- New teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s next movie, “The Master”. It’s a bizarre looking film that looks to be chronicling the rise of L. Ron Hubbard and his church of Scientology in America. A fictional version of that, of course. But all I’ve got to say about this footage is HOLY SHIT JOAQUIN PHOENIX. Why did you ever stop acting and do that weird modern-art I’m-a-rapper thingy?? You’re too good.
- What Makes Countries Rich Or Poor?
Among the good economic institutions that motivate people to become productive are the protection of their private property rights, predictable enforcement of their contracts, opportunities to invest and retain control of their money, control of inflation, and open exchange of currency. For instance, people are motivated to work hard if they have opportunities to invest their earnings profitably, but not if they have few such opportunities or if their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.
- THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: If we look back at history, we see that previous versions of ourselves were ignorant on a whole plethora of topics. Nobody would dispute that we were wrong about all sorts of shit in the Middle Ages. So, why then does every single generation, decade, people think it knows everything? Every single one thinks it’s got it all figured out, from Science to Economics. Is it not extremely fucking naive to think we know anything?
More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War.
-Sonny
