Apparently it's not considered newsworthy beyond the local press, but a whole block of the Morningside Estate in Hackney Wick/Homerton, i.e. prime Olympic boom territory, has been without electricity for SIX days and counting.  The supplier (French state-controlled London Olympic bid sponsor EDF Energy) blames a water leak (Thames Water: acquired for £8 billion by Macquarie Bank of Sydney, 2006).  You couldn't ask for a better display of how financialized infrastructure works: resource rundown by two fragments of the former utility system converges neatly to make life impossible for guess which class demographic (sitting on guess which real estate...)

Was just reading very interesting stuff on the Saudi's not following the latest interest rate cut in the US. The article is from almost 2 weeks ago... Apparently since then, there's been hedgefunds speculating on a revaluation and both Saudis and Kuwaiti's are dissing the dollar.. And also Hong Kong wants out of a peg... Anybody in on this?

A pertinent reminder that the so-called 'housing bubble' isn't just a matter of subprime foreclosures and repossessions: the buyers of the 'financial products' through which mortgage debt is abstracted and redivided at the outer limits of algorithmic calculation are none other than private pension funds, so that capital's 'no alternative' answer to the pseudo-problem of the 'demographic bomb' may yet manage to create a real 'pensions crisis' where none need have existed

Further to the dominant theme of the last couple of weeks...
(from Prudent Bear: http://www.prudentbear.com/)

Christopher Laird is editor of the PrudentSquirrel newsletter.

Speaks for itself, in devastating earnest

Join the London Riot Re-enactment Society now!
just send an email to join

The London Riot Re-enactment Society will stage re-enactments of noted riots from London's history, with some attempt at historical accuracy. You are no doubt aware of the widespread popularity of historical re-enactment societies, you may also be aware of moves to re-enact more recent events in history. The London Riot Re-enactment Society was inspired by the idea that we can re-enact not the distant past, but events that we remember and may actually have taken part in. We have chosen define our re-enactment society not by choosing a period of time, but by choosing a theme. We will tap London's rich history of rioting, and make these riots live again, in our re-enactments.
If you read a bit about the Gordon Riots or Wat Tyler's peasant revolt you will see that the re-enactment of these riots will take vast numbers, and a lot of planning or luck, so we may start with a smaller, more recent riot, such as the Poll Tax riot. But don't worry, the numbers will grow, so far 100% of Londoners who have heard about the LRRS have expressed an interest in joining.

Like a horseman of the apocalypse, Virilio is riding the ever-popular tide of doom once again. Selecting 'accident' as his curatorial theme and the Cartier Foundation in Paris as his location, his recent show 'Ce qui arrive' points to a generalised psychic pestilence. 'We' have grown indifferent to the constant stream of mediated accidents. But, as Matthew Hyland argues, it's Virilio who needs the wake-up call.

A preoccupation with management of risk has often been observed in post-millennial culture's efforts to express itself. The immediate past and future, however, almost belabour the point that this is not some marginal, hysterical obsession: at its disposal is all the apparatus with which constituted power's deadly earnest will is done. April Fools' Day 2003 heralded the third week of a total war waged pre-emptively on the pretext that a subaltern state's remaining industrial capacity could be used in unauthorised slaughtering ventures (something true of any such infrastructure in the world). Meanwhile Britain awaits the passage of more legislation encouraging counsellors and other police to intervene, as the Home Secretary puts it, 'before bad behaviour becomes criminal behaviour’. Blunkett's Anti-Social Behaviour Bill deserves special mention, in fact, for its doubly anticipatory structure. The trigger for therapeutic enforcement is behaviour ‘likely to result in members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed’. Here the problem is twice removed into the future tense, once in the wager ‘likely to’ and again the way ‘alarm’ and ‘distress’ imply as yet unaccomplished cruelty.

by De Selby
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An important and infuriating book, in which insights of the utmost urgency are smeared by association with disastrously insipid conclusions. The intersection of Henri Bergson’s thought with recent evolutionary theory generates a strong account of lived, ‘affective’ experience’s continuity (‘duration’) as something thinkable yet inaccessible to the spatial (or, in Bergson’s terms, ‘intellectual’) representation grounding scientific method. Objective representation requires the abstraction of a ‘snapshot’, an ‘instance’ presumed to be internally unchanging, from the indivisible continuity of process. This imposition of timeless form on temporality ‘renders all objective categories inherently Platonic’: the instant is ‘an ideal which measurement and recording approach but can never reach.’ The scientific subject can never successfully isolate the static object from continuous change, because s/he is immanent to that continuity.