The George Zimmerman Verdict

Presumably he's talking about the press, maybe those on TV. What are "mid level authoritarian traits" anyway? From what I could see, George Zimmerman had low empathy and high-level authoritarian traits.

@michaelarria is is a profession that seems to attract many with low empathy/mid level authoritarian traits

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 14, 2013

Also, Zimmerman will get his gun back.

This guy tweeted this,

Have to admit, I find the idea of rooting for someone to be convicted to be a bit strange if you have no personal connection to the case.

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) July 14, 2013

leading Max to ask rhetorically, What's the term for one lacking empathy?

Stalley feat. Scarface, "Swangin'"

Nepal: An Article

Nepal in turmoil.

UCC to Divest from Fossil Fuel Companies.

The United Church of Christ votes to divest from fossil fuel companies.

Kunstler: "We Are the Pea"

Kunstler: "We Are the Pea"

Evelyn "Champagne" King: "Hold On to What You've Got"

From Flirt (1988)

Flotsam and Jetsam: "No Place for Disgrace"

Dr. Calculus, "Full of Love"

This song is from the soundtrack of She's Having a Baby (1988). The movie was screened in my senior-year religion/social issues class, along with Kramer vs. Kramer, Father of the Bride (the 1991 remake with Steve Martin), and Mrs. Doubtfire, as examples of family life and problems faced by families. Anyway, when "Full of Love" played during the movie, one of my classmates cracked, "This is cherry music." (It is.) The lyric, Your mind goes yo, has stayed with me all this time, though I remembered it as Your mind says yo.



("Full of Love" is the kind of musical confection that could only be made at this time.)

Darwaza

Robin Thicke, "My Life"

I first heard this over the ending credits of Despicable Me.

Kunstler: Mid-Year Digest

Kunstler's Mid-Year Digest

Mechanical Transmission of Energy: Endless Rope Drives

Editorial Cartoons That Insult One's Intelligence

Ted Rall: "Not Safe for Cartoon Fans With Taste or Brains" Alternative cartoonist Ted Rall's overview of mainstream editorial cartoons that either attack Edward Snowden or conflate the late actor James Gandolfini with his character of Tony Soprano.

When J.D. Salinger died, Koterba (one of the featured cartoonists) drew a cartoon of a boy surrounded by the usual kid gadgets but engrossed in The Catcher in the Rye. It's possible but more likely the youngster was reading The Hunger Games.

Summer Begins

Summer began Friday and I'm still in spring-cleaning mode. Optimistically, we could clean everything up in a few weeks, but realistically, it'll take longer.

Blogger Field Negro Might Join Planned Online Magazine

From The Field Negro blog:

Still, I am sick of just blogging about this kind of carnage in our streets that everyone else is ignoring. This includes black leaders and politricksters who seem to just shrug their collective shoulders like the rest of America.

We all better start coming up with some solutions very soon. You can only build but so many prisons and close so many schools. The chickens will come home one day.

There is plenty of blame to go around: Trifling sperm donors, crooked politicians, the NRA, a lack of jobs, lack of a proper family structure.... I could go on, but the list is too long for this particular post.

But enough about all the problems, we all know what they are.

Someone I respect reached out to me recently and they will be launching a solutions based online magazine soon. I don't want to say too much because it is still in its infant stage. But soon I hope to be involved with that project and writing about solutions and engaging in critical thinking with folks who are trying to come up with solutions as well.

I still love my blog (although the partisan trolls and racists who comment can get a little tiresome at times), so I will continue with TFN for now.

Stay tuned.

Stephens Media Again Ordered to Pay Two Hawaii Tribune-Herald Reporters Who Were Illegally Fired.

U can fool some music critics all of the time MT @RaniaKhalek: Toure cannot contain his excitement about claims that 50 terror plots foiled

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 18, 2013

As Kelso would say, Burn!

Kunstler: "Paths of Folly"

Kunstler, "Paths of Folly"

Articles linked therein:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/business/economy/even-pessimists-feel-optimistic-over-economy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?pagewanted=all

Snowstorm

As I've said, some of the most trenchant criticism of Obamaism comes from the Black Left.

The Snowden affair is revealing all kinds of strange things. Most of the commenters at Nancy Nall, who would've gnashed their teeth if Bush had done this, are taking the matter in stride. David Ehrenstein has taken to casting aspersions on both Snowden and "his poolboy" Glenn Greenwald.

More later.

16 June update: This is a brief listing of various figures and their positions on the NSA revelations. Right now it's blank. It's not a straightforward left-right matter, as one can tell.

Pro-Obama/anti-Snowden:, a.k.a.

Liberal O-pologists homed in on Snowden's personal life, then went after a CNET story. Anything not to engage substance of spying programs.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 17, 2013

Anti-Obama/pro-Snowden:

Pro-Obama/pro-Snowden:

Anti-Obama/anti-Snowden:

Private/Public

Tanner Flake, learn that whatever you post online is not private.

That also goes for all the Twitterheads who verbally attacked a Mexican-American boy (who was a big hit on America's Got Talent, incidentally) for singing the national anthem.

GOP Reps' sons on Twitter: son #1 on Obama "spear chucking" http://t.co/jmN5mJzkZC son #2 goes by "n1ggerkiller" http://t.co/Dbl2r9eYwG

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 14, 2013

Moreover, Tanner (and son of Nevada congressman Joe Heck, and others) are giving Max Blumenthal another chance to gloat (see above).

Reading Joey Heck's tweets (which as of last night are still up and open to the public), I find most of them the typical gripes of a white middle class teenage boy: boring teachers, tough sports practices, etc. The racist and homophobic comments are probably no worse than those one hears in passing. Mainly, I hope Joey and Tanner, et al. shed their ignorance as they mature.

James Ferraro, "Global Lunch"

fxh/ho*



*first time heard and heard of

Driving thru Texas and Louisiana, I turn on the radio and discover right-wing authoritarians have suddenly morphed into civil libertarians.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 6, 2013

To which I'd add, And vice versa? Better late than never?

Honolulu Weekly Ends Publication, Possibly For Good

Honolulu Weekly is folding.

So much to say. I'll point out that the Weekly bought the Hawai`i Island Journal a few years before it closed. And I remember when the Stephens company put out Big Island Weekly to compete with HIJ. Big Island Weekly had some substance when it began, but now....

The Weekly seems to have hit its peak in the early-to late-nineties, with talented writers and cartoonists like Bob Rees, Curt Sanburn, and Bob Pritchett. Borders in Hilo carried the paper for a time, too.

http://bambooridge.com/blog.aspx?bid=441

As Hattie says in the comments, Tiffany Edwards-Hunt publishes the Big Island Chronicle, a spinoff of her blog of the same name. But it's hard. If you like a magazine, newspaper, or blog, especially a small, struggling one, consider a donation.

And again, I'll have more to say later.

Former Weekly writer Chad Blair remembers the paper. He provides details of Honolulu Weekly's acquisition of Hawaii Island Journal in 2005. It was part of a plan to extend the Weekly's reach statewide. Blair doesn't mention it but in December 2006, Stephens issued Big Island Weekly (you know it from its hot pink vending boxes). HIJ was a relaunch of Kau Landing (1992-99), premiering in late 1999 and ending in 2008.

Cliography

I've never heard of cliography before today.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1031461X.2011.640694

Kunstler: Out on a Limb

Kunstler elaborates on his statement that Japan will return to a medieval way of life. (Hattie, I read your comment about Kunstler and inner immigration, and I'll have something soon about Kunstler's general worldview.)

Out On a Limb
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 3, 2013 9:24 AM


There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any vision of history-yet-to-come must be predicated on this principle.

A correspondent of mine objected to the idea I floated a couple of times that Japan would be the first advanced industrial nation to "go medieval." This prompts me to clarify that emphasis should be on the word "first." The re-set to a much lower scale and intensity of human activity is certain for all nations; the only questions are the time-frame and the quality of the journey and those are sure to vary from one group of people to another.

I picked on Japan because their journey seems to have compressed and accelerated in recent years and also because there's a lot to admire in their possible destination if history is any guide: a graceful culture of lower energy and high artistry. The transition between that older culture and the point of industrial take-off was also much sharper for Japan than so-called Western societies. They did not look back on the startling episode of Rome and they didn't experience a thrilling "Renaissance" of rediscovery in its technical achievements -- which eventuated in the Western discovery of a "new world" and all its exploitable resources. The Japanese were pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s, but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them -- and then very consciously barred the door. They even gave up on the guns that the Euro-people had introduced, regarding them as unsportsmanlike. Finally, Commodore Perry from the USA landed in the 1850s, with all the weight of Western technological momentum behind him, and demanded access to trade there and Japan, in effect, surrendered to modernity.

They also thrived on it for a while. For one thing, they had a lot of beautifully-made exotic cultural objects to trade with the west, and their artisan skill level in things like ceramics and metallurgy made the transition to industrial technology of their own easy. In half a century, Japan went from an isolated archipelago of tea ceremonies and silks to building steel battleships and airplanes, and we all know the mischief that led to during the first half of the horrid 20th century: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the bombing of Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Then came Act 2: postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball, and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.

There was one insurmountable problem lurking in the background: Japan did not possess any fossil fuels, oil or methane gas, to run all the equipment of modernity that they had ramped up. That didn't matter so much when imported oil was $11-a-barrel, but it became crucial when the cost quickly rose to $100-a-barrel, as it did in recent years. It also began to matter that Japan's bigger neighbor and age-old rival (and sometimes victim), China, ramped up its own industrial economy which, of course, consumed a healthy portion of what the world oil market put up for sale. By the early 21st century, China was eating Japan's lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.

Then came the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011, and the giant wall of water that slammed, among other things, the multiple nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The Japanese industrial confederation had taken a certain amount of comfort in its ability to keep the electricity going by other means than fossil fuels. Now, all of a sudden, a nuclear dragon was loose upon the land, a veritable Godzilla, Japan's worst nightmare. A year later, all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down. By no coincidence, Japan also found itself wallowing in a trade deficit after decades of enjoying trade surpluses, due to the amount of oil and gas the nation had to import to keep the electricity running.

Japan's energy predicament is expressing itself in a financial crisis, naturally enough, since finance is a set of abstract markers for what is happening in an economy -- and the country's finances are pretty much running amok as its political leaders try desperately to adjust to the new realities of powerdown. They are employing accounting fraud to offset the inescapable failures of capital formation under the circumstances, the same as all the other advanced industrial nations. As a purely financial matter it simply amounts to no longer being able to generate enough new wealth to pay the interest on old credit, or to justify the creation of new credit. Since credit is the lifeblood of industrialism, the sun is setting on that phase of history. Japan finds itself in a dishonorable quandary and in tune with some of its older cultural infrastructure appears to be committing suicide with a sword thrust into the guts of its banking system.

America, in contrast, is driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louise-style. Europe is drinking a poison cup in sumptuous seclusion. China and India will just look like lemming marches into the increasingly vacant sea.

Financial hara-kiri might be the best outcome for Japan -- better, say, than a war with China over some desolate islands -- if Japan were to retreat as rapidly back into a traditional artisan economy as it bailed out of in the 1860s. I realize this is a long-shot and includes many knotty elements not under discussion here, such as population reduction and the fate of Fukushima. Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things don't retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest of us.

At the heart of the matter is this. Industrialism is an entropic project. It accelerates and intensifies entropy, which is to say the drive toward disorder and death. Tradition in human societies is the great moderator of entropy. Of course nothing stays the same forever, but some of us would like to see the human project continue, and to get to place where it can feel comfortable with itself for a while, perhaps even something resembling a new (and completely unfamiliar) golden age, when the people not asleep can be trusted.
===
Update [P.Z.]: Much to consider here. I'll have more on Kunstler's general worldview soon, in particular, his view on gender and why he doesn't put much stock in renewable energy sources ever replacing fossil fuels.

Sauce for the Gander, Sauce for the Goose

NAACP's official magazine defends Obama's drone policy. Because it's Obama's policy? mobile.twitter.com/thecrisismag/s…

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 2, 2013

Some of the most trenchant criticism of the Administration comes from the Black Left (e.g., Adolph Reed, Margaret Kimberley, Glen Ford).

Chris Farren and Amy Holland, "Learn to Love Again"

From the soundtrack of Night of the Comet (1984):

Time After Time

The latest cover of Time (U.S. edition) has the very apt headline "Chicago Bull" (a profile of Rahm Emanuel). The international editions are headlined "Why Gitmo Will Never Close." Interesting what Time thinks will grab American vs. overseas readers.

The Mermaid "Documentary"

Being busy (for reasons I'll divulge soon), I hadn't heard about Animal Planet's mermaid "documentary" until a friend of mine called Monday and left a message about a program she figured I'd be interested in. I returned her call and she said Animal Planet had a show on mermaids and the evidence for their existence. So I tuned in and thought, Hmmm. More later.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/mermaids_aren_t_real_animal_planet_s_fake_documentaries_misrepresent_ocean.html?wpisrc=most_viral

(I wouldn't call the show a mockumentary, because it claims to present facts, although there was a disclaimer. Anyway, I saw a little bit then changed channels.)

Kunstler: "Let's All Go Medieval"

Let's All Go Medieval
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 27, 2013 9:34 AM


That voice! All a'quiver with the dread of self-knowledge that it is confabulating a story, much like the "money" that his Open Market Committee spins out of the increasingly carbonized air. His words fill the vacuum of the collectively blank American mind, where hopes and dreams spin like debris in an Oklahoma twister, only to fall incoherently on a landscape of man-made ruins. If Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke were hooked up to a polygraph machine when he made a public statement -- such as last Wednesday's testimony before congress -- I bet the output graph would look something like a seismic record of the 9.0 Fukushima megathrust, all fretful spikes and dips.

When historians of the future ponder our fate around their campfires, they will marvel that this society invited such a temporizing little nerd to act as its Oracle-in-Chief... that he made periodic visits to sit before the poobahs of the land, and issued prophesies that nobody could really understand -- and that the fate of the people in this land hung on his muttered ambiguities. Let's face it: people need oracles when they don't know what the fuck is going on.

What's going on is as follows: America's central bank is trying to compensate for a floundering economy that will never return to its prior state. The economy is floundering because its scale and mode of operation are no longer consistent with what reality offers in the way of available resources at the right price, especially oil. So, rather than change the scale and mode of operations in this economy -- that is, do things differently -- we try to keep doing things the same by flushing more "money" into the system, as though it were a captive beast receiving nutriment.
One problem with that is that the "money" is no longer money. That is, it's not really an effective store of value, or pricing reference. It remains for the moment a medium of exchange, but the persons exchanging it grow suspicious of what this "money" purports to represent. Does it stand for promises of future repayment? Hmmmm. Those promises are looking sketchy lately, especially since this is an economy that does not generate enough new real wealth to make the interest payments, let alone manage to pay back the principal. Is it a claim on future work? Some are afraid that the future work deliverable will be less than they expect. Whatever else it is, does it find respect in other societies where different money is used?

These questions are making a lot of people nervous these days. Of course, a time will come when all matters concerning this particular incarnation of money will be seen as strictly ceremonial. Ben Bernanke, we will understand, was not stating facts before congress but rather singing a song, or rather chanting in a low, repetitive, tedious way in the primal manner of a frightened person trying to comfort himself with reassuring sound -- that is, prayer. You'd be surprised how well that goes over in a place like congress, which is stuffed with prayerful characters, people who exist in a religious delirium. These are not the people who are nervous, by the way. The nervous tend to be more secular, and inhabit the margins of life where unconventional thinking thrives weedlike at a remove from all the mental toxicity at the center.

These nervous ones are looking ever more closely these days at the distant nation of Japan, where an interesting scenario is playing out: the last days of a giant industrial-technocratic economy. The story there is actually pretty simple if you peel away the quasi-metaphysical bullshit it comes wrapped in these days from astrologasters like John Mauldin and Paul Krugman, viz. Japan has no fossil fuel resources. Zip. You can't run their kind of economy without the stuff. And they can't. Japan is crapping out, as they say in Las Vegas. Tilt! Game over. As this happens, Japan issues a lot of distracting financial noise that involves evermore "creation" of their own "money," and the knock-on effects of that, but it's all just noise. Japan's only good choice is to go medieval, that is, to give up on the rather hopeless 150-year-long project of being an industrial-technocratic modern super-state, and go back to being an island of a beautiful artistic hand-made culture. I call that "going medieval," though you could quibble as to whether that's the best word for it, since I'm not talking about cathedrals or crusades.
One of Japan's other choices is to "go mad-dog," something they actually tried back in the mid-20th century. It didn't work out too well then. The Japanese leadership is making noises about "re-arming," and a nice state of conflict is already simmering between them and their age old rivals-victims next door in China, a country that has lately enjoyed the upper hand in the industrial-techno racket (though it will be faced with the same choices as Japan not too many years hence). Do the Japanese start another world war on their side of the planet? Let's hope not. Let's hope they lay down their robotics and their nuclear reactors gently and go back to making netsuke. Just give it up and do things differently -- after all, that's what all the human beings on the planet have to do now.

For what it's worth, Japan's stock market has tanked a hearty 14 percent in the past five days, if that means anything, and I'm not sure it does considering the aforesaid "noise," but there you have it. Our own stock markets are mercifully closed this holiday, having given American worriers an extra day of anxious reflection on the state of things out there. My own opinion is that we're all going medieval sooner rather than later and the big remaining question is how much of a mess we'll make on the journey to it.

Also, personally, I don't like these manufactured holidays when the landscape is cluttered with morons enjoying motorsports. I'll be working today, and grateful when it blows over.

Pixie Lott, "Mama Do"

Maysa, "Head to the Sky"

Dionne Warwick, "(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls"

Divine Sounds, "What People Do For Money"

Yellow Magic Orchestra

?A YouTube channel devoted to the Japanese group.

David Bowie and Mick Jagger, "Dancing in the Street"

Plaisir de France

Daft Punk

Kunstler: The New Abnormal

Go to the original link to see accompanying images.

By James Howard Kunstler
on May 20, 2013 10:03 AM

The collective state of mind in the USA these days may be even more peculiar than what went on in Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were freely elected to lead the country and reconstructed the battered national psyche into a superman cult that soon beat a path to mass death and ruin. America has its own way of going crazy. We don't goose-step to tragedy; we coalesce into an insane clown posse and stumble into it by pratfall -- juggaloes dancing backwards off the cliff edge.

We've been softened up and made extra-stupid on a 60-year-long diet of TV and kreme-filled donuts. Instead of a "master race," our political fantasies revolve around a master wish - to get something for nothing. Want to feel good about yourself? Smoke some crank. Want to become economically secure? Buy a Powerball ticket or drive to the local casino. Want political esteem? Plug a flag pin into your lapel. Want status? Borrow free money from the Federal Reserve at zero interest and arbitrage it into massive earnings for your primary dealer bank. All these behaviors are the consequence of a culture that elevated advertising to such a high social good, it ended up drowning in its own manufactured bullshit.





A subset of our master wish has been on vivid display in recent months, namely the idea that God has blessed the USA with a limitless supply of new oil that will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. This propaganda from an oil industry desperate for capital investment has been swallowed whole by people in authority who ought to know better, just as that same class of people in Germany of 1934 should have known better about what they were bargaining for in economic well-being with the Nazi agenda. In our case, the propaganda drumbeat is being led by formerly respectable news organizations. The New York Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, Forbes, and The Atlantic Magazine [Note: The Atlantic has changed over the years from a literary to a general magazine focused on "Big Ideas"==P.Z.] are media giants that have lately spread the "good news" that America will soon be 1) "energy independent," 2) the world's leading oil exporter (greater than Saudi Arabia is now!), and the "go-to nation" for cheap manufacturing.

All of these claims are false, by the way. The American way-of-life was designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil, not $90-a-barrel oil, and "new technology" has not changed that. The unfortunate and, to some extent, mendacious memes about the wonders of "new technology" have only snookered the public into a false sense of security about a future that will disappoint them badly and probably provoke an extreme political reaction as the reality of our predicament sweeps through daily life.

Most of the current "endless oil" fantasy revolves around shale oil. Just to get a visual idea of what this amounts to, consider this map. It depicts the two major shale oil production regions of the USA: the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford "play" in Texas. Bakken production is confined almost entirely to four counties in North Dakota (Williams, Mountrail, McKenzie, Dunn). The Eagle Ford region touches perhaps ten Texas counties. Now, realize that the oil fields all over the rest of the USA (including Alaska) are in decline. Here's where the "bonanza" of new oil all comes from:



The oil coming out of these places is high cost and low flow-rate oil. This is exactly the opposite of what US oil production used to be (low cost and high flow-rate) when we were busy building all the freeways, strip malls, housing subdivisions, suburban office parks and all of the other stranded assets that now make up the infrastructure of daily life in this country. Those were the days when you could pound a single pipe vertically 1000 feet down (not much deeper than many home water wells) into the temperate wheatfields of Oklahoma (drive to work in shirtsleeve weather!) and after that modest investment in drilling you could kick back and depend on a great flow rate (5,000 barrels-a-day, not unusual) of sweet light petroleum for years.

Horizontal drilling (often more than 10,000 feet down + many "laterals" an additional 10,000 feet horizontally) and then fracturing "tight" rock for shale oil is not only a way larger capital expense (lots of steel!) but the flow rates per well (82 barrels-a-day average) are laughable compared to the halcyon days of conventional oil -- little better than "stripper" wells. Consider also that shale oil well flow-rates decline greater than 60 percent in the first year (rapidly thereafter, too) and you can see easily that there will be no "kicking back" to run the pump-jacks like cash registers, as in the old days. In fact, the rapid depletion only prompts more frantic drilling and re-drilling to keep the production at its current rate - the "Red Queen Syndrome" ("I'm running as fast as I can to stay where I am"), which means fantastic capital expenditure to keep drilling and fracking more wells (even more steel!). Consider also, that the small "sweet spots" in the shale oil regions were the ones drilled first (in earnest after 2003), for the simple reason that they were the most promising. This was the "low hanging fruit" -- easy to pick. Outside these sweet spots the oil may be too meager or difficult or costly to bother drilling for.

This is a picture of a boomlet that may run a few more years -- if the banking system doesn't implode and the massive stream of capital doesn't quit flowing to the shale counties. The excitement will all be over before 2020, but I suspect that troubles in finance and banking will put the schnitz on the shale gas mania long before that date. What will happen when the American public discovers that they were lied to about yet another important matter? The discovery will coincide with very severe changes in daily life that won't be avoidable. Everyone will be affected. Many will be impoverished and suffer real hardship. That's when the public goes apeshit and starts tearing down the house.

Apart from the issue of sheer economic suffering and all the damage that will ensue, consider that it will be generations before anyone believes the "authorities" again -- though, like the oil age itself, the era of giant national media will probably prove to be a one-shot deal, too. Future generations -- if they are lucky -- may read the news on one-page circulating broadsides, printed laboriously in hand-set type by letterpress. Or maybe they'll be reduced to just parsing out rumors.

The Great Ghastly

I'm dreading the Baz/Leo version of The Great Gatsby tonight since it seems that every generation gets The Great Gatsby movie it deserves...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 14, 2013

Baz Lurhmann's awful "The Great Gatsby" seems like some kind of ghastly Illuminati prank with Leo fighting against it and losing, decimated.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 15, 2013

==
20 May update: According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, The Great Gatsby has a budget of $105 million, and has earned a little over $90 million domestically. What is the point of all this?

American #Morans: Chants of "USA! USA! USA!" erupt outside courtroom after conviction of Jodi Arias nydailynews.com/news/crime/jod…

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 8, 2013

I wouldn't call them "morons" (correct spelling) for chanting "USA", although I'd exclaim something like "Hallelujah!" or "Praise God!"

A Worthy Mini-Screed

A recent comment at NancyNall.com by coozledad, typical of his blitzkrieg prose. On the "neofeudalism" he says the Republicans want, it will/might happen (and not by design) in the Long Emergency that Kunstler has described in his book of the same name, and
detailed in his subsequent World Made by Hand fiction series. But at the same time, much wealth (which exists only on paper and in computers) will vanish. Think of the Great Depression. (Some say it'll just change hands). In other words, a lot of rich people, especially those with most of their money in stocks and other investments, will become poor.


===
38.coozledad said on May 8, 2013 at 12:05 pm

You have to remember the Republicans are essentially frustrated dynasts, and Bill Clinton, while politically indistinguishable from the Republicans, shit all over their plans when he defeated Bush the elder at the polls.

They want a sort of Christo-monarchy so they can mop up the last bits of natural resources and finish centralizing wealth in a neofeudal gambit. They’ve got plenty of willing little monkeys with that fundie mindset, and the ones that aren’t quite that stupid get snookered by the pseudohistories of Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg.
Another distinguishing feature of the authoritarian mind is that reliance on hero figures that most modern cultures seek to discourage through higher education. The weepfest among American rightists(and virtually no one else) over the long overdue death of Margaret Thatcher gives some insight into their reflexive death occultism, and the eternal defensive crouch of the information deficient.
===

The Associates: "13 Feelings"

I found this while browsing on Armond White's Twitter. It's the first time I've heard or heard of The Associates.

Dionne Warwick: "Message to Michael"

"Toure Annoys Me."--Boyce Watkins

and me.

A Belated Acknowledgment of May Day (a.k.a Lei Day)

May Day is observed the world over in various ways. In Hawaii it's known as Lei Day and was celebrated with pageants. I don't know if schools observe it the same way they did when I went to school, but it was a huge deal, particularly in elementary school (e.g., Keaukaha in the early-to-mid-1980s).

Here's an article on a Lei Day pageant held in Hilo a few years ago.

General busyness and an illness in the family have precluded me from actually observing May Day this year (no lei, no wearing an aloha shirt), but I must acknowledge it, and sometime I plan to look for photos of old May Days, and share them.

Proyect on the 2013 New York Indian Film Festival

Here.

@the_real_fly I think Collins wants a parade now.Who The F**k cares! #nohomo

— Akolea (@akolea) April 29, 2013

Kunstler: We Wish

Kunstler: We Wish

More later.

SHARP

I just added the website for SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) to the History section of the list of links.

"Day by Day"

A version of this song was featured on tonight's Simpsons ("Pulpit Friction" [24: 18, 28 April 2013]).

Eat More Kale vs. Chick-fil-A

I just saw this article on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling in favor of Chick-fil-A vs. a Vermont entrepreneur who sells merchandise with the slogan "Eat More Kale." (Chick-fil-A's slogan is "Eat mor chik'n.")

I'll have more later. Until then, see my 29 July post, visit EatMoreKale.com, and don't forget to eat more kale!

A Debate on Same-Sex Marriage

Georgie Fame: "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde"

I've never heard of either the singer or the song until today.

More on Ebert

http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2013/04/10

Update: Do I agree that Ebert liked only middle-of-the-road stuff? Not necessarily. Did Ebert always like Spielberg's movies? And if he did, why couldn't he and Armond White, who were mutually antagonistic, have that in common?

Movie critics don't have the role, so to speak, in the larger culture that they once did. Ebert is the last great mainstream movie critic (at least for now). I liked him, but for sheer erudition and prose style, John Simon is unparalleled. Not that I always agreed with his reviews.

1 May update: Nancy Nall has always loved him.

Kunstler: Aftershocks

Kunstler: Aftershocks

@wideasleepnima @mlake9 As I told @antloewenstein, release hasn't been officially announced, but I will do that soon. Thx for supporting!

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 22, 2013

Richard Heinberg on Twitter

Here is the Twitter of peak oil writer Richard Heinberg.

A recent tweet of his:

nice article from Chris Nelder on why peak oil is still relevant. ow.ly/k2BN7

— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) April 14, 2013

This is the Indiegogo page for his upcoming book Snake Oil: How Big Energy's Misleading Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.

Boratland

What's Chechnya? To most Americans, it's all Boratland.

See this map, for example.

20 April evening update: Bill Maher argues with professor Brian Levin about Islam.



The Chechens are an ancient and distinct people.

Park Avenue Logger

I found this tonight.

Skee-Lo

@skeelo_musik Congrats on the "I Wish" track on the Toyota Rav4 "Wish Granted" Commercial!!!

— MUSTAFA M SHABAZZ (@SUCKERFREERADIO) April 15, 2013

Ron Paul Starts Think Tank

Here.

@robertecrump @mlake9 every frat douche i went to college with wore a white hat like that.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 18, 2013

I found this through Max Blumenthal's Twitter.

One thing for sure. Muslims can't seem to live in peace with anyone. Even each other. FACT.

— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) April 19, 2013

Routledge History Blog

Routledge History Blog

NYRB Founding Editor Robert Silvers

An interview with Robert Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books, which has just had its fiftieth anniversary.

The New Leader was around for eight decades, approaching nine, if one counts its online version.

Boston Marathon Explosion

News broke on TV about 9:15 a.m. Hawaii time. There's already a Wikipedia article on the Boston Marathon explosion and Max Blumenthal, listening to a scanner, has been tweeting updates.

Louis Proyect's Latest

Two recent posts by Louis Proyect reaffirm why I regularly visit his blog. The first, "The Koch Brothers Hedge Their Bets," takes on fracking and more. And the second is a review of the documentaries American Meat and The Revolutionary.

Has Demand for Oil Peaked?

Here.

The return of Mad Men is nigh! For lovers of great TV, tonight is a high holiday because Mad Men is the best show on TV right now.

— Touré (@Toure) April 8, 2013

I've never watched it. But The Carrie Diaries is the most wonderful show of 2013.

A List of British Movies Yet Unreleased on Region 2 DVD

A list from IMDb.com of British movies and TV shows made in 1977 yet to be released on region 2 DVD.

One can get a sense of the time just before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.

Heaven 17: "Fascist Groove Thang"

From their debut album Penthouse and Pavement (1981)

Kunstler Essay at PeakProsperity.com on the End of the Suburban Way of Life

Here.

All In With Chris Hayes: Should It be Moved to Another Timeslot?

This article details the ratings trouble All In and a new CNN show have encountered. All In is opposite ratings juggernaut The O'Reilly Factor. *Should it be moved to another timeslot? Or should it be left where it is and emphasize its difference from the Factor, the way The Rachel Maddow Show, opposite Hannity, differentiates itself from that show? (see below)





It's good to know they're giving All In a chance, the way networks used to give a chance to shows that weren't initially ratings blockbusters.

===
*I found out that Who's the Boss? first aired on 20 September 1984, the same day The Cosby Show premiered. For its first month, Who's the Boss? was broadcast on Thursdays opposite Family Ties (which immediately followed Cosby), and suffered in the ratings. The next month, it was moved to Tuesdays, where it stayed for several years, and the show became one of the top-rated sitcoms of the late `80s.

Have any great journalists come out of a journalism program? Or great writers from an MFA program?

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) April 1, 2013

Max Blumenthal's New Book Goliath Release Date Pushed Back to June

Searching online for reviews of Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath, I found none. The book's Amazon page might explain why. The release date is now 11 June, for whatever reason.

Louis Proyect: "Thoughts on Harper's Magazine and Intellectual Property"

In which he finds Harper's not as relevant as it used to be. He recommends subscribing to n+1 instead.

Proyect mentions, but doesn't include a link to, this interview with former Harper's editor Roger Hodge, in which Hodge points out problems that potentially spell the end of the magazine.

4 April update: I posted a comment to Proyect's blog. I subscribe to Harper's and Bookforum. Will Harper's go defunct before my sub runs out in Nov. 2015? If I didn't subscribe to either magazine, and browsed them at the newsstand, which one would I be more likely to buy? At this point I'd say Bookforum ($4.95), with its many, many book reviews and edgy writing. Harper's ($6.95) is more of a mixed bag. Its "Easy Chair" and "Anti-Economist" columns are a play for the Washington relevance The Atlantic enjoys, and its choice of Readings is more predictable than what I remember from the `90s, when I first began subscribing. Yet the March issue has a lengthy report on the cost of North Dakota's fracking boom, a review of a biography on P.G. Wodehouse and a feature on adult animation coming of age with the fX show Archer. It's this variety of writing, and a certain remove from the buzz-chasing world of opinion magazines, that are among Harper's strengths.

No one magazine can do it all. What Harper's lacks, an n+1 might have. But n+1 lacks what Harper's has. So I read the (relatively) edgy and stodgy together.

The Art of Noise: "Peter Gunn Theme: The Twang Mix"

Food Waste

http://www.wjbf.com/story/21800863/laney-supermarket-gets-evicted#.UViR1FeXQ5I.twitter

Kunstler: "Are You Going to Entropy Faire?"

Here.

An excerpt:

While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.

There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations.

Meanwhile, at the fifth annual BRICS* summit, held in Durban, representatives from the five member nations began negotiations to establish a bank to counter the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

According to the MarketWatch article linked to above:

"Collectively, the five BRICS nations account for 42% of world population, 20% of output, and nearly all of current growth in the global economy."

(*BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Formerly known as BRIC until South Africa joined the bloc in 2010.)

Stuff You Didn't Even Know You Wanted

Cashmends

Roger Ebert's review of Pasolini's The Gospel of St. Matthew (1964), which he saw not long after watching Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004).

Hitting the Stage.com

Reading Ilind.net today, I found out about Hitting the Stage, a website about Hawaii's theater scene. I might add it when I revamp my list of links.

The One-State Paradigm for Israel

Here.

Kunstler: Money Worries (a.k.a. Cyprus Ills)

Kunstler's latest. It would have been better titled "Cyprus Ills"

Money Worries
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 25, 2013 8:20 AM

Of course, everybody should have been worried a lot sooner than last week because the basic operating system of global banking is accounting fraud, and has become that stealthily, insidiously, for about fifteen years now. Nothing is what it appears to be anymore. Compound interest has not really been working since 2008 because the world can't increase its energy production enough to generate the additional surplus wealth needed to cover the aggregate interest due all around the world.

What remains are games of musical chairs, Ponzi schemes, frauds, swindles, stonewalls, ruses, ploys, scams, dodges, bluffs, subterfuges, QE martingales, interventions, rehypothecations, pretenses and other modes of evading or disguising reality. The reality is that there is not enough real wealth to go around, certainly not enough to cover the giant web of obligations that masquerades as "money." So, now whenever somebody or some company or government or entity is called upon to put up or shut up, the danger arises that the whole web will disintegrate, since all the participants are broke. You want "your" money? Wait three days. Make that four days. Check that, let's say next week. How about two months from now? Oh, forget about it.... No wonder folks are spooked.

This is really getting out of hand. That's why the ills of the poor, untoward, tiny crypto-nation of Cyprus have got everyone's knickers in a twist. Cyprus is everybody writ small. Cyprus ran out of pretense. It's banks are toast. It can't take care of itself. It is too poor to be a "modern" economy. It failed trying to be a money laundromat for the brigands of Russia and the dope merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The tourists and retirees may even have to pack up and leave now because there will be no access to ready cash for day-to-day living.

The terms of the latest bailout announced Sunday night are curious. The New York Times reports that, "the deal would scrap the highly controversial idea of a tax on bank deposits, although it would still require forced losses for depositors and bondholders." Say, what? In fact, there is no material difference between the so-called "tax" and the "forced losses." That was just semantics. The word tax had been bandied about two weeks ago when the EU first proposed that the Cyprus government might pass a legislative act skinning its bank depositors. That didn't go down, of course, so now its just an EU mandated haircut on deposits over E-100,000 and bank bondholders. As for the deposits under E-100,000... you're welcome to them, the catch being that the banks aren't open for business... and the EU bailout money will not arrive in Cyprus until May. They are sending it by packet boat from Antwerp and hoping for fair winds.

Cyprus has to become somebody's ward again. Cyprus was either Turkey's or Great Britain's ward for most of the past 400 years. The population is ethnically split about 60 / 40 Greek / Turkish making for chronically uncomfortable governance. The island remains physically divided into two separate and hostile north-south zones. If you look at it on the map, it is nowhere near Greece, but rather tucked right up under Turkey's bosom. It is strategically a naval hub of the Middle East and is occupied both by NATO troops and by two remaining British military bases - a convenience given the ongoing deterioration in Middle East geopolitics, as nation after nation melts down, and threatens to impinge on much of the world's oil supply. My guess is that Turkey will eventually recover administration of Cyprus by dint of sheer geographical proximity. It is said to possess considerable offshore gas, but the politics there are so problematic that the stuff may not be logistically recoverable, especially with the rest of the Middle East in flames.

The current bailout deal with its confiscations and haircuts is the first time in the multi-year melodrama of the wobbling EU that big-shot EU officials had voiced the idea that they had any authority to snatch private property (money) of a member's citizens. So, instantly the notion reverberated around Europe that they could easily do the same thing in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece - the usual broke suspects - if the EU was pushed too hard. And a few nervous nellies stateside began to wonder out loud when the US government might try some confiscational monkey business, such as the much-blogged-about notion of forcing retirees to put all their money in US Treasury instruments.

More to the point perhaps was the additional notion that the money was not there in the first place. Or anywhere. It was not snatchable. The banks were insolvent. They had pissed their meager reserves away on bad paper - like every other financial enterprise around the world - and the collateral was a joke. Depositors in Cyprus banks might indeed lose their money, but the EU would not collect any theoretical plunder either, so the whole bailout exercise was just another empty bluster. Even more to the point was the additional notion that no money in any bank in any sovereign EU member would be plunderable because there is no money in any of them, and the fiasco in Cyprus was leading to the recognition of the utter bankruptcy of the system.

In other words, this charade is far from over. There will be more bank runs. They may or may not take the form of disgruntled depositors physically standing in line along the pleasant blocks of Europe's cities as the street trees burst into lovely spring bud and flower. In the first flush of activity post-Cyprus, a lot of hypothetical cash will probably just end up shifting out of Europe altogether and into the clutches of Jamie Dimon and his fellow miracle workers, primed for grand new acts of rehypothication with the inflow.

The chatter around this crisis has not included any consideration of the dark forces roiling in the alternate universe of rackets known as derivatives -- which should now be primed to detonate whatever remains of financial legitimacy even while governments and central banks rally with new sets of excuses and "ring-fence" strategies for the floundering banks. All the ruling parties this whole world round won't face the fact that absolutely nobody can cover his losses, and the losses just keep mounting with every central bank keystroke. Welcome to the age of phantom money.

Al Jarreau: "One Shot"

Another of tonight's discoveries. This is the B side to the "All or Nothing at All" single (1988), included on the 2012 reissue of Heart's Horizon (1988).

MixedMedications.com

Mixed Medications is a comic strip I just discovered.

A March Miscellany

Last night Nightline marked the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with stories on "tween" girls dressing provocatively, children distracting their parents while driving, Tiger Woods's new girlfriend, and only at program's end, a brief overview of the war, according to the reporter, a mixed bag. There was untold carnage, but did you know there are now 21 million cellular phones in Iraq?

Power-walking with Michele Bachmann.

How Far is Heaven? Jack Schaap, former pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, (The megatacky megachurch building was Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month last August.) was sentenced to twelve years in prison for having sex with a seventeen-year-old parishioner.

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"]