Amy Winehouse

NBC Nightly News Video on Texas Drought

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Honolulu Weekly at Twenty

Honolulu Weekly turns twenty.

Far From the Best

If this guy isn't a dildo, I don't know who is. Considering he lives in a state shaped like America's phallus, perhaps it's not all that surprising.

25 July update: More
29 July update: AW faces a primary challenge--from the Tea Party.

AW: Tea Party Statist

AW threatens to leave Congressional Black Caucus. The article reminds us that during his 2010 campaign, AW claimed to have a higher security clearance than the President!

Has Militarist Right Found Its Warlord?

(12 September update: It's just sad when one unwittingly desecrates the flag.)

The Flag Code

Kunstler: "The Amazing Dissolving Nation"

in which he lays out the different paths European countries will take.

Europe has run the money string to its bitter end and now it just remains to be seen how each country blows up and where the dust settles. Greece and Portugal may just shrug and retire on an economy based on goat-cheese and olives. Ireland will get drunk and pass out for at least a century. Spain sinks back into an age-old catatonic daze, having gone broke spectacularly once before. Italy strings up Mr. Berlusconi on a lamp-post and breaks up into 112 warring city-states. France elects DSK, whose first act is to declare war on the City of New York. Religious wars leave England in embers. And Germany becomes the world's first "green" police state.

It's conceivable to me that Barack Obama may be the last president - for a while. He was a decent fellow but, in the end, ineffectual, and of course he got no help from the legislative branch, including especially colleagues in his own party, a most remarkable class of maundering chickenshits and grifters. Our money problems will not go away and after a while this land will not be governable by familiar means. In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is already AWOL in many sectors of our national life, most particularly money matters, but before long on every street-corner, every highway strip, plus every GMO cornfield, and brownfield. The two parties are unreformable and the Tea Party is the stooge of one of the two parties, and there is no other party of earnest, decisive, and sane individuals anywhere near the horizon. So some kind of convulsion is in the cards and it will be the unfortunate duty of some dutiful officer to step in and set an agenda based on something other than bluster, fakery, and pocket pool.

While there's a good chance the US debt ceiling will be extended, it seems to me that meanwhile we have crossed an invisible line into a place where untoward things happen.

Fred and Barney Get Jazzy

Koch Brothers Ignore Ron Paul

According to this.

I think Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, incidentally.

Olbermann vs. MSNBC

Mediaite: Can Keith Olbermann Win a War With MSNBC?"

14 July 2011 update: And Olbermann spars on Twitter with an elderly, disabled woman. Auwe.

Kunstler on Nancy Grace

Kunstler delivers a rant on Nancy Grace and the Casey Anthony verdict, as I knew he would.

12 July update: Incidentally, Casey Anthony upstaged Obama as the week's top newsmaker.

GBTV

Will Viewers Pay to Watch Glenn Beck Online? Would You?

On the Fourth of July

"There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That's July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well will vigorously distinguish the good from the bad, and especially from the BAD."
--Paul Fussell, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991).

The Immense Internet

Every Sixty Seconds...

The Richest Man in the World

Carlos Slim Helu

The World's Billionaires 2011--Forbes

Carlos Slim is a philanthropy skeptic.

Interesting findings:

The Koch brothers, David and Charles, both ranked 18th, are worth $22 billion each. David is slightly less rich than Charles but is still the richest man in New York City, if only because Charles lives in Wichita. Another Koch brother, William, is further down the list at 310, with a $3.5 billion fortune.

There are four Waltons listed (ranked at 10, 20, 21, and 22).

But Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart (currently ranked 100, with a $9 billion fortune) could soon have a fortune of $100 billion.

Wikipedia's list of non-Forbes billionaires, which includes Hosni Mubarak.

The Forbes 400 Richest People in America.

New Orleans Libraries Renovated

One of my first posts concerned the libraries of New Orleans, which were damaged in Hurricane Katrina. This article details the renovation and modernization of library branches across the city.

Cable News Ratings

Cable news ratings.

Headline News has strong showings because of its coverage of the Casey Anthony trial.

Cable Coverage Estimates as of October 2010.

CNN/HLN (100,877 households)
Current TV (59,122 households)
Fox Business Network (57,136 households)
Fox News Channel (99,057 households)
MSNBC (95,414 households)

Living for the City

In the new issue of Orion, Kunstler predicts the form cities will take in a post-carbon world.

Podcast of Kunstler interviewed by Orion editor.

"This Surely Deserves More Than [Eighteen] Views"

Countdown on Current, Part 2

We shall see how Keith's show does. Though his audience seems to be a fraction of what he drew at MSNBC, I attribute that to Current's relative obscurity. It still has ample room for growth. Meanwhile, the Countdown audience, small but dedicated, will keep holding it down for Keith

MSNBC's main anchors are coming into their own. Off-the-top impressions: Rachel is wonky and informative, Ed is a populist-with-heart, and Lawrence models himself after Keith.

Glenn Beck has about a week left on Fox News, after which he'll host an online show. I remember when he was a self-effacing, self-described rodeo clown on Headline News.

Countdown on Current

Ambivalent review>

"Salvage With a Smile"

Two Sides of the Same Coin

John Simon Uncensored

I just found out that John Simon has his own website, John Simon Uncensored. (As if he ever was!)

The Scandal Beneath the Scandal

While seemingly everyone focuses on the Weiner sex scandal, Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss hopes that it might bring attention to what he regardsas the real scandal, specifically Weiner's prevaricating about Israel and Palestine.

Maybe it's in their nostrils, but I think Weiner and "Diaper" David Vitter look alike.

Energy and Hawaii

This will be a short essay on oil and renewable power in Hawaii.

Ian Lind: "Energy Costs, Air Fares, and Our Tourism-Dependent Economy."

I'm still working on this, but wanted to add that direct flights between Hilo and Los Angeles have just begun for the first time since 1983. Are we approaching the peak of oil production or have we passed it? I don't know, but air travel will severely contract in the Post-Oil Age.

Update: I found this.

http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/06/energy-and-power-in-hawaii-1850-93.html

Shawn Christopher, "Another Sleepless Night"

Incorporated into D.J. Sir Charles's "Throwback House" mix, which I heard just now on MusicChoice Throwback Jams channel.

The two key American cartoon shows of the nineties: The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head

The two key American cartoon shows of the 2000s: Family Guy, South Park

Stephen Yamashiro is Dead

More soon.

Big Island Video News

KHON2

Honolulu Star-Advertiser

The Five Stages of Collapse

The five stages of collapse explained in this video.

"With God on Our Side"

"Once Was Paradise"

This local short film purports to show a post-oil Hawaii. I first heard about it Tuesday night when it was featured on an episode of Hawaii Reel Stories.

Don't go Garbo on us!

The event.

http://twitter.com/#!/BretEastonEllis/status/70020711078563840

@BretEastonEllis
Bret Easton Ellis
The last ever U.S. bookstore appearance of "Bret Easton Ellis" will be held at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on Thursday, May 19th, 2011...

Sexpress

"This Wheel's on Fire"

Empire or Solvency?

Antiwar column by Justin Raimondo.

"The Song of Spring"

The Song of Spring
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 9, 2011 9:28 AM


This is a nervous country. I'm not sure that hanging Osama Bin Laden on the White House wall like a coonskin really helps that much. Already, a familiar darkness sets back in, a loss of purpose of the kind that Lindsay Lohan must feel when she gets out of rehab. This is exactly the situation that empty rhetoric was designed for, so we got a week of talk about "bringing our nation together" when the truth is that Fox News would like to send Team Six into the oval office with guns blazing and helmet cams on "record."
We have no idea what we're going to do as a people and absolutely no credible thought on this emanates from the upper echelons. Leadership is more than telling people what they want to hear. In the middle ranks of society, a sullen docility rules, no matter how many affronts to reality we witness. You ride this wreck until the wheels come off and think of what to do next when you're sitting in the drainage ditch by the side of the road. There's no period in US history that matches this for lassitude.
I had a strange experience, driving north about fifty miles along Route 22 in eastern upstate New York, from Canaan to Cambridge, a very rural stretch that roughly parallels the Massachusetts and Vermont lines. Aside from a few convenience stores serving up gasoline, slim-jims, and pepsi, there was no visible economic activity in any of the towns along the way. The little town of Berlin, NY, was especially striking. A "for sale" sign stood forlornly in the parking lot of the lumber yard, the inventory sheds plainly empty of stock. The Seagroatt wholesale flower company - where, years ago, I picked up roses as the delivery guy for a Saratoga retailer - was shut down, with rows of empty greenhouses standing vacantly in the late day spring sunshine. The little downtown on a street one hundred feet off the highway was not only empty of businesses, but the old wooden buildings themselves had gone lopsided from a lack of regular caretaking, while the paint was all but gone. A number of old houses were still occupied - cars in the driveways - but they looked battered and worn, one bad winter from roof failure, and often with front yards strewn with plastic detritus.
One thing you didn't see a lot of along Route 22 was farming. Columbia, Rensselaer, and Washington Counties used to be all about farming. For much of the 20th century, it was dairy farming after electric milking machines and bulk refrigeration came in, and you could run larger herds. That's done now, since the giant factory farms in the Midwest and California started up, where the business model is you jam hundreds of cows into a giant steel shed where they stand hock deep in their own wastes all day long, with their necks locked into a stanchion, and it's "economic" to truck their milk back east. Who needs pastures with grass growing in them? Who needs a happy cow? That will change, by the way, yet it is one of the many things we're not having a conversation about in this demoralized land.
I saw teenagers here and there along the way, wherever a convenience store exerted its magnetic pull of sweet and salty snacks, the boys all wearing black outfits, those dumb-looking calf-length baby pants, and death-metal T-shirts. This must be the longest period of history for a particular teen fashion - going on two decades now? When even teenagers lack the enterprise to think up a new look (that is, to make a fresh statement about who they are), you know you're in a moribund society. I saw some young adults, too. You could tell more or less because they had young women and babies with them, and they were stopping for gas or groceries (if you call a sack full of Froot Loops, jerky, Mountain Dew, and Pringles "groceries"). Their costume innovation du jour is the cholo hat, a super-deluxe edition of a baseball cap with special embroidered emblems and a completely flat brim -presenting a look of equal parts idiocy and homicidal danger. The day was warm enough for "wife-beater" shirts, all the better for displaying tattoos, which are now universal among a working class that has no work and no expectation of work, ever. I tried to think of them as the descendants of men who had marched off to Cold Harbor, Virginia, and those who built the great engine that the American economy once was - but it was no go.
Up the highway, I passed through the classic Main Street town of Hoosick Falls, just outside of which were the haunts of "Grandma" Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses), the painter of rural scenes. Try as you will to find them, there are no characters in her paintings wearing cholo hats and no indication of tattoos under the stiff frock coats and bodices. The little burg's downtown has a quirky main street that doglegs twice in an interesting way that you rarely see in this country. It contained some wonderful old buildings that radiated confidence and noble aspiration from a time that is bygone. We couldn't reproduce one correctly now to save our lives. I don't think there was any business besides a pizza joint and a consignment shop along the whole length of the main street. All was vacancy and desolation in Hometown USA. The victory of the national chain stores is now complete. I hope our citizens are happy with the result.
The time will come when that disposition of things will change of course. If that time is at hand, few are aware of it. Perhaps they get an inkling in the moment when they realize that they have no money to spend in the chain store, even if they could buy enough gas to get there. The chain store executives must sense something themselves in those dark moments after closing when they have to send the day's report to Bentonville, Arkansas.
These are the spring sights one encounters in the background of a time in history when a society slides toward change nobody wants to believe in. Not believing is easy, especially when you don't pay attention. Meanwhile, somewhere off in a European bank, an executive reads a computer screen and gags on his lunch. In Shanghai, a Chinese government banking official wonders what it means when he lends money to an army general to buy an enterprise owned by the government. Down in the heart of Dixieland, Memphis drowns and New Orleans once more looks anxiously to the levees. Who was Osama Bin Laden, anyway?

"The Things You Find!"

Hello, Folly

Undeterred, the two-bit Lady Gaga/Carol Channing impersonator leaps to a new issue.

I wonder if this guy will finally get a life.

Phoebe Snow's Version of "A Different World Theme"

was perfectly mellow and funky.

Ron Paul on "Morton Downey", 1988

Ron Paul vs. the Kochtopus

In an article about glibertarian candidate Johnson.

The Banana Peel of Destiny

The Banana Peel of Destiny
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 25, 2011 9:21 AM
That was a cute move by President Obama last week, calling out the "oil speculators" with a memo to his Attorney General, Eric Holder. The President proved a few weeks ago, in his energy speech to the nation, that he doesn't understand how these resources are produced and traded. Consequently, the people he addressed remain clueless, but ticked off nonetheless. And the logic of politics now compels Mr. Obama to call out the dogs on... people who make money trading paper claims on oil?
Funny, he didn't show any interest the past two-plus years in people who make money swindling taxpayers via booby-trapped Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps. Maybe those things sound too abstruse to get excited about - but believe me, it was a heckuva lot more money. In fact, a case could be mounted by God's attorney general - if he has one - that Mr. Obama abetted a gigantic conspiracy in fraudulent financial paper which makes the oil speculators look like shoplifters in a Kentucky WalMart.
For those of you interested in the reality side of things, here's the scoop: The price of oil is going to go way up, and way down, and way up again, and way down again until everyone is too broke to ask for any, and companies are too ruined to go get it for them, and governments are too broken to interfere in the process.
The oil speculators are normal characters in a stressed market doing what needs to be done on the margins of "price discovery." The trouble arises when price discovery occurs in turbulent times and places, for instance, when people in a part of the world called the Middle East & North Africa (MENA, for short), start rioting against their governments, which has been the case persistently for a couple of months now - a region that contains about half the world's oil reserves. So interested observers conclude there's a fair chance that oil production there might face impediments to normal operations.
And indeed that is already the case in Libya, where some of the world's lightest, creamiest, sweetest crude oil has stopped flowing into pipelines and tanker ships. With protesters being slaughtered by the score in Syria, and Yemen's president about to get a one-way ticket to Palookaville, and the Saud family cowering in their solid-gold senior housing facility, and affairs looking sketchy at best in other nations around that neighborhood, speculators at the margins have called for higher oil prices.
You will recall, perhaps, that hoary old concept, the "bumpy plateau" of the peak oil story. This was the idea that the actual tippy-top "peak" of peak oil, studied at close scale, would actually take the form of a raggedy line representing the interplay between supply, demand, and most importantly the frantic psychological response of humans operating in markets. It was clear that economies would stagger under the burden of high oil prices, and economic activity would contract, and people would use less oil and the price would go down. When prices were real low again, people would resume buying more oil (and other stuff) and economic activity would mount and oil prices would go up again. We knew this would happen for a couple-few cycles, and that then things would get... more interesting.
We also knew that this would occur with some "ratcheting side effects" - that with each cycle of up-and-down oil prices, against the background of permanent a decline in easy-to-get oil, there would be less money available to find, drill for, and produce future harder-to-get oil. What we did not know - at least in the morbid clerisies where academic economists spawn - was that the permanent decline in easy-to-get oil would introduce gross disorder into our money systems, nor that we would incessantly lie to ourselves about the health of our money systems, until their operations were so fatally compromised and impaired that their failure was likely to put us out-of-business even before worse imbalances came to pass in real oil supply and demand.
Of course, we also didn't know that MENA would explode in political unrest in early 2011, or that the earth below the Japan Trench would shudder badly, and no doubt there are other things we can't predict that will affect the global economic dynamic. But you do what you can with what you've got to work with, and here in the USA collective intelligence space, we're not doing such a great job.
Tensions keep rising around the distortions and perversions now loose in the money system. You can get a headache thinking about inflation and deflation - but either way you stand to end up broke. Either you'll be rolling in worthless money or you won't have any money. The banana peel of destiny can send you flying in either direction, or first one and then the other.
We've done a poor job of managing contraction, which is the fate of societies that have piled up too much complexity. All of our schemes for grappling with this seem to boil down to one foolish obsession: how can we keep all the cars running? We're not going to, of course, but we refuse to even think about anything else. President Obama is merely reflecting the foolish obsession of the public.
Whenever I give a talk at a meeting or a college, somebody gets up and censoriously asks we why I can't present "solutions" to the problems of contraction we face. I do of course. The audience just doesn't hear them because I don't believe it is possible to keep all the cars running and I don't pretend that any of the schemes currently circulating will avail. To go a step further, I'm convinced that we are committing cultural suicide by using all the cars the way we do, so I am not the one to look to for rescue remedies in this department. In fact, I am serenely persuaded that we would vastly improve our chances of remaining civilized if we gave up on mass motoring and deployed ourselves on the landscape differently.
By the way, that will be the eventual outcome anyway, whether we like it or not.
In the meantime, prepare for thrills and chills in the alternate universe of money. The phase of that story we're approaching looks more and more like the final scenes of the old Todd Browning horror movie about the uprising in a freak show. America can have the role of the pinhead, grinning vacantly while the other freaks burn the joint down.

Fat Tail Politics

This article explains why minor stories about politicians are blown up.

ThinkTanked

http://www.thinktankedblog.com/think-tanked/

Phyllis Hyman: "This Too Shall Pass"

Will Japan Turn Inward?

An Odd Rumination
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 21, 2011 9:42 AM

Can't we just drop Pee Wee Herman on Tripoli? Surely this shocking manifestation of everything toxic in America's existential zeitgeist arsenal would send the Gadhafi corps shrieking for the blank Saharan interior - somewhere between Murzuk and Timbuktu - where timeless dunes shift in the eternal wind, and the cares of modern life, armies, geopolitics, banks, bombs, and crusaders in red bowties are but grains of sand under the uncountable stars. To recline there, outside the tent, in the bracing chill of the desert night, against the warm backrest of a sleeping camel, with a glass of strong tea, would bring one into communion with the peace of Allah - don't you think?

But it appears we're going for the heavy ordnance instead, aided by the latest and greatest in video-gaming technology, and, by Gawd (yes, that one, ours, the one Michelangelo painted in Rome) we are going to give this cheeky Gadhafi fellow something like a Semtex colonoscopy and few around the wide world will shed a tear as he is translated into just another late-night snack for the rats and scorpions.

Good gracious what an exhausting month this has been!

Most remarkable in the tsunami of events last week was the peculiar dearth of actual reported news - as in hard, reliable information. CNN played the same loop all weekend of brave Japanese firemen marshalling outside the Fukushima reactors, trotting this way and that way in disciplined ranks, while alarms went out about radioactivity showing up here and there, in milk, spinach (did it grow overnight?), and on airline customers de-planing in the otherwise spotless reaches of Dallas, Texas. My correspondents tell me that the radioactive scare meme is way overblown, with the number of actual dead so far at exactly zero from the whole reactor event- and they may be right, or not, though it is hard to imagine no severe consequences at all over time from this disgusting mess. More to the point perhaps is the loss of about 30 percent of Japan's electric power. What will they do in the long agony of sorting things out there?

I have a peculiar fantasy about Japan. It burbled up in my mind even before the earthquake-tsunami-reactor disaster, and I conceived it in rumination upon Japan's weird twenty-year-long economic malaise, as the nation's population shrank, and its debt climbed to astronomical heights, and its young people lost heart, and it seemed just to go through the motions of whatever modernity required of them - ship the cars, package the robot parts, show up at the salaryman drinking contest, get stuffed into another late-night commuter train. I don't claim to be a Japan expert, but I think all this was getting to them in a deep, major way. I think they perhaps secretly longed to get back to something like an older traditional Japanese society - the one before car assembly plants, big steel ships, chain reactions, and fluorescently-lighted pachinko parlors, back to the society that blossomed and fruited in cycles of centuries on those beautiful rocky, sea-washed islands into a culture saturated in artistry - unencumbered by idiot religions or the bothersome neediness of other nations.

I can't shake the odd feeling that Japan was looking for a way to get back to the 19th century, and perhaps even deeper beyond that - to the dream-time before they made the fateful decision to industrialize. The earthquake-tsunami-reactor moment is their chance now to begin that journey. Frankly, I don't know what else they can do. Japan imports over 95 percent of the fossil fuels it uses (that would be oil, coal, and natural gas). Does anyone think they'll be able to continue that indefinitely? Sorry, I just don't see it under any circumstances. And, anyway, the geographic region where the bulk of the world's oil comes from is in the process of blowing up. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are like some kind of mansion where fire has broken out simultaneously in the kitchen, the conservatory, the media room, the master bathroom, the chauffeur's apartment over the garage, and the pool house, and whenever the flames are doused in one spot, they break out in another. Yesterday it was Syria and Yemen. Bahrain is under lockdown. The Egyptians are having second thoughts about the loss of a grinding stability, trouble is stirring up in Kuwait, Iraq is like a crazy person in the rubber room of history, and who knows what kind of spells the vizeer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laying out in his Kevlar sanctum. There is just too much tension in the world and it is demanding release in the most vexing ways.

So, I can see the Japanese people - a deeply homogenous society - veering toward an as yet un-articulated consensus: let's just get out of the modern world. Let's go back home. Let's don the kimono and the hakama, get us some horses, sharpen the katana, and kick back in the chaniwa garden with a bowl of green tea - and forget about all that dirty, disgusting, dangerous, heavy manufacturing-for-export (to an insane world) nonsense. History may record their industrial adventure as a weird blip of activity in a much longer timeline. As it will for us and everybody else, I believe. In fact, this fantasy about the Japanese shrugging off the toils of modernity is exactly what all the other so-called advanced nations of the world will find themselves doing sooner rather than later as we all take the road back to a world made by hand. The Japanese may just be the pioneering exemplars of the universal process.

What we're seeing these days is an epochal unspooling of hypercomplexity. The world just can't take anymore of it. The world is telling us to cut it out or it is going to kick our upright bipedal asses. Of course, America may be absolutely the last society to get this message. We'll receive it in the car-wash, no doubt. On our iPhones.

"Make the World Go Away" indeed.

Fifth Anniversary

Five years ago today, I began this blog with the following message:

Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Welcome to Poppa Zao, my eponymous blog on culture, art, and other matters. I welcome comments at poppa-zao@hotmail.com.
Posted by Poppa Zao at 4:49 PM 0 comments

The e-mail address is defunct, but I'll have a new one soon. What I find is that the blog race belongs not to the swift nor to the prolific but to the consistent. Posting something, not necessarily every day, but at least once a week (if only a link) is important.

A few months prior, Hattie began her own blog, and it inspired me to start mine.

With that, here's Kunstler's latest (i'll add K's links later):

Rock Me on the Water
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 14, 2011 8:09 AM


Note of apology. My iMac turned up dead this morning and I got a late start by other means.
_____________________________________________

There was Japan, standing quietly offstage all these years, minding its own business, more or less - though unwinding financially and socially at some very deep level for two decades, debt rising around everybody's ankles like a silent, insidious tsunami, population dying back, young people demoralized by the "salary-man" culture with its meager consolation of nightly drinking sprees ending in micro-hotels with rooms like funerary vaults - Japan, who had been horrifically chastened after its mad military-industrial outburst of the last century, who shook all that off to become the world's most dependably, civilized nation.

And now, the sorrows of Job.

The world was very busy watching the ME/NA countries go batshit in history's center ring, but the spectacle of wreckage in Japan, unfolds now like the slow-motion blossoming of some gigantic evil chrysanthemum and you get the ominous idea that this is only the start of a story that will grind on and on as more bodies are discovered and the nuclear fiasco burns deeper and Japan's finances enter a death spiral. How could you watch those videos of the sickening wall of black water that slammed through Sendai without wondering how many doomed people it carried unseen beneath the rafts of cars, and the sideways ships, and the eerily floating houses?

I tried to follow the story on American cable TV Sunday night but with the exception of stolid, dogged CNN, all the other news channels were playing one sordid and titanically stupid program after another: meth freaks, show-biz narcissists, and sex chatter without sex. What a nation of morons we are. Over six hundred cable TV stations and only one that even tries to tell you what is going on in the world. How many citizens of this republic were watching a dessert chef undergo staged humiliation for the failure of a cupcake batch while two nuclear reactors melted down across the Pacific? We deserve what just happened to Japan three times over. And we might just get the equivalent at least in social and political trouble as our money follies unwind and normal living here becomes untenable on the old terms.

So many things are shaking loose now in this world-wrapped-too-tight that it is hard to track where they all overlap, but I will try today.

ME/NA has gone critical overnight. Saudi Arabia wants to occupy tiny-but-strategic Bahrain, and Bahrain says that would be an act of war - though it's hard to conceive how they would wage one against KSA, which is up to its eyeballs in US supplied state-of-the art aircraft and all sorts of other dangerous swag. The Shia population wants to blow the little Kingdom wide open; they'll be lucky if the Saudis don't inadvertently turn it into an ashtray, just to see if their equipment works-as-advertised. That might be exactly what Iran wants - poised, as it is across the Persian Gulf and wishing deeply to evict the US Navy from its deep-water port in Bahrain. It would be unlikely if Iran was not helping to provoke the Shia uprising that is ongoing in many of the states on the west side of the Gulf. I only wonder why Iran has not given a green light to Nasrullah of Hezbollah in Lebanon to start a rumble there with Israel. It can't be anything akin to a sense of political responsibility. More likely just fear of how the Israeli air force might answer this time, with events moving so quickly and the world's head spinning so fast, it can barely focus on one particular place. Anyway, stay tuned in the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, the dithering Euro-American alliance finally takes its green light from the Saudi-dominated Arab League for a NATO no-fly zone in Libya - or the eastern provinces of Libya for now - in hope of putting the schnitz on Mr. Gadhafi's shenanigans. I don't know what the political idea is behind this - perhaps little more than the notion that there must be some other colonel in the Libyan military who is less mad and more tractable than proven maniac Gadhafi. It would be nice for Euro-America (and China, too, actually) if the Libyan oil industry could survive all this intact but as Michael Klare pointed out on the Web last week, it is generally the case that oil production goes way down permanently in all nations that endure political uproars. Anyway, a no-fly zone involves a lot more than just shooting down Gadhafi's aircraft when it dares to take off. It starts with destroying the planes and helicopters on the ground, and moves forward quickly to the question of boots-on-the-ground.

At the moment, the oil markets don't know what to do. Some loose talk says that Japan will not need oil for a while, due to a wrecked economy. I dunno about that, with the reactors melting and twelve million people without electric power there. Let's remember, they are not the only people in the world who buy oil. In fact, everybody but a few savages in some tiny backwaters of the rain forest use oil - and even the savages do indirectly since they trade for things that come up the Amazon (and the rivers of Borneo) in boats with motors. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)

Most interesting to me this morning are the financial implications of all these things and let's start with Japan. Monumental doesn't seem to describe the unholy mess there, just the sheer awfulness of all that mud, twisted steel, radioactive trash, and decomposing human bodies scattered amongst and within it. The cost of it seems beyond calculation, but the first questions might be how does a deeply-in-debt Japan raise some cash to begin digging out and (possibly) rebuilding (and I add that qualification because I don't know that a lot of this lost stuff will be rebuilt at all). But it will be cleaned up and sorted out. The obvious answer to the funding question is that Japan sells foreign bonds, namely US and European.

That will not be a good thing for Euro-America. Japan was the quiet benefactor last time the European sick countries had to roll over their debt payments, and nobody wanted to buy their paper. Japan went in and hosed up their debt, allowing them to enjoy one last Christmas of seeming political normality. Now it's rollover time again in the Euro-Zone and not only will kindly Uncle Japan not be present for the bond sales, they will be selling off the stuff they already hold, and it is hard to see how the European banks digest that ugly bolus of reality.

Similarly, in the US. Japan has accumulated about 800-billion in US debt paper. They have more-than-generously propped up our operations here for years by buying the stuff. Now they would seem to have little choice but to liquidate a bunch of it and cancel their seats at the upcoming auctions of new paper issues. That leaves Ben Bernanke alone in his office with a shit sandwich for lunch. What to do now, Ben? Who on this planet is going to buy more debt of a people who spend their lives in zombie-like thrall to the Kardashian sisters? No, Ben's going to have to eat the sandwich himself, a least until the end of QE-2. Or watch interest go way way up to the point where the risks are acceptable to outside parties - but that would only destroy the US Economy and American government at all levels, since we can't meet our obligations even at ZIRP levels - and, anyway, who would step forward now to buy this crap under any circumstances? (Echo answers....)

The most beguiling financial idea of the week comes from Jim Rickards of Omnis on Eric King's interview website who says that the sheer load of stuff in the Fed's vaults is now so enormous that further QE is quite unnecessary to continue monetizing America's debt. All they have to do over at the Fed is roll over the maturing securities they hold and take the money and buy more securities! In other words we now have at our disposal a perpetual motion money-generating engine. And, by the way, if I do sound a tad facetious its not because I disbelieve what Mr. Rickards is telling us. I do, however demur when it comes to the question of consequences. Despite the elegance of that operation, it still remains a fixed law of the universe that you can' get something for nothing. What Mr. Rickards describes is a trick for buying just a little more time using the residues of wealth that already exists. But then the time comes when you have even burned through the residues of your wealth, and then what?

Kunstler: We Need a New American Dream

From Grist.org: Kunstler: "We Need a New American Dream"

Spoke Too Soon?

Can Nuclear Power Save Japan From Peak Oil?" (article from 3/3/11)

Analysis: Nuclear Power Growth at Risk if Japan Plant Leaks

Jerks on a Shopping Spree II

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2011/02/18/jerks-on-a-shopping-spree-ii/

Political Links

Who Are the Tea Party Patriots?

Another reason never to listen to a Dick.

"Reality Optional Nation"

Any links within Kunstler's essay are mine.--P.Z.

Reality Optional Nation
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 7, 2011 9:38 AM

Before retiring to a casket packed with clods of my native soil, I tuned in the Sunday night late news to find the political struggles of Araby banished from the screen. Charlie Sheen was all over the place, his defiant chin thrust forward as if auditioning for the role as our next president. I hope the execs at Fox News were paying attention, especially now that they've lost half their commentary squad to the toils of campaigning. Think of it: Charlie Sheen in the White House. With a pound of pharmaceutical-grade blow. More intellect in one seat than since the night Thomas Jefferson dined with his water spaniel, Hercules. No mouthy "advisors" cluttering up the West Wing (or disrupting the laser light show of Charlie's thoughts). And there is, of course, the memory of his dad, who a lot of prayerful Americans recall as a president, somewhere maybe between Clinton and Bush Two.

An Alzheimers fog creeps across this land, from sea to shining sea, as its intellectual class - theoretically the brains of this outfit - utterly fails to get a grip on what is transpiring in this world. The failure of leadership in America is comprehensive and deep. President Obama's top aide, Bill Daley, floated out the notion that we might draw down America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) so that the imprudent folk who traded-in clunkers for new Ford F110s and Cadillac Escalades won't feel any pain from four-dollar gasoline.

Harken, now - a reminder to the rest of you out there who do not have tubeworms boring tunnels through your brain-pans: there's a reason the petroleum reserve is called "strategic." We didn't stockpile that oil to pretend to be the world's "swing producer" for a month and a half, just to knock the price down twenty-seven cents a gallon so that soccer moms could feel more comfortable bidding for an Auslini Veneto crocodile leather handbag on The Shopping Channel. Strategic was meant to imply when something really really bad happens, like a national emergency, say, with military overtones.

The failure of the news media, trapped by the diminishing returns of technology, grows more epic every week. We've never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. [Note: A sharp-eyed Grist.org reader found a Will column from 2001 advocating high-speed rail.--P.Z.] He thinks it's just a sinister ploy to snatch the people's "individualism." Perhaps George hasn't noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago transformed from "citizens" into "consumers" - without a peep of complaint from anybody - so, having already surrendered their duties, obligations, and responsibilities to anything beyond their hunger for Cheez Doodles, they might now find themselves suddenly devoid of "individualism," staggering down the highways in mobs wherever a whiff of blood emanates from a strip mall?

I'd have to guess that the Maryland DOT ran a few lanes of the Beltway through George Will's head, perhaps so he could drag race with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Senator Jim DeMint to see who can get America to drive off a cliff fastest. Oddly, the basic question that now thunders through North Africa and the Middle East has not been heard on the fruited plains of this-land-is-your-land - viz: who gave this cohort of morons the right to tell us what to do and think?

Which gets us to the true matter at hand: the matter that the world is suddenly exploding in an epic phase-change rearrangement of the political order, starting with the lands that own most of the world's exportable oil. In this vein, a message to readers of George Will and other old-line "thought-leaders" of America's commentary regime: If you think the action in the streets will be limited to these sandy outlands seven thousand miles away, then your last thoughts will not be comforting when the zombies you helped to create turn up slavering in your driveway.

By the way, this doesn't let President Obama off the hook. His consistent failure to tell the truth about the fragility of our situation, to make the case for getting our citizens out of their car-prisons, to promote modes of living that comport with reality - the president's apparent cluelessness in every dimension of this crisis is something that historians of the future will shake theirs heads over in wonder and nausea (if the notion of history even survives the oil age). And for the moment we'll put aside some other rather pressing matters such as the AWOL rule-of-law in our banking operations.

One historian, Michael Klare of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, made the trenchant point last week that oil nations which undergo political upheaval invariably end up producing far less oil, permanently, no matter whether the political outcome is better or worse than before. So, notwithstanding the media fantasy in our land to the effect that America's founding fathers have been reincarnated in places like Egypt the past month, it is unlikely that there would be anything but an extreme downside effect on the world's oil supply, even if the successor to Hosni Mubarak (as yet unknown) turned up in a powdered wig and waistcoat, with the Bill of Rights magically translated into Arabic in his beneficent hand.

I was a young newspaper reporter during the 1973 OPEC oil "embargo" (so-called). Whatever else history records it as having consisted of - bluffing, hoarding, fear-mongering, market manipulation - a few things are inarguable. It arose suddenly out of a political conflict (the Yom Kippur War), and it disrupted life in the USA to a degree unknown since the Second World War - or for that matter until the present day, even counting the trauma of 9/11/01. My sense of things is that we are now entering an oil crisis much more severe and very likely permanent. If production is lost through political strife in Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, or even a lesser combination of them, it will crater the global economy and change how we do everything here. George Will may even find himself having to ride a bicycle down the freeway in his head.

Cassettes Revival

Cassette Tapes Are Coming Back...Kind of

"The Most Recent Vibrator"

George Will said it, I didn't, to describe Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee Watch: A List in Progress

(Child of the Corn, indeed.) Illustration from the mighty Buffalo Beast, about which I knew way back when.

Huckabee Watch at the LibertyPapers.org

Huckabee: On the Issues

"Huckabee's Anti-Christian Stand on Palestinians"

"Gov. Idiot"

"Huckabee Again Lashes Out At Media Matters Over Portman Remarks" (March 15, 2011 3:08 pm ET
From the March 14 edition of Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends)

"Huckabee Inadvertently Proves His Media Matters Out-Of-Context Charge Is A Lie" (March 09, 2011 4:02 pm ET)


"Huckabee's Latest False Defense: Media Matters Took My Remarks Out-Of-Context" (March 09, 2011 10:20 am ET
From the March 9 edition of WLAC's The Steve Gill Show)

3 April 2011: Will this be well-publicized? Probably not, but here it is.

4 April update: Huckabee hides his administration records.

The Underground Press: The Sixties

On the sixties underground press.

Lookalikes

Sam Rockwell has built his career playing smarmy characters like Eric Knox in Charlie's Angels. If a movie comes from the Wisconsin protests, who better to portray Scott Walker. Notice the puckered smirks on both men's faces.

Al Jarreau: "All or Nothing"

The tempo is slowed down a little, which I like.

Is Egypt the First Peak Oil Revolution?

Here.

and here.

"White is the New Black"

Kunstler's latest.

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 21, 2011 8:55 AM

Let it be remembered that as the world was blowing up, Fashion Week gave the New York news media a case of the vapors. But let them tell it. In the immortal words of The New York Times's Cathy Horyn: "...amid the parkas and the managed pant-suits there was a story here: the amount of embellishment and new technology...."

The mantra of New Technology is on everybody's lips, of course. New Technology is the New Jesus. It's descending from out of the holy ethers to float us across the rivers of Babylon to the New Jerusalem - although, now that fashion has got its hooks into the stuff, I dunno, it could be game over for New Technology. Nothing goes out of fashion like fashion. The same newspaper, by the way, tells us that "long-form blogs" are also joining the Dodo and Paris Hilton in the Museum of Extinct Curiosities. But I wouldn't want to try this on Twitter. And the mosh-pit of Facebook seems an uncongenial place for my brand of high-toned comedy. I guess I'll have to soldier on here.

Around the same time that Kanye West was perusing the gift bags at the Alexander Wang show on Pier 94, I heard a curious thing on NPR. Some cheeky young envoy from the realm of New Technology was complaining that the "public space" of Twitter and Facebook had to be respected world-wide as "the new town square," and wasn't it appalling that the authorities tried to shut these things down in places like Egypt, Algeria, and the lesser kingdoms of Arabia?

This is the kind of virtual thinking that passes for mental exercise these days in the land ruled by Lady Gaga. Hello. We (meaning the USA) do not run these foreign countries - I know it may come as a surprise to the paranoid conspiracy crowd. Even when these faraway places blow up and their former tyrants beat it to Monte Carlo, Zurich, or Riyadh, we do not step in and run them. We try to meddle a little, of course, but in the moiling red mists of revolution nobody even has the authority to pay attention to one of our perspiring attaches, and they don't want to hear our bullshit anyway, even when it comes with a suitcase full of cash.

The idea that the rest of the world owes Jeff Zuckerberg and the creators of Twitter a certain respect is unrealistic, though it goes against the grain of our own First Amendment and the cardinal beliefs of Rachel Maddow. The clinical psychologists often speak of boundary problems - the inability to recognize where your stuff leaves off and the other person's stuff begins - but what we're seeing now in the American thought-sphere is explicitly geographic (and ethnographic) confusion. We don't understand that we are not them, and they are not us.

Likewise, the infantile idea that these nations in the throes of revolt will slide from disorder into natural democracy like falafels into a pita pocket. What you generally get in political upheavals throughout history are protracted periods of confusion, factional fighting, and violence. More often than not, they resolve in the rise of a new tyrant, some figure who seems to know what he is doing when everybody else around him does not - which is the essence of human charisma, being a declension of the following:
1.) People who know what they are doing.
2.) People who seem to know what they are doing.
3.) People who pretend to know what they re doing.
4.) And people who don't know what they are doing.
Most of the human race is composed of the fourth category, which is why the figures in the categories above them claim their attention and allegience. Sometimes, the results are very unfortunate.

The world is now blowing up politically at the same time that it is blowing up financially, and there should be little doubt about the relation of these two conditions. At a time of rising resource scarcity (oil, metals, fertilizers), and capital scarcity (unpaid loans vanishing in the black hole of default), and raucous weather in places where grain crops usually grow (Russia, Australia, Argentina), you can be sure that things will get weird.

They are finally getting weird in the streets of the USA now, too. Wisconsin is surely just the first of many hashes that cry to be settled - and that state is not nearly as broke as broke as Illinois, New Jersey, and California. A lot of stuff is shaking loose out there. Our charismatic leaders, alas, have been drawn mostly from category 3, and out of all their pretending comes a banking system that is flying apart like a Chrysler Slant Six engine that somebody poured Karo syrup into, thinking it might work as an "alternative fuel." The reverberations will be felt in every household, business, and office in the land.

Some wags out there are even blaming Ben Bernanke for the worldwide rise in food prices, and the cause-and-effect relationship there is rather plausible. You juice the world money supply with an artificial $100 billion a month, at least, and the juice flows somewhere, lately into stock and commodity markets because who the heck wants bonds when no issuing entity has a prayer of staving off some kind of default, and the interest rates are a joke anyway.

Americans lost in the Techno-rapture and the inane transports of Fashion Week have no idea how fragile our vital supply chain system is. If the lands around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea continue to fall apart politically, you can be sure that something required by the oil markets will get broken over there - whether it is an oil terminal, or a shipping channel, or a royal skull - and before you can say Mike Huckabee the shipments of food to America's supermarkets will be interrupted, with predictable results.

This could be a helluva week. We've flattered ourselves for years about how wonderful it is that everything is connected in this world - the Tom Friedman fantasy about the eternal sunshine of the global economy. Now, we're more likely to see the dark side of connectedness, as the planet's goodie-bag deflates and folks in colorful costumes start fighting over what's left.

Curtis Narimatsu

is a treasure trove of local (i.e., East Hawaii) history, and now has his own site.

Has Scott Walker Met His Match?

Laser Cannon Deth Sentence

Gino Vannelli

"Jerks on a Shopping Spree"

Here.

"Huckabee of Judea"

Here.

More here.

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 late 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....

Peak Oil and Changing Climate: A New Video Series

from The Nation and One Earth Productions.

Kunstler's video.

Earth: "Engine of Ruin"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcLic3qg-90&feature=related

On Transit

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/01/27/ca-rep-hunter-roads-constitutionally-mandated-transit-must-pay-for-itself/

Mourning in America

by Ted Rall.

Kunstler on Russia Today

A Moment of Civility

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.

The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace

DFW receiving serious attention from scholars.

No Comment Except...

Damn!





17 January update: Maybe he looks more like Fester, as implied by StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.

Kunstler, et al. on Jared Lee Loughner

Here.

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

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.

Kunstler's Forecast for 2011

Read it in full.

Update: Justin Raimondo's predictions.

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.

Electropop Singles of 2010

This has a Moroderesque sound to it.

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

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.

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).

"Let the Sunshine In"

Miley Pilau

That's all I have to say about that.

Peak Oil at the Crossroads

Item 1: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/letter205.html

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.

Not the Usual Christmas Music

Cars

http://www.counterpunch.org/engler12032010.html

  Hawaii Time

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."

Grisly Mama

The tagline from the movie describes the original "mama grizzly" as aptly as anything else.

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.

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists also needs your help.