Of course the notion of addressing Hong Kong has been in my mind for a while, but it’s a bit of a moving target: things change all the time, and seemingly on the fly. However, with today’s fresh developments, it seems silly to wait any longer. Hong Kong Civic party lawmaker Dennis Kwok yesterday expressed the reason way better than I could: As I said time and again, the use of troops in Hong Kong will be the end
Read More...
Joan Miro The farmer’s wife 1923 In Jackson Hole on Friday, Bank of England’s outgoing governor Mark Carney talked about a Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) that the world ‘must’ create, and I thought: that sounds as creepy as anything Halloween. Now, Carney is a central banker as well as a former Giant Squid partner, hence a certified cultist, but still. He even mentioned Facebook’s Libra ‘currency’ as some sort of example for something that should replace the US dollar
Read More...
Piet Mondriaan Self portrait 1918 Guardian columnist Owen Jones, a self-described left activist and socialist, was attacked in the streets of London at 2 am Saturday morning in what he himself describes as “a blatant premeditated assault” by a bunch of guys. He says he was kicked, punched, but then saved by the friends he was with, and nothing really happened to him. Or he would have taken photos and published them. Owen was fine, before and after. But
Read More...
Felix Vallotton Verdun 1917 It’s been a few days since I did anything but my news aggregator, and that’s not so strange, since so much of it ‘encircled’ Jeffrey Epstein. Now that he’s supposedly died, though we have no proof of that, from an ‘apparent suicide’, there are other topics as well that we can turn to. But let’s start with Epstein just for good measure. We still don’t have an autopsy report, though New York City Chief Medical
Read More...
Pablo Picasso Man with ice cream cone 1938 My first thought after reading about Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called suicide is: let it go, watch a movie instead, or go out to dinner. But a suicide of someone under suicide watch is just too much. And then I understand NBC -oh wait, and Reuters too- said he wasn’t even on suicide watch anymore. A guy who allegedly tried to kill himself two weeks ago. But of course. Why should he be?
Read More...
Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unsealed a batch of documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case today, as announced recently. Actually, it’s a case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s madam and main procurer of little girls. Giuffre bought the case after Maxwell accused her of lying about the whole thing. There’s still much more of this to come, and given the VIP
Read More...
Edward Hopper Ground swell 1939 The US government has to come up with very very strong legislation for social media, and it has to do that very soon. Because if it doesn’t, it risks those same social media inciting a civil war (that’s no hyperbole, that is real) on American soil. And beyond as well, but as Donald Trump said about European efforts to curtail Twitter, Facebook et al’s activities, they’re American companies and hence America’s responsibility. Well, cool,
Read More...
Odilon Redon Peyrelebade landscape 1880 It’s never easy to gauge what exactly is happening in China, or why the CCP Politburo takes the decisions it does. Today, or overnight, is no exception to that. However, one thing that appears certain, but which I don’t see reflected in all the analyses, is that Beijing pushing the value of the renminbi (yuan) down below 7 to the USD in one fell swoop, is a major setback for Xi Jinping and his
Read More...
Edward Hopper The long leg 1935 Last weekend, I noticed that two of the main newsmakers were both named Cummings, one in the US, the other in the UK. At first glance they don’t look like family, but I’ll readily admit I can’t be sure of that. What I do know is that both are symbolic of what’s wrong with the political systems they figure in. Also last weekend, I saw a comment somewhere, think it was Twitter, that
Read More...
Pablo Picasso Massacre in Korea 1951 It’s been a long time since I wrote anything at all about nuclear energy. And even then I thought the whole discussion had been wrapped up and thrown away. But I guess it’s inevitable that as the climate change debate develops, there’d be parties seeking to revive the nukes ‘discussion’, because there’s so much potential profit in there. And then today I came upon this report, and a few interpretations of it, that
Read More...