OLIGARH...Y
Monday, August 31, 2009
QUICK OPINION
Thursday, August 27, 2009
All you need to know right now is that Japan's exports declined again in July - and they're now down 36.5% from last year. Imports are down about a quarter, and exports to Europe are down around 45%.
If the export collapse hasn't been felt yet, that's because production - not just in Japan, but around the world - is largely automated. But the New York Times has reported on "unemployed robots" in Japan, idled in factories or junked. Eventually the collapse in world trade will catch up to us.
Of course, it is only one of the aftershocks of the collapse of the World Trade Center.
QUICK OPINION
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
America is interesting because it is an essentially totalitarian infrastructure in which freedom has grown organically and spontaneously and continually rejuvenates itself - like a plant poking through concrete.
90,000
Monday, August 24, 2009
This is a pretty serious number. CLICK. Chances are swine flu will blow over the human population with minimal impact. Then again.
IN THE CRAIGSLIST PERSONALS
ill be eating dinner at 6:45 shit on it
come to door and ask to use phone ill be eating watching tv take a shit on my plate and call me faggot
THE GARDEN CITY
The funniest story about the garden city is the building of Gorky. Supposed to be the model socialist city to crown Stalin's Five Year Plan, construction was contracted out to "the premier industrial builder in America, the Austin Company of Cleveland, Ohio." Rejecting Soviet architects' Futurist blueprints as unworkable, but baffled at how to accommodate Communists, the Austin Company simply drew up a garden city along American lines.
Incidentally, Stalin's Five Year Plan was practically run by the "foremost American architect of the first half of the 20th century," Albert Kahn, also known as the "builder of Detroit" and "Henry Ford's architect."
Also incidentally - Magnitogorsk, intended to be the Soviet's largest steelworks and indeed one of the grandest in the world, was planned by none other than Weimar German architects (members of Ernst May's "Red Brigade," a leftist faction of Bauhaus) and American engineers who together lived ensconced in a verdant suburb outside Magnitogorsk called "the American City." The suburb had been copied from an American architectural catalogue, and Magnitogorsk itself was based on the model of Gary, Indiana. At night, in the "American City," jazz escaped from the manors and drifted away with the wind on the barren steppes.
CLICK
PENNSYLVANIA'S GREAT ANARCHIST EXPERIMENT
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
A snippet: Voltaire, rapturous over the Quaker achievement, wittily and perceptively wrote that the Shackamaxon treaty was "the only treaty between Indians and Christians that was never sworn to and that was never broken." Voltaire went on to say that for the Indians "it was truly a new sight to see a sovereign [William Penn] to whom everyone said 'thou' and to whom one spoke with one's hat on one's head; a government without priests, a people without arms, citizens as equal as the magistrate, and neighbors without jealousy." Other features of the Assembly's early laws were Puritanical acts barring dramas, drunkenness, etc.
CLICK
DETROIT
Monday, August 17, 2009
"While police and fire services would likely be protected, public transit, garbage collection, city maintenance, services to the poor and much else would be cut back." 
CLICK
BRIEF OPINION
The Californian frontier, as the endmost of Western civilization, was the actual birthplace of Nazism, not to mention of car culture, the oil complex, and the Saud-American relationship. You can witness this in the eugenics movement, pioneered in California, and In There Will Be Blood, with its sinister nexus of cult religion and oil. This is to say nothing of Hollywood, the cult religion.
GO, BULL MARKET, GO!
"...foreign direct investment into China slumped 35.7% to $5.36 billion in July from the year-earlier period."
Untitled
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The flower of the apocalypse opening up from a bud. The petals unfurl. Spines crack, the twilight of civilizations, the bonfires and the return of cannibalism to culture.
"SHE DID IN FACT POSSESS SOME SORT OF ACCELERANT"
Saturday, August 15, 2009
"She then doused herself with that accelerant, ignited herself."CLICK
I love that they're investigating this as an arson.
MY RUBBISH THINKING
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Indulge my superstitious momentThe Gods were greater than God
the latter an impostor
the former sculptors
both gone, now humanity
must all of it own it.
THIS SOUNDS BULLISH
HUNGER HITS DETROIT'S MIDDLE CLASS
It's not that I want the "recovery" to fail; it's that all this optimism and market-pumping is unreal, and it's an excuse to avoid growing problems. We'll give trillions of dollars to the banks at the same time that we close schools in Detroit and let the city run low on food. What food there is in the grocery stores will be guarded by armed men in combat fatigues.
I'd like to underscore that in the midst of two wars and an economic crisis, America's disaster zones on the fringe (the old industrial heartland, the Motor City, New Orleans) have become suburbs of Iraq.
TRAVELLING NORTH KOREA
Sunday, August 09, 2009
I'd like to point out that North Korea's architecture looks much like America's, only grayer. Modernist apartment blocks are a motif common to "capitalism" and "communism." North Korea's premier hotel even has a revolving restaurant on top. It doesn't get more modernist than that. 
CLICK
fert
Where did the utopian sparkle go?
The Diamond Building, a cubist glass triangle building down the street,
a Bauhaus space ship that flew here from Weimar Germany
and landed next to Pizza Hut and Popeye's,
is for lease.
CONEHEADS
This chart reflects the value of derivates owned by American banks. Note that the numbers are in trillions.
All the world's derivatives have a "notional value" of one quadrillion.
TIME FOR A BULL MARKET!
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Nevermind that American salaries fell 4.7% over the last year -- the most on record.Nevermind that because as long as Goldman Sachs is in charge of the country we're headed for 15,000 on the Dow.
EDIBLE
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
"Many of the young girls here look so beautiful as to not be human, very edible. After joining this gym, started lifting weights and like it."In other news, I'll be skipping my daily swim at LA Fitness this evening.
CLICK
On second thought, I might go to see how freaked out people look about the day's events. I wonder if I bring a toy gun... No, it's too soon.
LADY AT A MIRROR
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
As in sleeping-drink spicessoftly she loosens in the liquid-clear
mirror her fatigued demeanor;
and she puts her smile deep inside.
And she waits while the liquid
rises from it; then she pours her hair
into the mirror, and, lifting one
wondrous shoulder from the evening gown,
she drinks quietly from her image. She drinks
what a lover would drink feeling dazed,
searching it, full of mistrust; and she only
beckons to her maid when at the bottom
of her mirror she finds candles, wardrobes,
and the cloudy dregs of a late hour.
- Rilke
FUN CHART
And there could be an equally spectacular rebound on the way: CLICK
Then again, the economy of Singapore is still forecast to shrink 4-6% this year, even with a bounce.
