The Hemlock Report

Follow me onto my new blogging project: The Hemlock Report.

Inflatable Buildings

Know your structural limits. With this posting on inflatable buildings, I hereby end this blog. Stay tuned for one final posting directing you to my new project.

Apocalust

Apocalust — n. 1. yearning for the apocalypse. 2. nostalgia for the End Times. 3. a mania believed to be caused by overmediation, mainly afflicting Americans concerned for their nation's perceived loss of status

Matt Taibbi on Wall Street

Matt Taibbi on the complicity of the regulators with Wall Street Scoundrels: "The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class [of financial criminals], expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused."

Wikileaks

Fluxlist Europe has the best visual commentary on Wikileaks.

Catastrophe of Nature

Slavoj Zizek on the catastrophe of nature:

"There is no nature. Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes. We profit from them. What is our main source of energy? Oil. . . What is oil? . . . Beneath the earth are material remainders of an unimaginable catastrophe. . . . the remainders of animal life, plants, and so on. . . Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe had to occur on earth?"

Roadside Attractions

"single shoes on the berms and verges / of roadways and off-ramps; rusty / armature of a pram in a pasture / . . . . bags in the rumble strips and ditches" —RJ Gibson "In Transit"

Peak Oil, Sooner than Predicted

Wikileaks reveals that Saudi Arabian oil estimates have been obscenely overstated, leading to a global situation analogous to the Oil Shock of 1973, when the US could not pump its way to prosperity but was hobbled by OPEC's pricing strength.

Carcass-Fueled Appliances

Keith Wagstaff writes about household appliances fueled by common pests, such as flies and mice. "Projects like this [mouse-murdering table]," Wagstaff says, "are fascinating because on one level, they are extremely practical, but on another they are inherently revolting." And, in an even more funny and insightful way, Wagstaff asks, "Putting aside the horrific image of carnivorous intelligent machines hunting down humans in the streets, is there any logical reason to be opposed to a project like this?"

Flesh-eating machines have enormous implications. Along with exploiting an untapped energy source, such machines might some day crush and consume humanity while causing critical loss of the creatures at the bottom of the food chain.

Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season

"I drove some more. West on Sahara Boulevard, past the Strip, past the Be-Jak rance, until the road just petered out in the desert. A couple of rattlesnakes sunned themselves by a sign that said: 'Pavement Ends. Road Closed. Travel At Own Risk.' The sign was pockmarked with bullet hols; the time and the temperature were still plainly visible in the Sahara Tower. The side of the road out there on West Sahara Boulevard resembled the trail of an army in full retreat. Carcasses of cars, refrigerators, propane heaters, furniture with the stuffing ripped out, a dump that was not even an official dump. Just a place in the desert to dump the leavings of a lifetime, out past the Be-Jak ranch before the pavement ended. Tires, old radios, television sets with no picture tubes, stoves, washing machines, bicycles, ironing boards, supermarket carts, air-conditioning units. Why here? Why did so many people travel out here past the Be-Jak rance to junk their belongings? I could not find an answer, but today, years later, that stretch of highway out on the edge of the desert seems a more vivid image of Vegas than the lights of the Strip that even then were struggling against the summer twilight."

—John Gregory Dunne Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, pg. 21 (1974)

Coal Piles and Crumbling Hills

Leo sits in the Ramada Inn parking lot, near the confluence of I-79 and I-68. He watches headlights approaching, red taillights flowing away from him. He imagines each car as an energy cell, digesting fuel and shitting pollution.

Past the fork in the highways, he sees the crack in the earth where the energy comes from. It splits into the vein of coal—condensed, organic, inflammable. Pressure drills rattle the surface. Topsoil crumbles. The hill falls in upon itself.

Leo’s twenty-seven years amount to less than a single blink on a digital clock when compared to the aeons over which dead bodies have been compressing into coal and oil, energy unleashed in the last century by the burning of every milligram of fossil fuels ever dug or sucked from the earth.

End of Oil

When all the oil is drained from oil fields and all the coal scraped out, will the land crumple like an aluminum can?

Goodbye Dubai

Money to desert. Gold to dust. Goodbye Dubai.

In Praise of the Black Block

Cops and Autonomen Clash in Prussia.

A Dust Apocalypse

A dust apocalypse—

a trillion little scumbags,

floating,

catching rays,

reflect as mirrors the sun's tiny punch.

My mother was a smoker.

Triptych 2008

Imagine these human lampreys who sucked the bloody froth from the economy.

Detroit

Carolyn Kraus writes about "Recycling Detroit."

Good to the last drop

Good to the last drop: trickle-down economics. Are Bushburgs, Bush Terraces, and Bush Acres the new Hoovervilles? Is the economic collapse the last drop of trickle-down economics?

Decomposition of Text

Literature becomes journalism becomes blogging.

Decomposition of Piglet

Film becomes gnarly around 2 minute mark.

Post-Industrial Biomechanics

I imagine a bank of computer terminals glowing in a darkened, high-tech cavern. There sit a squadron of crew-cutted sadists who control a swarm of weaponized insects, watching video feeds from billions of compound eyes, each ommatidium glimpsing a world in flux, a world measured in millimeters. 

Insects as agents of American Empire.

Flies on a Battlefield

I opened the trash can to a miasma of flies. I imagined a field of corpses as a misguided effort to give back to the Earth what we'd taken away. Depleted minerals replenished by industrial-strength chemicals mired in the rotting flesh.

Another Abandoned Site

Please note San Zhi, a never-used vacation getaway near Taipei.

More here.