Media Watch

I'm not personally familiar with the situation, and all newspaper reports give a slanted version of reality.

However, reading a couple of pieces in the LA Times I get a sense of the root cause of the meltdown of the major financial institutions of the US economy.

AIG cancels planned events amid rebukes for hosting $440,000 function and For insensitivity, Wachovia refuses to be outdone detail a disturbing sense of entitlement in the leadership of these financial institutions.

In the case of AIG, the company held an expensive event at a luxury resort for 100 of its agents, even as it received $85 billion of taxpayer money as a bailout by the government.

Wachovia, who have since cancelled it, planned a week long Mediterranean cruise for 75 employees, as it waited for its own bailout.

Not only is this behaviour inappropriate given the performance of these two companies, it points to an underlying culture that would explain why these financial institutions are in such crisis.

As John C. Maxwell puts it in his characteristic pithy style: "As you go up, you have to give up." Leaders give up their independence and their freedom of action as they assume more and more responsibility in an organisation and on behalf of the people they lead. Leadership means stewardship. Often they are compensated for this sacrifice with financial reward. Sometimes, for example in a volunteer organisation, they are not.

Being responsible for the financial wellbeing of literally millions of people is a weighty thing. Assuring them of housing and financial stability is no small thing - in fact its a fundamental necessity of human life. Those who assume this responsibility should be compensated.

However, when this responsibility is not faithfully discharged, where does a sense of entitlement come from?

I'm not asking for people to start falling on their swords, but when your company fails, when you fail to provide this financial security to the people, where do you get the sense that you are somehow entitled to huge amounts of compensation?

That's not qualified leadership. It represents the sickness of entitlement without qualification, a pathological condition of any organisation.

Lee Iacocca demonstrated executive leadership when he went, cap in hand, to Congress to beg for a bail out for Chrysler. He asked his executives to take a substantial pay cut, and he reduced his own salary to $1 per year.

That's appropriate and it shows the moral fiber of a true executive leader. Demanding that taxpayers pay out million dollar golden parachutes and continuing to send people on expensive junkets while the people lose their jobs and homes, on the other hand, demonstrates exactly what got us into this situation.

The full effect of this meltdown will be felt next year, as we see a retail collapse due to lack of consumer spending in the Christmas season. Then we are going to know what it's all about...

The Fannie and Freddie situation was a result of their unique roles in the economy. They had been set up to support the housing market. They helped guarantee mortgages (provided they met certain standards), and were able to fund these guarantees by issuing their own debt, which was in turn tacitly backed by the government. The government guarantees allowed Fannie and Freddie to take on far more debt than a normal company.

- Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals, New York Times

And from His Divine Grace:

Unfortunately, on earth there is such a scarcity of gold that the governments of the world try to keep it in reserve and issue paper currency. Because that currency is not backed up by gold, the paper they distribute as money is worthless...

- Srimad Bhagavatam 5.16.20-21 purport

Gold-standard currency is based on falsehood because the currency is not on a par with the reserved gold. The basic principle is falsity because currency notes are issued in value beyond that of the actual reserved gold. This artificial inflation of currency by the authorities encourages prostitution of the state economy. The price of commodities becomes artificially inflated because of bad money, or artificial currency notes.

- Srimad Bhagavatam 1.17.39 purport

As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this all means.

- Steven D. Levitt, New York Times

He consults his other economist friends, Diamond and Kasyap, and they have something to say about it, so it gets better.

Alex Jones []wikipedia entry], however, was predicting that this would happen a couple of years ago, back when I was listening to his show. I did a six month stint of listening to him for 3 hours a day.

Why? Because I like observing people who are good at what they do, and learning from them. That's why I went to the Judas Priest concert (shout-outs to Paramatma das).

Here's a mashup for you - sung to the tune of "Metal Meltdown" from JP's 1990 Painkiller:

"Here comes the market meltdown, run for your lives..."

But back to Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is fascinating because he is fully, fully convinced. He is a man with no self-doubt - a total fanatic. And he gets on the radio every day and preaches his message passionately for 3 hours. That's interesting to me. He's also about my age.

And anyway, he was predicting this like a long haired, wild-eyed prophet a while ago. Interesting. I wonder what other of his "conspiracy theories" will turn out to be true...

Google.com.au today celebrated the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider with the above graphic.

Obviously the world didn't end last night, unless the black hole swallowed the Earth and we're now in another dimension, ala The Quiet Earth.

There is a website where you can check if the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world: http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/.

I just wish they had an RSS feed so that I didn't have to keep checking back there every hour or so...

The Large Hadron Collider is being powered up tonight.

Scientists have admitted that it may create a black hole that will swallow the Earth.

Less talked about is the possibility of it opening an inter-dimensional portal and allowing hordes of demons to enter the Earth and terrorize the population. Dude, I am so totally prepared for that. Video games have been demonstrated to be valid training for real life crisis situations, and I spent a few years of my teenage life battling demons in just such a circumstance in an underground base on Mars. BFG ftw!

I'll be at a Judas Priest concert when it happens, so it might be hard to tell whether the portal has opened or the original JP line up are just rocking out! I'll do a double-take if I find myself saying: "Wow, the epicness of this concert is approaching a Disaster Area gig.

So if you haven't done anything with your life, tonight's the night to cut loose - before a zombie pops through a wormhole and munches on your braaaaaaaiiiiiins!

If you haven't got anything else to do tonight, and you're in Brisbane, I recommend dropping by the temple for Nrsimha Kavaca prabhu's presentation on the new Mayapura Institute. Unfortunately I have a prior booking, so I won't make it, but it should be a good note to go out on.

Fasting for one day each month may reduce the risk of clogged arteries by 40 percent, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Intermountain Medical Center and the University of Utah and presented at a conference of the American Heart Association.

Researchers first began to study fasting when an analysis of a health registry indicated that significantly fewer Mormons than non-Mormons in Utah suffered from the clogged arteries indicative of heart disease, even after different smoking rates were taken into account.

The researchers then conducted a survey of 515 people, 92 percent of whom were Mormon. Participants were asked about a number of habits associated with the practice of the Mormon religion, including fasting one day per month, avoidance of caffeine and alcohol, observance of a day of rest, church attendance and donation of either time or money to charity.

Of the five religious practices, only observance of the monthly fast showed any correlation with heart disease rates, with 59 percent of regular fasters developing heart disease, compared with 67 percent of those who did not fast. The difference between fasters and non-fasters remained even after the researchers adjusted for age, weight and health status, including high cholesterol, diabetes or high blood pressure.

- Fasting One Day a Month Causes Significant Reduction in Clogged Arteries, via Natural News.com

''We cannot say with any certainty that cellphones are either safe or not safe,'' Dr. Black said on CNN. ''My concern is that with the widespread use of cellphones, the worst scenario would be that we get the definitive study 10 years from now, and we find out there is a correlation.''

- Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer, New York Times

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We’ll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

- Wake up America. We're driving toward disaster. James Howard Kunstler. Full article at Washington Post.

The other day I went to see Mike Myer's film "The Love Guru". First of all let me say that it contains some favorable (to devotional service) elements that have stuck in my mind - like the name of the village his character grew up in: "Haremakeester", and his greeting: "Mariska Hargitay" (a pig latin-inspired "Hare Krishna").

I think a lot of the humor is very childish. It's crude and relies more on being silly than on being clever, which is the kind of humor that I appreciate more, and that Mike Myers is capable of delivering.

The moral tale that Myers tells in "The Love Guru" is good. It's a tale of accepting and loving yourself for who you are, rather than what you can achieve. Both the guru and his student learn the lesson in parallel.

Myers presents Hinduism from within his own cultural context, and speaks to the experience of his North American audience. As such he lampoons the foibles of such familiar and visible personalities as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Satya Sai Baba, Rajneesh, and other super star gurus who have come to the West.

His gurus have questionable sexual morals and behaviour and are motivated by personal ambition as much as anything else.

Myers is making a comedy, a genre which exploits preconceptions and stereotypes for a laugh. He's not trying to educate his audience about religious and cultural traditions. However, his film does run the risk of reinforcing and perpetuating misunderstandings. The fact is that the majority of people gain their picture of reality from popular culture, not academic education.

He neglects the fact that Guru has become a respected position of authority for a reason. The Hindu tradition has evolved in that way because there really are people worthy of respect. While there are charlatans, the reason that the unscrupulous have an opportunity to trick people is because the real thing exists. Westerners, lacking the cultural experience and context to discriminate, have been repeatedly fooled by imposter gurus, and Myers film takes this dynamic and turns it into the normative experience, painting the entire tradition of guru as one of charlatanry and sexual deviance.

But what really makes it offensive to me is nothing specific to Hinduism or really Myers himself. It's the growing "Pornstar" popular culture in the West that this movie reflects and reinforces.

The Internet has taken pornography from being a marginal aspect of culture and turned it into a central pillar.

I get emails in my inbox every day telling me how I can "act like a Pornstar". Celebrities are busy making (and making profit from) sex tapes. There is a YouTube style website where anyone can upload and share their own amateur pornstar creations. The questions fielded by Aunt Bossy, an agony aunt on news.com.au, reveal that people are increasingly feeling like they are in a porn movie when they get it on with someone.

One popular internet website portrays a couple of men driving around and picking up women and having sex with them in a van. It's been revealed that the women are all
actresses paid for their participation, however the story relies on and reinforces the stereotype that women should make themselves freely available for sex, and that they should "do it like pornstars".

Porn portrays sex without commitment, without consequences. It divorces the emotional aspects and removes relationship from the picture. It dehumanises the participants, presenting a one-dimensional view of them.

Porn puts performance in the center, turning sexuality into a freak sideshow, sometimes literally.

Porn destroys intimacy and breeds insatiability.

Myers tells a tale of loving yourself for who you are and not for your achievements, but porn is all about achievement, with no room for love. The mainstreaming of porn encourages men and women to perform, and increases their anxiety about their performance.

Mike Myer's movie is so full of the mainstreaming of pornography as the new sexual norm that it's not funny.

This movie has an M rating in Australia, which means that anyone can go and see it, although it is recommended for 15+.

I would not want any young girl or boy to see this and accept the cultural norms that undergird it. In order to experience the movie you have to accept underlying assumptions that involve the mainstreaming of pornography.

Maybe that *is* becoming mainstream for a lot of the population, but I do not think that this will lead to a happy place. Am I just bemoaning the inevitable? Am I struggling with out moded Victorian morals and pushing back against the tide of history and progress? I don't think so. Porn will always have its place, just like prostitution, but it shouldn't be in the mainstream.

The strength of any society is derived from the strength of the family unit, and mainstreaming pornography leads to the weakening of the bonds that hold the family together. Ultimately this will lead to the destruction of the society.

Myers is not only playing to the cultural context of his audience, he's also creating it at the same time. He's not just an observer, he is a contributor to culture. The word Guru means "heavy", and whether he recognises it or not, Myers carries the heavy responsibility for giving leadership and guidance to popular culture. His moral tale is good, but it is mixed with something that I personally find offensive.

I mentioned that the ISKCON NA press release was getting some mileage in the Hindu press - this article points out that it might not be too hard to do:

You would think a press release about a German Nazi war criminal named Johann Bach being caught in the jungles of Goa after trying to sell a stolen 18th-century piano would be worth double-checking.

Nonetheless, the press release has been regurgitated on the front pages of the Deccan Herald and the Indian Express and inside the Telegraph, citing Perus Narkp, “the intelligence wing of the Berlin-based German Chancellor’s Core (sic)”, as the source.

Read more at Reuters.