Movie Remakes

Why remake one of the greatest American movies of the 1970s? CARRIE 2013 was the most depressing filmgoing experience I've had this year...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 23, 2013

Not all movie remakes are bad, but generally they are. Paul Fussell wrote: "[A]mong the intelligent the threat of a remake was almost always a cause of sinking spirits as viewers experienced repeated disappointments comparing the 1964 Night Must Fall with the good one of 1937....Despite the obvious folly of trying to remake Modern Times, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, High Noon, or even On the Waterfront or Hud, someone ... is sure to try and then, when the contempt pours in, respond by designating the critics elitist."

This doesn't even cover what I call the "Hollywoodization" of foreign movies. Compare, for example, the 1996 Japanese movie Shall We Dance? about a salaryman who discovers the world of ballroom dance, with the brassy 2004 American version, starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez.

Kunstler: "The Snapback"

Kunstler: "The Snapback"

I'll post the column soon. For now, I'll say that things are going as fast as they always are. They're building a giant gas station in the Safeway parking lot, for example. Everything's bigger and brassier than ever. I'll also say that I refuse to partake in the Christmas hype before it's time. I'll also write on Christmas creep.

22 September update: Here's Kunstler's latest. Coozledad has nothing on him when it comes to Southron-hatred.

The Snapback

Well, at least the poobahs cleared a path to the annual orgy of Christmas, which, along with the S & P 500, have become proxies for the American economy. Lately, the Christmas season starts directly after Halloween, so, the whole fourth quarter of the year becomes a circus of ceremonial distractions. In the background, though, the nation grinds toward anguish, measured in soiled Justin Bieber dolls deposited in the landfills.

Historians who look back on these strange years of suspended consequence will marvel at how this empire of grift kept its wheels turning after its engine died. Being on the downhill slope is often enough to keep anything going. One might think the young people of this land would be seething at the eclipse of their futures, but it seems they have been successfully lobotomized with cell phones — when the endorphin hits lag between text messages, they can watch sitcoms, or porn.

You can be sure there will be a snapback from all this drift and anomie, and when it comes, the snap will be savage. Like the US economy, the Republican Party is dead but hasn’t gotten the news. It killed itself just as the Whigs did in the years before the Civil War, by splitting up into factions — one faction of “know-nothings” preoccupied with scape-goats opposed to a faction of sclerotic parasitical fat-cats too timid and greedy to engage in the emergencies of the day.

The Tea Party faction should change its name to the Cracker Party because it represents the interests of white southerners who are too dumb to know what these emergencies amount to. They are really more comfortable with the supernatural, hence their fondness for religions based on snake-handling, visitations of the dead, and motor sports. Personally, I believe they will eventually contrive to form their own break-away Cracker Republic and attempt to re-enact the Civil War. They will fail, and starve, and find themselves back in an even worse long-term depression than Dixieland experienced from 1860 to 1960, in a de-suburbanized wasteland of bare subsistence farming. Their highest art will be soup-making.

The non-Tea Party Republicans will just shrivel and vanish out of sheer irrelevance. This leaves the Democrats to become the focus of intense ire as they attempt to ‘splain why the nation’s affairs went to shit on their watch. A lot of them will end up being executed and plundered by the new kid on the block, the Savior Party, led by some charismatic character willing to ignore procedural protocols to clear away the debris left by his-or-her predecessors. Alas, the juice will not be there to permit the Savior to really control a territory as large as the continental USA. By juice, I mean money and oil. Thus, the nation enters its new dark age.

Who knows when that will get underway in earnest, though I think the folks who say 2014 are onto something. If you believe in cycles, which I tend to, then it rhymes nicely with 1814 and 1914, two watersheds when one epoch ended and another truly began. 2014 would logically be the year that China tells America to go piss up a rope. The message would be sent on the back of the envelope containing $2.7 trillion in official American debt paper. As Ole Blue Eyes used to say, this could be the start of something big.

Sentient observers of the current scene are clearly frustrated by the remarkable homeostasis that seems to rule the scene, these horse-latitudes of history where the air is still and nothing moves and the mind is exhausted by watchful waiting. Things will get lively, soon enough, so enjoy the holiday quarter of the year which is so soon upon us. Gorge on candy corn. When you recover from that, roast a turkey. Then make a nice figgy pudding. Then pop some bubbly and salute your loved ones. Then gird your loins for the new age of consequence.

Weekend Movies

Pretty astute rundown of this weekend's movies. Benedict Cumberbatch has the kind of name the studio bosses of old would not abide. In other words, they'd say, "Benedict Cumberbatch?! What kind of name is that?! There's something European about you, maybe French? What about--Julian Assange? Yes. From now on, you're Julian Assange!"

Alterman vs. Blumenthal

In The Nation, Eric Alterman panned Goliath, Max Blumenthal's book on Israel, and Max has been tweeting away.

Alterman's gross and vacuous attack of @MaxBlumenthal's 'Goliath' concludes with his idiotic "Alter-Reviews" of pricey culture. Perfect.

— Andrew Bard Epstein (@andEps) October 18, 2013

Some Nation writers are known for their feuds with their colleagues: Alexander Cockburn vs. Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman, and Katha Pollitt; Hitchens vs. Pollitt and Cockburn; Alterman vs. Cockburn, and now Blumenthal. Hitchens even quit the magazine.

NPR's Terri Gross was happy to have @MaxBlumenthal on to criticize Christian Right, but wont talk to him about Israel http://t.co/oYeOQRP0oQ

— Charlotte Silver (@CharESilver) October 17, 2013

And I'll look at Hattie's post about Tea Partiers signing up for Medicare.

Light Yogurt and Anachronisms

Just had a Yoplait Light because I'm a busy woman in 1983.

— Alec Sulkin (@thesulk) September 23, 2013

If he were actually "a busy woman in 1983" he would've more likely had a Tofutti or a Tab, because Yoplait Light had just hit the market around early 1989, as pointed out in this Chicago Tribune article.

Kunstler: "Creepily Close"

"Creepily Close"

Things that can’t go on, the prophet Herb Stein once observed, go on until they can’t. Criticality eventually bushwhacks credulity. The aggregation of rackets that American life has become is rolling over like a great groaning wounded leviathan and the rest of the world is starting to freak out at the spectacle. Instead of a revolution, we’re having a suicide party.

But don’t worry, a revolution would not be far behind. My guess is that it would kick off as generational rather than regional or factional, but it would eventually incorporate all three. A generation already swindled by the college loan racket must be chafing at the bureaucratic nightmare that ObamaCare instantly turned into at its roll-out, with a website that wouldn’t let anyone log in. Isn’t technology wonderful? I wonder when the “magic moment” will come when all those unemployed millennials join a Twitter injunction to just stop paying back their loans. If that particular message went out during this month’s government food fight, it would do more than just get the attention of a few politicians. It would crash the banks and snap the links in every chain of obligation holding the fiasco of globalism together.

So far, the millennials have shown about as much political inclination as so many sowbugs under a rotten log, but it is in the nature of criticality that things change real fast. In any case, the older generations have completely disgraced themselves and it is only a question of how cruelly history will treat them in their unseating. The last time things got this bad, the guys in charge divided into two teams with blue and gray uniforms, rode gallantly onto the first fields of battle thinking it was a kind of rousing military theatrical, only to find themselves in a grinding four-year industrial-scale slaughter in which it was not uncommon for 20,000 young men to get shot to pieces in a single day — one day after another.

Of course, things are a bit different now since we became a nation of overfed clowns dedicated to getting something for nothing, but despite the abject futility of American life in its current incarnation, there is room for plenty of violence and destruction. The sad and peculiar angle of the current struggle is that both sides in government wish heartily to keep all the rackets of daily life going — they just disagree on the distribution method of the vig.

What amuses me at the moment is the behavior of the various financial markets and the cockamamie stories circulating to explain what they are doing in this time of perilous uncertainty. One popular story is called “the energy renaissance.” This is a fairy-tale that pretends that we have enough oil at a cheap enough price to keep driving to WalMart forever. Of course, shale oil wells that cost $12million to drill and produce 80 barrels-a-day for three years before crapping out altogether do not bode well for that outcome, but the wish to believe over-rides the reality. Another laughable story du jour is “the manufacturing renaissance.” This story proposes that the “central corridor” of the USA, from North Dakota to Texas, is about to give China a run for its money in manufacturing. The catch is that any new factory opening up in this scenario will be run on robots — leaving who, exactly, to be the customers paying for what these factories produce? Think about it for five minutes and you will understand that it is just a story calculated to goose up a share price here and there, and only for moment until it is discovered to be just a story. What interests me most is what happens when the stories lose their power to levitate the legitimacy of the people who tell them.

Well, Christine LeGarde, chief of the IMF, tried to read the riot act to the American clownigarchs over the weekend, but they’re not paying attention to her. What has she done for her own country, France, lately anyhow. They’ve got their own set of rackets running over there. The Chinese are getting a little prickly, too, since they are sitting on a few trillion in US promises to pay cash money in the not so distant future. The Chinese are beginning to apprehend that future perhaps never arriving.

In case you haven’t heard: America is “in recovery.” We can play all the games we want with money, or what passes for money these days. And then the moment will come when we can’t. That moment begins to feel creepily close.

Fossil Fuel Euphoria and "Petro Machismo"

We took in our computer for routine maintenance on Friday and picked it up this afternoon, so I've been offline. I'll post Kunstler's latest column as soon as possible, but now I'll link to this article by Michael T. Klare on fossil fuel euphoria and "petro machismo."

Fracking: Disproving Peak Oil or a Symptom of It?

Peter Orszag writes that the fracking boom disproves peak oil.

But what if fracking is really a symptom of peak oil?

The Shutdown and Political Variety

My staunchly rw friend and I were at his brother's place last Thursday and we watched a bit of Rachel Maddow and Hannity. Ann Coulter was a guest on Hannity and my friend gnashed his teeth about her. Up till now he sang her praises, even joking that he'd marry her. But he grumbled about her support for Chris Christie, unaware that she took it back because of his pro-reform stance on immigration. My friend thinks the Republican party should be all Tea Party, never mind that the TP viewpoint is that of a miniscule segment of the people, especially in Hawaii.

I miss the old days of Scoop Jackson Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans. I'd also like to see more parties represented in Congress: Green, Libertarian, Socialist, etc.

U.S. Oil Sands

Clinton Colleague Joins U.S. Oil Sands Board

Fun Boy Three: The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum

On the Racial Wealth Gap, Especially Between Blacks and Whites

I'll post more as I find links.

Kunstler: "Paradigm Blindness"

Kunstler spent a few days in Irvine, CA (a "notably honky and mercantalist" place, in the words of Paul Fussell).

Paradigm Blindness
by James Howard Kunstler

Something is sucking the air out of the humid terrarium that is US politics, making the lizards, tarantulas, and scorpions within hyperventilate. That something is the vacuum of disappearing wealth. All the accounting fraud, statistical mis-reporting, price manipulations, naked-short beat-downs, high-speed arbitrage hijinks, and carry trade rackets can’t conceal the reality that the nation is going broke – at least 99 percent of the nation. The remaining 1 percenters, outside the terrarium, are swimming in a pool of notional wealth that is primed to go down the drain and leave them at the bottom, desiccated little husks of animal matter that the crows will feed on.

The reason nobody seems to know what to do is because they know anything they do will make them look bad, so the only thing to do is nothing, with a sound track of lizard squawks and much darting of forked tongues. Nature is now in charge, not personalities, and nature is now leading a purblind humanity to the place it has to go, which is smaller, simpler, and local. The flailings and squawking of politicians can only avail to make the journey more painful and disorderly, but the march is on.

Leadership in every realm — politics, business, the ivory tower, media — does not grasp that the terms for carrying on the human project have changed. The agenda now is to go medieval, and not in the Pulp Fiction sense, but in our arrangements for daily life. We are being asked by nature to say goodbye gracefully to the hubris known as the current edition of modernity. If we don’t do this gracefully, nature will kick our ass out of it and drag the stragglers along kicking and screaming into the next disposition of things. That is pretty much the true subtext of the struggle in government this season, but it is not being translated at the conscious level into a coherent narrative that the public can understand. The failure of narratives produces a failure of leadership. Failures of leadership lead to failures of action.

I can especially understand this after being in a particular part of the USA for three days last week: Orange County, California, specifically the fiasco known as Irvine. This so-called “city” was once a ranch comprising hundreds of thousands of acres consolidated out of old Spanish land grants by one James Irvine, an Irish immigrant who made a fortune selling groceries and dry goods during the California Gold Rush and parlayed it into real estate — including eventually the nearly 200-square-mile tract of creosote bush and sagebrush forty-odd miles south of nascent Los Angeles. The so-called city named after Mr. Irvine — and still largely controlled by a private real estate development company he founded — prides itself on being rationally planned. By this they mean that all the angles have been figured out for producing massive volumes of exquisitely-tuned suburban sprawl at a nice profit.

One thing this demonstrates is that rational planning is not the same thing as intelligence because the end result on-the-ground is a nightmare of the most extreme car dependency in the nation, arguably even worse than Los Angeles. That it is also a nightmare of crushing uniformity, disconnection, boredom, and ennui probably matters less because the essence of the place’s character is that it has no future. There is absolutely no way that the American people can continue their Happy Motoring frolic for another generation, yet the Irvine Company is still busy slapping together new monocultures of housing pods, strip malls, and all the other usual furnishings with the kind of stupid confidence of people intoxicated on Rotary Club bullshit — which is to say zeal minus consciousness. It is the same frame-of-mind that produces the famous Orange County right wing politics.

Orange County, and places like it, represent a tremendous tragic problem for this country. They were the products of emergent economic forces that humans only pretended to control with their vaunted rational planning. They almost certainly cannot be fixed. They’re too big and the money won’t be there; it’s the essence of our predicament that capital formation is crippled and that situation will only get worse.These places will enter a state of widespread crisis within the next ten years, and possibly much sooner. The people who live there will see their property lose all its value, and then they will have to make choices about where to move to. In the process, they will dig in their heels, cause an immense amount of political mischief, and eventually lose anyway.

The emergent path of going medieval means living in smaller, tighter towns and doing some kind of business, or working some kind of trade, that is based in the economy of the town and its region. Under these conditions, things like the federal government are destined to wither. The dumbshow underway in Washington these days is just a symptom of all that.

Support Athletics? No Thanks.

Support Vulcan Athletics. #UHH #Hilo #Vulcans #Athletics @ University of Hawaii at Hilo http://t.co/ZeBCDtoM0l

— Akolea (@akolea) September 13, 2013

I don't donate to athletic programs because they all have dedicated boosters. But what about the library? Or the humanities department? These and other college departments aren't as flashy so they don't get the big money sports programs do.

Gravity Looks Like a Heavy Movie

GRAVITY is technically brilliant but it's totally boring in just about every other aspect. It has become the most overrated movie of 2013...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 2, 2013

Based on the trailer playing on TV, that's much the vibe I get from this movie. It just doesn't capture my interest. But then I didn't think much of Turbo from its trailer, until I saw the movie and had my expectations exceeded.

Kunstlercast: The Economy as a Waste Engine

Kunstler discusses the economy with Steve Ludlum of the Economic Undertow blog.

I'll try to listen to it later.

The Shutdown

As we were preparing to leave Monday for a short vacation in Waikoloa, the news had variations on a theme, "Countdown to the Shutdown." The shutdown would happen at 6 p.m. Hawaii time (midnight Eastern time). We left Hilo at 4:45 and listened off and on to NPR. By the time we reached our hotel at 6:30 p.m., the government had been closed for thirty minutes.

The next day, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser had coverage of the local effects, for example, the closure of the Volcano National Park.

Kunstler: "Then What?"

We end the month with Kunstler's latest, an overview of things written in his inimitable style. Next month, I plan to gather more information on aviation, climate change, Colorado, and sprawl in Hilo, then write a coherent overview.

Then What?

A theme in my 2005 book, The Long Emergency, was the counter-intuitive idea that the federal government, rather than becoming the omnipotent Big Brother Moloch so many feared, would instead spiral into impotence and become too incompetent and ineffectual to run everybody’s life. Another theme was that the USA was entering a political impasse comparable to the years that preceded the civil war, with many of the same old grudges playing out in disguise. What we’re seeing is an empire that had grown too quickly to even acknowledge it had become an empire, enter, just as quickly, the throes of contraction.

Hence, the great unacknowledged task before the leadership class is managing contraction. The radical Republicans, even in their Jeezus-driven transports of Dixieland retribution and John Bircher paranoia, come a little closer to recognizing the situation than the Democrats with their Leviathan problem — their nanny-state grandiosity. So, those red state radicals are gonna run that ole ‘possum up a gum stump now and see what happens.

What will happen is whole lot of uncertainty that will further undermine a faith-based economic system lurching on the fumes of legitimacy, especially where money and banking are concerned. The trouble with this kind of brinksmanship is that it is bound to produce unanticipated consequences. When the Carolina secessionists bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, they didn’t have in mind the carnage-to-come of Spotsylvania and Chancellorsville. Similarly, the genteel spectators who rode carriages out of Washington to observe the doings at Bull Run as if it were the NFL season opener. In short, neither the Union or the Confederacy had a clue that they were entering upon the world’s first extravaganza of industrial mass slaughter. So, one wonders if their descendents today realize that are toying with the financial suicide of an advanced technocratic society.

The merits of the case for or against Obamacare are almost impossible for even well-informed and educated citizens to parse. You start with a law roughly 2,000 pages long, cobbled together largely by lobbyists for the insurance and medical industries, both of them hideous rackets, and move to a labyrinth of 50 different state’s systems for administering the darn thing, and then consider the supposed beneficiaries, namely young people so burdened by college loans in an economy that only offers minimum wage scut-jobs that, from one day to the next, they probably don’t know whether to shit or go blind. They don’t even have the scratch to pay the opt-out tax, let alone purchase an insurance policy.

Beyond that kind of uncertainty is the certainty that a whole lot of things are primed to shake loose. One that deserves the anxiety it is generating is the question of US debt, which translates directly into the question of US currency, i.e., the fate of the dollar. Does the legislative branch want to play games with the only thing that supports the market for US Treasury paper — the dollar’s proxy — which is the generally-held notion that the full faith and credit of the nation stands behind promises to pay? 200 measly basis points in the ten-year note is all that stands between the pretense of economic stability and some pretty serious chaos in the government/banking matrix. The one-two punch of the continuing resolution for appropriations and the imminent debt ceiling crunch may rip the fabric of our constructed financial reality and open a black hole into which the wealth of nations disappears forever.

Some observers think a government shutdown would be salutary, the beginning of a wholesale house-cleaning of federal agencies and pain-in-the-ass public employees who get paid too much, enjoy too many benefits, and work strenuously to impede honest enterprise. There may be something to that. But the current actions in congress are more likely to produce a kind of epileptic seizure of all economic activity, public and private.

If congress is really hot to de-fund something, I suggest they start with defunding suburban sprawl, which enjoys more direct government subsidy than even the medical racket. I bet that would not go over so well in the big red Nascar states of Dixie, where driving in a car to do anything has been more-or-less mandatory for decades. This is the kind behavior that is truly killing American civilization, but it’s the last thing we will pay attention to.

Update to Post on George Zimmerman in Hiding

http://www.today.com/news/george-zimmermans-wife-i-have-doubts-i-also-believe-evidence-8C11257699

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/eric-holthaus-twitter_n_4005003.html

A Review of Goliath

A review of Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which will finally be released 1 October.

Update to "All Aboard the MLK Bandwagon"

I added a link to my post "All Aboard the MLK Bandwagon."

Carmen McRae: "Burst in With the Dawn"

George Zimmerman in Hiding

George Zimmerman in Hiding: Trying to Avoid Being Served Divorce Papers.

(26 September update) He was pulled over in August for excessively-tinted car windows.

Shellie Zimmerman Speaks to the Today Show.

Kunstler: "Taper (Not)"

In his weekly column, Kunstler alternates between peak oil and its effects on society and the precarious situation of the economy and financial system.--P.Z.

Taper (Not)
Remember, the doleful, lonesome figure of Ben Bernanke stands (or slumps) at the top of a pyramid of obfuscation so high, broad, and massive that all the debt serfs in a history of the future will not avail to reconstruct its hypothecated contours. When the world picks itself up from the smoldering ruins of the financial landscape currently being rigged to blow, nobody will be able to explain how the modern world collateralized itself out of existence.

What a set up. Bernanke gave the financial markets five months of the heebie-jeebies punctuated by a big fake-out and so the consensus finally perceives a giant green-light for resumed asset inflation. That’s why I like standing outside the consensus. Assets can inflate all they like on their way to the biggest train wreck of organized money ever recorded. Dow 20,000 is accelerating on a parallel track with the complete loss of confidence in paper representations of wealth. Enjoy your Facebook shares, or at least the digital ghost of them on your iPhone screen, while they’re fluorescing.

It was perfectly obvious all spring and summer that the Federal Reserve could not neck down its purchases of US Treasury debt paper and bundled mortgage swindles without causing the equivalent of the 1942 Boston Coconut Grove nightclub fire in the financial markets. But not pretending to contemplate the “taper” would have entailed an admission that the so-called economy was on artificial life support juice. That would have suited neither the politicians and their political economists, who clung to their “recovery” story, nor the 1 percenters who were the direct beneficiaries of the wealth transfer activated by the life support liquidity juice injections.

The net result is a return to the grand theme of pretend, with an increasingly dark outlook for the consequences, which will be the repudiation of what is officially called “money.” Meanwhile, congress now convenes to debate the question of extend, which can only add a frisson to the spectacle of pretend. The problem with these best laid plans of mouse-like creatures is that shit happens.

Those distant rumbles of thunder are the audible traces of the destruction at the margins, certainly out of earshot of those at the very center. The margins is the place where nations, towns, institutions, families, and individual lives are ground down into a fine entropic powder of broken dreams. From the standpoint of the blogger-journalist, the story has been about how the destruction travels from the margins to the center. The center has been able to protect itself so far with one swindle after another, at the expense of the poor schnooks at the margins. The swindles are so abstruse and impenetrable that the schnooks don’t have a clue what is hitting them. At least so far.

Faced with such a quandary, the schnooks may opt for political suicide, which is apparently the program of both major parties. Out of this sort of tragic muddle, Great Men emerge to galvanize the potential energy of the swindled multitudes. Recent models of this archetype are not so reassuring: Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ayatollah Khomeini. What history has in store for the USA is probably something that could only be cooked up on TV. One can hope that it turns out to be comedy, not something breaking bad.

Of course the inverse of the idiotic American exceptionalism story lies beyond the fact that were not as special as we think. There is a whole vast world beyond the podium of Ben Bernanke and in that big world other mouse-like creatures are working sedulously to take advantage of our exceptional fecklessness. Distracted by everything from same-sex marriage to Monday Night Football, we don’t pay attention to the attrition. They’ve got our gold now, and despite the theory that gold has no more intrinsic value than $100 Federal Reserve notes, you can bet that before this is all over it will buy whatever food and fuel remains in the ground.

The Tea Party Goes Way Back

"We Shall Overwhelm", an article from Prospect.org on the deep roots of the Tea Party.

Colorado Flooding and Hilo Sprawl: A Potential Essay

This morning I left a comment at Hattie's post about the Colorado flood and the words just flowed. I may develop the comment into a short essay here. The popular image of global warming, of melting ice caps and the subsequent flooding of coastal areas, enables complacency among those who live inland, especially in mountainous regions like Colorado. But the effects of climate change are not yet fully known, and some, like more severe snowstorms, appear to discredit its very existence in the eyes of deniers and skeptics.

I noted the inland movement of Hilo, not as a precaution against rising sea levels, but as a result of two tsunamis that destroyed swaths of coastal Hilo. Post-1960 development in particular occurred after the advent of mass motoring. Wide, multilane highways and vast parking lots discourage walking.

In my comment, I mentioned this piece by Alain de Botton, on a world without planes. My plan is to research the effect of mass aviation on the environment.

And here's a not-too-recent but still informative article on aviation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Wikipedia has an excellent
article on the environmental impact of aviation.

20 September update: There's much to write about. I'll post some more on Hilo's development and its tendency toward sprawl, and maybe on the Hilo airport, and what happened when the Kona International Airport opened. This will all take a while, but it should clarify the recent history of Hilo. For one thing, why is the Waiakea Villas all run down, when in the early eighties, it was thriving? Did you know Hilo had direct flights from the mainland? This post is basically writing things down, before I organize it into something coherent.

29 September update: Statistics on airplane emissions.

Peak Oil: False Projection or Impending Reality?

"Peak Oil: False Projection or Impending Reality?"

Don't Know Much About History

David Barton Takes a Lickin' and Keeps on Tickin'.

The people who believe in him will keep believing in him no matter how discredited he is among academic historians. If I found his books at the library book sale, where one can load up a box for a few dollars, I might buy them (as I have Tom DeLay's autobiography). Otherwise, no.

Popular American history books tend to focus on the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers, and the Civil War. These periods are not my interest, partly because they follow the same basic narrative or try to set an agenda, as Barton's books do. I have an abiding interest in German history, particularly the Wilhelmine and Nazi eras; American history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the recent scholarship on the `60s, `70s, and `80s is fascinating); and Asian history (Japan and India).

Kunstler: Commotion

Now that Lawrence Summers has removed himself from consideration as Federal Reserve chairman, President Obama is free to launch him into Syria as the first human rehypothecation weapon of mass destruction, where he can sow enough confusion between Assad’s Alawites and the Qaeda opposition to collateralize both factions into contingent convertible capital instruments buried in the back pages of Goldman Sachs’s balance sheet so that the world will never hear of them again — and then the Toll Brothers can be brought in to develop Syria into a casino / assisted living complex that will bring hundreds of good jobs to US contractors in the region.

No doubt the stock markets will fly like eagles today. Nobody knew what monkeyshines Mr. Summers might have pulled over at the Fed and it was making investors nervous, as well as the big banks who employed Mr. Summers occasionally as some kind of policy bagman. So a big sigh of relief blew over the Northeast Region of the nation like the gusts of autumn air that swept away a fetid hump of stale, wet tropical weather that ruined all the ladies’ party hair in the Hamptons this month.

Now that Syria has been disposed of — that is, indefinitely consigned to failed state purgatory — the world can focus its remaining attention on the almighty taper. I’m with those who think we’ll get a taper test. That is, the Fed will cut back ten or fifteen percent on its treasury bond purchases to see what happens. What happens is perfectly predictable: interest rates shoot above 3 percent on the ten-year and holders of US paper all the world round fling them away like bales of smallpox blankets and… Houston, we’ve got a problem. After a month (or less) of havoc in the bond market, and the housing market, Mr. Bernanke will issue an advisory saying (in more words than these) “just kidding.” Then it will be back to business as usual, which is to say QE Forever, which might as well be saying “game over.”

One must feel for poor Mr. Bernanke. He’s tried to run a long-distance foot-race against reality and now it’s breathing down his neck near finish line. The idea was to pump enough artificial “money” into the economy to give it the appearance of motion, but all he accomplished in the words of my recent podcast guest, Eric Zencey, was a commotion of money, and the commotion was pretty much limited to a few blocks of lower Manhattan, two ribbons of real estate running up the East Side and Central Park West, and a subsidiary disturbance out on the South Fork of Long Island. Everybody else in the country was left to stew in a tattoo-and-malt-liquor torpor at the SNAP Card application office.

The Fed can only pretend to try to get out of this self-created hell-hole. The stock market is a proxy for the economy and a handful of giant banks are proxies for the American public, and all they’ve really got going is a hideous high-frequency churn of trades in conjectural debentures that pretend to represent something hidden in the caboose of a choo-choo train of wished-for value — and hardly anyone in the nation, including those with multiple graduate degrees in abstruse crypto-sciences, can even pretend to understand it all.

When reality crosses the finish line ahead of poor, exhausted Mr. Bernanke, havoc must ensue. All the artificial props fall away and the so-called American economy is revealed for what it is: a surreal landscape of ruin with nothing left but salvage value. Very few people will get a living off of the salvage operations, and there will be fights and skirmishes everywhere by one gang or another for control of the pickings. The utility of money itself may be bygone, along with the legitimacy of anyone or anything claiming institutional authority. This is what comes of all attempts to get something for nothing.

By the way, for those of you still watching the charts, notice that gold and silver may bob up and down week-by-week, but the price of oil remains stubbornly above $105-a-barrel no matter what happens. That is the only number you need to know to predict the fate of industrial economies. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.]

George Zimmerman an Incident Waiting to Happen

I have a staunchly rw friend who thinks the Zimmerman verdict was the end of the story. Of course he supported the verdict. But this is not the end of the story. In fact, the story won't end well.

George Zimmerman an Incident Waiting to Happen.

18 September update: Field Negro highlights the medical examiner's allegation that Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in the back, which would mean Trayvon wasn't even struggling with him.

Resisting Education Privatization in Mexico

For Hattie:

Mexican teachers occupy buildings, block airport traffic to protest radical education privatization scheme: http://t.co/3K3uebZSBd

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 14, 2013

Oil Cornucopians Rejoice

Oil said to be worth $1.5 trillion found in the Gulf of Mexico.

The catch is that most of the oil is mixed with sand, so it will take more effort to process it.

Meanwhile, the oil industry in Libya has ground to a halt thanks to striking workers.

http://ddc.typepad.com/025431/2013/09/march-on-washington-for-jobs-and-freedom-1963-washington-dc.html

Kunstler: Gassy Politics

In which he replies to the elite's oil cornucopianism and general Panglossism.

First: Paul Sabin’s stupid op-ed in The New York Times Saturday shows how intellectually bankrupt and pusillanimous the “newspaper of record” has become, in step with the depraved and decadent empire whose record-keeper it supposedly pretends to be. Sabin is flame-keeper for the theories of the late cornucopian demi-god Julian Simon, a business school professor whose great idea stokes the wishful thinking that has overtaken a class of American leaders who ought to know better, and spread through the public they serve like a fungal infection of the brain. The core of Julian Simon’s great idea is that material resources don’t matter; human ingenuity will overcome all limits.

Maybe that’s a temporarily comforting thought for leaders in business, media, and politics, who don’t want to face the realities of peak resources and climate change, but it guarantees a harsher economic outcome since the wishful public will do nothing to prepare for the very different terms of daily living that are already shoving them into hardship and desperation.

Julian Simon, who died in 1998, is best remembered now for a bet he made in 1980 with biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. The bet was supposed to determine whether the converging difficulties of our time should be taken seriously. The two men picked a menu of commodity metals and bet whether the price would rise or fall by 1990. Ehrlich bet that scarcity would drive the price up; Simon bet that they would go down. Simon won the bet only for temporary circumstantial reasons, namely that the last great discoveries of cheap, easy-to-get oil ramped into full production by the mid-1980s and pushed a final orgy of global industrial development until 2008, when things really started falling apart. By then, Julian Simon has been dead for a decade.

Simon’s idea lives on in the wishful thinking around shale oil and gas, which have led the American public and their leaders to believe that we’re in an “energy renaissance” that will lead to “energy independence.” Just the other day, Senator John McCain made the inexcusably dumb remark that the US is now a net oil exporter. This is a man who ran for president five years ago, talking completely out of his ass.

Now oil is well over $100 a barrel, a price that the American economy, as currently configured, cannot endure. That price is crushing the kind of activity we have depended on lately: the house-building and lending rackets associated with the creation of suburban sprawl. $100 oil is especially corrosive to the problems of capital formation, because without more racket-driven “growth,” we can neither generate new credit, nor pay the interest on old credit. We’ve used accounting fraud in banking and government to cover up this failed equation. But it has only led to greater deformities in markets and a general fiasco in the management of money all around the world, and it is spinning out of control right now. If these conditions were to crash the global economy and the price of everything fell in a deflationary depression, with oil back under $60 a barrel — then it would not pay enough to frack the shale rock, or drill miles under the ocean, or do any of the very expensive operations of what’s called unconventional oil recovery.

For The New York Times to keep hauling out the sorry-ass figure of Julian Simon to “prove” a specious and dangerous point surely shows the limits of one thing: intelligence in the media. Because of that and other related failures in the transmission of ideas, this is now a nation that cannot construct a coherent narrative about what is happening to it.

Now, second: Syria. The world has pretty much lined up against President Obama’s proposal to issue a cruise missile spanking to Syria for supposedly gassing its own citizens. Nobody thinks this is a good idea, some for reasons of tactical advantage and some on the idea’s basic merit, or lack of. Mr. Obama pulled his punch over a week ago by standing down and taking the issue to congress for approval. I’m convinced he did that because he would have been impeached for launching an overt act of war — despite similar actions by his recent predecessors. The proposed spanking was a bad idea from the start. There was no visible threat to the national interest from Syria’s bad behavior within its own borders. The gas attack was a terrible act of depravity, but firing missiles into Syria wasn’t going to bring back the dead. It was only going to cause more death. There’s no advantage to the US for supporting either side in the Syrian civil war. The spread or deepening of any kind of disorder in that region will threaten a critical portion of America’s oil imports.

In the background of this, things are becoming unstuck in the seriously ill and constipated realm of international banking. The aforementioned deformities caused by central bank interventions, market manipulations, Too Big To Fail carry-trade rackets, and misreporting of financial data have begun to shred currencies in nations at the margin (India, Brazil, Indonesia) and that illness may prove contagious. The global economy depends on some basic faith that major financial institutions are sound, and that they trade in sound instruments that represent real wealth. That is all being called into question now, and how long will it be before a general paralysis freezes the entire letters-of-credit system that underlies global commerce?

The Syria soap opera has also managed to upstage the imminent mud-wrestling match between congress and the executive branch over the national debt limit and related matters of government spending. These problems appear for now to be completely intractable. If the government overcomes the latest version of this recurring dilemma, it will only be due to generating even more layers of accounting fraud to an already well-papered piñata that is just waiting to be smashed. While this goes on, the American public gets pushed deeper and deeper into a financial abyss, haunted by re-po men, lying bank officers, verminous lawyers, and chiseling hospital administrators.

All this is a recipe for a political explosion. What happens if the US Government starts gassing its own citizens? It happened in 1967. That one only made people cry. Maybe next time, they’ll use a different kind of gas.

George Zimmerman's Wife Shellie Files for Divorce

George Zimmerman's Wife Shellie Files for Divorce.

9 September update: Zimmerman briefly taken into custody after allegedly threatening his estranged wife and her father with a gun. He got his gun back.

2013: A Bad Year for Movies

2013 is undeniably, so far, the worst year ever for American movies.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) September 5, 2013

I don't know if it's the worst year for American movies, but we've had some really lousy ones. The movies I've seen that I like the most: The Heat, Monsters University, and Turbo.

9 September update: We saw Lee Daniels' The Butler yesterday. It's not a perfect movie (I see you, Field Negro) but full of superb performances (Forrest Whittaker, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, Lenny Kravitz, David Oyelewo) and inspired cameos (especially James Marsden as JFK and John Cusack as Nixon). And would you have recognized Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan? The direction is subtle for Daniels, and the music... is that a long-lost Gladys Knight song, or a new one?

"Ghetto Tracker"

"Ghetto tracker" app helps the affluent avoid the poor, draws profit from an endless wellspring of white fear http://t.co/rpdZbyfRiG

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 5, 2013

Update

I'm continuing to update my post "The Story of Trayvon Martin is Not Over" with news of George Zimmerman's misdeeds, most recently speeding.

Thanks to Hattie for linking to Monday's post on Kunstler.

The Beloit College Mindset List

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2017/

Kunstler: "Between a Rock and a Laugh Track"

Kunstler's column is on Syria.

After the British parliament put the kibosh on following the American punishment brigade to Syria, and then NATO, and the UN wrinkled their noses at the project, well, that pretty much left President Obama to twist slowly, slowly in the wind — washed, rinsed, and hung out to dry. It looks like a watershed moment in the USA’s increasingly klutzy career as the world’s hall monitor. International power relations are suddenly in flux. A phase change has occurred causing all that was solid a few days ago to melt into liquid.

The Iranians are having a good laugh, for now. Mr. Assad of Syria responded with a beaming smirk. However, any sentient observer can see this region of the world for what it is, a political demolition derby which, left to its own blundering devices, would blow up the whole arena when the last player sputters to a standstill.

First of all, it seems to me that extremists in the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives have been quietly searching for a pretext to impeach President Obama. Committing an overt act of war without congressional approval would have been a good case, legally, despite the fact that executive branch war-making has been absolutely the rule for decades in Washington. The British parliamentary move against the avid David Cameron pretty much begged the question for American legislators. The foggy part is whether they would actually come back to Washington from the fried dough alleys of their state fairs and mount a “debate” about whether it would be a good or bad thing to whack Syria for gassing more than a thousand of its own citizens.

Lately when America mounts a high moral horse about how other nations behave, we have gone into these places and smashed things up, bringing much more death and destruction than we anticipated. The hope is always that some surgical military operation can correct a political illness, but a cruise missile is not exactly a scalpel and once the patient is blown to pieces it is rather hard to patch up the body politic again. You’re just left, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a lot of bloody fragments fought over by political rats and cockroaches.

Syria is a real crossroads both for America’s policy in the region and for its position on the world stage. The region is in a state of destructive turmoil that is likely to lead to the further fall of regimes and the breakup of states. Many of these states are figment nations anyway, with boundaries drawn in the 20th century by the winners of the two world wars. The discovery of oil from North Africa to Iran and beyond has been catastrophic for everybody in the world, but most vividly for the exploding populations of these mostly desert states, which could not have supported so many people without the artificial support of petro-money. Now, faced with the specter of peak oil production, the whole region is flying apart from the stress of population overshoot, including countries like Syria which never produced much oil itself.

But the drama over the trade in the oil remaining only becomes more intense. For instance, the position of Saudi Arabia, pretending to sit quietly on the sidelines through all this, is curious. There are rumors, unverified, that the gas incident in Syria happened because Saudi Arabia sent canisters of Sarin to the Syrian rebels, who then mishandled them and gassed their own neighborhood. The world’s recent experience with so-called “intel reports” about weapons has made everybody skeptical of claims made by politicians that a particular country poses a danger to others.

Otherwise, there is a whole other strategic realm of concerns around the petro trade and its financing that is totally off the radar screen of the mainstream media. For instance, the sometimes erratic but brilliant blogger Jim Willie describes the larger struggle of Russia, Iran, China, and other interested parties to displace the US dollar dominance in oil trade — in particular a dollar based on increasingly sketchy US Treasury bonds, which has deformed global banking, roiled currencies, and made the settling of international accounts problematical for everybody else in the world. The opposition to the US, and its client / partner Saudi Arabia, the story goes, would replace the dollar with gold-backed oil trade and a logistical work-around based on a growing pipeline system from Iran and beyond, in Asia, to desperate customers in Europe. The implications are a collapse of the dollar (and the US bond market), a wedge between European and American interests, and a dominant partnership of oil-and-gas rich Russia with China — that is, a major power shift from west-to-east.

Who knows how much of this has informed President Obama’s decision process. The stall in the American whack-attack against Syria may itself be a symptom of the swirling new conditions in world finance and power relations. In any case, a great empire — which we have been — can’t afford to make idle threats. The outcome of the Syria melodrama may be that the US has been knocked down a big step in its ability to project power without terrible consequences to itself.

New York's Highest Court to Hear Appeals in Fracking Case

To be decided: Whether towns can ban fracking.

All Aboard the MLK Bandwagon

Richard Land was inspired by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Do tell!

He's the same man who cast aspersions on fellow clergymen Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as "race hustlers" for their protests of the handling of Trayvon Martin's killing. (25 September update: More on Richard Land's controversial, plagiariazed rant, for which he has never apologized.

The MLK Memorial, a slab of stone built w/$1 million donation from weapons manufacturer @BAESystems: http://t.co/sRpUoW6QpX #IHaveADrone

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 28, 2013

I saw part of tonight's Piers Morgan, where Tavis Smiley told the host that Martin Luther King opposed racism, poverty, and militarism. On a day when pundits and politicians both liberal and conservative mouthed platitudes about "the content of their character", etc., he reminded us that in the last five years of his life, MLK lost many friends and gained even more enemies as he stood against the Vietnam War and tried to organize poor people, even planning a Poor People's March.

2 September update: MLK is not around to dispute how people use him and his image to give their causes legitimacy. So we get things such as, MLK: Proud Republican or MLK: Proud Zionist. (Found through Max Blumenthal's Twitter.)

Kunstler: "The Self-Rehypothecation of Ben Bernanke"

Kunstler: "The Self-Rehypothecation of Ben Bernanke"

Also, I saw a trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street.

One Day at a Time

I didn't get a whole lot done today but I got some things done.

Part of an Interview with Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal on his background and political divergence from mainstream liberalism.

Glover Park

@thomaslawlor yeah it's a young Republican dumping ground

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 20, 2013

Update: The young, bright things of Washington, D.C. keep to their own parties.

What occasioned this exchange was a photo by Max of a decal on a truck. It read: IF YOU CAN'T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM.

Kunstler: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

Kunstler: "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide"

@MaxBlumenthal @davidsirota @GroverNorquist The progressive deal with the devil: fund big brother & big govt. And of course the wars.

— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) August 18, 2013

Lawsuit on Church Rental of Public School Facilities

Ilind.net is following the lawsuit on church rentals of public school facilities.

Ilind.net: "Lawsuit on Church Rental of Public School Facilities is Definitely One to Watch."

20 August update: Ilind follows up with "Documents Back Up Charge of Massive Underpayment for Church Use of Schools."

22 August update: Ilind continues: "Over at Civil Beat: 'Jihad Against God'"

24 August update: Ilind.net:"Partial List of Churches Using Public School Facilities"

The Suburbs: A Post in Progress

Linh Dinh essay on the suburbs.

Looking at Amazon for Leigh Gallagher's new book The End of the Suburbs, I found a book I've never heard of, by Stanley Kurtz: Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If I saw this book at the library book sale, then I might pick it up. But I can guess that it blames suburbs' woes not on any inherent vice but on an Alinskyite conspiracy. Well....

20 August update: Reporter Yasha Levine found a book by David Bach that summed up the get-rich-quick mentality, inflating the housing bubble in the process.

On another note, my family and I went on a day trip to Kona last Friday. I can't begin to describe what it looks like. Kona developed very differently than Hilo did, and so it's much more sprawly. (After the 1960 tidal wave, Hilo moved inland. Since this development happened after cars became more common, those areas were more convenient for drivers, not pedestrians, with wide streets and vast parking lots.) Even when I was a small kid vacationing in Kona, that was the case. But now there are more big-box stores, and on the hills, more houses. It's late summer so there were a lot more tourists. We checked out the Royal Kona Resort (f.k.a. the Kona Hilton): no bougainvillea spilling from the balconies, no roof at the porte-cochere, but they have little gates at the parking lots. I guess people have to pay for parking now (even guests?).

Nall vs. The American Spectator

Nancy Nall looks at a recent issue of The American Spectator, which was at the height of its popularity during the Clinton administration.

Bader's Dutch Shortbread Cookies

The company was based in Seattle.

Discussed here.

The Story of Trayvon Martin is Not Over

"Beyond Trayvon: The Great Divide"

http://mashable.com/2013/07/15/trayvon-martin-tumblr/

BlackAgendaReport.com article on why post-Trayvon Martin talk turns black kids into a problem to be solved.

28 August update: And George Zimmerman visited a gun factory recently! Me, I'd like to check out the Mauna Loa mac-nut factory sometime.

29 August update: George Zimmerman's wife Shellie admits committing perjury.

The wife of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer acquitted in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, revealed Thursday that the couple's marriage may be in trouble.

The day after Shellie Zimmerman was sentenced to one year probation and 100 hours of community service for lying at her husband's bond hearing, she appeared on Good Morning America expressing uncertainty about the future of their relationship.
...

4 September update: Zimmerman pulled over for driving 60 mph in a 45-mph-zone.

Kunstler's Essay on

"Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency" Part two is behind a paywall.

I don't agree with Kunstler's stand on gender relations. He basically says that without cheap, abundant oil to power things, housework will once again become toilsome, and that women will do most of it. Unsurprisingly, many women wrote to him and took issue with that prediction.

Despite that, it's still worth reading. And I might have more later.

George Zimmerman's Friend

http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/08/the-medias-go-to-george-zimmerman-defender-is-a/195298

#confessyourunpopularopinion getting things handed doesnt make you spoiled, it makes you fortunate. Being unappreciative makes you spoiled.

— Yours Truly, A (@thearielrogers) August 8, 2013

The Public Shaming Tumblr

http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/

Going through the channels, I saw a mention of a new book by Leigh Gallagher on the end of traditional suburbs. This article says it may be premature to write off suburbia just yet.

Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons

On the sixty-eighth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and three days from now, Nagasaki), here are Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, listed by Ward Wilson, in his book of the same title.

http://shameproject.com/report/recovered-history-selfhelp-propaganda-helped-banks-grease-real-estate-bubble/

"Mood and a World"

Apologies if I telegraphed any spoilers. But I think THE CANYONS is about mood and a world and not plot points. The best movies are.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) August 3, 2013

"A Very Short History of Driving While Black"

A Very Short History of Driving While Black, an essay from an upcoming book, Killing Trayvon.

I was just thinking earlier today that the Trayvon Martin killing will be discussed and written about for years to come.

Kunstler: The Dreadful Summer Wind

by James Howard Kunstler

The world is swiftly moving to the dangerous place where nations won’t be able to do business with each other because they don’t trust the institutions that control wealth, which includes central banks, commercial banks, and governments. It will happen when the purveyors of international commodities, oil especially, refuse to accept the letters of credit issued by untrustworthy intermediaries. And when that dark moment arrives, nations will throw tantrums. The USA may be the loudest baby in the playpen.

The USA is veering into a psychological space not unlike the wilderness-of-mind that Germany found itself in back in the early 20th century: the deep woods of paranoia where our own failures will be projected onto the motives of others who mean to do us harm. Of course, even paranoiacs have enemies. There are quite a few others who would like to harm the USA, at least to bamboozle and paralyze us, to push back against our influence on their culture and economies. But the tendency here will be to magnify the supposed insults while ignoring our own suicidal behavior.

Historians will remark that it was a beautiful August with bright days and cool nights for sleeping, and the Hamptons were ablaze with self-satisfied egos, and that nobody was paying attention to all the mischief that was set in motion the previous spring, not to mention the many seasons of bad behavior that preceded it. And when they returned from vacation, lo, the world was in crisis. What a surprise.

The USA cannot come to terms with the salient facts staring us in the face: that we can’t run things as we’ve set them up to run. We refuse to take the obvious actions to set things up differently. Instead, we’ve tried to offset the accelerating losses of running our unrunable stuff with accounting fraud, aimed at pretending that everything still works. But the accounting fraud has only accelerated the gathering disorder in the banking system. That disorder has infected our currency and the infection is spreading to all currencies. What a surprise that the first pandemic to strike an overstressed global immune system was not bird flu after all, but a sickness of money.

Near the center of that money sickness was the blitzkrieg against gold and silver in the spring, when arrant serial selling dumps were executed against the money metals to un-money them. The net result was only that a lot of that ancient money flowed from the places pretending it was valueless to the places that never adopted that pretense. At stake in that rather massive movement was the supposed value of the other stuff that pretended to hold value, namely sovereign bonds, and especially the treasury paper issued by the USA. After all, US Treasury bonds and notes were, in the eyes of bankers, the functional equivalent of cash-in-hand. Alas, the world was starting to choke on it — not least the US central bank itself, which had been gorging at the monthly auction buffet for years and was now stuffed to the gills. In fact, it had grown too fat to even leave the room where the buffet had been set up.

Anyway you look at it, there is no escape from the looming crisis of confidence. The “primary dealer” banks and commodity exchanges behind the spring gold smash are out of tricks and out of gold to play tricks with. Their partner, the US Government has two tricks left: confiscation of gold in private hands a la Franklin Roosevelt’s ploy of 1933, or punitive taxes on private sales of gold. What worked in 1933 might not go over so well now, in a land full of preppers armed to the teeth and long-simmered in gall. It brings to mind the bumper-sticker about prying things from people’s cold dead hands. As for the tax gambit, I venture to say that many holders of gold hold it in expectation that there may shortly be no effective government left to depend on to do the wrong thing. Meanwhile, over in the land of paper wealth, the interest rate on the 10-year US Treasury bond clicks up a basis-point here, a basis-point there, like a remorselessly rising sea level. It won’t take many more clicks to put, for instance, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under water.

I felt sorry for President Obama, going about the country trying to appear historically heroic without doing a damn thing, really, to face down to the monsters in our own midst. But then one hears the rumor of Larry Summers’ imminent appointment to chair the Fed, and it is no longer possible to feel sorry for Obama, but rather to feel sorry for the nation laboring under such a conclave of would-be wizards.

I just don’t see how the world financial system doesn’t blow up this fall, when the digested remains of the last miso-glazed oyster tidbit passes through the cloacal fundament of the prettiest girl in Sag Harbor. When it does blow, at least the NSA will have its prepared “to-do” list, and then perhaps all the unemployed can be enlisted at $8 an hour to harass the rest of the people trying to go about their daily lives. The roar you hear in the distance this September will be the sound of banks crashing, followed by the silence of business-as-usual grinding to a halt. After that, the crackle of gunfire.

Hunter Bishop Joins BigIslandNow.com

http://bigislandnow.com/2013/08/02/veteran-journalist-hunter-bishop-joins-big-island-now/

A Daria Movie Must Happen

This would be better than 99% of the Hollywood product out there.

Correcting Forbes on the Demise of TheOilDrum.com

Correcting Forbes on the demise of TheOilDrum.com

1 August 2013

Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bloody Monday (I'm typing this on 1 August at 8:50 p.m. Hawaii time). I have seen nothing commemorating the Hilo Massacre in the local paper or the local press in general.

According to Max Blumenthal on Mondoweiss, the online broadcast of Al Jazeera English will end with the launch of Al Jazeera America, formerly known as Current.

3 August update:

MT @andrewchappelle: Sad ...apparently AJAM's launch means an end to AJE radio programs in US as well. http://t.co/NhoaMFG664 via @kcet

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 4, 2013

Kunstler: The Dreamtime

Here.

The Dreamtime
by James Howard Kunstler

The idea that techno-industrial society is headed toward a collapse has become very unpopular the last couple of years. Thoughts (and fears) about it have been replaced by a kind of grand redemption fantasy that bears the same relation to economics that masturbation has to pornography. One way to sum up the current psychological state of the nation is that an awful lot of people who ought to know better don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground anymore. We’re witnessing the implosion of the American hive mind.

This is what comes of divorcing truth from reality, and that process is exactly what you get in the effort to replace authentic economic activity with accounting fraud and propaganda. For five years, the Federal Reserve has been trying to offset a permanent and necessary contraction of techno-industrialism by lobbing mortar rounds of so-called “money” into its crony “primary dealer” banks in order to fuel interest rate carry trades that produce an echo in the stock markets. An echo, let us be clear, is the ghost of something, not the thing itself — in this case: value.

The permanent contraction of techno-industrialism is necessary because the main fuel for running it has become scarcer and rather expensive, too expensive really to run the infrastructure of the United States. That infrastructure cannot be replaced now without a great deal of capital sacrifice. Paul Krugman — whom other observers unironically call Dr. Paul Krugman, conferring shamanic powers on him — wrote a supremely stupid op-ed in The New York Times today (“Stranded by Sprawl”), as though he had only noticed over the past week that the favored development pattern of our country has had adverse economic consequences. Gosh, ya think?

Meanwhile, the public has been sold a story by nervous and wishful upholders of the status quo that we have no problem with our primary resource due to the shale oil and shale gas bonanzas that would make us “energy independent” and “the world’s leading oil exporter — Saudi America!” A related story along these lines is the imminent “American industrial renaissance.” What they leave out is that, if actually true, it would be a renaissance of robots, leaving the former (and long ago) well-paid American working class to stew in its patrimony of methadrine, incest, and tattoo “art.”

To put it as simply as possible, the main task before this society is to change the way we live. The necessary changes are so severe and represent so much loss of previous investment that we can’t bring ourselves to think about it. For instance, both the suburbs and the big cities are toast. The destiny of the suburbs is to become slums, salvage yards, and ruins. The destiny of the big cities is to become Detroit — though most of America’s big cities (Atlanta, Houston) are hybrid monstrosities of suburbs and cities, and they will suffer the most. It is not recognized by economic poobahs such as Dr. Krugman and Thomas Friedman that the principal economic activity of Dixieland the past half century was the manufacture of suburban sprawl and now that the endeavor is over, the result can be seen in the millions of unemployed Ford F-110 owners drinking themselves into an incipient political fury.

Then where will the people live? They will live in smaller cities and cities that succeed in downsizing sharply and in America’s currently neglected and desolate small towns and upon a landscape drastically refitted for a post-techo-industrial life that is as far removed from a Ray Kurzweil “Singularity” fantasy as the idea of civic virtue is removed from Lawrence Summers. The people will live in places with a meaningful relationship to food production.

Many of those aforementioned swindled, misled, and debauched lumpen folk (having finally sold off their Ford-F110s) will eventually see their prospects migrate back into the realm of agriculture, or at least their surviving progeny will, as the sugar-tit of federal benefits melts away to zero, and by then the population will be much lower. These days, surely, the idea of physical labor in the sorghum rows is abhorrent to a 325-pound food-stamp recipient lounging in an air-conditioned trailer engrossed in the televised adventures of Kim Kardashian and her celebrated vagina while feasting on a KFC 10-piece bundle and a 32 oz Mountain Dew. But the hypothetical grand-kids might have to adopt a different view after the last air-conditioner sputters to extinction, and fire-ants have eaten through the particle-board floor of the trailer, and all the magical KFC products recede into the misty past where Jenny Lind rubs elbows with the Knights of the Round Table . Perhaps I wax a little hyperbolic, but you get the idea: subsistence is the real deal-to-come, and it will be literally a harder row to hoe than the current conception of “poverty.”

Somewhere beyond this mannerist picture of the current cultural depravity is the glimmer of an idea of people behaving better and spending their waking lives at things worth doing (and worthy of their human-ness), but that re-enchantment of daily life awaits a rather harsh work-out of the reigning deformations. I will go so far to predict that the recent national mood of wishful fantasy is running out of gas and that a more fatalistic view of our manifold predicaments will take its place in a few months. It would at least signal a rapprochment of truth with reality.

Kenny Loggins, "If You Believe"/"This is It"

As T.S. Flossie approaches, an opportunity to play this:



"If You Believe" is originally from the 1991 album Leap of Faith. This version is from the 1993 live album Outside from the Redwoods.

Madonna the Album Released Thirty Years Ago

An article on who should receive credit for launching the career of one of the twentieth century's most accomplished popular singers.

Joe Williams, "You Showed Me the Way"

Some Links

Orlov's blog maintains that communalism (a.k.a. small-c communism) is more efficient than market-based or central-government societies.

At NancyNall.com, they're gnashing their teeth at the possible sale of artworks from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

And The Oil Drum website will stop publishing after eight years.

What Does This Mean?

Does Max mean most people? Most "extreme conservatives"? He doesn't specify. Also, how does he define "fascist"?

It is emotionally/psychologically easier for most to be fascist: http://t.co/lIj6hFShlh

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 24, 2013

Kunstler: Requiem for Detroit

An excerpt is below:

Requiem for Detroit.

It’s fitting that Detroit is the first great American city to officially bite the dust, because it produced the means of America’s suicidal destruction: the automobile. Of course you could argue that the motorcar was an inevitable product of the industrial era — and I would not bother to enlist a mob of post-doc philosophy professors to debate that — but the choices we made about what to do with the automobile is another matter. What we chose was to let our great cities go to hell and move outside them in a car-dependent utopia tricked out as a simulacrum of “country living.” The entire experiment of suburbia can, of course, be construed as historically inevitable, too, but is also destined to be abandoned — and sooner than most Americans realize.

Finally, what we’ll be left with is a tremendous continental-sized vista of waste and desolation, the end product of this technological thrill ride called Modernity. It’s hard to find redemption in this story, unless it’s a world made by hand, with all its implications for a return to human-ness.

What happened to Detroit will come to all the other great American metroplexes in time, but perhaps not in the same way. So-called urban experts like Ed Glaeser at Harvard (The Triumph of the City), and other exalted idiots just don’t get it. These cities attained a scale of operation that just can’t be sustained beyond the twilight of cheap fossil fuels. They will all contract massively — some of them, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas will disappear altogether. The lucky ones will reconstitute themselves at much smaller scale around their old harbors or riverfronts. The ones burdened with too many grandiose mega-structures (New York, Chicago) will choke to death on the liabilities they represent. The reason for this can be found in the basic equations around the cost and supply of energy resources and the consequent impairments of capital formation. In short, neither the affordable energy nor the money will be there to run things as we’re used to running them. The voodoo economists of the [I]vy League, the White House, the Federal Reserve, and The New York Times are utterly clueless about how this works.

====
26 July update: Kunstler's walking tour of Detroit in 2009, supplemented by Google Street View.

====
28 July update: Oakland County (MI) executive director L. Brooks Patterson, recently featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, loves sprawl.

Max Blumenthal's Goliath Pushed Back Yet Again

Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is now to be released on 1 October 2013, according to its Amazon.com page.

Previously announced release dates:

11 June 2013

9 April 2013

April 2013

Notes from a Telecast of the 2013 Harlem Book Fair on C-Span

Below are notes I took during yesterday's live broadcast of the 2013 Harlem Book Fair on C-Span. Harriet Washington was interviewed after her panel discussion and that is when I started watching.
==============

Harriet Washington
--Deadly Monopolies
--Medical Apartheid (2007 Natl. Book Critics Circle Awd.)
--------------
E.R. Shipp
Morgan State U.
jrnlist-in-res.

Carl Hart
High Price
"Drugs are tools."
-------------
Tina Campt
Other Germans

>Peniel Joseph
--Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama
Tufts U. hist. prof.
--The Bk Power Movement
--Neighb. Rebels

>Kendall Thomas
--Co-ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Ctr. for the Study of Law and Culture and law prof. at Columbia U. Law Sch.

"racial moralism"
"the"
context--"the word can mean everything and nothing"

recognition vs. indifference
progress vs. retrenchment---> Obama asking for conv. on race but refuses to lead it.

>Farah Griffin
--Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics [in] World War II
prof. Eng. and Comp. Lit. + AA Stud. Columbia U.
problem she has w/ personal anecdotes "becomes the end all and be all"
-->gets lost: Pres. Govt. no role for them to do anything about it.
Personal anecdote not good when it trumps what has to be done
-->absurdity of judge's allowing use of "profiling" but not "racial profiling"

Peniel Joseph
The new racism:
--outcomes
--disparities
--only 1.6% [of African Americans] make more than $200K.
--28% below fed. poverty level.
Substantive policy change
beyond

no urban agenda
no confrontation of new Jim Crow

Trayvon Martin: posthumous portrayal as a criminal

841,000 black males in jail

-->The further we deny racism exists the worse it gets

-->Harlem Bklyn gentrified

"We need to confront it and force [the President's] hand."

Kendall Thomas: "privatization of race"
the idea of racism and its "private resolution"
The heart of racism is "economic injustice"

Obama "is himself a commodity" One of the deepest challenges we face is the bankruptcy of a political system controlled by financial elites.

KT calls Reagan the "Architect of liberalism." [I.e., neoliberalism]
KT, cont. "Identity is being mobilized" to discredit claims for justice.

Following KT's comments on neoliberalism:
TINA CAMPT: "The offloading" of the conversation of race into pvt. sphere
-->What wd effective ldrship be?
Peniel: "That's happening already" at grassroots
The Age of Trayvon

People who've abdicated their role of activists for access.
>Those who give Obama a pass.
Ray Kelly: "The nation's biggest racial profiler."
MLK traded access to LBJ's Wh. House for moral clarity

Poor People's March

"can't do the colorblind racism game"

KT discusses "From Protest to Poliics" [by Bayard] Rustin

Griffin: the old-fashioned idea of charismatic leadership
Electoral politics is only one avenue
--Ella Baker
--Ida B. Wells
--Fannie Lou Hamer
grassroots leaders

communities, groups
a model of ldrship

NYT art. about frmr gang ldrs org against violence

FARAH: Stand Yr Grd Laws not explicitly racist but applied not in a race-neutral way.

What do you expect from Obama after his presidency?

Do something about prison, health...

tainted products [being sent to Africa]

K.T. The law's limits are sometimes greater than what it can accomplish
-->On Obama's statement about his children's generation thinking about race.
Hopeful but it's the experience of a very narrow section of African Americans.
Segregation still alive

Racial publics: committed to anti-racist agendas.

K.T. "I am not a person of faith."---No single role orgs can play nor single method.

Peniel: A research org @ Tufts: race and democracy connecting to public policy
"We want public policy transformation[s]"

Farah: Measure of success can't just be by Sasha and Malia but by gulf between Juror B-37 and Rachel Jeantel

Farah: Twitter irritating but allows back-and-forth. "Angry at the access racists have" to her... Messy, but democ. debate

Farah: There's a focus on natl. elections but what about local elections?
"We need to be just as vigilant about those elections as well."

Audience member: African American pols "ghettofied" to narrow districts. Tea Party better organized.

K.T. Talking about "a long revolution." Politics is often about how we imagine ourselves in relation to others. Nation: "imagined community"
"[P]olitics of the imagination" no subst.for hard work but motivates people to think critically and even refuse neolib.

Audience member: What about Alton Maddox?

======
It was then that the panel discussion had to end.

Some Thoughts on Trayvon Martin and Kunstler (a post in progress)

I don't know if Kunstler will mention Trayvon Martin in his blog tomorrow. Last Monday's post suggests a wide gulf between black and white people, particularly younger black people and older white ones. Kunstler came of age before the rise of hip hop but during a time of Black Power. Liberal whites who sympathized with the civil rights movement were put off by Black Power. As they grew older, they didn't know what to make of Afrocentrism or hip hop culture.

What are Kunstler's thoughts on hip hop? Based on his writings, he seems to think it's immature at best and nihilistic at worst. Unaware of the many genres and subgenres contained within hip hop, Kunstler gives Kanye West as an example of the gangsta rapper shouting "N---a!" He is right that a gulf stretches between black and white in America.

I welcome your thoughts as I add to this post.

On Raising County Bus Fares

Sexism Gets One Nowhere

A gratuitous comment on Pamela Geller's looks, not statements.

@hsmoghul her face already stars in a claymation horror flick.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 19, 2013

He can write better. This is lazy. But he tends to insinuate (see his recent comments on Joyce Carol Oates) and make cheap shots.

Bu Lai

  Hawaii Time

Field Negro points out that Zimmerman attorneys Mark O'Mara and Don West were recently dining in a fancy New York restaurant, even though O'Mara claimed to fear for his life.

In Hawaii, we call that a bu lai.

Is College Useless?

The question is explored here. It depends on what one looks for. You could get rich with or without going to college, or at least without graduating from one. Consider professional athletes and computer magnates. The main value of college for some athletes, especially top ones, is exposure. To me, learning was and is its own reward, though I would have availed myself of the career center if I had to attend all ovewr again.

Kunstler on the Zimmerman Verdict

This column by Kunstler on the Zimmerman verdict appeared on Monday, but I wondered if I should link to it. I decided to post it with this caveat: Kunstler is very astute about the effects of oil scarcity but he has little understanding about this situation.

The Wikipedia Category of Former Entities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_entities

"Stress Will Age You"

Zimmerman is 29? He looks a lot older than that. Stress will age you.

— Akolea (@akolea) July 14, 2013

So will a bad diet, a mean streak, and an authoritarian personality.

The Heat

The Heat is doing well at the box office domestically, but not internationally. The main reason, perhaps, is that Melissa McCarthy is not yet famous outside America. It could also be that the international audience isn't used to female buddy comedies. Who knows?

But it's always interesting to see the gulf between American and international box office. Some movies do poorly in the States, but colossal internationally. And vice versa.

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"