Granted, this is little off the beaten track in terms of New Order’s discography. It is an album that has been too readily dismissed as sounding Joy Division like. Yet to reposition this in its rightful place in their canon is in no way to dismiss the power of their subsequent albums. But their excellence – and the clear distaste the group itself had for Movement, has tended to overshadow its mastery of the post-punk form and its status as arguably their most cohesive single body of work.

A cold, almost tinny artefact, the album is filled with filter effects – Hannett was either the greatest chancer ever or an absolute stone genius, and I tend to the latter view. Despite the greater use of keyboards, the filters and the glacial production make it sound almost entirely unlike anything they would do subsequently. There’s lots of space here, but there’s also a layering that wasn’t present before. In part that’s due to the keyboards – which are used sparingly but with a determinedly elegiac quality. That this should sound almost retro but doesn’t is perhaps due the emotional cast of the album. Lyrically and vocally it’s far too easy to write this album off as depressed – and the near emulation of Ian Curtis’s vocal style probably doesn’t help in that regard, but that’s not quite it. The vocals are urgent, reflective and often balanced between weariness and also a sort of anger. But whereas with Joy Division they seemed at times to drive the music, here it is the reverse as Sumner and Hook eschew front man status and allow the music to carry that role – an approach that characterised much of New Orders output through the 1980s and after.

And as the album continues this increasing emphasis on tone and texture is ever more evident. It starts with “Dreams Never End”, vocal duties taken on by Peter Hook. A song with an almost perfect introduction that sounds initially like Joy Division redux but then sharpish moves into a more complex layered sound. “Truth”, the next track might have cosmetic similarities with Joy Division too, but with synth drums and some odd melodic foreshadowing of tracks off Power, Corruption and Lies it too represents a shift. Then we’re into “Sense”, propelled by a none-more-deep synthesised bass, which uses a bunch of filters to provide more synthesised percussion. “The him” starts and stops and starts again, the rush of instrumentation reflecting the lyrical concerns. But the fullness of the sound pushes out vocals entirely as the track moves to its end.

It’s the second but last track, “Doubts Even Here”, which in a way provides the bridge between Joy Division and New Order. Once more, and for the last time with New Order, Hook took over lead vocals and provided a sound remarkably close to that of Curtis. A keyboard courtesy of Gillian Gilbert provides stately chords. So far so Joy Division, albeit at a slower pace. But then the percussion goes slightly mad with crashes and bangs that cut whipcrack across the track [and Stephen Morris deserves recognition for just how central he is to the overall sound], and a woman’s voice, again Gilbert, intones matching spoken vocals, an absolute first for New Order (and in some respects a last – unfortunately), something that gives it a post-punk edge that positions it directly in 1981 but somehow doesn’t quite date it.

Listen to the bass line in “Chosen Time” which lopes along, the urgent reiteration of a simple succession of notes… Even 31 years later… gulp, that has a raw power and urgency pushing it forward. It’s different to that which was to come later, more primitive – but it strongly hints at an electronica and dance inflected future. Finally “Denial”, a track that also presages future developments with a rapidly strummed guitar sound and a bassline that although on the surface seems to reference back to Joy Division is by contrast faster, almost funkier. They were decisively changing gear. And if it’s not quite what they would do next, it does indicate where they might have gone.

Pervading the music is a sense that they couldn’t take their original sound much further – even if the last Joy Division album had seen the introduction of touches of keyboard here and there. The weight of their history, only three or four years old, but already cohering into a near mythic body of work, wouldn’t allow them, and some sort of further experimentation, something different, was the only way forward.

Perhaps that’s the real power of this album. There’s much less sense of a group constrained by their past than might be expected, instead it sounds like a group, despite pro forma nods to that past, which is willing, and almost enthusiastic, to try to break free of it and in the process mapping out a range of alternative paths forward.

I think that was an achievement in itself.

Dreams Never End

Senses

Doubts Even Here

Chosen Time

ICB

The Him

Denial

Dreams Never End (Live NYC 1981 and with Peter Hook on vocals)

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

2. One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.

3. If libraries attempt to negotiate better deals, Elsevier is ruthless about cutting off access to all their journals.

4. Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act, that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA and PIPA and lobbied strongly for them.

And now there is a site where academics can sign up to “occupy Elsevier”.

I left maths behind a long time ago (Gowers’s department is holding seminars on “C^{1,α} regularity of solutions of degenerate elliptic equations” and “Scaling limits for anisotropic Hastings-Levitov type clusters” — crikes, I really have left it behind). I recently took an interest in what is known about apples and their genetic diversity, and was irritated to find publicly-funded research held behind pay-walls, at €34 a pop. And I used to work for a sub-contractor to Elsevier’s Shannon outfit, where we dealt with medical journals (and one on forensic science). All in all, I am glad to see this initiaitve.

Tell us a little bit more about his income over two years… where does it come from?

Really just from investments.. he gives a couple of speeches a year and from that earns a paltry $500,000… but most just investments… some from overseas… and that’s why he enjoys such a low tax rate… Bush era tax cuts, income derived from investment is taxed at 15% whereas regular income is taxed much higher up to 30%.

Who says Americans don’t do irony?

Also noted on To The Point, when Newt Gingrich took offence during the debate just prior to the North Carolina primary at questions over allegations of open marriage proposals and such like surfacing in the media why wasn’t the point made that it was he who had done precisely the same during the 1990s in relation to Bill Clinton at precisely the time he himself was having an affair – and given that Gingrich’s complaint appears not to be the veracity of these allegations but the fact they’re aired at all the issue of the former is irrelevant.

Here’s something that amazed me. I don’t usually feel my jaw drop reading articles, but this was something else. A range of examples of teachers whose use of social media has shaded into something quite dubious. Actually, strike that, very dubious indeed.

More than one in 10 school teachers accused of misconduct last year had used social networking sites and email to forge inappropriate relationships with their pupils, an analysis of disciplinary cases has found.
Facebook, Twitter, online chatrooms and emails were used to befriend children in 43 of the cases brought to the regulator, the General Teaching Council for England in 2011. Eighteen teachers were given prohibition orders and struck off, while 14 were suspended. In all, the GTC heard 336 cases of “unacceptable professional conduct” last year.

And what of this?

A disciplinary case brought against an English teacher, Lee Butcher, who taught at Garforth community college in Leeds came to light only after a pupil’s mother read parts of a Facebook exchange between the teacher and a former pupil.

And the details?

An investigation found that Butcher had had “inappropriate and sexually explicit” conversations with the 16-year-old over the site for three months. They included comments about the former pupil posing for erotic photos over a webcam.
During the exchanges with the girl, he tried to make sure she was alone and asked her not to tell anyone about them. The parent who discovered the exchanges believed they had also been emailed to other pupils.
There were no criminal proceedings, but Butcher admitted unacceptable professional conduct. A GTC committee reprimanded him, saying: “Teachers must not establish or seek to establish social contact with pupils, children or young people for the purpose of securing a friendship or to pursue or strengthen a relationship. That extends to the use of social networking sites such as Facebook.”
He was given a 12-month suspension order, from May 2011, but not struck off.

Some would think that that was a very generous. But the question that raises its head about the cases quoted is ‘how could any of the teachers have a sense that these were appropriate behaviours?

The curious thing is that as someone lecturing in 3rd level I’ve had discussions with colleagues about these issues. Tutorials take place in rooms with windows, or doors slightly ajar. There’s no communication on matters relating to none work related matters by email or social media and so on [I’m not saying it never happens but of those who were discussing the issue the consensus was that these are, again, inappropriate behaviours]. So the idea as expressed by one headteacher that…

The difficulty is that we didn’t grow up with social media, and therefore we fear it and don’t understand how our children interact with it. It’s easy to see the negatives, hard to understand how to protect the children – and very easy to ignore the positives.

… is a bit hard to take. The internet has been an increasingly pervasive part of life for over a decade and a half now for most people. It didn’t fall from the sky last year. That’s plenty of time for schools and other institutions to set out usage policies and so forth. But even if they hadn’t how could teachers believe that non work relationships were appropriate one way or another – whether conducted largely or not on social media. Duty of care and other phrases spring to mind.

Also in the Guardian John Harris has a good piece on how the rhetoric of self-employment, while find for some, is arguably a cul-de-sac for many others. An expedient one for the Conservatives though given that slipping towards self-employment alters the nature of the relationship with the state.

This week David Cameron will once again make a show of his support for an initiative called StartUp Britain, after paying tribute to its ethos in his “popular capitalism” speech last week: “If you take a risk, quit your job, create the next Google or Facebook and wind up a billionaire, then more power to your elbow.”

This is typically extravagant stuff, but the obvious riposte is how many Google’s or Facebooks are there? One each by my count, so effectively a couple of risk takers can look forward to the ‘rewards’. And the other risk takers? Harris references a CIPD report…

As happened in the Thatcher years, we are awash with such talk, just when going it alone is more difficult than ever – and, moreover, the grim truth about most new self-employment has just been revealed. “The additional self-employed are unlike self-employed people as a whole in terms of gender, hours of work, occupation and sector of employment,” says the CIPD’s report. Tellingly, of those who make up the net rise in self-employment since 2008, 90% are part-time. Moreover, the report’s author, John Philpott, talks about people “without skills, picking up whatever bits and pieces of work are available”, whose emergence “hardly suggests a surge in genuine entrepreneurial zeal.”

It’s the basic problem. Whatever about enthusiasm only a small fraction of those moving into the category – by the stats available – will make much a decent living in it. Only a tiny fraction will do much better.

Not that the Conservatives will worry overmuch.

The Tories are on 40%, up three percentage points from December, while Labour has drifted down one to 35%. The Liberal Democrats are on 16%, up one.

I tend to see Milliband as a weak enough leader, so on one level 35 per cent is good enough. But it’s not great, and against this particular Tory led government it’s nowhere near great enough. The next election is still some years away but one wonders what thinking is going on inside the LP currently as to how to change those numbers. Mind you, even the polling picture is fairly mixed still…

A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times recorded a five-point Conservative lead, whereas ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror now have the two main parties level-pegging, after the same company recorded a four-point Labour lead in December.

Though it seems that one Boris Johnson is set to enter the Commons in the next couple of years. Can this be true and if so what of his bid to retain the Mayor of London role? He himself rules it out…

“I really don’t see how I can run for Parliament in 2015. Let’s kill this. I’m ruling myself out.”
But Reigate may appear a more attractive prospect if Johnson finds himself with a bit more time on his hands in May. Two successive polls in recent days have given Livingstone a narrow lead.

Nice to have a parachute prepacked and ready, no?

Returning briefly to the US Republican primary contest I’d found a lot of comments on articles online from Ron Paul supporters saying that he was arguing the Golden Rule. Intrigued I have to be honest, I had to look up the Golden Rule. It may be familiar to many of us, albeit formulated in various different ways… [from wiki]:

The “Golden Rule” has been attributed to Jesus of Nazareth: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12, see also Luke 6:31). The common English phrasing is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

But here’s a thing. When Ron Paul tried out a variation on this in explaining his stance on foreign policy to an audience consisting in no small part of Christian evangelicals at the South Carolina primary debate the response was…well, here’s the ABC report…

Paul’s willingness to stand up for what he believes in when it comes to U.S. involvement in foreign countries hurt him repeatedly in Monday’s debate.
The conservative Republican electorate in South Carolina booed Paul’s answers on foreign policy and Texas Gov. Rick Perry even suggested that a gong should have been used to cut Paul off.

Christian evangelicals and an avowedly Christian oriented party booing the Golden Rule.
A bit of consistency lads would go a long way.

Then his 2009 Newsletter which might be of use to him now as it includes a section on ‘HOW TO COPE THROUGH DIFFICULTIES‘

Away from Ivor to a leaflet from the Repudiate the Debt campaign

Then this one might be of interest to city dwellers
An “Information leaflet on proposed Septic Tanks and Associated Charges” from Mattie McGrath

Then from Cumann na nGaedhael 1932 “De Valera’s Policy All Along has been Un-Irish and Un-Catholic” , “Remember Spain and Mexico”

And finally a 1979 Flyer and notepaper for Bert Bennett, Jim Maher, Dave Neligan ,Máirín Breheny of the Socialist Labour Party

Having suffered through Peig at school these gave me a great laugh when they came out in the mid 1990s.

“Let’s be fair about this – we all partied”

Viewable here

Then we had this today from Enda Kenny

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has blamed Ireland’s “spectacular” economic crash on a “mad borrowing” frenzy.

“What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing,” Mr Kenny told a meeting at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

“The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit was done between people and banks – a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash.”

He gives the impression that the whole country went mad borrowing for the sake of it.
But like many of you I had to borrow to buy an overpriced home. It may have been ‘mad’ but we had to have somewhere to live.
Like the vast majority I didn’t buy an investment property either. I didn’t drive a new car (Indeed we’re a one car family) , go on mad holidays , have flat screen televisions in every room and so on.

At least I’m in Dublin (close to family) , unlike some of my friends and relatives stuck down the country with a big mortgage and a property worth less than half what they paid for it.

Needless to say its those that got little or nothing from the boom that are amongst those now suffering the most from the “austerity”.

For any of us who had any direct dealings with Ivor Callely Harry McGee’s profile in the Irish Times certainly brought it all back. It wasn’t just the somewhat mischievous line:

Callely (53), politically, was a relatively minor figure (he was a junior minister for a short stint).

But also as McGee said that the man was ‘hard working and ambitious’. Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Others might well reflect on the following:

In his first junior ministry, he accounted for twice as much of the photographic budget as the senior minister Micheál Martin. In transport, he included prominent images of himself on Operation Freeflow billboards. He had a poor record for retaining staff, with some leaving after claiming he was unreasonably demanding.

If there was an ideology there it was hard to discern. As McGee notes:

He had a general pro-business outlook and took strong stands on diverse issues in the 1990s – backing taxi drivers in opposing deregulation and making indefensible statements about asylum seekers, some of whom he said had a culture of “bleeding of lambs in the back garden”.

That’s pretty loathsome, but is it worse or better because one has the impression that it wasn’t based on anything so much as the sort of chatter that informs parts of the public discourse.

One could perhaps argue, and McGee does so, that he was typical of a strata of ambitious individuals attracted to Fianna Fáil when it was the predominant political entity, individuals who had no interest in ideology. And I think it is a perfect reflection on how that party had had whatever residual ideological core hollowed out that it saw absolutely no problem in this. But there was a problem, that when it came to tougher times the organisation was much much more brittle, and almost as a corollary of that, had no clear fixed guiding principles. I’m not suggesting that FF would have done considerably better last year if it had a more clear cut ideological profile, but such a glue would have bound it up to a greater degree. And ironically that ideological glue could be left of centre, right of centre, whatever. But when there was none, none at all, then small wonder that an electorate whose support had been more in the nature of votes of confidence during good times fled for pastures new when it began to go wrong.

When their cross class coalition fractured it wasn’t the Callely’s of the world who were well positioned to take up the slack and save the org. Indeed Fianna Fáil’s current plight is almost directly attributable to this complete illusion that it somehow transcended class politics. Fine Gael has never made that error, albeit it has had tactical tilts towards a broader populism. But this was a paradoxical approach by FF.

Callely was an anomalous figure in Fianna Fáil. His spivvish pin-striped appearance and his trappings of wealth including a showy Range Rover, a power boat and a west Cork holiday home sat uneasily with some colleagues.

Note though that he managed to join and remain within the party. That although he never scaled the real heights of Irish politics he was a junior minister twice! If those colleagues were ‘uneasy’ they did little enough about it, and nor did it prevent Ahern nominating him for the Seanad in the wake of losing his seat in 2007. As with the appointment of Harris one has the sense that Ahern was either playing a strange in-joke or had completely lost the run of himself. But then again, Callely was a powerful vote getter in Dublin North Central.

One other thing that struck me was that many of those in a similar predicament to Callely found themselves at a loss when the tide went out. They’d never really known a situation where FF and by extension themselves were in charge. Sure, there had been times of opposition, but these were mercifully brief and always with the solid expectation that once given the opportunity a grateful populace would vote them back into power. To say that they were bereft as the writing solidified on the wall in the run up to the last election would not be overstating things.

If that sounds that I’m sympathetic to the man, don’t get me wrong. I’m not. But it’s another telling indication of just how cosseted their lives had become. These people weren’t built for opposition, or small party status.

One last thought on this matter. There’s a jibe about Independents which goes along the lines that they’re not able represent the national interest. Perhaps so in the case of some of them, though many of the current crop seem to talk of little else. But it seems to me that charge could much more easily be put about the likes of Callely and his peers whose interests truly appeared to be constrained by the boundaries of their constituencies and the perpetuation of individual political careers. That too would seem to me to part of the problem with Fianna Fáil in the contemporary era.

Meanwhile, one detail of a follow up report is worth noting:

Mr Callely’s home and office were searched yesterday by gardaí as part of a planned operation.
In many Garda investigations into alleged white-collar crime, suspects often arrange to meet gardaí at a designated Garda station to be taken into detention for questioning. However, the desire on the part of the investigating detectives to search Mr Callely’s home and office meant the element of surprise was used.

Those alleged white-collar criminals. They turn up for appointments. Never shove documentation into shredders. No need for surprise searches there – eh?

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