“The broad implication is you’ve got to dot your i’s and cross your t’s,” said Kathleen G. Cully, an expert in bankruptcy and lender regulatory law in New York. “You need a proper chain of title, and in both of these cases there was a gap in the chain.”

We’ve all been there. It’s late, you’re at home and you’re spooked by one of your works of art – an Andy Warhol screen print of a smiling, smug Chairman Mao – so you pick up a gun and shoot it. One as a warning, the next through his eye.

In truth, only the late actor Dennis Hopper was there and it was the 1970s, a time when he was taking drugs in order to sober up quicker so he could start drinking again. Certainly his friend Warhol didn’t mind, cheerfully annotating the two bullet holes.

As a result the work became a Warhol-Hopper collaboration, and it will be sold by Christie’s in New York for an estimated £20,000-£30,000 next week, part of a sale of some 300 items of memorabilia and Hopper-owned art that filled his Venice Beach home from floor to ceiling. Many of the items are estimated in the low thousands of dollars and it follows the sale of Hopper’s expensive stuff last November when 30 works were sold for a combined total of $12.8m (£8m) including a Jean-Michel Basquiat which went for $5.8m.

But Mr Hessel and his small left-wing publisher (which is used to print runs in the hundreds) say that he has evidently struck a national, and international nerve, at a time of market tyranny, bankers’ bonuses and budget threats to the survival of the post-war welfare state. They also suggest that the success of the book could be an important straw in the wind as France enters a political cycle leading to the presidential elections of May 2012.

In a New Year message Mr Hessel, who survived Nazi concentration camps to become a French diplomat, said he was “profoundly touched” by the success of his book. Just as he “cried out” against Nazism in the 1940s, he said, young people today should “cry out against the complicity between politicians and economic and financial powers” and “defend our democratic rights acquired over two centuries”.

In a party-political aside which might or might not undermine his new status as political prophet, Mr Hessel went on to imply that “resistance” should begin with a rejection of President Nicolas Sarkozy and a vote for the Parti Socialiste.

The book has not pleased everyone. It also contains a lengthy denunciation of Israeli government policies, especially in the Gaza Strip. Although the final chapter calls vaguely for a “non-violent” solution to the world’s problems, the book also suggests that “non-violence” is not “sufficient” in the Middle East. Mr Hessel, whose father was a German jew who emigrated to France, has been accused by French jewish organisations of “anti-semitism”.

    <p>This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.</p>

            Missouri car dealer Max Motors has upped the ante in its longstanding <a href="http://jalopnik.com/392524/missouri-dealer-offering-free-gun-or-free-gas-with-cars-though-we-see-a-way-of-getting-both">free-gun-with-purchase promotion</a>, offering a .50 caliber sniper rifle to anyone who buys a Dodge Viper. The next step? Air vents laced with powdered Viagra. <em>(Thanks <a href="http://www.jalopnik.com/people/mike4700">mike4700</a>!)</em> [<a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/2010-Dodge-Viper-SRT10-ACR-Ltd-Avail-/310283050754?pt=US_Cars_Trucks&amp;hash=item483e4f9f02#ht_25790wt_1165">Max Motors</a>]                <a href="http://jalopnik.com/5723392/snipers-for-vipers-gives-rifles-that-new+car-smell" title="Click here to read more about “Snipers For Vipers” Gives Rifles That New-Car Smell [Steals And Deals]">More »</a>
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Richard Seymour of the blog Lenin’s Tomb (also author of The Liberal Defence of Murder & The Meaning of David Cameron, and all round rising theoretical star of the British Socialist Workers Party) has also been grinding an axe against Žižek for some time. Initially Seymour was enamoured by Žižek — despite outrage at some of his opinions — but around 2006 that started to change. Seymour confessed:

Perhaps it’s transference, but I used to think that Zizek had all the answers. Even when he was wrong, I assumed he knew it and was being contrarian, using the cunning of reason to provoke thought and all that rubbish. Even now when he’s writing absolute pig shit like this, (apparently a re-mix of this and this), I feel the urge to say “well, he didn’t meanthat“. But he did, and does. To clarify, practically everything in Zizek’s latest is a regurgitation of increasingly common Eurocentric – well, actually, Christian supremacist – platitudes about Islam and secularism.

From this post Seymour’s gripes becomes apparent: his charge is that scrape beneath the seductive theoretical exterior and you will simply find a warmed up liberal with Eurocentric and racist tendencies. “The seductive Lacanian packaging positions the “ire” at the Muhammad cartoons (which Žižek still doesn’t acknowledge as racist, only blasphemous, only disrespectful within the confines of religion) as a reaction to the West as perceived through a distorting phantasmatic screen, “a complex cobweb of symbols, images and attitudes”: this would be more impressive if Žižek did not reveal his own “complex cobweb” in the process.” From here on Seymour’s criticisms of Žižek have effectively operated via a single strategy: take Žižek’s reflections on a subject, from whatever angle they might be, and simply shout them down with charges of racism: a kind of rhetorical ‘nuclear option’. No one likes racism — a single Cartesian point across the political spectrum, aside from the far right — so repeatedly charging your opponent with it operates as vicious tool of deligitimation, and allows one to not even enter debate. In fact, to even debate the alleged racist’s position would be to enter into the same racist discourse. The example above acts as a case in point. Here, Seymour simply asserts that cartoons lampooning Muhammed are racist, ergo any attempt to think the reaction to them as anything more than justified rage against an obviously evil act of injustice is also racist.

This type of tautological rhetoric is repeated in his most recent post regarding Žižek’s commentary on an attack on a Roma community. For balance I will reproduce the quote isolated by Seymour and what I think is Seymour’s most substantial commentary on it.

Žižek wrote:

There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.

Seymour commented:

This was actually a response to a pogrom which observers compared to Kristallnacht. If the police hadn’t driven the gypsies out, the racist mob would have done so with fire and blades. But Zizek has no hesitation about regurgitating the classic anti-gypsy propaganda (they’re anti-social, they cause trouble, they basically bring it on themselves), championing of the racist mob and its ‘legitimate concerns’, counterposing the decent locals to snooty metropolitan elites, channelling the resentment of the ‘little man’ while slandering the little man’s victims. Richard Littlejohn wishes he could get away with this level of barbarism.

Seymour refuses to countenance the idea that there are any legitimate antagonisms, even only in addition to the pure racist frenzy driving the mob. Žižek’s stab at metropolitan, liberal condescension is taken simply as a ruse to allow his own racist instincts some veneer of criticality. But really, is it so incredulous that there were genuine frictions over safety and property in this instance? And does to even consider that possibility make one a racist? It seems to me that there is a hysterical, liberal view of racism — in a purely voluntaristic, moralistic register — at work in Seymour’s denunciations of Žižek. Rather than thinking through structurally how racism is intertwined with class, economics, culture and mechanisms that perpetuate real racial divides and concrete problems with race vectors (those structurally constructed and emergent upon racism), Seymour’s absolute scepticism tends towards the liberal position Žižek is criticising, so it is no wonder that he is so upset by Žižek’s repeated criticisms of liberal anti-racists.

What is the deeper explanation for all this? We enter the realm of conjecture now, but I don’t think Seymour’s running battle with Žižek can be disassociated from the politics of the Socialist Workers Party. For a great deal of investment has been made by the party in the last ten years in defending the victimised Muslim, combating Islamophobia, anti-fascist campaigns and anti-racism music festivals, and so on. Indeed, the stock and trade of the SWP has increasingly come to be a variant of liberal anti-racism, with the establishment of permanent united fronts with Tories, rightwing Muslim groups, and so on.  So there is a lot at stake for the party in whether or not liberal anti-racism is the correct paradigm. Žižek has thus become a target for party-political reasons.

Two things are clear. First, the economy has to grow around 2 1/2 percent per year just to keep unemployment from rising. Second, growth above that level leads to a less than one-for-one fall in unemployment (because hours per worker rise, more people enter the work force, etc.). Roughly, it takes two point-years of extra growth to reduce the unemployment rate by one point.

So, suppose that US growth is accelerating. Even so, it will take years of high growth to get us back to anything resembling full employment. Put it this way: suppose that from here on out we average 4.5 percent growth, which is way above any forecast I’ve seen. Even at that rate, unemployment would be close to 8 percent at the end of 2012, and wouldn’t get below 6 percent until midway through Sarah Palin’s first term.

"As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue."
—Are you interested in a Foucauldian reading of George W. Bush's Decision Points? You probably are! I mean, it's not like anything else is happening today. @ 10:40 am

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Whatever else WikiLeaks may have revealed, one fact has been repeatedly confirmed: the US government under George Bush really loathed the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

After a leaked cable from US diplomats in Havana falsely claimed Cuba had banned Moore’s documentary Sicko – when in fact it was shown on state television – another cable reveals US officials flying into a panic after hearing a rumour that a New Zealand cabinet minister was hosting a screening of Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Labelling the event a “potential fiasco”, the classified cable from the US embassy in Wellington in 2003 reads like a failed plotline for an episode of In the Loop, breathlessly reporting a series of calls to the New Zealand prime minister’s office and to the minister involved, Marian Hobbs.

US Vice President Joseph Biden made the highest-level public attack on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange since the organization began publishing secret US diplomatic cables, calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and agreeing with a suggestion that the organization’s activities are “criminal.” Biden was interviewed on the NBC program Meet the Press, broadcast Sunday morning.

“Look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world,” the vice president said, in response to a question from interviewer David Gregory. The leaks of US diplomatic cables have “made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends,” Biden continued, adding, “There is a desire now to meet with me alone rather than have staff in the room.”

The discussion of Assange came as part of a longer interview conducted Saturday. Gregory raised the issue with a suggestion that the United States “do something to stop Mr. Assange,” a question that Biden chose to deflect. “The Justice Department is taking a look at that,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on that process.”

Biden continued, “I would argue that it’s closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers.”

Monnet, who is considered a “father of Europe,” wanted to guide European countries into a super-state “without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose.”