Without the state

links for 2010-12-15

• GOLDEN VIDEO LIBRARY
  (tags: art creativity howto painting artist paint printing technique video)

links for 2010-12-14

• Sohodojo Business Services
  (tags: sohodojo smallbusiness nanocorp businesssupport)
• Sohodojo: Home of the nanocorp and small business revolutionaries
  (tags: business urban resources nanocorp community culture books)

More dancing

No apologies for yet more exquisite dancing. This season of Strictly come dancing has the highest number of genuinely good dancers I have seen. Kara Tointon, Pamela Stephenson Matt Baker and Scott Maslen have all produced great performances. Gavin Henson must remain an outsider I think. Of them all, for consistently delivering at a superb standard the winner I think should be Kara Tointon and the performance last night was no exception.

Pamela Stephenson seems to be the exception to something I have noticed over the past three seasons, which is that women 'of a certain age'  (ie over about 50) tend to be voted off before men of a comparable or even lower ability and before younger women. In 2008 Cheri Lunghi and this year Felicity Kendall were both voted off earlier than men with much less talent. See the two routines below for evidence.

Could be my age of course...

Spectacular...

 

via Make magazine

Art in the White House

An interesting article on Obama's choice of art for the White House living quarters.

The 45 works the First Family chose to display, borrowed from various government institutions, range from simmering meditations on geometry and color by the great and under­appreciated Josef Albers to depictions of Native Americans by the ever-mysterious George Catlin to a glowing abstract Zen TV screen by Mark Rothko to otherworldly still lifes by the minor modern master Giorgio Morandi. They topped off the collection with three geeky U.S. Patent models (a paddle wheel, a telegraph and a prototype for a gear cutter), a realist portrait of Harry S. Truman, works by Native American artists (including a fantastic ceramic by Maria Poveka Martinez), Jasper Johns' super-strange low-relief 0 Through 9, and paintings by Sam Francis, Winslow Homer, Richard Diebenkorn, Alma Thomas and Susan Rothenberg, among others.

Critics were quick to put a gloss on the collection's meaning. On the right wing, the more aggressive contemporary work in the collection came in for a predictable beating. The focus was on Ed Ruscha's apparently banal, almost-monochrome conceptualist work made in 1983. "I Think I'll. . . " is an infinitely optical, obtusely cerebral fire-red/Popsicle-orange minimal field, streaked with floating phrases like, "Maybe. . . yes," "Maybe. . . no," and "On second thought." Predictably, a clueless anti-Obama website groused that the painting was "celebrating indecision."

...

But back to the Ruscha and its purported embrace of indecision. In fact, what it conveys perfectly is not waffling, but thinking. Like so much of the work the Obamas have chosen, it highlights a central difference between two states of mind, the progressive and conservative. "I Think I'll. . ." effortlessly and efficiently transmits a psychic inclination that accepts paradox and allows that the world is not only good or evil. The hallmark, so far, of Obama's administration has not actually been indecision, or Clintonian triangulation. It's been a hanging back, waiting till all the facts come in, and for all the ideas to be floated, and then making a (decisive) move. This painting embodies that inclination, and it's not the only one in the collection that does so.

I'm not so sure of that last characterisation of the Obama administration however. This seems more accurate these days:

"I met a law school classmate of Obama’s last week, and heard the long form version of reports on his conduct then: he’d get up and consistently make completely pedestrian, middle of the road comments (his classmate put them on the order of “rain is wet”)."

links for 2010-12-07

• IndieGoGo
  Like Kickstarter, but available outside the US
  (tags: socialnetworking business networking crowdfunding funding web2.0)

The State's Corporate Wasteland - from C4SS

The perceived inefficiency of government is often measured against the wholly unsubstantiated myth of the well-oiled corporate machine. The state’s many modules, thought of as shiftlessly unconcerned with the bottom line, are implored by the standard conservative philippic to be “run like a business,” as if real-world businesses are models of sleek efficiency.

 

The binary framework of American political folklore sees business interests as hermetically sealed from state interests, with the cold orderliness of “professionalism” defining our image of the corporate world. The state, by comparison, is thought to be the sanctum of all the good-hearted, underpaid crusaders for social justice, imprudent with the dollar but well-meaning. Just a passing glance at the actual corporation (as opposed to its idealized image), however, begs for a thorough reconsideration of the prevailing narrative.

In a special feature for CNN.com, Jason Fried, author of the book Rework, challenged the notion of corporate order and productivity. He notes that while “[c]ompanies spend billions on rent, offices, and office equipment so their employees will have a great place to work,” those employees nevertheless prefer to work outside of the “interruption factory” of the modern office, a seedbed of waste and misspent hours. It would seem, then, that the corporate world and the state — whatever their differences — operate in much the same way, squandering resources that might have been put to productive use.

Of those features that we, as libertarians, proclaim to admire most about the free market (e.g., innovation, responsiveness, social utility), most if not all of them are conspicuously absent from America’s multinational monsters. Conceding that the United States’ sweep of cubicles is a muskeg of stifling communication barriers and sinkholes for labor, our inquest ought to focus on why this is, on what conditions give rise to these results. After all, aren’t profit motive and the need to account to stockholders sufficient to incentivize some creative solutions from the country’s boardrooms?

It may very well be that these inducements are potentially enough, but — even assuming that’s the case — they are, in today’s corporatist economy, either completely erased or largely alleviated as considerations. In his book Organization Theory, Kevin Carson observes the fundamental difference between the existing corporate economy and the market economy that libertarian anarchists desire. He quotes David Friedman as noting that the American system, the titular situs of “free enterprise,” is actually “largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called corporations.”

And as vast, hierarchical institutions defined by a numbness to technological and social change, corporations seem an especially appropriate analogy to the bureaucratic mammoths of state socialism. The largest and most powerful of them, rather than being the most avant-garde or the most reactive to the wants of the humble consumer, are the most inept and incapable of competing in the tempestuous world of untrammeled exchange. In his exhaustive treatise on economics, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises counseled that a “successful corporation is ultimately never controlled by hired managers,” and in a free market that may be true.

In the state-corporate society, though, where status lives in job titles and climbing the corporate ladder, managerial elites enjoy a tight grip on the power. It is no coincidence that they run their companies in much the same way that the state functions, through gradations of authority and arbitrary administrative processes. It isn’t even as though there’s a societal balance between state and corporate interests, implying some polarity between the two. They are very simply elements of the same arrangement, whereby laws like the Williams Act — a securities rule that purports to protect shareholders — regulate away challenges to indolent suits in corner offices.

Just as taxpayers pay and vote for their own bondage, the average corporate nine to fiver finances the bloated salaries of CEOs who drive their companies into the ground only to be salvaged by ever more rule-making that stacks the deck for the Washington-Wall Street cufflink class. It’s no wonder the worker bees of the corporate prison have such low job satisfaction, or that so many seek escape in Big Pharma’s versions of Brave New World’s “soma.”

In this system, with only so many “seats at the table,” human life is defined by meaningless paper-pushing that augments the fortunes of our soi-disant “social betters.” But free markets would besiege corporatism with the energetic inventiveness of an order brought about not by autarchic rules, but by mutual respect and free exchange.

Original post at C4SS by David D'Amato. He is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

 

Kara Tointon Tango

Another stunning performance by Kara Tointon and Artem Chigvintsev, that I think deserved better marks, especially since the judges gave Pamela Stephenson and her partner a perfect score. How do you think they compare?

Still, at least Ann Widdecombe has finally gone. Although she could have probably made a fair living in the days of the Music Hall with her routines, this show is after all about dancing, not Music Hall.

Is your community legal?

Strange question perhaps, but in the nature of bureaucrats everywhere, the Department for Communities and Local Government are apparently faced with the need to come up with a legal definition in order to make progress on the 'Localism Bill'.

Apart from the rather strange spectacle of nationally defined local communities, another issue it seems is the ‘general power of competence’, which is set to give councils the power to act in the best interests of their communities. It appears that this has been changed from a previous wording of ‘power of general competence’.

In that light, Gabriel Chanan, formerly of the Community Development Foundation, has written a letter to theTimes:

Sir, Civil servants preparing the Localism Bill for the government are said to be having difficulty defining what a community is so that it can be given legal powers. This is promising. A community cannot be given legal powers because it is not an entity. It is a description of a certain (or more often uncertain) state of relationships amongst the population of a locality or some other group with interests in common. The only population-based entity to which you can give legal powers in a locality is a community organisation of one sort or another. This ought to throw the spotlight onto the question of the relationship between such an organisaton and the rest of the local population. So when the government, in Big Society mode, says it will enable ‘communities’ to take over a public service, the question should immediately arise of what does that community  organisation need to do to show that it is acting in the interests of the whole local population, and what responsibility necessarily remains with the relevant public authority to ensure this. Communities as a whole do not and cannot take over public services. Community organisations can collaborate with public authorities to deliver the services better.

Gabriel Chanan, www.pacesempowerment.co.uk

I don't know if they published it, but now you have read it anyway.  

[via Neighbourhoods blog]

 

Beauty on the dance floor