the theory of "ruins' value"

"naturally, a new national consciousness could not be awakened by architecture alone. but, when after a long spell of inertia a sense of national grandeur was born anew, the monuments of men's ancestors were the most impressive exhortations. today, for example, mussolini could point to the buildings of the roman empire as symbolizing the heroic spirit of rome. this he could fire his nation with the idea of modern empire. our architectural works should also speak tot he conscience of a future germany centuries from now." albert speer 'inside the third reich"________ speer was the creature of hitler and no mistake...the whole premise of empire is alluring to the hegemonic culture everywhere and is the flaw that seals their eventual fate...i've been re-reading speer as a break from "limits to growth: the 30 year update" and "the energy reader" ( contemplating more than architectural ruins...have a look at tainter's "the collapse of complex societies" while you're at it...change is around the corner ) and i have no sympathy for the nazi's aims or their methodology ( although there seem to be quite a few homegrown folks that do ) but is speer chock full of it or is he on to something? whoretown is a neoclassical mish-mash of architecture designed to show the founders' ( and their immediate successors' ) assumption of empire and also to showcase their overdone classical educations...were they thinking of the ruins the rotunda would leave behind? possibly not but popular culture certainly has latched on to the idea...the statue of liberty in "planet of the apes"...or the capitol itself in "logan's run"...that, however, was indicative of a dystopian present rather than past grandure ( and we all know i love a dystopia...orwellian to the core )so, perhaps, speer's view of the value and use of ruins is totally culture bound just like american popular culture is so dystopian and anti-social...the photos here are from a local ruin...a long abandonded football field built in a 1930s wpa style of ponderous concrete and steel tubing...(why was almost all thirties achitecture so concrete based? was it stalin, hitler, fdr, or was it just the cheapest thing going? )...it is a weird find my son attuned me to and one of many abandoned structures in our home county...i am told that the mecca of urban decay detroit is undergoing a transformation..i am skeptical since mayoral candidates there still seem to be campaigning by promising to tear down more structures than their opponents...but who will even a truncated detroit or a gary or lake station peppered with vacant lots colonized by native plants speak to...and what will it say...grandeur, failure. or, perhaps, a morality play about the costs of overshoot.

saved by boxing day?

"the 2012 holiday season may have been the worst for retailers since the financial crisis, with sales growth far below estimates, forcing many to offer massive post-christmas discounts in hopes of shedding excess inventory." reuters 12-26-2012__________________________ "shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford." one of the signs of economic and resource overshoot from " the limits to growth: the 30 year update"____________ odd that reuters isn't speaking of the "financial crisis" in the past tense...there's a recovery on...right? and all that bullshit about a "fiscal cliff" is just fear-mongering by the liberal media as it vainly represents the interests of an underclass in the face of the obvious darwinian superiority of the fucking one percent...clearly the political class will come to its senses and find a suitable compromise...i mean...the europeans have been doing it for years with the "greek crisis " and that's working out, isn't it? and those poor sods that keep harping away about limits and overshoot...too stupid to live and treasonous in their foolish insistence on limits...the market and its supporting cadre of economic commisars ( read the imf, world bank, and the "chicago school" ) know the real score here...there are no limits and the monetary economy is in no way embedded in the ecosphere...that is just leftist propaganda designed to undermine the confidence of investors..and god only knows what a panic there would do...best not to think about it much less discuss it...they are sensitive as a bug's nuts and as prone to panic as penguins...keep the lid on bad news and drive like hell for the cliff...thelma and louise aren't in congress.

nonrepresentation

"medically, i believe, this manner of thinking is called schizophrenia...closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obviously unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. it is especially in our political thinking that such vices flourish. george orwell. "in front of your nose"___________ "a prediction of disaster delivered to an intelligent audience with the capacity to act would, ideally, defeat or falsify itself by inducing action before the calamity." "limits to growth: the thirty year update"_____________________________ well whoever said the whores were intelligent? certainly not me...sluts for money and votes they will pander to their handlers and their true constituents no matter what the outcomes for the "voter" who, after all, is only important on election day...and only then if they vote in the number sufficient to maintain the status quo inside the beltway and not in number large enough to actually force the whores to give their needs and or desires serious debate time...no...an uniformed electorate mollified by sound bites and photo ops with the occasional platitude, crafted by some ivy league bonehead to sound meaningful and sincere without actually saying anything ( where's goebbles when you need him? ), and uncertain of who stands for what ( if anything ) is exactly what the professional political class and the industry that surrounds them want...madison's "interested and overbearing majority" neutralized...we will be plunging over the overhyped "fiscal cliff" shortly and these miserable bastards will ( i fervently hope ) go down with the god damned ship of state...the ever insensitive john boehner is trying to deflect responsibility to the obama camp while the president has said that the american people are more flexible in their outlook on taxes and spending cut than their elected representatives...no shit sherlock...i am inclined to think that the average american has the welfare of their fellow citizen far more at heart than the most populist of whores...we as a people can be as generous as we can be violent ( a peculiar dichotomy but one that is plainly visible )and i believe our better instincts are not supported by the political system which is in the hands of oligarchs who are more interested in insuring that we are played off against one another rather than giving any serious thought to their dubious stewardship...if we are to divest ourselves of one or the other i would say that the system has to be the logical choice...when leadership fails you have to lead yourself...the maxim will become more and more glaringly apparent in the coming years...time to dump this slime into the lake of fire and save ourselves...they have no interest in our welfare...fuck these people.

two weeks to st. thomas' day

blogger seems to use greenwich mean time for the zero point of the day...but where i live it's still december 7th and it's the 153rd anniversary the death of the proto-fugitive and self-proclaimed "pariah" thomas de quincey...critics at the time said his work was "steeped in egotism" because he wrote about his life experiences...they also said he suffered from "diseased introspection"...never one to empower a critic ( and, in this way, akin to henry fielding who said of critics that he would "not plead to their jurisdiction" ) de quincey had eloquent responses...taken to task for his subject matter he replied "...let no man expect to frighten me by a few hard words into embarking...upon desperate adventures of morality"...especially when it was someone else's vision of "morality"...as far as diseased introspection was concerned tom answered..."no man will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude. how much solitude, so much power"...a close part of the wordsworth's circle for years and a husband and father as well as poet, philosopher, writer, newspaper editor and opium addict de quincey was no social paraiah despite the the feelings of isolation that overcome all addicts at times...people liked him and respected his intellect and his expositions on the "pains of opium" will be recognized by anyone who has been chemically dependent...bill burroughs...augusten burroughs...and the exploitative hosts of rehab based reality shows ( cretinous fucks to a man ) all owe tom a debt for his unflinching self-examination

a pen warmed up in hell...

...(stolen from mark twain) is what i would need to do justice to international conspiracy theorists' day 2012...at least the n y times didn't involve itself this year ( have a look at last year's "umbrella man" op-ed piece )and , surprisingly, neither has the national inquirer...this new-found reticence does not extend to much of the rest of the interweb however...the sites are still proliferating in a peculiarly disgusting fashion...from the "refined"..."if you are a sophisticated conspirist you will know that the nonsense in conspiracy theories buries the 'case for conspiracy' under layers of bunk." to the overtly maudlin and border-line nostalgic..."november 22, 1963. dallas, texas. in less than a second america died." any way you cut it is a sad waste of time and energy better spent on addressing the entirely more serious problems facing the species these days ( an economic system in crisis and in need of a serious philosophical readjustment that the hegomonic culture will resist tooth and nail because it will certainly cost them their preeminence in society,,,but the collapse they will engender will do that anyway...read "the limits to growth" sometime or john stewart mill on "stationary economy") like climate change or obamalands' "entropy" ( how, i wonder, will he fight thermodynamics as applied to anthropogenic structures? "everything put together, sooner or later it falls apart ) so let me say again, categorically, i do not care who shot the giddy little hubris filled brahmin...it is irrelevant to all but the unbalanced and those with entirely too much time on their hands...aldous huxley and c s lewis both died on the same day...and while i find lewis unreadable and naive they still were the much greater loss in human terms...where are the conspirists for that?

death on credit ( sorry louis)

)

it's sunday morning people and i was just reviewing the "spam" folders in my email accounts and i have received twenty-seven credit related emails overnight....lending tree wants to give me a loan on my home equity...home improvement stores are offering 0%apr if i get their credit cards...sears wants me to re-open the account i closed after i paid it off...the reverse mortgage industry has obviously targeted me by my age demographic...and every damned fly-by-night credit company and big-time criminal bank ( hear me calling you j p morgan chase? more on those rat bastards in a minute...i mean fuck these people ) wants me to get myself into credit trouble using their instruments...why? i was having a difficult time understanding why the hegemonic culture would risk its collective ass on bundled sub-prime mortgages that they cobbled together into "wonderful investment opportunities" in an act of utter self-delusion until i sat down and gave it some thought...these poor sods from the imf, world bank, the doomed euro zone, obamaland, the fucking imbecile tea party ( get with the times you party of lincoln...these degenerates are and albatross [bloody sea-bird flavor] you have hung around your neck because you think i am stupid...fuck you too ) and all the mavens of the hegemonic culture are addicted to debt because it is the engine of "growth"...and the debt they are addicted to is yours and mine...they don't really care if we have new cars or computers or houses or spiffy clothes or the latest in martha fucking stewart's home decor as long as we have debt....it's the debt that makes them richer and it's the debt that makes the markets happy ( those earnings reports that have so much impact are about how much of your debt you have paid...get cracking...consume damnit...make this the best retail season in living memory and the market will be overjoyed to the world )...i just sent a check off to j p morgan chase to pay off my house because those scum-sucking bastards were basically going to latch on to the insurance money from the fire and keep it...so i will have less debt on december first...i have paid off my vehicle and i will be working on the very last of the credit cards to murder that debt as well...i cannot entirely remove myself from the consumerist utopia...we are embedded in it...it is where we live thanks to the self-same hegemonic culture i have been on about...but i can be a subversive by eliminating as much debt as i humanly can and reducing my consumption through a personal program of austerity and reuse...the goal is to eliminate debt over the next six years and retire to find an avocation instead of a job...i am fed up with consumerism, debt, growth, whore politicians, and criminal bankers...i will remove myself from their foul agenda of personal aggrandizement through the euphemistically labeled process call "the economy"...the gardens and the search for native food crops is only part of the project...it is an act of culture building that they will dislike but not understand...they have no grasp of limits,

four more years

it's the morning after the night before and hoosiers have show unusual political wisdom in rejecting a complete fuckhead who tried to steal a senate seat and confirmed their political foolishness by believing that the rest of the elected candidates are really any better...they were just a bit more tactful in their public statements...so after boatloads of money and enough mud slinging to plaster the walls a foot thick nothing substantive has changed...calls for "unity" all around last night but the senate and house are controlled by warring ideological factions and the gridlock that has characterized what passes for government will continue as posturing and rhetoric replace any attempt at forestalling the entropy that has gripped the late empire...sunk capital investments and self-aggrandizement will prevent any sort of political transition to anything like a steady-state, sustainable, low to no growth economy...the voters have cast their ballots and now they can shut the fuck up and let the whores get on with their "important work " ( to borrow a "tail gunner joe" bit of phraseology )...venality and corrupt practice are dominant...and you have to spend money to make money...as linda mcmahon in what? connecticut? i wonder how vince feels about all that cash she spent trying to land a job that would pay off big...meanwhile the rest of us are on our own...when leadership fails you have to lead yourself...plant a garden in the spring and start to think about how we will create the shadow institutions and practices that will allow us to form communities when these idiots collapse...the disconnect is nearly complete...time to move off in a different direction.