Turkey Week News

NEW ORLEANS

--In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.—A14, NYT 11-20-07 but we already knew that: --Old Line Families Escape Worst of Flood and Plot the Future. Mr. Reiss said he and other business leaders will no longer tolerate living in a dangerous city with bad schools and substandard municipal services. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way … “ The power elite of NOLA … insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. –WSJ, A-12 Sept. 12, 2005 [sic]

THE EMPIRE’S FIRE SALE

--The Deal Story of 2008: Will the US get LBOed? For 2007, foreign buyers have accounted for 20% of M&A in the US… The irony is that the US is, in essence, funding its own potential takeover. … With a weak dollar and the ever-enriched positions of petro-based economies, it’s inevitable that the worries will continue to stew. “We’re moving to a sharecropper economy,” said Mr. Mulloy [of Sloan Foundation] “The other guys are going to be owning, and we’re going tobe working for them.” –WSJ C1, C3, 11-20-07

--Wealthy Nations in Gulf Rethink Peg to Dollar…. Kuwait chose in May to link its currency, the dinar, to a basket of currencies. WSJ, Al, A14 11-20-07. Good thing USA saved Kuwait from Saddam…

--In a recent video [hip hop impresario Jay—Z] cruises New York with a stash of euro banknotes. It’s a statement, and it echoes Warren Buffett’s bet against the dollar and a recent campaign by Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, to promote the euro.—WSJ C10, 11-19-07

--the fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar—it’s the fall of the American empire,” Mr. Chavez said. NYT A1, 11-19-07

THE EMPIRE’S ILLITERACY

--[NEA] Study Links Drop in [USA] Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading. NYT B1, 11-29-07 EXTREME PROUST, sec. 45: Words are perhaps the most mediating of mediating media. Their role in human history has been both complicated and profound, enhancing humanity’s ability to cope with existence, undercutting humanity’s ability to appreciate existence, and then again assisting humanity in its hopes of appreciating existence. One irony is that just as Proust was beginning to explore these issues in depth (with words and words and words) the twilight for words may have been beginning. Proust’s lifetime witnessed a marked increase in the role that images might play in human communication, for better and for worse. Photography became more common. Cinema was invented. It became Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction” for images, with newspapers, posters, and cinematic theaters. The trend has intensified since Proust’s death, with television, computers, DVDs, power point presentations, home theatres, cell phone theatres, and more to come. The irony is that writing may have had its origins in images, as a review of at least Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters might attest. Alphabets abstracted this medium from its more immediate (unmediated?) sources. Yet while writing’s ties to the immediacy of images may now be forever severed, the point now is the degree to which humanity’s new image generating capacities are attempting to make writing and words irrelevant. If more people are not trying to communicate through images or sound bites, certainly more political rulers and commercial hustlers are trying to manipulate through less words and more sight bites.

--In an episode that has embarrassed the Department of Education, thousands of flawed testing booklets forced the invalidation of USA reading scores on an international exam administered without major mishap in 56 other countries.—NYT A16, 11-20-07. We can read MY PET GOAT...