Wonderful Matters

We watched the film Margin Call last night, much because as you know if you read my blog and webzine , I am very interested in studying the massive proliferation of modern-day human sacrifice. It is fascinating how much the World System facilitates it through rigorous law enforcement (U.S. federal government and its satellites), rigid civil religious expectations (Roman Catholic ecclesia and its 501c3 subdivisions), and rabid value assessment programs (banks and finance service firms coordinated through a central bank). Margin Call was a riveting expose of the latter. [Editors note: there will be spoilers in the following post.] It presented a dramatization of a condition I've been sharing for years, one that is surely dismissed as folly but was pouring off the screen in the film. The story revolves around the discovery that a financial services firm, much like a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, is holding a wad of "investment vehicles" that are essentially worthle...

Yesterday I directed your attention to Matt Miller's piece in the Washington Post in which he tries to explain what's going on in the world as he would if he were speaking to his young daughter. Today I noted a piece by Jeffrey Snider that is really the same thing but with all the turgid economics included. This is what you want to read if you want all the gory details of the way human sacrifice works these days. In fact, I like Jeffrey Snider's work because in virtually everything I read from him he is merely explaining the full apparatus for standard value extraction practices engendered by the World System. As I read it, all I could think about was the Black-Scholes model that everyone raved about once upon a time, that novel formula that could guarantee returns on an investment no matter what happened. Snider's piece demonstrates that the Black-Scholes seduction is still alive and well. As it should be . World inhabitants need it all to survive. Doesn'...

Another fine piece appeared in the Washington Post from Matt Miller, who likes telling us the way things really are. This one was called "Europe Made Easy," and it does indeed read like a primer. I found it quite interesting that the great and powerful men-behind-the-green-curtain felt the need to put this out there for general consumption. It seems too many just haven't a clue about what all the fussing is about. Greece and banks and bond auctions and the Euro and why on earth there are a bunch of young folk occupying things. Miller sets us straight with it all, fine work, yes, fine work indeed. Except for one not-so-minor point. Most of the all standard exposition about these things from all the uber-pundits such as Miller does get it right, pretty much, but just the same most get derailed right at the end. That's where the World keeps the full story from you and as such predictably holds you in some agitated state of consternation, rage, or even rebellion. His...