Cheery Economic News to Get Your Week Started

By Ken Silverstein

I missed this when it was published a few days ago. Worth a read.

From James Kuntsler:

I visited the Slate Political Gabfest podcast yesterday. These otherwise excellent, entertaining, highly educated folk (David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Daniel Gross, in for vacationing John Dickerson) were discussing the ramifications of the economic situation on the upcoming elections. They were quite clear about not being able to articulate the nature of this economic situation, “…this recession, or whatever you want to call it…” in Ms. Bazelon’s words. What’s the point of sending these people to Ivy League colleges if they can’t make sense of their world.

Let’s call this whatever-you-want-to-call-it a compressive deflationary contraction, because that’s exactly what it is, an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity (thank you John Tainter). A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We’ve generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That’s what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can “create” new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do.

July 29th, 2010
Hundreds of semi naked leather and latex clad men frolicked in the streets of San Francisco's SOMA district last Sunday afternoon. They are cultural libertines pushing at the limits of censorship. I think it's great. Male Sexuality. Part of the duality of gender is precisely because fully naked female bodies can be represented in parts of the public, while the penis is hidden away in shame. Post protestant societies like America project all kinds of Good and Evil on the penis. It remains symbolically powerful as long it cannot be depicted. I am bringing these images out of the San Francisco Gay Counterpublic and releasing them to the world.

Up your alley is the underground leather street fair in San Francisco. It happens in broad daylight every July in on Folsom Street in San Francisco. It is one of the few instances where the Penis is part of the Public. I invite you to view this Sartorial Rebellion as a Sex Positive, Body Positive mass movement. Male bodies and sexuality can be combined in public without anybody being harmed.

Visit the running application at: http://hyperlocative.appspot.com/wa/project9_4.html In this Mashup I take photosets from flickr and explore them through a san francisco map interface. Installation: 1 Register for an API key at Flickr 2 download the three files into a directory 3 Change the API key in geobrowser.js 4 doubleclick on index.html