mayakovfefe posted:

his poetry is really burning and urgent,

you know it's urgent when every sentence is an exclamation. anyway, i liked this one quite a bit so translated it..

And what if after so many words,
the word does not survive!
If after the wings of birds,
the still bird does not survive!
Better then, truly,
for it to all be swallowed up and be done!

Having been born to live from our
death!
Raising ourselves from heaven to the earth
by its own disasters
and spy the moment to extinguish its
shadow with its darkness!

Better then, frankly,
for it to all be swallowed up and what difference does it make ... !

And if after so much history,
we succumb,
not from eternity,
but from those simple things, like being
at home or brooding!
And if later we find,
all of a sudden, that we live,
judging by the height of the stars,
for the comb and stains on a handkerchief!
Better then, truly,
for it to all to be swallowed up, of course!

It will be said that we have,
in one eye much grief
and also in the other, much grief
and in both, when they look, much
grief...
Then... Clearly!... Then... not even a
word!

Edited by Gssh (Aug. 10, 2018 00:48:08)

marimite posted:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/michael-hudson-life-thought-autobiography.html

that's a really good interview. the stuff about CIA is gold,

There was a professor at the New York University, Solomon Fabricant, as in the word “fabricate”. He was the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research. I went into his office he said, “The first thing I want you to do, I want you to join the CIA. I’m recruiting.” He showed me a copy of the CIA’s first published report in America, when the CIA first went public. It was on Russia’s gold stock, saying that it didn’t have enough native gold in its rivers or mines to be credit-worthy. I looked at it and said, “You must know that this is all a lie. I work for the Chase Manhattan Bank. Our customer is Anaconda Copper Co. Anaconda has bought gold bars from the Soviet Union and the gold bars are not made from gold they pan out of the river. They’re made as an electrolytic by-product of copper refining. What you should do is forecast the copper output of Russia, when you electrolytically refine copper, gold and silver fall to the bottom and it’s the residue that is responsible for most of the gold stock, not only of Russia but for other copper producers such as Chile.”
He said, “well okay you’re not good at joining the CIA”. I couldn’t believe he didn’t know about my background, but that didn’t matter.

In the last few months that I worked for Chase Manhattan in 1967, I was going up to my office on the ninth floor and a man got on the elevator and said, “I was just coming to your office, Michael. Here is a report. I’m from the State Department (I assumed that this meant CIA). “We want to calculate how much money the US could get if we set up bank branches and became the bank for all the criminal capital in the world.” He said, “We figured out we can finance, (and he said this in an elevator), we can finance the Vietnam War with all the drug money coming into America, all of the criminal money. Can you make a calculation of how much that might be?”
So I spent three months figuring out how much money goes to Switzerland, from drug dealings, what’s the dollar volume of drug dealings. They helped me with all sorts of statistics on that, and said, “We can become the criminal capital of the world and it’ll finance the dollar and this will enable us to afford the spending to defeat communism in Vietnam and elsewhere. If we don’t do that, the bomb throwers will come to New York.”
So I became a specialist in money laundering! Nothing could have better prepared me to understand how the global economy works! I had all the statistics, I had the help of the government people explaining to me how the CIA worked with drug dealing and other criminals and kidnappers to raise the money so it would be off the balance sheet funding and Congress didn’t have to approve it when they would kill people and sponsor revolutions. They were completely open with me about this. I realized they’d never done a security check on me.
So I spent a year applying my balance of payments analysis to the US balance of payments. When I finally finished, I found that the entire US balance of payments deficit in the 1960s, since the Vietnam War, the entire balance of payments deficit was military spending abroad. The private sector’s trade and investment was exactly in balance; tourism, trade and investment were exactly in balance. All the deficit was military.
So I turned in my statistics. My boss Mr. Barsanti, came in to me three days later and he said, “I’m afraid we have to fire you.” I asked, “What happened?” He said, “Well, we sent it to Robert McNamara.” (who was the Secretary of Defense and then became an even more dangerous person with the World Bank, which probably is more dangerous to the world than the American military. But that’s another story). Mr. Barsanti said that McNamara said that Arthur Andersen would never get another government contract if it published my report.

I decided to become a professor at the New School, because I never had a course in trade theory and the only way to learn about a topic is to teach it. So I gave the course in trade theory, and then was hired as a full-time faculty member in 1970 and taught national income analysis, using Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value as my textbook. This infuriated the department head, Robert Heilbroner, whose idea of Marx was what he had for breakfast and how he felt later, and did he really have an affair with his maid. There was not much economic analysis, and he was furious that I would teach a national income course. He said, “You’re a Wall Street thug! You know only one third of the economics students are from business, one third are foreign students from the UN, and one third sort of radicals who are left-wing.” He just assumed that I was there for the business school students. I never once discussed politics at the New School. I realized that Heilbroner’s idea of Marxism was Stalinism, as a very crude idea. He brought in a Stalinist, Steve Hymer, ostensibly to teach trade theory, and I said, “That’s fine, I’ll teach monetary theory and banking theory.
Hymer was a proselytizer for LSD. He would tell the students to take LSD and then listen to his course. About a year after he joined, he went to the American Economic Association meeting in Montreal, had students take LSD and stand on their head. On the way back to New York he drove his car into a truck and his group died. It’s really dangerous to take LSD when you’re driving.
The foreign students were coming into my office and saying, “Is this man CIA? Why would he want us to take LSD unless he wants to, you know, deport us or arrest us or make us into a spy?” So I was the guy they would come to and that made Heilbroner think all the more that I must be a Wall Street plant.

slipdisco posted:

marimite posted:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/michael-hudson-life-thought-autobiography.html

that's a really good interview. the stuff about CIA is gold,

from the preface of Super Imperialism (2nd ed):

M. Hudson posted:

A few years ago I sought to update my breakdown of the balance of payments to update the impact of U.S. military spending and foreign aid. But the Commerce Department’s Table 5 from its balance of payments data had been changed in such a way it no longer reveals the extent to which foreign aid generates a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the United States, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. I telephoned the statistical division responsible for collecting these statistics and in due course reached the technician responsible for the numbers. “We used to publish that data,” he explained, “but some joker published a report showing that the United States actually made money off the countries we were aiding. It caused such a stir that we changed the accounting format so that nobody can embarrass us like that again.” I realized that I was the joker who had been responsible for the present-day statistical concealment, and that it would take a Congressional request to get the Commerce and State Departments to replicate the analysis that still was being made public in the years in which I wrote Super Imperialism.

marimite posted:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/michael-hudson-life-thought-autobiography.html

this really is fantastic, and hilarious in spots, and great

Edited by drwhat (Aug. 11, 2018 12:27:10)

elias posted:

Hi All!

We are incredibly excited to announce that the first book that will be published here at Sinistra Publishing is a translation of Domenico Losurdo's Stalin,

The terrifying bird-woman icon associated with “Momo” has been added to “Minecraft,” an online game that is wildly popular with kids and teens. The sick icon has been added by so-called 'modders,' people with knowledge of programming who create personalized content for “Minecraft.”

A parent is also warning that ads promoting “Momo” have appeared in YouTube videos about the game.

the "parent" is a literal cop from Ohio,

There are fears it could lead youngsters to investigate the dangerous phenomenon, which has also been linked to the theft of personal data, harassment, extortion, anxiety, depression and insomnia.

A police officer in Ohio described how his seven-year-old son was watching Minecraft content on YouTube when an ad about “Momo” popped up.

"It's scary," Lt. Dave Carter told WTOL.

SINISTER ‘BLUE WHALE CHALLENGE’ BLAMED FOR TEXAS TEEN’S DEATH

"He began talking about “Momo” and how weird she looked. So, he ended up looking it up and saw that it was that suicide challenge."

"That came from something simple, that kids all like doing this Minecraft stuff and watching the videos on how to play it and here it comes up in the search.”

The dangerous devil meme "Borbobo", has been linked to back-talk, cancer gas, grabby leg syndrome and a phenomenon known as "logging on" or "in". Specialists say Robubro was killed in Argentinia last year, but later 'modded' itself into infectious 'lore-friendly' disrespect for the masters of classic rock.

12 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

and this old king, who was called god, said that right? and his angels with their sharp swords backed him up? right?