Photo Credit: Bloomberg Business Week

CHINA has been feeling its oats: They’re a bit impressed with their stature, and they have been flexing their trade muscles as a result of it, for many years. (Not to mention, they are also flexing their political and military muscles — most recently in Syria — and [reportedly] with cyber attacks against American government and business networks.) And, in their mind, why wouldn’t they? They’re obviously on the rise; what with one billion-plus people, a growing middle-class, a workforce that has consistently been favored by American big-biz over stateside labor, because of China’s much lower wage requirements, an expansive economic boom, their leading status in global exports and the fact that China already owns many American companies. What’s America’s recourse in addressing this, as it’s very much a threat to the country’s economic security? There hasn’t been much, so far. Diplomacy is required, because of that last and greatest factor: that the United States is somewhat economically indebted to the nation and China is an important American trade partner.

The Atlantic via Bloomberg Business Week reports on a new sector for China in their growing portfolio of power and influence across global markets: heavy industry. There has been a shift from the light exports and techonological consumer goods that have been examined of late for the workers’ rights issues, most recently in regards to Apple and Foxconn, and other small goods that have led to Wal-Mart becoming responsible for much of the American trade deficit, among other things — such as perhaps a business environment that has facilitated this — towards heavy industry. According to the Bloomberg data (top) China has been steadily increasing their heavy goods sector for the last three years, producing and exporting much higher numbers of construction equipment, trains, ships and cars; showing an especially strong increase; in fact, showing its greatest positive slope since about 2009.

Sany Group, a construction equipment company profiled in the Bloomberg article — and who are part of a corps of Chinese companies that rank in the top ten globally in the heavy industries sector — has an ambitious goal that is reachable; to lift their heavy industry exports to one-fifth of their total revenue over the next five years. Currently it represents only five percent of Sany’s $16 billion dollars in revenues. Sany and other companies will be assisted by $2.5 billion dollars provided by the government to modernize their facilities in order to meet this ramp-up. Rising labor costs which have increased by 15 percent annually since 2005 and the appreciation of currency, are making it tougher for China’s production model, originally based on cheap labor and smaller goods, and this has led many of the nation’s companies to shut down and move to Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. This move towards the “heavy” is their response, their Plan B, and it is in full execution.

The Chinese controlled 41 percent of the global ship market in 2011. And the amount of China’s heavy industry exports — of which two-thirds is machinery, according to Bloomberg — has grown from 29 percent in 2001, to 38.7 percent last year, according to the Beijing-based economics consultant, GK Dragonomics. Said Andrew Baston of GK Dragonomics, in Bloomberg Business Week‘s “China’s Export Machine Goes High-End” article:

‘They are making different products with higher technology, things they can charge more money for,’ says Andrew Batson, GK Dragonomics’ research director, who estimates that the new industries can help lift China’s share of global exports from 10 percent now to 15 percent by 2020. ‘The typical Chinese exporter is not a shoe factory in Guangdong anymore. Instead it is some kind of equipment or machinery maker.’

Read “China Takes Aim at the Profitable Heart of U.S. Manufacturing at The Atlantic [Here]

Read “China’s Export Machine Goes High-End” at Bloomberg Businessweek [Here]

Photo Credit: The Economist

THE UNITED STATES and President Obama have their man: an academic, a physician and public policy guy, Jim Yong Kim. Kim is the president of Dartmouth and the chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at perhaps “The Ivy League College,” Harvard. So why is The Economist and The Financial Times pushing for an underdog and an outsider to Western power circles (in some sense) to be the new head of the World Bank? Ngozi Onkojo-Iweala has won the endorsement of several African nations and two well-respected publications for the soon to be filled post ahead of Jim Yong Kim and Columbia’s former finance minister and respected economist José Antonio Ocampo.

Onkojo-Iweala is Nigeria’s two-term finance minister who provided transparency in a corrupted market, and while what she accomplished wasn’t a complete “wiping” of the crony culture that plagues the nation (it ranked 143 out of 182 nations in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2011); it is a rather significant accomplishment considering the level of corruption that endemically has yoked the country. Ngozi also earned rave reviews as the Managing Director of the World Bank from 2007-2011, holds a Ph.D in regional economic development from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the Paris Club negotiations of a reschedule of Nigeria’s debt.

She has plenty of recent and relevant experience, post global financial crisis, and so it seems she’d be the best fit of the three, since Columbia’s José Antonio Ocampo’s last stint as finance minister was for a shorter span (1996-98), with a shaky record, where he oversaw a deficit expansion. The United States’ choice is also well-regarded and is a great humanitarian dedicated to effecting progress on these interrelated issues of education, health and development, but he hasn’t the level of experience in any comparable manner to Okonjo-Iweala — since his experience lies mostly with positions in academe — or positions which are limited in scope compared to the one he has just become a candidate for. As the Economist notes:

Mr Kim, the head of a university in New England, has done a lot of good things in his life, but the closest he has come to running a global body was as head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation—not a post requiring tough choices between, say, infrastructure, health and education. He pioneered trials of aid programmes before they became fashionable and set up an outfit called Partners in Health which does fine work in Haiti and Peru. But this is a charity, not a development bank. Had Mr Obama not nominated him, he would be on no one’s shortlist to lead the World Bank. (Indeed he is a far worse example of Western arrogance than Christine Lagarde, whom the Europeans shoehorned into the IMF job last year: the French finance minister plainly had the CV for the job.)

Nonetheless, America’s influence on this matter does loom rather large since it is still the world’s leading economy and historically the head of the World Bank has been American, and so to not take John Yong Kim as a serious prospect is folly. And not only that, the position — while it is about handling a financial institution committed to development in a straight sense — its larger goal is going to be influenced by two things Mr. Kim knows rather well: education and health. These factor immensely in development, and not just the attracting of foreign capital, because development is also about securing human capital. As The Financial Times published:

This newspaper has acknowledged that, were Mr Kim to be selected, he could be a good choice. His background in health fits well with the Bank’s broader development goals, while his managerial record at the World Health Organisation shows that he could be effective at implementing these aims.

This newspaper has acknowledged that, were Mr Kim to be selected, he could be a good choice. His background in health fits well with the Bank’s broader development goals, while his managerial record at the World Health Organisation shows that he could be effective at implementing these aims.

But the Bank needs more than this. Its new leader should have a command of macroeconomics, the respect of leaders of both the funding and the funded countries, and the management skills to implement his or her vision. These requirements make Ms Okonjo-Iweala the best person for the role.

Ms Okonjo-Iweala has real-world experience of policy-making in one of the most challenging developing countries. Her experience in tackling corruption would be helpful in the battle against the misuse of Bank funds. While her record as a finance minister is not flawless, her reforming drive has earned her credibility with the international community. That, and her charismatic personality, should help her to rally support for the Bank.

Further, for purely meritocratic reasonings it would be rather safe to assume that the transition on the job for Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala and the consistent and symbolic message that the World Bank would send in placing a well-credentialed woman in the position who has experience on these matters, would be logical, especially considering that a trope of development has been the notion that development’s frontline resides with women. That is not to say that placing other candidates in the post wouldn’t be logical, however. What the right answer is, I’m not particularly sure, but there are only two actual candidates it seems, with Mr. Ocampo being on the outside. On the one, the record of Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala should not be overlooked and it seems high time that not just a woman, but a candidate whose life is intimately connected to the experience and struggles of the developing nations ascends to the post.

On the other hand, development of these nations needs not just relevant experience, but big ideas and an understanding of global health issues and the education challenges at a very complex and expertise level that would only be met by Jim Yong Kim’s life’s work, who holds an incalculable level of relevant experience in the area. I’d assume, it would be best if both candidates skill sets could be utilized as both are needed, in an ideal situation. But if merit wins, as it should, and which is the safe call, The Economist is correct; Nagozi Onkonjo-Iweala should be the next president of the World Bank. But merit (as defined by just well-chronicled experience) has some blind spots, and in that regard Ngozi Onkonjo-Iweala should still look to utilize Jim Yong Kim, if she does become the president; and make him an indispensable tool to achieve the goal of lifting these nations’ lots.

Read “Hats Off to Ngozi” at The Economist [Here]

Read “The Right Leader for the World Bank” at The Financial Times [Here]

Read “Why Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Wants to Run the World Bank” at The New York Times [Here]

Photo Credit: Facebook (of Nicholas Kristof)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, “The Grey Lady,” as it has become known as the established and serious paper of record *, hasn’t seen much challenge over its roughly two centuries. In the early 2000s, however, there was a flap which provided two notable and rather damaging instances, the Jayson Blair affair: where young journalist Jayson Blair fabricated and plagiarized multiple stories, which was caught by one of the Times‘s own former interns — then writing articles in San Antonio for another periodical — and then the egregious and grave development of Judith Miller essentially greasing the skids for the Iraq Invasion by failing to ask the necessary rigorous questions of the Bush administration, and doing the necessary scut work to vet her multiple New York Times‘ stories in reporting the administration’s case for war.

Eight days ago, Village Voice Media released an official response to a story by well-regarded human rights journalist and one of the Times’ most well-known columnists, Nicolas Kristof, who on March 18th published a story concerning the Village Voice Media property Backpage.com and its frequent use by pimps to sell sex services on the Internet with impunity, often times of minors. The column revolves around a well-known Kristof tact of storytelling to make a point, a way in which Kristof personalizes sometimes abstract humanitarian issues. (It’s not always that the subject is abstract, but deluging a reader with the sheer numbers of those affected by these human rights issues, tends to depersonalize.)

In the column he details the case of “Alissa,” a young woman who was forced into prostitution as a teen, but miraculously has managed to escape the grip of her former life on the street and is now a senior in college with dreams of becoming a lawyer. The story of Alissa reports that she places much of her anger about her former situation on the role Backpage.com played, a Web site who once peddled normal, everyday consumer goods (couches and what not), but began to be a warehouse for pimps advertising sex services of young women. Village Voice Media claims in the response:

Nicholas D. Kristof was wrong about the most devastating ‘fact’ in his Sunday, March 18th, column in The New York Times regarding Backpage.com. He wrote about an underage victim of human trafficking: “Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.” A video that accompanied his online op-ed was headlined: “Age 16, She Was Sold on Backpage.com” That is not true. According to Alissa’s court testimony, she was 16 in 2003. Backpage.com did not exist anywhere in America in 2003.

Backpage.com is a Village Voice Media property which has become vital to its financial existence in a dwindled market for print advertising and especially for what are known as “alt-weeklies” such as the Village Voice and its papers L.A. Weekly, S.F. Weekly and O.C. Weekly in California. (And the Houston Press in Texas.) Such papers have had to lean on operations like Backpage.com for their financing. As a result, this has produced a journalistic conflict of interest. Village Voice Media attempted to discredit Kristof’s article with what he calls “journalistic tools,” because of this underbelly of the alt-weekly financing situation, and quibbles about the facts, attempting to paint Kristof’s work as an entire fabrication, it appears. While the columnist acknowledges that he got some of the details of the woman named “Alissa” wrong, but only on the blurb for the companion video, it clearly isn’t the same as it being a journalistic failure. What’s particularly disconcerting is not that Kristof got something (somewhat) wrong, but that this fits a pattern of Village Voice Media attacking journalists who report on Backpage.com. In Kristof’s response, he retorts that:

It’s interesting that Village Voice doesn’t dispute anything in my column or the accompanying video, but only the online blurb for the video. The Voice is right that Alissa was 16 in 2003 — for about two days. In fact, Alissa turned 16 at the end of 2003. So all during 2004, she was 16 years old. And so it was in 2004, not 2003, that she was traveling up and down the east coast being pimped. Backpage operated in at least 11 cities during 2004, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, both of them cities Alissa where says she was pimped on Backpage. Then at 17, as Backpage expanded to 30 cities including Boston, she was pimped even more broadly on Backpage — and also in Village Voice print ads, she says.

Moreover, contrary to what the Voice says, Alissa continued in the sex trade until 2007, when she got out for good. Backpage was steadily expanding and becoming a major force in this period, and pimps routinely used it to sell her, she says.

I’m frankly a bit surprised that Village Voice is even trying to deny its role. Attorneys General around the country have linked Backpage to arrests for trafficking of underage girls in 22 different states. As my column noted, one recent case involved a 15-year-old girl here in New York. A previous column I wrote cited a 13-year-old girl peddled on Backpage.

I’ve been an admirer of Village Voice over the years, including its great reporting on police abuses. But it’s really sad to see Village Voice Media become a major player in sex trafficking, and to see it use its journalists as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests. I can’t say I’m surprised, though. When Amber Lyon of CNN aired a piece about a 13-year-old girl trafficked on Backpage, Village Voice went after her and even published a piece in an affiliate in her hometown. It’s because of this record of Village Voice using journalistic tools to go after critics that Alissa chose not to use her real name.

So my hope is that Village Voice Media will decide to stop throwing resources into obfuscation and attacking those opposed to its role in sex trafficking, and will either get out of carrying prostitution advertising or at least require careful vetting — such as seeing adult I.D.’s — of those who place the ads. C’mon, Village Voice, does an an alternative newspaper really want to represent the greediest kind of exploitation?

Read Nicholas Kristof’s “Where Pimps Peddle Their Goods” at The New York Times [Here]

Read Nicholas Kristof’s “How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls at The New York Times [Here]

*The “Grey Lady” supposedly refers to more than its venerable stature, however. The nickname is (according to lore) a nod to its high ratios of text to graphics. Say, compared to periodicals such as USA Today.

Photo Credit: Foreign Affairs

OF THE MOST harrowing stories from last year, the terrible series of events behind the Japanese earthquake that led to a cataclysmic tsunami, which then led to an unforeseen overwhelm of the emergency safety system at three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant (after they had miraculously survived the quake), were tops on a rather remarkable list of news events. The tsunami and the subsequent reactor meltdown triggered visions of science fiction’s end-times in our heads; first with images of families being separated by Mother Nature’s angry water-borne hand, live on T.V., and then with news of the degenerating meltdown crisis, radiated food supplies and stories of an unprecedented radioactive plume that dwarfed Chernobyl.

The situation was the worst of the sums of all fears concerning nuclear energy, crises and crisis management. One of the nation’s largest energy company’s operating in the affected prefectures — directly charged with the oversight of Fukushima Daichi, as it belongs to them — Tokyo Power Electric Company (T.E.P.C.O.), had been highly-criticized and second-guessed by the international community (and even by myself on Twitter). What those who were critical believed, it seems, was that there was a decision by the Japanese government to sublimate any potential panic and downplay the severity of the Fukushima Daichi disaster, especially when the official Japanese government advice for its citizens and foreign workers in the areas were found to be quite different than that of the United States government, which prioritized being much more cautious. One of the main points where questions arose was in the benchmarks for minimal safety distance from the reactors for evacuations with the Japanese officials recommending a 12-mile evacuation zone, while American officials recommended a 50-mile zone for its citizens in the area, which included two military bases housing the greatest percentage of the 90,000 Americans in the potentially affected areas.

A recent Foreign Affairs article penned by Jeffrey A. Bader, senior director of the National Security Council, gives us a new view — from within the halls of American power — and he provides some illumination on the matter, a year later. Of his findings and implications, one of the primary is that the handling of information distribution to the outside by the Japanese government should be understood within an expanded context of how many more people the Japanese government had to accommodate in their evacuations — into already densely packed areas — and how that differed from the U.S. Government, since the American government families were much smaller in number, and responsibility dwindled as they left areas affected by the meltdown, by either returning to the United States or to other bases.

We had to decide whether to declare a larger evacuation zone around Fukushima than Japan did. Modeling conducted by the NRC and the DOE indicated that an evacuation zone of 50 miles would be more consistent with U.S. standards than the Japanese zone of 12 miles, so the administration recommended that all U.S. citizens in the 50-mile zone leave. The discrepancy attracted unwelcome attention and subjected the Japanese government to some criticism. Of course it was considerably easier for us to err on the side of caution, since we had almost no Americans in the area and no responsibility to house or take care of them once they departed, whereas the Japanese had several million people there, all of them the government’s responsibility if they moved.

Further, in understanding that there were longer term implications in every decision and information release — as far as their optics politically and their logistical tail (i.e. providing shelter and water for swaths of still unaccounted) — and the dynamic and unprecedented nature of dealing with that rarest medley: an earthquake, a tsunami, a meltdown at a key national nuclear power plant and the possible longer lasting effect of a large radioactive leak; one can understand how the Japanese government may have appeared to be less forthright and timely with its information and response, to the outside, but it was merely attempting to gain a grasp of all of those scenarios it had burning at once, and with accurate details. Comparing the situation to what is known of Bader’s experience in dealing with it through the National Security Council, the inability to accurately measure radiation levels and find applicable models were an issue that had a great effect on the decision-making. According to Bader, even the American government had widely off-base measures.

Because of the unpredictability of the situation at Fukushima, we needed to draw up contingency plans for the evacuation of all Americans from Tokyo and the bases in the event that the situation warranted it. That was normal and proper, although extremely unlikely. But once Pacific Command began planning for a noncombatant evacuation that, in theory, could involve 90,000 people under panicked conditions, the information would inevitably leak.

It leaked quickly. Stories ran in U.S. military media and the Japanese press that suggested that evacuation was a real possibility. I called the chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, with whom I had had very good interactions in the past. I told him of my dismay at the way the story was percolating. I said that I was as strongly in favor of protecting American servicemen’s health as anyone, but that we needed a scientific basis for decisions. We also could not be casual about the future of the alliance by allowing for a whimsical decision-making process. Roughead understood. Within an hour, he had called in the defense press and made unequivocal statements to the effect that our forces were not going anywhere, and that evacuation was not in the cards.

These daily crises in response to wildly speculative assessments and reports were testing our patience, not to mention our sleep cycles. We needed a firm scientific basis for decisions. Fortunately, Holdren and the DOE were about to produce one.

Working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Holdren developed a series of models based on plausible worst-case scenarios. They depicted simultaneous meltdowns at one or more reactors and complete drainage of the spent fuel pools at two reactors. The results for such worst-case scenarios, assuming unfavorable wind patterns from the reactor site and a lack of precipitation, suggested that radioactive plumes in excess of EPA standards would not reach within 75 to 100 miles of Tokyo, and that we would have several days’ notice before such a contingency could develop. In other words, there was no plausible scenario in which Tokyo, Yokosuka, or Yokota could be subject to dangerous levels of airborne radiation.

Still, the feeling among some of those watching the disaster unfold via the international 24-hour cable news networks and N.H.K., was that the Japanese government had dropped the ball in many ways. And that may still be true, but the utterly unique crisis had no contextualizing event to glean lessons from, and which is why it was so difficult. Towards the end of the nuclear reactor crisis, it had become so bad that T.E.P.C.O. and the Japanese government were gladly accepting septuagenarian and sexagenarian volunteers to work the plant as they handled the meltdown’s effects. The idea was that any radiation exposure to these older volunteers with experience in the matter, were least likely to be adversely affected by such exposures since their life-spans were presumably towards their end. It was a scary and disturbing thing to hear. As of now the global community has begun to reassess nuclear power as a result, with the European Union ordering a risk assessments of all of its members.

Read “Inside the White House During Fukushima” at Foreign Affairs [Here]

Read “Fukushima’s Fate Inspires Nuclear Safety Rethink” at New Scientist [Here]

View the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown via Cryptome’s “eyeball” series [Here]

Photo Credit: 1,000 Destructions

THEMED Tumblrs have truly changed the way the Internet interacts within a circle of insiders; it’s the one thing that the brain trust behind Google+ has realized and which seems very true: The Web is organized like our lives, with multiple circles and networks, which sometimes overlap. But just because you decide to share a circle, where you post updates about your life, with your mom and your pal from college; Mom isn’t necessarily going to get why a blog dedicated to the parts of life that deal in tragedy is fascinating to you and your bud, in the same way that Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion or Barbara Streisand are to her.

Of my recently discovered and favorite theme Tumblrs is 1,000 Destructions, whose creator seems to tap that feeling you have while watching Independence Day and root for that one annihilation, everyone inconceivably cheers for. Of all the viscerally dedicated Tumblrs that have developed a following, it’s one of the more original. And, let’s be honest, as much as the Internet and Tumblr seem to now be about striking photo blogs, aggregation of off-the-radar news, fashion, lifestyle and street style snapshots, it really is about destruction: of paradigms, of weary concepts, of perceptions, of the old-guard media’s blind spots and how we choose to spend our spare moments. (E.g. looking at .gifs of buildings folding like accordions, Norden bombsight images of W.W.II Germany and stills of volcanic eruptions.)

Visit 1,000 Destructions [Here]

2011′S DRIVE was as much about the look and feel of modern Los Angeles as it was about a quiet, young stunt driver and part-time mechanic with a good heart, stuck in an inescapable devolving life unwillingly tied to violence and criminal enterprise. The film’s title sequence and soundtrack painted the city romantically and in an emotive, etherial manner reminiscent of the Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the Tokyo of Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira. It was somewhat of a departure from the expected by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, which historically has tended to see other directors portray the City of Angels as a festering cesspool, and largely a creation of its Hollywood subterfuge and post-World War II boom development cycle, with a critical mass of sad lives beneath California’s golden sun and haze.

“A Real Hero,” College featuring Electric Youth,  Drive 

And maybe that is true for the city — possessing a critical mass of sad, broken lives — as it is anywhere, or perhaps a bit more. But overwhelmingly, that has been a pet of and vehicle for directors to transport viewers to a land of broken dreams and terrible misfortune, such as what is currently imagined in Michael Mann’s and H.B.O.’s serial drama of cinematic quality, Luck. (Or the classic Chinatown and the odd, Mulholland Drive.) While all of these films which have Los Angeles as a main character — and not merely as a setting — and a complete environ that influences the story in many ways, tend to deal with the underbelly of life and crime within a rubric and genre known as film noir, unlike them, however, Drive doesn’t seem to fault the city.

Refn skillfully captures its balance of urban and exurban landscapes and nature, even pivoting much of our perception of the main character’s sensitivity on it, by way of his excursion with a potential love interest and her son through the empty concrete canal of the Los Angeles’ river to a secluded brook. Refn also uses the emptiness of the night-time Los Angeles streets; a familiar and relevant scene so apparent to anyone who has driven the city any time after 2 a.m., to show its serenity, before his juxtaposing with adrenalin-dumping scenes.

Further, the soundtrack and musical score, produced by Cliff Martinez, seems to echo much of modern Los Angeles and its love for synthesized music elements, articulated in the younger communities of the city and the dreamy, hazy, pop and nostalgia for the contemporary found in the Angeleno music since even the Beach Boys. The standouts: “A Real Hero” by College featuring Electric Youth (above), “Nightcall” by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx, and the rest of the score by Martinez, find their way into your bloodstream and imagination, and perfectly yaw-and-pitch the varying moods of the film.

Photo Credit: Getty Images 

And a little child shall lead them…

-Isiah 11:6

A Vessel and Looking-Glass for Our Ideals 

WATCHING the accidental fortune that found Jeremy Lin’s personal showcase become a harbinger for the New York Knicks’ own serendipity — following a poor start amid lofty pre-season expectations and injuries to the team’s superstars — has proven to be a screed for the narratives concerning the best of our society, and what we desire to be generally true about opportunity and excellence in America, even as we realize in the back of our minds that all we symbolically project onto Lin’s emergence isn’t necessarily true for all. Nonetheless, Lin does represent many of the tenets of our sociopolitical history, and the ideals we tout as central to the American ethic: He is an example of the hard-working underdog story of Horatio Alger and similar tales told over and over; those about a mother and father or grandparents coming from the old country, to find in one generation their child or grandchild to be a wild success. He is ultimately what debates about immigration are about, in some sense, answering the irrationally xenophobic question, “Will they assimilate?”; resoundingly.

In the personal, sporting context, he is an atomization of 2010′s Butler Bulldogs and 2011′s Virginia Commonwealth University Rams, who impelled us to tune in to March Madness in recent springs — as Lin has, this winter — hoping to see that just once more in the smallest slice of time, that the guys or teams least expected to win, actually win. And regardless of Lin’s ancestry, which has undoubtedly fueled some of the novelty, any modicum of sporting success surfacing from obscurity would have engendered great support and produced a frenzy of this level in New York, because it is the central node city for our media, and that we all happen to love underdogs because of how antithetical their stories are to our reality; and that the expected always happening doesn’t allow for the sense of adventure we all need in our lives. Further, without that “vicariousness,” it would imply many of us are doomed to remain “little guys,” as we mostly are, a reality many cannot stomach. (Hence, striving to be “Facebook Famous” or “Tumblr Famous” or the prominent rise of horribly conceived reality-shows.) His surrounding story is made of the same stuff Hollywood produces in bulk, those things which make grown men shed a tear during Rudy: that of a dogged persistence and an iron-will determination to overcome obstacles both real and those created by the perceptions in the hive-mind of a society (e.g. Asian-American kids from Harvard, just don’t excel at professional basketball), and which become real, because of those who are willing to buy them wholesale. 

Lin is not just about the Horatio Alger myth, he is also the personification of the ideas of merit, skill and opportunity dancing together; that underlying belief — skill plus opportunity – being so powerful an agent for the most critical management decisions; from who gains the internship that changes a life, to those who move from middle management to the executive boardroom; it enraptures us all, implying that it is not just Lin, but all of us, are just a shot away from our own true greatness. And, of course, he has become the unifying cultural imprint expressed by the many Asian fans of various national backgrounds and is the embodiment of the pan-Asian-American cultural identity that came about as a product of governmental policies in the latter-half of the 20th Century, which included a diverse body of ethnicities into a uniformly protected class. Lin is about all of those things and Asian stereotypes and stereotypes in general, both positive and negative, which rule our brains in ways that they shouldn’t.

Stereotypes and Us

I grew up the only black kid on a block in Southern California in a military town near Los Angeles. And so my world was diverse, even if my block wasn’t. The best basketball player on that predominantly white, middle-class suburban block where every boy played all sports was a Chinese-American kid, four years my senior named Eric. He was my first in-person exposure to the kind of basketball characteristically played by Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas that is politically correctly given the euphemism of “playground ball.” (But is cognitively associated to black style.)

Eric’s game was an outgrowth and expression of a style originated in the black community — and what is so well-chronicled in the famed writer John Edgar Wideman’s memoir Hoop Roots; of a fluid and aggressive, improvisational attacking style recognizable to anyone in basketball culture. Eric didn’t have any favored spots nor a schematic program that he played under, unlike many hyper-coached kids. He simply was versatile and did many different things at once. His jumpshot was a streamlined silhouette with a rainbow arc, and because we generally congregated at a house with an eight and a half-foot breakaway rim attached to a garage, he dunked in various ways off the dribble and with alley-oops: sideways with one hand, reverse with two or over the top, often off a dribble. His was a highly-effective and personally expressive game. So it was never a surprise for me to see a Jeremy Lin or Japan’s Yuta Tabuse, years ago, because my experience in the communities I grew up in, in California, and later on a base in Japan; it just wasn’t odd to find many skilled Asian-American basketball players.

This was the 1990s and basketball was still seen as generally a black and (somewhat) white dominated sport, with very little diversity outside of that binary scheme. (The European invasion had just begun.) And within that bifurcation, it was well in the process of becoming even “blacker” than ever, thanks to perceptions, a cultural legacy that began in the 1950s, the demographic influx of urban kids playing and E.S.P.N. selling and popularizing the street game and playground aesthetic creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time I grew up to become a decent basketball player in 7th grade, I’d begun to notice something, though: some of the Asian kids I played against in elementary had begun to stop playing.

There were still plenty of Asian kids on the basketball courts at lunch in middle school, but not as many as there were during elementary. (And I didn’t count myself or another kid who was also black and Asian, by the name of Soweto, and who was then the best of our middle school bunch.) This was an awakening to my own Asian-mixed heritage being subsumed by my ostensible blackness. I “passed,” as they say in the black community, a term usually reserved for those fairer skinned receiving the social benefits of appearing white or “passing” as fully white, and this gave me an opportunity to see my “blackness” and all the social assumptions that came with it, for once, working as a plus.

I don’t know that it was specifically that the Asian kids I had known from elementary school had lost interest; they were just less inclined to play it seemed, because of the social constructs of the game becoming perhaps optically unwelcoming to them. The overarching culture had begun to tell them they were meant to be something different, and maybe they felt less comfortable in a setting where it was falsely believed that they had some biological disadvantage. They still loved the game, I could see. They still wore the hoops’ sneakers and the Hornets, Bulls, Spurs and Lakers’ branded apparel. They just didn’t play at school during the free periods. Possibly, the preponderance of black kids playing the game began to support a particular pernicious stereotype of young black men, and its corollary that is ascribed to Asian men: that of black men being hyper-masculine and possessed of the physical and less of the brain. And so maybe these Asian boys who grew up in the age of Nike marketing and Michael Jordan, adopted that other side of the coin much like their black male counterparts, and had unknowingly limited their experience because of it.

That is all supposition, but what comes out as an effect of whats-proper-for-your-group stuff is a sense of ethnic impostors, whether its underrepresented students at elite universities, minority employees in corporate America or young women in engineering departments and historically male-dominated fields; all of whom are often questioned for just being out of the believed respective norm. Honestly, I could never know why some of the Asian kids I knew stopped playing the game at school, it could be that they didn’t want to get dirty playing on the blacktop. But I assume the weight of the culture had pushed some of them to the sidelines; both the arcing culture outside of ethnicity, but also within Asian society and black-dominated urban culture. It is summed up politely in the idea of conventional wisdom (but also a form of prejudice), I believe, as David Stern, commissioner of the N.B.A., talked about the euphemism, “conventional wisdom,” when asked about Jeremy Lin saying:

The conventional  wisdom is that you know everyone who’s going to be coming into your league by the time of the McDonald’s High School All-American game. It’s so much fun to see some unpredictability thrown in, and I hasten to add, it’s been five games only. So we’ll see. I think it’s wonderful.

Stern cuts to the very heart of the matter there, that there is a conventional wisdom in basketball and in our lives in general: of what we can and can’t do because society tells us so by the various subcultures we inhabit, the mindsets that have become set in institutionally, and those things are both internalized individually and externally imposed on people and their social group classifications. They are the same things that tell us constantly, but informally, what scientists should look like or C.E.O.s or doctors or lawyers, or N.B.A. ball players.

And it hurts us all, ultimately, because while stereotypes simplify the world and remove some of the complexity from life; which is why stereotypes and even why the Favorite v. Underdog dialectic exists and develops a social reality, through acceptance by those stereotyped groups and the support of those too lazy to not generalize. While it’s true that it seems that girls and minorities who are not Asian tend to not be attracted to the sciences for study, there was also Marie Curie, Florence Sabin, Benjamin Banneker, David Satcher, or Neal deGrass Tyson. All of whom are seen as exceptions to their gender or race, but if we never lived in a world so hasty to presume, they would never be seen as anything other than exceptional, in the most fundamental sense.

Jeremy Lin 

All I can think about in watching all of this alternate universe telling of an infinitesimally short career relegated to the scrap heap of basketball history, before it even began, and has now created the Legend of Lin — a kid who went from wondering whether he was going to make it in the league, to a cat now in the midst of straight-up superstar-levels of fandom and similarly stratospheric play — is how he is also symbolic of the guys I play against at the local university or the park. He represents the kids I grew up with and who stuck it out; guys who played organized ball in obscurity in many times Asian leagues — which are probably a bigger deal than those outside of the Asian community know — but yet their skill was honed and tightened by the toughness on the playgrounds against all comers.

And that’s just how it is you come from what they call “nowhere,” as Lin did. It is because when you are a minority in a sport or society; you are at-once part of that specific society, as well as apart from it. But his road and journey is “somewhere,” it just never particularly fit the basketball orthodoxy in much the way the William’s sisters rise from Compton to dominate a white [and monied] sport such as tennis, never fit prescriptions. For Lin and pro-hoops though, it was the exact opposite, where basketball’s proving ground is actually places like Compton and not a high school in Palo Alto, in the shadows of Stanford; in a town more known for Silicon Valley’s computers and the software engineering industry than it is for high-level prep basketball. And his Palo Alto team won its division’s state championship but, nonetheless, that yielded not many offers to play Division I, big-time, college hoops, which left him deciding to play at Harvard, since choices like Berkeley and Stanford, academic and basketball powerhouses, never came a knocking. And because, obviously, getting an education in economics would be paramount, because “real basketball” — the kind not usually played in the Ivies* — seemed out of the question.

And then it’s getting drafted by his hometown team — Lin’s dream — to then only get cut by them, but not before playing for the out of the league, Reno Big Horns. All that time he kept getting better, kept getting up more jumpers on his own and no one was noticing, but he did end up with the Houston Rockets at the beginning of the year, only to get cut again. The Knicks and the City, the only real American city it seems, was his last stop; a place where they say, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” And because of all of this, and for the fact that I know Lin’s environments more intimately than I could ever know that enclosure and life of prominent A.A.U. squads and high-schools with Nike contracts and life being recruited by elite hoops universities, who have the same level of scrutiny as the Los Angeles Lakers, he truly means something to me for all of those things about our ideals:  That value system that tells us about the freedom in America to become something at the hands of our own skill; if the powers that be are willing, in even the slightest.

I can only think that Lin may be the small breakthrough in the minds for my culture/s, on the court and off the court, since basketball culture in the Asian-American society is quite large and there are many skilled people overlooked for myriad reasonings every single day in our world. It’s all so hard to quantify, but I grew up in Asian communities all of my life, within the intersections Lin has fought from, and I have been as much Asian in a black world of basketball and black in an Asian world overseas, or black in a white and Asian world of the academy, and so I feel a robust kinship, and for me and all of those things I’ve been, there has never been a figure that has coalesced those experiences as Jeremy Lin, in his excellence.

* Princeton Basketball, an Ivy League school, perhaps the Ivy League school, has made many notable runs in the N.C.A.A. Tournament and won it all in 1965. Further, it has provided the basketball community with great contributions, such as the vaunted “Princeton Offense.” Most notably, one of the N.B.A.’s best “50 Greatest” was a Princeton Tiger: former senator and New York Knicks’ star, Bill Bradley.

Photo Credit: STRATFOR

THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE firm known as “STRATFOR” — Strategic Forecasting — was thrust into the attention of laymen when the loosely connected “hacktivist” collective known as Anonymous, shut down its site by way of a distributed denial-of-service attack, and subsequently exposed and compromised its list of paid-for-services clients — those who subscribe to STRATFOR’s premium intelligence products — and obtained (reportedly) unencrypted credit card information over the holidays to make several charitable donations.

However ironic the event was (perhaps the leading security company not being very secure), STRATFOR has been at the center of the for-profit security and global intelligence dissemination business for 16 years, and they have provided many of their summary findings to the public and have even been somewhat transparent and “open-source” minded — a software development principle that argues information should be free to all — with a number of their products, much like that of fellow company, RAND Corporation. At the end of last month, (January 24), STRATFOR posted its annual Mexico drug map with cursory analysis of the Mexico Drug War murder victims’ numbers, which has proven to be a thorny issue in regards to accuracy, because of the rate of the killings and the Mexican government’s inability to provide its own official numbers in a timely fashion.

As of the second-last quarter of data for 2011, STRATFOR reports a dip in the overall number of deaths, but it was not enough to produce the slightest glimmer of hope in the most rosy of analyses: From January 2011 to September 2011, 12,900 people died as a result of Mexico’s drug war. That number is less than the figure for 2010, but that clocks in at a still-ghastly 1,400 deaths per month. If that rate per the period of January 2011 to September 2011 holds for the final three months of 2011, it would result in 17,000 total drug-related murders in Mexico, for the year.

There were dips in the well-known, hard-hit cities and regions such as Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where the death toll dropped from 3,111 in 2010 to 1,955 in 2011 (for the months available), yet still, Juarez registered as the country’s deadliest city. There were also significant increases across the nation in regions such as Durango, Durango state, Matamoros Veracruz, Monterrey, Nuevo León state, Veracruz state and Tamaulipas state. The Sinaloa cartel and the Los Zetas faction, the Sinaloa’s former enforcers, have divided the nation’s regions into two respective hemispheres of influence over a turf war with the Sinaloa controlling the west and Los Zetas controlling a majority of Mexico’s eastern region.

View STRATFOR’s Mexico’s Drug Wars Map (Enlarged) [Here]

Photo Credit: Billboard

“Peso,” ASAP Rocky

LAST YEAR MAY MARK a moment of pivot; where everything changes deep within the subculture: implying a possible shift in the ethos of what comprised the corps of the near-exclusively Internet-popular and influential-blog touted rappers. And perhaps the rap blogs’ editors, writers and readers took an unexpected side-step; their tastes moving from nerd-quirky, non-threatening, similar and bromidic artists; many of whom have now spirited themselves into the background. Of those now made apparitions, most exhibited an identifiable palatable appeal, lacking any sense of danger. And in that last Internet wave represented by Kidz in the Hall, The Cool Kids and a segment of the Web-popular artists circa 2008-2009, some of this cadre held an oddball interpretation of a played-out Native Tongues’ ambit, and a care-free vibe that is hyper-positive and corny, now.

2011′s most visible rappers — who tow sizable Web presence — were a migration back to the unvarnished, sharper content and essence of the mid-1990s; the best epoch overall for hip-hop. This is particularly true concerning the interplay of the charts and unadulterated rap. The decade was a time where the industry computation for success was weighted toward hard-copy sales (since there was limited mp3 distribution, even going into 1999), Billboard rankings and radio play. All of which is now superseded by Itunes purchases, illegal downloads, streams, blog mentions and is encapsulated by the ever-dreadful marketing neologism known as “buzz.” The ’90s market was dominated by what even the mildly informed could distinguish as “authentic” hip-hop, boasting artists from the Wu-Tang Clan collective to West Coast audio pugilists like Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre. By the latter part of the 1990s, though, commercial rap became truly about commerce, particularly in its spirit; it was dominated by pop-stylings attributable to the influence of “Puffy,” his compatriot, Mase, and Will Smith; all of whom churned out artistically soporific, white-friendly work.

It was the obverse of hip-hop’s origins; operationally a megaphone for the poor and ethnic minorities, while also a natural extension of jazz and rock’s wanton escapism, and paralleling the frustrations of youth exuded in punk. It rose as an unintended consequence and protest to the social program cuts by the Reagan administration which were deleterious to the inner-city following the social policies of the Johnson Great Society years. And for the most part, aside from those recent detours in pop-commercial approaches led by Puffy, the genre dutifully reflected this reality and remained true to its origins, even if some of its artists were unaware of all that led them to become the soundtrack for the central-city and minority experience.

To name-check an album title from Murs of Living Legends, the rise of ’90s dance-club rap with purely profit on its mind was “The End of the Beginning” for the archetype of successful ’90s black hat-wearing rappers (literally and figuratively); a vanguard who were soaked in 40 ounce beers, street aura, external discussions of being the enemies to order and sometimes viewed as threats to the state. (Often by agents of the state themselves.) These were acts who held working-class capital with challenging, socially-cutting commentaries to match. They were local heroes, not shills for products. But fatigue in that hip-hop brand had set in and in the early to mid-aughts, gone was the model of “The Nigga You Love to Hate” of Ice Cube, pre-Disney movies, provoking thought, acceded by lavish lifestyle players and even more awful, on the outliers of the mainstream, shiny suit dancers who were some bourgeois Boomer’s hip-hop take on Motown’s the Impressions.

Many in the society longed to feel a kumbaya about the “underclass” element in society and particularly about race, itself, during the rise of pop-rap, and the “cut with sugar” sound meant that many need not make any concessions or face challenges in their perspectives and understanding to the cold realities and the mental disposition of the streets and the disproportionately minority, disproportionately poor and adversely affected by austere fiscal policies. It was an exceedingly low bar for entry into the circle and discourse and language of the genre. The only consistent presence of out-and-out establishment threatening hip-hop late in the decade and early to near-late aughts was left largely to Eminem, Dead Prez, Nas and sometimes Jay-Z. (Though Eminem was not as threatening sociopolitically, aside from his identity; he was quite shocking in regards to the most extreme taboos of social deviance. And while Kanye produced honed social commentary at times, his work leans more personal and aspirational, peppered with sociopolitical references.)

The long tail of the buoyant raps of the late ’90s lasted into the mid-point of the 2000s with notable exceptions in Rawkus and other independent labels providing a small but impactful insurgency. In 2005-2006, rap blogs took rein over hip-hop’s conversation and produced semi-stars on the Internet with somewhat paltry artistic visions, but who converged the discourse once left to Web message boards and the offline pop-rap scene and the larger hip-hop Internet universe of one-off tracks, album leaks and mixtapes. The blogs were looking to find their voice and sometimes this meant supporting the “different,” but the different without lasting appeal, or those who were skilled but without much to say. One look at the underground and blog-supported rappers of the late 2000′s and this new decade, however, speaks a different story than the old one told about the genre once wading in the quicksand of the early and middle parts of the aughts.

Late 2010-2011 witnessed the most promising ascent of a school of edgier, elegantly skilled, seasoned rhymers who are much closer in tune to the ’90s heyday in their themes, aura or full-on complexity and delivery. Artists like ASAP Rocky, Danny Brown, Action Bronson and those from the oft-mentioned Odd Future collective, rose our artistic expectations, again, and forced the mainstream, offline hip-hop business’ world to take notice, as these acts gained love on the blogs, garnered magazine covers, editorial features, contracts, the support of the influential and the all-important respect in the streets.

This newest rise in hip-hop without compromise has brought back a days-of-yore feel and a once-missing interlocution of the social underbelly, while also committing to what the genre is known for best; tapping the magnetism of this underbelly and gripping the linchpin of counter-cultural appeal. Both of which are what hip-hop in its purest form and what is still seen as “underground hip-hop” — using this term while I find it problematic when popular sites like Pitchfork, Fader and Vice promote out-of-the-main music values — has tended to be.

This class is a stark return in popular scale to the deft portrayals of nihilism, anti-establishment values, the utter destruction of the known; from the depths of a once rather bastardized, muted form of the art and particularly on the music blog scene. This bunch are coarser, more aggressive in their lyrical content and more appropriately hip-hop, conceptually, because they challenge tastes, expectations and popular notions of what’s acceptable in rap. For example, Action Bronson, one of this new wave’s luminaries is a ginger-bearded Albanian rapper with sometimes homage-like derivative allusions to Ghostface and Raekwon, who’d probably scoff at anyone frequently mentioning or talking about being a white guy who grew up on the block. It is plainly more interesting work richer than its alternative.

This wave is capable of producing imagery analogous to the morose beauty of a show such as The Killing and its dark complexity, which employs hauntingly gritty character portrayals and the grossly macabre, humanity-examining nature of urban police work, to tell a story about man. That juxtaposes itself against (with some exception): the dull, predictable, simplified, hyper-glossy big network television crime dramas, sold to mainstream America. Much like the many strands of hip-hop, glossy crime dramas and their darker, generally for cable equivalents do the same job and traffic in similar fare, but one is clearly less interesting and less thought-provoking. Nor does it feel as life-like, especially in a world where it’s become “realer,” and closer to the bone, for many.

Of this newest class of Internet-popular avant-garde flag-bearers there is a figure poised to be a breakout star in 2012 emerging in ASAP Rocky, a Harlem rapper who embodies the refreshing grittiness presented by the cohort, all of whom seem as novel as those very early days of Rakim, Boogie Down Productions and later, early Nas. Only these young men are sometimes wedded to the outlandish, spacy and downright nutty aspects reminiscent of Kool Keith and MF Doom. All of those artists also marked turning points in hip-hop, as this bunch will re-define the current and next generation of hip-hop artists who’ve first defined their existence and established their fanbase via the Internet.

While his name has a homophone parallel to another rap vanguard figure from the early-2Ks in Aesop Rock, ASAP Rocky’s handle results from the mash-up of his collective’s acronym for themselves: “A.S.A.P.” — “Always Strive And Prosper” — and his nickname “Rocky”; as he is, I kid you not, actually named in honor of Rakim, a man many believe to be the best rapper ever. And even more distinguishing, Rocky’s rhymes are international in scope, an aberration in a genre known for it’s “hyper-localism,” to borrow journalists’ lingo. And it is especially peculiar for a town as proud as New York, Rocky’s home, the city that originated the genre, and a borough as important to the American arts as Harlem has been.

Yet hailing from the city where hip-hop found its provenance and the borough that is an important node in the history of black art and American art, in general, but rarely acknowledging of it in his content, he is even more essentially hip-hop by default, becoming everything beneath the canopy of “hardcore hip-hop” all at once: pushing the weed ethics of West Coast, the speedy rhymes of the Midwest, the drawl and medicated delivery of Southern rap, the drowned-out, underwater sound of lo-fi, experimental hip-hop and international trip-hop; and the alternative perspectives and imagery of groups twenty years before his time in Gravediggaz and Bone. And this is perhaps more New York than anything: taking all styles and assimilating them.

Further, he is, at times, the most alternative looking emcee on the planet, pushing the genre again, outside of the recording booth. He has abdicated the fashionably-boring looks, what some in the community dubbed the “Grown-Man” aesthetic, and which have become a uniform I’d expect from upper middle class buppies. Rocky eschews that for full-on ninja-inspired styles from the fashion-forward runway with a twist of global street style (think: Paris’s banlieu), such as the masked mouthed youth so often seen in fashion blogs and recently in the London Riots. And it isn’t a gimmick. There’s a subversion in it that really is him, as far as I can tell, and it’s what he has claimed he’s been about since being an unknown teen crack slinger in Harlem. He first hit our radar with the videos for his tracks “Peso” and “Purple Swag,” both extremely taut, well-produced forays which combined Southern Trill and brought about shades of Oakland’s Too Short.

“Purple Swag” notably featured a grill-wearing, white suburban high-school cheerleader type reciting the lyrics that often used “nigga,” which added shock-value for some who are still innately connected to the time-worn values taught by “racialism,” and motivated by the juxtapositions of “underclass” images against the suburban middle class image and semiotics, and just exactly what a young white female teen means in our societal calculations of value, and the rigidity of those categories. But it also drew some laser-like criticism for the obliviousness of the white-black power dynamic in and of itself, and the history of that incendiary word.

It wasn’t a completely non-obvious pairing, though, figuring hip-hop’s large white fanbase; and to assume that some or many whites do not recite those rap lyrics they hear word-for-word is asinine, and, in my mind, while I wouldn’t argue it’s always acceptable, it does not (usually) equate to “racism.” Intent, delivery and context should always be a consideration. (And particularly for this kind of hip-hop it is an obvious paring, since this category of hip-hop finds enthusiastic support from early-adopter whites who’ve formed and maintained often divergent and distinguishing identities, particularly in urban centers such as New York and L.A., as noted at Stuff White People Like or somewhat referenced in Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro.”)

In a Clams Casino collaboration which looks to explain him and his collective, entitled “Wassup,” the video treatment for [above] was just released last week, he raps about his own anomaly and he addresses the possible backlashes within hip-hop and Harlem’s streets spitting the bars, “pretty nigga in some shit you never hear of, only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror; clothes get weirder, money get longer, pretty nigga pin your hair up; ‘the nerve of this dude,’ but I’m cool as a fin, 40 ounce, full of brew.” In the video, at times incongruous to the actual lyrics and which was produced in collaboration with Vice, he uses movies like Casino and Scarface (beloved in mainstream hip-hop), placing a twist on them, as the video is ostensibly about him selling his soul to the illuminati to become a rap cliché, though these moments are interpolated with scenes of him and his crew in and around Harlem, being everyday joes from the block. In one of the verses he does provide a moment of clarity, amid the mystery, before he awakes from the nightmare, where he raps:

I ain’t talking about no money, I ain’t talking ’bout no cars; [not] talking ’bout no diamonds ’cause that shit is a facade, times is really hard…

Rocky is the end-product of an amalgam within the larger culture and things that reside on its edges; things going on sociologically. (As in the case of all relevant rap.) It is what makes him perfectly set to be this wave’s breakout star with only a mix tape so far — Live.Love.A$AP– and a full-length album still on the docket. Whether he acknowledges or is aware of it, young Rocky, is the gross product of the harsher world of the social Web that has helped everyone fine-tune the extensions of their actual self to an online persona, curating his “authentic” outsider, insurgent image to a tee. He is also the beneficiary of the expanded interpretations produced by the hip-hop world that has spawned around him: encompassing the battle perspectives of the hip-hop Web, where anything goes on chat boards, to the Internet fashion and lifestyle Web sites and  communities such as Superfuture and Hypebeast, who’ve undoubtedly helped a kid and his crew from Harlem identify and confirm the brands exalted in high-fashion, such as Rick Owens and Raf Simons.

And that itself, is also a tentacle and effect of the offline, hip-hop superstar overclass — if anything can truly be characterized as “offline” anymore — what with those frequent mentions of Maison Martin Margiela by Jay-Z and Kanye, and ‘Ye festooning women’s brand Céline, producing latitude for what is generally assumed to be a woman’s realm, (high-fashion). Moreover, those brand-name mentions of extremely limited labels which have more in common with European versions of high-brow “luxe,” but also seem edgy in the United States, not because of their price tag, but because of their outlandishness comparative to American taste and general limited appeal, transfer more mystery on to Rocky.

He is quickly becoming a positively strange, placeless vector for a new conception of hip-hop: conventional enough to be accepted, but unconventional enough to hold novelty, and his choices to routinely use Clams Casino’s hazy, drowning beats and promethenzine-tinged hooks; it makes him less from New York, but representative of an ever-rising, unified street culture, as the Big Apple’s rap sig now reads a bit overwrought now, 30 years later, but its imprint on the world still isn’t. And in the end, like Rocky, isn’t that just so very New York, to take the genre it invented and the clichés it became known for and bend them?… To give you characteristically Southern Master-P like rap, from a Harlem-bred Generation Y-er, or a gyro with Asian fusion ingredients?

I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.

Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.

Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.

Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.

Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.

-  “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,”  The Guardian 

The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.

All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.

Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.

Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.

The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.

If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.

Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]

North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.

“North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il,” The Atlantic

Photo Credit: The Atlantic

THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.

The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.

The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.

The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.

Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.

View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]

Photo Credit: Coverjunkie

IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.

During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.

The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)

I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.

By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:

For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”

Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-­seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-­minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are ­already wealthy.

* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes ­matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.

Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.

Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]

Photo Credit: Army Times

STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)

When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”

In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.

The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.

Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or  about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:

‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’

The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them.  The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:

‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’

The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now.  A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:

• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.

• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.

• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.

• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.

• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.

• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.

• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.

• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”

• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.

• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.

Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]

ZOO KID’S enigmatic presence on the music scene as a teen underground sensation hasn’t truly been explored as far as I can tell. He’s just not quite big enough, maybe? There is not even a Wikipedia page for journalists to scan (though after his recent name change to “King Krule,” there was an addition ), in order to get a sketch of the young man who is being besieged with music snob laudations, and is just the age of your average high school sophomore or maybe he’s the age of a junior now? Regardless, he has already released wonderful industry-noticing work that is some new take on Billy Brag (he sounds a little bit like a somewhat drawled-out, booming garage crooner version of the legend), but sometimes armed with synths and dipped in lo-fi ephemera; when most of us were skipping out of lecture to shoplift and blow smoke rings.

And Archy Marshall, [Zoo Kid's real name], is apparently as in touch with the visual arts as he is the sonic one. His ode-in-the-form-of-borrowed-title, of street art culture progenitor and underground icon Jean-Michael Basquiat’s “Out Getting Ribs,” makes it appear so, at least, with Marshall leaving the rougher edges of his track exposed as either a premeditated design or a hat-tip to signal his lo-fi literati cohort. (Though, it is choice both ways; either to leave the song rough and unfinished or to polish it beyond the point of any natural beauty, like some ironically unappealing, over-manicured, modern, unthreatening, mass-appeal and plastic Hollywood model.)

The roughly four minute single released in November of last year on House Anxiety shares its name with a Basquiat pencil sketch (above), maybe as a statement of the gritty nature of Basquiat’s work in general and a larger statement on Zoo Kid’s raw, unvarnished feelings. Or it could just be the byproduct of a kid who — despite the sometimes deceiving artistic signature of lo-fi artists — really is working out of his room with Fruity Loops (FL Studio), a Mac and a Casio keyboard; the ultimate music nerd, just randomly assigning names to his gush of prodigious intellectual products; this one just being one of an unwieldy corpus.

What I know is he wails a mean and skilled, intimate confession over jagged electric guitar melodies in “Out Getting Ribs,” and he does it appropriately in your face, at times: His is the voice of an angry, sensitive boy who’s been rebuffed. The song and delivery challenges the earlier Beta Male feel of similar 2000′s singer-songwriters like Ben Gibbard of The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins and fellow Brit, Badly Drawn Boy. (And somewhat newer, Bon Iver.) Unlike them, though, Zoo Kid is truly of this new, young lo-fi sweep in the culture, and what makes him so intriguing on this track is the fierceness of it, this is truly how boys feel when things go asunder.

And further unlike those far older men in Zoo Kid’s relative genre, there’s something more urban going on inside with him, hailing from southeast London. (He seems a bit more vulnerable, but still not completely castrated, ala a Drake.) And his look is another thing altogether, it seems part working-class Manchester in the 1980s and part anti-racist, early skinhead dub music fans, melded with some indie hip-hop aesthetics and prep school oddball to boot.  He intermingles street culture with a traditionally alien music form, when he uses the term “boo” for his lady. It’s a brilliantly odd new thing that I relate to far more than those acts before him; of the college rock stations and lumberjack sartorial leanings.

Photo Credit: Dr. Lakra

THE 2005 BOOK FREAKONOMICS  was a resounding hit. The authors, Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a New York Times’ journalist, looked to explain the world through economics and the lens of the transactions that govern daily lives. The project eventually spawned a film (and blog) in 2010, where various directors were enlisted to explore sections of the original book. In one of the more salient moments of the film, the section entitled “Pure Corruption,” written by Peter Bull and directed by Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Darkside, the authors relay a case study concerning how the perception of “purity” in environments, such as those in Japan and its cultural mores, facilitates the cloaking of cheating.

A philosophical cornerstone of Japanese society is the ideal of honor, promoted by the nation’s dominant religion, Shinto. This permeates any discussion of corruption in Japan: from individuals’ motivations to how it becomes systemic. But Shinto’s principle of honor has helped the country consistently rate among the lowest across nations in measures of corruption. [Japan scored an "8" this year according to Transparency International's 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index on a scale of ten, with "10" meaning "very clean" and "0" meaning "very corrupt."] So while Japanese society is not considered corrupt, there are, nonetheless, warrens which exploit that reality; specifically those elements walled-off from everyday society, say like those activities of the yakuza.

In Japan, Sumo is sacrosanct. This is partly based on the facade of its entwine with Shinto, as even referees are presented as Shinto priests, but also it is the effect of its time-honored legacy and weave into the nation’s culture. Sumo’s rituals date back thousands of years, which further helps in representing the ideal of Sumo’s honorability in the society. All of this provides it with an air of infallibility, an environment where Sumo’s propriety is seen as beyond suspicion. The belief is that it shows no taints and therefore has no impurities.

Yet there is a great incentive to cheat because of the money, the high-stakes gambling surrounding the game and the reputation conferred to its wrestlers at the highest levels. The Japanese public learned this in 1996 when two whistle-blowers, one of whom was a former stable master — stables are Sumo’s training communities, where young wrestlers begin their rise through the ranks and live together under austere (and many times physically abusive) conditions — who penned a tell-all book that included names, allegations of match-throwing, and which was re-printed in a series by the Shukan Post, exposed the dark-side of Sumo. Professional Sumo’s governing body, the Japanese Sumo Association, responded to the allegations by claiming that the tell-all and its corresponding Shukan Post series were outright fabrications, and it roundly dismissed the printed accusations as the words of a vengeful man seeking publicity and compensation.

In response, the whistle-blowers decided to hold a press-conference. However, two weeks before that press-conference, both men mysteriously died on the same day, in the same hospital, from the same unidentified respiratory problem. Despite these extraordinarily odd circumstances surrounding the men and their demise, the culture of honor and its appearance of pervasiveness in Japanese life, led to an absence of inquiry by either of the deceased’s families or the media. Everyone from the families to the nation’s press, simply accepted the police’s line on the matter, who said: “It’s a very good hospital, and there were no grounds for suspicion.”

But when another young, in-training “rikshi” — directly translated to “strong man,” but means wrestler — passed in what was initially explained as an accident, but whose body displayed visible signs of assault and mutilation; suspicions were again aroused throughout the country concerning the propriety of Sumo. It was found, only after an autopsy requested by the wrestler’s father, that the young man was beaten by baseball bats and burned with cigarettes by fellow rikshi, whom he had trained with. The wrestlers were ordered by their stable master to punish him for attempting to run away. The incident sent a shock-wave which rippled through Japanese society, and the way in which murders were being investigated by the nation’s law enforcement, came to the fore as a national issue and an example of an overly-imbalanced separation between Japan’s dueling concepts of  “tatamae,” meaning the perceived truth or appearance of propriety, and the “honnae,” or the hidden truth. It is a Shinto philosophy that looks to sometimes explain moral dysfunctions.

This separation between the two versions of truth was so wide that it led Tokyo police investigator, Hiromasa Saikawa, to publicly question the procedures involved in conducting murder investigations, in the wake of the wrestler’s death; particularly in a country where law enforcement regularly boasts an arrest rate greater than 96 percent. According to Saikawa, in Japan when there is a suspicion of murder, the police look to identify a killer, much like any country with an honest law and order system. But unlike in other nations, it is only if authorities can identify a suspect, do cops initiate a murder case. If there is no identifiable suspect, then a case can potentially be closed and ruled as an “abandoned body.” This obviously manipulates Japan’s crime statistics in such a manner, that it can’t ever accurately be known what the nation’s true murder rate is, or the police’s ability to solve such crimes. Hiromasa Saikawa officially resigned the Tokyo police force in protest of this investigative procedure.

This kind of numbers rigging which governs Japan’s police work is an important microcosm as it is a cultural red-flag that ties to Sumo, beyond those mysterious deaths that surround the sport. As in Sumo, as long as law enforcement kept its appearances and produced great numbers, then there was no need to question their propriety, regardless of schemes, because the “tatamae” — in this case, the widely-held perception of cops’ honorable intent to solve crimes –  was met. But the data in Sumo, much like that of Japan’s murder arrest figures, tells a story about (another kind of) numbers scheming: A systemic preponderance of corruption known as “yaocho,” meaning match-fixing; which was long suspected, but still seen as unlikely by many.

To Japan’s outsiders Sumo is a sport and an important pastime, but to its wrestlers it is a lifestyle and cherished community. Wrestlers live in a closed society, which they were raised in since they began training as youngsters. This fact, along with the sport being treated as above suspicion, only motivates cheating given Sumo’s system, which operates on a hierarchy of ranks and money distributed to all its wrestlers, at every level; with every match promising a certain amount as one travels up this hierarchy, known as the “pyramid.” The best parts of life as a wrestler, like anywhere else, accumulate at the top, and for only wrestlers with the best records. However, there is but a minimum threshold where this “good life” is bestowed, and so individuals’ records matter, only to a certain point; in the sense that a better life is dispensed upon one’s performance, determined by meeting that threshold.

In professional Sumo tournaments wrestlers wrestle one match per day for 15 days, with the eighth win of a wrestler being critical in the schedule, because it produces a winning record (say of 8-7), and allows him to advance and move up in rank. Otherwise, a wrestler could drop from the sekitori class, the highest division of Sumo, that is made up of the juryo and makuuci divisions, and where the most prestige and privileges in Sumo lie. The difference in half a rank in professional matches can be as much as (the equivalent of) $5,000 USD a month. As wrestlers attempt to rise through the stable system from the “jonokuchi,” the lowest rung, to the “makuuchi,” the sport’s highest individual realm; wrestlers inevitably become friends and begin to understand that a blind-spot in the organizational architecture, is that the ranking system affords a better life for some, at no cost to others, at certain points. Since it is a system based on honor and trust; that all wrestlers will put up an honest fight.

This produces collusion that allows for many wrestlers to essentially win outside of the game, by being rewarded the fruits of victory liberally, with the assistance of their sympathizing buddies, who they’ve fostered relationships with since they were in the stables. The authors found that at the threshold between the seventh and eighth wins, when a rikshi is entering his final fifteenth do-or-die match between him and an opponent who has already gained the all-important eighth win, the wrestler who needs the eighth win, won an astounding 75 percent of the time; an incredibly odd deviation from the normal odds of it occurring.

It turns out that when two wrestlers meet and one has already secured his place within the pyramid, it is a common practice that he will usually help the other wrestler who needs the win more, and he will literally take “the fall,” hoping at some point the favor will be paid forward. But when those two wrestlers happen to meet again, the wrestler with the better record, originally, going into that deciding fifteenth match,  wins a resounding amount of time according to the same data. It’s a built in incentive, and is the result of the tight-knit bonds of the wrestlers’ smaller society, and the presumption of purity in Sumo. Moreover, it keeps earnings high for everyone and fosters Sumo, as this money trickles down the pyramid.

What the authors conclude from looking at the case study of “pure environments,” is that presumptions of honorable intent can produce systemic fraud, as in the case of the most recent American financial mess: The presumption of free-markets and good, honorable stewards such as Alan Greenspan or to a lesser degree, financial agents like Bernie Madoff; men who held pristine reputations in the finance world, led to the wide moral failure in the system to go unnoticed. The presumption of honest and fair-play throughout finance created by supposed oversight boards and transparency regulations and trumpeted by the examples of those men, averted attention and reserved our suspicions for far too long.

Photo Credit: Only the Young Die Young

Photo Credit: National City Police Department

To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America’s big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, “special” has quietly become “routine.”

“How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,”

The Atlantic

ANYONE who has watched any National Geographic Television or Discovery Channel all-access program following law enforcement, or have witnessed them in action, or unfortunately have dealt with them first hand, will have noticed something: There is increasingly little difference between cops and the appearance of our modern infantrymen, deployed in war-zones.

The trend towards beefing up our police, military-style, started with Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams and high-priority, specialized gang units in big metropolitan areas, and was probably given momentum by watershed events like the violent and televised North Hollywood shootout in 1997; between bank robbers in full body armor, toting fully-automatic rifles, and woefully under-armed Los Angeles Police Department officers, that seemed to bring about imagery from the film Heat.



But it is mostly the great effect of 9/11 and the constant specter of myriad forms of terrorism that could potentially require military-type firepower, lurking just around the corner, that is mostly responsible for this new approach. Nationally, law enforcement had been reminded time and again, that in many ways they were not as well-equipped as they should be, to meet the challenges of modern-day policing. (And because Americans love their guns, it has increasingly fostered an arms race between cops and criminals, who can purchase an easily-converted-to-automatic AK-47 or an AR-15 at a gun show, and with some savvy and evil enterprise, load it with explosive rounds or those meant to pierce through body armor.)

As any global security analyst will tell you, law enforcement was and is considered one of the first lines of defense against terrorism. That is until the days after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and the focus shifted towards our military. Under the old paradigm, the basic nuts and bolts of thwarting terror was laid at the police’s doorstep: doing good detective work, showing a presence, working with the community to be vigilant, and so on. But our dramatic intelligence failure on 9/11 and the two successive wars to address Islamist terror — if one counts Iraq as having this justification — and the creation of several agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security,  all have conferred this fight largely to the domain of the United States military and the national-security-industrial-complex.

This, in turn, has changed the posture of America’s  law enforcement. The police, now feeling even more under-prepared to handle all of its duties along with the addition and prioritization of the staving of potential terror plots, began to invest in military-style weapons, adopt its tactics, consult with the military’s special operations units for training (as though they are some opposing guerrilla force to a dictator in a banana republic), and now work to absorb the military mindset.  In The Atlantic‘s “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” Arhtur Rizer, a former officer and the article’s author, explains that the justification behind this “weapon inflation” is primarily safety.

What was once considered tactics or weaponry only to be used in special circumstances, say like a S.W.A.T. team or the application of once-limited, but now readily available, assault rifles, are being regularly employed in the more routine parts of policing. But as pointed to in “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” there are some legitimate civil liberty concerns because of this, as a recent mishap in a botched raid involving an innocent ex-Marine named, José Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq implies:

Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot–or even switching his rifle off of “safety”–he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.

The chief concern in regards to this escalation of firepower and this new mentality among the police is that the organizational culture in the military and its operational philosophy of: identifying if someone is a threat and neutralizing them, and if so, do it with limited civilian casualties; is unlike that of the police, whose role is to “keep the peace,” uphold the law and the rights’ of citizens, even those it suspects. If the police changes its posture from “keeping the peace” and treats everyone as criminals, the way the military treats everyone as a potential combatant, it creates more situations such as that of José Guerena, where excessive and lethal force is sometimes just the cost of doing business, and where suspects no longer have the rights that they are supposed to, as the officers become judge, jury and executioner.

When law enforcement begins to adopt the soldiers’ mentality, it tends to forget its original goals of maintaining a good solid relationship with its public, while upholding the laws when they are broken, along with the most important rights of the individual. This is not to understate the difficulty of their jobs or minimize their optimal chances for safety by not having them bring as many resources to bear as possible, as Arhtur Rizer put it:

The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.

Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.

Read “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” at The Atlantic [Here]

Photo Credit: We Are the 99 Percent

AS THE OCCUPY WALL STREET movement gains steam and 68 percent of millionaires, according to The Wall Street Journal, now say that they actually support more taxes on their earnings,  a recent article in Scientific American implies a retreat on the idea of increasing taxes on the nation’s top earners, in a key sector. While a vast majority of the one percent — despite our currently personally beneficial tax situation — feels that a country in need should have those most able of it to pitch-in just a bit more, there has been a surprising attitudinal adjustment with working-class Americans.

In the article “The Last Place Paradox,” Scientific American reporters Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton, Ivy League business school professors who co-authored a paper of the same title, found that among the nation’s blue collar, support for income redistribution (taxes) fell, marking this odd shift of millionaires, generally, approving to be taxed, while potential beneficiaries of such taxes believing it is unfair to tax them. Between 2008 and 2010 — the most recent years of data available — support for such measures actually “plummeted.”

My first inclination was to presume that the drop was due to the demagoguery of President Obama as a “socialist re-distributor” by his opponents on the right, but that presumption does not square with who is primarily in fundamental opposition to the government addressing large-scale income inequality; our have-nots in this winner take all system.

While the working-class is a demographic that is known to vote against its general interests, and those actions are thought to be an expression of their aspiration  – for example, voting for policies that favor the wealthy, because they innately believe that they will be the wealthy someday, or their kids will be — it turns out that their motivations in regards to flagging support for re-distribution efforts, is actually motivated by a fear of being met at the same economic rung, or lapped, by those below them.

Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.

How does last-place aversion play out with regard to redistribution? In our surveys, we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.

The writers replicated this finding in lab tests where an artificial income distribution was created and subjects are shown their position within it, and where each rank is separated by just $1.00 USD. The subjects were then given $2.00 USD to either give to those below them in the distribution or above them, meaning giving to those below them would make those recipients jump past them in position, relative to the scale. While most gave the money to those below them, regardless of those recipients jumping their position, those in the penultimate (or second-to-last) and would thus become the lowest in the income distribution, were the least likely of all to give to those below them.

While these finding are not necessarily indicative of how things actually work in America, because of a number of factors, but primarily that it’s not always certain that everyone knows their position on the economic scale, as seems to be the case, since most Americans consistently identify themselves as “middle class,” it is an important finding that provides some very strong explanations as to why the G.O.P. is undeniably successful in attracting blue-collar workers, beyond just their economic aspirations to be wealthy. And beyond that, as said by the writers, this experiment and its finding portends a key effective strategy on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, because instead of dividing the income distribution among several strata, which would then produce potential supporters of the cause competing against each other, it focuses on one large group versus another, smaller group. As the writers said:

 Framing the issue this way focuses the attention of people at the bottom of the distribution on those at the top – rather than on each other – and implicitly suggests that anyone not in the top 1 percent (“them”) is one of “us.” While it is too soon to tell if OWS has staying power, their rhetoric has the potential to reframe the discussion on redistribution and inequality.

Read “The Last Place Paradox” at Scientific American [Here]

WHILE LOS ANGELES’S sports fans are anxious over the still unresolved and perpetually ongoing saga of the Frank McCourt divorce and its potential to reap utterly negative consequences upon the franchise, possibly leaving it to Major League Baseball to step in — or owner Frank McCourt having to split the Dodgers in half with his wife — and now with an absolutely deplorable and savage beating of a Giants’ fan, Bryan Stow, leaving him in a coma at the beginning of this baseball season; some in the city are pointing fingers and becoming very critical of just how the Dodgers are being managed off the field of play. It is mostly the uncertainty surrounding the team now and the lack of security in the venerable stadium in recent years, along with “the element” McCourt supposedly attracted through his economical marketing promotions, often involving the sales of beer, and which is presumed to be a culprit in the Stow attack, that the Dodgers franchise now find themselves in a bad way with a segment of its faithful public.

But the McCourt case and even the Stow beating, are a mere pebble compared to the boulder of a problem that the building of now-timeworn and iconic Dodger Stadium was, in order to get the Dodgers here; an event which exposed the racial cleavages between whites and Latinos in the city, in the 1950s, just years after the Zoot Suit Riots.  (One can argue that the recent ramping up of security by Dodgers’ management and the Los Angeles Police Department, and their perceived racial profiling of Latino Dodger fans, in particular — one of the team’s courted and stalwart patronages — in response to the most recent controversy, has also shown this, in the aftermath of the Stow incident.)

Prior to Chavez Ravine housing Dodger Stadium, the area was home to a community of mostly Mexican-Americans spread among a conglomeration of three smaller towns by the names of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde. The 175 acre tract of land was originally inhabited by 3,800 residents and named after Julian Chavez, the original landowner, and early Los Angeles councilman in the 1800s. Once a parcel tended to by the state government, over time, Chavez Ravine became a neglected area where its inhabitants relied heavily upon each other, and where they created a communal garden, began to hold social functions and essentially produced a de facto ghetto or ethnic enclave, depending on how one wants to parse it. But more importantly, it became a tightly-bound, respectable community. However, as many of these stories go concerning resource-neglected and predominantly minority communities, Chavez’s perception to those on the outside in surrounding Los Angeles, found it to be a less-than desirable blight. This began a move to look to re-develop the swath with 10,000 new units furnished by the 1949 Federal Housing Act.

Through several political machinations to clear the land by a group of local business elite known as Citizens Against Sociable Housing (C.A.S.H.) — that acronym is some kind of irony! — and a grand deceit on part of the local government who promised Chavez’s residents first crack at the new homes being built and also largely recanted a promise of compensations to those who were dislocated; the Ravine became a ward to the city at a bargain-basement price of $1.25 million (a 75 percent discount), but only under the federal government’s required auspice of using it for a “public purpose.” This “public purpose” condition was the byproduct of negotiations by mayor, Norris Poulson, a man essentially elected through the works of C.A.S.H., and who ran on an anti-housing development platform for Chavez Ravine.

The individuals who made up C.A.S.H. had plans for the Ravine all along and to “cake-up,” as we say now, but several failed attempts by the city to do anything with the space made it a nuisance to some in the local government, and a portion of the original homes were cleared to be used for firefighter training, while others were just stripped and sold piece meal at auction. At that point, still unable to find that federally mandated public purpose for the area, Chavez Ravine could have just been handed back to its original community, who were now seen as squatters; to do with it what they once did, and which would meet the federal requirements for its selling. That didn’t happen.

But that was just the beginning, because Brooklyn Dodger owner and legend Walter O’Malley wanted to move West and showed interest in the spot, or at least used it as bargaining chip to have Brooklyn help him build the new stadium he was looking for. And so began a battle with a series of dramatic turns that speaks to the powerful and their flagrant moral abuses of power to make money, with little regard for people, and which is outlined at luminary Los Angeles street wear company’s, FreshJive‘s, blog. Here is an excerpt:

Playing off the needs of both coasts, O’Malley spent much of 1957 considering the idea of staying on the east coast or heading west. Facing mounting pressure from city businesses and politicians to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson gathered city officials together to begin planning a way to bring the Dodgers to L.A. Considering the legal and financial solutions of the move, Mayor Paulson found that his biggest obstacle lay in the rhetoric of the legalities, as the construction of a stadium did not serve as an “appropriate public purpose” to the citizens of Los Angeles.

After rejecting O’Malley’s proposition to build a new stadium in New York, the Dodger’s owner’s attention turned to Los Angeles. Receiving approval from the National Baseball League to pursue a move to the west coast, Walter O’Malley was given until September 30^th, 1957 to make his decision. Amongst mounting pressure from the Los Angeles Times urging city officials to bring baseball to Los Angeles at any cost, The Los Angeles City Council sat down to propose a deal to attract the Dodgers. Crafting what would later be considered a “sweetheart deal” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the city of Los Angeles offered to trade 300 acres of the Chavez Ravine land, while taking on over $4 million towards the construction and grading of the ravine. In return the Dodgers would trade the 9-acre Wrigley Field property owned by O’Malley, while paying $350,000 in annual property tax. Additionally, the deal called for the Dodgers to maintain a 40-acre public park for 20 years that would become the property of the Dodgers after the duration was over: the small stipulation regarding the 40-acre park serving as a sly political maneuver aimed to make the deal appear as though the agreement served an “appropriate public purpose.”

Needing a two-thirds vote to confirm the deal by midnight of September 30^th, a 14 member city council met to decide the fate of Chavez Ravine. Debating throughout the day and into the night, a deal had not been confirmed as the council grew closer to midnight. Eager to conclude the dispute and bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson lied in front of press and media, telegramming the National Baseball League that the council had reached an agreement when in fact they hadn’t. The lie spurred an unexpected series of events. Although facing immense backlash from city council, the National Baseball League extended their deadline two more weeks, allowing O’Malley more time to declare his decision. Taking another week to reach a verdict, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the Chavez Ravine deal in a ten to four vote, officially allowing for the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Read more of “For the Love of Baseball: The Battle for Chavez Ravine” [Here]

Oh, the Kingston gangsters use masks like that to scare victims before shooting them.

- Boogie

A PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES by the acclaimed street scene, gang and war photographer known as “Boogie”; a born and bred Serbian who got his start documenting the ravages of the conflict in Yugoslavia and who emigrated to New York in 1998, only to become an art world darling, made the Internet rounds after he had posted the images on his personal blog, and then the art magazine Juxtapoz.

The destination for this particular photo excursion was the gritty streets of Kingston, Jamaica, a place where Boogie had previously produced a great series of photographs. It is also a place that has stood out in an underground music scene and culture often dominated by its influences, think Jamaican patois in rap, ganja culture and Rastafai culture, dancehall, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bob Marley, Ziggy Marley and now Damian Marley.

It’s also a city known for a mixture of sexy flair and disturbing violence, and which has been thus tapped to provide the background scenery in some hip-hop videos. What is little known about the city and country, however, other than what is portrayed by the culture at large and the nation’s tourism board,  is not really heartening, though its revenues were up last year, surprisingly, in the midst of a global recession. According to the C.I.A. World Fact book on Jamaica:

Tourism revenues account for roughly 10% of GDP, and both arrivals and revenues grew in 2010, up 4% and 6% respectively. The Economic growth faces many challenges: high crime and corruption, large-scale unemployment and underemployment, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 120%. Jamaica’s onerous public debt burden – the fourth highest in the world on a per capita basis – is the result of government bailouts to ailing sectors of the economy, most notably to the financial sector in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Boogie’s pictures tell the story even better.  Now, obviously, one could find people to stage pictures and make them look reflective of a time and place much more raw than is actually the case, but that has not been Boogie’s modus operandi. Nope, these are what they are, the pictures which tell a story about Kingston, Jamaica rarely told. Boogie is able to capture the fallow of the area, the way its poverty and resulting crime economy seems to burst out of every seam of the life there. It’s as real as photography outside of war, natural disaster and famine gets, when looking at the eyes of his trusting subjects who as he put it in a Vice Magazine interview:

Yeah, man. The police in Kingston are very brutal. If they catch you with a gun they’ll most likely just kill you on the spot without making an arrest. So, the fact that these guys let me shoot them with their guns meant big respect.

View Boogie’s Kingston, Jamaica experience at Juxtapoz [Here]

Read an interview with Boogie at Vice Magazine [Here]

THE COMPLEX instruments of the financial sector that helped to deepen the trough in Bush no. 43′s economy, and then fully bottomed it out during the last year of his second term, made for a shocked global financial market in late 2008. (And for an absolutely apocalyptic one, nationally.) Nearly four years later, this is still the case, with the Eurozone in crisis and Greece and Italy, particularly on the brink, while America’s “real unemployment” — an indices which combines those who looked for work and didn’t find it in the past year, with those who are underemployed, or known as “marginally attached”– hovers at around 16 percent [Bureau of Labor and Statistics].

Those grim facts everybody knows, and particularly as the 2012 campaign season heats up, candidates who are tirelessly campaigning will inevitably flog the dead economic horse over and over to make sure it is not forgotten, even with or without the proper credentials nor the grasp to talk about economic matters otherwise. (Sup, Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain!?!?) But answering just how we got here is the harder part, since it seemed to sneak up on us — except for this revered guy — like it was that of the highest level order of ninjas. Just how did “money” become about derivatives and credit default swaps (C.D.S.), high frequency trading (H.F.T.) or “algo-trading,” which looks to maximize profit, even at the cost of international economic stability; and what were the conditions that made for a system where mortgage companies lent to the risky and then, essentially, dangerously bet against those very loans failing? ( And, oh, did they ever fail.)

Oxbridge/Harvard professor Niall Ferguson‘s 2009 book and its companion documentary, The Ascent of Money, both of which were somewhat criticized for their organization, digressions geared towards the already informed, sometimes topical coverage, the overlooking of competing historical viewpoints and which left some feeling like both endeavors were superficial examinations, especially considering Ferguson’s past meaty efforts; did actually yield a documentary that was a relatively good primer on an ambitious, expansive, complex subject. (I’ve not read the book.) The documentary, though it spans four hours — later bulked up to five hours – criss-crossing the globe to explore how money came to be and then morph to what it is now, in all its multiple forms (e.g. credit, bonds, real estate, et cetera), is quite digestible and interesting. And Ferguson is able to pepper in related historical elements that enlighten a greater understanding of the world beyond money, just as he did in covering the early lending practices of Venice, and which ultimately leads to some explanation as to how some of the more pernicious forms of anti-semitism and the accompanied stereotypes concerning money (wrongly) came to be.

Though he never thoroughly connects the dots  on the matter, possibly finding it best left unacknowledged, since it is more a sociological matter, or it is presumed to be already known and unnecessary, Ferguson explains that it was an established practice in Venice to import Jewish bankers and use them as lenders, since in Catholicism lending money with interest to other Catholics was deemed a sin by the papacy, but there were no such rules of any kind in Judaism. These same, imported Jewish bankers were then cordoned off in an area of Venice known as the ghetto (Italian for “armed boundary”), which left the bankers treated as an entity separate from the city’s population.

This practice obviously would create spite in some local Venetian’s eyes as these bankers became rich by way of the practice (and the Jewish community being largely limited to the banking trade), and the resulting limited interactions of some Catholic Venetians to the only Jewish people in their town — and only so when they were in their most desperate financial times — possibly produced an enduring animus that lives on in the racist banking conspiracies of today and the denigrations: “blood-sucking,” or “blood-suckers,” coupled with “Jews”; both ugly invective, disparagements still heard today, and which still refer to lending practices.

While this is a digression, and not particularly important to the story of money, other than it is an early example of usury (referring to the original/antiquated meaning of the word, and not what is now considered loan-sharking), and how it influenced the world and still influences everything today, from the rise and fall of nations to the globalization of markets and the invention of commodities trading; it is still important, even if Ferguson doesn’t fully touch on its non-economic boundaries. And further, it is an example of how The Ascent of Money illuminates how the story of money is as Ferguson implies, not just a story about financial history, but really the back-story of human history, saying, “the ascent of money has been an indispensable part of the ascent of man.”

Watch the first four episodes of The Ascent of Money (above) or [Here]

Watch the update “Episode 6″ explaining the meltdown [Here]

9.11.01 | A Confirmation

THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.

A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.

Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”

The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)

9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.

I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”

Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.

Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.

This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?

What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.

The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.

I DON’T KNOW if I hold any more romantic a view of a machine than that which I hold for the F-86, especially given my considerably pronounced romanticizing of war-birds. There was just something about its placement in the annals’ intersection between the modern jet-age fighters of now and the propeller-driven battlers of yesteryear, that makes it stand apart. Being one of the first of the American jets to see heavy air combat before the advent of modern weapons systems, it still remains pure in the mind for me, and still just so much of what a little boy — where much of the inertia behind military aircrafts’ popular culture presence resides — would seem to think a jet would look like; on top of everything else that it brought: From being a versatile combat workhorse to its survivability and maneuverability.

And mind you, this was a design made far before the later iterations of the fighter jet genetic line of my youth and (now) adulthood, which had me first absorbing the signatures of the F-14, F-15, F-16 and now and for sometime into the future the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter (J.S.F.) — as ugly and as troubled as the J.S.F. is — into my concept of “The ideal of the Fighter Plane.” The F-86 was also one of the first and final stick-and-rudder jet fighters. It came along before computers took over the cockpit and made for a different experience altogether: higher, faster, more acrobatic; but not as much pilot versus pilot. 

The pilots had to fly this completely, which was more challenging in the jet age, because of the speed creating smaller margins of error; there were none of the fancy systems of now to keep it stable or to enhance its abilities against the pull of the laws’ of gravity and rules of physics. It was from a time when the jet was still primarily an extension of the pilot and his skills, and not an extension of vaster power imbalances between nations in regards to technology, wealth and research and development, as it has become today.

Photo Credit: Gizmodo

And in a way, all of those late ’60s and early ’70s designed aircraft of my youth, which went operational in the 1980s all looked the same — with their sleekly pointed noses envisaging a predatory beak and utilizing hyper-aerodynamic, weather-beaten, sand-dune looking silhouettes — particularly for the epochs and technological generations they inhabit. North American’s F-86 was not that. It was not an aircraft representative of its respective time. It is in retrospect the jet version of another beloved, classic air foil of mine, the P-51 Mustang (photo above), produced by the same manufacturer. The P-51 was a World War II leap in propeller fighter technology, which went head-to-head against Nazi ME-262s, the first jet planes, and won many if not most, of those battles.

The F-86 “Sabre,” as it had become to be known, was a sleek first generation 1950′s comic-book drawing of a jet aircraft come-to-life, a plane which earned its respect in battles against an opponent falsely rumored to be its superior, the Russian MiG-15. But it is its style more than its storied operational  successes, while in service with many N.A.T.O. countries, that grabs me. Style is something odd which we project onto it now as aviation enthusiasts, but it was obviously an afterthought. Plainly, the thing had to fly and fly well, and aesthetics mattered not a bit, as it was designed to be the protagonist in a struggle against Russia and became a figure in some of the most intriguing and brutal dog-fighting in history. 

And so its beauty comes from the pitch-perfect execution of its more utilitarian concerns. It was a silver bullet with wings and a bubble canopy, perfect for a pilot engaged in an ever-expanding, three-dimensional chess match at 580 mph, tens and thousands of feet over the land.

A part of me wants to say that it was more along the lines of something from Buck Rogers, and another part of me wants to say that it was of Disney’s Tommorowland. It just wholly spoke to a kind of 1950′s pop-culture futurism evident in the culture. It was simply one of the smoothest plane designs ever encountered; like some beautiful Bang & Olufsen-meets-late-’90s-and-early-21st-Century Apple creation, an industrial design that could’ve been mistaken for art. 

In fact, there was a comic book All American Men of War panel (the first illustration above) dedicated to the plane, which was later adapted by Roy Lichtenstein in “Whaam!!” (directly above, panel 2), to avoid the accusation of plagiarism, and which was ironically made to depict a P-51, the Sabre’s cousin from the propeller age, in a piece that seemed to capture this spirit of the Sabre, in the pop-mind.

It was a reputation that the F-86 famously earned by burning its foes in the skies over Korea, where it dueled both North Korean MiGs and (secretly) Soviet piloted ones, who were used as an auxiliary force, in the infamous “MiG Alley.” During this process it became something greater than a mere beautiful assemblage of parts, but an absolute affirmation of America’s dominance in the skies, against any and all communist air power.

Photo Credit: Fleer Sticker Project

ON MY TUMBLR, I used to post scanned basketball cards, and on my even more intermittent basketball blog: Searching for Harold Miner, I would get into the finer points of card collecting; perhaps one of only a few still-somewhat respectable childhood hobbies that you can practice as an adult, if only because of the mortgage-sized sums the pieces of cardboard can fetch and maybe the clientele of sports’ auction warehouses happening to include C.E.O.s and money-raking celebrities. Since my first scans, a number of more dedicated Tumblrs came about to carry the torch and rep those card scan enthusiasts out there like Oakley and Allen, Fat Shawn Kemp and later Factory Set; a torch that I barely even tried to lift. (I actually kinda regret this, really.)

But no one so far has gotten into the most granular aspects, the very atom of collecting: the absolute “nerding-out” on rare items on a regular basis, than a blogspot known as the Fleer Sticker Project. This is because, primarily, (my speculation), all of those Tumblrs’ authors seemed to have grown up in the ’90s amid the marketing explosion for sports and sports memorabilia, and “rarity” then was based mostly on limited edition printing and what not, unlike what it means for the majority of pre-’90s early baseball and football cards and sports sticker collecting discussions that go on at Fleer Sticker Project, where rarity means oddball things and items that have since been mostly disposed of, from a time where collecting wasn’t in vogue.

What is particularly special about the blog is the writer’s ability to find entire sets or companions of things, and fully give readers the history behind them, and then those stories behind the story. This is a place where talk of proof sheets, card variations — Billy Ripken’s “fuck face” bat card anyone? — and the spotting of the art departments’ foul-ups and adjustments are given center stage. But there is also the dissection of serendipitous treasures like, say, the first picture of Reggie Jackson in an Orieols’ uni. It’s really not just about the content here, it’s about the actual dig to get to the content, exposing the history behind the pictures, promo items, autographs and errors; and it is why I am reading.

Check the Fleer Sticker Project [Here]

WE are now even more ensconced in this remarkable fix: the economy has been putrid for years and shows little signs of improvement, and with no actual assistance from the government, other than a largely de-fanged stimulus; that lets those who do not believe in the already accepted hallmarks of Keynesian economics — that when a country is in a situation like ours and no one is willing to spend, the government must — say, “Look, in fact, it doesn’t work.” And this may actually be a commentary on the setup of our political system and its dogmatic allegiances that separate facts from the discussion; a system which is proving to be not well-equipped to handle crises of this kind, magnitude and scope, since it is based on limiting the actual amount of policy change that can be made. (Not to mention an obstructionist Republican contingent, which blunts necessary and deliberately dramatic measures.)

The corporations are now holding onto their cash — $2 trillion USD — while upping their productivity and still turning profits at an unprecedented level in the midst of a global economic downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Depression; the exact opposite of what we need them to do. And the political conversation in America is so polarized as a result of the fragmenting of the information consumers to outlets that only parrot their views — and which stoke the flames of partisanship, that reason has left — and now neither side of the political divide is willing to talk to one another, and even centrists are forced to choose sides. And this is exacerbated by a faction within the right, the “Tea Party,” that magnetically pulls its moderates towards a cartoon version of the G.O.P. to look like that idiotic neocon character in Dr. Strangelove, and ultimately enforces a militantly arrogant ignorance about the most fundamental of modern notions from climate change, to the birthplace of an already elected U.S. president; to how to respond to such an economic crisis, in spite of experts’ opinions.

It is a Democratic president saddled with all of this, a totality of factors that almost makes it impossible to govern the country out of its mess. I mean, we are still hearing questions about his birth certificate and from those who look to de-legitimize him in every way, from race-coding him into an anti-colonialist revolutionary, to the idea of who is  “American,” yet for some unbelievably insane reason, he still looks to compromise with a bunch unwilling to even meet him half-way and ultimately has him giving much of the pot, usually, just to get just a third of what he wants. And the problem is, what he wants is usually some lessened form of what is ideally best for us all (based on reason and well-proven historical political data), but the environment has made this not so in many minds. What is he left to do? Since he is a believer in government, in democratic values, in debate and in consensus building?

The forces aligned against him are many and so vast and deep within our culture (example: rugged individualism versus a distrust of European-style socialism), both individually and institutionally, that he is already fighting what might be a Sisyphean battle, yet he doesn’t seem to be consciously aware that it is thus, and it is necessary that he respond more forcefully. For a guy so aware of everything socially and culturally to the point of it sometimes being a problem (e.g. I believe that he is reluctant to put on even a stern face, because of the implicit stereotypes of being an “angry black man”), why is he now so unaware of this situation? He at his core wants to sensibly play the middle, but now is not the time, particularly since there is no middle; just right and wrong. This has been talked about over and over by the pundits, but the president has to channel F.D.R. and talk about the “Do-Nothing Congress” and the political atmosphere we all now inhabit. As Ronald Dworkin at The New York Review of Books, NYR Blog, points out in “How FDR Did It“:

We now have a President we can admire and respect. But he seems unaware that his opponents are not patriots anxious to help govern through a decent consensus but fanatics who would destroy the country if that would lead to his defeat. We think he should understand that this is a time for confrontation not compromise. He should therefore remember the words of another president running for reelection in the middle of an even graver economic catastrophe, words that seem eerily relevant now.

Here is Franklin Roosevelt, in Madison Square Garden, in 1936:

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

President Obama might recall that Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.

July 7, 2011 2:38 p.m.