Who is Tyler Durden?

.… well most people know “him” as a character in the movie The Fight Club, which is really not about fighting although that might be easy to miss if all you see are surfaces … “Tyler” now appears in other guises by those who realize that an almost perfect foil, perhaps the first since John Galt in Atlas Shrugged has appeared, barfed up by the zeitgeist and run with by among others, a guru to pickup artists and, what this article is about, an amazingly, screamingly fast becoming inevitable Market commentator … read someone else’s take on this. 

When the someone, who is no one is able to become someone else and from that amazingly free platform say whatever one wishes … you have Zero Hedge … and, probably just in time.  Note the header:  "ON A LONG ENOUGH TIMELINE, THE SURVIVAL RATE FOR EVERYONE DROPS TO ZERO"  ….

Working backwards to the philosophy of the movie character, here is a summary, useful for, well, everyone.  Especially Creatives!

Here is the pure Zero Hedge link, just refresh it in a couple of hours and you’ll see how prolific whomever is.  After reading this for several days, it is clear that this source is akin to the massive “AI’s” in Gibson’s Neuromancer.  Check out this bitchy little dig at Goldman.  Read this guy/gal/collective even if you understand less than 10% of what is being written.  You’ll begin to understand the brave new terrrain.  We’ll soon be saying post 10-07 or something like that and it will mean a LOT more than post 9-11.

Another Answer to Cancer

Dr. William Donald Kelley, a dentist who cured himself of liver and pancreatic cancer, independently found, much like Max Gerson that diet is the KEY … and fresh is best.  For this he was much persecuted, but managed to see 33,000 people, assisting them with the process of cancer.  He did become a bit paranoid in the end and Section II reflects that, but the first part of the book is potentially very helpful.  Read it here on the web.  I believe that these explorations of cancer are MORE valuable to those of us who have yet to manifest symptoms of what is becoming all too prevalent as time goes on.  That our food supply has passed from the hands of farmers into the hands of business is tragic and we all must find ways of relating to the consequences.  This is further light in that dim room.

A Beacon is set in NYC … Energy Retrofit of Empire State Building, all 6500 windows.

RMI = Rocky Mountain Institute

April 6, 2009 saw one of the most significant announcements in Rocky Mountain Institute’s history. The Empire State Building, New York’s most iconic skyscraper is set to undergo a groundbreaking energy efficiency retrofit. RMI, serving as a technical advisor, helped design a program that will lead to a 38 percent reduction in the building’s energy use. This will cost $13 million, save approximately $4.4 million per year in energy costs, and thus yield a 3-year payback on investment! If you think this is exciting news, you are not alone. So far, over 500 news publications around the world have featured stories on The Empire State Building's “going green.”

Through The Empire State Building program, RMI and its partners revolutionized the process for analyzing and retrofitting existing buildings to use energy more efficiently. By taking the right steps in the right order and reducing loads before looking at supplying additional energy to the building, they set a great precedent for the retrofit of other aging buildings around the world.

The integrative design approach RMI introduced will yield about double the normal level of savings in such projects, yet at comparable or lower cost, by optimally combining a whole package of improvements. For example, 6,500 windows will be remanufactured onsite—a world first, saving a huge amount of truck traffic—into “superwindows” that nearly triple their insulating value and are almost perfect in letting in light without heat. The better windows and state of the art lighting will cut the cooling load by one-third. This lets the old chillers be reduced and renovated rather than expanded and replaced…saving capital that helps pay for the other improvements.

I Must have been Sleeping

Just discovered DharmaNet … well see for yourself the feast that is offered here.  Even some vintage Trungpa video from 1974 Summer at Naropa I think.  This is a place for the post post-modern student to hang out.

It’s Just Time … in as many ways as you can imagine

This is the most significant piece of information I have come across since the beginning of the financial crisis … it’s worth reading even if you don’t understand 90% of it, because you will still have 25 new ideas and/or perspectives.  The best introduction to the piece is this blog article from Seeking Alpha.  The comments contain the links you will need to check out the background on Martin Armstrong who writes the paper I am recommending on an old typewriter from his jail cell, where he is, from his point of view, a political prisoner. 

It’s Just Time is a relatively short (71 Page) manifesto describing the interaction of various cycles to produce forecasts which, in the past, were very accurate.  The second half of the article describe his situation, why he is in jail and what he thinks should be done to rescue the current economic situation.  You can get a lot from the article without understanding the numbers or the math/physics and the 2nd half is a great adventure story and, perhaps, cautionary tale.

Wikipedia article on Martin  …  Martin’s 1999 article “The Business Cycle and the Future”

Even if you think this man is a crook, the ideas in the article(s) may still be of great value to you and the times.

Have we turned the corner?

This week Nouriel Roubini aka Dr. Doom, one of the harshest critical voices on the economist front, found a way to see a light at the end of the tunnel of recession and said we will not go into depression.  The markets were frisky and frothy and would not give up their euphoria that started when rumours of the toxic asset purchase plan first surfaced a few short weeks ago.  The Dow has moved from 6500 to 8000 in that time.  Those who bought the relative junk of General Motors and Shitibank at around $1 per share 3 weeks ago made triple their money.  Treasury Secretary Geithner is insisting that this is workable without disaster a necessity.

However, master trend analyst Gerald Celente is predicting Great Depression or worse levels by 2012, with 25 % unemployment, a commercial real estate crash, ghost malls with the only possible salvation the discovery of some new form of energy equivalent to the discovery of fire.

Who knows?  If you were betting you would have to go with the trend master, because trends are the most reliable way of predicting future events.  But with the relative ignorance of this present moment in history, all bets are off!

Across town, so to speak, the young musician brothers Benjamin and Daniel Stewart have followed up their Zeitgeist-like Esoteric Agenda with another internet video movie entitled Kymatica.  In this one they step forward, stepping on fear into the Warrior’s World … seeing the human struggle for wisdom and in the end seeing the essence of that struggle.  They urge us to recognize that the world we see is a reflection of what is going on inside of us and relate to our own dark shadows, rather than project our anger onto a world we cannot understand without the clarity on the other side of that transition.  Voices like these that urge us to take this moment to heal ourselves from our own ignorance and fear rather than to  see excuses outside for sinking into despair, are a welcome, refreshing and ultimately hopeful sign that a spiritual renewal is beckoning.  There is a koan-like suggestion in the middle of this movie that we are not who the State would like us to think we are, that YOUR NAME capitalized is not really you at all unless you go along with this bizarre residue of naval commercial law.  This is definitely worth the time to view and contemplate.  Kymatica