Victim recalls assailant’s breasts, little else
April 19, 2013 § Leave a comment
1. Gold is a Currency: This is rule number 1. It is not a decorative or industrial metal, it is a permanent store of value, as dictated by Greeks in Lydia around 700 B.C. And, it shall be ever thus.
2. The price of gold cannot fall, it can only be manipulated lower: When gold’s price falls, it is an unnatural act. It can only occur as the result of an international cabal of Central Bankers and politicians. It’s a conspiracy, and we know who the guilty parties are.
3. If the price of gold is rising, it is doing so despite enormous and desperate efforts by manipulators to prevent the rise: This is the corollary to the prior Rule of Gold manipulation. Gold runs up despite the overwhelming opposition to it…
6. Gold works whether the economy is good or bad: When we have a red hot economy, Gold is your hedge against inflation. When we have a bad economy, Gold is a safe harbor against collapse. It is a one way trade that never fails!…
11. Gold is always rallying in one currency or another: Sure, it may be down 30% in Dollars, the reserve currency it is priced in, but you can always find a currency falling faster than it does and claim you own it in that denomination. Last week, it was up in Japanese Yen. This week, it is up in Zimbabwe dollars. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Adrian Apo
Specious one bedroom available
April 18, 2013 § 2 Comments
‘Oh!’ cried Mrs. Skewton, with a faded little scream of rapture, ‘the Castle is charming!—associations of the Middle Ages—and all that—which is so truly exquisite… Such charming times!… So full of faith! So vigorous and forcible! So picturesque! So perfectly removed from commonplace! Oh dear! If they would only leave us a little more of the poetry of existence in these terrible days!’… ‘Those darling byegone times… with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!’
While Dicken’s Dombey and Son is not one of the books included in Castles: an Anthology, Mrs’ Skewton’s medievalist rhapsody may well have been the guiding principle behind the selection of the 160 items included in this online collection from the British Library, which includes archaeological treatises, antiquarian histories, images, Gothic romances and pseudo-histories featuring picturesque dungeons, sieges, knights and fair maidens. With three exceptions from the 18th-century and one from the 17th-century (Dryden’s King Arthur, 1691), all of the items in the Castles Anthology are digitized 19th-century primary sources. The reader is therefore introduced not only to histories, images and fiction associated with medieval castles, but experiences these sources through the lens of Victorian culture and taste. Hence the result is a fascinating glimpse of Victorian medievalisms, viewed through a 21st century interface. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Angela Strassheim
It’s not important to understand Teorema
April 17, 2013 § Leave a comment
The 3D printer stands like a work of modern sculpture on a grassy patch outside the collective’s slightly raffish offices.
It’s not just that it would it be too big to fit inside their offices, the team wants the public to be able to see the virtuosity of this 3D printer in action.
They also have a more regular-sized 3D printer inside their offices which is used to build doll’s house-sized architectural models of the canal house on a scale of 1:20. Critically, the instructions for building these small versions are from the same computer files that the architects have designed for the actual house.
The canal house will be built over time from the bottom up.
Ms Heinsman says you might notice a change in the aesthetic of the building as your eyes travel up it.
“The top part of the facade will be the most beautifully ornamented because by then we will have perfected our knowledge of how the printer works,” she explains.
It is unlikely that the finished KamerMaker 3D-printed house will be built as cheaply as conventional canal houses which are mass-produced by developers. read more
ART: Alyson Provax
the bond markets are just another public welfare recipient and will go cap in hand to government on whatever terms the latter offers should it have the economic gumption to realise who is in charge
April 16, 2013 § Leave a comment
Rukeyser escaped Spain after five days on an overcrowded Spanish ship. There were rumors that the People’s Olympiad would be rescheduled for October, which, of course, did not happen. Rukeyser attempted to make her way back to Spain to cover the war, but she couldn’t find a way in. “I could not go back; nobody would send me,” she wrote in the Esquire article. “You had to belong to a party or an organization or something, or have a press card. Nobody would give me a press card.” Nonetheless, she wrote later that experiencing war’s earliest thunder marked her. This was, she said, the time where “I began to say what I believed.” She was twenty-two years old.
Later, that autumn of 1936, Rukeyser wrote the only novel of her life, an autobiographical tale written in high modernist style about being a foreigner in Barcelona as war loomed. Each chapter begins with quotations, many from newspapers that seem pasted like clippings. Chapter One opens with a Reuters dispatch: “On Saturday, according to all the latest reports, Barcelona was calm and as yet not a shot had been fired.” These epigraphs give a mournful historical sheen to a fictionalized, and often baldly strange, narrative. Sex and politics loom large here. Individual psychology and momentous social change fuse together, paralleling Rukeyser’s hybridic use of poetry and prose on these pages.
Rukeyser sent the novel to a publisher in 1937, but it was rejected, in rather harsh terms. She nonetheless tinkered with the manuscript for years. But though Rukeyser would go on to publish many more books of poetry and essays—quite often about Spain’s war, which haunted her for the rest of her life—her novel was never published. The only remaining draft of it ended up being filed in an unmarked and undated Library of Congress folder—that is, lost. While interest bloomed in how other major twentieth-century writers approached the Spanish Civil War—Hemingway, Orwell—Rukeyser’s perspective was not part of the narrative. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Anna Balecho
They stuffed him with pages torn from his favourite book. Could you cook him?
April 15, 2013 § Leave a comment
Our breath may be as unique as our fingerprint. Compounds in exhaled air produce a unique and stable molecular autograph or “breathprint” – one that could be used to monitor disease or track response to medication.
Renato Zenobi at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his colleagues discovered breathprints by analysing the breath of 11 healthy individuals. The team did this four times a day over nine days, and used a technique called mass spectrometry to identify the molecules in each breath sample.
The team was interested in metabolites, compounds produced by the body’s metabolism. The molecules are volatile and small enough to pass from the blood into airways via the alveoli in our lungs, so are present in our breath – albeit in minuscule amounts, sometimes less than one molecule per billion molecules of air.
The team found that metabolites in individuals’ breath remained “constant and clear”, says Zenobi. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: penny
I’ve seen your picture in the paper and wondered what you looked like
April 12, 2013 § 1 Comment
Whilst perusing some seventeenth century recipes for medicines I stumbled across a few curious ingredients. Granted, many of the ingredients found in Johanna St. John’s recipe book – aside from now common herbs and spices like cinnamon or saffron – might look odd to the modern eye. Some of the ingredients that struck me were spermaceti (sperm whale fat); the sole of an old but clean shoe, burnt to ashes; a crab’s eyes, and the black tips of its claws.
As I read I couldn’t help but assume that the addition of spices, or the use of wine, sugar, and brandy might have best served to make some of the recipes more palatable. But then something caught my eye that all the cinnamon, saffron, and distillation could not possibly conceal. To put it lightly, it was, well, poo. Precisely, for smallpox, “a sheep’s dung, cleane picked”. Clearly you would want to make sure you were getting pure, uncontaminated crap. The recipe goes on to instruct the user to mix a handful of the stuff into a pint of white wine, “mash it well” and after leaving it to stand a full night, to serve a spoonful or two at a time. But wait, there’s more! A note tucked into the margin recommends this smelly recipe for gout and jaundice. Fecal wine, if you will: good for what ails you.
In the mid-seventeenth century Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1652) heavily criticized the Royal College of Physician’s required inventory for Culpeper and his fellow apothecaries. In his work, which translated the tome on medicine to English from Latin for the first time during the English Interregnum, Culpeper wrote this of a section featuring “living creatures” and “their excrements”: “alack! alack! the king is dead, and the College of Physicians want power to impose the turds upon men”. Culpeper was right, it seemed many were holding onto ideas about fecal medicine. However, while most insisted that ordure altered by the art that was physick was medicinal, some practitioners had more radical ideas about the uses of feces and medicine. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: dralliv
whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong
April 11, 2013 § Leave a comment
The idea that there might be different emotional responses to rape is not popular. All rapes are equally traumatic and those who suggest otherwise are labeled rape apologists. It is unforgivable to publicly question the mythologizing of rape’s status as the ruination of all women who go through it. Camille Paglia, who has been roundly denounced for her take on rape (among other things), has said that “rape is an outrage” but that she considers the “propaganda and hysteria” around rape “equally outrageous.” I’ve never forgotten reading her Spin interview from the early ’90s in which she shared the story of an acquaintance who had been raped and found the rape counseling more alarming than helpful because of its focus on the inability to recover. “The whole system now is designed to make you feel that you are maimed and mutilated forever,” Paglia said. “It made her feel worse.”
In 1998, novelist Fay Weldon suggested that while rape is a terrible and serious crime, it is not by definition “the worst thing that could happen to a woman.” She even qualified this by adding “if you’re safe, alive, and unmarked after,” but the level of insult and recrimination she faced was staggering regardless. She’d hurt all women with her “extremely dangerous” comment, she’d made it harder for women to “come forward,” she was “talking rubbish.” I hope I may be allowed to at least say that my rapes were not the worst thing to ever happen to me. They are not even in the top five. They are not the worst thing I can conceive of happening to me, nor happening to any human being. I can, of course, imagine rapes much worse than mine, but the idea that there may be degrees of rape is not a popular one, either.
Though some feminists regard “rape equals devastation” as sacred fact, the notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more “dangerous” to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault. Weldon ventured this same conclusion when she said that “defining it as some peculiarly awful crime may even be counter-productive.”
Similarly, Germaine Greer claimed, “It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualized as devastating.” When we refuse to acknowledge the possibility that a rape could be anything less than a tsunami of emotional and mental destruction for a woman, we establish a fantasy of absolute male sexual power and absolute female vulnerability. We are, in essence, honoring the timeless belief that a woman’s worth, self-respect, and ability to function within society are dictated exclusively by the sexual use of her body. read more
ART: Lucio Fontana
Ain’t got no time for Western medicine
April 10, 2013 § Leave a comment
So back to the 70′s, and continuous oil price hikes by a foreign monopolist. All nations experienced pretty much the same inflation. And it all ended at about the same time as well when the price of crude fell. The ‘heroes’ were coincidental. In fact, my take is they actually made it worse than it needed to be, but it did ‘get better’ and they of course were in the right place at the right time to get credit for that.
With the price of oil being hiked by a foreign monopolist, I see two choices. The first is to try to let there be a relative value shift (as the Fed tries to do today) and not let those price hikes spill into the rest of the price level, which means wages, for the most part. This is another name for a decline in real terms of trade. It would have meant the Saudis would get more real goods and services for the oil. The other choice is to let all other price adjust upward to keep relative value the same, and try to keep real terms of trade from deteriorating. Interestingly, I never heard this argument then and I still don’t hear it now. But that’s how it is none the less. And, ultimately, the answer fell somewhere in between. Some price adjustment and some real terms of trade deterioration. But it all got very ugly along the way.
It was decided the inflation was caused by unions trying to keep up or stay ahead of things for their members, for example. It was forgotten that the power of unions was a derivative of price power of their companies, and as companies lost pricing power to foreign competition, unions lost bargaining power just as fast. And somehow a recession and high unemployment/lost output was the medicine needed for a foreign monopolist to stop hiking prices??? And there was Ford’s ‘whip inflation now’ buttons for his inflation fighting proposal, and Carter with his hostage thing adding to the feeling of vulnerability. And the nat gas dereg of 1978, the thing that actually did break the inflation two years later, hardly got a notice, before or after, and to this day.
As today, the problem back then was no one of political consequence understood the monetary system, including the mainstream Keynesians who had been the intellectual leadership for a long time. The monetarists came into vogue for real only after the failure of the Keynesians, who never did recover, and to this day I’ve heard those still alive push for price and wage controls, fixed exchange rates, etc. etc. in the name of price stability.
So in this context the rise of Thatcher types, including Reagan, makes perfect sense. And even today, those critical of Thatcher type policies have yet to propose any kind of comprehensive proposals that make any sense to me. They now all agree we have a long term deficit problem, and so put forth proposals accordingly, etc. as they are all destroying our civilization with their abject ignorance of the monetary system. Or, for some unknown reason, they are just plain subversive.
Thatcher? It was the blind leading the blind then and it’s the same now. read more
COVER: [unattributed]
It’s one which I think, actually, came in with Milton Friedman. I used to read about it, I used to look about – it’s not a doctrine, it’s a theory to which I’ve never subscribed
April 9, 2013 § Leave a comment
In a series of stunning decisions starting on 7 March 2013, Japanese High Courts have turned the tables on the Abe government. Out of 16 cases filed, the courts have ruled the expected way only twice. Fourteen cases ended with the justices determining the election to have been unconstitutional, without question or qualification. In a post-war first, two courts ruled the election districts unconstitutional and invalidated the results.
Even more surprising were the justices’ arguments. The key point was not a violation of the ‘2.0’ standard; indeed, the decisions invalidating election results came in areas where this was not a problem. The key consideration for the justices was the contempt shown by the legislative branch for the judicial branch. Justice Junko Ikadatsu, who handed down the first of the historic decisions to invalidate an election result, said that by taking more than 18 months to even consider redrawing electoral boundaries, the legislature could not be said to have fulfilled its constitutional role. Justices of the Tokyo and Sapporo High Courts condemned the +0/-5 solution as being not at all what the Supreme Court had demanded.
The Supreme Court, which will take all the cases on appeal, is not expected to hand down its decision before the upcoming House of Councillors election. This means that in strict legal terms the Abe government can claim legitimacy from its victory in the tainted 2012 election and its projected landslide in the 2013 election. However, a penumbra of illegitimacy will descend over the Abe government once the Supreme Court finds the 2012 election unconstitutional. While previously unthinkable, such an outcome seems almost guaranteed given the preponderance of High Court decisions finding the election results unconstitutional (14 out of 16) and the Supreme Court’s own warnings in 2011. read more
FILM: Bea Fremderman
“If I have made mistake, the apologize is terrific. But if this is not the lunatic asylum what are you doing here, my esteemed friend?”
April 8, 2013 § 1 Comment
Well. It looks like Homebase have accidentally let the cat out of the bag.
Here’s a poster currently displayed on the wall in the manager’s office of Homebase Haringey… read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Sergey Veter
my nerves are bad to-night 