"Was That All It Was"

I like the tempo of this remix. Jean Carne sounds a little like Phyllis Hyman.

Modo Dodo and Gibby.

Donna Allen, "He is the Joy"

Ted Stevens and Cowboy Boots

19. Ted Stevens

Charges: It’s amazing, really, what can take a 40-year senator down. You can take money for legislative favors, but whatever you do, don’t let your lobbyist friends give you a gaudy statue. Alaska owes its very statehood to Stevens’ willingness to break the law—he was illegally lobbying congress to pass the bill from within the Eisenhower administration in 1954. “We were violating the law,” he happily admitted years later. Stevens has gotten rich off his lack of integrity, and the friends it has brought him. And what friends they are, paying for a house-sized extension on his house, offering him land deals that multiply his money tenfold in six years, and all he had to do is funnel hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to them, bringing home between 500 and a thousand dollars per Alaskan annually. Finally busted after a lifetime of graft, charged and convicted on seven felonies, Stevens still very nearly won reelection. And people talk about Chicago.

Exhibit A: Four days after being convicted, Stevens told a debate audience “I have not been convicted.”

Sentence: Pushed through a series of tubes—each one narrower than the last.
==
Re: Ken Buck's boast that he doesn't wear high heels but cowboy boots:

Cowboy boots do have high heels.

Traditional cowboy boots have narrow toes, high heels that slope under the foot, and leather tops that reach halfway up the shins. Designed for men who spent virtually their entire day in the saddle, cowboy boots are notoriously uncomfortable to walk in, and though adjustments have been made over the years, the boots remain unsuited for almost any work a cowboy or a rancher has to do on foot. Cowboy boots have also led a long double life as fashion accessories, beginning in the early 20th century, when Western life and work done on the open range were first mythologized in movies. Most cowboy boots that are manufactured now are not sold to people who will ever wear them on a horse, and the boots are valued more for the image they have acquired than the work they were originally intended to do. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.]

"Thank God for the Atomic Bomb"? No.

I disagree with Paul Fussell on the necessity of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome: Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century."

Walter A. Davis's book and play about Hiroshima.

The Difference Between the NYRB and the LRB

as detailed in this book.

More later.

Black Dice, "La Cucaracha"

Skidding Toward Fall

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/skidding-toward-fall.html

...A few people will make more money than they did before, but overall we are in an epic contraction. More people and organizations will go broke than will thrive. It will seem very unfair.

The true destination of the US economy is to get smaller and for two reasons mainly: 1.) Capital ("money") is vanishing out of our system steadily and rapidly due to a massive collective failure to repay money owed on loans, mortgages, debts, and assorted obligations. 2.) Access to the primary resource we depend on for powering the economy (oil) is increasingly beyond our control -- even worse, under the control of people who would like us to eat shit and die.

We really have a choice between two ways of dealing with this. We can downsize and re-scale consciously and coherently, or we can continue to chase after the phantom of growth and allow the nation to fall into a shambles of desperation. So far into this long emergency of an economic fiasco, we seem to have chosen the pursuit of a phantom.

...

Interestingly, NPR ran a local story over the weekend -- an obscure little item -- saying that Amtrak was determined to raise the average speed of its passenger trains running north from Connecticut through Vermont from 40 miles-per-hour to 60mph. That would be some triumphant accomplishment! It would bring us back to about an 1860 level of service. Of course, I happen to believe that we will be lucky in a few years if we are able to enjoy an 1860's standard-of-living, so maybe this little side venture in public transport is perfectly in tune with America's future.

[I couldn't find the NPR story, but this article from the Brattleboro Reformer details a twenty-year plan by Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to renovate their rail system.--P.Z.]

Otherwise, these are just ominous days of drift in a place of stillness where the uncomplaining robot traders tirelessly work their magic in the server farms of Wall Street, while their putative "handlers" enjoy the dainty pleasures of the Hamptons -- which seem to center these days on pounding back vast draughts of premium vodka in conjunction with Red Bull, cocaine, hydroponic ganja, Viagra, and Klonopin to round off all those edges.

...

Among the books I bought on a recent visit to Borders was The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg.

Post 500! "Street Life" by Randy Crawford

Used to great effect in Jackie Brown.

Borders Hilo: The Last Month

Borders Books in Hilo will close 21 August. I'll try to document its last month of operation, and share some memories.

31 July update: The headline from today's Hawaii Tribune-Herald:

Walgreens May Move Into Border's [sic] Building

An excerpt:

Walgreens, a nationwide drugstore chain that arrived in Hawaii in 2007, is planning its first Big Island store, a Hawaii County administrator has confirmed.

"It's You", Stevie Wonder-Dionne Warwick Duet

Even a minor Stevie Wonder song is better than most songs by most artists. This one, a duet with Dionne Warwick, is lovely.

The Case for Rail

in the August issue of The American Conservative:

The Case for Rail
For half a century, Washington has subsidized road socialism and stranded us all.

William S. Lind: What’s so conservative about federal highways?

Glen Bottoms: Keeping costs under control

Christopher B. Leinberger: Private development can fund public infrastructure.

John Norquist: Why cities still matter

John Robert Smith: Saving downtowns

Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?

asks Kunstler.

The reality I spend these days rambling the river with is the reality of a nation riding a great wave of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming vampire nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all be wishing desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow and the kindly touch of a loving hand and the dim memory of what it was like to care about anything or anyone.

Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss... and decided that we liked what we saw in there.

Bret Easton Ellis on "Tavis Smiley"

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201006/20100629_ellis.html?vid=1534066991#video

A telling comment, from a 2009 Investor's Business Daily editorial by Newt Gingrich and Steve Everley.

http://www.investors.com/newsandanalysis/Article.aspx?id=508513

And recently, in the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced they had made a huge new discovery of oil, estimated to be as large as the biggest oil-producing spots in the Gulf, which means it could supply as much as 300,000 barrels of oil per day.

It's just too bad that oil is being "supplied" without a container.

"Be a Father to Your Child"

Happy Father's Day to those who are fathers to their children.

Lookalikes: Glenn Beck and Stephen Harper

Collapsing the Hard Way

is what America is doing, says Kunstler.

The Return of the Airships

Sprawled Out

http://fullyarticulated.typepad.com/sprawledout/

I need to read this more. It looks interesting.

Patti LaBelle: If You Asked Me To

Yesterday, while helping clean out a closet, mainly by lifting heavy boxes of books, I took breaks by watching G4's "Movies That Don't Suck", including Licence to Kill. As the end credits began to roll, I heard the opening strains of a very familiar song, Celine Dion's breakout hit, "If You Asked Me To." But this is the original version, which Patti LaBelle recorded for the movie soundtrack. Though overshadowed by Dion's rendition, LaBelle's is far superior in my view. What do you think?

Ethnic Diversity in America

The Census Bureau has just released its 2009 National and State Characteristics Population Estimates.

The Wall Street Journal reports.

USA Today article.

Kunstler on the BP-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and how it relates to the Long Emergency.

For the moment we can only speculate on what the still-unresolved incident will mean for America's oil supply. The zeal to prosecute BP for something like criminal negligence has bestirred a Department of Justice comatose during the rape-and-pillage of the US financial system. BP may be driven out of business, but then what? The net effect of the oil spill, one way or another, will be the gradual shut-down of oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. New government supervision will make operations very costly, if not non-viable, and the surviving companies will probably pack up for the west coast of Africa where supervision is almost non-existent. Anyway you cut it, the US will produce less oil and import more -- and have to rely on the political stability of places like Angola and Nigeria, not to mention the simmering Middle East.

So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don't know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations. For years, anyway, the few public figures such as Boone Pickens who give the appearance of concern about our oil problem, end up down the rabbit hole of denial when they get behind schemes to run the whole US car-and-truck fleet on something besides gasoline.

This unfortunate techno-narcissism shows that almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We're going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that's our destination, like it or not. All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and "green" cars is just a form of "bargaining" on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief.

Traveling around the US, it's easy to understand our failure to come to grips with reality. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency. You go to places like Atlanta and Minneapolis and you understand how deep we're into this. We spent all our collective national treasure -- and quite a bit beyond that in the form of debt -- building the roadway systems and the suburban furnishings for that mode of existence. We incorporated it into our national identity as the American Way of Life. Now, we don't know what else to do except defend it at all costs, especially by waving the talismanic magic wand of techno-innovation.

The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We're going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources for that transition on too many other things. We're stuck with our investments in houses and their commercial accessories, built where they were built, and no Jolly Green Giant is going to pick them up and move them closer together in an artful way that adds up to real towns. A reorganization of American life will occur, but now it will be on much less deliberate terms, a much messier and more destructive operation, a default to the smaller scale by extreme necessity, with a lot of losses along the way. The Deepwater Horizon incident only hastens the process.

...
==
I'll discuss a good article on the three main ways countries have responded and will respond to the peak oil phenomenon.

It's Newberry Medal!

Just a Rock n Roll Clown

Cf. "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" by David Lee Roth.

Rand Paul and Buddy

I'll delve into the Rand Paul situation later. Right now, I just wanted to post these pictures showing the haircuts of Rand Paul and Buddy the beagle from Where My Dogs At? It wasn't until yesterday, when I read Field Negro's crack on Rand Paul's hair, that I realized the similarity.

Good Riddance to Scoundrel Arlen Specter

Here's why.

But it was Specter-the-prosecutor who seemed to relish eviscerating Hill - to the horror of almost every woman watching. Thomas won confirmation and for years Hill had to hire a bodyguard because of serious death threats.

Every time I saw Arlen Specter on television after that, I got queasy. The man had no shame or even an understanding of how flat-out sexist he was. I confess that I was thrilled to see him defeated, especially with all the Democratic Establishment supposedly having his back.

Bret Easton Ellis Interviewed

To promote his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, due 15 June, Bret Easton Ellis has done interviews with Vice and Movieline.

The Movieline interview unfolds over five days this week.

Spring Blog Updating in Progress

I changed the background color to gray, which I hope is more readable. I'm still trying to get the hang of blog design, and may have nicer typefaces in the future.

Links Update: Feminema

On a whim I clicked onto the link for Feminema at Professor Zero's blog, and decided to add it to my List of Links. There's still much to do in the way of spring cleaning, but I see Hattie is organizing her sidebar too.

Kunstler: Virtual World Isn't the Real World

Episode 108 of the KunstlerCast: The Virtual Realm vs. the Authentic.

It's ironic that this is broadcast via the Internet, but still well worth a listen.

Relevant to the topic: Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

The Most Loathsome Americans, 2009

I just found the list of the Most Loathsome Americans, 2009, compiled by The Buffalo Beast. Number 18 is Blankenship, head of Massey Energy, and this was before the recent mining disaster in West Virginia.

Much to Ponder

Hattie's Web is one of the first sites I check every day. Hattie is skeptical of charter schools and addressed this in a recent post. I think public education will not be feasible in its current state, especially in a post-peak oil world. I have a lot to read and re-read on public education and will post something more thoroughly later.

Kunstler has a great column today on New York City.

Kunstler Asks, Our Turn?

Kunstler thinks America will go crazy. I'm not so sure.
==
Our Turn?
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 29, 2010 7:49 AM


Nations go crazy. It's terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.
China had a psychotic break in the 1960s in its "cultural revolution," provoked by the mad neo-emperor Mao. He sent cadres of Chinese baby boomer youths rampaging across the land, turned every institution upside down, and let millions starve. Mao's China lacked the ability then to export this mischief, but enough of his own people suffered.
Cambodia was the next humdinger of a national nervous breakdown when the Paris-educated classic marxist Pol Pot decided to make the world's biggest omelette by cracking a million eggs. He took everybody wearing eyeglasses, everybody who appeared to have a thought in his or her head, and sent them out to the bush to be worked to death, or shot in ditches, or disposed of otherwise. The mounds of skulls remain to tell the tale.
Lately we've had the Hutu-Tutsi genocides in Rwanda, the craziness in former Yugoslavia, the cruelty of Darfur, the international suicide-bomber craze (including today's blasts in Moscow). Surely, I've left a few out... but these are minor episodes compared to what be coming next.
Am I the only one who senses it might be America's turn to go nuts? I don't mean a family squabble, like the Boomer-Hippie-Vietnam uproar that was essentially an adolescent rebellion against bad parenting in the national household. I mean a genuine descent into madness, with the very high probability of persecution, violence, murder, and mayhem -- all more or less sponsored by various authorities and institutions.
The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking such a dangerous episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful practical problems and challenges. They're in the process, right now, of transforming themselves from the party of "no" to the party of no decency, no common sense, no ideas, no conception of the public interest, and no respect for the traditions that they pretend to stand for, like due process of law. In the days since the passage of health care reform, they've gone as far as inciting mobs to violence against their fellow congressmen and senators -- bricks thrown through windows, death threats made, coffins placed in the yards of their adversaries. One day soon, somebody with a gun or an explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice himself to become the Tea Party's first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall in some blue district.
Republican leaders' avidity to ally themselves with the followers of hate-monger entertainers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and the Fox News gang is only the beginning of the process that will lead to a political convulsion possibly worse than the one that started at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, 1861. If it comes, it will certainly be a far more incoherent conflict. The guerilla forces of the radical right will not know whether they are fighting for WalMart, or the Financial Services arm of General Electric, or against abortions, or for bigger and better freeways, or the rights of thoracic surgeons to drive families into bankruptcy, or against the idea of climate change, or evolution, or Jews-in-the-media, or their neighbors having something they feel envious about....
In the background, of course, is an economy just barely holding together with political baling wire and duct tape. It has very poor prospects for continuing in the way it was designed to run, on cheap oil and revolving debt. The upshot is an economy now destined for permanent contraction, and nobody has a plan for managing that contraction -- which will include awful failures in food production, in disintegrating water systems, electric grids, roadway systems, schools... really anything that requires ongoing public investment. It includes a financial system that cannot come up with capital deployable for productive purpose, or currencies that can be relied on to hold value, or markets that function without interference.
For its part, the Democratic Party has done a poor job of clearly articulating the realities of these things, and in actions like bailouts they've given the false impression that the nation can somehow engineer a return to the reckless hedonism of the late 20th century. My guess is that the situation is so desperate now that President Obama and his supporters can't risk telling the truth about the comprehensive contraction we face.
The health care reform act was a tortured way of dealing with some of this indirectly. It will absolutely lead to a kind of health care "rationing," but rationing is unavoidable in an economy where there is less of everything that people need, and fewer resources to spread around. The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Republicans would prefer to see the rationing accomplished by money-grubbing health insurance companies denying coverage to policy-holders who get sick, or by the bankrupting of households (i.e. losers who deserve to die anyway), while the Democrats want to at least try to distribute what we can a little more fairly. The larger failure of both factions to emulate better systems running in sister societies like Canada and France is something that history will judge.
I was in favor of the health care reform act for the reason of that basic difference between the Right and the Left. For all its flaws -- and perhaps even the prospect that we are too far gone in national bankruptcy to ever get all its provisions running -- I believe it was necessary for our national morale to pass the bill, to prove that we could do something besides remain stuck in paralysis and bickering indefinitely. And it was necessary to smack down the Party of Cruelty, to inform ourselves that we are not quite ready to go completely crazy.
Whatever his flaws, omissions, and failures, I'm impressed with President Obama's ability to conduct himself like an adult, like a good father, in the face of the most unseemly provocations by his red-faced adversaries John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and all the other apoplectic opportunists trying so desperately to turn the United States into a high-definition Jesus tele-theocracy of Perpetual NASCAR. As economic conditions worsen -- I believe they will -- I hope Mr. Obama can discipline these maniacs. I would like to see him start by instructing his attorney general to look into the connection between Republican officials (including staff members) and the threats of violence and murder that were made last week around the country.
_________________
My novel, The Witch of Hebron, a sequel to World Made By Hand, will be published in September by The Atlantic Monthly Press.

Spring Blogcleaning in Progress

I'll be taking out defunct links and adding new ones to my Ever-Evolving List of Links (click All Links in the sidebar to see). Just now I added a link to Smatter of Opinion in Politics (Hawaii) and deleted ZeroShibai.com, which has been offline for several months.

Actuality

From Kunstler's latest:

Being an actualist, I'm in favor of getting real about things, and the reality we've entered is one of comprehensive contraction, especially for our cities. One of the reasons places like Cleveland (and Detroit, and Milwaukee, and St Louis, and Kansas City....) continue to fail in their redevelopment efforts is because they are already too big. They became overgrown organisms a while ago, unsuited to the realities of the future -- especially the energy resource realities of the future -- and they have tried everything except consciously contracting into smaller, finer, denser, differently-scaled organisms. In fact, the trend up until the so-called housing bubble of recent years was to just keep on expanding ever outward beyond the suburban frontier, which left our cities in a condition like imploded death-stars -- cold and inert at the center, with debris speeding uselessly outward to an unreachable infinity.

This future we're entering, which I call the long emergency, compels us to imagine our society differently. Our cities and towns exist where they do because they occupy important sites. Cleveland is where a significant river empties into the world's greatest inland sea (which has the additional amazing benefit of being fresh water). Some human settlement will continue to be there, very probably a place of consequence, but it will not be run under the same circumstances that produced, for instance, the civic center of Daniel Burnham with its giant Beaux Arts courthouses, banks, and municipal towers.

This disintegrating nation is woefully distracted by Web 2.0, iPads, Avatar movies, Facebook, and the idiot celebrity spectacles of TV, not to mention the disasters of job loss, foreclosure, medical extortion, bankruptcy, corporate loot-ocracy, and the squandered moments of politics. We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is the last place to look for your destination.

The confusion is apt to get a lot worse before it gets better. I'm not saying this to be ornery but because I believe it is true, and it will benefit us to know the odds we're up against. The confusion is going to generate a lot of ideas that are inconsistent with reality -- especially involving the seductive nostrums of technocracy. Our redemption will be found closer to the ground in the things we do by hand. But we don't know that yet, and we're going to try everything except looking there before we find out.

==
If you haven't already, read BAD by Paul Fussell. It is in part a look at America's flight from actuality.

The Power of Bhangra

Just discovered this video today. A bhangra-infused update of "The Power."

Kunstler vs. Stossel

March 5, 2010



My Invitation From Fox News
On Mar 3, 2010, at 4:52 PM, Lott, Maxim wrote:
Hi Howard,

John Stossel of the FOX Business Network is doing a show this Friday at 6pm on zoning. We’re going to be comparing zoning rules in Cleveland and Houston, and will also have Randal O’Toole on the show. He will say that we need to get rid of zoning because it gives the government planners too much control.
Max--
I was on a John Stoessel ABC show a few years ago and I consider him a completely unethical person, since he used me as a straw man and distorted everything I had to say -- in the editing process.
Randall O'Toole is a shill for the sprawl-builders. You deserve him.
Please tell Stoessel he can kiss my ass.

Jim
James Howard Kunstler
“It’s All Good”

==
Of course, seeing Kunstler on that aforementioned ABC show is how I heard of him in the first place.

Oscar Predictions Half Right

From Bret Easton Ellis's Twitter

Oscar night 2010: George Clooney, Streep, Christoph Waltz, Mo'Nique...
10:42 AM Nov 30th, 2009 via web

Two out of four isn't bad.

Alice in Pandora

Does this sound familiar?

Reviews were mixed, with critics more enthused by the movie's visual splendor than its narrative essence.--From a Reuters review of Alice in Wonderland.

(Nice phrase, that "narrative essence".)

Cop Out seems to have in its plot some implausibilities and inconsistency, but I'd rather go see that than Avatar or Alice. At least it promises to be funny on purpose rather than unintentionally.

New Left Review at Fifty

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/13/new-left-review-stefan-collini

Euroland and Tea Partiers

Pungent commentary by Kunstler on the economic crisis in Europe, Greece in particular.

And Auntie Hattie, opining on Kunstler's column from 8 February, is not worried by the Tea Party movement.

In response to Kunstler's claim that the "Tea Party people are the corn-pone Nazis I have been warning you about" Hattie says:

The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich are historical eras I happen to know something about. I lived in Germany and Switzerland for many years, and when I came back to the States studied the period extensively in college and read many sources in both languages. Nothing going on now reminds me of that period. We are in a totally unknown world and trying to understand what's happening through false analogies from past events.

And no, the Teabaggers are not Nazis. They don't at all resemble the raggedy resentnicks who were the backbone of the Nazi Party. One flaw in leftist thinking has been to lay the blame for the rise of the Nazis on the middle class, especially the reviled bourgeoisie. Statistics show that the majority of the Nazis were the working class and peasants.

The Teabaggers are a scheme to make money, and that is their only purpose. They are playing affluent dumb people for suckers. They can't build a viable movement without inviting in the poors, but since they are just out for the buck, they will keep such people at bay. Their "audience" is middle aged and elderly people with some means but no brains who get all their ideas about life from Fox News and other garbage TV sources.

The Tea Party movement is definitely a conservative-populist one. As Firedoglake points out, a rift is developing between the libertarians who started the movement and the national and neo-conservatives who came late and are trying to co-opt it all.

Ron Paul himself warns that the Tea Party "might not necessarily build the [Republican] party."
"'They get frustrated, they act out and sometimes they act too angrily and sometimes it doesn't come off well,'Paul told MCNBC's [sic] Rachel Maddow on Wednesday."

Though premature and inaccurate in calling the Tea Partiers the "corn pone Nazis", Kunstler offers a compelling case that the Long Emergency will "produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class."

Tenured Radical writes, "I would say that the spine of this protest is not any well considered opposition to health care, but to taxes, and to the idea of government itself…" The Tea Party has attracted many protestors for different, sometimes contradictory, causes (e.g., low taxes but keeping a large military).

(Fun fact: In the first photo (left edge) from the Contexts.org post, some guy is holding a sign that reads BEST ICE CREAM EVER! Milwaukee Frozen Custard. The sign [not that particular one] can be seen here.)

18 February update: A discussion on Kunstler's anti-Tea Party column at Life After the Oil Crash.

Louis Auchincloss, R.I.P.

Visiting Arts and Letters Daily, I have just learned of the death of Louis Auchincloss.

More here

Kunstler on "The Jive Economy"

Another fine Kunstler column on "The Jive Economy".

Ed Case Lookalikes

Whom do you think Ed Case looks more like: Ted Forth or Boomer Esiason? I say Boomer, but Ted Forth is very close too.

Avatar, a.k.a Juggernaut

Avatar discussed in connection with David Foster Wallace's essay "F/X Porn."

(The late David Foster Wallace often contributed to Harper's and this blog asks "What if Avatar Took Over Harper's Findings?")

In an interesting footnote, Avatar is predicted to surpass Titanic's $600 million domestic box office take tomorrow, when Oscar nominations are announced.

(Revised 1 February 2010)

==
19 February update: Box Office Mojo reports that Avatar has earned almost $670 million domestically and $1.7 billion overseas for a total of almost $2.4 billion.

A New Decade

Rod Dreher's blog has a new title.

Not So Bad

As the decade is written off for its economic and geopolitical turmoil (was it always thus), I choose to remember the good, particularly on the cultural front. No decade is entirely bad which has given us the following: Degrassi: The Next Generation, Drake and Josh, iCarly, Miss Kittin, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Detroit Grand Pubahs, Madonna's Music and American Life albums, Die Another Day (the best Bond movie of the 21st century), Lunar Park, Against the Day, Wikipedia, Slumdog Millionaire, Lagaan, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Cam'Ron's Come Home with Me and Purple Haze, The Emancipation of Mimi, James Howard Kunstler, Zero 7, The Hipster Handbook, American Idol, Metalocalypse, Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, and whatver else comes to mind.

Robert Christgau names this one of the best songs of the decade. He's right.

RuPaul Does It Better

Spliced Krispies

The 2000s: A Look Back

Here

Horse and Carriage Remix

The screwed version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEVAzvpO3o0

Kunstler Back in Fine Form

I had some computer problems so I was effectively offline for two weeks. Catching up, I found Kunstler's latest column, one of the best he's written in ages.


The Fate of the Yeast People
By James Howard Kunstler
on November 16, 2009 6:16 AM

Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) - so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness - "You haven't said anything about overpopulation!"

Right. I usually don't bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?

It's certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We're way beyond "carrying capacity." Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.

The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.

I'm fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as "an offense in the sight of God" has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on "TV dinners," motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy's day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It's hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

And they were able to express themselves - as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well - in exuberant "taste cultures" of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the "playful" motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking - the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount - and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.

A very close friend of mine calls them "the yeast people." They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there's more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.

What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to "policies" and "protocols." The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We've barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we'll see "the usual suspects" come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.

It's a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There's some credible opinion that "this time it's different" but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.

Madonna Did It Better

Classical Indian Music

Today I attended a performance of classical Indian music at UH-Hilo. Achyut Ram Bhandari played the tabla, Parashuram Bhandari was on the sarangi, and Babette Ackin played the tamboura.

The Sun Magazine, etc.

I hear that Kunstler has an interview in the October issue of The Sun magazine, which I plan to check out.

And yesterday I watched Jon Meacham at the National Book Festival on C-SPAN. He described his alma mater, the University of the South, as Brideshead Revisited meets Deliverance. Sounds marvelous! Later, he was asked if Ron Paul was like Andrew Jackson, but he didn't really want to discuss him, and dismissed him as impractical.

Kunstler and LATOC

Another Kunstler column on the disintegrating economy. The first comment points out that nothing can replace cities.

I'm getting into the swing of LATOC's Doomer board.

Patrick Swayze

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/09/voices-patrick-swayze-1952-2009.html

My post at Life After the Oil Crash pointing out Tiger Warsaw as a flawed but underrated movie.

On Secession

From Secession.net:

At least 5,000 racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups are lumped together into only 189 nation states. Most of the world's violent conflicts are related to struggles for dominance within or independence from some large, multi-national nation state. A large percentage of the world’s people (especially in populous India, China, Indonesia and Africa) would choose to secede from their respective nation states if given the opportunity.

Not to mention states and provinces themselves splitting up. This is how West Virginia, for instance, formed.

Accents

I just recently returned to the library a good book on accents by Robert Blumenfeld, titled Accents: A Manual for Actors.

What I found interesting was that accents change over time, and the late-nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century accents used by the American and British upper classes are all but extinct. Two CDs accompanied the book, and there was a sample of such an American accent, in which the speaker pronounced Philippines as Philippins, and abdomen as abDOmen.

I plan to post more later.

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.html

One post here mentions the accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley.

One-Hundred Forty-Four Ways

to national decline.

In Memoriam

On this date nine years ago my maternal grandmother died.

Off the Wall

Off the Wall, released on 10 August 1979.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/hunky-dory.html

An excerpt:

Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we're entering a new phase of history: The Long Emergency.
Government at every level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemmorrhaging legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Unemployment rising implaccably.
So-called "consumers" unable to consume consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.

When The Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the greatest danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs -- rather than face the need to make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly what has happened, and it didn't happen under the rule of some backward-facing, right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a "progressive" party led by a dynamically affable young man unburdened by deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been sucked in and suckered. "Change you can believe in" has morphed into "a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold onto."

Whatever else you might think or feel about Mr. Obama's performance so far, this strategy on the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses with tragedy. What's remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence of comprehensive vision -- not just in the president, but in all the supposedly able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders not in government but in business and education and science and the professions.

History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now. Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition, whether it is military control of people in Central Asia, or colossal bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or national chain store retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global energy supply networks.

And Kunstler acknowledges Kauai blogger Juan Wilson for his post about R. Crumb.

http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/08/kunstler-digs-crumb.html

Brad Degroot/Christian Lacroix

A Sequel to World Made by Hand

Kunstler says he's working on the sequel to his post-oil novel World Made by Hand.

Cold, etc.

I'm battling a cold, hence the lack of regular postings. The Hilo weather has often been overcast this summer (consistently clear, sunny days are a hallmark of winters here, especially December through February). People have to get serious yet maintain a sense of joy and lightness.

LewRockwell.com reprints an Iranian interview with Kirkpatrick Sale on secession.

And I'll see what ABC's take is on America's addiction to oil.

"Stand Behind the Mic Like Walter Cronkite"

Exactly.

Wobble Time

Kunstler predicts a mass uprising against the rich, in particular, those who got their wealth on Wall Street.

Empty Boxes

Via Kunstler, who says, "It was obvious years ago that the grotesque spewage of Big Box stores across the landscape would come to this.": "Big Box Closures Leave Big Blight Across U.S."

Cf. DeadMalls.com

Curiously, many of these businesses' websites live on long after their namesake companies go defunct.

11 July update: "This is what a dying mall looks like."

Sheila Jackson Lee

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.RES.600:

Man in the Mirror

Michael Jackson, performing "Man in the Mirror" at the thirtieth annual Grammy Awards ceremony, held on 2 March 1988 at Radio City Music Hall.



Magnificent.

Vibe Ends Publication

But Quincy Jones plans to buy it back. Below: The cover of the first Vibe I bought. I believe at the 7-Eleven on Kilauea Avenue.

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

See MichaelJackson.com

and innumerable sites across the Internet.

30 June update: Ishmael Reed jousts with the media bullies who speak ill of a dead man.

Armond White on Michael Jackson's legacy here.

And here (Part 1). (Part 2).

Don't Wanna Fall in Love

Link Updates

I've just found (via ilind.net) and added Honolulu Agonizer (under Local and Hawaiian Culture) and Beard Revue (under Fashion and Appearances). Go to All Links in the sidebar.

24 June update: Paleo-Future ("a look into the future that never was") joins the other links in the Uncategorized section. The future is never quite as we predict it.

Bret Easton Ellis's Tweets

Oh my.



I've been unconvinced either to join or to follow Twitter, but for him I'll make an exception. Not to say I'll join or become a Twitter follower, but I'll tune in regularly.

Brace Yourselves

says this.

However:

While much of the world will be roasting (he prefers the term "global heating"), there will be a few oases to weather out the storm, he says. Island nations, such as his own Britain as well as New Zealand, Ireland and Hawaii, will do fine thanks to the moderating effects of oceans and their rainstorms. Ditto for currently cold northern areas, including parts of Canada and Siberia, which will gain a more hospitable climate.

Island Chevrolet Pictures

Hating on Conan: What's the Point?

James Wolcott says, "Conan O'Brien, who cares." But then he goes on and on: "[I]s there anything worth remembering from O'Brien's multiyear stint on Late Night?" If Triumph isn't memorable, who or what is?

Wolcott's ideal host may be Dick Cavett, but an entire generation watched Letterman (whom he grudgingly accepts), Leno, and Conan. Arsenio, too, but he's largely forgotten today. Twenty years ago, though, Arsenio was the hottest late-night host. (This graph offers more proof of Arsenio's stark rise and fall.) I watched Arsenio all the way through to his last show with James Brown.

Dennis Perrin explains to Conan fans who took offense to his previous post, that he really likes Conan but thinks he's in way over his head as the new Tonight host, and will have to water down his style even more. But he stands by his assertion that Jimmy Fallon's a mediocre host. (No kudos for having The Roots as his band?) As for me, I can't really say. And nobody mentions Carson Daly!

Link Updates

Click on All Links in the sidebar. Among the new links are Professor Zero and Dennis Perrin, whom I've been reading for a while. This is what finally made me decide to add him.

The closest local (i.e., Hawaii) blog to his is Andy Parx's Got Windmills.

Memorial Day Motoring

Traditionally, people drive around on Memorial Day. Kunstler implies that this is the last one for doing that.

Island Chevrolet closed its Hilo and Kona dealerships last week, and I plan to post some photos of the Hilo lot, empty but not yet desolate. For that, there's a gas station on Kamehameha Avenue, closed for several years now. I think it was a Shell.

May 25, 2009
Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies

Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer.

This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out." One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the "former middle class." Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications.

Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently.

Even assuming some Americans can continue buying cars one way or another, I'm not convinced that we can make the kinds we fantasize about. Notice, nobody talks about hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars anymore. Why not? Because the technicalities and logistics could not be overcome at the scale required -- i.e. at the current scale of mass highway motoring and commuting. Sure, you could build a demonstration vehicle and run it around a test track a few times, but could you build a mass production car by the tens of millions that would run for 150,000 miles without a hugely expensive fuel cell change-out? No, at least not within the time-window that the liquid hydrocarbon fuel problem presented. Or could you construct a hydrogen fuel station (and product delivery) network replacing the old gasoline stations? Fuggeddabowdit. Hydrogen, as an element, was just too hard to move and contain. It's teeny-weeny atoms leaked out of valves and gaskets remorselessly and you couldn't pack enough into a tanker truck to make the trip to its destination worthwhile. Schemes to generate hydrogen on-board all ended up in the "perpetual motion" sink.

The current wish is that the dregs of GM and Chrysler will hire low-paid elves with no pension or health benefits and pump out hybrid and/or electric cars. It's conceivable that we could "reverse-engineer" a Prius or an Insight, but considering what a lousy job American car companies did on reverse-engineering everything that Japan or Germany pumped out over the past thirty-five years, the odds are pretty high that these new products will be just lame enough to fail against the established competition. What's more, they also present logistical and technical problems. For the hybrid, gasoline is still an issue (and Jevon's Paradox comes into play: the more efficient you make a means for using a resource, the more of that resource you will use). For both the hybrid and the electric car, the issue of how to get enough lithium for the batteries obtains, at least for now, given the current state-of-the-art battery technology. Most of this rare metal now comes from one place, Bolivia, and everybody wants "a piece" of it. Electric vehicles in large numbers depend on either coal or nuclear powered electric generation, each presenting special hazards. Both hybrids and electric cars would depend on the old installment loan purchase system -- at least to work in the current mode of suburban living, long-range commuting, and interstate highway travel.

Boone Pickens's plan of last year for converting the US car fleet to natural gas was another fantasy with wide appeal. But it depended on the companion fantasy of building massive wind-farm infrastructure on the great plains to shift natural gas use from power plants to vehicles, and the financial crisis has destroyed the capital necessary to even begin planning that project -- it even destroyed a large part of Mr. Pickens own capital reserves. Anyway, I would not be so sanguine about the long-term future of the shale gas plays that this scheme was based on. The depletion rates of these wells is horrendous and the amount of steel needed to keep production up is not consistent with the realities of the available infrastructure.

All the technologies under consideration are not likely to extend the Happy Motoring era. A prayerful reflection on them can only reinforce the specialness of oil and its byproducts -- cheap oil double-specially -- as well as reinforcing the reality that the cheap energy era itself is over. And, of course, in the play of events over the past several years we can see the relationship between cheap energy and easy credit, and how our entire economy has run aground, one way or another, on resource limits.

The implications of all this in the sociopolitical and geopolitical realms are pretty daunting. As long as we maintain Happy Motoring as the normal mode of existence in this country, we are going to see an ever-growing class of very resentful citizens pissed off at being foreclosed from it. In my oft-repeated scheme-of-things, this leads very quickly to the trap of political extremism, perhaps even corn-pone Naziism, as the system becomes increasingly difficult to prop up except by force. In geopolitical terms it leads to ever more dangerous international contests over the world's remaining oil reserves.

All this leads to two conclusions.

One is to accept the fact that the Happy Motoring era is over and to devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities, and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are. If the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making the rolling stock for public transit -- and for now the most intelligent choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines instead of venturing into grandiose new transit systems requiring stupendous capital outlays. Let the car era wind down gracefully. Triage and prioritize the highway maintenance agenda -- we won't be affluent enough to keep repaving the whole existing system -- and let other nations meet the diminishing demand for cars in the USA. This would be a "best case" scenario. (Other nations may decide to go further up the Happy Motoring road at their own eventual peril.)

My second conclusion is not so appetizing, namely that the bankruptcy of General Motors may set in motion a chain of events that will accelerate the destructive unwind of the bad credit economy, the damage to our bond values, the loss of faith in our currency, and the authority and legitimacy of our leaders. This last dire outcome might be allayed if, say, President Obama directed his policy efforts to the items in the paragraph above, that is, a reality-based agenda for true change in how we live -- but who can feel confident about that happening these days? Maybe it will take a horrifying chain of events to get Mr. Obama there. And then, tragically, he may be overwhelmed by the chain of events itself. I hope not.

Star-Bulletin Back in Hilo

On the way to the supermarket I saw that the nearby Star-Bulletin vending machine was full. I picked up a copy inside the store. It's in a tabloid format, eighty-plus pages. It reminds me of The Village Voice and The New York Post.

25 May update: Only the Sunday paper is available in Hilo. Better than nothing, I guess. It's now two dollars a copy, jumping fifty cents.

The American Conservative Now Monthly

The current (May 18) issue of the magazine contains an important announcement that bears repeating for on-line readers: The American Conservative, endangered though it has been by the economic collapse, will survive. An outpouring of support from readers (and authors) heartened us to continue; that boost, plus some restructuring and an ambitious plan for fundraising, have enabled us to fight on. And after all, we could hardly absent the field while a struggle is underway for the future of the Right.

There will be a few changes: TAC’s print version is going monthly. (Subscribers will, of course, receive the full number of issues that they signed up for, even on the new schedule — and you’ll be getting a thicker magazine, too, since we’ve upped the page count.) There will be a short hiatus — six weeks — between the current issue and our first monthly issue, which goes to press June 18. In the meantime, we’re going to continue building up the website — the addition this week of John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth blog is just the first step.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/05/14/the-future-of-the-american-conservative/

Imagine No Cars

As Ian Lind, on whose blog I found this link, says, "We are so far behind!"

Indeed.

On Television, Then and Now

From ThirdEstateSundayReview.

Adorno, the Flu, and Other Things

I've been reading Adorno these past few days. Thanks to Google Books, among other sites, I've read parts of Minima Moralia and The Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as Adorno: A Biography and Adorno in America. He's one of the densest (and I don't mean dumb) people I've read, and very fascinating, too.

Other interesting books include Weimar on the Pacific, from which one learns that Adorno lived at 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood (1941-9), then at 803 Yale Street in Santa Monica (1949). And I found a great New York Times article, "Following Weimar to Sunset Boulevard" and a supplementary letter.

==
I'll have something soon on the swine flu.

2 June update: What can I say that hasn't been said about it. I notice that hand sanitizers are used far more frequently. That's about it.

Where He's Been

I've told you where I've been. Readers of Alan McNarie's blog have probably wondered where he's been. Now they know.

My apologies for the infrequent posts lately. I've been heavily engaged in a little research project. I've been going through the campaign spending reports of local legislators, and making my own annotated versions: figuring out what the acronyms of the various political actions committees stood for, who [sic] the individuals worked for, which of them were lobbyists. The results have been pretty eye-opening.

Keep your eyeballs peeled for the lowdown on such funzanoons as Clift Tsuji.

Global Economy Sloughing Away in Big, Horrid Gobs!

The flu takes a lot out of one, hence my absence.

This is Kunstler's latest.

April 6, 2009
Strange Days

Even while a wave of reflex nausea washed over America last week, and the unemployment rolls swelled by much more than another half million, the greatest stock market suckers' rally in seventy years pulled in the last of the credulous. These are strange days. The earth is heaving and the buds swelling again -- at least north of the equator, where most of the action is -- and the global economy, which was supposed to be a permanent new add-on to the human condition, is sloughing away in big horrid gobs. But no one in charge of anything can believe it. The banking fiasco has introduced so much noise into the system that world leadership can't think straight.

What they're missing is real simple: peak oil means no more ability to service debt at all levels, personal, corporate, and government. End of story. All the other exertions being performed in opposition to this basic fact-of-life amount to a spastic soft-shoe performed before a smokescreen concealing a world of hurt. If the "quantitative easing" (money creation) and fiscal legerdemain (TARPs, TARFs, et cetera) happen to jack up the "velocity" of the new funny-money, and the world resumes its previous level of oil use, the price of oil would rise again -- this time astronomically because the previous crash of oil prices crushed the development of new oil projects to offset depletion -- and the global economy will crash again. Only the next phase of the disease is liable to move beyond the financial and into the social and political realms. Disorder of various kinds will rule -- toppled governments, civil unrest, international tension and conflict.

The US is doing everything possible to avoid these awful realities, but probably the worst self-deception is the idea that everything would be okay if we could just "re-start lending." That's just not going to happen. There is no more capacity to service the debt we've already piled on. Americans borrowed too much, and the bankers who made obscene fortunes in fees and bonuses in fraudulent lending managed to leverage this unpayable debt into the greatest collective swindle the world has ever known. The swindle has sent poison into every cell of the macro socio-economic organism, and further swindles are unlikely to revive it.

The rally in stocks, the financials in particular, could go on for another month or two. In the meantime, banks are striving desperately to avoid calling in more bad loans -- especially in commercial real estate, malls, strip malls, Big Box power centers -- because they don't want any more losses on their balance sheets. That can only go on for so long, too. Sooner or later the daisy chain of credibility in the fundamental transactions of business lose legitimacy and something's got to give.

My guess is it will first take the form, sometime after Memorial Day (but maybe sooner) of wholesale liquidations of everything under the North American sun: companies, households, chattels, US Treasury paper of all kinds, and, of course, the S & P 500. We'll soon find out whether an organism the size of the United States can run an economy based on one family selling the contents of its garage to the family next door. My guess is that this type of economy won't support the standards of living previously enjoyed in places like Dallas and Minneapolis.

The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe. The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV News calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight. One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or Easthampton, New York. [Cf. Paul Fussell, whose Top-Out-of-Sights learned long ago to have their estates in the deep country or on islands--P.Z.] Unlike the beleaguered elites of South Africa (where I visited recently), who live behind layers of fortification, the executives of Citibank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and a long list of hedge funds, will be found cringing in their wine-lockers behind a measly layer of privet hedge when the tattooed minions of Glen Beck come a'calling.

This could perhaps be avoided if someone in authority like US Attorney General Eric Holder took an aggressive interest in the multiple swindles of the decade past, and commenced some prosecutions. But the window of opportunity for this sort of meliorating action may close sooner than the government and the mainstream media believe. Social phase-change, as in the formations of mobs, is nothing to screw around with. Once the first window is broken, all bets are off for social stability. My guess is that the various bail-out gifts to the bankers are long past having gone too far in the eyes of this increasingly flammable public.

We have no previous experience with this type of social unrest. The violence of the Vietnam era will look very limited and reasonable in comparison -- in the sense that it was an uprising on the grounds of principle, not survival. And the Civil War was a wholly regimented affair between two rival factions. This time, people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice. By the time Lloyd Blankfein sees the torches flickering through his privet, it will be too late to defend the honor of his cappuccino machine.

President Obama will have to starkly change his current game plan if this outcome is to be avoided. I think he's capable of turning off the mob -- of preventing the grasshoppers from turning into ravening locusts -- but it may take an extraordinary exercise in authority to do it, such as the true (not pretend) nationalization of the big banks, engineering the exit of Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve, sucking up the ignominy of having to replace failed regulator Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, and calling out the dogs on the swindlers who had the gall to play their country for a sucker.

As I've averred more than a few times in this space before, the standard of living in America has got to come way down. We mortgaged our future and the future has now begun. Tough noogies for us. But the broad public won't accept the reality of this as long as the grandees of finance and their myrmidons appear to still enjoy the high life. They've got to be brought down hard, perhaps even disgraced and humiliated in the courts, and certainly parted from some of their fortunes -- if only in lawyer's fees. Mr. Obama pretty much served notice to this effect last week, telling a delegation of bankers in the White House that he was the only thing standing between them and "the pitchforks." It's possible he understands the situation.

Not Everything is on the Internet

Believe it or not.

On the Demise of Newspapers

Andy Parx says, 'Keep the bones'.

Time predicts the ten major newspapers that will either fold or go online.