Winter Is Coming

Did a 2011 overview here. Discussed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo here.

Forgot to mention Johnny Depp's second Hunter S. Thompson movie The Rum Diary, where Thompson puts the bastards on notice. Also, there was the George R.R. Martin's A Dance of Dragons and HBO's Game of Thrones. 

Tyrion Lannister was great and the scene of Eddard Stark's execution was the most shocking and heartbreaking scene I've witnessed in a while, with the man from the Nightswatch Yoren clutching Arya and yelling at her "Look at me! Look at me!" And afterwards she looks at the blue sky where a flock of birds flies.

Really enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I liked the Karen O, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Finch cover of Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" at the opening and the Swedish setting with its social democratic trains. It was funny that the killer listened to Enya and Mikael Blomkvist sported dark speedo underwear. Hopefully they'll make it into a franchise as has been suggested.



The late, great Hitchens on Stieg Larsson, his books and Sweden, published in December 2009.

The Problem by Krugman

Richard Koo has another paper on balance sheet recession out (pdf), with good charts for a number of countries. I still have some differences with him over monetary policy — I still don’t understand why he doesn’t see debt-eroding inflation as something helpful in dealing with debt overhang — but his view of the sources of our Lesser Depression is completely right.

Triffin's Dilemma And the Global Safety Shortage by Yglesias

What a weird year 2011 was. The highlight was meeting Laetitia Sadier. Steely Dan at the Ravinia Theater was amazing. Also, Calexico covering Love was a great moment. Also, Archers of Loaf rocking out at the Onion Blockparty. The movie Drive was cool. Christina Romer wrote about NGP level targeting, Bernanke was annoyed when asked about it and a Time columnist wrote in support of it. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans stepping up and arguing that the Fed should do more.

The fall of Saddam led to Tahir square and Dan "Double D" Davies sparked Occupy Wall Street with a Crooked Timber post. The European Feedback Cycle of Doom kicks in after the ECB raised rates in April. Muammar Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Václav Havel, Kim Jong-il and Christopher Hitchens all die.

Pepper-spraying cop at UC Davis.

Hitchens on North Korea.

David Brooks is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again by Dean Baker

Why the Global Shortage of Safe Assets Matters by David Beckworth

In the early-to-mid 2000s, the Fed exacerbated the asset-shortage problem as its loose monetary policy got exported via fixed exchange rates to much of the emerging market world which in turn recycled it back to the U.S. economy via the "global saving glut" demand for safe assets. (For more on this point see this post and my paper with Chris Crowe.) Since late 2008, both the Fed and the ECB have worsened the asset-shortage problem by failing to first prevent and then restore nominal income in each region to its expected path. In other words, since 2008 both the Fed and the ECB have passively tightened monetary policy and this has caused some of the AAA-rated securities to disappear. (Yes, some of the AAA-rated MBS and sovereign debt would have defaulted on their own, but some of them like French sovereigns would have maintained their safe asset status were it not for insufficient aggregate demand caused by passively tight monetary policy.)

I would look into the "loose monetary policy" and the context of it.

A Financial Crisis Needn’t Be a Noose by Christina Romer


Olivier Blanchard Isn't Very Serious by Krugman

Gully Wells on Hitchens and Amis

Fucking shameful. DeLong posts Dennis Perrin on Hitchens.

Perrin:

"Milosevic wasn't a mere regional thug with blood on his hands--he was a genocidal monster who, if left alone, would wipe out every Muslim and Kosovar he could catch."

Just like Saddam was a "mere" regional thug. Some on the left are very forgiving of the Empire's designated "thugs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anfal_campaign

"The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide,refers to the July 1995 killing, during the Bosnian War, of more than 8,000[7] Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The mass murder was described by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War. A paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions, officially part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, participated in the massacreand it is alleged that foreign volunteers including the Greek Volunteer Guard also participated.

In April 1993, the United Nations declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica in the Drina Valley of north-eastern Bosnia a "safe area" under UN protection. However, in July 1995, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), represented on the ground by a 400-strong contingent of Dutch peacekeepers, Dutchbat, did not prevent the town's capture by the VRS and the subsequent massacre.

In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the "Prosecutor v. Krstić" case, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The Hague, ruled that the massacre of the enclave's male inhabitants constituted a crime of genocide. The forcible transfer of between 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak women, children and elderly which accompanied the massacre was found to be confirming evidence of the genocidal intent of members of the VRS Main Staff who orchestrated the massacre."

Hitchens had been to Bosnia, unlike Perrin. He had also been to Kurdistan.

"The Anfal campaign began in 1986 and lasted until 1989, and was headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid (a cousin of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit). The Anfal campaign included the use of ground offensives, aerial bombing, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation, firing squads, and chemical warfare, which earned al-Majid the nickname of "Chemical Ali".

Thousands of civilians were killed during the anti-insurgent campaigns stretching from the spring of 1987 through the fall of 1988. The attacks were part of a long-standing campaign that destroyed approximately 4,500 Kurdish village in areas of northern Iraq and displaced at least a million of the country's estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population. Independent sources estimate 1,100,000 to more than 2,150,000 deaths and as many as 860,000 widows and an even greater number of orphans.[5] Amnesty International collected the names of more than 17,000 people who had "disappeared" during 1988.[6] The campaign has been characterized as genocidal in nature. It is also characterized as gendercidal, because "battle-age" men were the primary targets, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East.[7] According to the Iraqi prosecutors, as many as 182,000 people were killed.[8]"

Christopher Hitchens, Consumate Writer, Brilliant Friend by Ian McEwan

Hitchens on the Daily Show

Victor Navasky on Hitchens

Andrew Sullivan on Hitchens

Timothy Garton Ash

David Corn

Fred Kaplan

Good Vanity Fair video montage on Hitchens. 

It was so funny to see him on CSPAN early on.

Graydon Carter remembers Hitchens

People Hitchens spoke highly of: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jessica Mitford, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, Hunter Thompson among others he know. From history, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot among many others.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg on Hitchens

I ran a Hitchens fansite and met him a few times and corresponded with him a few times more. He was very generous, kind, funny and cheeky.

Most memorable was having a drink with him at Café Loup in Greenwich Village and attending a party at his DC apartment with a Pakistani politician, Grover Norquist, and a hot female conservative commentator among others.

Benjamins Schwartz at the Atlantic

We shared a great admiration for his friend Gene Genovese--a fervent Catholic, a man who at different times in his life was dedicated to a vision of the left and of the right that Christopher equally opposed. And we shared a fondness for one of Genovese's rather martial and uncongenial passages:

In irreconcilable confrontations, as comrade Stalin...clearly understood, it is precisely the most admirable, manly, principled, and, by their own lights, moral opponents who have to be killed; the others can be frightened or bought.

Just as Orwell, when an adult, was drawn to his old Etonian classmate, the high Tory Anthony Powell, not because of Powell's literary promise, but because of his military bearing and position, so Hitchens most cherished what he called (quoting his father) "sand"--grit. Christopher was haunted by his father--whom he called "the commander," and in a piece I asked him to write on Churchill, he wrote a throwaway line that I've always found hugely illuminating:  

My father, a Royal Navy commander, was on board H.M.S. Jamaica when it helped to deal the coup de grâce to the Nazi warship Scharnhorst on December 26, 1943--a more solid day's work than any I have ever done.

 

What Christopher Hitchens Held Sacred by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz at the Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates links this video: