The Clockwork Condition | The New Yorker

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A photo of a shark from below. Everything not all as it seems.

Evil is always evil, and it may be thought of, perhaps, as essentially destructive, a willed and deliberate negation of organic life. It is always evil to kill another human being, even though it is sometimes right to do so. It is probably evil to kill any organism, even the bullocks and sheep we need for our nutriment. To be a carnivore is neither right nor wrong, at least in Western society: it is a thing of neutral significance. Hinduism feels so strongly about the sanctity of all life that it opposes the killing of anything, for food or even, at times, for self-protection. It is permissible to use a mosquito net but not to swat the insects. I have seen Hindu workmen holding up great constructive enterprises in order to look after the welfare of the crawling life dug up with the spade or shovel. East and West meet in principle on the sanctity of life, but the West is more pragmatic about it. By a kind of metaphorical extension, the West will go farther than the East in regarding as evil (not just wrong) the destruction of an artifact, especially if that artifact is a work of art. A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offense against property but an offense against life.

Source: The Clockwork Condition | The New Yorker

Category: History, People | Tags: ,

Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell – VICE

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It took 20 years for this idea to get this far. I started in recruiting doing this profile analysis stuff. And it is discriminatory and reaches too far and is given more credit than it deserves. If everyone didn’t need a good job so badly, there would be no need for this software.

-ed

Source: Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell – VICE

Category: economics | Tags: , ,

Wood Buffalo: Canada’s largest national park and its people in peril | The Narwhal

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….Climate change, natural sedimentation and pollution from rampant development of the Alberta oilsands play a role in the changing delta and another factor is post-glacial rebound — the slow lifting of the lake bottom after the end of the ice age.

Also, the Peace and Athabasca rivers flow into the delta and, as oilsands development surges ahead industry withdrawals from the Athabasca River are increasing, with current figures hovering around 111.5 million cubic metres of water annually.

But dams on the Peace River remain in the crosshairs as the major culprit and fears are growing about what will happen when Site C, the third dam on the Peace River, is built.

These concerns don’t seem to sink in for provincial and federal governments considering projects such as Site C or the massive Teck Frontier oilsands mine proposed for 30 kilometres south of Wood Buffalo Park, said Melody Lepine, government and industry relations director for Mikisew Cree First Nation.

Source: Wood Buffalo: Canada’s largest national park and its people in peril | The Narwhal

Edgar Allan Poe and the Economy of Horror | The New Yorker

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I know how it feels to starve for your art. Not intending to die for it though…

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Poe’s birth and the publication of two collections of gothic tales produced by the Mystery Writers of America. “On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe” (Harper; $14.99) contains stories by twenty mystery writers, including Mary Higgins Clark. “In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe” (William Morrow; $25.99) pairs Poe’s best-known stories with modern commentaries; Stephen King muses on “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ” There’s also a sensitive and haunting brief biography, Peter Ackroyd’s “Poe: A Life Cut Short” (Doubleday; $21.95), that offers a fitting tribute to Poe’s begin-at-the-end philosophy by opening with his horrible and mysterious death, in October of 1849. Poe, drunk and delirious, seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died four days later. He was forty years old.

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death, “in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch. His biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were transatlantic financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known, in Europe, as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-year-long depression brought on by a credit collapse. He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up-and-down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything he attempted. Poverty was his raven, tapping at the door, and it was Poe, not the bird, who uttered, helplessly, another rhyme for “Nevermore.” “I send you an original tale,” Poe once began a letter, and, at its end, added one line more: “P.S. I am poor.”

Source: Edgar Allan Poe and the Economy of Horror | The New Yorker

Category: History, People | Tags: , ,

Capitalism In America: How A Dismal Decimal Is Robbing Americans Blind | Zero Hedge

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The United States is an oligarchy

This concentration of the income and wealth on the top, proves that the United States is an oligarchy. A 2014, study by Princeton University  demonstrated how the US is a political oligarchy. With this report showing the insanely widening income and wealth inequality, my aim is to show, that the country is an economic oligarchy, too. In fact, economic super riches are the precondition for their political power, too. In America, as always, the oligarchy has achieved their uncontested power in a hermeneutical feedback loop, where the initial wealth of the superrich has bought them increased political power, which has given them increased riches, which has bought them more political power, and so on, until today, when they own practically the whole economy and the entire government. Clearly the source of higher inequality has been Fed policies, which has pushed cheap money into the pockets of the already rich, who have exclusively then benefited from soaring stock and real estate prices.

Fittingly, we got end of 2019 a report revealing that the world’s richest people increased their wealth in the year by $1.2 trillion, a staggering 25%, most of which belong to the oligarchs of the United States.

The question – which I have set to explore in my series of Capitalism in America – is whether there has been a game plan, a long-term strategy or whether intermittent achievements have just spurred the oligarchs on to new economic and political power grabs in the course of establishing their totalitarian rule. I tend to think, there has been a long-term plan ever since the establishment of the Federal Reserve. The economic and political history of the United States provide so much circumstantial evidence, which supports the view that there has been a conspiracy of the Wall Street elite. I shall return to this hypothesis in further installments to this series of Capitalism in America. It is however clear – whether through a long-term plan or by a series of ad hoc interventions – the US financial elite has by now completed a creeping coup, which have delivered them absolute economic and political power.

*  *  *

In my investigation of the oligarchization of America – the creeping neoliberal oligarch coop, which set in full force since Reagan – I have so far completed these instalments:

  • The first installment was a study showing how all corporate ownership has been concentrated in the hands of the oligarchy, titled Extreme concentration of ownership in the United States
  • The second part was a study revealing how the oligarchy has totally taken over US media, titled The Oligarch Takeover of US Media
  • The third installment was a report published on the Saker blog titled New World Order in Meltdown, But Russia Stronger Than Ever
  • The fourth installment, The Oligarch Takeover of US Pharma and Healthcare  was also on the Saker blog.
  • Next due is a report showing how from point of view of political science the oligarchy has destroyed the social fabric of the US economy and deliberately enacted laws that favor the few over the people. Of particular interest here is how the oligarchy has rigged the political system by institutionally solidifying the mendacious Janus- faced two-party system in order to remove any potential challenge to their rule.

Source: Capitalism In America: How A Dismal Decimal Is Robbing Americans Blind | Zero Hedge

Category: Cities, economics | Tags: ,