Joe Costello

This and That

Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet Work all day still can't pay the price of gasoline and heat Alas, their lives are incomplete Don't it make you want to rock and roll all night long Mohammed's Radio It’s hard to

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Populists, Technology, & Organization

“The underlying social reality is one not generally kept firmly in mind as an operative dynamic of modern society – namely, mass democratic movements are overarchingly difficult for human beings to generate. ...coordinated insurgent actions by hundreds of thousands or millions of people represent a political, an organizational, and above all,

Science Fiction as Idiocy

I’ve always been a science fiction fan. Though not reading many books, I watched plenty of movies. 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt noted the then still new genre had not been taken seriously enough in regards to revealing mass aspirations. Last year, I realized popular science fiction is increasingly

No yen for Yen?

Where are you going, my beautiful friend? Is this the road that we take 'til the end? And if we break down are we left behind? Is this the highway of all mankind? Get up and clean your teeth and have a shave It's 1 am let&

State of Play: Electoral Politics in the USA

For two reasons I write little about electoral politics in America. First, without a massive rethinking about all sorts of things, it’s no solution for much of anything. Secondly, I’m not paid to write about it. If you’re not making a lot of money in this election

Classical Clever - Odysseus

We are the Greeks. We are the Romans. We are the continuation of Western Civilization that began three thousand years ago. The Iliad and The Odyssey are a good, if somewhat random, marking of its start. Not totally surprising the contemporary West’s giant Hollywood entertainment machine released a massive

Obummer

This is one of those if you live long enough, an Ivy Boomer Lady actually holding Obama accountable for his role in helping create the mess we’re in. Obama is entirely culpable for the crime of pardoning our big bank, Wall Street financial system, creating an even greater concentration

Tops, Fusion, & the Hand of God

It’s a fool’s quest to call the top of financial hysterias, not that randomly, or in this quantum age call it a certain probability, some will get it right. The thing about hysterias is whenever you think there’s a top, they can always rave higher. Nonetheless, a

And then, depression set in

After four weeks of prime futbol every day – two, three, four games a day – you get to today, no games, and then depression sets in. This Cup has seen some great football. It’s now down to 8. Frenches still look best of breed. I had some questions about Argentina,

Politics

Politics, a word devoid of meaning these days. At best, here in these United States, thought of politics immediately turns to Republicans and Democrats, yet, neither the Declaration or Constitution says anything about parties. Parties are the invention of representative republicanism, one of many modern political innovations brought about with

Me, World Cup, & USofA

"But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor