Kunstler: "A Kid With Skittles"

Kunstler discusses the Trayvon Martin case.

A Kid With Skittles
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 16, 2012 9:54 AM

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April 13; "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.

The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially hand-wringing - the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of 1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights struggle.

The reason the race conversation remains so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites (especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety over the stigma of racial inferiority.

The crucial moment in this recent history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.

The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a mystery never solved.

I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."

Bill Moyers did not even attempt to address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school? Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?

I doubt even that question can be settled conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war. Well it's hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was being made.

I don't know for sure what Trayvon Martin was doing in the moments before George Zimmerman shot him in the Florida condo cluster. The public may never learn what really went on, even after Mr. Zimmerman's trial. People don't get shot for no reason, though sometimes it is not a good reason, or one we want to talk about.

Bob Krauss Newspaper Index

http://manoa.hawaii.edu/hawaiiancollection/krauss/kraussabout.html

Alexander Cockburn: Is the Foodie Frenzy Finally Fizzling Out?

Here.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/13/farewell-gastro-porn-is-the-foodie-frenzy-finally-fizzling-out/

Sepia Mutiny is Defunct

I just found out through a Colorlines article (linked at Feministing) that Sepia Mutiny has stopped publishing. The article discusses the challenges the ethnic blogosphere faces: lack of money and buy-outs.

"Global Oil Risks in the Early 21st Century"

Here.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9015

Al Jarreau: "Girls Know How"

From the original motion picture soundtrack of Night Shift (1982).

John Derbyshire Interview with Gawker

Here.

==
12 April update: Tom Fleming of Chronicles says, "Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye"

On the other hand, the worst thing that John Derbyshire has done to his reputation with serious people is to associate with NR. He is intelligent, reasonably well-read, possessed of a decent prose-style and the courage of his convictions. What in the world was such a man doing in such company?

JohnDerbyshire.com

Santorum Drops Campaign

Rick Santorum Suspends Campaign.

But the news of his departure is overshadowed by George Zimmermann's lawyers' announcement that they will no longer represent him.

==
It's obvious Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, but I think Ron Paul will hang on until the end.

Kunstler Predicts Youth Uprising

Strange Jubilee
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 9, 2012 9:26 AM

Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist could fail to notice. Here's how it will go: some months from now, as the financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of gainful employment shimmers away to nothing, and the technocrats of Europe meet nervously by some Swiss lakeside (and are seen glumly shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try to out-do each other peddling miracle cures for the tanking national self-esteem - a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free!

And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.

I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.

And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.

This idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like the anti-war youth of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa this summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these places) with the smoke of their burning loan contracts - and then proceed with the loud repudiation of party politics in its two current useless, lying, craven, feckless factions. The effrontery of these rogues, promising a hundred years of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs, and a personal relationship with Jesus! Send them packing into the bowels of history, then go home and make it work locally, where it will have to happen in any case because the arc of events has a velocity of its own now and that is our certain destination.

The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students. I can imagine a period of turmoil in America even harsher than, say, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where officials, professors, and authorities of all kinds were paraded through the angry mobs wearing dunce caps. Weird things happen history.

The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.

Al Jarreau: "Burst in With the Dawn"

From the 1977 album Look to the Rainbow.

Conservative Infighting

Gary Johnson Tops ACLU Liberty Watch Report Card

http://www.lvtsg.com/imho/2012/01/gary-johnson-tops-aclu-liberty-watch-report-card/

Kunstler: "Unthinkable"

Unthinkable
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 2, 2012 9:29 AM

In the drunken, drug-crazed twilight of its run as Leader of the Free World, America's collective imagination swerves from one breakdown lane to the other while the highway patrol throws a donuts-and-porn party down at headquarters and the news media searches the gutter on hands-and-knees looking for the spot where it dropped its brains.

The other day, Larry Kudlow, the king popinjay at CNBC, told viewers that the US has over a trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drill-drill-drilled on our way to "energy independence." This is the kind of malarkey that America thrives on these days, the way yeasts thrive on sugary mash. [The two links I added are typical of Kudlow's views.--P.Z.] It's a complete falsehood, of course, but the working dead over at The New York Times said substantially the same thing in a front-page story the week before. The Timespersons have only one source for their stories: Daniel Yergin, chief public relations pimp for the oil industry, because he makes it so easy for them by providing all the information they will ever need. The oil and gas companies would like to direct the fire-hose of loose and easy money out there into their stock prices - building to the magic moment when, Mozillo-like, the executives can dump shares, cut, and run for the far hills where no SEC officer or DOJ attorney will ever think to look. This is just another racket in an all-rackets society.

The fantasy of energy independence therefore takes shape as a "settled matter" as we lurch toward elections. The arch-moron Mitt Romney will inveigh against Obama for holding the oil dogs back while Obama pretends to spank the oil companies for gouging the public on that alleged Niagara flow of new oil. None of them understands the true situation, which is that the USA is enjoying one last gulp of a very expensive oil cocktail with the last few dollars it can prestidigitate out of the central bank's magic box, and then there is no more even notional surplus wealth to blow on more drinks.

And it isn't even much of a gulp. US production of "all liquids" - which includes methane gas drippings, ethanol, etc - went from 7.2 million barrels a day in 2004 to about 7.7 in 2011. We use about 19 million barrels a day, down about a million from peak US consumption before the financial crash of 2008. The reason it's down: Americans are going broke, one household and one small business at a time. Shale oil production is approaching half a million barrels a day. That's about 45 minutes of daily go-power. It might go up to an hour-and-a-half before production of shale oil permanently crashes on the combination of fast-depleting wells and a lack of capital to keep drilling new ones at $8 million per well.

The story for shale gas is similar, except that initial production was so exorbitant that it drove the price down to nearly nothing (the $2 range), and the bust from that Ponzi will be even more spectacular than the shale oil. Everyone from Mr. Obama to the chiselers who run Citigroup maintain that there is a one hundred year supply of gas in the USA. They are going to be very disappointed. The public, on the other hand, will not even remember what they said as they burn down the cornfields in anguish.

I met a guy at the pumps last week who was filling up a pickup truck at least twice the size of mine a few yards away. I asked him how things were going fuel-wise with that monster Ram-Charger he was feeding. At more than $100 a fill-up, it was killing him he said. His line-of-work required him to drive all over the county incessantly. His reality was a bit different from the oil company execs promising limitless horizons of oil to CNBC-watching retirees desperate for some "yield" on investment in the face of ZIRP bond rates. The price of oil (and gasoline) may well crash again, but when it does, there will be fewer business reasons for anyone to drive around the county all the live-long day, and that guy's Ram-Charger could fall into the hands of the re-po goon squad. He may never be able to get another one, either. No more money for truck loans. Capital shortage. Sorry. [I know a man with a GMC Sierra, and he says it costs about $90 to fill. But his truck has been fully paid off. A retired airline pilot, he's starting a car restoration business with his brother who lives on the far side of town so he drives--a lot.--P.Z.]

This oil and gas thing cuts so many ways that the public will feel like it is gargling Gillette blue blades. Just add up the total tonnage of steel necessary to keep this Ponzi going and you would reach a discouraging conclusion: this thing has nowhere to go but swift and implacable contraction. The ultimate destination of "energy independence" will be a nation with no cars and trucks to run. We'll get there, you'll see. But that is speaking the unthinkable.

*
Thanks to all readers for sending many kind and thoughtful letters about cholesterol, diet, statins, doctors, and the medical racket in response to my two previous blogs on those subjects.

"How Do You Keep the Music Playing?"

Rebecca: "Vanity Angel"

Q: What is Sanford, Florida?

A: A town in Central Florida.

A: A place that at first glance has little charm or history.

A: A place that owes its current existence to abundant fossil fuels.

A: A town that would likely suffer in the Long Emergency.

"The Myth of Peak Oil"

is the title and subject ofthis essay on today's CounterPunch. I'll read it more fully and comment on it later.

On Indigenous Control of Pacific Media

Here.

I've found the blog of the Pacific Island News Association and begun subscribing to its feed. Press coverage of the Pacific region is very sparse. Sometimes the Pacific region (i.e., the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia) is lumped in with Asia and Australia, but those two areas receive far more attention.

Kunstler: Matrix of Rackets; Fracking

Kunstler continues a discussion of his diet and the American health system. Matrix of Rackets

There's a good article on fracking in the 15 March issue Rolling Stone. Specifically it's about Chesapeake Energy, America's second-largest producer of natural gas. The article is behind a paywall so pick up a copy (Whitney Houston is on the cover).

27 March update: The article is online, after all. But it's easier to read in the print format.

Andrea Bofill: "I Just Wanna Stop"

Andrea Bofill brings an unmistakenly jazzy flavor to her late-eighties remake of one of Gino Vannelli's biggest hits.

Community Radio

FCC Promotes Community Radio.

FCC Decision Strikes Critical Blow to Right-Wing Radio Dominance

"And They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love"

Pat Robertson says Peyton Manning deserves injury over Tim Tebow snub.

On Tar Sands Pipeline Spills

"Report: Pipeline Spills of Tar Sands Oil Three Times as Frequent as That of Crude Oil and Nastier"

The report itself.

Kunstler: "Juked By Medicine"

Kunstler takes time off from discussing peak oil and financial shenanigans to write about the strict vegan diet he followed for about four years, and how awful he felt afterwards.

I'll discuss this more later.

==
late 24/early 25 March update: In the 1 March KunstlerCast, Kunstler discusses his vegan diet and how the American diet will change in the Long Emergency.

Kony2012 is Phony

Ten Ways That Kony2012 is Phony.

I know at least one young person who supports Kony2012. A lot of good-hearted people have fallen for this.

==
16 March update: Jason Russell Arrested.

==
21 March update: "Kony's Invisible Christian Fanaticism"

==
6 April update: Swans.com article by Michael Barker

Ron Paul's Hour of Decision

Here.

The Sixth Anniversary of Poppa Zao

This blog is six years old today.

Newt Gingrich: Cornucopian

Newt Gingrich: Cornucopian

More here.

"The idea of peak energy is a stupid idea. It does not exist, it is a technologically limited model, it has been the basis of American energy policy for 40 years, and it is wrong."

Enjoy the Silence

The Rush controversy is slowly disappearing from the mainstream press, but it reminds me of this, from the June 2010 issue of Index on Censorship, an essay on talk radio by Joe Queenan, a pretty good writer I know of mainly from his work in GQ. (He sure gets around.)

But most important, I dislike talk radio. I dislike talk radio for one reason and one reason only: because it is unrelentingly unpleasant. (This is true not only of politically oriented radio but of sports-talk radio.) Talk radio, the stomping grounds of a battalion of Johnny One-Notes, creates the impression that everyone in the United States is at everyone else’s throat, that everyone is angry and bitter and outraged and miserable all the time. Talk radio is dominated by crackpots and paranoids; talk radio is dominated by people whose entire emotional repertoire consists of rage and disbelief; talk radio is hysterical. Thus, if you turned on your radio while motoring past the wheat fields of Kansas or through the foothills of the Rockies or across the wide Missouri you could easily forget what a remarkable country you are living in, a country of hard-working people who love their jobs, love their families and love their country.

===
My own listening to Rush is a long story, on which I'll elaborate soon.

Kunstler Starts a Garden

Intermezzo
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 12, 2012 10:21 AM

Unless your mobile home was blown all over the county on opening day of the tornado season, this must seem like an interlude of reassuring normality in the world's convulsive wendings. The IED known as Greece has not quite yet exploded, loud as all the graveyard whistling that emanates from Europe might be. Even the invocation of a "credit event" by the notorious ISDA has seen a first-stage payout of a few mere billions - though you've got to believe that this is some kind of stage-managed dumb-show designed to conceal the fact that the whole credit default swap racket is a network of frauds.

Where I live, in the uppermost Hudson Valley, the peace and tranquility of the moment is overlaid by sweet spring zephyrs arriving about a month early. I hope that doesn't portend weeks on end of 90-degree summer heat, but I have the consolation of not being in Texas, where that would be more like three straight months of 100-degree-plus heat. It must get tedious running in and out of the a.c.

My gardening schemes which fermented all winter are finally going into action. Yesterday, I banged together the first two of ten raised beds arrayed geometrically in a forty-eight foot square foot formal vegetable and herb garden. I've done it before on a smaller scale at a different house in a different time when nobody except the clinically paranoid expected the collapse of civilization. I'm going to put in a not-so-formal patch of corn-squash-and beans outside of that in the manner of the people who lived here a thousand years ago, really just to see how it works, and I may also plant a monoculture patch of potatoes elsewhere.

The "back forty" awaits the arrival of twenty fruit trees - mixed apple, pear, cherry, plus blueberry, raspberry and current shrubs - and two blight-resistant American chestnuts (not absolutely guaranteed blight-free). A mighty effort has been made over recent decades by valiant arborists to restore the American chestnut. It was this tree (Castanea dentate) which made the forests east of the Mississippi so prolific with game in the time before clocks arrived in North America. My back forty used to be huge lawn, with an above-the-ground pool decorating the middle of it. The pool is gone, thank you Jeezus. I'll start with this set of fruit and see how they take to the soil here, and if they get going well I'll get twenty more next year. It could add up to a really immense amount of fruit for one household. There's always cider....

Altogether I have about an acre-and-a-quarter of already clear land to experiment with. The rest is woodlot. The woods will require a lot of grooming and brush-hogging to get decades of "trash" out: rampant honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, box elder. There's a lot of good hardwood in there otherwise, and I built a saw-jack set up to cut stove lengths. There's enough in there to be self-replenishing with careful management. The house I bought last fall has a fireplace with a stove insert. The builder insulated the shit out of the place. The chain saw is off in the shop getting its battered old chain replaced. I have to learn how to sharpen the damn thing now. Cutting firewood is where you get a really vivid sense of the power embodied in gasoline. A couple of gallons will get next season's supplementary supply laid in. In the past, and probably, in the future, this is a job that would be nearly impossible to do by yourself.

These days, except for highway repair and oil-drilling, there are few outdoor activities that require a gang of men working together. In the years ahead, household composition is going to change hugely for many reasons. It's unusual these days to have a lot of children - considering population overshoot, it seems crazy to promote that - but people with something to offer in the way of skills and labor may have to join forces just to get the necessary day's work done together. I'm sure that will have its consolations, even if it means you don't get to have a 3,500 square foot house to yourself.

The deer-fence installer just submitted his estimate. It was an eye-opener, but it has to be done and it's a one-time thing. I could have done it myself in a half-assed way with plastic netting but this is not a time for half-assed measures. My place is like a petting zoo, there are so many deer on and around it. Left open, they would ravage anything I grow like locusts. And they had the easiest winter in memory - no snow on the ground all January and February, something nobody around here has seen before. Here it is March and they are still looking plump and ready to pop out lots of healthy babies. So I have to put a fence up around the garden and orchard part of the property, with gates into the woodlots. The fence has to be eight feet high because the white-tailed deer is a mighty leaper. It's going to look a little like Jurassic Park.

Of course, if the USA gets into really deep socio-political shit, it's easy to imagine the entire deer-herd of Washington County getting exterminated inside a couple of years by hungry, desperate jackers. The people I play fiddle with on Tuesday night, many of them boomer-age hippie homesteaders and master gardeners, remember thirty years ago when you hardly ever saw a deer. We could easily get to that point again when times get hard.

About a week ago, I stopped on a country road to take a leak. I stepped into the woods for a minute and then, stepping out, was horrified to see dozens of ticks crawling on my pants legs. I took the otherwise unused snow-brush to them. The really weird part is that it was only thirty degrees that day. Yet they were already active and right lively. This place is now the epicenter of the eastern Lyme Disease epidemic. I went to a party not long ago where at least fifteen people were currently in treatment, or had been more than once before, for Lyme. Some just couldn't get rid of it. It is a wicked-ass illness, very difficult to get out of your system, and debilitating in myriad ways. It, too, was unknown around here thirty years ago.

I honestly don't know if my own little homesteading experiment at the edge of this sweet-but-beat little village is going to work out. I'm pretty confident about growing vegetables because I've done it successfully before, even in recent years when I was a renter sitting out the housing bubble. But it gives you something psychologically nourishing to do while the turbo-industrial world wends its way into the long emergency. Pictures to come on my website as the season wends where it will.
Apologies for late posting today...time change and all....

"Shock Me": Jermaine Jackson feat. Whitney Houston

I'm reading an unauthorized biography about Whitney Houston, in which I found out about this song from the soundtrack of the 1985 movie Perfect. Jermaine and Whitney were an underrated duo.

Evangelicals and Israel

Interesting article on evangelicals tightening their embrace of Israel amid that country's rising tension with Iran.

===
10 March update: I don't know if he's an evangelical, but Tom O'Halloran obviously wants "Bibi" for president, and also seems to be a birther.

http://twitter.com/#!/TPO_Hisself/status/178405935562227712

Tom O'Halloran
‏ @TPO_Hisself
#Bibi for potus, OBVIOUSLY birth cert is not a concern, and we NEED a president that has Honor, dignity, love for America & has BALLS!

11:04 PM - 9 Mar 12 via web ·

The Notorious B.I.G.: Fifteen Years Later

The Notorious B.I.G. died fifteen years ago today (9 March).

The video for "Sky's the Limit", apparently made after Biggie died, is inspired by Bugsy Malone.

Cornucopians to the Left, Cornucopians to the Right

Keith Olbermann:

http://twitter.com/#!/KeithOlbermann/status/177472185424818177

It means, Sasquatch, that if you can artificially recreate the natural compression process you can MAKE crude oil

http://twitter.com/#!/KeithOlbermann/status/177457115110191104

Answer? Oil was once algae, plankton RT @GingerGibson Newt "I don't think your car is going to go very far if you s... http://tl.gd/ga8hph

===
Rush Limbaugh: "The supply may be infinite [sic], but we're nowhere near its end. There is enough oil in this country to run this country at current levels of usage for around 250 years, and the regime wants you to believe we've only got 20 billion barrels; we're gonna run out here in ten years or so. That's outrageous."

==
Cornucopians: A Guide for the Perplexed.

A further definition.

==
10 March update: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore on "What North Dakota Could Teach California: While One Plays Host to a Modern-Day Gold Rush, the Other Shuns Evil Fossil Fuels and Wallows in Debt.":

"Williston [North Dakota] sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output." (Subscription required for full access.)

Michael Klare, interviewed in 2010 by Chris Hayes, is certainly not a cornucopian. Neither is he a doomer.


(Here, Chris Hayes casts a skeptical eye on Kunstler's book The Long Emergency.)

Rush Limbaugh: No Longer on KPUA

Who could have thought today was the last day The Rush Limbaugh Show would air in Hilo--at least for now? KPUA became the first radio station in the United States to stop carrying the program. This New England station soon followed suit.

KPUA's announcement

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/141474943.html

I wonder if this will make tomorrow's Tribune-Herald.

(6 March update: Full front-page treatment. An article by John Burnett incorporating content from the Associated Press, and a large color photo of station manager Chris Leonard.)

And check out HFP for this pungent rant, headlined CENSORSHIP:

(Make one nasty comment about an abortion activist and you will be silenced. Meanwhile UH Hilo Faculty is infested with 9-11 trooothers and anti-Semites. And they are PAID to spout their filth.)

==
11 March update: Rush scrubbed his website of "slut" comment and demand for sex videos.

Dropping Rush Attracts Support Across Nation (10 March Hawaii Tribune-Herald)
==
14 March update: Michael J. Smith at StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain takes it in stride.

Breakfast at Wailoa State Park

Busy at home, but I had a nice breakfast (from Hilo Lunch Shop) with a friend today at Wailoa State Park. The ducks and other fowl came right up to our pavilion. I found that Hilo Lunch Shop serves generous cups of coffee, and ogo salad. (Recipe for ogo salad if you want to make it yourself.)

Thomas Naylor mentions Morris Berman's book on America.

The Oscars

The Artist won five awards, and it's playing at the Prince Kuhio Stadium Cinemas, not yet at the Palace. I haven't seen it yet. Interestingly, it's only the second silent movie to win Best Picture. I figure that the Academy Awards began around the time silent movies began to be displaced by the "talkies."

Oscar site.

I don't like the recent practice of nominating ten films for the Best Picture category.

Kunstler: "A Fog of Mendacity"

[Note: All links added by me.--P.Z.]

A Fog of Mendacity
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 27, 2012 9:43 AM
Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter - like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital - are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they'd been locked in the nation's attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd "narratives" circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble - as any set of pernicious untruths will.
One popular new lie is that US oil production is suddenly so robust that America is about to become a leading world oil exporter again - which is completely untrue. The lie arises at the intersection of wishful thinking and the willful misuse of statistics. It was trumpeted by the appallingly credulous Tom Friedman in his Sunday New York Times column, of all places, and it shows how effective the oil and gas industry's propaganda campaign has been.
A lot of the wishing comes out of the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Those TV commercials you see around the news hours on the cable networks are designed to extract investment capital from elderly people who have been swindled in the bond markets and don't know where to stick their dwindling retirement funds. Shale oil and gas must seem like a good bet to them, especially the ones marooned in retirement housing clusters in dismal places like Arizona and Florida, where not being able to drive is a virtual death sentence.
The US government is in on this propaganda offensive, especially the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA), which routinely issues overly optimistic reports about future oil production. The political spin is a quixotic effort to promote another commonly touted lie about the future: that the US is approaching a point of "energy independence." You'll know we got there when you have to walk to your new job weeding the potato fields. The mendacity behind this propaganda is strictly the wish of politicians to avoid telling voters the truth, out of sheer cowardice for the consequences. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu will go down in history as a pathetically passive quisling, who thought he was honest and patriotic by standing in the background and keeping his mouth shut.
In fact, a lot of the propaganda behind the current madness is based on the incapacity of Americans to imagine daily life without all the cars. One very active drummer on the propaganda scene is John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil. About a week ago he debated Tad Patzek, a petroleum engineer from the University of Texas. {See below for the embedded video.--P.Z.] Hofmeister's rap is based on one central fallacious idea: that American life can only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running. Any other outcome is unthinkable, off the table. To put a finer point on it, he insists that our national identity and destiny are tied to "personal transportation," code for car dependency. The debate was therefore absurd and Patzek was way too polite. He never challenged Hofmeisiter's core idea.
The public's gross misunderstanding of these issues arises over a set of mis-statements made in recent years especially focusing on the Bakken shale oil basin on North Dakota, the various shale gas plays around the country, and the tar sands of Canada (which so many spinmeisters seem to regard as belonging to the United States). The true state of the US oil industry is that we only barely stalled a 40-year decline in oil production by throwing massive amounts of money (capital) at oil reserves that are very expensive and difficult to get. In so far as we've entered the terminal stage of a long debt cycle, one thing we can be sure of is a shrinking pool of real capital investment. Hence the frantic propaganda effort to funnel remaining available money into the shale plays.
A companion fantasy to all this is that the US has a hundred year supply of natural gas. President Obama is guilty of this whopper. (One commentator, financier Bert Dohmen, made the ridiculous claim in a recent podcast on the Financial Sense News Network, that the US has a thousand year supply.) These are the kinds of irresponsible statements that will eventually inflame a public yet again swindled by authorities they desperately want to trust. The truth is we probably have perhaps a seven-year supply of shale gas, and maybe 20 of all gas including the regular old conventional gas. And even that could easily be reduced by the disorders in capital formation now underway in the destabilizing banking sector.
In any case, all this wishing and lying is about to collide with price volatility to make the American voting public absolutely batshit crazy with dread and anger. That, of course, will only prompt more lying, whopper-spinning, and grievance-flogging in the political arena. It will be nearly impossible for the public to evaluate reality. In the meantime, those disorders in banking and financial markets are close to running out of control. Events are tending ever closer to criticality. I believe they will be expressed in political violence around the major party conventions this summer. Those will be interesting fog-lifting weeks.

TransitionVoice.com: A Snarky Guide to Peak Oil

Everyone Has Feet of Clay

Elizabeth Warren

Ron Paul

If what I hear is accurate, that Ron Paul intends to withdraw troops from around the world, only to install them on the border between the United States and Mexico, then I don't like that at all.

John B. featuring Shaz Sparks: "Red Sky"

Is Fox News Mellowing With Age?

Here.

"Ron Paul's Last Hurrah"

by Justin Raimondo.

The American Press: "Male and Getting Maler"

Here.

Lookalikes: Bashar al-Assad and Glenn Quinn

Glenn Quinn, who played Becky's boyfriend Mark on Roseanne and the president of Syria, the aptly-named Bashar al-Assad.

Whitney Houston Dead!

I just logged onto the Internet at 4:15 P.M. and saw a headline announcing the death of Whitney Houston at age 48. Immediately I turned on CNN. It's all over the news.

L.A. Times: Houston Found Dead at Beverly Hilton Hotel in L.A.

(The first CD I ever got, on Christmas Day 1991, was Whitney Houston (1985), her self-titled debut album.)

Analyzing Romney

John Dean: Profiling "President" Romney

Give Her All Your Luvin'

The new song by Madonna, featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.

Komen

Some thoughts off the top of my head: The Komen group was compromised long before this controversy. I would donate to Breast Cancer Action.

Breast Cancer Action
55 New Montgomery Street, Suite 323
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-9301
877-2-STOPBC
http://bcaction.org
info@bcaction.org

The Super Bowl

An interesting column on four reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

I'll add another one: Madonna's halftime show.

"Arthur's Theme"

The War Between the U.S./E.U. and China and India to Control the World's Energy Resources.

Kunstler: "Jive Talkin"

Kunstler on The State of the Union, and his disillusionment with the President:

I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again.

Good news in sight.

New SuperPAC Targets the Tea Party Ten.

Peak Oil Skepticism

Is it a Big Oil plot to drive up prices, asks Owen Paine. The commenters aren't having it.

And have you ever heard of the hypothesis of abiogenic petroleum origin?

Cockburn Opines on Gingrich, and Tin Tin

Here.

Sick with disappointment that I missed the Tin-Tin movie showing in Eureka, I had to settle for Obama’s State of the Union and Thursday’s Republican debate in Jacksonville.

...

==
I saw Tin Tin--in 3-D--on the third and enjoyed it thoroughly, but my friend, who had chosen the movie and invited me to watch it, found it relentlessly propulsive.

Blast From the Past: The Hawaii Observer

Ian Lind has a post about The Hawaii Observer, an investigative magazine from the seventies.

Morris Berman

Before reading this review by Kirkpatrick Sale of his latest book, I have never heard of Morris Berman. But now I think I'll check out his books.

He has a blog, Dark Ages America

Health After Oil

http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/

Introduction

Welcome to Health after Oil (HAO), a place for news, opinion, research, discussion, networking, planning and action in response to the unprecedented and sweeping challenges peak oil, energy decline, and population pressures poses to human health and the institutions whose purpose it is to protect and promote human health. We invite submissions -original content and links- about energy and health and related fiscal/economic and environmental and ecological issues. We note in particular that: 1) Climate change and peak oil are indivisible threats, both stemming from reliance on fossil fuels; and 2) The fiscal and economic crisis now enveloping world economies are intertwined with population growth, energy decline and resource depletion. Infinite growth cannot continue on a finite planet.

Oil Production Will Decline Shortly After 2015

as

Olivier Rech, formerly of the International Energy Agency has predicted.

Original post.

Afterwards, in my view, we will have to face a decline of the production of all forms of liquid fuels somewhere between 2015 to 2020. This decline will not necessarily be rapid, however, but it will be a decline, that much seems clear.

Cockburn's Latest

The return of Newt and other things.

Sanctimonious Santorum

(Picture of Santorum lookalike Eric the Cavalier..)

Here.

"America's Last Chance"

according to Paul Craig Roberts.

Kunstler on the Situation in Iran

What Gives
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 16, 2012 9:55 AM

The awesome exertions of the global banking system to evade the mandates of reality finally yield in a sickening slippage to epochal unwind. What a bad idea: to try to juke nature itself. In case you weren't paying attention over the weekend - and who really wants to? - the cosmic Brinks truck of free money went over a cliff, and the darn thing will keep free-falling until (at least) the American markets open again on Tuesday.

So, everybody and his uncle over in Europe got a sovereign debt downgrade and now the math changes for all the pretend bail-outs and back-stops that had been so exquisitely rigged through the long, nauseating autumn. Math is an annoying representation of reality, but hard to argue with. Bail-outs and back-stops finally became unaffordable even as poetic constructs.

Thus, we also approach the dreaded inflection point for the credit default swaps. Nobody believes that this Mount Everest of jive bond "insurance" can actually pay out, since the first instance of any attempt will bankrupt everybody. And yet there are the holders of all that paper who will object to, say, an 80 percent haircut on their Greek (and other) bonds. Surely some of them will try to invoke their CDS contracts. What then? Three possibilities that I see: 1) all parties and counter-parties go down the drain faster than you can say Benedict Cumberbatch; 2) all parties declare in unison that CDS were a prank that should now just be ignored, as if the cast of Downton Abbey showed up naked at the dinner table; and 3) every sort of loan on God's Green Earth is instantly re-priced and the entire world turns into a flea market. How will America do with its stock of slightly pre-owned Dunkin' Donuts stores, a million-odd Elvis lunch-boxes, and all those old videos of Friends? Don't you wish you'd invested in some hand tools?

In the background of these grave machinations lurks the tragedy of Iran. Subtract the Islamic maniacs who seized the levers of government there thirty-three years ago, and you'd actually find a perfectly modern society, complete with industries, skyscrapers, highways, TV shows, and people eating nice food in restaurants. One can understand why the last Shah was hated and resented. But here you now have a whole class of despotic maniacs much worse than the Shah ever was and they cannot be gotten rid of. Worse, they are devoted to exacting vengeance on the USA and its kindred western nations.

This may be just a tragic case of collective psychological scripting, but it is tending in the direction of a full-dress play-out. Our government believes that their government is determined to build an atomic bomb. Iran's government says, over and over, "...what an idea...!" The trouble is, our guys don't buy their vaudeville act. They will not be allowed to have a bomb, and that's all there is to it. We are doing everything short of all-out war to prevent it, but let's face it, a lot of these things could be construed as acts of war: Stuxnet attacks... blowing up nuclear scientists in their cars. These things are making already-crazy people even crazier, and more reckless.

If events continue down this path then there will be some action in the Persian Gulf. The oil markets will be thrown into disarray. Iran may sink a US naval vessel or two, but we know about their sunburn missiles and we won't put the whole fleet in harm's way, and before too long we will fuck them up very badly. The Iranians are capable of busting up a lot [of] stuff in their neighborhood even as their air force is vaporized and their electric grid goes down. They could launch missiles into the Saudi Arabian oil terminals, for instance. Surely they will try to rain hell down on Israel. That would be a recipe for turning Teheran into an ashtray and a terrible tragedy for those otherwise normal Iranians who are not religious maniacs who wanted nothing more than to raise their children and once in a while go out for a nice lamb dinner.

I don't see any percentage in China and Russia coming into this rumble, though more than a couple of European nations may want to forget their troubles for a moment and, at least, cheerlead from the sidelines.

The result of all this - if the action doesn't get totally out-of-hand - is sure to be a gigantic step down in worldwide energy consumption, trade, and advanced economic activity. It would make the Great Depression look like a sit-com. The American suburban nexus would fail in a matter of weeks. The USA would have to commence the greatest work-around the world has ever seen. In the event, governments everywhere are liable to fall, even here, with elections postponed. There will be little in the way of real money to repair all the things that are falling apart.

Most amazing of all is how quiet the world scene has been, really, since 2001. The buildup of tensions must be out-of-this world. Something had to give.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Death in the Amazon

I found this at twitter.com/maxblumenthal

Loggers burned Amazon tribe girl alive.

The Amazon rainforest isn't featured as prominently as it was twenty years ago, but the destruction continues.

More on Ron Paul

StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.com has some interesting posts on Ron Paul.

A$$hole

As I said at Hattie's Web, it's not that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, it's that he's an a$$hole. (It's never a good idea to put your money where your mouth is.)



16 January update: More proof of Mitt's a$$holiness.

"Ron Paul will fight on"

From Alexander Cockburn's latest column.

Now Romney heads down south to a likely victory in South Carolina and probably in Florida. Such triumphs, should they come to pass, will plunge the election industry into profound crisis. At this stage in the game, precisely one week after the presidential year opened with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, no one – except perhaps the candidate himself – wants to have the race locked up. The news business, led by the TV networks, wants cliffhangers. Campaign managers, dirty tricksters, and kindred consultants want volley after volley of campaign ads rolling dollars into their pockets. There are armies of “strategists” to be fed their campaign stipends.

...
Ron Paul will fight on, and give the campaign season at least the semblance of life. In New Hampshire he won strong support from low-income Republicans and the young. It’s conceivable he could bolt onto the Libertarian third party ticket. It would certainly juice up the political year. High-level Republicans are reportedly threatening Paul that if he does bolt, they’ll make sure that his son Rand is not re-elected Senator in Kentucky in 2016.

Kunstler: This Ripe Moment

This Ripe Moment
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 9, 2012 9:21 AM


The narcolepsy of the long Yuletide draws to a close and the world reawakens to its self-spun web of mutually reinforcing fiascos. Just before the holiday, a sense of futility darkened the European banking landscape as cascading sovereign default looked more and more inevitable. It was halted by a bazooka-caliber currency swap Ponzi that allowed the European Central Bank to pretend it had a $700-billion bag of sugar-plums to hand out to more than 200 banks there. That gambit will only keep up the appearance of normality for a couple of months, until the late winter bond rollover provokes a new crisis stage.

Likewise, in the USA, some pressure-cooked December employment statistics gave the false impression of a brightening jobs picture, but no major news network dared to glance behind the curtain at the short-term holiday hires, the uncounted long-term jobless, the ones who don't show up at the government offices anymore, the ones who stopped getting checks, the legions of the hopeless. A nation that can't call 'bullshit' on its own lies deserves all the suffering that might rain down upon it, and that's exactly where we are heading as things economic morph into things political.

How quaint the current Republican jousting tournament will seem in a few months when real violence rides in on the zephyrs of springtime. Each new primary is like the unloading of a Ringling Brothers clown car. There is an inverse relationship between the seriousness of these times and the laughable personalities vying for a place in history. Are they running for high office or auditioning for the role of Parson Weems in a new Lifetime Network TV mini-series? Are you charmed by their absurd casual clothing? Comforted by their know-nothing jabber about the "game-changer" of shale oil [Links mine--P.Z.] and their sincere doubts about the climate change "story?" Is it morally satisfying to know that one or another of these candidates won't drink a beer? (They'd make good Ayatollahs.) In what sort of Creationist parthenogenetic incubator are such pietistic idiots hatched? What these sanctimonious pricks don't realize they are doing is destroying the very legitimacy of the idea that we're capable of governing ourselves per se.

This is the long-term direction of life in North America, by the way - a breakup into small autonomous governing units. It's just that the current cast of characters brings an aura of low comedy to the process. By the time they're through with Washington, the credibility of Federalism will sound like a knock-knock joke.

As for the other side, the "folks" now occupying the White House and its folkster-in-chief, Mr. Obama - the time has come to abandon them. Their failure is complete with the new national security act that allows for suspension of due process of law. The cheek of Mr. Obama in offering a "signing statement" to the effect that his administration would not enforce the law! - as he signed it! For one thing, Obama tacitly invited his own impeachment by declaring he had no intention of enforcing federal law, since enforcement is the chief duty of his office. If John Boehner were not himself such a fraud, he would have started a motion for impeachment before sundown that day.

Occupy Wall Street will seem like a mere harvest dance when we look back from the uproars later in 2012. Both organized parties have managed to banish the rule of law in America. Both parties need to be driven into the wilderness of history and the rule of law has to be rescued from the oblivion they sent it to. What group of clear-thinking adults can get behind that simple project? What voices will resolve out of the phenomenal noise of gadget America, with its deafening tweets, incessant advertising, instant messaging, idiotic robo-calling, and ever-present flat-screen assault on the senses?

I discern the distant sound of rebellion, a spirit that won't be appeased by bytes of Disney-babble from the pandering snouts of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul or Obama. They are interested only in keeping a set of suicidal rackets going. All the yammer about "freedom" and "liberty" is hollow when the rule of law is AWOL. This ripe time is the natural moment for a true opposition to rise. A few months from now neither major party will have a credible candidate or a plausible platform of ideas. This will be painfully obvious. What angels and demons will rush into that awful vacuum?

Huffy

http://twitter.com/#!/MaxBlumenthal/status/154696228913950720

Santorum's key to victory: a guy w/19 kids named Jim Bob prayed "for months" for him http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/01/04/duggar-familys-prayers-for-rick-santorum-come-true-in-iowa/
==

I'd have written it "a guy named Jim Bob, w/19 kids" because at first glance the reader might think he's the father of nineteen children all named Jim Bob! (Of course, George Foreman has five sons all named George.)

No Comment

Janus Part Two: Kunstler's Forecast for 2012

2012 Forecast: Bang and Whimper
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 2, 2012 7:28 AM


There's a lot to be nervous about, even if you don't subscribe to the undercooked Mayan apocalypse lore moving through the gut of the Internet like a Staphylococcus-infected tamale. The casual observer might say that nothing seemed to give on the world scene in 2011 despite the Fukushima meltdown, the Arab Spring uproars, the train wreck of European finance, the disappearing act at MF Global, and the assorted injuries done to the Kardashian brand by the giant walking dildo Kris Humphries.
I demur. On close examination, the industrial world underwent complete zombification in 2011. Its member states and their institutions are now lurching across the stage of history like so many walking dead. Whole European nations are dead, their citizens squirming around the ruined bones of failed speculative condo projects, housing estates, and luxury hotels like botfly larvae. The USA lies in complete moral ruin despite the exertions of ten thousand evangelical preachers in dusty back-road tilt-up chapels from Texas to Carolina, several new museums of Creation Science, and the shining example of former Senator Rick Santorum. Just look at how we behave, from the cloakrooms of Congress to the piercing parlors of West Hollywood to the 7-Elevens of suburban Maryland: a nation of thieves, racketeers, reality TV sluts, wannabe road warriors, light-fingered gangsta-boyz, and crybabies living in an anomie-drenched decrepitating demolition derby landscape of failure. When everybody is a zombie, whose brains are left to eat? Echo answers.... On to the predictions for 2012 then.
The biggest political shock awaiting us is the massive disruption of the major party nominating conventions next summer, when thousands of angry citizens descend on Tampa and Charlotte demanding a reality test. The parties will attempt to go about their ritual business, ignoring the mischief outside the convention centers, and both parties will make the mistake of siccing the cops on the protestors. The result will be a much bigger mess than the one I personally witnessed on the streets of Chicago, 1968, when the party hacks anointed the grinning sell-out Hubert Humphrey to run against Ole Debbil Nixie. Just before getting tear-gassed on Michigan Avenue that night, I saw some kid hoisting a sign that depicted the nominee with a Hitler mustache over the epithet: Mein Humph! It made my night, despite the subsequent retching in the gutter.
The two major parties are completely bankrupt zombie organizations and this election may be their last stand - if they even survive the conventions. Neither of them can come to grips with the reality-based issues of the day: epochal financial and economic contraction, peak energy (and many other resources), climate change, the absence of the rule of law in banking, and generational grievance - or, perhaps more to the point, the manifestations of these giant trends as presented in unemployment, debt slavery, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness, hunger, and X-million family tragedies. Both parties can only promise the return to a bygone status quo that is largely mythical.
President Obama, the putative "progressive" - spokesman of the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Lower Manhattan, and all the other precincts where "folks" imagine themselves to be advanced thinkers - can't even wrap his mind around the simple fact that we will never be "energy independent" if we think that means running 260 million cars and trucks, no matter how many algae farms we pretend to invest in. Here is man who ought to know better and either doesn't, or is lying about it. He has other failures to answer for, too. Why, following the Citizens United decision in the Supreme Court, did Mr. Obama not prompt his party to sponsor federal legislation (or a constitutional amendment) that would redefine a corporation as not identical in "personhood" to a human being? Why does he still employ an Attorney General who has not started one prosecution for financial misconduct amid a panorama of arrant swindling and fraud? (Ditto: heads of the SEC, CFTC, etc.) And why did he not object loudly to the provision in the latest defense appropriations bill that allows for the capricious arrests and indefinite detention of anyone in the USA on suspicion of "terrorism?" Does this graduate of Harvard Law remember what habeas corpus means?
A lot of voters projected on Mr. Obama some notion of supernatural brilliance - our Hollywood fantasies are rife with wishes to be saved, and therefore redeemed, by our former victims - but he turned out to have a pedestrian mind. Could he possibly believe we have "a hundred years of natural gas" in the ground? Or that we're in a position to ramp up another cycle of industrial economic "growth?" Or that we can continue the web of cruel rackets that passes for medical care in this country? When the Democratic Party re-nominates Obama, it will be sealing its death warrant, and it will be on its way to the same cosmic vacuum where the memory of the Whigs lingers on.
Meanwhile, the Republicans labor to convert themselves into the party of corn-pone Nazism with all their unconcealed lust to push everybody around under the plastic eagle rubrics of "Freedom" and "Liberty." Look at the dismal lineup of morons, hypocrites, and religious fanatics arrayed for the Iowa caucus: a doctor who is also a creationist!? A leveraged buyout artist! A grifter fresh from K Street! A lady Christian theocrat wholly owned by the "dominionist" New Apostolic Reformation cult! A George W. Bush imitator showing symptoms of early onset senility! The whole posse is preoccupied with things supernatural. And being so dedicated to things unreal, they're the prime representatives of the suburban clusterfuck, who will do anything to keep that obsolete machine running, even if it means national suicide, because they lack the brains to understand where history is taking us and what the mandates of reality are shouting at us about the urgent need to reorganize American life. They are also the vassals of corporate despotism - where the Democrats are mere footservants. They masquerade as "job creators," but they promote the off-shoring of every activity that corporate America can shed in its quest for ever-greater executive compensation. The lip-service they pay to "freedom" is belied by their intent to control everybody's personal life, commoditize the public interest, and sell out their grandchildren's future for a few extra rounds of golf.
I think this gang, too, will be sent packing by the mobs of 2012. I have a nagging intimation that some third party candidate will emerge. The two personalities I keep seeing in that role are Howard Dean and Michael Bloomberg. Both of them are imperfect, but both of them are clear-headed and action-oriented, and I have a feeling that both of them are stewing in the background over the spectacle of idiocy, inertia, and dithering they see at every political compass point. Maybe somebody else will crawl out of the woodwork. I've said before in the weekly blog that conditions could deteriorate so badly that a Pentagon general might have to step into national leadership just to keep the grocery stores supplied with basic rations - but that is an outcome in my personal asteroid belt of probabilities.
Whatever party ends up running things, and whomever fronts it, is going to be in for a helluva wild ride. The USA is diving into an economic depression that will make the 1930s look like a Busby Berkeley production number. Compressive contraction will have its way with us, whatever Ben Bernanke thinks. There will simply be less activity of the kinds we're used to - Big Box shopping sprees, hamburger sales, theme park visits, house closings, you name it - than our hypertrophic system requires to keep its own destructive momentum going. Instead, the whole thing will just topple over, inert, like a 99-cent gyroscope giving into the forces of entropy. There will be a lot of bewildered, angry, dispossessed people from sea to shining sea. Not a few of them will "act out," that is, start breaking things, stealing things, targeting easy prey, hurting bystanders, and even tangling with police. Personally, I don't believe in the internment camp meme so popular among the doomer paranoiacs, but surely a lot of people will be cooling their heels in some slammer - while many other miscreants will just get away with crimes against persons and property.
The global banking system was on death-watch all through 2011. Somehow the various doctors in the central banks and finance ministries were able to muster enough accounting legerdemain to give the appearance of a system still showing a pulse. But in a compressive debt deflation, there are only so many accounting tricks you can pull off as money (and wealth) literally disappears down a cosmic worm-hole. In Europe, the process has moved from the margins toward the center. The people of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Belgium will have less income, fewer government services, lost wages and pensions, less comfort than they have had for a couple of generations. Meanwhile, France is drowning in bad paper and the German banks are choking on it. There is really only one plausible outcome and that is default. The reckoning of the bondholders is at hand. Everybody will get poorer simultaneously - and if not, there will be not just regime change but civil war and revolution. The fantasy of a fiscal union in Europe is impossible because it means two things: that Germany will have to issue orders to everybody else; and that Germany would have to pick up the tab for everybody else while telling them what to do. Both are intolerable and implausible. Let's just think of the Euro experiment as an interesting side effect of the peak energy era... now drawing to a close.
These professional economists with their jabber about QEs and "financial repression" and bond-term "twists" and debt-to-GDP ratios are missing the point. The advanced industrial nations will not be re-jiggered onto any "growth" runway. Rather, we're entering the rutted wagon-road of de-industrializing and un-advancing. What awaits us in a "time-out" from hyperbolic technological progress. Forget about Ray Kurzweil's nanobot nirvana. That is not in the cards. Instead, wrap your mind around life in an economy organized around farming, with a much sparser distribution of big urban centers, and far fewer people overall. Don't imagine for a moment that your grandchildren will be zinging across the landscape in electric cars sampling one theme park after another while "networking" with "friends" on cyborg social networks implanted in their brain jellies. Think of them grooming their mules in the summer twilight. Anyway, you get the picture: everything that the finance ministries and treasuries and central banks are affecting to do is mere shadow theater performed in support of wishful thinking.
The question, then, is what kind of hardship and disorder will attend our journey out of the industrial era into post-technological age we are entering. Will we just turn the world into a Michael Bay movie and blow everything up? Or will we make some graceful descent and retain what is really best about the human spirit?
2012 will be the year of internal strife in these "advanced" nations, of people fighting over the table scraps of modernity among their own, in their own backyards, a desperate sorting out of the remnants. I don't think we'll see fighting between the European nations until the internal conflicts are resolved and that will take a few years.
The hot-spots for 2012 are very likely to be in the Middle East. You already know that. What could be more obvious than the tinderbox character of that region? Islamic extremism is poised to take over governments (and armies) in Egypt, Syria, Libya, possibly Algeria, and probably Pakistan. Iran lost its mind decades ago and seems determined to dominate the region by means of a strategy that can only get it into trouble (and perhaps the whole world if it goes really badly). Saber-rattling is one thing; making an actual move something else. Block the Straits of Hormuz? Not if you don't want Teheran to turn into an ashtray. That may happen anyway if Iran rattles a nuclear saber. Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, all struggling with terrible problems at home, would breathe a sigh of relief if the mullahs were chastened. The chatter around the Web about an Israeli preemptive attack never ceases. But it is a possibility.
Oh, and don't forget Turkey. Formerly the "sick man" of Europe, Turkey has become strangely resurgent, prompting some recollections that the Ottoman Empire actually administered over much of the Middle East until 1914, and not with complete incompetence, either. They just sort of imploded from empire fatigue, which is not the worst way to go down, if history is taking you there anyway. But empires come back, too, and what passes for Turkey today is a polity that in one incarnation or another has been around since the ancient Greek days, and was, for quite a long while, Rome Release 2.0.
Don't be surprised if some hostilities break out between Turkey and Iran, since a battleground named Iraq lies between them. Iraq is a basket-case despite an immense reserve of oil under its sands, and having had the US military babysit it for eight years. The last American combat units left Iraq this fall, but there are still plenty of US soldiers there, maintaining our garrisons and keeping an eye on things. The question is: can they control what the Kurds do in the north, and whatever meddling Iran engages in around the Basra oil region in the South? These American support troops remaining in Iraq could find themselves looking like a ham-and-cheese sandwich between a lot of crusty mischief north-and-south. The Turks have already had a dustup or two with Syria lately - Syria occupies a big wedge between Turkey, Iraq and the Mediterranean Sea - and Turkey will take a dim view of that nation falling into the hands of Islamic extremists if Assad gets booted.
All bets are off in Egypt. Anything can happen there.
The dangerous position of Israel vis-à-vis all these quarreling players is probably as bad as it has been in two generations. An attack by a neighbor or getting caught in a crossfire between neighbors would stimulate a lusty response, and perhaps World War Three. As if the world needed this added aggravation. It makes my kishkas ache just to think about it. Sometimes I wonder why the whole Israeli nation doesn't just pack up and move to Nebraska.
2012 is the year that China proves to be a mortal nation and rolls over with a very bad case of the vapors. Their banking system is a sham. Their property bubble is a fiasco. Their government has no formal legitimacy and will install a new leadership group this year, while exports crash and mass factory layoffs happen. There will be a lot of pissed off people in China, and they may express themselves politically in ways that have seemed unthinkable for decades. The aura of social control looms large in China, but an aura is a light garment not recommended for stormy political weather. 2012 could be the year that China begins its journey into a "Balkanized" collection of smaller autonomous parts, which is the big fat trendline for all the nations of the world, including the USA.
It is hard to think about the bizarre case of India, a nation with one foot in the modern age and the other in a colorful hallucinatory dreamtime. Their climate-change related problems are doing heavy damage to the food supply. Their groundwater is almost gone. The troubles of the wobbling global economy will take a lot pep out of their burgeoning tech and manufacturing sectors. It wouldn't be surprising if these travails prompted distracting hostilities with its failed-state neighbor, Pakistan. Pakistan, with its inexhaustible supply of Islamic maniacs could easily start a rumble with some crazy caper like the Mumbai hotel assault of two years ago, but this time India would answer with a heavy cudgel, perhaps even a nuclear sortie designed to neutralize Pakistan's dangerous toys at a stroke. And that would be that. Like cleaning out an annoying neighborhood crack house. It's not a very appetizing scenario, but what else can you do about failed states with nuclear bombs?
Turning to Japan....That sore beset kingdom is suffering all the blowback of modern times at once: the Godzilla syndrome up in Fukushima; a demographic collapse; an imminent bond crisis; the collapse of export market partners; and a long, agonizing death spiral of its banks. I stick by a prediction I tendered back in March, after the deadly tsunami: Japan will decisively opt for a return to pre-industrial civilization. Why not? The rest of the world will be dragged kicking and screaming to the same place. Let Japan get there first and enjoy the advantage of the early adapter - back to an economy of local, hand-made stuff, rigid social hierarchy, folkloric hijinks in whispering bamboo groves, silk robes, and frequent time outs for the tea ceremony.
Russia? The big bear might have just sat out another decade and enjoyed its remaining fossil fuel supply, but the temptation to project power is a demanding habit, so they make all sorts of noises about watching Iran's back - though mutual hatred abounds - and generally rushing into the power vacuum occupied by a US with dwindling mojo. There were stirrings of political discontent just few weeks ago, after the rigged early rounds of national elections, and who knows where that will lead. Vlad Putin has held things together there impressively after the meltdown of the 1990s, but apparently the tranquil veneer is thin. Except for two big cities, the sprawling nation is broke and decrepitating, with little to offer the world but oil and gas - not an inconsiderable offering, but one with certain limits especially as they drain their oil fields for export cash. The rule of law is also pretty sketchy there. The government, as ever, is a kind of gangster affair, only this time one that allows some people to get really rich, not just connected. Their 70-year experiment with Marxian dogma has probably put them off ideology for a few centuries to come, which means less money spent on prisons for people with independent thoughts and more for call girls and home furnishings. I imagine that Putin will maintain his grip through the year. The Russians will appreciate relative order more when they see a few other countries devolve into internal conflict.
I don't see much action around South America this year. Some Americans are already fleeing to Argentina. Perhaps they'll enjoy it, but there is always the menace of property confiscation, and worse. Brazil will continue to appear vibrant while it grows more population, shoving it toward eventual ruin. They will see setbacks in the development of their deep-sea oil due to an international shortage of investment capital.
Mexico's fortunes depend on its oil industry, Pemex, which faces remorseless depletion. Revenue from oil production and (dwindling) exports can't hope to keep up with continuing population growth (and ever more poverty). These trends suggest a continued loss of control for the central government and more territorial fighting among the drug gangs and other criminal mafias. As long as all those loose heads roll on the south side of the Rio Grande the US will just tut-tut off to the side. But if the gangs get bold and start venturing cross border to make mischief we will make like Woodrow Wilson did and send the regular army down to spank them. It would be a satisfying diversion for that portion of the US demographic that enjoys Ultimate Fighting on TV, though it won't get them their job back at the Pontiac plant.
The global oil picture is not so reassuring. The fragility of our supply is simply unnoticed by commuters enjoying Lady Gaga on their iPods. Meanwhile, our politicians retail fantasies of endless domestic reserves, which is total horse shit. Global exports are in remorseless decline, apart from geopolitical fissures and strains that could just paralyze allocation cold. If a hot war breaks out in the Middle East, you'll see the American supermarket shelves empty in three days. Won't that be fun. Note, too: the manias over shale oil and shale gas will reveal themselves as just more bubbles in a long cavalcade of bubbles, and both will begin to founder on a shortage of investment capital. The shale plays will prove to have been a national self-esteem-building program, not any part of an energy policy.
The abiding question as we turn the corner into the New Year is: how come Jon Corzine is still at large? (Not to mention Angelo Mozilo, plus the entire executive floor of Goldman Sachs, and about 5000 other assorted Wall Street grifters still on the loose.) There is plenty of dire talk that the collapse of MF Global, and the shenanigans around its demise involving the evaporation of segregated accounts, has gravely and permanently damaged the entire investment industry, but especially the commodities funds, who can no longer depend on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to honestly clear trades and regulate behavior. The whole affair, and the thundering silence from the oval office, makes Barack Obama seem not just inept but somehow complicit in the looting of America. As if he needs another mark of discredit in his record of consistent fumbling. There are signs that a lot of people who still have something resembling money invested in various funds will go to cash in the weeks ahead, including under-the-mattress style. The distrust and paranoia is palpable now, with the frenzies of Yuletide bygone for another year. After all, why trust banks, especially the TBTF monsters. Such a mass move could take the starch even out of highly manipulated equity markets.
Nemesis may have her day, though. Jamie Dimon might have just gone a swindle too far for the fates to ignore him another year. JP Morgan looks to be in a peck of trouble for its role in the confiscation of MF Global accounts, not to mention its hijinks in the precious metals markets. The impudence of these rascals! In a nation when all sorts of people are murdered every day for little more reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is it not a wonder that some poor swindled Grampa with nothing left to live for has not tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Wall Street watering hole known to be frequented by banking poobahs? Perhaps this sort of action awaits us in 2012.
Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average to crash down to 4000 every year. I never disappoint - though I am often disappointed. In 2011, the SP index managed the delightful trick of finishing a fraction below its previous January kickoff. The stock markets have churned in range-bound purgatory for a decade while the price of a jar of pickles has multiplied four-fold. Applying the calculus, and given the pickle-DOW differential, I'd say my call was actually pretty good. In any case, this year I change the tune slightly: I predict the DJIA will go to 4000, with the catch that the number is only a way-station to 1000, which it will hit in 2014. We may be short of snow here in the Northeastern US - thanks to La Nina - yet not short of confidence that the mills of the Gods grind slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.
Finally, look for the publication of my next book round July 2012, a non-fiction work titled Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation... from The Atlantic Monthly Press. In a week, I begin work on World Made By Hand 3.
Good luck to you in 2012, and report any suspicious characters adorned with ear-plugs, quetzel feathers, and carrying obsidian knives to your nearest office of Homeland Security.

==
3 January update: Swans looks to the new year also.

Happy New Year!

"Cry"

News of Newt Gingrich's weepiness at least affords me a reason to post Godley and Creme's song "Cry."





Imagine what Beavis and Butt-Head would say if they watched the Iowa caucus coverage.

Janus, Part One: Cockburn Looks Back at 2011

Here.

LMFAO: We Came Here to Party

Remember that weird incident from last year between Mitt Romney and LMFAO? LMFAO wrote a song referring to it.

Two Choices: Ron and Non-Ron

Statists in the GOP might be able to tolerate some of Ron Paul's economic and limited-government views, but never his views on foreign policy.--Laurence Vance, lewrockwell.com

Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul"

...That said, sometimes it all comes down to a couple of big issues, and in the unlikely chance that the election next November were to end up being the choice between Barack Obama and Ron Paul (and assuming no emergence of a viable Third Party progressive candidate like Rocky Anderson and his Justice Party), while I might have a hard time pulling the lever for Paul unless he can really make it clear he has no truck with White Supremecists and their ilk, it would be easier than pulling a lever for Obama.

Why? Because with President Obama we would get more war, increased military spending, and at the rate he’s been going stripping away our Constitutional rights, there wouldn’t be any of those after another four years. We would also be electing someone who we now know lies through his teeth, who takes money from some of the biggest corporate thieves in human history, and who has appointed some of those very criminals to most or all of the key economic policy positions in his administration.

With Ron Paul as president, at least we’d be done with all the wars, the people of the rest of the world would be finally free of US military interference, including attacks by US drones. The long-suffering Constitution and its Bill of Rights would mean something again. We might even get a Supreme Court justice or two who actually believed that Congress should declare any future wars before we could fight them, and that citizens who were arrested had an absolute right to a speedy trial by a jury of peers. And we’d be electing someone who appears, especially for a politician, to be that rare thing: an honest man who says what he means and means what he says — and who doesn’t seem to be owned by the banksters.

We’d have a hell of a fight on our hands in a Ron Paul presidency, defending Social Security and Medicare, promoting economic equality, fighting climate change and pollution, defending abortion rights and maybe fighting a resurgence of Jim Crow in some parts of the country, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about being spied upon, beaten and arrested and then perhaps shipped off to Guantanamo for doing it.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new Project-Censored Award-winning independent online alternative newspaper. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

31 December update:
Mike Whitney.

Ron Paul is the only antiwar candidate who has a (microscopic) chance of winning in 2012. He’s also the only candidate who will make an effort to restore the Bill of Rights and reverse Congress’s decision to allow the president to “indefinitely” imprison American citizens without due process. For these reasons alone, Paul should garner the support of leftists, liberals, and progressives. But he won’t, because liberals are convinced that Paul will try to dismantle the social programs upon which the elderly, the infirm, and the vulnerable depend.

Lookalikes

The resemblance lies in the faint and shaven eyebrows, respectively.

Merry Christmas!

Here.

Big, Big, Big!

In partial response to Hattie's post "Big, Bigger, Biggest":

Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, a book I've heard about a few years ago but haven't yet read.

The anthem of Blubberland:

Autistic Student Stuffed Into Duffel Bag, Left in Hallway

Here.

And, as I find them, I'll provide updates on the Wyoming Republican state legislator who assaulted his mentally disabled son.

And this.

Ron Paul on Jay Leno

The Jive

Here.

They get uptight about Saturday Night Live's Tim Tebow skit and Ron Paul's Friday interview with Jay Leno, among other things.