Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Monday, February 07, 2011
Kunstler on Egypt and the Super Bowl
Here.
...
Case in point: the Superbowl halftime show. My Gawd, what a farrago of auto-erotic triumphalism tarted up in the raiment of techno-grandiosity. The renowned Black Eyed Peas vocal krew descended on cables from the ethers of Cowboys Stadium stuffed into carapace-like costumes that lit them up like robotic waterbugs while something like a thousand worshipful myrmidons in LED-rigged suits capered about the pulsating stage like bits of discarded CGI FX from the latest installment of the Tron saga. Message: this is a nation so dangerously intoxicated on fumes from the arson of its own culture that it will soon melt down into a smoldering puddle of techno-narcissistic glop. Our bread and circus hijinks (or, should I say, Nacho and Fuhball), make the lat
e Romans' antics look like a simple summer evening at the frog pond. In fact, nothing would make me happier in 2011 than the coming-true of the threatened NFL "lock-out" - except maybe if Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) were nabbed in flagrante delicto at a Super-8 Motel with a nineteen-year-old sheet-rocker of the undocumented persuasion. For that, I would definitely open the bottle of Lambrusco that somebody left at my Christmas party.
[My note: Kunstler should have been glad that the two teams are among the oldest in the NFL, thus having strong connections to America's small-town and manufacturing past, and that one, the Packers, is communally-owned, hence Harvey Wasserman's article in today's CounterPunch,
...
Case in point: the Superbowl halftime show. My Gawd, what a farrago of auto-erotic triumphalism tarted up in the raiment of techno-grandiosity. The renowned Black Eyed Peas vocal krew descended on cables from the ethers of Cowboys Stadium stuffed into carapace-like costumes that lit them up like robotic waterbugs while something like a thousand worshipful myrmidons in LED-rigged suits capered about the pulsating stage like bits of discarded CGI FX from the latest installment of the Tron saga. Message: this is a nation so dangerously intoxicated on fumes from the arson of its own culture that it will soon melt down into a smoldering puddle of techno-narcissistic glop. Our bread and circus hijinks (or, should I say, Nacho and Fuhball), make the lat
e Romans' antics look like a simple summer evening at the frog pond. In fact, nothing would make me happier in 2011 than the coming-true of the threatened NFL "lock-out" - except maybe if Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) were nabbed in flagrante delicto at a Super-8 Motel with a nineteen-year-old sheet-rocker of the undocumented persuasion. For that, I would definitely open the bottle of Lambrusco that somebody left at my Christmas party.[My note: Kunstler should have been glad that the two teams are among the oldest in the NFL, thus having strong connections to America's small-town and manufacturing past, and that one, the Packers, is communally-owned, hence Harvey Wasserman's article in today's CounterPunch,
"Socialism Triumphs at the Super Bowl." (The link was broken at the time I posted this but it's now fixed.) And the Black Eyed Peas' halftime show had to be glitzy; it's just what they do.
This Super Bowl halftime event looks like the talent show from Revenge of the Nerds. ]--Seth MacFarlane
What he forgets is that it was wildly popular.
Judge for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRG2oAQhso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9lnBN7nrg
Back in Cairo, events have momentarily devolved to a standoff between the mummy's minions and a lot of people who are, apparently, just sick of the old grinding status quo that had Mubarak-Ho-Tep funneling the endless fruits of their miserable labors into the vaults of banks here, there, and everywhere. The Web is notoriously shifty where facts are concerned, of course, but somewhere in The Cloud I saw the mummy's ill-gotten family fortune estimated at around $50-billion. That's a lot of tana leaves, any way you cut it, and of all possible outcomes in the script-factory, recovering the loot would seem the least likely scenario.
More interesting to watch right now are the peculiar gyrations of the US Government, which is acting a bit like a victim of Tourette Syndrome, with various figures up to the president himself emitting strange blurted squawks that resemble policy pronouncements but lack both conviction and official sanction. What it adds up to are the rather painful exertions of a world power that has lost its power to affect events in the world. I imagine that leaders in other nations - and even their rivals for leadership beyond the levers of power - have not failed to notice the American impotence over Egypt. But then, to me it's not so much different than watching the US government's ineffectual dealings with its own affairs, especially the ones involving money. Virtually everything about them is false, dishonest, mendacious, and ruinous.
The Middle East gives every sign of blowing up into widespread disorder these coming weeks and months. We hear other little splurts and wheezes from the media sidelines to the effect that all this hugger-mugger could end up expressing itself at the US gas pumps - the only touch-point in American life where reality meets perception. To put it a little more bluntly, you kind of wonder when the people around the region might really start blowing stuff up. Revolution, once started, is rather like the insidious invasion of water through the eaves of a house when the ice-dams build up (as they are doing now all over the northeastern US). Seeps appear here and there on the junctions between the wall and ceiling, and before you know it an electric circuit inside the wall starts sparking, and that's all she wrote for your house. Water within, water without, first the flood, the fire next time....
This Super Bowl halftime event looks like the talent show from Revenge of the Nerds. ]--Seth MacFarlane
What he forgets is that it was wildly popular.
Judge for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRG2oAQhso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ9lnBN7nrg
Back in Cairo, events have momentarily devolved to a standoff between the mummy's minions and a lot of people who are, apparently, just sick of the old grinding status quo that had Mubarak-Ho-Tep funneling the endless fruits of their miserable labors into the vaults of banks here, there, and everywhere. The Web is notoriously shifty where facts are concerned, of course, but somewhere in The Cloud I saw the mummy's ill-gotten family fortune estimated at around $50-billion. That's a lot of tana leaves, any way you cut it, and of all possible outcomes in the script-factory, recovering the loot would seem the least likely scenario.
More interesting to watch right now are the peculiar gyrations of the US Government, which is acting a bit like a victim of Tourette Syndrome, with various figures up to the president himself emitting strange blurted squawks that resemble policy pronouncements but lack both conviction and official sanction. What it adds up to are the rather painful exertions of a world power that has lost its power to affect events in the world. I imagine that leaders in other nations - and even their rivals for leadership beyond the levers of power - have not failed to notice the American impotence over Egypt. But then, to me it's not so much different than watching the US government's ineffectual dealings with its own affairs, especially the ones involving money. Virtually everything about them is false, dishonest, mendacious, and ruinous.
The Middle East gives every sign of blowing up into widespread disorder these coming weeks and months. We hear other little splurts and wheezes from the media sidelines to the effect that all this hugger-mugger could end up expressing itself at the US gas pumps - the only touch-point in American life where reality meets perception. To put it a little more bluntly, you kind of wonder when the people around the region might really start blowing stuff up. Revolution, once started, is rather like the insidious invasion of water through the eaves of a house when the ice-dams build up (as they are doing now all over the northeastern US). Seeps appear here and there on the junctions between the wall and ceiling, and before you know it an electric circuit inside the wall starts sparking, and that's all she wrote for your house. Water within, water without, first the flood, the fire next time....
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Friday, February 04, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
On Transit
http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/01/27/ca-rep-hunter-roads-constitutionally-mandated-transit-must-pay-for-itself/
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
The Great Okay-ness
The Great Okay-ness
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 17, 2011 9:43 AM
Days after the Tucson shooting, President Obama rode into town on a gooey gel of good will, but by the time the memorial service - or whatever it was - got underway, the president looked rather ill-at-ease. His speech was preceded by several others, including, for promotional purposes, the President of the University of Arizona, which hosted the event, a diversity infomercial in the person of a Native American shaman, the pert student government leader, a current and former governor, and the Attorney General of the US. The gooey gel couldn't contain the crowd, which more than a few times broke out in whoops and cheers.
The only kind of ritual that Americans seem to understand these days is an award ceremony, and that's what the Tucson event most resembled: a fete of congratulation and warm therapeutic self-affirmation. In the aftermath of yet another horrifying milestone event that changes nothing about how we live or what we do, comes the warm soothing anesthetic gel of okay-ness. I know a lot of people felt uplifted by Mr. Obama's remarks. I give him points for venturing out to that politically toxic city (if that's what the agglomeration of strip malls actually is). What he said struck me as not just lacking in an original thought, but filled with something like pre-owned sentiment.
And Mr. Obama looked less than comfortable through the whole gruesome show, as though he sensed there was something off about the vibe in arena, with all its photo-op immediacy that will fade into the cavalcade of a zillion preceding it and countless more yet to come. It all made me wonder: what is the difference exactly between trying to comfort people and making them comfortable? It's normal to want to comfort people who have suffered. But I'm not persuaded that the American public beyond the McKale Memorial Center deserves to feel comfortable about how they are and what they're doing at this moment in history. To me, the ceremony was short on solemnity and decorum, the willingness to suspend comfort for a little while in order to recognize that what happened at the Safeway supermarket was not okay. Even the official moment of silence near the end was too brief, as though they were trying to spare the crowd too much self-reflection.
I wasn't the only person in this country who felt a little jarred by the strange proceedings. As they wound down and the cameras followed Mr. Obama milling with the crowd, CNN's anchor, John King came on air with a hastily-constructed narrative designed to explain all the hooting and hollering. His thesis was that the local folks of Tucson had been so emotionally squashed for five days that they just had to let it all hang out. This struck me as something between an excuse and a cockamamie story to paper over the awkward question: how come we don't know how to act in the face of tragedy?
Of course, we don't know how to act in the face of reality, either, by which I mean politics, our means for contending with reality. So much of the Tucson story was whether there is any remaining shred of something like common purpose between the opposing political wings and the answer resolving out of all the grief and soothing gel is no. Common purpose is AWOL in our politics lately because whatever terrain of the issues is not occupied by sheer lying is filled by cowardice and ignorance. We lie to ourselves incessantly about the nation's financial condition. We've suspended both the rules of accounting and the rule of law in banking matters (lying). We're too frightened to go into the vaults and find out exactly how much we've swindled ourselves (cowardice). And we aggressively misunderstand issues that will shape our future, such as how much oil is really in the ground, and how long people will be able to live in places like Tucson the way they do (ignorance) - all of this prompting us to march off the edge of a political cliff where we hang today, the cartoon coyote of nations, undone by our Acme techno-fantasies.
Discomfort is probably the only thing that will avail to alter this pattern of behavior. For the moment we have no idea where we're going, what we're doing, or who will take us to the next era where life will be very different. It could easily be some loutish spawn of Limbaugh and Beck, stepping in to push around a land full of lost souls desperate to be told what to do after years of forgetting how to do anything. All of Mr. Obama's earnest, gel-like warmth does not conceal the astounding corruption of the Democratic party and the surrender of progressivism to anything that smells like money (in the immortal words of Matt Taibbi).
The Tucson shooting displaced two important political stories last week. 1.) the sentencing of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay to three years in prison for money mischief, and 2.) the appointment of JP Morgan executive William Daley as White House Chief of Staff. Both of these stories tell us as much about ourselves as the lethal antics of Jared Lee Loughner, but nobody paid attention.
_______________________________
My books are available at all the usual places.
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 17, 2011 9:43 AM
Days after the Tucson shooting, President Obama rode into town on a gooey gel of good will, but by the time the memorial service - or whatever it was - got underway, the president looked rather ill-at-ease. His speech was preceded by several others, including, for promotional purposes, the President of the University of Arizona, which hosted the event, a diversity infomercial in the person of a Native American shaman, the pert student government leader, a current and former governor, and the Attorney General of the US. The gooey gel couldn't contain the crowd, which more than a few times broke out in whoops and cheers.
The only kind of ritual that Americans seem to understand these days is an award ceremony, and that's what the Tucson event most resembled: a fete of congratulation and warm therapeutic self-affirmation. In the aftermath of yet another horrifying milestone event that changes nothing about how we live or what we do, comes the warm soothing anesthetic gel of okay-ness. I know a lot of people felt uplifted by Mr. Obama's remarks. I give him points for venturing out to that politically toxic city (if that's what the agglomeration of strip malls actually is). What he said struck me as not just lacking in an original thought, but filled with something like pre-owned sentiment.
And Mr. Obama looked less than comfortable through the whole gruesome show, as though he sensed there was something off about the vibe in arena, with all its photo-op immediacy that will fade into the cavalcade of a zillion preceding it and countless more yet to come. It all made me wonder: what is the difference exactly between trying to comfort people and making them comfortable? It's normal to want to comfort people who have suffered. But I'm not persuaded that the American public beyond the McKale Memorial Center deserves to feel comfortable about how they are and what they're doing at this moment in history. To me, the ceremony was short on solemnity and decorum, the willingness to suspend comfort for a little while in order to recognize that what happened at the Safeway supermarket was not okay. Even the official moment of silence near the end was too brief, as though they were trying to spare the crowd too much self-reflection.
I wasn't the only person in this country who felt a little jarred by the strange proceedings. As they wound down and the cameras followed Mr. Obama milling with the crowd, CNN's anchor, John King came on air with a hastily-constructed narrative designed to explain all the hooting and hollering. His thesis was that the local folks of Tucson had been so emotionally squashed for five days that they just had to let it all hang out. This struck me as something between an excuse and a cockamamie story to paper over the awkward question: how come we don't know how to act in the face of tragedy?
Of course, we don't know how to act in the face of reality, either, by which I mean politics, our means for contending with reality. So much of the Tucson story was whether there is any remaining shred of something like common purpose between the opposing political wings and the answer resolving out of all the grief and soothing gel is no. Common purpose is AWOL in our politics lately because whatever terrain of the issues is not occupied by sheer lying is filled by cowardice and ignorance. We lie to ourselves incessantly about the nation's financial condition. We've suspended both the rules of accounting and the rule of law in banking matters (lying). We're too frightened to go into the vaults and find out exactly how much we've swindled ourselves (cowardice). And we aggressively misunderstand issues that will shape our future, such as how much oil is really in the ground, and how long people will be able to live in places like Tucson the way they do (ignorance) - all of this prompting us to march off the edge of a political cliff where we hang today, the cartoon coyote of nations, undone by our Acme techno-fantasies.
Discomfort is probably the only thing that will avail to alter this pattern of behavior. For the moment we have no idea where we're going, what we're doing, or who will take us to the next era where life will be very different. It could easily be some loutish spawn of Limbaugh and Beck, stepping in to push around a land full of lost souls desperate to be told what to do after years of forgetting how to do anything. All of Mr. Obama's earnest, gel-like warmth does not conceal the astounding corruption of the Democratic party and the surrender of progressivism to anything that smells like money (in the immortal words of Matt Taibbi).
The Tucson shooting displaced two important political stories last week. 1.) the sentencing of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay to three years in prison for money mischief, and 2.) the appointment of JP Morgan executive William Daley as White House Chief of Staff. Both of these stories tell us as much about ourselves as the lethal antics of Jared Lee Loughner, but nobody paid attention.
_______________________________
My books are available at all the usual places.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Kunstler, et al. on Jared Lee Loughner
Here.
...
Kunstler also notices Boehner's eyes were dry when he issued his statement on the shooting, but that he "notoriously weeps when recounting his own youthful travails rising to fortune in business and power in government. He handled this incident like a news-caster at a Midwestern TV station reporting rush hour traffic."
==
Dennis Perrin, always caustic.
Louis Proyect
I don't know if the ambient political mood of the USA is any more poisonous now than it was for about a decade starting in the 1960s, when all those assassinations changed history: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, plus Lennon and the attempts on Ford and Reagan. The Baby Boomers produced more than their share of lost souls. Myth still shrouds the doings of Lee Harvey Oswald, since he was bumped off so quickly, but other shooters have been around for decades. Surely plenty of people from FBI agents to forensic psychiatrists have plumbed the depths of Sirhan Sirhan and Arthur Bremer over their many years of incarceration, and all they find are a couple of human black holes yielding nothing that illuminates their acts.
...
The shootings of Congresswoman Giffords and all the others took place in front of a Safeway Supermarket in a strip mall in a city of strip malls and housing subdivisions - many of them failing financially. It must be unbelievably difficult for a young person to make sense of such an incoherent environment and such cruel swindling culture. A society that habitually and incessantly lies to itself is apt to choke to death on its internal contradictions. Jared Lee showed an unusual concern for language and literacy. His videos were all words, no pictures. I wonder if the word SAFEWAY flashed through his brain when he pulled the trigger.
Kunstler also notices Boehner's eyes were dry when he issued his statement on the shooting, but that he "notoriously weeps when recounting his own youthful travails rising to fortune in business and power in government. He handled this incident like a news-caster at a Midwestern TV station reporting rush hour traffic."
==
Dennis Perrin, always caustic.
Louis Proyect
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Link Updates
I've added MaxBlumenthal.com and Mondoweiss to the Politics section of my list of links (click "All Links" in the sidebar).
My Birthday
Yesterday I celebrated my birthday in a low-key way. We roasted a leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary, and baked a chocolate cake. I also picked up some vindaloo from Akmal's and made some tabbouleh.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Enter the New Year
We regret to announce the death of Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily... more»
Obama leaves tomorrow.
Hardly any fireworks heard in my neighborhood.
The earworm of the moment.
Obama leaves tomorrow.
Hardly any fireworks heard in my neighborhood.
The earworm of the moment.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Twenty Years Ago
America was fighting a war in the Middle East and some musicians decided to remake "Give Peace a Chance." To me it hasn't held up well but it's a nice time capsule.
Cockburn looks back.
As 1990 drew to a close, this was the top song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09qBdgqwYJY
Cf.
the top hit of the moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJuMBdaqIw
As 1990 drew to a close, this was the top song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09qBdgqwYJY
Cf.
the top hit of the moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJuMBdaqIw
Happy New Year
Reflecting on the year, I realize that each of us is alloted the same amount of time. The challenge for me in 2011 is how to spend my time more wisely. And decluttering physically and mentally is the first step.
5 January update: Good piece by Ralph Nader on taking back time.
5 January update: Good piece by Ralph Nader on taking back time.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
LATOC
I checked Matt Savinar's site Life After the Oil Crash.Net and saw this message:
Breaking News: Monday December 20th, 2010
***Subscribe to the Free LATOC Breaking News Email List***
Last Friday's update will be the final LATOC Breaking News update. LATOC will remain as an archived resource here on the web but will no longer be updated. I'm moving on to focus on my astrological and related practices. Those of you who have asked about consultations, my standard rate is $200 for a full anaylsis of your chart in MS Word format. More infomation at my astrology site: MattSavinar.net
Best of luck,
Matt
==
Peak-oil cynics can bust a gut that Savinar is dropping LATOC for his astrology practice, but LATOC had a wealth of information, and also one of the liveliest forums (it stopped being updated in October).
Breaking News: Monday December 20th, 2010
***Subscribe to the Free LATOC Breaking News Email List***
Last Friday's update will be the final LATOC Breaking News update. LATOC will remain as an archived resource here on the web but will no longer be updated. I'm moving on to focus on my astrological and related practices. Those of you who have asked about consultations, my standard rate is $200 for a full anaylsis of your chart in MS Word format. More infomation at my astrology site: MattSavinar.net
Best of luck,
Matt
==
Peak-oil cynics can bust a gut that Savinar is dropping LATOC for his astrology practice, but LATOC had a wealth of information, and also one of the liveliest forums (it stopped being updated in October).
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Peak Oil at the Crossroads
Item 1: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/letter205.html
More at the above URL.
Item 2: Matt Savinar's decision to end the discussion board at LifeAftertheOilCrash.net, not because he disbelieves in peak oil, but because he thought it was a distraction.
I wonder if the idea of peak oil will break through to the mainstream or wither.
The religion of peak oil passed its own apogee in 2010. It has had its last innings. Everywhere peak oil notions are seen to be in decline. The media are all but silent on the subject.
Peakoilism became meta-language for resistance to higher prices for oil, and for concern that oil will be exhausted in our lifetime. Such notions are founded on ignorance concerning oil exploration, of how the oil industry works, and how the price of oil is fixed.
More at the above URL.
Item 2: Matt Savinar's decision to end the discussion board at LifeAftertheOilCrash.net, not because he disbelieves in peak oil, but because he thought it was a distraction.
I wonder if the idea of peak oil will break through to the mainstream or wither.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Hawaii TimeTuesday, November 23, 2010
Fundraising Update from Antiwar.com
"In the first fifteen days of our fund drive, you contributed $61,873. Please help us reach our goal go keep Antiwar.com running for the next quarter."
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Grisly Mama
The tagline from the movie describes the original "mama grizzly" as aptly as anything else.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
CounterPunch and Antiwar.com Fundraising Updates
From CounterPunch:
Our fall fundraiser has almost run its course. We’re nearly there. But not quite. Nearly 1500 CounterPunchers from every state in the union, from every continent have rallied with money and messages of support. For us here at CounterPunch it’s always a nail-biting business. We tell you the truth every time. We don’t make our $75,000 target, we have to think about cutting back. Then you rally. If you haven’t yet, the time is now. We have just THREE DAYS, ending Sunday, to make our target.
From Antiwar.com:
In the first five days of our fund drive, you contributed $25,931. Please help us reach our goal go [sic] keep Antiwar.com running for the next quarter.
The situation for Antiwar.com is more dire; their site could end if they don't raise at least $150,000. They're one-sixth of the way.
Swans should have a fundraising update next Monday.
==
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists also needs your help.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Where My Dogs At?
More from The Daily Grunt Archive
From Kunstler.com:
The Daily Grunt
If I have anything to say
November 11, 2010
The past two nights on CNN, Elliot Spitzer has grilled a couple of extreme Republican electees about their vows to drastically cut the federal budget. Senator-elect Rand Paul came off as a mad dog, blustering, evading, acting like a maniac (and a bully) -- in order to conceal the fact that he has no idea what can really be cut from the federal budget.
I predict that Rand Paul's politiical career will blow up within a couple of months after he takes a seat in the US Senate. He's just too crazy and belligerent to last. Wednesday night it was Texas Congressman Jeb Henserling's turn to embarrass himself with bluster and evasion -- though Spitzer eventually cornered him and drove a bandillario of reality into his neck. Check out the video. Scroll way down for the Rand Paul show.
David Stockman was also on last night and his remarks about QE-2 were positively shocking. The former Reagan budget chief called it the most reckless, dangerous policy he's ever seen, and more.... A real stunner....
http://parkerspitzer.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/09/spitzer-presses-paul-for-specific-cuts/
Now AntiWar Needs Funds
Just as CounterPunch is about to meet (or almost meet) its $75,000 fundraising goal (Day 23: 1,345 donors, $68,750, if you're keeping track), now Antiwar.com says:
Did you ever have one of those dreams where you're drowning, and there's no one to save you?
Well, that nightmare has become a reality for us here at Antiwar.com. We are now facing a situation in which the very existence of this Web site is being called into serious question. The funding we thought we could depend on to make up any shortfalls in our fundraising efforts has suddenly disappeared – and we are struggling to keep our heads above water.
Would you please throw us a lifeline in the form of a contribution?
We're facing a deficit of $150,000 – a shortfall that will probably sink us if we don't get an immediate flood of contributions from our readers.
Keep Antiwar.com alive. Please donate today!
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
CounterPunch and Swans Fundraising Update
From CounterPunch:
"We’ve been telling you for two weeks that either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website.
Hundreds of you have rallied with donations. With two more weeks of our fundraiser to go, we’re more than half way to our target. And now a CounterPuncher has stepped forward with a magnificently generous pledge.
"This CounterPunch supporter will match every donation of $100 or more, to a combined total of $20,000. That means that any of you out there thinking of donating $50 should know that if you donate a further $50, CounterPunch will receive an additional $100. And if you plan to send us us $200 or $500 or more, he will give CounterPunch a matching $200 or $500 or more."
Day 14
Donors: 750
Amount: $50,200
==
From Swans:
"FUNDRAISING DRIVE: Thanks to the helping hand of Louis Proyect (see his message below) and the generosity of 13 donors we've raised almost $600 in the last two weeks. This is good news! But it also means that we need to raise another $1,900 before the end of the year. You do remember what Swans is about, right? "In a time of revisionism, faux-semblant, spinning news, and skewed information, Swans is about thinking, questioning, observing, and providing ideas that are lacking in the mainstream media." (It's also about Arts & Culture.) We've been doing it for almost 15 years with authors from many countries who appreciate and agree with our quiet radicalism, our Web exclusivity, and dedication to proper editing. Please help us carry on our tradition of providing you with only original work, not multi-posted stuff you find in most Web publications... Donate now!
"Many thanks to Louis Proyect, Alex Munro, Cecilio Morales, Samuel Bennett, Michael Yates, William O'Connor, Richard Brand, Nick Harlow, John Halle, Raymond Alford, Claudia Resch, Isidor Saslav, and Michael Fahey for their generous contributions."
==
James Wolcott joins the effort on behalf of CounterPunch.
The underlying lesson is that if you have money to spare, donate some to your favorite magazine.
"We’ve been telling you for two weeks that either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website.
Hundreds of you have rallied with donations. With two more weeks of our fundraiser to go, we’re more than half way to our target. And now a CounterPuncher has stepped forward with a magnificently generous pledge.
"This CounterPunch supporter will match every donation of $100 or more, to a combined total of $20,000. That means that any of you out there thinking of donating $50 should know that if you donate a further $50, CounterPunch will receive an additional $100. And if you plan to send us us $200 or $500 or more, he will give CounterPunch a matching $200 or $500 or more."
Day 14
Donors: 750
Amount: $50,200
==
From Swans:
"FUNDRAISING DRIVE: Thanks to the helping hand of Louis Proyect (see his message below) and the generosity of 13 donors we've raised almost $600 in the last two weeks. This is good news! But it also means that we need to raise another $1,900 before the end of the year. You do remember what Swans is about, right? "In a time of revisionism, faux-semblant, spinning news, and skewed information, Swans is about thinking, questioning, observing, and providing ideas that are lacking in the mainstream media." (It's also about Arts & Culture.) We've been doing it for almost 15 years with authors from many countries who appreciate and agree with our quiet radicalism, our Web exclusivity, and dedication to proper editing. Please help us carry on our tradition of providing you with only original work, not multi-posted stuff you find in most Web publications... Donate now!
"Many thanks to Louis Proyect, Alex Munro, Cecilio Morales, Samuel Bennett, Michael Yates, William O'Connor, Richard Brand, Nick Harlow, John Halle, Raymond Alford, Claudia Resch, Isidor Saslav, and Michael Fahey for their generous contributions."
==
James Wolcott joins the effort on behalf of CounterPunch.
The underlying lesson is that if you have money to spare, donate some to your favorite magazine.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Kunstler's Letter From Above the Pacific
Now What?
By James Howard Kunstler
on October 31, 2010 10:35 PM
On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.
But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.
The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).
It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.
Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.
By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.
This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.
I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
By James Howard Kunstler
on October 31, 2010 10:35 PM
On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.
But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.
The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).
It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.
Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.
By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.
This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.
I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Golf Courses
"President Hugo Chavez said some of Venezuela’s golf courses should be expropriated and used for other purposes."--Bloomberg News
President Chavez's show, Alo Presidente.
In a time when oil is scarce, golf courses will either revert to wilderness or be converted to farms, with or without the government commandeering the land.
President Chavez's show, Alo Presidente.
In a time when oil is scarce, golf courses will either revert to wilderness or be converted to farms, with or without the government commandeering the land.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Cockburn vs. Proyect
In his column praising the TEA Party, Alexander Cockburn slags Louis Proyect:
"Who says these days that in the last analysis, the only way to change the status quo and challenge the Money Power of Wall St is to overthrow the government by force? That isn’t some old Trotskyist lag like Louis Proyect, dozing on the dungheap of history like Odysseus’ lice-ridden old hound Argos, woofing with alarm as the shadow of a new idea darkens the threshold."
Proyect responds:
"This is the kindest thing I have heard from a Nation Magazine writer ever since Marc Cooper called me a 'prolific buffoon'. ...
I should add that I spotted Alex’s fulmination not 5 minutes after sending in $25 to the Counterpunch fund-drive."
==
As for myself, I'm taking CounterPunch's appeal (below) in stride. As of day eleven, 605 donors have given a total of $32,500. At this rate, CP should meet or even surpass its goal in three weeks.
"CounterPunch needs your financial support! Either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website.That’s the bottom line reality for us, every year. We’re not sitting on big reserves. We operate on a very thin margin."
Instead, I'm more inclined to feed Swans. As I learned from another Louis Proyect post, Swans is also holding a fundraiser for $2,500 (a mere 3.33% of CounterPunch's goal).
Some background on Swans.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Berlin Time
Mumbai (Bombay) Time
Seoul TimeSunday, October 17, 2010
Bret Easton Ellis to Appear on "Che Tempo, Che Fa"
As he tweeted, "On the final night of the Imperial Bedrooms world tour I find myself on an Italian talk-show with...Phil Collins. Somehow this makes sense."
The website of the talk show, Che Tempo, Che Fa.
The website of the talk show, Che Tempo, Che Fa.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Blog Updates
I added Baptist Planet to the Politics section of the list of links. Professor Zero is now a private blog. Since it's still online, it will stay in the Politics section. Professor Zero, who now goes by Huehueteotl, has a research blog, Seminario for short, which I have added under the Education section.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Monday, October 04, 2010
Get Out of the Car
http://www.laweekly.com/2010-08-19/film-tv/get-out-of-the-car-dystopia-by-the-dashboard-light/
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Yesterday I saw Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Although it's not as good as the original, it explains the financial bubble of 2008 very well.
(Factoid: Oliver Stone's son Sean, who played Gekko's son Rudy in the original movie, has a cameo as "Hedge Fund Trader #1.")
Full Bore to the Vanishing Point
Discussion of the movie here.
Dealbreaker's articles on the movie.
(Factoid: Oliver Stone's son Sean, who played Gekko's son Rudy in the original movie, has a cameo as "Hedge Fund Trader #1.")
Full Bore to the Vanishing Point
Discussion of the movie here.
Dealbreaker's articles on the movie.
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Friday, October 01, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The Radical Right
With the TEA Party in the news, I'm reminded of Daniel Bell's book The Radical Right. Linked here is a recent edition of the book.
Teabonics.
The TEA Party protest in Hilo from April 2009.
The Anti-Anti-Authoritarians
20 October update: A link to a report by The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights on Tea Party nationalism.
Teabonics.
The TEA Party protest in Hilo from April 2009.
The Anti-Anti-Authoritarians
20 October update: A link to a report by The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights on Tea Party nationalism.
Monday, September 27, 2010
How Far is Heaven?
What can I say? This guy was a major bunghole even before the allegations against him had surfaced.
==
28 September update:
Wise words from Margaret Kimberley.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
"Witchcraft"
Revelations that some silly goose "dabbled into [sic] witchcraft" at least afford me the opportunity to present this clip of Frank Sinatra singing, what else:
And this one, a duet with Anita Baker, from 1993:
And this one, a duet with Anita Baker, from 1993:
Monday, September 20, 2010
"Stop Me Before I Vote Again"
I just found and added this blog to my list of links, under the politics section.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Happy Motoring Still in Effect
What I wrote in May 2009. People were still driving around this past Memorial Day, and showing off their cars on the Fourth of July, so Kunstler's prediction did not come to pass. Incidentally, the empty Shell on Kam. Avenue is now a mini-used car lot. Old gas stations tend either to become mini-car lots, or cafes, like the one on the corner of Waianuenue Avenue and Keawe Street. But Island Chevrolet is still empty.
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.
Scary People, Scary Times
By James Howard Kunstler
on September 13, 2010 7:24 AM
In that order. The scary people have already started coming out of the woodwork. The times lately have been mostly uncertain, but soon they'll turn scary, too, as it becomes clearer that the people running things in the USA have no idea what's going on or what they're going to do about it -- and what's going on is an involuntary permanent re-set of the terms of everyday life, from a wet-dream robotic "consumer" techtopia to something more like the first chapter of Tobacco Road, with a family of half-wits reduced by hard times to fighting over a sack of turnips in a roadside ditch. That's the story-arc anyway, and lots of people won't like it. But the theme of dwindling resources is not a pretty one.
The most striking feature of the current scene is the absence of a coherent vision of our multiple related predicaments and how they add up to a valid picture of reality. To be precise, I mean our predicaments of 1.) energy resources, 2.) vanishing capital, and 3.) ecocide. This inability to decode the clear and present dangers to civilized life is a failure of leadership and authority without precedent in the American story.
On the eve of the only other comparable national convulsion -- the lead-up to the Civil War - a strenuous public debate was able to focus on the salient question of the day, namely whether human slavery would continue in this country. Lincoln and Douglas parried for hours in the hot sun, arguing unscripted in complete sentences without the aid of teleprompters or offstage spin doctors. Yet no one above age of nine failed to understand what was at issue.
Note the diminishing returns of technology at work in our time, making it impossible for us to think straight, despite the proliferation of snazzy devices, programs, networks, blog-clouds, and the pervasive, non-stop spewage of so-called information all intended to enhance communication. What did Lincoln have to work with? A pencil.
Today, no one present in the political arena appears to have a clue and, lacking clues, any ability to articulate the terms of what we face. Both major parties are hostage to a peculiar nostalgia, a wish to return to the time when America could dream up any kind of machine or breakfast cereal or techtronic brassiere, and sell the manufactured surplus from our own happily oversold markets to the rest of the clamoring world - even lending them the cash (at interest) to buy the stuff. America makes and the world takes, was the theme song then. That earnest, upward-striving society of Eisenhower simplicity, of well-paid factory workers dreaming of a little summer place at the lake, and the Main Streets bustling in the cheerful early twilight of Christmas Eve, and the Beach Boys crooning about "fun, fun, fun," and purloined German physicists stashed in comfortably aire-kooled rooms, turning a few tossed-off equations into moon-shots, and Bob Hope cracking wise before a nationwide audience of car-dealers and self-satisfied Rotarians - well that America has imploded like a weevil-infested hubbard squash in a back pantry. And all the prayers to Moloch by the Jesus boomers in and out of congress won't make it whole again.
There is no theme song for contraction - at least not one with a hummable tune. The current background music sounds like Stockhausen run through scrap-metal shredder. No wonder everybody's so nervous.
A few hours ago I drove up the immaculately conceived highways north out of Detroit to the drear industrial outlands of Happy Motoring history, north past Flint and Saginaw where an exhausted American Dream is being hunted down by the angry ghosts of the Wyandots. The heartland these days looks like it's preparing for a return trip to the 9th century A.D. Nobody knows what's ailing it, but they're whispering of "last stands" out here around the all-you-can-eat buffet at the year 'round Christmas Shoppe.
And the Tea Party aims to fix all this, to make things right again. I listen to their blather about "freedom" and all I can imagine is the sound of boots outside the door, and men in badly-fitted camo uniforms and buzzcut hair commanding me to accept John Boehner as my personal savior. Pardon me, but I don't see how this will really improve anybody's lot in life.
You can just feel the heat of emotion rising, even as the northern hemisphere cools down. We can't speak clearly anymore; we can only beat drums. All across the land self-appointed saviors are stepping up to heroically rescue the squandered entitlements of the bygone day: Rand Paul, the Kentucky physician who (like his dad) subscribes to the idea that the earth is only about 4000 years old; [Maybe, but Ron Paul has opposed both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and ending both, and withdrawing from other countries, are prerequisites for preparing for the Long Emergency as much as relocalization or anything else Kunstler proposes--P.Z.] Dan Maes, the Colorado Tea Party candidate for governor who believes that bicycling is a "gateway drug" to communism; Sharron Angle, the Nevada polymoron running John Birch Society scripts to the psychologically-spavined blackjack dealers crowding the unemployment lines. ("The Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburgers did this to you!"); and lonely Joe Miller, the hermit-attorney of Fairbanks, stalking out of his survivalist cave to drive a silver lance through the flaming heart of the ravening liberal windigo.
They can flap their gums with this nonsense as much as they like, bit it's not likely to clarify things. Maybe this is what death is like: a descent into the dark maw of simply unknowing. No wonder people fear it.
___________________________________
By James Howard Kunstler
on September 13, 2010 7:24 AM
In that order. The scary people have already started coming out of the woodwork. The times lately have been mostly uncertain, but soon they'll turn scary, too, as it becomes clearer that the people running things in the USA have no idea what's going on or what they're going to do about it -- and what's going on is an involuntary permanent re-set of the terms of everyday life, from a wet-dream robotic "consumer" techtopia to something more like the first chapter of Tobacco Road, with a family of half-wits reduced by hard times to fighting over a sack of turnips in a roadside ditch. That's the story-arc anyway, and lots of people won't like it. But the theme of dwindling resources is not a pretty one.
The most striking feature of the current scene is the absence of a coherent vision of our multiple related predicaments and how they add up to a valid picture of reality. To be precise, I mean our predicaments of 1.) energy resources, 2.) vanishing capital, and 3.) ecocide. This inability to decode the clear and present dangers to civilized life is a failure of leadership and authority without precedent in the American story.
On the eve of the only other comparable national convulsion -- the lead-up to the Civil War - a strenuous public debate was able to focus on the salient question of the day, namely whether human slavery would continue in this country. Lincoln and Douglas parried for hours in the hot sun, arguing unscripted in complete sentences without the aid of teleprompters or offstage spin doctors. Yet no one above age of nine failed to understand what was at issue.
Note the diminishing returns of technology at work in our time, making it impossible for us to think straight, despite the proliferation of snazzy devices, programs, networks, blog-clouds, and the pervasive, non-stop spewage of so-called information all intended to enhance communication. What did Lincoln have to work with? A pencil.
Today, no one present in the political arena appears to have a clue and, lacking clues, any ability to articulate the terms of what we face. Both major parties are hostage to a peculiar nostalgia, a wish to return to the time when America could dream up any kind of machine or breakfast cereal or techtronic brassiere, and sell the manufactured surplus from our own happily oversold markets to the rest of the clamoring world - even lending them the cash (at interest) to buy the stuff. America makes and the world takes, was the theme song then. That earnest, upward-striving society of Eisenhower simplicity, of well-paid factory workers dreaming of a little summer place at the lake, and the Main Streets bustling in the cheerful early twilight of Christmas Eve, and the Beach Boys crooning about "fun, fun, fun," and purloined German physicists stashed in comfortably aire-kooled rooms, turning a few tossed-off equations into moon-shots, and Bob Hope cracking wise before a nationwide audience of car-dealers and self-satisfied Rotarians - well that America has imploded like a weevil-infested hubbard squash in a back pantry. And all the prayers to Moloch by the Jesus boomers in and out of congress won't make it whole again.
There is no theme song for contraction - at least not one with a hummable tune. The current background music sounds like Stockhausen run through scrap-metal shredder. No wonder everybody's so nervous.
A few hours ago I drove up the immaculately conceived highways north out of Detroit to the drear industrial outlands of Happy Motoring history, north past Flint and Saginaw where an exhausted American Dream is being hunted down by the angry ghosts of the Wyandots. The heartland these days looks like it's preparing for a return trip to the 9th century A.D. Nobody knows what's ailing it, but they're whispering of "last stands" out here around the all-you-can-eat buffet at the year 'round Christmas Shoppe.
And the Tea Party aims to fix all this, to make things right again. I listen to their blather about "freedom" and all I can imagine is the sound of boots outside the door, and men in badly-fitted camo uniforms and buzzcut hair commanding me to accept John Boehner as my personal savior. Pardon me, but I don't see how this will really improve anybody's lot in life.
You can just feel the heat of emotion rising, even as the northern hemisphere cools down. We can't speak clearly anymore; we can only beat drums. All across the land self-appointed saviors are stepping up to heroically rescue the squandered entitlements of the bygone day: Rand Paul, the Kentucky physician who (like his dad) subscribes to the idea that the earth is only about 4000 years old; [Maybe, but Ron Paul has opposed both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and ending both, and withdrawing from other countries, are prerequisites for preparing for the Long Emergency as much as relocalization or anything else Kunstler proposes--P.Z.] Dan Maes, the Colorado Tea Party candidate for governor who believes that bicycling is a "gateway drug" to communism; Sharron Angle, the Nevada polymoron running John Birch Society scripts to the psychologically-spavined blackjack dealers crowding the unemployment lines. ("The Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburgers did this to you!"); and lonely Joe Miller, the hermit-attorney of Fairbanks, stalking out of his survivalist cave to drive a silver lance through the flaming heart of the ravening liberal windigo.
They can flap their gums with this nonsense as much as they like, bit it's not likely to clarify things. Maybe this is what death is like: a descent into the dark maw of simply unknowing. No wonder people fear it.
___________________________________
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Monday, September 06, 2010
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Borders in Hilo: The Last Day
At ten P.M. tonight Borders in Hilo will close permanently. I went one last time yesterday afternoon and took these photos.
The children's section was the first to be depleted. The Hawaiiana section was nearly bare, and so were the romance, mystery, and sci fi shelves. The usual checkout impulse items were either sold out or put away. But the magazine section was still full, perhaps because periodicals were exempt from discounts.
The children's section was the first to be depleted. The Hawaiiana section was nearly bare, and so were the romance, mystery, and sci fi shelves. The usual checkout impulse items were either sold out or put away. But the magazine section was still full, perhaps because periodicals were exempt from discounts.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
"Was That All It Was"
I like the tempo of this remix. Jean Carne sounds a little like Phyllis Hyman.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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.]
Sunday, August 08, 2010
"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.
"Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome: Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century."
Walter A. Davis's book and play about Hiroshima.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Monday, August 02, 2010
Skidding Toward Fall
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/skidding-toward-fall.html
...
[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.]
...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....
Monday, July 26, 2010
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.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
"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.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
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
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
Monday, July 12, 2010
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.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Bret Easton Ellis on "Tavis Smiley"
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201006/20100629_ellis.html?vid=1534066991#video
Friday, June 25, 2010
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
It's just too bad that oil is being "supplied" without a container.
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.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Sprawled Out
http://fullyarticulated.typepad.com/sprawledout/
I need to read this more. It looks interesting.
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?
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Monday, June 07, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
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.
Friday, May 21, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
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.
The Movieline interview unfolds over five days this week.
Monday, May 17, 2010
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.
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