Not the best diversion for the end of the republic, since it’s not about game theory, but perhaps that’s all these have been, since the inevitable is coming in 20 days.
This Eric Garland tweet rant is shilling for his toastmaster business and we have been given a narrative arc not quite good enough for the toasters of Battlestar Gallactica.
This game has been developing for many years, is asymmetrical, and much cheaper than building a decent aircraft carrier.
So it’s strange, but not surprising, that so many people would sing the praises of Garland’s masterpiece, because it is absolutely the worst piece of political writing ever inflicted on any public in human history…
Garland starts his magnum opus with a promise: He’s going to combat the idea that Obama and Clinton are “doing nothing, just gave up” in the face of Trump’s victory. “Guys,” he writes. “It’s time for some game theory.”
Game theory, for the uninitiated, is a branch of mathematics that uses computational models to predict the behavior of human beings in potentially conflictual situations. It’s complex, involves a lot of formal logic and algebra, and is mostly useless. Game theory models human actions on the presumption that everyone is constantly trying to maximize their potential gain against everyone around them; this is why its most famous example concerns prisoners—isolated people, cut off from all the noncompetitive ties that constitute society. One of its most important theoreticians, John Nash, was also a paranoid schizophrenic, who believed himself to be the target of a vast Russian conspiracy…
Here are some examples of cultural substitution in the built environment that articulate multiple meanings and identify an axis or axes of more than geodetic importance.
Every historical site is both monumental and documentary and connected by a visible, invisible and visual logic appropriate to the accumulated cultural production and reproduction in and on those sited places. Their axes are found in the historical logic of spaces as one interprets both a structural replacement/displacement and a substitution/transference of modern power.
Every place has not only its sense, but its agency and structure, constructed and deconstructed by its history. The urban history of the built environment, rather than valorizing and commodifying aesthetic attributes, might be better served by studying the transfers of development rights and the formation of historical space in the cycles of construction, demolition, and creation of open/closed spaces on the same geodetic sites.
“In social terms, a bourgeois space and cosmopolitan society has a new layer of urban order and meaning imposed – with a nationalist ideology and modern state-building – that is not only visual and symbolic, but also real and instrumental.”
Whether facadism or roof-ism, it is what all occupation movements try to do, as the sublimated mode of production becomes historically sedimented and occasionally excavated. It is a data base with an information superstructure, layered onto the intertextual determinacies of urban plans. The first example buries the sign, the second projects the sign by projecting a plan, the third substitutes the sign because location, location, location(sic). Place remains yet disappears, only to reappear in new, more virtual forms.
There is always sedimented meaning in every urban site: example one has cold war surveillance built on WWII rubble; example two has the logic of the modern capitalist state imposed on colonized histories; and example three replaces one stage of commercialized colonialism with the structures of modern governmentality.
The ruins of the NSA Cold War listening post set atop an artificial mountain built on the rubble of WW2 covered one of the Reich’s buildings, the Military-Technical university in Berlin.
Albert Speer planned Germania’s first university on a site used for NSA surveillance
Example Two: Shanghai and Nanjing, China – The unbuilt capitals of Modern (interwar) China one commercial and the other governmental, but both built using European modern plan-logic and yet kept the feng shui orientation to North and relocated themselves as planned, modern new capitals away from the historical old cities like Washington DC, Brasília , Chandigarh, Canberra, (soon Cairo — built by China) etc.
Example Three: Singapore — a modern city-state with minimal land area that carries a similar logic to the above examples by replacing the place of the commercial colonizer with the governmental seats of national and civic administrative power.Continue reading →
The New Year. It has often seemed bright with the promise of better things to come.
New Year 2017 fills me with foreboding, which is reflected in this week’s poems. While some people are out celebrating, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking there’s an ominous zing of ozone in the air.
Weather forecasts are unclear, but our headlights have picked out rockslide warning signs in the murk ahead. Roll up your windows, and check your seatbelts. ___________________________________________________________
December 31st
by Richard Hoffman
All my undone actions wander naked across the calendar,
a band of skinny hunter-gatherers, blown snow scattered here and there,
stumbling toward a future folded in the New Year I secure
with a pushpin: January’s picture a painting from the 17th century,
a still life: Skull and mirror, spilled coin purse and a flower.
Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the gray And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose And found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sun To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow. ________________________________________________________
“Aktion artist Hermann Nitsch, for example, was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for breaking Austrian indecency laws by masturbating and enacting violent sexual scenes in his performances” … (“(Art) History, it’s reputable” – John Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith)
We are reminded again, even if very few noticed the first time, that Trump, because of his ignorance of the details of being POTUS, is simply about the profitability of role and status. He is all about the spectacle, unfortunately, Trump’s beauty pageants now signify however unintended, Judgments of Paris.
In July 1975, Idi Amin Dada staged a £2 Million wedding to 19 year old Sarah Kyolaba, a go-go dancer with the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band, nicknamed “Suicide Sarah.” [61]
Much text has been expended on analyzing the state of Trump’s sanity often using the medium of tweeting, and often diagnosing a variety of psychological and pathological conditions.The reality is that it is all performative — he’s all about being that “star” as he self-described it in the bus recording about groping. Ratings and photo-ops are the relics of his rationality — the problem is deciding whether post-truth is always a lie.
We ignore the constant triggers and performative frames at our peril. That he has appropriated most major media industries makes the ideological apparatus of a major capitalist nation his (hair) brush. 60+ million voters could have been wrong, but we will never know because the Electoral College acted like so many elite art reviewers or auction bidders.
The author, Lawrence Kudlow, is a noted voodoo economist and the reported leading candidate to head the administration’s Council of Economic Advisors.
In a column touting the brilliance of Trump’s appointments — “Trump’s transition continues to go smoothly. Better than smoothly. Confidently. More than confidently. Transcendently” — and naturally omitting any mention of his own prospective candidacy, Kudlow dismisses any concerns of the conflicts of interest that are already rife.In a National Review column, Kudlow makes the case not only that Trump and his administration are not corrupt, but also that they cannot be corrupt, by virtue of their wealth. “Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people?” reasons Kudlow,
“Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.”
Kleptocracy (from Greek: κλεπτοκρατία, klépto- thieves + -kratos rule, literally “rule by thieves”)[1][2] is a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service.[3][4]
’s sanity often using the medium of tweeting, and often diagnosing a variety of psychological and pathological conditions.The reality is that it is all performative — 
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