The startup marriage

A New Yorker Cartoon (September 16, 2013)

A financial history of the world

Nial Ferguson's Documentary, The Ascent of Money traces the historical rise of money as the global hegemon.

This should pair well, like a thesis and an antithesis, with the animated history of poverty in the world, Poor Us (This is the second time this film finds place on my blog, but it's differently placed here, or differentially).

Century 21 goes to the moon

Ordinarily, one would laugh at the proposition that you could buy and sell property on places outside the earth.

But this proposition isn't risible or a crack pot scheme anymore; this video demonstrates that entrepreneurs are making money, even if its paper money for the time being, by selling lunar properties.

Ridiculous or ominous?

To me, conceptually, it's a mark of crude acquisitiveness to consider the moon as real estate/ "property," to be bought and sold like the slaves of yore.

The moon-dealer from Nevada, is an Oklahoman, who calls himself a "pioneer," re defining a pioneer as somebody who not only thinks outside the box, but outside the planet as well.

Alas, the white colonizer's acquisitive instincts have degenerated into that of a swindling instinct.

Putting the poor to sleep...

...doesn't require much.

But this lullaby is beautiful.

Silent Greed

Eric Stroheim's silent film (1924) on America's obsession with money was a 10 hour long odyssey. MGM producers managed to slim it down to an hour and forty minutes.

From The New Yorker ("Critic's Notebook"):

[The film] magnifies one California couple's striving rise and craven fall into an inferno of American madness. [Stroheim] moves Frank Norris's 1899 novel--about McTeague, a gold miner turned unlicensed dentist, and Trina, his best friend's girl, whom he makes his fluttery bride--to 1908 and the years before the liberating agonies of the First World War and Hollywood's universal pageantry. Showing the masses at their most unwashed, Stroheim captures a heaving, struggling, stinking world of rugged labor, precarious comfort, and primitive naivete. the ladder of social mobility goes both ways, and the terrifying decline that ends in one of the greatest of all cinematic set pieces--a struggle over gold, under the hellish sun of Death Valley--is set up by a banal catastrophe, unemployment. In the bare wild, Stroheim saw an old world--but not its evils--end.