SHARD
Friday, May 29, 2009
Marx carrying a cane, a dying skeleton,cranes over the dead flowers in the garden;
the skies over capitalism darken.
cranes over the dead flowers in the garden;
the skies over capitalism darken.
ASPHALT SPIT
The pleasure of this history
the way the electric grid invests
the city, houses, buildings,
and bodies with energy
Corbusier, have you seen the
streetlights over here?
America's light architecture
The pleasure of bright infinity.
!9!9
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Flu pandemicRussian Revolution in regress
boy-queen commanding
Nazi prototype armies
in Estonia
socialist spectrum and capitalist bandits
across Siberia
Incipient workers' councils crushed in
Germany
American soldiers
outside Petrograd in the Arctic Circle
The Versailles Treaty.
EVOLUTION OF INFRASTRUCTURE
America was
First a railroad,
then a grid of electricity,
roads,
now a total
virtual reality
PAKISTAN APOCALYPSE UPDATE
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Pakistan is dire. The country is one of the worst affected by the global economic crisis - it has the lowest credit rating in the world. It's also struggling against a cancerous Taliban insurgency that has inched within 60 miles of the capital.
Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation, but it seems nobody in the West knows the number or location of those nukes.
LOS ANGELES: CIA Director Leon Panetta said on Monday that the US does not know the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons but is confident Islamabad has a “pretty secure approach to try to protect these weapons”. “But it is something that we continue to watch,” he said, repeating concerns of possible Taliban access to the weapons.
Is Panetta telling us everything the CIA knows? Of course not. But it would be foolhardy to assume that the CIA has an all-seeing eye - especially after the intelligence failure in Iraq. By extension, it's blithe to bank on a swift, special forces takeover of Pakistan's nuclear sites in the event of a government collapse or a Taliban coup. The nukes are unaccounted for and they could easily slip out of Pakistan, with the consent of a corrupt scientist or a drunken general. They could also be launched by missile at Israel, India and parts of Europe.
Pakistan's nuclear apparatus isn't known for its airtight security. Nuclear secrets have leaked out as if through a sieve: the former head of the nuclear program, AQ Khan, sold technology and blueprints to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Another major Pakistani nuclear scientist was forced into early retirement in 1998 when he began fantasizing to colleagues about bringing on the end of days and paving the way for an Islamic caliphate.
On the bright side, numerous reports in Pakistani newspapers corroborate that local people are hostile to the Taliban, vociferously so. No wonder; Taliban have beheaded innocents on the streets, kidnapped townspeople's daughters to take them as wives, and poisoned and bombed girls' schools. The Taliban are barbarians and they rule through terror, not through any popular will.
Nevertheless, with well over a million people displaced in the past week by Pakistan's civil war, there is the potential for a massive humanitarian disaster and anarchy - phenomena you never want to see in a nuclear-armed nation, let alone in a nuclear-armed nation where the keys to the bombs are within arm's reach of millenarian, nihilistic Islamists.
We shall see what happens. At the very least, Pakistan is not short on excitement.
ELECTRICITY
Nikola Tesla standing atop an electric pole in the clouds,
pleased, surveys the flickering grid overlaying the ground
as the skies and the horizon roll around.
PAKISTAN APOCALYPSE UPDATE
Well, here's a chilling panorama of Pakistan's nuclear security apparatus, which consists of one guy and a rusty rifle:
NEW YORK TIMES: TO GET TO THE HEADQUARTERS of the Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with keeping the country’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons away from insurgents trying to overrun the country, you must drive down a rutted, debris-strewn road at the edge of the Islamabad airport, dodging stray dogs and piles of uncollected garbage. Just past a small traffic circle, a tan stone gateway is manned by a lone, bored-looking guard loosely holding a rusting rifle. The gateway marks the entry to Chaklala Garrison, an old British cantonment from the days when officers of the Raj escaped the heat of Delhi for the cooler hills on the approaches to Afghanistan. Pass under the archway, and the poverty and clamor of modern Pakistan disappear.
LINK
YES, YOU CAN SLIGHTLY DIM YOUR CHANDELIER!
I'm mesmerized by the way Soviet products spiral around enticingly on the screen. And the music in these commercials has me pumping my arms in the air and crying out for psychedelic lightswitches, musty suits, and a Walkman.
AN INVITATION
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Take a ride in mytime-traveling model T
we'll sneak onto the grounds
of the Los Alamos test
bring picnic sandwiches
and goggles so you can see.
DISPATCH FROM PAKISTAN
REUTERS: Pakistan is bracing for its biggest ever displacement of people, as many as 800,000, as a military offensive against Taliban in Swat appears imminent. Convoys of military vehicles carrying troops and artillery were seen heading towards Swat as authorities in Mardan set up camps for the displaced. Meanwhile, the influx of displaced persons continued in Rawalpindi and Islamabad with no official policy announced so far by the administration to deal with the situation.
SUPERTRAIN
Monday, May 04, 2009
Supertrain was a show in the (disco-ridden and miserable) late 70s about a nuclear-powered bullet train that housed swimming pools and shopping centers. The show is remembered as one of the great flops in television history. The opening credits might explain why that is. I like the music though.
