launching these ‘summer blockbuster’ type of films.
‘Regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster and won several awards for its music and editing. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars two years later; both films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily.
https://archive.ph/mW93N#selection-2611.0-2633.86
——————————
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-writer-who-broke-epstein-case-a-rumored-mossad-link-is-worth-digging-into/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of57iKZMobg
Dan Kelly
“E.T. debuted at Cannes in late May. Poltergeist debuted June 4, and was then released to the masses on June 11.”
E.T. was released to the masses on June 11.
I was ten at the time and saw it with my parents and sister at a drive-in movie theater in Welfleet, Cape Cod, MA. My sister can’t stand the movie to this day because she was actually scared at the time and hid under her sleeping bag in the back seat. Upon rewatching it later in life – or attempting to anyway – she just thought it was stupid. My recollection is essentially the same. I vaguely remember going to get snacks multiple times which I wouldnt’ have done had I thought anything of the movie. I’ve never watched it again.
https://www.capecodtimes.com/gcdn/-mm-/660d8ed63918dde16e1b67d91a99546da1b42d65/c=0-184-2844-1784/local/-/media/2020/09/17/Hyannis/ghows_gallery-CC-530009999-81ec7abe.jpg?width=1320&height=744&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellfleet_Drive-In_Theater
both sides do it
re: Jaws
shagggz
@bruce wilder,
“You are not thinking this through at all. ” – That statement seems unwarranted. NR does seem to understand the unsustainable idiocy of the arithmetic, but is merely pointing out that people rely on said idiocy to actually get by. That is not an endorsement of said idiocy, and your condemning it for being idiotic does not a plan for getting by make.
bruce wilder
@ shagggz
“ people rely on said idiocy to actually get by”
does the idiocy “work” for the people borrowing money at usurious rates? do people “get by” by means of digging themselves into an ever deeper hole?
I stand by my assertion that prohibition of usury is obviously good public policy. The idea that poor people couldn’t survive if banksters were not actively making them poorer is absurd and I won’t dignify such poorly reasoned arguments with any degree of respect.
I learned once again which side NR is on.
different clue
@ Mark Level,
. . . ” TINA, No hope, no change, just an Empire falling to pieces.”
If an Empire is falling to pieces, that is certainly a change-process for that Empire. If the Empire falls all the way to pieces, then that Empire doesn’t exist anymore. And that is certainly a change.
” Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to learn how to survivalize between the pieces.”
shagggz
@bruce wilder,
It “works” in enacting the predatory goal of instilling debt slavery. I think we all agree that this is a bad thing. But you seem determined to conclude that acknowledging this reality on the ground is tantamount to endorsing it.