Drone Warfare:

Neither Cheap Nor Surgical Nor Decisive

Louis Proyect talks about Harper's and n+one magazines.

The Leprechaun Movies

Like the Energizer bunny, he keeps going and going. More here.

Kunstler: Things Went Awry

Kunstler has had a medical adventure of his own.

James Salter

Described as perhaps the last great American prose stylist, James Salter is a writer whose work I should check out.

16 March update: Searching the state library catalog, I find six books of Salter's in the system: Burning the Days, The Hunters, Last Night, Light Years, Solo Faces, and Then and There: The Travel Writing of James Salter. Three are available at the Hilo library, and two of these are only at the Hilo library.

His latest novel, All That Is, comes out in April.

Seventh Anniversary

This is the seventh anniversary of the founding of Poppa Zao, a blog which I use to comment on and make sense of this immense world.

Just Found Out Thomas Naylor Has Died; New Pope Chosen

All kinds of people are on Twitter, so I wondered if secession activist Thomas Naylor also tweets. It turns out that he died last December.

As I type this, at eight-ten in the morning, news has broken that a new Pope is chosen.

Proyect Mentions Kunstler

I had to give Louis Proyect props for mentioning Kunstler in his post about a woman fighting the gentrification of Williamsburg. Did you know that he interviewed Jane Jacobs in 2000? I hope he can get permission to publish that interview on his own site.

12 March update: I spoke too soon. It turns out the interview is on his site.

14 March update: And Metropolis Magazine, in which the interview originally appeared, is still around at age thirty.

Toure: Drone Apologist

Here.

Too Much Magic

Yesterday I picked up the copy of Kunstler's Too Much Magic that I'd ordered a few weeks ago. It's reviewed here but I should have my own brief review up soon.

Kunstler vs. Gary North, or Kunstler vs. Big Box Retail and Its Apologists

Reply To Gary North
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 3, 2013 6:56 PM

Last week, extreme right-wing, hyper-patriot blogger and "Christian Reconstructionist" Gary North published a piece that bounced around the Web titled "James Howard Kunstler: Foul-Mouthed Apologist for the Good Old Boys." Gary North was inflamed because I had put out a recent blog inveighing against the chain-store rape of local economies from sea to shining sea. North wrote:

Consider his [JHK's] most recent screed. It begins with an attack on the most successful free market retailing operation on earth, Walmart. He uses Walmart as a representative company for all of the low-price, high-volume box stores. He hates them all.

In the United States, millions of customers return day after day to buy at stores like these. But Kunstler, who is an arrogant Leftie elitist, dismisses them as helpless rubes who need protection from price competitive retailers. And who will supply this protection? The Good Old Boys.


My point, of course was that the chain store business model, and WalMart in particular, has destroyed local Main Street economies all over America, as well as the networks of social relations that went with these economies, in which local business owners employed local people and had to take responsibility for how they treated them. The damage to American civic life ought to be self-evident in the desolation of thousands of crumbling traditional downtowns, the extermination of a whole class of local business owners (and the local institutions they cared for), the funneling of business profits out of every local community to a few corporate bank accounts in distant places, as well as the desecration of the once-rural landscape outside our towns, now a uniformly profaned wilderness of parking lots and the tilt-up warehouses of chain-store commerce.

My further point was that the WalMart model of business now faces its own demise as America contends with the realities of a what will prove to be a permanent energy and capital formation crisis, requiring us to downscale our activities and rebuild fine-grained local networks of economic interdependency.

Gary North's intemperate response to these ideas illustrates everything that has become malignant and dishonorable in conservative politics lately. It also displays a brand of shocking stupidity that bodes darkly for America's political future. There are many towns across America where WalMart is not just the only place to buy all goods, but the chief employer, too. How is it a good thing for anyone's home town to be dominated by such a single despotic entity? How does it square with the rhetoric about "liberty" spouted by conservatives? How is it so different in kind from the tyrannical one-party rule of the old soviet system that is the pole star of conservative animus?

WalMart is the largest corporate employer in the USA and most of its rank-and-file store workers barely get paid enough to live on (those with children fall statistically below the official poverty line). They have no control over their working lives, are cruelly deprived of full-time status in order to avoid giving them health insurance, have been subject to lock-ins during late-shifts, and are forced to attend off-hour browbeating ("coaching") sessions with no pay. WalMart trumpets "made-in-America" propaganda around its stores but buys the majority of its merchandise from foreign countries -- over $20 billion in merchandise from China every year, and more from other overseas vendors.

For Gary North, the supposed benefits of "bargain shopping" trump the fantastic damage that this mode of commerce wreaks on the nation. It was some bargain to sacrifice all the local business enterprises in this land, and the careers that went with them, and the incomes they produced, and the choices they represented so that underpaid chain store serfs could save five bucks on a toaster-oven. Gary North writes:

Kunstler is merely one more hapless defender of local business oligopolies. He stands in front of the freight train of price competition, yelling: "Stop!" He will be run over, just as they all have been run over.


Gary North is not being ironic when he characterizes the Americans whose independent businesses, lives, and towns were destroyed by WalMart as "good ole boys." The owners of all those shuttered mom-and-pop stores along the vacant Main Streets of America were oligarchs?

Gary North is exactly what I have in mind when I refer to the "corn-pone Nazis" who threaten the political future of this country. Either he's a hostage to his own ideological rigor mortis or he is a genuine fool. He's certainly a fake patriot. He literally knows not what he actually stands for. There is no precedent for such malign totalitarian nonsense in American history. But it matches the spell that Germany fell under in 1933. And it can happen here, too.
====

All Publicity is Good Publicity

On 28 January 2005, John Stossel hosted a special on ABC, 20/20: Lies, Myths and Nasty Behavior with John Stossel. Among other things, he set out to prove suburban sprawl was actually good because it supposedly gave young families the chance to buy houses. (In retrospect, this was the time of the housing bubble.) And he had
a confrontational interview with Kunstler:

I told Kunstler "smart growth" is destroying the lives of poor people, that he's basically telling low-income people who want back yards that they can't have one.


"Well, you can't have everything," Kunstler said.

I could have written him off as an arrogant ass, and some doubtless have. But Kunstler was new to me. The idea of peak oil was also new. That June I saw a TV movie, Oil Storm, that supposed an oil shortage brought on by a hurricane. Though not strictly about peak oil, the movie underscored modern society's dependence on oil, and the difficulties people encounter for lack thereof. Then in the early fall, I went to a talk on peak oil by Shepherd Bliss. Among the books I saw on display was a new one, The Long Emergency, by that crusty old guy, James Howard Kunstler.

Just as I discovered Kunstler through his contentious exchange with John Stossel, so some readers of the North column just might be intrigued by that elitist. Incidentally, North praises Wal-Mart, etc. as the free market in action, but doesn't take into account the massive government subsidies it receives.

I ordered Kunstler's latest book Too Much Magic through a local bookstore and hope to pick it up soon.

A Good Day to Flop Hard

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=diehard5.htm

Early 2013 Expendable ["Bomz"]

Zero Dark Thirty's Paltry Takehome

Glenn Greenwald rejoices that Zero Dark Thirty won just one Oscar, for Sound Editing, which it had to share with Skyfall. Here.

Kunstler: "Not So Smart"

I'd be interested in what he has to say about the Oscars or the shootout in Las Vegas.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/not-so-smart.html

The Oscars

As seen through the two-part Jem episode "Hollywood Jem." Jem is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar along with "Sigourney Reever", "Meryl Saint", and "Geraldine Pathos." (Where the customary fifth nominee is, I don't know.) The four nominees appear on a talk show, (about a minute into the first video) where Pathos takes offense at Jem's admission of never having studied acting formally:

(to Jem): You never studied?! Yet you presume to compete with actresses who have spent years, decades at their craft.

(Standing up, arms akimbo): That's it! I refuse to share an interview with someone who became an actress for frivolous reasons.

Can you imagine Emmanuelle Riva launching into Quvenzhané Wallis like that?

"Hollywood Jem, Part 1: For Your Consideration"



"Hollywood Jem, Part 2: And the Winner Is..."

Zero Dark Thirty: Thumbs Down in Pakistan

They don't like Zero Dark Thirty in Pakistan, for obvious reasons. Give me Les Mis any day.

Jean Carne: "Ain't No Way" and "You're a Part of Me"

From You're a Part of Me (1988)

Kunstler: Scale Implosion (and My Own View of Local vs. Mainland-Owned Businesses)

Today's Kunstler column is on a topic--mass retail--I can understand better than the machinations of high finance. Hilo has a Wal-Mart (open since 1996), a Target (opened in summer 2011), and a few other semi-big box stores (Ross, OfficeMax, etc.) Hawaii, this island in particular, has never supported big box stores and chain retail in the same way the mainland (or Oahu) does. In some ways, our retail environment, especially restaurants, has actually become more localized. This deserves a more thorough treatment, but for now, let me say:

Target and Wal-Mart are lucrative in Hilo, but many local businesses are holding their own against them. I haven't been gone to Wal-Mart in years.

We have a larger (appx. 61,000 sq. ft.), fancier Safeway. But KTA has a nearly 100-year presence and strong customer loyalty. Longtime Hiloans remember Sure Save and Food Fair.

Borders is sorely missed, but there are still Book Gallery and Basically Books, as well as CD Wizard, Hilo Bay Books, Big Island BookBuyers, and Still Life Books.

We have McDonald's and Burger King but not many of the casual dining restaurants that Hattie does not like. We have innumerable small places, including two Indian restaurants. (Akmal's, which has existed in one form or another since its beginnings in Frankfurt in 1974, opened in Hilo in 2005 at the strip mall on Lanikaula Street. It was the first Indian restaurant not only in Hilo but on the island.)


http://hawaii2050.org/images/uploads/futures_scenarios.pdf

Scale Implosion
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.

Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.

The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.

What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.

The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.

BBC2 and Channel Four Closedowns from the Mid-1980s

The BBC2 announcer, David Miles, rhymes the second syllable in comrades with fades.

Ragga Jungle Sound Clash 95

The House Crew: "Keep the Fires Burning"

Zero Dark Thirty Chances for Best Picture Oscar Fading

Here.

CJ7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJ7

Frank Ocean" "Forrest Gump"

@aleithead See all my tweets here: storify.com/MaxBlumenthal/… Was using an iPhone app called 5-0 Radio.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 13, 2013

I managed to pick up police scanner of Dorner chase thru an iPhone app. There is chatter of "cabin identified." "Where are u on the cabin?"

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 12, 2013

On the Pope's Resignation

I will post here links as I find them.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/02/12/a-godly-man-in-an-ungodly-age/

http://www.telospress.com/on-pope-benedict-xvis-enduring-legacy/

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/02/18/analysis-conservatives-vent-disappointment-over-benedicts-papacy/

Kunstler's State of the Union Address

State of the Union
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 11, 2013 9:09 AM


The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen.

The implacable contraction underway is the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource. Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and space tourism. There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all bullshit concealing the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible, paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.

One thing you can be sure of: the current sociopolitical weather will change. A front will blow through and sweep the fog away. So many circles of hazard are spinning around events that some fast-turning object will come off its axis and start smashing all the fantasies. When that happens, it will be every community for itself, and where there are no real communities -- for instance, the vast matrix of suburban noplaces that America emergently composed itself out of in a tragic quest to become its own televised fantasy -- we'll discover the dark side of the "liberty" that so-called conservatives endlessly invoke, in all its screaming eagle iconography.

Not since the Civil War (1861 - 65) has anything bad of this scale happened within the United States itself and the public is unprepared despite our total immersion in the on-screen ersatz heroics of avatars such as Dwayne Johnson. The terrible convulsion of the 1860s was preceded by a political time much like ours is now, with figures (calling them leaders is inaccurate) of no conviction backpedaling furiously toward strife.

Remember these things if you tune in to watch President Obama move his lips on Tuesday amid the incessant applause in the House chamber. He'll speak the words "climate change" and the hall will rock with thunderous handclapping -- but it won't mean anything because both the president and the people have no intention of changing the way we live. Mr. Obama will cheerlead for economic growth and he will be talking out of his ass. It's the nature of this contraction that economic growth is absent. You can have plenty of economic activity -- especially if you re-form (literally) the systems we depend on, such as farming, commerce, medicine, and transportation -- but it won't be expressed favorably in the GDP stats or the balance sheets of CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley.

At the core of this contraction is the disappearing act of real capital -- that is, accumulated wealth -- for the excellent reason that we are squandering what remains of it in the futile effort to keep living the way we do. But it will be vanishing fast, contrary to the view of such fantasists as David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times -- catch him on the current Slate Political Gabfest -- who thinks that the Growth Fairy is about to land on the south lawn of the White House.

The State of the Union Address is happening in a peculiar quiet moment when all the financial brushfires of the time have been reduced temporarily to a smolder that conceals the full involvement of the roots under the surface. Our economic system is burning down. Nobody wants to talk about the system that will have to replace it, which I call a world made by hand.

The fortunate few will be those who have already established themselves in an authentic community of helping hands, who have some tools -- and I don't mean Adobe Photoshop or the latest iPhone app -- and laid in some bits of silver and gold.

Bauhaus: "Bela Lugosi's Dead"

Ron Paul on Firing Line, 1988

A Review of Kunstler's Too Much Magic

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-12/review-too-much-magic-james-kunstler

Anita Baker, "Lately"

The Chemical Brothers: "It Began in Afrika"

Kunstler: Cattle Drive

Kunstler details more financial misbehavior which is over my head. And he sneers at the Super Bowl.

Cattle Drive
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 4, 2013 8:09 AM


How hilarious is the Federal Reserve's cattle drive of cash money (i.e. "liquidity") into the stock markets? I'll tell you: if that cash is outflow from bonds that pay ZIRP interest rates, then this attempt to stampede investment into the stock market is only going to succeed in ravaging the bond market and by extension the credibility of the dollar, the US banking cartel, and then the world financial system as a whole.
If bond-dumpers rush into stocks, then who are the next bond buyers at ZIRP? The USA can't keep going without continuous bond selling. Somebody has to buy the darn things. The Federal Reserve is now buying around 70 percent of US issue -- a lot of it via secondary market pass-thru shenanigans involving "Primary dealers" (a.k.a. Too Big To Fail banks, who get to cream off a premium when they flip bonds to the Fed -- tidy little racket). If the other 30 percent of issue can't find willing buyers at ZIRP then interest rates will have to go up. If interest rates go up, then interest paid out on bonds (that is "debt service") by the US government will go up catastrophically, because the aggregate debt is so colossal and most of the debt is short term, meaning that in a post-ZIRP world the interest rate ratchets up automatically every 13 weeks as bonds roll over. The US will then only be able to pretend that it can service the debt at higher interest rates. Everybody in the world will recognize this -- surely only increasing the velocity of the stampede away from bonds. The question is: how long can pretending to service debt go on before it is just called by it's real name: default? Or, if countered with additional furious computer "money" creation: hyperinflation? Either way, of course, you end up broke.
This cattle drive into stocks is strictly a political gambit. The cattle are being driven to the slaughterhouse. It's discretionary strategic national financial suicide. They're driving up the stock markets for cosmetic purposes, to make it appear that an economic recovery is going on, and with the aim of setting in motion a self-reinforcing financial feeding frenzy in this rush to "equities." By the way, in case my manner seems didactic today I am attempting to define my terms as I go along because most other financial bloggers seem to assume that ordinary people understand all their jargon, which I am quite sure they do not.
Returning to my point... the Fed and their auditors on Wall Street and in government, are jacking up the stock markets in the hopes of stirring up "animal spirits," as the financial psychologists say, to put over the story that it equals a vibrant economy -- which is nonsense, of course, to anyone who shoots a casual glance at the economic wreckage all around them. Anyway, since the stock market action these days is dominated by high frequency trading robots running on algorithms, where exactly would animal spirits even factor in? If anything the absence of real animal spirits in this action also implies the absence of its counterpart, animal survival instinct, of which human intelligence is an order. What can come of stirring up animal spirits among robots? A train wreck is exactly what.
Now, I ask you: at a moment in history when vast interlinked global financial markets have never been so unstable, so primed for unintended consequences courtesy of the diminishing returns of technology, so ripe for a massive, cascading "accident," is it a prudent thing to fuck around with such crude PsyOps?
One other factor outside pure financials assures that US economic performance will remain impaired (that is, the kind of economic activity we regard as "normal" (suburban sprawl building, credit card "consumer" spending): the price of oil, which is inching up to the $100-a-barrel hashmark. Apparently that shale oil bonanza we hear so much about has not left the USA swimming in cheap oil. As a general principle, it's probably safe to say that an oil price above $80 crushes the US economy. It drives up the cost structure of just about everything we make, do, or sell here, but of course the primary things that go up in price are food and motor fuel.
Hence, it's tragically ironic that -- getting back to official financial PsyOps -- that one of the primary motives for the Fed keeping interest rates super-low in the first place (apart from enabling wild fiscal irresponsibility in government) has been to promote the housing sector -- because in the reality of our time "housing" translates into building more suburban sprawl. How smart is it to promote more suburban sprawl at a moment in history when there's no more cheap oil?
It is this kind of stupendous foolishness that is putting the USA on the path of an epochal systemic collapse.

Superbowl addendum:
Did anyone notice how violent and psychotic the Superbowl advertising was this year? An Oreo commercial that depicted a mob of nerds destroying a library -- huh? The Doritos spot where "Daddy" and his male buddies transform themselves into an insane clown posse of cross-dressers. The Fast and Furious 6 trailer featuring the destruction of every vehicle known to man and a few office buildings, too. The third-quarter power failure was a neat harbinger of things-to-come in the Most Exceptional United States of America. Party on, peeps!

The Kunstlercast podcast is back online all y'all! This week: interview with Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth.com
===
There were some charming ads too. More later.--P.Z.

Soviet TV News of the 1980s

High Oil Prices Explained

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9789

Urban Gardening, How to Find Books on

http://ddc.typepad.com/025431/2013/01/urban-gardening.html

Fingers, Inc. "Can You Feel It?"

Billie Holiday "On the Sunny Side of the Street"

Big Maybelle: "Candy"

Vesta Williams: "Special"

Peaches & Herb: "Reunited"

Ashford and Simpson: "Solid"

Kunstler: Sustaining the Unsustainable

The Master Meme
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 28, 2013 9:13 AM

The gentlemen and ladies of the meme-o-sphere, where collective notions are birthed like sleet from clouds, have decided lately that the USA has entered a full-on broad-based bull market - a condition of general happiness and prosperity as far advanced beyond mere "recovery" as a wedge of triple-cream Saint-Andre cheese is advanced over a Cheez Doodle. It has become the master fantasy of the moment, following the birth of some junior memes such as... we have a hundred years of shale gas and the "housing sector" (i.e. the suburban sprawl-building industry) is "bouncing back." What a sad-sack nation of credulous twits we have become.

You can be sure that when a nation is led by the reality-deficient, unhappy outcomes are a sure thing. They will systematically destroy trust in the way things actually work and beat a fast path to either tyranny (where reality doesn't matter) or anarchy (where reality cannot be managed at all). This is what happens when nations go mad. Even when they are led by people later-determined to be "evil" (Hitler, Lenin) this sad process is allowed to happen because it just seems like a good idea at the time - which is the central political tragedy of human history. To the beaten-down Russians, Bolshevism seemed like a good-idea at the time. To the bankrupt, hopeless Germans, Naziism seemed like a good idea.

I'm not even sure what to call the current disposition of unreality in the USA, though it is clearly tinged with different colors of grandiosity ranging from the plain dopey idea of "American exceptionalism" to the wishful claim that we're about to become "energy independent," to the lame assertion so popular in presidential addresses that "together we can do anything." Speaking of the inaugural, in all the Second-Coming-of-Lincoln-Meets-MLK hoopla of the grand day, with the national mall lined by gigantic flat screen TVs (an Orwellian nightmare), and the heartwarming displays of ethnic diversity, and the stridently inoffensive songs and poem, there was the genial Mr. Obama at the epicenter of the huge ceremony delivering a bouquet of platitudes so stale and trite that it could have been composed in a first-year Harvard Law School ethics skull session at a back table of Wagamama. Despite all the blather about his graying hair, and the wisdom of age, and the supposed music of his rhetoric, I couldn't detect a single idea in Mr. Obama's inaugural address that wasn't either self-evident, or devised to flatter some "identity" bloc, or an imitation of old tropes out of the "Great Speeches" book.

What's obvious to me is what I have been fearing about this country for some time now: that all the disorders of our time would prompt a campaign to defend the status quo at all costs and to sustain the unsustainable. That is really the master wish behind all the political hijinks of the day, especially the pervasive accounting fraud in all high-order money matters. We see the comforts and conveniences of modernity slipping away and we'll do anything to try to hang onto them, including lying to ourselves to such an immersive degree about what is really happening that we suppose we can manufacture a happy counter-reality. That's at the heart of zero interest rate policies, and Federal Reserve manipulation of markets, and statistical misreporting from all the national agencies charged with adding things up. So, the Fed pumps its $90 billion-a-month and the Standard & Poor's index inflates like an old tire while ten thousand more families get added to the food stamp rolls, and the banks sit on enough foreclosed property to fill the state of Indiana, and another 25-year-old college loan debt serf ODs on vodka and Xanax because he finally understands that even bankruptcy will not save him from perpetual penury.

Apparently, there are moments in history when nations just get lost. I maintain that things would go a whole lot better for us if we acknowledge what is actually going on, namely: a major shift of direction into economic contraction after 200-plus thrilling years of expanding energy resources and easy-to-get material riches. It's in the nature of this world that things cycle and pulse, and we have entered a certain phase of the cycle that demands certain responses. We have to make the scale of human activities smaller, finer, simpler, and more rooted to the local particulars of place. We have to let go of WalMart [and Target, the archetypical retailer of the 2010s--P.Z.] and globalism and driving cars incessantly and attempting to manage the affairs of people half a world a way... and we just can't imagine engaging with this endeavor. That is true poverty of imagination.

Will.i.am feat. Britney Spears: "Scream and Shout"

What America Avoided: A Second(-Rate) Lady

I just found this.

Oneohtrix Point Never: "Sleep Dealer" and "Replica"

The End of More (Another Peak Oil Blog)

I just found this blog, The End of More (a.k.a. Your Medieval Future), tonight via Health After Oil.

"Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios"

Reserving Judgment

I reserve judgment on the Manti Te`o story till all the facts have emerged. But, without comment, I will share others' opinions:

Manti Te'O's fake relationship with his imaginary girlfriend sounded deeper, more meaningful and passionate than most real relationships...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) January 17, 2013

====
http://nancynall.com/2013/01/17/a-sad-sad-song/

4.nancy said on January 17, 2013 at 8:15 am

Doesn’t anyone think there’s at least a halfway decent chance he was in on the deception? He was a top-five Heisman candidate, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he thought a little human-interest angle might have put him over the top.

9.nancy said on January 17, 2013 at 9:15 am

I think he’s gay. This is the tragically-dead-girlfriend plot from the gay canon: “I cannot marry, for you see, I have this tragically dead girlfriend. My heart was buried with her. So no, I won’t agree to be fixed up with your sister, for I no longer have the capacity to love. Say, is your brother still in town? We really need to catch up. Maybe have some drinks.”

13.nancy said on January 17, 2013 at 9:43 am

I dunno. A Mormon kid who plays football at a Catholic school might have trouble coming to public terms with his sexuality?

I’m doubling down on the Gay Theory. Although the Heisman should still be at 3-2.

30 January update: I added comments (above) by Nancy Nall in which she thinks Manti was gay. But it turns out that the hoaxer, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, engineered the deception because he was in love with Manti.

1 February update: Various tweets and retweets from one Akolea.

Punahou = Don't believe the hype. #Obama and #MantiTeo

— Akolea (@akolea) January 17, 2013

@cvpayne I don't get it. Only plausible explanation is the dude was on the down low.

— Akolea (@akolea) January 17, 2013

@jaybwood no kidding. He will drop to the 4th round now.

— Akolea (@akolea) January 17, 2013

why couldn't te'o just meet a pretty catholic gi-sorry i just couldn't get through that without laughing

— TRAPBOY (@BadNewsRapDudes) January 17, 2013

advice to te'o: go on oprah, confess you made up lennay kekua, get a hug from oprah, and then watch her give away 50 new cars

— TRAPBOY (@BadNewsRapDudes) January 17, 2013

Hey Manti, good luck in the 4th round draft. Do yourself a favor and don't have a news crew follow you on draft day. #nohomo

— Akolea (@akolea) January 17, 2013

Doonesbury, a day late and a dollar short.

The Best Films of 2012

Some of the best things about Louis Proyect's blog are his reviews and lists of movies, many of which receive no mainstream attention.

Here is his list of the best movies of 2012. And not a mention of Zero Dark Thirty.

But Armond White does name Zero Dark Thirty, as markedly inferior not only to the French movie Unforgivable but also to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and Taken 2 in his annual "Better Than" list.

Kunstler Goes to the Movies

Neither movie really captures my interest.--P.Z.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/01/going-to-the-movies.html

Going To the Movies
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 14, 2013 9:26 AM


I don't go to the movies much anymore, alas, because the nearest mall cineplex -- owned by a company named Regal that runs the place like a self-storage facility -- is a dump with broken seats and teenage employees who forget to turn out the lights when the movie starts. But the weekend weather here was sloppy, and this is the movie awards season, and I wanted to get an idea of what Hollywood thinks America is about these days, so I hauled my carcass over to see Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, in that order.

Years ago I rather admired Tarantino's Pulp Fiction for its rococo storytelling method and comic expansiveness. The sheer volume of gore and mayhem strained my suspension of disbelief, but I was charmed by the audacity -- for instance the scene where a character played by Quentin himself repeats to the two hit men with a dead body that he's not in the business of "dead n----r [dashes mine--P.Z.] storage," which was in there, I'm sure, just to rub a lot of sanctimonious minds the wrong way.

Django Unchained is something else: perhaps the most incoherent movie ever made, but in a way that nicely represents the culture that it comes out of. For the uninitiated, the movie tells the tale of a slave named Django ("the D is silent," actor Jamie Foxx informs another character) rescued from a slave coffle by a German bounty hunter named Schultz posing as an itinerant dentist. Together they ride forth to slaughter white people involved in the slavery business to 1) make a lot of money off bounties, 2) free Django's captive wife Broomhilda*, and 3) enjoy many acts of bloody revenge.

What you notice right away is that the filmmaker has no sense of American history or geography. One moment you're in the Sonoran Desert, the next moment the Montana Rockies. Huh? Of course the line on Tarantino by film savants is that his weltanschauung is a gleeful composition of movie history pastiche. That is, his ideas come only from other movies (or television), not from the so-called real world and the record of goings-on there. So in this case they are derived from previous movies made by earlier auteurs who got the details wrong about mid-19th century life. That may be so, but the difference is that the earlier movie directors, however mis-educated or befuddled by convention, might have cared about the milieu they attempted to represent. Tarantino is content to be wildly wrong about just about everything. Or rather, the details don't matter as long as the fantasy satisfies portions of the brain where ideas are not processed.

What interests me about all this is how perfectly Tarantino's mental universe reflects the current situation in our nation, in particular the infantile disregard for the facts of life, the self-referential inanity of our culture, and the complete absence of authenticity in anything. What disturbed me about the movie was the sense that Tarantino has set the table for race war, like a jolly arsonist playing with matches and gasoline in a foreclosed house. He won a Golden Globe award for directing last night.

Zero Dark Thirty tells the tale of a CIA unit based in Pakistan and its laborious efforts to track down Osama bin Laden, perpetrator of the 9/11 airplane attacks on the USA and other misdeeds. It focuses on the doings of a female American agent, uncelebrated in the annals of this long, strange "War on Terror," who pored over the minutiae of cell phone records for a decade before locating the messenger who led CIA watchers to bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, where Navy SEALs finally sent him to his eternal reward of feasts and virgins.

The movie, directed by Kathryn Bigalow[sic], is a bloodless recounting of some very grim and bloody business from recent history. The controversy around it comes from the extensive scenes of "extreme interrogation" carried out by American officials against captured jihadists in "dark" locations. Critics have objected to the movie's lack of a moral position about these brutal activities. Was it right? Was it wrong? The movie simply asserts that it happened that way. Some politicians have objected as to whether the depiction of all these matters is correct in the first place. Nor is the killing of bin Laden treated as an occasion for fist-pumping histrionics. If anything, the event leaves you with a hollow feeling and a bad taste for the time we live in. I admired especially - for the first time in many a movie - the absence of techno-triumphalism involving computers.

The contrast between the two movies is extremely interesting to me: Tarantino the populist, shall we say, reveling in a splatter-film Americana with barely a tenuous connection to reality, either historical, cultural, or emotional; and the assiduous Bigalow [sic] laying out the very serious business of capable adults engaging with a world that consistently terrifies and disappoints. Kathryn Bigalow didn't win an award for directing at the Golden Globes.

==
*Tarantino was most likely referring to the Broom-Hilda comic strip.--P.Z.

France Goes Into Mali

The media spews out tons of jibber-jabber but nothing about France getting involved in Mali. Pan African News has good coverage.

The Wikipedia article on the Northern Mali conflict ishere.

The Oscars

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning. I have to look them over, but for now, I'll say, go back to nominating five, not ten movies, for Best Picture. And, I hope the Academy doesn't go the predictable route and award Lincoln everything. Mix it up. Maybe Hugh Jackman or Bradley Cooper for Best Actor.

Zero Dark Thirty is Truly Less Than Zero

The new holier-than-thou Oscar ads for Zero Dark Thirty. Angels sing while: "A lot of my friends died trying to do this," Maya cries. Ugh...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) January 8, 2013

Happy Birthday to Me

See
my post from four years ago.

http://poppa-zao.blogspot.com/2009/01/happy-birthday-to-me.html

Black Stone Cherry

Were it not for a mention on NancyNall.com, I doubt I would have ever heard of this song.

Kunstler: Some Sunny Day

Some Sunny Day
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 6, 2013 9:44 PM

The story behind the "fiscal cliff" melodrama and the much-memed handwringing about the "good-for-nothing congress" is probably not quite what it appears -- a set of problems that will eventually be overcome by "better leadership" armed with "solutions." The story is really about the permanent disabling of government at this scale and at this level of complexity. In other words, the federal government will never solve its obvious problems of mismanagement and bankruptcy and is now only in business to pretend that it can discharge its obligations (while employees enjoy the perqs). It's just another form of show business.

The same can be said of most of the state governments, too, of course, except that they have a lower capacity to pretend they can take care of anything. They can and will go bankrupt, and then they'll go begging to the federal government to bail them out, which the federal government will pretend to do with pretend money. By then, though, the practical arrangements of daily life would probably be so askew that politics would take a new, darker, and more extreme turn --among other things, in the direction of secession and breakup.

The wonder of it all is that there hasn't been civil disorder yet. When I go into the supermarket, I marvel at the price of things: a single onion for a dollar, four bucks for a jar of jam, five bucks for a box of Cheerios, four bucks for a wedge of cheese. Is everybody except Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Mark Zuckerberg living on store-brand macaroni and ketchup? It's hard to measure the desperation of households in this culture of rugged individualism. At social gatherings friends rarely tell you that they are two months behind in their mortgage payment and maxed out on their credit cards. And that's the supposed middle class, at least the remnants of it. I can't tell you what the tattoo-and-falling-down-pants crowd talks about in the parking lot outside the 7-Eleven store. Perhaps they swap meth recipes.

Civil disorder would at least mean something, a consensus of dissatisfaction about how life is lived. Instead, we only get mad outbursts of tragic meaninglessness: the slaughter of innocent children in school, or movie theater patrons mowed down by a lone maniac during the coming attractions. Life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde said, and these days television is our art. Hence the United States is now equal parts Jersey Shore, Buck Wild, the Kardashians, and Honey Boo Boo. That's not really a lot to work with in terms of social capital, especially where radical politics might be called for.

Does anybody now breathing even remember radical politics? Whether you liked them or not -- and I was not crazy about the whole "revolution" of the late 1960s, which I lived through -- it at least represented a level of seriousness that is now absolutely and starkly absent today, especially in young people. Who, in the West, besides Julian Assange, has stuck his neck out in the past ten years? And please don't tell me Ron Paul, who had ample opportunity in congressional hearings over the years to really call out the banksters and their government wankster errand boys, and all he ever did was nip around their trouser legs.

So I stick to the point I made in The Long Emergency and again in Too Much Magic: expect America's national and state governments to only become more ineffectual and impotent. They will never recover from the insults inflicted on themselves. Events are in the drivers seat, including things unseen, and the people pretending to be in charge have arranged things into such a state of fragility that accidents are sure to happen, especially involving the basic structures of money. In case you don't know it yet, you're on your own now. Put whatever energy you can muster into finding a community to be a part of.

Meanwhile, reality stands by with mandates of its own. Do people like Barack Obama and John Boehner think we're going to re-start another round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That's largely what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the computers. We've already seen what happens with the telephone system: after 30 years of techno-innovation in "communications," it's now impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don't really have the energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.

All the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart, whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until the markets are zombies. The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call "bullish." It's all noise and the madness of crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.

Current TV

Current TV was sold to Al Jazeera, and will be renamed Al Jazeera America. It was on channel 900 for digital cable households in Hilo, but the local cable system, owned by Time Warner, immediately removed it from its lineup.

I'll have more later, but I remember when we got digital cable in 2001. Newsworld International was a Canadian-based news channel with much more international coverage than CNN or Fox News. It disappeared a few years later, replaced by Current. At the time, Current was a kind of proto-You Tube, with short videos, often made by viewers. Again, I'll expand on this later.

Justin Raimondo's predictions.

Happy New Year!

Once again, I ask everyone to donate to Swans.com, one of the most idiosyncratic web magazines around. It costs $4,000 a year to operate, but it's a thousand dollars short.

I donated recently, but I'll send a little more, and hope you do too.

Swans has been around since 1996. Help it stay around.Wikipedia page on Swans.

Paul Fussell Remembered

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-2012.html?view=Paul_Fussell

Kunstler's New Year's Forecast

Here.

"...Two hundred years of cheap fossil fuel programmed mankind to expect limitless goodies forever on an upward-swinging arc of techno miracles. Now that the cheap fossil fuels have plateaued, with decline clearly in view, the hope remains that all the rackets of modernity can keep going on techno miracles alone.

"Meanwhile, things and events are in revolt, especially the human race's financial operating system, the world's weather, and the angry populations of floundering nations. The Grand Vizier of this blog, that is, Yours Truly, makes no great claims for his crystal ball gazing (Dow at 4,000 - ha!), but he subscribes to the dictums of two wise men from the realm of major league baseball: Satchel Paige, who famously stated, 'Don't look back,' and Yogi Berra, who remarked of a promising rookie, 'His whole future's ahead of him!'"

...

"The bottom line for shale oil is that we're likely to see production fall in the years directly ahead, to the shock and dismay of the 'energy independence' for lunch bunch. 2012 may have been peak shale oil. If the price of oil does go down to a level that seems affordable, it will be because the US economy has been crushed and America is mired in a depression at least as bad as the 1930s, in which case a lot of people will be too broke to even pay for cheaper oil. Hence, the only possibility that America will become energy independent would be a total collapse of the modern technological-industrial economy. The shale oil and gas campaign therefore must be regarded as a desperate gambit by a society in deep trouble engaging in wishing and fantasy to preserve a set of behaviors that can no longer be justified by the circumstances reality presents."

...

"My forecast for China in 2013 is a widening crack in the political façade of the formerly omnipotent ruling party, organized agitation by unemployed factory workers (with government blowback), bullying of their senile neighbor (and historical enemy) Japan, and sullen, peevish behavior toward their ailing trade partners, Europe and especially the USA. Worldwide economic entropy cancels out China's putative advantages in cash reserves, stockpiles of "stuff," and government that can do what it pleases without a loyal opposition tossing sand in its gears."

"Contrary to the wishful thinking of Tom Friedman, globalism is winding down. The great contraction leads back to a regional and local reorganization of activity in all nations. The world becomes a bigger place again with more space between the players and a larger array of players as big nations break up into autonomous states. This is really a new phase of history, though it is only just beginning in 2013."

Donate to Swans.com!

Swans.com is one of the most interesting and deserving web magazines around. Its budget is meager compared to those of CounterPunch and Antiwar, both also worthy, but Swans is far less known, hence it has a more difficult time raising funds. As they say, money makes money; Swans can't even afford to hold a lucrative cruise like The Nation or National Review.

"Another Day in Paradise"

Playing the Race Card Cynically

The tweet refers to Brian Schatz, who was born on the mainland but came to Hawaii with his family when he was three.

@haina83 that guy was not even #BnR - Born and Raised.Unreal.

— Akolea (@akolea) December 27, 2012

Mock outrage.

Hawaii Gov ignores Senator's dying wish, picks white male to replace minority for Senate... drudge.tw/ZDSBcc

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) December 27, 2012

New Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer

Ron Dermer to replace Michael Oren as Israeli ambassador to the United States.

Christmas Music, Part 12

Christmas Music, Part 11

Christmas Music, Part 10

Christmas Music, Part 9

From:


(I doubt if those were real Marines.)

Kunstler: In the Shadow of Christmas

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/in-the-shadow-of-christmas.html

In the Shadow of Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 24, 2012 9:05 AM

Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you're alive, but the sight of a freeway only reminds you of what it's like to be dead.

By extension, the true condition of the USA is too depressing to think about, and that's largely the reason for our political paralysis. The "fiscal cliff" is only one step on a stairway to a different disposition of things, a world made by hand, in which we will no longer be prisoners of the freeway or hostages of the WalMart corporation, and I'm in favor of hastening the journey to get there rather than waste what remains of our wealth and spirits in futile rear-guard actions to stay where we are. There may be fewer frenzied days of Christmas shopping in that future world, but the company will be better, and the music will include the sound of your own voice.

It's not that hard to imagine where history is taking us, if you accept the fact that it means a very different shape and texture of daily life. For instance: the jobs problem. We seem disappointed that none of our policy dodges -- money-printing, stimulus packages, bailouts, wars -- can bring back the working-stiff paradise of 1965 in which assembly line workers made as much money as tenured college professors and a year at the State U cost $500.

I don't happen to be a political conservative in the standard sense, but the right-wingers have a point when they say there are a lot of idle people out there who can't be supported forever by transfer payments. A lot of positions will be opening up in agriculture, but not in the way it is practiced today. The Agri-biz model of food production is not going to be operating much longer. We're on the verge of a world food crisis that will provoke a complete revolution in farming, from the giant scale to the small and local scale, from industry to husbandry, from automation to loving care. The transition might not be a smooth one, since it entails questions of land ownership that, historically, get settled by political upheavals. But eventually we'll get to that place of social re-set and there will be plenty of work for even the partially able-bodied. Hard to imagine, I know.

The future is quite the opposite of the robotic wet dream currently being sold out of the corporate propaganda mills. It's much more likely that human labor (and human attention!) will be needed in millions of local economic niches, since rebuilding local economies is at the heart of that future. This will be true in the activities that support local agriculture, but also in rebuilding Main Street commercial networks, the physical reconstruction of towns and neighborhoods to replace failed suburbs and failed giant metroplex cities, in transportation, education, and medicine, and in running households that are organized differently than today's familiar McHouses.

Right now the political process is resisting any effort to imagine that future, the aforementioned right-wingers most of all, despite their recognition of the transfer payment trap. More disturbing, though, is the likely apprehension by those in authority that the current arrangement of things is dangerously fragile. They are hostages to their own unwillingness to imagine living differently. So, doing nothing to upset the current system of organized complexity seems like the only safe option.

These implacable forces of history cannot be held back forever and will only move toward greater criticality in 2013. My annual forecast on these questions will come out next week in this space. Meantime, find whatever joy you can in the frantic exertions of Christmas, as practiced today, mostly on the freeway, coming and going to and from the WalMart or Target or TJ Max -- and if you happen to be on the path to living differently tell us what your Christmas is like in the comments roll.

Christmas Music, Part 8

Christmas Music, Part 7

The Pretenders' cover of
"Have Yourself a Merry Christmas", from the album A Very Special Christmas (1987).

No Justice, No Peace, Indeed

The pungent commentary of Mark Ames at NSFWCorp.com on the futility of gun control without social justice.


He is also the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull Press, 2005)

Peace on Earth (1939)

This Christmas is overshadowed by the Newtown massacre, among other violence. So here is a reminder of why we all should strive toward peace on earth. Peace on Earth was way ahead of its time.


Available here: http://archive.org/details/PeaceOnEarth1939

and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfH3MXYF5Xo

Zero Dark Thirty

The most morally dubious, obtuse and overrated movie of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 17, 2012

Christmas Music, Part 6

Everyone is trying to answer the main question about the Newtown massacre, Why? And it's becoming a cacophony. They all have part of the answer, but not the full one.

Hattie's Web has an excellent post on America's gun culture. Check it out.

Questions About the Newtown Massacre

We know the Who, the What, the When, the Where, and the How. The question left to answer is, Why.

Christmas Music, Part 5

Christmas Music, Part 4

Christmas Music, Part 3

Christmas Music, Part 2

Christmas Music

Video Demonstration: Japanese Christmas Cake

Kunstler: Christmas Story

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/christmas-story.html

Peter Sur Leaves the Tribune-Herald

His announcement was reposted at BigIslandChronicle.com.

Peak, What Peak?

Here.

Kunstler: Homeless

  Hawaii Time

Homeless
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 3, 2012 9:14 AM


Even if the so-called economy were "recovering," the people of the USA would be stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future - the nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is no more cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster wheel of futility means.

In fact, the heart of our economic predicament is that the American economy came to be based on the construction of ever more suburban stuff, the financing of which, especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic swindles that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our society in the process. How tragic is that?

The behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that living arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the physical residue of it. It has left the people in a network of alienation, anxiety, and misery that defeats exactly the mentality needed to break free of it. For the truth is we're faced with a massive necessary re-ordering of daily life in this country, and there is no vision or will to get on with job.

Among the tribulations of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection between place and purpose often expressed in the phrase "loss of community," which is a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of individuals living with no sense of purpose -- and by that I mean duties, obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.

Obviously, the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers, employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation, single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards - Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more sheer physical luxury at home than Louis XIV.

Put the single-family house in the context of a suburban monoculture organized to conform relentlessly to the dictates of single use zoning, and you get a recipe for instant (and permanent) social dysfunction. Then, fill that house with electronic diversion devices and a microwave oven and you end up with a very few disconnected humans who rarely share a meal and exist, while "at home," in a narcissistic vapor-realm of canned entertainment, pornography, texting (i.e. melodrama created to fill a void of purposelessness), and the sado-masochistic combats of video games (a substitute for purposeful, virile endeavor), all floating on a virtual river of relentless advertising.

It always interests me to see the emergent purposelessness of the American Dream expressed so vividly in the television sitcoms of that mid-20th century day - the very moment of its emergence. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet seemed to have absolutely nothing to do except sit around the kitchen waiting for somebody else to come in for a cup of coffee. He clearly had nowhere else to go. The ennui of Ozzie Nelson was a source of mirth to busy hipsters who savored the ironies of behavioral kitsch - loving what's horrible for the horror it induces. But it really isn't so funny since it is a portrait of an un-manned man trapped in utter purposeless and reduced to the pathetic existential status of somebody endlessly waiting for nothing. (Cue Samuel Beckett....)

Anyway, that was then and it's all crashing down now in a great galumphing debris-field of bankruptcy, psychosis, regret, obesity, and foreclosure. So what comes next? They say that the millennial generation is the most group-oriented, cooperative bunch to come along in the march of Boomers, Xs, and Ys. How much of this is an hallucination of transient computer connectivity, I don't know. The fact that it is so difficult for them financially to even hope to form a household will surely be a defining factor in the choices they make ahead about how exactly to inhabit the landscape. I think they will make out better in this project than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their careers to the looting of posterity.

I'm quite sure that many will rediscover a sense of purpose in the re-ordering of social life that lies ahead, which includes a return to different household arrangements and probably much more hierarchical social relations. Implicit in the latter is the now-utterly-incorrect-and-taboo notion of someone knowing their place. The catch is: you need to have a place in order to know your place, and therefore know who you are - and in a society full of people for whom place means nothing, there is little chance of acquiring a real identity, other than the sham raiment of the app-supported avatar life that has taken the place of being human.

I had a fugitive thought the other evening walking through my beaten-down small town in the late fall chill. I imagined that instead of the blue tomb-like glow of television emanating from house to house that I could hear the sequential music of parlor pianos, and voices singing to them, and of healthy people coming and going from warm kitchens to fetch firewood, and of groups of people gathered around tables for a meal, and generally of buildings that were truly inhabited, not just storage containers for lives unspent. I grant you it was a fleeting nostalgic fantasy. But isn't nostalgia just a state of being homesick?

Goliath Book Cover

To be released on 9 April 2013.

"Why Did Florida Fire Allen West?"

In light of all his antics it seems obvious, but this article points out yet another reason:

To improve his chances at winning reelection, he chose to leave his Fort Lauderdale-area home and run in a more Republican-friendly district about 100 miles north. Bob Crowder, a well-liked Republican sheriff, challenged him in the primary. When the two crossed paths one day in June, the sheriff extended a hand to the congressman. “No, thanks,” West said, turning away. His refusal to shake hands with a member of his own party made a bad first impression in his adopted district. ...

Murphy won by 1,900 votes. In Martin County, the district’s Republican stronghold, West received 4,800 fewer votes than Mitt Romney, while Murphy outperformed Obama by 3,700 votes, a sign that a significant number of Republicans split their ticket. It didn’t help that in the final weeks of the race, Crowder, West’s spurned GOP rival, endorsed Murphy. West believes he lost because voters accustomed to pandering politicians couldn’t handle his directness. “I just talked the truth. I think that a lot of people maybe are not comfortable hearing the truth.”

Glenn Beck: Artiste Manqué

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York, elaborates. In the embedded video, Beck paints clothes on several nudes: "painting a thong on a print of a Rubens (whom he calls the "butt-crack guy") and adding a sweater and jeans to a Lucian Freud," according to Saltz. Then it goes downhill from there.

Dude is one sick puppy.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Les Inrockuptibles

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists It's still a nuclear age. Read all about it here.

Les Inrockuptibles.com Practice your French and augment your hipness quotient with this music/culture magazine (which I heard about just today).

Stevie Wonder Cancels Gig

Stevie Wonder is the lead performer @the Friends of IDF fundraiser in LA next week. Protest at his Facebook page: facebook.com/StevieWonder #Gaza

— Shirin Sadeghi (@ShirinSadeghi) November 26, 2012

The lyrics to Wonder's anti-apartheid song "It's Wrong" (1985).

==
28 November update: Stevie Wonder cancels gig:

@mikopeled I know another major recording artist who refused despite being offered a huge fee. I wonder if Stevie oversaw negotiations.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 28, 2012

Kunstler: "Modernity Bites"

Modernity Bites
By James Howard Kunstler
on November 26, 2012 9:05 AM


There is surely a correspondence between an exhausted culture and a populace devolved so far into mental dullness that it can't recognize its predicament. We don't seem to get how much the industrial production spree of the past 200 years has just plumb worn us out, not to mention the ecosystem we were designed to dwell in. My general sense of things for at least a decade is that we are closing this chapter of history and heading into something smaller, slower, and simpler, and that we could either go there willingly or get dragged there kicking and screaming by circumstances.

It interests me to reflect that the way things are temporarily is the way people define normality, and think things will always be, so that if you are living in a big city like New York where so much remaining wealth is concentrated, and you are dazzled by the whirr and flash of things, including all the pretty young people drilling into their iPhones, you might expect a longer arc to the moment at hand.

Out here in the provinces it's a different story. The exhaustion is palpable. I dropped into the mall at mid-day on Sunday to take the pulse on the ballyhooed post-Thanksgiving ritual shopping frenzy and the place was like a ghost town. The sparse stream of supposed "consumers" had the dazed, beaten-down look of people pushed beyond the edge of some dark threshold, like displaced persons in a low-grade war zone.

Their behavior seemed ceremonial, though, mere acting-out as opposed to acting. They were not carrying bags with purchases. I saw almost nobody actually shopping, that is, fingering the merchandise, in either the two department stores I passed through or the smaller shops lining the corridors. There were strikingly few clerks in either the big or little retail operations and you got the feeling that these stores were now expected to run on automatic pilot, with a skeleton crew of employees because the margins just aren't there anymore. They are going through the motions of being in business, and when Christmas is over some will not be there anymore. America has had enough, notwithstanding the latest YouTube videos showing crazed mobs fighting over worthless plastic crap at the "Black Friday" WalMart openings elsewhere around the country.

The physical condition of our so-called towns (many of them just "facilities" smeared carelessly over the landscape) is something else. We are not taking care of our property in part because we don't have the money, but also because so much of it is obviously not worth caring about, was not designed and built to be cared for - and anyway, there is the lure of the narcotic flat-screen television within to distract anyone with a fugitive thought of opposing the pervasive entropy of these times. The disgrace of this nation - I mean it quite literally - is now total, from our bodies to everything around us. We are entropy made visible.

Variations on this exhaustion are playing out in other parts of the "advanced" world, Europe and Japan, where all the money-related parts of the modernity machine have gravel in their gears and are grinding into self-destruction. China will get to the same event horizon soon, too, despite the fact that so much of their stuff is brand-new - after all, what use is a set of new super-highways if Brent crude prices remain above $110?

What if we just accept the reality that the industrial spree was a self-limiting adventure and now we have to move on? What do we give up? What do we actually do with our time and effort?

There's a clear trend to give up on the gigantic nation-state, at least in its current corporatist configuration, most recently in Spain with separatists winning this week's election in the northern province of Catalonia. Perhaps greater Spain will now join the defunct entities of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR. There are rumblings of "secession" here in North America now, where a certain moron-inflected cohort favors a replay of the Civil War, largely for sentimental reasons instilled by TV. What Dixieland doesn't seem to grok is the unraveling of its own Sunbelt miracle economy which was, in effect, a suburban development bubble, and which will land them back in a ditch with a sack of turnips like Jeeter Lester's family in Tobacco Road.

Here are some trends we would benefit from getting comfortable with:
Globalism is withering and will end with a whimper (sorry, Tom Friedman). The economy of North America will become much more internally focused in the decades ahead. If you are young, think about getting into the boat business on the continent's magnificent inland waterway system. There will be no more trucking to move stuff around, and at the rate we're going the railroads will never be fixed.
National chain retail will be dying as its economies-of-scale vanish. WalMart and everything like it will be gone. No more Black Friday toy riots. Sorry. If you are young, think about getting into some kind of local business that will play a role in your rebuilt local economic network. There will be plenty of work for you, but not so much new cheap plastic crap to hassle with. Lots of opportunities for the business-minded!

Farming comes back to the center of economic life. Hard to believe, I'm sure, if you live in an iPhone fantasy-land of apps and tweets. Forget all that stupid shit. The electric grid will certainly fail, or at least fail to be reliable enough to matter, in the next couple decades, and the real value in human existence will be using the land to produce a living. Lots of opportunities for young people who like to work outside. Also, some chance of political revolution to expedite changes in land tenure.

Farewell to the auto age and hello again to real communities. Hard to believe, I'm sure, as you read this in traffic on your iPad, but your commuting days are numbered. Indeed the whole car thing comes to a rather stunningly abrupt halt - though we are certainly doing everything possible now to prop it up. The old Herb Stein formulation will apply here: people do what they can until they can't, and then they don't. The implications in this for how we inhabit the landscape going forward are rather huge. Find a nice small town on a waterway surrounded by farmland and get ready to have a life.

In the meantime, as these circumstances roil in the background, you can be sure that the people running things will campaign strenuously to keep the current set of rackets running. The results will be sad and possibly terrifying. Be brave and seek opportunity in these epochal changes. Modernity has nearly put us out of business. Leave the exhausted enterprise behind and be human for while. Enjoy the time-out from techno-progress that is at hand. It will be something to be grateful for.

Say what you like about Obama, but it could have been this guy.

The Many Meanings of Black Friday

Here.

I care more about Bradley Cooper's jazzy, crazy, messy Pat in Silver Linings Playbook than I do Daniel Day Lewis's noble Lincoln perfection.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) November 21, 2012

Pere Ubu: "Stormy Weather" and "Thoughts That Go By Steam"

I've heard of Pere Ubu, but never actually heard its music, until I sought it out tonight. Within a few seconds of listening to "Stormy Weather" I was hooked. Among the things I am thankful for are YouTube, Wikipedia, and this music.

Split Enz: "I Hope I Never"