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EGR: The Tower
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Christopher Locke
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Sep 14, 2001 04:11 PDT
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Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund
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number of donors: 109,645
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At Seventy-ninth Street and First Avenue the taxis
lined up every day to take the young Masters of the
Universe down to Wall Street. According to the
regulations, every cabdriver was supposed to take you
anywhere you wanted to go, but the drivers in the line
at Seventy-ninth and First wouldn't budge unless you
were going down to Wall Street or close to it.
Tom Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities
http://www.rageboy.com/buck.jpg
The Tower
http://www.rageboy.com/tower.html
file last saved:
Saturday, March 04, 2000
Valued Readers:
These are some notes I took today. They're rough and unfinished, but I
imagine you can read between the lines.
There was a certain crowd that didn't go counterculture in the '60s.
The math wizards and double-E's who stayed in school, got their
degrees, didn't go to war, didn't inhale anything stronger than the
occasional case of Bud. The engineers. The hackers who dabbled in AI
for the DOD without asking embarrassing questions. The technical
traders, rocket scientists. The masters of the universe. For a while,
they ran the world.
"It's a pleasant Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, and on the 44th
floor of one of the World Trade Center towers, Marcus Goodwin is
speaking to two dozen people on the subject of psychic investing...
what's remarkable is the identity of the organization that is
hosting [the] lecture. He's the guest of the New York Society of
Securities Analysts... Goodwin is telling a room of attentive,
suit-wearing people how they can use tarot cards, candles and
pendulums to help pick stocks... for Goodwin, psychic investing
usually starts with tarot cards -- not some medieval deck, but a
contemporary edition he bought a few years ago, one that features
pictures of stuff like guns and television sets rather than swords
and cups."
"As I flip through my tarot cards," says Goodwin, "I see the tech
sector lowering its prices."
When they were completed in 1973, the towers of the World Trade Center
were, for a while, the tallest buildings in the world.
The Tower is the 16th card in the major arcana of the Tarot. In the
Rider deck designed by A.E. Waite, the card shows a tower in flames.
It has been struck by lightning from above and people are falling from
its upper stories. The card has been described as "the chastisement of
pride and the intellect overwhelmed in the attempt to penetrate the
Mystery of God."
"The norms of the new intelligentsia -- the norms of
professionalism -- are a departure from the hitherto prevailing
norms of economic self-interest which have guided a business
civilization. In the upper reaches of this new elite -- that is,
in the scientific community -- men hold significantly different
values, which could become the foundation of the new ethos for such
a class."
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in
Social Forecasting, 1976.
Genesis 11:4-9 http://www.rageboy.com/babel-big2.jpg
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top
may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the
children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one
language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they
may not understand one another's speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all
the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did
there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did
the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
I got email today in which Patrick Harker says: "The attacks on New
York and Washington have stunned the world. The magnitude of the
devastation and sheer barbarism of these acts utterly defy
explanation." Ghastly, outrageous and heartbreaking, yes. But do they
truly "defy explanation"? The Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School might at least be expected to be able to put two and
two together. The World Trade Center -- the world's largest commercial
complex -- hosted and gave comfort to, among other radical groups, The
Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange, The New York Cotton Exchange,
Salomon Smith Barney, American Express, Sumitomo Bank Securities,
Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse Group, Commerzbank, and Deutsche Bank.
In the global economy, there are no people, only human factors; no
pain, only capital deployment considerations. Buy low, sell high.
"A screaming comes across the sky..."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~eddie/pynchon.page.html
Dr. Harker earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering
from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, and received a master's
degree in economics and a Ph.D. in civil engineering, also from the
University of Pennsylvania, in 1983.
Yesterday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz spoke
about America's determination to punish the perpetrators of the
attacks. He said the American government expected support from all
quarters of the civilized world -- and even from "the uncivilized
world." I've gotten out all my atlases, but I can't seem to locate the
latter.
Wolfowitz should know better. For the past seven years he has been
Professor of International Relations at the School of Advanced
International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University, served for
three years as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and served three and a
half years as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs.
"The golden age of Islamic civilization, the thousand years from
about 700 to 1700CE during which Muslims ruled from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, and were the driving and leading force in human
history, laying the foundations of much of what is now considered
'modern,' have been carefully airbrushed out of modern western
history books. History, the west teaches us, can be traced from the
Greek and Roman 'ancients,' through 'the Dark Ages,' to the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the sudden emergence of
modernity in Europe in the last 300 years or so."
Dr. Wolfowitz received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in
1965 in mathematics, and a doctorate in political science from the
University of Chicago in 1972.
"...theoretical knowledge increasingly becomes the strategic
resource, the axial principle, of a society. And the university,
research organizations, and intellectual institutions, where
theoretical knowledge is codified and enriched, become the axial
structures of the emergent society."
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
In his first public reaction to the events of 11 September 2001,
President George W. Bush said, "America was targeted for attack
because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the
world."
The violation and disruption visited upon the United States this week
have been terrible, terrifying. The death of so many Americans is a
tragedy of nearly unimaginable proportions. Any senseless death is
tragic, wherever it occurs. Every life uniquely precious. And fleeting.
Sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, friends and lovers -- none will
ever come again. When even one is lost, our sorrow is boundless. When
so many are lost at once, we are inconsolable.
Yet many are lost every day. Equally precious and unique. Equally
irreplaceable. And their passing evokes no less sharp a grief, even
in "the uncivilized world."
Some men kill for pleasure and power. Many are running our government.
Some men kill out of convenience or distraction. Many are running our
corporations. Some men kill because they have seen their wives and
children die for no reason they can understand. These last are not
"making a statement" -- there is no conversation, no one listening.
When the voice of love is stifled, silenced anguish seeks only to
hurt, to cause harm. To inflict terror.
"Paul Wolfowitz, second in command at the Pentagon, hinted broadly
at a campaign that wouldn't stop at the borders of countries that
harbor terrorists. 'It's not just simply a matter of capturing
people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries,
removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor
terrorism,' he said."
For many, the sanctuaries and support systems were removed long ago.
The logic is backwards. What creates terrorists is living too long in
terror. Until you no longer care. Until you would gladly die to make a
difference. Or even just a dent. Their acts may be inconceivable. If
we dare to look deeper, their motives are not.
But now, from their lofty towers of moral outrage, our questionable
leaders strut and preen and promise war. They know we distrust them
and talk of their plans amongst ourselves. They fear what we see and
what we know. And in their righteous godlike anger, they say to
themselves, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another's speech.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel.
The Management
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
------
NOTES:
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1987.
George Mannes, "Wall Street's Return to Paranormalcy,"
TheStreet.com, March 31, 2000.
http://www.thestreet.com/stocks/brokerages/910730.html
Marcus Goodwin, "A Psychic Eye On Wall Street: Word on The Street,
is, 'The Chips are Stale.' Psychic Says, it's a Good Time to Lower
Your Prices," marcusgoodwin.com, October 17, 2000.
http://www.marcusgoodwin.com/pe11-17-00.htm
A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pktar16.htm
Patrick Harker, "Message From Dean Patrick Harker," The Wharton School
of the University of Pennsylvania, 2001.
http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/whartonnow/archive/news/2001/9_dean_wtc_letter.html
U.S. Department of Defense DefenseLINK
http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/wolfowitz.html -- current as of
March 6 2001.
Iqbal Siddiqui, "How Islam influenced British culture and
civilisation 400 years ago," Muslimedia, March 1-15, 1999, a review
of Nabil Matar, _Islam in Britain: 1558-1685_, Cambridge University
Press, 1998. http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/book99/islamukbk.htm
President George W. Bush addressing the nation after attacks on New
York and Washington , September 11, 2001.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.speech.text/index.html
"Bush Vows Defeat of Terrorism," David Espo, Associated Press,
September 14, 2001.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
be the first kid on your block!
http://www.gonzomarkets.com
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