Chris Anderson, The editor of Wired, tired of getting hundreds of unsolicited emails a day from PR firms, has retaliated in a suitably fitting manner. First, he put all their emails in his blocked list.

There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.

Second, and this is the sweet part, he printed all their email addresses on his blog.

If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play.

Tip: The Big Picture

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How the SWP’s bureaucratic factionalism is wrecking Respect

If like me, you have trouble figuring out what’s happening with the Respect/SWP rupture because you don’t know the players and the history, the following explains clearly what happened, then puts the blame squarely on SWP. Their conclusion -

If Respect now crashes this will have extremely negative effects. It will create deep scepticism about the possibility of greater left unity and the potential for a broad left party. It will set back and complicate the whole process of politically and organisationally refounding the British left. Although the SWP leadership clearly don’t see this, it will have major negative consequences for the SWP itself and confirm the suspicions of all those who see the SWP as a deeply sectarian and factional formation.

It will confirm those suspicions because they are, sadly, correct. The SWP has shown itself in successive experiences - the Socialist Alliance, the SSP and Respect - to be incapable of fruitful long-term co-operation with other socialists in building a national political alternative. The leopard hasn’t changed its spots.

I call it”Leninitis.” A left faction decides it is inerrant and therefore need not form coalitions or cooperate with those with differing views because, ta da, they are leading a revolutionary vanguard, just like Lenin did! Well, ah no. There was only one Lenin (love him or hate him, he was a brilliant and charismatic organizer, strategist, and tactician) and they aren’t him. What they forget is that for a vanguard party to lead, people must want to follow. Not “be forced to”, not “bludgeoned into” but “want to follow.” Because if they want to follow, then poisonous bureaucratic factionalism never really has a chance to form, does it?

For continuing coverage of what’s happening, check Socialist Unity and Liam Macuaid.

Tip: Left Click

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Monsooned Malabar is my current favorite coffee. You can buy the green beans from Sweet Marias (then roast your own, which is both much cheaper and better quality than store-bought.)

From their review:

Monsooned coffees are stored in special warehouses until the Monsoon season comes around. The sides of the structure are opened and moist monsoon winds circulate around the coffee making it swell in size and take on a mellowed but aggressive, musty flavor. The monsooning process takes around 12 to 16 months of duration, where in the beans swell to twice their original size and turn into pale golden color.

While a good Monsooned coffee should be pungent, aggressive and almost musty, these should be clean flavors: nobody wants coffee to taste like mold! The Elephant is exactly that, which means it is great for espresso blending.

Sweet Maria’s carries dozens of coffees, all meticulously reviewed and graded. We use the Fresh Roast 8 to roast the beans, it’s $75 and works fine for two people. Given that green beans are $5-6 a pound, it quickly pays for itself. Plus, fresh-roasted beans are way better than anything you can buy in a store. Another of my favorites is the Ethiopia Kochere District Yirgacheffe.

The photo shows the Fresh Roast 8, with the Ethiopian on the left and the Monsooned on the right. Both are 5 lb. bags. Note how much larger and lighter the Monsooned beans are. This is due to its unique processing which makes the beans swell.

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From Bill Gross of PIMCO, they manage $726 billion in assets

The loose regulation and financial innovation of the past 35 years have spawned what PIMCO’s Paul McCulley has labeled a “shadow banking system” where credit is composed on a keyboard as opposed to a printing press. Economic historians marvel at the ability of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s to have printed paper money so fast that workers would lower their afternoon wages in a basket to waiting wives in order to front run rampaging six-digit inflation. Surely they could not have imagined shadow investment bankers and their minions spawning financial derivatives in the hundreds of trillions, far beyond the reach of central bankers and Treasury officials alike.

Gross concludes by saying the Fed will need to drop real interest rates to 1% to stave off recession, and is clearly worried about the economy. Yet the Japanese recession, which started for much the same reasons, was not solved by dropping interest rates to 0.25%.

John Robb comments

Unfortunately, there aren’t any control systems big enough or fast enough to compensate for behavior that exceeds acceptable boundaries — as we are seeing today. In physical systems this usually results in loads that exceed the tolerance of the system, things break apart, and the system crashes. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the financial system.

In you look at this in Marxist terms, then the ruling class should be manipulating and controlling the situation. But they’re not. The really scary truth, I think, is they are just as stunned by this as anyone else - and uncertain about what to do. This crisis of capitalism could mangle the lives of countless people everywhere, most of whom have  probably never even heard of CDOs or SIVs.

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Call them water wars, with the Great Lakes states hunkering down to protect what they see as theirs.

Why would they need to form a water pact to protect their water? Let the always-charming Dick Armey explain.

“We’re not going to be buying it. We’re going to be stealing it,” then-U.S. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) said in 2000. “You’re going to have to protect your Great Lakes.”

That’s the incentive behind the proposed water compact. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is making similar threats, saying Great Lakes water needs to be sent to the Southwest - that such a mad scheme would be hugely expensive, impractical, plus the Great Lakes are also low on water, appears not to matter to him. Nor does concern as to what this might do to the Great Lakes long term.

Asymptotic Life has commented here that the northern tier states have the water and the southern tier states grow the food. This is certainly true. But there’s no practical way to get northern water to southern states.

“It doesn’t make economic sense to send Great Lakes water to the High Plains or the Southwest,” Annin said, “but we know the thirsty will be calling.”

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