Monday, March 24, 2014
Kunstler: Weak Sister
In which Kunstler discusses Russia, Ukraine, and proposals to undercut Russian power with American exports of natural gas to Europe (a.k.a. fracking for freedom).
24 March evening update: John McCain talks tough about Russia but in
this oldie-but-a-goodie of an article, McCain has cultivated extensive ties to the Kremlin. (Another reason I'm glad I never voted for him.) Romney also had harsh things to say about Russia in 2012, and recently, but he had invested in Gazprom through his equity fund, later divesting himself of Russian investments around the start of the 2012 campaign. The Russia Today article is boosterish about the country's business climate, as befits the output of a state-owned network, but it's good to know.
Kunstler: Weak Sister
Was it such a good thing in the post-cold-war decades that the US was regarded as the supreme sole super-power? Look what we did with that privilege: fumbled around like an overfed stumblebum, blundering from one foreign occupation to another, breaking a lot of things and killing a lot of people — under the clownishly-conceived rubric of a “war on terror.”
Why is it in our interest which way Ukraine tilts? It has been in the Russian orbit for hundreds of years under one administration or another. Are we disappointed now that Kiev won’t answer to the floundering Eurocrats of Brussels? Was that ever a realistic expectation? Really, the best outcome for western Europe would be a return to the prior condition of Ukraine as a mute bearskin rug with oil and gas pipelines running through it to the oil and gas starved West. The idea that the US could supply Europe with oil and gas instead of Russia is a preposterous fantasy. Anybody wondering whether Ukraine might turn its armed forces loose on Russian forces supposedly massing at its border should ask themselves how Ukrainian soldiers will get paid.
I’m sure Russia can’t afford to annex all of Ukraine. Russia can barely maintain its paved roads. But it obviously couldn’t afford to give up its rented warm water ports and naval bases in the Crimea, either, with the new Kiev government making so much anti-Russian noise since the “revolution.” The annexation of Crimea changes nothing materially about the disposition of Russian military force in the region. They were already there. Given the size of their navy compared to the other nations in the neighborhood, the Black Sea is Russia’s bathtub and has been as long as anyone can remember. Was the brass at the US State Department shocked to discover this two weeks ago?
The recognition that there are some places on the planet where the US can’t exert its influence has also come as a shock to the so-called American Deep State — that matrix of bureaucratic toxic sludge that labors to pretend to control everything and succeeds mainly in embarrassing itself in a world that is now deeply tending away from the centralized control of anything. Nations are breaking up everywhere and for the moment there is no coherent public discussion of the ramifications. Venice voted the other day to secede from Italy — that is, to not send anymore tax revenue to Rome. That should be interesting. How about Scotland’s independence vote scheduled for September? Judging by the British newspapers, there is next-to-zero concern about that. Then there is the list of failed states, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and probably half the manufactured nations of sub-Saharan Africa, places with no viable economy or polity and too many clamoring poor people. These are parts of the world that will neither develop nor redevelop. In a hundred years they could be no-go zones or just return to howling wilderness.
The US would be better served these days to literally mind its own business. With Detroit in bankruptcy, why would we send Kiev billions of dollars? American urban infrastructures — water, sewer, gas, and electric lines — are falling apart. We have no idea how we’re going to manage most of the crucial economic activities of daily life in ten years, when the illusions of shale gas and shale evaporate in a dark cloud of disenchantment, when we no longer have an airline industry, and most Americans won’t have the means to own automobiles, and there’s not enough diesel fuel to plow Iowa mega-farms, or enough oil and gas based fertilizers or herbicides to pour into the eroding topsoil, and not enough fossil water left in the Oglala aquifer or enough electricity to run the center-pivot sprinklers where the prairie meets the desert? How are Americans going to live and eat and get from Point A to Point B and keep a roof over our heads in this beat-down land?
We’re having no conversation about these things and the political landscape in this country is a wasteland of mirages and dust devils. That is the true weakness of the USA now. We’re incapable of seeing the disorder in our own house. Why should we even glance overseas at others?
24 March evening update: John McCain talks tough about Russia but in
this oldie-but-a-goodie of an article, McCain has cultivated extensive ties to the Kremlin. (Another reason I'm glad I never voted for him.) Romney also had harsh things to say about Russia in 2012, and recently, but he had invested in Gazprom through his equity fund, later divesting himself of Russian investments around the start of the 2012 campaign. The Russia Today article is boosterish about the country's business climate, as befits the output of a state-owned network, but it's good to know.
Kunstler: Weak Sister
Was it such a good thing in the post-cold-war decades that the US was regarded as the supreme sole super-power? Look what we did with that privilege: fumbled around like an overfed stumblebum, blundering from one foreign occupation to another, breaking a lot of things and killing a lot of people — under the clownishly-conceived rubric of a “war on terror.”
Why is it in our interest which way Ukraine tilts? It has been in the Russian orbit for hundreds of years under one administration or another. Are we disappointed now that Kiev won’t answer to the floundering Eurocrats of Brussels? Was that ever a realistic expectation? Really, the best outcome for western Europe would be a return to the prior condition of Ukraine as a mute bearskin rug with oil and gas pipelines running through it to the oil and gas starved West. The idea that the US could supply Europe with oil and gas instead of Russia is a preposterous fantasy. Anybody wondering whether Ukraine might turn its armed forces loose on Russian forces supposedly massing at its border should ask themselves how Ukrainian soldiers will get paid.
I’m sure Russia can’t afford to annex all of Ukraine. Russia can barely maintain its paved roads. But it obviously couldn’t afford to give up its rented warm water ports and naval bases in the Crimea, either, with the new Kiev government making so much anti-Russian noise since the “revolution.” The annexation of Crimea changes nothing materially about the disposition of Russian military force in the region. They were already there. Given the size of their navy compared to the other nations in the neighborhood, the Black Sea is Russia’s bathtub and has been as long as anyone can remember. Was the brass at the US State Department shocked to discover this two weeks ago?
The recognition that there are some places on the planet where the US can’t exert its influence has also come as a shock to the so-called American Deep State — that matrix of bureaucratic toxic sludge that labors to pretend to control everything and succeeds mainly in embarrassing itself in a world that is now deeply tending away from the centralized control of anything. Nations are breaking up everywhere and for the moment there is no coherent public discussion of the ramifications. Venice voted the other day to secede from Italy — that is, to not send anymore tax revenue to Rome. That should be interesting. How about Scotland’s independence vote scheduled for September? Judging by the British newspapers, there is next-to-zero concern about that. Then there is the list of failed states, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and probably half the manufactured nations of sub-Saharan Africa, places with no viable economy or polity and too many clamoring poor people. These are parts of the world that will neither develop nor redevelop. In a hundred years they could be no-go zones or just return to howling wilderness.
The US would be better served these days to literally mind its own business. With Detroit in bankruptcy, why would we send Kiev billions of dollars? American urban infrastructures — water, sewer, gas, and electric lines — are falling apart. We have no idea how we’re going to manage most of the crucial economic activities of daily life in ten years, when the illusions of shale gas and shale evaporate in a dark cloud of disenchantment, when we no longer have an airline industry, and most Americans won’t have the means to own automobiles, and there’s not enough diesel fuel to plow Iowa mega-farms, or enough oil and gas based fertilizers or herbicides to pour into the eroding topsoil, and not enough fossil water left in the Oglala aquifer or enough electricity to run the center-pivot sprinklers where the prairie meets the desert? How are Americans going to live and eat and get from Point A to Point B and keep a roof over our heads in this beat-down land?
We’re having no conversation about these things and the political landscape in this country is a wasteland of mirages and dust devils. That is the true weakness of the USA now. We’re incapable of seeing the disorder in our own house. Why should we even glance overseas at others?
When Mike Huckabee Was Fat-Shaming the Schoolchildren of Arkansas
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16994609/ns/health-childrens_health/t/arkansas-obesity-report-cards-get-failing-grade/
As governor, Mike Huckabee lost a considerable amount of weight through diet and exercise, then got self-righteous about it: wriing a book titled Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork and having children's BMIs (body mass indexes) on their report cards. Not only is the BMI an imprecise measurement of how overweight one is (e.g., muscle weighs more than fat, so a very muscular child could be considered obese), what else did Huckabee do to help reduce obesity among Arkansan schoolchildren?
As governor, Mike Huckabee lost a considerable amount of weight through diet and exercise, then got self-righteous about it: wriing a book titled Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork and having children's BMIs (body mass indexes) on their report cards. Not only is the BMI an imprecise measurement of how overweight one is (e.g., muscle weighs more than fat, so a very muscular child could be considered obese), what else did Huckabee do to help reduce obesity among Arkansan schoolchildren?
Keystone Kochs
The biggest lease holder in Keystone XL isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers. http://t.co/TcpTMgYzyL
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 23, 201424 March update: Like those who urge "fracking for freedom", some point to oil spills as a reason why we need the Keystone XL pipeline.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Saturday, March 22, 2014
The USDA Economic Research Service
The website of theEconomic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The ERS also has a Twitter account.
The ERS also has a Twitter account.
#Nutrition programs are projected to receive 80% of funds under the #farmbill. http://t.co/isBSKuUHsN pic.twitter.com/HZi3qc7OJm
— USDA_ERS (@USDA_ERS) March 12, 2014Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal
I didn't know there was an effort to demolish freeways. A welcome development.
Moving Beyond the Automobile: Highway Removal from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
Sometimes I watch Rachel Maddow for laughs but tonight she is on an anti-Putin rant cheer leading for sanctions. I. Just. Can't.
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) March 18, 2014Well, I saw the first part of The Rachel Maddow Show yesterday, and she discussed the immensity of ExxonMobil (the most profitable company in history), a company exceeded in size by Russia's state oil company. They're uniting in a $500 billion venture.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
While @jstreetu is silent, conservative FIRE slams the suspension of @NortheasternSJP and chilling of campus speech http://t.co/ZaN5oNYDwV
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 16, 2014Fracking for Freedom (a post in progress)
I've intended to write this post for about a week or so. Basically, the unrest in Ukraine has given pro-fracking advocates an excuse to push for the United States to drill and frack for natural gas, convert it to liquid form (liquefied natural gas, or LNG) and export it to Europe in order to undermine Putin's control of natural gas supplies and routes to Europe. Some pro-frackers throw in criticism of Obama's supposed inaction for good measure. Fracking and exporting are neither cheap nor simple. Here I will post some links to articles and videos.
Fracking Ban Momentum Builds on Both Sides of the Atlantic.
At least twenty liquefication plants are proposed.
Krauthammer urges Obama to get tough with Putin and expedite 25 LNG plants in the process.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) Joins Call for Natural Gas Exports in Response to Ukrainian Crisis.
The article mentions The Natural Gas Act of 1938.
The New York Times: U.S. Seeks to Reduce Ukraine's Reliance on Russia for Natural Gas.
The article notes that "Congressional Republicans have joined major oil and gas producers like ExxonMobil in urging the administration to speed up oil and natural gas exports. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush." It adds, "The United States does not yet export its natural gas. But the Energy Department has begun to issue permits to American companies to export natural gas starting in 2015. American companies have submitted 21 applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. The agency has approved six of the applications."
Though this isn't about fracking to export LNG, it is about the Ukraine. Orlov asks, Is Anyone Really in Control in Ukraine?
Fracking is not the only thing being pushed in the name of "national security" and "protecting our friends and allies." On Thursday, retired general James Jones (a former national security advisor in the Obama administration) testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. Rejecting it would make Putin's day, he says. Jones did not disclose his extensive industry ties before testifying. (FYI: There are no disclosure rules for hearing witnesses in the United States Senate.)
This is a C-SPAN video of the hearing.
17 March update: The idea that America can displace Russia as the provider of natural gas is not new, as Orlov points out in his blog post "Shale Gas: The View from Russia."
24 March update: The Nation: "How the Gas Lobby is Using the Crimea Crisis to Push Bad Policy and Make More Money."
Fracking Ban Momentum Builds on Both Sides of the Atlantic.
At least twenty liquefication plants are proposed.
Krauthammer urges Obama to get tough with Putin and expedite 25 LNG plants in the process.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) Joins Call for Natural Gas Exports in Response to Ukrainian Crisis.
The article mentions The Natural Gas Act of 1938.
The New York Times: U.S. Seeks to Reduce Ukraine's Reliance on Russia for Natural Gas.
The article notes that "Congressional Republicans have joined major oil and gas producers like ExxonMobil in urging the administration to speed up oil and natural gas exports. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush." It adds, "The United States does not yet export its natural gas. But the Energy Department has begun to issue permits to American companies to export natural gas starting in 2015. American companies have submitted 21 applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. The agency has approved six of the applications."
Though this isn't about fracking to export LNG, it is about the Ukraine. Orlov asks, Is Anyone Really in Control in Ukraine?
Fracking is not the only thing being pushed in the name of "national security" and "protecting our friends and allies." On Thursday, retired general James Jones (a former national security advisor in the Obama administration) testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. Rejecting it would make Putin's day, he says. Jones did not disclose his extensive industry ties before testifying. (FYI: There are no disclosure rules for hearing witnesses in the United States Senate.)
This is a C-SPAN video of the hearing.
17 March update: The idea that America can displace Russia as the provider of natural gas is not new, as Orlov points out in his blog post "Shale Gas: The View from Russia."
24 March update: The Nation: "How the Gas Lobby is Using the Crimea Crisis to Push Bad Policy and Make More Money."
Thursday, March 13, 2014
D.J. Max Blumenthal
Tonight Max Blumenthal was a guest DJ on the New Jersey-based freeform radio station WFMU and played these songs. The show concluded just before 9 p.m. Hawaii time. He was glad for this change of pace.
More soon.
More soon.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
More on the Future of Oil, and Rand Paul's Proposal to Export Natural Gas
Best Peak Oil interview in months. http://t.co/p1bJDjVlct
— Richard Heinberg (@richardheinberg) February 17, 2014'Peak is Dead' and the Future of Oil Supply."
Dan Dicker, an oil trader, was on All In With Chris Hayes tonight (10 March) to discuss Rand Paul's proposal on Fox News Sunday to drill everywhere for petroleum*. Chris noted the irony of Rand Paul's pro-drilling stance, as he represents a state where coal is the main energy source. In other words, fracking has displaced coal.
Dicker says not only is it unprofitable to export liquefied natural gas, high prices for LNG are not guaranteed. Most of all, the United States risks becoming a petrostate like Venezuela or--Russia, using petroleum as political leverage.
Again, I'll try to compile some of the CPAC material about fracking for freedom soon.
11 March update. From CounterPunch: "Up in Smoke: A Record 36 Percent of North Dakota Fracked Gas Flared in December.
* From the Fox News Sunday transcript (linked above):
PAUL: ...The other thing is Putin needs to be warned, and I'm perfectly willing to tell him, that if he does occupy Ukraine, it will be chaos for him and for the world. If he creates a Syria out of Ukraine, what's going to happen is 80 percent of his oil and gas is going through Ukraine. It will be a disaster for him. And so, he needs to be fully aware of that.
The other thing I've said is that I would do something differently than the president because that would immediately get every obstacle out of the way for our export of oil and gas, and I would begin drilling in every possible conceivable place within our territories in order to have production that we could supply Europe with if it's interrupted from Ukraine.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Kunstler: Deep State Descending
Kunstler: Deep State Descending.
And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians* sound enough like one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.
Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.
Theories abound about what drives this crisis and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and, at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a threadbare carpet-runner between them.
Contributing to our own country’s excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over the European gas market from Russia.** Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas, Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production? That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to happen.”
Even the idea that we will have enough natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize that it costs more to frack it out of the ground than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,” possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.
The most amazing part of the current story is that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru. [I added a link should you want to learn more about this wine.--P.Z.] Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.
If you travel around the upper Hudson Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers. Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill for that come April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.
===
*I like the recent episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which I began watching again. In fact, they (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and Rob) are part-Armenian. Their father was the high-powered attorney Robert Kardashian, best known for being one of O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers. The show usually airs in tandem with #Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, that I'll discuss in another post.
** This was a big topic at CPAC. I call it "Fracking for freedom." I'll address this in more detail later.
And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians* sound enough like one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.
Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.
Theories abound about what drives this crisis and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and, at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a threadbare carpet-runner between them.
Contributing to our own country’s excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over the European gas market from Russia.** Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas, Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production? That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to happen.”
Even the idea that we will have enough natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize that it costs more to frack it out of the ground than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,” possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.
The most amazing part of the current story is that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru. [I added a link should you want to learn more about this wine.--P.Z.] Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.
If you travel around the upper Hudson Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers. Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill for that come April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.
===
*I like the recent episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which I began watching again. In fact, they (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and Rob) are part-Armenian. Their father was the high-powered attorney Robert Kardashian, best known for being one of O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers. The show usually airs in tandem with #Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, that I'll discuss in another post.
** This was a big topic at CPAC. I call it "Fracking for freedom." I'll address this in more detail later.
Proyect vs. Blumenthal
The things one finds at three in the morning.
Louis Proyect: Thoughts Triggered by Max Blumenthal Tweets About Ukrainian Fascists.
Louis Proyect: Thoughts Triggered by Max Blumenthal Tweets About Ukrainian Fascists.
Friday, March 07, 2014
Proyect vs. Orlov
Proyect: The Disinformation Campaign on the Ukraine Gathers Momentum.
Orlov: Reichstag Fire in Kiev. Proyect doesn't even deign to mention Orlov's name.
I don't know much about what's happening there, like most everyone, and one can dispute Orlov's article, but dismissing it as a "pile of garbage" means not bothering to read Orlov's other posts, in which he addresses the post-Soviet collapse, which he attributes to a crash in oil revenues, not the U.S.-Russian arms race.
Orlov: Reichstag Fire in Kiev. Proyect doesn't even deign to mention Orlov's name.
I don't know much about what's happening there, like most everyone, and one can dispute Orlov's article, but dismissing it as a "pile of garbage" means not bothering to read Orlov's other posts, in which he addresses the post-Soviet collapse, which he attributes to a crash in oil revenues, not the U.S.-Russian arms race.
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Archaeological Survey of India
I added the website of the Archaeological Survey of India to my list of links. See All Links in the sidebar.
12 Years a Slave
In time, people will realize 12 Years a Slave was the Crash of 2013.
Comparing 12 Years a Slave with Gordon Parks's Solomon Northup's Odyssey.
Comparing 12 Years a Slave with Gordon Parks's Solomon Northup's Odyssey.
Monday, March 03, 2014
The Oscars
The Oscars is a nickname. ABC should go back to titling it the Academy Awards.
https://twitter.com/3xchair
https://twitter.com/3xchair
Only in Chelsea can you hear young men leaving #Oscar parties singing that awful #Frozen song
— armond white (@3xchair) March 3, 2014When #DarleneLove sang gospel @Oscars why did ABC cut to #SteveMcQueen? pic.twitter.com/E1OGxhRDzX
— armond white (@3xchair) March 3, 2014Kunstler: Let's You and Him Fight
Kunstler on Russia vs. Ukraine.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 [sic] Pennsylvania Avenue* how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
===
* It's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.--P.Z.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 [sic] Pennsylvania Avenue* how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
===
* It's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.--P.Z.
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Where's the Agency?
12 Years A Slave: "Black viewers are shown a portrait of themselves only as sufferers and victims." http://t.co/QdC5DxMgwt
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) March 2, 2014As I've read elsewhere, will they ever show a movie about Nat Turner?
Also, Stanley Crouch mentioned in a recent column that in 1984 Gordon Parks made a movie for PBS based on Solomon Northrup's life. It's probably a lot different from 12 Years a Slave.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Hey America, you can skip the cliched Charlie Sheenish d-baggery of THE WOLF OF WALL ST & just read @Eileen15Jones: https://t.co/DzSvkzXXUy
— Matt Karp (@karpmj) February 28, 2014Or you can just watch Wall Street, which starred Charlie Sheen, in his best role.
The Baffler vs. The New York Times
The Baffler vs. The New York Times And this after The Times referred to The Baffler as "A compendium of literary curveballs."
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Why does Ron Paul’s version of libertarianism so often align w interests of authoritarians and dictators? http://t.co/ON2MTdk4wx
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) February 24, 2014Welcome to Miami! Except...
Killer and attention houndGeorge Zimmerman confronted by cross beachgoers.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Kunstler: Savagery for All
Savagery for All
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11th centuries, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11th centuries, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Ukraine
Dmitri Orlov's post on the Ukrainian situation. He observes that Ukraine is basically two countries: Eastern Poland (Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic) and Western Russia (Russian-speaking, Orthodox).
Friday, February 21, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Monday, February 17, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Scoundrels
A list in progress. Links added to underscore why they are listed here.
Donna Alderman-Crosby, proprietor of The Forks Pit Stop in Walterboro, South Carolina.
Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) for this and this. And "moderate" senator Bob Corker (R-TN) for this: When two sexual-assault survivors confronted Republican senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, he said, “I know this is enjoyable to y’all.” “It is not enjoyable,” Tracey Corder, the director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, responded. “It is not fun for us to tell our stories.”
Adrien Broner.
Clay Higgins.
Leslie E. Gibson, candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, for insulting via Twitter a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Though he apologized, he deactivated his personal Twitter account <@LeslieEGibson2> and made private his campaign Twitter account, Gibson 4 Maine House <@Gibson_house>. At least, unlike Morgan Roof (younger sister of murderer Dylann), he didn't actually bring weapons to school, and hope protesting students would get shot. (16 March 2018 update: Faced with challenges from a novice Democrat and a former Republican state senator, both of whom declared at the last minute, Gibson has dropped out of the race.)
Disgraced gymnastics coach John Geddert. Will he get even a bit of the scrutiny his crony Nassar has received?
Carl Higbie, former chief of external affairs of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Brianna Rae Brochu.
Milo Yiannopoulos. For this and so much more. If Justin Bieber doesn't change his ways, he'll look like him and he doesn't want that.
Katie Quackenbush.
Greg Gianforte, his spokesman Shane Scanlon, and anyone who approves of his assault of a reporter.
Yale dean June Chu.
Talib Kweli Greene and Ben Shapiro.
Christopher Duntsch.
South Carolina state representative Chris Corley.
Dae Hae Moon.
Christian Gutierrez.
William Spingler.
Caleb Joseph Illig.
Michelle Herren.
Jennifer Boyle.
Tucker and Buckley Carlson, and Christopher Bedford.
Louisiana sheriff Louis Ackal. Is his middle initial J? It's the most fitting for him.
Brandon Phillips, former Georgia state director for the Trump campaign. Was he remorseful or tried to make amends with his victims? The article doesn't say.
Rodrigo Duterte.
Marc Wabafiyebazu.
Stanley Vernon Majors.
Dani Mathers.
Alex André Moraes Soeiro.
Steven Arnold "Steve" King, Iowa congressman, lover of guns and meat, English-only custard shops, watcher of Mexican migrants' "cantaloupe" calves, hater of Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill.
Howard Sparber, spurned loser.
Serial vandal of national parks Casey Nocket.
Tennessee candidate Rick Tyler, who wants to make America "white again." He's also against "miscegenators."
Christopher Mohrlang.
Nevada judge Conrad Hafen.
Rachel and Nyomi Fee.
John R. K. Howard and the other defendants. (9 January 2017 update: And Deputy Attorney General Casey Hemmer, for saying this assault doesn't amount to a sex crime.
https://www.change.org/p/idaho-state-senate-recall-deputy-state-attorny-general-casey-hemmer
Larry Thomas, barber.
Azealia Banks.
Jason M. Feldman. (His law firm page includes this: "He is active member of the National College of DUI Defense ... and has made it his personal goal to make miracles happen on daily basis." Where are the indefinite articles?)
Peter Kema, Sr. and Jaylin Kema.
Tennessee state representative Jeremy Durham, alleged sexual harasser, co-sponsor of anti-trans bathroom bill. Of course, he announced earlier this month that he'll seek re-election.
Former policeman Douglas Ioven, for assault and false imprisonment.
Fort Worth police officer W. Figueroa, for pepper-spraying motorcyclists as they were riding by.
Hawaii State Rep. Isaac W. Choy.
Michigan State Senator Virgil Smith, Jr.
Leonard Debello.
Robert Rialmo.
Former Arizona Congressman Ben Quayle.
Rep. Mitch Holmes. Not so much for his dress code but for his assertion that men don't need a dress code because they look "professional" already. Cf. Montana State Rep. David Moore (R) and his proposed ban on yoga pants.
Katr1na P1ers0n.
Ragheb Nouman.
Joshua Warren Killets.
Roselle Park, Councilwoman. At least she resigned.
Jodie Marie Burchard-Risch of Coon(!) Rapids, Minnesota.
Dr. Steven Anagn0st and Rick Perry.
Marshall W. Leonard.
Officer Bobby Harrison, HPD.
James Declan Basile, Christian Guy, Tucker Cole Steil, Austin Rice, Kyle Hughes, and whoever in the college let them off easy.
Triceten Bickford.
Chase Utley.
Jennifer Connell and William Beckert.
Dr. Geoff Marcy. (He has since resigned.)
Matt Bevin. (He has now won the governorship of Kentucky.)
The Gawkerites.
Donald Anthony Watson.
Natalie Munroe.
Poppy Harlow. I just found out about this story when I read a Mark Ames article. Sympathy for the devils, indeed!
Justin Harris.
Ikemefuna Enemkpali.
Ariana B. Kelly
Pamela Bullock
The as-yet unidentified Fox News anchor who inexplicably called Rory McIlroy a leprechaun and said she couldn't stand him.
Rachel Dolezal, impostor extraordinaire.
Sean Toon and his unnamed high school cronies.
Matt Bruenig.
Matthew Makela.
Gemma Wale.
Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore.
Robin Paul.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, for pulling an Alvin Greene*. (*This man.)
Jeff Roe.
Maria Valdes, Cypress Bay H.S.
John Hancock.
Thom Tillis, for advocating this loophole, and writer Luke Brinker, for making such a to-do about it. I wash my hands of both of them!
Kirby Delauter and Billy Shreve.
Elizabeth Lauten.
Mark Fuller.
Carlo Dellaverson. See also Scott Bentley.
Toure Neblett.
Jurger Klinsmann and his son Jonathan Klinsmann.
Shannon K. Smith.
Sharlene Simon.
"Guru" Bikram Choudhury.
These people.(names forthcoming)
One refused her cup of iced tea without a lid and a straw.
"Hashtag activists" (about as useful as "momagers").
Laura Ingraham.
Sara Netanyahu.
Bill Newcomer.
Kevin Kavanaugh and Tim Russell.
Laura Bush.
Jeff Orr.
Drew Paahao and Koa Alii Keaulana.
Faye Hanohano. She is no Helene Hale! In fact, she didn't even show up for Helene Hale's memorial service.
Michael Dunn.
Rick Perry, for his tepid "condemnation" of Ted Nugent's "subhuman mongrel" rant after earlier saying he didn't personally take offense.
Justin Bieber, of course, but also his father and partner in crime, Jeremy Jack Bieber.
"Pastor" David "Scott" Lemley, arrested on charges he raped a 20-year-old woman with the mental age of seven. Also the woman's father who urged her to have sex with the pastor. (And look at the photo. What a cretin.)
The soldiers who made funny poses around a flag-draped casket then posted the photo on Instagram.
(I mean the tag to read BAD behavior. BAD, from Paul Fussell's book of the same title. Bieber, for instance, is BAD. Not a bad singer like William Hung, who was so bad he was good, but a BAD celebrity: donning gas masks, (allegedly;P) egging a neighbor's house, drag-racing a rental car, etc.)
Donna Alderman-Crosby, proprietor of The Forks Pit Stop in Walterboro, South Carolina.
Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) for this and this. And "moderate" senator Bob Corker (R-TN) for this: When two sexual-assault survivors confronted Republican senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, he said, “I know this is enjoyable to y’all.” “It is not enjoyable,” Tracey Corder, the director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, responded. “It is not fun for us to tell our stories.”
Adrien Broner.
Clay Higgins.
Leslie E. Gibson, candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, for insulting via Twitter a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Though he apologized, he deactivated his personal Twitter account <@LeslieEGibson2> and made private his campaign Twitter account, Gibson 4 Maine House <@Gibson_house>. At least, unlike Morgan Roof (younger sister of murderer Dylann), he didn't actually bring weapons to school, and hope protesting students would get shot. (16 March 2018 update: Faced with challenges from a novice Democrat and a former Republican state senator, both of whom declared at the last minute, Gibson has dropped out of the race.)
Disgraced gymnastics coach John Geddert. Will he get even a bit of the scrutiny his crony Nassar has received?
Carl Higbie, former chief of external affairs of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Brianna Rae Brochu.
Milo Yiannopoulos. For this and so much more. If Justin Bieber doesn't change his ways, he'll look like him and he doesn't want that.
Katie Quackenbush.
Greg Gianforte, his spokesman Shane Scanlon, and anyone who approves of his assault of a reporter.
Yale dean June Chu.
Talib Kweli Greene and Ben Shapiro.
Christopher Duntsch.
South Carolina state representative Chris Corley.
Dae Hae Moon.
Christian Gutierrez.
William Spingler.
Caleb Joseph Illig.
Michelle Herren.
Jennifer Boyle.
Tucker and Buckley Carlson, and Christopher Bedford.
Louisiana sheriff Louis Ackal. Is his middle initial J? It's the most fitting for him.
Brandon Phillips, former Georgia state director for the Trump campaign. Was he remorseful or tried to make amends with his victims? The article doesn't say.
Rodrigo Duterte.
Marc Wabafiyebazu.
Stanley Vernon Majors.
Dani Mathers.
Alex André Moraes Soeiro.
Steven Arnold "Steve" King, Iowa congressman, lover of guns and meat, English-only custard shops, watcher of Mexican migrants' "cantaloupe" calves, hater of Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill.
Howard Sparber, spurned loser.
Serial vandal of national parks Casey Nocket.
Tennessee candidate Rick Tyler, who wants to make America "white again." He's also against "miscegenators."
Christopher Mohrlang.
Nevada judge Conrad Hafen.
Rachel and Nyomi Fee.
John R. K. Howard and the other defendants. (9 January 2017 update: And Deputy Attorney General Casey Hemmer, for saying this assault doesn't amount to a sex crime.
https://www.change.org/p/idaho-state-senate-recall-deputy-state-attorny-general-casey-hemmer
Larry Thomas, barber.
Azealia Banks.
Jason M. Feldman. (His law firm page includes this: "He is active member of the National College of DUI Defense ... and has made it his personal goal to make miracles happen on daily basis." Where are the indefinite articles?)
Peter Kema, Sr. and Jaylin Kema.
Tennessee state representative Jeremy Durham, alleged sexual harasser, co-sponsor of anti-trans bathroom bill. Of course, he announced earlier this month that he'll seek re-election.
Former policeman Douglas Ioven, for assault and false imprisonment.
Fort Worth police officer W. Figueroa, for pepper-spraying motorcyclists as they were riding by.
Hawaii State Rep. Isaac W. Choy.
Michigan State Senator Virgil Smith, Jr.
Leonard Debello.
Robert Rialmo.
Former Arizona Congressman Ben Quayle.
Rep. Mitch Holmes. Not so much for his dress code but for his assertion that men don't need a dress code because they look "professional" already. Cf. Montana State Rep. David Moore (R) and his proposed ban on yoga pants.
Katr1na P1ers0n.
Ragheb Nouman.
Joshua Warren Killets.
Roselle Park, Councilwoman. At least she resigned.
Jodie Marie Burchard-Risch of Coon(!) Rapids, Minnesota.
Dr. Steven Anagn0st and Rick Perry.
Marshall W. Leonard.
Officer Bobby Harrison, HPD.
James Declan Basile, Christian Guy, Tucker Cole Steil, Austin Rice, Kyle Hughes, and whoever in the college let them off easy.
Triceten Bickford.
Chase Utley.
Jennifer Connell and William Beckert.
Dr. Geoff Marcy. (He has since resigned.)
Matt Bevin. (He has now won the governorship of Kentucky.)
The Gawkerites.
Donald Anthony Watson.
Natalie Munroe.
Poppy Harlow. I just found out about this story when I read a Mark Ames article. Sympathy for the devils, indeed!
Justin Harris.
Ikemefuna Enemkpali.
Ariana B. Kelly
Pamela Bullock
The as-yet unidentified Fox News anchor who inexplicably called Rory McIlroy a leprechaun and said she couldn't stand him.
Rachel Dolezal, impostor extraordinaire.
Sean Toon and his unnamed high school cronies.
Matt Bruenig.
Matthew Makela.
Gemma Wale.
Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore.
Robin Paul.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, for pulling an Alvin Greene*. (*This man.)
Jeff Roe.
Maria Valdes, Cypress Bay H.S.
John Hancock.
Thom Tillis, for advocating this loophole, and writer Luke Brinker, for making such a to-do about it. I wash my hands of both of them!
Kirby Delauter and Billy Shreve.
Elizabeth Lauten.
Mark Fuller.
Carlo Dellaverson. See also Scott Bentley.
Toure Neblett.
Jurger Klinsmann and his son Jonathan Klinsmann.
Shannon K. Smith.
Sharlene Simon.
"Guru" Bikram Choudhury.
These people.
"Hashtag activists" (about as useful as "momagers").
Laura Ingraham.
Sara Netanyahu.
Bill Newcomer.
Kevin Kavanaugh and Tim Russell.
Laura Bush.
Jeff Orr.
Drew Paahao and Koa Alii Keaulana.
Faye Hanohano. She is no Helene Hale! In fact, she didn't even show up for Helene Hale's memorial service.
Michael Dunn.
Rick Perry, for his tepid "condemnation" of Ted Nugent's "subhuman mongrel" rant after earlier saying he didn't personally take offense.
Justin Bieber, of course, but also his father and partner in crime, Jeremy Jack Bieber.
"Pastor" David "Scott" Lemley, arrested on charges he raped a 20-year-old woman with the mental age of seven. Also the woman's father who urged her to have sex with the pastor. (And look at the photo. What a cretin.)
The soldiers who made funny poses around a flag-draped casket then posted the photo on Instagram.
(I mean the tag to read BAD behavior. BAD, from Paul Fussell's book of the same title. Bieber, for instance, is BAD. Not a bad singer like William Hung, who was so bad he was good, but a BAD celebrity: donning gas masks, (allegedly;P) egging a neighbor's house, drag-racing a rental car, etc.)
Monday, February 10, 2014
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Thursday, February 06, 2014
More on CVS Decision to Phase Out Tobacco
Repost at Townhall of an AP article about the decision by CVS to stop selling tobacco products. The comments are mostly people gnashing their teeth about the alleged agenda behind the decision.
Longs Drugs was acquired by CVSa while ago in 2008 and today's Tribune-Herald has an article about the local impact. I think the hardcore smokers will go to 808 Tobacco and Irie Smoke Shop (Boom!) for their cigarettes. And I think smokers will likely "stock up" at Longs, causing the shelves to empty months earlier than October.
Longs Drugs was acquired by CVS
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
What "Downside"?
Louis Proyect notes, a little too smugly, that Prince Charles, three years his junior "looks nearly old enough to be my father. Just look at my photo below...".
Of course Prince Charles, who has spent a lifetime outdoors (polo, yachting, etc.), will have weathered skin, compared to Proyect, who has "spent my time indoors pouring [sic] over the Grundrisse, etc."
But Prince Charles has aged into a very distinguished-looking man.
(Grundrisse)
Of course Prince Charles, who has spent a lifetime outdoors (polo, yachting, etc.), will have weathered skin, compared to Proyect, who has "spent my time indoors pouring [sic] over the Grundrisse, etc."
But Prince Charles has aged into a very distinguished-looking man.
(Grundrisse)
Hole>Nirvana?
Hole was a better band than Nirvana. #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion
— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) December 4, 2013Hole had some good songs such as "Malibu" and "Doll Parts."
Courtney Love was seen as a Yoko Ono--not a serious artist in her own right but a talentless gold-digger/social climber latching onto a brillian musician. So in the popular imagination, especially when Kurt Cobain killed himself almost twenty years ago, Hole was just a footnote.
Monday, February 03, 2014
"Talk Good English or Get Out!"
@Millie__Weaver @Vir_Superanus I think English Only advocates should to write in English, don't you?
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 3, 2014Sunday, February 02, 2014
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Trouble at The American Conservative
This article details the conflict between the publisher and editor of The American Conservative. The magazine, founded in 2002, has never been a moneymaker (true of almost all journals of opinion). It has an amazingly high cover price (about $10 an issue!) and subscription price.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/congressman-michael-grimm-at-the-caribbean-tropics.html
.@Trackerinblue let's see how many times Rep. Grimm is referred to as a "thug" versus how many times Richard Sherman was.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 29, 2014Monday, January 27, 2014
Kunstler: Like Your Hair's on Fire
Kunstler: Like Your Hair's on Fire.
Kunstler sees Breaking Bad as a metaphor for American life. I regard it as one of the most overrated TV shows this decade.
Kunstler sees Breaking Bad as a metaphor for American life. I regard it as one of the most overrated TV shows this decade.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
An Interesting Blog About the `60s and `70s
I just found this a few minutes ago.
http://sixtiesandseventiesblog.wordpress.com/about/
http://sixtiesandseventiesblog.wordpress.com/about/
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
The Disenchantment of American Politics and the Coming Uproar
Kunstler writes essays for the Peak Prosperity site. Linked here is part one of his latest, "The Disenchantment of American Politics and the Coming Uproar."
Monday, January 20, 2014
Kunstler: "Warrior Land"
Kunstler: Warrior Land
Looking around America these days, if you can stand it, the sense of what it means to be a man has become a very shaky business. I was studying one particular tattooed moron, twenty-something, in the gym Saturday. He had on display a full sleeve-job of “tribal” skin décor in that curvy blade-like motif that invokes a general idea of ninja swordplay. Perhaps he really was a dangerous dude, a Navy Seal just back from slitting Taliban throats in Nangarhar. More likely, he was a fork-lift operator in the local Ace Hardware distribution center. He seemed to resent my attention — but then why had he taken so many pains to adorn himself?
Is it not interesting that so many males in America affect to be warriors? What does this tell us about the psychological dimensions of manhood in this country? If I have to guess, I’d venture that many people of the male persuasion hereabouts can’t imagine any other way of being a man — other than as a fine-tuned bringer-of-death, preferably some species of cyborg, with “techno” bells and whistles. This is obvious fodder from the many Transformer and Robocop movies, the dream of becoming a most excellent killing machine.
This ethos was on hyperwarp display in Sunday’s NFL football playoffs, football being, after all, mock warfare with mock warriors. San Francisco quarterback Colin Kapernick’s arm tattoos were hard to decipher even on a large high-def flatscreen. At first I thought they were maps of suburban Milwaukee, or perhaps the full text of Jude the Obscure but it turns out (I looked it up) they record his ongoing life “narrative,” his triumphs and distinctions, his mom’s heart transplant, and his dealings with the fugitive deity known as Jesus Christ. Between scoring drives, Colin vamped on the sidelines in a red Cholo hat, one of those ball caps featuring an exquisitely flattened brim designed to make the wearer look like a homicidal clown — which is the favored motif of aspiring criminals abroad in the land nowadays. As Lon Chaney, the master of horror, once remarked apropos of his character creation technique, “There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” The objective: to look as ridiculous as possible and yet give off a vibe of unpredictable danger and violence.
Colin was hardly the sole creature on the field adorned with ink. At times, the scrimmage looked like the recreation yard at the Washington State Penitentiary. But that brings us to another theme of contemporary American manhood having to do with the grand initiation rite of serving time in prison. There is a meme on the loose, especially among the hopeless idealists, that American jails are filled with “political prisoners.” This is just not so. Though our drug laws are certainly idiotic, cruel, and pointless, I believe sincerely that the prison system is filled with psychopathic monsters. They may be creations of our monster-making culture, in all its depravity and pernicious falsity, but they are monsters nonetheless.
But the romance of monsterdom is yet another theme in the current caboodle of American manhood. Boys are in love with monsters, and want to be them, or like them, or with them, and nowadays many succeed at that. The indulgence in all these juvenile enthusiasms presents in the absence of any better models of a way to be. The time is not distant when a lot of things are going to shake loose in this land, and when that happens, there will be monsters amongst us everywhere: tattooed clowns in baby clothes with large muscles and weapons. Really, what are the chances that such people reared on dreams of triumphal violence will operate on the basis of kindness, generosity, and consideration of any future beyond the next fifteen minutes.
Let’s face it, the reason we do the things we do, and act the way we act, is because American manhood is in full failure mode, in full retreat from what used to be known as virtue. We wouldn’t know what this is anymore if it jumped up and bit us on the lips. I’m afraid it will take very stern leadership to reform all these current trends. When it comes around, it will look like Dolly Parton meets Hitler.
Looking around America these days, if you can stand it, the sense of what it means to be a man has become a very shaky business. I was studying one particular tattooed moron, twenty-something, in the gym Saturday. He had on display a full sleeve-job of “tribal” skin décor in that curvy blade-like motif that invokes a general idea of ninja swordplay. Perhaps he really was a dangerous dude, a Navy Seal just back from slitting Taliban throats in Nangarhar. More likely, he was a fork-lift operator in the local Ace Hardware distribution center. He seemed to resent my attention — but then why had he taken so many pains to adorn himself?
Is it not interesting that so many males in America affect to be warriors? What does this tell us about the psychological dimensions of manhood in this country? If I have to guess, I’d venture that many people of the male persuasion hereabouts can’t imagine any other way of being a man — other than as a fine-tuned bringer-of-death, preferably some species of cyborg, with “techno” bells and whistles. This is obvious fodder from the many Transformer and Robocop movies, the dream of becoming a most excellent killing machine.
This ethos was on hyperwarp display in Sunday’s NFL football playoffs, football being, after all, mock warfare with mock warriors. San Francisco quarterback Colin Kapernick’s arm tattoos were hard to decipher even on a large high-def flatscreen. At first I thought they were maps of suburban Milwaukee, or perhaps the full text of Jude the Obscure but it turns out (I looked it up) they record his ongoing life “narrative,” his triumphs and distinctions, his mom’s heart transplant, and his dealings with the fugitive deity known as Jesus Christ. Between scoring drives, Colin vamped on the sidelines in a red Cholo hat, one of those ball caps featuring an exquisitely flattened brim designed to make the wearer look like a homicidal clown — which is the favored motif of aspiring criminals abroad in the land nowadays. As Lon Chaney, the master of horror, once remarked apropos of his character creation technique, “There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” The objective: to look as ridiculous as possible and yet give off a vibe of unpredictable danger and violence.
Colin was hardly the sole creature on the field adorned with ink. At times, the scrimmage looked like the recreation yard at the Washington State Penitentiary. But that brings us to another theme of contemporary American manhood having to do with the grand initiation rite of serving time in prison. There is a meme on the loose, especially among the hopeless idealists, that American jails are filled with “political prisoners.” This is just not so. Though our drug laws are certainly idiotic, cruel, and pointless, I believe sincerely that the prison system is filled with psychopathic monsters. They may be creations of our monster-making culture, in all its depravity and pernicious falsity, but they are monsters nonetheless.
But the romance of monsterdom is yet another theme in the current caboodle of American manhood. Boys are in love with monsters, and want to be them, or like them, or with them, and nowadays many succeed at that. The indulgence in all these juvenile enthusiasms presents in the absence of any better models of a way to be. The time is not distant when a lot of things are going to shake loose in this land, and when that happens, there will be monsters amongst us everywhere: tattooed clowns in baby clothes with large muscles and weapons. Really, what are the chances that such people reared on dreams of triumphal violence will operate on the basis of kindness, generosity, and consideration of any future beyond the next fifteen minutes.
Let’s face it, the reason we do the things we do, and act the way we act, is because American manhood is in full failure mode, in full retreat from what used to be known as virtue. We wouldn’t know what this is anymore if it jumped up and bit us on the lips. I’m afraid it will take very stern leadership to reform all these current trends. When it comes around, it will look like Dolly Parton meets Hitler.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Just spoke to great group at Congregational Church in Coral Gables. United Church of Christ is gearing up to back #BDS & the Kairos document
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 19, 2014Saturday, January 18, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
What is the Matter With Florida?
Just got to Tampa, everyone's talking about the local cop who shot a man to death for texting in a movie theater: http://t.co/e0glULnqVh
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 15, 2014I saw a bit of Cross Creek on Monday (I think). It starred Mary Steenburgen as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who moved to rural Florida and wrote The Yearling, itself recently discussed in Harper's. Her husband was appalled at her wanting to move to some "hick town" in Florida.
I've never been to Florida, which might retain some of the beauty M.K. Rawlings saw. But what I hear is not good. Florida seems to concentrate much what is bad about the mainland.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Fracking and Cracking
I just found Resilience.org, via a tweet by Richard Heinberg. "Next Oil Sands Threat: Cracking Caprock."
And the French energy company Total, banned from fracking in its own country, has invested heavily in the emerging British oil-shale industry.
And the French energy company Total, banned from fracking in its own country, has invested heavily in the emerging British oil-shale industry.
My System of Movie-Watching Worthiness (with Examples)
Go to the Prince Kuhio Stadium Cinemas: (Nothing really. Might grudgingly go to Ride Along. Her will more likely come to the Palace.)
Go to the Kress: The Wolf of Wall Street or Saving Mr. Banks
Wait till it comes to video:Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
Wait till it airs on TV: American Hustle
Don't ever plan to watch: The Lone Ranger, 12 Years a Slave
Go to the Kress: The Wolf of Wall Street or Saving Mr. Banks
Wait till it comes to video:Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
Wait till it airs on TV: American Hustle
Don't ever plan to watch: The Lone Ranger, 12 Years a Slave
Monday, January 13, 2014
Kunstler: The Fate of a City
I see Hattie is already in California, which is "still home." Likewise, New York is home to Kunstler, who grew up in the city. I might add some appropriate links to this column later.
The Fate of a City.
I was born and raised in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan (with a brief intermezzo in the long Island Suburbs (1954–1957) though I have lived upstate, two hundred miles north of the city, for decades since. I go back from time to time to see publishers and get some cosmopolitan thrills. One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.
Which was that Central Park, and indeed much of the city, had never been in such good condition in my lifetime. The heart of New York had gone through a phenomenal restoration. When I was a child in the 1960s, districts like Tribeca, Soho, and the Bowery were the realms of winos and cockroaches. The brutes who worked in the meatpacking district had never seen a supermodel. Brooklyn was as remote and benighted as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The Central Park Zoo was like a set from Riot in Cellblock D, and the park itself was desecrated with the aging detritus of Robert Moses’s awful experiments in chain-link fencing as a decorative motif. Then, of course, came the grafitti-plagued 1970s summed up by the infamous newspaper headline [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Now, the park was sparkling. The sheep’s meadow was lovingly re-sodded, many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original structures, the dairy, the bow bridge, the Bethesda Fountain, were restored. Million dollar condos were selling on the Bowery. Where trucks once unloaded flyblown cattle carcasses was now the hangout of movie and fashion celebrities. Brooklyn was a New Jerusalem of the lively arts. And my parents could never have afforded the 2BR/2bath apartment (with working fireplace) that I grew up in on East 68th Street.
The catch to all this was that the glorious rebirth of New York City was entirely due to the financialization of the economy. Untold billions had streamed into this special little corner of the USA since the 1980s, into the bank accounts of countless vampire squidlets engaged in the asset-stripping of the rest of the nation. So, in case you were wondering, all the wealth of places like Detroit, Akron, Peoria, Waukegan, Chattanooga, Omaha, Hartford, and scores of other towns that had been gutted and retrofitted for suburban chain-store imperialism, or served up to the racketeers of “Eds and Meds,” or just left for dead — all that action had been converted, abracadabra, into the renovation of a few square miles near the Atlantic Ocean.
Nobody in the lamebrain New York based media really understands this dynamic, nor do they have a clue what will happen next, which is that the wealth-extraction process is now complete and that New York City has moved over the top of the arc of rebirth and is now headed down a steep, nauseating slope of breakdown and deterioration, starting with the reign of soon-to-be hapless Bill de Blasio.
Mayor Bloomberg was celebrated for, among other things, stimulating a new generation of skyscraper building. There is theory which states that an empire puts up its greatest monumental buildings just before it collapses. I think it is truthful. This is what you are now going to see in New York, especially as regards the empire of Wall Street finance, which is all set to blow up. The many new skyscrapers recently constructed for the fabled “one percent”— the Frank Gehry condos and the Robert A.M. Stern hedge fund aeries — are already obsolete. The buyers don’t know it. In the new era of capital scarcity that we are entering, these giant buildings cannot be maintained (and, believe me, such structures require incessant, meticulous, and expensive upkeep). Splitting up the ownership of mega-structures into condominiums under a homeowners’ association (HOA) is an experiment that has never been tried before and now we are going to watch it fail spectacularly. All those towering monuments to the beneficent genius of Michael Bloomberg will very quickly transform from assets to liabilities.
This is only one feature of a breakdown in mega-cities that will astonish those who think the trend of hypergrowth is bound to just continue indefinitely. It will probably be unfair to blame poor Mr. de Blasio (though he surely can make the process worse), even as it would be erroneous to credit Michael Bloomberg for what financialization of the economy accomplished in one small part of America.
The Fate of a City.
I was born and raised in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan (with a brief intermezzo in the long Island Suburbs (1954–1957) though I have lived upstate, two hundred miles north of the city, for decades since. I go back from time to time to see publishers and get some cosmopolitan thrills. One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.
Which was that Central Park, and indeed much of the city, had never been in such good condition in my lifetime. The heart of New York had gone through a phenomenal restoration. When I was a child in the 1960s, districts like Tribeca, Soho, and the Bowery were the realms of winos and cockroaches. The brutes who worked in the meatpacking district had never seen a supermodel. Brooklyn was as remote and benighted as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The Central Park Zoo was like a set from Riot in Cellblock D, and the park itself was desecrated with the aging detritus of Robert Moses’s awful experiments in chain-link fencing as a decorative motif. Then, of course, came the grafitti-plagued 1970s summed up by the infamous newspaper headline [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Now, the park was sparkling. The sheep’s meadow was lovingly re-sodded, many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original structures, the dairy, the bow bridge, the Bethesda Fountain, were restored. Million dollar condos were selling on the Bowery. Where trucks once unloaded flyblown cattle carcasses was now the hangout of movie and fashion celebrities. Brooklyn was a New Jerusalem of the lively arts. And my parents could never have afforded the 2BR/2bath apartment (with working fireplace) that I grew up in on East 68th Street.
The catch to all this was that the glorious rebirth of New York City was entirely due to the financialization of the economy. Untold billions had streamed into this special little corner of the USA since the 1980s, into the bank accounts of countless vampire squidlets engaged in the asset-stripping of the rest of the nation. So, in case you were wondering, all the wealth of places like Detroit, Akron, Peoria, Waukegan, Chattanooga, Omaha, Hartford, and scores of other towns that had been gutted and retrofitted for suburban chain-store imperialism, or served up to the racketeers of “Eds and Meds,” or just left for dead — all that action had been converted, abracadabra, into the renovation of a few square miles near the Atlantic Ocean.
Nobody in the lamebrain New York based media really understands this dynamic, nor do they have a clue what will happen next, which is that the wealth-extraction process is now complete and that New York City has moved over the top of the arc of rebirth and is now headed down a steep, nauseating slope of breakdown and deterioration, starting with the reign of soon-to-be hapless Bill de Blasio.
Mayor Bloomberg was celebrated for, among other things, stimulating a new generation of skyscraper building. There is theory which states that an empire puts up its greatest monumental buildings just before it collapses. I think it is truthful. This is what you are now going to see in New York, especially as regards the empire of Wall Street finance, which is all set to blow up. The many new skyscrapers recently constructed for the fabled “one percent”— the Frank Gehry condos and the Robert A.M. Stern hedge fund aeries — are already obsolete. The buyers don’t know it. In the new era of capital scarcity that we are entering, these giant buildings cannot be maintained (and, believe me, such structures require incessant, meticulous, and expensive upkeep). Splitting up the ownership of mega-structures into condominiums under a homeowners’ association (HOA) is an experiment that has never been tried before and now we are going to watch it fail spectacularly. All those towering monuments to the beneficent genius of Michael Bloomberg will very quickly transform from assets to liabilities.
This is only one feature of a breakdown in mega-cities that will astonish those who think the trend of hypergrowth is bound to just continue indefinitely. It will probably be unfair to blame poor Mr. de Blasio (though he surely can make the process worse), even as it would be erroneous to credit Michael Bloomberg for what financialization of the economy accomplished in one small part of America.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Narendra Modi
India, and the world, should be wary of Narendra Modi: http://t.co/hzt5WMMcwI @rezaaslan @_michaelbrooks #India
— Fair Observer (@myfairobserver) January 3, 2014The Indian General Election of 2014. As far as I can tell, it will be held this spring.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Rep. Louie Gohmert Piles on Max Blumenthal
Gohmert condemned me as anti-Semitic during an extended rant warning that BDS will lead to the second Holocaust http://t.co/xLu7E8WNgY #PT
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 10, 2014Max is mentioned at the 3h 17m mark.
A discussion about this is on Max Blumenthal's Twitter account. What stands out to me is the unseemliness of Gohmert, a Gentile, calling Blumenthal, a Jew, anti-Semitic, for his vocal and sustained anti-Zionism.
11 January update: A transcript of the remarks.
Thursday, January 09, 2014
Armond White's "Better Than" List
I like Armond White too, and don't always agree with him either. Nor did I always concur with John Simon.
I don't always agree with Armond White but he's probably the most important American film critic right now: http://t.co/meDL2lKlPl
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) January 9, 2014Monday, January 06, 2014
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Kunstler's latest, which is excerpted below. It was worth the wait and is worth reading in its entirety (see link). Some comments of mine are after the excerpts.
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It’s like being buried alive in Jell-O. It’s embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war.
Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical “recovery” and the “shale gas miracle” on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations.
Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt — with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage. Some of us are anxious to get on with the job, to expel all the rats, bats, bedbugs, roaches, and lice, tear out the stinking shag carpet and the moldy sheet-rock, rip off the crappy plastic siding, and start rebuilding along lines that are consistent with the demands of the future — namely, the reality of capital and material resource scarcity. But it has been apparent for a while that the current owners of the house would prefer to let it fall down, or burn down rather than renovate.
Some of us now take that outcome for granted and are left to speculate on how it will play out. These issues were the subjects of my recent non-fiction books, The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic (as well as excellent similar books by Richard Heinberg, John Michael Greer, Dmitry Orlov, and others). They describe the conditions at the end of the cheap energy techno-industrial phase of history and they laid out a conjectural sequence of outcomes that might be stated in shorthand as collapse and re-set. I think the delay in the onset of epochal change can be explained pretty simply. As the peak oil story gained traction around 2005, and was followed (as predicted) by a financial crisis, the established order fought back for its survival, utilizing its remaining dwindling capital and the tremendous inertia of its own gigantic scale, to give the appearance of vitality at all costs.
At the heart of the matter was (and continues to be) the relationship between energy and economic growth. Without increasing supplies of cheap energy, economic growth — as we have known it for a couple of centuries — does not happen anymore. At the center of the economic growth question is credit. Without continued growth, credit can’t be repaid, and new credit cannot be issued honestly — that is, with reasonable assurance of repayment — making it worthless. So, old debt goes bad and the new debt is generated knowing that it is worthless. To complicate matters, the new worthless debt is issued to pay the interest on the old debt, to maintain the pretense that it is not going bad. ...
Miscellany
I get a lot of email on the subject of Bitcoin. Here’s how I feel about it.
It’s an even more abstract form of “money” than fiat currencies or securities based on fiat currencies. Do we need more abstraction in our economic lives? I don’t think so. I believe the trend will be toward what is real. For the moment, Bitcoin seems to be enjoying some success as it beats back successive crashes. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of investing in an algorithm. I don’t see how it is impervious to government hacking. In fact, I’d bet that somewhere in the DOD or the NSA or the CIA right now some nerd is working on that. Bitcoin is provoking imitators, other new computer “currencies.” Why would Bitcoin necessarily enjoy dominance? And how many competing algorithmic currencies can the world stand? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of an alternative “go to” currency? All I can say is that I’m not buying Bitcoins.
Will ObamaCare crash and burn. It’s not doing very well so far. In fact, it’s a poster-child for Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong). I suppose the primary question is whether they can enroll enough healthy young people to correct the actuarial nightmare that health insurance has become. That’s not looking so good either now. But really, how can anyone trust a law that was written by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? And how can it be repealed when so many individuals, groups, companies, have already lost their pre-ObamaCare policies? What is there to go back to? Therefore, I’d have to predict turmoil in the health care system for 2014. The failure to resolve the inadequacies of ObamaCare also may be a prime symptom of the increasing impotence of the federal government to accomplish anything. That failure would prompt an even faster downscaling of governance as states, counties, communities, and individuals realize that they are on their own.
Sorry to skip around, but a few stray words about the state of American culture. Outside the capitals of the “one percent” — Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, etc. — American material culture is in spectacular disrepair. Car culture and chain store tyranny have destroyed the physical fabric of our communities and wrecked social relations. These days, a successful Main Street is one that has a wig shop and a check-cashing office.^ It is sickening to see what we have become. Our popular entertainments are just what you would design to produce a programmed population of criminals and sex offenders. The spectacle of the way our people look —overfed, tattooed, pierced, clothed in the raiment of clowns — suggests an end-of-empire zeitgeist more disturbing than a Fellini movie. The fact is, it simply mirrors the way we act, our gross, barbaric collective demeanor. A walk down any airport concourse makes the Barnum & Bailey freak shows of yore look quaint. In short, the rot throughout our national life is so conspicuous that a fair assessment would be that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.
Elsewhere in the World
Globalism, in the Tom Friedman euphoric sense, is unwinding. Currency wars are wearing down the players, conflicts and tensions are breaking out where before there were only Wal-Mart share price triumphs and Foxconn profits. Both American and European middle-classes are too exhausted financially to continue the consumer orgy of the early millennium. The trade imbalances are horrific. Unpayable debt saturates everything. Sick economies will weigh down commodity prices except for food-related things. The planet Earth has probably reached peak food production, including peak fertilizer. Supplies of grain will be inadequate in 2014 to feed the still-expanding masses of the poor places in the world.
The nervous calm in finance and economies since 2008 has its mirror in the relative calm of the political scene. Uprisings and skirmishes have broken out, but nothing that so far threatens the peace between great powers. There have been the now-historic revolts in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other Middle East and North African (MENA) states. Iraq is once again disintegrating after a decade of American “nation-building.” Greece is falling apart. Spain and Italy should be falling apart but haven’t yet. France is sinking into bankruptcy. The UK is in on the grift with the USA and insulated from the Euro, but the British Isles are way over-populated with a volatile multi-ethnic mix and not much of an economy outside the financial district of London. There were riots in — of all places — Sweden this year. Turkey entered crisis just a few weeks ago along with Ukraine.
I predict more colorful political strife in Europe this year, boots in the street, barricades, gunfire, and bombs. The populations of these countries will want relief measures from their national governments, but the sad news is that these governments are broke, so austerity seems to be the order of the day no matter what. I think this will prod incipient revolts in a rightward nationalist direction. If it was up to Marine LePen’s rising National Front party, they would solve the employment problem by expelling all the recent immigrants — though the mere attempt would probably provoke widespread race war in France.
The quarrel between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands is a diversion from the real action in the South China Sea, said to hold large underwater petroleum reserves. China is the world’s second greatest oil importer. Their economy and the credibility of its non-elected government depends on keeping the oil supply up. They are a long way from other places in the world where oil comes from, hence their eagerness to secure and dominate the South China Sea. The idea is that China would make a fuss over the Senkaku group, get Japan and the US to the negotiating table, and cede the dispute over them to Japan in exchange for Japan and the US supporting China’s claims in the South China Sea against the other neighbors there: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The catch is that Japan may be going politically insane just now between the rigors of (Shinzo) Abenomics and the mystical horrors of Fukushima. Japan’s distress appears to be provoking a new mood of nationalist militarism of a kind not seen there since the 1940s. They’re talking about arming up, rewriting the pacifist articles in their constitution. Scary, if you have a memory of the mid-20th century. China should know something about national psychotic breaks, having not so long ago endured the insanity of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-71). So they might want to handle Japan with care. On the other hand, China surely nurtures a deep, deadly grudge over the crimes perpetrated by Japan in the Second World War, and now has a disciplined, world-class military, and so maybe they would like to kick Japan’s ass. It’s a hard one to call. I suspect that in 2014, the ball is in Japan’s court. What will they do? If the US doesn’t stay out of the way of that action, then we are insane, too.
That said, I stick by my story from last year’s forecast: Japan’s ultimate destination is to “go medieval.”* They’re never going to recover from Fukushima, their economy is unraveling, they have no fossil fuels of their own and have to import everything, and their balance of payments is completely out of whack. The best course for them will be to just throw in the towel on modernity. Everybody else is headed that way, too, eventually, so Japan might as well get there first and set a good example.
By “go medieval” I mean re-set to a pre-industrial World Made By Hand level of operation. I’m sure that outcome seems laughably implausible to most readers, but I maintain that both the human race and the planet Earth need a “time out” from the ravages of “progress,” and circumstances are going to force the issue anyway, so we might as well kick back and get with the program: go local, downscale, learn useful skills, cultivate our gardens, get to know our neighbors, learn how to play a musical instrument, work, dine, and dance with our friends.
As it happens, the third in the series of my World Made By Hand novels, set in upstate New York in the post-collapse economy, will be published in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press. It’s a ripping yarn. Whether anyone will have enough money to buy a copy, I can’t predict. Happy 2014, Everybody!
===
Eventually, there'll be
^I went to the Kuhio Plaza on Friday, and after our breakfast at IHOP, walked around a bit. Big Island Surf closed, but an HIC opened in the old Waldenbooks space next to Radio Shack. At one end, it's bustling with the new Zippy's and Sports Authority, but throughout the mall are vacant spaces or stores that barely occupy their spaces and sell cheap stuff. Near IHOP, what used to be Suncoast Video was more recently an anime shop (that could have fit in a smaller space; it was cavernous). Now it's closed and serves as an occasional meeting room, which itself was moved from the original Footlocker space to make way for a calendar shop. I'd like your thoughts on the Plaza: what it was like? where it's going? It's been in operation almost thirty years (opening in 1985). The Kaiko`o Mall was around for about that long before it closed. (To malihini and visitors: that giant courthouse in midtown Hilo is on the site of the mall.) Downtown is mixed: pockets of gentrification, longtime businesses, and some downscaling and "frivilousation" (e.g., a good toy shop replaced with a nail salon; the Farmers Exchange, with a bar and a tattoo parlor).
*As I posted recently, our cable system broadcasts a free preview of the Nippon Golden Network around New Year's (this year it ran from 30 December through 3 January). Many of the movies are samurai films from the `50s and `60s. Will Japan go back to the time of the shogunate? Probably not.
Kunstler: Forecast 2014: Burning Down the House
Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It’s like being buried alive in Jell-O. It’s embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war.
Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical “recovery” and the “shale gas miracle” on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations.
Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt — with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage. Some of us are anxious to get on with the job, to expel all the rats, bats, bedbugs, roaches, and lice, tear out the stinking shag carpet and the moldy sheet-rock, rip off the crappy plastic siding, and start rebuilding along lines that are consistent with the demands of the future — namely, the reality of capital and material resource scarcity. But it has been apparent for a while that the current owners of the house would prefer to let it fall down, or burn down rather than renovate.
Some of us now take that outcome for granted and are left to speculate on how it will play out. These issues were the subjects of my recent non-fiction books, The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic (as well as excellent similar books by Richard Heinberg, John Michael Greer, Dmitry Orlov, and others). They describe the conditions at the end of the cheap energy techno-industrial phase of history and they laid out a conjectural sequence of outcomes that might be stated in shorthand as collapse and re-set. I think the delay in the onset of epochal change can be explained pretty simply. As the peak oil story gained traction around 2005, and was followed (as predicted) by a financial crisis, the established order fought back for its survival, utilizing its remaining dwindling capital and the tremendous inertia of its own gigantic scale, to give the appearance of vitality at all costs.
At the heart of the matter was (and continues to be) the relationship between energy and economic growth. Without increasing supplies of cheap energy, economic growth — as we have known it for a couple of centuries — does not happen anymore. At the center of the economic growth question is credit. Without continued growth, credit can’t be repaid, and new credit cannot be issued honestly — that is, with reasonable assurance of repayment — making it worthless. So, old debt goes bad and the new debt is generated knowing that it is worthless. To complicate matters, the new worthless debt is issued to pay the interest on the old debt, to maintain the pretense that it is not going bad. ...
Miscellany
I get a lot of email on the subject of Bitcoin. Here’s how I feel about it.
It’s an even more abstract form of “money” than fiat currencies or securities based on fiat currencies. Do we need more abstraction in our economic lives? I don’t think so. I believe the trend will be toward what is real. For the moment, Bitcoin seems to be enjoying some success as it beats back successive crashes. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of investing in an algorithm. I don’t see how it is impervious to government hacking. In fact, I’d bet that somewhere in the DOD or the NSA or the CIA right now some nerd is working on that. Bitcoin is provoking imitators, other new computer “currencies.” Why would Bitcoin necessarily enjoy dominance? And how many competing algorithmic currencies can the world stand? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of an alternative “go to” currency? All I can say is that I’m not buying Bitcoins.
Will ObamaCare crash and burn. It’s not doing very well so far. In fact, it’s a poster-child for Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong). I suppose the primary question is whether they can enroll enough healthy young people to correct the actuarial nightmare that health insurance has become. That’s not looking so good either now. But really, how can anyone trust a law that was written by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? And how can it be repealed when so many individuals, groups, companies, have already lost their pre-ObamaCare policies? What is there to go back to? Therefore, I’d have to predict turmoil in the health care system for 2014. The failure to resolve the inadequacies of ObamaCare also may be a prime symptom of the increasing impotence of the federal government to accomplish anything. That failure would prompt an even faster downscaling of governance as states, counties, communities, and individuals realize that they are on their own.
Sorry to skip around, but a few stray words about the state of American culture. Outside the capitals of the “one percent” — Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, etc. — American material culture is in spectacular disrepair. Car culture and chain store tyranny have destroyed the physical fabric of our communities and wrecked social relations. These days, a successful Main Street is one that has a wig shop and a check-cashing office.^ It is sickening to see what we have become. Our popular entertainments are just what you would design to produce a programmed population of criminals and sex offenders. The spectacle of the way our people look —overfed, tattooed, pierced, clothed in the raiment of clowns — suggests an end-of-empire zeitgeist more disturbing than a Fellini movie. The fact is, it simply mirrors the way we act, our gross, barbaric collective demeanor. A walk down any airport concourse makes the Barnum & Bailey freak shows of yore look quaint. In short, the rot throughout our national life is so conspicuous that a fair assessment would be that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.
Elsewhere in the World
Globalism, in the Tom Friedman euphoric sense, is unwinding. Currency wars are wearing down the players, conflicts and tensions are breaking out where before there were only Wal-Mart share price triumphs and Foxconn profits. Both American and European middle-classes are too exhausted financially to continue the consumer orgy of the early millennium. The trade imbalances are horrific. Unpayable debt saturates everything. Sick economies will weigh down commodity prices except for food-related things. The planet Earth has probably reached peak food production, including peak fertilizer. Supplies of grain will be inadequate in 2014 to feed the still-expanding masses of the poor places in the world.
The nervous calm in finance and economies since 2008 has its mirror in the relative calm of the political scene. Uprisings and skirmishes have broken out, but nothing that so far threatens the peace between great powers. There have been the now-historic revolts in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other Middle East and North African (MENA) states. Iraq is once again disintegrating after a decade of American “nation-building.” Greece is falling apart. Spain and Italy should be falling apart but haven’t yet. France is sinking into bankruptcy. The UK is in on the grift with the USA and insulated from the Euro, but the British Isles are way over-populated with a volatile multi-ethnic mix and not much of an economy outside the financial district of London. There were riots in — of all places — Sweden this year. Turkey entered crisis just a few weeks ago along with Ukraine.
I predict more colorful political strife in Europe this year, boots in the street, barricades, gunfire, and bombs. The populations of these countries will want relief measures from their national governments, but the sad news is that these governments are broke, so austerity seems to be the order of the day no matter what. I think this will prod incipient revolts in a rightward nationalist direction. If it was up to Marine LePen’s rising National Front party, they would solve the employment problem by expelling all the recent immigrants — though the mere attempt would probably provoke widespread race war in France.
The quarrel between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands is a diversion from the real action in the South China Sea, said to hold large underwater petroleum reserves. China is the world’s second greatest oil importer. Their economy and the credibility of its non-elected government depends on keeping the oil supply up. They are a long way from other places in the world where oil comes from, hence their eagerness to secure and dominate the South China Sea. The idea is that China would make a fuss over the Senkaku group, get Japan and the US to the negotiating table, and cede the dispute over them to Japan in exchange for Japan and the US supporting China’s claims in the South China Sea against the other neighbors there: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The catch is that Japan may be going politically insane just now between the rigors of (Shinzo) Abenomics and the mystical horrors of Fukushima. Japan’s distress appears to be provoking a new mood of nationalist militarism of a kind not seen there since the 1940s. They’re talking about arming up, rewriting the pacifist articles in their constitution. Scary, if you have a memory of the mid-20th century. China should know something about national psychotic breaks, having not so long ago endured the insanity of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-71). So they might want to handle Japan with care. On the other hand, China surely nurtures a deep, deadly grudge over the crimes perpetrated by Japan in the Second World War, and now has a disciplined, world-class military, and so maybe they would like to kick Japan’s ass. It’s a hard one to call. I suspect that in 2014, the ball is in Japan’s court. What will they do? If the US doesn’t stay out of the way of that action, then we are insane, too.
That said, I stick by my story from last year’s forecast: Japan’s ultimate destination is to “go medieval.”* They’re never going to recover from Fukushima, their economy is unraveling, they have no fossil fuels of their own and have to import everything, and their balance of payments is completely out of whack. The best course for them will be to just throw in the towel on modernity. Everybody else is headed that way, too, eventually, so Japan might as well get there first and set a good example.
By “go medieval” I mean re-set to a pre-industrial World Made By Hand level of operation. I’m sure that outcome seems laughably implausible to most readers, but I maintain that both the human race and the planet Earth need a “time out” from the ravages of “progress,” and circumstances are going to force the issue anyway, so we might as well kick back and get with the program: go local, downscale, learn useful skills, cultivate our gardens, get to know our neighbors, learn how to play a musical instrument, work, dine, and dance with our friends.
As it happens, the third in the series of my World Made By Hand novels, set in upstate New York in the post-collapse economy, will be published in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press. It’s a ripping yarn. Whether anyone will have enough money to buy a copy, I can’t predict. Happy 2014, Everybody!
===
Eventually, there'll be
^I went to the Kuhio Plaza on Friday, and after our breakfast at IHOP, walked around a bit. Big Island Surf closed, but an HIC opened in the old Waldenbooks space next to Radio Shack. At one end, it's bustling with the new Zippy's and Sports Authority, but throughout the mall are vacant spaces or stores that barely occupy their spaces and sell cheap stuff. Near IHOP, what used to be Suncoast Video was more recently an anime shop (that could have fit in a smaller space; it was cavernous). Now it's closed and serves as an occasional meeting room, which itself was moved from the original Footlocker space to make way for a calendar shop. I'd like your thoughts on the Plaza: what it was like? where it's going? It's been in operation almost thirty years (opening in 1985). The Kaiko`o Mall was around for about that long before it closed. (To malihini and visitors: that giant courthouse in midtown Hilo is on the site of the mall.) Downtown is mixed: pockets of gentrification, longtime businesses, and some downscaling and "frivilousation" (e.g., a good toy shop replaced with a nail salon; the Farmers Exchange, with a bar and a tattoo parlor).
*As I posted recently, our cable system broadcasts a free preview of the Nippon Golden Network around New Year's (this year it ran from 30 December through 3 January). Many of the movies are samurai films from the `50s and `60s. Will Japan go back to the time of the shogunate? Probably not.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Protesting B.D.S. While Divesting From Palestinian Universities
Louis Proyect: "Bard College and the American Studies Vote"
In an apparent breach with two other prestigious universities, Botstein has refused to break ties with Al Quds University in occupied Palestinian territory. Although Syracuse University and Brandeis University are both opposed to boycotting Israeli institutions, they had no problem breaking ties with Al Quds on grounds far less substantial than those that are fueling the BDS movement. Supposedly, a rally by Islamic Jihad on the East Jerusalem campus of Al Quds was punctuated by Nuremberg type Nazi salutes. Without conducting any serious investigation into the matter, Syracuse and Brandeis abandoned Al Quds. Why would Leon Botstein, an ardent supporter of the state of Israel that now puts forward the demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a “Jewish state”, not follow suit? The explanation for that requires understanding the particular place that Bard occupies in the American academy and the pressure that Botstein would be under to maintain the illusion that he is committed to free speech. ...To understand Leon Botstein’s stance in the Al Quds controversy, you have to start with his need to go one step further in reconciling Mammon and God. Bard College has a reputation as being some kind of “progressive” liberal arts institution and cutting ties to Al Quds would be counter-productive from a marketing standpoint. Let’s say you are some successful professional in New York who voted for DiBlasio and subscribes to the Nation Magazine and NPR. Would you want to send your kid to a school that broke with a Palestinian university on the basis of a witch-hunt organized by the Israeli right and its friends in the U.S. like Pamela Geller?
Corey Robin: "When It Comes to the Boycott of Israel, Who Has the Real Double Standard?"
In an apparent breach with two other prestigious universities, Botstein has refused to break ties with Al Quds University in occupied Palestinian territory. Although Syracuse University and Brandeis University are both opposed to boycotting Israeli institutions, they had no problem breaking ties with Al Quds on grounds far less substantial than those that are fueling the BDS movement. Supposedly, a rally by Islamic Jihad on the East Jerusalem campus of Al Quds was punctuated by Nuremberg type Nazi salutes. Without conducting any serious investigation into the matter, Syracuse and Brandeis abandoned Al Quds. Why would Leon Botstein, an ardent supporter of the state of Israel that now puts forward the demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a “Jewish state”, not follow suit? The explanation for that requires understanding the particular place that Bard occupies in the American academy and the pressure that Botstein would be under to maintain the illusion that he is committed to free speech. ...To understand Leon Botstein’s stance in the Al Quds controversy, you have to start with his need to go one step further in reconciling Mammon and God. Bard College has a reputation as being some kind of “progressive” liberal arts institution and cutting ties to Al Quds would be counter-productive from a marketing standpoint. Let’s say you are some successful professional in New York who voted for DiBlasio and subscribes to the Nation Magazine and NPR. Would you want to send your kid to a school that broke with a Palestinian university on the basis of a witch-hunt organized by the Israeli right and its friends in the U.S. like Pamela Geller?
Corey Robin: "When It Comes to the Boycott of Israel, Who Has the Real Double Standard?"
Friday, January 03, 2014
Too Middle Class, Too Rural, Too Urban, Too...
"BBC Axed My Family for Being Too Middle Class.
I've seen reruns of this show on BBC America; it was nice. It reminds me of how, at the beginning of the seventies, TV networks cancelled many rural-themed sitcoms like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, some of which still had high ratings, and started a wave of gritty urban programs.
I've seen reruns of this show on BBC America; it was nice. It reminds me of how, at the beginning of the seventies, TV networks cancelled many rural-themed sitcoms like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, some of which still had high ratings, and started a wave of gritty urban programs.
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Kinpira
One of our local New Year's traditions is the free preview offered by our cable system of the Nippon Golden Network. This preview of NGN and NGN3 lasts from 30 December through 3 January. This morning I saw Kinpira, about a yakuza boss's daughter who starts a pirate TV broadcast. One of the characters, a hapless yuppie drawn into her scheme, is named Gobo (burdock root in English).
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