Poem of the Day

Hard Life with Memory
by Wisława Szymborska

I’m a poor audience for my memory.
She wants me to attend her voice nonstop,
but I fidget, fuss,
listen and don’t,
step out, come back, then leave again.

She wants all my time and attention.
She’s got no problem when I sleep.
The day’s a different matter, which upsets her.

She thrusts old letters, snapshots at me eagerly,
stirs up events both important and un-,
turns my eyes to overlooked views,
peoples them with my dead.

In her stories I’m always younger.
Which is nice, but why always the same story.
Every mirror holds different news for me.

She gets angry when I shrug my shoulders.
And takes revenge by hauling out old errors,
weighty, but easily forgotten.
Looks into my eyes, checks my reaction.
Then comforts me, it could be worse.

She wants me to live only for her and with her.
Ideally in a dark, locked room,
but my plans still feature today’s sun,
clouds in progress, ongoing roads.

At times I get fed up with her.
I suggest a separation. From now to eternity.
Then she smiles at me with pity,
since she knows it would be the end of me too.

A Lesson to Learn from Chile vol.2

From today's FT comment section, an article by the finance minister of Chile:

Chile, for example, runs fiscal policy according to a structural rule whereby spending is determined by anticipated revenue, which depends on an independent committee’s estimates of the long-term copper price and potential output growth. Fiscal policy is countercyclical, resulting in a surplus in the good times and a deficit in the bad times. The rule has allowed Chile to accumulate more than $20bn (about 9 per cent of GDP) in sovereign wealth funds, most of which can be used in case of significant shocks.

[...] These elements are at the core of the contingency plan we have been designing in Chile during the past few months. At recent meetings with my emerging market colleagues, especially from Latin America, we have discussed the design of contingency programmes that will enable us to respond effectively should the international outlook deteriorate further. In this way, emerging markets can not only help themselves but also help cushion the rest of the global economy. In other words, we now have a clear opportunity to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.

Addendum: Lesson vol.1

Opportunity Knocks

The new kid on the block, particularly for China, is Mongolia, providing a rapidly developing alternative for Chinese buyers to Australian imports. Mongolian coking coal exports to China rose 37 percent year-on-year to 17.5 million tons in Jan-Nov 2011. With Mongolia’s expansions continuing, HSBC expects Mongolia’s coking coal exports to rise from 21 million tons in 2011 to 28 million tons in 2012.

Mongolian coal has both a grade and price advantage over domestic Chinese coking coal and a price advantage over Australian imports, so the trend of rising Mongolian imports to the detriment of Australia and the US is likely to continue in 2012. If Chinese steel production slows, or even contracts in 2012, this trend will simply be exacerbated.

Steelmakers Welcome Falling Coking Coal Price Trend via Mongoliana

Music of the Day: Амартvвшин

УДБЭТ-ын гоцлол дуучин Энхбатын Амартүвшин П.И.Чайковскийн "Нам звезды кроткие сияли"-г дуулж байна. An incredible rendition! Bravo, Bravo!

And here are some comments on the video:

milutina1: Увы,наши певцы должны теперь учиться у монгола,как петь Чайковского.
В большинстве своем они перестали владеть тайной душевного пения,
которая раньше отличала русских певцов.

Sa743512: да, и не только многие русские, вообще почти все певцы перестали владеть тайной пения душой. кто теряет духовность - не может петь сердцем, а значит не может передать сокровенную силу своего чувства зрителю. именно русский дух давал и даёт нашим певцам это свойство проникать в глубину сердца.
Амартувшин Энхбат поёт сердцем, это передаётся сразу. Дай Бог ему это сохранить!

Here's a much more impressive performance of Verdi's Rigoletto

+ Ж.Бямбажав "Благословляю вас, леса..."
+ Ч.Энхтайван: from Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci

Addendum: Mongolia: Ballet, a Soviet Legacy Continues To Thrive in Ulaanbaatar

Photo of the Day

Элчин сайд Д.Баярхүү ЛБНИУ-ын Ерөнхийлөгч Махмуд Ахмадинежадад итгэмжлэх жуух бичгээ барив

Addendum: New Mongolian ambassador submits his credentials to President Ahmadinejad + Ахмадинежадад бараалхсан торгон агшин

Has Anyone Heard of Beer Hall Putsch?

Манай хувьсгалч найзууд нэр дэвших эрхтэй болсон надад баяр хүргэхийн хамт миний нөхрийг "өрөвдөж" өнөө орой пивоны ширээний ард цуглаж ярилцлаа. Бидний хүрсэн шийдэл бол "ХУВЬСГАЛ ГАРЦААГҮЙ!!!"

Setguulch Uyanga

A Note for Magnai (chihshig)

The questions people seem to come back to over and over again is: to what extent can one change the current system from within, and can one compromise with it? How do you answer these questions?

You can't change this system from within. Its founding principles are corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism. If you join this system, your main instruments become corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism, and it's impossible to build anything with such instruments. I have my own experience with trying to reform the system from within -- I spent a year in Kirov [as an advisor to the Kirov governor] -- and I've also seen the experience of other wonderful people, like [former finance minister] Aleksei Kudrin, who became part of the system instead of changing it.

People who talk about changing the system from within are lying. They're trying to justify their own hypocritical position, to defend the fact that, as part of the system, they're deriving material or political benefits from it.

So then what's the plan? How do you change the system?

You can change the system using a tool invented by human civilization. This tool is called "democracy" and "free elections." We need to have free elections. Then we need to participate in these elections and win, to show that our principles for building a government, unlike those of corruption and cynicism, are better.

The End of Putin: Alexey Navalny on why the Russian protest movement will win

Addendum: One of the best recent films on this subject: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

Larry Summers on Education

Unabashedly lucid Larry Summers asks the following question and gives a six-point answer:

Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different?

Photo of the Day: Faces

Photo courtesy of shuud.mn

Checks and Balances

Suuliin uyed AH zasgiin gazraas garsand haramsaad barahguy baigaa humuus neleed bii bolson bololtoy. Deputatiin uner avsan zarim ni bur ene uil yavdliig Mongol Ulsiin tusgaar togtnoliig busnuilj baigaa hereg gej uzeh ni holguy baina. End nuhduud bogino hugatsaanii togtvortoy baidliig bodood urt hugatsaanii ur dagavariig tootsohguy shig baih yum. Neg talaasaa ene bol ugaasaa daraagiin songuuliig amdan hiij bui zailshguy alham. Harin ch iim shiidver garaaguy baisan bol AH-iin udirdlagiin tenegiig gaihaad barahguy baih bailaa. Uls tur gedeg bol yuruusuu daisnaa todorhoiloh urlag. Ted buruu, harin bid zuv gesnii undsen deer uls turiin huchiig olj avdag. Bi chi dee tulahguy neg tsul zuil yavaad baival tegeed hend ni songogchid sanalaa uguh bolj baina?

Nuguu talaasaa ene bol Mongoliin ardchilliin suuri yadaj ungun taldaa buh baigaag haruulsan yavdal. Olon namiin togtoltsoog bid 1990 ond haa hamaaguy shaltgaanaar songooguy shuu dee. Neg nam nuguuhiinhuu huchiig hazaarlaj baij ardchilal bat buh boldog. Harin ch hoyor gol nam hoyul hamtdaa uvur turiidee orood baival bid sanaa zovoh uchirtay (harin AH "tuuhen uurgee guitsetgesen" ene ter bol tusdaa asuudal). Uuruur helbel AH zasgiin gazraas garsnaar Mongoliin ardchilal yadaj uragshlaaguy yum aa gehed aragsh uharsan aldaagaa zassan yavdal bolson yum.

Addendum: I am proud of the fact that we can say something like this in public without any fear of political persecution whatsoever. In the end, this is what will save us, not revolution:

On Manicheanism

Saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a couple of days ago. I gotta admit, it was surprisingly well made. What stood out in the film is the overly moralistic tone of the story. I guess there is something about good/evil dichotomy that makes us feel comfortable.

What matters instead is the division of the world into good and evil, a division that begins with splitting sex into positive and negative experiences, then ripples out from that in fascinating ways [...] It is the ingenuousness and sincerity of [Stieg] Larsson’s engagement with good and evil that give the trilogy its power to attract so many millions of people.

The Moralist by Tim Parks

I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more....

from Ben Casnocha's post on Tyler Cowen's Talk

Quote of the Day

The way to test a great work of art is to ask how it survives decontextualisation, transposition into a new context. One good definition of a classic is that it functions like the eyes of God in an Orthodox icon: no matter where you stand in the room, they seem to be looking at you. For instance, by far the best cinema version of a Dostoevsky novel is Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot, which is set in Japan after the Second World War with Myshkin played as a returning soldier. The point is not simply that we are dealing with an eternal conflict that appears in all societies but that, with each new context, a classic work of art seems to address the very specific qualities of that epoch.

Slavoj Zizek on the new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Video of the Day: Did Coffee Fuel the Age of Enlightenment?

Tour de France Moment of the Day: TDF 2010 Stage 17 Finish

Christopher Hitchens: A Man of Letters

My intellectual hero Christopher Hitchens passed away. His courage, wit, intelligence, and sense of humour will be greatly missed. May your writings and moral force continue to inspire us.

"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humour, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so."

"I shouldn't be in these gardens?" Who the HELL are you? I think you're about as smart as you look! You're about as smart as you look! I shouldn't be in these gardens, what! You see what brain rot - you see what brain rot descends on people. Unbelievable!

typical Hitchens... :)

Addendum: Andrew Sullivan remembers Hitch
Christopher Buckley's tribute to Christopher Hitchens
My favourite Hitchens video

Postscriptum: Hitch-22 was the best autobiography I read last year (here's an excerpt). The prose flew like river, yet every single word hit right on the spot. I gotta admit, I really had hard time putting it down - even during my finals week :)

Saturday Night Music

"Цагаан цайлган сэтгэл шиг
Цасан цайдам алсалж
Өврийн илчээ цантуулсан
Өвлийн тал минь цавцайна аа"

I wonder where has all this great aesthetic sensibility gone. I guess sometimes in culture, as in economy, we regress.

Addendum: Lunch with the FT: Donald Keene

Yasunari Kawabata (try Snow Country), Yukio Mishima (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) and Junichiro Tanizaki (The Makioka Sisters) all worried that their country was beginning to lose its soul and, in their different ways, tried to rescue and to memorialise it before it got ravaged, so to speak, by the west.

+ Tyler Cowen on whether we are stagnating aesthetically

Mongolia from the US Perspective

[Mongolia] still falls short in many areas: lack of a well-articulated national development strategy; a pervasive lack of transparency in government transactions; corruption, including widespread disregard for conflict of interest among elected and appointed officials; a combination of populism and lingering attachment to the state's role in the economy which are detrimental to the development of a friendly environment for foreign and domestic investment; police abuse of suspects and jail inmates; and an abysmal percentage of women among elected and civil servant decision makers.

[...] As we proceed, we should keep in mind that Mongolia currently lacks the capacity to design and implement the policies and programs necessary to achieve sustainable economic growth. Specifically, Mongolia lacks western-educated, apolitical, well-paid, private and public sector professionals who are able to grasp the principles of and implement private sector-led growth and rule of law, the two determinants of sustainable economic growth. This lack of capable manpower is probably the single, largest obstacle to Mongolia's ability to move forward. The bulk of the current political leaders and senior bureaucrats are of a generation that was educated in the former Soviet Union and steeped in socialist doctrine, government by fiat, and central planning. On top of this, the social fabric of a small, inter-related populace abhors competition with its winners and losers and encourages a lowest-common denominator consensus approach to decision-making.

Former US Ambassador Pamela J. Slutz's concluding remarks on her three-year tour as chief of mission in Mongolia (hat tip to Munkhnaran)

The Work of Bach in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Reason Why I Love Cycling

The stage was going along pretty easily but I wanted to suffer as much as possible to get the body into racing shape. So I went to the back of the field and slid next to a Rabobank rider named Dennis and told him, ‘you and me, let’s go’. Without hesitation he says, ‘OK’

Dave Zabriskie's note from March 6th, 2011

No other sport demands the same time, pain, and work ethic. You cannot race a Grand Tour without being in supreme physical shape, so fit that you are actually eating yourself, and must consume the same amount of food and liquid as nearly three grown men — which amounts to about 6,000 calories a day — to stay alive. During a warm weather race, a cyclist will lose three kilograms, and must chug five litres of restorative liquid, or it’s game over. (Try that twenty-one days in a row.) Cycling doesn’t have a bench. It doesn’t have time outs. 

The Pain Principle

Winning a Classic means minimizing the amount of time spent in the wind. In the first hours of the race, a winner will rely on his team’s protection to save every watt for the key attacks during the finale. In a race where over 6,000 calories will be burned, every rider is on the limit and every watt counts. Cyclists save.

On the Wheel by Michael Barry

There's nothing better in the cycling world than watching Jens Voigt "turn himself inside out" with the commentary from Phil Liggett

A Note for Myself

A name becomes a brand when consumers associate it with a set of tangible or intangible benefits that they obtain from the product or service. As this association grows stronger, consumers’ loyalty and willingness to pay a price premium increase. Hence, there is equity in the brand name. A brand without equity is not a brand.

To build brand equity, a company needs to do two things: first, distinguish its product from others in the market; second, align what it says about its brand in advertising and marketing with what it actually delivers. A relationship then develops between brand and customer—a relationship arising from the customer’s entire experience of the brand. As the alignment grows stronger, so does the brand.

"If Nike can 'just do it,' why can’t we?" from 1997 McKinsey Quarterly

Photo of the Day

The title of this photo should be "Cosmic Irony"

In case you're wondering, the watch he's wearing is worth $24,000

Quote of the Day

There isn’t a single example of a successful country on the planet today – if you define success as lower rates of unemployment, higher rates of job growth, less income inequality and a health system that produces the same or better care at lower cost – that doesn’t have both a strong economy and effective government that find some way to work in harness with each other … If you don’t do that, if you don’t have a system by which the poor can work their way into it, then you lose the social cohesion necessary to hold the country together and that is a big problem.

Bill Clinton talks to Simon Schama